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    ATLAS

    Captain’s Log #39: Meet The Crew!

    Greetin's Pathfinders!

     :anchor: News from the Cabin :anchor:

    In this Captain’s Log, your new Community Team will be emerging from below deck to introduce themselves and also to touch on exciting new developments for ATLAS. We look forward to sharing further details on our roadmap with players in the near future, but for now, whet ye appetites on these tasty morsels!

    :wheel:

    First up! I'm Chismebeard (Ye can jus' call me Chisme, which is Gossip in Spanish, pronounced chees-meh) yer new Senior Community Manager o'er at Grapeshot Games! As we ramp up the crew for the new content we plan to bring you in the coming months, you can expect Nami and me to communicate your feedback and excitement back to main base.

    Here's a wee bit o’ background about me: I've been working in the gaming industry for over 5 years and have experience in building up nonprofits. When I'm not working, you'll most likely find me playing monster-catching games, farming games, and first-person shooters. I've been playing ATLAS with the development crew over the last few months and can say it's a game I'll be sinking many hours into. I'm excited to get to know this awesome community of scallywags!

    I can be reached directly on our Forums as Chismebeard & Discord as Chismebeard#4432.

    :wheel:

    Ahoy Pathfinders~!

    Nami here sailing in on the waves and happy to be a part of the ATLAS crew! I'll be on deck with ChismeBeard as another Community Manager. First-mate, doctor, shipwright, archaeologist, musician, sniper, cook, navigator... whatever we need, I'm here to help! Okay, maybe not navigator... unlike my namesake, I'm directionally challenged. But you know, as I like to quote, "there is little difference between being lost and exploring" and we're excited to be exploring all the new things coming to ATLAS with all of you! 🙂

    When I'm not getting lost at sea or trying to outdo Chisme's “chees-eh” puns, you can find me watching anime (You can probably guess one of them, shishishi), working out (manning the sails is great for the arms!), and of course, playing games! I love platinuming RPGs, supporting feeders on MOBAs, being bad at matchmaking shooters, dungeon running in MMOs, and living out my own version of Groundhog's Day in survival games lol. Fun fact: I drew a life-size Jack Sparrow for my art final back in high school. I'm sure that qualifies me as a pirate.

    Please feel free to reach out to me at Nami#6151 on Discord, as long as you're not also reaching out for our treasure 😉

    :wheel:

    Yo ho! Primus here -- I recently joined the Grapeshot team as the lead designer for ATLAS. My focus is to steer the new vision for the game (more below), creating a busy roadmap of content as we steer it towards 1.0. Prior to working on ATLAS, I led the player experience, economy, and crafting efforts for the fantasy game Wildstar. At Riot Games, I was a game designer working on new player experience, matchmaking, and the ranking system. Much of my career has been spent developing gameplay that enhances how people competitively work together and against each other in a simulated world. During my free time, I play a myriad of game genres, including strategy, shooters, co-op survivals, and more! You can find me commenting in the Forums as Gortok - feel free to say Hi!

    As mentioned on Monday, we’ve redesigned the whole World Map and today, we wanted to give Pathfinders more insight on some of the upcoming changes. The new map was designed with the goal to drive more interactions between players -- both competitive and cooperative!

    atlaspreview2020.jpg

    The Golden Age islands are moving to the map center, surrounding it with a high-density ring of lawless territory, and adding sparse island outskirts where players can claim island territory to have a lower-risk experience. This will reduce the amount of sailing between core islands, incite more conflict, and give more opportunity for Companies to capture and control water lanes for the upcoming Trade Route system -- but we’re getting ahead of ourselves on that new system -- we’ll reveal details in the weeks ahead!!

    :wheel:

    Happy Sailing,

    - ATLAS Crew

    :skull: For the latest dispatch on #playATLAS keep yer one good eye trained on this here information :skull:

    Natter n' chatter on Discord: https://discord.gg/playatlas
    Hear ye, hear ye on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/sailtheatlas
    Watch us scallywags on Twitch: http://twitch.tv/sailtheatlas
    Plus ye can band with us Pirates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/playatlasgame

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    so if you live on the edge of the map your gonna have to travel 5 hours just to get to the golden ages? the people who live closer to the golden ages are going to be at a great advantage with closer availability to better bps. this looks BAD

     

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    6 minutes ago, Akajerry said:

    so if you live on the edge of the map your gonna have to travel 5 hours just to get to the golden ages? the people who live closer to the golden ages are going to be at a great advantage with closer availability to better bps. this looks BAD

     

    Yeah the Megas are going to cut off all travel to the center. One mega will take the row above golden age and the other mega will take the lower row. People are going to be more scared sneaking through the Megas row than going into the golden age lmao

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    1 hour ago, xwildslicerx said:

    Did we really go from 25x25 down to 11x11 AND mix up West/East all confusing like?


    I can't believe this.... do you guys have more to share? Like... pronto style...?

    You know the map wasn’t 25x25 right? Please tell me you know that. Or he’ll even tell me it was a typo and you meant 15x15 right?

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    I really hope you just take out some grids in current map. Im sure this sounds like a fix for some issues but I assure you that it will create new ones and take away a feeling of actually sailing the world instead of just some random map some game designers throw at us haphazardly. As a pve player since launch  I wish you would just say if your not getting enough traffic on your pve servers to make it worth it because that would be the only reason I could see why you are taking a new direction. I feel basically you want to limit the money your spending on the official servers and run us to community servers. Most of us that choose official have multiple reasons but id say the biggest for me is the thought that if I log in every 7ish days(tame timer diffen't than structure timer) I would have a persistent game world to come back to. Give us some stability a lot of things in this game require possibly hundreds of hours to do  which is fine if you believe it will still be there tomorrow. Last note seriously take out some grids in a square around middle and put new age ruins through out the middle of the entire grid all will be happier.

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    Hi Folks. I was brought on recently to help build a new team working exclusively on Atlas! I know there's been a lull in development lately, and we've actually got several things that are in development that we are going to be rolling out over the next couple months. I want to address a few design topics about this map.

    We wanted to get people moving around the world more. This map lays some of the groundwork for that, and aligns with some of the systems we're rolling out in the next couple months that we will have details on soon. What's shown here is the plant and weather biome layout, which dictates what type of plants an area contains. We've separated the mineral layer and the edges of those mineral biomes do not line up with the plant biomes. The areas in the middle of the map are densely populated with islands and are closest to the most diverse selections of plants and minerals. The outer areas of the map have less access to rich diversity of resources, and they also use the claim system. This is intentional. The outskirts are safer and less rewarding.

    In the short term, we expect more conflict in the center of the map around the Golden Age Islands. We're also introducing new systems for Trading that we will dive into soon. This should provide opportunities for both cooperation and conflict. What's a pirate game without the opportunity to pillage trade routes? More on that in the weeks to come.

    Edited by Gortok
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    Pvp and pve are totally different play styles, I don't want to build ships that are wooden blocks loaded with cannons, and I wouldn't want forced conflict either. I am not alone by a long way in this view, please bear that in mind with the changes u make. Thx

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    35 minutes ago, Gortok said:

     The areas in the middle of the map are densely populated with islands and are closest to the most diverse selections of plants and minerals. The outer areas of the map have less access to rich diversity of resources, and they also use the claim system. This is intentional. The outskirts are safer and less rewarding.
     

    Ah, there is the reason for eliminating PVE.

    Could just scramble the islands for PVE map. You could even make it procedurally generated randomly, so every PVE server has a different make up. 

     

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    48 minutes ago, Gortok said:

    Hi Folks. I was brought on recently to help build a new team working exclusively on Atlas! I know there's been a lull in development lately, and we've actually got several things that are in development that we are going to be rolling out over the next couple months. I want to address a few design topics about this map.

    We wanted to get people moving around the world more. This map lays some of the groundwork for that, and aligns with some of the systems we're rolling out in the next couple months that we will have details on soon. What's shown here is the plant and weather biome layout, which dictates what type of plants an area contains. We've separated the mineral layer and the edges of those mineral biomes do not line up with the plant biomes. The areas in the middle of the map are densely populated with islands and are closest to the most diverse selections of plants and minerals. The outer areas of the map have less access to rich diversity of resources, and they also use the claim system. This is intentional. The outskirts are safer and less rewarding.

    In the short term, we expect more conflict in the center of the map around the Golden Age Islands. We're also introducing new systems for Trading that we will dive into soon. This should provide opportunities for both cooperation and conflict. What's a pirate game without the opportunity to pillage trade routes? More on that in the weeks to come.

    I am EXTREMELY happy that Atlas is once again being worked on. Question: Is single player still going to be an option? While I get that there are a lot of PvP lovers out there,  I really enjoy most of what the single player game has to currently offer.

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    I spent six months on this game and over two different xboxes just specifically for this one game yall took a good thing and are literally ruining it we had a community we had friendships and trades and all sorts of stuff ourselves sure the content wasn't great but it still wont be yall took what we had and are literally crapping on it good for you I doubt I'll be part of that just so you can screw me later with another "necessary " wipe to add more bull crap amd take away the great parts of the game that made this a place I wanted to be part of guarantee you ruin everything i loved about this game while not fixing anything that was wrong time will tell but past dev's said they would fix things and only "fixed" minor stuff that was helpful to us the players and made the rest of the game lag central and loosing of tames wayyyyy worse once again I hope I'm wrong so restore my faith and you'll have a player for life though next time before you screw us how about a little more notice so we actually have time to do end game stuff if we haven't yet for all those daily grinders who never did end game stuff because they wanted to build an empire or have a million tames in short dont just lie to us about how you are gonna do all these great things then not deliver and if that's how yall are gonna do business I'll be taking my business else where 

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    Welcome all. As many other PvE players I do share my concern towards the upcoming changes. Throughout history of atlas most big updates and changes have really been originated from PvP issues. I hope in the future we see more changes aimed at improving PvE servers too.

    Of course a map change will be good for alleviating some of the issues we previously had: time to sail from A to B, deserted grids...But hopefully you have some plans for Skill Tree and player progression too, while taking in account PvE side of the game ofc. 
    For example in PvE we never really really had a need to make mythical ships, they were more of a trophy ship. So i hope we will get more reasons in the future to use them. More ships, more base building options (gib decorations), some better ship and base painting (the small things that matter you know?)


    Many assumed from your statements that there will be no PvE servers anymore which i think it's wrong because there was a statement about the PvE regions combining into one server. Hopefully lag won't be too bad for both parts of the world. 
    Looking forward to the future of Atlas, it is my ideal type of game and I'd love to come back to it when there's more content. (I already put 1700 hours in PvE and I want more)

    Thanks,
    Helkhiana.

    Edited by FloBot
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    Let's hear your ideas for the trade routes ?

    How am i to get a hold on resources that are specific to the Tundra when i decided or was forced to to settle in the Equatorial region or high desert ?

    do you really expect me to travel in my nutshell all across the map to gather resources that i might lose on my long way back ?

    that brings up the question someone else here already asked: does the map still wrap around ?

    so, what about trade routes ?

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    2 hours ago, Mr.Smith said:

    Lol dude, if these are PvPvE servers, then why take over the island? You can live in a free port and raid everyone with the help of the "mechanics" of the free port that you offer, on the contrary, developers need to reduce the time that the ship can spend in this port. In pvp
    it's been abused for a long time. A free port without rotting ships - unbalanced shit
    upsets the balance in the game, you already have a peaceful phase of 15 hours, what else is needed? In the first season of Atlas PVP there were no peaceful stages at all, and everyone survived as best they could ...

    Out of Port, you will continue to live your adventures, inside the Ports you will come to negotiate, refuel, meet new players and maybe members for your company. The idea not is to live in ports. The idea is to have reasons to want to return to the ports at the end of a day of action. 
    Keep in mind that port mechanics already exist, I am not adding any new mechanics. I am considering improving it. 
    I just made a suggestion, I believe there are better ones, I don't care. What really matters is that we have a port in the game and it could serve much, much better purposes. Right?

    There is a peculiarity that the doors forget to address. The true meaning of the entire MMO game is to achieve fame, glory, wealth. Porto is the perfect place to parade and show our achievements. All players must be able and willing to meet at the ports to share their stories and adventures. So it is with any successful MMO game.

    Monster HUnter, Old Ragnarok, Old PerfectWord, Old Tibia, Old Pristom Tales, Etc etc. etc.

    Edited by Juliocp

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    i do not want to partake in any pvp whatsoever, nothing but griefing and toxicity, forcing people who literally dont want any part in pvp is just going to kill the game for them and then you loose a really big chunk of your player base that you wont get in return, learn from the mistakes like blizzard have made... deciding for the players how they should be playing the game is only going to lead to more backlash, and more people leaving. maybe take a dedicated PVP server since they are already doing both pve and pvp.. pvp players would be more open to a change like this, i get that this is "early access" but the way this is being handled right now seems like constructive criticism isnt welcomed, and devs dont actually care about how any of the pve players feel about this change because "it's not what they want to see players doing" when taming/breeding/building etc is EXACTLY  what players want.. dont punish the players for playing your game the way they want to play.. 

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    I like the idea of making the grid of the map smaller but the arrangement of how the biomes is shown is so unrealistic.   Putting them in each corner seems more like an ARK setup.

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    I agree with @AZ APOCALYPTIC on what he said about PVP vs PVE.  I too will not be playing on the PVP servers.  Working all day I prefer to login and have a more relaxing enjoyable play that is not just going to frustrate me.  I get enough of that in the real world.

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    Hey there @Chismebeard, @Nami, and @Gortok.

    I am glad that the hidden gem that Atlas is has not been forgotten on the seabed.
    Im sure you can understand that the community is a bit salty as it had been left there as well 😉

    You have my respect for willingly jumping into such rough waters.
    I would suggest you to communicate as much info as you can as soon as possible to give players a clear and honest idea of what to expect and also include singleplayer and pve-players which make up a large part of your playersbase and potential new players. Everyone understands that money, time and abilities are limited resources so it would be a good thing if you could share if you are able to extent the Early Access Phase or if you have to finish up the game for the 1.0 release in a few months.

    New Map
    Well it is much smaller so i can already give you feedback on problems that will arise if you havent made some significant fix for it.
    Putting the lawless sectors into the center of the heat/map is problematic since those sectors are mainly used buy new and solo players or small groups.
    On PVP a even smaller number of players will now be able to clear the game of any other players.
    On PVE even fewer players will now be able to litter the whole map so you cannot find a place to build.

    The reason why the official servers could not sustain a large community is not that there are not enough players that want to play. It is more that even with the big map the game could not support more players on a server -> not technically but from the gameplay side. People left because there was no room for them to play, and playing includes much more than just sitting around somewhere.
    I am all for one big map with a hot spot in the center and a progression from easy to harder the near you get to it. But keep in mind the reasons why most people left the game dont make the same mistakes again and again.

    I hope you leave the old map atleast optional for Singleplayer/Dedicated and Serverhosts. Deleting it would be ultimativly negativ even if it would not get the new features like traderoutes. The giant size of the map is a unique selling point of Atlas you should try to hold onto it as much as possible.

    All in all it sounds really promising but we need more info. I hope we can give you more feedback once we get a clearer picture.


    I guess the following are some of most important questions for players that consider playing or buying the game.

    1. Scale of the work you plan to put into the game. How long do you plan to build the release version? Do you plan to add significant content after the release and continue to grow the game?
    2. How do you plan to stop griefing. Even games like Red Dead Online had to put passive mode as players where fleeing the game and there you didnt even loose anything except for the fun.
    3. How do you plan to provide a place to live for players be it new players, casuals, or groups. Whether it be a rental house, base or a ship but something you can actually use not just rebuild every day to lose it overnight.
    4. How do we spent more time on water when on the smaller map there is so much less water? Will it be optional fun activities that make you want to go out sailing or will it be necessary grind that forces you out.
    5. How will there be playerinteraction besides KoS? Do you plan to have hubs like neutral cities or npc guarded areas where players can live and work together with strangers?
    6. How do you plan to kick off the economy, will there be an NPC economy as foundation and players can jump in? With a smaller map it seems even more like getting the stuff yourself is always easier than finding a trade partner and organize it.
    7. Most requested feature -> new ships. Can you do it?
    8. Are you planning to bring alot more cooperative content to give players more reason to work together? Maybe even stuff seen on almost any other mmo like drop-in drop-out events and quests? Are you planning to add scaling difficulty so a mission will scale to the size of an group to give everyone a good experience while playing?
    9. Servers cost money so it figures you want to reduce the amount of servers. What playernumber do you plan for the new map and will you open new official server when they reach that number?

    I am positive the news you had planned will answer this all but if not please try to include it, thank you.

    Good Luck
    Lin

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    Why would you join a MMO pirate game to PVE. that just makes no sense. Go singleplayer then. 

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    First of all, thank you for introducing  yourselves to all of us hopefully in the future we will have The opportunity to give our input and get a response from this new team. The main reason I’m writing this is to ask you in all seriousness why are you reinventing the wheel? The way the map was set up worked perfect it encouraged players to explore the entire map it laid out the environment in a familiar layout for each individual to understand easily. If you want to add a PVP aspect to a PVE sir oh that really needs to be done is to make the lawless regions able to have PVP and counters rather than reworking everything and making it more confusing than it needs to be. From what I’ve seen from the information provided so far I foresee one of two things happening one players are going to stay in one area more often except for the occasional run to the center of the map for events, two Players will abandon the game due to the lack of input and reciprocation from the previous team and reworking the entire system that was already working well other than issues that were reported.

    Edited by diaz012682
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    5 hours ago, Jat said:

    Alrighty, news is out there now. Probably no surprise to most that Dollie and myself have been working on ARK for sometime now. We're glad to finally be able to introduce some of ATLAS new crew members, including their Community folk. ❤️

    It was a pleasure sailing the seas with y'all and we're looking forward to the changes that are coming from the team. :pirate_mask:

    Thank god for that. Yourself and Dollie were probably the two most incompetent community managers / developers I have ever witnessed in any computer game.

    Yes, very much looking forward to some changes / development and not just empty promises; who remembers the 'road map', I member'

    Best of luck to the new team.

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    North, East, South, West? North, West, South, East? Did a 3-year-old come up with this map? What's a compass???? LOL!

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    5 hours ago, Gortok said:

    Hi Folks. I was brought on recently to help build a new team working exclusively on Atlas! I know there's been a lull in development lately, and we've actually got several things that are in development that we are going to be rolling out over the next couple months. I want to address a few design topics about this map.

    We wanted to get people moving around the world more. This map lays some of the groundwork for that, and aligns with some of the systems we're rolling out in the next couple months that we will have details on soon. What's shown here is the plant and weather biome layout, which dictates what type of plants an area contains. We've separated the mineral layer and the edges of those mineral biomes do not line up with the plant biomes. The areas in the middle of the map are densely populated with islands and are closest to the most diverse selections of plants and minerals. The outer areas of the map have less access to rich diversity of resources, and they also use the claim system. This is intentional. The outskirts are safer and less rewarding.

    In the short term, we expect more conflict in the center of the map around the Golden Age Islands. We're also introducing new systems for Trading that we will dive into soon. This should provide opportunities for both cooperation and conflict. What's a pirate game without the opportunity to pillage trade routes? More on that in the weeks to come.

    Not to be too hash man(because you are new and all) but do you think you are going to get some WOW type of scenario? 
     

    most of these people are from ark and they are “very much” either pve or pvp. Depending on how you act they will either hate you or hate your guts lol. 
     

    the company you decided to work for gave you a bar that is way higher than you thought you had. Even if you do a good job, expect a “well you did your job” attitude. You better take that and be appreciative of it! No questions asked. After you have done your job for over 6 months(the typical probationary period for any job) then we can start giving kudos.

    but please, if you consider yourself a professional you will realize that any praise given within the probationary period was given by people that would literally praise a toothbrush for brushing teeth. 
     

    believe me, there are some easy to please “people” here. Lol. Just do what you got hired to do and you will be fine. Your predecessors luckily left a very low bar for you, so thank god for that right? 😂
     

    you think these guys got it @PeglegTheAngry 😉

    Edited by Pooter
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    I personally really enjoy meeting people while playing on PVE.  Grouping together to complete tasks is a lot of fun to me rather than fighting each other.   For me this is much more fun then just playing single player.

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     Good Morning Pirates,

    I feel the same as this quoted post:

    10 hours ago, TacticalNatty said:

    Welcome aboard @Chismebeard, @Nami, and @Gortok!

    Your PVE community is feeling a little left out/betrayed. Can you share your plans for its future?

    100% agree at this stage of the game. It feels like the map is PVP orientated, and this will leave us with a problem in the PVE game-play world. That being said, very little has been shared and we can probably only start judging when more information is available.

     

    9 hours ago, Juliocp said:

    I do these as my words and I would like to put some more suggestions:
    - Give more use to the ports. A port should be a place where everyone at the end of the day shoulding want to be. They are currently ghost towns. We have no use for them and to make matters worse, nor can we stay there, or we lose our ships.
    -  Kitchen and agriculture. Manufactured and / or grown food must be able to be sold in the store! They should also serve more purposes and bring much more benefits to the player. That way, we would have more trading items in the game!
    -  It is necessary to give much more love and attention to solo players. Many Atlas players like to play outside a company, but the rules of the game benefit companies, and individual players are overlooked.
    - It is past time to improve the vitamin system. I believe that agriculture and cooking could work with more unity. Mybe!

    You dint think some of this through I guess. I will use an example to simplify. We had 255 grids, and we are now down to 121, that nearly half of what we had. For PVE, the NA servers were shut down, so many of those players will be joining EU PVE. Many companies that left due to lack of effort from Grapeshot's side will also be back with hopes of a new better game-play experience, now that there will be active dev's and community managers again. There will also be some new players, hoping to get their claims in with the start of a new season.

    This being said mean half the grids, double the player base. Image having a ton of people in one grid, aka freeport, as you suggested. LAG FEST comes to mind. I know, as we have done many events as a company, and recently had a event in the MAW, where there is no islands and buildings to render. Just having 100 players and ships in the MAW caused us to have massive lag and poor overall performance. (Hear is hoping they dint decrease server capacity even more, aka more grids per server or less resources per server, as that would make it even worse).

    I for one like the fact that more players will be around with less islands. It would mean that more islands would now get settlers as not all players/companies would be able to have their own islands, as the nearly the case in the last stretch on PVE EU now. I know many others hates the idea, as more buildings means more lag, and I get that, as XBOX players mostly crashed coming into render distance of our current base, due to lag on their part. Freeports are balanced well enough for PVE, and I'm betting in PVP they are getting abused as hell, and PVP players would want them nerfed even more.

    I don't think I need to comment on the "East/West" compass matter, can see that has been done quite a bit, guess we will now wait and see if we even get a reply from Grapeshot, which would mean things has already improved I guess.

    That being said. Many things need more attention and we can only hope, wait and see what they have cooked up ( or will be cooking up ) for us.
     

    Edited by die pieter

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