Something has happened at Grapeshot

[strawman 114]

Expanding on a theory that I came up with in another thread, I think something bad happened at Grapeshot about a week ago.

The quality of their work has never been good (remember the introduction of SOTD?) but everything fell off a cliff with v14. The impassable doors, the elephant nerf, the ongoing Fountain of Youth debacle, the stone nerf, and tonight the struggle to even deploy the right version - their work is significantly worse than it was during the first four weeks.

My theory is that the Grapeshot leadership has decided that Atlas is a failure and re-allocated resources accordingly. They're not wrong, if so; it has two-thirds negative reviews on Steam, nearly 15,000 thumbs-down, with no sign of the trend changing. Player counts are declining daily, subreddit growth is dead, everything in the press has been negative. Besides the occasional big name obviously being paid to play, it's dying on Twitch.

I think they did a major layoff last week, and the remaining employees are either rattled or bitter. It clearly shows in their work.

Obviously, this will only make things worse faster.

What's the solution? It's pretty simple. Just like every major videogame failure, the community has been telling the developer how to stop the bleeding every step of the way. I don't know if the creative direction is being done democratically or by one bad creative director, but in either case, Grapeshot needs to make a big, public change. Give all the decision-making power to one person with clear vision and enough humility to listen to the community, and maybe you can turn it around.

Do it fast, because this ride will be over in about a month if you don't.

[JC67 38]

Well i like the game and i believe in it. It's EA and under development and personally i feel there is to much hate. I even go so far to say its the most interesting and comprehensive survival game i seen in a long time.

[BuilderX1 10]

What ever the reason it is true that things are getting worse by the patch. Any developer who puts their head in the sand and believes their way is better than the majority of their player base, is heading for disaster no question. I find it hard to believe that any one would alienate their customers in that manner, read flags start to appear and all the wrong assumptions start to arise, some may be correct and some will not be. Either way it gives the wrong impression. While it was true that this game was fun to play that is fast disappearing, that inevitably means players not playing, reviews going bad (or not recovering) and people not buying. 

The easy solution to this problem is to listen to the MAJORITY of your player base and act accordingly, this would improve your ratings and number of players online, together with word of mouth and more people buying = more revenue.

This is not rocket science it's common sense which at the moment is lacking.

It would also make things a little better if there was a logical reason for some decisions that have been made, although none can be seen.

Yes communication is worth a lot.

Yes taking note of your player base is important.

Unfortunately most posting here on the forums are essentially talking to themselves as no one at Grapeshot seams to read them, or if they do they ignore us.

Please, Please Grapeshot take a few moments and smell the roses!

[Lb9591 11]

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

[SockStink 26]

6 minutes ago, BuilderX1 said:

What ever the reason it is true that things are getting worse by the patch. Any developer who puts their head in the sand and believes their way is better than the majority of their player base, is heading for disaster no question. I find it hard to believe that any one would alienate their customers in that manner, read flags start to appear and all the wrong assumptions start to arise, some may be correct and some will not be. Either way it gives the wrong impression. While it was true that this game was fun to play that is fast disappearing, that inevitably means players not playing, reviews going bad (or not recovering) and people not buying. 

The easy solution to this problem is to listen to the MAJORITY of your player base and act accordingly, this would improve your ratings and number of players online, together with word of mouth and more people buying = more revenue.

This is not rocket science it's common sense which at the moment is lacking.

It would also make things a little better if there was a logical reason for some decisions that have been made, although none can be seen.

Yes communication is worth a lot.

Yes taking note of your player base is important.

Unfortunately most posting here on the forums are essentially talking to themselves as no one at Grapeshot seams to read them, or if they do they ignore us.

Please, Please Grapeshot take a few moments and smell the roses!

Agree on everything you said! Does anyone remember what happened to the Culling when the devs decided NOT to listen to the people who BUY and PLAY their games? Turned a Great game into a DEAD game. Grapeshot, the reason we are so upset about this is because we see massive potential for Atlas to be great being throw away by unneeded patchs followed by NO COMMUNICATION responding to the feedback we are giving. LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYERBASE

3 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

That did cross my mind until you look at the number of people responding to this thread agreeing, 

As  well as this poll 

 

AND also take a look at twitter and reddit. After seeing all of that feedback yes I can say the majority of the player base agrees. 

[Jean Lafitte 451]

Well, my response would be No Man's Sky.  I think most of us know the story.  How the hype train went racing across the planet then suddenly dove off a cliff after release.  The thing to take note of here are the Steam reviews.  Those initial negative reviews.  I decided not to buy NMS on day one and see what those reviews were like.  I patted myself on the back when they all plummeted. Now though, just over a year later, Hello Games has done an amazing turnaround.  It's reviews are mostly positive (71%).

Steam does things in a very intelligent manner.  Not only does it compare all reviews, it also compares reviews for the past 30 days.  NMS is currently sitting with all reviews being mixed.  While Atlas has definitely gotten off to a rocky start, and should the dev's be able to turn it around as well as Hello Games did with NMS, it too will likely have an overall rating of mixed.  Before I decide to buy a game (Atlas being a big exception) I look hard at reviews.  The ones that interest me most are those in the past 30 days.  While a review from a year ago may still carry some weight, I realize that what the game was a year ago could be vastly different from what it is today.  Everything that reviewer a year ago complained about could have been fixed in that time.  So the bad Atlas reviews now?  I'm not too worried.  As a matter of fact, the population that is here now is still more than adequate for doing EA and had all those 58,000+ people kept playing, we'd all be bitching about the lag instead of stone walls.  My Steam review for now is thumbs down.  Will I change that when I think this game is something someone else should buy? You bet I will, and be happy to do it.

While there may be some circumstantial evidence of internal issues at GS, the fact is, they know and we don't.  Until such time as they announce something or some media outlet drops a bombshell, we won't know anything for certain. While it may be amusing to speculate on such things and I too have been juggling around some thoughts on it, it's nothing but speculation and I am not going to change the way I play based on that.  Nor, should we be making any demands or suggestions on how they run their company based on that speculation. 

As for the steam charts, twitch feed and reddit, that's to be expected.  As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the numbers are as good as they are. No Man's Sky went from a peak of 212,000+ to only 9,200 in less than a month.  A few months later it was lucky to have 1,000 players.  Now, they're back into the 6-9,000 player range.  So every time I see a doomsayer talking about the Steam charts for Atlas, I take it with a grain of salt.  Atlas is doing MUCH better than NMS did.

As for who should be in charge...  I never played Ark.  And I'm kinda glad, it would have severely jaded my opinion about Atlas and WC/GS.  What I do know is that Ark is pretty consistently in Steam's top 10 games based on player numbers.  And to me, that's no easy feat to achieve, whether they're on private or official servers.   Atlas has been in the top 20.  That means to me that the same creative minds that are behind Ark are also behind Atlas.  While everything about Ark may not be what everyone wanted or expected, that top #10 position tells me that it must still be a pretty good game. Atlas also sucked up a bunch of Ark players, and I'm assuming Ark modders a well. And, the dev kit is out and being actively developed.  In the near future, those modders are going to be working on Atlas mods giving even more choices to private servers. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter which genius is at the helm, as long as it's the same creative genius who worked on Ark.

So as for the solution, my thoughts for now are, let's see where this boat is going.  If I see some dumb shit, like paste for stone, I'm gonna start waving my shuffleboard stick around like a lunatic geriatric.  I may not like all the ports of call we stop at and I'm pretty sure we're gonna hit some rough seas along the way and I may need some Dramamine.  But I am excited to see where this boat is going.  And who wants to always sail on calm seas anyway.  How boring.

tldr: chill.

[Lb9591 11]

8 minutes ago, SockStink said:

Agree on everything you said! Does anyone remember what happened to the Culling when the devs decided NOT to listen to the people who BUY and PLAY their games? Turned a Great game into a DEAD game. Grapeshot, the reason we are so upset about this is because we see massive potential for Atlas to be great being throw away by unneeded patchs followed by NO COMMUNICATION responding to the feedback we are giving. LISTEN TO YOUR PLAYERBASE

That did cross my mind until you look at the number of people responding to this thread agreeing, 

As  well as this poll 

 

AND also take a look at twitter and reddit. After seeing all of that feedback yes I can say the majority of the player base agrees. 

Uhh that poll had 181 yes votes from what I saw. 

The biggest post on this site has like 780 comments. 

How many people bought this game? Lol

[SockStink 26]

Just now, Lb9591 said:

Uhh that poll had 181 yes votes from what I saw. 

The biggest post on this site has like 780 comments. 

How many people bought this game? Lol

Ever heard of a sample?

[Ban Tier 29]

Well I totally agree with the OP. We have had some really "bad" design decisions lately.

Unless Grapeshot really wants to cater offline griefing and mega-companies.

The only problem I see with catering these two groups, how do the devs think, their future business modell will be ? Do they really think, a big cluster full of mega-companies and offline raiders will motivate ppl to buy the game or a future DLC ? Do they really hope, that ppl will setup private serverclusters large enough to attract a lot of new costumers ?

[Jean Lafitte 451]

22 minutes ago, BuilderX1 said:

Unfortunately most posting here on the forums are essentially talking to themselves as no one at Grapeshot seams to read them, or if they do they ignore us.

Please, Please Grapeshot take a few moments and smell the roses!

 

[Lb9591 11]

Yeah so did all the pools during the last presidential election 

If you only pool from people with your same views it’s pretty easy to get the result you want. 

[SockStink 26]

4 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Yeah so did all the pools during the last presidential election 

If you only pool from people with your same views it’s pretty easy to get the result you want. 

That was posted in general discussion?

[Charles U Farley 46]

13 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

Do you have any proof of that? Do you have more to say then common internet narratives like: throw tantrum, all toxic, acting infantile and so on. Just guessing that there are more people with the same opinion like your own does not make a truth out of that.

So think about that: If players start to take their time to write about their concerns in an internet forum there must be an intention to do that. For some the intention is clearly to troll, no doubt about that, but most of them just love the core of the game but are upset with the direction the game develops. Let me repeat this, they are upset because they love the game, otherwise they would just stop playing and thinking about this game. BTW we all already gave them honey! We bought this EA title with the hope it will be a great game some day.

[SockStink 26]

25 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

Also who is calling devs names or throwing tantrums? Pretty much every post I’ve seen about this has used either evidence or sound reasoning as to why they are displeased with the recent patch. They give multiple legitimate concerns to back their negative feedback up with.

[Aleeya 18]

In ARK they just made up a bigger dinosaurs accessible only to large tribes in order to fix "balance issues".

They found a way in Atlas too.

 

[Baps 5]

The game is indeed dying very quickly. It has already peaked and they aren't getting many much more sales. The only way people are going to buy the game now is by word of mouth. Unfortunately for them, they designed a game that makes it nearly impossible for new players to get established so no one is going to recommend it to their friends unless they are already in an established company, and even then they may not recommend due to the amount of issues with it and performance. The only people that will be playing soon are people in megatribes/alliances. It is good that added Neutral claims but that came too little too late for a lot of players. After day 3 every island was completely claimed. The minority of players held all the land which ran off many players and destroyed future sales. Other than that they have to make serious improvements to server lag, anticheat, and the claim system. Then after that they have to wipe the servers. It will bring more people back than it will run off. Especially if they hope to maintain the game through microtransactions. They have to get players to return to the game. The only way that will happen is with a full wipe once they have some of this s*** fixed.

Also another possibility is they are probably now focusing efforts on getting the console edition out to get a massive influx in sales.

[JanuzDarkwater 5]

29 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

Also without calling names and throwing tantrums, if you just use simple and pure logic....."Stone Wall"....where can you see metal in it? in a door, I would understand it for the hinges and lock, but we are not in a "construction based game" that needs metal for the reinfoced structure.....it is a survival MMO, and survival is knowing how to manage to get things done and survive, not to get a master degree in ingeniering and agree to things that are not logical....just to make things more complicated than should be.

Think about people who play solo, or people that live in islands without some resources...according to the devs there are only two ways out for them....(well 3 actually),

1) forget to build stone...just live in thatch or wood base (maybe) and settle for that...if they dont like to sail haf the map to get resources

2) leave the island and start from scratch somewhere else....(forced eviction)

3) join a large company in order to survive or to make things that could have made alone but forced to do it in a group.

Either way, for devs that assured from the begining that this would be an absolutely unique and large game in which you could do what you want....they are limiting that "what you want" to "what THEY let you do"......false sense of freedom i guess....because adding materials that are not logical to an item craft does not increase immersion or get a better experience from playing just the opposite....

Hope the Devs do some adjustments but to make a few steps forward in the game and not 2 miles back as they are doing now.

[JC67 38]

They are still balancing the game and nothing you see today will be permanent i believe. They try things out and see the impact. They have changed almost everything so far and see how it works. From predator behavior and numbers of spawns to sod ships numbers and aggro rang, temperature in different zones, buffs and de buffs, speed on the seas and wind impact, number of resources you get and the durability of things you use and so on and so on.. Its under development. just chill.

[strawman 114]

1 hour ago, JC67 said:

Well i like the game and i believe in it. It's EA and under development and personally i feel there is to much hate. I even go so far to say its the most interesting and comprehensive survival game i seen in a long time.

You're not wrong that it's interesting and comprehensive, but each patch makes it harder for me to believe in this game. I want to think there will be a miracle patch that fixes all the backward steps they've made since launch, but I don't see it coming.

56 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

Be careful about assuming the silent majority is on your side. This game called itself an MMO that supported 40,000 players, but fewer than 3,000 people are logged into NA PVP right now, with less than 13,000 playing the game at all. And before you say it's the middle of the night - it's 5 PM in Beijing.

[Agent53 2]

1 hour ago, Lb9591 said:

Ever crossed your minds that just because you’re loud doesn’t mean you make up the majority? Plenty of people like the recent changes, just because we don’t yell, scream, throw tantrums and insult the devs doesn’t mean we don’t have an opinion. Final note, calling names and acting like a child doesn’t go far in getting people to listen to you. You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar lol. 

I mean sure, the loudest people are often in the minority. However, the op presented a well thought out argument without leveling insults and typing in all caps about the stone changes. Sure polls aren't perfect, but the poll is literally 90% of people hate the change. The Atlas discord, forums, subreddit, and Twitter are full of people mad about the changes. So you might be right, but every bit of evidence we have points to the conclusion that it is you in the minority, not us. I've also seen that many people don't necessarily mind the cost if the effectiveness of it wasn't nerfed into the ground as well. It is more time/resource efficient for me to make 5 wood walls instead of one stone wall, and protect me better against siege, explosive, and cannon damage. So it's not even that there aren't possible compromises that the community is willing to accept, but as far as anyone can tell the vast majority of people are not happy about the current state of stone structures.

So has it crossed your mind that maybe you don't make up the majority?

[Lb9591 11]

57 minutes ago, strawman said:

You're not wrong that it's interesting and comprehensive, but each patch makes it harder for me to believe in this game. I want to think there will be a miracle patch that fixes all the backward steps they've made since launch, but I don't see it coming.

Be careful about assuming the silent majority is on your side. This game called itself an MMO that supported 40,000 players, but fewer than 3,000 people are logged into NA PVP right now, with less than 13,000 playing the game at all. And before you say it's the middle of the night - it's 5 PM in Beijing.

Haven’t all these posts been doing nothing more than making assumptions? The poll had maybe 200 votes the other post had over 700 reply’s not all for reverting the changes... a lot of the reply’s were from the same people over and over again. I would venture a bet that most people complaining across the different communication platforms are the same. 

[sand man 99]

Powerfull post and no holding back.

[Lb9591 11]

57 minutes ago, Agent53 said:

I mean sure, the loudest people are often in the minority. However, the op presented a well thought out argument without leveling insults and typing in all caps about the stone changes. Sure polls aren't perfect, but the poll is literally 90% of people hate the change. The Atlas discord, forums, subreddit, and Twitter are full of people mad about the changes. So you might be right, but every bit of evidence we have points to the conclusion that it is you in the minority, not us. I've also seen that many people don't necessarily mind the cost if the effectiveness of it wasn't nerfed into the ground as well. It is more time/resource efficient for me to make 5 wood walls instead of one stone wall, and protect me better against siege, explosive, and cannon damage. So it's not even that there aren't possible compromises that the community is willing to accept, but as far as anyone can tell the vast majority of people are not happy about the current state of stone structures.

So has it crossed your mind that maybe you don't make up the majority?

You’re right the poll is 90% of people wanting to revert the stone change. I believe the max votes were 200 pretty small sample given the size of this game. Like I said before it’s easy to get a result you want when you only ask people with your same views. 

Let’s see what happens over the next week if everyone quits and the game dies you all were right if not... guess we should stop all the redundant posts. 

[JanuzDarkwater 5]

3 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Haven’t all these posts been doing nothing more than making assumptions? The poll had maybe 200 votes the other post had over 700 reply’s not all for reverting the changes... a lot of the reply’s were from the same people over and over again. I would venture a bet that most people complaining across the different communication platforms are the same. 

Then if the upset people is really the minority posting several times.....you being the majority, go back to play calmly, build stone wall with metal, and organic paste....because if this goes this way much longer, you will need gems too to build the stone walls.

Let Us the minority keep doing our claims....since we are SOOO few it would not mind....

[Charles U Farley 46]

3 minutes ago, Lb9591 said:

Haven’t all these posts been doing nothing more than making assumptions? The poll had maybe 200 votes the other post had over 700 reply’s not all for reverting the changes... a lot of the reply’s were from the same people over and over again. I would venture a bet that most people complaining across the different communication platforms are the same. 

First if all, please specify "all these posts".

Betting and repeating an assumption does not make it more true. You just try to give your arguments more weight by adding suggestive claims.

Maybe you should just try to tell others your opinion about specific topics. That way you will allow an constructive discussion, and that´s a good thing i think.