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You seem to have skimmed over the part where the map was made by one person, and that that one person doesn't even work for Grapeshot, and that they decided to make the download opt-in using the Steam DLC system so that people who have no intention of playing it don't have to download a 10gb update. And where did that part about having to pay their employees even come from? There are plenty of valid things to criticize Atlas and Grapeshot for. This is not one of them.

Atlas One server admin’s perspective on how to save Atlas. About me, I run a small hosting server for game servers. I mostly serve a small gaming community and a few streamers. Most of my experience on game server hosting started in 2015. However, I have over 25 years of sysadmin experience. Atlas is an ambitious idea. I say idea because at this point that is all it is. As it stands now the game continues to bleed players. Even with new content players are just not returning to the game. It is my opinion that this is primarily due to the complete lack of support for unofficial servers. One can’t discuss Atlas without mentioning ARK. Just in case you didn’t know, Atlas, Grapeshot, is made up of ARK Developers and Producers. The game itself has a lot of code ported from ARK as well. This should have made several aspects of the game just work. Many of the features of ARK that work very well have been broken in Atlas. Below are the things that I feel are done right and things that need changes. Done right: · Water system and weather. The water mechanics, waves, wind etc, all are wonderful. I can’t say enough good things about this part of the game. I truly enjoy and most players I know enjoy sailing. It is fun and you can really immerse in this part of the game. · Changed stats. The way stats have been changed generally are good. Much of the power creep that has occurred in ARK is negated with several stats not being changeable and others having much smaller changes. This is for both players, animals. · Building system. Hands down the building system is a 500% improvement. Every aspect to how building works in Atlas is by far one of the best of any of these types of games. I especially like the multi-part system where a wall can be many different things just by cycling when u place. Needs Work: · Animals. While some aspects to animals are ok, several other parts are not. Either you have a taming system, or you don’t. At this point you have, in my opinion, a dumb system. Same with breeding either make it work or don’t have it. It was stated that animals were not going to be a focus of this game. If that was the case, then why make all the changes that make it feel stupid. If animals are not the focus, then don’t give them a lot of utility. If they are needed then don’t change what has worked before, ARK, to some stupid system that doesn’t work well. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it. At this point you have gone too far to obviously revert to ARK systems, so you need spend some time and make it work. Major changes Needed: These next parts are more about how the current server systems work. Ini files. · Don’t make us guess what works or doesn’t work here. Have someone spend some time and Actually document the current ini file options for servers. · Fix difficulty scaling, whatever you did to totally bork this, undue it. Add or go back to how ARK difficulty scaling works. Right now, it’s totally borked up and is incredibly frustrating to players and admins. Either have NO difficulty scaling at all or have it work in a nice linear method JUST LIKE ARK. Why does it have to be this bad? o As it stands now, animals don’t gain XP if they are above a certain wild level. Difficulty scaling totally borks Alphas to be unkillable and able to kill everything. Why does having wild 150 animals mean we have level 1160+ Alphas that cannot be killed unless u glitch them or trap them somewhere. o The entire system needs a massive overhaul. In my opinion separate out wild animal levels scaling and alpha scaling. Also break out SOTD and AOTD treasure maps. Some high level AOTD are immune to all damage or only take a single point. o Some survivors from high level SOTD disappear after you “claim them”. Again, difficulty scaling problems. Ship stats · I understand that “official servers” need to maintain a balance. However, you should know by now that this game will be make or break on the unofficial servers. ALL ship stats need to be fully exposed in ini files. Servers need an easy way to adjust these. This is an absolute must; mods will never work well for this and it needs to be a priority change. Many players and servers play a more PVE style and creative style. Without more ability to easily make these changes you lose long term playability. The single biggest complaint I have from players on all the PVE and creative side is this issue. Along with borked animal taming but this one issue is huge. Ships are ATLAS, you have to do better here. o Changes needed, exposed stat settings like that exists for player/animal stats. o Ini control of ship base speeds, including backup speed. o Ini control of each sail type/size. o Ini control of each ship type, number of sail “points” i.e. how many points each ship has for sails, larger sails costing more points etc. o Ini control for expanding builds outside boundaries or expanding the boundary by X factor. This obviously can’t work in all servers but if I want to have a server where I can build crazy ships then, if this is a sandbox game there should be a setting too allow that. Server map systems This is a big topic and I don’t have enough coding experience to know exactly what changes are needed but this is probably the single biggest issue facing Atlas. As it stands right now you can now play single player or non-dedicated with the full official map. Or try the actual official servers. However, unofficial servers are basically non-existent for truly large maps. The game is designed for a large map. The official 15x15 is 225 shards/servers. As it stands now it costs thousands of dollars to have the hardware capable of running a full 15x15 server. So, we have these smaller ones. The problem is that they don’t deliver the full experience because the game isn’t designed for “small” maps. Blackwood attempts to provide this by having a fully custom experience, but that isn’t much better than non-dedicated because it is too small, resources, quests, etc. I have tried to come up with ways to make this work. I’ve had a 5x5 custom map designed which I can run on a single “server” albeit one with Dual 8core/16t processors and 192gb of ram. That is an extreme example. It highlights the big issue. Another workaround that I have been talking with the developer of one of the Atlas Server Utilities about is a hybrid solution. Have a Set number of shards say a 3x3 as a “permanent” online server. This server is running the 15x15 map. Using a discord integration, a player can send a command to a bot to boot up shards F3, F4, F5, etc. This in turn would have those shards boot up for X amount of time and shutdown XX minutes after no players are detected. Something that could be configured for each server integration. Some hurdles are when a player logs off on a temporary shard and that shard shuts down if the player forgets what shard they are in, there needs to be a way to see last known location. This is complicated by a bug with Atlas that player locations are buggy. Often players will be shown online in several shards at once when they are not there. This is likely due to some issue with Redis not sending back data to the shards when a player moves to a new shard. Often this is seen when a “sleeping” logged off player is moved to a new shard on a moving ship. Although it occurs without that happening as well. Another option is for Grapeshot too develop a better server system that integrates some of the features of the single player/non-dedicated experience. Custom maps and the quests. This is got to be the messiest part of having custom maps, trying to integrate the quests and locations correctly. It can be done but it is so damn messy and when new content gets added it frequently must be done again. This needs to be fixed. A re-write of how quests are tracked internally in the game needs to happen. When a server admin must spend more time on upkeep than playing the game or simply cannot because of IRL things like a JOB, and Family, then the game just gets dropped. In closing, I want to stress that this post is just my opinion, though many parts are shared by the players who have player on my servers. Along with other server admins I have spoken too on the various discord servers. Generally, the conscious is that Atlas has great potential but as it stands now it just isn’t worth the time, money, and aggravation. Any constructive opinions are welcome.

A short list with some fixes and maybe some new features who can be added to the game. Land- -The max health on characters should be limited at 300 and only with BP gear we should be able to cross 300 health.(more fair fights between players) -Fix pike range underwather (is huge and higher in comparison when is used on land) -The glider should loose altitude depending on the weight of the character.(More weight means much faster loosing altitude). -The timer for heal our self with a medkit should be increased. -To heal our self under the wather with a medkit shouldnt be a thing. -Increase mortar damage (it is no longer effective against galies with full resistence,no sense to use mortars against enamy ships even if is an 200% damage mortar. -Increase the 3rd person view when using mortars, we cant use the mortars properly when the mortar is placed somewhere in top of the pillar/cliff. -Increase Standard Carbine damage. -More gun depression for ballista. -More gun depression for Swivel. -Increase puckle resistence, 2 nades and the puckle is gone (Fix puckles behind the stairs) -We shouldnt be able to contest the flag when we are inside the submarine. -We should be allowed to move the flag location in our island once per week without loosing the island claim. -Less range for cannon on tames especially when the tames are on top of the hill/cliff. -Let as to able to pick the Swivel/Puckle/Ballista whenever we want and be able put it somewhere else. -Because no one is farming resources for BP walls/cellings/floors everyone prefers to spam more walls layers so will be nice if we can crafts on usual smithy with only 1 type of resources walls/cellings etc with 1/3/5/x resistence and off course the costs should be much higher but at least the walls spam will be much less or maybe BP with random resistence between 1 and 5 but this BP shouldnt ask for more types of resouces. SEA- - More speed for ships when backwards. -Fix Grapplinghook ships (We shouldnt be able to grap an enamy ship if our ship have less weight than enamy ship). -Let us to be able to take parts from enamy ship or from our ship who got sunk planks/sails/deck.etc (More reasons to sail and have sea fights). -The resistence on ships should be limited at 300. -Let us to decide if our/any ally company can see our ships position on the sea (this is for sea fights). -Let us to be able to reset our points for ships same like our character. -We need large doors who can be used for Harbour entrance,in particular for Galleon. -The cannons placed on ships should do less damage to structures on land. -Will be nice notifications when an ally join in the grid so will not be neccesary everytime to asking in ally chat who joined. I can explain even better why i'm asking this changes if someone is really interested.Will be nice to see your opinions about this list @Dollie and @Jatheish and off course the opinions from our community. ( 2700 hours in game only on PVP official if someone is curious)

I really like where this is going! So suppose every island has these people on them, let’s just call them “survivors”. And every week this group can choose to vote some company off the island that is not helping the greater good. We could do this during a “tribunal”. The company that’s left becomes the representative to that grid and then all the grids vote for a King. Oh wait...you don’t vote for Kings Never mind.

You need to level up crew from lvl 1 to lvl 2 to be able to buy more crew

You have game design experience. If asked to write code, I can very reliably hit a random sequence of 1’s and 0’s that would most likely result in the entire game being replaced with a vaguely British robot voice asking Shall we play a game? How about a nice game of chess? which would likely lead to the end of human civilization at the hands of Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. So for the good of all humanity... Not it. (War is hell.)

The developers could always do a stream every now and then to show off the latest stuff and tease upcoming content. It would also allow for the audience to ask questions live, and maybe get them answered. Regular streams on common social media might also raise interest in the game from the public who yet don't know it. It all comes down to if the company deems it worth the time and if they think they got something to gain from doing it. I guess we'll have to wait and see, don't we?

Steve, I am one of the players who resides on the Kara's servers. I couldn't agree with her more. Official servers are always going to be infested with Mega alphas and other forms of cancerous aids looking for somewhere to leave a skidmark. That is official. That is the very reason that unofficial servers are so important. Firstly it allows admins to curate the asshats. Secondly it allows us to use far superior hardware to what GS/WC can afford to use for hosting. The Nitrado boxes are very cheap quality hosting solutions this is beyond debate. These things are why proper INI documentation matters soo much. This games overall population has dwindled to the point that myspace may have more active users at once than Atlas has players. This is sad because this game has a great deal of potential. The taming system is one example. Ark got taming and breeding correct IMHO. It wasn't too easy but it also wasn't too much of a grind once you know what you are doing. Atlas on the otherhand injects an ungodly amount of grind into the process. I should not have to breed different animals in different climates. That is a level of grind that has probably contributed greatly to the issues they have had with continued community engagement. Remember that players who have 6-8 hours a day to play are a minority and should not be catered to.It's your 6-8 hour a week crown that matters the most. They have the highest incomes usually and will also be loyal willing to may 20-40 bucks extra whenever you drop expansions. It's the 6-8 hour a day gamer who usually whines and moans about having to buy expansions because they don't have or won't get a real job. I am aware there are exceptions to this rule as there are a few exceptions in our group that Kara is well aware of. This is however marketing 101. I'm sure GS has this metric internally but I would guess that around 80% of the Atlas players also own Ark. I know this bothers some people who are ignorant as to how much of the underlying assets and code Atlas borrows from its parent. They need to get over it and accept that Atlas assets are about 90% reused from Ark with a light reskin in a few cases. The SDK for Atlas even still has TRexs and Argent's in it as well as dozens of other dinos and all Ark items. GS would do well to emulate the features such as breeding and INI documentation that have been popular in Ark. At this point they have little left to loose with Atlas.

I disagree with this. Many unofficial servers are running on way better dedicated hardware, which can handle far more than what official is handling. It simply then becomes a balance on how much the players can handle on the client side with the hardware they're using. Devs are tuning for their lowest denominator, which may not be the case for unofficial servers. There are mods that are exposing settings like the ones mentioned for admins to set how they work best on their server. The OP is just requesting that the devs just do this with the vanilla game. If an admin crashes their server because they set these values too high, they can adjust them down. It will be the admin's responsibility at that point, not GS.

Reputation sadly means Nothing as it is way too easy to Manipulate And would also mean Realist has a higher Chance of beeing Chosen as a rep than Most others on the forum

Wiping is hygenic. Just sayin....

Level Up the crew ! then you can recruit more ....( i think 10 lvl but not sure)

Well said and I agree with what you're saying. You don't have to go too far to see what players WANT to have in this game. A lot of us see the diamond in the rough, and come back to see the changes that are being made, get disappointed, and leave again. One thing to note is that you will NEVER make content faster than players can consume. Blizzard failed at that, and they are a major player in the mmo world, and others followed that same path have failed as well, but they changed their strategy. We should learn from that and not repeat the same mistake. It's more about "bringing the player back" to do the same content, in different way, and to hook them into playing more and more. It's not about making me play for 10 hours a day, it's about bringing me back everyday to do something. Most of our current players are here for ship battles and sailing and all that, but surprisingly, they spend more time on land than on the sea. From building to taming to farming. How about we give them some content to do while sailing that isn't, whaling, SotD, or flotsam?

Spot on! i seriously cant agree with your post enough Its hard enough keeping players interested as it is. Grapeshots obvious focus on single player/non dedicated modes and not addressing Unofficial server problems is slowly killing servers (i dont give much thought to Official servers as that isnt my focus). Things like the whole oh we've added this quest etc would also be a lot less painless if they released the code for it at the same time. If it wasn't for discord channels like Atlas Server Owner Support and others we would still be looking for the code.

Right ..... so you and your two mates hear some good things about Atlas and decide to pull away from Rust and give it a go. How many hundreds of hours do they need to spend in the game (in between your getting base wiped as base defences are another issue) to become remotely viable in PvP? To have any chance of not being one shotted by one of these BP'd, level 100+ large clan guys. Little chance of even getting a shot off and if you are lucky enough to do so, it moves their HP bar 5% with a head shot. Screw it you'll build a ship and have some fun on the open ocean. Problem is your up against ships whose planks potentially have twice (2x) the HP of yours and their cannons do twice (2x) the damage of yours. Not to mention ship levels that are derived from the quality of the BP'd ship yard. Might as well stick another 2x in there. Quickly decide you gotta bail as you are simply out matched ...... sorry, their sails and resulting speed lets them easily harpoon you and finish you off. The separation of high and low is the problem. FPS games with thousands upon thousands of regular player put some thought into this and your level/gear gains are very slight to maintain a skill aspect. Atlas has completely lost the skill aspect of PvP .... completely ..... it is quite simply a gear based game that will not sustain any solos or small group players. They will try it out. They will quickly figure out the substantial long term disadvantage they have. They will be gone. You seemed to focus on BPs in your post. Perhaps that was a result of the way I worded mine. It's not about getting BPs or even the mats to make them or even the grind associated with both. It is the fact of how much gain they give and the incredible advantage a larger group has over a new smaller group or new solo player. The numbers are borked. To be fair the game is in EA and that goes a long way with me. Perhaps the Devs are just not worried about it at this point in time. I do know that if it is not addressed at some point the game will not succeed as a "PVP GAME".

Hush, or someone at Coffee Stain might hear you and soon I'll have to eat and drink, maintain my vitamins and worry about the temperature in Satisfactory...

Only way we've found is to have two characters, one creates a brand new company (made after the server restarted) and then have the company with the bed issue merge into the new company. You can then keep placing new beds down and they work. After restart any new beds placed after the restart will not work (ones merged or placed after merge but before server restart continue to work). You do lose any claim flags during the merge and can't port to those beds until a new flag is placed but all structures, boats merge. Beds on boats are usable right away. The bug appears to be with companies created before a server restart. Beds placed do not show up in the company log but show up in the world but you can't see them on the Atlas Map or port to/from them.

Your confused about the decisions they make about a dead game? this game died along time ago, BECAUSE of the decisions they were making. your mad about something too late bro. move on. theres much better games out there.

1.- render lag, and lag in ship battles. 2..- maps disappearing when looted in the shore. Maps in pillars. Maps in foundations or close to structures made by players. AoD stuck in mesh. 3.- tames stuck in mesh forever, when doing maps. Tames stuck in pits. 4.- all defense towers NPC being completely useless against ships, crabs or high level players with overgeared items. 5.- gold sink of maintaining the useless NPCs, leading you to point number 2 and 3 in my list. A repetitive cycle of boredom. 6.- losing ships for random reasons, losing ships when getting to close to the shore at 10% speed, losing ships when trying to go throw a large behemoth and crashing with the door closing, close the door when your ship is going half of the behemoth. The ship will bounce around doing 360 degree circle. 7.- encouraging megas to be the center of the game, locking content behind powerstones, neglecting solo players and small tribes letting them become cannon fodder for megas. Until they left. And megas left after losing their prey.

ADDENDUM POST I'm going to add to this post to clarify and explain things further. I feel like I missed some stuff in my sleepless manic induced stupor last night. Pirate and Trade Companies So one thing I forgot to expand on was piracy and trading focused companies. Trading Companies: Companies that flag themselves as a trading company have PvE waters in their sovereign tiles. They do this by flagging their company as a "trade company" this prevents them from being wardeced. However, this title is lost upon aggression against another player. Defending yourself does not drop the Trade Company flag. When a trade company declares sovereignty waters in that zone become PvE and behave like empire water. Companies declared as trading companies can only join alliances with other trade companies. Standard companies who store ships or build in sovereign trade areas are open to attack by enemies. Pirate Companies: are players who only prey on others; not as a result of war.. but for the sake of it. Pirate players are not allowed in secure waters. If these players wander into secure waters such as Trade Sovereign, golden age, or empire they are free to attack; by anyone, but can not defend themselves in PvP. Gameplay Philosophy Complimentary Gameplay: Pure PvE players should never have to be subject to PvE scenarios; but they should not be left out of being touched by them. PvP conflict would be of great benefit to PvE players under this system: Traders could open vast market places, beautifully built show casing their skill and creativity to its fullest. These area's could one day end up as hang-out spots and areas touched by conflict that unaffected players are able to witness there by immersing everyone into the same event. I go back to EvE: The reward for the participating players is intrinsic; the battle itself is the reward. Now imagine this, but it happened at YOUR personally owned and built Port. You get to clean up the wrecks, you get to profit from the recovery, you get to witness, participate in it.... and it only benefits you... as a PvE only player. The PvP Players, likewise benefit from PvE players. PvP players have a place to trade knowing they wont be scammed or attacked. BPs that are otherwise useless to the PvE Players can be purchased by PvP players... and vice versa! Risk vs Reward: For the players who chose to risk PvP, they are rewareded with more resources, better BPs, more rep gains, and the instant gains PvP can bring. Likewise, for the easy going life of a PvE player; rewards come at a slower pace and with patience. After all... who else is going to breed that line of 125 bears?

So, I went to this Mercedes dealership looking for a new car. And the salesman told me that, because of accessory limits that they were having to downgrade the engines to 4 cyl 100hp. And the leather seats are replaced by velvet. And the satellite stereo, AM... not stereo. Oh and the carpet... rubber welcome mats cut to shape. What's the point of investing in a gaudy, massive ship that has all the comforts of a Honda Civic???

My only worry is that we are able to build insane super structures on land. But this game is based around our boats. From day one, the Goal, Get a boat. Limiting the build limits on these boats seems more detrimental to lowering the overall perception of the direction of this game, rather than say, limiting land structures. I know its not as easy as that, as we do spend a great deal of time inland as well. Hopefully they can find a way to optimize ships to eventually allow for more creativity in the shipbuilding section.

This. Yes you only NEED ladders on one mast but you may WANT them on all masts for the look, convenience, to allow multiple players to be up each mast. This is the issue if you limit building (not just structure limits either the crew limits are pretty tight as well on the larger ships if you want them fully manned) to the bare minimum necessary for PVP and protection you kill creativity and drive away people like myself who have zero interest in PVP but love to craft and build. My prefered schooner design has a whole bunch of design choices that do nothing for it as a ship but make it feel like a home. I have dividing walls in the lower deck solely so I can have a store room, kitchen, living room and crew room plus the captains cabin on the upper deck. I have tables and chairs down there for the NPC crew, I made and put on the same crew cloth, hide and fur armours for different climates simply because it adds to the realism of the game for me. I would have given them all swords not for melee but simply so they had a cutlas hanging off their belt (only you can't have one on them that way its either equipped or invisible). All this stuff would be counting against structure limits, crew weight, etc but I do it because to me it makes the game a little more real and a little more fun. I'm part of a company where we have two galleons and outside of group events (like raiding a golden age ruin) I almost never go near them because to me they have no life and no interest. I can't put rope ladders on all 6 sails (Structure limit), I can't make a dining area and crew cabin (structure limits and weight). They are great at killing ships of the damned and may be ok in PVP (we haven't really had ship to ship combat yet) but that doesn't interest me and building wise we've got parts of the decks that are just unfinished and never will be finished because for PVP other priorities take up the structure limit and so they simply aren't a part of the game i'm interested in bothering with. Increase the structure limit and on the interior decks I can have fun making the galleons look more like a real functioning ship rather than a platform to transport 60 odd NPC's with canons between fights.