Letter to Jatheish and Development team

[Killmaster 11]

Jatheish

Live Producer and Lead Community Manger

CC: Grapeshot: Atlas gaming development team.

 

RE: Atlas Early access/development

 

Dear Jatheish

 

I am writing this in an effort to help maintain a productive way in to furthering and improving the development of this MMO we currently enjoy.

 

It has become clear to me, very clear to me that the biggest problem to the advancement of this game is your very own team.  I have seen a lot of games come and go I am 37 years in age, I was there when World of Warcraft was launched, I was there in Beta of Starwars Galaxies empire divided, I was in Beta for Matrix online, I played myth of Soma, Eve online beta, Lineage 2 beta, Diablo 1 through to 3 beta.

 

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) killed their games from extremely poor management and poor community skills.  Matrix online team WB killed their game with in-experience and sold it to SOE who put the final bullet in it.  The Greatest MMO killer is its creators.  I have played countless of games too many to list them all here, so I am somewhat experienced.  

 

Everyone I listen to tells me you were part of the team that worked on Ark and you broke away to make this MMO separate. So I had hoped that you brought with you some experience however that is not the case. As you are making a lot of mistakes that newer game developers make and before it’s too late the faith in their product has tanked (e.g Star trek online, I have a live time sub to that but I’m playing this instead says it all.) Rather you choose to hate or dislike Blizzard and their MMO there has to be something that kept it alive for so long. That is what you should be trying to emulate not trying to come up with your own way. Because you simply can’t it isn’t new, too many people have tried and it has all failed. None of the games I have mentioned have the success or fame they do now from when they first opened. The new stars wars game has the nickname World of Warcraft in space, for pity sake.

So please allow this letter to serve as wakeup call as it was intended.

You apologized for the rough start to early access, as you were not prepared for the numbers.  Which shows you do not -Think, You do not plan, you do not plan to fail and shows no logical thinking at all-

There is no 2^nd 1^st impressions, this is what everyone will remember you for now. So straight off the bat you already shot yourself in the foot (and we only get two feet.) But ok you apologized and no one is perfect,  Getting over that.

Yet here we are, with problems that are in the game, Your solution is to keep bringing out new content hoping to entertain people and dazzle them to hopefully distract them from the problems of the game. However when your problems are the scale of a group of people sinking peoples ships, or entire servers not even being playerable, or when you max your on screen ping to 255ms because if you showed the real number no one would ever play it, to entire sections of the game that is just simply not accessible or reachable. Then we don’t care how many shiny new pieces of armor you put in front of us these game breaking, gameplay effecting, player grieving is driving people away from the game,  Early access or not.

Your acting like a little boys on the street corner shouting your selling lemonade, while standing next to Walmart that has the internet to shout on. It doesn’t matter what you as the boy shout no one is going to hear you over the loud voice of these problems.

SO I URGE YOU to please just hit the breaks on the new content. Just stop. It doesn’t impress us when every new thing you put into the game is just broken anyway and it becomes more stuff for your to fix. Adding to the list of things to never get fixed.

-          You already admitted that you didn’t plan for the volume of people, You apologized but you clearly have not learned from that mistake.

-          The FOY feature should have been in from day 1 not waited until weeks later when you have thousands of people at or close to the age of death. Of cause everyone would rush to it. I just was honestly astounded you did not stagger the release.  You keep making the same dumb mistakes doing things that was expected for a few hundred when you have 1000s going to one place in the game.   (WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?)

I take advantage of the tool discord and I try to talk to the people in there, I was told by a member of the grapeshot team the reason the ships now attack ships that are docked is to add realism.  (realism, really?)  When in hindsight now having went to area of fountain of youth. I saw clearly why the Twisters and the ships of the dammed (sotd) are coming to the shore I saw it myself. They were destroying/ all the docked ships at the island for the FOY -  I honestly thought it was a recreation of the allied landings at D-day in pirate version. So many ships and so many ship wrecks, While the server was completlely lagged out for its 30-60min spells. I jumped off into the water while the game still thought I was in the crows nest to see all the ship wrecks ( screenshots below.)  All this clutter is creating lag.

Now I have never played Ark, I never heared about it honestly until I came to Atlas, the Twitch Streamer Pokket started playing this and it got me interested. However the people in my company have soon as I showed them what I was seeing – they all said you guys should know better it was the same problem in Ark.

Which appears to be the common theme here, (You should know better.)  It is clear to me the biggest problem which I have said it once before here however it bares repeating.  As things stand with the things as they are. The biggest threat to this game right now, is the entire team and your way of thinking. Because you are harming your own game, you keep making the same mistakes. Which demonstrates you do not learn, or learn too slow.  It is very common for Developers to get caught up in their own game and want to keep advancing it.

However they all came to realize the same thing after a while -  SOE, Blizzard, Linage, Bioware  all of them, and this is the key point here.  Developers are under the mistaken impression that the players are always wanting new content and feel under pressure to give. But that is simply not the case. – Blizzard in the 2^nd year it was out asked its players flat out after a bunch of us complained -  and asked everyone “What do we as players want”  The unanimous answer was to fix the game they are not worried about new content with the state the game was in then.  Blizzard actually listened and said ok then we do that.

 

Then and only then when the majority of the bugs were fixed did they start working on the new stuff (before  the new staff took over etc.)

As of right now – The one and only thing you should be doing is fixing the game. – STOP V16 Stop any new content for now and work on fixing the stuff you have out now.

I don’t care about the FOY, I don’t care about the baby stuff, I don’t care about any of the new stuff if I can’t play the basic game and would prefer to go on a private server instead of dealing with the Skyscraper towers in A11, or the people sinking ships by standing on ladders or Galleons getting stuck in loading zones. That is what Early access is about. Finding and fixing bugs.

Not identifying them so we can tag them and let them back into the wild as we go ahead create new bugs to fix two weeks later.

Get a good foundation game under you before you start adding new stuff. Otherwise your tower of cards will crumble every time.  – and for christ sake stagger the FOY before you completely break your game for a limited time have the FOY open at all locations otherwise you are going to keep getting thousands of people going to one tiny spot and crash the games every time. ( common sense)   

The only thing you have displayed to me is that

1.       You don’t think,

2.       You don’t look ahead,

3.       You don’t plan

4.       Your narrow minded vision (i.e blinkers on)

5.       Your going down a path and you don’t care what you hit or destroy to get there.

At the end of it all your going to have a nice game but no one or the interest to play it because they all be on private servers or buggered off to another game in the two years it will take to fix this cluster of a mess you created.

For the record we as the players don’t care about the time it takes, as long as we know you are fixing the game.  Going back to the time on Blizzard 2^nd year of WOW after we got our way and blizzard listened. Anyone that came on to the forums and complained – we explained it to them, some in a nice way (some not   online forums you know )  Soon as it was explained people were fine with just waiting so they can have a good basic game to play on that they know was reliable and it was WOW was extremely stable. Then they added the 2^nd expansion there was bugs etc but the basic game stayed the same until the expansion was fixed or fixed to a state that everyone can live with. – They didn’t go back to touch their Foundation game until Cataclysm where they redid their entire map to allow flying in that area that was like at least 10 years without touching their basic game (correct me if I’m wrong on the years.)  

However the point remains – unless you have a good foundation of a game to stand on – all of this is mute.

I submit this to your viewing in hopes it would be received – I will be posting, mailing and emailing this.

As I have extremely high hopes for this product to be turned around before it gets shot in the head before it even gets off the ground. Because you’ve already shot yourself in one foot,  and I’d say you’ve taken skin of your only remaining foot you don’t have that many body parts remaining.

 

Respectfully

 

C Bartram

(Aka Illegal Killmaster)

 

(I would include screenshots however the Max total size is currently 0.07mb so I will instead paste a link to 1 video of 1 bug to prove the point while things like this occurs New stuff should be put on hold - That is what Early access is for ) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIuSU6dY-T8

Edited January 22, 2019 by Killmaster

[Realist 504]

26 minutes ago, Killmaster said:

Jatheish

Live Producer and Lead Community Manger

CC: Grapeshot: Atlas gaming development team.

 

RE: Atlas Early access/development

 

Dear Jatheish

 

I am writing this in an effort to help maintain a productive way in to furthering and improving the development of this MMO we currently enjoy.

 

It has become clear to me, very clear to me that the biggest problem to the advancement of this game is your very own team.  I have seen a lot of games come and go I am 37 years in age, I was there when World of Warcraft was launched, I was there in Beta of Starwars Galaxies empire divided, I was in Beta for Matrix online, I played myth of Soma, Eve online beta, Lineage 2 beta, Diablo 1 through to 3 beta.

 

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) killed their games from extremely poor management and poor community skills.  Matrix online team WB killed their game with in-experience and sold it to SOE who put the final bullet in it.  The Greatest MMO killer is its creators.  I have played countless of games too many to list them all here, so I am somewhat experienced.  

 

Everyone I listen to tells me you were part of the team that worked on Ark and you broke away to make this MMO separate. So I had hoped that you brought with you some experience however that is not the case. As you are making a lot of mistakes that newer game developers make and before it’s too late the faith in their product has tanked (e.g Star trek online, I have a live time sub to that but I’m playing this instead says it all.) Rather you choose to hate or dislike Blizzard and their MMO there has to be something that kept it alive for so long. That is what you should be trying to emulate not trying to come up with your own way. Because you simply can’t it isn’t new too many people have tried and it has all failed. None of the games I have mentioned have the success or fame they do now from when they first opened. The new stars games has the nick name World of Warcraft in space, for pity sake.

 

So please allow this letter to serve as wakeup call as it was intended.

 

You apologized for the rough start to early access, as you were not prepared for the numbers.  Which shows you do not -Think, You do not plan, you do not plan to fail and shows no logical thinking at all-

 

There is no 2^nd 1^st impressions, this is what everyone will remember you for now. So straight off the bait you already shot yourself in the foot (and we only get two feet.) But ok you apologized and no one is perfect.  Getting over that.

 

Yet here we are, with problems that in the game, Your solution is to keep bringing out new content hoping to entertain people and dazzle them to hopefully distract them from the problems of the game. However when your problems are the scale of a group of people sinking peoples ships, or entire servers not even being playerable, or when you max your on screen ping to 255ms because if you showed the real number no one would ever play it, to entire sections of the game that is just simply not accessible or reachable. Then we don’t care how many shiny new pieces of armor you put in front of us these game breaking, gameplay effecting, player grieving is driving people away from the game.  Early access or not

 

Your acting like a little boy on the street corner shouting your selling lemonade, while standing next to Walmart that has the internet to shout on. It doesn’t matter what you as the boy shout no one is going to hear you over the loud voice of these problems.

 

SO I URGE YOU to please just hit the breaks on the new content. Just stop. It doesn’t impress us when every new thing you put into the game is just broken anyway and it just more stuff for your to fix. Adding to the list of things to never get fixed.

 

-          You already admitted that you didn’t plan for the volume of people, You apologized but you clearly have not learned from that mistake.

-          The FOY feature should have been in from day 1 not waited until weeks later when you have thousands of people at or close to the age of death. Of cause everyone would rush to it. I just was honestly astounded you did not stagger the release.  You keep saying making the dumb mistakes doing things that was expected for a few hundred when you have 1000s going to one place in the game.   (WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?)

 

I take advantage of the tool discord and I try to talk to the people in there, I was told by a member of the grapeshot team the reason the ships now attack ships that are docked is to add realism.  (realism, really?)  When in hindsight now having went to area of fountain of youth. I saw clearly why the Twisters and the ships of the dammed (sotd) are coming to the shore I saw it myself. They were destroying/ all the docked ships at the island for the FOY -  I honestly thought it was a recreation of the allied landings at D-day in pirate version. So many ships and so many ship wrecks, While the server was completlely lagged out for its 30-60min spells. I jumped off into the water while the game still thought I was in the crows nest to see all the ship wrecks ( screenshots below.)  All this clutter is creating lag.

 

Now I have never played Ark, I never heared about it honestly until I came to Atlas, the Twitch Streamer Pokket started playing this and it got me interested. However the people in my company have soon as I showed them what I was seeing – they all said you guys should know better it was the same problem in Ark.

 

Which appears to be the common theme here, (You should know better.)  It is clear to me the biggest problem which I have said it once before here however it bares repeating.  As things stand with the things as they are. The biggest threat to this game right now, is the entire team and your way of thinking. Because your are harming your own game, you keep making the same mistakes. Which demonstrates you do not learn, or learn too slow.  It is very common for Developers to get caught up in their own game and want to keep advancing it.

However they all came to realize the same thing after a while -  SOE, Blizzard, Linage, Bioware  all of them, and this is the key point here.  Developers are under the mistaken impression that the players are always wanting new content and feel under pressure to give. But that is simply not the case. – Blizzard in the 2^nd year it was out asked its players flat out after a bunch of us complained -  and asked everyone “What do we as players want”  The unanimous answer was to fix the game they are not worried about new content with the state the game was in then.  Blizzard actually listened and said ok then we do that.

 

Then and only then when the majority of the bugs were fixed did they start working on the new stuff (before  the new staff took over etc.)

 

As of right now – The one and only thing you should be doing is fixing the game. – STOP V16 Stop any new content for now and work on fixing the stuff you have out now.

 

I don’t care about the FOY, I don’t care about the baby stuff, I don’t care about any of the new stuff if I can’t play the basic game and would prefer to go on a private server instead of dealing with the Skyscraper towers in A11, or the people sinking ships by standing on ladders or Galleons getting stuck in loading zones. That is what Early access is about. Finding and fixing bugs.

 

Not identifying them so we can tag them and let them back into the wild as we go ahead create new bugs to fix two weeks later.

 

Get a good foundation game under you before you start adding new stuff. Otherwise your tower of cards will crumble every time.  – and for christ sake stagger the FOY before you completely break your game for a limited time have the FOY open at all locations otherwise you are going to keep getting thousands of people going to one tiny spot and crash the games every time. ( common sense)   

 

The only thing you have displayed to me is that

1.       You don’t think,

2.       You don’t look ahead,

3.       You don’t plan

4.       You narrow minded vision (i.e blinkers on)

5.       Your going down a path and you don’t care what you hit or destroy to get there.

 

At the end of it all your going to have a nice game but no one or the interest to play it because they all be on private servers or buggered off to another game in the two years it will take to fix this cluster of a mess you created.

 

For the record we as the players don’t care about the time it takes as long as we know you are fixing the game.  Going back to the time on Blizzard 2^nd year of WOW after we got our way and blizzard listened. Anyone that came on to the forums and complained – we explained it to them, some in a nice way (some not   online forums you know )  Soon as it was explained people were fine with just waiting so they can have a good basic game to play on that they know was reliable and it was WOW was extremely stable. Then they added the 2^nd expansion there was bugs etc but the basic game stayed the same until the expansion was fixed or fixed to a state that everyone can live with. – They didn’t go back to touch their Foundation game until Cataclysm where they redid their entire map to allow flying in that area that was like at least 10 years without touching their basic game (correct me if I’m wrong on the years.)  

 

However the point remains – unless you have a good foundation of a game to stand on – all of this is mute.

 

I submit this to your viewing in hopes it would be received – I will be posting, mailing and emailing this.

As I have extremely high hopes for this product to be turned around before it gets shot in the head before it even gets off the ground. Because you’ve already shot your self in one foot,  and I’d say you’ve taken skin of your only remaining foot you don’t have that many body parts remaining.

 

Respectfully

 

C Bartram

(Aka Illegal Killmaster)

 

(I would include screenshots however the Max total size is currently 0.07mb so I will instead paste a link to 1 video of 1 bug to prove the point while things like this occurs New stuff should be put on hold - That is what Early access is for ) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIuSU6dY-T8

I swear to god I got through about 75-80% of it first off. It was pretty long and a good read but damn I just kept scrolling and after awhile i had to stop, no offense to you at all.

ill inform you real quick since you never played ark. A lot of people played ark but they didn’t actually follow ark, no matter what they say.

i followed it so closely that even after I stopped playing I was still looking at every twitter and forum post. Ark was a game I was very passionate about. Still went back a few days ago just to say hi to some buddies and helped them grind out some mats just because that is what I do.

jeremy was the biggest problem with wildcard and now jeremy is the biggest problem with grapeshot. He is the owner, the final say, and the main idea man behind everything. He was able to come up with two very good ideas at a grass roots level, but NO MATTER WHAT, he always destroys it because of his ego. He always wants to be “cool” so to speak.

he was silent for 6 months on twitter before atlas. Not one word on ark. Then once atlas comes he is not only all over Twitter but he is literally copy and pasting what the atlas twitter said. To make things worse, he tweets it before the atlas twitter tweets it. He has to have that thunder, no matter how pathetic it is.

ark was one of the ones that COULD have been one of the great ones. The stage is already set with atlas. There is absolutely no possibility for any greatness. Nobody forgot the past and even though they tried to bury it, history has already repeated itself. It really doesn’t matter how many copies it might sell. Atlas will always be a failure because it failed before it began. End of story

 

Edited January 22, 2019 by Realist

[CamsterAu 16]

I feel like we need another forum category, just so people can rant and we don't have to put up with every 3rd post being a complaint, no matter how verbose you make it

[Realist 504]

10 minutes ago, CamsterAu said:

I feel like we need another forum category, just so people can rant and we don't have to put up with every 3rd post being a complaint, no matter how verbose you make it

I think he did a pretty good job. Slightly long winded but all in all it was a good read. Made some good sense too. 

To be fair it kind of sucks hearing the “stop complaining” post as well though. Could do without that too

[Jean Lafitte 451]

1 hour ago, Realist said:

but NO MATTER WHAT, he always destroys it because of his ego.

Ark Stats

27,448 - playing 21 min ago
46,377 - 24-hour peak
106,170 - all-time peak

Atlas Stats

21,355 - playing an hour ago
31,772 - 24-hour peak
58,788 - all-time peak

Ark is currently listed at #10 Steam's top games by player count.
Atlas is #17.

I'm not sure where you learned business or economics but those do not look like failures. As a matter of fact, based on the success of Ark, I'd fully expect them to use the same exact playbook they did with Ark. In this case, the method obviously isn't broke so they have no reason to fix it.  Despite all the bitching that's been done about Atlas, all the threats to quit and all the prophecies of doom, the fact is, people are still playing it. A lot of people.

As disheartening as this sounds, until those numbers start to tank, expect them to proceed exactly as they have planned.  Apparently they're going to have to screw up even worse than FOY.

[Realist 504]

10 minutes ago, Jean Lafitte said:

Ark Stats

27,448 - playing 21 min ago
46,377 - 24-hour peak
106,170 - all-time peak

Atlas Stats

21,355 - playing an hour ago
31,772 - 24-hour peak
58,788 - all-time peak

Ark is currently listed at #10 Steam's top games by player count.
Atlas is #17.

I'm not sure where you learned business or economics but those do not look like failures. As a matter of fact, based on the success of Ark, I'd fully expect them to use the same exact playbook they did with Ark. In this case, the method obviously isn't broke so they have no reason to fix it.  Despite all the bitching that's been done about Atlas, all the threats to quit and all the prophecies of doom, the fact is, people are still playing it. A lot of people.

As disheartening as this sounds, until those numbers start to tank, expect them to proceed exactly as they have planned.  Apparently they're going to have to screw up even worse than FOY.

They already tanked dude. Please don’t be that stupid. Ark is ark. It always will be. Atlas is crap and it always will be.

those numbers you tried to proudly post are pathetic. Well the atlas numbers at least. 

You just made the game look worse than it already does

ark is over 3 years old and had a bad past and still easily beats the numbers of a brand new game. This is so sad it isn’t even funny. I love ark, I know it is way better than atlas, you didn’t need to prove that to me.

wow. Smh

Edited January 22, 2019 by Realist

[Realist 504]

2 minutes ago, Realist said:

They already tanked dude. Please don’t be that stupid. Ark is ark. It always will be. Atlas is crap and it always will be.

those numbers you tried to proudly post are pathetic. Well the atlas numbers at least. 

You just made the game look worse than it already does

ark is over 3 years old and had a bad past and still easily beats the numbers of a brand new game. This is so sad it isn’t even funny. I love ark, I know it is way better than atlas, you didn’t need to prove that to me.

wow. Smh

And sorry dude. Ark was popular because it’s ark. Not because of the devs. The devs messed it up beyond belief. 

Marla’s is not taking a page from ark. It will never even come close to ark in any way shape or form.

[Jean Lafitte 451]

14 minutes ago, Realist said:

They already tanked dude. Please don’t be that stupid. Ark is ark. It always will be. Atlas is crap and it always will be.

those numbers you tried to proudly post are pathetic. Well the atlas numbers at least. 

You just made the game look worse than it already does

mark is over 3 years old and had a bad pass and still easily beats the numbers of a brand new game. This is so sad it isn’t even funny. I love ark, I know it is way better than atlas, you didn’t need to prove that to me.

wow. Smh

Here we go again with your crusade to kill anything WC/GS does.  Tell me, just how successful have you been at that?  Oh wait, you haven't have you.  You'll pardon me if I base my opinion on the game itself and not your cockeyed viewpoint.  Go buy the game and then you'll have a right to bitch.

AND IF YOU READ THE POST PROPERLY... NOTHING IN THERE IMPLIED PRIDE.

I was stating very public facts.  Do the math moron.

Using the 24 hour peak:
Ark has lost  ~56% of it's players since peak.
Atlas has lost ~45% since peak, less than Ark.

BOTH are still in the top 20 games. If I had 2 games on Steam in the top 20, I'd be doing a serious happy dance and laughing at your stupid attempts to sabotage them.

10 minutes ago, Realist said:

And sorry dude. Ark was popular because it’s ark. Not because of the devs. The devs messed it up beyond belief. 

If you get to #10 in the Steam rankings by being messed up beyond belief then YOU should develop a game.  It oughta hit at least #2.

My god man, you are the only person I know of who's so insecure that they need to quote themselves.

Edited January 22, 2019 by Jean Lafitte

[Realist 504]

1 minute ago, Jean Lafitte said:

Here we go again with your crusade to kill anything WC/GS does.  Tell me, just how successful have you been at that?  Oh wait, you haven't have you.  You'll pardon me if I base my opinion on the game itself and not your cockeyed viewpoint.  Go buy the game and then you'll have a right to bitch.

AND IF YOU READ THE POST PROPERLY... NOTHING IN THERE IMPLIED PRIDE.

I was stating very public facts.  Do the math moron.

Using the 24 hour peak:
Ark has lost  ~56% of it's players since peak.
Atlas has lost ~45% since peak, less than Ark.

BOTH are still in the top 20 games. If I had 2 games on Steam in the top 20, I'd be doing a serious happy dance and laughing at your stupid attempts to sabotage them.

One game is 3 years old and still top 10. One is brand new and barely 17. I already know ark is a success. I am saying that atlas is not, which it isn’t. It can’t even beat out a 3 year old game

ark lost 56% of peak recently because exticntion was broken. It was clear they spent their time making atlas instead of focusing on extinction. That isn’t my opinion, that is widely known everywhere to every ark player.

atlas has been out 1 month and lost 46% of its peak? yeah that is a true success story right there man.

still drops everyday. Let’s check back next week shall we? Bet ark will still be around the same with atlas even lower 

[Jean Lafitte 451]

17 minutes ago, Realist said:

still drops everyday. Let’s check back next week shall we? Bet ark will still be around the same with atlas even lower 

What did I say mister cool emoji dood?  What did I say?  Oh wait, let me pull one from your playbook and quote myself.

43 minutes ago, Jean Lafitte said:

As disheartening as this sounds, until those numbers start to tank, expect them to proceed exactly as they have planned.  Apparently they're going to have to screw up even worse than FOY.

And if I had a game that was #17 a month after release, you're damned straight I'd call it a success.

Let me clue you into something dimwit.  There's an old saying in business, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." Even you on your soap-box with your libelous posts, you're just creating more publicity. And when people like me shut you down, it causes others to want to play this game even more.

If Atlas is going to fail, it will fail just as fine without you flooding these forums with half-witted defamatory rantings.

Edited January 22, 2019 by Jean Lafitte

[Domino 48]

4 hours ago, Killmaster said:

It has become clear to me, very clear to me that the biggest problem to the advancement of this game is your very own team.

yep, got this far and realized "oh, it's another one of these posts."  You can't seriously think anyone is going to spend the considerable amount of time you probably spent writing this and actually take it as constructive feedback, do you?

Then I skimmed pieces of it and each time, I just shook my head.  You've played games... awesome.  You're criticizing the development cycle... fantastic.  Mostly, though, just seems like a reeeeeally long wall of rambling text by yet another person who thinks they know the Perfect Solution.  News flash: if you did, you'd probably be an experienced game developer.  Unfortunately, just seems you've played some games and think you know all the answers.

PS, when you say "we the players" please don't.  You don't speak for me.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I'm looking forward to new content.  And, crazy as it seems, that's part of the development cycle.  

So thanks for spending what probably amounted to a substantial amount of time writing a wall of gibberish asking to cease adding content to an unfinished game.  Hopefully you're ignored.

Next.

Edited January 22, 2019 by Domino

[Bullet Force 151]

15 hours ago, Realist said:

I swear to god I got through about 75-80% of it first off. It was pretty long and a good read but damn I just kept scrolling and after awhile i had to stop, no offense to you at all.

ill inform you real quick since you never played ark. A lot of people played ark but they didn’t actually follow ark, no matter what they say.

i followed it so closely that even after I stopped playing I was still looking at every twitter and forum post. Ark was a game I was very passionate about. Still went back a few days ago just to say hi to some buddies and helped them grind out some mats just because that is what I do.

jeremy was the biggest problem with wildcard and now jeremy is the biggest problem with grapeshot. He is the owner, the final say, and the main idea man behind everything. He was able to come up with two very good ideas at a grass roots level, but NO MATTER WHAT, he always destroys it because of his ego. He always wants to be “cool” so to speak.

he was silent for 6 months on twitter before atlas. Not one word on ark. Then once atlas comes he is not only all over Twitter but he is literally copy and pasting what the atlas twitter said. To make things worse, he tweets it before the atlas twitter tweets it. He has to have that thunder, no matter how pathetic it is.

ark was one of the ones that COULD have been one of the great ones. The stage is already set with atlas. There is absolutely no possibility for any greatness. Nobody forgot the past and even though they tried to bury it, history has already repeated itself. It really doesn’t matter how many copies it might sell. Atlas will always be a failure because it failed before it began. End of story

 

ARK was a great concept and a good game for the first year and a bit but then the devs basically let things get out of control with regards to mega tribes, breeding and flyers. It stripped the game of its fun in PVP when you had tribes with sometimes hundreds of players in them allied with other large tribes with hundreds of players in them dominating servers. There was no competition anymore on Official servers.

The same is true for flyers, they narrowed down the game play into an air supremacy game with the occasional need for some land combat.

I petitioned the ARK devs for over 2 years to put a hard cap on tribe numbers and also limit alliances. For whatever reason they chose to willfully ignore many of their players and act as if there was no problem at all. Finally in mid 2018 they actually listened and well Small Tribe Servers actually become overnight the most popular mode by far in ARK and has remained so ever since.

While the devs finally improved the game by adding those Small Tribe Servers they then shot themselves in the foot by adding that terrible DLC called Extinction. I don't understand how their balance and testing department could conclude that a flying monster with 500,000 health, 9000 carry weight and one that could bite through the highest tier - TEK with ease was perfectly balanced and fit for release, yet somehow they thought it was. End result has been that raiding is now a much dumbed down boring experience that just involves brute force.

Sadly it seems many of these ARK experts have ported their skillz over to Atlas and gifted us with such delights as the wonderful FOY idea, fire arrows, 4 hour claiming times, rocket gliders, alpha creatures and tornado volleys...

Edited January 22, 2019 by Bullet Force

[Caldrin 55]

Lol 

 

Devs make the game you want to make if it's good people will play it.. if you try and please everyone's wishes you will just end up with a mess.

 

You have clearly have a vision for this game so follow through with it.

Edited January 22, 2019 by Caldrin

[Kyorin 44]

Eh I think OP stated things pretty well.  He's not asking for specific balancing or buffing or asking for offline protections.  He's asking for the base game to be fixed before piling more crap that's broken on release on top.

A few months with no new content and an obvious focus on fixing and improving things is very forgivable if they are transparent about it.  The art teams can still create new content but it doesn't need pushed to the game ASAP.

Edited January 22, 2019 by Kyorin

[BeaWolf 0]

Writing a letter, no matter its lenght, will go a long way if you do it right. What ever this is, its closer to a waste of time than it is to changing anything.

let me give you a hint.

leading any letter of any sort with the phrasing “Omgz n00bs, you suck at your job, but worry not, mister noname himself just wrote you a Wall of text that clearly show where you all went wrong” aint gonna yield whatever outcome you might have imagined when you first began wasting your time with this ‘letter’.

I would be supprised if the devs got much further down the Wall than I did.

[Realist 504]

7 hours ago, Jean Lafitte said:

What did I say mister cool emoji dood?  What did I say?  Oh wait, let me pull one from your playbook and quote myself.

And if I had a game that was #17 a month after release, you're damned straight I'd call it a success.

Let me clue you into something dimwit.  There's an old saying in business, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." Even you on your soap-box with your libelous posts, you're just creating more publicity. And when people like me shut you down, it causes others to want to play this game even more.

If Atlas is going to fail, it will fail just as fine without you flooding these forums with half-witted defamatory rantings.

You are right about that, it will fail regardless of what I do. I am standing up for what I believe and nobody is shutting me down.

you can be happy with 17 all you want, by that isn’t anything to be happy about lol

[Realist 504]

5 hours ago, Bullet Force said:

ARK was a great concept and a good game for the year and a bit but then the devs basically let things go out of control with regards to mega tribes, breeding and flyers. It stripped the game of its fun in PVP when you had tribes with sometimes hundreds of players in them allied with other large tribes with hundreds of players in them dominating server. There was no competition anymore on Official servers.

The same is true for flyers, they narrowed down the game into a air supremacy game with the occasional need for some land combat.

I petitioned the ARK devs for over 2 years to put a hard cap on tribe numbers and also limit alliance. For whatever reason they chose to wilfully ignore many of its players and act as if there was no problem at all. Finally in mid 2018 they actually listened and well Small Tribe Servers actually become overnight the most popular mode by far in ARK and has remained so ever since.

While the devs finally improved the game by adding those Small Tribe Servers they then shot themselves in the foot by adding that terrible DLC called Extinction. I don't understand how their balance and testing department could conclude that a flying monster with 500,000 health, 9000 carry weight and one that could bite through the highest tier - TEK with ease was perfectly balanced and fit for release, yet somehow they thought it was. End result has been that raiding is now a much dumbed down boring experience that just involves brute force.

Sadly it seems many of these ARK experts have ported their skillz over to Atlas and gifted us with such delights as the wonderful FOY idea, fire arrows, 4 hour claiming times, rocket gliders, alpha creatures and tornado volleys...

Oh yeah. I totally wasn’t saying that ark it just awesome by any means. But yes you are right. A lot of the same business practices are still being utilized and they aren’t the good ones. 

Extinction was a real disappointment because we all know they were working on atlas instead. Should have been a lot better. That desert titan was actually a very bad idea, you are definitely right there.

the reason arks numbers still haven’t fully dropped is because they already know how it will go will atlas so they aren’t bothering coming over.

even though ark has a ton of problems still , it is still a better game than atlas for many reasons.

your name sounds familiar, I think I remember you on the ark forums 

[Kveldulf 32]

Forgive me if this has already been pointed out, but some of the inter-personal bickering makes it difficult to weed through sometimes...

New content like new armor is largely re-skinning and maybe changing some stats in a database, is it not?  Mostly art-team work?

This is very different from people programming the network stuff or core components of the game's mechanics.

Perhaps different teams are working on different areas of the game simultaneously?

Not to say there haven't been mistakes:

• The 1000 mobs defending the FoY reminds me of devs in the past giving ai perfect aim to make a game more challenging.  It didn't because it just wasn't interesting.  It wasn't challenging as much as frustrating.  What is needed is a more intellectual challenge. 
  • Since there are 2 FoY's in operation?  How about 2 different types of challenges? 
  • The brute force of a 1000 mobs for those with the numbers to tackle it, and those who prefer to brow-beat it.
  • Another kind that requires more sneaking, more planning, more finesse?  A topic worthy of its own thread maybe.
• Don't forget QoL updates!
  • The chat system comes to mind.  The chat UI is huge and often gets in the way.
  • The territory announcements... that box is way too big!  Need eyes on the horizon to survive and then view is obscured by the same message I've read 50 times.  Smaller and expandable if it looks interesting, which honestly it rarely is.
• Defensive thinking before releasing something...
  • Overweight ship fix w/ floating to death.  Haven't tested how it is lately, and got over the experience, but someone on the dev team should be in charge of thinking more defensively prior to releasing something.  Who will this affect, how will it affect them, can we mitigate the damage?
  • FoY, how many players over 90?  How do we prepare for the rush?  How can we mitigate that?

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and one can't foresee everything.  Someone paranoid in charge of "worse case scenario," a healthy voice of dooom might help.

World of Warcraft had a rocky start.  A lot of games do.  It doesn't mean the end of days.  I love how the ocean feels in Atlas, the vitamins frustrate me sometimes but love the survival aspect and logistical challenge.

There is a TON to really like about this game.  Let's not let the devs forget that either.

 

[Midax 7]

I agree with what you are saying but I feel you could have left the insults out.

 

It does feel like they are implementing things in the game without having everyone sit down and talk about their idea. I'm sure if they had a meeting that involved all the teams, their server team would have asked the question, "How many players will be needing to visit the FOY?" Then someone from another team would have said, "We had 10K people create characters on launch day....oh."

[Dragoon14th 12]

the main problem with Atlas so far is that.... this game was built for those who has no life and who loves to do nothing but play games.   There was actually a reason behind Warcraft Time gated. It was to do a couple of things.... it was to pro-long the game but also get people from playing too long in the game.   Its a reason why Open MMO generally cater toward Kids and private server for success.   Now this network technology is new but they Failed at it... and didnt let the pros to actually handle it instead they rather do it in house rather then letting a 3rd party to set-it up for them.  So now we got these cheap ass rip off Servers that doesnt make any sense 150-200 server max that still seperating the world from being able to play with each other.... 

The owner of the game just want total control and chaos to everyone.  

[darcek 44]

Letter to my mom:

Dear mom I love you!

sincerely yours:

Darcek!

[Captain Jack Shadow 488]

23 hours ago, Jean Lafitte said:

Ark Stats

27,448 - playing 21 min ago
46,377 - 24-hour peak
106,170 - all-time peak

Atlas Stats

21,355 - playing an hour ago
31,772 - 24-hour peak
58,788 - all-time peak

Ark is currently listed at #10 Steam's top games by player count.
Atlas is #17.

I'm not sure where you learned business or economics but those do not look like failures. As a matter of fact, based on the success of Ark, I'd fully expect them to use the same exact playbook they did with Ark. In this case, the method obviously isn't broke so they have no reason to fix it.  Despite all the bitching that's been done about Atlas, all the threats to quit and all the prophecies of doom, the fact is, people are still playing it. A lot of people.

As disheartening as this sounds, until those numbers start to tank, expect them to proceed exactly as they have planned.  Apparently they're going to have to screw up even worse than FOY.

A lot of the numbers for ARK are unofficial servers, almost all of them running mods, and almost all of them have altered the game in significant ways through settings.  Unofficial, and Mods have saved ARK.  Without them, the numbers would not be impressive.