Califax

Curious about this as well as I play single player but not on single player settings. Not all multiplayer designed activities are overcomable with extra grinding...

Necro, all the info is wrong now, now you have to do all the research again.

Curious as well. According to some website both Ark and Dark and Light support HDR natively, and im looking into an OLED.

Wonder if it only works when crew are on board.

Triremes.

I kind I kind of like how giant Bulls are one of the smaller animals. Makes everything seem so much more dangerous.

A critical question is what TYPE of difficulty. I'd argue there already is quite a bit of RPG difficulty; it takes quite a lot of grinding, exploration, etc to hit that (I assume, not got there myself). If you mean more twitch difficulty then I'd say you're probably in the wrong game; Atlas seems deliberately slowed down compared to Ark. Longer cooldowns, animations, etc.

Why is the goal to attract as many people as possible? Why cant they be satisfied with the more hardcore pvpers?

Yes, it may technically be enough time to see them and stop. But as you can clearly see from all the posts about it, most people simply don't enjoy the extremely low pop-in distance. For one it is completely against the point of a sailing game, which is all about huge view distances except in fog. The sense of danger they produce is wonderful, the Seas really feel Deadly. But the deadliness is on such a tiny time scale that it forces rapt attention for extended periods, in a game about huge distances and times, and very long animation cooldowns (for an action game). That's why we see all these posts questioning the design conflict.

Hell of a lot of subjective opinion tossed around as objective reality here. Making a game easier is not necessarily an improvement.

I'll give this; that was some fancy mental gymnastics you pulled to squirm out from under that one.

Wouldnt that make everything extremely predictable? That's disastrous in PVP games.

Definitely not true. Many do eventually cash in on their popularity and cater to the majority but quite a few drop amazing games (to us) before selling their souls, and many never steal the game from us they just move on (Fallout, HoMM, others). Elite Dangerous is active. Ark is pretty hardcore. The X series (Egosoft). E.t.c. Plus plenty of studios survive perfectly fine on the smaller market.

It is widely understood that the vast majority of players prefer easy convenient gameplay the moment they feel the desire. This is perfectly fine and the vast majority of the market serve those desires. But please do not forget about the smaller contingent. We deserve to be served by the market as well, so please leave our games alone. We have a hard enough time finding ones built for us without them constantly being changed to serve a different Market. And please understand I'm not being rude here, I understand tastes differ and my preferences are not Universal. But I need to point out that having a game crafted for a different Market isn't bad. But having a game changed from one market to another is. Imagine the amount of work we would all lose if the Gathering rate in Ark were suddenly cut to 1/3.

There is a wonderful tradition of high-level Elite monsters roaming much lower level zones, leaving the trail of newbie corpses in their path. This venerated tradition should never change. Fear and respect are an integral part of immersion. However it is critical that the newbies' death be attributable to some lack of foresight or inadequate response. Thus, the real problem with ships of the Damned is, as mentioned, spawning into a horde of them or their low pop-in distance.