Lessons learned from the MMOS that have gone before?

[MisterMyztik 59]

So, I've spent a lot of time in MMOs since my first step into UO in 1997 and there are a lot of things which Grapeshot appear to have ... overlooked? 

I truly have high hopes for the game and want to see the community bounce back and thrive eventually but some of the key building blocks appear to be lacking here.. 

 

Community Volunteer GMs (eg http://www.uoguide.com/Volunteers ), support tickets are literally just being used as bug reports, I understand we are effectively alpha testers and honestly I'm happy to do it! But there are so very many community members who would readily set aside an hour or two of their time to assist others in the community with being stuck or getting removed from their own company etc. You would of course need to administer these volunteers and (why I suspect this isnt being done) track what they do, which would require significant logging and tracking of items/admin commands etc. 

Events & Story arcs, this goes hand in hand with the Community Volunteer GMs. I dont believe we need quests, but there is so much potential for story arcs and random spawn events, even if it were as simple as a manned ghost ship. The game is great for exploring, but once you've been somewhere, nothing generally changes there.. that has a severely limited lifespan.

Network:Client communications, it seems like the client has an awful lot of control over positioning of your character and even your vessel(?) in Atlas, far more than it should, this in past MMOs has resulted in speedhacks, wallhacks, teleporting etc. I hope that you guys employ some of the old MMO chief network engineers with the experience to get that right. 

Randomness!, things are very static here, an island has the same spawn, a grid has the same whales, the ghost ship sails the same route and the trade ships which appear to be the only thing you could consider to be "random" are absolutely pointless... Embrace the exploration aspect, throw in some randomness so that on your way back from exploring you run across something different to the journey out... Roaming world bosses, random shipwrecks, fish up a sea serpent (or whale? since its already in the game) on occasion, allow a few of the army of the dead minions to roam an island occasionally. 

 

Just a couple late night thoughts/suggestions. 

Looking forward to seeing the game grow into something great. 

Edited February 14, 2019 by MisterMyztik

[DannyUK 308]

This game should have been released for free if all they want is testers and not bother with tickets. People wouldn't have the right to complain about it.

Paying money for it is unacceptable when nothing is done in regards of stamping out exploiters and cheaters. You are right, they are using the ticket system as a bug report feature and not to look into these problems on a 1 by 1 basis which is unfortunate and why the game should be free to play for testing.

People have left in droves and I don't blame them, my personal opinion is the game is in the wrong hands, if it was in the hands of better developers we might be talking 1 of the best games to be released.

I'm having fun playing it right now but I know as soon as I get raided in PVE with people bringing SOTD in I will be leaving it and playing another game. i won't even bother submitting a ticket because it's pointless. We've paid money for the game, yes to test things out I get that but you expect some help when it comes to cheaters and such, they are not worried about that at this stage.

[Shintai 117]

The client offloading is a modern concept to host discount servers, even down to FPS games. Clients need more computational requirements as well, often multiple times more combined than the server would. I guess this is due to a mix of fast sloppy coding and cost effective solutions. A few games today still use proper server side handling, but overall MMOs are at a dead end cheating wise. From the looks of it cheating in ARK is just unofficially accepted as something there will always be and I don´t see it any different in Atlas.

 

The same limitation to computational abilities of the server is also applied to world dynamics and client rendering abilities. Again, not going to be changed or fixed unfortunately.

[MisterMyztik 59]

With where the development is at currently id rather be playing it as an alpha and having regular server wipes.. higher resource/tame rates etc so we could goof off and really test things... it feels like the game is destined to wipe since the grids are filled with inactive ghost towns of players who have left atlas entirely or are hedging their bets retaining their official "kingdom" whilst playing unofficial. That combined with the slow resource gathering make it pretty unrewarding trying to build grandiose.. and the small builds look attrocious dotted all over the world.

Edited February 14, 2019 by MisterMyztik

[MisterMyztik 59]

Can we also please get a usable chat system? 

The sheer toxicity in many grids is disgusting to the point where you have to turn off the chat box, and therefore cannot communicate in game with company mates let alone other broader community members.

An Ignore feature, chat channels etc would be very much appreciated.