boomervoncannon

This is exactly what I'm talking about. With all the things that are making this game redonculously hard right now, boosting rates by 3x to make things a little easier on players is hardly cause for concern. Sorry but it just isn't. When you assert otherwise, you come across as someone who just wants a super hard game out of reach of most players, which isn't a realistic approach, or someone who wants everyone to be forced to join large clans, also unrealistic.

Okay, couple things: 1) The underlying premise you're presenting here is that the flag claim system is bad because it lacks realism. In a fantasy MMORPG with dragons, ghost ships, cyclops and hydras, this is a pretty weak arguement. Further, please tell me you're not so new to online gaming that you're unaware that nearly every game you could care to mention has mechanics in it that are not "realistic" but exist for gameplay balance reasons. This is just an accepted reality of gaming and most gamers understand that. It completely undermines trying to assert that the mechanic is poor because of a lack of realism. 2) There is nothing wrong with suggesting an alternative you personally find more appealing, and tbh, I see no reason why on a pvp server, this suggestion isn't a perfectly viable one. But your suggestion seems not to have even given any thought to how things would work for the pve side of the game. I'm going to take a wild guess you play pvp and so might be unconcerned with how pve works. Just pointing out that what you suggest wouldn't be a viable option for pve, so something else would need to take it's place. Game developers are often loathe to have radically different systems in place for pve and pvp, so the chance they would adopt your suggestion for pvp and do something different for pve I would guess to be not good. 3) Labeling Percival as a lying propagandist because he doesn't agree with you is immature behavoir and to this point in the thread you've provided zero evidence that he's either lying or in any way doing so at the behest of GrapeCard™ The problem with labels within the context of debate is that they do not refute arguements. Rather they are a way of allowing one to dismiss another party without having to confront the force or validity of any arguments they put forward. You probably wouldn't like it if I just said you're an ignorant kid sitting at his momma's laptop talking about stuff he doesn't know anything about, but this is in essence the same thing you're attempting to do to Percival. By labeling him, you're trying to dismiss him. Since you have zero evidence to back your asserted label to begin with, you would be better served to dispute his assertions on the merits. This has the added benefit of being far more likely to convince anyone reading who may not already be locked into one position or the other to see things your way, something labeling without evidence is unlikely to do.

It doesn't though. It just doesn't. Tripling resources for a limited time event doesn't wreck game balance. I know because I've seen very similar things in other events across multiple MMORPG's. This isn't worth further debate though, because it's simply a difference of perspective on an agreed upon set of facts. You think 3x wrecks game balance. I think it does not and you're overreacting. I've cited my previous experiences that lead me to this conclusion. If you're bound and determined that it's somehow awful, I can't stop you from running around like your hair is on fire, but imo this is just a non issue, especially in comparison to other things that are major issues.

Ummm the first MMORPG I played in 2004 had events all the time. So did the one I played after that, and the one after that. Just not sure where you get this notion that the MMORPG genre is an eventless one. And stop hyperventilating like 3x is the end of the world. It’s just not. Given that there will almost certainly be A) wipes B) more events, your claims of Silver spoons come across as fairly hyperbolic at best, if not a littte silly. There are any number of legitimate complaints to be had right now about Atlas, two of which are the way that OP creature and ghost ship overspawns are causing large percentages of the playerbase to lose lots of hard work to futility. Boosting rates during an event to give people a chance to recoup their losses more easily is one of the decisions that seem like a good one from this development team right now. Christmas was last week. The time to rp Ebeneezer Scrooge has passed. Just relax.

Best weapon in pvp? A working brain. /em mic drop

WTB upgraded bp for GrapeCard development team. Looking for buffed stats on idea execution.

That depends on whether you believe it’s a bug or a poor design choice that should be corrected. At this point neither can be ruled out.

“I accidently named the ship.” sounds an awful lot to me like “I accidentally slept with your wife.” Some things are just extremely unlikely to happen accidentally.

There is stuff that needs to be tuned and then there is stuff that plain common sense should have told you better. Look, I’m sorry, you can say “it’s EA” all day long til you’re blue in the face, but if you honestly think that after Ark official pve pillar spam, that they shouldn’t have known better than to come up with something better than the existing flag claim system ON DAY ONE, then I’m not sure you’re operating with a meaningful level of horse sense and intellectual honesty, and I do not mean that as an insult, just an observation. Let me employ an analogy. If you’re an engineering team, and you design a car from scratch, literally a kind of car no one has seen before, and it’s a hit, that’s great. Then your team goes to design it’s second car. If the prototype for that car doesn’t have round wheels, then saying “yeah but it’s a prototype” is not an acceptable explanation. Your team shouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel for the second car. (btw, I’m the guy who started a thread warning people that EA involves lots of change, so please don’t preach to me about iterative testing and change. On some of these things it just isn’t the issue, failure to learn from past experience is)

10 dubloons to the poster who can confirm what the sextant buff is.

The longer what lasts?

This is the second thread I've seen in the last 24 hours discussing this. Let's try to keep this thread bumped so that the devs can be made aware this seems to be a thing.

You forgot to say we're you're only hope.

Thatt's the one. Thanks Dags. Us old people sometimes get CRS diesease.

Wait for splus to be ported to Atlas? This seems like one of those things they didn't put any thought into before rushing this game into EA, but will have to address at some point in the next 2 years. That does not solve your problem here and now I realize, but I think that's where we're at, unless someone knows a trick that can help.

...then you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all ABOUT!!

There was a resource location post just yesterday that showed regions for all resources. Google it. Can't recall the posters name but he had a Tyler Durden avatar. Think he was gonna update the official wiki with the info over the weekend.

Guessing this is something where all the functionality hasn’t been added yet.

These are used because you’ve chosen phonetic alphabet, since you speak English. I don’t think the game is coded to display phonetic, Chinese, and Cyrillic characters in chat simultaneously, and I think this standard across most games. In short I think it is about the game and not your pc, but I don’t know to a certainty.

Raft not lost. Spawn elsewhere and die til cd met. But yes, your experience is both awful and typical.

sorry but TL DR doesn't really work for this post. The issue is a little too nuanced and involved to sum up in a sentence. Not everything can be or should be.

So I think there is increasingly a need for a conversation to be had amongst gamers, not just for Atlas, but across gaming, about Early Access. And @#$% it, since Atlas is the most high profile EA out there right now and (most importantly) it's the one I'm playing, there's no time like now, and no place like here to have it. I think the conversation that gamers need to have, and need to communicate clearly to the game development industry, is what are our minimum expectations for a game going into Early Access? I have been through several Early Access experiences now, and two things strike me equally about the process with regards to players. 1) Many players do not understand, accept, or make allowances for the EA process as compared to a finished game. These players do not have proper expectations, which leads very predictably to anger when their expectations do not remotely match reality. 2) Many players who fully expect the EA process to be a bumpy one exhibit a tendency to dismiss any and all complaints coming from others with the catchall "It's EA." Both of these things are problematic. The first one has been covered ad naseum in other discussions, but the second I want to examine more closely, because any reasonable person examining the landscape of gaming today can see that EA has not been purely a win for gamers, with all shinning light and rosy outlooks. EA to date has it's good points and it's bad, but there is a clear need here, and that is the need to create some definition of what is minimally acceptable as a level of game development BEFORE entering the EA process. There is a simple reason for this. Beta testers are either paid or far more often unpaid, but they don't pay to be beta testers. The difference between beta testers and EA players is that the latter have paid to be there. This means they have a right to expect a minimally playable product, even if it is one still being developed. The truth of this is shown in the fact steam is currently offering refunds for Atlas for many players beyond their usual standard of 2 hours, primarily because those players could not reasonably have been deemed to be offered a playable game. Given that charging players to be beta testers works very much to a game developers advantage, while paying for a game in a not playable state is very much not to the players advantage, we should not reasonably expect developers to self impose limitations upon minimum thresholds before pushing a title to EA. Personally, I believe one of the core initial mistakes made here with Atlas has been pushing to EA too quickly, and I strongly suspect the likely reason for doing so was to get Atlas onto the market during the peak consumer spending month of December. From a revenue generation standpoint, this makes a lot of sense, even if from a development standpoint it would have been better to wait another 3 or 6 months or whatever. I think that the record level of refunds and negative reviews that GrapesCard™ is facing because of this decision right now is good for players and good for the industry, because it is demonstrating to all developers that there can be very real negative consequences for pushing your game to EA too early. But let's stop and think about this for a moment as gamers. Do we really want our only option to hold game developers accountable for the product they offer as EA to be refunding and negative reviewing after the fact? Would it not save time, money and energy for ALL parties concerned, players, developers, and heck even Steam itself, if there were clear expectations of minimum levels of development in place coming from players, since after all, we are the final arbiters of the products worth? To give a clearer understanding of what I'm talking about, I'll use two specific examples from Atlas of where I think game development was an obvious failure and "it's EA" is not an acceptable excuse. 1. The extreme level of creature overspawning. C'mon Wildshot™, are you really gonna say with a straight face that after 3 plus years of developing Ark, that you didn't have any better idea than this of what constitutes appropriate levels of creature spawns in your game world? Really? Yes it's EA, yes we understand things will need to be tweaked, but we did actually pay money for this, and if you can't come up with a better default out of the gate than what you have, with Ark's development as a baseline to work from, that's just piss poor. Try again. 2. The land claim debacle. This is especially egregious for anyone familiar with the ongoing saga of pillar spam on Ark official pve servers. How in the name of Keith Richard's beard could you not have come up with a better approach than what we have after having that experience to learn from? Saying "it's EA" just doesn't cut it here, because you've had a directly correlational issue from your other game from which to learn and improve upon. The troubling thing is this one thing more than any other suggests you're not learning from experience, and that's a dangerous thing for a development studio to have as a flaw. Now that I've laid out the conversation as I see it, I'd like to ask those posting to do two things please: 1. Refrain from using non helpful pejorative labels such as white knight, fanboy, hater, kid, etc when discussing this. These labels do little but provide an excuse to dismiss those you disagree with without having to actually address any points they may be making. They do not move a conversation forward, and this conversation, I believe strongly, we all have a stake in. 2. Try to avoid having the conversation get lost in the morass of details or sidetracked. This is not a thread to debate the land claim system or creature spawns or other specific aspects, but to talk about what sort of expectations we should set as players for developers. I know this was a long post, thank you for taking the time to read it, and thanks to all that contribute constructively in advance.

Good tip. The only problem is, how are we supposed to get inside the lair if they have all the sharks with lasers? C'mon Wildshot, we need our own sharks with lasers. #NEEDMOARLAZORSHARKS

I read in a post that there are already sharks with lasers ingame, and they’re stealing all the best fighter jets and nuclear subs, leaving none for you and me. Just because you read it in a post doesn’t mean it’s true. Doesn’t mean it’s not true either, but it’s important to take that sort of stuff with a grain of salt.

I got ten bucks says you didn't sacrifice small animals to the Internet Gods. You'll just say you did to make yourself look committed. But you're not really all in, and this is why the Internet Gods do not show favor upon you. At least, that's what I'm going with because why not? It's not like you can prove me wrong. God I love empirically unverifiable statements.