Ellentro

Strange. I have done the exact same thing. After several years playing with BLDX. In CG. In Bloodie Marie. I have spent the last three to four years playing with more Brazilians and Chinese then any other groups. The chinese have fundamentally different views on cheating. Sure, not *all of them do*, but large groups of them do. As long as the Chinese groups win, they actively encourage cheating and exploiting. To them it's about making a statement about their superiority. You might have a different view of them. Coming from outside the Ark/Atlas community, but the dominate chinese and asian communities here are vastly different then the pictures you paint of them. Sure. I love many of my chinese/malaysian friends to death, and they me, but even they will not deny that cheating, in their culture, is prolific and accepted. It is unlike any english or australian group I have played with. Not to say that English groups do not have that form of culture, but given this community, it is fair to think that.

The problem is that, unlike most countries, China actively encourages and accepts cheating as a form of competition as long as it proves their national superiority. It's a thing.

See. Here's the problem. Wildcard (The studio behind this game) has already done this once. We all thought the exact same thing for Ark. We gave them full throated, complete good will and support. Then they released from EA and nothing changed. Every patch and DLC was riddled with game-ending bugs, exploits and issues. Most content released did not function in a gameplay environment. Balance and exploit issues persisted for months, if not years (Some never actually ended up being solved). Wildcard has proven themselves once, already, to be incapable of delivering a complete product, testing their content, listening to their community or any of the basic hallmarks of what constitutes an effective and successful EA company, despite having landed a goldmine in the premise of Ark, and now Atlas, they prove, time and time again, that they, as a company, are incompetent to an extreme. People here are, rightfully, upset and frustrated with Wildcard. Your analogies don't work here because they are fundamentally flawed in comparison.

Actually it was pretty much in the launch description for Path of Exile when they entered Early Access, and it took them several months to add respec options to quests and add Orbs of Regret. No respecs are/is simply an antiquity in gaming, from the times when people thought extreme mind-numbing boredom and tedium was equivalent to difficulty. It's been relegated to the ash heap, as it should be. It's entirely your prerogative if you still equate tedium to difficulty, but most people have moved past it, thus have most games.

I did read your post, and I specifically addressed it. Ark originally was meant to have no respecs, however due to overwhelming community demand, they reached a 50/50 compromise. Once per level. Outside of that, games like Path of Exile also demonstrate that no-respecs are a bad concept. Simply put, you're unlikely to find what you are looking for in any game due to how niche your desire for extreme mind-numbing tedium=difficulty is. Any game attempting to cater to any meaningful majority will have respecs, particularly in a game like this, where your skills are so incredibly necessary and it is a balancing point for smaller groups and/or solo players.

It isn't really about what someone thinks or not, it's just about the reality of the situation. There's a very real reason why games with "No Respecs HARDCORE LUL" always end up going back on that stance. It's because the entire concept is garbage and does absolutely nothing. It's entirely fine if you want to equate mind numbing tedium with difficulty, it's understandable that activities that challenge the attention span adds difficulty to games for some people, but for most, it adds nothing, and detracts noticably. Either way it's utterly unreasonable to take respecs away from people in an EA game where the skill tree/system is so radically imbalanced and broken, undergoing major systemic changes on a weekly basis.

Making the game incredibly tedious doesn't make the game more difficult. There's nothing difficult about fucking up on your points and having no recourse to fix it, it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the difficulty of the game.

Wildcard is very well known, and documented as having absolutely no clue what they are doing from any point in time to another. The amount of times they have blatantly gone back on their words, changed what they mean and in general, lied about things, is quite high. Never take Wildcard on their word because, fundamentally, it's been proven to be worse and less then meaningless.

The problem with that is that if they did that, they'd lose a huge chunk of their most dedicated players/members. Wildcard took a couple years to take any action (at all) against Cheaters in Ark, which largely caused all of the legit playerbase to leave. By the time they decided to start enforcing any rule set, there was no one left to enforce it for.

You can believe it, but I just fundamentally disagree with you that negativity is toxicity.

It isn't though. Toxicity is usually undeserved and unfounded negativity. Almost every negative piece of critique Wildcard gets, they have earned through broken promises, strung out ETA's/ release dates, general bullshittery and their lack of concern about their playerbase. I just don't agree with you that any negativity is essentially toxicity.

Ark's community wasn't/isn't toxic. It isn't Toxic to give accurate critique and feedback on a game just because the reality of the situation/game happens to be negative.

If this is the same Rex from Ark, he's been banned a couple times for Aimbotting (With the framework/UI enabled/visible) on stream

Thats pretty much what happens here. Sure, they give ETA's, but those ETA's are never met and are usually ignored by anyone with a brain at this point, so do they really exist?

They missed their announced ETA for Extinction by almost an entire month. Sure, that's "Within their time frame", but that's because their time frame is half the calendar year. It is entirely accurate, and reasonable, to say that they have never hit an ETA. Because they haven't. As for City of Heroes dev team. I enjoyed them thoroughly, even if they had some complete batwits like Castle and Positron whom had no idea what they were doing with anything (Cough cough i13 cough cough), they had a good heart and a sense of professionalism that gaming studios of the current generation are thoroughly lacking. The biggest issue with Wildcard is a seeming lack of any form of cohesion. They behave and act like a studio with absolutely no sense of management or professional duty/sense. They are far closer to a team you'd expect to see working on a game Mod rather then an actual game. They demonstrably do not test anything they make, nor do they have any real idea how to meet deadlines or actual sense of duty to their playerbase.

No. They don't. They wait until the last minute, the code doesn't compile (IE the patch doesn't even start) so they can't ship it. Wildcard doesn't test or play their game. At all. Or their staff is fubar. If they actually tested their games and found bugs, we wouldn't have nearly the issues we do when patches launch. IE Ships of the damned driving through islands and demoing bases from under the mesh. Ships of the damned aggroing from out of render. Whales one shotting galleys. Etc.

When Ark bosses were first released, they one shot any dino with less then 5k HP, and had over 3 million HP each (On Alpha). They were literally impossible to kill. The moral of the story is that Wildcard does not play or test their own content. It's very likely, just going by their history, that they have no idea that they're unkillable (As are many of the major PvE objectives atm), and that Wildcard does not (yet) know about it. In similar fashion to how Wildcard thought Ships of the Damned were perfectly balanced (As they said themselves they had been "Rigorously tested by our internal QA team", despite the fact that they aggro'd on anchor'd ships from out of render and drove through geometry (IE islands). Seeing as how no one has seen this game (Including wildcard) played at any major depth, before we got it, it's only natural for almost everything to be horrifically broken. Just have to give Wildcard time (Years) to fix stuff.

Wildcard has literally never met an ETA for anything in their company's history. Usually, you'd think that "Oh, he's just exaggerating", but in this case. I'm not. They have *never* hit an ETA. Ever. In history. People need to learn to just ignore any ETA they post because it's literally just irrelevant mind games.

Territory taxes are already in the game. You can set them via the placable/craftable Tax bank. Items harvested in your claimed region with a tax bank active will have a tax you set (0 to 30%) placed automatically in the bank.

Well the problem is that the wrticle is written under a *very* different concept of "An MMO". Contrast their examples of Everquest and World of Warcraft to what we have. The differences are drastic and stark. The development costs are likely completely incomparable with that logic. While, no, I can't provide better examples, it doesn't change the fact that your example is simply very tenuously connected, likely to the point of uselessness. This game is, in no way, like World of Warcraft or Everquest, and is not a game made in their genre, even if the game has "MMO" slapped on it. It's not nitpicking for me to point that out because your sources and points derived therefore from them, are based on extremely thin ice to begin with.

That article isn't very applicable to our reality in this game. First off, this game, while an MMO, is not the same as those MMOs. Second, most of the assets/engine were completely reused (It's just Ark with new graphics and a few new mechanics, made off a base of the Extinction DLC map pasted across a number of zones. They more then likely already broke even for this game simply due to the fact that, comparatively, this game was extremely easy to build given the tools and content they developed previously for Ark and Dark and Light, combined with the fact that several of the mechanics (Such as Wind, Sailboats etc) were/are blatantly ripped from the Ark modding community.

How about they fix the game to the point where it's semi-playable in an effective environment before we think about further monetizing it? I would love to see them add more cosmetics after they improve the playability of the game, maybe even for cash, but the discussion is fairly premature as it stands now. We just dropped a pretty good bundle of cash in the company (collectively as a community), I'd like to see what they do with it before discussing how much more we should give them.

I mean, sure, but that doesn't make it useless or obsolete. It will be very useful for planning trips, PvP and generally being on the ocean. It's just no longer a complex geometric puzzle game to tack correctly to get where you need to go.

How is it useless? You still go significantly faster tacking upwind.

Fire arrows *are* overpowered, but the only reason they're overpowered is because every other ranged option is complete garbage. As in complete and utter garbage. I don't disagree with nerfing them, but nerfing them before buffing firearms to be a usable alternative is awful. As it stands you probably are better off pickaxing something to death then using a gun.