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Captain's Log 21: Hull-up On The Horizon

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2 minutes ago, Archsenex said:

I'm beginning to wonder if people are confusing "small group/solo" with "largely inactive players".  I play with 3 friends, and we have an enormous reserve of gold, even after crewing a war Galleon (70 Crew) and a Whaling Schooner (14 Crew).   We literally cannot spend it as fast as we earn it.  

Kill one whale, get 1200 coins.  Do a single fine map, get 600-700 coins (double on weekends).  Even common maps will often give almost 200.  How are people having a hard time with gold?

 

 

You make a good statement here but keep in mind not everyone play in the same fashion. Some people want to just have a claim to make a beautiful base and not really wander off where they set off. Those are the most penalized. If you do the Treasure / whale yes you're right gold comes in faster. But in involves being away from base often. That's why I think no limitless flag per player is better than upkeep. mate. And keep in mind they will introduce trading through NPC do you want to keep a bit of that gold for trading? Or maybe playing just to pay for upkeep and your Full galeon crew everyday suits you better?

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5 minutes ago, Lorien said:

You make a good statement here but keep in mind not everyone play in the same fashion. Some people want to just have a claim to make a beautiful base and not really wander off where they set off. Those are the most penalized. If you do the Treasure / whale yes you're right gold comes in faster. But in involves being away from base often. That's why I think no limitless flag per player is better than upkeep. mate. And keep in mind they will introduce trading through NPC do you want to keep a bit of that gold for trading? Or maybe playing just to pay for upkeep and your Full galeon crew everyday suits you better?

By the same token, can't a person then trade the resources they gather from their claim to get the gold to afford it?

Our Galleon is only 380 gold a day.  With the reserve we have sitting around doing nothing, we could pay it for about 130 Days.  On an average day, we can easily get 10 or more days worth of pay, just by doing maps while doing supply transfers, taming, gathering, etc. 

LONG before people should worry about paying their crew, they need to worry about feeding their crew.  Those bastards EAT.  I have to log in to gather food and feed the crew once every 2-3 days.  That's honestly more of a time sink than paying them.

Edited by Archsenex
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11 minutes ago, Archsenex said:

By the same token, can't a person then trade the resources they gather from their claim to get the gold to afford it?

Our Galleon is only 380 gold a day.  With the reserve we have sitting around doing nothing, we could pay it for about 130 Days.  On an average day, we can easily get 10 or more days worth of pay, just by doing maps while doing supply transfers, taming, gathering, etc. 

LONG before people should worry about paying their crew, they need to worry about feeding their crew.  Those bastards EAT.  I have to log in to gather food and feed the crew once every 2-3 days.  That's honestly more of a time sink than paying them.

Again you're point stands mate. I'm just putting myself in the pant of solo and small 2-3 crew group. If they don't play like that. and have just one flag, they won't have a lot to sell, right?

I happen to be in a company that is mixed with casual and regular player in PVE and I based my suggestion on that. One of our regular is the type that stays at base improves it all the time, yet rarely goes at seas. Imagine a Solo player like that in a pay 100 Gold per day for Upkeep with just 1 flag and a Brig. I'm sure he would just quit. Try to see it overal. There was also a logic to the per member count. It's natuaral you need more land the more people you have in the Co. It's the whole idea.

About you edit before my reply. Making Salted meat is the answer to that BTW.

Edited by Lorien
Fixed typos and added comment based on quote edits.
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One more thought about Upkeep 100 gold per day(per flags) would have to be the minimum to free up some land for new players. and at that rate Solo and Very small crew would only play to keep what they have. anything lower than that would only be just a dent to Big Co. (From a PVE point of view) I agree PVP is different. That's why I insist thoroughly about per member count.

Edited by Lorien
Added the Per flag specification.

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5 hours ago, Lorien said:


I happen to be in a company that is mixed with casual and regular player in PVE and I based my suggestion on that. One of our regular is the type that stays at base improves it all the time, yet rarely goes at seas. Imagine a Solo player like that in a pay 100 Gold per day for Upkeep with just 1 flag and a Brig. I'm sure he would just quit. Try to see it overal. 

 

The other thing is to think of it in terms of what problem you're trying to solve. 

The problem is that some players grabbed up too much land and now others can't get a claim.

The solutions are:

1.  Put an expiration on claims and make the timer shorter for large numbers of claims -  this was a decent response to the problem.  It should free up any claims held by inactive players, without hurting the active ones, and we haven't seen what the results will be yet.  It will help partially.

2.  Limit the number of claims - This just needs to be done.  There's no way there can be an unlimited number of claims per person.  Assuming the game stays alive, they'll run out of room eventually anyway and have to put more land in, but it'll happen much faster with unlimited claims.

3.  Make claims cost something, either gold or mats -   This won't take the place of limiting the number of claims.  Huge companies would have no problem with it, and people who play a lot and can get gold easily also won't have a problem.  The only people who will lose claims from this are the smalls/solos/casuals, and those are the ones they are trying to help with the changes.  So if this is done, it would have to be in addition to the first 2 fixes.  

Doing all 3 would be a mistake, because you may not need to do #3.  Numbers 1 and 2 would probably fix the problem.  When you add in #3, you've just made another unnecessary hoop for players to jump through.  If you have a player who wants to come in, do some building, some trading, sail around gathering mats and stuff, they've already got plenty of other things they have to do that aren't anything to do with that.  They have to manage their food and vitamins and temperature,  maybe every so often they have to run off and do a useless FOY, they've got to work around all the bugs at this stage of the game,  and they have to spend a lot of time trying to keep safe from griefers.  (Although that's better than it was).  Now finally, after all that, they get to do what they want.

If you add a needless gold payment to claims, now they also have to drop what they want to do and go out and get gold.   People keep saying how easy that is.  They probably use tames for it or have groups that get together for it.  If you don't, it's not at all easy.

I'm pretty sure everyone suggesting this thinks if it happens there won't be a restriction on claims.  That's not true, because a gold cost won't fix the problem for the people they're trying to help.  Does anyone really want this if claims are also restricted...just as some kind of great game feature they think we ought to have?

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6 hours ago, Lorien said:


 It's natuaral you need more land the more people you have in the Co. It's the whole idea.

 

Something else to think about - you don't need more land per person the more people you have in the company.  You need less!

A base for 1 person needs to be big enough to have all the workstations, probably a taming pen, an animal shelter, shipyards, dock space, gardens, etc.  A base for 10 people doesn't need 10 times as much because they are sharing all the big things that take up room.

Lots of the small group and solo people are not really playing alone.  They make friends in their regions and play more as loose groups.  The game should be taking advantage of that by making the alliance system better.  If you could give individual permissions on locks/buildings/animals, etc to an ally, then these people could share space as well, and they wouldn't each need as much space.  Improvements to the alliance system would help with claim space as well.

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I am all for the cost upkeep. IF there is a limit on flags, it will likely be a lot higher than most of you suggest. Making it small (3-5) basically negates the purpose of a taxation bank and the whole tax system.

 

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Please fix last update, now im getting a low fatal error for D3D, never once I got this, now I cant even connect to a server...

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How much longer before u shut down the official servers due to lack of interest and being a big cost if we compare it to the sales and refunds from Atlas alone? That Ark money won't last forever and this project is a pure cashgrab with the result that this game is a crabshack.

Just took a look at Battlemetrics website to see how many people are on the various official servers, I could choose 3 official servers excluded NA PVE, for some reason it's not listed atm or it's somewhere in the list and I haven't found it. Either way, if u rank that list on highest players per server u will see the first page of 10 servers already drops down quickly to just 30 players per grid. Going down the list towards the back this decreases ofcourse, to hit the last 5 pages which are 50 (51 actually) grids/servers where there is not a single player online. From those 50 (51) servers from 3 out of 4 official server lists there are only 4 Freeport regions in it, 2 Central Maws(?), and 4 Lawless regions. So still 40 servers where areas are claimable that nobody is online at this very moment.

51 servers without players

52 servers with 1 player

70 servers with 2 players

65 servers with 3 players

70 servers with 4 players

61 servers with 5 players

58 servers with 6 players

43 servers with 7 players

34 servers with 8 players

40 servers with 9 players

+-110 servers with 10 to 15 players

40 servers with 16 - 25 players

13 servers with 26 - 55 players

1 server with 129 players online which is currently NA PVP E9

 

Even when NA PVE would be included I doubt this list would become much better. Now take in mind that each server has up to 4 islands where these players are also (possibly) divided over just to give an idea how much fun it must be to play Atlas nowadays. I'm not gonna take the time to try and add all those numbers up to see how many people are actually stlil playing on official servers, was hoping there was a website that could show me this by just selecting the 4 official ones showing how many players were on each but couldn't find it yet. Sure these numbers are still to get slightly higher as there is a weekend starting for most and well if the trend continues this weekend we'll peak around 12k maybe 13 if lucky but over the last weeks the playerbase peaks in weekends drop off around 2-4k players a week so yeah, have fun while it lasts.

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2 hours ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

Lots of words

I'm confused. Whats the point of posts like these?

I'm sure the devs know the numbers.

I'm sure the people playing on those servers see the numbers on the servers that they play on.

I'm sure the people still enjoying what they're doing in the game are still playing.

I'm sure there's a good portion of people who are in maintainence mode, log in to reset their claims/lawless timers and bounce.

I'm sure there's a significant portion of people who just left completely, and don't even bother checking the forums.

 

I'm just confused why a few people insist on doomsaying constantly, on every post. Are you expecting the people who are still having fun to suddenly say "Oh, shit, the towel is right. This game sucks, I'm leaving!"? Are you expecting the devs to suddenly say "Wow, I had no clue what our player numbers are. president mozambique, shut down everything! Thanks for telling us, Mr Towel" Are you expecting the people who quit to sit there, quietly chuckling and stroking their goatees, to suddenly say "I'm glad I still read the boards for this game I dont care about any more. Thanks for letting me know that less people are playing, Senor Towel, heres a Starbucks gift card and some internet points for your crack investigative reporting"

 

On a side note, checking server numbers on a weekday, when a large part of the players are at work or school in the US, and is a weekend evening in Europe is kinda not the best judge of any kind of numbers.

https://atlasgame.info seems to update fairly quickly, and has all 4 servers up, just in case you wanted to look at NA-PVE and yell about how the sky is falling because people are at work and school.

Edited by MeatSammich
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5 hours ago, Jozzie McTowel said:

 

 if the trend continues this weekend we'll peak around 12k maybe 13 if lucky but over the last weeks the playerbase peaks in weekends drop off around 2-4k players a week so yeah, have fun while it lasts.

And yet, here you are.

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Sounds great with only 1 problem I still can't play due to a bug? Sent 3 tickets no response ask the community for help they tried but didn't help? This was after a patch I got on 2-8-19 so ya haven't played in awhile I be been on to try and do something but I have up. I am a new player I play for a week and then the bug hit and haven't really got into the since. Don't really think you guys even care since I not even got to talk with a real person other then the community. This is your game you responsibility.

 

If I had to say so a file needs replacing and or fixed which I do not know how to do

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56 minutes ago, KevinNight said:

Sounds great with only 1 problem I still can't play due to a bug? Sent 3 tickets no response ask the community for help they tried but didn't help? This was after a patch I got on 2-8-19 so ya haven't played in awhile I be been on to try and do something but I have up. I am a new player I play for a week and then the bug hit and haven't really got into the since. Don't really think you guys even care since I not even got to talk with a real person other then the community. This is your game you responsibility.

 

If I had to say so a file needs replacing and or fixed which I do not know how to do

Yup, the only official who ever talked to me was this forum moderator in terms of insulting the devs. Plenty of topics and bug reports are not looked at and yea the support ticket is just a placeholder right now.

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This game's playerbase is in freefall right now.. You're still clinging to mechanics that shouldn't be in the game.

1. The age mechanic

Nobody bought this game to worry about age, or hunt a fountain, people bought the game to be pirates. You know; what you advertised the game as? Every time I have to think about that fountain, or my character slowly looking  a way I don't want them to look, I just get annoyed; it just makes me, and many others want to quit, because we know the hunt for the fountain NEVER ENDS. It must end... Maybe you should even just give eternal youth on the third run when the buff no longer stacks, that way atleast we know we don't have to keep running it over and over. It is that idea that it never ends that really puts people off.

It is like we have to be tortured every month. Sure, you removed the debuff.. But no one is going to pass up that buff... Just remove the whole thing, make age a slider in the character creator; or for the love of god just give us eternal youth when the buff is capped. 

2. Convoluted melee

Melee is just useless right now.. It is utterly embarrassing actually.. You've completely overcomplicated it; you need to keep it simple. There are many ways to fix this.. But the main problem with melee is obvious.. The mobility. Either you need a way of melee players being able to prevent people from running (not exclusively the very bottom talent); or you need a way to hit people who are mobile when you've closed the gap. Right now, all you have are people shooting eachother with guns, and fire arrows.. It is brainless.

3. Anti-stealth gameplay

How is a small company supposed to compete with a big company when you can't do anything against them without being alerted? You give players too much information on stuff happening. What If I wanted to turn a mega tribe against a mega tribe? Play on their insecurities by attacking them at just the right time, and trigger a war? But noooo, you don't let us attack something without telling them precisely who attacked it. Stupidity. Let us use our intelligence to trick and deceive people, otherwise it becomes a game about pure brawn. Boring predictable brawn; where numbers define everything.

You don't let us do anything smart, you just let the big dumb dumbs domineer over everyone because you tell them everything they need to know .Where is the subterfuge??? Where is the guile?. You're taking these important elements out of your game that the little man uses to manipulate the bigger tribes.

You want your game to simulate a real world political dynamics; start with this.

Can't even sink a ship, or kill a tame without them being alerted.. COME ON. Stop it. This is ridiculous. You're just helping the big tribes more and more; and look where that has got you? The log should be entirely anonymous, as should the popups on screen.

Claims being placed actually make sense to be announced, as they are claims, something you're announcing as your own. Everything else ? No.

4. Turret based defense

If conan exiles can make a game without turrets, you can. Turrets just ruin ark quite frankly; the game is a success no doubt; but turrets just make big tribes untouchable. You add them here in the same manner, and say goodbye you your small companies, aka : the majority of your players. 

5. Claim based ranking

There was another thread that aptly pointed this out : "top companies are NOT top companies". This is correct. The people who you've proclaimed are top, are not actually top. Claim quantity is not a viable measurement for who is and is not the top company, and this whole idea of "top" should be revised. 

6. Fast travel

Nothing helps the big tribes more than this ability; it seriously needs to go. It just allows these huge tribes to greed monger all of the land easier; it should be scrapped asap, and you should only be able to spawn on a bed in your grid, or it is back to starter island with you.

 

Edited by Adfax
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Resources will become an issue with your changes. Don't so it. So many will build and block resources from spawning. Start by making one shipyard to make all the ships will help. 

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I would like to comment on the statement made by @Adfax

Quote

1. The age mechanic

Nobody bought this game to worry about age, or hunt a fountain, people bought the game to be pirates. You know; what you advertised the game as? Every time I have to think about that fountain, or my character slowly looking  a way I don't want them to look, I just get annoyed; it just makes me, and many others want to quit, because we know the hunt for the fountain NEVER ENDS. It must end... Maybe you should even just give eternal youth on the third run when the buff no longer stacks, that way atleast we know we don't have to keep running it over and over. It is that idea that it never ends that really puts people off.

It is like we have to be tortured every month. Sure, you removed the debuff.. But no one is going to pass up that buff... Just remove the whole thing, make age a slider in the character creator; or for the love of god just give us eternal youth when the buff is capped. 

Personally, I like the Age mechanic. It adds to the game play. However I would like to see it slightly different, more like the original idea they had for it. That is that over a period of time you get older and eventually die (as you would IRL), once you die  (and this can be based on pure age limit i.e. 100 years, or based on the amount of damage you have taken over your life, much like Star Citizens age mechanic) your character is recreated as a young teenager and your skills need to be relearned, however you get to keep the levels that your ancestor obtained through finding discoveries. I think this would add more gameplay, and a more realistic way to allow you to rebuild your character, other than using a silly mind wipe tonic.

Quote

2. Convoluted melee

Melee is just useless right now.. It is utterly embarrassing actually.. You've completely overcomplicated it; you need to keep it simple. There are many ways to fix this.. But the main problem with melee is obvious.. The mobility. Either you need a way of melee players being able to prevent people from running (not exclusively the very bottom talent); or you need a way to hit people who are mobile when you've closed the gap. Right now, all you have are people shooting eachother with guns, and fire arrows.. It is brainless.

I absolutely agree, the melee mechanic is ridiculous. It should be more like ARKs melee mechanic. The auto lock is annoying and can be used against you (I appreciate it can be turned off, but then whats the point of having it in the first place.)

Quote

3. Anti-stealth gameplay

How is a small company supposed to compete with a big company when you can't do anything against them without being alerted? You give players too much information on stuff happening. What If I wanted to turn a mega tribe against a mega tribe? Play on their insecurities by attacking them at just the right time, and trigger a war? But noooo, you don't let us attack something without telling them precisely who attacked it. Stupidity. Let us use our intelligence to trick and deceive people, otherwise it becomes a game about pure brawn. Boring predictable brawn; where numbers define everything.

You don't let us do anything smart, you just let the big dumb dumbs domineer over everyone because you tell them everything they need to know .Where is the subterfuge??? Where is the guile?. You're taking these important elements out of your game that the little man uses to manipulate the bigger tribes.

You want your game to simulate a real world political dynamics; start with this.

Can't even sink a ship, or kill a tame without them being alerted.. COME ON. Stop it. This is ridiculous. You're just helping the big tribes more and more; and look where that has got you? The log should be entirely anonymous, as should the popups on screen.

Claims being placed actually make sense to be announced, as they are claims, something you're announcing as your own. Everything else ? No.

Once again I completely agree. I ended up HAVING to play with a Mega tribe, as we as a tribe of around 24 were constantly being annihilated by the 50-100+ tribes. We could never attack them as they would know it was us, and would immediately retaliate and wipe us. Therefore the only way we could enjoy the game and have any chance of surviving was to join up with other bigger tribes.  I can see that if this mechanic doesn't change, no matter what else changes in the game, the only way you can play this game and enjoy it,  is to be as a larger tribe. In ARK we would drown a member of a tribe we want to be accused of the attack, and simply knock out a tamed dino on the side we wanted to attack, and place the players ID tag inside. Then more times than not the tribe would find the tag assume the other tribe had attacked them, and go raid them. Job done. Espionage is not possible if we all know who attacked us.

Quote

4. Turret based defense

If conan exiles can make a game without turrets, you can. Turrets just ruin ark quite frankly; the game is a success no doubt; but turrets just make big tribes untouchable. You add them here in the same manner, and say goodbye you your small companies, aka : the majority of your players. 

| disagree with Adfaxs comments here. I believe that Turrets are the only way a small tribe can ever take time away from their base, whether it be for exploration, & conquest or just going to work/school, time off or sleeping. The only other option is to make the buildings and ships overly strong, or add permanent raid protection (both on and offline). The game-play with turrets is to find a way around them (either by Tanking them till they run out of ammo, destroying them with explosives and cannons, or killing the AI manning them) that's just part of the game, and a fun part. I want this game to be hard, i don't want it to just be a simple run around offline raiding game where I can break through a door in 2 seconds and steal all their stuff with no consequences.

Quote

5. Claim based ranking

There was another thread that aptly pointed this out : "top companies are NOT top companies". This is correct. The people who you've proclaimed are top, are not actually top. Claim quantity is not a viable measurement for who is and is not the top company, and this whole idea of "top" should be revised. 

I agree, however I would go further and say that really who cares who's in the top 10, its an ego thing, and I have no time for it. If you must have it, then make it based on something like the length of time you have held the most land, or maybe the richest top 10 based on the amount of gold you have (wouldn't that be more true to RL).

Number of players - Nope.
Number of Ships or Structures owned - Wouldnt work.
Number of friends on the server - Awww bless. Nope.

The only way this ego trip could work is by the amount of gold owned or the length of time land held, as already stated.

Quote

6. Fast travel

Nothing helps the big tribes more than this ability; it seriously needs to go. It just allows these huge tribes to greed monger all of the land easier; it should be scrapped asap, and you should only be able to spawn on a bed in your grid, or it is back to starter island with you.

On this point I Absolutely agree. When we eventually joined a mega tribe, they had SO Many beds, literally hidden on every island, that all we had to do to level up, was jump from bed to bed. I took me less than an hour to get over 150 extra levels, that should have taken me weeks if not months to get. If you are an XP junky and thats why you play then great, woohoo  you've read the last page of the book without reading the story, great for you. (Slight touch of Irony). However If the devs want us to actually play the game as intended, then they need to make the beds Individual or limited. 

Thanks Adfax for some great and useful thoughts.

In additional I also believe that What the current game needs is for the players to get reputations., and for there to be an NPC Royal Navy (Police). Then for those players that like offline raiding and attacking targets that they are not in an official declared WAR with, they would get a worse reputation. If they are seen on the seas by the NPC royal Navy they will be attacked.

The Royal Navy should (like the Ships of the damned), come in various sized ships. But the Royal navy unlike the ships of the damned should only attack ships with players on that have a poor reputation. Therefore if the player with the bad reputation jumped overboard the Navy ship would target on the player with the poor reputation and not continue after the ship.

At the end of the day, why penalise the crew mates when maybe only one person has been raiding.

Obviously the worse the reputation the bigger the aggro range of the player, and the easier it is for the NPC royal Navy to detect.

Reputation should not reset when you die, but should only reset when you die of old age or fountain of youth regen. To regain your reputation, you should get a reputation increase for every game Month that you don't attack someone. The worse your reputation the longer it takes to get rid of it. This would force more official wars to be fought, and get rid of a lot of the offline raiding.

We could also have Law enforcers walking around the Free ports. Which would then arrest or kill law breakers as detected.

If arrested, the criminal would  only be released by the Law enforcers on receipt of a substantial fine. The amount would be based on the level of their reputation.
Once the fine is paid they would lose  approx 50% of their reputation, and a 30 minute armistice would be granted, before the law enforcer would be allowed to recapture the assailant, giving them enough time to finish their business in Freeport, and leave the area.

Payment of the fine should be in person (i.e. a crew mate from the same company would have to physically attend a freeport Naval Office to make the payment). In the event that the perpetrator is a solo player, there should be the option to be released,and to bring the payment to the enforcers within a time limit (lets say 1 hour). Failure to make the payment will double the fine, and increase the negative reputation substantially.

You could also have a Law Enforcer on board the Royal Naval ships, that could arrest the assailant at sea, and take them to the nearest Freeport for detention, until the fine is paid.

At all times the reputation of a player should be visible, as per the current char/company name.

https://www.playatlas.com/index.php?/forums/topic/46983-royal-navy-npc-law-reputation-enforcement/

 

 

Anyways these are just the ravings of a mad man who can really see a great potential in this game, so long as both the devs and the player base don't treat it as just another BS PVP kill everything game, and can see the bigger potential.

 

Edited by Critor

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