Nox

I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom. Not sure what the devs thought they had going that would survive the stupid shit they have pulled, but nope.

Can't say I see the point of a wipe when you make bad decisions like the stone nerf, tame nerf, and basically are addicted to sucking streamer dick. Yer just gonna make more shitty decisions. Tame nerf was a streamer dick suck decision - burkeblack whined that his army of terribads couldn't kill 10 SOVs, some of which were on high level tames. Skill being greater than zerg at that time. Hence, tame nerf. Stone nerf was a streamer dick suck decision too. Gotta make stone easy to blow up so streamers with their terribad armies can raid people when they have 10 people online at 3 am and make the game look fun.

OP is right. Devs have done everything in their design power to cater to zergs and suck streamer dick. No offline defense = constant pvo. Lowering weapon damage means that skill < numbers. Nerfing tames = skill < numbers Nerfing stone = skill < offline Infinite claims = skill < numbers giant companies = skill < numbers This is supposed to be a pirate game, but since when are pirates about having massive nations? So offline zergs now just trash bases, swarn with garbage, claim up everything and don't actually utilize it. There's a lot I love about this game, but the ruleset on NA PVP is unplayable to me.

I did actually manage to do pretty well around 45 solo,and my build was a generalist build. small ships but also medium speed sail at first, no skill in guns (too expensive), basic artillery to afford swivels and later cannon. stone construction is mandatory i highly, highly recommend maxing out swim speed and swim air endurance as well as water temp tolerance - salvage diving is really a boon. captaincy just for the ship resource container, larder don't gather anything - salvage it, or steal it. stick and move. be cool and don't make enemies that you can't handle on your own and you can make it.

That's why I think you can't really solo until about level 45ish. even then, you can't go deep into things

Yeah, actually I did have fun. The only reason I eventually started a company was to help other people succeed - I was doing ok on my own. Then again, I'm very laid back and don't make enemies without cause.

it depends a lot on what you're doing solo. When I was playing solo I had a lot of caches around, stole other people's stuff, salvaged a lot of stuff and stashed it...

Oh. Well, I have played this game solo - it's possible but it is about 10x harder and you're constantly being set back.

They want it to be "like eve" but the design is nothing like eve. Eve has a progressive risk/reward mechanic. This game has a risk mechanic.

LOL hardcore design. Wow talk about masturbatory fantasies. Some of us raided old-school eq. We pvp'ed in UO before Trammel, we beta tested shadowbane, darkfall, etc. This game? Doesn't even come close. It's a sophomoric mess. The reasons why people don't advance are due to shit bugs and even worse shit design.

I don't see Atlas getting anywhere near the place that WOW was at that it could make those mistakes. I see Atlas being a failed effort like Dark and Light. They released something looked... pretty good and then fucked it up with every patch, until finally giving up on it when noone was interested in it anymore

It's hard to keep people playing with these slapstick changes.

That's a golden ruin shore. People leave boats there to have beds to respawn at. That isn't even the dense side, the other side is far worse.

the problem with cobras and whatnot is that their collision box doesn't include half of their body so they extend into things. The problem with most animals in this game is that they are agressive to everything without any reason. I mean if sharks attacked when hungry, ok. If wolves attacked when threatened, ok. It's dumb that things like lions just attack everything all day long. We look forward to improvements but - that's how ARK is.

So last night I set myself to the challenge of figuring out what it would take to pacify the golden age ruins at G3 which are necessary for the fountain of youth and turning in the key fragment. The land animal enemy list includes : Giant Scorpions Giant Cobras Rattlesnakes Lions Wolves The water enemy list includes Sharks Manta Rays There is one amphibious creature - the Giant Crocodile One in-shore you have 1 to 2 spawns of undead, and then fire elementals. I've run this gauntlet naked probably 30 times? On the 31st time I got the fountain and never looked back until my woman had to do it. She's not the sort to make this futile run 30 times in a row, and neither are a lot of people judging from how many people in my own company quit coincidentally after getting to 100 and then not levelling anymore. I decided to set my mind on solving the problem, so I looked at sloops people had built all over the game and settled on one that I saw built by one of the guys from the streamer Sirslaw's old alliance - don't remember their name but they had very creative ships. I scavenged up shipwrecks, stole a real sloop and built up a little fighting platform. It's a nice roomy setup, I love how it ends up working out. I put a forge on the top, and smelted enough ingots for some different weapons - cannon and balista, and tested them out. Turns out the balista is a great anti-creature weapon. 1-2 shots the big monsters. It took me about 45 minutes to clear all of the creature spawns on the beach on foot using bow. Lions and wolves you can train into the water and kill, crocs, rattlesnakes, cobras, and scorps you can kite on land and kill. Once I had cleared the beach, the next challege was undead spawning in the valley but those turned out to be easy with bow headshots. I started out solo, but then some brazilian guy from a company I don't recognize started helping and just the two of us cleared the whole valley up to the fire elementals. Once the beach and valley were clear, people were able to run in to the powerstone podium trivially. The bats were still there but they didn't stop people from clicking on it. So there you go. You can fight the mobs, they are easy to kill with even a regular bow. Also, it's disappointing that I was there for 5 hours doing this and not a single person confronted me in PVP. I would have loved some fighting. blackjack and handcuffs were ready for them. The minute I went offline someone picked the boat down and sank it. That right there is the state of atlas. Cowardly little shits.

In PVP the megagrind tryhard superfriends companies have claimed up massive areas of real estate that they don't use.

There are a few silly things in this game that bother me endlessly. First, the vitamin system (pretty much all of it), but specifically ... milk doesn't give vitamin D. The milk in the US is fortified with it, which is pretty much completely unnecessary since the body synthesizes vitamin D utilizing sunlight. Drinking 4 glasses of milk will not kill you. You cannot overdose on vitamin C. Not at least in the levels that we're doing it in the game. The body evacuates it in urine. It's water soluble. Most people should be able to get by on meat with a little berries and a little greens. This silly ass system feels like a virtue signal for kale lovers. ------ Farmers do not force berries in the mouths of newborn mammals. They eat from their mother's titties. They can't ingest berries. They are also endothermic, which means that they regulate their own body temperatures. If it's cool or cold, they rely on the heat from their mother. This silly ass breeding system feels like it was dreamt up by someone who has never seen a farm. Or a film about farms. Or ever read a book. ----- Rafts don't work that way. ---- Manta rays don't actually have teeth to bite with, and they are very laid back. You can put your hand right in their mouths and they will just gum it looking for a handout. ----

Well the aging debuff isn't the problem, it's the mobs at the point where you go to the fountain of youth. I don't see that particular challenge as a positive element because it's not really feasible. *I* did it, but you can tell them all about me. I do not expect normal people to do it.

Well, I like the one-big-world element, the challenge and political struggle. I want to be there. I could (and do) run my own private servers. I came up with a way to do atlas in containers with kubernetes (my rl work) but if I run it, I won't play it.

I'm the old man in this duo. I'm the guy with the focused power of autism who was sniping people at the beach defending our beds, running and learning how to perform this incredibly badly designed content. At this point I'll just say that the design choices in this game are flat out abusive. One of the two of us has to work and the other one has to take care of the rest of it - so between us we have time to play at different times and sometimes together. I often forgo sleep in order to do what I want to do in games but it's gotten to where I'm spending a lot of un-fun time getting things accomplished that are unnecessary. FOY is an example. That 's straight up shit content that demonstrates incompetence. I said it, and I mean it. If that is the best that you can come up with, and you don't realize the consequences then you really are just not qualified to be designing games. That's not meant to be hurtful, it's just how it is. I'm not a bad player, but we're in a small company by choice. When I say small, I mean 8 active players. I recruit new players often, try to teach them the game but this is not a game that you can really expect to keep people interested in. I'm fighting the design most of the time. I won't derail this excellent post with my own issues which I've detailed elsewhere. I'll just say that it's a heartbreak to see my love leave the game, and that pretty much finishes me too. I tried very hard to make it possible for her to play casually, but dear god this game just puts obstacles in the way of actually enjoying it at every turn. We can say "early access" - but the stone changes and the fountain of youth aren't early access problems. Those are problems introduced by the developers that were moved here from ARK - a set of developers famous for being really, really bad. I think this game, unless something changes, is really fucked.

That was not an understatement. It was about 22 hours of severe bullshit with a couple of brief moments of fun. I mean that exactly as I say it. From what I see, this game is shitting out players like a fat man with dysentery.

Mathematically speaking, that would be a server performance improvement of 4.761 percent. 5% would be if you used to rubberband 100 feet and now you do so for 95 feet. One just cannot resist.

What a naive and refreshing point of view! I imagine that if you saw someone drive over a line of kindergarten children you would say "At least they're driving!"

There were some brief moments of fun. I like building ships, and I didn't mind clearing the beach so people could get into the cave. Not many people understand the virtue of cooperation, so that made it a lot harder for americans who are always trying to fuck one another over.

Here's my diary of getting to the fountain of youth - Day 1: try to find it. make three different newb sloops, sail to three different islands where it's supposed to be. 9 hours of play time. (did some other random stuff in the middle, got distracted, met a bunch of people) Day 2: found C6, tried to rush in, cave full of bats, tigers on land, alligators in water. Servers restart, magic pixels go away. Move sloop with swivels to beach on C6 to help other people get to shore by killing crocs. Day 3: Try to find fountain. Spend some time on C6 - wiping out beach trash with swivels. While I am elsewhere, Some superfriends tryhard grind peon guild destroys it with cannons. Mafia? Whatever doesn't matter. No good deed goes unpunished. Hear that fountain is in o7. make a sloop, go there, DDay on the beaches of normandy with my semi-competitive horde of naked runners. Made it in, then logged out to run my lady's character in and something busted both of our beds at the same time - assuming mob damage and not picking because they both popped in the same second. So now I am young and spry and she's still an old pickle. Total effort - 3 days of nonstop effort. Probably 22 hours of play.