Captain's Log 13: Updates Ho!

3 minutes ago, Captain Kuro said:

If you think they they refuse to acknowledge that this is an issue, you must be deluded. They have commented several times that they are looking into server issues and stability.

 

In this very post for example:

 Server-side crash fixes and stability improvements

 

Again, these things are not always a "lets turn it off and on again" problem. These things take time. Again thats a fact of Early Access games.

That has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer able to connect to the game anymore.

If someone can log in, and AFTER A PATCH DROP can no longer connect. this isnt all the same patch btw, People drop like flies PER patch. 

so to fix your comment * Server-side crash fixes and stability improvements by preventing more players from being able to access the game

Get your head out of your ass and stop trying to white knight just because YOU get to play.  Done with your degeneracy. o/

3 minutes ago, Incarnate said:

Just to emphasize on the information provided in the image ironhyena has uploaded.

This is straight from the Steamworks Documentation: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess - you can go read further if you like!

What is Early Access IS NOT!

You should not use Early Access solely to fund development. If you are counting on selling a specific number of units to complete your game, then you need to think carefully about what it would mean for you or your team if you don't sell that many units. Are you willing to continue developing the game without any sales? Are you willing to seek other forms of investment?

Early Access is not a pre-purchase
Early Access is not meant to be a form of pre-purchase, but a tool to get your game in front of Steam users and gather feedback while finishing your game.

Early Access titles MUST deliver A PLAYABLE game or usable software to the customer AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE, while pre-purchase games are delivered at a future date.

NOW!? Did Atlas provide this at the time of purchase, no it did not. I do want to see Atlas succeed, but I not if the developers priorities aren't right and the majority of the players cannot even play the game.

+1

1 minute ago, Desolo said:

That has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer able to connect to the game anymore.

If someone can log in, and AFTER A PATCH DROP can no longer connect. this isnt all the same patch btw, People drop like flies PER patch. 

so to fix your comment * Server-side crash fixes and stability improvements by preventing more players from being able to access the game

Get your head out of your ass and stop trying to white knight just because YOU get to play.  Done with your degeneracy. o/

No, you get your head out of your ass.

You should know what you are buying before you do. And just FYI, the patches have worked for person. 2 of my friends also had the time out issue, patch came out, it was working. This is all part of the testing and developing of the game/server. 

But anyway, no point saying anymore. Get your refund, one less person to take up server resources. 

Honestly...refund the game if you are so mad about it instead of flaming in the forums.
Whats way worse than your connection issue (that might prevent you from playing a bit but not loose your shit if its properly stored away)
is when a "Ship of the Damned" spawns in a friendly area and kills all the peoples ships that went to the harbor to get NPCs/Skins or simply left it there because its safe from PvP destruction.

3 minutes ago, Captain Kuro said:

You should know what you are buying before you do. And just FYI, the patches have worked for person. 2 of my friends also had the time out issue, patch came out, it was working. This is all part of the testing and developing of the game/server. 

But anyway, no point saying anymore. Get your refund, one less person to take up server resources. 

Perhaps you should read the part about what early access IS NOT?
The game is currently UNPLAYABLE for thousands of players.

In Early Access the game has to be playable at the time of purchase, Atlas is not!

Resources in the NA PVE C12 Region still not respawning 

tryed to play with a friend of mine for about 3 days now....we can´t get on to the same Server or geting "Connection Timeouts" etc. Sometimes I can join a server and he couldn´t and sometimes it´s the other way around.....I still hold my hopes up high for this game, because i want it to be a success, but it´s hard sometimes.

- Playing in lowmemory mode and it feels like it lags a bit more/ runs not as smooth as without it

- still spawning on the wrong side of islands (you have to swim around it to find a place where you can get out of the water)

- textures sometimes look good and get "messed" and "undefined" all of a sudden (changes between this two stats) 

- freeport capacitys are maxed out all of the time. it´s impossible to join one to get a good clean and save start on pvp servers

and (wich probably is only a case of no skill ^^) to get vitame D (blue) is way to annoying at the beginning of the game

all in all i´ll hope the best for the future of ATLAS, but it´s a lot of work that needs to be done (manly connection wise at the moment )

I currently have 19 hours logged, but only less than one hour of actual game time on any of the servers.

When I actually got on I was like "Finally, frigging about time", because I'd been trying for several days since release of the early access to get on to a server, enduring long times of connecting / loading while my system was completely locked up and unresponsive while it was attempting to connect and load into the game. But then I changed the homeserver region, I get disconnected and the client crash and could no longer login into any server, and were then stuck with the loading limbo issue, which I currently still have.

So I'm one of those who cannot play, who bought the game and I fully understand what it means that it's in early access, I want this game to succeed, but they're actually somewhat in violation of the terms and conditions with Early Access titles on Steam, because of the majority of players cannot play the game. My pc is above the required specifications, and still I'm not able to play the game, and I've been trying for so long to play the game, trying so many different things, trying the same things again whenever a new patch has been released, but clearly it still doesn't work. I'm open to helping the developers getting the game to work for those it currently does not, I'm open to test out various workarounds and other kind of things to identify what is going on when the issues occur and to try and fix these these things.

I got a simple fix for your server "stability, connection, and data issues", get more servers online to spread the load. The current number of atlas main servers is not enough to support the actual playerbase.

Another great idea would be to have different freeport servers e.g. freeport 1 is for players who want to return to hire crew, freeport 2-10 are for new players that want to start playing the game . If a player leaves freeport 2-10 he can only return to freeport 1.  As you allready have a cluster system in place that should not be a problem in my opinion.

Oh wait that would cost money and of course having money is far better then having properly running servers and players that can actual play the game.

Well on the other hand that if you continue the way you are going right now, that will fix the issue as well. You don't need servers if you got nobody playing you game anymore.

6 minutes ago, Sparti said:

I got a simple fix for your server "stability, connection, and data issues", get more servers online to spread the load. The current number of atlas main servers is not enough to support the actual playerbase.

 

Another great idea would be to have different freeport servers e.g. freeport 1 is for players who want to return to hire crew, freeport 2-10 are for new players that want to start playing the game . If a player leaves freeport 2-10 he can only return to freeport 1.  As you allready have a cluster system in place that should not be a problem in my opinion.

 

Oh wait that would cost money and of course having money is far better then having properly running servers and players that can actual play the game.

Well on the other hand that if you continue the way you are going right now, that will fix the issue as well. You don't need servers if you got nobody playing you game anymore.

I agree, they need more servers, and not just actual gameplay servers but servers to handle various task.
I might be wrong, but I think they need something more like the capabilities of datacenter to pull this off.

I've already suggested they should get servers up to handle authentication and queues, so they don't have a massive amount of connections hitting the live servers severely impacting their performance, which are already dealing with heavy load.

They also need to realize that they need to change some things if they really would like this to be an MMO, currenly it is not - it's just servers with a player cap of 150 players.

Still no word on Asia/SEA/Oceanic servers? What is the best way to get into contact with you if not your official forums, twitter or reddit?

42 minutes ago, Sparti said:

Oh wait that would cost money and of course having money is far better then having properly running servers and players that can actual play the game.

But having no money means that no one can play as the company goes bust. Its a fine balance. People seem to forget that they HAVE to make money. It costs money to buy servers. It costs money to run servers. It costs money to pay employees. OF COURSE THEY NEED MONEY.  No point throwing money at servers when that may not even be the issue. Especially further down the line when the initial rush has died down, they will just be sitting there wasting money.

2 hours ago, Desolo said:

The most active forum posts are Connectivity issues,  Do I need to be a game developer to say I logged on first day and played perfectly fine then they release a patch and I can no longer connect anymore. But don't worry they communicate about the issue right? Oh right no they don't. But hey I'm glad they fixed tree respawns in game. You continue to have fun playing the game while I am sitting here with no information one what THEY broke and if its fixable ANYTIME SOON. So no they do not communicate shit and there is a damn good reason they have the worst steam reviews which are VERY so justified. We would be SO much happier and patient if they said SOMETHING and explained ANYTHING for the problem. They simply do not care is the bottom of it. The LEAST they can do is offer refunds to the people who cannot even TEST the fucking game. I tested their play button on the stema page for 4 days now. I did not pay 25$ to press play. I'll gladly take that money and actually launch any other fucking game on steam. Explanation or refund. Again it is not JUST me, we are talking thousands of people that have the same issue that these devs REFUSE to acknowledge. Im sure 50% of us would be perfectly fine with an explanation not even an ETA. But to sit there and watch all these forum posts and tweets about the #1 issue and not fucking have the decency to speak upon it, is UNACCEPTABLE. 

Well that summed it up quite nicely. I have the same issues. Yes my PC isn't the greatest.

I'm not exactly sure why a lot of players have their client become unresponsive which also for most locks up their system, where they can't really do anything other than just sit and wait, although what I'm about to reveal might shed some light on this. However I have done some investigation using both the windows task manager and the windows resource manager , where I'm questioning my findings, like for instance why it's not using an optimized video format for games for its menu video sequences, like for instance the bink video format by radgametools, because the menu animation is basically just a video named AtlasTitle with the format .wmv, which for those who don't know, this is windows media video, which is NOT optimized for games and furthermore uses windows program libraries to function. Another thing I found that it's actually compressing data some data, I don't know what data specifically, but I can see that it's compressing data, which could causing performance issues and instability issues. Another odd thing I notice, which is super weird and might also be one of the reasons why it's becoming unresponsive, the Atlas.exe program seems to run the program from within itself. Furthermore, the loading animation is another video file thats running - LoadingScreen.wmv, which happens to be run more than once simultaneously, weird right? It's definitely something that could cause more instability. I did get screenshots of this, just in case.

6 hours ago, CharisardTT said:

Optimize your game pls :D

Learn to read

On 12/27/2018 at 8:39 AM, Jatheish said:

WTF can we steal PvE land ?! Doesn't make ANY sense when those players are regularly online !!!

 

Great work. Respect for you guys how many hours you work each day to fix the bugs.

THIS GAME IS JUST BECOMING RETARDED!

Ghost ships still spawning too close, cant find any land and single players able to take over entire islands!!! Whats the point????

there is no point even trying to start, those who have land grabbed hold the monopoly on the game in such a way that it becomes pointless, lawless is only good for building a ship and even that is now becoming a commodity for space.

Sailed into B7 on Sirens song server, (before ghost ship got my sloop as spawn too close for me to outrun), the main island appears to be held by one person....and entire Island. Do you really think your game is working properly when people can just land grab to the point of no-one can get any? thats in a matter of weeks!!!

I want to love this game but i cant because of your stupidity and apparent lack of foresight 

We must be playing 2 completely different games.    It would be fun to play yours, where people are happy to see all the crews taking land and where a fix to vultures, lighthouses, and flotsam are good news.  And those ships of the damned..well, good thing they got fixed if you've made a huge ship and don't want it destroyed, I guess.  I hear there's a crew out there with an entire armada of galleons, although we don't know what they're up to because , although they talk a LOT, we can't understand them.

Unfortunately, some of us are playing the game where, after laggedy laggedy rubberbanding, character disappearing,  disconnecting, gold-farmer griefing, we are finally making it out of Freeport, except we have nowhere to go because all the land is already claimed.  Oh sure, we're considering stealing all of some guy's stuff and his claim (on a pve server) if he has some issue where he can't get into the game for a couple days, but it seems a crappy thing to do.  (And we know we won't benefit anyway, because someone else will just take all OUR work before we accomplish anything there.)    Seems a disappointing exercise in futility, after working so hard to get out of the n00b zone.   And that tweak to skills made all of us laggards so very happy too.

Make no mistake, this is not a post about EA tech issues.  It's about game design, and about what seems to be a complete disconnect between what you think is the current gameplay, and what many of the players are actually experiencing.  Given what many of us have experienced so far, some of your comments seem to freakishly off-base.

Lauding crews that are grabbing up all the land on the servers before many players can even get out of the gate.  Not recognizing the distinction between  goals and playstyles between PvP and PvE servers.  (Dominate the map?  Sure, for PvP.  Not necessarily a goal on PvE)

Not providing any sort of "vision" of how you see players actually playing the game.    What's the gameplay for a group of 4 friends wanting to start a crew and join the game in 3 months time, for example?  Maybe one wants to be the best boatbuilder on the map, one wants to be the best cook, one wants to be a trader, etc....They enter Freeport, start a crew, sail out..and then what?    How do they accomplish that with no land, or 3 day chunks of time with land?  Do you have in mind a more ephemeral existence for the players, with no real base of operations?  Do you see people building structures on ships and just living on them?    Is the game designed specifically to exclude more casual players, single or small group players, adults with lives?  Some explanation of what you're going for here would be helpful.

Again, the focus on performance and server stability is spot on at the moment, and this is not a complaint about that.  But it would help to know if there's a point to enduring it, and if restarting from zero 20 times will eventually become a fond memory, or an unhappy experience of time wasted when there's no prize at the end of it.  I was fairly confident of the former until this post and especially until this tweet - 

If it continues to run smoothly, we're going to be looking at doing a wider release to see how it fairs against a large horde of players.

Have another look at the game experience many of us are having, and you tell me if this sounds like good news.

it·er·ate

/ˈidəˌrāt/

verb

1.

perform or utter repeatedly.

Maybe it's time to stop "iterating" and do something different.

you deleted me all over again, do not you know what backups are?

13 hours ago, Incarnate said:

This -lowmemorymode  doesn't seem to work at least it's not working for me

Are you clicking play from the library page which gives you this startup option?

19 minutes ago, JasonYork said:

Are you clicking play from the library page which gives you this startup option?

No I'm not, I have manually set the startup parameter -lowmemorymode.
But even so, it still doesn't actually explain my findings with the windows resource monitor.

i am so amazed when i read these threads of the anger from people that just don’t get the fact that a testing phase means the game is more than likely not going to work correctly at first.

That’s the whole point people. Yes you paid a discounted rate to enter the game early but you are forgetting your purpose.

Your purpose at this stage is to help the developers fine tune the game and get it ready for release, not to whine and cry about everything you feel you should be entitled to do. omg, grow up people and remember your role.

keep up the great work devs i have no doubt you will make this game a smashing success!

2 minutes ago, Flint Hullcrusher said:

i am so amazed when i read these threads of the anger from people that just don’t get the fact that a testing phase means the game is more than likely not going to work correctly at first.

That’s the whole point people. Yes you paid a discounted rate to enter the game early but you are forgetting your purpose.

Your purpose at this stage is to help the developers fine tune the game and get it ready for release, not to whine and cry about everything you feel you should be entitled to do. omg, grow up people and remember your role.

keep up the great work devs i have no doubt you will make this game a smashing success!

Well a lot of people have been testing the rejoin server button....It'll all be for nothing the Chinese will kill this game post release in 3 months like they did Life is Feudal

36 minutes ago, Flint Hullcrusher said:

i am so amazed when i read these threads of the anger from people that just don’t get the fact that a testing phase means the game is more than likely not going to work correctly at first.

That’s the whole point people. Yes you paid a discounted rate to enter the game early but you are forgetting your purpose.

Your purpose at this stage is to help the developers fine tune the game and get it ready for release, not to whine and cry about everything you feel you should be entitled to do. omg, grow up people and remember your role.

keep up the great work devs i have no doubt you will make this game a smashing success!

Uh, Flint, unless I've got the wrong guy, you're the one I was looking for on NA PVE to tell him he set no pin codes on his storage chests.   If that's not you, then NM.  If that is you, and you continue to lecture and scold the people who are unfortunate and utterly frustrated, then kiss your stuff goodbye.

Also, be aware that all the threads here aren't just people who don't understand testing phases.  For some people the game is an unplayable exercise in frustration.  To have a Dev post in the forums about how wonderful it is all the land is being claimed, and look!  here's a top hat for you to get better treasure,...honestly..it's like poking those people with a pointy stick.  Here's everything you can't have, most of which will be gone by the time the game works for you, isn't it great?   You'd be seeing a lot fewer upset people if the Devs showed the least little bit of understanding what the player experience is like for many people right now.    

me and my mate just watched a ghost ship sink a schooner that had just come out of dry dock and was anchored just outside it right on the island coast...your update fix is bullshit