boomervoncannon

Oh I didn't say that I knew, just that there are people who do. I imagine they mostly work for GrapeCard. But you can ask me again on Sunday and I might be able to tell you something. I know. You want to punch me right now don't you? I'm just messing with ya. Hopefully someone who has been on the ptr can shed some light for you, but even that might just be speculation. *shrugs* Either way the info will be readily available this weekend.

While you have a point, I think if you look at the thread dates on most of those posts, they would tend to be back in the early days, when there were tons of them, they aggro'd everything in sight, and they chased you to heck and back. This led to pretty heavy nerfing. If people are quitting the game because of sotd's in the last several months, then they likely can't handle any meaningful level of challenge.

Yes.

The most glaring imbalance I'm aware of is the imbalance between offense and defense, where the former far outshines the latter in pvp. Speaking as a pver, my understanding is that it has not. If you are referring to some other form of imbalance you'll have to be more specific, but either way it's good to hear from you. Hope you've been well.

Be sure to pm me with next weeks winning lottery numbers. I got 20 bucks to burn. If you can make me rich I will dance at your wedding/funeral/arraignment/graduation. Please ignore what I said here because it was before I fully read the wipe annoucement. Nothing to see here folks. move along.

For what it's worth I dont' think it sucks that it's happening at all. Everyone knew or should have known that at very barest minimum there would be at least one more wipe, at game launch. People were demoralized and paralyzed into inaction when they didn't know for sure whether a wipe was coming sooner rather than later, and unfortunately your rants did contribute to that uncertainty imo. But don't sweat it too hard because now we know, and it isn't just so someone else gets a clean slate, it's because important new changes are being made. Anyone who is sour grapes about the wipe in that context isn't being very reasonable imo. I would have been pissed if they wiped just to placate xbox players, but all this stuff is getting added? Bring it on, that's what improving your game is all about. I'm very relieved to hear these kinds of changes are happening sooner rather than later, so to me this is all good news.

I can't speak for anyone else but I'm fine with this wipe. There are clearly multiple technical reasons it's more than necessary. 70 new island templates, polish to existing islands and a new biome type. These are all extremely valid reasons to wipe in an Early Access game and just as I've said I'm not interested in listening to xbox players whine about needing a wipe because they think they deserve it, I'm now uninterested in existing players whining about losing their stuff. It's EA, this is part of the deal. They're not wiping us just to give xbox players what they want, they are making major changes and improvements to the game world. Be thrilled about the new stuff and look at it as a chance to start fresh. Also if you got heavy into breeding or building in an EA game that had already wiped once and are now sour grapes over losing all your time invested, well, I don't really know what to tell you. I think everyone should be excited about this and move forward together. Remember at the end of the day it's only a game.

Okay, let's try and get things off on the right foot here. To start with, welcome to the forums, always good to hear from new voices. I can see you feel strongly about your views regarding a wipe. That's fine. Please understand that the issue of a wipe is no longer even a dead horse here. It is the descendants twenty generations removed of the flies that congregated on the horse's rotting corpse. Let me assure you that anything you could possibly say on the subject, and any possible counterpoints have all been said before. Many, many times. Let me further assure you that at this point pretty much nobody is willing to change their views. Certainly they are unlikely to change their views if you call them a moron. If your goal isn't to engage in productive discussion and debate, but rather to hurl insults and name call...well, this *is* the internet, but there are many here who would appreciate if that sort of thing were done elsewhere. I hear political forums are lovely this time of year. If meaningful discussion is what you're here for, we only ask that you try to keep things respectful even when others have differing viewpoints. Obviously they're wrong if they disagree with you, but reasonable people can disagree and still be civil right?

There's not much here I really disagree with. I think you're just more finely parsing what I said in broader brush strokes. The games I was thinking of you pretty much covered. I never played Ultima but my gaming partner did and was a big fan back in the day. I disagree that Eve didn't do a good job of creating a viable world for both precisely for the reasons you described. The only thing I'll nitpick is I never said treated equally because all I meant was shoved into the same game and forced to coexist despite different playstyles and goals. I think Eve managed this and according to what you're saying Ultima did so even better. I've also had enough experience with serious pvpers to agree with what you're saying in differentiating true pvp with pk. I don't find pk's trying to kill pvers out looking for resources to make that adventure more exciting and rewarding, so I do disagree about that. If I went out to the grocery store, and some guy showed up there with an assault rifle and started shooting the place up, yes that would be more exciting, but not in a way I had any interest in being part of. More rewarding, definately not unless in the abstract "holy shit now I really appreciate being alive because that maniac might have killed me if I hadn't thrown a gallon of milk at his face and run like hell." sort of feeling. In the times in the past when I've had to deal with that in games, it was more like "oh great, this emotionally stunted dingleberry just flushed the 2 hours I spent down the drain when he very skillfully and bravely ganked me while I was gathering. I get to pay the price and listen to his inane shit talk in chat because his parents didn't love him enough. Lucky me." But that's nitpicking mostly. See, I didn't grow up a gamer. I grew up playing basketball. Lots and lots of basketball. When you were discovering the joys of Ultima, I was perfecting my 3 point shot (okay perfecting is too strong of word, let's go with making respectable.) To me, competitive pvp in video games just doesn't really do much for me, because when I compete I like it to be in a real world face to face, mano e mano type scenario. Likewise I find all forms of shit talking online to be laughably absurd. When you've left pickup games because the court cleared when an argument over a foul ended with one party going to his car and getting a gun, guys waving their epeen around just doesn't tend to impress. Not that I can't admire skill, and I've seen some pretty skilled pvpers, it just doesn't do anything to get my competitive juices flowing. What I like in MMORPG's is exploration of a vast gameworld, crafting (as long as it's not brain dead oversimplified like so many games. I stll mourn The Repopulation because I would have made robots til the cows came home http://aena.at/craftmap/item1752.html. Btw when you click on that link, go to gold link circuit board and click on it to see all the sub crafts involved, then click on oh say circuit board within that to see all the subcrafts needed for it, THEN click on gold electrode within that to see all the subcrafts needed for IT. Then click on flux within it to see all the subcrafts needed for it. Now THAT was a crafting system I could have sunk my teeth into.), and a decent economy that I can tinker around in and find arbitrages etc. Anyway, you have put forward some thought provoking comments. Thanks for the perspective.

I've never been against wiping if the developers determine it's necessary for any development related reasons. What I was and still am against is wiping for the sole reason of making it "fair" for new players, or because they think they deserve it. It takes only the simplest of logical examples to illustrate why this line of thinking does not hold up. Do the people who join the game at any point down the road after it has been wiped for the initial wave of xbox players not deserve the same level playing field? If so, then you must wipe every x period of time to make it "fair". That is obviously an absurd approach to any game where there is long term investment of time and energy. In just the same way that life is not fair, a game should not cater to such a perceived need just because some group agitates for it. Every player who joins Atlas or any other MMO for that matter at a point after an initial launch has to cope with the "unfairness" of others having a head start. I myself have done it many times on many games. It is the nature of the beast, and frankly part of the challenge. MMORPG's have successfully divided servers when game population size made that prudent, or to better serve real world geography. I absolutely disagree that pvp and pve should not be seperated. They are two fundamentally seperate game modes with players seeking fundamentally different experiences, and what has happened every single time any game I've played has tried to shoehorn them in together because of some hairbrained developer notion otherwise is that the pve experience has suffered horribly for good reason than to provide amusement for pvpers who would rather grief players than actually engage in competition. It is a foolish invitation to asshattery, and the only exception I've ever seen to this is Eve, which found a way to blend the two reasonably successfully. When Grapeshot demonstrates the same level of professional competence and mastery that CCP has over more than a decade, fine, we can have that talk. Until then, I'm firmly against it. I agree that it is precisely this sort of toxic behavior that limits games which allow this sort of nonsense into a backwater niche within the MMO genre. that's completely understandable, and as you've already made clear in the past, your decision is as much about playing with your friends as anything else, so a change in their preferences based on the information in hand could obviously result in a change of where you play.

My comments had nothing to do with whether official or unofficial is the better place to play. I have tried both and prefer official because to me personally the size of the game world is an important draw, and unofficials are much much smaller. However, that is very much about personal preferences. The point of my post is that Realist as much or more than anyone here has been the driving force behind campaigning for official server wipe as "necessary" for a "level playing field" for Xbox players when they enter. For him to have invested that amount of time and energy into something that would result in other players losing their far greater amount of time and energy invested to suit his personal whims, only to make a decision at the last minute which renders the need he campaigned so hard for at others expense irrelevant, well.... that's why I was giving him a hard time about it, if only in jest. Based on what Realist has said he likes to do in the past, I think he could enjoy the game in either place. Keep in mind, he won't be the only one joining, and his play preferences and what he finds enjoyable could be quite different from what you enjoy, or what I enjoy. I still think that unofficial servers for a traditional MMORPG that was trying to promote the things Atlas claimed to be aiming for at launch is a head scratchingly bad idea, and that's coming from someone who ran his own multi server cluster for over a year on Ark, so I'm certainly not anti unofficial. However, as I have watched Atlas's development this year, I am letting go of the notion that unofficials make no sense for this game, because it is never going to be the things they said they were setting out for in the beginning, and I think if Atlas ultimately survives and finds any long term success, it will have to be by finding a genre defying space in the gaming world that does not fit previously held definitions. So I'm not standing on an unmoving inflexible hill of "unofficials bad, officials good." I'm just saying for what I would want from the game, having tried both, I think officials are more likely to get there, but as always ymmv.

Yeah but 6 years? Note the initial release date to steam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Days_to_Die

He mentioned in another thread that they are about to release alpha 18. Now I don't doubt that he's having a blast with the game and it may indeed be coming along nicely, but the fact that a game is still being labeled as alpha state 18 iterations in and counting when it's been out for years to the point where people like me who've never played it should be expected to at least be aware of it tells you much about the tortured and wildly inconsistent nature of modern game development.

Time for a fun thread while we wait for Xbox launch on the 8th Soon™. Post your Atlas oriented haiku here. For those not familiar with haiku : https://poets.org/text/haiku-poetic-form I'll kick things off: Will there be a wipe Everyone and brother ask From the devs silence

... I’m gonna shoot you in the face with a bazooka. You’ve been on here for months arguing about the absolute necessity of a wipe and now at the last minute you’re shrugging your shoulders and saying “ meh it doesn’t matter, I’m going to unofficials.” You get back here and eat your peanut butter and broccoli sandwich young man. There are starving children in Alabama who would murder you in your sleep for that sandwich. Seriously, don’t go to Alabama. Kidding aside, I’m not sure what advantage you think going to unofficials will gain. Boosted rates and some mods maybe, but on a vastly smaller game world subject to change or disappearance at any time based on the whims of the server owner unless you and your buddies rent your own. But you’re an Ark vet, you don’t need me to tell you that. Just curious as to your thinking because while the game has plenty of issues, those issues still exist on unofficials. Maybe I’m overlooking something relevant. Break it down for me.

Based on prior history I’m expecting a delay, but you bring up a good point. At this point I can think of no good reason not to say one way or the other save some technical reason they are still evaluating internally. To still be in the process of evaluating such a key decision 2 weeks before your announced date would not be great imo, but based on prior behavior I wouldn’t put it past them.

Hello and welcome to the game and the forums. Server wipe has been a heavily debated topic around here, but the long and the short of it is that GrapeCard’s publicly stated position is they will only do a wipe if it is needed for technical reasons and prefer not to if it’s not necessary. Anything beyond that stated by parties not employed by them is speculation. Take it for what it is worth.

Reading comprehension in the age of mass media took a hit. In the age of social media it has cratered.

I have not. Aware of it but never played.

Gonna go out on a limb here and guess this gentleman is our first non Realist console player.

At this point I bet the inevitable delay makes your original prediction spot on. I was thinking later in the year.

I know it’s too many syllables, but this *almost* feels like a PTR haiku.

Yeah def a variety of ways to go at this that seem more practical than what they’ve said.

Who's to say they aren't? It takes time to implement things. Some stuff is pretty straightforward sure, but I wouldn't assume that none of our ideas are being listened to and considered. Way back when I played City of Heroes, players clamored on the boards for the ability to customize the visuals of their powers (mostly color). We were told this wasn't a simple thing and because of the way powers were coded and would require a major rework of that code. Most players considered it a dead issue and moved on. Literally years later ( I wanna say 3 or 4) with little fanfare the devs rolled out power customization to the great surprise of the playerbase. "We said it would take a lot of work. We didn't say we wouldn't do it." To this day the City of Heroes development team is the gold standard against which I measure the devs of any game I play. Those guys were epic in every sense of the word.

We're kind of going on the assumption that long term they wouldn't develop content just for single player and non dedicated only. That wouldn't make much sense, so the operative assumption is how to bring them to officials eventually, and the initial GC statements about that don't seem promising.