boomervoncannon

Since Atlas will have crossplay from the beginning of its Xbox launch, I’m not sure how this information affects Atlas in any way. They thing they could do they are already doing.

nominal repair costs in metal and wood iirc at a smithy. No biggie.

Early Access as a concept does have a legitimate purpose. It can allow small independent studios who could not otherwise get their projects funded to have a means to take their idea to the marketplace, raise cash via crowdfunding or other means enough to get something playable off the ground, then use Early Access and player feedback to develop it further. In the hands of major studios and already successful ones like Wildcard, it's a perversion of a system that was working perfectly fine for 20 years.

*shrugs* still the only one I know of. Games that are doing poorly don’t usually have an abundance of 3rd party resource sites.

This is the only one I’m ware of: https://atlas.hgn.hu/

You might personally have no issue with lootboxes but if you understand what they do and how they do it from the companies perspective, it becomes obvious that the company driven by greed and lack of caring for its customers is the one far more likely to use them.

The problem is that if they put Early access on the page where you buy it once (or wherever), that’s all they have to do to avoid the legal liability you’re talking about. They aren’t required to inform you every time they talk about it. As far as why companies are doing this, it’s simple, they’ve found a way to turn what used to be a cost center into a profit center. To them it looks like a no brainier, but there is no free lunch. By charging people for a substandard product, Early Access or no, you negativity impact your game’s reputation in the marketplace, which has harder to quantify but definite consequences.

Well for the moment they should be everywhere for the sake of testing them. But I can see dialing them back when live.

Each game world is a grid of 225 servers all interconnected. Two extra would be an additional 450 servers on top of the 900 the existing 4 grids represent. That’s a very significant cost and available information suggests the Xbox launch may be happening because funds for development costs are running low. Even if funding were not an issue, existing player populations dictate that if possible new players are added to existing grids rather than create even more grids just to create options. I agree completely that more testing should have been done. The Xbox launch feels rushed and doesn’t feel like the game will have a great chance to succeed in its current form.

No offense but please tell me you did not specifically mention Ubisoft as a company you prefer and then later imply they care more about their customers and are less greedy than GC. That’s really just not a credible assertion about any company that uses lootboxes in their games considering loot boxes are considered one of the main ways to increase monetization in gaming, allowing the companies using them to extract more money from their players without adding value to their experience. Lootboxes have been outright banned in Belgium and the Netherlands because of the way they amount to encouraging addictive gambling behavior and other governments are looking closely at regulatory/legistlative action in this direction. Bottom line, asserting that any company which uses them is less greedy and/or cares more about their customers than a company which does not is just not a supportable assertion in my book.

*mutters under his breathe about people getting up to tomfoolerly when he's not paying attention.* I suppose if they're desperate to cut costs, it might be something they're looking at.

*blinks* it is? According to whom/what?

Also BAPS, we promise, you're the very first person to propose merging pvp and pve. Honest. It absolutely hasn't already happened several times, usually every couple months like clockwork. All of the other proposals that weren't made didn't also suffer from having no real benefit to pve players, just a way for pvpers to invade pve. This is the first time. As far as you know.

PM me to discuss why Calvinball would be the greatest VR game EVAR, and how we can get in on it. I promise it’s much more than me having the idea and you doing all the work. I would of course write all of the marketing copy.

Heard you out. Pass.

*farts* qualitywhat?

This is what leads me to suspect that their cash situation may be other than what we were led to believe. It’s either that or they are making what I would regard as very ill advised business decisions.

It’s possible the game might release on the 8th, but based on GC’s track record to date, I wouldn’t count on it. Since they’ve already said that NA PVP is iterating the Xbox launch version over the 10 day window between, they may be waiting til last minute to release a preload version.

To start with, all gaming companies are businesses, and ALL businesses exist to make money. If they do not, they cease to exist. No company, no game. So as a player, you should want the companies that run the games you play to make a profit. Let’s dispense with this underlying assumption most gamers seem to have that making money is bad and always at their expense. Do you work for free? No? Neither do the devs, and I assure you they work plenty. Greed in gaming is when companies seek to make additional profit without adding value to their customers experience. Loot boxes are greed because they allow companies to hide the cost of additional content which used to be either free or at a straightforward cost in a cash shop behind an RNG that has the side benefit to them of triggering addictive behavior in their customers. If your marketing strategy is the same as your coke dealer, yeah that’s greed. Do you see any loot boxes in Atlas? No. But you’re not a fan of the move to sell the game to Xbox players. Neither am I at this juncture. However there is a strong possibility it’s necessary. 4 official game worlds, totaling over 900 servers, that monthly bill ain’t cheap. And everyone at Grapeshot needs to eat and pay the rent. The game has fared poorly after its initial launch, meaning the amount of revenue coming in the past 6 months is falling far short of expenses. At some point more money has to come in or the music stops. It would not be unreasonable to infer that the Xbox launch when the game is clearly nowhere near a finished product means that that point has been reached. If it has not, if this move is not being made from need, its an extremely poor long term business decision because the game has not been improved enough to expect it will do much better on Xbox than it did on pc. But when things go south as quickly as they have for Atlas, it may be the only option they have. None of us knows for sure because we don’t have access to GC’s balance sheets, but with what we do know, these are reasonable guesses.

You are my sunshine my only sunshine you make me happy when skies are grey

LIES!! The hat is a lie!

Yeah there's actually a club here for people who want the pirate game to be more about pirates and less about tames. We would have hats, but well...

*coughs* You might wanna look at Perci’s post count and join date before you assume he’s an Xbox player new to the game. He’s actually a returning player who was very active during initial launch. Just FYI.

All the servers are crossplay. They haven’t actually added any servers since you last played.

Such is the nature of Early Access games. Sometimes they have lots of wipes, sometimes few, but if you are buying them without accepting you may lose what you work for multiple times, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. I’d recommend checking back at official game launch.