boomervoncannon

Cool find. Thanks for sharing.

How did you arrive at the 1/3 ratio? Is it based on anything or just your personal take on how the game should be designed? Do you have any empirical data which suggests company size has been a factor in decline of official servers of other games or is this also just personal opinion?

This statement belies a fundamental lack of understanding or acceptance of what EA is. Countless bugs is exactly what one should expect 2 months into a 2 year EA cycle.

It is impossible for anyone to say with any certainty why Atlas is doing poorly. If anyone has any peer reviewed survey of players who have quit I have yet to hear of it. Failing meaningful data my best guess is Atlas is doing poorly for a combination of reasons: unpopularity of design choices in claiming system, unpopularity of aging mechanic and the perception (off base imo) that FOY runs are forced and unfun, steep difficulty curve with regards to number and power of wild animals, SOTD, storms etc, and so on and so on. Everyone likes to claim that the thing they personally dislike is the reason the game is doing poorly. I think as has already been stated it is more complicated than that, and at most the thing they dislike is one of a number of factors. Unless you are like Realist who posts here purportedly only to warn others about the evils of GrapeCard, then you are here because you play the game. If you play, then you must be enjoying it to some degree and you shouldn’t want it to fail if only so that you can continue to play and enjoy it. There is likewise nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade and acknowledging that the game has flaws and needs a great deal of work to attract back players who have left. This is not only a complicated process but will take time. The best way you can contribute to the process is to not only offer your views in a clear, calm manner, but to also offer as much insight as you can on why you think so. Given that beast mastery is a profession I doubt tames are going anywhere but since the community clearly seems divided about them, the best design choice imo would be to work to make them useful but not required. To me the approach that makes the best sense to achieve this is to make crew on par with tames for combat and gathering. Perhaps tames could retain greater overall carry capacity while crew could have greater ability to passive farm.

Dunno. Never owned a giraffe either. But if giraffes are still outclassed by common picks, that’s not a good sign considering there are significantly better picks to be had. Bryan raises good points about further info. Do you have harvesting perks? What’s the melee on the giraffe etc.

*Goes off to name his crew things like Prettylittlebabylemmelightyourcandle Causemammai’msurehardtohandlenow just to mess with Shin*

Tal, is this you? Sorry couldn’t resist.

Breeding isn’t fully implemented yet, but in Ark people bred for 2 main reasons: better stats and interesting or unique colors. In Atlas it appears there will be a third reason. Rumor has it breeding has a very small chance of producing alpha offspring, which would be the only way of obtaining alpha tames.

Your avatar seems perfectly calibrated for this post. Just wondering since you didn’t specify, was that a common pickaxe?

Agreed. I think a focus of developer effort should at some point be improving crew AI and expanding their functionality. It doesn’t necessarily have to be next week, because I think there are more pressing issues, but it’s something that should be on the to do list for fleshing out the game over time. Well, except for manning ships. My elephant can trim sails okay using his trunk, and he does work for peanuts, but my rhino can’t aim a cannon for @#$&.

Which is problematic for the game long term. In contrast to Ark, where it was in Wildcard’s best interest to have most players playing unofficials, Atlas’s core design goals of developing economy and trade mean that they need to work to ensure official servers are appealing. When the game was first announced, even as someone who had run a 4 server Ark cluster for over a year, I found the decision to provide for unofficials in Atlas perplexing. Now that I have seen some of how the game will be setup, I can see how having unofficials is less counterproductive than I originally imagined prior to launch, but I still think that if Atlas winds up with the majority of its player base playing unofficials, it won’t reach its full potential.

Extremely well written OP laying out your position and reasoning. This is the kind quality feedback developers I’m sure are looking for. Well done sir. Awesome first post, looking forward to your future contributions and welcome to the forums.

I am not anti tame. I played a lot of Ark even though I’m not someone who gets jazzed up about dinosaurs. It is worth pointing out that although the developers said there would be tames in Atlas before release, they also went out of their way to say tames would not be the focus. I think the Op is saying he feels the recent changes are making them too much of a focus. Personally I would like to see Atlas be more crew focused than tames. This is after all a pirate themed game. I think that the best design choice is to make both crew and tames equally useful for gathering and combat, leaving players the ability to choose which they prefer for aesthetic or thematic reasons without feeling they are forced into one or the other. The fact crew can fill more roles onboard ship would justify their additional cost in gold.

Why does this sound like an SAT word problem? If Johnny is level 52 and earned 24 skill points per level to that point, and a game patch says it will give him 20% more points, calculate how many points Johnny should have after the patch assuming that: A) The developers weren't drunk when they coded the patch. B) Johnny wasn't drunk reading the patch notes. C) Thinking about math when I'm gaming doesn't make me wish I were drunk.

Well here's what we do know: They have said it will be a 2 year EA phase at minimum, which means any such wipe is 2 years off, possibly longer if they should decide a longer EA is needed. Not to be a prophet of DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM because I sincerely like the game and hope it does well, but at the moment Atlas downward trendline in playerbase means that a more relevant question is whether the game will survive to leave Early Access or not. I think it will because GrapeCard™ has deeper pockets than other indie studios, but the bottom line is atm there's probably as much a risk from losing your time invested from game failure as there is from launch wipe. Ask yourself this: Do you typically play games for much longer than 2 years? How many times have you done so? If the answer is no or not very often, I'd just play and worry about crossing that bridge when you come to it. There is nothing known currently that is concrete, but it matters little at this point. It's entirely possible that the devs have not decided one way or the other and there may be good reasons for not making that decision this early. Try not to worry too much at the start of 7th grade who your prom date will be.

Yup. That'd work. Only problem is if lots of people do it, official servers won't have playerbase to make economy etc function properly. At the rate playerbase is headed, that might wind up being the case regardless, which would be disapointing.

This is flat wrong. I attack arguments, not people. Go look through my post history. You will not find personal insults and ad hominem attacks. You will find pointed criticism of views and for that I make no apology. You on the other hand are mocking someone for taking issue with personal insults. How mature. Btw, while you are searching make sure you take note of Realist’s thread where he announces his trip to Thailand. Anyone familiar with my posting history knows Realist and I have disagreed repeatedly and strongly. I wished him safe travels. You should also look at Sand man’s current joke thread. Sand man and I differ sharply on whether the game should have SP or not, but I applauded him for keeping things light hearted and joined in. I draw a distinction between people and arguments which seems lost on you.

The people who do check the forums is consistently a significant minority of a game’s playerbase so imo it’s not on you at all. Also more than one ingame warning is needed. Most similar games give warnings at intervals of say 30, 15, 10, 5 and then one minute. If you miss all that then yeah it’s on you, but not just a single warning an hour out. Why they aren’t doing it the way pretty much every other game does is getting simple stuff wrong. C’mon Wildshot, we know it’s EA, but this is low hanging fruit. Put out more regular server down warnings.

Ah okay, sorry for the confusion.

Maybe you should stop with the ad hominem attacks and stick to presenting your case. I think all the time, but it’s not up to me to make your case for you in advance. Your insult implies that I should already have known everything you just explained,yet it didn’t take you a few short words to convey the problem as you perceive it, rather you had to write a detailed description of why you think it will be problematic. If it is not so obvious on its face, then let us dispense with the notion that I should already have known exactly what you meant, and call it what it was, going out of your way to attack me personally. Assuming someone else should already see a non obvious thing the way you do suggests it’s not the other party that is exhibiting arrogance.

Following this line of reasoning to its logical end the developers should never introduce anything new to the game that could potentially be used to interact with others in new ways because they will inevitably be used to grief. You might as well just say they should never introduce anything new except new dance emotes. Those seem pretty safe. *passes Evir the salt.*

US President Ronald Reagan often said of the Cold War "We don't mistrust each other because we're armed. We're armed because we mistrust each other." What you are observing is fundamental to human nature, in that sense it is not solveable as an issue ingame unless the developers wish to include translation software into the chat functionality, something I would be shocked to see happen.

Assuming no one held a gun to your head while you did it... you did.

If you review his earlier posts to this thread, he's actually argued that logic cannot exist without emotion. He asserts that even computer programming stems from emotion. I would encourage you to review his posts before investing to much energy into trying to convince him of the need for a study as opposed to his opinion.

I would not expect your statement to register with someone who contends that logic derives from emotion, but for the record I concur.