Winter Thorne

They haven't been able to get the collision detection right with them. I'm sure hunting them is fun, but repairing the hell out of everything they chew up all the time is really boring. People are sick of them eating all their tames. Yesterday I put a sign on my boathouse saying, "No Snakes Allowed". This morning I watched an alpha cobra eat the sign. For no earthly reason at all. Let the devs give you some other nice big mob to hunt that doesn't glitch through walls.

They're broken as anything, and warp through any amount of structures. Why not just remove them until (if) you can get them working right? They're just a mob...not critical to any element of gameplay. Replace them with more spawns of existing creatures that don't have the problem so badly, or put something new in that doesn't warp through objects. They're needlessly annoying with no redeeming game features.

Your comment shows that you don't have a good understanding of what pve content is. What's your idea of pve content, anyway?

Do crazy stuff. I think it's a mistake to play an EA game seriously, spending a ton of time creating and building things and expecting them to persist. When you read on the forums that people are having a terrible time trying to breed animals, keep their tames, hang onto huge ships if they have griefing neighbors, why bother dedicating yourself to that before it's fixed? You'll only drive yourself crazy. Do it casually if you like, with an attitude of, "Oh, I guess I'll try this today". If it's still there in a week, that's great! If not, then do something else. Take a long sail (on a raft ), have a flotsam collecting contest with bonus points for who gets popped most by SOTDs. Sail through some zone where everybody is heads down slaving away at building something like it's their job, and sing a song in general chat. Collect 10 other silly people, put them all in armor painted pink and go visit other islands, telling them you're from Mary Kay and they've won a free makeover. If you've already built all the big ships and bases, tamed all the animals and got all the powerstones, what is there left to do when things are finally fixed and actually fun to accomplish? Remember, nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition...so show up uninvited and unexpected and give them one.

Every single one is showing Lost Connection Time Out. There seem to be tons of timeout issues reported in the bugs forum, but no answers for any of them yet. I didn't see any where someone couldn't get to any of the Freeports though. The reason I'm posting it in here is because we're supposed to be getting a big new feature of player merchants in Freeports soon. How many other people are having this problem who will be locked out of the new feature? (It's deja vu all over again on the great EA land rush) It's also a PITA with the FOY mechanic.

All just to say -

I always plan for bigger stuff to be a multi day adventure, having probably even less time all in one lump to play. I didn't start out that way, but now that I've changed my expectations for sailing trips it makes them less aggravating. There's been a forum thread lately on doing away with fast travel, which would kill that whole approach. I hope nobody takes that idea seriously.

And for the players that start in May or June? Are they required to read through 6 or 8 months of patch notes, forums, discord and twitter before they start playing?

I agree with the OP. You know, some people just want to play the game, and not be all involved in all the meta on the forums, discord, twitter, etc. I've looked for stuff in the patch notes before and not been able to find it too. I read the forums a lot, and there's plenty of stuff I've missed too. Even if you think it's his fault for not knowing, piling on somebody who's just lost a ton of stuff is kind of a rotten thing to do. But here's the real reason this pisses me off and why the OP is right - games get new players. Can we all stop thinking about the game as though everyone who will ever play it started on day 1? Somebody who buys this game in May is not going to have all this history of forum discussion to know what everyone else knows. Treating them as though they're stupid for not knowing all this is a weird thing to do. If there's a game mechanic that's going to seriously impact players like that, there needs to be some sort of notice in the game.

Some players have never been in a Freeport, since they didn't start there.

On twitter, Jat said - Contemplating whether to do a Captain's Log tomorrow (Weds). Don't really have much to share in terms of future plans yet as we're still figuring things out. It would just be another filler one sharing the recent notes and the show n tell. Not keen on those.Would rather post one where we've got something more concrete in terms of our upcoming direction and how we're going to be addressing concerns brought up by the community. As we're still figuring it out, seems appropriate to hold the current one. Jat, your Captain's Log idea is contained right in your post. You don't need to wait until you've got all the concerns solved. Why not publish the list of concerns you're all discussing, along with whatever bits of the back and forth you think are appropriate? There's a huge difference in perspective from your view of being immersed in that design discussion every day, to the players' view of seeing chaotic bits of issues big and small flooding the forums. I think people would enjoy an overview of the discussions of our concerns at a high level , say 35,000 ft.

or beans.

You seem to be talking about pve, so yes, it's griefing there. Although the game uses the word "enemy" talking about other players' territories, pve is supposed to be an environment where you cannot attack other players or their belongings and destroy them. Deliberately attacking and destroying the property of other players in pve is griefing. The claim system is awful. The devs know that. They say they are going to rework the entire thing. Using griefing as your own personal way to change the claim system is a stupid and selfish idea. It will get you reported and it may get you banned.

Pvp and Pve are two entirely different games. Pve is not a territorial game all about claiming land.

I gave you a like, not because I agree with all you said, but because they're reasonable criticisms and the phrase "loveless mechanics", which seems spot on. There's nothing that generates awe or surprise or humor in it. To be fair, that's the same for all the new games lately, so Atlas isn't alone. Well, hope springs eternal.

I love this idea. It's a pain in the ass getting ships in and out of a crowded harbor, and I'd rather see a harbor built out with moorings than a bazillion shipyards. Once trade really gets going there will have to be spots for traders to put their ships, so the moorings will need permissions that can be set on them as well.

Anyone having performance issues (lag) is going to see a different render time than someone else, even if they both have the same game settings. People in a zone that's lagging and possibly needs a reboot are going to have a different experience than someone in a zone that's performing better. It helps to not talk about these kinds of issues as though everyone is seeing the same thing all the time. Gitgud is not an appropriate answer when you don't know what it is that person is actually seeing on the screen. "SOTD are always spawning at the border" / "SOTD never spawn at the border" "It's easy to outrun them" / "It's impossible to outrun them" Without seriously getting into the details of different configs and performance metrics, there's no way to sort this out in any intelligent way in the forums, because we haven't got the keys to the servers to have a look at it. Hopefully the devs will be looking at this at some point and testing the lower end of the client configs to make sure the performance is still acceptable. If people keep bringing it up in the forums, maybe they will. Stuff like that isn't as helpful as treating it as though it might be a performance problem - what zone, what time, what is the pc config, etc.

Well, I'd agree with that based on <mumble> years of professional experience with it. Two points though - It may be that an update has done something that only affects certain types of hardware. If the hardware config is supported, it's still a game issue. I'm not sure how small the numbers of people affected are, since many don't use the forums at all, but I've seen a number of threads complaining about different things that actually could be this same issue. The last thread complaining about SOTD had some people swearing there was no problem with them spawning too close, it was ridiculously easy to get away, etc., while others swore the opposite. That's what got me wondering about this issue in the first place. It could be that the problem is also limited to certain zones as well. Makes me wonder if their hardware configs and settings are all the same.

I may be having this problem too. It's hard to tell because it's always been laggy off and on for me, but there's a definite increase in graphics lag, where it takes a lot more time for the graphics to draw in when I respawn, and where mobs suddenly appear very closely sometimes (including SOTD). Turning around is lagged as my comp attempts to read in the graphics, etc.

I've been sailing around on nothing but a raft since the game started just to avoid having to deal with SOTD. I've had one shoot at me, and I got away, but I was sunk by one yesterday, and it was fairly weird. Normally I try not to get closer to them than just enough to read the level, even though rafts are very safe, and that's about how far away I was, and the thing made a beeline for me and blasted me out of the water. Earlier that day I'd passed at least 16 or so with no problem. There is something weird going on with them. I almost suspect some dev is having a little fun after hours.

Hey, who are you calling sober?

If you really wanted to do something about the player count, you'd come up with an idea that works for both pvp and pve.

In a badly designed game, that's what usually happens, and usually sooner than 2 years. A good pve design needs good core systems and the systems need a lot of depth . If you had a game with exploration, meaningful crafting, player competition through city systems with economics, diplomacy, politics and trade, along with changes the players could make to the entire game world through massive cooperative efforts, then you'd give people enough to do for quite a long time. The problem happens when a developer goes for breadth instead of depth and throws little doodads at the game in an attempt to keep people interested, rather than fully developing bigger systems. Usually if you see "we're adding quests!", in a game that's fully released, that's a pretty good danger sign that development is either lazy or lacks imagination.

If we were talking about RL I'd agree with you, but, unlike life, there's only so much content you get in a game. People who chew through all the content in the first 3 months find themselves with nothing left to do. They begin to badger the devs for "more content", but that's a losing battle. No dev team can keep up with the really fast players. In the end (assuming development improvements continue), players who go more slowly and collect and build their own things will still have plenty to do and enjoy the game longer.

It's probably bad timing bringing this up now with everything else that's happening, but we need some more mechanics behind the alliance structure. There's no "there" there. It would be good, for starters to be able to grant individual permissions for locks, and set separate tax rates for them.