For more than a year now, all official PvE servers are suffering from a horrible affliction that drives new players away in disgust and leaves the servers depopulated. Which ever server you visit, they all display the same symptoms: One gargantuan base that stretches all over the map, often blocking access to obelisks, almost always occupying all attractive spots that could be settled by new players, and ruining the scenery with usually badly constructed walkways. In most cases, the owners of these monstrosities have long ceased playing actively, and only login once every two weeks, just for a few seconds, to keep their cancerous megastructures from decaying.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely believe that they have every right to do this, now matter how much it annoys everyone else. If they were able to claim most of the map as their own, then it’s theirs by right of conquest. Owning land is not shameful, even if your buildings look ugly as hell. But that doesn’t mean the game should make it so easy for them. Here’s my idea of a solution:
Bases should cost upkeep. The cost of maintaining a base should be proportional to its size, and it should be paid in coins. That would have the added benefit of making coins useful for something.
To facilitate this, a craftable placeable container would have to be introduced, where one can put one’s coins, from which the system can deduct the upkeep cost. Simply, the more building blocks a base consists of, the more coins are consumed. This can happen once every week, or even once every month, so as not to put a burden on the server resources, and also to give players sufficient time to restock their coin containers.
When the upkeep cannot be paid, a purge will spawn, and the size of the purge will be proportional to the missing amount of coins. The purge will not have any desirable mobs, but only mobs that don’t drop loot and don’t make good pets, so that people won’t intentionally trigger these purges.
Alternatively, instead of a purge, a number of random building elements (proportional to the missing funds) will simply decay.
This way, inactive perma-refreshers will eventually run out of funds, or they will be forced to start playing again; either of which is an improvement over the current situation.
All obelisks periodically spawn very powerful purges, so that buildings that block access to them, will get destroyed. Those purges should have a very short life, so that they cannot be farmed or kited to other regions of the map. They should put out a ton of destruction within a time frame of 1-2 minutes, and then disappear.
Alternatively, instead of a purge, an earthquake or an explosion of currpuption energy could occur periodically, that doesn’t harm living creatures, but damages buildings.
This way, obelisks (and maybe other key locations that habitually are being walled off by griefplayers) can be made accessible again for a time, until they get blocked again.
Some of the current no-build zones should be connected by thin strips (no broader than a few pixels) of additional no-build zones, to act as barriers against contiguous bases that span the entire length and width of the map. Those barriers could maybe run along the borders between biomes. No single base should extend over two or more biomes.
I don’t mean to say that all 3 of these ideas should be implemente. Even if only one of them were implemented, it would greatly alleviate the deplorable current situation.
Making very strong purges located at very resource rich areas or obelisks does sound like a good idea. Even lore wise it makes sense, you are located at a valuable area so it’s gonna attract more powerful/dangerous things wanting to take it from you.
I will keep putting my ideas in true weather cataclysm (tornado, blizzard, name it) that does actual damage to structures, no matter how enhanced they are, no matter what’s the tier they are built in.
Nature should be the “over-ruler” forcing people to maintain their bases, purges would be good but AI it’s not so brillaint and very often purges fails to deliver what are designed for.
Extend sandstorms (maybe adapt to each biome in a correct graphic manner) to all map and make those weathers damagin’ structures no matter what or where are built, this way you have to survive not only in the early game, but throughout all you “career” in CE.
My 2 cents.
I can entertain the idea. I always find it funny to read the reactions when bases are being damaged by meteors. However, losing all you have at level 30 is not ideal neither is having a dragon spawn in your storage room.
But weather should not “spam” randomly inside your storage, this si what a Purge “can” do… A blizzard comes and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the grand leveller…
They could implement some system to predict Bad weathes (dunno, darfari bone-bells start tingling “an hour” before a storm arrives) and maybe a system to fix things a lil’ more confortable… But the non -avoidability of this feature would simply be “fair” to all, you can’t complain to the cold or to the wind. they simply exist, and while an active player would constantly maintain its base (the bigger you build, the bigger you have to work, it’s your choice), those palyer who simply show up to avoid decaying would have no tool to save their bases.
I like much the surviving aspect and in this game you do not need to survive very soon, food and water no longer are a problem, as for materials or workstations.
Honestly you have to survive only in the first 2 hours of the game? Less probably…
I’d rather prefer you never stop surviving, in a more complex way if you want (keep fixing walls instead of finding water sources), but in this way the method would be flat to all.
(of course in server setting one could amplify or diminish the rate of damage or how often a storm will appear, but personally I’d keep these events pretty rude: it’s fun to be scared from something bigger than all the players in my opinion)
my server is PVE/C 1 guy blocked the entery brimstone lake with foundations, zero spawn of brimstone… and in SAVANA he did squares and X`s with foundations and a huge wall and the animals are not spawning, we cant farm elephants and theres is nothing we can do about it… YT dot com watch?v=XpcjgKFcitk&t= take a look at the video
Nope. Not on the official PvE server I play… And its not like I play alone… Every month there are several new players and bases which vanishes after 7days.
Maybe only your PvE server is full of toxic players and I doubt you tested them all…
Try to avoid these kinds of servers is the best solution unfortunately.
It will just end up causing you much grief and frustration otherwise. My advice is to find a nice private server with active admins, this is the only sure fire way to keep a server clean of that kind of filth. Let the scum sit on their dead and empty servers, their gigantic resource blocking bases will end up just blocking the resources for themselves if everyone else leaves, then they can essentially have their co-op/single player server and you will be free of their cancer and enjoying the company of other players.
When no,one plays on the server they have spent so much time building their cancer on they to will either move or die of boredom, win / win. Active admins is unfortunately the only way to remove these cancerous types and keep them away. Believe me they choose to play on servers with other players for a reason, they are usually just too stupid to realize that their actions kill servers and make others leave. If they didn’t want other players around they would be on dead servers or be playing on their own singleplayer/ co-op private server.
EDIT: The most effective way to prevent this on the backend would be for PVE servers to just have different building zones than PVP and then have all the notorious blocking areas, such as obelisks and brimstone lake and such, as no build zones. But this requires extra resources and time from the dev team on something that they may not deem as all that important, not that it isn’t important but they may have a long list of important stuff that they feel prioritizes over something like this.
Me and others where talking in another thread about changing the claim mechanic.
Basically removing the claim mechanic from all building blocks so that anyone can dismantle. Add a bench for claiming (like rust tool cupboard) that once placed down on a block it will propagate the claim to all connected block to a certain metric range, the bench will tell you how much materials the upkeep costs will be, and if no materials get placed into the bench the base will start to decay.
For PvE this will be awesome because people will be able to build together without having to be in the same clan.
Also keep in mind this mechanic will make “join to refresh the decay” useless because they would need to farm the upkeep materials and spend time playing. Not just joining once a week to refresh the decay timer.
I agree that it isn’t every official pve server that have these problems, but I have played on several pve and pve-c servers, and my experience is that server population also play a role in this, the pve-c(1041) I have been playing on for more than a year often has 20-30 players online at the same time especially during pvp hours, and since the latest update the server has frequently been maxed out - The point is that while the most populated servers seems to be more attractive to new players it also attracts more toxic players.
And we have for the past 8-10 months has especially 1 player that have built sandstone spider webs going from his base, almost surrounding the entire outskirts of Sepermeru, through the oasis, area around unnamed city, he does have a base, but mostly it is just sandstone foundations that spread out in a web pattern preventing several spawns + preventing anyone from building in those areas, and all he has to do is log in once a week to refresh since everything is connected to his base.
Once in a while an old base decay around there and sometimes he gets top expand his web, our fear is that one day he will have completely covered the west side of the map.
What he does isn’t against any rule, but it is just too easy and cheap for anyone to start blocking huge areas with sandstone making it hard for others to move around and almost impossible to find a place in that area to build a base.
He is not the only one, there are a few others that have build huge walls blocking paths and areas of interest.
I’ve tried riding around the map on horse which was a pain because most of the time I had to ride back the way I came from because I often met a China wall that stretched from mountain to mountain, so yeah I agree that some sort of tax or build limitation would definitely make it a lot harder to block huge areas
You misunderstood, faster decay that activate when the upkeep costs materials runs out in the claim bench. And only clan members of that bench can build in that area. Try rust, they have the best claim mechanic around.
The problem with just having no-build zones around choke points is that someone can always build a base that encircles the zone, cutting it off from the rest of the map. You would need something that would make sure there was always a walkable path between important areas. Invisible lines that zig-zag the map and prevent large bases probably isn’t the best way to do that. Unless the unbuildable zones were a cave network that didn’t get in the way of potential smaller builds on the surface. Maybe as a purge, an Avatar could spawn in around obelisks and travel to a point of interest, threatening to level anything in their path. Not only would it demolish obelisk blockers but it would look hella cool.
The last thing this game needs… Now with the xmas holidays. Lets see how many of my maprooms will vanish.
Pump up the max decay to 10 days and make it resource-driven. When it has max resource, you are at 10 days (and of course like always - it has to have a certain size and/or T3). And it will slowly reduce the resources in that table.
Something like a maintenance fee for decay.
@Frillen Yeah, on some day the server has >10 players… But not really full. People at reddit also always complain about that. People jump at full-servers at PvE and then complain that the map is blocked?!
Well, try an empty server? (thats not directed to you)…
But when you have a toxic troll, then he goes to mass populate servers just to ruin it for everyone else
Long story short: Without server admins, this will always be a problem.
You haven’t understood what I said, not one bit. This actual system is the fault. There should be no decay, everyone should be able to destroy anything that isn’t in the claim-bench area of effect. So people can build together. If you build a base and place the claim bench then you’ll need resources for the upkeep costs. Or get evicted and squatted by other players. FasterFasterMurderMurder. This for pvp.
For pve it will allow different players to build togheter, you place enough materials for a week of upkeep in your claim range, if the materials finish then the decay will set in and in 3 days everything will crumble if no-one squatted your base and refilled the bench.
Not true. I’ve been to couple of official servers where autonomy and anarchy got the best out of people.
Many good ideas here for PvP servers also. Not much to add, you nailed it. The upkeeping costs in coins instead of building materials is really interesting. I would love to try that one out. This should be scaled however so that new players and people who own small bases have almost irrelevant upkeeping costs. Otherwise its too much hassle to gather silver in order to keep your T1 base at the noobriver alive.
I would really love to see hideous demons coming from the obelisks that prowl the lands and destroy whatever they find. Really cool idea.
