What do the Devs even want from the player base?

[Slash78 95]

I don't get it.  They make a sandbox, then they go out of their way to limit the player experience to narrow, miserable experience.  Not everyone wants to run around all the time and grief people.  Nor do the rest of us want to be a army of mindless zombie grinders, harvesting mats by hand to keep the griefers going.

I've been playing on a RP server, trading in tames.  Devs wanted to discourage people from taming and it's worked.  Not taming anything else in this game.  But it also leaves me little else to do.  The three things I liked to do in Ark was build, explore and tame.  My base is built (but was built by someone else as they don't like the way I build).  Exploring isn't fun as you have to spend and hour or more sailing (though it's better now) just to jump off the boat and die if you actually try to explore the island you've reached.  Or the island is completely built over.  That left taming.  I like the mechanics in Atlas far more than Ark.  I like the fact you can't just pick up whatever you're trying to tame with and Argent or Quetz and drop it in a pen.  I don't like the changes in v15.  I never had the patience to tame a Bull and I don't like the fact that now Tigers, Elephants and Rhinos (what I was taming the most) are now worse than that. 

 

So I guess I quit as I have nothing in this game I actually want to do.  Don't feel like griefing...er..."PVP" (play plenty of PVP games, just not open world ones).  Don't feel like the lame boss fights (didn't do a single boss fight in Ark).  It seems like the parts of Ark and of Atlas that I've like are an accident, not the gameplay intended by the Devs.  And the devs have "learned from Ark" and are going out of their way to make discourage wider gameplay.

[MaxPower 126]

Part of the problem is simply the nature of an early access game. You're playing a game that's in a very early developmental state which means not only is there a lot of content missing but also balance is all over the place and subject to significant change in a short period of time. I think especially that last part is someone people need to really understand: Don't fall in love with the current balance of things because its going to change a LOT between now and the 1.0 release, which is years away. Creatures/weapons that are dominant now might be mostly useless next patch and things useless now might be far more powerful. People tend to fall in love with things that are super overpowered and then freak out when they're properly balanced (and make no mistake, some of the tame changes DID balance them). 

The best example I can think of was the flyer nerf in Ark. Flyers were so overpowered in Ark that's all anyone used. The entire ground game was essentially ignored aside from harvesting dinos because all you needed was a decent Quetz or Argy and you were set since they could get you anywhere faster and carry plenty of weight (PVP did have more use for the ground game to some degree than PVE did). Yet when the devs tried to balance them, people lost their collective minds. Whenever something is unbalanced and overpowered, people LOVE to use it... and they get angry when their overpowered toys are taken away. Its an age old problem for game devs.  

So really, if you're going to act like every single balancing change is the end of the world and threaten to quit because of them.... do yourself a favor and don't play early access titles since you'll be doing it a lot. Best to wait till the game is mostly finished and such major changes to balance are less likely. 

[Jozzie McTowel 170]

Just now, MaxPower said:

Part of the problem is simply the nature of an early access game. You're playing a game that's in a very early developmental state which means not only is there a lot of content missing but also balance is all over the place and subject to significant change in a short period of time. I think especially that last part is someone people need to really understand: Don't fall in love with the current balance of things because its going to change a LOT between now and the 1.0 release, which is years away. Creatures/weapons that are dominant now might be mostly useless next patch and things useless now might be far more powerful. People tend to fall in love with things that are super overpowered and then freak out when they're properly balanced (and make no mistake, some of the tame changes DID balance them). 

The best example I can think of was the flyer nerf in Ark. Flyers were so overpowered in Ark that's all anyone used. The entire ground game was essentially ignored aside from harvesting dinos because all you needed was a decent Quetz or Argy and you were set since they could get you anywhere faster and carry plenty of weight (PVP did have more use for the ground game to some degree than PVE did). Yet when the devs tried to balance them, people lost their collective minds. Whenever something is unbalanced and overpowered, people LOVE to use it... and they get angry when their overpowered toys are taken away. Its an age old problem for game devs.  

So really, if you're going to act like every single balancing change is the end of the world and threaten to quit because of them.... do yourself a favor and don't play early access titles since you'll be doing it a lot. Best to wait till the game is mostly finished and such major changes to balance are less likely. 

In most early access games devs made sure the game mechanics and server worked properly before balancing stuff out like in this case material gathering tames. How can we enjoy any balancing when so many things are broken in the game? Priorities, get them striaght then use the Early Access reply.

[MaxPower 126]

Just now, Jozzie McTowel said:

In most early access games devs made sure the game mechanics and server worked properly before balancing stuff out like in this case material gathering tames. How can we enjoy any balancing when so many things are broken in the game? Priorities, get them striaght then use the Early Access reply.

While balancing fixes usually wouldn't be a high priority this early in a games development, we're talking about the adjustment of some numbers in a config file. Its not something that takes a ton of time to do... and keeping balance from getting too out of whack is probably a good strategy. Its possible to both fix things and tweak some variables as development progresses. 

[Jozzie McTowel 170]

1 minute ago, MaxPower said:

While balancing fixes usually wouldn't be a high priority this early in a games development, we're talking about the adjustment of some numbers in a config file. Its not something that takes a ton of time to do... and keeping balance from getting too out of whack is probably a good strategy. Its possible to both fix things and tweak some variables as development progresses. 

They probably "balanced" those things (elephant rhino) because they were unable to find a way to make them add their real weight to boats, people would abuse this by storing elephants or rhinos in boats to get much more materials on a boat than they should be carrying. Same goes for the weight sinking of ships. Rather than making it impossible for a player to carry more weight than they should by dropping it all on the floor and picking it up by E you can over encumber yourself AND still move your character. Their fix is make people hover over achored shipdecks, unable to get off and having to die, whilst the weight thing wasn't fixed cuz people still abuse it by haning from ladders or spamming a boat with materials cuz they can still overencumber themselves. Now you say balancing is ezpz for them cuz they have to just change some numbers. I'm not gonna dig into which patch came out with what new bug, but it wouldn't surprise me if we had another doors not working glitch after a "simple" balancing patch. Yet again priorities and the sheer lack of insight in coding and knowledge to properly find a solution not a workaround that is bringing more frustration to the playerbase.

[tateybread 59]

1 hour ago, Slash78 said:

I don't get it.  They make a sandbox, then they go out of their way to limit the player experience to narrow, miserable experience.  Not everyone wants to run around all the time and grief people.  Nor do the rest of us want to be a army of mindless zombie grinders, harvesting mats by hand to keep the griefers going.

I've been playing on a RP server, trading in tames.  Devs wanted to discourage people from taming and it's worked.  Not taming anything else in this game.  But it also leaves me little else to do.  The three things I liked to do in Ark was build, explore and tame.  My base is built (but was built by someone else as they don't like the way I build).  Exploring isn't fun as you have to spend and hour or more sailing (though it's better now) just to jump off the boat and die if you actually try to explore the island you've reached.  Or the island is completely built over.  That left taming.  I like the mechanics in Atlas far more than Ark.  I like the fact you can't just pick up whatever you're trying to tame with and Argent or Quetz and drop it in a pen.  I don't like the changes in v15.  I never had the patience to tame a Bull and I don't like the fact that now Tigers, Elephants and Rhinos (what I was taming the most) are now worse than that. 

 

So I guess I quit as I have nothing in this game I actually want to do.  Don't feel like griefing...er..."PVP" (play plenty of PVP games, just not open world ones).  Don't feel like the lame boss fights (didn't do a single boss fight in Ark).  It seems like the parts of Ark and of Atlas that I've like are an accident, not the gameplay intended by the Devs.  And the devs have "learned from Ark" and are going out of their way to make discourage wider gameplay.

I feel the same. I was taming for my company as it's something I usually find enjoyable in these games. I've tamed lots of bears, Elephants etc so far and while it was tedious and annoying a lot of the time, I could just about handle the frustration until now.

I wasted over an hour tonight trying to get an Elephant tamed... the 'sweet spot' for feeding the bloody thing was so buggy that progress got reset to zero several times, to the point that I logged out and told my friends i'm re-speccing to something else and someone else can do this job from now on. Im done with taming in this game. I'll hand harvest from now on. Fucking Done.

[MaxPower 126]

1 hour ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

They probably "balanced" those things (elephant rhino) because they were unable to find a way to make them add their real weight to boats, people would abuse this by storing elephants or rhinos in boats to get much more materials on a boat than they should be carrying. Same goes for the weight sinking of ships. Rather than making it impossible for a player to carry more weight than they should by dropping it all on the floor and picking it up by E you can over encumber yourself AND still move your character. Their fix is make people hover over achored shipdecks, unable to get off and having to die, whilst the weight thing wasn't fixed cuz people still abuse it by haning from ladders or spamming a boat with materials cuz they can still overencumber themselves. Now you say balancing is ezpz for them cuz they have to just change some numbers. I'm not gonna dig into which patch came out with what new bug, but it wouldn't surprise me if we had another doors not working glitch after a "simple" balancing patch. Yet again priorities and the sheer lack of insight in coding and knowledge to properly find a solution not a workaround that is bringing more frustration to the playerbase.

Don't get me wrong... the ship sinking glitch is the biggest issue I have with their game and I've pretty much not played for a couple weeks because of it. There is certainly room to complain about the way the devs go about things, their priorities and their testing procedures (if they have any at all).

My point was that you're getting bent out of shape about a balancing "fix", when there are likely going to be a million such fixes and changes over the next two years. If you can't handle that, don't play.