Respectful humans also don’t repeatedly use autism as an insult, dehumanizing people with autism in the process.
9 Likes
Don’t be overly sensitive. People that spend months harassing other players for the fun of it are dehumanizing themselves. Referring to it that way is a description of the behavior, not an attack on people with the condition.
And how is it you imagine the behavior of my autistic daughter? Calm? Collected? Frightenly intuitive? Autism =/= raging, lashing, cancer. And as for sensitive, think of it as informative. I am not a man ever accused with an abundance of feeling or emotion.
10 Likes
I don’t think that everyone who builds such bases is engaged in Griffing. The balance in the game is built in such a way that the avatars are overpowerful. This is the only meta. That’s why people build so much. They don’t want their entire base to be demolished in 10 minutes. The only ok way to get rid of the servers from the foundations is to add some construction restrictions and significantly weaken the avatars.
Thank you for saying what most of us were thinking. Using this unfortunate condition as a verbal insult is very dismaying. I had two nephews who were autistic, both passed because of this condition.
4 Likes
I am so sorry to hear that
2 Likes
Seems to me there should be some sort of “Affront to the Gods” type secret stat that grows rapidly when a player or clan builds in a way that takes up an obnoxious amount of territory (on public servers). Is there any way for the game to calculate how much territory a person or group has claimed?
If this was possible, you could have it so that Worshipping each God would appease them, so dedicated clans and players could still claim large territory on Public Servers, but it would require they actually put work into keeping it. If they don’t please the Gods, then whichever Gods they failed to please will send their avatars down on a regular basis to attack their base and free up territory for everyone else who might be on that server.
If you keep small territory or even just REASONABLE territory, even if in multiple locations throughout the map, you can easily fly under the radar of the Gods. If you start to try recreating the Nazca lines so you can create a bird’s eye picture of Sonichu… then you’ll incur Heavenly Wrath.
Edit: It Occurs to me you can’t really please Crom. This could be a fascinating way to implement him, as he would probably have less frequency of attack, but he would be impossible to appease if you cross his bottom line.
Playing the game in a manner that wasn’t intended to sabotage intended gameplay isn’t Meta. It’s exploitation… and depending on the game/developer it may be treated on the same level of cheating, hacking, and using external modifiers.
Now, given, Funcom hasn’t really been moderating the game at a level for that to be the case, but weakening the Gods is not the solution… because they are SUPPOSED to be able to wreck your base. If you want to play PvE, that’s already an option anyway. When you are in PvP, territory control needs to be more fluid and the Gods are the primary way of changing that.
Other than having the God’s punish players, the other option is to give each player a certain amount of “authority” to enforce territory. A Clan could stack their authority to control more… but if you overstep your limit, then other players could step in and straight up claim your buildings for themselves until your authority is back below a certain level (which would be lower than the level which triggers this vulnerability.) Authority would be a stat that players and clans could view at anytime… so they could avoid going over the limit.
Of course, a player could still risk it if they don’t mind losing whatever territory the opponents have their eyes on.
Imagine those Vaults just getting claimed because someone thought it was strategic to puke foundations across the desert. That’s Justice.
This game is all about building. The Dlc´s are mostly about it too. Go on to a Pve/Rp Server and tell people they can´t build big castles anymore because you think building should be restricted. Go and tell the pvp community, their buildings can only be build by using the stacking method now, because they have to cut the sizes of their bases. Lets see how “welcoming” people will react to that announcement.
Reality is, people farm hundreds of hours just to be able to build big. And thats for two reasons:
- they like building and want to challenge themselfs
- they need to do it, because its mandatory in pvp, because of explosives are too strong and learned the hard way that “hidden bases” most times don´t stay hidden and are not safe
If you wanna get rid of a problem don´t get the hammer out, slash around you and call it a day. Search for whats causing the problem and fix that instead. Trying to forbidd building is the first. There are enough solutions to the problem. Starts with nerfing explosives, including the siptah double shot bow goes over to, make building harder or more costly or charge an upkeep cost so people who want to build big have to pay more then the ones that doesn´t.
100s is stretching it.
Me and a clan mate started a dead pvp server. in 2 weeks, about 80 hours combined we had
A footprint 20x50.
all t3 crafting stations.
Pet pen
greater wheel
20 t3/named thralls
40 pets
fence stacked security
4 vaults full 9f excess.
And we ran 7 vaults to get all armors/weapons
had 15 of the tower recipes, explored.
Also had a decoy base (20x20), a northern log off base that was also a backup main (20x30), altar base, thrall wheel in new area.
All T3.
And then spent 2 raid windows (10 hours) hanging at base waiting for the allied server trolls who like to offline that never showed up. So 70 hours was actually playing and farming.
So yeah, too easy to build big is the problem, not the actual over building.
1 Like
The game IS all about building. When someone “Builds” foundations in straight lines across a wide territory, but then refuses to build any meaninful structures and leaves Vaults out in the open, they are just preventing OTHER people from building.
You can build a massive base without ever doing a snake trail of foundations and leaving a huge amount of territory occupied for nothing.
A balance has to be struck Edit between creative building and foundation spam. I think the line between these things is absolutely clear and can be detected by the game… provided it actually tracks the territory players occupy.
Again, if a FULLY stocked clan of people actually build up an area, they could potentially control a massive territory with my suggestion of “Affront to the God” auto magic Avatar calldowns. This is to stop people from turning a building game into a weird game of Restraining Order Tron.
Yeah I like to build big always have and sadly had to put out foundations to keep trolls back the foundation spamming is a problem funcom created this monster wish they could come up with a way to stop the spamming because any body that plays on official knows what happens if someone gets hurt feelings you log in the next day to foundations all around your nice build it happen to me and others many times but yet nothing has been done about it
That first picture didn’t event render completely. This is the reason video games should have rules and limitations. Too much freedom is bad.
You are missing my point entirely. There is a reason why people feel the need to overbuild and block areas and this is do to the fact that explosives do way too much damage and are cheap as hell. And on top of that Funcom always introduce more contraproductive stuff like a bow that shoots twice as many arrows as the standard bow, so that you are able to do twice as much damage to structures. They also took away the posibility to open doors/chest with your weapon. Well technically its still doable but with 1hp per hit you are going bonkers before you will succeed, leaving alone the time you have to waste.
I still remember times when we orbed peoples buildings and did less damage to the buildings or simply hit the door with our spears got in the base looted some stuff and went away. People nowadays blow everything away, just because they wanna do so and the damage they do is massive. It takes you only 1 vase to be able to rip a massive hole in a t1 base and most people that start new are shocked and can not believe that it only took you a few seconds to destroy their buildings. The next time they hurry to get to tier 3 and think they are ok now and before they even know they get blown away again in minutes. At this point, they either quit or start adapting.
Like I said, everything you see people doing in the game has a background history. If you can´t achieve your buildings to be safe/safer by upgrading them, then you start stackbuilding and/or building bigger in general, making it harder to get into your base and way more cost intensive for the invader. There are no other options if you don´t want to loose your stuff on a regular basis.
If Funcom wants to stop the spaming and overbuilding then they need to change the system how raiding and explosives work in the game. And give people more options to get into a base without ripping everything into pieces.
Well, it takes only one “not-so-social” human to ruin an official server… honestly, thats why I don’t bother with the official servers. I game to relax, not to view more s****y behavior.
1 Like
Maybe. Or maybe the problem is neither the cost of explosives nor the damage they deal. Maybe the problem is offline raiding, so people try to design bases in such a way that they will be raid-proof without players’ involvement.
But at any rate, this is just one form of overbuilding. Which brings me to:
Excellent advice for PVP servers, but overbuilding is also a problem on PVE(-C) servers. Funcom needs to introduce a mechanism that acts as a counter-force to overbuilding.
5 Likes
I was thinking of some sort of “Affront to the Gods” Mechanic that would have system generated attacks by God Avatars on a regular basis (More regular the more territory you occupy Balanced against Clan Size, active benches, thrall placement, and actual structures built)
But it wouldn’t necessarily be that or limited to that. It could alter storm patterns to hit territories with poor space management harder, it could even call down Meteor Showers as a sort of punishment with a silver lining as well.
Building things that last on PvP servers should be a challenge and REAL ACHIEVEMENT compared to PvE, or private RP servers. It’s the soul of competitive play… the only avenue where someone who believes in whatever enforces that order shows they have the chops to achieve it.
It doesn’t need to be made easier to defend because anyone who is incapable of doing that on the current PvP has countless options at their disposal to achieve the effect of defensive victories on PvE-Conflict.
Also you have to consider what a player who freshly joins the game or a server is going to experience and balance it against the wishes of legacy players who have maxed out characters and fully loaded vaults. When a new player joins a server and finds out the entire starter desert has been walled in, or all the starter areas have foundation spam that both limits their ability to even establish themselves, or even blocks off large numbers of important resource spawns… You either HAVE to go raiding as a response to the lack of living space… or you have to give up and look for another server.
Players who are spamming foundations haven’t been forced into a corner. They are sitting on massive piles of resources quite often. More troublesome, these are often the players who are forcing OTHER players into a corner, thus forcing the opinion that disproportionate exploitation of opportunities in the game is Meta rather than absurdly cheesy.
And at the end of the day, it’s an UGLY Meta. It’s not a hill I would ever plant my flag on with any form of pride. Nobody is saying that people need to have lush and palatial estates in PvP servers, but they should at least be building sensible structures. There are many aggressive/defensive building features that serve no purpose because the way competitive builders play is so alien from what the designers intended that those elements have become useless or weak redundancies.
OF course there is background history to the behavior… but that applies to bad behavior just as much as it applies to good behavior. History isn’t an excuse or rationalization for what happened. It’s a dispassionate listing of how the events went down. Propaganda is how you rationalize unreasonable actions and behavior.
Stack building that I have witnessed is exploitive… but at the very least it isn’t hideous like Fountation spam. I don’t care about “overbuilding” as much from a competitive standpoint… it’s more concerning to me because it can create lag issues which just ruins the game for everyone. However, it does have the benefit that if a new player joins a server (and barring lag ruining the experience) see’s a stackbuilt structure… it’s not completely alien or insane looking and it won’t prevent them from building anything at all.
I suspect if the server could properly detect and distinguish purposefully stack built structures from poorly planned shanty towns, they would have already done something about it. However, if they had simply chose not to act on the information, it would be an excellent metric to include in things that infuriate the Gods.
If FunCom gave people the ability to pick locks and loot bases, there would certainly be an entirely new wave of arguments slamming the forums for months on end… but it’s canonically sound.
What are you talking about? explosives are not cheap at all. 1 explosive costs 10-15 T3 foundations. Avatars Yes, hiring an avatar like a mitra or a set takes about 4.5 hours. And you can wreak havoc by completely ignoring the layout. But the construction of huge squares with foundations is still much cheaper than avatars, which is why they are being built.
The other major factor when considering how the game should be balanced is that you want to reduce the amount of moderation necessary.
The “Meta” Behaviors you are stating are needed are, in fact, against the rules… but for many players, it’s become a grey area, so it goes unreported. Even if it IS reported, it’s something Moderators have to investigate and by the time they step in and do something about it, a lot of damage has been done.
However, I’m arguing that they need a different system for handling this. Too many people aren’t clear on what exploitative game behaviors are or simply lack the ability to distinguish between intentional abuse and coincidental circumstance. It’s not as cut and dry as when someone is cheating or using an external modifier… (and even that isn’t always cut and dry for certain players who will accuse anyone under the sun of cheating.)
What FunCom should aim for is a system that maintains it’s own equilibrium such that they don’t have to pay staff to personally intervene as much. If corny behaviors resulted in gameplay consequences, players would self moderate.
Let’s talk about Meta. When players don’t have steady consequences for bad behavior, then it creates a lot of confusion. People who are really committed to (And actually capable) of stirring up trouble aren’t afraid of being reported… because they are playing the bigger Meta Game, which includes the Moderators. Anyone who intends to report them for bad behavior is likely to engage them in chat first with an accusation. This allows them to attempt to suppress the player in the game legitimately, but also try to stoke fires until the would-be reporter says something in chat they shouldn’t have. If they can pre-emptively file a report of harassment then they can often avoid real scrutiny unless they get mass reported. All they have to do is never admit anything in chat and continually accuse their vocal objectors of anything under the sun.
But then we get to the Meta Meta… which is that even players who aren’t abusive are adopting these “Meta” tactics. If you build a bunch of Foundation spam and have a giant stack built fortress that’s lagging the server, you can’t report people who are doing it as well. Even if you only did one of those things, you won’t report people who do them, because you can’t afford scrutiny or you aren’t sure they are even against the rules.
The problem is this stuff is still happening despite the fact that anyone who has the energy to investigate it knows it’s wrong. The Consequence of a ban or being thrown off a server is harsh enough, but it’s not consistent enough. That’s why I’m hoping they can make the game detect it and respond accordingly. Maybe you can’t stop it, but if you can make it so the people doing it have to carefully consider how far they want to take it… then the situation on Official Servers will improve so much.
Dragonpowder is cheap as hell. I can solo farm severall hundreds of them a day if I need to. You only need to know how to farm hide effectively. And with the new stations it can be even cheaper (50 steelfire). We had several situations where we wanted very toxic clans gone and had to speed up production to make that happen it was a piece of cake. Once you are lvl 60 which you can achieve in some hours and you have all the neccessary stations you are good to go for raids. And as soon as you can blow up some bases you are settled and can produce even more dragonpowder with the stuff you looted from others.