Bullet Force

Did they say what the reasons were for wiping? Is it just the claim system? It seems odd to me that they are going to wipe and then fail to add any new meaningful content. All I see is PVE stuff. No new ships (desperately needed), no new cannon types (also desperately needed) and no new melee weapons or ranged weapons (also desperately needed). Nothing of value is being added.

I agree. Land battles and tames are the most boring part of this game. It is very peculiar that for For a pirate game there exists only 3 ships capable of combat.... The current choices for pirate battles are: Schooner, Brig or Galleon Medium Cannon or Large Cannon Fast Speed Sail That is some incredible and amazing variety. It's overwhelming the choices we have.

I haven't read much into what they actually plan to do with this system but I am curious as to whether they will still let defenders drop all their loot like they do currently. If that is the case then this whole thing will be pretty pointless. If you are going to give the defenders new advantages you also have to go give attackers some too.

A few weeks ago they re-enabled bodies in freeports. They might to 'tweak' that change come wipe

Fix the map. There are some zones that have the same rotated island repeated twice ie N10. Secondly reduce the amount of Mt Everests everywhere. There is no need to have so many giant peaks on every island. The average mountain/pillar height should also be reduced for the sake of balance. Thirdly add more ship types. 3 IS NOT ENOUGH for PVP. Add more cannon types for ships. 2 TYPES IS NOT ENOUGH Add more guns and melee weapons to keep land combat combat interesting and varied Once you do this then wipe otherwise nothing will change with regardless to your player count and in all likely hood it will probably drop further if you don't.

The only reason that I can think of for why there should be a server wipe is power stones. Until a patch a few weeks ago, players basically had infinite keys once they killed the hydra. As a result it was far easier to do the power stones then compared to now, since it didn't matter if you died and lost the key since you would respawn with another. That said if they do wipe they will probably kill off the remaining player base.

The sea claims should be removed since they make little to no sense. The land claims though are valid and make perfect sense for taxing treasure hunting.

What is quite amazing though is that even after 2 months the devs have still yet to work this out, that a red X in a sea of red is maybe slightly possibly hard to see It would take them no more then 5 minutes to change a value in a text file to fix this and yet 2 months in they still haven't, however in the next patch we are getting more cosmetic items. Good to see they got their priorities in the right order....

I'm not sure why people are surprised at the drop. You have a pirate PVP game with just 3 PVP compatible ships in it...

"Content" or lack of is the keyword here.

An easier solution would be to simply increase the build zone box size of the cannons so you can't place them close together.

Yes most of these ideas would be fairly easy to implement within the existing game especially the increased de-spawn timers for rarer items. I'm part of a large company atm and when we raid its mostly to delete someone rather then get their loot. If they leave their loot in the boxes then that is a bonus for us but not the primary goal. For small companies though with limited reasons I can imagine it would be quite frustrating to spend several hundred cannon balls to get into a base only to find it completely bare of loot and items because the owner dropped it just before the final wall fell.

Yes & Yes.

If your talking to me for recruiting, I'm in a top 10 company atm. This thread was just to highlight an issue I think that is being missed.

The real issue is simply that there are only 3 boats to choose from when it comes to naval battles - schooner, brig or galleon. In addition there is only have 2 types of cannon to pick from and the end result is a pretty boring and limited naval game. Can you imagine playing Eve or some other ship game with just 3 ships and people not finding it slightly dull?

You are obviously new to the game. Basically because of the pathetically low velocity of the cannon balls it is quite hard to use front cannons while chasing a ship. If you are chasing a ship and you have front cannons and they have rear cannons unless their ship is slow and overburdened they will do a lot more damage to you then you will do them. With ship of the damned the principle is similar. You simple kite it and get it to follow you and you rear cannon will shoot while their cannons (if they get into range) will aim where you are currently and not where you will be when the cannon balls land. If you do it correctly you could in theory take out a lvl 50+ ship of the damned using a sloop.

Yes please don't forget the all important cosmetics...

If you think that is is bad then it gets worse. There is even at least one region that I have noticed that has the exact same island copy pasted twice in it. The only difference is a bit of rotation. I noticed this because I tried to do some treasure maps there and went to the exact same spot where it showed on the map and oddly there was no beams there. So I did a bit more sailing around and discovered this second island which was a 1:1 replica of the first..........

I don't get it. Why don't you hit F1 on your keyboard and put your flag down and take their claim? It's really quite simple. Anyways the best solution to dissuade over claiming is a gold upkeep which is likely to be patched in anyway soon. No one is going to want to hold islands in the distance which they don't use if it costs them a fortune each day in gold.

I noticed in the latest Captain's Log that the devs seem to have given into the "game is too hard" crowd yet again and in particular have said they are going to do something about offline raiding. I have not seen though any thought given to one of the reasons why players offline raid and that is because if you raid someone that is online and has a brain he will drop all the items/loot in his base before you finally breach the wall. This creates a lack of incentive to raid while online especially for smaller companies that actually need that loot. This game needs a mechanic where say you can put a little 'raid stone' which has a radius around it which makes it so that anything in that area cannot be dropped while that stone is still active and not destroyed. The stone could have a health bar and an overall timer on it. Alternatively make it so certain more valuable items such as gold and higher quality items and blueprints take far longer to despawn when dropped. Or even more alternatively do the above with the extra timers but allow players to destroy those items faster by placing them in a special 'incinerator' building which allow them to be burned in faster way. The building would be both large (at least 3x3x3) and expensive so as to make it more rare.

That suggestion doesn't achieve anything. No one completely destroys a base in this game and certainly not a stone one because its not worth the effort or cost given how cheap stone is. This game is already 10x more defensive and passive orientated then ARK was, it doesn't need even more reasons to dissuade people from engaging in PVP.

All on one map? Did you even play the game? That was only the case at the very start. Since about 2016 you have been able to transfer chars, dinos and items between servers to raid.

This is the real issue with this game for small tribes not 'Offline raiding'. In ARK you could make a little hut in the jungle on some random server and the chances of someone finding you were fairly minimal and the same is true here. Bases in Lawless Islands can exist for weeks if not months without being found. So that part of the game is working, the same cannot be said for bases in claimed lands though. However the problem with this game and one that ARK did not have is the total reliance on ships. Having a hidden base on some mountain is pointless if you have no access to ships and here in lies the problem. As each zone only has a max of 4 islands it is quite difficult if not impossible to hide your ship effectively for very long. I'm not sure of a way to fix this problem as it seems to be a major design flaw with the game but one way that could help is to remove this silly idea that each zone can only have a max of 4 islands. Why not mix it up have zones with heaps of little islands scattered about and some with far less.

Yes I'm strictly a PVP player. That's a PVE wide problem that isn't just specific to this game. When you play a game mode that basically has no real challenge then its obvious at some point players will get bored. Isn't that the whole point of PVE and why people play it. To have a peaceful safe space where they can't be hurt? Not really sure you can fight other players but after a while you realise there is a very finite way you can build your ship and design your base. There are only 5 ship types to choose from and of those only 3 are actually viable at all. The problem is the lack of variety and options for players. There is only 2 cannon types and 3 ships to work with. There isn't a whole lot of variety there and so battles more or less play out the same. The current meta is shotgun builds with a lot of cannons stacked on one side to instantly plank other ships. For SOTD it's a lot of cannons on the rear of your ship. It is funny you say this because I remember my first time setting foot on an ARK PVE server. I was curious to see what PVE players did so I spawned in and wandered around and was amazed at the lag and the strange play-style that existed over there. I saw a player on the beach shooting rockets and tossing grenades at wild dinos (rather expensive items in ARK), there was also players using dinos that were of a substandard quality. Dinos that you would never bother with in PVP. As well in general the bases seemed entirely nonfunctional, over-sized and poorly designed and defended. Many bases were painted bright colors had no roofs or were made of glass (one bullet destroys that in PVP), while others were so large that you got extreme lag when you went near them. If you go to the ARK forum you will see thread after thread from PVE players complaining about their inability to tame more dinos, a clear symptom of the lack of attrition. Since no one ever loses anything, everyone keeps taming, breeding and taming until the server eventually hits its limit and no more is allowed. It is only logical that Atlas will have the same issues. The main gold sink in PVP atm is the upkeep cost for NPCs both for ship crew and NPC's manning turrets around the base.

I know its still early but all the indications are that is what the final product will more or less look like. If I compare this game for instance to ARK, that game had new dinos and new content being added to the game just about every week. What is even more troubling is that ARK did all the hard ground work for this game. The building system, the gun system, the tribe system, the bed system, the taming system, the breeding system, the inventory system even a lot of the items and creatures are more or less copies from ARK. All that is new in this game is the transition system between servers and the boat physics. Given that this game more or less had all the hard work done for it I find it strangely odd that it still has far less content then the game which had to do all of that...