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Request AI to remove Pillars


MarioX

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Request AI to remove Pillars

This is a sample of pillar structure over many initial easy tropical isles on Crystal Isles.
The owner says play form day 4 o this server and have rights to construct aniwhere, the objective is simple create dificulty to new players construct.
entire isles is pillared, charge nodes bloqued.

the question for devs: where is AI to pillar removal ?

report2.jpg

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What they need to do is have an algorithm run and if there are any building components beyond a structure that is recognized as a "base" (say "x" number of feet/meters/foundations/whatever) that the those structures will auto-delete at 00:00 zulu time every day.  It is completely ridiculous that people are allowed make it impossible for a new player to find a place to build a base.  If people what to do this kind of crap, then force them to move over to private server that would allow something like that.  But not on an official server. I can understand that you would want a little buffer between you and the next person, but some of these people are just ridiculous on how far out they put these darn pillars and foundations.

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Removing pillars that are excessive is reasonable, however, the last time someone filed a ticket against our tribe, we had very little out there resulting in a large mega tribe building nearly right up to our base. To change that would mean they'd have to get it right the first time around otherwise it will result in disaster.  I can already see the pillar removal causing anger, strife, griefing, massive amounts of tickets and chaos. 

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I wonder why they don't add a function where "if the owner of the pillar has not touched the pillar in a while, then mark for possible decay or destruction", on top of whatever code they are using to indicate the pillar should not be destroyed. If they can detect if a tribe hasnt been on in a week, then there shouldnt be a problem implementing this code. This should not have been a problem up till now. But then maybe Ark is nearing its end.

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5 hours ago, MarioX said:

Request AI to remove Pillars

This is a sample of pillar structure over many initial easy tropical isles on Crystal Isles.
The owner says play form day 4 o this server and have rights to construct aniwhere, the objective is simple create dificulty to new players construct.
entire isles is pillared, charge nodes bloqued.

the question for devs: where is AI to pillar removal ?

report2.jpg

Circumvented before it could even be implemented! if you want to start seeing hundreds of small huts all over the place, thats a good way to make it happen.

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3 hours ago, AzureJ said:

I wonder why they don't add a function where "if the owner of the pillar has not touched the pillar in a while, then mark for possible decay or destruction", on top of whatever code they are using to indicate the pillar should not be destroyed. If they can detect if a tribe hasnt been on in a week, then there shouldnt be a problem implementing this code. This should not have been a problem up till now. But then maybe Ark is nearing its end.

The game has an auto-decay function, and we have been hearing from noobs for 5 years how ark is doomed.

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Pillaring is the bane of ark PVE something needs to be done about it for sure, put in ticket and GM will remove them if they are excessive, it's against TOS to structure spam excessively. 

We put a ticket in ages ago when someone pillared half the valguero maps I mean literally half if not more.  We only expected GM to remove the pillars but they got a full tribe wipe instead and they ranted about it, tbh they deserved it.

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Just report it and be done with it.  Take good screens that help highlight the amount of area claimed by one tribe.  There was a person who claimed an entire block on valguero like from 10-20 and 20-30.... Needless to say, he got wiped.  If someone has pillared the entire area of the tropics on CI, then you can bet a gm will wipe them once they look at it.  SHow off all the island pillared with no bases on them.  That should be enough to get all their pillars wiped.

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I agree overpillaring should be regulated. 

I see so many people enter a server though and then 5 minutes later complain there is no place build. They never even got off the beach.

Maybe I'm the luckiest person in the world but I can always find a place. I just moved to my old Rag server 2 months ago. Nobody I use to play with still on the map yet I was able to place TP's in Highland, Swamp, Green Ob, and the Ice Cave with no concessions. 

When reporting pillar spam or pillars that prevent your building get SS of the coords and offending pillars, closest real structure of that tribe, and your base. This gives good info for enforcement I have found. SS of you asking for removal and a negative response or an ignore despite being in server will help too.

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The solution is really simple, and it seems as if they are working towards this end... allocate each player a block of space, stackable in tribe mass. anything outside of that area is either not placeable, or decays within 12 hours.   this would also alleviate the cancer of traps all over the map, little huts all over the map, and every other build players leave behind and "forget" to remove.  end of a lot of support tickets!

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Perhaps they could add a way to calculate the area used by a tribe. That should be displayed on the the structures. That should also be alluded to in the coc e.g. something like: "an acceptable base size in pve is x to y square meters" or whatever. This alone would do a lot to help people know what bases to report, and prevent tribes from claiming to much land in the first place. That might be a little harder to implement than I initially thought, how do you account for the terrain not being flat? Could do a 3d calculation (volume claimed by a tribe) instead...

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34 minutes ago, sjskdjkfa said:

Perhaps they could add a way to calculate the area used by a tribe. That should be displayed on the the structures. That should also be alluded to in the coc e.g. something like: "an acceptable base size in pve is x to y square meters" or whatever. This alone would do a lot to help people know what bases to report, and prevent tribes from claiming to much land in the first place. That might be a little harder to implement than I initially thought, how do you account for the terrain not being flat? Could do a 3d calculation (volume claimed by a tribe) instead...

That might be tricky to control too - amount of "square tiles" you allow for tribe to claim can be shaped as a cube [base], flat, long, high or a series of separate buildings close enough to prevent others from building between those.

I remember someone suggesting a system where each tribe would be able to claim land with limited amount of flags and pillars outside of this area would be illegal. I don't remember all the details, but it was something like that iirc.

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22 hours ago, Malvegil67 said:

What they need to do is have an algorithm run and if there are any building components beyond a structure that is recognized as a "base" (say "x" number of feet/meters/foundations/whatever) that the those structures will auto-delete at 00:00 zulu time every day.

That would just make things worse.

1) Maps would be absolutely covered in small stone buildings in the same way that they're covered by pillars now.

2) If you think it's hard to get people to remove pillars so you can build, imagine how much harder it would be to get them to remove a collection of stone buildings. Once they spend the resources to create all those huts it would be nearly impossible to get most people to take down a bunch of stone buildings.

22 hours ago, Malvegil67 said:

If people what to do this kind of crap, then force them to move over to private server that would allow something like that.  But not on an official server.

You have that backwards.

Pillars are much less important on private & Unofficial servers because they have admin that are more active and more willing to enforce their own server rules. If someone is running their own private/Unofficial server they are both capable and willing to make rules about where people can build, how close to other players they can build, and then to enforce those rules.

But on Official servers the game system (auto-decay) is how that is decided, and pillars are part of the game system. That's one of the reasons why WildCard GM's are so slow to respond to tickets that complain about pillars, it's mostly up to the players to negotiate with each other about opening up space to allow others to build.

22 hours ago, Malvegil67 said:

I can understand that you would want a little buffer between you and the next person, but some of these people are just ridiculous on how far out they put these darn pillars and foundations.

That's a two-edged sword. If you don't pillar enough space around your base then other people will build too close to you which will prevent you from being able to expand or modify your base. if you think it's frustrating trying to find a good spot for a new base, consider how frustrating it is to be in a base for 6 months and then realize you're boxed in with no place to go.

Speaking from personal experience, I've played on a couple of PvE servers where people built all around our base and we had no place to grow, there wasn't even enough space to have an outside yard for our tames. As we grew and developed we ended up having to build a skyscraper to keep our tames and we had destroy and rebuild parts of our base so that we had a new floor plan that allowed bigger dinos to get in and out of the base. We spend a lot of time and resources re-configuring our base because we wanted to be nice to people.

in both cases they started small, it was "just a hut" so they had a safe place to respawn, and then they liked that location so much that they kept building a little bit larger, just asking us to "remove one pillar" until we no longer had enough room to keep growing.

And that doesn't even begin to address the problem of spawn points. The more bases there are the more that spawn points get blocked and resource spawns start disappearing. People can (either accidentally or intentionally) prevent resources from being publicly available.

You need so much more than merely "a little buffer", you need enough space that as your base and your tamed menagerie grows you have room for your own growth. Cooperation is essential to being good neighbors on PvE but that goes both ways - you need to be willing to talk to people and negotiate for a space to build, and you also need to understand that other people have very good reasons for wanting to preserve open space.

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2 hours ago, sjskdjkfa said:

Perhaps they could add a way to calculate the area used by a tribe. That should be displayed on the the structures. That should also be alluded to in the coc e.g. something like: "an acceptable base size in pve is x to y square meters" or whatever. This alone would do a lot to help people know what bases to report, and prevent tribes from claiming to much land in the first place. That might be a little harder to implement than I initially thought, how do you account for the terrain not being flat? Could do a 3d calculation (volume claimed by a tribe) instead...

This ignores the fact that some tribes are more cooperative than others.

Two examples:

* If a tribe builds a public taming pen and unlocks all of the doors and gates, your suggestion would still penalize them for over-building.

* If a tribe builds a public resource harvesting platform, like for tree sap or for gas on Aberration, your suggestion would still penalize them for over-building.

Any rule that punishes people for creating shared resources is a bad idea on PvE.

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5 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

This ignores the fact that some tribes are more cooperative than others.

Two examples:

* If a tribe builds a public taming pen and unlocks all of the doors and gates, your suggestion would still penalize them for over-building.

* If a tribe builds a public resource harvesting platform, like for tree sap or for gas on Aberration, your suggestion would still penalize them for over-building.

Any rule that punishes people for creating shared resources is a bad idea on PvE.

Taming pens etc. are only going to add a trivial amount of volume. I'm talking above in terms of x and y for a reason, idk what numbers to put there. But if I were one of the devs and were considering some approach like this, I'd start by fleshing out the calculations by building an analytics tool. Write some code to sweep the servers tribe by tribe, look at each structures x,y,z coordinates add up the volume, then build up a data set which would probably look like a bell curve, then I'd find a way to send a message to the outliers on the right side of the curve (the %5 percent or so of tribes with more volume than anyone else) and use the 5% to 95% volumes on the curve to do another calculation, probably make a simplifying assumption that their volume is an ellipsiod of some sort and put that into square meters and use that as the x,y for the coc. And more to your point, those outliers on the right side of the curve, they have more than a reasonable sized base with two taming pens or what ever. They can delete some pillars to save their pen.

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7 hours ago, deedoubleu said:

That might be tricky to control too - amount of "square tiles" you allow for tribe to claim can be shaped as a cube [base], flat, long, high or a series of separate buildings close enough to prevent others from building between those.

You misunderstand. I'm not suggesting assigning people square tiles. Nothing would change about the current land claiming system, you'd still build your base how ever shaped you want, throw up a ring of gates to protect a yard, and put a couple dozen pillars around it or on some metal or what ever. Or make seven smaller bases ina v shape for all I care lol. The only thing that changes is the game calculates your impact visa v the amount of land you have claimed. It would require an algorithm that would for example only add a little bit of area to your sum if your pillar is snapped to your front porch cause your base is already there taking up area see?

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There is already a no build zone around every ones bases, a different algorithm could go along with like an ai player and a test pillar, and try to place it then run 15 ft and try to place it again (grid search the whole map). The maps that are chuck full could be flagged for a GM to go look at. A variation on that idea is another analytics tool that would dig deeper, when trying to place and the game says can't place due to being close to enemy foundation, write some code that queries which tribe the enemy foundation belongs to. Then compile that into the same bell curve as mentioned before. Idk which method would be easier, just saying there are WAYS.

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Btw before some one calls me a whiny beach bob newb, I'm actually end game pve, and would also like to emphasize that if something like this were implemented... please wc do it in a way that gives people a chance to adjust. I highly doubt I'm any where near the top 5% (of tribes claiming land) but if I were I'd very much appreciate communication. Or even just to suddenly see an area displayed on one of my pillars, and a server message saying to check the coc.

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One thing I would suggest, and being quite conservative here, create your bare minimum buffer around the area you plan to build within and expand into with fencefound+pillar+ladder.  Your gated area within the minimum buffer you already set, make sure all gates are snapped to a fence foundation or some other way of snapping.  Make sure all gates are 3 snap points or greater. 

After you are looking out further for resources, use fencefound+pillar.  Only use 2snap features for all the area outside of your immediate base needs.  ANything that another tribe will try to punish you for will be that extra stuff.  This is assuming you aren't a darling who went and did do something already against the coc with your initial start here.  I'm assuming you are not blocking a road or resource or something that would get you in trouble regardless...  So assuming they can't point to your immediate needs structures, the only thing that would disappear is your resource protections, this will reduce how much you lose to enforcement.  and it's completely assuming you took a minimalist approach to the suggestion here.  One of the things that helps w/ protecting resource areas though is to put a tiny 1x1 hut, or even a 1triangle hut nearby a resource w/out being too close.  Huts with pillars have more pull than pillars w/out huts.

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5 hours ago, sjskdjkfa said:

You misunderstand. I'm not suggesting assigning people square tiles. Nothing would change about the current land claiming system, you'd still build your base how ever shaped you want, throw up a ring of gates to protect a yard, and put a couple dozen pillars around it or on some metal or what ever. Or make seven smaller bases ina v shape for all I care lol. The only thing that changes is the game calculates your impact visa v the amount of land you have claimed. It would require an algorithm that would for example only add a little bit of area to your sum if your pillar is snapped to your front porch cause your base is already there taking up area see?

Guess I didn't. Can you explain how system you are suggesting suppose to work in more details?

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1 hour ago, Aylana314159 said:

Honestly official PvE need ORP removed and dino siege events based on numbers of dinos and structures. The E part of PvE needs work. 

That would be just a weapon for greifers, u go offline, someone kites corrupted dinos to ur base while ur tucked up in bed. 

There are a number of issues with PVE I agree and currently the biggest one is the mass pillar spam.  Land grabbing and total greed is the real issue, I don't get why people would pillar a map up so no one can build, they might as well go play single player, that way they have the entire map to pillar up till their hearts content.

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11 minutes ago, reddotjellytot said:

I don't get why people would pillar a map

Pillaring has legitimate uses like preserving spawns of creatures and resources. Would you like to play on a map missing entire resource or specific creatures like beavers?

 

Also pillar buffer zones, so no one blocks you from finishing your base.

 

Now mass land grab for no reason is different.

 

13 minutes ago, reddotjellytot said:

That would be just a weapon for greifers, u go offline, someone kites corrupted dinos to ur base while ur tucked up in bed. 

This is why defenses exist in the game. And if WC implemented an environmental threats system (dinos, weather, etc) then players would need to build with defenses in mind.

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