I was playing Lost Ark with a few veteran buddies of mine and information seemed to get disseminated quite quickly. I never saw notices from Smilegate in game and hardly ever visited their forums. But through the network of people I was playing with, somebody was always watching for something. So all the new stuff that came down the pipe was said via guild chat or in our discords. Hell I know about patches and policy changes on games I’ve never played or purchased.
So I wouldn’t worry too much. The word is getting out. This thread is probably being linked in quite a few discords and probably on reddit.
I’ve seen people make this argument a few times. And sorry to say, it simply isn’t true.
In this cottage, there was T3 benches in the left side workshop. Every workbench was present in side of that stone area with the exception of the firebowl (T2 instead), dye bench (somewhere else), and everything for cooking (stove, firepit, preservation boxes, apiaries, drying racks, compost, and brewing barrel somewhere else). It also had an extensive storage area, around 44 chests worth. Far more than what was really needed, but I like to organize.
Admittedly this is a PVE-centered build but it was right around a measly 250< pieces. Doubling or tripling that amount to reinforce it would make it viable for PVP, or even more and you’d still be far under the footprint of what would be considered landclaim abuse. It also had enough room for up to 3 players.
Suffice to say, you can fit all the workbenches into a smaller area.
Well To have everything in a comfortable working condition and some storage you need a 5x11 and 2 floors.
But then you don’t have the pens, maproom, stable, pen and greater wheel and vault.
So, 8x11 for the pens, 9x9 for the map, 3x5 for the stable, 6x6 for the greater wheel, 4x5 for a vault plus 7 times 4x5 for the shrines which have to have a minimum distance of 8 foundations to each other.
So, yes, you get all your workbenches in a 5x11 with 2 floors but not a functioning base
And you need all of that right next to your crafting area?
From a PvP perspective…
The animal pen can be reduced to the same size as the stables and both should be viewed as temporary structures that once taming done, should be removed or considered dead zones. As far as WoP, greaters are not worth the space. You can get two lessers in a circular hut Radius of two foundations, one wall high and then do wedge and slanted roof. You can stack the two with ceiling pieces inbetween and wala, a very small footprint that can break two thralls at a time. You get these little shacks in the thrall hunting areas and mass produce. As far as alters…yeah I still am not sold on the avatars. I have seen the amount of damage they do and for a solo person…not worth the effort. Well anyways, these are just base beacons so put them eslewhere away from your base. God bubbles aren’t all that anymore for defenses but yet people love them…don’t know why but they do.
And lastly…vaults. The biggest waste of space in the entire game. Look there is a reason why foundation spamming also included vaults. They aren’t serious storage for a base because the size to storage amount ratio is junk. So clans just used them as high HP land claims that have a mild function when PvPing. Heck if I was a moderator getting a zendesk report, I would query the amount of placed vaults the offending clan has and use that as one of the obvious metrics of clans that need further scrutiny.
Now this talk about building extra areas and in the context of land claiming…here is the secret that I will share about land claim and moderator wrath…do it in moderation and not with an obvious intent of being a jerk. It should be obvious to anyone seeing the build that you respect the game, the environment, the experience, and the players playing. If you can’t or won’t do that…yeah ummmm sorry.
After reviewing the clarification thread, TOS, and PMs on the subject I’d like to offer some further feedback. I’d also like to say the since the TOS was updated months ago, I have been very vocal supporting the value of the vague language in the TOS and it’s allowance for FC to make case by case judgment calls.
That being said, @Umborls, these are the subjects I would like more clarification on if there are to be any further updates on this subject. These are based on questions I read on these forums from my fellow exiles regularly:
Satellite Building - So long as they do not violate any condition of the TOS(and clarification thread) are we allowed to build in more than one location?
Clan Building - Do clan building allowances scale linearly to their number of members? Or are clans expected to utilize economies of scale? How does being in a clan interact with rules on satellite building?
Bans - I don’t think it’s in the interest of players or FC to have to ban players. I also understand that a message/warning system bogs down the process of moderation. Do you think it is more beneficial to have upfront warnings/clear rules and swift punishment or vague rules/subject judgment and less severe punishment?
Decorative Builds - How does the ruling on purely decorative builds interact with PVP objectives? Meaning, does a build (assuming it’s not spam) with the sole purpose of defense always qualify as unacceptable land claim?
I have tried to ask these in a way such that they can be answered without giving away too much power of subjective judgment. That being said, I understand if you choose not to answer or address one or any of these. These are the kinds of “edge cases” people talk about here on the forums and the ones we have to guess and argue about endlessly.
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Also I want to say @liran brings up some interesting ideas. While the game doesn’t solely focus on official servers when developing, considering ways to facilitate the type of experience this new moderation is aiming for would go a long way. A general god alter with access to all religious recipes would go a long way to answer the land claim problem that the need for multiple alters creates, just as an example.
Excellent questions! I hope we can get @Umborls to shed some light on them.
As a follow-up question to this one, does Funcom view this differently for different game modes? In other words, are PVP clans expected to rely on economies of scale and PVE aren’t? Or is it the same for all game modes?
it brings up to me a thing ive seen clans do with alts, fake clans made to landclaim around their base with fake raid bases, the lengths some go to , one clan I saw had 3 fake clans surrounding them ( I was friend with someone in clan so it was confirmed XD ) but all made to look like raid buildings surrounding them, when in reality was land claim buffering out the trebs under different clan names.
Ugh. Yeah that is just sleazy…and for what? “winning”? Those types of players are the exact reason we need regulation because they don’t play well with others.
I guess, but people will find a way to circumvent, its kinda my thing about the most people getting caught now with stuff are doing it out of ignorance not for advantage, because you get admin deleted so easily, and the people getting away with stuff are smartly circumventing.
tbh the treb thing, need for landclaim never seemed apparent to me, maybe I dont build treb vunerable bases very often or see trebs as grave threats as you can counter treb, arrow or even suicide bomb to stop a treb raid, but I have used trebs in many raids too, you build a treb tower high enough you can fire it over a square and a half (well out of the shooters render range even, spotters are super useful XD) so unless you expect landclaim to cover a square and a half which is kinda insane, whats the point in it?
Hell yes, I would love this. There has been some indication that having many chests filled with random stuff can have an impact on server performance. It’s kinda hard to confirm, but regardless of that, it would be nice to have better chests.
I’ve always wondered if there are any reasons for this, apart from the lore. It would be nice to at least reduce the radius of the Divine Prima Donna Effect
Okay, so I’d like to offer a counterpoint here, but I wanna preface that by saying I’m speaking from the PVE point of view. PVP players are welcome to chime in with their own experiences if they think these don’t apply.
If we look at what Funcom rules say they want to accomplish, their concerns fall into the following categories:
preventing the spawning of resources
a common example is suppressing one or more of the scarce/unique resources (e.g. a world boss or a rare NPC)
another example is suppressing a significant quantity of common resources (e.g. paving over the whole Shattered Springs)
restricting other players’ access to content
prime examples would be walling off an obelisk or a dungeon
a more subtle example would be preventing access to a discoverable POI that counts towards a journey
hogging too much land without leaving enough for other/new players
this one is easy to understand, but hard to agree on how much is “too much”
affecting server performance
this one is something players have no way of figuring out
So let’s examine whether the placeables we have are really so massive and bloated to make us break these rules:
The first two concerns have obviously nothing to do with the placeables. Even if you do need a lot of space for them, there’s no reason you can’t be careful about how you lay out your base so that you don’t nuke resources or prevent access to content.
When it comes to hogging too much claim, let’s set aside – for the moment – the question of “how much is too much”, and let’s examine how much space the placeables take up.
If we’re talking only about crafting stations, @Taemien already showed that you can have a super-compact build for those, but I don’t think we need to go to such extremes. If you build vertically, you can use the bulky T3 crafting stations and place several of each for parallel crafting, without having a huge footprint.
Adding wheels, pens, stables, and shrines into the mix will expand your claim footprint, but even if you have all 7 shrines and at least one greater wheel, one stable, and one pen – and even add the nearly-useless large well – you still don’t have to build a sprawling mess that takes up a whole grid square or more.
Don’t take my word for any of this. If you don’t believe me, go look at @JJDancer’s screenshots above.
The most difficult concern to tackle is the impact on server performance. We simply don’t have any way to measure that. On the other hand, everything we’ve seen so far seems to indicate it’s not a function of the surface area or the number of pieces, but rather which pieces are used, how many of them, and how densely they’re clustered. I really don’t think that big and bulky placeables are causing performance problems. They might even help, by forcing players to spread the resource-intensive bits around, so they’re not densely packed.
So, are the big, bulky placeables really a problem? I doubt it.
I’ve been trying to distill my opinions into something less verbose than usual (he said, adding a forward to his missive, because brevity is such a naughty word) and think I can strip it down to it’s most distinct framework.
I am extremely pleased and appreciative of the level of engagement from the official community minders. Communication matters, and even if it doesn’t change anything in the fullness of time, at least going through the process of dialogue is a show of dignity and respect. Regardless of any views on the actual content of the rules, good etiquette is being followed and as I am not slow to condemn for perceived malfeasance, so too must I show some alacrity in praising upstanding acts.
Regarding the content of the rules. Much of it makes sense in principle, especially in light of the offered clarifications, however there remains a sticking point or two for me.
2.a. The ban on walls and villages.
Gorramit. It’s in the bleeding intro to the game building a city state. Settlements were something of an advertised point early in the life of the game. As for walls, stockades and curtain walls have been a staple of fortification for centuries. The walled city-state is the basic social unit of civilization, ancient and wicked, from the source material the game is based on. Given how server load enforcement went in the last round of the Report meta, I am very curious how aggressive land claim emphasis will impact this patch for the Report meta.
2.b. Out-buildings and decorations.
Most of this is fairly reasonable especially in the context of land claim spam and the current health bar displays destroying stealth as a mechanic. I offer some exceptions that I feel should be considered.
Traps, the firepot pressure plates that insta-gib avatars. What is the purpose of a minefield if you have to keep it in your living space? Perhaps these items should be retired to accommodate the new-, er, clarified rules.
Torches and other light sources. With the big health bars, this doesn’t matter as much for functional combat, but being able to set out a bit of light so you can find your way home or see approaching foes as a punishable offense is worrisome. On one hand, they are land claim “spam”, on the other, they are a reasonable part of any sort of defensive, or even lived in, home system.
Stockades and other single placable baby walls. By nature these are things that would live outside your main fortress, designed to annoy foes by funnelling their flow. Their entire purpose being to break up charges and siege engine movements or eat up time to be removed. Why include these in the game of they are denied their purpose?
I’m not certain how hard it would be to strip these placeables of their ability to claim land, but there are numerous “decorations” which should not count as a flag for purposes of whether land is owned.
Vague vs Specific.
Rules with some wiggle room are generally good as they allow for adaptation to circumstance and acting based on context. However, when the enforcement system seems to be a binary lose all and be banned for two weeks (with an ambiguous start-stop date) or you don’t even know you were complained against, specifics are appreciated. The examples are good, but something a bit more firm would be appreciated. Perhaps a few more “these are good” and “these are bad” with a line or two noting what the functional difficulty is.
I tried to trim this down. I really did.
I just fail.
Requests like this are precisely why @Umborls explained that the game is not designed with only official servers in mind. Ask @Croms_Faithful what he thinks about adding more no-build zones that restrict his single-player experience. Or, for that matter, any private server admin who has placed community buildings around or near POIs to add content for their players.
This is unlike deciding how much is too much, or what your impact on server performance is. Those are difficult questions. Not building in certain spots is an easy choice to make, so I have no sympathy for those who just don’t want to make that choice and then complain about how it’s unfair that they’re allowed to break a simple rule.
They need to remove no-build zones from the game. And simply have a server rules handle issues individual to the servers themselves. In fact many of the arbitrary restrictions by the game can simply be removed in that regard.
This would also be a problem against the idea of expanding player’s land claim borders. Expand them even 2 block and all three of these base’s borders will overlap. And there are other places on this server and other servers where this is also the case. On another Official server I can show you where 5 people build around each other in a circle. No one normal cares if they get a new neighbor in close proximity - in fact it adds to the community spirit and promotes the making of new friendships - well, except for the old “get off my lawn” codgers and hermits. In this case these three people spend about 30 to 50% of their time online playing together.
Sometimes it spoils the view if they build too close and the maps are really big. If the servers could handle it there is more than enough buildable areas to hold hundreds of player’s builds out of render range of any other build. There is always that guy that wants to move it right next door, literally and I never can understand that. I know everyone wants to be right next to the obelisk and all but sheesh. Common courtesy should tell you that parking right next to another player when there are about 80 grids without anything built in them is just rude and very unneighborly if you ask me.
As far as building limits and size of builds is an issue, shouldn’t Funcom at least allow for a base to have one of every crafting station or building type be at an installation? Shouldn’t a full clan of 10 players have the ability to have their own little slice of Funcom heaven and not have to shack up with another clan member? PVE players tend to be more casual or more artistic in my experience and why not allow an artist the ability to use the canvas that Funcom has given them, at a cost to the player and not for free, to build a place of their own? Why does Funcom seem intent on forcing people to forgo clan play on Official PVE servers? All the changes seem to favor casual or single players.
Are quality of life builds like maprooms near obelisks seen as a sin in the eyes of Funcom and considered spam land claim? I just think that without clarity of what is ok to build and what isn’t needs to be addressed for PVE especially. These types of builds enhance the game experience and does not detract from it in my opinion.
And also those of us who don’t like our shіt blown up by someone else’s purge. But hey, glad to know we’re not normal if we don’t conform to a certain idea of how friendly and welcoming we should be
Yeah, of course normal people doing this need to be in contact with each other - mutual discord channel members or something normal like that. And of course ask first like a normal person. And if you’re sharing purges then informing your neighbors would be the normal behavior. If your build wasn’t cleared with your neighbor and they’re a crotchety “get off my lawn” type, or if you’re obstructing their view, they can ask like normal people, for you to move. And then the normal thing would be of course to comply - it’s not normally difficult.
I am referring to pve, pve-c, I don’t play on pvp and yes in that environment I would want that in my base with added beautyfication.
Different mindset tbh
