Winter Thorne

Not everyone is an Arkie, so some of the people here are bringing a fresh perspective. I did play ARK for a while in the beginning, although that was on a private server, but I remember the frustrations on the part of the guy trying to run the server and those doing the mods. Dinos aren't my thing, so I was never into it enough to learn anything about the individuals on that team. I figured they're the same as any other - there's always one guy with wacky ideas who wants to just throw them at the game , at least one who really really hates the players, one who wants everything to be planned out and have the systems all work together, etc. So I knew about the ARK launch, but the question for me is who are those guys who became Grapeshot? Are they the ones who said, "Now we know how to do this better", or is it more like Beavis and Butthead put on pirate hats? I'm not optimistic about that answer, but I'm having fun fiddling around in there, so I'll continue to do that for a while and make the occasional plea for sanity and logic in the forums. Hell, there's 3 feet of snow outside. Can't garden in that.

One thing I've been thinking about that hasn't been mentioned in the discussion is that for rocky launches, especially with fast untested iterations, the players who have no problem sticking with the game through that have to have some sense of trust in the dev team. There has to be some underlying sense that even when things get crazy, it'll work out well in the end. Players with a sense of trust forgive nerfs, bugs, rollbacks, the occasional bad decision and correction, and hang with the game for the long run. I'm on the fence about trusting this bunch. On the one hand, they came up with a great concept. On the other hand, at some point even before EA, someone sat down and "envisioned" the goofy claim system, and no one envisioned the boat weight issues or pin code hacking. So, who knows how it'll all turn out? I have a feeling a lot of the complaints are not so much that something is broken right now, but that there's no trust it's going to be good in the end....that the basic plan is bad or doesn't exist. I've been having fun playing so far because I've decided to play in a non-permanent sort of way. I'm 100 years old and all I have is a raft and a small spot in Lawless (that I have to keep protecting from encroachment), and on any given day I may decide to go sail and grab flotsam or build something shockingly nice (for a lawless zone), or stand on my roof and shoot snakes. If something gets destroyed, it's not a big deal. I highly recommend this approach for anyone having a hard time getting more advanced content to work properly.

Someone is more likely to get banned for acting like a nazi than for calling someone a nazi. Your best bet is reporting them blockading you in, although I'm not sure that's bannable.

I can define your weird mindset on this by the fact that anything you don't seem to like is defined by "millennial", and the fact that you think people "earn" land in this game. Personal responsibility, amirite? Lazy kids on welfare. Not happy to live on a raft and visit every island in the game checking each claim. You had to travel 50 miles in the snow..uphill...both ways to find a piece of land and when you did it was covered in polar bears and crocodiles. You have no idea how many hours per day or how many days. (Or the fact that it's x2 because 2 of us are looking in different places) And apparently anyone you don't like is a millennial. Here's another clue. Get a calendar. The game's only been out for a month, and I spent the first almost 2 weeks of that in Freeport trying to stay logged in, crashing, rubberbanding, being griefed and verbally assaulted by 42 idiots all named some variation of p33nius, or ni*%*r. I was a bit too busy to join the yacht club. So that leaves @ 2 weeks. Betcha didn't know that can also be expressed as 14 days. So your opinion is that no player can criticize the lack of land or the claim system unless they've first traveled to every island and checked every claim. Please do us all a favor and stay out of game development as a career. In fact, even commenting on game design is probably something you might want to avoid. (And that job at the carnival guessing people's ages? Not a good choice for you.)

Forgot to thank you for your comment. When I returned from 2 days of sailing and looking today I found a bunch of people encroaching my settlement in Lawless, so I guess I'd better spend a day or so putting up foundations, posts, walls, etc. There's one other friend left there from our original bunch of 10 or so (all started small or solo and met in Lawless, and most of whom have quit due to griefing and bugs), and he's also out looking, so I better try to protect his spot too. Could hardly get my raft back in there when I got back today. (Yes, I'm still on a raft. No point building anything bigger when it doesn't last overnight here) After that, I may take a long trip your way and see if anything's left in that area.

Well, at least you didn't claim people without land were lazy, cause that's getting really old right now. You must have missed the part where I said I'd been sailing around for days looking for claims. So go back and try again, and take your insults and personal remarks with you. Re. sleepers - the only reason I can see for them being there doesn't make sense with the rest of the game. It would be to prevent one person having a whole bunch of far-flung claims if they need to be out of the game for a number of days, because you can't sleep everywhere at once. But the game doesn't otherwise discourage people from having multiple far flung claims, so I'm sure that's not it. I know most survival games include sleepers. That wasn't what I was asking. I was wondering what purpose they serve in THIS game. The purpose can't be to ensure every player must build a nesting Russian doll to sleep in, because that would just be...well....stupid. The problem with sleepers is that they're there ostensibly to hold a claim while the player is not in the game. But it sets up a confusing ruleset that's more complicated than it has to be. What's the expiration for a claim? (It should be simply X amount of time since someone has logged into the game.) But what is it really? Is there a sleeping cutoff time, or does it go on forever? So now we have one expiration for a claim with no one in it and (a different?) one for a claim with someone sleeping in it. Is there anything gained by not just having a login clock that counts down..if you don't log in for 20 days, your claim expires?

If that's what you meant to say you should have said that. But it's a bit more than bright purple ships and foul names. If I saw those trying to claim next to me, I wouldn't like that either. Not sure if I'd take advantage of what I think must be a bug to grief them out of it though. Would have to think about that one. So you need someone willing to chat with you. What if they don't use voice? (like me), what if they don't speak English? what if they're frequently afk when you're saying hello? What if they actually DO come by and ask if there's any land open? You don't like that either. Bzzzt....you flunked Ryan's test. No land for you, cause he's going to skip around in it until you get fed up and leave. Re, Roughrider's comment - that's not an HOA. Everybody knows not to build like an asshat, except an asshat. He also didn't threaten to grief me out of a claim if I didn't go through his interview process. See the difference?

Look, I understand not wanting to have crappy people in your area. We had some griefers in my lawless area and we had to follow them around getting screenshots and reporting them till someone finally did something about them. It stinks. And there are areas I sail through where I won't even look at the claims, because the chat and the company names are toxic and/or so juvenile I couldn't stand to live there. But.... There are bunches of us out here with no land because this claim system was designed by a lunatic. Not only can we not get any decent land, we also get penalized by fast decay, overcrowding, and no beds allowed on land. And now we get to hear that there's some sort of HOA out there dictating who can move in and who can't, and you have to stop and talk and no, talking isn't enough, you have to use voice and it can't be just a general query, you have to stop long enough for an interview, and don't show up if it's not primetime, cause there's nobody there, and we have to approve you, yadda yadda yadda, and dance little monkey, dance for me. Is that it? If anybody's got restrictions on colors for your window boxes, I don't want to hear it. Look, it's bad enough some of you grabbed up everything while the rest of us were playing "connect to the server", but this attitude that you're also entitled to control everything within the reach of your general chat is pretty flipping arrogant. Oh, I know you can do it, just as you can grab up 42 claims on day one, because the game was designed by drunken squirrels, apparently. But just know if that's how you're operating, you don't also get to pretend you're one of the good guys saving your territory from terrible people. Because it makes you one of the terrible people.

I'm one of the people that didn't get land in the first couple days. After that I continued to put it off because claims were so buggy, and I didn't want to steal somebody's claim on a bug. Now as I'm traveling around, I check claims and if I find one that's available to challenge, I'm going to challenge it. Nothing sneaky about it. I know all the early birds weren't going around asking permission of the whole zone to make a claim, why should I? I have actually tried checking in general chat to see if anything's available, and have never gotten any answer but no (over 12 servers or so). Some of these claim flags even have a message telling people looking for land to stay away. I know people are leaving the game or have been AWOL for a long time, and those claims are out there, but there's very little reason for anyone to say "Yes, there's land available". If they live there, they're likely watching the claim timer for themselves or for a friend. And I refuse to rent. That's nuts. Unrelated to that - does anyone else just find the idea of "sleepers" to be weird? Why have them at all? Why don't people just vanish when they log out? Is there some real reason for them to be there?

Were you in L4?

I fixed this by dying when it happened to me.

A couple of you guys are just missing the point. This thread is not complaining about bugs and problems. It is complaining about priorities and lack of planning. We are very used to getting an incomplete system, network and performance issues, and bugs in the code in EA. Everybody knows those are going to be there. We don't care about that. The two complaints, restated are: Design and planning - How could you possibly not anticipate this or imagine this would turn out well? This applies to the claims system, grief-sinking boats with weight, the day 1 network issues and land rush, and other things like that. Focus - Now that the initial rush is over, what's next? The upcoming patch notes are full of little unconnected new things which won't matter a lot, while we feel we are sitting here in an unworkable mess. You all jumped right on the network stuff and made a number of improvements to it. We'd like to see the same focus on getting the game basics finished and working before you start throwing out little new things (that also don't work right). We would also like to see you think things through more before putting them out. How could this be exploited? Could this cause a network/performance problem? How will this affect players joining 4 months from now? Does this make sense for both pvp and pve? Does it break some other system already in place? We are not complaining that there are bugs in the game. Please reread the thread to avoid debating that strawman. Are you kidding with this? UO, EQ, WOW, the Funcom games, ESO, (and I'm sure I'm forgetting a million others here)..... none of those were as "massive" as this? I remember all those launches, and despite all the (now) hilarious things that happened, you could tell the developers at least sat down and talked through the design..how it could be implemented, how it could be abused and griefed, and how they were going to support the games, handle bugs and code violations. Of course some of these issues were obvious. They've been obvious for decades. And still, you know what? I can excuse this launch, because I'm also familiar with the marketing and release pressures for gaming companies. If somebody tells you, "We have to have something new out in 6 mos. or you're gone", then what's happening is perfectly explainable. What's not explainable is what's happening now, where instead of buckling down to make some order out of the chaos, they're just making more chaos. I can almost guarantee you that there are some in that meeting room pushing to just go go go and get cool looking stuff out because the reviews are dropping and people are looking unhappy, and others in the room advocating for the more boring course of fleshing out the systems and getting the bugs nailed. (Which is why I'm writing this in support of more stability and better systems) If you think any of this is groundbreaking, you're mistaken, and if you think the thread is whining about a buggy EA, you're mistaken again. It's the focus and direction.

We can't be the QA because we haven't been given the design spec. All we can do is give them multiple confusing incomplete reports about something we thought was wrong, which, as you say, burns up their time and slows everything down. If they wanted us to do QA, they should be providing enough info with the patch notes - X type of food should expire in Y time raw, in Y*2 when cooked and Y*4 cooked in a preserving bag, for example. Or when they change the claim flags, they should state how they're supposed to work in different situations so we can test that. With the right kind of information given to the players, they could get bug reports with a repeatable scenario that could actually be used to fix something. When I do A, then B, then C, I get Z, and I'm supposed to be getting D, and this is repeatable. (A good bug report) With the wrong kind, they have two choices - ignore them or chase their tails trying to figure them out. Of course they don't have a large team, or an unlimited budget. This makes it even more important that they don't run around doing 10% of a food system, then 8% of a claiming system, then jump to creating submarines, and then go work on armor and weapon skill trees for a day, then back to vitamins. They are designing and coding by the seat of their pants and according to some wacky chaos theory scheduling. The result is an incoherent, broken, incomplete mess. Most of all it's the most inefficient way to go about doing anything with limited resources. It's not as fun, not as edgy to firm up a design spec for the core systems, set a schedule and go like gangbusters to get those done. Much more fun to toss a whale or SOTD or a submarine at the players like some kind of glitterbomb. But it's a bit juvie. They need to attack these unfinished and broken systems with the same energy that they are going after network and performance issues, which they have done surprisingly well. Gee, welcome to online gaming. Glad you're enjoying your first EA experience. Some of us have seen LOTS of the inner workings of a game in development. I guarantee you it won't be as entertaining when you're doing it 15 years from now and wondering why nobody ever figures some of this stuff out, as you plunk down your 50 bucks in 2034 and think "Surely they wouldn't have done THAT"....and yet there it is. Sorry that you feel it's childish to ask for focus on the broken and unfinished elements of core systems while you're enjoying the chaotic explosion of glittery doodads. People who want something other than what you want should always be defined that way, so that your own arguments can seem bigger and make the desire for shiny broken things more grown up. It's a great approach.

That video WAS funny. Re. Q&A - If the idea is that the players do it, that's a terrible idea. Many of them have less experience than your average art employee at a gaming company, but the biggest reason is that the first requirement for Q&A is that you tell the testing team how something is supposed to work. Their job is to try it and see if it works the way it's supposed to. If not, they need to write up a report saying exactly what they did and what the result was. This is a job that any literate, fairly logical person can do if they are given the right input. Coding is different. You can't give someone a short cheat sheet and expect them to code. We don't know how anything is supposed to work. There's no way for us to "test" it. All we can do is say whether we like it or not. A good example is the salted meat comment from Thor. On the day I tried it, salted meat lasted less time than cooked meat. But I only tried it on one day. It could have worked entirely differently when Thor tried it, and who knows how it's really supposed to work? Could be broken...might be getting stealth tweaks....who knows? All I can say is that I don't really like the way food works.

I realize that. It may be helpful to have the art guys do some skins or something unless it keeps them from working on art needed for some of the core functions. In most cases it wouldn't, so I probably could have left that kind of thing off the list. It needed inclusion , though, to make the point that these kinds of things aren't going to appease anyone frustrated with the inadequate buggy core systems. In the sense that's it's not fixing a core system, submarines and underwater trenches are a doodad, the FOY is a doodad, even player shops (which I'm looking forward to if done right) are a doodad at this point, and they all require programming. If they all get implemented without recognition of how they must tie into the core systems and endure the same bugs, it won't be anything to be happy about. Griefers finding a way to wreck subs, buggy taming on the new mobs, limited trenches producing "server full" and rubberbanding, land rush for player shops making the "haves vs. have nots" issue worse. None of that would be a good thing.

I'm on an island with no yellow anything on it. My understanding is that many others are too. People say there are no seeds for herbs, or anything yellow, and I can't find them either, so I'm guessing it's true. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd love to take long trips finding stuff other players need and then sell it in a shop. But you can't preserve it long enough. I've had a preserving bag with salt and tested cooked meat in it..it lasted overnight (Realtime), which was an improvement but not good enough, really. At some point, I'll try finding some more herbs to see if actual recipe food lasts longer. Would be good if they turned off spoilage in shops so you could sell the stuff to people who don't want to mess with cooking, but it's so exploitable it'll never happen.

There's a lot of player frustration with the game being expressed as an issue with claims, a problem with taming, a problem with vitamins, dislike of the FOY, skill trees, etc. I think there's an underlying issue in that there are some core systems in the game that were only given a basic start. They weren't fully implemented and/or weren't fully thought out, and now, when they are addressed at all, it's by throwing a "thing" at them and seeing if it sticks. And rather than going back now, after the bumpy start and taking a deeper dive at some of these, what we're getting instead are doodads - things the devs are throwing out like mardi gras beads from a float, trying to regenerate some of the excitement people had for the game at the beginning. Figureheads, submarines, giant crabs, clothing skins...that stuff is exciting in a game that's already working well, but when the basic systems are broken it makes it seem like the developers are floundering and don't really understand their own game. There's a lack of understanding of how one system affects another leading to a lot of surprise over unintended consequences. Take aging and the FOY for example. Supposedly, the more you die, the faster you age, yet until now, dying has been a legitimate game mechanic. No good way to really balance out food/vitamins? Die and come back. Overrun by alpha wolves or lions? Die and come back. Stuck on someone's boat? Punch the air till you die and come back. My char dies at least twice/day now, but in the beginning it was more like 20. Penalties for dying seem appropriate, but only when you have good ways to prevent it, especially at lower levels, and the systems that support staying alive aren't broken or incomplete. I'd like to see a lot fewer doodads in the upcoming patch notes and a lot more finishing of the basic systems, as well as the addition of new systems that would give the game more depth. People who have managed to get land, build get ships and set up farms and pens are already starting to be bored and wondering what to do next. Systems that need to be finished and fixed: Claims, claims claims - especially on PvE , including the general direction you are taking with them. Why applaud landgrabbers on pve and put up a "winners map" for who grabbed the most land? Seems a bizarre goal. Are you planning to stick with it? Survival - food, water, vitamins, cooking, farming - anything that can't be grown needs to be able to be preserved better. Taking a long trip around the globe to find ingredients is actually a good thing, but only if the stuff doesn't disappear by the time you get it back. Recipes need to balance the vitamins so they're worth something. PvE combat vs. wildlife - wildlife spawns just need to be more sensible. I've been cheesing the wildlife by standing on my roof and shooting them. It feels pretty cheesy, but the only alternative is dying or running away. Taming - I don't do taming, but the people who do seem to have a lot of issues with it. Jat has said Atlas really isn't meant to have a focus on taming like Ark. If not, take it out, or make it plainer to people what the purpose is. Adding new tameables doesn't seem to agree with that. Armor/weapons - don't seem terribly coherent at the moment. Other people can probably provide better details on that. Incoming systems: Player shops - this is something people will be looking forward to, if it's done right. If it's another laggy massive land grab, it'll only be disappointing to most. Towns and Cities - what's the plan? Is there an underlying mechanism to it or is this something the players are supposed to organize on their own? If done right, this could provide players with further goals that would last a long time to keep them in the game. TL;DR - fix the existing systems and add any new core game systems before throwing doodad updates like armor skins and giant crabs at the game. Resist game design after 5pm and 4 beers on Friday, which leads to FOY seeming a good idea.

How does this help landless players find claims? Any claim someone has abandoned is already taken over by their neighbors automatically. (That happens enough already since the neighbors know best when someone hasn't been around)

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#1 - land/claims and claims issues

To me it's just the same as when all the players who were lucky enough to find land early, come into the forums and call everyone else lazy for not having any land. Nobody seems able to stand in anyone else's shoes anymore. I thought about going for the stupid fountain, but being one of the unlucky landless, I had just spent a few days getting ready to sail around the world trying to find a claim and was up freezing my butt off in the tundra. Checked the forums and saw the problems a lot of people were having getting to it and figured I wasn't going to scrap my plans for that. By the time I do get to go, I won't have the cover of a mob of players and the alphas won't all be lagged out, so I doubt I'll get there. The alternative is just living with the debuff in a polar region somewhere, since there seems to be no other land. It's not about coding, it's about design, and yes, I've been submitting a number of creative ideas, as have a few others. They can use them or not, although I think it's probably time some of these game companies stopped stealing people's mods and ideas and started paying for them. I have no problem with anyone raging intelligently and creatively on the forums. A good bit of sarcasm and mockery is appropriate for some of this stuff. There's also a lot of incoherent, badly reasoned juvenile rage going around. It goes with the territory. We know that, the devs know that, and anyone with any sense either makes a joke out of it or ignores it. Does no good to have another bunch of people running around just telling everyone to STFU.

Really? What really cool things is the aging system going to bring us? You didn't give any details. Will the cool things be all pirate-y, maybe something to do with treasure or fabulous land claims and building or getting together with other players to make a town and defeat incoming NPC pirate invaders? I play on pve. Let's say my goal is to find a good bit of land, raise my crafting and cooking skills and....oops, wait a minute, I've got to repair my raft. Still in Lawless..things take damage. Ok, so I want to raise my cooking and crafting skills and sail the world finding rare...hang on a sec..vitamins are dropping, have to go cook something.. So...finding rare treasures, and I'm gonna open a shop where everyone....oh hell..just a minute..need to start a fire where everybody will come from miles around to stock up on supplies and...well crap..30 day timer's up..now I have to go halfway round the world and defeat some endgame content or breed like some sort of freaking animal with some squicky NPC (which , as an older married woman, I have to say is one of the creepiest game decisions ever), and produce a freakish baby that I have to raise which only has 30 days to live.. Well, maybe some day I'll get to be a scavenger pirate with a kickass treasure shop. Maybe one of these cool things you're talking about will help with that?

Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. Whenever the doorbell would ring in her apartment, she'd say, "What fresh hell can this be?"

I was thinking the same thing. The beatings will continue until you are all having a good time. It's just a seriously stupid thing. Seriously. It's not tied to any greater game mechanic, because there ARE no greater game mechanics. Everything is about as deep as a mud puddle. For pvp, the idea is Capture the Flag + a bit of survival, which will grow old really quickly. For pve, it's....well, I'm not sure what it is. Survival without enough land, and even once you get land, what then? Build a few small things to clutter up a coastline, go sailing, fight ghost ships and collect "treasure". Then what? This age mechanic doesn't help you do any of those meager goals any better. It's just a doodad stuck on the game with a piece of chewing gum. The devs need to learn it's not about how hard you make the game, it's about how interesting you make the game. Throwing alphas and ghost ships and age debuffs at everyone doesn't give them a challenge, because you've given them nothing to attain. Figure out some interesting way for someone to be a mayor, a spy, a famous master shipbuilder, the head of the warfare council on the pvp servers...then make those goals hard to achieve, and you've got something. Let an entire server's worth of companies plan and work together to defeat something and build something, after which everyone on the server gets a boon, or a 2x or a benefit of some kind. Quit taking the players hostage and give them the adventures you promised them. For more doodads stuck on the game with a piece of chewing gum, see the latest patch notes - guillotines, submarines, cosmetics and armor skins, and a new dungeon for megas. That'll keep everyone busy for a week or two. The new bounty system might add a little more real gameplay to the game, but it's only on pvp. What it needs is some sort of ruling body to set the bounty and pay it out..some structure, and some reason for some of the companies to want to work together and drop the Lord of the Flies schtick. That might create some new power struggles that are something other than whacking somebody in the head with a fire arrow.

There, fixed that for ya.