I hear the creative director abandoned ship? Hire me ill work for cheap. Ive modded ark, ive got over 1k hours on both atlas and ark, im a top tier pvper, I was in order of freedom back when they were good. Here are just some quick ideas that wouldnt even require much work to implement.
srsly not a joke i loved this game i hope it doesnt die.
Reduce Overall Atlas Grid to 9x11
Remove 6 Latitude tiles (Essentially making all biomes 1 tile tall like equatorials)
Remove 4 Longitude tiles (A,B,N and O in order to reduce the number of continuous tiles from 10 to 6)
Condense NA and EU servers and open new servers later on if current ones become crowded
Reduce company size to 20
Reduce alliance size to 3
Reduce tile cap to 65 (Allow some overflow space and kick the the latest person who joined the tile after 10 minutes until server cap is reached)
Inverse lawless and claim tiles (Make claim tiles closer to freeports and have lawless tiles on the outskirts)
Increase claim tile upkeep by 200%
Reduce amount of gems mined to 1-3 per node
Make gems drop from treasure chests and sunken treasure
Randomize(or just stagger) gem node respawn timer
Shoveling on the beach should alawys yield 1-5 salt
Remove resource conversion and allow outright buying of resources with gold, gems, and/or mythos
Reduce max level to 80
Increase base health to 160
Increase base stamina to 115
Increase base weight to 400
Increase base fort to 10
Make basic crafting engrams unlocked by default
Make ship planks not destroyable by damage
Increase flood rate from damaged planks by 200%
Increase base speed of sloop+med speed sail to match the brig+3 large speed sail
Incrase base crew of sloop to 6
Force friendly fire on swivel guns (Allows the swivel to retain its power, but forces you to think about using it so you cant spam them on your boat and put npcs on them without considering FF or spam a bunch of forward facing horse carts)
Make lions unrideable (seriously...)
Remove melee animations (Ark melee did nothing wrong! Fighting people with spears in early SOTF was fun!)
Add very very very slight amount of inaccuracy to the carbine (So that its not a literal laser beam)
I think this would make the game more oriented around sailing and fighting for treasure rather than sitting around your base hitting rocks all day.
Ive even got ways to inoffensively monetize the game. hmu!