wildbill

Your experience is not so different from many first time players of Atlas. The game has a very steep learning curve. Most of the things you encountered are easy to avoid. I always make sure I have a bed made first thing and place it on my first ship. Never ever not make that bed as soon as possible. You don't know that of course until you learn it the hard way. Atlas is a bit cruel that way. Also as soon as possible, you make a climbing tool, like a grappling hook. That hook can get you out of the crevice and also back on your boat if the ladder fails to work. The ladder seems to fail when you park in shallow water, but not the most shallow the ship will go in. Just a certain depth messes it up. I don't actually see these as major issues once you learn how to deal with them, but they do seem that way to a new player. The game is meant to be hard core, and many like that. I don't personally so to make it not hard core I play with mods and on boosted unofficial servers. That is one option for those that don't like how hard core the game is with vanilla settings.

I have to agree, I'd like to see the features from the road map being added. I play Early Access games because they tend to get new features more often. I'm just as disappointed as everyone in the slow progress. Not sure I agree that No Man's Sky is all that great of an example. Atlas could still go the same way it did. NMS was released in 2016, it took them like 3 years to make it into a decent game and the one release I played (I think it was called beyond update), was a huge mess. They added 3D and broke all of the land vehicles so you couldn't see worth shit from them. Didn't fix that for months. NMS does seem to listen though. Although their community doesn't seem near as hostile as this one. Not sure I'd respond to much here if I was in the dev team.

Maybe they will use the money from Ark: Genesis to do some more work on Atlas. I'm not going to hold my breath, but I'm hopeful. I'll probably maintain that optimism about two months, and then move on to some other game

Ya, the way forums work is when someone is upset with the game (like they just had something really annoying happen in the game, or they rage quit over a serious bug), they come here immediately before they have a chance to cool down and post something that they will later regret when they are more level headed. Or they stop playing the game and come here and repeatedly post the worst stuff they can think of. Kind of a way to vent their frustrations Of course there are also those that have played many hours in the game and invested a lot of time in it and are very frustrated that it is not progressing like most Early Access games, with new features every month or two. So of course there is a lot of negativity, that really is to be expected. I was one of those people early on that always said good things about the game. Now I think I say about 50/50 positive and negative stuff about it. The developers are not evil or shady, they are just employees of a company and do what they are paid to do. Paying them costs money, so the company needs to create something that will bring in the money. That seems to be ARK Genesis at the moment. That is basically what you said. I think most people realize this, no matter what they might say here. I think they will work on this game again, otherwise I probably wouldn't have been playing it for the last couple of months. I played it for a few months when it was first released, took a long break and came back recently. The difference in attitudes in general since over a year ago is obvious. I think it is best not to focus on what other people are saying right now in my opinion. Mostly I just state my opinion once or twice in a thread and not engage those that have a much more negative view of the game. Most of them have their reasons for being so negative, and their experience of the game is much different than mine. The game is a sandbox after all and there are literally hundreds of different ways you can play it.

Well, instead of building a ship to fight the SOTD, you could just have a ship with the resistance so high, they do very little damage. The unofficial server I play on boosted the ships leveling so high, you just need to level the resistance maybe 10 times and your are fairly safe. I leveled a modded ship to 300 resistance. I had three SOTD attacking my ship when a mermaid pulled me off. I managed to slug the mermaid and then swim back, all the time my ship is taking hits. I get on, I try to sail away, but my main sail is missing the NPC. So I take about 30 more seconds, finally get going, I fire on the ships behind me, destroy two of them and make my escape. I anchor a few minutes later and check the ship. No plank has more than about 10% damage. Seems kind of ridiculous, but until the game is improved and balanced out, I'm just going to play the game in a way that all the problems kind of disappear. It is still plenty of fun. The main challenge becomes the bugs in the game and not the actual game play which becomes pretty easy

I watched a video about buying a home in a city. I didn't quite understand it, but they talked about the home being "offline" when you are not logged in. That multiple people could buy the same home and all use it and never see the other people that use it or their furnishings and decorations. I've never played a game that does that, so I'll have to see it to understand how it works. New World is like Atlas in one way. They pissed off a bunch of PvP players when they let them try the game and then based on seeing them play and other feedback, removed some of the PvP features. Now they will have the trolls in the forums bad mouthing the game even if they are not playing the game, same as Atlas has

This is worse the higher the ping is to the server you are playing on. The longer it takes your PC to load into that next grid, the farther in the ship goes and the more likely it is to hit a SotD. You can play on server with lower ping. Also what I do is reduce speed to 10 kts or less just before crossing the border. This reduces the distance you teleport into the next grid (I think it does, but hard to know for sure), but mainly it makes your ship a bit more maneuverable and gives you a better chance to avoid and SotD that are right in front of you once you load into the new grid.

I don't play officials, but occasionally see this on unofficial servers too. When I press Esc and look at the ping, it is always going very high, close to 200. I think this is just one weird way that lag shows itself. Either the server you are connected to or your PC has a high ping and high amount of lag.

What makes no sense is that ARK already has the stable master (cryopod the tame and put it in the cryofridge). Would be pretty simple to port this over to Atlas. Dry docking a ship is a bit more complicated, seeing as how they have items with inventory. There is no similar feature in ARK either. The road map seems to imply that we will at some point get something like this though. The game does need to be more like an MMO in my opinion. It just takes too long to make something like a ship that can be there when you log out and gone when you log back in.

From what I've seen of New World in videos, the closest you get to ships is that you arrive in the game with your ship sinking and you are left on the beach to figure out what to do next. Some people compare it to Skyrim (never played that game). As far as I can see, it really doesn't compare to Atlas as far as game play goes. People here just seem bored as nothing new has dropped in Atlas in awhile and they have nothing better to talk about If they add unofficial servers to New World, I'll probably give it a try. I normally don't play PvP, but it isn't looking like it will be the typical PvP game. It is looking like it might be a bit grindy, so I doubt I would play on the official servers.

Do you have the DLC downloaded? It is not included with the main game, you have to do a separate free download.

Not saying I didn't like Scorched Earth, and maybe you didn't play it when it first came out like I did. The game still had the old system of taming. So many of the tames required stuff you could not find on scorched earth. Stuff like wolves that had always been in the cold biomes were in extremely hot deserts. Just for me, a lot of stuff felt out of place that was included in that map that was borrowed from other maps. The original stuff for the map was well done. I don't agree the Wyverns were OP. I played there like six months. That is when they "patched" them, and that is when I quit playing on that map. Doesn't sound like you actually played the map the first six months it was out like I did. I took a full four days to raise wyverns and lost sleep (I took vacation from work to do it). They had better be OP once you have an adult with all the real pain and suffering you go through (unless you think sleep deprivation is no big deal) to get them. People were selling the Wyverns for actual cash back then. It does really say a lot for this dev team if you think that was the best thought out and polished of any Ark/Atlas release. The way the wells worked was just stupid. I kept expecting them to change it and "fix" it. I don't think they ever did though. Instead of using the wells on the PvE server I played on (since they didn't work right) was that people ran pipes through the air for long distances. There were pipes all over the place and fights about pipes (you could connect to any pipe, not just yours). Took a lot of work to find neighbors that would work with you and not against you.

I haven't played Genesis, but watched a few videos. It does seem to still need a lot of work, although the audience (in my opinion) for Genesis is not your typical ARK player (seems to be something mainly for PvE players and maybe only a segment of those). Very hard to tell what they were thinking at this point. It feels a bit like Scorched Earth at this point. Once you tried Scorched Earth, you went: Huh, is this really complete? It still doesn't feel complete. It is a strange mix of new and old stuff and not all of it blends well together. Same with Genesis. My guess is a lot of that will never be "fixed". Hopefully they will realize soon it has a limited appeal and not through all of their resources at Genesis and instead get back to Atlas.

So this is on an official server? I don't play the officials because of things like this happening. Most unofficial servers don't use the island claiming mechanic. It is not an improvement on the previous system (which most unofficial servers still use). The system used by unofficial servers requires that people be considerate of other players, which unfortunately isn't always the case on official servers.

A shark doesn't always appear, but when they do, I just write those NPCs off. I have thought about trying to use a crossbow from the ship to kill the shark and then jumping in. Problem with that strategy is that the shark will then agro to your ship, you, and everything on it. It could get a bit messy with all your tames jumping into the water to try and kill the shark. BTW, if you jump in the water with your diving suit on, you are perfectly safe, but the second you claim an NPC, the shark will kill it.

Yes. You need practice. I generally switch to arrows as soon as I can. I find that the first hit sort of stuns a creature and with practice you can get off a second shot. With low level stuff, it takes just two shots to kill some stuff.

LOL, good point, although I'm not sure why it took you over a month to respond to my stupid post. I wish I was paid. I might be missing some fun, but can't even stand the thought of spending even a few hours to find out what they are like. I've tried playing on some official servers in ARK, even put in like 500 hours or so on a PvE. Maybe 50 hours on a few PvP servers. Closest I came to the official Atlas servers was trying to login to an official PvP server when the game was first released and never really getting logged in anywhere that wasn't super laggy. I then tried an official PvE server and played there about a week. That was enough for me.

Are you both using Nature's Cry at the same skill level? That is the only thing I can think of that makes a bear do twice as much damage when it has the about the same amount of melee.

I'm really getting the hang of the sunken treasure. There are just a few types, but still a little bit of a challenge to figure out which and get the gold quickly all the time wondering if the ship will still be there when you get to the surface or some SotD will be trying to sink it (hasn't happened to me yet). The biggest challenge is for me to remember to put my monkey down first I lost like three monkeys and one parrot. I then leveled oxygen on my monkey and he actually survived getting the treasure once

Not sure if you've played an Early Access game, but that is kind of what it is all about. Adding features, not fixing bugs. If you don't like to play a game with so many bugs, pick one not in Early Access. They do fix some, and this latest patch had some bug fixes, but that is not the main focus.

Before Atlas was released, watching the trailer, it did appear that maybe factions would be a thing. We saw what looked like some official type army, like possibly the British army and then pirates. If they had created a faction system around at least those two, that would have been cool. I can see now that would be way too ambitious, so instead they just used the existing system of tribes (called companies) for Atlas. We may still get it some day, hard to know.

I too have been trying to make sense of the latest patch. In one way though, it did seem to be part of the road map. They are planning changes to move people to spend more time at sea. Since the treasure maps are so messed up, I've been doing more of the sunken treasure chests, so have been spending more time at sea.

I don't think I've gotten more than one actual item at a time.

Ya, pretty cool. I've gotten a few of these items already, some of them are good, but like all random loot, you will get duplicates and I've gotten those too. I now need to figure out where to put all these extra items I'm so glad to see the thatch removed from the loot tables. I can't think of anyone that wanted those.

Or you could choose not to play on official servers where all the trolls live