Yeah, we already established it was a contest that happened three years ago and not the most recent one I was thinking of. So 3 years ago was before my time. It was also a time prior to Funcom’s “new direction” so in my opinion fairly irrelevant to this discussion. When did FC change direction anyway? What, about a year ago, maybe a tad more? And they got serious about that direction when, maybe 6 to 8 months ago? I can’t be off by more than a couple of months.
landclaim abuse 
iv been suspended for 10x times less
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nicole still works at Funcom. She administered the last contest.
Shame you don’t know what you’re talking about either. You know, my winning entry was a Welsh Castle that will be impossible to build due to the fence foundation thing, and would be deleted due to the landclaim thing and sheer size thing. Also I had three temples close together for visuals.
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I didn’t “just take” that meaning. Since the “sandbox game” has absolutely no reference to amount of time your creations last, I would say the implied concept of temporary sandbox creations is justified by the root of the phrase which defines this very clearly. So what justification do you have in your opinion that there is a requirement of permemence?
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Sandbox predates gaming, substantially. In Open Source, Sandbox was used predominantly in the financial sector as proving ground for software prior to hooking it up to actual banks and credit card processors. PayPal still runs the successor system to this.
Earlier still, sandbox (little S) was used in private military contracting, to create an enhanced software scenario for a given weapon. For instance, Target Drone and Stealth Bomber.
Even earlier, Sandbox was the scenario system for nuclear engineers. In particular it was used in the creation of several power plants. Three Mile Island was built from the Sandbox up, and the Sandbox existed even when the plant went hypercritical. Using multiple Sandboxes, many teams could deconstruct the problem. The Three-Mile Sandbox lives in the Smithsonian, in a great big room, and contains my dad’s signature among others.
Durable, resourceful and potentially timeless.
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honestly most people on pvp officials get wiped due to land claim spam.
no one would be nearly as annoyed at funcom if they just removed the spam instead of wiping the entire base + banning the players lmao.
This game is designed around land claiming honestly.
Default land claim size. A player not in your clan can build 12 foundation lengths away from your land claim. Thats so insanely close it boarders on stupidity.
Explosive jars do an insane amount of damage compared to building piece health. Let alone demon fire barrage from a treb. So of course players are going to land claim to protect them selves from trebs.
People are also going to land claim because they don’t want people building 12foundations away from them.
It’s clear funcom knows difference between a main base and foundation spam so just remove the spam instead of the entire base and stop banning people for building. Start banning the hackers that plague every region because your ping caps for officials dont work.
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Because it’s normal for a game studio to have their official servers represent the dev team’s vision for the game. Explicitly saying that the game was not developed with official servers in mind goes contrary to widely adopted expectations.
Yes, we do say that a lot, and the context in which we say it matters, and the key word there is “free”. This is invariably brought up when someone complains about how “they have a right to XYZ on official servers because they paid for the game”. Saying that the official servers are not what you paid for is not the same as saying that the official servers are not what the devs design for.
It came as a shock to me, and – judging by the replies here – I wasn’t alone. So no, I wouldn’t consider it well known.
I’m not sure whether “melt” is referring to the level of surprise or trying to describe something specific about the tone. If you find that the reactions are insulting or offensive – I didn’t, but we all see these things differently – then it’s perfectly fine to flag those posts or maybe point out the specifics. Other than that, I don’t see anything wrong here, and I certainly wouldn’t want to think that the price of Funcom’s direct and honest communication should be that we have to stay silent in response. And I’m pretty sure they would agree with me on that.
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While I did not mean to sound rude and abrupt, and I apologize, the fact is I have put most of my thrall workstations in these buildings, so I do not assess that they are just RP.
Yes, a few are. The church with the Crom altar is, the stable is, even though its weird that they actually made stable pieces, and now want to delete stables.
As I said earlier, the Inn was actually a working base at one time. Just a fancy one, lol. The whole area, as shown in my earlier thread takes up 1/20th of one grid square.
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But not stable and certainly not consistent also I challenge the timeless aspect because the data from the sandbox is timeless, the sandbox itself wasn’t meant to be timeless but an R&D environment which by it’s very nature is mutable and never consistent. Saves done in these sandboxes were for data collection of the experiments performed and not a stance of the sandbox environment itself. The environmental enviroment of a sandbox is separate from the experimental design and the saving was not to capture the sandbox but to capture the data of the experiment.
All of this is completely different than gaming sandboxes which is more equivalent to the children’s sandy play area and therefore the analogy and logical conclusion still stands. Our creations in sandbox games should have the expectation of being lost after we are done playing when we are playing with other people. If it’s our own personal sandbox, then you can argue the expectations are changed and a level of permemence should be planned on. Communal sandbox? No not really and are at the whims of those that manage the sandbox if they are willing to protect what we build or not.
What FC has done is put rules on the communal sandbox and everyone is flipping out over it. These rules had to be put into place because apparently we couldn’t resolve things like children do (sure there are some spoiled kids out there but the majority of kids will share space and if they are done with it, they let the other kids just use it) and therefore FC had to step in. Yes I understand that I have just ticked off about 75% of all folks playing and probably closer to 95% of the PVE crowd but some perspective is needed because the company is doing EXACTLY what we asked them to do. They are regulating officials in a manner that is equitable for all gamers (both current and future) to enjoy. What did everyone think was going to happen? That FC would just target folks that we find offensive and not look at our own dirty laundry in the process? Yeah it doesn’t work that way. Arbitration and regulation typically means everyone suffers…some more than others but this idea that a person can just skate on by and not be affected…yeah that doesn’t exist. I’m sorry that folks assumed it would.
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And I remember punching a lot of people who said things like this.
Personally I don’t feel betrayed. I’m a PvP scumbag who builds scummy PvP things. I’m used to things going kaflooey. It just really hurts to see a monolithic approach here, especially against people who aren’t used to this kind of wanton destruction.
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It certainly was a shock to me that in a thread devoted to feedback on a staff member’s clarification of TOS, said staff member chose to inform us that the mode we are discussing is not even a priority of development.
I’m not surprised that people took that as them thumbing their noses towards us, or outright dismissal of concerns raised here and elsewhere.
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Well you see this is just where we differ. I look at a sandbox as a location for safe, creative action. I think you are locked up on durability.
My sandbox allows other people to come in and stomp on mah stuff. Yet every day, when I log in, the sandbox has refreshed itself and all my things still stand. Maybe they have some holes in them. But no rain has come to wash them away, there’s no bird poop on my pink pail. The real-world sandbox analogy fails in my construct, because servers live forever. A game.db is a slice of time that can live eternally.
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And I see a personal sandbox the same. The difference here is the sandbox in your backyard is different than the one at the park. The park is what officials are. The backyard is private and SP.
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I think some of the real issues is those that are the loudest get the most sway, or to put it in a common phrase, squeaky wheel gets the oil.
Most people that were content as is weren’t complaining, even most that are upset won’t complain but will quit with next to no explanation, and I believe you are right in some regards in the double standard of rules for thee but not for me.
However there certainly is more debate to be had, and the issues have created more squeaky wheels than before, no one is talking about speedhackers being unfairly banned, or skybases/undermesh being deleted because that was always very clearly wanted, however the impression given of the game through both its marketing and even mechanics and development (favouring larger stations) leads people towards a building style that seems at odds with the rules, if funcom can change and start enforcing the rules, perhaps there is some hope that they can with grace and understanding pull back and realize the ramifications and design of their game and why this occours.
I will speak openly for a second that I am a developer myself with a relatively large successful mmo, and balancing such things is not always easy, and sometimes the devs and the playerbase is at odds, so the developers very much have my empathy however I have felt the best thing you can do in regards to a community is listen and be open to change, sometimes your players are playing in a way you dont intend, and sometimes you do have to reflect and ask yourself why, what elements of the design have encouraged this, is this part of the game boring? problematic, why are people trying to circumvent this mechanic, or exploit this, is it for gain? unfair advantage? enjoyment?.
you may realize that the players are compensating for bad design or the unintended gameplay is far more interesting.
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You’re getting warmer, that’s from 2020…
I didn’t find them offensive to me nor insulting really.
By melting I meant shocked or slightly unable to cope.
Maybe, but likely gritting their teeth or grimacing as they do so.
I will say that regardless of my opinion on the subject itself, I’m glad to see Funcom clarifying their rules a bit. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, additional clarification is NEVER a bad thing. Thank you @Community for the OP.
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I mean, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can honestly tell you that I never asked Funcom to do this. As a PVE player, I asked, quite persistently, for official servers to have moderation to protect us against griefers, because the game offers no recourse against them.
If I had an in-game mechanics for dealing with the griefers, I wouldn’t need help from an admin, but I don’t: if, for example, someone walls me in on a PVE(-C) server, I have no way to deal with that after the fact. That doesn’t mean I wanted admins to go to what seems to be quite extreme.
And it really does make me think, you know. I mean, things like extensive player-built highways and huge, ornate bridges traversing one whole grid square have always been my pet peeve, and I try to avoid servers where people build stuff like that. On the other hand, it’s not something I think Funcom should wipe, much less ban for.
Which is kinda odd, because I would have no problem with a private server admin regulating the same thing, so I had to ask myself: why do I feel that way? And the thing is that I know that a private server admin will reach out to me and talk about the problem first, and then resort to more extreme measures if that doesn’t work out.
I have doubts about whether Funcom can offer that level of support for free servers, and I have even more doubts about whether they should do it, which is why I would prefer it if their admin action was reserved for extremes, situations in which the vast majority of players would go “pfft, well of course they would do that”, rather than “huh, that’s weird, I don’t see anything wipe- or ban-worthy here”. I used to think Funcom regulated only those extremes, but what @Palm522 shared with some of us – and Funcom’s clarification of the rules – convinced me otherwise.
Why? What’s wrong with “hey, can you be honest and direct with us and we’ll respectfully do the same in return”?
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Most land claim issues I see stem from PVE and PVE-C servers. In PVP, we can take an active role in removing the offensive structures. But any server with “PVE” in the title is powerless to stop land claim. As a PVP player myself, I don’t report anyone unless it’s excessive (like the foundation web in the OP) and actively ruining my gameplay experience. And even then, it’s a last resort. I can see it being an entirely different story on a PVE server since you can’t take an active role in removing the issue.
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Yeah but even in a PVP setting, it the alpha is just so entrenched there really isn’t much you can do outside of blowing up foundation by foundation…especially if they are salty and just refresh timers on their destroyed bases just to be jerks and keep the landclaim active.
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