CoopedUp

Can you confirm this? I thought you had to have a bank if you claimed an island? If the flag acts the same as the bank then why not place the flag right outside the base and save yourself the space of a bank?

Okay, so I didn't know where else to post this. But we've recently started doing something similar to this on our island where everyone posts a "mailbox" for communication since we are all playing at different times. Are the Notes like in ARK where there is a 200 character limit? Or is there a way to 'open' it and read a longer message? Seems like if I type to long of a note it cuts it off.

\signed I agree with the other responses. The game may still have some bugs and some content is nothing more then just writing on a concept page, but I for one am excited to see what happens to the game in the future.

I don't think you are right, were you hitting the same exact type of trees or other resources? The island I was on was claimed when I was in the process of building and the average amount of resources I gathered between claimed and unclaimed was the same. There was no drop.

I think the submarine SHOULD stay locked behind the Kraken. It's end game content ... the major point of it is so that someone can go explore the trenches and collect the Power Stones from them and summon the next level of World Boss (dunno if it's just a harder version of the Kraken). MMO's have always locked better loot and resources behind end game content since they started coming out. Getting the submarine is WAY easier then it ever was to get Sulfuras <Hand Of Ragnaros> or Thunderfury <Blessed Blade Of The Windseeker> back in Classic WoW. Those required 40-man raids and several weekly runs to gather enough materials, and that was assuming that your raid was even lucky enough to have the item that started the quest-line even drop.

Ah, but like with the claim system that too has all kinds of downfalls and problems. First and foremost is the biggest issue, everyone wants "a big enough piece of land" but there is no consensus of what is 'big enough'. You have some people that say they would be happy with one claim spot and others that say they need 5 for their castle and animal stables, then when you start adding Company members it gets even more crazy. Then comes the next problem ... what do you do when you find out your neighboring company is an asshole that is blocking resources or walled off an entire section of the island? You can't move, your tied to your flag. I guess you COULD pull up your 5 flags and move, but where you going to move too? You'll have to sail around island to island, sector to sector for several hours HOPING to find some random shitty stretch of land where thankfully neighbor A & B spaced their claims out far enough that you can put down 1 of yours. My situation sucked, but with the current system I have WAY more freedom then I would have had with a claim flag. My landlord and neighbor was a dick, so I gathered my shit into my boat and left. I didn't have to go floating island to island scouting the coastlines ... I simply looked at the map, found a couple islands with low taxes a sector over and sailed there. After talking to a couple people in General Chat for 2min about resources, I decided on one of the islands and then just found an open stretch of beach that wasn't right on top of another Company.

Congrats! Hope you Enjoy the perk, there is a couple of really nice ones for some of those quests.

https://atlas.gamepedia.com/Wheatgrass Looks like it's mostly in the Temperate Zones between K -> O.

What if the next island I went to didn't have a land-owner and someone sails in while I'm logged off and decides that he doesn't like that I'm on the beach he wants and surrounds my little hut with thatch walls so I'm forced to give up and leave or quit the game? With the land-owner system I take a bit of a risk that he might destroy my stuff in the first 24 hours, but I can easily take a couple minor precautions (like don't keep all my important resources and bloops in freshly made storage until after the 24 hour period) and talk to them or leave some mail/notes for them. In trade I should be protected from people building on important resource points, walling me in to grief me into quitting, or foundation spamming 1/4 of the island to "claim" territory. It needs some tweaking (like I said) so that running tenants off the island has a more significant impact on whether a company can even maintain ownership, and I'd like it if they could maybe figure out some new way of calculating Company points. I get where they are coming from with the thought that a large company should be able to maintain and manage larger islands, but Company size shouldn't be as impactful on points as much as Company Activity. Like a 3 person Company where 2 members play 5+ hours a day should have as many points as a 10 person Company who only has 6 active members that play maybe 1 hour a night. Company Size =/= Company Activity

Thanks @Jerryn! I have to agree. It needs a few tweaks to make it so that tenants have more "say" on if a land-owner can keep the island but I find the new system to be fairly good so far. And I was someone that got screwed by it with a shitty land-owner in the beginning that decided to run around the island right after claiming it and pop into everyone's bases that he could and take all their stuff. I lost two bookcases of Bloops and a fully stocked Resource Bin that I had put down the previous day. T'was a bad time.

I also think that the rates are fine. I'll admit though that it is a bit of a mental shift to be playing a new character on reduced rates again ... I mean I don't remember it being such a pain to keep from starving to death or being unable to make certain tools or craft certain items. It's kind of nostalgic really ...

@wandelaar You are correct that it would be motivation to keep the resources accessible, but generally speaking that is something a land-owner is going to want to do anyways since they are resources that he harvests himself. No land-owner is going to prevent resource blocking whether he has the taxes set at 5% or 20% because if he allows someone to block resources it just means he can't harvest the resource either or collect from others. @8ball While you are correct in that a land-owner has to work more to collect the gold for upkeep right NOW, but in the long term it'll be a different story. If enough people live on the island, his upkeep will be reduced to the point that it manages itself with the taxes received from treasure chests or at least enough that he barely has to expend any effort to maintain it.

Okay, So with the new release of Mega-Patch 1.5 they decide to tweak a couple items on the PvE side of things. With the latest patch this is the change that jumped out at me ... - Max Tax rate on PvE set to 20%, and is only additive on PvE (doesn't reduce the taxee's resources) I'm sure that for a lot of people that this seems like a good change, and in a way it is. I agree that the 20% maximum tax rate is a necessary addition because currently the PvE side of Colonies doesn't have a resource sink like the PvP side is supposed to have (land-owners are responsible for building island defenses against raiders for his tenants). But the second part of the patch is something that I'm not sure I understand or agree with... I'm sure that there is a lot of people that are preparing to flame the shit out of me for saying that, because damnit they want ALL of their fucking resources and to hell with anyone that says otherwise! But really, what is the incentive for being a good land-lord now? Before if there was 4 islands with tax rates at 20%, 15%, 10%, & 5% then it was natural that people would tend to gravitate more towards the 5% and 10% islands helping to lower that landlords upkeep. Now since the tax rate no longer matters to the settlers then no one is going to give a flying shit what the rate is and not being inclined to settle more on lower rated islands. So land-lords can raise the tax rates to maximum and besides for monitoring their island for foundation spam or resource blockers, they have no reason to expend any effort into being a "good" landlord and maintain relations with their tenants. They can just sit back and enjoy all the free resources that the system will be basically gifting them with for just being a land-owner.

Not to mention, what are they going to hit with? The land-owner is responsible for any and all defense on an island besides for puckle guns unless they give permission and even then nothing on the island is damage-able unless the island is in the "Combat" period that the owner has set-up. If another crew settles in, learns the habits and patterns of the Land-owner, builds up enough resources to sack the land-owner's fort without cannons, plans a reliable raid strategy, AND manages to execute the raid DURING a "Combat" phase while the land-owner is either defending, offline, or away ... Kudos. That deserves a nod of recognition and proper execution of PvP in my opinion.

You COULD if you really wanted to be a complete dick of a landlord. But it would take effort on their part to police the island every day and record all the ID's then travel back to the flag and input them one by one. Really if the landlord is that much of a dick he'll be popping people's bases with the "E" wheel anyway, and if you log in to find your base completely gone, would you stay on that island anyway? The idea of the system is kind of a protection against a troll that'll log in, pillar spam your island, log out and do the same thing again over and over everyday in an effort to grief you into leaving the island or giving up the claim. I guess you could limit the black-list to something like 20 Company ID's, but then in the odd case that you do get a lot of legitimate griefers you wouldn't be able to deny them all.

I like these suggestions, I'd just add a couple. 1.) Give the land-owner the ability to deny build rights or evict a toxic company by recording and inputting that Company's ID Code into an exclusion list, kind of like the old flag system had where you could give permission to a company to build but reverse where you can deny a company. (This allows for a Company to deny a pillar spammer, but doesn't prevent trap building or starter bases and such) 2.) When a land-owner adds a Company to the inclusion list that unlocks build limits it also increases a Company's decay rate from 4 days to 16-20 days. (This allows more casual and smaller companies that are trying to build a "home" to not have to worry about maintaining their structures while on vacation, traveling, or if they can't log in except on weekends.

I'm with Jack on this one. Placing the ability to dictate that no one can build on the island at all would completely undo everything that they are trying to accomplish with the current claim system and to many islands would be automatically set to "Company Only" or "Ally Only" leaving no places to build for new players or weekend warriors. It's to drastic of a action. I agree that the 12 hour timer is to short especially for PvE and a landowner should have denial rights, but they should be on an individual company basis only. Some company comes in and pillars the island? Deny that ONE company build rights and then pop all their pillars.

Did you check if the claim flag after placing has an "exclusion" ability? Like if you find your island bombed can you deny that Company build rights? Also I think the Devs are hoping (and it may happen) is that if the landlord is nice that other Companies will come donate gold into the claim flag so that the landlord doesn't have to constantly work at just maintaining the upkeep. It's a good idea, but I don't think the system is set-up properly yet to accomplish this ... never mind the assholes, people are lazy and don't want to run across the island every day to deposit gold for something that isn't giving them any direct immediate benefit a lot of the time.

You are correct in that a majority of the land-owners WOULD be reasonable and cooperative. However I think right now everything needs to settle down OR the claim system needs some tweaking. Currently I'm seeing a lot of people claim the flag initially, jack the tax rates up, hoard all the free resources that come in, then just let the upkeep lapse or let someone else steal it while they use all the free resources and the claim time to build freely for themselves. I'm hoping in PvE it'll calm down and it won't be so much of a "me, me, me" attitude since people will be more looking to put down permanent bases/homes, but I also think that the upkeep should be in both gold and resources or the tax collection should be accessible by anyone based on the island. I've been raided 3 times in the last 48 hours so I haven't been able to test shit ... if multiple companies put a tax bank down do the banks share an inventory perhaps? Like if you move all the taxed resources into a bank will another company's bank on the island show the resources?

True enough. But that just doesn't seem right to me. I thought the idea of the taxes was that a fair portion of ALL the resources would be needed to pay the upkeep and any "extra" was so that the landowner could set up defenses to protect his tenants from raiders. I mean if the upkeep is just gold and you can tax every random person that lands on shore and pops a treasure chest then the Dev's comment that "it would be extremely difficult for any one company to maintain an island's upkeep solo" doesn't make any sense. With a 50% tax rate it'll probably be easy to pay the upkeep from whatever treasure chests are dug up on the island.

Wait, what? I know that "claiming" an island takes some gold, can anyone else confirm that all the upkeep needs is gold too?

The PTR just started so like anything else it's going to be a bumpy road until things settle down. I don't think that the system can be judged that it "doesn't work" in a span of less then 24 hours before the system has really even had a chance to trigger an upkeep or settle out. If your husband had all his stuff destroyed and the island is being taxed that heavily then I think it's time to move on. Chances are right now that a LOT of people are being really short sighted with the claim system. There is a lot of smaller companies that are taking advantage of the tax rates and ownership rules to raise tax rates into the sky and build all kinds of boats and stuff, forgetting that the system will come knocking and that they have to pay to keep that island. Something I am curious of though is if there is a cool-down or increased cost to re-claim or claim a new island? Because there should be. I can't imagine that if you can claim an island for a couple hundred gold that instead of paying the upkeep you can just let the upkeep slide and immediately reclaim the island for another couple hundred gold every so often.

There is always the option to leave Notes now. I had a small storage box outside my base labeled as a "mailbox" and even once or twice had people leave Notes or BP's before. Where-ever I put down I'd encourage the land-lord of the island to do the same so new visitors can leave Notes for when the land-lord logs in.

We've had to pay taxes since day one of this game, at least now my taxes actually stand for something instead of fueling all my neighbors houses and boat collections.

I've listened. I've read forum post after forum post since I started playing this game 3 days after launch. I've read COUNTLESS posts about ass-hats that built on rare resource points, walled off chunks of the islands, took over a neighboring plot and over-lapped half of another persons claim, and the ENTIRE time the people posting couldn't do anything to the offender at all. And not only that, they were FORCED to endure it because if they de-claimed their one little spot they were completely screwed and would probably never find another open spot to build again. Then came the announcement that they were looking at fixing these issues and that a wipe was necessary. They proposed a system where EVERYONE can build ANYWHERE, but that all the islands would have a moderator with limited power but was also dependent on his tenants. And instead of reading and digesting that the players are no longer shackled to a claim flag, can now move around and build freely, AND can impact whether a Company can even maintain control of an island. A small percentage of people seemed to have stopped reading at the "the landowner can destroy any structure built on the island" and immediately bombarded the forums with complaints that you want your shackles back. I think everyone has digital Stockholm Syndrome or something and is afraid to be given their freedom. I mean did everyone forget all the problems that the original claim flags had? There was no simple fix for them, the foundation was crumbling and the system needed to be removed completely and re-worked.