strawman

Predictions for Next Week: A 15% decline by next weekend is in-line with prior numbers, maybe a little too optimistic. Assuming no further changes to gameplay, that would place next weekend's peak players at 25,557. The Good: If my observation is correct, that much of the decline is directly due to the stone and FoY changes, a "miracle patch" this week could reverse the trend entirely as players who liked the game but not the changes return. Simply reversing the stone change and putting Fountains of Youth in each freeport, for example, would probably not be enough; players were expecting other changes to gameplay which have not happened. To really offer an olive branch to the former players, Grapeshot would probably need to address some of the major issues that have lingered since launch and affected most or all players - for example, overhaul the claim system and add offline protection for ships. The Bad: If another deeply unpopular change happens this week - say they were to double cannon damage to ship planks and add organic paste to the recipe - the trend suggests the bleed rate will get even worse. At that point, Atlas, which billed itself as an MMO supporting 40,000 concurrent players, will probably never recover. The Ugly: Doing nothing will make things worse, because the Fountain of Youth is a ticking time bomb. Despite the reduction of the Old Age debuff, Grapeshot seems not to see the psychologically negative effect of having an unavoidable debuff guaranteed to happen on a timer. Like many others, I played from the beginning and got lucky hitting the FoY immediately, when it was too laggy for the local monsters and wildlife to fight back. My character is already back in his 40s, and I'm logging in less than I used to; I don't plan to keep playing after I hit "Old Age" again.

I also used the extreme negative reaction online and my own personal experience as a player, then backed it up with this data. If you have a better argument than FoY/stone for why people are leaving at a faster rate now than they were two weeks ago, I'd love to hear it. Looking closer, I noticed that last week's peak actually came on Sunday with about 800 more people than the Saturday peak, but using that peak doesn't change the trend - only indicates that it was a sharper decline this week than my original numbers indicated.

My understanding is that Steamcharts is showing the total number of Steam users who have the game open at any given time, regardless of official or unofficial server, or if they're even connected to a server. If you compare it against Reznok's player tracker, it looks like 50-60% of the Steamcharts population is usually on official servers. I played a lot of Rust. It didn't do well in legacy (it's first year or so) but since the game was re-released, it has grown consistently, almost always sitting in the top 10 now.

Saturday, December 29. Just after launch, Atlas achieves its all-time peak of 58,788 players. Saturday, January 5. 50,877 players are online at the peak, a 13.5% decline from the prior week. Not bad - people are sticking with the game. Saturday, January 12. Just under three weeks after launch, 44,130 players are online at the peak, a respectable 75% of the all-time peak population, and a similar 13.25% decline rate. Saturday, January 19. Days after the introduction of the "Old Age" debuff and Fountain of Youth quest, Atlas peaks at 37,166 players, a 15.75% decline from the prior week. Not only is the population not stabilizing, it's bleeding at an increasing rate. Saturday, January 26. Today, with the Fountain of Youth essentially unchanged and the stone building nerf in place, 30,067 people were online at the peak. This is a 19% decline from the previous Saturday - the worst bleed rate in the game's short history - and only 51% of the all-time peak. This game has a problem, and I think I know what it is.

That's genuinely sad (but well-written). Grapeshot Games is a disaster. It wouldn't take more than a few minutes to change the breeding coefficients, but I guess their decision-making process is what's really broken.

People don't deserve a participation trophy because you assume they have good intentions.

Besides the server problems, the game was more fun at launch than it is after a month of patches. Can't blame EA for that...

you are not doing anything wrong, this is just another bug grapeshot isn't fixing

If you go into the detailed chart it's a lot worse than the month-by-month summary makes it look. 50% would be more accurate

I don't know when speculation about things that happen behind closed doors became "conspiracy theories" and "tin foil hat nonsense". It's not just you, all over the society people are refusing to think critically about things that happen in secret and trying to discredit anyone who does. You're right that the devs are pretty bad at their jobs, but at the same time, corporate layoffs after an astonishingly bad product launch aren't exactly aliens-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon-tier. At a studio this small, three or four layoffs would absolutely count as "major" and have a substantial effect on the other employees and the company's output.

Couple additional observations on my original point about Grapeshot probably having done layoffs last week... There are only ever 6 names in the Grapeshot category on Discord anymore: Amberenix, Baker, DebbySaurus, Dollie, Evza and Jat. There were at least 9 or 10 at launch. And have a look at today's patch notes. That's a major version...? Compare to something like 10.43 from a couple weeks ago, there's a fraction as many fixes and changes.

It's still 9 cannonballs to take one down. Literally five flint, 30 gunpowder and 25 metal, and you have a cannonball left over.

Classic "we know best, you stupid players" change. It's game over for Atlas soon. Population was peaking around 30k last week, this week it's 25k. Servers gonna shut down in February at this rate.

You're not wrong that it's interesting and comprehensive, but each patch makes it harder for me to believe in this game. I want to think there will be a miracle patch that fixes all the backward steps they've made since launch, but I don't see it coming. Be careful about assuming the silent majority is on your side. This game called itself an MMO that supported 40,000 players, but fewer than 3,000 people are logged into NA PVP right now, with less than 13,000 playing the game at all. And before you say it's the middle of the night - it's 5 PM in Beijing.

Expanding on a theory that I came up with in another thread, I think something bad happened at Grapeshot about a week ago. The quality of their work has never been good (remember the introduction of SOTD?) but everything fell off a cliff with v14. The impassable doors, the elephant nerf, the ongoing Fountain of Youth debacle, the stone nerf, and tonight the struggle to even deploy the right version - their work is significantly worse than it was during the first four weeks. My theory is that the Grapeshot leadership has decided that Atlas is a failure and re-allocated resources accordingly. They're not wrong, if so; it has two-thirds negative reviews on Steam, nearly 15,000 thumbs-down, with no sign of the trend changing. Player counts are declining daily, subreddit growth is dead, everything in the press has been negative. Besides the occasional big name obviously being paid to play, it's dying on Twitch. I think they did a major layoff last week, and the remaining employees are either rattled or bitter. It clearly shows in their work. Obviously, this will only make things worse faster. What's the solution? It's pretty simple. Just like every major videogame failure, the community has been telling the developer how to stop the bleeding every step of the way. I don't know if the creative direction is being done democratically or by one bad creative director, but in either case, Grapeshot needs to make a big, public change. Give all the decision-making power to one person with clear vision and enough humility to listen to the community, and maybe you can turn it around. Do it fast, because this ride will be over in about a month if you don't.

Looks like you're not alone. Last Thursday at this time, 18,500 players online... today, 15,000.

lootboxes are just gambling, which has been recognized for many centuries by many cultures as evil yea, i've read it, and here's the thing: positive reinforcement isn't working. sometimes people are too stupid or arrogant to respond to it, sometimes the people who matter (grapeshot execs) aren't paying attention. plenty of people have made posts here and on reddit applauding the few good decisions grapeshot has made - yet they still keep trashing the game and only responding to outrage (see the elephant nerf). nothing else to do now but quit logging in and start screaming on the forums

idk, making a "pvers suck amirite guys" thread was a pretty smart way to get replies

https://twitter.com/jeremystieglitz oddly quiet since atlas released

if i were doing as bad a job as the people at grapeshot, then yes, i'd hope someone would tell me how bad i'm fucking up

People were reporting the hacks all over Reddit and the forums for the first couple weeks of release, when they still could have salvaged the game's reputation, and Grapeshot did nothing. It's silly to have empathy for a corporation, and the larger gaming community only cares about quality and results. Atlas' reputation is, excuse the pun, set in stone now. I want to keep playing, but like most other people who bought the game, it's left me a bad taste and I'm not coming back without a major change in trajectory.

The time to ban hackers was four weeks ago, before they accumulated 12,000 negative reviews on Steam

A day late and a dollar short

nothing paranoid about noticing that something changed for the worse around the time of the fountain of youth patch. for all we know a bunch of employees might have gotten fired and the people left are bitter

The theory that Atlas is a failed project and they're trying to kill it is starting to make more sense to me. FoY seems purpose-built to make players quit.