Some ideas to spice up the seas.

[MichelNey 2]

I recently started playing this game together with my wife, and so far it has been really fun. But there are a few things that could be changed for the better especially when it comes to single player and coop. These suggestions are mostly tied to exploration and progression: 

- Treasure maps: Exploration can be quite rewarding in games, but if you find what you are looking for all the time, it stops being exciting. There are just too many bottles at the beaches, and you get tired of finding them 5 minutes after you start playing the game. It quickly becomes a farming issue instead of exploration. The second issue is that the event is always army of the damned. Adding some more events could be beneficial. Like underwater treasure guarded by an alpha shark or something. All in all, give us far less bottles (and maybe increase the loot from each one), and vary them up a bit. Hunting treasure is fun after all, or should be at least. 

- The sea should be more dynamic: Sailing in this game is really fun tbh. But the encounters could need some diversity. Currently in coop and single player, you only see ships of the damned (who only spawn in armadas btw), and storms always spawn on top of you. Every zone contains a lot of ships of the damned, so you are sure to encounter them all the time, and since water spouts always spawn on you, you are sure encounter them a lot too. This ties to what I said in the treasure map section: If something happens all the time, it stops being exciting. In this case it becomes more of a nuisance. So I suggest you add more variety here too. Add some trade ships with lots of good trade resources sailing around. If a player attacks them, his ship gets a debuff that will aggro Navy ships sailing around. Also add some pirates that will aggro players and navy ships alike (I know you are adding pirates with the pirate encampment patch, which is great!). When it comes to storms let them be more random so you can see them in the distance, or at least see the spouts in the distance and make them more dangerous. This will add drama and tension. Adding more types of storms like lightning storms and maybe a rare Tsunami could also spice things up a bit. 

I don't think these suggestions would cost too many hours in programming time, and they wouldn't really require too many new assets.

 

[Sleepinator2000 87]

Welcome to ATLAS!

As you progress, you might find the quantity of treasure maps is less of a concern, right now they are presumably all challenging to you and your wife, but eventually you will find that only a small percentage of them hit the sweet spot between challenge and return on investment.

I would love to have storms be more localized so that a skilled sailor could see and avoid them from farther away. The current implementation is really just 3 minutes of bullshit. It does deliver on the tension, but in a way that seems cheap.

[PeglegTheAngry 99]

You aren't finding what you want all the time, you just don't know it yet. Yellow glowing maps are chump change.
You want the purple glowing ones. You want the ones that say 14+ quality. The same goes for SoDs, and floatsams.

As another example, unless its a special color, you really don't want to tame an animal that's below level 26. (This is especially important when you consider wilds all have the same stats until you tame them, taming a level 30 is the same as a level 1.) Even then, when you do tame it, there is no guarantee it will have the stats you need.  You still have to tame a few more and breed them after that!

 

Edited August 7, 2019 by PeglegTheAngry

[MichelNey 2]

15 hours ago, PeglegTheAngry said:

You aren't finding what you want all the time, you just don't know it yet. Yellow glowing maps are chump change.
You want the purple glowing ones. You want the ones that say 14+ quality. The same goes for SoDs, and floatsams.

As another example, unless its a special color, you really don't want to tame an animal that's below level 26. (This is especially important when you consider wilds all have the same stats until you tame them, taming a level 30 is the same as a level 1.) Even then, when you do tame it, there is no guarantee it will have the stats you need.  You still have to tame a few more and breed them after that!

 

I know what you are referring too, I have thousands of hours in Ark, and I have bred rexes for bosses etc, so I know the tedious stat game. 

That being said, you missed my point: Having tons of bottles turns it into farming instead of exploration, it stops being exciting and starts being tedious. In single player and coop you are not competing with anyone, so its not like have HAVE to find a bottle of a certain quality to find the treasure you need. 

[PeglegTheAngry 99]

24 minutes ago, MichelNey said:

That being said, you missed my point: Having tons of bottles turns it into farming instead of exploration, it stops being exciting and starts being tedious. In single player and coop you are not competing with anyone, so its not like have HAVE to find a bottle of a certain quality to find the treasure you need.  

I see!
Wild Pirate Encampments are coming, so don't worry. You will have to clear islands before you can get to good stuff.

[Sleepinator2000 87]

30 minutes ago, MichelNey said:

That being said, you missed my point: Having tons of bottles turns it into farming instead of exploration, it stops being exciting and starts being tedious. In single player and coop you are not competing with anyone, so its not like have HAVE to find a bottle of a certain quality to find the treasure you need. 

I suppose it depends on your frequency of play and playstyle. I spend most of my time hunting higher level maps. If I haven't been on for a week, I do indeed have to go "farm" a couple big islands so that I have a starter set of maps to pursue. Once I have that however, I pass close to islands enroute to the maps, especially at night (the bottle glow has increased visibility at night).

If I am attentive, and a little lucky, I can usually find one decent map per zone, which lets me perpetually chain them up, and over time I can develop clusters of them to make my long journeys more worthwhile.

*if* they were to reduce the quantity or quality of the maps from their current level, farming would become a permanent requirement, and would indeed increase the tedium of maphunting.

[PeglegTheAngry 99]

2 hours ago, Sleepinator2000 said:

 Once I have that however, I pass close to islands enroute to the maps, especially at night (the bottle glow has increased visibility at night).

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when you get let's just say a Journeyman map, when you get to that maps location there is likely another bottle for a journeyman map where you got the first map from. You could very well keep a back/forth map route going if you get lucky enough.

Edited August 7, 2019 by PeglegTheAngry

[Sleepinator2000 87]

12 minutes ago, PeglegTheAngry said:

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when you get let's just say a Journeyman map, when you get to that maps location there is likely another bottle for a journeyman map where you got the first map from. You could very well keep a back/forth map route going if you get lucky enough.

I find that varies by quality. I think of maps like a Spirograph. You can draw a circle around the place you pick it up with a radius based on the quality:

Less than 5 quality will almost always be within 1 zone, so if you have to travel, you only have about a 12.5% chance of it sending you back to your original zone (about half of the low quality maps are in the same zone you are already in).

Greater than 20 quality will almost always send you somewhere 8 zones away in a random direction, but you can't get further than 8 zones away on a 15 zone map, so the lines cross, effectively doubling the chances that it will send you back to the region you came from.