boomervoncannon

boosted rates? Boosted rates made kibble unnecessary. If you did raw meat tames at 1x taming rates, then you were doing it very inefficently. If you did it on boosted taming rates greater than say even 3x, then taming raw meat made perfect sense and kibble is almost pointless. I've done it both ways.

okay that's definately the part that's dumb, if true. A seagull should not count as crew. No wild creature should. This is *hopefully* just a coding oversight, not intended.

This might be one of the things put in to encourage cross biome trading, or it might just be something where effort vs reward wasn't carefully considered initially. Hard to say which, but yes in it's current configuration it's not worth it. Hopefully with feedback it will get improved.

Every bit of this is self rationalizing nonsense. Bye Felicia.

Yeah I fail to see the utility in having something that can one shot the biggest ships in the game. Particularly a thing you have little to no chance to see coming. Unless I'm missing something it just doesn't serve any useful purpose. Having a challenge is useful. Having a mechanic that randomly destroys your work regardless of what you do isn't useful, just frustrating and annoying.

Arrr, welcome aboard matey. *hands eddo an ale*

If true, this is more than a little troubling, as it's effectively indefensible and serves no useful purpose as to game challenge. Might require tweaking of the whales. Sorry for your loss. Respect for reporting it without childish ranting or emoting invectives at the devs.

You raise an interesting point. I'd guess I'd say the only reason I can think of off the top of my head to build the larger ships would be (I assume anyway) larger weight carry capacity. I have a schooner. It has greater weight capacity than my sloop. It's probably fair to assume the same continues to be true as you get larger, but yes otherwise, why bother? Then again, in a pve game, since trading is probably a big component of gameplay, having that extra carry weight would be no small advantage.

*sighs* You're still on about this? Okay, fine. You want to talk about dismantling? You don't have the first idea of what dismantling really is. Asserting things on your own is not dismantling. Let me show you what dismantling really is. I'm going to dismantle your false assertion of my position as "age good" right here right now. Review every post I've made in this thread. Absolutely nowhere will you find anything I've said stating that age is good or even endorsing the mechanic. You know how I know this? Because I don't have an opinion on the mechanic yet because it isn't in the game, at most it sounds potentially interesting. What I've said here is to summarize YOUR position as wanting the game altered to suit your tastes because you don't want your characters appearance to change. You have made the logical fallacy of assuming my objection to your position constitutes taking a position endorsing the age mechanic, and you have falsely assigned this position to me. This mistake shows the flaw in your reasoning and thinking. It is not clear and it makes false assumptions about others views without supporting them through evidence. So, to summarize, my position is not "age good", I've just dismantled your assertion that it is by showing it's based on no evidence but rather assumption on your part, while your postion, based on your own statements, can very fairly be summarized as wanting the game altered to suit your preferences and absolutely none of your bloviating to distract from this core point changes this basic fact. Oh, that information you seemed so sure I didn't have? Here is the link: https://gematsu.com/2018/12/studio-wildcard-announces-pirate-mmo-atlas-for-pc-xbox-one The relevant passage is at the bottom "A brief history of Atlas" and it outlines how Atlas has fantasy lore roots and is not a pure pirate MMO. Note where it describes how the players or Pathfinders are the descendants of the fallen magical kingdom. This is how the aging and breeding mechanics tie directly into the game's lore in a significant way. So my assertion IS supported by independant evidence. Evidence that instead of being in possession of or being willing to seek out yourself, you simply wrongly tried to assert I didn't have. It's not that the information didn't exist, it's that you didn't want it to be true because it is contrary to what you want. Sad day for you. You don't have to like this mechanic. You don't have to like the lore. You are entirely free to say they suck and you think it's bad. What won't change is you are still wanting the developers to change their game and vision of that game, to suit your personal preferences. That is all I have ever asserted in this thread, and nothing you have said changes that. So now you have a choice: accept that this mechanic ties into the game's lore in a key way and likely isn't going anywhere, suck it up and play anyway, or leave. If you choose the latter, I think you know my rejoinder by now. Bye Felicia.

Someone who doesn't like what someone else on the internet has to say. Shocking. You call it noisy, senseless and useless. I call it using my brain. Is there a topic where you feel using your brain is a bad idea? Are you suggesting it's this one?

Although I am typically skeptical of developer claims that sound like excuses, saying that they didn’t expect the huge level of interest on day one is actually plausible and believable in this instance because of the way they limited promotion of the game to such an extreme degree beforehand. Kept its mere existence under wraps except for a leaked trailer during the summer and announcement only weeks before EA launch. There are aspects of the game’s design this doesn’t give them any kind of pass on because lessons should have been learned better from Ark than they appear to have been, but not expecting this many people to want to play right away is something I can buy. I think what it speaks to is the poor overall quality of offerings out there and how many people are looking for something to hold their interest. For all it’s flaws Ark certainly showed an ability to do this and I suspect that may have contributed to so many people wanting in day one.

No the reason I’m not spoon feeding you has been already stated. It’s not up to me to give you relevant information about game design. It’s up to you to educate yourself, particularly on matters related to your own complaints. You’re not dismantling anything here, you’re simply asserting things to be true, valid or invalid because you say so. Nothing you have said changes the very simple basic fact that your position here amounts to: ”Devs remove or make optional a game mechanic I don’t like to suit my preferences or I’m gone.” to which my response is still (and no I still don’t give a flying fart how cringe you think this is) Bye Felicia.

Die. There will be an option to make a new character instead of res pawn.

I highly recommend the youtube channel Extra Credits. It is made by people in the game design industry, and while many of their five to ten minute videos are made at least in part for industry peers, they are communicated in a clear technical jargon free way that is accessible to the layman. I couldn't write the first line of code if you held a gun to my head, but I've been playing online games since 2004, and I've found that EC as much as anything I've come across better helped me understand some things I often found frustrating and inexplicable as a player. This includes things like nerfs and game design aspects and choices that as you say, came across as sheer stubborn stupidity. Not saying it made everything crystal clear for every game, but it definately helped me gain perspective on some things. Some stuff is still a head scratcher, like how Atlas's land claim system out of the gate seems to have learned exactly zero from the debacle of Ark's pve official pillar spam problem.

One of my big gripes about Extinction was actually once Atlas was announced shortly after Extinction's release, the half finished state of Extinction seemed to strongly suggest to me that Wildcard had likely taken revenue from season pass sales and instead of using all of it to fund completion of that dlc on time, diverted some of that revenue to funding Atlas's development startup. If this is in fact what was done, it isn't illegal, but it's questionable ethically, and I argued strongly at the time that we as gamers should stop paying for games in advance whether through pre orders or season pass devices or whatever. The benefit to us is almost nonexistent, while creating a strong disincentive for developers to have to actually deliver a finished polished product. This is true regardless of whether you're talking about Wildcard or EA or Bethesda. How this industry convinced people to pay for something before they have any meaningful idea how good it is boggles my mind a bit. Grapeshot is technically a different company, but they have made no secret that the people in charge are the same people and the core of Atlas's development team are all Ark veterans. IMO it's perfectly fair to draw on this when commenting. You're right that we don't know how long they've been working on Atlas but my best guess is development probably got underway to a meaningful degree around the time the season pass was introduced, not too long before Aberration's release. That could be wildly off base, but it's my gut level guess.

It is not my job to spoon feed you information about the game's lore, which you obviously based on your statements here, haven't done the first bit of research on. Go and actually look things up for yourself and then you will know how the aging ties into the game's lore and why it is key. You can continue to call it a cheap stunt or fluff all you want, but that will not change the simple fact in the least that this was an announced part of the game prior to release, that it ties into the game's story in a significant way, and you, ignorant of that, are here demanding that the game be changed to suit your personal preferences. Memes are for people with no originality. What a joke of an overgeneralization. Because clearly the individual analogy to you at a Led Zeppelin concert that I crafted to illustrate my point shows no orginality of thought right? You know what I couldn't care less about? Critique of my creativity or lack therof by people whining on a game forum two weeks after EA begins that features they don't like should be removed without bothering to educate themselves on how or why that's an incredibly selfish and self centered demand. Oh wait, here it comes again, lack of originality and all Bye Felicia.

Yeah, cause the first two you built for yourself worked out soooo well for you Palpatine.

Then given the game’s stated genre and publicly available information about its design and intended focus, it sounds like you may have chosen a game bot suited to your preferences. You should feel free to explore games more suited to your style. If you object to companies, and they are a core design feature, then this game might not be your cup of tea.

If only there were a pinned thread at the top of the forum section with helpful info on exactly that topic....

Sorry just disagree that there is no relation or that the relation is wildly tenuous. The article itself makes it perfectly clear that costs can vary wildly within the industry and if you think the fact that this game is a hybrid of survival and MMO means that any cost comparison to other MMO’s is not even remotely applicable then I would say on what basis do you suggest that SOME diffferences in game design and mechanics means core design costs would be dramatically different? Personally I think the strongest argument for a difference in cost comparison lies in the fact that Grapeshot elected to spend little to nothing to market the game beforehand. That’s where the biggest chunk of cost difference lies. You can go on all you like about Atlas not being similar to Everquest or Wow, but all 3 require the same basic expenses in terms of hiring and paying a development team, paying all the overhead and hardware expenses etc etc. But again I wasn’t offering the article as anything remotely definitive. The Op asked for some info and I linked what I could find, knowing in advance the information would never be very precise given already stated factors.

You should have clarified this key point better both in your thread title and Op. Private server owners can do as they like. If you don’t like the way they run their servers don’t play there.

It’s applicable in the sense that it provides development costs for games within the same basic genre. Given that this isn’t an industry where this sort of information is often publicly disclosed, it’s about as applicable as you're likely to get. You should feel free to provide more directly applicable info links if you have them rather than nitpick what I provided without offering something better. I will agree the reuse of some assets probably builds in a non insignificant cost savings, but what that might be is also hard to judge.

They’ve obviously learned little from past communication/self imposed deadline fiascos of the past. It is better they actually test a patch before releasing, but at this point I think they just miss deadlines out of habit as much as anything.

This sort of thing is hard to pin down given that Grapeshot isn’t publicly traded and really only the biggest studios are, but this article gives some ballparks that imply strongly it’s unlikely development costs to date were less than 10 million. Even before all the refunds there’s almost no way they have yet come anywhere close to break even on this game. The business models on large MMO’s just don’t work that way. They have enormous upfront costs that they don’t recoup in a short frenzy of revenue, but make back over time. Sure Wow was a license to print money for a long time, but it was the extreme outlier that created a dream everyone in the industry chased. https://www.engadget.com/2014/01/15/a-look-at-game-budgets-and-mmo-budgets/ Also I agree that adding servers at this point would be an added expense with no real benefit to anyone.

Given that they were very upfront about this mechanic being a key part of the game in interviews prior to EA launch and how it ties directly into the game’s lore, demanding that it goes or you will strikes me very much like buying a ticket to a sold out Led Zeppelin concert in the 70’s and then in the middle of Immigrant Song when everyone is thrashing around and otherworldly noises are coming out of Robert Plant’s mouth, turning to the person next to you and complaining about the noise, then going to security and insisting that if they don’t tone the racket down, you’re leaving. If you do actually leave for the stated reasons, then by all means let me be the first to say... Bye Felicia