Some Feedback

[Chimera 8]

I've been playing pretty loyally ever since launch, and here are a few of my suggestions and feedback for you guys. 

 

• Nutrition

This is the most frustrating thing I have ever encountered in any video game. The vitamin system is too punishing. If you're going for realism it's not realistic. I do not have to really balance my food groups in real life, and going outside is enough to keep me health! On a serious note, the vitamin system in Atlas is something akin to what I would see on some extreme weight loss show. "Come on everyone five more squats, and then we're going to eat twenty fish, ten fruit, five pounds of deer, and five bowls of veggies. This will keep us super healthy as we balance our food groups, calorie intake, with our calorie burning prowess! Keep on pushing, now squat two three four, push two three four, twerk two three four. Let's go! Do you feel the burn flowing through your body yet?!" Is what the vitamin system in Atlas makes me think of. No, I did not want to join an extreme workout regimine, and it's just so time consuming. Food also spoils extremely fast, so sailing with some friends and storing food? Forget it, take 5 beds and respawn when you get low vs calorie counting on Atlas. 

• Predators

They are everywhere, all the time, and you're constantly getting gang banged by a pack of snakes, crocs, yetis, wolves, lions, cyclops, etc. Then if you survive taking five feet, in another ten steps there's an alpha whatever that's level 200+ there to one to two shot you depending on your level. If you're going for realistic (judging from the vitamin system) please take a look at the african ecosystem. There's twenty million zebra to a pride of twenty lions. I wouldn't mind running into five wolves on an island if those were the only five wolves on the island. Or ten lions if they were the only ten lions on the island. But it's like we find one cow, sixty wolves, and twenty snakes instead. I would like to see instead personally, six cows, two wolves, one to two snakes on a small island, and scaling numbers to match the size of the island. Now managing the vitamin system as well as the hoard of aggressive predators make survival a chore. 

• New Flag System (Suggestion) 

This will help support my following bullet point on claiming. Anyways the suggestion is as follows: each company can build one claim flag that you set somewhere and you build around it, and it automatically claims all the land around the building to the water. (So an entire island) Each company can only have one Claim flag, and therefore only one island. When the flag is destroyed the claim on the island is destroyed. This would stop people from stealing everyone's island when they go to sleep. I also propose using Dark & Light's house seal system with the flag. You stick gold in the flag and in return it provides and aura that protects your buildings, ships, and tames from being damaged, claimed, and the like while it is powered. This stops people from waking up and having -nothing- and having to restart when they log back on. For all of Dark & Light's faults, this is the one thing they did right. How you deactivate the protect is in the next bullet point. 

• Claiming

This is going to go for both land & ships. The timers for claiming on the PvP server need to be increased. On the PvE server it is managed by decay which is great, so I won't touch on the PvE server much if at all here. But as I said in another thread, PvP should be fun, fair, and balanced. What is balanced about going to sleep for the night waking up, and having your entire base and ship gone because people came and claimed it in 30 minutes? That's not PvP at all, it's just PvE since most people like to watch to see when people are active the most before doing things like that. Now a lot of people like to fall back on: "We're pirates, we should be allowed to steal your stuff!" You my kind reader are absolutely right! You are pirates...PIRATES. Big ships, boom boom, sword fights, oh yeah.  Not NINJAS. Not sneak sneak, creep creep, toss ninja star...oh yeah! No more of this coming under the shadow of sleep, slitting everyone's throats, and stealing all of their stuff. People had to work for what they have, you need to work to earn it. 

On the PvP server, claiming land should be done by a War system like on Dark & Light. They come throw a flag at your island, "arr matey we're going to steal your crap" and you get 8 hours from the flag throw to prepare and then 8 hours of war time where they can try to wipe your base. Therefore it forces the attackers to actually PvP on a PvP server instead of trying to PvE steal all of your hard work when you need to rest. Eight hours should be enough for at least someone in the company to log on and see that they have an attack coming and therefore tell the others in their company. This would encourage PvP, PvP battles, Ship battles, etc. Where both sides can lose stuff, instead of one side getting gibbed because we're humans that need sleep, or we're in a different time zone. 

[Percieval 1,067]

Yes, agree with it. You want to be doing other stuff rather than keeping your vitamins up all the time. 

Also agree with the claiming. Every company is allowed to have 1 island only. This makes trading/raiding trade ships more important. Ofcourse that needs to be looked at balance wise, since some islands can be pretty OP with their resources than other islands. 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Good fedback. Agree on all points. Nutrition definately needs a tweak because managing vitamins shouldn't be an overwhelming focus of your gameplay. It's both unrealistic and bad mechanics. Predators are definately overspawning especially in relation to what lower levels can hope to contend with when forced to seek out what they need to keep those vitamin bars up. Right now this is a pick your poison situation. I've found that taking the 3 skills that reduce vitamin drop rate help a great deal, but players shouldn't be essentially forced into this just to make this mechanic manageable instead of an overriding concern.

I have not yet found a spot to claim so can't comment on that aspect. Only hit an island or two since the freeport.

[Inanna 0]

Overall, these are some great points and I agree! An interesting sidenote is that we are actually seeing an upswing in deficiency diseases in the West (hi scurvy and rickets). Also, modern food and drink has a lot of vitamins and minerals artificially added specifically to combat these diseases. 

 

More on the point, have you and/or your company looking deeper into the cooking skill? So far it seems like recipes learned from that skill line restore multiple vitamins at once while having a longer decay timer. I wonder how having access to ingredients and a chef will impact this aspect of gameplay. I agree it depletes at a ridiculously quick pace, even after investing in the depletion reductions skills.

[MadMage 1]

My own additions to feedback: 

1. Nutrition
The system itself isn't BAD, however foods don't replenish enough hunger/vitamins. I've never needed to eat 8+ steaks in my life to be 'full'; the vitamins also deplete far too quickly and the effects of a SINGLE deficiency are essentially a death sentence. This needs to be adjusted on many levels. 

2. Predators
I fully agree with the OP's points on predators. I would add that a single aggressive predator spawning as a high level alpha will wipe an entire region of all life with little recourse... which is a bit much. 

3. Claiming Land/Flags
I don't have an overall 'fix' solution for this, however I do agree that claim spamming an island is not a good thing overall for the game; perhaps making the flags themselves cost resources would slow down on this, however right now groups of all sizes are simply spamming whatever landmass they hit and if you DON'T spam flags, it is far too easy form someone to roll along and start claiming land immediately next to your base. It needs to be an investment to drop a flag. 

4. Resources
The lack of resources is STILL a major issue; nothing is respawning besides alpha predators at this point, making the game nigh unplayable - I went to a freeport just to look and not a single tree was on the entire landmass. 

5. Population vs Landmass. 
The islands are too small, period. There are a few larger ones, but given the number of players in the game versus the actual total landmass available... basically every island is inhabited and stripped clean already. This requires two fixes: first, there needs to be more than one PVP server; the populations is simply too high as is. Second, the island sizes need to be doubled at least - most islands are little more than rocks. 

6. Structure Integrity. 
Buildings are far too easy to break into. 

7. Server Region Locking. 
The servers need to be region locked and Oceanic/Asian servers added. As it is right now, NA people build bases and ships, then go to bed and then get completely cleaned out by players in opposing time-zones. 

[MadMage 1]

Bumping. 

A modification or reiteration of point #7: 
If the servers are not going to be region locked, then we need to have raid times - as it is right now, NA population goes to bed and wakes up to find they've been raided overnight. This is simply not fair. 

[SoloHan88 23]

I agree with OP. Especially with the claiming. Right now, its just steal while they are offline.