Bleakwise

IE having the kracken drop 10k gold (not a lot) is a relatively simple mechanic, as a result you would have large naval battles instead of people just doing harbor runs and screaming "get gud" at each-other all day as opposed to H8 being a PVE zone even on PVP servers. I would also scrap the whole golden compass idea. It's just a time sink, and time sinks are very ineffective ways to get people to want to support your game. Sure maybe it can work in a game like Skyrim or Risen, but this is not a campaign story driven game with deep lore that is going to have novels and movies written and made about it. I have no idea why they are trying to compete with WOW and TESO on this front, both in Ark and Atlas. Hell, I would argue Ark was better before they started twisting game-play around a story. I would guess they will probably make the game PVE at some point, there will be a small spike in sales and then a steep decline, and they are going to be left scratching their head why simply making half the zones (a very minor budget change that skiddies do on modded servers) PVE didn't line their pockets with gold, same way UOGamers has more players than the official servers for EA's other "sandbox" game. Also, instead of all this "limited company and alliances" crap, it needs is an /lfg function, and better rank/access mechanics. A new player should be able to jump right into the big company/alliance wars. That was all it needed back in Season one as well. I actually liked that better because ships were either blue or red, now there is so much "teaming" nobody pvps because out of game alliances extend beyond what the game allows. The new player experience has gotten worse for it, and there is less eve-like drama. Now we're talking about adding factions and shit, when the game had that already in season one, and people shouldn't have to turn to social media in order to find a group of people to play with, honestly, most people are not going to sign up for reddit or join a forum to play an MMORPG nor should they be expected to.

You havea different definition of emergent gameplay than I do. I have to disagree with GameCrate on that. Since we're using Google, the Wikipedia version is better....

What you're talking about is some crazy match of D&D on a blank sheet of paper. It's no different than having resource nodes. You can't just wipe the game down to a blank screen and call it a sandbox with "limitless emergent gameplay" cause it has a blank screen you can stare at on acid.

All of my bases have lasted though seasons so far, tho this season it looks like SDC may wipe us. By emergent gameplay I mean, add a player based "mission" system, make golden age ruins farmable via groups of players/tames (who will run into eachother) etc. So far the only "emergent gameplay" is pvp that breaks out in golden age waters while farming SOTD, and when mapping. That's it. Make the kraken give you 10k gold divided up by boat, bunch of blueprints and shit, and people will slaughter each-other in H8 in a battle royal. I might actually even build boats for that. Make golden age mobs drop like 100-250 gold, make them farmable via razortooth and tortuga and crab, and ballista bears or something, and people will fight over the opportunity. Would make for some interesting land battles.

They don't seem to understand the concept "emergent gameplay." Just look at the resources wasted on the Kracken and the Ice Cave. You do them once, done, no reward for doing them beyond that. They seem to think oh, who cares? Well, the problem isn't the lack of the reward, it's the lack of emergent gameplay that comes along with it. No one is going to fight over Kracken or Ice Cave because it's just a grind to get torpedoes and subs... and we have to get back to grinding maps like it's a fing job so that hopefully somewhere in there we can go grief someone for content. Same could be said about the hydra or dragon bosses. Killing them is pointless when mythical blueprints are in such short supply the entire Atlas economy runs on handling sail and shipyard BPs.

Rumor has it ships have a large memory footprint, probably due to nvidia waveworks etc, which would be fine but they are working within an 6gb memory limit due to console.

OP is spoken like someone who doesn't know how to build a ship. The screenshot of the ship you posted is a common newb boat. 1) no swivels so it can be boarded and 2) damage is too spread out. Way to many points in crew and weight (25 points by the looks of it). Not enough firepower concentrated in any direction. Ship speeds are also already different. Brigs handle better than schooners, schooners are faster, galleons are fastest on paper but not in practice, and handle like dog shit. Only reason galleons go dual broad side is cause they handle so bad. If you armor your boat up super heavy like that, you are not able to level up resistance as much, you have to level weight, and all ships are pretty tight on weight when you run with 300 or so cannon balls and the suggested gunport cannons. You pass 50% weight you slow down quite a bit, the big boys run at 30% weight. Any points you put in weight are less points in damage/resistance. 20 points in resistance and 20 points in damage and 4 points in crew and 5 points in weight is kind of the meta for mythical boats. For non-mythical boats you generally just want 15 resists 15 damage 4 crew 5 weight, 10 cannon broadside, 2 extra crew for players. A 25/25 damage/melee galleon (18 cannons each side * 1.8 blueprint * 2 from levels = 65 normal cannon barrage) broadside will shit on that brig and any other. There needs to be something like a "destroyer" that has a chance at taking down galleons. I mean 54 crew points is HUGE advantage over the 16 we get on a brig. The amount of resources/planks/decks needed is also WAY higher on Galleon. We could use something in between. Like brig plank count that uses large planks but uses the extra deck for cannons.

I was honestly expecting Atlas to add a new boat every other month or so. Sad because it's the only "PVP MMO" out and so little dev time goes into it, just tweaking scripts here and there, and the base raiding meta is in many ways better than Arks. We got the 6 gun, crossbow, tortuga, and cat last year, rest was all bug-fixes. Honestly I think they expected much higher sales, but the botched launch and all the negative press killed chances for this game to get resources put on it. The horrible melee combat system and superiority of it over guns doesn't help much either. People like run and gun gameplay not stunlock 1 shot kill melee combat and 10 second reload times. The "end-game" tames are also garbage, ie the Razortooth gets wrecked by bears/horses. It's a complete joke. The Tortuga is only good for gathering sea-weed and that's if you don't have a sub. I mean why even devote the tens of thousands of dollars and dev time it takes to create these things if they serve no purpose in game? Same with the Kracken, it serves to unlock the sub, making that hundred or two thousand dollar investment a side-show as well. With the Tortuga, why should I even do the Kracken except for getting bonus levels, which the community is telling you is a broken and tedious way to handle progression anyway. You could argue "to get to unlock torpedoes" but nobody uses those due to cost, and Ice Cave is done for XP only, no rewards, so it goes double for that content, why just throw away your dev time by making it inaccessible to people and done once? Who is the game designer here? In Ark at least that's how you would farm element. And even if they did it becomes a "why should I even bother with this game" type issue and something long-time players will get bored from because the content is done once. Even WoW reused dungeon content more than once before sending you off to the next theme-park ride. This is not a theme-park, it's a sandbox, a pvp sand-box at that. Devs need to make the content contribute to the sandbox in some way otherwise people are going to go back to playing PubG and APEX Legends and battlefield if it's just a game about throwing down claim flags, I can do that in those games without breaking my mouse left clicking trees and shrubs. Either that or they will go back to Runescape or that other Pirate RPG. As it is now, my Atlas play consists of 1) putting food in my food larder and 2) fetching some deep sea loot crates for my gold supply and 3) logging out, because other than maps or grieving someone (which is less profitable than farming), what to do? Oh, and claims are so fucking expensive and such a huge monotony to maintain there is really nothing to fight over except your fucking map/berry-farming chores. It's starting to seem like another Fallout 76 where "players make the role-playing content" instead of relying on EMERGENT GAMEPLAY to handle that for you. People should be fighting over the Kracken spawn, ie you should get something good for killing the Kracken. Same with Ice Cave. People should be fighting all over golden age ruins for gold and mythos. Even 1997 UO had things to fight over, it was less of a "grand theift auto/pvp game" than Atlas, just look at that. People would fight over spawn camps and shit like that all the time. Flyers are already in the game in the form of a fucking DRAGON, why not have Leatherwings tame-able? Just normalize golden age ruins to lvl 30, make all the normal creatures alphas, you're done. Remove the ability to "pick" people while you're at it if you dont like that meta. I would also suggest making blueprints like Ark's. GIVE ME A REASON TO FARM RARE MATS AND MYTHOS. I'm not going to do it if I have to spend 8 hours doing a map for 3-4 mythical crafts, and have enough mythos left over to make 100 more items, nor will I do it if you simply cut mythos drop rate, simply because Legndary items are usually better. mean holy shit that mechanic is stupid. People are going to /quit or get raided anyway and either get looted or popcorn blueprints. Ark economy does fine with endless blueprint crafting. Would be cool if I could store those in a bank box too, which would add some element of players backstabbing their company to the game like you have in EVE, and like people aren't going to inside raid anyway. I mean even Ark has a vendor-merchant now in the form of HLNA where you can buy resources, items etc, all kinds of questing, races etc.. How is that in Ark which isn't even an RPG and is not in Atlas which is AND has been in development longer than Ark's latest expansion?

I bought Atlas early access because Ark's was so good. We got SO MUCH new stuff in Ark Early Access, and while I understand player numbers are down, Atlas made a shit-ton of money on release. I'd add that the reason Ark early access did so well was because every two weeks there was a new tame, or a new item, there was a new map etc etc. IMO Atlas needs a re-work to the golden age ruins. These are supposed to be end-game zones that you run/farm with your tribe, end-game content, but the only purpose they serve is to lock the submarine behind the kracken, and a place to fight high level SOTD. I would suggest making land-farming as well as sea-farming viable, that is, make the island a giant Easter-egg hunt / gold/blueprint farming ritual, and raise spawn rates on SOTD in golden age zones. Simply all journeyman and up maps be on golden age zones, and re-working the golden age content to be completed without "cheesing" the game and using ships. Something needs to be done, because there is no incentive for player interaction at the moment beyond "winning the season." Having a group of players with max high level tames getting 1 hit by giant random spawn, or not even being able to look at a gorgon without "freezing" and resorting to cheesing or kiting to complete a map or even powerstones is not fun gameplay. Seriously, I think atlas players have just accepted a huge part of the game is broken and "not greifing/trolling so who cares", but that's exactly why the game hasn't taken off in sales, it will kill this game just as it did Ultima Online. I don't mind PVP or having to fight other players to exist, but gold farming in atlas is so broken/lame it's a wonder the population is as high as it is.

Would be nice to have a bank at freeport, just to store gold. Nothing fancy, just the ability to deposit/withdraw gold.

Just be sure it doesn't wipe when it's actually finally released. The powerstone grind is garbage and I'm not going to play a game that puts ALL of the end-game content behind a grind only for it to wipe every 6 months. Oh and for the love of MMO God put a fucking group finder in the game. I mean wtf kind of MMO doesn't have a group finder. Quit thinking in terms of Ark 2 and make a fucking MMO already. PS: The PVE/PVP mixed server cluster is a horrible idea. The game needs some kind of solo-player/lfg docks with limited personal storage and maybe up to two schooners and that's it. Personal storage is important not only for Companies but for individual players as well, so that they can "own" some stuff that isn't really just property of the Company.

When will exploratoin islands be rebalanced? Even the Crab, Turtle, and Razortooth is not good enough. Either buff the Razortooth, Crab, Turtle, or lower difficulty. Will we ever be able to tame Leatherwings? Can we expect flying machines or hot air balloons or zeppelins at any time? The Pteranadon was my favorite creature in Ark, especially before the nerf, and I would love to see it's doppleganger here. Gryphons would be amazing too. I'm fine with creature difficulty as it is, but it should also go for things like Fire Elementals and Cyclops, gorgons etc as well, and their base HP is way too high. I also think Cyclops are way too big and fast. Their blueprint should be shrunk down and have their run speed reduced.

Here is the jist. So, you go to a freeport, and you buy stuff on marketplace, no problem. Here's the catch. The item has to be delivered to "your" freeport in the form of a cargo haul, so you gotta wait around a while to get it. There's another catch. The cargo hall is essentially just a cargo container that some random player has to buy for some gold that can't be looted so we can always just assume it was somebody else's items, or the cargo rack can be taken to the freeport and cashed in for some gold. Player should also have the option to do a pickup and get his items immediatly. You could also pay premium shipping any amount you want to expedite the transfer of your goods, that gold would go 50/50 to the delivery guy and the freeport. Here's the intended effect of the system. It gets players moving goods around. The more people trade, the more they play, the more opportunities you have for piracy. Yes piracy, not just fighting over land like a bunch of cowboys. The money that a freeport acquires would allow players to instantly sell items to the freeport that the freeport lacks, which would probably be resources from further and further zones. The lower they are on the resource the more they will pay, eventually incentivising players to move those resources to that freeport. As for treasure maps, there should be a "map vendor/collector" that you can give treasure maps to for something like 5% map cost. You are then able to buy the map for 20% map cost. The catch now is that the treasure map when bought has no gold in it, instead it has a novelty item that you have to go back to turn into a (not the) "collector" to get the full gold reward.

I like how AoD drop gold now. Sadly Cyclops and Elementals are not re-balanced yet. Needs to be a reasonable way to kill these. I don't want to play Ark where I'm exploiting dodobird AI for kills hiding on a cliff, I want to play a pirate RPG adventure.

If they only did it to AoD then I hardly see the reason of boats getting XP as a valid reason. The amount of XP you get is so paltry, you would have to afk the process on an AoD spawn or something, in which case you're chances lean towards being sunk before max leveling your boat. Not like you can carry more than 500 or so cannonballs anyway on anything less than a brig. Last time I played it all still worked on Cyclops and Rock Elementals and I was doing it because any other method was going to take hours and hours to just down one, but then again hey you can just level your boat on wolves and shit now? More than likely they just made them PVP only items. Whole thing reeks of the "middle school programmers" meme that floats in game chat. Also, not all spawns are reachable by bears as the random map generator likes to stick maps in locations requiring climbing pick ALL THE TIME, and being required to have a crab to do maps is pretty fucking ass, especially when crab can't even reach them all. They really need to add a UObject to the game called "map location" and tag a bunch of them all over the islands (and make them de-activate with structures around), and stop using a random number generator to do it. Sailing for hours to find out the map is in a base or in-accessible by tames is not fun, especially with how easy AotD clip through and get stuck in cliff walls making you have to reset a map that was more than a pain in the ass to get to. It's also going to seriously fuck the end-game content as oil jars and flame arrows were the best way to take the yetis down in the ice dungeon.