Winter Thorne

If you're on pve, what do you care if there's a wipe? If you just want to start over, wipe yourselves and restart. You know, you can do that any time you want. How does what someone else is doing 8 grids away from you have any impact on you whatsoever? This makes no sense.

I was waiting for someone to make that point. Of course Boomer may be right as well. It's one of the two, or possibly a combination of both. The overall game design has floundered, they've got a new guy in to try to get it headed in a decent direction again, and that takes a bit of time. So in the meantime, what better to do than a purely technical project that should bring cash? If we had any sense, we'd go back over all our old ideas about what the game should be about, and consolidate them into something coherent that might give them some ideas of what to do. Or we'd quit. Depends on whether you see Boomer or Sheep as having the stronger argument.

I don't see much conflict there. I don't understand the worry about SP. It's not like the game is going to start providing better building tools or better ships and not make them available to single player. And that doesn't hurt the MMO piece in any way. OTOH, there are going to be parts of the game that don't make any difference at all to single player and they're going to get improved. That doesn't hurt single player in any way. Seems like a pointless argument.

I don't expect random wipes for no reason, even in an EA. Sometimes there's a failure of some sort, something goes wrong in EA, and most often you'd get a rollback from that, but I suppose if it's massive enough you might get a wipe. If the devs are hopeless about hacking, you might get a wipe for massive duping or something. (But seriously, there are better ways to handle that than wiping) The other reason you might see a wipe is a major change to the game, which should mean new goodies for the players. I don't mind a wipe to put some big new features in the game. But that's not happened yet. The last big wipe was to implement a new claim system that nearly nobody wanted and everyone argued against. It's bad enough to wipe for some piddly little additions to the game, but doing it to bring in something nobody wants is pretty bad. The only other comment I have on the OP is that Atlas isn't just one game. The PvP game plays very differently from the PvE game. If you want to be making game recommendations to the devs, you need to consider the game from a dev perspective as well as a player perspective, rather than just saying "a wipe would bring people back", when clearly that's going to be different for pve than for pvp. You could even make the case that one of the pvp servers should have periodic wipes permanently. Some pvp players like that environment. But you'd be taken more seriously if you show you have an understanding of the whole EA environment, and aren't just yelling for one thing you want personally and trying to claim it's the direction the whole game should go.

Love this idea. Makes it more of a real treasure hunt.

Perception and perspective. I'm not irate, up in arms, or even more than slightly worked up over all this stuff, and I think Jat and Dollie are trying very hard to do this right, but I also think there are some perspective points that get missed. Sure, it's part of the job if you see 100 people in discord voice chat getting worked up over something to go in there and try to address it. But it's easy to get caught up in the moment and lose perspective. What's the correct answer to 100 people in discord upset about a wipe? This is just my opinion, but if you understand first that it's NOT just 100 upset players on discord, it's everyone, what needs to be done is to tell those discord players you understand that everybody wants more information on this, and you are going to get with your team, draft a statement, and post it on the forums by the end of the day, and then do that. The discord group gets shown some respect, they get told an answer is coming and where to find it, and the situation has been de-escalated. If you let a highly emotional group of people wind you up so that you begin shooting from the hip trying to make them happy, the results won't be great. Here's where I think the discord respnse fell down and needs improvement: We've had the same brouhaha about wipes here on the forums for a couple weeks now, with various regular participants posting with great surety and authority that there will , of course, be a wipe with crossplay, even if it's not technically needed, because the servers must be clean for the new players. It's ridiculous, but even so, it's discouraging new players, and causing existing players to talk about leaving, to put off starting big projects in the game, etc. It may appear to lack the urgency and emotional level of what happened in discord because the forums work at a slower speed over a greater amount of time. (Which is where my comments are coming from about letting the emotional level of the players dictate your responses above ) Yet with the forum threads, no one thought "I MUST GO TO MY PEOPLE", and ran in here to correct those opinions. Apparently the forum people are not "the people". Even so, you should know this is a universal concern and it should be handled universally and centrally, rather than rushing in specially on a day off to handle the concerns of one group, after ignoring another for weeks. There may also be other places where this issue has been a big topic, and if so, I'm sure those players would like to see it addressed as well. It's not easy having many official venues of communication and trying to keep a rambunctious player base happy on all of them without showing favoritism. Again, just my opinion, but I'd use the social media sites for "personality" appearances, light game chat, and the opportunity to point to officially released statements on the website, and I'd use the official website for statements of concern to everyone, and the heavier game issues. The website crawler that sometimes gets used at the top for breaking news is a great addition. It's good that the twitter feed is on the main page of the wiki, but that should also be on the main website page, taking the place of the oldest captain's log there or something else that's not really needed. just my .02

I'm old and I agree. The issue is not that much about being old or being young, except that younger people seem more attracted to shiny new things that promote some sense of belonging to some group or other. If you're older you might have learned over time that the important thing is whether a tool suits the purpose. I remember years ago at work when a bunch of people got very very excited about changing all the systems our company used for internal email, calendars, documents, accounting, marketing and sales...for everything...because the idea of client/server had just come out. These apps had all been running on a series of mainframes with boring text interfaces and command line interactions. This group was dazzled by new pc based interfaces with icons you could click on - they were colorful and fun and new. The old system had maybe 200 huge servers grouped in 5 centers around the world serving over 300,000 people. These excited people were all set to replace them with an enormous series of locally run lans, running windows, and were really charged up about it idea. Utterly the wrong tool for the job. So..if the job is to communicate key aspects of the game to a player base located in timezones around the world, with varying amounts of attention and time to spend looking for info, what's the best way to do that? Synchronous or asynchronous communication? Do you put the information in a central place where everyone can come and see it during whatever timeslot they have available? Or do you float it out onto discord where it remains for an hour or so and then disappears into a massive stream of mostly useless remarks? If you have a complex issue to talk about, do you write paragraphs about it or do you chop it up into tiny groups of 280 characters each and tweet them as 1/16, 2/16, 3/16 so that they're nearly unreadable? Using discord and twitter and livestreams is arrogant. It says, "You must all come to me, when and where I say so to get this information." With something like discord it's even worse, because you're not told when to be there, you must just go and sit and wait in case a developer shows up and feels like saying something. There are actually people who do that. Pfffft. I'm not your fan, I'm your customer. If there's somethng you want to tell me, put the info somewhere and I'll go see it at my convenience. I understand why the devs feel they have to participate in social media. Games are part of the entertainment industry, and you've got to be seen as fresh and hip and up-to-date. You've got to make contact in the places the players are, and that's where the (younger) players are. But social media needs to be for socializing. You don't make product announcements to one table at a cocktail party, you make them in some official way that everyone involved can access. Websites are good for that. Social media is good for...socializing. They've made a couple of improvements since the last time we complained about this, but things are backsliding now. Inside scoops on discord. Special channels for "special" people. On again, off again participation in the forums, including asking for lots of feedback and then ignoring it. Wrong tools, wrong methods, and not much respect being shown for people's time and participation in their project. Now get off my lawn.

I didn't remember that and went to look it up too. To my surprise, the thngs that got yelled weren't exactly standard. Pre-WWW I guess. Some of the links had so many audience participation lines it seemed nuts. Too much yelling. I liked ours..maybe 10 or 15 lines, and standard props and that was it.

It's easy if you only have one perspective. Devs perspective: The game is in the doldrums, people are bailing, there have been a number of unpopular design decisions, nobody seems to know what to do. Suddenly there is new energy, a new director in charge, a better idea of where we need to go. Everybody is busy as hell and working hard. The xbox release is exciting, the community managers run here and there, posting on twitter, hanging in discord, briefly hitting the forums...everyone is going like gangbusters. The EA has a long timeline, but we have a roadmap and everyone is kicking around all the big new ideas. Very exciting. Player perspective: The game is in the doldrums, people are bailing, there have been a number of unpopular design decisions, one of which caused a wipe and lost even more players. The devs don't seem to know what to do. Problems that have been around since launch are still unresolved. The latest efforts are all focusing on things that don't affect the official servers and nearly everyone has left them. Now there is a new director, new energy, and a livestream coming up. Maybe something good will happen.................... Livestream - nothing is going to happen. Focused on xbox release. After that focused on performance. Eventual focus on what the base elements of the game should be. From the perspective of a player on official, this says "Nothing for you. One year. Maybe a wipe." It's either very encouraging and energizing or deeply demoralizing, depending on what shoes you're standing in, and not many people seem to be able to change their shoes and have a look from a different perspective.

Sure there's doubt. I have doubt. Other people have doubt. If there is a technical reason that they must wipe, then they should do that. (And if there is, then it will be interesting to see the reaction when single player gets drawn into that) If there is no technical reason, then they should not. Alla yous who keep going around saying that of course this will happen, ought to stop doing that, because for some players, that makes it as good as done, and they leave. That's not a good thing. The statements above are logical, and given some of the earlier GS decisions, they may not follow logic. (Anyone remember the great idea of land owners being able to wipe the entire island?) Still, hope springs eternal.

I agree somewhat. Many people I know started talking about quitting as soon as a bunch of people starting posting on the forums with great confidence and surety (but not a single fact) that a wipe was coming soon. It demoralizes everyone. On the other hand, there's got to be some place to tell the devs about thing we don't like (and things we like). Maybe people can be made to realize that if they're having fun in the game, that's all that matters, and those of us here complaining are for the most part still playing, which tells you that there's still good reasons to be here.

Nah, When you plunked down your cash you had no idea what to expect. The premise was good. It was worth a go. The rubes are the guys who think it would be just great and totally fair if the devs destroyed all the other players stuff so they can hand over their cash to play on a nice clean server. (Not realizing that once they pay, they'll be in the exact same spot themselves, and they'll become the "dirty" ones who need to be wiped out for someone else) I gave up on the hat. Cut my hair, dyed it navy blue and selected long dreadlocks. Those have been fun, but they didn't get very long, and the game decided I needed a tan to wear them, so it did that too. What I really want is a hairstyle called "combs hair with mixmaster".

I wish I had been. I watched it this morning and it was excruciating. Recap - 8 months after the game launches in which they repeatedly state that they are emphasizing performance and bugs, they present a roadmap. The roadmap is not going to start until they launch Xbox, which may or may not be sometime in the fall. The first phase of the roadmap is performance and bugs. So 8 months ago they released a pirate game with no pirates in it. After a year of focusing on performance and bugs, while delivering claims 1.0, claims 2.0 , a succession of increasingly ugly tames, and a couple of single player modes, all improvements are now going to be held while they focus on new sales. There may or may not be a wipe for the new sales, but if it makes things all nice and comfy for some rube holding a 20 dollar bill , then hey, why not? (You'd think the rubes would see this as a sign of how well they'll be treated in the future , but I guess that's why they call them rubes) After that's done, they are going to try to improve performance and fix bugs. (If you can't do that in 8 months, can you do it at all?) And they have stated very firmly this time that they really do understand now that it ought to be a pirate game and they have the charts to prove it. Water. Lots and lots of water. No new ships for a long time because those are hard. Water is easy. All you need is 2 hydrogens and an oxygen. So hold onto your missing reward hats. If you liked the first 8 months of Atlas, just wait for them to finish the sales part of game development and starting next year you can have all the performance and bug fixing you can stand. After that - pirates.

Oh, I see. The first thing you want to say to the new developer is about the deficiencies of the postal service. Very nice. For your information, the post office is being rebuilt. It has been being rebuilt for weeks now. First, the floors wouldn't place underwater where needed, then the walls refuse to snap properly unless bribed with triangular ceilings which cause the entire building to fall down if inadvertantly removed. And when all that has been solved, the last wall will not place because it says it has no foundation support, even though foundation exists for miles around it in all directions. You have no idea of the time and trouble that Atlas Mail has gone to in order to provide service to the embattled inhabitants of the map. Rest assured, the postal service will soon resume operations with a new and improved post office, as long as nobody touches the triangular ceilings. Atlas Mail - Let's go Postal.

If you're still trying to reproduce the bug of building tiles disappearing, I can do that nearly at will on NA pve, A3, Barracude Refuge.

What exactly does it mean when your company log says someone has "settled" on your island? Will there ever be an autorun?

What if the letters are only in those bottles that were going to disappear when you picked them up anyway?

Well I wouldn't mind if they tossed it as us as a bauble to keep us happy, but still, it makes no sense given your argument that it requires a wipe. "Here you go, something fun to play with so you'll all stick around - WPE. But first we're going to destroy all your stuff for it. Hey, where's everybody going?"

There may be sometimes and there may not be other times. Regarding discovery points, you can wipe all reference to dp that don't exist anymore. No "dangling references", no giving more DP than possible. Nobody expects rescue boats of admins, but allowing people to rescue themselves has been done before, and keeps people happy. Wipes for fairness? LOL. They shut down an entire pve server and gave it to pvp for over a week. There are no established "rules of fairness" happening here, and it's a bad argument. You might as well say existing players had to fight griefing players who kept sinking their ships, hacking their pin codes, and killing them with repair hammers, so we have to bring all that back too, because..fairness. Good arguments have to do with keeping the game moving forward and retaining the player base. But if you want to talk about fairness, first you have to remember that that means different things in pvp and pve. Second, WPE isn't a "new player" situation. Are you trying to say that if someone starts playing the game next November and WPE is on official, it's unfair to them to have to fight WPE, when the existing players didn't, so everyone has to get wiped for "fairness"? What happens if they have a big steam sale and 2000 people buy the game next Feb.? Wipe the servers for "fairness" again? I'm speaking mostly about pve here, and pvp has its own challenges for bringing in new players when the older ones can just flatten them. But this is something every game has to solve - how to prevent newbie ganking. So far, none of the other games have decided to wipe the servers when someone new joins to prevent this. As much as I'd like to see WPE on official, it's a silly idea anyway, because it's so temporary. Sure, there's empty islands they could go on right now, or you could wipe the place and it would be empty for them, but at some point, the servers will be fully loaded like they used to be, and all the islands will be claimed. New people will have to wait to get an island from someone who is leaving on pve or fight for it on pvp. If you've been playing since December, think back to how that was, and realize it will be like that again some day. There won't be any place for WPE, so the idea is all done at that point. It's a concept that needs a rethink. They need to be put on unbuildable adventure islands or something.

I'm a fan of neither, so I had to look it up to remind myself who they were. And I remembered I thought they were creepy.

Ewww. No.

Surprisingly, I agree with you on some of that. Truth 1 for sure. As far as truth 2 and truth 3 - sure. It's EA. There will be wipes. There shouldn't be wipes without a good reason for them, and most of the reasons people have been posting here are not good reasons. What's a good reason? Technical reasons cause wipes. If there's some major change being made to the hardware or OS or networks where it's impossible to overlay the saved data back down after the change you get a complete wipe. Nearly all the other (valid) reasons for wiping don't require a full wipe. If there's a massive change to the geography, you can wipe the geography and leave the character data intact. With some planning, you could also allow characters to save some possessions - ships, tames, mats, BPs, etc. If there's a huge new feature coming that changes characters so they must be started over - a completely different skillpoint/skilltree/leveling system, or something like that, you can preserve claims and possessions and just wipe the char data, leaving only the ID number. If you wanted to be nice about it, you could pre-load the new chars with the new skillpoints or level points. If they end up merging some servers, that may require a wipe. It may not. Almost all the other reasons people are giving for wipes aren't things you need to wipe for. Many of them boil down to - "I'm bored. We should wipe.", or "I want to start playing on a brand new server nobody else is playing on yet." Both are bad reasons for a wipe.

If that's the point of the game, then you don't need a server wipe to be happy. There's plenty of trees. They even respawn. Or you could go play Farmville or something. You need to make better, more logical arguments.. You make so many contradictory ones that people can't possibly respond to them all to correct them, and I'm starting to think that it's done on purpose. Dawg made a comment assuming things about my personal life and history. I don't do that, because it's stupid. I make comments about what people say here in the forums. No hypocrisy there at all. Hypocrisy would be declaring that all existing players should get wiped because you are coming into the game, and then calling them selfish for not agreeing to it.

A wipe is a good thing because....the private servers must also be wiped? Goofy reasoning. Because wipes get rid of bugs? No, they don't. Surely you can make up something better than that. Even Realist has made up a reason that millions of console players are ready to plunk down some cash if only they'd scrape us dirty PC players off the servers first. It's not a great reason, and it's not true, but he at least made an attempt. Yes, we all know it's EA. It's in the company's best interests to make sure they don't have to wipe everyone out without a good reason. Why? Because when the game stops being fun everyone leaves. It's no fun placing 5000 ceiling tiles over and over and over and over, although it does make a nice break from staying up for 3 days to attempt breeding tames and doing that over and over and over, or hitting a tree 5000 times to replace a ship which you have already replaced during the last wipe. So much fun. So much winning. People are here for fun. No fun=no people. You shouldn't make snarky assumptions about people you don't know.