Velius

You mean the 50,000 people that left? A TON of people bought the game for pirates. I'd say a majority of the players who never played Ark or even realized it was the same studio did so for that reason. The Ark fanboys keep thinking Ark is the reason people bought the game, while a great many of the people I personally played with bought it because they saw "Pirates" "Survival sandbox". The game was marketed as a naval-based survival game full of pirates. Tames and such were hardly covered in the initial press releases that were shown literally days before the initial EA release when the vast majority of copies were purchased. Naivety to the fact that people wanted a pirate game does not change the fact that people wanted a pirate game.

Sounds like an order of operations: Flag>Box>Inventory instead of going by proximity, in which case the order would be the exact opposite. If that is true then it's not necessarily a bad thing as you can keep your gold consolidated and it's less running around to tend to NPCs. Instead you can just tote around berries and keep them fed.

Seriously! I was THIS close to being able to figure out what the girl at the restaurant was really writing on my order slip when I go to pick up my house special lo mein. "It's that guy again. Make sure you something something something. Extra pork."

Pretty sure it is any caused by any player entering the claim radius, whether they set foot on land or not; whether they build/interact or not. It's basically a radar ping when someone who is not in the controlling company enters the vicinity. I do not believe that island territory ends at the shoreline, but extends a bit beyond, so any passing rafts would trigger the message.

I can't speak for the other gentleman here, but I received two at character creation.

You'll take your AT-AT and like it!

Do what the sailors who came before you did: Follow these easy step-by-step instructions and you'll be carting that gold in no time!

Not sure if smartassery... or prophecy....

New weapon type: Laser gun. Because who cares about pirates? New tame: Shark. Harvests fish by pacman'ing over them. Can be equipped with "Freakin Laser Beam" to gain long-range attack Players who defeat the Kraken 5 times during the night of a full moon while sacrificing a live chicken and successfully not getting blood on their gaming chair will unlock the ability to build and pilot an AT-AT. Because, and we cannot stress this enough, who the hell cares about pirates?

Along that same line of thought, what if they added a stat to NPCs for Artillery/Cannoneering/Munitions that would increase their effective range and, possibly, reload time? Would make an actual purpose for leveling up crew and putting points into something other than food/hp. Makes sense from a mechanic standpoint as well as being grounded in reality, as accurate distance shooting with artillery requires a decent amount of skill and would need people who specialize in it to be able to hit targets at maximum range.

Because in reality a galleon IS faster than a sloop. In reality you cannot put so large a mast on such a small vessel as you can in-game. In reality a galleon has something like 15x the sail of a sloop, not 6x. An actual sloop is relatively slow by comparison, especially in choppy seas because it cannot cut through the waves as easily. It's not like cars where you have the exact same engine in two different models and the lighter one will be faster on a straightaway. It makes perfect sense that a larger ship with more mass and proportionately more sail will always overtake a ship with less mass and less sail on open water. That's just physics.

I bet you're one of those "The Earth goes around the Sun" crackpots too, aren't you?

Not to derail the derailment by talking about the original topic, but I thought this was both hilarious and sad: How much spam is there? When I loaded up the General Discussion board on my phone just now, I got the message "This page is in Chinese. Would you like Google to translate it?"

While your assessment is absolutely correct and I commend you for taking the time to write it out in detail, this is not a new.problem in the slightest. Every non-region locked survival game I have played has been PLAGUED by Chinese spam. LiF was the best/worst example, where you would see literally pages of it appear every single night. The mods were regular in their purging of it the next morning, however it sadly does not matter how many are deleted, more replace it. China is too large of a revenue stream for the developers to lock out, and captchas do not work with Chinese keyboards. Adding a required time delay between posting or replying on forums is never a good solution, as it leads to people ceasing to use them altogether. The best solution is the one that no one wants to suggest because it "sounds mean", and that the devs will never implement because it means added development costs and potentially lost revenue: Region locks.

Reduce their hitpoints to zero or fewer.