Bandit439

Sloops are built way forward in the dock so there is a chance that it will mostly clear the rock. Sloops are so cheap it will only take you 30 mins to find out one way or the other. I see no way a Schooner could be built in that dock though.

They tried something like this in ARK at one point I recall. Foundation spam was a problem so they put a rapid decay timer on a single foundation or pillar. Within a day it became widely known that you could circumvent the new rule by placing a pillar and attaching a ladder to the side of it so it was no longer a lone structure subject to rapid decay. People will find ways around whatever safeguard they put in place sadly, I will say though that I have not seen significant foundation spam on the islands I've visited since the reset. No idea how it looks in lawless but on the "owned" land we have visited has all been pretty clean.

I'm not sure how they even ended up in this situation. It seems obvious that the existing NA PVE hardware is going to be used for one of the two NA PVP modes, but they announced that decision on March 18th and would have had to have decided that internally some amount of time prior to that. So let's say they decided a month ago to add an additional set of PVP servers so they could run both Colonies and Empires. I have no idea what a reasonable timeframe is to add hardware but the part they could have managed was the expectations. You don't wait until Christmas morning to tell your kids Santa's sleigh is still two weeks out.

I do not prefer the claim system currently on PTR but I believe their thinking is that the tax rates will self-correct. A landlord charging 50% taxes is less likely to attract settlers and will have to pay the full upkeep (no reduction for having other tribes settle there). A landlord who sets the tax rate at a lower % will probably attract more settlers and because more people are farming, might end up with more resource income in total. Additionally, the landlord with a lower tax rate gets a break on upkeep cost. Where this has the potential to fall apart is if the upkeep cost becomes trivial. If your company has more gold than it knows what to do with, you won't make decisions based around the economics of balancing tax rate and attracting settlers because you can just pay the upkeep no problem. My fundamental gripe with the new system is that only a small fraction of companies, who can be online in the first 3 hours the servers come up, will get to participate in land ownership. I am not at all confident islands will routinely change hands after that and if they do it will likely pass from the owner to someone already settled on the island. How appealing will this system be to new players who join a month from now? Would you feel good about joining a world where all the land is already owned?

I'll give it a try and hopefully I can convince my 4-5 friends I was grouped with to come back and try it out but the devil is really in the details and we have very few at the moment. Whether or not this system will work will depend on the upkeep cost, tax structure and the landlord's demolish window. The problem will be that people don't always play on a PTR in the same way they will on live. For example, the Companies who are going to desire to take an island for their exclusive use (run off other settlers) may not bother with the PTR. If they want to get useful data out of the PTR I think they need to make it be a relatively small map where there are relatively few islands to claim. PTR participation in most games is low and if you have a situation where most companies are able to claim an island, you won't get the needed insight into how land owners and land tenants are going to interact to test whether the balance of upkeep, tax, demolish window etc. is in the right ballpark. The best thing we can do at this point is get as many people, with as many different play styles as possible into that PTR so we can either prove their approach needs to be adjusted or they can prove to us that we are barking up the wrong tree.

I don't mind paying a tax. I already do that now because the little sliver of beach I was able to claim after 3 weeks of sailing around doesn't have resources. What I don't like is that we won't have an assured place to build a little base with enough beachfront for our ships. I don't want to be right on top of someone else's stuff like in lawless and I want to know we can build without fear of our new base/dock/shipyard being removed 3 hours after we log out. I'm already resigned to the fact that my little group of 5 friends (if I can lure them back) won't all be able to log in at the same time on patch day, group back up and claim an island before they are all gone. Maybe I will feel differently when they flesh out their design more fully but right now I don't feel like I will be better off than in those first few weeks I played and sailed around endlessly looking for a place I could build.

I'm thoroughly confused by this change in direction. The fundamental problem with PvE claims was that if you weren't there on day 1, you either had to settle for a permanent base in lawless or you had to sail around for literally weeks looking for a sliver of land you could claim away from someone. With this revised claim system claiming an entire island at a time, it is basically assured that fewer than 500 companies will own any land at all since solo players can take an entire small island and large companies can potentially claim multiple islands. Everyone else who logs in more than 6 hours after the patch will be at the mercy of someone else as to whether they can build anything or not. I can't reconcile this design with the statement in the Captain's Log that " One aspect of the design is the fact we want players to always have an option to build, otherwise, the game cannot be truly experienced in its current state." How does putting all the land under the control of a small % of the player base achieve that goal?