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Yo! Trying something new here, this is more of an informal blog-style post where I’d like to do a bit of a post mortem on recent events. That could be following a large update, a tradeshow, an announcement of a new feature, etc. My aim with these kinds of posts is to provide some additional insight, it will be less about what’s coming/promotional content and more real talk from myself. Fair warning, my musings can be pretty verbose. Unlike the Captain’s Log, these won’t be made on a regular basis, but when I feel they might be necessary -- keep in mind, at indie studios people tend to wear many hats and whilst I am the Lead CM, I also work on the development side of the project, this was also the case for ARK too For the first Post Mortem, we can talk about Patch v10, bug reports, late-night deployments and the timelines surrounding them, support tickets, as well as rollbacks. Patch v10 So! This was a pretty big update, it dropped later than we intended due to some personal problems (people being sick), and then needing the extra time following that for people to get everything ready, as well as our QA team to run through it all. The delay did allow us to bring in more tweaks and fixes, which is always nice. I am not going to go into much detail about the patch itself because we’ve had two Captain Log’s which share the notes, but I do want to address some of the feedback and reports we’ve received since. If you want to know what came in v10, as well as our big announcements for the week, you can read about it on Captain’s Log #16: So this patch didn’t come without its flaws, and to be honest, it would be delusional to think any major one would, especially whilst we’re in this highly iterative state. Our development team, including QA (yes they exist, and they work damn hard and are often underappreciated in this industry), aim to catch and resolve every patch-related issue before it gets out to you, but we’re human and sometimes things can slip through the cracks -- whether that’s due to design, lack of numbers (tens of thousands are much more likely to identify problems!), or just something that was overlooked. Our style of development is to work hard, fast and get the changes out to you guys as soon as possible, though we still run checks to make sure it's stable and it meets our release goals. We don’t like to sit on updates, if it checks out, let’s get it out there! Hence the frequent late-night deployments, though some nights aren’t as lively as tonight, lol. Our goal is to ensure that ATLAS feels like a vastly different experience in a short period of time due to the improvements and changes we’re making on a frequent basis. This means that comparing ATLAS day 1 will be very different to ATLAS day 30 and then again to ATLAS day 100, so on so forth. This will come in the form of optimisation, bug squashing, rebalancing, and new content. This is how we develop titles as a studio, especially during Early Access. We find it effective and enjoyable. Sure it comes with its frustrations, and there could be adjustments made to our processes but the same could be said about any style. Not that we won’t make changes should we deem them necessary, but what you’re experiencing now in terms of the pace and size of updates, is most likely what you’ll be experiencing throughout Early Access. Updates coming at you harder and faster than the busted Ship of the Damned did in v10.72 . (Note: That patch did go through QA, sadly we didn’t expect our change to effect SOTD and had it patched out as soon as possible. My condolences to any seafarers who lost their lives and had their boats sunk). Now onto the hot topics! I may not cover everything, but I’ll try to cover what I believe are the important ones to address. If you think I’ve missed something, get at me: Discord: Jat#0001 Twitter: twitter.com/Jatheish Reddit: /u/Jatheish (not Jaton… also that was JATonreddit guys.. not Jaton…) Additionally, you could also reach out to Dollie! My co-captain on all things Community. You might recognize her from the forums, Discord, or from the Official ARK PVP Community. We’ll do a proper introduction post for her on Monday, in the Captain’s Log. Discord: Dollie#0001 I won’t reply to everything, in fact, I probably only respond to like 20-30% but I do read the majority of my messages, unless it gets super chaotic and impossible to keep up with. E.g you crash my browser/phone/discord (which has happened far more often than I’d like). This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway, I would like to reply to everything, but I learnt very early on that is not possible. I remember when I first started at Wildcard in 2015 and tried to respond to every Facebook and Steam comment. Mental. I will respond to the critical reports, assuming I am still actively investigating it (or the team is). OKAY. Now we’re really onto the hot topics. Sorry, I did say my musings can be pretty verbose. It’s crap when there are platforms with a word limit! Thankfully, I don’t think that’s the case on the forums, but I guess we’ll find out. Lawless Regions: Spawns, Resources, Temps. and Weather Shortly after launch, we temporarily hacked up a change which turned Lawless Regions into Homeservers and enabled some special settings on them which prevented Alpha Creatures from spawning, it had faster respawns when it comes to harvestables, and weather events (or might have just been rain) were disabled. In the latest update, we removed these changes and have set it back to our initial design. These servers are meant to be unclaimable land to allow players to gain a foothold once they’ve left Freeports, but they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS! Based on our investigation thus far, resources are certainly respawning on these grids, and the signs point to the structure spawn-prevention radius causing confusion and leading to the reports. This system is native to the game but wasn't present during our initial launch due to Lawless Regions being listed as Homeservers, so from a technical point of view, it's intentional, however, I know better than to rule out possibilities for other issues (hence they're investigating). There's an argument that the radius itself needs to be adjusted, so we'll have to think on that. Keep in mind that this can change, whilst there may be some things we’re unlikely to change, it doesn’t mean that we’re set in stone. We’ll keep you posted if we have any updates! A quick note about the weather systems, these are the initial Early Access launch systems we have in place. We’d like to take it further, beyond just having fog, cold, heat, and rain! Though we believe there are certainly other things we need to prioritise which will have more of an impact on the game… such as volcanoes and of course the holy trinity of: bug fixes, optimisation, and balance! Plus. seeing that we’re on the topic of weather, I think I should mention temps too. Yes, they suck in some places, and we have resolved a lot of these in the most recent patch, as well as made it more clear when you’re experiencing a certain weather event, but there are more fixes to come, hopefully in the coming days. One of our designers is meticulously going through all the various biomes (we have a lot) and adjusting the temperature time of day and armour insulation values to make sure we’re hitting the sweet spot. Combat and Creatures: Guns, Melee Weapons, and Armour The overall goal with these changes was to ensure sure that weapons were more effective against higher armoured players, whilst not making the lower tiers completely worthless. The primary change you should notice is that the weapons themselves are more piercing and have had their base damage reduced to reflect this. Clearly, this had some knock-on effects on how players dealt with creatures (tamed and wild), which we expected but to know the full extent of the changes it is best witnessed in a live environment. The gameplay/balance team are consuming your feedback and will make adjustments when necessary, it’s possible that there may be some potential tweaks too with some multipliers which are being looked at right now. Not going to confirm anything is being changed right this instant, but just acknowledge that we’re aware of the feedback and it is actively being discussed internally. Tamed Creatures I figure this needed its own mini mention itself. ATLAS isn’t a taming orientated game. Yes, we have it, and we plan to expand on it, as well as introduce more creatures for you add to your arsenal, however, the creatures themselves are meant to be supplemental and not the main focal point. Prior to v10, we felt like certain aspects of the creatures made them too strong. Primarily how quickly they could restore health via shovelling food down their mouths and consuming corpses -- mechanics we weren’t really keen on with ARK either but for legacy reasons are necessary to that game. It’s understandable that we may have overshot with this update and we’re happy to bring some baselines back up, but it’s not likely we’ll adjust those healing mechanics. At this time, we’d rather have creatures that are inherently more powerful than having immense regen. Though we do understand the need to manage your tame’s health and we’ll be investigating additional ways we can do this beyond the skill/feat system. Something we’re toying around with now is the idea of custom cooking recipes for individual creatures (or more broad recipes that can affect multiple creatures) to heal em up. It’s safe to say that you can expect changes and content coming in the days/weeks/yadda yadda ahead revolving around this. PvE Exploits Not going to share what the exploits are, that would be unwise…although I suppose for those of you who weren’t aware, you might be with my post. Just wanted to say we are well aware of what’s happening and are exploring ways to deal with it. The obvious solutions won’t quite work due to some backend stuff, however, we are actively looking into a more delicate and effective solution. In the meantime, quit being jerks and griefing each other, otherwise, I might have to set Amberenix (our Game Master) on ya! I think that covers most of what I wanted to discuss about v10. I realise that doesn’t cover everything, but then we could literally be here for days on end and right now it’s 8 a.m and I’d like to get some rest soon haha. We had some hotfixes and patches go out today following the release, mostly just to resolve things that had been overlooked/missed in the update and some exploit fixing… as well as deal with the menacing rapid-firing Ship of the Damned that we introduced ourselves. Which kind of brings me to another topic... Server Deployments and ETAs! Typically when we have a release candidate that’s ready to go out, we announce it via a server broadcast in-game. The release candidate usually will go through some basic smoke checks to make sure everything is running smoothly. Assuming we do not encounter any problems and the fix checks out, we then begin the deployment immediately. Unfortunately, sometimes we run into issues that were unexpected and have to deal with it, or a player report has just come in and we want to get it fixed prior to deploying, saving us needing to deploy multiple times a night -- unless it calls for it. As for the comments asking why we don’t keep builds in QA for a week at a time, well, to be frank, running a full playthrough of all our content and having QA check every nook and cranny for every update would take longer than a week. It would increase our development time and is not incredibly useful to us in our current development cycle, and as mentioned previously, we don’t want to sit on updates. If we believe a patch is ready, we plan to roll it out as soon as possible. It’s not our intention to get these times wrong and we don’t plan to make you guys wait, it’s just how it happens. I will say though, as long as I’m around during the deployment process I will be keeping the Discord and Twitter fully in the loop when it comes to actual-actual deployments, as much as I can. In essence, if it’s mentioned on either of those platforms, it’s probably going to be incoming. This is when it comes to specific deployment messages such as: in 15 minutes major version etc is incoming and not in related to the larger ETA timelines we share (i.e 4 hours). It’s no secret that we’re not the best with time management, there’s no point hiding it. It is definitely something we need to improve on and I’ll be encouraging the team to do so, it’s been a quibble of mine for ages and not just because of all the hate messages I get about missed ETAs, but because I know how frustrating it can be. For those of you asking why we even bother giving you these inaccurate ETAs and not just say the moment the patch is ready to deploy. Well, when we share these ETAs, we believe they are accurate at the time and then XYZ thing happen. Some players would like to be informed ahead of time so they can try to plan out their day around our ETAs (to their own risk... might I add, I always get messages about folks taking off days from work or skipping dinner to hang around for a patch, I don’t recommend doing it! Even if we were the best damn ETA-deadline hitters in the world, ya never know what could happen and if you do decide to, hey that’s on you man :P). For those of you who don’t want to be informed and would rather wait until the very moment we are deploying, then I’d recommend ignoring our general broad ETAs and look out for the ‘15 minutes’ to deployment ones, those are the most accurate -- and especially if they’ve hit social platforms like Twitter/Discord, but ya, the criticism around how we handle this is warranted. As for late night deployments, well I think I’ve covered this a few times with this post but just to reiterate. We don’t like to sit on fixes and updates. If we’re confident in something and the team is available, we’re happy to set it live. Whether that’s at 4 AM or 4 PM. It’s a little more chaotic at the moment as we’ve just launched and soon enough we’ll have some more structure and planning to it, but generally, you can expect the same frequent updates. ATLAS launched as an early access title and we plan to update it often, and regularly with meaningful changes. Rollbacks Moving on from that, let’s discuss rollbacks as this was mentioned today shortly after the Ship of the Damned patch was released and some players, unfortunately, had their ships sunk. First of all, I’d like to apologize profusely for that. I feel for anyone who suffered a loss, it definitely sucks and we’ll always do our best within our process to ensure we’re able to avoid those scenarios as much as possible. When it comes to rollbacks, it is something we explore as an option in the event of a catastrophic game failure, as they could potentially introduce other problems. This means things such as an unintended wipe, data deletion, game content not being cooked properly, etc. There are other scenarios, but not feasible to list it all out. Just know that as a team we do not take these decisions very lightly, and everything is handled delicately on a case by case basis, if we determine that a rollback would be warranted, we would inform players as soon as possible. I know that doesn’t make up for the loss of boats, creatures, etc in the event that a deployment goes awry; please understand that due to the rate that the game is changing, this could also happen due to a balance change, or the introduction of new content. A lot of players had their boats sunk early on by the insane fire arrows (which may still need to be looked at), or cheaply sunk with metal picks; it could happen for a number of reasons and is a downside when playing a highly iterative and ever-changing title. On that note, we will do our best to ensure that we avoid these situations. Having a patch screw you over sucks, having a rollback sucks, so let’s stay away from both if we’re able to! Support Tickets, Player Reports & Bug Reports As of yesterday, we launched our support ticketing system. Right now we’re helping out folks with Company Ownership issues and Players getting stuck, though hopefully, the latter is not as necessary anymore due to the recent v10 changes. Over time, we’ll be increasing the options for how we can support players as we identify more areas where it is necessary and implement more tools to tackle these. Please note, that we’re always going to be leaning on the side of technical solutions to game problems versus direct Game Master intervention where we can help it. We’re a small team and our resources are better funnelled into development. We’re also going to be actively investigating player reports as they come in. I primarily want to shut down cheaters who are using hacks/3rd party progs or ridiculously exploiting unintended game mechanics to gain an unfair advantage over other users. Please keep in mind the final verdict of these punishments comes down to us, in a sandbox environment, monitoring your game is best done on a case by case situation. There is no silver bullet, but we will certainly invest time and resources into dealing with this. Not going to go into details because it’s best left close to our chest - but it won’t be tolerated. This isn’t solely just limited to cheaters though, but also ‘toxic’ users. That word is probably overused now and has lost some of it’s meaning, but to be clear; we understand when people are joking between each other, we know there’s an element of banter when playing a competitive game, especially one of pirating and world-conquering nature, however, we will not tolerate outright harassment, discrimination etc on our servers and have already taken action against multiple companies/individuals. And finally, bug reports! Right now the reports are coming in from a variety of different platforms. The forums, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, Youtube, etc. We’ve got our eyes spread around but are looking into a more effective way to accept reports, as well as show you that we’re aware of them. Whilst I was working on ATLAS pre-launch, I know the ARK team created a custom bug report system on survivetheark. I’m looking to do something similar based on the Support Ticket system, but hopefully more customized with better user permission management, highlighting things like developer response, and upvoting. Not sure how much of that is doable based on our current systems, but going to be exploring it as an option with Chris. We’ll see how things pan out with the Support Tickets and Report Players system, if it holds up well then we can look into implementing the bug reports area. In the meantime, continue as you are -- we’ve got enough coverage around the multiple platforms and you can be sure that your reports are being investigated! OKAY. I think I have covered everything that I wanted to talk about in this blog post. It’s a lot wordier than I anticipated. If you prefer seeing posts like this, let me know and I’ll probably end up doing more in the future, but maybe not as wordy -- this was more so as it was the first and there was a lot to say. Anyways, take it easy, and here’s hoping you all continue to enjoy sailing the seas of ATLAS!

Maybe some streamer complained they had to go thro too many doors while raiding.

I understand its a survival game, but the wolves are ridiculous. i get two shot by a level one wolf that hits three times per bite. change that please. or at least make wildlife only pissed off and aggro when they're hungry or something. prioritize wildlife over players. literally anything. i wanna farm and play the game,so i can sail boats and pvp. not play death simulator 2019 or constantly have to worry about wolves running across the map to eat my butthole. and then y'all also nerf weapon against pvp with this patch...forreal devs? you trolling? you even take time to play your own game? i get you want people to roll in packs and play together, but you gotta make that an option, not shove it down peoples throats as a necessity to gather already scarce resources. seriously though, so much potential, just please work on fixing the dumb sh!t please.

If the snoring is nerfed, please apply the fix to my wife. Thank you.

On Resources: Come on, you know damn well what the problem is... its the same as it was in Ark. People are foundation spamming the lawless regions and its preventing resources from spawning due to the laughably large block range on foundations. This was foreseeable since its been happening for years in Ark and while many of us would LOVE to leave lawless in Atlas the terrible claim system is currently preventing that. Now, a large block range made sense in Ark. The Island was covered in trees/rocks and people wanted to build huge dino pens without having trees and stuff in the way. You don't have such a need in Atlas. There is no real need to have a football field of clear land around every foundation and just like Ark, it allows for easy griefing and a lack of resources for the players that need them most. I see no reason the foundation block range couldn't be reduced to only a few feet. Its not like people were complaining when there was no blocking at all.... PvE Exploits: Nice to know that the only thing keeping my ships from being sunk right now are other players behaving. I'm sure that stern talking to will help! Oh right, that's not working... someone was in chat before bragging about all the ships they've sunk and salvaged on PVE. I doubt a hollow threat that the GM is going to get them will make it stop, especially since its really hard to report such activity when they sink your ship while you're sleeping. What's frustrating is this has been a known issue since launch and isn't a hard one to fix: Ships can't be sunk due to weight in PVE, they just don't move. Being able to destroy another players property in PvE should be THE top priority of the team, as its pretty much game breaking. That's obviously not the case unfortunately.

dua all the red zones on island due flag related it is nearly impossibel to see the red player crosshair on maps could u devs fix this maybe

I cant run 1 minute without finding an alpha (can provide video proof). This must be fixed. Taming is 100% a waste of time because you cant leave the base with a tame and have it live with the current alpha spawn rate. Farming is a nightmare. Granted not every alpha is aggressive but read on. Its rediculous to have any alpha that literally cant be avoided if it aggros because theyre faster than normal spawns and even further ridiculousness that I cant even tame replacements because there is an alpha every 5th spawn that kills the high level potential tames. A pack of wolves cant kill an alpha cow, horse, crow etc. I would be ok with alphas being gone completely if necessary or BALANCE them so that theyre RARE (meaning you dont see one every day) and then also make them WORTH KILLING. Right now you get like 3 or 4x the amount of NORMAL MATERIALS that you get from killing the same type of monster but the risk is retarded versus the reward. If the spawn rate isnt going to be reduced then at least reduce their run speed to normal so you can GTFO if you dont want the encounter. They add nothing to the game and make taming completely useless.

I understand the reason behind the snoring, I get it.. But for the love of everything that is good in the world, please make it so that the other people in your company that are sleeping are muted or seriously nerfed as it's become almost too much to deal with for my poor ears.

Consider a few things. 1. Dev kit for unofficial server mod creation releases the same week they implement a broken resource system. Which isn't a bug. They said earlier they were doing this. 2. There's only 2 servers regionally. 1 PVP and 1 PVE. No intention of adding more any time soon. 3. Current maps are completely consumed with claims, making it impossible (in my experience) to make a claim outside of a lawless system. All challenges have failed, and there's no room to squeeze a new claim in anywhere. This means, server is full. It doesn't matter how many people they think they can squeeze into a server if they don't give us enough land. 4. Island are terrible. Most islands aren't really islands. They're just pillars of rocks, with only 5-10% of the surface area capable of being inhabited or holding resources. 5. They break the resource spawn radius around foundations with no word or intention of reducing it. SO from all this I can only presume 1 thing. Grapeshot wants to force it's players onto unofficial servers, in order to avoid having to expand their server needs or redesign islands to be more habitable to more players. Deceptively griefing their own customers with unsustainably low resource respawns to force them to play somewhere else. And a lot of people talk about it like it's a move to just force people off lawless islands... but where are they going to go? I mean really? Is there really room out there for thousands of more players to sail and set up on islands already completely consumed with claims? No. Get that stupid thought out of your minds. It's not even remotely realistic. They already need more server. They're not going to give us more servers. So they're trying to frustrate people just enough to go unofficial.

@Jatheishhow about just give it to us straight? What is the intended purpose of the lawless areas? We know that they were changed to be used as spawn area to help with the freeport server spawn @launch problem, but what were they before you made that change and what is the desired result of the resource spawn nerf? And from an aesthetic standpoint this... looks much better than this...

If you aren't going to make it easier for small companies or solo's (on at least PvE) to claim land, by either limiting claims per person or company, or some other measure that makes land available to these people... The "Lawless" resource spawns will remain limited because they were forced to make these places home...

The more I play this game the more the problems with its design become obvious. It's got huge potential but I can't help but feel that they need to make some massive changes in order to correct its path. The Devs announced at the start that they were taking massive inspiration from Eve. Given Eve's massive success it's a logical choice to look at for ideas on how to make this type of game work. Eve is effectively a game about space ships (ships) moving between planets (islands) with everyone harvesting resources to create everything that exists in game. With that in mind... There's a significant different between Atlas and Ark currently from a game design perspective. That is the existence of High Sev vs Null Sec and the existence of very mature player trade. High Sec being the area where approximately 70% of the players live and play. High Sec is safer, CONCORD (the police) rule the area and maintain law. Anyone breaking that law is swiftly dealt with (the police spawn in and blow you to pieces), it is possible however to break the law should you choose (incredibly difficult to do this successfully, near on impossible). The further you go from the safety of Concord the more dangerous and lawless the area becomes. I think it's the Atlas version of CONCORD that's missing. There should not be PVE and PVP servers. Just servers local to your region. It needs an AI controlled Governing force that maintains ownership of primary squares. Those squares become PVE squares. There should be enough to provide adequate space for the PvErs. They should absolutely have Trade Houses that are run by the game. Players should be able to place Buy and Sell orders in the Trade Houses knowing that they are in a relatively safe place. Those places should act as players hubs. Allow companies to have Company Offices if they are acting as trade merchants. Allow the bounties to be placed from these hubs. Ships should be able to be docked in relative safety in these locations with the understanding that they are under the protection of the local government. The PVE players can live safely within the governed regions. The PVP players can try and sneak into those regions and cause chaos if they like, with the knowledge that the AI controlled Government will come down on them swiftly. To make this work you need to create a reason to go out into Null Sec (pretty much all of Atlas is currently Null Sec). Define the resource availability in a way that there is reward for stepping out into the risky waters. Allow the'Pirates' to create their own Trade Hubs. This will encourage players to try and sail to these locations to fulfil trade orders. This gets the trade working. Prices need to be defined by the market. Not by the game. We need the market to fluctuate as this will encourage people becoming traders. Buying low and selling high from one port to the other. The Null Sec areas become serious business. Political borders start to form between some of the largest most feared companies. They may allow smaller companies to operate within their borders as alliances form. Eventually things will no doubt get very interesting. This would be a much better game experience for new players. They can begin the game in relative safety and as they grow more confident in their ability they can set forth into more dangerous waters to seek out glory and fame. If they fail, they can retreat, if they succeed they may very well end up dominating new lands. , This will encourage more mature meta-game. It will encourage better PVP. It will create a better community.

this is likely the kill shot for the game, PVE especially, do you even understand why we are building in lawless? Have you bothered to engage the community? The bullshit claim system you have stopped us from being able to find anywhere, a single player who can get an entire Island and tax it. So what do you do? You paper over the cracks trying to change the claim flags so allow new players to build in claimed land, this is at the choice of the land owner (ohh can you now see the language im using), the LANDOWNER can get tax from them, fair enough. Yet how can that possibly be a reliable model for a game? As anyone who has played the game from the beginning has a unique advantage over any future players. you may as well call it Bexatlas, you have created a group of 1% ers and the lower class. tell me in what reality is someone going to want to play a game, especially on PVE where they want to be the working class paying rent? So we decided we want to be the lawless...(you made us do this) and build in lawless so we can play the game. We built a community in the lawless sector, helped each other and started having a really good experience and fell in love with the game. But you now killed it for us. You dont listen to the community, you dont look at what the community is trying to achieve, you dont seem to let people naturally evolve the game for you. You are using ARK models for a game that is built on it but is totally different and has different requirements. Lawless regions have become the homes for the outcasts, for those who due to your broken claim system have no where to go other than stop playing and move on to another game. I like it on lawless sorry I did... oh and to add, imagine the new players coming into the game, they will only ever be rent payers. If all the current players stayed and owned land, long term, then they have no hope of ever being a land owner and will only ever be able to rent land and resources. Even if you open up new servers the cycle will continue. 1%ers and the tax payers. the idea does not stand up. Shortly after launch, we temporarily hacked up a change which turned Lawless Regions into Homeservers and enabled some special settings on them which prevented Alpha Creatures from spawning, it had faster respawns when it comes to harvestables, and weather events (or might have just been rain) were disabled. In the latest update, we removed these changes and have set it back to our initial design. These servers are meant to be unclaimable land to allow players to gain a foothold once they’ve left Freeports, but they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS! Based on our investigation thus far, resources are certainly respawning on these grids, and the signs point to the structure spawn-prevention radius causing confusion and leading to the reports. This system is native to the game but wasn't present during our initial launch due to Lawless Regions being listed as Homeservers, so from a technical point of view, it's intentional, however, I know better than to rule out possibilities for other issues (hence they're investigating).There's an argument that the radius itself needs to be adjusted, so we'll have to think on that. Keep in mind that this can change, whilst there may be some things we’re unlikely to change, it doesn’t mean that we’re set in stone. We’ll keep you posted if we have any updates!

I would really love to see more ship types, eg. Fishing trawler (with nets of course), Man-o-War, Frigates, etc. Have some ship classes be stronger against certain types to give fleets a meaning.

LOLOLOL. Maybe you should actually take a look at the state of your game before making bold statements like that. If that is the point of Lawless servers then you need to decrease the amount of resources it takes to craft things by at least 70%. You can't have ARK clone and expect people to play the game any differently, because there is very little different in this game to that one. You are expecting people to grind 500000 ish resources to craft a Galleon that "might" survive the night by traveling around all over god's creation to gather materials that might not even be on islands because they don't spawn anymore with reverted changed and somehow expect to find that fun and engaging? Are we even playing the same game? Fix claims so people don't have to pick at the scraps that exist on Lawless servers. You're jumping 50 builds into the future expecting players to deal with it and all that's going to do is make people stop playing. Unless that is your goal or has seemed like your goal since this game launched. Stop taking 1 step forward and 3 steps back. The patches and fixes have been nice but the constant shooting yourself in the foot is getting old.

They clearly dont' really care about PvE. If they did it would already be fixed. >.> Meanwhile, I get to live on an island where some dude sank my boat/salvaged it and then acted like he didn't do anything wrong.

That's the beauty of a MMO. While you barely use tames I use them quite frequently. Having high lvled tames rendered nearly useless completely fucks guys who've spent a lot of time and skill points into this "supplement" part of the game.

@Jatheish about '' Lawless Regions: Spawns, Resources, Temps. and Weather '' i understand the idea behind it being 'helping areas' but honestly there are so many people with claimed land wether they're online or not that cant be stolen/claimed so for those of us with no land and being stranded on lawless how are we supposed to '' set sail into the wide ATLAS! ''? the flag system currently is a good concept IMO but just doesnt work in game for everyone playing. i'm hoping to see a whole new system like buy land or anything other then its current form.

Grapeshot is basically 'that DM' who is hell bent on power tripping over their players, and if you somehow survive their sadistically over-tuned encounter, they just get angry and throw something else at you to try finish the job. "You SURVIVED the at sea ambush by 4 crocodiles? - Well NOW YOU HAVE SCURVY AND YOUR LEGS ARE BOWED OUT SIDEWAYS! - Also, there's an alpha wolf gnawing on the boat's hull, IN THE DEEP OCEAN!. It's a deep ocean alpha wolf! - Also your guns suddenly do 50% less damage because, I dunno, rust monsters in the hold. Also, there is now 7 tornadoes converging on the boat"

oh wow, you're that cool guy on the internet. You'd rather deflect someones opinion and tell me to "get gud" and not address a design flaw for a game that is in fact a work in progress . We've all paid the toll essentially to be their QA/beta testing teams they can profit from. I'd hope we at least have some say. you're just being dumb, so stahp.

Well the problem with PvE is that it has too much PvP right now. The reason people play PvE is so they don't have to deal with other players destroying this stuff or stealing from them, yet that's been quite possible. They finally fixed the lack of locks on containers however its still possible to sink other players ships in PvE, which is hilariously messed up. PvP just has the usual issues with PvP in a survival game, so you know what to expect going in.

PVE server : EU PVE Siren's Call This is the most serious exploit we've encountered today !!! If a character has a maximum weight of 500/500 (info character stats), he cannot take by himself another goods from anywhere and transport them because the system wont permit it and he'll move very very slowly BUT !!!! If a second player drops items next to him, the supra over loaded player can grab them (even will not be able to move due to supra over loading), get offline and the second ONLINE player can grab him (the body of the supra over loaded player) with no over weight penalty and transport him with ease anywhere on the map !!! This way, many toxic players can sink easily boats with a HUUGE load on them and destroy this game with their unpunished behavior. This exploit can also work if the Online player grab the offline player with the grappling hook !!! Please fix this SERIOUS ISSUES ASAP !!!

Server involved: EU PVE SIREN'S CALL, Cresney Cay Island (A12) Team concerned: Team Majority of the island Team guilty: Hailong Regiment A team that exploits a bug with the grapple on ships, which sink in less than 30 seconds, see the video below. we see the name of their team in 0:52. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKpJFkFDEPk&feature=youtu.be This team sank a lot of ship tonight and continues to do it right now. We ask that all members of this team be reported to Steam VAC. Cordially.

^^^^^^ THIS IS THE PROBLEM FOR PVE^^^^^^^^ Perfectly said, well explained, and fully encompasses the environment we experienced. THERE IS NO LAND TO CLAIM ON PVE ALLOWING ONE PERSON AN INFINITE AND ENDLESS AMOUNT OF CLAIMS IS JUST PLAIN STUPID PUNISHING those of us on Lawless for playing how PvE should ACTUALLY BE, has cost you at least 15 of my friends ALSO: not fixing exploits that take mere minutes to do but WRECK many hours of work is why I haven't left Lawless... IVE TRIED. My current list of losses is: 3 Brigantines 3 Schooners 5 Sloops and countless Rafts All to the griefers, OVERPOWERED SotD, and Storms randomly LOCKING your ship in place.... I just told my friend, I'm a pirate with Hydrophobia because E V E R Y T I M E I've saved up resources, built the ship, stocked it with supplies, maps, armor, weapons, food, work stations, DAYS of work.... I go sailing... 1 day later... It's at the bottom of the sea and I just COMPLETELY WASTED my time. I've been with this game since the moment of release... over 150 hours in and you know what I've got... a tiny bit of land on Lawless... I personally have been through 20 sectors.... NOTHING LEFT TO CLAIM. Now you're saying the ONLY place left is NOT going to have resources???? So why don't you just put in proper text and say: "I'd say we care about your losses matey, but aye, we'd be lying, for the sea is cruel mistress that offers no apologies, so get on with walking the plank, and maybe Davey Jones will keep your cold dead corpse company. Begone with ye."

New changes in a recent update: - Changed how custom blueprints are crafted for STACKABLE items when they're given a stat roll: > If a stackable item is crafted from the same blueprint and you already have an item crafted from that blueprint in your inventory, it will stack on that pre-existing item and not receive a different Intelligence Stat Bonus. > If you want a different roll from the same blueprint, you must make sure that you do not have an item which was crafted from that same BP in your inventory (stated or non) > This means that you can keep rolls by keeping the item in your inventory when crafting from the BP, even if you do not have the level of intelligence required to get the crafting bonus. Alternatively, you can remove the stated item from your inventory to get a new roll from the BP. - Resource respawn should now function as they did on Lawless servers prior to v10. - 50% reduction in the enemy structure prevention radius so that you can now build closer together on Lawless Servers.

So this was supposed to happen then and wanted us to need 2 headshots from pistol to kill a lvl 1 wolf. Ok, gonna stick with a stone age bow then while sporadicaly rage quiting from being unable to clear 3 wolves every minute that spawns on tundra. In case it may be seen as a rage post (tbh, it may even be, guns are useless, even on stream seen a naked guy take only 60+ dmg from bodyshoot and only 39 dmg from strongest gun, carbine against a plated armor bodyshot), reduce animals hp by 2x, then we can again one-shot their heads, otherwise why waste 10 seconds reloading for something like 160 or whatever headshot when w ecan stick in this time like 6-7 stone arrows that do incredibly more damage except without one-shoting heads we always gonna take damage, no matter how much more dps the bow have. Not to mention some animals don't even have a head hitbox (horse, sheep, shark, fish, turtle and propably more) so doing 75 dmg to their body takes alot, both time and resources.

Revert the changes to lawless, at least the resource thing. Many of us don't want to deal with people stealing our claims, or having to pay taxes... THAT'S WHY WE ROLLED ON A PVE SERVER. lawless areas were the only place you didn't have to deal with that. We want to build, sail and explore, not get involved in daily land battles and overly aggressive Zerg companies.

I think it's pretty ignorant to call tamed creatures a supplement to the game when it's highly based around niching players inside companies ie. a few guys specialize in taming and others as crafters etc. You went way too far with the nerfs regarding tames. In fact it shouldn't have happened at all. It doesn't matter that it isn't the focal point of the game. Limiting the amount of playstyles is not something you would want to do in a game that is advertised as a MMO. Especially if the features are already there.

Still being worked on by our team, we have some technical issues we need to resolve; stability is the primary concern but it is on our priority list and hope to have it available as soon as possible. Some further comments that came through social media: - Respecs. These should still work as they have done so previously, and we issued a force respec with v10. So presently, with each level up you're granted a respec if you wish to use it. If you skip to the next level, you lose your prior respec and this isn't retroactive. With the latest update, we made some tweaks to the level ramping due to adding in 50 more levels (which are obtained through discoveries) and it might have resulted in some players losing a few levels despite their EXP staying the same. In that situation, if you had a previous respec done at a higher level, it wouldn't be available at the moment, but once you get back to your previous level and all levels beyond that, you'll be able to respec. Though I am having the QA guys investigate if there are scenarios which cause respec to break in general, and we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary thus far. - Breeding. We want this to be more difficult than it was in ARK and for players to have to travel around the map to raise their species on ideal biomes. Whilst that does make it harder for smaller groups, arguably you could focus on breeding within your region and build up some beast mode tames to trade - Yes, we are looking at resources still, that's why I made the text gold! - Spawns are crazy in some parts of the ATLAS: aye, we're working on a technical solution to this so that the numbers and (types/tiers/sizes) of creatures are more balanced. Not sure when we'll get this in, but it's happening in the background! - Roadmap? Maybe at some point, still in FIX ALL THE THINGS mode atm. - Devkit? Soon! Got a day? no, but very soon. It's just having it's final bits touched up and prob needs to be updated for v10 now. - Linux Binaries -- see above

Claims need to be limited to 1 per character, with a maintenance cost. In addition after so many hours if the clay. Isn't built on, it should expire. We've spent 14 hours now sailing, and found no claimable islands. players are claiming everything they come across, and it's then never used. I would also recommend adding another PvP and PvE server cluster to each region worldwide. No need to pack in so many players.

not even that. is a griefer - zerg-tribe "semi-pvp" offline raiding wets dream. no game mechanic thats in it - right now that is - being it freeports - lawless - whatever the rest is has any risk & reward thought or even level and difficulty-scaling in it whatsoveer. you can engage a lvl 200 alpha on any island. its purely random. which is dum in terms of player progression and engagement. the claim system is a hot mess. unlimited claims that cost nothing to setup or maintain and only takes "being there" to make them safe. (at least in theory). thats even bad for a pvp server, let alone a pve server. the latest installment of ressource spawn prevention (bug ? intentional? ) is bad for a game based on ressources to do even the most basic shit. insane amount of dead travel-times which just act as major timesink and offer not even the slightes value for any player doing it. flotsam might be fun, but once you realize it is very tedious and never really worth it, you just ignore it most of the time (blueprints from flotsam are building only and rarely ever worth to actually build) its supposed to be a pvp game, yet the "mot effective" pvp tactic in the game seems to be either low tier weapons (bows + flame arrows) or simply griefing the shit out of others. (weight griefing, which as to be the biggerst oversight ever). a tacked on "eating- and nutrition"- mechanic that is more hassle than benefit. its simply more efficient to just die and respawn as the burden to be able to constantly level everything out is not worth the actual benefits the total reset when you die. its not about loss - in eve you also lose a lot - but if you play smart, you never lose everything. in atlas- as of now, there are simply situations from which you are basically reset to zero. company mechanics that are not thought through,. as well as alliance-mechanics that are visual in nature only and offer no real strategic or gameplay value. the list could go on. but its obvious that there never really was a real long-term vision behind it , except "lets make a game with soo many players on it at the same time and lets make it pirate-themed because we were working on that dlc anyways...." they would have to go back to the drawing board, not being afraid to wipe repeatedly in the process, no matter what the outcome per wipe is.

The peak player count happened during what was pretty much a holiday weekend, so that's something to keep in mind. There are also some pretty game breaking issues right now that are keeping some people (myself included) from playing at the moment. Until other players can't sink my ships in PvE and resource respawning is fixed in lawless, I'm not going to be spending much time in game. Might see an increase in population after those fixes.... if they ever come. You'll also see spikes in player population going forward every time there is a large update. Once the game is stable and not a complete dumpster fire after every update... things will likely improve. For now, so long as Atlas is above 20-30k players, I'd say its population is healthy... and I don't see it falling bellow that anytime soon.

I had to go to work....

Just adding my report to the pile... HOT FIX PLEASE!!!!!!!!

the respawn rate of carnivors is simply insane. After killing 5 wolves and 3 Lions, losing a bear du to not being able to get a wolf from the bears tail, barly being alive, another bunch of wolves respan a minute later. It took me hours to get my stuff back into safety grabbing, running, dying, respawn, grabbin running, killing etc... until I manged to get some higher ground PLEASE REDUCE RESPAN RATE AND AMMOUNT of CARNIVORS it is simply no fun. In addition remove wild creature spawn within players structures! -Michael

I know you guys have a murder boner and love killing players but the spawn on sharks is worse than wolves. You might as well remove diving cause you can't even get half way to the bottom without 10 of these try hards chasing you.

They are patching it so Snakes can make their own company and claim Islands.

I'll have to post this from a last night perspective. Logged on to the company brigantines heading down to a tropical area where elephants spawned in. Found some welcoming locals who pointed us in the right direction and even had a open taming trap. We lured in 3 nice level elephants (15+) one at a time to this trap, knocked em down and tamed em. Moved them to the boat one at a time as well so we didn't have any issues with the local wildlife. We encountered an issue with one of the elephants getting stuck and had to rearrange our boats in order to move the one to the proper location, where we found a future workaround(empty side of the boat only or your gonna have a bad day). Once we got the 3 elephants tamed we decided to start heading back as the only remaining population were below level 10, and for the benefit of others we killed those off along with most of the islands wildlife so higher level ones would have a chance at spawning in. On our way back a few team members had to log off which left us with 1 captain for each boat and 1-2 others hanging around but we had someone pop on the discord who wanted to join us. Luckily we were going to pass through a freeport on our way home so we picked him up while we were there and checked out the new npc trading system. We didn't encounter much in the way of trouble and already had plenty of npc crew to handle the sails and the cannons on our battle brig, however we did run into a massive storm once we reached our home block and this caused us to lose some control on our ships as we got closer to shore and nearly crashed into the reef by the bay. We parked our brigs in the bay docks and offloaded the animals after we made sure none of our islands wildlife would be a problem, only to realize we couldn't get them in our base walls because we never built a behemoth gate, so we installed an elevator system to haul them over the walls. Obviously this is not a normal day for us but it was a good and fun day thanks to the farming patch that allowed us to gather plenty of wheat for these tames. Tonight's adventure is going to be rather dull, gathering materials to launch our first Galleon.

Its just stupid, nothing has to be „investigated“ as all facts are clear. - mega tribes own all claimable islands and let nobody in - casuals/new players/people with life-job-family must live in the Ghetto (lawless) - ghetto is full, no ressources respawning —-> people leave

Well this is a show stopper for me.. Love the game and was upset that we could not find a claim. But, I could still set up in lawless and at least build a ship and now if this will not be fixed I am done with this game.

Sorry your ship is gone.. move on

The biggest problem in PvP is not the damage of melee, but the fact that it makes your character stop in animation to perform a melee attack. That will NEVER be viable if all the ranged can just outrun you even while they are reloading. It is impossible to catch someone with a melee attack if they are kiting you. This needs to be changed, we need to be able to swing while moving or melee will never be viable.

There will be mechanics in place for them to avoid if they want. The biggest complainers about it are definitely just the 'want everything, do nothing' crowd.

All these kiddies that want reward but none of the risk. I hope it becomes permadeath too.

This is exactly what we don't need though. That doesn't improve multiplayer game play. It just encourages people to play solo and make a profit. What this game needs is to mimic Eve. Isolated trade hubs where you can place buy and sell orders. Those trade hubs should be defended by the Queens Navy (aka CONCORD) and prices need to be defined by the players and therefore by the market. The games design needs to be made in a way that prices will fluctuate between regions. They also need a merchant system in game that allows you to place transport requests. Let players ask people to transfer X from A to B for Y profit. This will in turn create game play opportunities. People will start to play the market. Buy low, sell high. There is risk involved as they need to actually transport goods to the region where they will make the most profit. Pirates get juicy targets to chase. Merchants get the thrill of trying to avoid being captured. The Queens Navy is a necessary AI mechanic to ensure humans don't ruin the experience. We know they will try so something is needed to ensure that doesn't happen. I believe it should be possible to attack these trade hubs. But it needs to be raid level difficulty. A very large organised attack with incredible risk but amazing reward. On top of this we need some sort of system that defines players are criminals. I have no idea how to make this work as we all know bounty systems get gamed hard and thus ruined. Perhaps just a wanted list that updates with stats of players and their criminal activities so that the players can create their own manual bounties and run our own hangings. This is a hard one but would definitely add a required element to the game. Aka this game needs less Ark and more Eve

Separate release thread over here: Sorry, I made that thread with the intention on closing this one, unfortunately, I don't see a way of doing that.

We're looking into it!

Lol i actually found the guys doing that and made lots of screenshots, found a support ticket on forum and submitted it and you know what? My ticket was deleted like it never existed and those players still walking around doing their stuff! Seems like that system doesent even work or mb their GMs are too lasy to investigate each case.

@Jatheish Are you guys looking into the claimed flags and the x amount of number a player can put down? There have been a lot of complaints from small groups that they don’t have any land to play on.

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats" - H.L. Mencken