Captain's Log #41: A New Direction and Trade System + Ramming Ship Tease

Серверы PVE были полностью забыты !!! Никто не спрашивает у игроков PVE их мнение и пожелания !!!!!!!! Кому нужны ваши фермы и склады на PVE серверах, они загадили ими все острова, убили этот огромный игровой контент, который был песочницей !!! НУЖНЫ НОВЫЕ КВЕСТЫ, ЦЕПИ КВЕСТОВ !!! ГДЕ УВЕЛИЧИВАЕТСЯ И РАСШИРЯЕТСЯ СОДЕРЖАНИЕ ИГРЫ !!! ВЕРНИТЕ СТАРУЮ КАРТУ ДЛЯ PVE СЕРВЕРОВ !!! Игра становится полностью PVP, поэтому вы потеряете большинство игроков и игра обязательно умрет и уже НАВСЕГДА !!!!!

I' am glad to see that ATLAS isn't dead. 
Now lets wait for the patch notes next week to see if there are bug fixes too :)

I'am hyped again xD

Used to love Atlas... Was all I played every available minute. Had a company that eventually worked it's way to owning an island. Then the "previous" (cash grab) devs left everyone in the dark for ARK. This killed it for most of the company and many never came back. This season I went in solo. Settled on a mega company island - friends I made when I started playing Atlas. 

As a solo player on PvE it can be a grind and farms and warehouses helped kinda. Farms in your area work well but warehouses... If I have one I kill the ability for the island owner to have one meaning I don't get to have one. This means that the "new content" just doesn't apply to me and I'm sure this will be the case for many.

Claiming should be a hybrid of what you have now and had before. Each player has a certain radius they can claim with a flag or tax bank that makes it their spot on an already claimed island. That way it compartmentalises the area and allows a farm and warehouse and tax bank. This way content isn't just for the megas.

I had 2 super casual players join my company... So casual that they are dead each time they log in. We managed to make a bit of gold but 95 percent of our purchases in game are with resources. I assume trade routes would help here but again will we even be able to use it. It really would be an awesome shift if this is implemented well.

Later I had a friend from previous season come over. Bringing gold earned from being in a large company, which we used to get us up to scratch vs the megas. If ships are going to cost gold... As a solo player I'd have nothing just a ramshackle all season (If even as one storm and SoTD and it's gone). How is this supposed to get people on to the oceans. We have lives outside of the game so unless there is a passive job or trade route that can persist while I'm at work there is no way that'll happen.

Lastly while the season started out roughly from a dev stand point it was OK for me till around the farm patch. Something on our grid broke and many couldn't log in. We got stuck in infinite load loops. Tickets were raised and immediately resolved. For a solid few months we couldn't log in. The work around was to not click rejoin but select the server you were on and join from there. This seems to work but something on the persistent players on ships broke players sleeping on islands. It's still broken and we still have to mess with the work around to play.

TLDR:

Please fix the issues.

Please listen to your community (PvE paid for the game too)

Please remember that there are solo players out there.

Please take our time seriously - we also have lives outside of ATLAS

Please take your games community seriously - give us more concrete interaction. Quality communication is beter than putting things out to just have captains logs. Bring back the Dev streams at least once a month. Give us actual lists and progress updates. Currently in the eyes of many players I've interacted with Grapeshot is a bunch of gamers trying to kinda make a game while playing their other favourite games. You need to be seen as a bunch of Devs working for a company that is producing a game that they want to produce and give feedback and join in the frustrations we feel (and perhaps fix them). Sweeping most of it under the rug ain't helping PvE or PvP.

As mentioned... Make ATLAS the game the original Devs were excited about and the game you seem to want.

All that said if what you previewed here is implemented and balanced properly I'm looking forward to it. Oh and Devs... feel free to contact us if you actually want to interact with the community, most of us have the same user name here and on the Discord server.

I was more hoping of the announcement for the frigate, some weapons/armors. We seriously need that breach between brig and galleon shortened, and the whole shield/mace being the only viable weapons, makes the game stale after 2 seasons of it.

When you introduced farms and warehouses, thereby you killed the huge content of the game, you no longer need animals, seeds, plants, their extraction and breeding! Be consistent, then remove all animals from the game, all plants, they are no longer needed by anyone !!! Let there be bare islands and trees !!! Why was it all to kill ??? !!!

...

Because the servers run so well that the trading system ever works properly. You develop completely past the users.

The fantasy component in the Atlas is the main thing that brought many here! Return the old map, return the old content! Add quests, new NPCs, make a more interesting crafting system, so that it is difficult, dangerous and interesting to mine rare resources for new recipes! Think about global, high-quality underwater content !!! INTEREST THE PLAYERS !!! ONLY THEN YOU WILL HAVE PEOPLE ON SERVERS !!!!!

How the fuck are you gonna balance a ramming ship? 4 seasons and you have not been able to balance one fucking aspect of the game and now you propose to add another potentially game breaking element?

This is about the dumbest idea i've ever seen for a ship.  Good riddance Wild Card and your "I have no idea what we are doing" developer team.

Ah yes, the quarterly Atlas update sandwich. Top slice of 'Hey guys this is really hard but we have some great ideas and we're going to be doing a better job communicating and listening to you... and this time we really mean it!'. Bottom slice of 'Just remember guys it's still early access, so please don't hold us accountable for anything regardless of how poorly thought out or executed it may be'. So what's the filling this time?

Ah, of course. An extremely complex multi-grid trade route system adding new island types with automatically generated defenses, npc trade ships, and a boat designed to ram other boats. What could possibly go wrong? I mean last update you said you were just adding warehouses, and we got an unannounced game-destroying barrel 'balance' change and you broke a number of critical core game functions and disappeared for a month without a word. I hope you don't expect much confidence from anyone that you are even remotely capable of successfully implementing something of the magnitude that you're describing.

Stop dangling stuff that nobody cares about or asked for and 'teasing' all these cool new ideas you have when there are so many existing mechanics that are completely broken, useless, or imbalanced. Fix them. Get your game running smoothly and add some polish to what you already have before you go introducing a bunch of new stuff that you aren't capable of doing anyway.

You also mentioned more frequent wipes. How frequent? Do you really think that's a sustainable model for a game that has a ridiculously complex breeding and 6 resource type grindy upgrade mechanic? Is that the purpose of the trade routes? Having to get a bunch of different resources sucks, so rather than simplify the core system lets implement a complicated, difficult to implement alternative to make it suck a little less.

You guys have no direction, no accountability, no credibility, and nobody buys your 'new ideas, more communication, we're going to do a better job and btw look at this amazing idea we have' PR nonsense that we've seen over and over and have been let down every time. Nobody cares that it's early access. Early access doesn't give you carte blanche to make strings of idiotic decisions and expect players to stick around.

The last thing in this update you said is that you'll be paying extra attention to suggestions and feedback, so here's some from a 5,000 hour player. Put this trade system, ships for gold, and whatever other half baked band-aid ideas you have on the shelf. Fix what you have, give regular updates on what you're working on, and stop saying over and over that you're going to be listening to players and start actually doing it. Focus your energies on resolving those issues and building on those ideas first. Thinking for yourselves and deciding what you think is best for the game is why there are 92 players on NA PVP as I write this. Get your shit together or just shut it down.

Not to sure this will ever bring the player base back. Same old problems will still exist.

OMG
I like the idea to be finally pirates and plunder traderoutes.
But having the traderoutes playerdriven is hard to implement. You realised that resources only would never make this system worthwhile, so you added the whole gold thingy to it. But you may need to go the extra mile and reduce income elsewere to really make it the central point of the game. I see it failing hard.

If this it the big picture we needed to see to understand the other QoL changes, i see no future for atlas esp. in PVE. If this is still a QoL for the big picture, it is also very worrisome.

I was joking about the traderoutes would be the airship collecting the resources from the warehouses, tbh now that sounds better then what we will get. A system you will mostly use to earn your gold, eigther as initiator or attacker. How much old content you just deleted with this? 

What you need the resources for if everything gets autogenerated for you?
 

Hey glad to hear you are still kickin, it sounds like awesome additions that are well thought out.

The first feedback i can give you is that it sounds awesome as additional feature but not so awesome when done in a way that the new feature basically deletes the complete game and all its possibilities like survival, open world, ship building and customization. Upkeep to play is a evil thing, upkeep to control or dominate is the way to go.

When you buy a ship it costs gold and when you place it in a dock where it is repaired, maintained and refilled it will cost a gold upkeep.
But by all means there should be no gold cost or upkeep if we build ships ourselves and maintain them ourselves.
The trading is a good feature for endgame pvp but if it is mandatory for 90% of the games content there wont be much players able to play since those controlling the server will effectively prevent other players from playing wheter they want or not to do so. It still needs to be possible to go to an island and build ourselves up and not have to buy everything from a shop or be at the mercy that those controlling the economy give you a ship and allow you to work for them. There still need to be pirates that are self dependent and can strike out of the blue if the game should not stall and drop to very low possible number of players per map.

Customizable ships, buildparts are also very important, the premade ships should be interchangeable or prepared for this system from the start so you dont run into trouble later that will result into the loss of this and other features.

Keep up the good work but take the additional time to fit the new thing ontop rather than burn everything down and place the new thing on barren land.

Hopefully, this means ARK DLC is done. Then, Jeremy and Company are coming back to finish Atlas!

MAGA-Make Atlas Great Again!

BTW-The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662.

seens with the ideea of frequent wiping you just will kill the game!!!

maybe you should not be to focused only on the pvp side,when the pve has much more players...

would be better to fix some stuff before bringing new stuff who no one wants!!!

8 hours ago, Athenious Grimslade said:

I was more hoping of the announcement for the frigate, some weapons/armors. We seriously need that breach between brig and galleon shortened, and the whole shield/mace being the only viable weapons, makes the game stale after 2 seasons of it.

Yeah I think I would have preferred a frigate as well, but I'll reserve judgement on the galley. I do like that it seems to have some features we haven't seen before that I'd like to see on other ships, like forward facing gun ports and a forecastle type structure. Yeah, I know, we can kind of build them but they don't blend with the ship very well IMO and there's no options to add gun ports that aren't built in. 

"ask the community for gameplay feature ideas and see if some of them work…"

FUCKING LOL.

The Community - We want a ship between Brig and Galleon, you know like a Frigate...

Atlas Devs - Hold my Beer and behold the "Ramming Ship"

/palmface

19 minutes ago, Ghost Pirate LeChuck said:

The Community - We want a ship between Brig and Galleon, you know like a Frigate...

Atlas Devs - Hold my Beer and behold the "Ramming Ship"

/palmface

1 hour ago, eeeceee said:

"ask the community for gameplay feature ideas and see if some of them work…"

FUCKING LOL.

"Community"

Ok, let me fire this one;

"Who on THIS COMMUNITY asked for rammingships?"

I want lasers btw.

ATLAS - это больше игра про PVE, а не про PVP !!! Не сохраняйте игроков PVE, тогда игру не сохраните! Если хотите оживить игру, срочно начинайте разбираться с PVE контентом !!! СУИЦИДЫ ???!!!!!

PVE servers were completely forgotten !!! Nobody asks PVE players for their opinions and wishes !!!!!!!! Who needs your farms and warehouses on PVE servers, they dirtied all the islands with them, killed this huge game content, which was a sandbox !!! NEED NEW QUESTS, CHAINS OF QUESTS !!! WHERE THE GAME CONTENT INCREASES AND EXPANDS !!! RETURN THE OLD MAP FOR PVE SERVERS !!! The game becomes completely PVP, so you will lose most of the players and the game will definitely die and already FOREVER !!!!!

The Greek type ship that you have put in does not fit much with the ships of the time and people wanted something frigate type, but well if you already have it, I don't think people are going to complain because you put more ships but a frigate in a game of pirates can not miss.

You wanted ideas, then have mine, instead of putting ships for gold you should give the option of making them too.

Well the idea is the following, add daily BP global auctions of good quality where some plans of each piece of ship are auctioned such as 5 mythical sails, 20 mythical cannons, 20 plates etc in set (each type of piece in a different auction ) and add a structure or from the flag of the island itself or somewhere where you can put gold the option to bid for those lots until a certain time of the day (the ideal would be an accessible time for the largest number of players) thus the gold it would be even more useful and the importance of trade routes would be enhanced.

Well all I can say is, I look forward to hearing what else is in store.

Not too excited for the trade routes... but thank god they didnt implement a frigate for purchase. I want my frigate customizable, not prefabed!