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Forb Hidden

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Hello Devs, hello Community.

Since I read this forum (nearly daily since I play atlas) I am confused about the way you take care on your playerbase, dear devs.

There are sooooo many open question in here, only you can answer.

It's fine, that u use discord, twitter, forum, facebook, letter-doves, smoke signals and many more other platforms. But in my example, I just read the forum, because I'm already an old man.

Do you only get an hour/week for the q&a in the official forum? That would explain why there are so many open threads only waiting for an answer or a statement.

Please take a little more care on your playerbase on your official website. It's the only real way, where we can get proper informations. I don't want to wait two days until maybe a player post a answer u gave on twitter or in the discord.

Don't let a huge amount of people who keep playing your beautiful game stand alone with the feeling of getting lost.

Sry for my English.

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What? Discussing things on your own official forum in 2019?

Are you insane?

Better only discuss relevant stuff in that private group on some proprietary third party website.

And never mention it anywhere where it can be linked back to you.

Afterall, we don't want any people to show up and take part in it, right?

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2 hours ago, Forb Hidden said:

Hello Devs, hello Community.

Since I read this forum (nearly daily since I play atlas) I am confused about the way you take care on your playerbase, dear devs.

There are sooooo many open question in here, only you can answer.

It's fine, that u use discord, twitter, forum, facebook, letter-doves, smoke signals and many more other platforms. But in my example, I just read the forum, because I'm already an old man.

Do you only get an hour/week for the q&a in the official forum? That would explain why there are so many open threads only waiting for an answer or a statement.

Please take a little more care on your playerbase on your official website. It's the only real way, where we can get proper informations. I don't want to wait two days until maybe a player post a answer u gave on twitter or in the discord.

Don't let a huge amount of people who keep playing your beautiful game stand alone with the feeling of getting lost.

Sry for my English.

/signed

/signed

/signed

/signed

/signed

/signed in blood

triple stamp the double stamp

This. This. This. This times a hundred. 

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You have a higher chance to catch Jat on reddit, and the rest only on twitter apparently.

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9 minutes ago, Grongash said:

You have a higher chance to catch Jat on reddit, and the rest only on twitter apparently.

Yes but the op's point is that this really shouldn't be the case. These are the game's official forums. Their presence here should be strongest of anywhere.  When your presence skews towards social media over your own game forums, the underlying implication is that you prefer to ignore questions you don't want to deal with.

Edited by boomervoncannon
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The Captain's logs and the occasional response in here show a complete disconnect with the players, as though there is no capability to put themselves into the players' shoes and imagine the game experience as it is today, especially on pve.  When the new raze mechanic was added in, we received a response surprised that there was an issue with it.  How can you add a sanctioned griefing mechanic to pve and be surprised that people are unhappy with it?

In addition, there doesn't seem to be a lot of context being understood.  If we list the changes that have happened since the wipe, there are very few on the plus side, especially for smaller pve groups on official, and a huge list of minuses, or changes that look great but are "not for you", like the new additions for singleplayer and hosted servers.  If the trend continues, there won't be much reason to try to continue on with the game.

Edited by Winter Thorne
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4 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

Yes but the op's point is that this really shouldn't be the case. These are the game's official forums. Their presence here should be strongest of anywhere.  When your presence skews towards social media over your own game forums, the underlying implication is that you prefer to ignore questions you don't want to deal with.

I agree, was more meant as a statement about the sad state of the communication 😞 I probably spend more time here than they do 😉

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1 minute ago, Winter Thorne said:

 In addition, there doesn't seem to be a lot of context being understood.  If we list the changes that have happened since the wipe, there are very few on the plus side, especially for smaller pve groups on official, and a huge list of minuses, or changes that look great but are "not for you", like the new additions for singleplayer and hosted servers.  If the trend continues, there won't be much reason to try to continue on with the game.

I will give you a hint - addition of single player wasn't for the "current" player base. Rather for those of us who had enough of toxicity on PvE and wanted to play in peace. And you know what? At least in my case it worked pulling me back into the game. On Single player where i don't have to worry about griefers and toxicity and riffraff...  Non the less back into the game and interested again. 

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You know you can tell the last login time by going to their profile, right?  It's not uncommon for the community managers to only pop in once every few days.  They truly dont care about the forums.  

What's ironic is that even on discord we've given feedback that is also ignored.  They pretty much look for one or two people to support a change, then ignore the rest.

Edited by Archsenex

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17 minutes ago, Elrood said:

I will give you a hint - addition of single player wasn't for the "current" player base. Rather for those of us who had enough of toxicity on PvE and wanted to play in peace. And you know what? At least in my case it worked pulling me back into the game. On Single player where i don't have to worry about griefers and toxicity and riffraff...  Non the less back into the game and interested again. 

I've already given myself that hint.  "What if the goal is to just get everyone off the official servers and onto the single player or single-multiplayer or hosted modes?"  Makes sense from a money perspective.  Why bother running a whole bunch of servers for a low population when you can just let them run their own servers, make their own rules, save money, eliminate 50% of the complaints, and for a bonus, they do all their own development work?

Then I tell myself, nah, that's too cynical.  

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Just now, Winter Thorne said:

I've already given myself that hint.  "What if the goal is to just get everyone off the official servers and onto the single player or single-multiplayer or hosted modes?"  Makes sense from a money perspective.  Why bother running a whole bunch of servers for a low population when you can just let them run their own servers, make their own rules, save money, eliminate 50% of the complaints, and for a bonus, they do all their own development work?

Then I tell myself, nah, that's too cynical.  

😄 Devs didn't push me out of multiplayer servers. Players did. Devs just added a way for me to return to it and have fun. 

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19 minutes ago, Archsenex said:

What's ironic is that even on discord we've given feedback that is also ignored.  They pretty much look for one or two people to support a change, then ignore the rest.

You need to foster and cultivate your own filter bubble, otherwise you are going to find nothing but opposite opinions in there.

P.S.: ..is there an echo in here?

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9 minutes ago, Elrood said:

😄 Devs didn't push me out of multiplayer servers. Players did. Devs just added a way for me to return to it and have fun. 

Players pushed you out by doing things the devs allowed and even encouraged and wrote code for them to do.

So they added a way for you to return.  I'm assuming that's more than the fact that there just aren't very many players left.

What way was that then?

The way to find an unclaimed island and wipe all the other players off it?

Maybe the way to be a good island owner and police your island by using the log which tells you someone has "settled" on your island, meaning, they've picked a berry and left, or killed a pig or something? (Because who the hell knows what that message means anyway and isn't it fun looking for beds hidden in the weeds every day?)

The way to do the most popular game activity, treasure maps, by sailing halfway around the world and finding that you can't do the map because it's locked behind gates or buried in the geography?  Or maybe the way to grief some other player by spawning AOD inside their tame barn with a high level treasure map that someone was too lazy to assigned fixed spawn points to?  (The tame barn holding tames that were not supposed to be "a thing", according to Jat, but inow are the only way to do maps?)

I'll admit, it's a real thrill not knowing when your ships will disappear, so it's got that going for it.  Do you have to render them?  "Base" on them? (whatever that means.), lift and drop the anchors on them?  Who knows, no man can say, and certainly nobody is telling us.

The way to have structure decay to reduce spam (that won't reduce spam) that oops....removed your legitimate structures instead?

The way to enjoy the new NPC village content?  Oh, sorry...that's not on officials, but you can have a CAT (which at least is not as ugly as the 3 previous "not a thing...not a thing at all" tames inflicted on the servers in the big MEGA RELEASES.

 

If there is some sort of "way" here, I'm having a hard time seeing it.  Maybe it needs some signs and some flashing neon lights or something.

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Players pushed you out by doing things the devs allowed and even encouraged and wrote code for them to do.

Well yea. This is sandbox and imho we can't have cake without cake. Devs imho had good frame for survival, "kind of" realistic game. Than jerks came.


What actually pushed me out was: griefers sinking boats by weight (perfectly good mechanic if it would not be randomly abused), idiots building trapping pit on a slot I left open for settling which I had no way to remove (surely they could just demolish it after use, but it would take additional 3 minutes....) - thanks, not only I didn't get neighbor, i lost resources spawns for nothing. Idiots building gates around a ship. Idiots trying to steal stuff from not pin-coded containers.... Idiots building on rarer resource nodes which I didn't manage to claim to protect after my neighbor lost interest. Idiots who claimed a spot on island and blocked resources spawns using gates. Etc. In short - people who didn't consider others, didn't care. 

All those problems with spawning animals inside pens, spawning AotD inside base... This I had dealt with successfully. It wasn't that hard, just a bit tedious building spawn proof pens. Decay was not really a problem if you have modicum of time.... AotD blocked by gates means climbing picks and you can deal with that too (mostly). Well, most of what you written I actually didn't care that much about. Just people being jerks. 

I do like most of the mechanics those jerks used to grief. When they were working according to spirit, not letter. And then some jerk sink ship using weight. So now anchored ship has unlimited weight limit. Another one level ships on mobs on the island. And some quick fix goes. And game goes downhill. Add to it constant worry about overlapping claims...
So after they decided to wipe the server, i finally quit. 

And now, that single player is there, I can play with all those "griefing friendly" mechanics which imho makes game more interesting without whole bunch of jerks using them to make my life miserable. At least when I figure out how to reapply them again 😄 

Plus i can make "backup saves" so i don't have to worry about stuff disappearing cause of bugs and loosing multiple days of progress. Few hours sure, I can live with that. Few days? Backups exists. 

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28 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

If there is some sort of "way" here, I'm having a hard time seeing it.  Maybe it needs some signs and some flashing neon lights or something.

 

Perhaps there is a blueprint of a way. Ain't that reward enough?

 

@Elrood You can't blame the players for this.

It is entirely the oversight of obvious(!) results by the devs, nothing else.

You give the ability to randomly sink boats to a million people, you can be sure as fuck that somebody is going to abuse it.

And the only way to prevent this, and this is a widely accepted fact, is to not give that ability to anyone.

Literally anyone who had ever successfully designed a game (in contrast to barely getting your progam to compile at least and then calling it a game) knows this.

Edited by user1

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at this point im more worried about server player cap ruining the game for the major player base. talking about getting 80 people together with 100 cannon and swivel carts dropped off on a chinese island during war dec... 200 people on the server... the lag was so bad the only people that got kills were the npc's... if this was a real mmo there would have been an actual battle.. instead of a slide show. the devs NEED to lower the server cap to 100 for god sakes. completely unplayable at 200. Probably can't see it, but theres like 30 ships right there, and that was just the chinese. ours were on the other side of the island.OYULzPx.jpg

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10 minutes ago, user1 said:

 

@Elrood You can't blame the players for this.

 It is entirely the oversight of obvious(!) results by the devs, nothing else.

 You give the ability to randomly sink boats to a million people, you can be sure as fuck that somebody is going to abuse it.

And the only way to prevent this, and this is a widely accepted fact, is to not give that ability to anyone.

 Literally anyone who had ever successfully designed a game (in contrast to barely getting your progam to compile at least and then calling it a game) knows this.

Why can't I blame players?! Sure, I agree, probability that in several thousands players there will be jerks is around 100%. But that doesn't mean I can't blame them for what they are and for what they force games to be.

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4 minutes ago, Skinner NA PVE said:

I would like them to play the game a few hours a week. Shit like green screens would be fixed quickly.

green screen is nothing compared to black jacks and shield bashing ruining melee combat.

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An excellent example is the latest updates. The first introduced the ability for a new landowner to raze an island. Which for pve has now been removed again. There has been no form of announcement on here to inform us of these big changes. @Dollie was not even aware gold could not be put on flags by tenants due to owners putting their flags behind walls. This needs a forum post in here. Not everyone can or wants to use Twitter etc

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18 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

Players pushed you out by doing things the devs allowed and even encouraged and wrote code for them to do.

So they added a way for you to return.  I'm assuming that's more than the fact that there just aren't very many players left.

What way was that then?

The way to find an unclaimed island and wipe all the other players off it?

Maybe the way to be a good island owner and police your island by using the log which tells you someone has "settled" on your island, meaning, they've picked a berry and left, or killed a pig or something? (Because who the hell knows what that message means anyway and isn't it fun looking for beds hidden in the weeds every day?)

The way to do the most popular game activity, treasure maps, by sailing halfway around the world and finding that you can't do the map because it's locked behind gates or buried in the geography?  Or maybe the way to grief some other player by spawning AOD inside their tame barn with a high level treasure map that someone was too lazy to assigned fixed spawn points to?  (The tame barn holding tames that were not supposed to be "a thing", according to Jat, but inow are the only way to do maps?)

I'll admit, it's a real thrill not knowing when your ships will disappear, so it's got that going for it.  Do you have to render them?  "Base" on them? (whatever that means.), lift and drop the anchors on them?  Who knows, no man can say, and certainly nobody is telling us.

The way to have structure decay to reduce spam (that won't reduce spam) that oops....removed your legitimate structures instead?

The way to enjoy the new NPC village content?  Oh, sorry...that's not on officials, but you can have a CAT (which at least is not as ugly as the 3 previous "not a thing...not a thing at all" tames inflicted on the servers in the big MEGA RELEASES.

 

If there is some sort of "way" here, I'm having a hard time seeing it.  Maybe it needs some signs and some flashing neon lights or something.

My aren't you grumpy..

I wonder how many in this thread have played atlas in the last week.

This discussion of the island raze, the main contention was an assumption that someone could possibly maybe remove structures in use.  Not that they would.  But an assumption that everyone is evil and toxic.  I haven't removed a single bed from our islands.  I haven't even removed traps.  I ask people to do that and they come and do it.   Beds I don't mind, most of them are plonked down in out of the way places.  I'm certainly not going to run around looking for stuff just to break it. 

Seems to me, most of you need to take a good long hard look in a mirror if you want to see an actual toxic personality and not just base your assumptions onto everyone else. 

Today is a sad day.. and a loss for the pve community.

To pull out one part of what you are saying here, about the guys doing maps in other peoples bases.  you know if you throw a grapple in someones base it is returned, because a grapple does a small amount of damage.. therefore violates rules of pve.  Thus, you can't grapple onto someone elses gates.. but you can fire a zipline into them. Cos apparently ziplines don't do damage.  I'm sure there's a bug in there somewhere.  But I do agree, maps on peoples bases, should auto migrate to a location outside of peoples bases.  But I'm sure the devs have thought about this already..

59 minutes ago, AntonyVW said:

An excellent example is the latest updates. The first introduced the ability for a new landowner to raze an island. Which for pve has now been removed again. There has been no form of announcement on here to inform us of these big changes. @Dollie was not even aware gold could not be put on flags by tenants due to owners putting their flags behind walls. This needs a forum post in here. Not everyone can or wants to use Twitter etc

Do you know why people put flags behind walls?   It's because people in their own companies.. were stealing from it.

 

As for who is to blame for griefing etc.. well the devs for allowing the concepts that allow the griefing to occur.. but also the players who do the griefing.. and latterly the devs for not going anything about them, when they're caught.  Outside of written warnings.

Funny tho.. make a homophobic remark or a racist comment.. and you get banned permenantly from the servers.  As a certain Russian found out last week.  But caught using exploits or 3rd party code.. ach noone cares.

Of course.. if they did care, they'd have region locked the servers and made Asian servers for the chinese, koreans, japanese and various others whose countries I cannot spell correctly..

Edited by Martyn

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16 minutes ago, Martyn said:

Do you know why people put flags behind walls?   It's because people in their own companies.. were stealing it. 

Yes. That is why our company put ours behind walls. Sad really, but we never did find out who did it. But we are absolutely certain that it was a member of the company

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17 minutes ago, Martyn said:

My aren't you grumpy..

I wonder how many in this thread have played atlas in the last week.

This discussion of the island raze, the main contention was an assumption that someone could possibly maybe remove structures in use.  Not that they would.  But an assumption that everyone is evil and toxic.  I haven't removed a single bed from our islands.  I haven't even removed traps.  I ask people to do that and they come and do it.   Beds I don't mind, most of them are plonked down in out of the way places.  I'm certainly not going to run around looking for stuff just to break it. 

Seems to me, most of you need to take a good long hard look in a mirror if you want to see an actual toxic personality and not just base your assumptions onto everyone else. 

Today is a sad day.. and a loss for the pve community.

Do you know why people put flags behind walls?   It's because people in their own companies.. were stealing it.

 

As for who is to blame for griefing etc.. well the devs for allowing the concepts that allow the griefing to occur.. but also the players who do the griefing.. and latterly the devs for not going anything about them, when they're caught.  Outside of written warnings.

Funny tho.. make a homophobic remark or a racist comment.. and you get banned permenantly from the servers.  As a certain Russian found out last week.  But caught using exploits or 3rd party code.. ach noone cares.

And where does this stick to the OP? This thread is not to discuss about the wipe thing or something else.

I would like to read an answer for this question from a dev. Or does I need to stream a video first, that they listen to me?

 

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3 minutes ago, AntonyVW said:

Yes. That is why our company put ours behind walls. Sad really, but we never did find out who did it. But we are absolutely certain that it was a member of the company

Our owner did the same.  However on our new island I strictly forbid it.  No gold has gone missing.  Yet..

But that said.. there's only 5-6 of us left now still playing.  If you can't trust someone.. why play with them.

3 minutes ago, Forb Hidden said:

And where does this stick to the OP? This thread is not to discuss about the wipe thing or something else.

I would like to read an answer for this question from a dev. Or does I need to stream a video first, that they listen to me?

 

Join thier discord then.. or twitter.. email them.. They won't post in public except to answer very specific questions.

Edited by Martyn

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