boomervoncannon

Games in general that have a lot of pre launch interest (a la Atlas) tend to see a launch spike that tails off. What counts as data depends largely on your definition of similar games. The more narrowly you define that the fewer examples you have to examine, but the more likely those examples are to correlate. Conversely a more broad definition would give a greater sample size but call into question how well all of the samples correlate. I would posit that one of the reasons Ark didn't see a decline was because it was an extremely innovative concept. Survival was an up and coming genre at the time and lots and lots of people love dinosaurs. Frankly, the fact that major dino oriented games prior to Ark consisted of Turok and, well, Turok is a bit of a head scratcher, but I think the fact there wasn't much out there meant Wildcard capitalized on a demand the whole industry had overlooked. One of the crucial differences between Eve's economy and every other online gaming economy out there is the buy order. Buy orders allow the demand side of supply and demand to be expressed. What no one realized until Ark because there is no gaming industry buy order is that there was significant demand for a dino game done right. Ark got it more right than wrong, and the proof of that is the game's success despite some rather glaring technical shortfalls in it's design and execution . In short, I think there are a number of reasons to believe that Wildcard caught lightening in a bottle with Ark and what we are seeing with Atlas is a failure to do so a second time. To go back to the questions you actually asked (see I got back on my own), I suspect that comparing Atlas only to Ark isn't very useful, as the only thing they really have in common is the development studio. They aren't even the same genre of game really. When you look more broadly across gaming, it is more common for games to see big numbers right at launch and shortly after if the game had a lot of pre launch interest, then for those numbers to tail off to some degree as the crowds that were only interested in having a look at the new shiny thing move on to the next shiny thing. In that context Ark and Atlas are polar opposites, neither representing the most common game experience. But you are right, there is no hard and fast rule and never has been, there is only rule of thumb or typical or commonly at best. Don't look now but No Man's Sky has been busily thumbing it's nose at the entire notion anyone can predict anything about a game's success or failure. OMG It's gonna be huge! OMG it's a total fraud. Complete rip off! It's going down in flames and the developers might actually go to jail! Hey, umm wait, I think he's not quite dead Jim. Holy shit Jim, he's kinda showing signs of life. Jim he's flying! The patient is actually @#$%ING FLYING! Look at those numbers holy @#$% that's amazing that it recovered after so loo--- Nope. Looks like he's down again.

Au contraire mon frere. The phrase "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" goes double in the gaming industry. To say that gamers as a group have a short attention span is ----Oooo look Anthem's out! I bet it's gonna be awesome and not suck at all! What was I saying? Right. Atlas. Numbers. Meaning. Look there is a hard truth to face here. If it weren't for Bethesda inventing new ways to piss off their own fans with Fallout 76, or maybe whatever is going on with the aforementioned Anthem right now, Atlas would arguably be one of the worst major game launches ever. If your game forces Steam to suspend it's normally ironclad refund policy in acknowledgement of just how bad you screwed the proverbial pooch, that is not something that is without meaning or consequence for your game's long term success. Atlas may recover from an inauspcious beginning to rise to respectability, but becoming a hit EVER is likely off the table, and respectable numbers will take a lot of hard work, righting the ship, and will be an uphill fight. Personally since I prefer to play one or two games for long term periods rather than hopping from game to game, I would like to see that happen, but I'm not gonna piss on anyone's leg and tell them it's raining in the meantime. Don't fool yourself, this game has potential but is off to a very bad start, and that is exactly what those numbers mean.

Well aware of that. That's the contrast. Ark was by any reasonable measure a hit, and while it's common for games to see a decline after launch as the initial burst of interest fades when some folks move on, with Ark it grew, while with Atlas it plummeted. What did I say in my previous post that gave you the impression I thought or was asserting otherwise?

You don't need a short amount of time. You just need time when no one is around, and I have yet to meet the company with members willing to stand guard over someone 24/7 to make sure they don't suicide. It's just not worth it when you can go do actual stuff. If you are handcuffed you can't eat poop but you can yell.

I play the game plenty. I know of almost no one who has bothered with the medical tree, but putting that aside, are you really saying that you know anyone prepared to constantly stand watch over their captives force feeding, force drinking and force healing to prevent them from suiciding and thus escaping around the clock? The fact you can do these things is not an effective measure against using yell to escape confinement given that the prisoner can log in at any time of their choosing to yell, while I know of no one willing to stand around a cell in shifts to guard against such. But hey, maybe I'm so ignorant of the fact you're that one guy with no life willing to do it, who knows?

https://slideplayer.com/slide/9248122/ I play Civilization and in Civ 6 the linked quote is one of the many used in the game. It still makes me chuckle.

Okay so obviously the next 3 weeks are gonna be a bit of a slow news day here at the forums with everyone waiting for the new patch and many not bothering to play until after the wipe. So I figured this might be a decent time to discuss a topic relevant not just to Atlas, but to gaming in general. Namely, why do players invest themselves emotionally in a game's success or failure? It's a safe bet that most players on a game's forums aren't employees working on the game, or related to them by blood or marriage. I have yet to see a single post on any game's forums that amounts to "My Johnny works really hard on this game so you should all be nice and appreciate his hard work." -Johnny's Mom. These games are a product that we invest time and money into, and don't misunderstand me, I'm by no means suggesting that we shouldn't have opinions on them. Rather what I would like to discuss is the fact that many posters seem invested in a polar extreme view of the game they are playing that amounts to either "This game is the source of all that is good in my life. It cured my cancer, made my kids smarter, house trained my pets and got the chic weed out of my lawn. I am nominating the developers for a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, a Pulitzer and voting for them on American Idol." or "This game and it's developers are the spawn of Satan and should all die screaming. Playing this game is worse than a North Korean prison or a Yoko Ono solo album. It has destroyed my will to live, put stains in my living room carpet and will probably blot out the sun if we don't stop it." The problem with these approaches imo is they are pretty much never reflective of reality when translated into expressed opinions and create an environment that disallows for nuanced discussion of what is both good and bad about a game. Most importantly, they lock people into a state where their pride and ego are attached to the rightness of these extremes and proving them regardless of facts on the ground. I am curious to see what others make of this tendency, why it happens and thoughts on how to address it. Do you consider it a problem or just a mildly amusing quirk of human nature? Do you think I'm delusional and everyone is approaching things just fine thank you? Just thought it might be an interesting thing to discuss while we listen to the elevator music.

The kid around the corner from me growing up turned out to be a math and computer science prodigy. He has his doctorate from Cal Tech and last time I spoke to him and asked what he was working on I *think* the gist of his answer was using nanites to reprogram DNA. To be honest I consider myself reasonably intelligent and educated, but when he tried to describe what he’s doing, it was like God trying to explain algebra to a dog. I understood all of the individual words he used, but not what it meant when he put them together in that order. My point is this: don’t worry about humanity’s progress. The people moving us forward are working quite diligently on doing so, what they aren’t doing in the meantime is playing Atlas. Atlas and other games are what the rest of us do with our spare time while we wait for the 1% to give us driverless cars and gene therapy to cure cancer.

Question, how are you determining the percentages that are official vs unofficial?

*claps* Actual logic on a gaming forum, will wonders never cease?

Not designing a car doesn’t preclude one from offering a meaningful review of one, including suggestions for improving it. The cup holder, a universally standard feature in cars, wasn’t added because of an engineer’s insight, but because of feedback from focus groups of every day drivers.

Not a given but entirely possible. At this point a very pertinent set of questions about Atlas’s future relate to what it’s burn rate in development and maintenance costs are and how long Wildshot is willing to keep them at their present rate before making cuts.

Nearly all games decline after initial launch but there is a meaningful difference in the percentages that are normal and what Atlas is experiencing. Whether you like the game or not, the OP’s point about the dearth of players being problematic for an MMO to give the intended experience is dead on. From day one I never understood why they were allowing private servers for Atlas as it serves to drain players from one of four primary player bases into diffused sidepools of small groups. Don’t get me wrong I ran a multi server cluster for Ark, but that game wasn’t intended to be a single massive world of interconnected server grids all with a single combined economy. The game that Atlas is supposed to be patterned upon is Eve. Ever heard of an Eve private server? Allowing private servers was a troubling sign that perhaps the devs didn’t really grasp the fundamental mechanics of what makes large scale MMO’s work. Unlike the OP I’m not pronouncing the game dead. The example of No Man’s Sky (man that is a weird steam player count history) really does mean the opera ain’t over til the fat lady sings, but I do firmly believe that Atlas’s disastrous first 60 days has probably lost it any chance of it ever being a hit with a robust playerbase like Ark. This has implications for how well some of its core MMO mechanics like economy are ever going to be able to function. Like it or not, Atlas faces an uphill battle to even obtain stability and respectability at this point. The good news is that with Ark’s success backing it, Wildshot has deeper pockets than most indie studios, so if they believe in Atlas they have the ability to keep the doors open longer than most could.

I generally don’t admit this in public but I actually played defiance for a while. Never saw even a single episode of the show but that was partly because the game didn’t impress me very much. It was one of those things you do for a while to placate a friend before finally going back to real games.

Yeah FIFA is the game that Belgium literally just forced EA to stop offering lootboxes in. EA is actually trying to challenge Belgium's interpretation of it's OWN LAW. That isn't the act of a well run company with good intentions towards it's customers and concern for maintaining it's reputation in the marketplace. It's the heroin junkie who breaks into your house to steal your TV even though everyone and their brother knows you keep an armed pitbull with AIDS on the premises. EA is a drowning man of a company right now. FIFA is admittedly a better life preserver than you and I will ever see, but I doubt it's gonna save many folks with cushy corner offices when the blood starts to flow. Part of the point is that while FIFA is admittedly a cash cow, as a publicly traded company EA has put itself in an untenable long term position where it not only has to keep making money, but has to keep making more money every financial quarter. Expect a major house cleaning when the wheels come off and shareholders (read: hedge fund managers) fire top executives. What emerges from the other side is anyone's guess, but it's unlikely to closely resemble the company that is one of the main reasons the term AAA gaming exists.

AAA gaming is busy imploding on itself. EA actively has various governments investigating it's lootbox practices for how it may very well constitute encouraging minors to gamble. Bethesda is basking in the warm glow of Fallout 76's success and UbiSoft seems to be nervously enjoying not actively being pursued by legal authorities or your former fans with pitchforks. Let's see if The Division 2 turns out to be AAA gaming's savior. Ehh who am I kidding, with Anthem looking like it might go down the tubes EA is probably toast no matter what. Good riddance. But if you're living on a prayer (sorry my gf is a hardcore Bon Jovi fan), Ubisoft does have Skull and Bones in the works. Don't worry, I'm sure the fact a game that isn't even released yet but already has a TV show based on it in the works isn't a huge red flag for possible overhype underdeliver. https://skullandbones.ubisoft.com/game/en-us/home/

Okay the notion that an actual chef would EVER work at a Waffle House is WAY funnier than anything I came up with. Well done sir.

"Dead Cat Bounce" sounds like the name of really good blues album you found in the back of the music store on a vinyl and now can't wait to tell everyone you know about.

Just because you didn't get the joke cause you were so focused on slamming the developers doesn't mean others didn't.

I was neither defending nor attacking, merely making a Waffle House joke.

In the same way that burnt toast, runny eggs and stale coffee house would be more accurate but doesn’t fit on the sign, so they just stick with Waffle House.

Maybe I didn’t explain my idea well but a big part of the reason I’m suggesting standards is to protect consumers like you and I by providing clearer expectations of what a given EA will or won’t entail. Like it or not EA as an industry practice is not going anywhere. You already have the option not to purchase EA products. What I’m suggesting are standards so you can know beforehand what to expect if you do buy EA products.

And who’s definition of Early Access besides yours entitles you to a fully developed game? Dont misunderstand me. To some degree I am with you, in the sense that EA is qualitatively different from beta or alpha testing by virtue of the fact you paid for a product, so you have the right to expect some standards for the product. The problem lies in the fact that it is still a product in development and that has been clearly communicated before your purchase. The crux of the issue lies when these two facts intersect in a way that leaves you unhappy. I suggest that what is needed is clear standards for EA products so that customers have a better understanding of what they have a right to expect and not to expect in EA titles. I think developers are disinclined to embrace this notion because for them it is more conveniant and expedient to take the cash in hand for what were previously free beta trials. But if developers do this and fail to compromise by setting clear standards, then they are ignoring a long term issue that will affect their games success negatively. The point you have just made goes to the heart of the issue. Once you are a paying customer, they don’t have the right to treat you like an unpaid tester. If the industry (including Grapecard) persists in doing so the cost in customer dissatisfaction, refunds and lost sales will be a high one.

Then someone with your age and experience shouldn't be exhibiting the double standard you are here. Posting a video of a kid with an assface and saying "I found this video of you as a kid." isn't "feedback" it's a needless insult. The poster with the shit emoji as avatar then goes on to call Jat an assface. Jat's only reply is to say I found an emoji of you. Given that the emoji is the exact same image this person chose as an avatar, how can that even be construed as an insult? If the guy chose it as his own avatar, how can it be an insult coming from someone else? I agree that being in a public facing position requires professionalism, but I agree with other posters, there is nothing unprofessional here about Jat's reply and indeed he shows restraint in the face of obviously immature behavior. There is a flip side of the coin to expecting professionalism out of people fulfilling a business role: It's called treating people with basic human decency. Since when does the guy with the shit emoji have no responsibility to control his own behavior and posting? Given your thread title and the fact you take Jat to task for the most minute of perceived insults but say nothing of the other party's behavior, it's obvious you don't hold him responsible at all. IMO this is the greater issue, the mentality that the customer is always right, even when the customer is behaving like a 3 year old. Yeah, if that's your idea of the "real world" I'll do without. As it happens I am also in business. I'm in sales and meet directly with customers in their homes. Sometimes they get upset and it is my job to be professional. You know what isn't my job? To take personal insults with a smile and tolerate such abusive immature behavior, and my boss fully backs me on that.

Debatable.