General Play feedback

[phaylen 7]

I can only imagine how difficult it is to sift through the posts or anger and outrage to find the golden nuggets of actual feedback rather than aggressive complaints so I'll start by saying I love the game. Bugs and all. I appreciate it's status as an early access release and how quickly you've addressed so many game breaking issues.

I understand that a lot of your focus has been primarily on the PVP experience and bringing it into balance, reducing exploits and trying to ensure a quality, fair but still competitive experience for players of that demographic. 

I play on a PVE server, so a lot of those fixes, while necessary, haven't improved our experience.

Here are a few things we deal with as players who don't have huge companies, fleets of battleships and have chosen to play through the adventure without the PVP element.

Temperature is an issue. Investing in fortitude doesn't scale with the extreme heat we experience on every island, regardless of it being tropical or temperate. Some of us have spent 70 points in fortitude and still die from repeatedly during unnecessary daily heatwaves - and they happen every single day. We invited some new players who had not experienced ATLAS before to join us. The spawned at the freeport and died within minutes of heatstroke. Then, they chain died from it. They tried everything- Jumping into the ocean, drinking fresh water, standing under the awnings of the freeport buildings. Cloth clothes didn't help them survive. There is no ability to stave the consequences of extreme, 141 F heat daily. 

What we discovered is that we have to actually leave a island biome and move into open sea to escape on a boat. That means, drifting along side an island, two feet to the left it can b 141 degrees, and two feet right it can be 75 degrees. The problem here is new players do not have ships. Even houses that provide the shelter icon do not reduce the temperature, and while yo can bundle up in the cold, you can only take off so much before you just submit to the inevitable and die until it's night- that leaves nighttime the only real viable time to get anything done. Occasional heatwaves are acceptable- but at level 70 with 50 points in fortitude, in cloth clothes, sitting on an ostrich, wearing a parrot, dying from heat every day cycle is arduous. Nothing helps.

Those players we invited? They quit. All three of them. Dying due to unavoidable circumstances in the first 15 minutes is a bad user experience.

 

Pet Leveling

Again we have an issue with scaling. When our pets level, they get, o the average, between 2 to 8 points of health added to their pool. That is inconsequential.
Putting points into their melee may improve it 0.2% - meaning a single swipe does virtually no more damage post level than it did prior to the point investment.
I understand you wouldn't want "SuperPets" that provide the proverbial "I Win" button, but the achievement of leveling a pet lacks any sort of reward. There is no sense of accomplishment in return for the effort. The gain is so minute that there are some players not even bothering to spend points gained via leveling their pets until it is actually worth it. Weight is probbably, thus far, the only thing that provides a modicum of assistance to the player.

Breeding
As mentioned before, temperature. temperature, temperature, temperature. It bakes a newborn on day one. We've had players build custom housing, testing with different forms of shelter to see the disparities in insulation. No matter the material of the shelter, wood, thatch or stone, death come on the first heatwave. We're trying to work around this by building out onto the sea as far as we can to reduce the temperature damage. It is not fun to wait 4-9 hours for a birth just to find that the results are nonviable due to elements outside our control. 

Age
I'm now 88 and the Fountain of youth is well outside my reach. As a small company without outside assistance, we do not have access to the abilities or strength required to access the fountain of youth or the resources required for it. When the debuff comes in, I'll likely have to re-roll my character. 

I expected a much different mechanic when it comes to aging. When I chose my Family Name, I thought that implied I would have access to future legacy characters. for example, I might have to start again at level 1, but benefit from a legacy buff, as my characters child. Not only would that have demonstrated my playtime invested, but paid tribute to my achievements made throughout the game. I expected I'd have inherited all of my dead players content, but have to crawl up the ranks again to achieve her greatness! I was excited about the concept of generations and carrying a family name through the eras. 

The fountain of youth is indeed something at least, but it feels more like a simple reset that I have to go to great lengths to find and enlist the help of more people than I even know. It is still a disappointing mechanic in ATLAS where dying is easier than managing all the mechanics in play. We have a running joke when vitamins are low or we're minutes from heatstroke. "Eat Sh*t and die" is the quickest resolve. Hilarious as it is, it shouldn't be such a trial to simply survive that death is so often the only answer. It often feels like ATLAS is the game that doesn't really want you to play it as much as it demands you die in it over and over until you simply quit. A look at the reddit demonstrates that many share those same sentiments. It can be so unreasonably unforgiving to the player. 

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. And thanks for all your hard work.