Aquagoth

Lol, don't worry, mateys. The next few months are going to be just like the last few months. They will shift a few .ini digits around, create a few more bugs, maybe swap some desert southwest zones in next to north-northeast polar regions and boost barrels and submarines. All the while, they will not do us the simple favor of keeping in contact with us. I just checked the staff activity around here. The new PR Team first introduced themselves in June. Their last message was, you guessed it: June. Dollie hasn't been seen this year. From a business perspective, if you were the manager of this team and you were responsible for handing out the checks, 11/10 people would fire the entire staff. These guys are making, what?, 50-80k a year? Idk the going rate, just a guess. Can you imagine forking over that much loot per team member and when you ask what they've accomplished, they show you 2 new structures and a smaller map that has east stuff on the west side and west stuff on the north side? And then, just out of curiosity, you spend literally 5 minutes going through social media to find a player base that is pissed off, leaving in droves and making sure to tell potential new customers to not waste their time on your game. And to top it all off, you come to find out that modders, in their free time being paid $0, are outpacing your team of professionals in content produced. If this was my business and I was responsible for the bottom line, I would lose my fucking mind. The whole team would get wiped and replaced. But that isn't happening. So there's only one explanation: Grapeshot is not a game developer like Wildcard is. It is a money laundering/drug running shell company. It's the only explanation that makes any sense. Within the next year, the DEA is going to have a massive raid on Grapeshot HQ and find a literal mountain of pure-grade cocaine and heroine that is being distributed to small time gangbangers throughout the Pacific Northwest (the Antarctic Northsouth in Grapeshot terminology). Screencap this post.

Egon von (((Sturmberg))) Good God. They even control the central banks in fictional worlds.

LFOOKINMAO!!! As promised, I Aquagoth, have checked in after 3 months to see the progress on the greatest idea for a video game of all time. I am not disappoint. 3 fabricated questions were asked and answered in the first post. "Ask the devs anything!" you said. Not even 1 question was answered after your fake 3 question blitz. Absolutely fookin' hilarious. Grapeshot/Wildcard is a complete joke. I am so bitter, because I honestly love Atlas. I love being a pirate on the high seas. I've been waiting for a great pirate game for years, and I thought this was the one. But to watch you imbeciles destroy it like you are really hurts. I don't know how many personnel you have on the case, but I still really feel like I myself, without any current knowledge of game developing or code, could do what you guys do every couple of months. Welp, 3 more months will put me at October, beginning of November. I'll meet you then with yet another post ridiculing you.

Good thing Grapeshot devs don't read our forum posts, huh? If they did, they would have actually taken into account our collective rage.

Well, been away for 3 months and glad to see nothing has changed. Devs are still on coffee break and have abandoned this game. Personally, I pirated the shit out of ARK to play it singleplayer out of spite because of what these guys have done to Atlas. I would rather be on the high seas in a game I paid for, but at least taming dinos gives me some satisfaction that I hurt Wildcard's bottom line now. I'll check back in another 3.

Phase 1 of Atlas road map = BUG FIXES, QoL changes, performance issues. Hmm...

Yes, I AM letting a game in ALPHA get to me. I absolutely love Atlas and the original vision that Grapeshot/Wildcard set for it. There are at least 1000 things in the game that I can name that need work or could use improvement/adjustment. That's not what I'm upset about. It's the lack of effort and communication that is unforgivable, because there is no valid reason for it. It would take one Grapeshot employee (Dollie is the designated PR lady, I think?) no more than an hour each week to give us a quick shout out on all their social media platforms and let us know that they are on the grind improving this game. As for the lack of effort, put yourself in a theoretical leadership role over at Studio Wildcard. You're the boss and project manager. Jimbo, your only employee down at the Grapeshot department has been working on Atlas for a month and a half. You pay him, I don't know, 50k a year for his services. In 6 weeks' time, you've shelled out $5,700. He reports back to you that he's fixed 3 of the smaller bugs in-game, moved some loot tables around and input different figures on 10-20 items. And, oh yeah, he accidentally fudged the numbers to the Army of the Damned. Also, when Jimbo lowered the level cap to even out the odds for new players to the PvP servers, he couldn't foresee that there would be a cause and effect on the Discovery Points needed to get to those higher levels, effectively not solving the problem at all. So, boss, what do you do? Is JImbo's work worth 6k? Do you continue to employ him? Now remember that in real life it isn't just Jimbo. It's an entire team of programmers that probably average more than 50k a year. If I was the boss and this update is what my investment paid for, I'd clean house. They'd all be fired and replaced by people that could get things done. The only reason that isn't happening in real life is because of the only scenario that makes sense: Wildcard has been redirecting Grapeshot's time and energy into working on ARK instead of Atlas. Again, I'm not upset about no new content, no major changes to gameplay and so on. Those issues aren't supposed to be addressed until later. We are on Phase 1 in the road map: bug fixes, QoL changes and performance issues. Almost nothing out of these 3 categories was improved upon in the time since the last "patch". Which sends the signal to anyone paying attention that Atlas has been put on the back burner. That, friendo, is why some of us are pissed off.

The 1-hour-later update: Bad News: Well, you guys have seriously taken the wind out of these sails. My only hope for this patch was that you would implement the location discoveries in singleplayer like you have in pvp/pve. Instead, I try booting up Atlas only to find my character now only has enough discovery points for lvl 55 instead of (almost) lvl 58. And, oh yeah, discoveries still not working. Again, I'm not a programmer, but it can't be a difficult fix. You already have it working in online play. Good News: ARK really looks great. Seems like you guys actually put effort into that project. I think I'll play that instead. More Bad News: Since I couldn't be a proper pirate in the world of Atlas, I decided I'll try my hand at real life pirating. I can't in good conscience give more money to the same company that is willing to do these kinds of shenanigans to its player base. This "update" was touted as a "major update" (as per your Twitter announcement). So major that you needed another week to put the finishing touches to it. Hey, not a problem. I understand that things don't always run according to schedule. I'll wait patiently. But if you're going to stand behind this as your major update and pretend like you are actively trying to polish this amazing idea you had... nope. You don't communicate with us, give us updates on development, respond to tickets, reply to forum/Facebook/Twitter posts, take our feedback into consideration or act on common bugs that we report to you. Look, if the Atlas project isn't profitable for you, then can it. Why waste your time and money developing something half-heartedly? P.S. Atlas has literally become my favorite game of all-time in an incredibly short period of time. More than Halo, Starcraft, Mass Effect and a slew of other games dating back to Super Nintendo. But after seeing this... I think I'm done. Signing off

Wow. Just wow. This patch must have taken one guy one lunch break to finish. Hell, if you gave me a month, I could have done this update. And that includes the time I would need to learn how to fix 3 bugs. As someone who really, really loves this game, I am beyond disappointed. This is just pathetic. I've learned by now that no one from Grapeshot ever reads these posts, but just in case one of you accidentally clicks on the wrong tab... If this is the level of effort that your team is going to put into Atlas, just pack it up and move on. Work on developing a game that you're actually interested in making great. Changing a couple of math digits and shuffling loot tables around is not an update and does not require even one skilled programmer a month and a half.

Thank you for the update of the update that you posted on Twitter. Even though you don't get much love on the forums here, some of us really love this game. What this guy said (with a little editing): #4 can't be too difficult of a fix since it is already implemented in online play. PLEASE give me a reason to explore these beautiful islands you guys have obviously painstakingly handcrafted. And thanks again for such an awesome game!