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Is there any thread you don't jump in with the words "crossplay", "wipe" or "Xbox"?

I'm holding out for the thread suggesting sailing should be more dull. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, no breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

The first time I saw the trailer I was immediately thrilled to enter the game to see it is beautiful Freeport full of life, animation and players! Unfortunately I could not find that in game apart from the Freeport completely turn into a ghost town! only two three Png persist ... Would it be possible to animate the existing Freeport? without increasing the structures that are already quite beautiful, just add some Png with dialogue animations between them certain could make trips and move from point to point to a B and make a loop on the term, I do not not sure if anything is planned for and I understand that a lot of problems need to be fixed before but the freeport also empty makes me want to commit suicide! to give life even artificial so that it is not the impression to arrive at the real ports and not only to buy pirate proues or underpants, that one does not have the impression to arrive on animated docks so that you can admire the powers of ATLAS! Sorry for bad translation ( French )

There is exactly zero incentive to PVP in atlas. Why hassle with trying to attack an enemy fleet in an epic sea battle, or siege a well equipped fort with heroic defenders when you can simply wait for your enemies to log off, then kill them without resistance and destroy everything they ever created in the game in minutes. Once your enemy logs off, they are defenseless, sleeping, and therefore can be killed with a single hit and looted of all possessions without any skill or difficulty involved. There are no safe places to log off either. The strongest walls anyone can build in the game can be destroyed with a few salvos from a ship, so in about 10 seconds. Even walls that are built far away from shores can be destroyed by a single cannon cart in about two minutes. Also, a simple cannon has longer range than any defensive armament of a base, so you can safely park your ship or cannon cart outside any base, and shoot it without any chance of retaliation. Any ship you may build will also go down in a matter of seconds if found unmanned, even if you spent a week building it. Suppose you are really vested into not dying when you log off, and decide to spend an enormous amount of time and effort building on a remote mountain top that is both away from ships, and cannot be reached by cannon carts. Well, then then any attacker can still destroy the strongest wall you can build in the game with about 30 grenades, in about 2 minutes. To put this into context, grenades are relatively cheap to make and the average player can carry about a hundred. Interestingly, not only is it incredibly fast and easy to kill people offline and destroy entire bases, its rather expensive to build them. Atlas has the odd logic of making it cheaper to attack a fort than to defend one, even not counting the range advantage of attackers that makes all the defensive armaments useless anyway. At the moment not even mega companies seem to keep a large enough player force to defend themselves 24/7, so just build yourself a cheepo ship, get a horse with a cart, pack in a few grenades and sail around to find any building or ship left unattended for two minutes. Destroy it, loot it then move on. Its what everybody seems to be doing as its the most efficient strategy with the current game mechanics. A single player in underpants can currently beat any mega. I had this stupid idea a month ago to start the game, team up with some friends, build an awesome pirate base and fleet and then look for other fleets to battle. After a month, the four other guys left, as if we built something, it would always be destroyed while we were offline. We never witnessed an actual battle. We did see ships sometimes, but if they found us online, they would just sail away without attacking, and avoided us if we tried chasing them. The few allies we met have the exact same experience (most of them left after getting wiped repeatedly). I have only witnessed actual ship vs ship combat on videos. And to be fair, cruising around we found countless fleets moored on shore with their owners logged off, and also countless bases built by fellow players. We made the policy of not attacking anything if there are no players on it, as it did not seem much fun griefing others. But for most people this is the game: find an unattended ship or base, destroy it, then loot it. If you find other players, then just avoid them. Offline griefing is by far the most efficient strategy in this game, and this makes it a very unrewarding experience in my opinion. Its not the fault of the players, its a mistake of the game developers that made offline raiding the easiest and most rewarding activity in Atlas. A very poor game design choice if I may say so.

I've pointed to No Man's Sky in the past as the ultimate example in the gaming world of "The opera ain't over til the fat lady sings", but until this past weekend, I'd never actually played it. My boss (who incidently is one of those mythical grown adults who plays both console and PC games and makes distinguishing between the two as somehow separate and distinct groups somewhat silly) has been campaigning for me to try it for at least half a year, and has kept me abreast of Beyond, it's free update released last Wednesday. It is currently on sale at half price for another couple of days and so after giving it til friday for my boss to verify the new update was as promised, I finally took the plunge over the weekend. I didn't write this to hype a different game on Atlas's boards, but in the sincere belief that all concerned can take something instructive away from No Man's Sky. If you've been living under a rock for the past 3 years, then NMS's launch might be the only one to rate as a bigger charlie foxtrot than Atlas's. When you have legal and regulatory agencies of multiple governments publicly declaring their intent to investigate your game based on allegations of outright fraud, it's safe to say something has gone horribly wrong. Yet Hello games, in the face of massive bad publicity and widespread public rebuke, declared their intention to simply put their head down and go about making NMS into the best possible game they could. If ever a developer had every reason to just walk away, this was it, but they didn't. Fast forward 3 years. The game I played over the weekend was engaging, it felt fully developed and fun. If I had been unaware of NMS's disastrous launch I would never have known from playing it. I believe NMS is an instructive example for 2 parties in 2 ways. The first will not be what you expect. For Jeremy and Snail Games, and all other decision makers in the gaming industry, look closely at No Man's Sky and think hard about whether you really want to release your game long before it's anywhere close to a finished product and charge people money for it, whether you call it Early Access or not. Because the damage to your game's reputation if you do so and it goes poorly cannot be undone. No Man's Sky took 3 years to dig itself out of that hole, and what it has arguably lost in the process is the chance to ever be a big hit. It's clawed itself into being a solid game because Hello games put blood sweat and tears into making it that way without ever asking for a penny more from the people who bought their product. But if they had waited until now to release, who knows what it might have been. Certainly more than the 10k average activity steam charts even over the past weekend with a major new content release AND the game at half price. "Long is the road and hard is the way that out of hell leads up to heaven." Indeed. It would seem wiser never to put yourself in hell in the first place, wouldn't it? Secondly, for everyone who bought Atlas and now despairs of the game's prospects as hopeless and beyond repair: go and have a look. I'm not saying what will be, merely what is possible. If GrapeCard™ were merely shysters looking to make a fast buck, I sincerely believe that they would never have chosen an MMO to do it with, and more importantly, they would probably already have walked away. Atlas is making almost no revenue at this point. Do you see many new players trying the game out? The fact they continue to press forward should be evidence of a significant commitment to produce a viable game. It is entirely possible that the game could still fail, that it's myraid issues may never be satisfactorily resolved enough to attract a meaningful and viable playerbase, but that is only a possibility, not a certainty. I want to also say a word about the continuing criticism of Atlas's concept as not just pirate themed, but pirate/fantasy. If you don't like the concept, by all means say so, that's useful and legitimate feedback. But at the same time, try to give them credit for trying something new and different. The gaming industry has too little innovation and experimentation at the top these days, as the bigger companies just regurgitate mostly bad sequels to already proven franchises. If Jeremy et al had truly wanted to just create Ark II, they could have done it without taking the chances they have with Atlas. Beyond this, for those that just want to stand on the sidelines, throw stones and jeer instead of offering useful and constructive feedback, I offer the words of Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

If you're still trying to reproduce the bug of building tiles disappearing, I can do that nearly at will on NA pve, A3, Barracude Refuge.

yes when I posted this there was 100 people on each for a grand total of 400 players insane.

I'm in for a wipe ASAP

Id say sailing is boring because it is a single repetitive task of staring out at the sea and running to the helm as soon as a SotD appears in sight to drive around it. You cant do anything else cause if you take your eyes of the water you run into SotD immediatly. With empty ships you can speedrush past them as well but thats as boring and doesnt make an enjoyable sailing experience. Some things that could improve this: 1. Allow NPC crew in the crows nest to expand vision range to free players stuck in the crows nest. 2. Allow NPCs to sound a ship alarm or notify you when there is an enemy ship or npc or dangerous weather in sight, let us take our eyes off the water to do other stuff. 3. SotD only appear at night and in fewer but smaller and larger groups to give us different sailing experiences -> during day we can do cooking, dancing, chatting with players, organizing cargo, manual repair our ship or even change its layout while sailing. during night we need to be more careful if we run into a large group of SotD we need to dodge them and its more of a challenge but happens more rarely. (SotD for farming can still be in Golden Age 24/7) 4. Different weather phenomena like a random moving giant watercylone that can sink our ship if we dont dodge it, heavy storms and giant waves we need to turn the ship right into to not take damage and stuff to also give us different experiences while out at the sea. Even no wind that can make us stuck could be a challenge but it need to be super rare to not get annoying. 5. We should meet real NPC ships that spawn in higher numbers on servers with low player counts from traders we can robb or steal their ship to pirates that attack us and we need to fend off or surrender our cargo etc. -> since the pirate encampments are said to have ships guarding the waters around them lets hope they will also have trade and travel routes to send ships out on the sea and lets hope they are real ships not like SotD. This would also allow to have different areas where you can meet more traders, more small ships or more pirates or sea monsters to have different experiences while sailing across several grids and they are not all the exact same. 6. Rare events with rewards that happen randomly, small ones like finding someone shipwrecked to get a reward for rescuing them or a trader ship with a special offer to bigger ones like npc fleets or giant monsters with special rewards for everyone that helps defeat them - like the dynamic event from other mmos where all can take part and drop in anytime. 7. The phases with low wind should be shortened it happens to much, rather have more weather with randomly changing wind. 8. Add more activities that can be done on ships more interactive objects and even more RP stuff so we can socialize and gather on ships while traveling. 9. since it affects sailing as well, let vitamins have the same modifier like hunger from doing heavy or light work or idle around its impossible to balance otherwise when your hunger depletes much slower while sailing and your Vitamines do not so you cant eat enough to keep them up. 10. ship combat, is part of the sailing what i think players would want to do with ship combat -> manage crew, ammo, weapons, maneuver your ship fight the enemy ships, and board them sometimes to steal cargo or the ship. plus visual damage when ship parts are damaged to give a better feel of actual combat and allow you to easily see where you need to repair and how damaged the enemy ship is. what i think players would not want to do with ship combat -> keep your ship from sinking 24/7 as it will start to sink as soon as anything hit it. planks break super easily and you only work to replace missing planks and bucket water from a swimming frame during combat. thats not fun its really repetitive as every battle you are doing the same instead of all the stuff above that is actual fun. repairing and keeping your ship from sinking can be part of combat it shouldnt be the main part taking more than 90% of your combat experience. 11. more ships types and models would also improve the experience a lot since we dont sail or meet the same 3 ships over and over.

Dead or not I’m not the one crying cause a CM left the chat and I lost my super special double secret exclusive dev access that regular players don’t get. Taking your ball and going home when you don’t get special treatment. Boo @#$&ing Hoo

Imo, once you have the double harvesting skill, all the handharvesting skills, the 250% encumbered speed skill and high damage legendary or mythic tools, during those ten minutes you'll beat any animal at their thing except bears. Now we rarely use an animal to gather mats if its not fiber.

1. Remove 90% of tames, you can gather yourself with tools. 2. Add in more crafting hardcore mode to make special items for your ship. 3. Remove 90% of the stupid things like Torpedos 4. Add more NPC, AI driven random boats around the waters. 1-2 per zone is all that is needed. 5. fIX THE GAME TO GET RETURNING PLAYERS. 6. Its a hopeless issue at this point because they moved away from the pirate theme and made it more ARK clone, with water. Remember i was the first one in ARK to build a castle and a ship on the water. Back in alpha release. I wanted ship pirate games to come out. But this one had potential and now its a mess... and the steam reviews are just a small faction of what we warned devs about. But whatever, its their baby and it will die their baby, sadly it will happen.

I didn't bring that up because it's not the point. He was obviously unclear about Snail Games relationship to Atlas and possibly Ark. The point of my post wasn't really about Jeremy, but about Snail games, and what we know about what they do and don't own. They bought Wildcard, they made the wild west thing using part of Ark's code. But GrapeCard is a seperate company and we don't know how involved Snail might be, if at all. What's not true is that all 3 are somehow just in some big pot o gaming company from out which pops 4 or 5 different games all with the same base code.

Bottom line is that if people are actually playing another game while sailing that is stupid AF. while playing sea of thieves, I might text someone back because I had the time to but I sure as hell wasnt playing another game. this is becoming very unacceptable. Increase sailing speed by atleast 3x if not 5x. That old stuff just isn’t going to work. This isn’t a sailing game mind you. A pirate game yes, a sailing game no. definitely not happy with hearing how people spend their time sailing.

Right now there is a lot of concern over Atlas and what it is and where it's going. Is there an updated vision for Atlas? Is it possible to get a road map from the developers? e.g https://fix.pubg.com/ What is good in PvP life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women. Done that and now we have nothing to do. We raise their fleets and destroy their base and then they quit? How is that going to make a sustainable player base? What are your plans for incentives and accountability? Many, many, many people have asked for combining PvE and PvP and given great suggestions, myself included. Are you even considering doing this? Why separate the player base? Why is decay of structures forced into the game? Can you not allow the player base to clean up things? This has created all kinds of nuisances including but not limited to people not reliably being able to take a break and helpful structures such as ramps to treasure maps auto destroying. If someone quits, let us be pirates and pillage their items. We should be able to destroy structures and get resources. We should be able to take over ships that are abandoned and either sink em or salvage them. Auto decay is awful.

Hey pal, Grapeshot stated that Atlas is meant to be played by solo, small, on up to mega-companies. They claimed that they were taking special precautions to ensure that Atlas would be available to all aspects of gameplay mode and this includes CASUAL play, you pompous arse. What makes you think that YOU get the right to decide how this game should be played? The fact is simple, the devs are currently trying to make Atlas work for all playstyles and this might very well include offline raid protection flagging. Who knows, as they are still working out their ultimate solutions, you know, early access and all...

And I don't blame them, they are clearly playing the game within the rules and have a very efficient strategy for success. I blame the game developers who made the game rules favour this kind of gameplay. That fact that it takes more resources to build a wall than to destroy it means if you are building any base, you are losing. Because you could have used that time and effort to easily grief someone and gain their hard-earned wealth instead. And as Mike says, for the players who are not interested in griefing, the only logical solution is to not play, hence why 90% of the playerbase left.

I think it's fair to say a lot of players had already departed before any time, thought, or effort was put into those alternative game modes. As for Blackwood, it's development did start much earlier but was primarily handled by one developer up until the last two weeks to get it out the door and deal with the technical issues. Obviously the openworld game has its issues, we don't shy from that, but it's clear the direction the team had taken with our updates weren't really impactful in turning the ship around. You could argue that taking a break from it allows us to give it a fresh perspective and tackle different things in order to get ATLAS to where it needs to be. As for not caring, you're highly mistaken. This isn't just a job for a lot of the people here, it's a passion and everyone wants to see the project succeed. There's still a lot more work to do and will be continuing to do it over the months ahead. Whether people choose to return or stick around, that's up to them but the team will always put it's best efforts forward in that regards.

Devs pls. remove our tames from crew when they are on ship put them into weight, because of that we can't use more crew. And make our crew more usefull, so we can use them when we gather food and resourcess.

But birds, or any other wild animal, should not count as crew.

The max counts for lvl 1 crew in freeport. You need to level them and then you can buy more. Thats how it was in the past...not even sure anymore with all these ninja updates.

To cannons, puckles, balistra etc? It's becoming a real chore having to seat/unseat 35 npcs from cannons everytime I stop at an island to repair etc.

Interesting story about Ark – I started playing that game when it came out, and I was alone and had no friends there. I met a really nice group of guys that recruited me and let me join their clan. They would recruit other ‘lost soul’ types and give them a group to belong to that was well-organized and successful. Every now and then a member would say something a bit off-color, and I would just chalk it up to the usual internet racism. After I while I joined their Teamspeak and noticed that people would post racist memes occasionally, and swastikas could be seen in some member’s avatars. After asking around I confirmed that this was a gaming wing of a white supremacist group. Their recruiting strategy focused on lonely male gamer types who were trying to belong to something. That’s when my time on Ark came to a close!