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Structure Decay Changes


Jatheish

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On 6/5/2018 at 5:04 PM, Jatheish said:

Survivors,

First and foremost, thank you! Since our announcement post yesterday, we've received an incredible amount of feedback and have decided that we are not going to be rolling out the structural changes this week. We've decided to step back and reevaluate our solution, taking into account the feedback you’ve provided.

Our intent behind the change remains the same. We want to address structure spamming issues (pillar/foundation spam) which often takes place when players attempt to claim or grief different areas of the map in both PVE and PVP. However, we understand that there is legitimate gameplay uses for these mechanics. We want to make sure that the inevitable change we make recognises and can differentiate between illegitimate and legitimate cases.
We want to ensure that our change is a step forward for the game overall. 

We anticipate that this could be a significant change for the game, which is why we need the extra time to step back and reconsider all possible options. We remain vigilant and dedicated to addressing issues that affect survivors the most and want to be cautious that changes like these benefit players overall without causing more harm than good. Stay tuned, as we’re hoping to have more details on the update in the future, as well as the ability to work with you directly in determining the best solution.

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I have a simple suggestion that might address the problem with minimal effort:

Make the non-buildable area scale in proportion to the number of connected structures within a certain range.

It should only count connected structures in a relatively small radius so you can't just chain fence foundations to get the same effect, and it could weight different structures based on their size or material or other factors when adding them all up, like how it currently works for individual structures. For example, one pillar with a ladder might only block an area of a few feet, and a small thatch hut might block 10 feet or so, and a wood hut of the same size might block 12, and then a larger base or series of connected foundations/ceilings/etc. would block up to the current non-buildable distance. It would make it so you can't use a relatively small amount of resources to block a very large area, and you can still maintain a perimeter around your base like normal.

Then if you want to get a little more elaborate and have a way for people to deal with the existing pillars, you could have the auto-decay inversely scale with the size of the surrounding connected structures. So if someone builds their base around one of the pillars that now only blocks off a tiny area, that pillar or ladder's timer might drop from 7 days to 2, or whatever makes the most sense.

With changes like this, you could even possibly extend the maximum non-buildable area and increase the auto-decay time. (Or get rid of dino auto-decay altogether for non-capped servers. ?)

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4 hours ago, Solstic3 said:

My thoughts:

After a certain period bases from people that havent been online snce that time should become destrucable by other people(also on pve), have an increased decay rate and dino's might become more "attracted" and aggresive towards these kind of buildings.

something like that...

Structures already auto decay after 4 days+ and dinos 8 days, which is hardly enough time to leave for holidays. If the timer gets even shorter no one can take a few days break from ark.

Wild dinos being more agressive is not such a bad idea, but pve has offline protection, and most dinos are not able to dmg somewhat advanced bases anyway.

Maybe when your tribe logs in less than x amount of time a week you lose offline protection for 24h or until the next login + agressive wild dinos. Not sure how exactly that can be calculated though, and it's easy to circumvent...

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14 hours ago, Weiss said:

Structures already auto decay after 4 days+ and dinos 8 days, which is hardly enough time to leave for holidays. If the timer gets even shorter no one can take a few days break from ark.

Wild dinos being more agressive is not such a bad idea, but pve has offline protection, and most dinos are not able to dmg somewhat advanced bases anyway.

Maybe when your tribe logs in less than x amount of time a week you lose offline protection for 24h or until the next login + agressive wild dinos. Not sure how exactly that can be calculated though, and it's easy to circumvent...

Well they are not on my server (Not official) but maybe they should introduce some sort of holiday mode. The decay rate would be increased in normal mode but when holiday mode is switched on ( maybe by capturing some sort of cartpenter dino to not loose the emerging) it would be able to have the decay slowed (dino should then have a "area of effect" so you can not capture one for the entire map). 

I play only PVE at the moment and what I think is that the offline protection should be switched off at a certain point of days offline.

Also a possibility would be that when the food runs out of dinos captured they "after some time" become aggressive and will attack the structure. This would even make sense since they would be looking for food anyway. They could still be tamed for a while in this mode but after some time even this will be gone and they will be free to be tamed by other people on the server. Can you imagin a bunch of gigas becoming wild again! :D

 

 

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@Solstic3

I only play pve too :)

I really want a holiday mode, but I don't believe we will get something like this on officials. It has been suggested so many times, and I never saw a reaction from the devs. On unofficial at least the decay timers can be altered to solve this. A "carpenter dino" sounds quite funny, it could be a very expensive structure with an AoE too, and maybe a cooldown of at least 30 days, idk. Would probably be too easy for storage tribes to be abused though. 

Maybe a non-transfereable dino, that can be sacrificed for prolonged decay timers, but is as rare as a titano, and small, so it's hard to find. If you have it you can keep until you need it, or give it to your allies/friends in case they need a break. It has to be too time consuming for storage tribes to find and tame (or raise like wyverns and drakes), but not too hard for people who actually play on their map. You can only own one at a time in your tribe. That would not solve the pillaring problem, but it's still a change regarding decay timers^^

 

I wouldn't want tamed dinos to turn wild again, and be tamed by everyone. that would be too similar to claiming, just with a little more effort. It's still like a gift to anyone who doesn't own bred dinos, and a big loss for the one who put time and effort in raising it. Also sucks if you're a smaller tribe next to a very big one with gigas and rex armies...

Removing offline protection after a certain time would help the pillaring issues, but also lets trolls destroy your stuff. Maybe removing offline protection for structures that cound less than x amount of connected or different pieces. Removing offline protection from my small ramps inside my base wouldn't bother me at all, they are protected from wilds behind my walls anyway. But then again, people would put down a mess of things instead of pillars and kill spawns...

 

I don't understand why someone can place a behemoth gate under my base and block me from placing more structures in my own base. Why is the "no build zone" not way bigger than the "resource blocking zone"? That's one reason we placed pillars in a huge radius around our base. I would rather have no pillars around my walls, but if I removed them, someone can place a hut close by and prevent me from repairing my own base (someone placed two metal pillars as close as possible to our griffin trap for example, which was built out of wood, and now I can't replace the wall with stone).

It's very hard to find a solution that doesn't interfere with the current system too heavily but solves the structure spamming. 

 

Off-topic: I wish that offline protection on dinos would be removed entirely. You need a good base to protect them while you're online anyway, or they are strong enough to defend themselves.

 

 

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so is there an update like if this plan is still in the minds of WC or is it actually online. Still see Pillars for Blocking , they still dont Decay. Maybe we just make a radius around the actual base, and Limit the amount of 'bases' per Tribe 

so lets say a 20 Person tribe can built 3 Bases ( for different Purpose ) and some Outposts (for gathering Mats) so in Max they are allowed 10 Buildings …. and only around theire 3 Bases they are allowed to have Free Space …. like lets say 4 Behemoth in each direction which would be big enough 

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From a PvE player perspective, I have been impacted by pillars around my initial thatch 2x2 base, which resulted in me having to build vertically at that location.
Pillars were from a tribe which base was about 500 meters from my base, they had just pillared everything at 500m radius from their base. I am fine with people "pillaring" 20 meters away from base, but 500m seems exagerated.

On the other hand, I play mostly solo on public servers, which makes it impossible to go on vacation without having the bases evaporate...

 

Here's a quick algorithm suggestion:

1. implement a "real base" location detection algorithm. What is considered a base ? 100+ structures , beds , ... ? It needs to have a much much higher cost that just putting a pillar and a ladder down. Maybe even scale the cost to the tribe "size" (members, structures, dinos..). Then share the requirements with the community, as long as algorithm scale, there shouldnt be anything wrong with it. Implement a way for tribes to check in-game how far from their closest "real base" they are.

2. for each structure, scale the decay timer to how far the structure is from that tribe's closest "real base". ie, if structure is 0 meters away from closest "real base", decay timer = 10d - but if structure is 500 meters away from closest "real base", decay timer = 10/500 = 30 minutes.

You want to address people building temporary structures for taming, for instance ? Fine, implement a minimum decay timer of 2 hours.

What about tribes which starts with a 2x2 house ? Since algorithm does not detect a "real base" location, they are treated differently. Maybe give them 2 days to come back and refresh their structures timer.

This simple algorithm possibly has flaws which could be exploited, so it probably needs to be refined.

 

Now, here's a lead to address dino cap:

Why is there a cap ? To make sure game runs properly server and client side, I suppose (servers' memory usage, rendering, ...).

How could people retain the dinos they have , yet limit resources used by too many dinos owned by a single tribe or all server's tribes ? Maybe implement a storage like Warframe did for kubrows/cats. WC already has the code to store dinos in a transmitter, just allow for longer storage than 24 hours. Even if you made it a tek item, pretty sure 90% of tribes with 500 dinos can get needed elements to craft it. Make a tribe cap on that storage (500), then move in-game tribe cap to 200 or something. Nobody really needs a kibble farm with 400 dinos for 100% of the time.

And limit rafts to 5-10 per tribe, if you cannot take them out of dino counter. This would be impossible to implement on existing servers, but could work on FRESH ones.

 

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