Vonhelswag

There are positives and negatives. An example being this. players can only build bases along the shore of an island so that gems, forests, etc are protected. But salt is a beach resource. Is that now a lost resource? I dont know but it's the hard balance of the system.

Thanks. Out group has been talking about these things for a while and we were really hoping the comments on seeing the player base asking for claims in PVE would bring something different than came around in the latest post. I know some people don't mind paying taxes for someone else to to the island maintenance, I'm with you though and don't want to have the worry that someone is going to just take 30% off the top and then if we're not producing enough destroy the base and kick us out. Also if you are all on the same island why don't you just merge into a company? That could even be a viable solution for this in that when you build on the island it automatically adds you to the island alliance. Then everyone can work together easier. The limited alliances though creates a bottleneck there. It could be abused in other places as well. To bad. I also am willing to say maybe the new system they are talking..... probably just throwing ideas around at this point if we're honest.... about to replace PVE alliances will be better. If so that's great. I'm willing to back them and support the game where we can as players. I just don't feel like we have the opportunity to do so as much as they should be using us. They should have a weekly poll on different topics for the game direction, meta, etc. They should ask everyone to build a galleon and go into a server to see how many it can hold before it crashes to get a better idea on ship battles. Gamer Dev coordination. As for the playing the game I'm sure they do, but I do wonder how much is them testing ideas with codes or spawning in things to make it work the way they want it to. When they showed the videos of the trench and everything they are going to have down there they made the comment it's to dark lighten it up so we can show them. They do via code and we can see how amazing it is. How often are they taking a short cut though and missing the parts where we struggle? Take this for example. One of the smallest things in the world that bothers me every time I play is the map. I know they are working on the circle colors for allies (that no longer matter for PVE), but a red x in a red circle is hard enough to find as is. But the ambient lighting (which is gorgeous at times) changes the reflection on the map. If I want to be able to find the red x it becomes a game of look up, down, left right, where is the spot where you can actually see it if I am in a red circle. Some things like that are okay to make simple and just have the map not have the lighting effect, or since it was a big complaint on the forums a while back change the color of things temporarily, let us know the X color change to purple is temporary till they figure out a better color scheme. Or maybe instead of starting the game with a 10 page scrolling text that you can't possibly absorb in one go through, maybe actually have a tutorial for the games for 5-8 levels. 8 makes sense since it gets you out of the freeport. I personally like the idea of NPC factions at some point to make it more dynamic and allow both PVP and PVE players something else to do. So if there are X amount of pirate leaders and the royal navy, it gives people a reason to work together. We're on the same team. Then each team wants to be #1. Each pirate leader wants to be the Pirate King or Queen, and remove all obstetricals from their patch. Royal Navy wants to get rid of all pirates. I digress the tutorial.... Game opens up in your freeport based on faction choice, and one of the dock pirates (or officers) starts yelling at you to get on the boat. Dialoge doesn't need to be deep, we're under attack, take the wheel. Introduction to sailing through the captain of the boat having you go to the different stations cause you're the scrub new sailor. Take a bunch of hits, you're told to steer the ship to the shore while you're being chased. As you do they catch up, grappeling hook onto your boat and had combat basics and gun basics are explained. Repel the invading force and make it to shore after the final shots of the cannons begin the sinking process of the enemy ship. Then (because excitement first gets players into the game) now we can explain basics of harvesting etc while showing you how to kill wildlife and have them mention taming and say they'll give you a book (perminant save in inventory that honestly could be googled, but give you the bola basics etc) They walk you through crafting your first smithy and metal tools and you go to prebuild stations for a loom, grill etc. Then the enemy shows up again right as it starts raining. I'm sure you see where this is going. Now we learn about dodging tornadoes etc. We've harvested, done combat, sailed, and know the basics to get into the world so what happens now? First the tornadoes are normal, then more, then more cause we've dealt with sentient tornadoes for months, but new players need to understand they somehow know where you are and where you're going. The kraken pops up, tenticles smash both ships, last thing you see is some creature taking a bunch of stones from your captain. Then classic ARK entrance of you waking up on a beach in a freeport again. Stand up, shake it off, and your captain is there and says depending on which side you started with who to go find and to give them this note. Each faction can have a port city that no one can build in and just is a central hub. So it takes you a while to get there. That's cool, now you know the basics. Wander, sail, pillage, start trade routes. I don't know, it's hard to watch the trailer and not get excited, but then the comedy that is the game just is exhausting at times. There are so many gamers out there hoping they can help the Dev's turn the game into the gem we all know is there. As an analyst though I have no clue if the code rewrites are brutal and maybe our ideas and wants are to extreme and arew never going to happen. What do you guys want to see happen if you could add anything reasonable in with no problems? edit: to add in on factions I'm opposed to fast travel. Factions or alliances should be able to put a fleet together and surprise attack someone without having 100 people fast travel from who knows where. I love the idea of even someone being able to do hit and run on small NPC or player towns with this. In out, don't need to break everything they build, find the tax bank, rob it, add an armory building to the code, it can be pillaged.

After reading through the updated notes I want to first say to @Jatheish @Dollie , and everyone else working on this, thank you for listening and trying to fix the issues we are talking about. That being said some of these are better than others, and some are just a swing and a miss in my view. I'm going to break this down into multiple posts on multiple topics cause I see a lot of potential problems. ALSO this is longer, but I feel it's really important. CLAIMS-General The boat decay system will be enabled. This means that there will be a tagging system attached to boats which will cause them to self destruct after multiple weeks of inactivity on PvE, Golden Age Ruin, and Freeport servers. To tag a boat, the owner of that boat (single player or company) will just need to enter its stasis/render distance. This is great idea as a start, but misses the mark. I appreciate that some areas will clear out tons of ramshacled sloops, but it doesn't stop the greifing locally. PVP can demolish any boat that is parked in their bay , but PVE is left defensless and your team hasn't made a workable fix cause it's just sandbox to you guys and all we care about and need access to is building. One aspect of the design we intend to stick to is the fact we want players to always have an option to build, otherwise, the game cannot be truly experienced in its current state. FYI guys: I do love building, but it's not the only reason I started playing. I was really looking forward to the co-op and you keep taking more and more away from PVE This is what will still happen as players use boats to continue to grief each other. I will make boats, anchor these boats with beds for fast travel and blocking off your harbor or coast, then once every 10 days fast travel over and render them in. Give me your island and I'll unblock the harbor. Some islands are harder but the point is someone will do this. So good idea, but it doesn't fix the problem, it just creates a new way to have the same effect. Claim owners will be able to demolish structures (via the pinwheel) on their settlements temporarily as long as the structure has been placed within the last 12 hours. After the 12 hour period has passed, they will not be able to demolish the structures using the pinwheel, and must manually destroy it. Claim owners can do this outside of raid hours or warlike. This exists as an anti-griefing mechanism. On PvE servers, we may extend the time beyond 12 hours as players will not have the option to destroy via PVP. This just says to me that all you guys want is a system where you can say we gave you guys an out but you didn't use it. Should have logged in after someone pillar spamed your island . It's your problem if you didn't catch it cause we (Grapeshot) gave you a fix. So this by my reading will actually reward spamming as someone can place foundations or pillars down, and if I'm not on for a day or two due to RL something, I'm stuck with them and can't get rid of them at all....... and hope you don't miss any they hid in bushes etc. Everyone get used to surprise "To close to enemy structure" messages. There will be a notice sent to the Settlement Owner’s Company and also via a cross-server notification pop-up when new players/companies are building on their territory. Players will have the option to subscribe to this Company Log via email or Discord, similarly to other Company Log messages. THIS IS AWESOME!! GREAT IDEA AND IMPLEMENTATION. I really hope it works well but everything can't ride on me getting a message due to phone signal, etc. Again it is a cop out on an actual fix by saying you have given us a warning system. CLAIMS - PVE Summary of Grapeshot's oppening paragraph, "We hear you, we get that you're worried, we want to make sure it's all going to be okay. We're working on fixes for your concerns, till then, PVE will have the same system as PVP (whole island claim), but no raid hours, hard caps on claims, implimenting player shops, tax bank is there for people renting to help with cost. Wait....why and I still renting in the new system? This means that players will be able to claim islands, and anyone can build on those settlements If ANYONE can build on your settlement. 1) How do you stop them from blocking resources, walling off sections, etc (read back above in CLAIMS -general). 2) Why do I have to run ALL over the island to delete stuff cause someone had a bad day at work and wanted to be an ass and feel powerful for 10 minutes leaving me with hours of BS? Pass 3) Weren't we the player base asking for a system that allowed EVERYONE to claim a section of land? Idea being you would start at the freeport, work your way up to lawless, then go stake out a claim somewhere? We DID NOT want renting and we DID NOT want every island to be lawless. -ROUGH MATH FOLLOWS- 15x15 grid so 225 servers, but we loose almost 80 to power stones, lawless, and freeports. So that leaves 145 Servers now each with an additional island. For eash math we will say each of them now has 4 islands giving you 580 islands to claim and sure some companies will claim 2-3, but even if we took out 1/2 to these companies claiming multiple islands there's still 290 left so we're good right? NOPE, that alone is 435 small companies which is nearly the full amount of available. So then it becomes rent, lawless, or quit. No one wants to rent, so So then lawless becomes a big pillar spawn issue again cause at least we have our space (hopefully your comment on fixes for that down the road are true, but for now it's what we know will happen till then). So all the perks of owning the island and renting to others is potentially lost cause WE DO NOT WANT TO RENT!!! Maybe if we could have PVE alliances and have the alliances build trade network bases spread out on different islands or shared alliance taming bases...... oh wait... CLAIMS - PVP Give claim owners the option to enable allied companies to build cannons on their lands Give company owners the option to allow allies to use their cannon (governance setting) Enable an activation timer on cannon structures placed by non-allied companies during wartime and raidable hours to prevent instant FoBs. Similarly to battery-powered heavy turret activation timer on ARK. Delay on joining a new company or alliance after leaving one (24 hours) Company owners and admins can now set other companies as neutral. This is done via the in-game pinwheel, similarly to alliances when targeting another company’s structure or player. Companies which are marked as neutral will have a different colour display HUD, as a way for players to indicate they are non-hostile, however, they will not have other benefits which the alliance system would provide. In summary, there will now be three states in which other companies can appear: ally/neutral/enemy. Looks like you listened and achieved pretty well a lot the major concerns in PVP. Well done there. The big issue left is alliance limitations, but what I don't understand here is you say that you quote understand that there are some concerns regarding how that (that being alliances) could potentially be exploited in a PvE environment, and we’ll be working on designs and systems to ensure that isn’t the case from a technical point of view, as well as through GM involvement. How are you not worried about people working around alliance caps in PVP? If any place I can see greater exploiting of alliances and groups would be in large scale attacks of other players in PVP. The alliance limits are flawed, and people are already figuring out multiple ways to work around it. Discord anyone? SUGGESTION You created a whole new system to replace something that was already in place and could still be tweaked. A large portion of the players have said (Not claiming these as my ideas.) 1) Get rid of sea claims. They are horrible and a blight. Good idea but they don't work. I can overlap so much land, and then from there can prevent others from claiming land cause your claim is over a portion.... to many bad tricks. 2) Limit claims per person or per company. As a reference, our company of around 15 has since launch worked from an offshore claim to a corner of an island which is still more space than we need. If this claim change happens and we were to claim the same island, you just gave us around five times the land and took away claims from 6 other good companies that share the space with us. 3) Resource upkeep building should just be a claim upkeep and not worry about your buildings falling appart all the time. There should be a repair building added in for if/you're attacked and you can have crew staffed to it to help repair your base during the seige. There can even be new ship of the damned that will land and offload undead to attack your base. If your base in under attack by players the undead attack the first players they see so it could help repell the attack. 4) Drop the time down on claims. There should be a healthy turn over to an extent. in PVE or PVP this is a colonial, survival, mmo. I know a lot of PVE players don't want to think about loosing everything but that's why solo play is harder. If you are the only one resetting claims by running around a whole island have fun, not what I want to do. If you do, congrats, it's a lot of commitment to have a large base/island. 5) Going back to alliances and how companies tie into them with claim flags etc, set up some factions for the game that we choose to join, and unlike other MMORPG games where you are Alliance or Horde forever, you can switch groups in this cause pirates!!! maybe 3 pirate factions and a colonial military. You can even add quests to infiltrate and steal later in production. 6) Last and probably most important..... Fast travel is bad. Being able to set up beds in claims or islands all over the grid is not good. If an alliance wants to raid a base 5 squares away, someone might see the fleet passing. They can possibly fast travel to other islands in the same square, but at best they know the direction this fleet of ships was going unless they follow. Imagine people in glider suits trying to do recon and pass messages on to other allies. BUT WHERE THIS IS DIFFERENT is I can't teleport 5 squares ahead of that fleet and ambush them. I can build speed ships to try to pass them, skirt around them, etc. But if they sneak through and get to one of our lesser defended islands, 50+ people shouldn't magically appear from 13 squares away. This again allows CLAIM TURNOVER. There are more things but really these are the big ones I've heard a lot of times, that my company and I talk about, and we worry that none of these things will end up in the game and that it won't live up the the praise we've been trying to give it. We're still here and will be post wipe and will try Atlas 2.0, but the biggest thing our group and those around us talk about is how quickly things swing from one extreme to another. Maybe this month is taming. We're going to try raising levels available to tame, well now the higher level animals are killing more players. Maybe that's not a good idea or maybe we can lower the spawn rate. Whole point being we are here to help test the game..... give us direction (kinda like your post asking about tames and what we'd like to see), let us test what you want that day, week, month, and submit feedback. We can help if you let us. Lost Boys edit: changed title to fit better after the post went long

Everyone uses discord to communicate because of the lack of functionality in the chat system. Many games allow you to create your own tabs for different chats groups, this is a QoL issue and more over their explanation doesn't make sense. @Jatheish or @Dollie saying only PVP needs it, so we're removing it from PVE......but we get that there are situations that PVE needs it as well so we're going to come up with a new system for them to talk trade etc because PVE will game the system to get past company limits. Company alliances will no longer be enabled on PvE servers. We understand that there are some legitimate use cases, however, in this sandbox environment, we believe they will primarily be used to game the system and get past company rules/limitations. We recognize that this may impact how trading communication takes place on PvE servers and we are looking into an alternative option for players. Why are you not worried about PVP doing that? Don't they have more to gain by setting up super alliances to "game the system and get past company rules/limitations"? By making islands a single claim you don't have groups working together to steal land claims like before. I mean how dangerous is ally chat guys? I really want to know what they see PVE doing to game the system that PVP won't use and have a bigger gain from raids which PVE only can do with the kraken..... but now can't do that either.

AND THEN YOU MUST FACE THE SUPER KRAKEN ALONE AS WELL!!!!! Shun the nonbeliever.

Put 4 cannons on the back of any ship schooner on up, I personally run 6, and you can kite anything. SoD are not hard. This game requires some effort. I play solo. Edit: also I don't use blueprints.

I fully get that this is early access and its subject to change. That's not the complaint here. I'm not saying don't wipe the servers, I'm not saying everything is going to be horrible, I'm not even saying RIP Atlas. During their livestream they repeatedly said we cant fully explain everything in the time we allotted for the stream. We have a huge Captains Log that will explain all our ideas and changes better and you can read it after the stream when we post it. Then there was nothing posted to explain what they were talking about.

If you are going to make big announcements like this in the future and tell us the game design is changing drastically. Then tell us to wait for the notes after the stream....... Please for the sake of everyone you have playing your game, have the notes ready to drop RIGHT AFTER your stream. You guys keep taking one step forward and two steps back @Jatheish. Swing and a miss here.

Pve, pvp, NA, EU?

Happened twice on my transport brig today. Once while traveling through fog (which should cut render distance some) and once in open sea during the middle of a sunny day. Both times SoD appeared and let loose a full broadside into my hull in the same second.

Southern island in C11 has lots of leaves on the ground you can harvest for thatch.

Wait you think Jat doesnt care and is being unprofessional?!?! If the game designers say this is how we plan on doing something due to efficiency in the process right now, repeatedly post in captain's logs and forum posts that this is the system, and even set up the tickets to say expect this....... and then further say our focus is on mechanics, playability, etc not refunding every lost item to a glitch they are laying out a ToS (Terms of Service in case you don't know)for the playerbase. That is incredibly professional. Maybe people should actually read the content not just post titles. Furthermore he at no point says you're a crybaby go dry your sweet tears on mama's apron. He calmly says the game is still rough around the edges, center, top, but the bottom seems okay... hasn't fallen out yet. (That was sarcasm/humor for the game isnt perfect), so give us some time and come back. The fact that the dev's have the patience to read all the hate and vile in here and keep plugging along with their project is a testament of their dedication. It's not finished. I've lost high level tames more times than I can remember. I've lost an entire base do to a server restart causing a collision issue and it all broke. I've had SoD spawn in my harbor and sink my ships even after things are supposed to be fixed. I've fallen through the mesh. I've lost gear, land, dealt with griefing, and more. I've played Pvp, pve, and private. Ive started over 12+ times to test different things. Guess what... they care. Know how I know that? Cause they are still working. This isnt a fairy tale. There is no magic wand. The dev's and @Jatheish are probably working 12 hour days with little sleep. Why? Cause there is just a hunger to produce an awesome game. I hope you realize how ignorant you (you in this instance is not singling out only the OP, but all the big whiners out there )sound someday, and how hard people work in real jobs all over the place not just here. Keep up the great work guys.