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So the intensely problematic land claim system which forced a wipe to overhaul, the massive lag during launch month from official servers, the epidemic of player griefing and imbalanced combat systems which lead to weeks worth of effort and resources lost in minutes or while offline, the poorly designed economic mechanics in a game striving to emulate Eve, the lack of actual content, especially any content having any semblance of depth or lack of mind numbing repetition, none of these things or a dozen others mentioned more times than I can count...none of these things are Atlas’s downfall in your view? Instead it is something mundane that I’ve seen in every game I’ve played since 2004, hit and failure alike...players bickering? Interesting. Hi. My name is Boomer. Welcome to the internet. Things can get salty here.

For those who dont believe that EA of ATLAS is dying, just watch your Island and visitors, i hade plenty visitors for gold evry week, for over 2 months there is noone who came to dig up treasure on my island. ATLAS Storyline looks like this. AFTER WIPE FIrst month 1)HOPE and excitement, A LOT OF Player set sails to catch their Islands. 2)Taking Island, beeing polite to others, ppl were discovering gameplay, trying to build up as quickly as possible. 3)Making Alliance, trying to keep up with neighbours cause they were bigger or just quicker. Gathering res , taming and trying to get gold. 4)Freeport were empty after this Second and THIRD month. 1) Ppl had nothing to do, all they were dooing was waiting for another patch with new content or gathering more gold , making defence and watching fights . 2)MEGA vs MEGA vs MEGA and some MEGA were kicked out so they never came back they just left game and went to play ARK. 3)Freeport were still empty so there was actually nothing to do cause small company was afraid of raiding by big company so they were gathering res and trying to build great defence. 4)MEGA vs MEGA vs MEGA vs MEGA were still fighting so others were wtaching who will win or who take which island. Fourth and Fifht month. 1)AFTER winning MEGA were establishing their Island, preparing to more fighting. 2)Freeport were still empty (that means no trading, no purpose to go there, no other players, nothing) so smaller company were leaving game after so many days of boring building and waiting for other company to raid them. Which was not coming. Most of them already quit game cause MEGA were starting to wipe smaller company. 3) Many Island have been left free. 4) Those who were still playing were making better ships or just trying to tame more Animals (BTW there is not much to tame) Last Month 1)Freeports are still empty 2)There is nothing to do expect PvP 3)That means MEGA have no enemy now so they wipe smaller company 4)PPL are leaving cause they have been building great defence but who cares....1 bear with cannon can wipe all their defence. 5)So they realised it have no sense to build anything cause sooner or later some guy will come with 1 bear and 1 cannon. 6)Smaller company have left ATLAS 7)MEGA Company are still trying to wipe all Future Month 1) There will be nobody to play cause MEGA will have nobody to fight with. 2)Some players will play still PvE or Single player 3)Some of them will play non dedicated 4)........ Thats all folks PS: Game is made in this way so you can easly revuild what you lost on other islands but the problem is you dont want to. Not cause you lost much, its because you didnt had fair fight.

fine. i fixed it. for the feels

Says the guy from the "top 5 warring company", that wipes anyone else as the last remaining fun in the game, with high end gear and PVP specific character skills...? And of all people you think the others left because of missing shops and skins...? while you party over the latest company you wipes 'of the map' and the small company ship you sunk in port, just because...? Let me guess, you want a better player economy so the small guy can get some higher stuff, before you loot it from him with the no skill cannon bear... This game is dying, because most people learn the hard way, that the balancing is not in favor of accumulating stuff and build things that last longer then the time they log off... And that is because the system is made this way (hopefully no for long) and people like us use it 'as intended' with the unintended consequences... "Hey, please come back and play again with us! We have no one else to wipe anymore... You get a cute skin for it you can trade for in the freeports! It will be worth it! - for us..." Also now makes more sense why you want trade ships auto-cruising... because even the "Top 5" companies lost most their people and now they are stuck with their giant empire and not enough Bobs to make the menial labor to sustain it...

2B. I am on the No-Auction-House Team. Because I like the idea of player shops. So maybe we can have the advantages of an auction house + the shops? How about a physical Marketplace on each Freeport where you can open a player shop on a fixed location. You have to rent this location and the whole marketplace becomes an auction house. The reason for this is simply because I would like to see trade happening in the world. Not in a menu where you can hit a button to list all offerings sorted by price. A large market creates the immersion of a lot of items. If I compare this to the auction house in the early World of Warcraft versions where unlimited items would be stored in a vault. I prefer the marketplace with physical limitations. Sometimes less is more. Especially in terms of efficiency. This tension creates fun for some people. Believe it or not but I played on a minecraft server once and they implemented this market perfectly! You rent a shop in on a fixed spot (so it looks like a market) And from there you could offer stuff for other stuff. Most people wanted diamonds because they are rare in this game. but most importantly it wasn't a one way shop. My main complaint about player shops is that you can only sell stuff for gold. You cannot buy stuff and offer gold as shop keeper. I cannot go with an inventory full of wood to a shop and get gold in return. (If it is possible please tell me how) And here comes the catch why a real marketplace is better imo than a menu. It takes effort to compare the price of something. It is a lot of fun to look for good trades and sometimes you can find stuff you can buy in one shop and sell it in another still making profit because the shop keeper was to lazy to look for it. This is good for new players or Solos who cannot afford their own shop. They can go there as a person with resources and leave with some gold. Perfect experience. Not a menu! I like your other points. I don't mind auto trade even if it is more efficient. I think the benefits of this you described would be real.

So youre saying that humans are the actual problem..??? Wow, genius at work... ?! ;)

Good news for you then: You can stop repeating yourself! Because nothing of this will turn around the tide in a significant way. Also, you need to rename your topic from "How the devs can save Atlas" to "What I WANT", because its really nothing beyond that. Theres no real undestanding of an MMO environment, gamedevelopment, marketing, etc, etc. And btw, Atlas isnt an MMO - its just a clustered server array - no matter how the devs try to brand their ..idea. I suggest some inside reads about gamedevelopment on e.g. Gamasutra before jumping to bold, but unfounded suggestions.

Like 1.000 times before: You never played ATLAS. You have 0 hours, because you are waiting for console release. Dont judge a game what you never played.........!!!!

More ships. Like you would expect, you know, for a Pirate game. Actual use for Crew instead of adding a Zoo of tames. Fixing the claim system. Fixing the "endgame" content.

I didn't say that. I've long been a proponent of civility in gaming and on forums. When someone treats you poorly, the temptation is to behave in kind in response. What I'm saying is that I don't think this is the primary reason for Atlas's downfall. On that front I'm of the opinion there are many things having more of an impact. One of the reasons I say this is because in 15 years of gaming, I have seen both good behavior and bad present in games both successful and failure, over and over again. It just does not tend to be a driving factor in whether a game succeeds or fails imo. That doesn't mean people should be jerks, or that I'm not in favor of treating each other with respect.

Actually, the reality is when you fail at developing a game properly and it's a steaming pile of broken repetitive content...people just give up and quit.

You mean the 50,000 people that left? A TON of people bought the game for pirates. I'd say a majority of the players who never played Ark or even realized it was the same studio did so for that reason. The Ark fanboys keep thinking Ark is the reason people bought the game, while a great many of the people I personally played with bought it because they saw "Pirates" "Survival sandbox". The game was marketed as a naval-based survival game full of pirates. Tames and such were hardly covered in the initial press releases that were shown literally days before the initial EA release when the vast majority of copies were purchased. Naivety to the fact that people wanted a pirate game does not change the fact that people wanted a pirate game.

I can usually jump on a band wagon but I just let this one pass by. i was fully expecting an ark stand alone that was meant to be a DLC but they decided they want to make more money bu making it an ark stand alone. That is exactly what I got. the problem is they went too far away from ark with the crappy claim system. I really haven’t seen a worse idea in any other video game. i would definitely like to let you know that I fully respect your opinion. I am glad you are trying to be helpful, I really am and just because I disagree with you, I would never want you to feel as if your opinion was not validated. Only people of poor character would do that. I do definitely disagree though. The saving grace would be one of two options. 1. Making it even more like ark(no claims) 2. Making it a true mmo and have the main aspect nothing but quests. Who cares about exploring, it should be an option not a necessity. That was a really stupid idea. The main form of leveling should come from quests. You make a map that takes hours to get around(stupid) and then make that the main way to level? Yeah way to go wildcard. if they keep that stupid exploring do crap I am literally just going to sail all over the globe to gain the do and then stay put right when I build my base after leveling. Sorry, not going to do it. You might make me step foot on every island once, but I guarantee it will never happen again. now, if you make me travel to an island because a “quest” tells me too??? Yeah if I am getting WoW style exp you will see me traveling to every damn island, every damn day. This gives us content and story. sorry but if all I need is a discovery point, I won’t be back plain and simple. anyways man, thanks for sharing. Your opinion will always be welcome with me.

I sincerely hope the devs read this and take this to heart. I'm sure some will disagree but after talking to countless people and being in streams asking streamers and viewers alike why they stopped playing the same few answers keep coming up. The main answer being the devs went too “Ark” with Atlas. I think describing that would be an insult to peoples intelligence as there is a reason the recent 24 hour peak of Ark was 55,518 people and Atlas was 3,430 people. The reason people were so excited for Atlas originally was the idea of a survival based piracy game. Somehow that concept got morphed into a game with a fictional AI enemy (ghost ships), animals that are far too important when it comes to raiding and hostile animals such as crocodiles that are massive and pull from the experience. It seems much easier to just add the ships from Atlas to Ark to get that same affect. What people actually wanted from Atlas was a survival based piracy game without the Ark style creatures in it. Which is why Ark has more daily active users than Atlas by a long shot. What people want to see changed that will draw large numbers back: A game that doesn't feel like a job in terms of gold/food upkeep for AI. More AI enemies and different factions that are realistic to the lore of it i.e. AI pirates and a Royal Navy that is out trying to catch pirates (even the AI pirates) and if you are able to sink them they have loot on them such as weapons, armor, gold, supplies, etc. Add the possibility of the Royal Navy landing on your shores to kill/capture pirates. Maybe even a "reputation" with them that provokes more aggressive attacks the higher your reputation is. Essentially like a wanted system. Help relieve the pvp griefing when AI is also attacking people that are killing the AI navy. Have animals that are relevant and realistic i.e. cows, horses, parrots, monkeys etc. Limit the number of AI members for a company instead of the insane gold upkeep (which mostly only Megas can keep up with). Make it so it's expensive to recruit them and only takes food to upkeep them and limit it to 10-15 AI per person with a cap of 200 AI in a company or something to that affect. Anti griefing measures which most agree have been resolved already. Thank you for that btw!!! These are just a few of the major recommendations people had to help bring life back to the game and make it something they would enjoy again. For the life of me I can't wrap my mind around why the devs keep pushing Atlas closer and closer to Ark while watching the player base drop constantly to the point where I can hardly see it being profitable to keep trying to develop this game which means the game is literally dying. I would love to hear the devs reasoning for constantly taking this game down a road that clearly pushed over 55,000 people away from their game (all-time peak of 58,788 per steam). At a certain point there needs to be a realization that the current model/path for this game is not one that is conducive to a large player base. I agree with most people that “you might as well play Ark instead” at this point. Minus the stability issues this game is a goldmine if it just goes away from the Ark mentality. It's clear the devs did a great job at Ark because the daily peak is literally 16x higher than Atlas. The issue is people don't want Atlas to be Ark with ships and that is how the vast majority describe it. I beg the devs to take a serious look at what they are doing with the game and to take a serious look at what the community actually wants out of this game. Of course it is absolutely their decision how to develop the game and where to take it but it's those same decisions that are killing Atlas. I understand that this will most likely fall on deaf ears and will mostly get responses from trolls but at least I can say that I tried to help push the game in the right direction before watching it die.

Other than a single meme almost every top post there is player drama. If a post is not player drama it turns into player drama. There is a video post from someone who discovered bears wont whistle off of a Cyclops; the comments turned it into player drama about the player taking a bear into a powerstone; or flat out wrong comments about the game in general. Let's also not mention the bigotry, and the fact the sub is mostly used to shit on the game. Honestly, if I were to blame anything for the lack of players recently, its that shit.

Or maybe its passworded?

Hmm, I seem to have attracted the attention of a large number of monkeys.....

The players are a large part of Atlas's problems. Just like players are a large part of the problem on Ark Official servers. The Devs not only didn't do anything to mitigate the problem there, they in fact encouraged the problem behavior. And a big part of what is sinking Atlas is the very same behavior.

It should be a .json But I don't know after sry

As the VAST majority of people who've actually played the game have decided that it's not worth playing, maybe the opinion of those who stayed don't matter much either. Especially the ones who say things like "it's EARLY ACCESS" or "maybe it's just not the game for you" or "don't worry, the devs know what they are doing".

How about getting back to topic? I see a lot of threads drifting into discussions about anything but the OP's topic ^^ Maybe it would be better to post suggestions into the suggestion section of the forum. It has been cleaned up and isn't cluttered any longer with ideas that are already implemented. Which is good to discuss new ideas and bad because we lost all proof that the devs are listening to ideas Of course the OP is an isolated idea and neither I nor you or anyone here can formulate ideas that take every little detail of the current game into consideration. That's why professional game designers exist ^^ But it is a good start. I think it is good to change the Headline because the old headline was destined to attract posts which wouldn't lead anywhere. To sum it up 1. Automated ship routes Very few of us seem to like it. It could lead to more cargo ships and this could lead to more piracy and more fun stuff happening. BUT the only difference to the situation we have now would be that an NPC is sailing the ship instead of an actual player. So it is at least questionable if one NPC could change the whole game. I highly doubt it! I think the reason for a lack of piracy is not easy to determine. The game is a complex system with many factors that play into that. I wouldn't mind auto ship routes but I don't believe that it would have the described effects on the game itself. Because even if there would be more ships for small companies to raid. They couldn't do this because the revenge of the trading company would be harsh. So it would be convenient to have this but I don't think it is a solution for anything. 2. I agree with the exception of a WoW-like auction house. Make it a physical marketplace 3. This is crucial! On a baseline this is something that needs change. Almost nothing in this game is worth anything. Resources are meaningless. I think the farming and crafting system needs a little bit more depth (New World's crafting system is a good example). As far as I can tell the main reason for trade right now is "I don't have to spend time on it myself" be it farming stuff or taming animals. There is nothing special you can trade. There is nothing with personality you can trade that has actual impact on the game itself. Take any WoW item with cool stats for example. That is something unique! Higher tier items get just higher numbers. They don't change. And this is dull and empty after a while. So a little bit of rarity or specialness or millenial items or how tf you want to call that wouldn't be that bad. But again. Each idea on its own doesn't improve anything. We need a set of different features that work hand in hand that it almost feels like a redesign of the whole game. And honestly I hope that the devs have a list of such features and will blow our mind someday with a real MEGA patch. So why bother discussing ideas here? It is a creative process and every shit idea can inspire someone else to have a less shit idea and so on. And maybe these "someone else" are the devs Happy Brainstorming guys

Yes, i am copying my comment to a different thread and making my own thread. If anyone else would like to add to this list, please comment. 1. automated ship routes. would add a shit ton of player content with just this one mechanic alone. trading routes. widely available piracy targets. more trade between companies and alliances. better and more convenient shipping. blueprint ships more accessible to the masses.2(A). An entire re work of freeport grids. there is no reason for 4 cloned free port islands in the same grid. if anything it should be one large island with more shit on it. more detailed in the next points. 2(B). The player shops may be okay on company island but for the most part they were a joke. what is actually needed is a centralised Auction house on freeport islands, smack dab in the middle of town square, where you can list your items/materials alongside other peoples listed items for easy comparison and competition. 2(C). a dueling arena on the freeport island where you can go and have one on one or small group land pvp either by duel request or battle queue. would be nice to bet things on a battle or pay an admission fee where the winners get the spoils. (hell id even pay gold to watch that shit)2(D). Bulletin boards and bounty boards. Would be nice to put tames up for sale, community events, and recruit in the actual game instead of spamming the chat/discord/forums.3. tradable items that can not be crafted by players and spawn into the atlas only once. skins... hats... cosmetics... fuckin anything. purely for the sake of creating a "rare" market that will also be a way to hold wealth and show off without actually having to hold gold. (Similar to runescapes rares like party hats, halloween masks, santa hats and etc.) You did good with the bunny ears, keep em coming. now we just need the automated shipping and auction house to create the economy and streamline the market.Im really tired of repeating my self tbh... ive been talking about ALL this shit since the first month this game was released. You want a successful MMO where the players will stick around and buy your shitty micro transactions later on devs? id rather this game didnt die, take a fucking hint from what works great in other games, for the love of atlas, please.

That bad, we don't even get 2x anymore. Nvm, seems in 20 mins they love us again.

This man knows where his towel is.

42

Sinners and saints is the name of enki old clan he was in before they booted him, which has a population of 0 atm

Reddit does not matter for a game - it's a very small % of the marketing-mix. There are other social plattforms that matter way more because they reach massivly more ppl. Especially for a small dev-team trying to mod Reddit is a lost cause. The man-power needed for that is simply not there. I would not bother with it either. It's a simple number game of where to invest the little money and manpower you have. Btw if you think that Reddit is a viable source for information and to shape opinion I am actually worried for you. Don't bubble up like that!

Many thanks @Vackillers ! I tried it. (Your post has overlapped with mine)My current game status is exactly as you described it: I spawned at my starting freeport(had a bed left) and now i've to find my way back to the old base and then i'll see how the rest works out. Edit : I reached my old base.Everything is ok, except for some smaller and already known bugs.

are you really trying to compare a fps to sandbox survival mmorpg?

Yes.

Only thing I found that worked for me right now, is deleting the "LastGridCoord" file thats inside your ATLAS/ShooterGame/Save/SavedAtlasLocal folder. You will have to respawn at a freeport and then find you're way back to your base/home but at least it'll work for you. Just get into a habbit to backup your save game when you finish playing so if an update breaks it you can revert back to a working save. This is not a fix, just a work-around to back into your save game.

They "banned" rgh655455 and vhg755865? But they had important information about highschools and medicine

They do have fast travel, that's what the beds are for.

Factions - Make 4-8 factions (e.g. swashbucklers, corsairs, imperials) and make a small cluster of zones for each faction as starter zones and safe areas. Everything else is lawless, golden age ruins, etc PvP faction objectives, add garrison control points in Lawless and the faction that controls them get specialized quests from outposts (like obtain a cyclops eye or hydra blood) and can access specialized vendors there (for cosmetics) Rewards or at least some reason for PvP. Kill so many players of the Swashbuckler factions Combining PvP and PvE systems into the same game. This can be done by making factions! Freeports - This is where you can turn in quests from the special quests obtained from the control point garrisons above Centralized vendor systems - an auctioneer type system like WoW. Animals pens you can purchase breed animals from Quality of Life- Being able to move great quantities of resources from one container to another container without popcorning Fast travel - once you've been to a Freeport you can now fast travel between them. Make Freeports every 6 zones or so

Not being a regular user of reddit, I have a hard time believing that as a game's reddit goes, so goes the game. I think reddit is one component as it's certainly a social media platform that lends itself in many ways to the gaming community's needs, but E3, steam reviews, youtube vids, live streaming, media reviews, and believe it or not, good old fashioned word of mouth ("See kids, this is what us old timers do when you lot are texting and facetiming each other, it's super old school and it's called having an actual honest to dog face to face conversation. Someday you'll try it, probably when the power goes out."). There are more components than just reddit to a game's public face, especially when you talk to gamers over a certain age who have been playing games since before social media was even a thing (there are more of us than you think). Even if we accept the notion that it's all about reddit, Atlas's poor performance thus far would still be about more than just people being jackholes to each other. I have little doubt redditers are also talking about the game's functional and structural shortcomings as well as any perceived abundance of asshattery.

I think the game is missing a real reason to play it....

Terrible launch, lag, tragedy (and slide show) called fountain of youth, nerfs of fun way to play (like fire arrows were first for me, than stone build with organic matter if I remember correctly), completely random deaths (like fleets of kill on sight sotd, whales, i don't remember what else), tone of carnivorous death on sight, unkillable flocks of alphas just after nerf of fire arrows, PvE ship sinking by players when you were offline, sinking ships by sotd when anchored near island, loosing claim because crocodile spawn next to shack, aotd and wolfs spawning inside animal pens and finally wipe... tarrot magic scraped (at least it looks like it)... Still no flying ships yet ( :( )... Claim overlapping... General level of griefing on PvE. Tide of thiefs when someone learned how to glitch into houses... And this is only what i can come up from top of my head. All of that had nothing or not so much to do with those 50k people leaving? People left because atlas become too similar/not similar enough to ark? Edit: Or was marketed as different flavor than it really is? Edit 2: typos.

Well I never played Ark so can't compare everything but I have seen some gameplay of it and it does look remarkably similar. I think they thought they could hoodwink alot of people and its severely backfired. They should never have based it like Ark, even the controls. It doesn't feel like a pirate game I have to say. The ghost ships shouldn't be in at all or at least have them so they are rare. I don't have confidence in the devs to make the game what it should have been, even to take it in opposite direction of Ark right now would be a massive job, they might as well start from scratch and that won't happen. They missed a good chance to have a great game. They may as well just have focused on an Ark DLC like others stated. Overall it has been a big let down can't get away from that.

Not needed. Mods already fill that gap.

@boomervoncannon and @Realist you guys really need to pay attention to what you read. The OP @Darkweaver is PvP, he was talking about PvP, the OP was about PvP. Did it say PvP, well no, but he did comment on the cost of 12k gold which is the amount to raze on PvP. So yes technically it was taken off topic, not on the subject itself but on the mode, i.e. PvP. And no the change was NOT reverted for PvP. The OPs points still stand for him as nothing has changed for him.

Constructive Feedback is a tool that is used to build things up, not break things down. 1. If you can't think of a constructive purpose for giving feedback, don't give it at all. I commend the development team and management for their perseverance and dedication to getting it done right. It's a small team, they don't occupy a large warehouse floor and the project is exceptionally complex. Hats Off

Atlas being similar to Ark is no issue at all. Only people who are fans of “pirates” have problem with that similarity. You are right partially though, when you quote “lack of anti griefing measures”. This is correct. However, Atlas is failing because of 3 other things. 1. sailing to already discovred places takes too long and gets boring, which caused many leavings from game (solution:fast travel) 2. too much oriented towards Zerg companies, majority of players left due to that (some facts say that 70% or more players are buddies and solo players, who stand no chance vs megacompanies, and they left very early on) 3. in pvp aspect, raiding is too easy on land (solution: improve peformance of passsive defenses)

To me it's got a lot of what I like about Ark, plus ships, treasure hunting, etc. For me the issues are, PvP lacks focus. Also, only the large pvp companies are really supposed to compete, which leaves everyone else out. Also, no real in-game economy. They managed to turn exploration into a chore. It's a mistake to say Atlas should be a "pirate game". It's pirate themed, but it should be more of a empire builder/4x game (at least from the macro level). Get as many people as possible taking part in that, without losing the create-your-own-adventure nature of the game. Give people reasons to do things and not to do things. People get board and leave the game or people get board, troll others and the other people leave the game. Leaving the game pretty much empty at this point.

Grapeshot has finally resolved the "Offline Griefing" issue where players would run around nightly and sink my ships or constantly blow up my bases. It seems that the issue was that previously there was actually a player base and now that there are only 2-3 players on at any given time no matter the region, the griefing has halted. Thank you Grapeshot

Not as much resources as you think - much of this was already figured out in ARK and it was a mystery why they simply did not enable this to begin with since it shares the codebase. The SP options and ini is copypasta at its finest. The only thing they needed to update was the player leash code to deal with the vectoring of which grids to open. You cannot blame the decline of MMO on SP/MP, it is fact the otherway around! SP/MP only exist because MMO is in decline. They realize they have to get their steam numbers up one way or the another. Also they probably already know from adding it in ARK that SP/MP is what XBOX wants to play - so the fact they beta these features on PC just shows XBOX is around the corner.

ya, its a bad joke and noone can tell me this doesn't use a lot of dev resources which are obviously not spent on the MMO part.

Nice little battle i recorded.

Agree, everything from the OP is just a matter of opinion. Sure a few of the things would be cool but it wouldn't be enough just alone to turn the game around. The other stuff I mean blah to at least me. So as one would say these changes would save the game and another side saying it will not. That is all just opinions no facts what so ever. Title should be "what I feel would save Atlas"

The official populations continue to dwindle as the most significant game changes are geared toward single-player and non-dedicated.... speechless.