boomervoncannon

You don’t even have to write a separate announcement for the forums. Your official forums by the way. Just copy paste your twitter announcement to the forums instead of expecting people to go to twitter. The inherent flaw in your point is that people who use the forums but are unaware of this dev team’s tendency to only communicate via twitter at times may not know they need to go look at twitter and that responsibility doesn’t lie with them to begin with, it lies with the developers to communicate as broadly as possible as quickly as possible to the players. Get over your own self. Telling people to get over it doesn’t change a long-standing pattern of lackluster communication.

So we should applaud them for setting the bar low and keeping it there?

In communicating professionally to the public, the rule of thumb is don’t make people come to you, go to them. Sure it doesn’t take much to go to twitter, but you can flip that argument on its head by saying it doesn’t take much to post to their official website either, and when you take your official game servers down unscheduled, the responsibility lies with you to communicate as broadly as possible to your playerbase about it, not with the players to seek out your sole preferred platform.

Source?

You guys can criticize the Op all you want, but his point is a simple one: This is the game’s official website. If the devs want to communicate announcements only via twitter, then they should only have a twitter account. Not everyone uses all social media platforms and instead of calling the Op lazy for not wanting to go to twitter to find relevant info, I would suggest the laziness is in fact on the part of the devs for being unwilling to communicate to their playerbase across multiple platforms instead of only posting to twitter. Most professional organizations that care about communicating clearly with their customers make the very minimal effort to do so across platforms rather than putting announcements on a single platform and expecting people to conform to their preferences. GrapeCard has a long history of being less than professional, candid, or timely in communicating with their players. They claimed they learned “so many lessons” from their experience with Ark, but what we learned before this game even launched was that when it came to communicating, they had in fact learned zero.

Be glad you don't know.

I appreciate where you are coming from, but trust me, the notion that people are inherently smarter because they are older is a complete fallacy. Morons do not age into wise old men, they just become old morons. But yes, it would be nice if there was some buff as a trade off to the debuffs, there just isn't one that presents itself as a logical option. IQ testing data say your intelligence level is pretty much set by the time you reach adolescence and doesn't change much if it all over the course of your life.

I say we dub whatever grid the fountain of youth is on lemmingville for however long it is there.

I can put up with a lot during EA, but if I ever see a furry ingame, I'm gone. Take that @#$ to Second Life, creepy rping pervs.

EA or no, bad game design or no, it sure as hell sounds like you're not having fun. Sometimes it can be hard to do as a gamer, because we tend to get ourselves dialed in to meeting challenges and overcoming difficulties, that we fail to step back and ask ourselves: Is this fun? Am I having fun? Look, I think you should take the six months off that you mentioned. If the game sinks in the meantime, you got out early and wasted less of your time. If the game improves, then when you come back you'll be more likely to be able to see that clearly. If six months go by and its still here and still not fun for you, walking away for good will be easier if you haven't already invested six months trying to push Sisyphus's rock up the hill. Just remember that no one is paying you, this isn't a job, it's your hobby, your spare time. Why would you let yourself be miserable with your free time? Especially if your friends have quit. Friends are the thing that can make a bad game a good experience, and now you don't have that. That's just my two dubloons. At the end of the day you're the only person who can say what's best for you. GL.

I C wat u did thar.

okay, but per the method I described above, it's also pretty trivial for me to get it back...

I was referring to the buff/debuff values being comparable, and commenting with sarcasm how many people dismissed the Equilibrium buff as trivial, then turn around and decry the age debuff as horrible. With similar values it's eye rolling to decide one is trivial while the other is not. I will agree that what seems to be required to remove the old age debuff seems a bit over the top, perhaps until you remember that once breeding is implimented the easy solution will be just using dying to accelerate yourself to 100 once you hit 90 and then start over at 20. Btw I have the equilibrium buff on a large percentage of the time, so I wouldn't call it occasionally. Once you pump fortitude and the vitamin management skills, keeping the buff on is fairly easily done once you realize the value of prime meat and prime fish meat is they increase the bar while increasing food very very little. Combine this with the fact that once over 100, vitamin A and C foods increase the food meter almost not at all, and it becomes fairly routine to have the buff far more often than not.

Why do I feel like many of the people who will shout that this debuff is horrible are the same people who dismiss the Equilibrium buff as worthless, when it's similar values? I do agree that the way they are introducing it is piss poor, regardless of how big a deal or not it actually is. It does show a disconnect with the playerbase and a lack of forethought or planning.

That sounds dangerously like encouraging economic development, something the devs have clearly stated they are against. They would prefer everyone do everything for themselves and view the exchange of goods and services ingame as a form of cheating. At least that's what people are saying.

The current system is not animal abuse. There are no animals in Atlas. There are pixels that look like animals. Normally drawing this distinction isn't necessary, but in this conversation it is. Abusing pixels is not really a thing. The only concern one might have about the pixel abuse being a negative is what it conveys to impressionable children young enough to still not entirely seperate fantasy from reality. In other words, children young enough they should not be playing a pirate themed survival MMO unsupervised anyway. Adults who can distinguish between fantasy and reality should not need to be concerned about Atlas's taming system impacting their own behavior negatively in some fashion. If after playing Atlas, you feel the urge to go out and beat a chicken or cow, that is a mental health issue, not something wrong with the game in any way.

Probably the sort of thing that will get added later.

Seen it myself. He's very fond of spewing bile. Not so fond of using his brain. That's why he's on ignore. Hating on maturity by trying to frame it as teacher's pet behavior convinced me he has nothing to say that I want to read.

QFT.

Be sickened. If you think people only behave maturely to be some kind of teacher's pet I pity you. The person who literally does nothing but shitpost and who has been demonstrated by his own words to be a hypocrite in other threads casts shade at others claiming they are desperate for attention. *eye roll* I am generally loathe to do this, but you've proven repeatedly that you have absolutely zero to say worth reading. Welcome to ignore.

Yes being friendly to people is a horrible idea. We should all follow your example and be insulting to anyone who doesn't view things the way you do. I'm fully aware that the mods aren't developers and if you think I'm a mindless fanboy, try getting a grip on reality by checking my post history and reading the posts I've written in just the last hour that are critical of GrapeCard™. Since that doesn't fit the nice conveniant box you like to put people in, I doubt you'll do it, but your fanboy label is simple minded regardless.

There may be hope for you yet.

Hi, I was lead to believe by the title that the ramblings here would be general. These ramblings are much too specific for my tastes. Please speak in more vague generalizations going forward, expressing half formed concepts rather than detailed specifics. JK An intriguing suggestion. Don't know if the devs are open to altering the game as much as implementing such a system would entail, but it's definately an intriguing idea. I'd be excited to try it out if it did get implemented. It's obvious you've given this some thought.

True, but the merits of this, and you've stated them clearly, should ideally be weighed against that never getting a second chance to make a first impression thing. How many of those head scratchingly out there mechanics drove away players who with more thorough in house testing for a few more months, might well have wound up becoming long term customers when their EA experience wasn't so rough? Jat started a blog style post where he discusses just released patches and upcoming plans both less formally. You should have a look at it, to some degree it's the sort of thing you seem to be requesting in terms of communication. Beyond that, different companies and development teams vary wildly in the quality and scope of their communication with their playerbase. This organization's track record in that regard could charitably be described as....poor.

I think whether the EA model is appropriate for a company like WildShot™, sititng on a pile of cash from Ark's 3 year success, is questionable. The best arguement for the use of EA is that allows small independant companies who are cash strapped and lack the resources otherwise, to get their game out there to the public and have a chance to have it seen, played and get it through the development cycle without having to have massive cash resources to fund development for literally years before generating dollar one. This is a win win because gamers get the chance for more innovative outside the box studios to offer them games that aren't the same old Company of Battlefront WOW Overwatch Creed clones. GrapeCard™ fit this profile....3 years ago. They no longer do. At this point one could argue that a company which has significant resources but still announces a planned 2 year EA cycle to get free development testing is abusing the model. But hey, there's no law against it, and as long as steam allows it, they'd be foolish not to right? With regards to whether the players hate this model, you and I both know that the demographics for gaming skews younger, and many players are unaware that the testing they plunk down cold hard cash to do used to be called free beta (sometimes open, sometimes closed, but always free). Make them aware of this on a larger scale and see how enthusiastic they become. The bottom line is that game studios love the EA model because so far for them it has only upside. To my knowledge the overwhelmingly bad press Atlas's EA launch received was the first high profile example of a significant negative to a developer, and IMO it was due to Wildshot™ rushing Atlas into EA too early, likely to capture as much holiday season spending revenue as possible. Only time will tell if Atlas's bad experience gives the industry pause and encourages a more balanced approach to the use of EA.