State of the game

[Realist 504]

I am trying to take an objective approach to the numbers currently on steam.

now I am not sure exactly how many clusters there are but I know there is eu pve and pvp as well as na pve and pvp. So we will call it 4. Hopefully there aren’t more or that will make things look worse.

since the average has dropped to 38k and if you were to divide that into the 4 clusters that would really mean that less than 10k were on a cluster. 

Now if you could actually fit 40k per cluster/globe that would be 160k which 38k is less than 1/4 of the total capacity.

the one other concern is that the all time peak is 58k which was actually over 1/3 of the total capacity which isn’t that bad. The thing is the 24 hour peak now is 44k so it is getting pretty close to dropping back down to 1/4 capacity.

ill keep an eye on the numbers and see what they do.

i don’t believe they would actually add more servers such as small company servers for the main reason that there is already a lot of empty players slots on all clusters/globes.

 it would be a waste of money and just increase their expenses even more.

i would actually take a guess that they probably sold around 100k copies. Because of the numbers that is a pretty safe assumption. There was a lot of refunds but there is no way to know how many so we will just leave them out of this which is beneficial. 100k x 25.00 would be 2.5 million dollars. I think it costed them a pretty good amount of money to start up grapeshot so I am not sure how much money they have as of right now. I would really like to find out though. There team has grown a lot so the expenses are even higher than with the ark side of wildcard.

if anyone knows how or where to find the numbers I would appreciate it.

 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

This sort of thing is hard to pin down given that Grapeshot isn’t publicly traded and really only the biggest studios are, but this article gives some ballparks that imply strongly it’s unlikely development costs to date were less than 10 million. Even before all the refunds there’s almost no way they have yet come anywhere close to break even on this game. The business models on large MMO’s just don’t work that way. They have enormous upfront costs that they don’t recoup in a short frenzy of revenue, but make back over time. Sure Wow was a license to print money for a long time, but it was the extreme outlier that created a dream everyone in the industry chased.

https://www.engadget.com/2014/01/15/a-look-at-game-budgets-and-mmo-budgets/

Also I agree that adding servers at this point would be an added expense with no real benefit to anyone.

Edited January 4, 2019 by boomervoncannon

[Ellentro 107]

Just now, boomervoncannon said:

This sort of thing is hard to pin down given that Grapeshot isn’t publicly traded and really only the biggest studios are, but this article gives some ballparks that imply strongly it’s unlikely development costs to date were less than 10 million. Even before all the refunds there’s almost no way they have yet come anywhere close to break even on this game. The business models on large MMO’s just don’t work that way. They have enormous upfront costs that they don’t recoup in a short frenzy of revenue, but make back over time. Sure Wow was a license to print money for a long time, but it was the extreme outlier that created a dream everyone in the industry chased.

https://www.engadget.com/2014/01/15/a-look-at-game-budgets-and-mmo-budgets/

That article isn't very applicable to our reality in this game.

First off, this game, while an MMO, is not the same as those MMOs. Second, most of the assets/engine were completely reused (It's just Ark with new graphics and a few new mechanics, made off a base of the Extinction DLC map pasted across a number of zones. 

They more then likely already broke even for this game simply due to the fact that, comparatively, this game was extremely easy to build given the tools and content they developed previously for Ark and Dark and Light, combined with the fact that several of the mechanics (Such as Wind, Sailboats etc) were/are blatantly ripped from the Ark modding community. 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

2 minutes ago, Ellentro said:

That article isn't very applicable to our reality in this game.

First off, this game, while an MMO, is not the same as those MMOs. Second, most of the assets/engine were completely reused (It's just Ark with new graphics and a few new mechanics, made off a base of the Extinction DLC map pasted across a number of zones. 

They more then likely already broke even for this game simply due to the fact that, comparatively, this game was extremely easy to build given the tools and content they developed previously for Ark and Dark and Light, combined with the fact that several of the mechanics (Such as Wind, Sailboats etc) were/are blatantly ripped from the Ark modding community. 

It’s applicable in the sense that it provides development costs for games within the same basic genre. Given that this isn’t an industry where this sort of information is often publicly disclosed, it’s about as applicable as you're likely to get. You should feel free to provide more directly applicable info links if you have them rather than nitpick what I provided without offering something better. 

I will agree the reuse of some assets probably builds in a non insignificant cost savings, but what that might be is also hard to judge.

[Ellentro 107]

Just now, boomervoncannon said:

It’s applicable in the sense that it provides development costs for games within the same basic genre. Given that this isn’t an industry where this sort of information is often publicly disclosed, it’s about as applicable as you're likely to get. You should feel free to provide more directly applicable info links if you have them rather than nitpick what I provided without offering something better. 

I will agree the reuse of some assets probably builds in a non insignificant cost savings, but what that might be is also hard to judge.

Well the problem is that the wrticle is written under a *very* different concept of "An MMO". Contrast their examples of Everquest and World of Warcraft to what we have. The differences are drastic and stark. The development costs are likely completely incomparable with that logic. 

While, no, I can't provide better examples, it doesn't change the fact that your example is simply very tenuously connected, likely to the point of uselessness. This game is, in no way, like World of Warcraft or Everquest, and is not a game made in their genre, even if the game has "MMO" slapped on it. It's not nitpicking for me to point that out because your sources and points derived therefore from them, are based on extremely thin ice to begin with. 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

1 minute ago, Ellentro said:

Well the problem is that the wrticle is written under a *very* different concept of "An MMO". Contrast their examples of Everquest and World of Warcraft to what we have. The differences are drastic and stark. The development costs are likely completely incomparable with that logic. 

While, no, I can't provide better examples, it doesn't change the fact that your example is simply very tenuously connected, likely to the point of uselessness. This game is, in no way, like World of Warcraft or Everquest, and is not a game made in their genre, even if the game has "MMO" slapped on it. It's not nitpicking for me to point that out because your sources and points derived therefore from them, are based on extremely thin ice to begin with. 

Sorry just disagree that there is no relation or that the relation is wildly tenuous. The article itself makes it perfectly clear that costs can vary wildly within the industry and if you think the fact that this game is a hybrid of survival and MMO means that any cost comparison to other MMO’s is not even remotely applicable then I would say on what basis do you suggest that SOME diffferences in game design and mechanics means core design costs would be dramatically different? 

Personally I think the strongest argument for a difference in cost comparison lies in the fact that Grapeshot elected to spend little to nothing to market the game beforehand. That’s where the biggest chunk of cost difference lies. You can go on all you like about Atlas not being similar to Everquest or Wow, but all 3 require the same basic expenses in terms of hiring and paying a development team, paying all the overhead and hardware expenses etc etc. But again I wasn’t offering the article as anything remotely definitive. The Op asked for some info and I linked what I could find, knowing in advance the information would never be very precise given already stated factors.

[mndfreeze 92]

All game companies reuse assets, code, tools, framework, etc from prior games unless they are starting an entirely new project that is so far distanced from their normal IP's they can't.  Fallout 4 uses fallout 3 data.  Battlefield does it every iteration. So does call of Duty.  A few exceptions to this would be games that have massssive time scales between them. Like the first game came out in 2005 and only now we are seeing the next one.  Thats how games evolve and its a terrible way to "judge" a game.  If grapeshot/snail/wildcard suddenly decided to do a card game  like hearthstone but with ark characters we would see minimal reuse.  If they make another 3d game you can be sure they will port over, update and alter existing stuff.

The devs also said on day 1 or 2 that they didn't expect the huge number of people to want to play, which is part of why everything was such a shit show on release day.  We are probably a lot closer to their expected projections now on player count and therefore adding servers most likely isn't a good business decision and won't happen.  As they add features and make the game more stable/less laggy they will probably put out some huge update or DLC to draw in people again and it will grow.  Around then we might start seeing an additional world or two get added in, perhaps with different settings like increased rates or limited company sizes.  We may not ever see any at all and they may expect the unofficial server community to handle that sort of stuff. 

I'm fairly certain there is a way to see steam sales, but I dont know how or where to look for it and it might not be available for EA titles.

 

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

Games need balance.  While they can't add more servers, at least not right now.  Games however, need balance, and there simply is no balance when Megas have hundreds of people, and can run roughshod over small companies.  Not everyone wants to be in a huge company.  This does not make them antisocial.  If anything, they are social, but want to actually game with people they know, and add new friends slowly.  When a Company gets too big, it gets to the point that you don't really know anybody.  Or, well you have a handful of people you know, and like, but the rest you just don't actually know.  So, this is one of the reasons that it sucks for the little guy in a big Company.  The leader promotes people to leaders, and these tend to be his friends, or become his friends.  Thus, it becomes a bit of a clique, even in the best companies.  So many choose to avoid that by forming their own company, with their friends.  Maybe 5 to 50, maybe even 100 people.   But they have no chance against a company that has ten times those numbers, or more.

For the 4 to 20 member companies, a private server is a good option.  But 50 to 100 is pushing it because their numbers may be too high to allow for a well populated unofficial server, AND opponents to fight.  If it's PvE, they are golden, because you don't really need people to fight against.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

3 minutes ago, mndfreeze said:

All game companies reuse assets, code, tools, framework, etc from prior games unless they are starting an entirely new project that is so far distanced from their normal IP's they can't.  Fallout 4 uses fallout 3 data.  Battlefield does it every iteration. So does call of Duty.  A few exceptions to this would be games that have massssive time scales between them. Like the first game came out in 2005 and only now we are seeing the next one.  Thats how games evolve and its a terrible way to "judge" a game.  If grapeshot/snail/wildcard suddenly decided to do a card game  like hearthstone but with ark characters we would see minimal reuse.  If they make another 3d game you can be sure they will port over, update and alter existing stuff.

The devs also said on day 1 or 2 that they didn't expect the huge number of people to want to play, which is part of why everything was such a shit show on release day.  We are probably a lot closer to their expected projections now on player count and therefore adding servers most likely isn't a good business decision and won't happen.  As they add features and make the game more stable/less laggy they will probably put out some huge update or DLC to draw in people again and it will grow.  Around then we might start seeing an additional world or two get added in, perhaps with different settings like increased rates or limited company sizes.  We may not ever see any at all and they may expect the unofficial server community to handle that sort of stuff. 

I'm fairly certain there is a way to see steam sales, but I dont know how or where to look for it and it might not be available for EA titles.

 

I think most people are aware of this.  I think the people have a hard time articulating their frustration.  I do not.  I have tried to tell people, but too many do not want to listen.  So let me spell it out once again.  People do not mind assets being reused and reskinned.  They simply don't want to play ARK with Pirates.  Too much focus is on battling wolves, snakes, tigers, etc... BORING and FRUSTRATING all at once.  The Alphas need to be removed from the main islands, to the boss Islands.  Spawning very rarely on the main Islands, OK, but not like now where they are everywhere you look.   Second, stop with the OP animals from level 2 to 60.  They are absurd.  Voracious eaters that do nothing but run from one thing to the next, eating.  It's beyond immersion breaking.  Take the focus off battling those for good XP.  Put more things to discover, and boost the XP for gathering, crafting, and building.  Allow people to spend most of their time on boats, at sea.  This what they came for, but this is not what they got, and 3 out of 4 refuse to play, and many are gone for good.

Add in ORP for ships that are undefended.  Add alarms for ships under attack.  Your first clue should not be a death message for an AI crewman, followed 60 seconds later by message that your ship was sunk.  If you are away from the ship, allow it to have a buff such that another ship won't want to fire at it.  Not until the ORP buff is gone.  Give us the ability to put AI crewman in the crow's nest with 360 degree awareness, to alert you of approaching enemies.  Allow us to fast travel back to the ship with our armor, weapons and gear, but not stuff we have gathered.  Make that drop into a chest to be discovered by others, or recovered by us, say within 24 or 72 hours.  Nothing wrong with the fun of discovering free resources somebody dropped, but couldn't get back to.  Adds to the fun of the game.  Give us home ports with AI so powerful, you CANNOT get past them, at all.  We want to fight at sea with our ships, not get them blown up while we sleep, or are inland at our main base.  This does not mean your port should not be able to be raided.  The protection should just be very nasty for anyone who tries to damage the ship.  Might not be necessary if while in the port area, the structure of the ship, other than the doors and hatches, are invulnerable.  This would mean you can be raided, just not destroyed.  Allow for containers and stations to be broken into without destroying them.  Often, people raid you in ARK, and only take a small amount of your stuff, but everything is gone because the bags disappear in 30 minutes.  Would be nice if a raid didn't cost you everything you worked for.

The issue, for the TLDR crowd is that people don't want to play ARK.  They don't want the focus being so much on fighting wolves, tigers and snakes for the XP.  And they don't want to spend so much time gathering and building forts.  They want to be on the water, in cool ships, fighting, and having a good time exploring.  Take a cue from Star Citizen.  9 of 10 ships you see will be NPC's.  This allows for everyone to shoot at stuff, without half the people being winners, and half being losers.  Like it or not, people don't play games to be your target, to be your punching bag.  They play for their own enjoyment.  I know many old friends you used to PvP with me, who can't be bothered with PvP these days, because it's so toxic, and so focused on large clans led by some streamer.  They only play Single player games, or dabble in PvE.  50% of the online gamers, are now doing PvE, or close to it.  I am starting to believe that this is the only way to go in this game, at the moment, because there is NO way to protect your stuff, without a large online presence around the clock.

[mndfreeze 92]

I don't feel like I'm playing an ark reskin.  I feel like I'm playing a new game with similar mechanics that were improved upon or will be improved upon.  I like the survival aspects of the game and am glad they are tougher and have more meaning.  In ark they meant absolutely nothing.  Once you got even a beginner level handle on the harvesting and some metal tools the game turned into super easy mode and became a 3d pokemon game all about collecting all the dinos.  I rarely died to anything PvE in ark, even in the beginning, once I got that first mount, unless I spawned in a very tough area and accidentally fell into a t-rex.  The animals in this still need some tuning and the alphas do spawn a bit too much, but I don't think it's nearly as big of a deal as people want to make it out to be. There is a lot of hyperbole on the forums and reddit, with every person struggling a bit acting like the devs designed the game to specifically make their life miserable.  Most of the time those people just need to adjust how they play.  Until things are balanced out a bit (most likely as we go and as they add in new creatures) it's part of playing EA.  I died 6 times to 3 alpha creatures yesterday, but I also leveled twice trying to kill them off and kite them away from our other people.  Instead of looking at it in a bad light, I looked at it as fun.  

I hear you about the toxicity. I dislike it too and ran my own Ark/Conan/D&L servers so I could just relax and game with some friends, but I also missed a lot of the main points of those games with the pvp and the encounters.  In this game its designed for that, built for that, not for small tribes or solo players and with that comes risk, work, and toxicity.  I think a lot of the issues people are complaining about now will get resolved over time.  Dev's can't just magically wave a wand and suddenly the game is balanced, complete and finished.  We have 2 years of EA to play the game, find bugs, show where things need improvement and what sucks.  That said I don't think its fair to expect to play on an official server of this size and just get to cruise around sailing all day like its sea of thieves.  There are people who actually like having to grind to earn things and IMO, big guilds shouldn't get punished because small guilds don't have enough manpower to  compete and have to work harder to earn the same things.  Things will always be out of balance in this regard and doing something like jacking server rates isn't actually a fix, not that you suggested it but it gets brought up as an example quite often here.

The ORP idea doesn't work very well on 24/7 PVP realms because we don't have regional servers, people don't play at the same time and would get locked out of the primary content focus of the game. On top of that you should NEVER have a way for people to raid you, jack your stuff, then run back to some server protected area/mechanic where you have no way to get your stuff back at all.  Freeports have enchanced decay so people can't use them as protection spots for ships, which are giant moving storage.  Just think back to all the pvp mmo's that have banks.  How people would sit in high traffic areas near/outside of places with a bank.  Gank people heading to auction houses or popular loot areas then high tail back to the bank to deposit the shit they stole from you.  Even if you killed em later you were never going to see your stuff again.  

I do like the idea of NPC's having more functionality and I imagine they will over time.  The crows nest thing makes sense, and while I don't like any sort of 'auto alarm' feature to tell me (or my enemies when I'm attacking them) that their ships are burning, if there was an NPC watchman I'd be ok with it.  Then at least I have a target to snipe if I'm attacking, and upkeep if I'm at home asleep.

Also, if you build your cove correctly your ships are pretty safe.  I see a LOT of people leaving ships just out on an exposed beach with no land protection, no gates or walls, no harbor of any sort.  We have a naturall cove that we turned into a harbor with towers, cannons and mortars all around the entrance.  No way a ship is getting in there to cannon our stuff unless they manage to kill our npcs, avoid our players and allies, etc.

 

 

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

4 hours ago, mndfreeze said:

I don't feel like I'm playing an ark reskin.  I feel like I'm playing a new game with similar mechanics that were improved upon or will be improved upon.

 

I stopped reading there.  That post is not to be taken seriously.  This game does nothing better than ARK did.  And the Devs aren't talking about what will fix the problems, and instead go backwards, like 40 shots per bow, when easily 1/3 of the shots don't even register as hits.  They seem to be stubborn, and dead set on proving everyone wrong.  People left for a reason, and it wasn't because this game does anything better than ARK.

[Realist 504]

6 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

This sort of thing is hard to pin down given that Grapeshot isn’t publicly traded and really only the biggest studios are, but this article gives some ballparks that imply strongly it’s unlikely development costs to date were less than 10 million. Even before all the refunds there’s almost no way they have yet come anywhere close to break even on this game. The business models on large MMO’s just don’t work that way. They have enormous upfront costs that they don’t recoup in a short frenzy of revenue, but make back over time. Sure Wow was a license to print money for a long time, but it was the extreme outlier that created a dream everyone in the industry chased.

https://www.engadget.com/2014/01/15/a-look-at-game-budgets-and-mmo-budgets/

Also I agree that adding servers at this point would be an added expense with no real benefit to anyone.

Yeah true. And I did my best to stay objective as well. Didn’t even hate on them this time.

doesnt mean I won’t later but that was the best ballpark I could come up with.

i didn’t really mention that the ark side of wildcard has some money but I am not sure if that is ethical or not since grapeshot is technically supposed to be a different company.

plus we don’t actually know how long they have been working on it. With a game this size they must have been working on it for a good while now

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

Oh, and with fish, it's even worse.  It normally takes two shots to kill a fish, minimum.  Occasionally one will die with one shot.  If it doesn't die with one, it swims away from you, and several shots stick to the tail, but don't register.  Meanwhile the fish is healing as those shots fail to register, so it takes more actual hits.  Next, they will then make another boneheaded decision by reducing how many arrows you can recover.

I don't hate the devs.  I hate that they seem to be stupid and stubborn all at once.

[mndfreeze 92]

14 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

I stopped reading there.  That post is not to be taken seriously.  This game does nothing better than ARK did.  And the Devs aren't talking about what will fix the problems, and instead go backwards, like 40 shots per bow, when easily 1/3 of the shots don't even register as hits.  They seem to be stubborn, and dead set on proving everyone wrong.  People left for a reason, and it wasn't because this game does anything better than ARK.

So, quit?  I can't take posts like yours seriously when they put out patches as often as they do, cave to all the community whiners who throw the biggest fits about every single change and mechanic.  The whiners that no matter what are never happy.  If you can't see past ark then you will never enjoy this game anyway and you probably should leave now.  You already jumped on the groupthink hate train anyway.

If its not vitamins its fire arrows. If its not fire arrows its bows.  If its not bows its no wind.  If wind gets fixed now its too much wind.

2 weeks into a 2 year EA cycle.  ffs people.  So much hyperbole and a general lack of understanding of how game design works.  

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

27 minutes ago, Realist said:

Yeah true. And I did my best to stay objective as well. Didn’t even hate on them this time.

doesnt mean I won’t later but that was the best ballpark I could come up with.

i didn’t really mention that the ark side of wildcard has some money but I am not sure if that is ethical or not since grapeshot is technically supposed to be a different company.

plus we don’t actually know how long they have been working on it. With a game this size they must have been working on it for a good while now

One of my big gripes about Extinction was actually once Atlas was announced shortly after Extinction's release,  the half finished state of Extinction seemed to strongly suggest to me that Wildcard had likely taken revenue from season pass sales and instead of using all of it to fund completion of that dlc on time, diverted some of that revenue to funding Atlas's development startup. If this is in fact what was done, it isn't illegal, but it's questionable ethically, and I argued strongly at the time that we as gamers should stop paying for games in advance whether through pre orders or season pass devices or whatever. The benefit to us is almost nonexistent, while creating a strong disincentive for developers to have to actually deliver a finished polished product. This is true regardless of whether you're talking about Wildcard or EA or Bethesda. How this industry convinced people to pay for something before they have any meaningful idea how good it is boggles my mind a bit.

Grapeshot is technically a different company, but they have made no secret that the people in charge are the same people and the core of Atlas's development team are all Ark veterans. IMO it's perfectly fair to draw on this when commenting. You're right that we don't know how long they've been working on Atlas but my best guess is development probably got underway to a meaningful degree around the time  the season pass was introduced, not too long before Aberration's release. That could be wildly off base, but it's my gut level guess.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

39 minutes ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

Oh, and with fish, it's even worse.  It normally takes two shots to kill a fish, minimum.  Occasionally one will die with one shot.  If it doesn't die with one, it swims away from you, and several shots stick to the tail, but don't register.  Meanwhile the fish is healing as those shots fail to register, so it takes more actual hits.  Next, they will then make another boneheaded decision by reducing how many arrows you can recover.

I don't hate the devs.  I hate that they seem to be stupid and stubborn all at once.

I highly recommend the youtube channel Extra Credits. It is made by people in the game design industry, and while many of their five to ten minute videos are made at least in part for industry peers, they are communicated in a clear technical jargon free way that is accessible to the layman. I couldn't write the first line of code if you held a gun to my head, but I've been playing online games since 2004, and I've found that EC as much as anything I've come across better helped me understand some things I often found frustrating and inexplicable as a player. This includes things like nerfs and game design aspects and choices that as you say, came across as sheer stubborn stupidity. Not saying it made everything crystal clear for every game, but it definately helped me gain perspective on some things. Some stuff is still a head scratcher, like how Atlas's land claim system out of the gate seems to have learned exactly zero from the debacle of Ark's pve official pillar spam problem.

[Realist 504]

13 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

One of my big gripes about Extinction was actually once Atlas was announced shortly after Extinction's release,  the half finished state of Extinction seemed to strongly suggest to me that Wildcard had likely taken revenue from season pass sales and instead of using all of it to fund completion of that dlc on time, diverted some of that revenue to funding Atlas's development startup. If this is in fact what was done, it isn't illegal, but it's questionable ethically, and I argued strongly at the time that we as gamers should stop paying for games in advance whether through pre orders or season pass devices or whatever. The benefit to us is almost nonexistent, while creating a strong disincentive for developers to have to actually deliver a finished polished product. This is true regardless of whether you're talking about Wildcard or EA or Bethesda. How this industry convinced people to pay for something before they have any meaningful idea how good it is boggles my mind a bit.

Grapeshot is technically a different company, but they have made no secret that the people in charge are the same people and the core of Atlas's development team are all Ark veterans. IMO it's perfectly fair to draw on this when commenting. You're right that we don't know how long they've been working on Atlas but my best guess is development probably got underway to a meaningful degree around the time  the season pass was introduced, not too long before Aberration's release. That could be wildly off base, but it's my gut level guess.

Couldn’t agree more. Literally with all of it. I didn’t want to bother guessin a time because I am sure I would get a lot of shade for it lol but yeah your guess on just before aberration is what I would have said as well.

i was actually excited for extinction too. I was so mad when they announced the release of atlas, especially since at that second I realized why extinction was so bad. Before they announced it I fell for the whole “well it’s wildcard, that is just them”.

sure enough here comes atlas. That was the last straw in my book.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

1 hour ago, mndfreeze said:

So, quit?  I can't take posts like yours seriously when they put out patches as often as they do, cave to all the community whiners who throw the biggest fits about every single change and mechanic.  The whiners that no matter what are never happy.  If you can't see past ark then you will never enjoy this game anyway and you probably should leave now.  You already jumped on the groupthink hate train anyway.

If its not vitamins its fire arrows. If its not fire arrows its bows.  If its not bows its no wind.  If wind gets fixed now its too much wind.

2 weeks into a 2 year EA cycle.  ffs people.  So much hyperbole and a general lack of understanding of how game design works.  

Ridiculous holier than thou attitude you have there Sport.  I have news for you, this is not my first rodeo.  I have played many alphas and early access games.  I was there nearly 20 years ago, when WWIIOL had the most epic worst launch in history, and I stuck with it, and excelled in the game.  That game, in a way, was Star Citizen, before Star Citizen, but then, they didn't have things like crowd funding, and no game before it had launched in Alpha condition.  It set records the first 3 days, and then forever after that, could not shake the reputation that it was garbage. It was not.  It developed into a great game within 2 to 3 years.  I defended it because it was worth defending, and the Devs, while not perfect, made mostly good decisions.  As a result, it still has a hard core, though small following, to this day.

The teaser trailer was very misleading.  That's my first issue.  What we say in that trailer, is NOT what we have today.  I dislike the short sightedness of the devs who never thought about what would happen undefended ships, and bases.  This is like ARK, but with no turrets for defense, and it's not like those were at all hard to bypass.  The actually made that too easy there.  It was a simple process, but at least you had something.  That seems like a luxury now.  And no warning that your ship is under attack?  And a fucking Brigantine can be sunk by one idiot on shore?  Probably used fire, while all our very expensive NPCs sat there like idiots.  The game is a wreck.  Nice idea, poor execution.  My concerns are valid.  Like the wasted points for strong arm on the bow.  Even with that, the bow is pathetically weak.  The skill tree is an abomination.  They say they want you to have to cooperate with others, yet they make it such that I have to tame to be able to tame a creature, in order to ride them.  I have to be able to make guns, to use them.  The skill tree is a wreck, and if you don't understand that, you haven't played games with skill trees.  This is the worst one ever made.  Period.  Engrams made far more sense than these do.  In fact, that was one thing about ARK that was pretty good.

They had made ships very expensive to create, and they still aren't exactly cheap.  We settled on an Island with many mountains, and is the biggest on our server.  As a result, those mountains funnel all the animals into the valleys you need to traverse through, and so you encounter many wolves and lions, and snakes just to go 400 meters to an area that has fiber.  Not once have we been able to go there and farm without a stealth attack by lions and wolves, and snakes, often snakes and wolves or dogs at the same time.  Mix in the ridiculous alphas and we end up respawning and trying to make our way to our body to rescue what we lost.  Just trying to get from our base to the area we selected for a port is a very dangerous trip.  The animals are insanely OP, such that our focus is on them most of the time, and not on our ships, and that IS a huge problem.  I did not come here to fight unrealistic lions and wolves, and their otherworldly Alphas.  I don't know a single person who likes those Alphas in the game.  They are so ridiculous, they are worse than a Giga.  Not one time was I ever one shot killed by a Giga.  I want to focus on building my pathetically weak ships, not fight 5,000 OP animals between each sailing.

Now we get to the Atari 1600 minigame to reload a pistol.  What genius came up with that?  I am sure a mod will come to get rid of that, along with all the other ridiculous such minigames.

How about the ridiculous way we tame animals.  Last I knew, you don't shoot arrows into an animal that you want to like you.  They had a chance to fix this from ARK, but made it more ridiculous.  Why not use the way you imprint babies?  You trap the animal in a cage, or tranq it and cage it, then take it home, and imprint it over time.  Passive tames just need to eat enough times, like now.  But aggressive tames have to be punished for snarling at you, and fed when they act calm towards you.  Now that would be realistic, and make far more sense.  Eventually they should act affectionate, and want a hug, or go for a walk, and then they are tamed.  I thought taming in ARK was dumb, and tedious, but this is even worse, even though it's faster.  This is a legitimate complaint because they had the chance to do something that made more sense.  Everything does not have to be a challenging minigame.  But if it is, it can make more sense in the process.

The facts are there, Sport.  3 out of 4 people left.  I am at least still here, and have not demanded a refund that I could get, but I won't be silent about what is wrong with this game.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

9 hours ago, mndfreeze said:

All game companies reuse assets, code, tools, framework, etc from prior games unless they are starting an entirely new project that is so far distanced from their normal IP's they can't.  Fallout 4 uses fallout 3 data.  Battlefield does it every iteration. So does call of Duty.  A few exceptions to this would be games that have massssive time scales between them. Like the first game came out in 2005 and only now we are seeing the next one.  Thats how games evolve and its a terrible way to "judge" a game.  If grapeshot/snail/wildcard suddenly decided to do a card game  like hearthstone but with ark characters we would see minimal reuse.  If they make another 3d game you can be sure they will port over, update and alter existing stuff.

The devs also said on day 1 or 2 that they didn't expect the huge number of people to want to play, which is part of why everything was such a shit show on release day.  We are probably a lot closer to their expected projections now on player count and therefore adding servers most likely isn't a good business decision and won't happen.  As they add features and make the game more stable/less laggy they will probably put out some huge update or DLC to draw in people again and it will grow.  Around then we might start seeing an additional world or two get added in, perhaps with different settings like increased rates or limited company sizes.  We may not ever see any at all and they may expect the unofficial server community to handle that sort of stuff. 

I'm fairly certain there is a way to see steam sales, but I dont know how or where to look for it and it might not be available for EA titles.

 

Although I am typically skeptical of developer claims that sound like excuses, saying that they didn’t expect the huge level of interest on day one is actually plausible and believable in this instance because of the way they limited promotion of the game to such an extreme degree beforehand. Kept its mere existence under wraps except for a leaked trailer during the summer and announcement only weeks before EA launch. There are aspects of the game’s design this doesn’t give them any kind of pass on because lessons should have been learned better from Ark than they appear to have been, but not expecting this many people to want to play right away is something I can buy. I think what it speaks to is the poor overall quality of offerings out there and how many people are looking for something to hold their interest. For all it’s flaws Ark certainly showed an ability to do this and I suspect that may have contributed to so many people wanting in day one.

[mndfreeze 92]

14 hours ago, Captain Jack Shadow said:

Ridiculous holier than thou attitude you have there Sport. *giant wall of text removed to stop eye bleeding* t I won't be silent about what is wrong with this game.

There is no holier than thou attitude at all.  I started my post of the SAME WAY you started yours.  You are not the only one who has been gaming for a long time or playing EA games.  I love EA games and have been buying them since the practice first started.  Your entire post was just a example of exactly what I said.  If you think this is just ark then quit, but you don't and that's why you're still here playing, because it isn't. It's a new game with new features and old ones expanded upon.  Don't be so caught up in your groupthink echo chamber that you lose objectivity.

Other then over new years we have gotten patches every day almost.  Massive adjustments have been made to cater to the complaints.  Plenty of games have TANKED because they decided to cater to the group think of the loudest complainers on forums/media instead of sticking with their vision of the game.

As for the devs shortsightedness on their design stuff, again, its week 2 of a 2 year EA cycle.  I'm not sure what is with all the people who seem to think EA means finished game, or don't understand that the entire point of EA is specifically to find bugs, balance problems, roll out new features and adjust based on community feedback.  In addition there are, oddly enough, ways to go about making a constructive post about something that's a problem in the game without it sounding like grapeshot raped  your mom and defiled your family name.  With how quick they have been addressing things, compared to MONTHS that most devs take for EA games, if ever, I'm not sure what all the hyperbole is about.

 

tldr, you paid to alpha test a game.  If it's going to upset you that there are issues you should wait until its released.  Otherwise make a constructive post without the garbage emotional shit.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

5 hours ago, mndfreeze said:

There is no holier than thou attitude at all.  I started my post of the SAME WAY you started yours.  You are not the only one who has been gaming for a long time or playing EA games.  I love EA games and have been buying them since the practice first started.  Your entire post was just a example of exactly what I said.  If you think this is just ark then quit, but you don't and that's why you're still here playing, because it isn't. It's a new game with new features and old ones expanded upon.  Don't be so caught up in your groupthink echo chamber that you lose objectivity.

Other then over new years we have gotten patches every day almost.  Massive adjustments have been made to cater to the complaints.  Plenty of games have TANKED because they decided to cater to the group think of the loudest complainers on forums/media instead of sticking with their vision of the game.

As for the devs shortsightedness on their design stuff, again, its week 2 of a 2 year EA cycle.  I'm not sure what is with all the people who seem to think EA means finished game, or don't understand that the entire point of EA is specifically to find bugs, balance problems, roll out new features and adjust based on community feedback.  In addition there are, oddly enough, ways to go about making a constructive post about something that's a problem in the game without it sounding like grapeshot raped  your mom and defiled your family name.  With how quick they have been addressing things, compared to MONTHS that most devs take for EA games, if ever, I'm not sure what all the hyperbole is about.

 

tldr, you paid to alpha test a game.  If it's going to upset you that there are issues you should wait until its released.  Otherwise make a constructive post without the garbage emotional shit.

Once again, you show how stupid you are, and how clueless you are to what was typed.  Never have I criticized this game for being made with the same engine as ARK.  I do not have a problem with SOME things being like ark..for instance, the building system, or the crafting system, or the UI.

I am pointing our actual problems with the game, and things that have driven people away from that game.  Many of which were preventable if the Devs made the right decision.  Things that are common sense.  For instance, don't make the boys break after 40 shots, when it can take 10 to kill a fish because 7 of the shots hit the tail or fins and didn't register.  A fish's tail and fins aren't a shield.  Remove their collier if they don't take damage.  Put a head on the sheep.  And allow the strong arm skill, especially when both are chosen, to do real damage.  In real life, a bow is not a weak weapon.  It will kill you just as fast as a rifle, and is actually more accurate at range, when used by a skilled user, than a pistol.  Especially pistols of that era.  BEFORE nerfing the bow more, they should have fixed the problems, and increased the effect of Strong Arm skills.

BEFORE making ships expensive to make, they have put at least a little bit of thought into how players would keep their ships safe when they logged off.  The leader of our group, and his wife, appear to have quit.  Why would he stick around?  We grind to build a Brigantine, and take it out on its first voyage and 7 SotD destroy it in their SOFT WIPE fiasco.  Then we go to unofficial, and grind to build another.  One dude on shore, likely with just fire arrows, destroys the second Brigantine, that had a full crew of NPCs manning guns, and set to repair.  Gold, Crew, Ship, and Supplies, all gone from one fool with fire arrows, or whatever he used.  And two of us were online, inland at the main base.  First clue something was up, a crewmember death message, followd less than a minute later by the message that the ship was sunk.  And you think people should want to stick around for this, or think the devs have a clue?  I have no faith in them.  I am waiting for mods to make a better game than the Devs seem capable of.  That may be harsh, but it is earned, when you release a game like this, make the ships very expensive to build, but so easy to destroy, with NOT ONE SINGLE WAY to protect the ship when you are away from it.  The criticism is valid, and earned.

You are guilty of a logical fallacy.  People have legitimate complaints.  Your attitude is that because some people can't be made happy no matter what the devs do, anyone who criticizes is wrong.  This is ignorant.  People left, and for good reason.  Many complaints are on point.  Just because people bring up valid complaints, does not make them a whiner, no matter how much you want to believe it.

Being a mindless supporter of the Devs is just as bad as being a mindless critic.

 

[mndfreeze 92]

Hey there "sport" you are just an aggressive angry forum troll who wants to bitch.  There are ways to legitimately complain about issues without acting like someone stole your bike off your lawn.  My "attitude" has nothing to do with what the devs do and everything to do with how asshats like you post and the logical holes in your arguments for  why its justified.  Perhaps you should go back and re-read my very first post to you and your dumb-ass response to it. 

If you can't see the difference between posting valid and constructive complaints vs whining and bitching then I don't know what to tell you.  Never once did I defend the issues with this game but I certainly know what the definition of early access is and what that process entails, something you don't seem to get.  It's called having "realistic expectations" especially so for a game that literally just came into EA.

As for your ark shit: My orignal post was to ellantro, not you. You decided to jump on in with the ark comparison shit only to act like an asshole.  You are a troll out to argue with everyone, bitch about alphas, follow the same group think pattern as the whiners, and live in an echo chamber.  You have a choice.  You can either enjoy the money you spent to make the most out of the game you have and help the devs make it better, or you can continue to hop on the forums, act insulting and generally shit talk everything like a troll and nothing will improve.

Good luck to you.  You won't be missed if you decide to refund.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

Also, what you seem to not understand is that the game needs more than balancing and tweaking.

The animal system, and the Alphas need completely reworked.  Never in human history has an animal been tamed by repeatedly shooting it with arrows.  This is beyond ridiculous.   I made a suggestion of how they could use ARK code to make the taming better.  And bolas trap without an animal, or human, being injured.  Did you dismiss that and not even read it because you wrote it off as just more whining?

Make animals more useful for gathering.  Don't limit animal breeding by region, and give us greenhouses to grow things from other regions.  Are they realistic for that period?  No.  But neither are dragons.

The Alphas are way too OP with as plentiful as they are.  I actually like the Alpha Horse mechanic where it defends the other horses, but it and all Alphas are too OP with as plentiful as they are.  Unless of course, battling them is to be the goal of the game, and as I said...most people don't want that, and the people who all left credited them as one of the major reasons they left the game.  They are end game powerful, but plentiful in areas where many beginners and mid-level players try to get things done for their company, forcing you to always move in packs of 6 to 12 people.  We only have 10 in our company, and some don't play every night, and now 2 of the most active, appear to have quit also.

I do acknowledge that they have made some steps in the right direction, on some of the smaller issues, such as the animals healing while dong battle with you.  I believe they reduced how much the animals heal, when they should eliminate that entirely.  At a minimum, drastically increase the time it takes for them to heal, and drastically reduce how much they heal each time.

Bring in a reputation system.  You can't have a trade and mercantile system, without a reputation system that rewards doing trade, and other good deeds, and punishes aggressive PvP.  This is something Star Citizen is working on, and has had in bare bones for since the start.  If you shoot at a lawful ship, you earn a crime stat, and now shooting at you no longer earns lawful players a crime stat for shooting at you.  Not until you clear the crime stat.   In this game, actions could earn lawful or unlawful stats.  Taking an escort mission...in other words, accepting a request through game mechanics, to escort somebody from point A to point B, earns you lawful points.  If they arrive safely, you get the points.   Put smuggler AI ships in the game for people to attack.  This earns lawful points.  Attacking a lawful player earns unlawful points.  One unlawful action should not make you an outlaw.  THIS would need balancing and tweaking.  Put a powerful government navy in the game to punish those with OUTLAW status.  Gaining MOST WANTED OUTLAW status should give all lawful players a BUFF when battling you.

Raiding somebody's ship should earn far less unlawful points than sinking the ship, or doing excessive damage to it.  This would be defined by what is damaged and how much.  Doors, hatches, and containers...not so many points.  Hull, Masts, Sails, etc...many points.   Same with somebody's base.  Make the containers unlockable without destroying so that you don't lose everything just because you were raided.

The game will never have a thriving economy system without this.

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

4 minutes ago, mndfreeze said:

Hey there "sport" you are just an aggressive angry forum troll who wants to bitch.  There are ways to legitimately complain about issues without acting like someone stole your bike off your lawn.  My "attitude" has nothing to do with what the devs do and everything to do with how asshats like you post and the logical holes in your arguments for  why its justified.  Perhaps you should go back and re-read my very first post to you and your dumb-ass response to it. 

If you can't see the difference between posting valid and constructive complaints vs whining and bitching then I don't know what to tell you.  Never once did I defend the issues with this game but I certainly know what the definition of early access is and what that process entails, something you don't seem to get.  It's called having "realistic expectations" especially so for a game that literally just came into EA.

As for your ark shit: My orignal post was to ellantro, not you. You decided to jump on in with the ark comparison shit only to act like an asshole.  You are a troll out to argue with everyone, bitch about alphas, follow the same group think pattern as the whiners, and live in an echo chamber.  You have a choice.  You can either enjoy the money you spent to make the most out of the game you have and help the devs make it better, or you can continue to hop on the forums, act insulting and generally shit talk everything like a troll and nothing will improve.

Good luck to you.  You won't be missed if you decide to refund.

Bahahahaha

The logical hole is you thinking that you have all the answers.  You have amazingly few, starting with you claiming to understand what early access is.  You also don't seem to understand when the problems go beyond tweaking and balancing.  The problems with this game go way beyond tweaking and balancing, and you seem to be too stupid to understand this.  An early access version of this game would have some means of defending your ship when away from it, but as I have pointed out, this doesn't even seem to have been given any real thought.  That's not early access, that Pre-Alpha.

That's a game breaking lack of game mechanics.

 

[mndfreeze 92]

Do yourself a favor and go look at the wiki on the software development cycle.  You will sound like less of an idiot then.