CoopedUp

Then they'll either have to pay for their own server (where they can use admin commands all they want), or accept that some content will always be locked behind events that require a group. In my opinion I can't see why anyone would want to play ATLAS in single-player. I mean in that state it's no different then a slightly modded ARK. Why buy an entirely new game when you can modify an existing one to achieve the same results?

The problem is that most people's computer can't handle a single player game. Or if it could you'd only be able to operate a single sector ... which means no Powerstone islands or Kraken Maw. This game is designed to be an MMO. Just like there is no single player version of WoW or EVE, you aren't meant to play it as a single player. Is there problems right now that individual and casual players have trouble finding groups? Sure, but I wouldn't put it past them to remedy that in the future.

I think they already posted that the PTR will have less and different grids then the live servers. It was posted somewhere in a Company Log I think.

I have heard that you can Solo the Kraken, but we are talking like CRAZY HIGH skill level needed. And bigger Companies sometimes post open invites to Kraken raids for solo and small Companies. I play in a Company with 1 other person and we've killed the Kraken twice by Allying and tagging along with other small Companies. Honestly, the Kraken SEEMS like more of an impossible challenge then it really is.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think the biggest problem isn't that people provide feedback. It's that they aren't providing the feedback constructively and the forums seem to feel more like a small percentage of people that want to scream their own negative opinions about an idea 600 times, and another 300 times on top of that when the first 600 results in a change but not the one that they wanted.

Add 250 people to your company and take over 60 islands with 750 flags! Whoo!

Your right, but like the other poster stated ... WE are the ones playing the game and WE are the ones buying it ... but WE only see one very small portion of the full game. We are looking at the sky from the bottom of the well so to speak, there is a lot more to the game then any one person's play style. I'm betting even the forums only cover maybe 5% of the actual player-base. So there is no guarantee that the people that post on the forums make up every aspect of the game or are proportionally ratio'd for even a single aspect, so suggestions and posts are often times skewed to one play-style's perspective. EDIT: I just realized that for some reason the Quote section listed "Sansa" for both phrases instead of Kappinski for the second one. Silly forums...

A week should be more then enough time. I mean we're talking about an entire company here, not just a single person. One person in the company may take a longer vacation or break from the game but usually even if the company is 2-3 people then someone will probably be on before that 1 week timer. And the Devs get involved currently, why would they stop completely? The new system isn't going to completely fix every system, but it will lighten their work load and constant barrage of messages.

I could see them extending it to a week maybe. It might be a little long, but it does offset that on PVP a landowner can place down a cannon and shoot a structure outside raid and war times. And by making a new company you would get a new ID, maybe. But then you are locked out of all your boats, structures, tames and everything else. Renaming a Company does not change its ID, so you wouldn't be able to do it that way.

They posted that they would probably increase the timeframe in PvE due to the fact that there is no alternative way to demolish another companies structures, unlike PVP. So the devs could decide to make that timeframe a week in PvE servers, or add an exclusion list like they have already with the current flag system. Especially if they have to step in too often because an island owner was unable to respond while on vacation.

With the PTR delay, "Next Time" should be every Sunday now because why not. Anyways I felt a good design for the fight would have been the basic 12 mid-deck guns to help poke and thin out the SoDs, and 6 Ballista on the nose to snipe tentacles. Or maybe 3 Ballista and 3 Large cannons to do long shots at the Kracken/Healbot after the tentacles are down? Depends on weight because you want to keep it lower for speed. The design would probably be great for the Kracken fight, but useless for any other SOD fights in Open water.

It still has a lot of the current flaws that are still in play now that they are trying to eliminate with the new claim system. With the Deed system you can purchase a claim, but there is no oversight and you still have to farm other people's claims for resources. Are you allowed to tax people that farm all the resources on your land? Or will you be taxed because you are farming on someone else's land? What if a Mega Company proceeds to buy all the land around you and completely walls you in? Or doesn't like that your island has a gem spawn and buys that one deed just to pillar spam it and force everyone to travel 3 sectors to the next nearest point? I know that there is a lot of people are worried about the new system, but the purpose of it is to create a system of checks and balances. It's trying to make is so that no one person can rampage around without consequences and repercussions. If a tenant is a dick then the landlord can break his stuff and evict him from the island, if the landlord is a dick then no one will live on his island and he'll probably fail his upkeep and lose control of his island. Then one of the previous tenants can take over the island and evict him, like he did to others.

Yes, thank you Jean and everyone else that put this together for the public. We had an absolute blast, and can't wait to crack that fish after the wipe and some more server improvements. I imagine the fight would be even better if I can manage it on a higher graphic setting then "Low".

Our company and another friend can donate a couple more boats to the cause. For a chance to see this we can bring in a a Galleon and a couple Brigs with some decent armaments.

I think this would actually put us mostly back at square one. People would claim islands and then set the entire island to non-buildable or spam the No-Build zone flags all over the coast, which would be fine if it was just a couple islands but current record holds that it would be a pretty significant amount of islands that would be done this way. Then a new player would log in sail to the first island and find it "no-build", repeat maybe 3-4 more islands and another sector before he would get frustrated and quit like they do now. I think a better solution would be an "exculsion" addition, where you can deny a specific company the right to build but only up to a limit of of say 5-10 companies. You find the resource location spammed after the time frame you can deny the company permission to build and it would prevent them from repairing any of their structures. They then have a couple days to negotiate or their base and all their foundation spam will pop naturally and they'll be forced to move on.

Pretty sure you aren't a slave. I mean no one is stopping you from packing up your little raft and sailing away to look for greener pastures. If you want oversight and protection from pillar spam and gate walls, then pay the taxes. If you'd rather take your chances and be tax free, put down in lawless. It's as simple as that.

The maps are still processing, they just aren't rendering. It's still processing all the data on what SotD's are in the area, what mobs are on the island, what the status of every resource is ... everything. Just because a player is not nearby doesn't mean that the entire area goes into a stasis, it just funnels the processing power from the rendering into data manipulation. Island instancing would add a whole new level of memory usage that would just tax the servers even more. As it stands, if there is no players on a server the entire server is still monitoring several scraps of data for that sector. Now imagine if it had to include on top of all that, what different wild animals are spawned into each instance and their locations/conditions, as well as what the status is of every resource. The worse part is the wild animal factors ... your right in that with a Tame it'll log it and place it in statis more quickly, but wild animals are a dynamic moving unit that is always changing on a server. Instances means that you would multiply that memory usage by 100+.

Ah, I think I see. But the problem would still exist. Yes, you'd basically be making it so that no new player is turned away because they can't find some place to build. BUT you'd still be right back at square one with thousands of other people crying because Player X pillar spammed the communal areas or Player Y built on top of me and I can't expand my shop. With the current system that they are proposing it'll be kind of rough to start with, but after the initial "zerg" period a new player will be able to look over map and choose several islands with low tax rates and sail to those sectors. With structure decay to eliminate in-active bases there won't be so much "wasted space" and the new player will be able to explore the area and talk to the residents to see if he'd like to settle on that island or move on to the next one.

Then why make it a Sandbox MMO at all? Why even bother with structure building? Why even bother with exploring? I build structures because I WANT to show them off, I WANT random people to be sailing by and go "Hey, check that out over there! Let's go take a look." I play on NA-PvE and I even leave all my doors on the house unlocked so random people can wander in and tour the place. I WANT actual dock-side player shops where the neighbors and myself can set up stalls and have a sort of open market that people may just stumble across. And while they are playing tourist and checking out the island, maybe they decide to see if they can settle in the area and open a stall too. Half the reason I sail around is to EXPLORE (both the island and other people's bases), it'd be awefully boring and not worth my time if every island I go to is a barren wasteland with no signs of any other players. A lot of MMO's have instanced player housing, but NOT ONE of those MMO's has a dynamic sandbox style instanced player housing where the player can design and build their own massive structures of different materials, and item placements. In those instances the player housing is always the exact same model with just a few dozen minor variations and with limited "instance size", and that's because the processing power and memory systems to render and run anything more then that would send any server into a meltdown.

Nope. Like any system introduced it would close some issues and just open the door for a truck-load of more. With instanced islands you would eliminate all free island roaming and exploration. You'd eliminate any sense of community or the feeling of the game being an MMO. You'd have MORE loading times and increased server lag every time someone sails to or from an island. All player shops would be eliminated except for Freeport only, all trade would be regulated to a freeport server as well. Like he posted earlier. At that point you aren't playing an MOM, you are playing Single Player Atlas is all.

I can kind of see the idea with the politic policies that you pointed out. But I'd change one item and add another political policy. CHANGE: Implement something like this on the new islands, so 1 island per sector is using it. Lawless isn't supposed to be a permanent location, it's supposed to be a starting point or a temp home. NEW POLICY: A company that has laid any claims down can not build on any island with a settlement in place. If a structure is on an island that is recently claimed then that structure rapidly decays in 24 hours with no option to repair/maintain it.

They can't do that though. The current claiming system is so broken that it's just not viable AT ALL! You can't place limits on the amount of claims on a fluid concept like players or company sizes, it just will not work for anything but solo and very small companies made up of friends. EXAMPLE: You limit the amount of flags to 1 per player, so the 250 man company claims a large portion of the island including the resource points. When Joe Dirt decides to leave that company which flag does he get to keep? Because obviously the company can't keep all 250 claims because they only have 249 members now, and what if Joe Dirt is only allowed to keep the flag he placed? Well sucks to be him that flag was used to cap the gem nodes on the top of the mountain, I guess he's not allowed to have a shipyard. Or what if his flag is the one that the base is built on? Guess the other 249 members are forced to move out of the castle so Joe Dirt can have his 1 claim back. EXAMPLE: You limit the amount of flags to the size of the company. Say that the company has 250 members and they placed 25 flags back when the game started, but now 100 of those members have went in-active. So the Company admin decides to purge them from the roster. When he kicks the first 10 he now no longer has the requirements to uphold 25 flags, so does he have to go out and destroy 1 of those flags? Or is one going to pop randomly and he has no say in the manner? What if those 100 people decided to break off into another Company ... what 10 of the 25 flags do they get to keep? What if the original company owner is a dick and decides to not release those 10 flags, is he punished for having 25 flags when his company is only 150 players now?

You are thinking about the OLD upkeep system when it was proposed as being a pseudo lawless environment. Now that they are emulating the PvP settlement system they stated that the upkeep would be dependent on the island size, resources, locations, and other items that rank them with the ability to reduce the upkeep for every different company that has settled on the island besides the landowner. And they also pointed out during the Dev stream a bit back that while a single company COULD own and settle the island for themselves the upkeep cost would be WAY harder then if he was to allow other pathfinders to settle as well.

I could see the appeal for the landowner to be "elected" so to speak by the system utilizing some form of 'contribution'. Not sure if I'd use the farming of resources as the primary component because just because someone farms a lot of resources doesn't mean that he has the "well wishes" of the island or the people on it in mind, he just has more time on his hands. The SotD crew invasion is one that I've been advocating for as a responsibilty of the landowner and a way that the landowner can pay back his tenants for their service and donation to the island's upkeep. I'm thinking it may happen sometime down the line, but trying to implement it right now before the March Update would be to tight of a timeline to achieve it.

That'll probably be the majority of land-owners after everything settles down, especially if they make the island owners and tax rates public record on the map. I mean seriously? Who's going to sail to an island and settle down knowing that the tax rate is at 30% and has never been lowered? Especially when there will be other islands with tax rates of 5-15% just to pay the upkeep. As long as the tax rate is low and the important resources are protected. I'm fine with the idea of a landlord, I mean seriously how much harm can he do? So he has a period after I place something that he can pop it. So when I start I'll tame a cow and store all my resources in it ... after the resource chest passes the time-limit then I'll start stock-piling resources and building.