Land Claim Abuse on Official Servers: Feedback/Discussion

An official statement has been made making clarifications on how FC interprets and enforces TOS:

https://forums.funcom.com/t/land-claim-abuse-on-official-servers/190158/3

Questions? Concerns? Comments?

Try to keep it civil and ZERO discussion about specific bans/base wipes - let’s not get thread locked.

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It’s unfortunate for players like myself who enjoy building helpful community structures or even small townships around the place but it does make sense and at the same time I’ll be glad to not see anymore foundation webs around.

I assume structures like these would also put a strain on server performance, this announcement on top of the recent server mergers just makes me more and more curious about what’s going to happen with 3.0, is all of this happening now in preparation for 3.0 or is it just coincidental timing?

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They never said don’t have communal structures. Just don’t pretend it’s “community” when it’s just land claim. Public map rooms are still fair as far as I see it. But make them just public map rooms and folks just need to stop leveraging the term communal.

This is a great thing and loving the pictures. They even nailed decorative land claim which I am grateful for. I hope that is a living document type of post and as the game evolves more, this can get revised to meet the new challenges. I also love that they are quite specific about the scope of this (as they always have been)…it’s onlyl official servers. Knock yourself out on private and solo projects.

Every single one of their examples are ones that I would consider too much for official servers.

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I think the main thing that people seem to “forget” is that they share the server with others so when they build across a path that they are not being very nice to the other players that either have to dismount and climb said wall or they have to go a very long route to get to where they are going. Or the ones that seem to think that it is ok to build over an area that has a 1 skull spawn in it. Or they decide they want to build really close to an already established base then ask the person of the older base to remove blocks or change their design because the new player wants to move their base in that direction even though they have more than enough space on the other side of their large sprawling mostly empty sandstone mess to build.

FYI…I detest sandstone structures for long term bases…I think it is ugly.

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I think it’s a pretty good start. It’s nowhere near complete enough. It answers the questions it addresses fairly well IMO. There are however, several other question remaining. So, yeah, good start! Let’s see what they add in the hours and days to come.

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The one at Heliograph took some commitment.

These guidelines are still too vague. Let’s just focus on webbing: is some allowed? And how do we know when it’s too much?

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Yeah, they didn’t really focus on any edge cases - which would have been helpful. Until such time as they do my guess is that we’re left to assume “None!” is the answer.

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I have a BIG problem with the walls and villages section. So if you build a castle and make a purge defense wall its land claim? That is utterly ridiculous. YOU ADVERTISE THESE STRUCTURES. I’m at a loss for words this is infuriating.

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I think it’s fine how much they detailed it. People who need more specifics than this are just trying to push how much they can get away with. I know there’s gonna be at least six replies to this disagreeing with me, but my point still stands. It doesn’t matter the exact number of pieces, it’s about how you use them.

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I reckon it would still be ok to put a wall defense around your base as long as you weren’t claiming an unnecessary large land-claim radius. As long as you kept the wall reasonably tight around your base I wouldn’t see a problem.

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It can be hard to draw a hard line for all of these cases. Edge cases usually involve more than one person assessing any negative impact that the structure is causing. Some of the factors we consider are the restriction of movement and the restriction of access to resources.

Please feel free to ask about any specific edge cases you have. This kind of feedback will be helpful to us.

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I am okay with this. Basically building on officials should be for use and basic protection, and not decorative or for perma defense. For those that have to build large art pieces (not a bad thing) use sp or privates and then share via videos. I thing many were doing it for notoriety (again not necessarily bad) but did not realize 90%of buildings arent as unique as they thought they were.

Officials are meant as the gate to the game, not to be permanantly settled.

As a pvper, i hope they revisit DbD and 24/7 raiding for officials. i feel making bases more of a conflict point and not a turtle shell could be good.

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Hello is it possible to exported the data from someones base, to be transferred to a single player game? Like a kind of data base migration?

Most of what’s on display in that post is stuff that I’ve detested for a long while and I’ve been hoping they would get rid of it.

The only thing that I’m a bit concerned about are walls. I agree that building a replica of the Great Wall of China is not something anyone should be doing on an official server, but I’m wondering about bases that incorporate a central keep and a curtain wall. I used to have a base like that, and I always made sure that it didn’t block, enclose, or suppress any important spawns, but I’m not sure if anything like that would be tolerated anymore.

Then again, I can always build it, ask someone to report me, and see how it turns out :stuck_out_tongue:

This right here! I’m glad that they’ve decided to address some of our questions, but I really hope they don’t stop there. :slight_smile:

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This is why I moved to a vanilla private server. A fluid ToS serves no one.

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so basically don’t build anything that can protect your base from people building too close. got it. thx funcom!

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Short answer, no. Long answer, kinda yes but with a ton of caveats. It requires a mod (Pippi), but only works multiplayer to multiplayer. But you could just use the dedicated server software to ‘act’ as a singleplayer. So you’d take the database with the base you want, bluboard copy it. Log off, load up the database you want to use in SP. Login. Paste the bluboard copy. Log off and then move the database back to SP. None of that doable with an official unfortunately.

If Funcom were to ever offer a feature similar to Pippi bluboard, it would likely be 5.0 or 6.0, but who knows? We know its possible.

Active raiding has been some of the most fun I’ve had in CE. If they ever turned on DBD, you’d be in for a real treat. It would alleviate alot of the building concerns in PVP as well. You don’t need to build thick to slow down raiders during times you can’t login. You need to build in a way to allow yourself to sally out and attack the raiders. It is a vastly different way of building and doesn’t require as much building material.

And of course those raiding have to be wary of being raided themselves. If you and a few buddies aren’t in the same clan… or maybe there’s enough of you to have two clans. When one is being raided, the other counter raids.

I will have to agree with this statement. A bit shocked actually. You cannot build a wall around your base? You cannot build a small village around your base?
I have a small village at the foot of my Castle, a blacksmith forge, a leather crafter building, an Armory, four residential buildings, a stable, an Inn and a church.
Not one thing other than some rocks and weeds was displaced.


I have never received anything other than compliments from my fellow players on this server.
Am I now to understand that someone that Zendesk griefs for fun can report me and all I own will be destroyed?

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While I agree with the roads and bridges are a form of land claim, and the towers and running blocks everywhere is just plain spam, I cannot believe that building a wall around your base or a village nearby qualifies.
The sad thing is that most private servers have even more restrictions, so basically, if you want to keep playing, you are forced to RENT a server.

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I don’t want to sound too harsh but if there were more things to do in HL, we would spend less time building. In addition, it seems appropriate to differentiate PVP and PVE. Construction is at the center of the game, especially in PVE (if not you might as well stop making DLCs). It would seem a shame to favor hideous cubes over interesting creations. I don’t have a large base on the official server but I’ve met players who have spent years building their own. They are not annoying and even bring life to empty places. It would be a shame to destroy the creativity of some players by mixing land claim and simple pleasure of building.

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