"Give me something for the pain, and let me die."

[Envie 12]

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." -  Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones.

 

Give me something for the pain, and let me die ... geat last words for my own exit from this game. And in the end, a pig is what did me in too. RIP Baby Superpig.

Atlas was both, at times, awesome and horrible. There were exciting moments where small bits of hope shined through the ugliness of it's "Early Access" alpha status. Sailing the high seas with my man in search of treasure, narrowly escaping huge storms, watching dolphins arc alongside your ship ... this part of the game is really well done and has a lot of promise for a solid future game. There were times of fun and laughter - seeing a crewmate accidentally hang himself from a noose, or capturing an enemy in a gibbet and forcing them to sing bawdy pirate songs to get released. Political fights of massive proportions including inside betrayals. Trading with neighbors for precious resources - even if just lowly fruit or vegetable seeds worth their weight in gold. These were the good bits.

Sadly, the good bits get drowned as quickly as a sailor lost in the open sea of what becomes a vast ocean of problems the game has this early on in its life-cycle. I'm not sure why game developers choose this route for their games these days. In the old days of EQ, WoW etc, you had to be invited to closed beta testing to experience this level of early/broken gameplay. Now, in modern gaming times, you PAY to play this sort of broken gameplay. It's bad. I'm too old for this. Figuratively, and literally in real life. 

There are just far too many glaring flaws with Atlas for me to be able to continue at this time on the public NA/PvP server. There are hundreds of players everywhere, still struggling to make it work ... but as the bigger fish eat the little fish ... so too do the majority of 'casual' players slowly start to dwindle away in just a month since it's release. Large mega-guilds....  alliances of sharks feeding on all the available smaller companies are beginning to starve, and turn on one another. And this is, at the bigger picture level, how the game will die before it's even completed development. More and more 'refugee' companies (small outfits of friends that can't survive in claimed territories) washed up on our lonely lawless island ... tired and wrung out to dry, having lost everything to bugs or predatory players with no further agenda than wiping them out because. Pirates. That sort of food-chain goes against the equilibrium needed in the predator-prey relationship but humans are, notoriously stupid, as always. Gamers are even worse. They'll prey upon everyone else and then proclaim the game is dead because they won. What exactly have they won in a game not even finished where all the smaller groups of players have already quit? 

But before I lose the point  here,  in the bigger picture, let me shrink it back down to the real problems, and sadly it's not even the PvP at all. That's actually going along as expected.

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die." 

Ahh, the Fountain of Youth! 

 I thought that particular game mechanic would be the most painful blow ... and it nearly was. Our characters were 100 years old now and looked like prunes with a horrible multi-stat debuff! This was insane. Adding insult to injury in an already buggy/laggy game - they decided to introduce this ridiculous 'Quest' to get a youth buff to reverse the aging mechanic they designed and implemented without providing any way to counteract it with children/lineage as was promised in the game mechanic they were developing. Seriously - who thinks this stuff up? "Oh hey, we'll put this insanely difficult game mechanic in (FOY) to challenge (read: punish) the players for a broken game mechanic we didn't even finish yet!" Wow. just. wow.

So ... My man spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing from one Freeport to a nearby golden age region, to the next. Over and over he did this with a sort of insane determination most gamers don't have. I certainly don't. I tried to stay awake until 3 am to participate in this spectacularly bad 'event' ... but over and over we died trying to run the gauntlet of high-level monsters. Sometimes he would arrive in a region only to find the FOY had moved on to the next. Sometimes the lag was so bad we couldn't even move or swim let alone evade the high-level monsters. Parking a ramshackle nearby meant it would be inevitably destroyed within hours either by previously mentioned high-level monsters, or players. Or both.

But then, he finally made it. In a fluke experimental run to just find out the FOY location or if it was even still there on one particular island, he managed to outrun dozens of Chinese players that had come ashore en masse to run the gauntlet too. Like the running of the bulls, he finally avoided the chaotic aggro of fire elementals, gorgons, and dozens of high-level lions, bats, etc. etc. ... you get the picture. He was rewarded with the promised mythical youth regeneration.

Me? I was offline trying to hold our real life together. You know, taking care of our kids, cooking a meal, being tired and making coffee for us. I watched him try to quickly run my character up the beach too from my PC as the opportunity had finally come! But then, our two beds on the sloop were instantly destroyed. Probably the fire elementals I'm guessing. Not players that time (amongst half a dozen lost sloops already lost)...

So now my dude is young, and I'm still a 100-year-old crone with a crippling debuff and a young man husband invigorated and ready to go again! Well, this wouldn't work in real life and I can assure you it's not working in this ridiculous game. I'm disheartened and disappointed and he really did try. He even started the whole process all over again this weekend, albeit rather deflated this time because it was going to take days, again, to get that lucky shot at making it alive to the FOY without losing yet another (or half a dozen) sloop.

But that wasn't what finally did me in. In the end, like Robert. It was a pig.

 

"My memory. - Murdered by a pig." 

Because he had spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing to various FOY regions, my man told me not to bother coming with him - just hold down the fort at our island base - keep our tiny company intact and try to avoid getting into fights with our fractious neighbors in a lawless region. We weren't in the mega-alliance anymore - we "retired" literally and figuratively as both players tired of claimed territory issues and old/debuffed characters too. We'll just hold a small piece of some lawless island until we get rid of this old age debuff! Famous last words. 

So, to keep myself entertained, I started taming animals. I tamed a bear so our crew-mates could gather fiber and outfit their ships and we could build a small base. I tamed two lions ... The Cadillacs of destruction I rode around proudly on our island, greeting neighbors ... and sometimes eating them ... accidentally or otherwise.   We had a strange truce with the Chinese ... talking in short sentences on both sides to keep the language barrier to a minimum. Refugees from other companies and alliances moved in up the beach and we traded materials. I even had a cow to give us milk! Life was simple. 

And then came the pigs.   The War Pigs. 

It was an addiction, really. First I tamed just one or two out of boredom and for fun... then a few more ... and then before I knew it we had a whole pack of pigs - I think I stopped counting at 10 of them. I selectively tamed only level 25+ wild pigs so they would level up to 50+ and become mini-tanks of death. Kept in a pack and all on neutral stance, they were lethal guards against anyone who tried, accidentally or otherwise, to even lay a finger on our base. Just try to fight 3-4 wild pigs at once, you'll see what I mean.

Finally, I had two or three level 60-65 impressive males I was proud of and their 'harem' of lady pigs. Why not try to breed them? And so I did. The first two never made it through gestation ... a server rollback or reset aborted that effort, literally. Another pair kept glitching through the walls and wandering off ... I'd find them down by the beach several times. Maybe guard duty was more important than making little piglets. Who knows.

And then it finally happened. We were about to eat dinner and my phone alarm beeped... gestation was up on another two females! I half-heartedly logged in while we were eating to check. Lo and behold, we had piglets! Two males... tiny and nearly dead. It was too hot! (we live on an eastern tropics island) ... we spazzed out and tried to get them to follow us into the shallow pond next to our base to cool them down ...  The lions watched from their cathouse roof, licking their lips.

One piglet (the superior leveled one, sadly) died immediately. The other barely survived with a few hitpoints to spare. We lovingly hand fed it. At first, it could only hold 5 or 6 berries in its tiny inventory ... but as the hours passed it grew and could go longer and longer ... the stacks of food grew. It ate chickpeas and turmeric, and berries galore! We were succeeding! Through heat waves (barely surviving each one in our covered breeding barn by a nice cool waterfall) and cold nights lighting torches and then snuffing them out before dawn and the inevitable heat to come that day. I nursed this tiny piglet. 6 hours later. Yes, six. It wanted to "cuddle"... the first level of imprinting! I was rewarded for all my hard work with a piggy cuddle and a measly 7% gain on imprinting. No increase to health or other stats other than the slow progress it had already been making. It was 6% matured by then. That's it. Roughly 1% maturation per hour. You do the math there. All this - for a pig? It was 3:30 am. I was exhausted. My man was off trying to find an island with corn ... the pig's 1st preferred food. Perhaps that would help our little piglet mature faster! I had to go to bed. 2 more sows were gestating and would have piglets in 5 hours! They have a 10-hour gestation stage. 

Well, you can already guess how it ends. Little baby Superpig died while I was sleeping. He either starved or died in a heatwave which happens every other in-game day or so on our island. He lived for less than 10 hours of real-life time when his gestation period was just as long. His total maturation process would have taken ten times that. The six hours I spent hand feeding and guarding him, adjusting the temperature in his barn ... wasted. 

I didn't even bother to get up for the 'birth' of the other pigs. Why bother? They would just die too. 

I've read the forums here extensively ... all the stories of the baby bears people spent equally insane amounts of time trying to keep warm with packs of penguins and dozens of campfires. The losses to glitches and server resets too. I guess I thought maybe pigs would be a little easier. More hardy perhaps. Why is this how they want the game's breeding mechanic to be? Why doesn't the MOTHER PIG care for the newborn infant as they do perfectly well in real life? I don't understand why a human player has to hand feed and watch a baby animal with 25 hitpoints die from being too hot, or too cold, or starvation because the humans had to sleep. This is insanity.

~~~

The Fountain of Youth is insanity. The pig (or any tamed animal) breeding is insanity. I'm ashamed to even admit I spent so many hours doing this I was exhausted and didn't do the dishes or get a decent nights sleep for days on end. This is ridiculous. This is not 'extreme survival game' fun. 

And so, my time in the Atlas world has ended. I'm sure it matters very little to the mega-alliances out there doing their shark tank thing. It probably matters even less to the developers of this game who designed these horribly broken mechanics which punishes me for being a 'casual' player and therefore unable to get to the Fountain of Youth or to raise a humble pig from birth to adulthood unless I either don't sleep for days on end or have 3-4 friends dumb enough to take shifts and help me out (which I would never ask friends to do). It's a pirate game... but the only thing getting pirated here is my sanity and I didn't have much of that to start with since I seem to enjoy subjecting myself to ridiculous early access survival games a lot.

 

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die."

I'll never make it to the Fountain of Youth.

I am going to release the lions today. I will put them on aggressive stance so they can at least still hunt and feed themselves. My apologies to all the little lawless refugees and Chinese farmers on our island they will probably eat. When they finally do get taken down -  at least they will have died free spirits!  

The pigs? King Henry, Sir Walter, Prince Humperdink and their harem of ladies... Bertha, Gertrude, Big Betty, Brunhilde, Fannie ... and many others... They become the property of our tiny company. There are a few good guys in there I know will feed them and keep them guarding the docks while they plunder for treasure. Feed the bear, she is happy and fat. Milk the cow, or the lions will eat her I'm sure. 

My character is 100 years old. She wants to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea and erase the pain and enjoy the few memories of the sea she had... maybe one day this atlas will be a place to return to ... maybe when pigs fly! 

 

Oh, the glorious war pigs. Enjoy life, my noble friends! 

 

 

PS: If you're a Game of Thrones fan like me, here's a tribute put to "War Pigs" that is really well done and one of my favorites by Zurik to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F_PDWZxNBA

 

Edited January 26, 2019 by Envie

[strawman 114]

That's genuinely sad (but well-written). Grapeshot Games is a disaster. It wouldn't take more than a few minutes to change the breeding coefficients, but I guess their decision-making process is what's really broken.

[Coggage 239]

Not even going to skim through that mountain of text!  I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it was witty and to the point.  Header said it all.

[Envie 12]

6 minutes ago, strawman said:

That's genuinely sad (but well-written). Grapeshot Games is a disaster. It wouldn't take more than a few minutes to change the breeding coefficients, but I guess their decision-making process is what's really broken.

 

Thank you for actually reading it - it's long and I wanted some symbolic eulogy that might make sense for some. My War Pigs ... symbolic for everything wrong with Atlas but a testament to the gamer spirit that hopes for something better!

Dear Developers: Please fix your terrible fountain of youth game mechanic first. Then fix breeding and all the other design flaws, thanks. 

[Scorpionshawn 134]

Another one gone...

The only thing to help this game is for these devs to save any reputation they have left and hand the game over to a real gaming company.

Otherwise there maybe a patch or two here and there that will spark some kind of hope that things will get better only before they end up doing a bunch of other really bad moves.

DARK AND LIGHT!

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Well written. Yes I read the whole thing. Your experience highlights both the joys and flaws of Atlas. My wish for you is that you may someday have the chance to return to a much improved game.  I like the Robert Baratheon metaphor. Since you shared a pop culture reference, I will offer one as well. My favorite line from Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is this:

”Madam, in my country we have a saying. “Everything will be alright in the end.” So if it is not alright....then it is not the end.”

 

 

May your journeys from now til then be adventures, and I will hope we see you again before the end.

[Envie 12]

26 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

”Madam, in my country we have a saying. “Everything will be alright in the end.” So if it is not alright....then it is not the end.”

Love this, thanks for the encouragement!

I know it's not the end yet. Perhaps just a long hibernation is in order ... I will ask the bear how that's done.

 

[Jean Lafitte 451]

2 hours ago, Envie said:

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." -  Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones.

From Bacon, Bologna, Ham, Sausage, Chops, Ribs, Chorizo, BBQ, Carnitas and Al Pastor, we wish you fair winds and following seas.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Jean Lafitte

[Envie 12]

2 minutes ago, Jean Lafitte said:

From Bacon, Bologna, Sausage, Chops, Ribs, Chorizo, BBQ, Carnitas and Al Pastor, we wish you fair winds and following seas.

This is so awesome, thank you! I love your pack of pigs (great names!) and appreciate their well-wishes to mine who shall continue to live on with my company on their island as well. I may return to pig farming one day, if they decide to fix breeding to a way that makes any sense for players.

 

Good luck to you and your porcine pack of delicious friends!   

[Realist 504]

2 hours ago, Envie said:

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." -  Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones.

 

Give me something for the pain, and let me die ... geat last words for my own exit from this game. And in the end, a pig is what did me in too. RIP Baby Superpig.

Atlas was both, at times, awesome and horrible. There were exciting moments where small bits of hope shined through the ugliness of it's "Early Access" alpha status. Sailing the high seas with my man in search of treasure, narrowly escaping huge storms, watching dolphins arc alongside your ship ... this part of the game is really well done and has a lot of promise for a solid future game. There were times of fun and laughter - seeing a crewmate accidentally hang himself from a noose, or capturing an enemy in a gibbet and forcing them to sing bawdy pirate songs to get released. Political fights of massive proportions including inside betrayals. Trading with neighbors for precious resources - even if just lowly fruit or vegetable seeds worth their weight in gold. These were the good bits.

Sadly, the good bits get drowned as quickly as a sailor lost in the open sea of what becomes a vast ocean of problems the game has this early on in its life-cycle. I'm not sure why game developers choose this route for their games these days. In the old days of EQ, WoW etc, you had to be invited to closed beta testing to experience this level of early/broken gameplay. Now, in modern gaming times, you PAY to play this sort of broken gameplay. It's bad. I'm too old for this. Figuratively, and literally in real life. 

There are just far too many glaring flaws with Atlas for me to be able to continue at this time on the public NA/PvP server. There are hundreds of players everywhere, still struggling to make it work ... but as the bigger fish eat the little fish ... so too do the majority of 'casual' players slowly start to dwindle away in just a month since it's release. Large mega-guilds....  alliances of sharks feeding on all the available smaller companies are beginning to starve, and turn on one another. And this is, at the bigger picture level, how the game will die before it's even completed development. More and more 'refugee' companies (small outfits of friends that can't survive in claimed territories) washed up on our lonely lawless island ... tired and wrung out to dry, having lost everything to bugs or predatory players with no further agenda than wiping them out because. Pirates. That sort of food-chain goes against the equilibrium needed in the predator-prey relationship but humans are, notoriously stupid, as always. Gamers are even worse. They'll prey upon everyone else and then proclaim the game is dead because they won. What exactly have they won in a game not even finished where all the smaller groups of players have already quit? 

But before I lose the point  here,  in the bigger picture, let me shrink it back down to the real problems, and sadly it's not even the PvP at all. That's actually going along as expected.

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die." 

Ahh, the Fountain of Youth! 

 I thought that particular game mechanic would be the most painful blow ... and it nearly was. Our characters were 100 years old now and looked like prunes with a horrible multi-stat debuff! This was insane. Adding insult to injury in an already buggy/laggy game - they decided to introduce this ridiculous 'Quest' to get a youth buff to reverse the aging mechanic they designed and implemented without providing any way to counteract it with children/lineage as was promised in the game mechanic they were developing. Seriously - who thinks this stuff up? "Oh hey, we'll put this insanely difficult game mechanic in (FOY) to challenge (read: punish) the players for a broken game mechanic we didn't even finish yet!" Wow. just. wow.

So ... My man spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing from one Freeport to a nearby golden age region, to the next. Over and over he did this with a sort of insane determination most gamers don't have. I certainly don't. I tried to stay awake until 3 am to participate in this spectacularly bad 'event' ... but over and over we died trying to run the gauntlet of high-level monsters. Sometimes he would arrive in a region only to find the FOY had moved on to the next. Sometimes the lag was so bad we couldn't even move or swim let alone evade the high-level monsters. Parking a ramshackle nearby meant it would be inevitably destroyed within hours either by previously mentioned high-level monsters, or players. Or both.

But then, he finally made it. In a fluke experimental run to just find out the FOY location or if it was even still there on one particular island, he managed to outrun dozens of Chinese players that had come ashore en masse to run the gauntlet too. Like the running of the bulls, he finally avoided the chaotic aggro of fire elementals, gorgons, and dozens of high-level lions, bats, etc. etc. ... you get the picture. He was rewarded with the promised mythical youth regeneration.

Me? I was offline trying to hold our real life together. You know, taking care of our kids, cooking a meal, being tired and making coffee for us. I watched him try to quickly run my character up the beach too from my PC as the opportunity had finally come! But then, our two beds on the sloop were instantly destroyed. Probably the fire elementals I'm guessing. Not players that time (amongst half a dozen lost sloops already lost)...

So now my dude is young, and I'm still a 100-year-old crone with a crippling debuff and a young man husband invigorated and ready to go again! Well, this wouldn't work in real life and I can assure you it's not working in this ridiculous game. I'm disheartened and disappointed and he really did try. He even started the whole process all over again this weekend, albeit rather deflated this time because it was going to take days, again, to get that lucky shot at making it alive to the FOY without losing yet another (or half a dozen) sloop.

But that wasn't what finally did me in. In the end, like Robert. It was a pig.

 

"My memory. - Murdered by a pig." 

Because he had spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing to various FOY regions, my man told me not to bother coming with him - just hold down the fort at our island base - keep our tiny company intact and try to avoid getting into fights with our fractious neighbors in a lawless region. We weren't in the mega-alliance anymore - we "retired" literally and figuratively as both players tired of claimed territory issues and old/debuffed characters too. We'll just hold a small piece of some lawless island until we get rid of this old age debuff! Famous last words. 

So, to keep myself entertained, I started taming animals. I tamed a bear so our crew-mates could gather fiber and outfit their ships and we could build a small base. I tamed two lions ... The Cadillacs of destruction I rode around proudly on our island, greeting neighbors ... and sometimes eating them ... accidentally or otherwise.   We had a strange truce with the Chinese ... talking in short sentences on both sides to keep the language barrier to a minimum. Refugees from other companies and alliances moved in up the beach and we traded materials. I even had a cow to give us milk! Life was simple. 

And then came the pigs.   The War Pigs. 

It was an addiction, really. First I tamed just one or two out of boredom and for fun... then a few more ... and then before I knew it we had a whole pack of pigs - I think I stopped counting at 10 of them. I selectively tamed only level 25+ wild pigs so they would level up to 50+ and become mini-tanks of death. Kept in a pack and all on neutral stance, they were lethal guards against anyone who tried, accidentally or otherwise, to even lay a finger on our base. Just try to fight 3-4 wild pigs at once, you'll see what I mean.

Finally, I had two or three level 60-65 impressive males I was proud of and their 'harem' of lady pigs. Why not try to breed them? And so I did. The first two never made it through gestation ... a server rollback or reset aborted that effort, literally. Another pair kept glitching through the walls and wandering off ... I'd find them down by the beach several times. Maybe guard duty was more important than making little piglets. Who knows.

And then it finally happened. We were about to eat dinner and my phone alarm beeped... gestation was up on another two females! I half-heartedly logged in while we were eating to check. Lo and behold, we had piglets! Two males... tiny and nearly dead. It was too hot! (we live on an eastern tropics island) ... we spazzed out and tried to get them to follow us into the shallow pond next to our base to cool them down ...  The lions watched from their cathouse roof, licking their lips.

One piglet (the superior leveled one, sadly) died immediately. The other barely survived with a few hitpoints to spare. We lovingly hand fed it. At first, it could only hold 5 or 6 berries in its tiny inventory ... but as the hours passed it grew and could go longer and longer ... the stacks of food grew. It ate chickpeas and turmeric, and berries galore! We were succeeding! Through heat waves (barely surviving each one in our covered breeding barn by a nice cool waterfall) and cold nights lighting torches and then snuffing them out before dawn and the inevitable heat to come that day. I nursed this tiny piglet. 6 hours later. Yes, six. It wanted to "cuddle"... the first level of imprinting! I was rewarded for all my hard work with a piggy cuddle and a measly 7% gain on imprinting. No increase to health or other stats other than the slow progress it had already been making. It was 6% matured by then. That's it. Roughly 1% maturation per hour. You do the math there. All this - for a pig? It was 3:30 am. I was exhausted. My man was off trying to find an island with corn ... the pig's 1st preferred food. Perhaps that would help our little piglet mature faster! I had to go to bed. 2 more sows were gestating and would have piglets in 5 hours! They have a 10-hour gestation stage. 

Well, you can already guess how it ends. Little baby Superpig died while I was sleeping. He either starved or died in a heatwave which happens every other in-game day or so on our island. He lived for less than 10 hours of real-life time when his gestation period was just as long. His total maturation process would have taken ten times that. The six hours I spent hand feeding and guarding him, adjusting the temperature in his barn ... wasted. 

I didn't even bother to get up for the 'birth' of the other pigs. Why bother? They would just die too. 

I've read the forums here extensively ... all the stories of the baby bears people spent equally insane amounts of time trying to keep warm with packs of penguins and dozens of campfires. The losses to glitches and server resets too. I guess I thought maybe pigs would be a little easier. More hardy perhaps. Why is this how they want the game's breeding mechanic to be? Why doesn't the MOTHER PIG care for the newborn infant as they do perfectly well in real life? I don't understand why a human player has to hand feed and watch a baby animal with 25 hitpoints die from being too hot, or too cold, or starvation because the humans had to sleep. This is insanity.

~~~

The Fountain of Youth is insanity. The pig (or any tamed animal) breeding is insanity. I'm ashamed to even admit I spent so many hours doing this I was exhausted and didn't do the dishes or get a decent nights sleep for days on end. This is ridiculous. This is not 'extreme survival game' fun. 

And so, my time in the Atlas world has ended. I'm sure it matters very little to the mega-alliances out there doing their shark tank thing. It probably matters even less to the developers of this game who designed these horribly broken mechanics which punishes me for being a 'casual' player and therefore unable to get to the Fountain of Youth or to raise a humble pig from birth to adulthood unless I either don't sleep for days on end or have 3-4 friends dumb enough to take shifts and help me out (which I would never ask friends to do). It's a pirate game... but the only thing getting pirated here is my sanity and I didn't have much of that to start with since I seem to enjoy subjecting myself to ridiculous early access survival games a lot.

 

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die."

I'll never make it to the Fountain of Youth.

I am going to release the lions today. I will put them on aggressive stance so they can at least still hunt and feed themselves. My apologies to all the little lawless refugees and Chinese farmers on our island they will probably eat. When they finally do get taken down -  at least they will have died free spirits!  

The pigs? King Henry, Sir Walter, Prince Humperdink and their harem of ladies... Bertha, Gertrude, Big Betty, Brunhilde, Fannie ... and many others... They become the property of our tiny company. There are a few good guys in there I know will feed them and keep them guarding the docks while they plunder for treasure. Feed the bear, she is happy and fat. Milk the cow, or the lions will eat her I'm sure. 

My character is 100 years old. She wants to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea and erase the pain and enjoy the few memories of the sea she had... maybe one day this atlas will be a place to return to ... maybe when pigs fly! 

 

Oh, the glorious war pigs. Enjoy life, my noble friends! 

 

 

PS: If you're a Game of Thrones fan like me, here's a tribute put to "War Pigs" that is really well done and one of my favorites by Zurik to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F_PDWZxNBA

 

Hello envie, even though I haven’t seen game of thrones I can pretty much get the point of what you were saying.

see, the unfortunate truth is that the most passionate will actually leave after betrayal is felt. That is what this dev company needs to start realizing.

with ark they did listen to a hardcore fan base. With atlas they are not, they are listening to idiots streamers. It’s not even a real job

the die hard ark fans are pretty damn loyal. Even I will admit that. But once you just start trying to be trendy, wildcard will find out exactly how badly they messed up. 

To be ho eat it would be better to listen to anyone that says they have over 5k hours of ark game play. Because to be ho eat these newbies have no clue how wildcard works, so they don’t really know anything 

Edit: not to sure what ho eat is but I meant to say honest. Lol

Edited January 26, 2019 by Realist

[Itsme 16]

Very well written post with very valid points, all of which I completely agree with.

I too stopped playing the game two days ago. While I liked the game, I struggled with all the bugs and fail mechanics (save me the blanket  'it's an early release' BS excuse) before hitting the same straw that helped break my camel's back- the fountain of youth.

I found the fountain areas extremely laggy and changing locations way too frequently when I was attempting this asinine mandated process. The character weight mechanic is already ridiculous so having the further nerf to that for being over 90 made finding the fountain a no option decision. 

Once you actually found the frequently changing location, trying to thread your way through the legs of massive amounts of rock elemental and other creatures as well as griefers laying down or crouching to block your path as you endlessly rubberband back and forth due to the number of players and NPCs in the area while  trying not to throw up from the sickening low fps visuals was not in the least bit fun and downright aggravating and nauseating. 

Two times, I attempted this asinine mechanic at two different locations and BOTH times I and the boat and bed I was spawning on were teleported out of the area due to too many people on the server.  So after investing the time to get a boat there and attempting to actively work on this asinine broken game mechanic which I felt forced to do, I am kicked out of the server I spent an hour just getting to and trying to run?

 It's ok though because as I said, this was only part of the straw that broke my camel's back. The other was the day after the last attempted fountain of youth when we had the issue where no one could transfer out of the server they were in.  I found myself logging into the middle of the sea that morning nowhere near where I logged off in base (ANOTHER rollback). I could not transfer out of this area all day after being killed by a shark  and repeated attempts to simply 'rejoin atlas' resulted in being randomly tossed to the new character screen and I have not seen my character since. I tried all the fixes suggested online (other than someone dragging my body as that was somewhere in the middle of the ocean) but nothing resolved being tossed to the new character screen. 

I saw promises from Atlas that this was being looked into last week but the updates since then have not resolved my issue nor was my individual support ticket from last week even answered. 

I should have paid attention to the red flags of the connection this developer had to Ark and Dark and Light (another game that had potential that the devs appeared to intentionally screw up) and not even bothered purchasing Atlas but lesson learned for future game purchases. 

If support is reading this, feel free to continue to ignore that support ticket submitted last week, that character that disappeared by simply hitting 'rejoin Atlas' and nothing more doesn't need the fountain of youth anymore, she has seen the true light. 

 

Edited January 26, 2019 by Itsme

[mgsgta3 13]

What a sad but entertaining story(not being condescending, but genuine)


Also, I would HIGHLY suggest trying unofficial, its way better, much higher breeding rates and such. you can choose one of many servers to fit the time youre willing to invest. Most have Admins, and rules to prevent trolling and griefing, etc. Some have "kits" where you can buy all the seeds for say, 5 points(which you get for playing 30 minutes)

[Envie 12]

1 hour ago, mgsgta3 said:

What a sad but entertaining story(not being condescending, but genuine)


Also, I would HIGHLY suggest trying unofficial, its way better, much higher breeding rates and such. you can choose one of many servers to fit the time youre willing to invest. Most have Admins, and rules to prevent trolling and griefing, etc. Some have "kits" where you can buy all the seeds for say, 5 points(which you get for playing 30 minutes)

 

I have considered this idea as now that the modding community is also starting up, there will likely be fixes to breeding that make it more tolerable on private servers to actually get somewhere with a breeding project. It's just disheartening that the mega public servers, which we joined to be a part of a larger political community and economy, is too broken to make it possible to do either of those things. 

I'm sure once things stabilize and there are good mods in place, I'll reconsider my decision to quit and will seek out a good unofficial server to join. 

[Nox 56]

I'm the old man in this duo.  I'm the guy with the focused power of autism who was sniping people at the beach defending our beds, running and learning how to perform this incredibly badly designed content.

At this point I'll just say that the design choices in this game are flat out abusive.  

One of the two of us has to work and the other one has to take care of the rest of it - so between us we have time to play at different times and sometimes together.  I often forgo sleep in order to do what I want to do in games but it's gotten to where I'm spending a lot of un-fun time getting things accomplished that are unnecessary.  FOY is an example.  That 's straight up shit content that demonstrates incompetence.  I said it, and I mean it.  If that is the best that you can come up with, and you don't realize the consequences then you really are just not qualified to be designing games.  That's not meant to be hurtful, it's just how it is.

I'm not a bad player, but we're in a small company by choice.  When I say small, I mean 8 active players.  I recruit new players often, try to teach them the game but this is not a game that you can really expect to keep people interested in.  I'm fighting the design most of the time.

I won't derail this excellent post with my own issues which I've detailed elsewhere.  I'll just say that it's a heartbreak to see my love leave the game, and that pretty much finishes me too.  I tried very hard to make it possible for her to play casually, but dear god this game just puts obstacles in the way of actually enjoying it at every turn.

We can say "early access" - but the stone changes and the fountain of youth aren't early access problems.  Those are problems introduced by the developers that were moved here from ARK - a set of developers famous for being really, really bad.  I think this game, unless something changes, is really fucked.

 

[Realist 504]

3 hours ago, mgsgta3 said:

What a sad but entertaining story(not being condescending, but genuine)


Also, I would HIGHLY suggest trying unofficial, its way better, much higher breeding rates and such. you can choose one of many servers to fit the time youre willing to invest. Most have Admins, and rules to prevent trolling and griefing, etc. Some have "kits" where you can buy all the seeds for say, 5 points(which you get for playing 30 minutes)

Very true, but even though it is sad that people have to choose unofficial just to play the game, ot is even more sad that people do not just stop because the game is in such a bad shape.

unofficials are a good thing, as well as a bad thing. Unofficials make it to where even if the co pant sucks you still play the game because you make it your own game.

even though Unofficials are a better opinion, I still see them as the problem as well. No wonder the devs don’t have to do anything 

[Nox 56]

Well, I like the one-big-world element, the challenge and political struggle.  I want to be there.

I could (and do) run my own private servers.  I came up with a way to do atlas in containers with kubernetes (my rl work) but if I run it, I won't play it.

 

[Adfax 157]

7 hours ago, Envie said:

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." -  Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones.

 

Give me something for the pain, and let me die ... geat last words for my own exit from this game. And in the end, a pig is what did me in too. RIP Baby Superpig.

Atlas was both, at times, awesome and horrible. There were exciting moments where small bits of hope shined through the ugliness of it's "Early Access" alpha status. Sailing the high seas with my man in search of treasure, narrowly escaping huge storms, watching dolphins arc alongside your ship ... this part of the game is really well done and has a lot of promise for a solid future game. There were times of fun and laughter - seeing a crewmate accidentally hang himself from a noose, or capturing an enemy in a gibbet and forcing them to sing bawdy pirate songs to get released. Political fights of massive proportions including inside betrayals. Trading with neighbors for precious resources - even if just lowly fruit or vegetable seeds worth their weight in gold. These were the good bits.

Sadly, the good bits get drowned as quickly as a sailor lost in the open sea of what becomes a vast ocean of problems the game has this early on in its life-cycle. I'm not sure why game developers choose this route for their games these days. In the old days of EQ, WoW etc, you had to be invited to closed beta testing to experience this level of early/broken gameplay. Now, in modern gaming times, you PAY to play this sort of broken gameplay. It's bad. I'm too old for this. Figuratively, and literally in real life. 

There are just far too many glaring flaws with Atlas for me to be able to continue at this time on the public NA/PvP server. There are hundreds of players everywhere, still struggling to make it work ... but as the bigger fish eat the little fish ... so too do the majority of 'casual' players slowly start to dwindle away in just a month since it's release. Large mega-guilds....  alliances of sharks feeding on all the available smaller companies are beginning to starve, and turn on one another. And this is, at the bigger picture level, how the game will die before it's even completed development. More and more 'refugee' companies (small outfits of friends that can't survive in claimed territories) washed up on our lonely lawless island ... tired and wrung out to dry, having lost everything to bugs or predatory players with no further agenda than wiping them out because. Pirates. That sort of food-chain goes against the equilibrium needed in the predator-prey relationship but humans are, notoriously stupid, as always. Gamers are even worse. They'll prey upon everyone else and then proclaim the game is dead because they won. What exactly have they won in a game not even finished where all the smaller groups of players have already quit? 

But before I lose the point  here,  in the bigger picture, let me shrink it back down to the real problems, and sadly it's not even the PvP at all. That's actually going along as expected.

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die." 

Ahh, the Fountain of Youth! 

 I thought that particular game mechanic would be the most painful blow ... and it nearly was. Our characters were 100 years old now and looked like prunes with a horrible multi-stat debuff! This was insane. Adding insult to injury in an already buggy/laggy game - they decided to introduce this ridiculous 'Quest' to get a youth buff to reverse the aging mechanic they designed and implemented without providing any way to counteract it with children/lineage as was promised in the game mechanic they were developing. Seriously - who thinks this stuff up? "Oh hey, we'll put this insanely difficult game mechanic in (FOY) to challenge (read: punish) the players for a broken game mechanic we didn't even finish yet!" Wow. just. wow.

So ... My man spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing from one Freeport to a nearby golden age region, to the next. Over and over he did this with a sort of insane determination most gamers don't have. I certainly don't. I tried to stay awake until 3 am to participate in this spectacularly bad 'event' ... but over and over we died trying to run the gauntlet of high-level monsters. Sometimes he would arrive in a region only to find the FOY had moved on to the next. Sometimes the lag was so bad we couldn't even move or swim let alone evade the high-level monsters. Parking a ramshackle nearby meant it would be inevitably destroyed within hours either by previously mentioned high-level monsters, or players. Or both.

But then, he finally made it. In a fluke experimental run to just find out the FOY location or if it was even still there on one particular island, he managed to outrun dozens of Chinese players that had come ashore en masse to run the gauntlet too. Like the running of the bulls, he finally avoided the chaotic aggro of fire elementals, gorgons, and dozens of high-level lions, bats, etc. etc. ... you get the picture. He was rewarded with the promised mythical youth regeneration.

Me? I was offline trying to hold our real life together. You know, taking care of our kids, cooking a meal, being tired and making coffee for us. I watched him try to quickly run my character up the beach too from my PC as the opportunity had finally come! But then, our two beds on the sloop were instantly destroyed. Probably the fire elementals I'm guessing. Not players that time (amongst half a dozen lost sloops already lost)...

So now my dude is young, and I'm still a 100-year-old crone with a crippling debuff and a young man husband invigorated and ready to go again! Well, this wouldn't work in real life and I can assure you it's not working in this ridiculous game. I'm disheartened and disappointed and he really did try. He even started the whole process all over again this weekend, albeit rather deflated this time because it was going to take days, again, to get that lucky shot at making it alive to the FOY without losing yet another (or half a dozen) sloop.

But that wasn't what finally did me in. In the end, like Robert. It was a pig.

 

"My memory. - Murdered by a pig." 

Because he had spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing to various FOY regions, my man told me not to bother coming with him - just hold down the fort at our island base - keep our tiny company intact and try to avoid getting into fights with our fractious neighbors in a lawless region. We weren't in the mega-alliance anymore - we "retired" literally and figuratively as both players tired of claimed territory issues and old/debuffed characters too. We'll just hold a small piece of some lawless island until we get rid of this old age debuff! Famous last words. 

So, to keep myself entertained, I started taming animals. I tamed a bear so our crew-mates could gather fiber and outfit their ships and we could build a small base. I tamed two lions ... The Cadillacs of destruction I rode around proudly on our island, greeting neighbors ... and sometimes eating them ... accidentally or otherwise.   We had a strange truce with the Chinese ... talking in short sentences on both sides to keep the language barrier to a minimum. Refugees from other companies and alliances moved in up the beach and we traded materials. I even had a cow to give us milk! Life was simple. 

And then came the pigs.   The War Pigs. 

It was an addiction, really. First I tamed just one or two out of boredom and for fun... then a few more ... and then before I knew it we had a whole pack of pigs - I think I stopped counting at 10 of them. I selectively tamed only level 25+ wild pigs so they would level up to 50+ and become mini-tanks of death. Kept in a pack and all on neutral stance, they were lethal guards against anyone who tried, accidentally or otherwise, to even lay a finger on our base. Just try to fight 3-4 wild pigs at once, you'll see what I mean.

Finally, I had two or three level 60-65 impressive males I was proud of and their 'harem' of lady pigs. Why not try to breed them? And so I did. The first two never made it through gestation ... a server rollback or reset aborted that effort, literally. Another pair kept glitching through the walls and wandering off ... I'd find them down by the beach several times. Maybe guard duty was more important than making little piglets. Who knows.

And then it finally happened. We were about to eat dinner and my phone alarm beeped... gestation was up on another two females! I half-heartedly logged in while we were eating to check. Lo and behold, we had piglets! Two males... tiny and nearly dead. It was too hot! (we live on an eastern tropics island) ... we spazzed out and tried to get them to follow us into the shallow pond next to our base to cool them down ...  The lions watched from their cathouse roof, licking their lips.

One piglet (the superior leveled one, sadly) died immediately. The other barely survived with a few hitpoints to spare. We lovingly hand fed it. At first, it could only hold 5 or 6 berries in its tiny inventory ... but as the hours passed it grew and could go longer and longer ... the stacks of food grew. It ate chickpeas and turmeric, and berries galore! We were succeeding! Through heat waves (barely surviving each one in our covered breeding barn by a nice cool waterfall) and cold nights lighting torches and then snuffing them out before dawn and the inevitable heat to come that day. I nursed this tiny piglet. 6 hours later. Yes, six. It wanted to "cuddle"... the first level of imprinting! I was rewarded for all my hard work with a piggy cuddle and a measly 7% gain on imprinting. No increase to health or other stats other than the slow progress it had already been making. It was 6% matured by then. That's it. Roughly 1% maturation per hour. You do the math there. All this - for a pig? It was 3:30 am. I was exhausted. My man was off trying to find an island with corn ... the pig's 1st preferred food. Perhaps that would help our little piglet mature faster! I had to go to bed. 2 more sows were gestating and would have piglets in 5 hours! They have a 10-hour gestation stage. 

Well, you can already guess how it ends. Little baby Superpig died while I was sleeping. He either starved or died in a heatwave which happens every other in-game day or so on our island. He lived for less than 10 hours of real-life time when his gestation period was just as long. His total maturation process would have taken ten times that. The six hours I spent hand feeding and guarding him, adjusting the temperature in his barn ... wasted. 

I didn't even bother to get up for the 'birth' of the other pigs. Why bother? They would just die too. 

I've read the forums here extensively ... all the stories of the baby bears people spent equally insane amounts of time trying to keep warm with packs of penguins and dozens of campfires. The losses to glitches and server resets too. I guess I thought maybe pigs would be a little easier. More hardy perhaps. Why is this how they want the game's breeding mechanic to be? Why doesn't the MOTHER PIG care for the newborn infant as they do perfectly well in real life? I don't understand why a human player has to hand feed and watch a baby animal with 25 hitpoints die from being too hot, or too cold, or starvation because the humans had to sleep. This is insanity.

~~~

The Fountain of Youth is insanity. The pig (or any tamed animal) breeding is insanity. I'm ashamed to even admit I spent so many hours doing this I was exhausted and didn't do the dishes or get a decent nights sleep for days on end. This is ridiculous. This is not 'extreme survival game' fun. 

And so, my time in the Atlas world has ended. I'm sure it matters very little to the mega-alliances out there doing their shark tank thing. It probably matters even less to the developers of this game who designed these horribly broken mechanics which punishes me for being a 'casual' player and therefore unable to get to the Fountain of Youth or to raise a humble pig from birth to adulthood unless I either don't sleep for days on end or have 3-4 friends dumb enough to take shifts and help me out (which I would never ask friends to do). It's a pirate game... but the only thing getting pirated here is my sanity and I didn't have much of that to start with since I seem to enjoy subjecting myself to ridiculous early access survival games a lot.

 

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die."

I'll never make it to the Fountain of Youth.

I am going to release the lions today. I will put them on aggressive stance so they can at least still hunt and feed themselves. My apologies to all the little lawless refugees and Chinese farmers on our island they will probably eat. When they finally do get taken down -  at least they will have died free spirits!  

The pigs? King Henry, Sir Walter, Prince Humperdink and their harem of ladies... Bertha, Gertrude, Big Betty, Brunhilde, Fannie ... and many others... They become the property of our tiny company. There are a few good guys in there I know will feed them and keep them guarding the docks while they plunder for treasure. Feed the bear, she is happy and fat. Milk the cow, or the lions will eat her I'm sure. 

My character is 100 years old. She wants to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea and erase the pain and enjoy the few memories of the sea she had... maybe one day this atlas will be a place to return to ... maybe when pigs fly! 

 

Oh, the glorious war pigs. Enjoy life, my noble friends! 

 

 

PS: If you're a Game of Thrones fan like me, here's a tribute put to "War Pigs" that is really well done and one of my favorites by Zurik to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F_PDWZxNBA

 

So what you're saying is :

"STOP THIS MADNESS IN THE NAME OF YOUR KING!"

[Envie 12]

25 minutes ago, Nox said:

Well, I like the one-big-world element, the challenge and political struggle.  I want to be there.

I could (and do) run my own private servers.  I came up with a way to do atlas in containers with kubernetes (my rl work) but if I run it, I won't play it.

 

 

We discussed this at length and we know the hard work involved in running a private server. We chose the public PvP server to see what alliances and wars there were to be had ... but sadly the game is making that very difficult to do or enjoy.

And no, you being admin on a privately run unofficial server will kill any remaining joy you had in it. 

The solution here is for the developers to revert the recent changes, eliminate the aging debuff (until they have better options such as the lineage/child feature they promised) and encourage players to come back and try again without the recently added absurd broken game mechanics. They're bleeding out here. 

Edited January 27, 2019 by Envie

[Nox 56]

Well the aging debuff isn't the problem, it's the mobs at the point where you go to the fountain of youth.  I don't see that particular challenge as a positive element because it's not really feasible.  *I* did it, but you can tell them all about me.  I do not expect normal people to do it.

 

Edited January 27, 2019 by Nox

[sand man 99]

Now thats a post,, well said.

[Aery 20]

Thank you Envie for writing this, it was long, but kept my attention all the way!
All true and valid points you made, as a tribe of ark breeders, and great love for animals and tiny cute baby raising, we have given up on breeding in this game, untill they fix the mechanics. We have had so many babies die, its heartbreaking and nearly traumatizing, yes I know its a game, but when u spend ur free time into raising cute baby bear cubs, and they die after half a day, it makes u feel like the worlds most horrible parent..
We have literally tried everything, except moving to tundra ( our mainbase is in temperate) but we arent moving to tundra either, because we hear tundra babies die too, unless like u said u have a team of people switching babysitting shifts, otherwise it's not doable.

I hope you will return some day Envie, this game has chased away too many good people, way too many. 
I don't even understand why devs made atlas, there are so many pirate games already out there, they could have just given more love to Dark and Light, oh how I loved that game so much, it had such a GREAT potential, it was truly amazing when it came out, and then it got destroyed by its own developers...I fear this game is just another side project just like DaL, time will tell..
As bad as this game is at the moment I hope people will find more patience in the deeper parts of their being and stick around, its sad to see good neighbours and friends quit the game one by one every single day.

[mgsgta3 13]

10 hours ago, Envie said:

And no, you being admin on a privately run unofficial server will kill any remaining joy you had in it. 

1

That is for sure. Being an Admin is a lonely (in-game) life. I used to admin on pvp servers, and would actually play to give presence but all I could do was build stuff since I wasnt allowed to raid or anything like that. Couldnt say "hey wanna tribe up?" lol It had its plus sides too though and was just as satisfying as playing but in a different way. 

As for the changes Grapeshot makes, in the order they make them...you both covered it but basically yeah they are making poor decisions. They did that a lot with Ark too, they would implement some seemingly(or actually) awful mechanic or change, often because of incoming content thats related to it but nobody says "this change is a balance for upcoming content" so it seems like out of the blue and incompetent work. It sounds grim but its almost like they get a kick out of causing those temporary panics and uproars because they do it all the time. 

For the FOY itself, yeah they shouldve waited for the full mechanic to be working first. At present having the FOY being the ONLY option to remove the debuff is absurd. 

[mgsgta3 13]

11 hours ago, Realist said:

Very true, but even though it is sad that people have to choose unofficial just to play the game, ot is even more sad that people do not just stop because the game is in such a bad shape.

unofficials are a good thing, as well as a bad thing. Unofficials make it to where even if the co pant sucks you still play the game because you make it your own game.

even though Unofficials are a better opinion, I still see them as the problem as well. No wonder the devs don’t have to do anything 

 Well... I mean. tht is sad that its how it is(that some people need unofficial to enjoy the game) and thats absolutely how it is for me. I have 6k hours in ark, only 20-30 at the very most are on official. It's my favorite game but you wont catch me on official, and if it only had official I wouldnt play it because the base rates are an insult to my time, plus all the other downsides that are there.
   It is also true that the modders do have a big hand in making the game, Wildcard was hiring modders left and right(For years I was like "That guy who makes the S+ mod deserves employee of the year even though hes not an employee", but...now he is. You can see so much of S+ in Atlas, which is a good thing overall. The modding community and its role is one of the most genuinely good things about Ark(and hopefully will be for Atlas), where just anyone could create something and if it was good enough it would be one of 10 sponsored mods each month( and given so much money a month to have incentive to finish it). Thats really cool(to me), even with it being something WIldcard obviously did for their own good as well.