Gloves Are Off ...

[JodianGaming 15]

I've offered my technical knowledge.  I've posted detailed bug reports.  I've offered assistance.  I've spent 15 hours trying to troubleshoot.  I've messaged devs directly on Twitter.... Nothing.  So maybe it's time for the gloves to come off.   Enjoy.
 

 

Edited December 30, 2018 by JodianGaming

[McGimp 56]

I understand your frustration, i had that issue for several hours a few days into release. You arent missing much right now though. Seeing as you paid money to play the game i guess that doesnt help to ease the pain though lol.

[JodianGaming 15]

13 minutes ago, McGimp said:

I understand your frustration, i had that issue for several hours a few days into release. You arent missing much right now though. Seeing as you paid money to play the game i guess that doesnt help to ease the pain though lol.

The fact that I'm not missing much just adds to the problem.  This game was nowhere near ready for a PAID release, not even into Early Access.  If they wanted to do a free trial run, that would have been acceptable.  They've taken people's money, are completely ignoring the issues, and are wasting time setting up events for players when the game (for a huge number of people) can't even be played.

This company deserves to go down, and Steam should be required to refund those who want it.

[Sunderbrass 3]

Game ran great for me for three days, then a patch a couple days ago made it unplayable. Early access is early access but this has been a special kind of mess.

[notegs 0]

Sucks for those having this issue but seems random. I've only crashed out maybe 4 times

[Ankhwearer 19]

1 hour ago, JodianGaming said:

This game was nowhere near ready for a PAID release, not even into Early Access. 

This is WAY better to play than the launch of other EA survival games, like Subsistence.

And you accuse them of ignoring issues you have reported. Until three weeks have gone by, I feel it is premature to describe a report that hasn't been fixed as "ignored" .

Also, you aren't messaging "devs" in Twitter. You're messaging GS communications.

EA is paid beta test. My years at Nintendo and Xbox says they've landed square in that description.

------------------

And if they are ignoring you, what does posting hate here accomplish?

Edited December 30, 2018 by Ankhwearer

[mndfreeze 92]

1 hour ago, JodianGaming said:

The fact that I'm not missing much just adds to the problem.  This game was nowhere near ready for a PAID release, not even into Early Access.  If they wanted to do a free trial run, that would have been acceptable.  They've taken people's money, are completely ignoring the issues, and are wasting time setting up events for players when the game (for a huge number of people) can't even be played.

This company deserves to go down, and Steam should be required to refund those who want it.

While it sucks you can't connect to the game, that sort of thing is all part of the EA process.  You paid to get in early and alpha test the game.  The points you make about 'not doing XP events' and stuff are silly because thats just a simple config file change.  They also have been addressing issues every day fixing issues the community has been  up in arms about.  It's been out for 7 whole days.  The 'bugs' you think are not important and shouldn't be fixed because YOU can't connect is also a silly point.  Connectivity bugs and in game bugs are all the same beast and your problem does not supersede the problems everyone else is having.

Your video just comes across salty.  Refund it and be done with it.  Vote with your money and learn your lesson that you shouldn't be buying EA games if you are not prepared for this sort of thing to happen.

[JodianGaming 15]

48 minutes ago, mndfreeze said:

While it sucks you can't connect to the game, that sort of thing is all part of the EA process. 

No, that's not part of the EA process.  That's part of extremely early ALPHA process where you're still making sure that your servers actually WORK before they go into public testing.  Note, the A in EA doesn't stand for ALPHA, it stands for ACCESS, which I and thousands of other players don't have.  They've flat out admitted they weren't ready for the rollout, but rolled it out anyway.  Remember, this game was pushed back and pushed back and pushed back.  They only released it because it was Christmas.

You're also setting aside the history of this company.  This isn't the first time they've been down this road, and it's not the first time they've taken development time away from fixing issues and put it into meaningless "events".  This company is noted for being unreliable, and they flat-out lied saying this game wasn't built off Ark.  Hell, the poor management of Ark servers shows this company isn't capable of handling an MMO system.

This is nothing but a money-grab off a product they've already maxed out with expansions.  The vast majority of "issues" existed in Ark, or are likely a result of using that same code.

P.S.  My refund is in, and I'll be sure to post when it's approved.

Edited December 30, 2018 by JodianGaming

[JodianGaming 15]

51 minutes ago, Ankhwearer said:

This is WAY better to play than the launch of other EA survival games, like Subsistence.

Spoken like someone who's actually able to play... If you were sitting at a blank map, unable to connect, since you purchased it, then followed that up with detailed troubleshooting that nobody from the company willing to even acknowledge, you'd reach my level of frustration too.

Edited December 30, 2018 by JodianGaming

[mndfreeze 92]

EA is alpha.  It's literally an alpha version of the game.  NOT EVEN A BETA YET.  

The servers also work for a ton of people.  It's not like 50% of the people can't connect here.  The FIRST DAY it was bad like that.  I get it your pissed, but just based on your video and my 20 years of I.T career time specializing in internet tech it seems like  you have some sort of a network problem.  There are so many possible factors as to why its happening to you that could have absolutely nothing to do with the game.  You could have some funky network shit with your provider.  It could be your anti virus software or firewall.  You're install of windows could be wonky.  It could be your router settings.  It could be a combination of all of the above stuff and more.  

All game companies use prior code when releasing new games.  You don't reinvent the wheel every time you make a car.  Thats normal operating procedure for just about every business and manufacturer out there.  

I'd be pissed too if  couldn't connect, but making that video and the way you went about your 'points' just sounds like a salty person not using logic or reasoning to vent and complain.  Just refund it, move on, never buy an EA game again.

[JodianGaming 15]

28 minutes ago, mndfreeze said:

EA is alpha.  It's literally an alpha version of the game.  NOT EVEN A BETA YET.  

The servers also work for a ton of people.  It's not like 50% of the people can't connect here.  The FIRST DAY it was bad like that.  I get it your pissed, but just based on your video and my 20 years of I.T career time specializing in internet tech it seems like  you have some sort of a network problem.  There are so many possible factors as to why its happening to you that could have absolutely nothing to do with the game.  You could have some funky network shit with your provider.  It could be your anti virus software or firewall.  You're install of windows could be wonky.  It could be your router settings.  It could be a combination of all of the above stuff and more.  

All game companies use prior code when releasing new games.  You don't reinvent the wheel every time you make a car.  Thats normal operating procedure for just about every business and manufacturer out there.  

I'd be pissed too if  couldn't connect, but making that video and the way you went about your 'points' just sounds like a salty person not using logic or reasoning to vent and complain.  Just refund it, move on, never buy an EA game again.

First, EA is not Alpha.... And I quote;

" Alpha testing is a type of acceptance testing; performed to identify all possible issues/bugs before releasing the product to everyday users or the public."

If anything, EA is supposed to be Beta testing.  Through the years EA has been warped to mean, "We know our game isn't even close to ready but lets see how much money we can make anyway".  If you are the IT professional you claim to be (I have almost 30 years in IT) then you can't even argue that because you know it's true.  They pushed back this game more than once, and then released it when it wasn't ready just because Christmas came along.  That's why we have a hot mess.  They wanted the Christmas money.

If you're thinking it's my network then you've obviously not run across my troubleshooting threads, because you'll know if you did that the issue is outside of my network.  Hell, it's not even within my ISP.  I have a clear trace all the way to Germany, which is where all NA and EU servers seem to loop through.  Then the trace goes dead.  Go ahead, check yourself.  The connect IP's are in the main game folder under a clearly unmistakable file name.  I don't make it any further than the Frankfurt 80-series IP's.

I have another 403 games, just in Steam, that work absolutely fine on my PC.  Including ARK, although it has a habit of crashing if you do certain things (like alt+tab while it's map loading).  If you knew the history of Ark, you would know that connectivity issues and game-breaking patches are fairly common with Studio Wildcard.... as is their lack of acknowledging problems as well as putting DLC/Events above bug fixes.

That said, Wildcard provided advertising and media releases stating this game was a brand new game and not a clone of Ark (which the in-game menus would seem to disagree with) and was very well designed.   Now we find all of that is completely false.

I have no doubt this company has great pride in their work and really wants to make great games, but their track record so far shows that they're not ready for the size of projects they seem to be taking on.  Ark's release was an utter disaster, it's still a fairly broken game, and now Atlas is nothing more than a launch-week abortion.

You call me salty...  I call it a justified consumer complaint.

Edited December 30, 2018 by JodianGaming

[Percieval 1,067]

1 hour ago, JodianGaming said:

" Alpha testing is a type of acceptance testing; performed to identify all possible issues/bugs before releasing the product to everyday users or the public."

 

Sounds like EA to me. 

Edited December 30, 2018 by Percieval

[Domino 48]

I think your video has ruined the future of this game.  You've shown them.

In case you missed the patch notes, they've been working on improving stability and resolving connection issues.  Of the tens of thousands of people playing the game though, why are they supposed to single you out and immediately jump to your assistance?

[mndfreeze 92]

So, first off. I never said EA means Early Alpha. I said early access means you are playing an alpha game.  So we can clear that misunderstanding up now and you can stop repeating it.  I was going to paste the software release cycle for you so you have a clear grasp of the stages but I don't imagine it will serve much purpose.  Pre-alpha -> Alpha -> Beta -> pre-release -> release -> support -> end of life are the basic steps.  We are at the second step.  That's the step where software features are not yet finalized. Things are being added and removed.  Shit is super broken and may not function correctly or even at all.  That's what early access games are.  The caveat for steam is they have to be able to reasonably function for most users to be sold on steam.  If 50% of us had your problem, steam would pull it.  But the game works for most people and your problem is not a huge percentage.  The connection issues most people are having are different than yours and related to server load, player count, etc.

Second. I just ran a traceroute. NO where did my network hit germany, at all.  It routed all the way to amazons aws servers (which is the datacenter platform the game runs on) and had no issues.  So, I'm fairly positive there is some fuckery going on over on your end like I stated before. Or there is some fuckery going on at your ISP or their backbone provider.  Regardless none of that has to do with the game itself.   Here is my trace:

  1     2 ms     2 ms     1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2    10 ms     9 ms    22 ms  10.35.XXX.XXX
  3    16 ms    13 ms    11 ms  100.127.73.168
  4    23 ms    36 ms    25 ms  100.120.100.6
  5    37 ms    35 ms    37 ms  dalsbbrj02-ae3.0.rd.dl.cox.net [68.1.5.134]
  6    37 ms    38 ms    39 ms  99.82.176.104
  7    71 ms    70 ms    72 ms  176.32.125.174
  8    69 ms    70 ms    74 ms  176.32.125.181
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10    68 ms    67 ms    70 ms  52.93.129.235
 11    70 ms    67 ms    69 ms  178.236.3.31
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19    73 ms    68 ms    70 ms  52.93.29.202
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26    69 ms    69 ms    69 ms  s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com [52.216.237.242]

Trace complete.

Those timeouts are normal as long as you hit the last hop, which I did, without packet loss.  Those are hidden core routers and stuff to stop DDOS kids from taking out major network segments.  The game also routes its data out over port 80 and port 5757, at least it was for me.  Zero issues. No Germany.  That is amazons edge network.  Its impossible for me to say where shit routes past that point because that's where they start doing their cloud stuff, anti-DDOS stuff, etc It will route from there to the actual physical set of servers and is handled by their network.

Just because 401 other games work just fine has nothing to do with this unless those other games ALSO use the same set of amazon hosted cloud servers, which they don't.  Now, I've read about this game being bitchy if you go through a double NAT (network address translation) which you might be behind. One at your house on your router (required to have a single internet IP to multiple devices in your house) and one on your provider.  If that's the case you might just be screwed unless they alter their network code or get amazon to change their connection requirements, impossible to say who is actually at fault for that here since its all just speculation and may not be any of it.

The fact that you keep coming back to talking points used by allllll the angry salty kids like 'it was a cash grab!' and 'its jus ark reskinned' is exactly why you are just salty.  You could have put out a legitimate complaint video that addressed the actual shit going on, but instead you chose to bandwagon on the hate train and sound like the angry kids on reddit when they get zerged by chinese.  instead of admitting they just got beaten they immediately cry HAX HAX AIMBOT DUPE with no actual evidence of anything.  You should have just stopped  your video at 'shit doesn't work, not happy about it, gunna get a refund' instead of going down that road.  You're just trying to use your "internet personality" in hopes your salt spreads.  Hell, you haven't even played it so how can you make the ark reskinned comments?  Just regurgitating other peoples drivel at that point.

You have every right to be pissy the game doesnt work for you but you also need to admit that you paid to be an alpha tester and this is part of the package. The store page has a big ass warning on it about it. You chose to support the game (cashgrab!) to see it 2 years early, help them develop new content and find bugs along the way.  It has been 7 days and they have put out patches every day, usually multiple.  They put detailed patch notes up of each patch as well as the upcoming patches.  For someone who says he remembers arks release your memory must be fuzzy because that ACTUALLY was a disaster and for a lot more than just the first day.  That shit was a disaster for 80% of its entire EA process. They have been super quick to try to address issues this time, listen to the community, and fix shit.  They have made major gameplay changes already at the request of the community.  Remember all the vitamin sucks posts? Notice the constant nerfing of the ghost ships as they try to dial it in? If they could fix the entire games problems in a week I imagine they would but it's no surprise it's going to take 2 years to get it all worked out and that's what we all signed up for.

 

tl;dr your network or computer is fucked.  Be better than the hate train and use some logic and reason.  Don't sign up for alpha test shit if you are gunna get pissed and lose your shit over it being exactly what it says it will be, buggy and broken.

If you want some ACTUAL assistance fixing the issue I suggest you have a friend come over with a computer strong enough to at least open the game (playability not required), log into steam on his system, see if it works. If it does, its your PC.  If it doesn't then its something on the network.  See if you can hook your PC directly up to your internet connection (cable modem or DSL) without a router, no NAT or anything and see if it fixes it.  PM me your traceroutes if you want and I'll gladly take a look and see if I spot anything obvious.  The most likely culprits though are going to be software firewall/anti virus/network related stuff on your PC, windows being stupid and blocking ports, your router and its NAT capabilities or configuration, your ISP and how you connect to it and finally some network shennanigans out on the internet outside of your control.    

[Grongash 201]

15 minutes video footage of the loginscreen of a bug thats not even affecting most people. You showed them.

[LaiTash 156]

I can play but those EA exuses are getting ridiculous.

Right from partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess:

> Early Access titles must deliver a playable game or usable software to the customer at the time of purchase

Note the keywords "playable" and "usable". Yeah a lot of people are having this problem and yeah fixing it should be a #1 priority.

[Percieval 1,067]

4 minutes ago, LaiTash said:

I can play but those EA exuses are getting ridiculous.

Right from partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess:

> Early Access titles must deliver a playable game or usable software to the customer at the time of purchase

Note the keywords "playable" and "usable". Yeah a lot of people are having this problem and yeah fixing it should be a #1 priority.

They’re not, that’s what all the people above are saying. 

 

Call of Duty had way worse connection problems than Atlas does now in it’s EA state. 

Edited December 30, 2018 by Percieval

[LaiTash 156]

Discord is full of people who can't connect still.

And no one cares about what problems some other game have/had.

Edited December 30, 2018 by LaiTash

[Percieval 1,067]

1 minute ago, LaiTash said:

Discord is full of people who can't connect still.

The official atlas discord? The meeting place for toxic people you mean? 

[LaiTash 156]

1 minute ago, Percieval said:

The official atlas discord? The meeting place for toxic people you mean? 

That's no reason to invalidate legitimate complaints. 

[Percieval 1,067]

Just now, LaiTash said:

That's no reason to invalidate legitimate complaints. 

I don’t, but it’s up for 7 days and it is improved very much. 

[Domino 48]

16 minutes ago, LaiTash said:

I can play but those EA exuses are getting ridiculous.

Right from partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess:

> Early Access titles must deliver a playable game or usable software to the customer at the time of purchase

Note the keywords "playable" and "usable". Yeah a lot of people are having this problem and yeah fixing it should be a #1 priority.

Considering myself and tens of thousands of other people are able to play, I think that qualifies as "playable" and "usable". And for those that can't play, Steam also has a refund process.  

This entire thread was just an attempt for someone to get views on his small channel.  And fueled by people unhappy that they don't understand what an Early Access release means.  It usually means it's being released early while still in development, not being released early because entitled and ignorant people deserve it.

[Sunderbrass 3]

Just now, Percieval said:

I don’t, but it’s up for 7 days and it is improved very much. 

For some, yes, for others no, and for some it's worse. You telling anyone having legitimate issues how great the game is running just makes you sound like a complete ass.

[Percieval 1,067]

2 minutes ago, Sunderbrass said:

For some, yes, for others no, and for some it's worse. You telling anyone having legitimate issues how great the game is running just makes you sound like a complete ass.

I said it runs way better than 7 days ago and that sounds to you like a complete ass? You’ve another thing coming in life then. They are resolving it and I’m sure it will work out for everyone, right now they made it better for the bigger part of the community. 

[Loni 32]

The bugs put aside. I am surprised how stable the game is. I crashed maybe like 3x on day 2 and never since. Ofcourse the server timeouts were present, but it was the same for everyone on the grid I was on.