Linea

Id say sailing is boring because it is a single repetitive task of staring out at the sea and running to the helm as soon as a SotD appears in sight to drive around it. You cant do anything else cause if you take your eyes of the water you run into SotD immediatly. With empty ships you can speedrush past them as well but thats as boring and doesnt make an enjoyable sailing experience. Some things that could improve this: 1. Allow NPC crew in the crows nest to expand vision range to free players stuck in the crows nest. 2. Allow NPCs to sound a ship alarm or notify you when there is an enemy ship or npc or dangerous weather in sight, let us take our eyes off the water to do other stuff. 3. SotD only appear at night and in fewer but smaller and larger groups to give us different sailing experiences -> during day we can do cooking, dancing, chatting with players, organizing cargo, manual repair our ship or even change its layout while sailing. during night we need to be more careful if we run into a large group of SotD we need to dodge them and its more of a challenge but happens more rarely. (SotD for farming can still be in Golden Age 24/7) 4. Different weather phenomena like a random moving giant watercylone that can sink our ship if we dont dodge it, heavy storms and giant waves we need to turn the ship right into to not take damage and stuff to also give us different experiences while out at the sea. Even no wind that can make us stuck could be a challenge but it need to be super rare to not get annoying. 5. We should meet real NPC ships that spawn in higher numbers on servers with low player counts from traders we can robb or steal their ship to pirates that attack us and we need to fend off or surrender our cargo etc. -> since the pirate encampments are said to have ships guarding the waters around them lets hope they will also have trade and travel routes to send ships out on the sea and lets hope they are real ships not like SotD. This would also allow to have different areas where you can meet more traders, more small ships or more pirates or sea monsters to have different experiences while sailing across several grids and they are not all the exact same. 6. Rare events with rewards that happen randomly, small ones like finding someone shipwrecked to get a reward for rescuing them or a trader ship with a special offer to bigger ones like npc fleets or giant monsters with special rewards for everyone that helps defeat them - like the dynamic event from other mmos where all can take part and drop in anytime. 7. The phases with low wind should be shortened it happens to much, rather have more weather with randomly changing wind. 8. Add more activities that can be done on ships more interactive objects and even more RP stuff so we can socialize and gather on ships while traveling. 9. since it affects sailing as well, let vitamins have the same modifier like hunger from doing heavy or light work or idle around its impossible to balance otherwise when your hunger depletes much slower while sailing and your Vitamines do not so you cant eat enough to keep them up. 10. ship combat, is part of the sailing what i think players would want to do with ship combat -> manage crew, ammo, weapons, maneuver your ship fight the enemy ships, and board them sometimes to steal cargo or the ship. plus visual damage when ship parts are damaged to give a better feel of actual combat and allow you to easily see where you need to repair and how damaged the enemy ship is. what i think players would not want to do with ship combat -> keep your ship from sinking 24/7 as it will start to sink as soon as anything hit it. planks break super easily and you only work to replace missing planks and bucket water from a swimming frame during combat. thats not fun its really repetitive as every battle you are doing the same instead of all the stuff above that is actual fun. repairing and keeping your ship from sinking can be part of combat it shouldnt be the main part taking more than 90% of your combat experience. 11. more ships types and models would also improve the experience a lot since we dont sail or meet the same 3 ships over and over.

The Wildcard team (Ark) has expanded a lot compared to the initial team that started developing Ark. Grapeshot (Atlas) will also have to expand, they have a lot of island and creature creating developers but in the future might need more ship/vehicle, server architecture, ai, quest/story creating developers. Initial sales where good they should have the money to bring the game to a release version that can surpass Ark but it might take a little longer than the actual planned release in 1.5 years. But just imagine a pirate world that gets as much stuff/content added during its lifetime as Ark did, that would be a really awesome goal. Maybe in the new live stream they can point a bit farther into the future. Because of the bad rating the game could use a 2.0 relaunch between now and the final release once there is significant more content and problems solved.

Will we see visual damage to planks in the future? Like a damage skin for planks that starts showing at a certain condition (Client side). Maybe one important question you might want to talk about: Have your goals for the game changed after the EA release or are you still planning to bring the game to the same success and scale you intended for it in the first place?

Some more questions about NPC crew on ships: Will we be able to place NPCs in the crows nest so players can go back to steer ships from the wheel? Will NPC be able to notify you about danger like SotD so you can go below the deck and actually do stuff while sailing? Will NPC captains be able to have different behavior like attack enemies, flee, avoid danger in sight? Some more questions in general: Will there be Day and Night as two different experiences? For example SotD spawn only during night time, undead roam some areas during night times, some predators hunt during the night and move around more but rest during the day and more features so night and day feel different. Will we see regular Ghost ships, NPC pirates, NPC traders and other stuff to liven up the world? (could be server based, the fewer players are on the server grid the more NPC ships can spawn to keep performance on a good level) And like others asked already, will we see a true mmo server -> structured map with newbie area, PVE area, regulated PVP area, no build adventure area, full PVP area? Increasing the difficulty and reward the farther you get away from the newbie area.

Sorry but thats what pirates do, they throw chickens at someones ship until it sinks. You didnt even need to board a ship you can just throw chickens from another ship, i think it was fixed by the fact that anchored ship can no longer be overcrewed or overweighted.

Hey great to have another livestream Some things on my mind maybe you can share some info on some of these: New Ships/Vehicles: An important feature of the game, can you share anything on these no matter how vague at least that some thing will come some time? Crew Functionality: Will crew be able to do more tasks and even on land, maybe guard duty, raising an alarm, maning mining or woodcutter camps and so on? MMO Living World: Will we see something like a living and changing world with some bigger events? Trading: NPC Ports with different prices to allow a trading career when you are not on a server with a functioning player trading network? Quests: Will we see some of the basic MMO stuff to keep players playing? Could be exciting tasks in a dynamic way, collect and deliver certain amount of resources, defend location against npc armada, attack certain npc base or ship, steal special goods from npc ship, base. Progression mechanic: Will you flesh out the progression mechanic to provide some of the basics for an mmo that keep players playing for a long term? Like different xp trees (build ships, become better at building ships, faction relations, expansion of the gold progression and other alternate ways to progress in a permanent way. Survival: Will the survival mechanic(collect resources and survive without a ship) and the gold mechanic(once you have a ship collect gold and buy the basics with it, upgrade ships and buy better ships with gold etc.) be separated to allow for a true survival experience when you dont have access to a ship and thus gold and traders? Water/Air Bases: Will we see under water basebuilding or flying bases/islands Crew Breeding: Any Infos on breeding our own crew? Has that horrendous baby model improved Will we see gradual aging and an expansion to the age slider to allow human npcs to grow up and get old in a normal way and not change from a new born into a random 90year old looking crew like they pop from the shop? Sliders: Will we get a feet height slider? Small Characters with small feet look awkward from the side with their brick feet Will the aging include sliders in the future so old characters shrink a bit and loose muscles for example? Wild Pirate Encampments/Strongholds: Will they just be kill on sight and feature the same wonky respawn mechanic as the treasure maps or will we get a different system for example kill x numbers and they retreat or stop respawning instead of kill all in one go? Will Encampments be peaceful initially and let us trade with them and do they also spawn ports so we can trade with them when we dont want to settle on ever island in single player and dedicated? Keep up the great work

i hope there will be friendly "wild pirate encampments" or ports so we can trade. or they will be initially friendly unless attacked and can be used for trading until then.

will we be able to adjust the tether range? for example when using a lan connection and a powerful rig. in ark we had to stay really close to the host, will it go farther in atlas so we can be on different sides of one island or different island within one grid?

yeah it is not easy to balance. of course one would have to place valuable boxes in buildings of reasonable size where it is very costly to remove a part or there might be a limit and parts cannot be removed once a building has reached a certain size or is considered a complete building. at least it would work on smaller obstacles that serve no real use since the fast decay system can already detects those structures. i thought about a timer as well but the issue with this is that most foundation spammers are online every day and often live on the same island as the person they try to annoy on the PVE network. if they log in every day and place new foundations there needs to be a way to remove them quicker than they can place them and at the same time it needs to be more difficult to remove something like an active player base than it takes to build said base to balance things at least a little bit. also a timer remove on PVE would mean players go on vacation and loose all their stuff to an free action for the current landlord which was a similar feature removed already earlier. but yeah they could instead allow to pay the upkeep for the flag with basic resources instead of gold to reduce the gold sinks. but as it stands everything will likely be gold based in the end for obvious reasons

about the structure spam on PVE, how about giving island owners the option to remove building parts one by one for a gold cost per part instead of a nuke. Maybe increase the cost depending on the size of the building the part is attached to and decrease the cost depending on how far the inactivity timer is advanced. This way would allow island owners to remove foundation spam and pillar spam relatively easy, while not destroying other buildings in the progress and make it very costly to remove a base of an active player.

thanks for the quick reaction i would suggest to keep the raze option limited to a small area big enough for a base around the new placed claimflag. this would be a good option for PVP to keep collateral damage to other players as low as possible. with more players planned and higher density one wouldnt want to see a company that can keep servers around their island void of players with this mechanic.

i want to point out that we are already only talking how to defend against the obvious abuse of the raze mechanic. but i dont see it beeing used as it was intended either, neither on pvp or pve. you have to wait 48h, you need to pay a lot of gold and you loose your buildings as well. no one will use it to raze an island they intend to live on and build their first base. and definitely no one will use the raze to get rid of a foundation or pillar droppen on their doorstep. i see this mainly used by big companies that already have a main base and dont know what to do with all the gold they get to raze large areas around their island void of players or just move around the map razing island in an area and moving to the next after 48 hours. anyway this change will make more players quit but it will not bring more players to the game. the bad just outweights the good by far. maybe it would be a good idea to limit the raze option to a one time raze in a small area around the new claimflag, so you free up the space for your own base but not raze every player on the island.

Your food-bar drains faster when you do heavy work and slower when you do light work or nothing. Same should apply to vitamins or they will get out of sync. Its a really easy quick-fix that would make the system work, it cannot be balanced without. Further improvements would be nice also but that fix could be released tomorrow.

Non-Dedicates Multiplayer awesome! Will buy more copies for friends now :) Will players be able to go to different grids at the same time or do they have to stay with the host? It would be great if we can at least move freely on a grid and dont get teleported to the host once we are a few meters away which was really annoying in the ark local mode. Next new ships and it will sail to a bright future. Wipe island button for mmo mode, i also dont think its a good idea. Its the mmo mode dont always listen to people that dont want other people around in a mmo. It is not single player and it is not a deathmatch, to get a lively world with a place for many people, they need to live together not just in closed groups or on lawless. You should be absolutely sure before implementing a nuke all button. It does not differ between inactive and active players you dont want to get rid of active players just because people think the endgame content is to farm gold and wipe islands with it. Keep up the good work!

i think if they also add local multiplayer and more ships this game has the potential to be more successful than ark. really hope for local multiplayer and mod support so i can play with friends like i did in ark. im fine with them adding skins for now, its the best way to get the models into the game without affecting the balance every time they add something. once the models are in the game it is much easier to make a large redesign of sailing or armors and the economics and make those models into separat objects with their own mechanic and stats. for example if you want to include different materials resulting into different sails or ship hulls with different stats and effects you need those objects made first. i guess no one complaining its not getting better fast enough would be content to wait months without anything until the bigger redesigns and improvements are done. i guess fixing of ships and sailing goes hand in hand with adding more ships and sails, its hard to fix something when you can only see half of it.

Now this is truly awesome stuff! Huge thank you to the devs for solving all the issues and implementing all the wishes of the players quiet fast and for adding an amazing single player mode that even allows you to sail the whole map, amazing!

it would be nice if we could drop the cargo container not only when the ship is destroyed but on purpose so we can just drop the container on a close enough dock construction, pick up another cargo container and sail on. for example when selecting "place container" from the cargo rack menu we can then place it in a small area around the cargo rack on land, water or the ship deck, when there is enough free room to place the container. it would allow the crane to function well as a crane and help with ship constructions that collide with cargo racks hanging on the outside. they can still be spottet by pirates when placed on deck.

they can swim and follow your ship that way, so you can use them as additional containers.

at least they cant implement a cat in a way that breaks the game, oh wait... also its clear we've only seen a small teaser on the update there will be more to update 3, how big that will be we dont know, there will probably be a live stream to reveal the content.

Ships are indeed long time overdue, its too important to do sometime later and should get at least as much resources as tames and islands do. We can only hope work is done on some complete overhaul of ships, with new sails, planks and ship types that will be released in a big update together as its easier than releasing changes to ships in different updates and having to fix them every time when implemented. And after that we could be seeing regular updates with new ship types and stuff. Thou i never heard any word from the devs about plans to add new ships, sails or planks to the game at all. Even just announcing the intend to add new ships would let many players keep faith after 6 months that one of the most wanted features will make progress some day. A teaser or a release would be better thou, lets hope there is something right around the corner :)

indeed it seems rats are just an object used as ammo for catapults. with a six shot revolver, where we can equip 4 and dual wield them for rapid fire and a total mag capacity of 24 shots, it seems save to asume machine guns will hit with this or the next mega update just before rocket launchers o.O

well its the new end boss - kitty cat the mighty! but indeed that pistole looks like some overpowered gated content thou. maybe we can also turn our ship into a ghost ship, having to maintain it and the crew with a magic resource that comes with the tarot skill tree. ghost ships go without wind, down to the sea bed and fly to the moon, cause space pirates

oh i like the cat! would have said a two shot pistol unlocked late in the firearms skill tree and available to all players as high level weapon would have been the next step for firearms. a six shot revolver sounds like a totally overpowered weapon locked behind some endgame dungeon... or does it have reduced damage per shot or bad aim?

So the notice about the next mega update is already ingame we should soon get some details. Lets speculate a bit what it could contain. It seems it has something to do with the undead. It could be the tarot skills that allow us to have an undead crew. It could mean we will see something like a spook night happening every now and then where the undead roam the lands and the seas. Its too early for an Halloween event. Unlikely but maybe it does refer to the aging/death system getting a rework and this is how we look when we dont make it to the fountain of youth in time Or its just another endgame dungeon with an undead topic.

im not a friend of pure pvp and pure pve servers either, i hope we will see a mixed official server in the future. it could have a red player system like nearly all other mmos do, or it could have you get any reasonable gold amounts and rare resources from pvp areas but can store them in pve areas so you progress once you got em secured. or a npc bank that allows you to save your gold, together with a goldshop for ships and all stuff, you could do more fun stuff and need to rebuild less often so building could be made a little bit harder and more on the survival side. but i would prefer a consequences and economic system that allows you to progress over indestructible stuff, thou i do agree that it shouldnt be so easy to sink ships, maybe something like anchored ships dont sink or sink very slow so you can still save them when you log in the next day. when someone steals your ship or resources i dont mind but if they just randomly destroy it for no real purpose thats not good for the playerbase of the game. so dropping all resources on the ground to make em vanish by some random burglar that doesnt steal em or take em with him would be another points to adress. maybe a save stash that is indestructible but you can not drop resources into it instead it will pick up 50% of the resources dropped to the ground when they vanish in an area.