MagpieOAO

My suggestion on addressing both nutrition and a death penalty: Imo Nutrition should be a measure of your overall wellness, maintaining nutrition increases your wellness while dying or being malnourished reduces your wellness. Having low wellness makes you more susceptible to disease and has a stat penalty. Bottom line: You die a bunch, your wellness is in the shitter and you get a stat penalty + easier to catch diseases for more penalties. Makes naked raids counter-intuitive.

Yeah, fairly sure. My suggestions on the subject:

SWG is a good analogue, I never played prior to the patch I'm told screwed over most of the game but now that I think of it, Atlas should be capable of living up to a similar potential. Especially given SWG was...what, a decade ago?

Keep up the good work! I know it must be difficult to listen to constant complaints, some of things you're working on fixing or have to address pre-requisites first, have other priorities or just plain are being blown out of proportion as you're hardly into a month of EA, but I think you have an excellent foundation for a game here with all the tools for an incredible experience. I hope you can pull it off!

I think the ability to set up an NPC as a "trader" is key. In Port towns they'll be selling necessities people can trade for rather than try to hunt down, but for other players it's the core of creating a city that others might actually explore rather than raid. If you can pop an NPC in a special type of building with the job of trading and tweak the values on what's for sale, how much and what you'll buy, players may actually check the trader first rather than trying to loot the place or burn it to the ground. Not saying you'll stop players from raiding of course, but it's a step towards incentivizing them not raiding on sight.

This is a pretty big departure from either though. Trying to take what they did learn and implement that on an MMO scale with integrated server shards that load seamlessly is kind of a big deal. Add to that the mobile bases that are ships which is another layer of complexity. I think, technically speaking, what they're working on is pretty impressive and feasible. But yet to be seen if they can pull it off. That said, people keep treating early access as a finished game and it's anything but. If you bought the game expecting a finished product despite everything telling you otherwise, there's no one else to blame. Complain, sure. But know that "It's early access" is a reasonable response to almost any criticism.

Free ports with some degree of protection could help immensely for people just getting their feet under them: In an expanded suggestion, I'd recommended having 3 major NPC port cities scattered around the map. Tortuga, Singapore and Port Royal. Players should be able to dock here under the protection (And cost/taxation) of the port town if they don't have a place with defenses erected. That said, there should be an intermediate solution to hiding your ship or small port at sea which has a fair chance of avoiding offline destruction by players happening across it or NPC's spawning and aggroing near it. Some form of camouflage for now but ideally at some point having caves and coves to pull into that would make your ship more difficult to spot let alone attack without facing concentrated defenses.

My suggestions on Free port cities and their respective Orgs Would make sense to give players the means of advancing through an NPC org and the option to ignore that and strike out on their own and/or eventually split for their own org. Could also work to help players learn the game and features, see what kinda things exist in it and how they work in the NPC cities to eventually build for themselves.

Thanks to @REAPO For another idea of Warehouses and to expand on the idea a bit, crafting stations and all other facilities in the towns. In town, one can expect to find all facilities you can construct in the game, but available for gold and at a tax for their continued usage. Merchants offer a quick route of obtaining equipment and means while craftsman will allow you to utilize their tools at a modest cost. From warehouses to (relatively safely) store your goods to drydocks in which to conduct your ship repairs. It's worth noting that in the idea, nowhere is truly 100% safe from pillaging or pilfering. But anyone who attempts will have to deal with the defenses of the city who are always present.

Could be a drydock that is effectively a massive stone structure. One would have to destroy the structure to get at the ship? Otherwise though ships tied up in dock could still be attacked, but the attacker would probably get slaughtered by town defenses. By sharks if trying to be clever, by guards if on land and by artillery if at sea. As for the port cities, I'd had a suggestion for a few (Three initially) NPC run port cities scattered around the map. This suggestion elaborates on that idea. Effectively these huge cities should have all facilities available to players that they can craft themselves out in the world, but at the cost of coin. Warehouses are another good idea. I'll add it!

If the claims require upkeep and can be destroyed, 2-3 people would be pretty hard pressed to both protect and upkeep said claims. A concentrated effort by a few players should still be able to overwhelm a "pillar" base that's just a claim and small buildings. A single person or small group would be better off building a small claim in a hidden location or staying mobile.

I like the ideas of cooking providing buffs and the claim issues. Would also make sense if there are taverns where you can buy food for buffs, possibly player made ones eventually.

Another bit that comes to mind: * Taverns If they don't exist already, players should be able to safely log out in a port city Tavern for a fee. They will despawn from the world on entering their room and logging out after a brief period.

Increase harvest rates slightly, 2x base rates would be acceptable (this is pretty much the standard in ARK official now, with their constant events). Imo they could create a bonus like "Well rested" or "Healthy" when high on nutrition (See below) That gives you more resources when gathering to encourage and reward gathering resources but not so much mindless grinding. Ie after sleeping for x hours you get a "rested" buff which gives you double resources for one hour or something. Could be exploited with multiple toons, but it's something. Cut vitamin drain by about 25%, leave hunger and water drain as is. My suggestion on nutrition. In short: Nutrition should be a measure of "Wellness" that decreases with malnutrition, disease and death. Lower nutrition lowers your stats and makes you more vulnerable to disease but doesn't kill you. Nutrition should be available at a shopkeep in Free Ports where players will spawn if they have nowhere else to spawn (to prevent a death spiral). More sources of fresh water, or a wider variety of methods earlygame to acquire water other than X+LMB, throughout the islands. Imo should be a means to boil water for quick but "expensive" water and a means to slowly, passively collect it via drip tarp which would barely sustain one person but there might be better variants for "moisture farms". Like ice blocks which can be harvested, transported and melted. Allow 1 claim flag per island per player, maybe include a 30 minute cooldown. Increase claim radius to double current size to compensate. Someone else had a great suggestion of claim flags having to mature in a sense. You place a flag which gains XP from your activities around it until such a point you can level it up, which starts the initial claim. You cannot place any more claims in that area and you have a build cap. The cap is expanded with more claim flags but they can only be placed within the are of the first, which is limited by that initial radius until you upgrade it again. All flags increase your build cap (but not area) and must be maintained. If you exceed build cap, the structures under that flag/s will start to crumble and have to be maintained. If your flag crumbles or is destroyed, ditto. Make all crafting stations have a company lock/pin-code function. Should be behind a locked door, but we need grates that can be locked on the ship to prevent people from just waltzing in to use them. Lower raft durability drain by about 20%. Other ships are fine, rafts die way too quickly in my opinion. They should be temporary but it could be tweaked. Allow beds to function in Lawless territory. Keep the current decay rate. Imo Free port cities are the way to go by allowing people to rent a space or mothball their ship before logging out. Ideally you could rent a room at an inn where you would be protected, for a fee. Investigate and eliminate ocean respawn points. Yesterday I spawned deep in the middle of the ocean several times, surrounded by eels and whales. Along with the previous suggestion, add a 'safety' timer to prevent wild creature attacks while players are loading into a zone, so they don't find themselves dead upon loading. This already exists in ARK. Imo both could be resolved by spawning in aforementioned port cities if the system cannot determine a valid spawnpoint.

Would be a great way to just hop on and play at your own pace, without a massive org but with some of the benefits of an org. All players that are part of that port city should be (nominally) friendly to boot. But it does give you reason enough to attack players of enemy city-orgs on sight too!

I've made some suggestions to this effect. In short: * Port cities that are relatively safe * You can dock your ships in port cities * You can bury/stash loot in hidden containers (Stashes, Chests, Troves) to recover later * You can lure agressive monsters to your ship or base with Chum, which acts as a form of deterrent Ultimately, nothing will really stop an absolutely determined griefer who has nothing better to do than hack at your base while dying repeatedly until other parts of the game are addressed (Like death penalties, where I've also made suggestions) but it's a good start I think.

Good points. Most people here have probably played Ark, have at least something of an idea of how to play. But Atlas doesn't explain much, especially to new players...I got an idea for a suggestion though in that regard. Added to my topic on the suggestion of Free Ports Towns and NPC orgs. Effectively, your next mission after the suggestion for gathering supplies and leaving the Island, is to head to one of three major cities, at which you won't want for food, water or nutrition as long as you have money, and you can earn money by trading with the NPC's and doing "quests" in some form. The "quests' of which will function as a tutorial ingame, at your pace. EX: A guard will let you in if you get some water to trade. Go digging in the sand over there, here's how.

Elsewhere someone made a great point that Atlas doesn't explain much and provides even less to new players or even Ark Vets who don't know the new mechanics. After leaving your first Island, your next major quest should be leading you to one of the major port cities and gathering supplies along the way as needed to make the journey. At the ports, you can receive a number of jobs (quests) and manuscripts that further explain the game and it's features. Not sure what form they could take with the ingame engine, but I doubt it would be a typical fetch-quest MMO type mission.

As there doesn't seem to be an "edit" button.. Another idea is to be able to "Chum" the area around a land-base as well. You can create a trough or give an NPC the command to leave out meat to lure predators. The predators around your base make it a less entertaining prospect for griefers...but also might give you a bit of hassle once you log back on and feel like leaving!

Even then though that just means the griefers take +50% more time on destroying it. Hmm... The problem is that no matter the solution, a clever or dedicated griefer will always find a way. Though one idea I'd had was that you could set an NPC to chum the waters around your ship, which summons sharks. If you logged off with your ship in a random cove, protected by NPC's, this would prevent people from exploiting their lack of pathing to sneak under your ship and start hacking away at it. Maybe something similar on land. People complain about how many critters there are around and how aggressive they can be. Maybe you can set an NPC or food-trough like item to lure in predators around your base. The only problem is dealing with everything you've attracted when you log back on haha.

Nutrition should affect quality of stats, vulnerability to disease. Disease, malnutrition and death should decrease it. You should be able to survive on any given type of food but to be healthy you will need nutrition. Without nutrition you will start to receive penalties on your stats including after a revive at which point you start at a reduced nutrition level. Nutrition should be readily available at traders in free ports so you always have some method to obtain nutrition (Likely fruits, which won't last long on the seas) at a cost and some risk. This runs the risk of a death cycle, but given at rock bottom you should spawn at a free port, you should still be able to scrape some things together to sell for fruit to regain your nutrition.

Fair point. I think then the ports should have an NPC trader that gives players a means of buying basic provisions so they can get their no-skill in. It's still ultimately better to be able to craft it your self and best to have an org with specialized crafters specced into trees, trading items you need. But at least that way you might be able to stop some complaints.

I've made at least one suggestion regarding death: You should be able to bury stashes (chests or Arks) of loot and if you die, people can loot your body for the map. Making death less desirable but also not an outright loss. I agree entirely though, death should never just be a tool to quick travel or refill your hunger/thirst + free meat. I might have some suggestions on it later. But to make survival more possible/practical: * We need water barrels that can be filled and moved to provide longterm and high amounts of drinking water storage. * Need passive means of developing drinking water, boiling it for a quick method and drip-tarps for a very slow, passive method barely enough for one to survive on * Need nutrient "packages" IE crafting all the nutrients into a single consumable. Grog for instance combining fruits and liquor to make a non-spoiling nutritional drink.

See my suggestions Why not make it a fun part of the game? Having people bury their treasure can turn a raid into a treasure hunt, or at least having a means to protect your ship in port.

See Buried Booty and Free Ports for more info on treasure and ports, some will be referred to here. Free port Orgs: See the previous post for the bare-bones functions of Tortuga, Singapore and Port Royal. As many players may not want to join with other orgs, but do want a means to progress without getting absolutely crushed or would like a much more loose form of organization they can hop on and play without any massive need for coordination and organization with the clan, I suggest that these Capital city/port towns have NPC Orgs that players can join. The orgs of Tortuga, Singapore and Port Royal are at war with one another, but not inherently hostile towards any player org. Anyone can dock in any port and use their services so long as they do not break their laws. Each player has their own standing with a free port org, and their standing will affect the standing of any org they join to a degree. So if you have someone who constantly harasses a port, they aren't going to put your entire org into enemy territory for doing so. You can raise your standing/reputation with a port by trading with them, completing quests for them or destroying their enemies. Raising standing with one port will lower it for others. But you will not become hostile with the other ports unless you attack them, only going as low as "unfriendly". Expeditionary gear: Aka, what do I use my good standing for? Recipes, gear, materials, the higher your standing with a free port the higher grades of these materials you can trade with/for in the port. They're always willing to buy but not necessarily to sell high grade stuff unless they trust you. Likewise certain services become unlocked or discounted with higher standing. There may be some recipes which are unique to each port (Tortuga, Singapore, Port Royal) as well to encourage working with a port over time. You can also spend your standing as a currency to purchase gear like Grog (high nutritional values) water barrels, Tack, Ammunition and some gear to get yourself quickly equipped for an expedition. They should also offer quests (Treasure maps at their simplest, boss fight summons at most complex) based on your level which may open up more advanced gear. This provides an alternate means of advancing in the game that is persistent in a way. Even if you die, you still have your standing with a port through which you could obtain the means to get back on your feet. It's worth pointing out though that seizing Freeport trade ships and raiding the ports is also a viable method of advancement for the more daring.