State of Atlas (post-May update)

[Goombay 21]

Dear Jat/Dollie/other Grapeshot staff,

 

The Ice Cave is brilliant, well done. Cargo racks, the harpoon and new weapons as well. I’m not into tames, but the new ones are cute enough. But let’s address the torpedo in the room.

 

We’re all having a wonderful time loading up common schooners with one-sided 5 torpedo launcher builds and griefing legendary ships (video coming soon). But even a cursory glance at concurrent players proves this update, combined with your completely arbitrary and now-reverted bans, has mortally wounded your game.

 

As an eternal optimist, I think you can recover if you remove torpedos and take a moment to balance them, much like you did with explosive barrels. In my estimation, this needs to happen this weekend or you’ll face a dramatic loss in game testers. You may or may not care about this, but if you do, please continue reading.

 

The primary mode of PvP in your game is ship combat. Without it, you don’t have a game. Land combat is buggy, laggy, and generally unenjoyable for most people. If more than 30 people are in the grid, it’s virtually unplayable. 

 

The end-game objective, as far as I can tell, consists of farming rare resources, finding powerful blueprints, building a strong ship, and fighting your enemies with it. That has kept a lot of us around through the six months of testing so far.

 

Common torpedos on a common schooner are doing 9-11.5k damage to ships. That typically means taking 1-3 planks off a ship with anything less than 180% durability mythical/legendary defenses. If more than one torpedo lands, goodbye to half your ship, regardless of quality.

 

The resulting meta is common schooners with 3-5 torpedo launchers running at 15-20 percent weight. Most major companies aren’t letting their blueprinted ships leave the harbor because of this, as I’m sure you’ve heard on your Discord. Yes, the cost of torpedos is punishing, but quite easy for advanced companies to manage. I feel the most regret for smaller groups who can’t farm those resources and thereby stand no chance.

 

Torpedos are an interesting, visually appealing addition to the game. With some tweaking, I think they would be fantastic. But as it stands, they’ve removed all impetus to pursue your intended ship combat advancement hierarchy. 

 

For now, we’ll take advantage of this obviously unintended and broken meta. I do hope you’ll keep your word, listen to your player base, and make the necessary changes. If not, you may as well continue investing development time into tames and PvE mechanics, as people clearly aren’t sticking around to sail the 2-4 hours necessary to find another populated grid worth engaging. 

 

Thank you, and have a great weekend.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

19 hours ago, Goombay said:

Dear Jat/Dollie/other Grapeshot staff,

 

The Ice Cave is brilliant, well done. Cargo racks, the harpoon and new weapons as well. I’m not into tames, but the new ones are cute enough. But let’s address the torpedo in the room.

 

We’re all having a wonderful time loading up common schooners with one-sided 5 torpedo launcher builds and griefing legendary ships (video coming soon). But even a cursory glance at concurrent players proves this update, combined with your completely arbitrary and now-reverted bans, has mortally wounded your game.

 

As an eternal optimist, I think you can recover if you remove torpedos and take a moment to balance them, much like you did with explosive barrels. In my estimation, this needs to happen this weekend or you’ll face a dramatic loss in game testers. You may or may not care about this, but if you do, please continue reading.

 

The primary mode of PvP in your game is ship combat. Without it, you don’t have a game. Land combat is buggy, laggy, and generally unenjoyable for most people. If more than 30 people are in the grid, it’s virtually unplayable. 

 

The end-game objective, as far as I can tell, consists of farming rare resources, finding powerful blueprints, building a strong ship, and fighting your enemies with it. That has kept a lot of us around through the six months of testing so far.

 

Common torpedos on a common schooner are doing 9-11.5k damage to ships. That typically means taking 1-3 planks off a ship with anything less than 180% durability mythical/legendary defenses. If more than one torpedo lands, goodbye to half your ship, regardless of quality.

 

The resulting meta is common schooners with 3-5 torpedo launchers running at 15-20 percent weight. Most major companies aren’t letting their blueprinted ships leave the harbor because of this, as I’m sure you’ve heard on your Discord. Yes, the cost of torpedos is punishing, but quite easy for advanced companies to manage. I feel the most regret for smaller groups who can’t farm those resources and thereby stand no chance.

 

Torpedos are an interesting, visually appealing addition to the game. With some tweaking, I think they would be fantastic. But as it stands, they’ve removed all impetus to pursue your intended ship combat advancement hierarchy. 

 

For now, we’ll take advantage of this obviously unintended and broken meta. I do hope you’ll keep your word, listen to your player base, and make the necessary changes. If not, you may as well continue investing development time into tames and PvE mechanics, as people clearly aren’t sticking around to sail the 2-4 hours necessary to find another populated grid worth engaging. 

 

Thank you, and have a great weekend.

Very well written, well reasoned, and clearly presented. Kudos. This is what high quality feedback looks like.

[Martyn 246]

I would suggest details in balancing.

Not used torpedos in the game myself, nor seen them in videos.  But I have experience with real torpedos irl.

I'd make them travel only in straight lines when fired.

Give them drop off, so they sink after a certain time period.

Require an aiming period, to be fired.  Requiring the aiming ship to slow down.

Have a time delay prior to arming. So they need to be fired from outside of a minimum distance, otherwise they do no damage.

Stuff like that.. torpedos are great when they work, but often miss unless they have tracking built into them.  Very much a fire and forget weapon system.

Damage wise, limit them to something around the damage of a small or medium cannon ball.  Afterall, the amount of weight the weapon carries, there's limitations placed on the engine and distances it can be used.

Alternatively, change them from an explosive warhead, to a stun charge.. perhaps to assist in taming crabs or stunning monsters of the deep, removing them from pvp gameplay completely.

Edited June 8, 2019 by Martyn

[Goombay 21]

Credit where credit is due, Grapeshot. Well done balancing torpedoes.

[Captain Stabbin 34]

Excellent post!

In a game like world of warships torpedos are fun and necessary but in a sailing ship game they are completely OP at any design.

Now if the devs are going to add ironclad ships in the future perhaps they should be re-evaluated.

[Gremlin_senpai 9]

peak players in EU PVP is like 1-1.3k now. Almost impossible to find engaging experiences out on the seas, or have huge battles (which wouldnt be possible with the lag anyway).

Without player interaction, people will get bored faster; its a pretty quick downward spiral.

Ship pvp meta is also pretty bad, every brig is basically just 12gunports + a few back canons, sniping each other side by side. Used to be so much more fun with the heavy canon builds, even if there was a tendancy for shotguns. Atleast every ship looked different, and you had to spyglass it to determine how you wanted to engage the fight.

infinite grenade spam and horses also make land pvp fairly tedious.

Game is in a very bad state, but noone is going to want to come back if they know unplayable lag still occurs when player counter goes above 70, thats got to be the first priority

[DocHolliday 366]

Server performance is why I hate engaging in land PvP.  I tend to stick to the seas and if I am required on land I run logistics.  I grew up playing twitch shooters like Counterstrike so dealing with this games performance drives me nuts.  I'll find another way to help my company win the day.