Grodgen

Will we be seeing any new ship parts and hulls soon? The current four are cool and all but I'd really like to see >lots< more variety it the kind of vessel that exist in the game.

For the love of ATLAS people, up vote this.....

Snow, I did make a post about this but it seems this is the place to drop it.

1) Collidable Bowsprits / Figureheads: Currently they aren't collidables. You can't paint them or stand on them, it also limits their functionality as actual bowsprits.

2) Auxiliary sails: Jibs, Mizzens, Staysails, etc: Currently we only have access to main mast sails. It limits the potential of ships. Ships have tons of sails on them, including these smaller or medium sized ones. Have them take up sail a small amount of points like masts but provide enough bonuses to the ship to make them viable. Having bowsprits collidable means that they can be used to attach jibs to, like they are in real life.

3) Lateen Sails: We have square sails, gaff sails, and mainsails in game right now, however, we are missing lateen sails, which were used way before the other three became popular.
 

Thanks for making this list, mate. You're awesome.

Ships are complex. I think most of the community here that has a passion for 16th - 18th Century vessels knows that, and I feel like I'm in the same boat when it comes to wanting a game like ATLAS to be an extremely enjoyable sailing/pirate/explorer game, because few are out there. I have a feeling a good portion of the community has at least made it into brigantines and I've noticed a growing trend of people wanting "more" to their ships, not just planks or hulls but more of what makes these ships unique, their sails.

I propose an expansion to the current sail system in game:

1) Collidable bowsprits and figureheads: This needs to happen first, as of right now, bowsprits and figureheads are non-collidable objects in the game, so they can't be used for anything other than looking pretty. In order to add functionality to that section of the ship, they need to be collidables. This, in my eyes, adds some gameplay elements such as being able to add rams, paintable figureheads, and mountable bowsprits with jib mounts.

2) Max Masts: Masts weigh a lot and take up quite a bit of space. From a gameplay perspective, it's a simple solution to filling in all the empty space that missing due to a lack of auxiliary sails all over the ship. Large vessels should be about be able to have more for less, so sticking to more IRL mast amounts would be beneficial from a crewing and resource cost perspective. Doing this would free up some of that space needed for additional rigging and thus open up options for adding jibs, mizzens, etc. With this setup, ships would enjoy greater customization of sail patterns, as well higher speeds.

3) Jibs, Mizzens, Staysails, etc: Last bit would be to add all the little sails you can dot along rigging. There are tons of sail plans in real life and it's a shame ATLAS doesn't have these already. Sailing is fun and being able to customize your sail pattern with auxiliary sails would add some pretty fun gameplay to the game, both PVP and PVE.

Someone has already proposed climbable rigging some there is no real reason to add that here, it should already be in the game IMO, but we'll see where the wind takes us.

Thanks for reading!

2 minutes ago, Jatheish said:

New changes in a recent update:

- Changed how custom blueprints are crafted for STACKABLE items when they're given a stat roll:
> If a stackable item is crafted from the same blueprint and you already have an item crafted from that blueprint in your inventory, it will stack on that pre-existing item and not receive a different Intelligence Stat Bonus.
> If you want a different roll from the same blueprint, you must make sure that you do not have an item which was crafted from that same BP in your inventory (stated or non)
> This means that you can keep rolls by keeping the item in your inventory when crafting from the BP, even if you do not have the level of intelligence required to get the crafting bonus. Alternatively, you can remove the stated item from your inventory to get a new roll from the BP.
- Resource respawn should now function as they did on Lawless servers prior to v10.
- 50% reduction in the enemy structure prevention radius so that you can now build closer together on Lawless Servers.


 

"- Resource respawn should now function as they did on Lawless servers prior to v10."

Thank you..... now talk to the team about claims. That is quite possibly the biggest issue right now for both PVP and PVE. I can imagine player will be crying if you manage to remedy that.

17 minutes ago, MaxPower said:

Grodgen might be exaggerating a bit but what he's saying is true. Jat DID say that lawless is suppose to be unclaimable land that's just a stepping stone.... and that's a problem right now. People ARE claiming large chunks of lawless with foundations and their foundation spam is blocking the spawning of resources. Its pretty hard to get a foothold when there are no resources spawning. This is made into a larger problem by the amount of people living in lawless because its very hard to find a claim anywhere for solo/small group players. 

I'd also be happy to leave lawless and just live on my ship... but right now some d-bad can easily sink it even in PvE, so that's out too. The whole thing is a cluster right now that's making the game unplayable. 

Small groups need to be given a least a carrot to play with, even if the limit claims to 1 for small groups. But saying lawless is a stepping stone really irks me the wrong way when people have been tell these devs, since the game launched, that claims need to be dealt with or any vision they have of whatever game design they are planning is literally a pipe dream. And they used the wrong word as well, a foothold implies they are staying (Which they clearly don't want you to do, for whatever reason). What they actually intent for them to be is a pit stop and to move onto claimable land. But we all know how that is going.

1 minute ago, Percieval said:

No?

You were talking about a 70% resource requirement release because you want to build a galleon.

 

But that is your decision. You can leave it with a raft or a galleon, don’t be surprised a galleon takes more resources than a raft. Stays your decision. 

1 minute ago, Percieval said:

He never said that. I don’t know where you have that from. 

It clearly says " they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS! " and in it's current state with the current expectation... yes. That is exactly what they just told the community.

42 minutes ago, Jatheish said:

......we removed these changes and have set it back to our initial design. These servers are meant to be unclaimable land to allow players to gain a foothold once they’ve left Freeports, but they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS!
 

LOLOLOL.

Maybe you should actually take a look at the state of your game before making bold statements like that. If that is the point of Lawless servers then you need to decrease the amount of resources it takes to craft things by at least 70%. You can't have ARK clone and expect people to play the game any differently, because there is very little different in this game to that one. You are expecting people to grind 500000 ish resources to craft a Galleon that "might" survive the night by traveling around all over god's creation to gather materials that might not even be on islands because they don't spawn anymore with reverted changed and somehow expect to find that fun and engaging?

Are we even playing the same game? Fix claims so people don't have to pick at the scraps that exist on Lawless servers. You're jumping 50 builds into the future expecting players to deal with it and all that's going to do is make people stop playing. Unless that is your goal or has seemed like your goal since this game launched. Stop taking 1 step forward and 3 steps back. The patches and fixes have been nice but the constant shooting yourself in the foot is getting old.

God, I played EvE for around a decade.

What needs to change is the economy ( or lack there of ) in this game. It NEEDS an economy set in the background for players to play with. Baseline prices were already in place and the player driven economy was something that was slowly allowed to grow over years and when it was apparently that CCP had created a living economy they basically let go of the leash and let it do it's thing. Just to clarify, it was never made by the players, it existed and the players created something around that. If Grapeshot wants that... it first needs to MAKE an economy, which it doesn't have. It doesn't even have towns yet. This economy point I made needs to be addressed first or this game will never be like EvE to begin with.

On a second note, your idea about Highsec -> Null sec is actually pretty well thought out. The only thing it's missing is resources having special qualities, which would make sense for a game about wooden ships. Different kinds of timber should have qualities that effect health, speed, damage reduction, etc. Different kinds of metals should have qualities that effect ships and guns and cannons, etc. That creates even more incentive for players to go to these null sec regions. In EvE, I go to null for special mining materials, T2 materials, T3 materials, the vast amount of unique gear that drops from rats, gas mining, the list goes on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/8hvucr/why_are_ships_so_expensive_now_they_objectively/

This article also helps a bit with understanding how the economy works in EvE. It's a large complex mess, but it works. And for me, that's the first issue that need to be addressed, before sectors are made. What's cheap, what's hard to get, THEN where do I find it. In that order.

The game is more about being an explorer and less about being a pirate. They just used the pirate tag to lure people in.

Considering the era they chose, they've done a shit job representing it. The npc "trade" ships are a joke and the freeports aren't ports.

This idea the OP brought up could be fixed by:
> Towns buy/sell goods for gold or lesser forms of currency ( such as silver and copper ) as well as specialized goods for sale.
 > Incentive to trade for players opens up. NPC traders then have destinations, routes. Economies need to be fleshed out as well.
  > This all then creates an incentive for pirates to pirate. Money and/or goods are on the vessels. Pirates can engage both NPC and players if they choose.

> Discoveries need to be more in depth. Resources, animals, flora, etc should all be fleshed out and made somewhat unique. This world is huge with 80% of it the same things reused.
 > Special areas mean players have focal points for special materials and such.
  > Areas like this give players an incentive to defend / pirate those locations.

> Towns need to exist in this game. Economies need to exist in this game. Think EvE, players were given stations and economies to play around with and created empires around it.


I could go on about it. The idea of ATLAS is there but the execution so far has been, for lack of better words, lackluster.
" ....we’re fully dedicated to ensuring that ATLAS gets one step closer to becoming one of the most ambitious online worlds of all time and fulfilling its destiny as the ultimate fantasy pirate adventure!"

So far they've dedicated to ensuring that ATLAS becomes the college textbook definition of how not to design an MMO and treat it's playerbase. At 70% mostly negative reviews on Steam, it's going to be a grind to right this otherwise sinking ship.

Honestly, having PVP and PVE zones should of been the focus of this game. It gives players the ability to create towns and communities in more friendly spaces and gives other players the ability to enjoy the PVP aspect of both land and sea.
 

I'm usually considered a very patient man, but this is slowly testing it. Most of the NA players I've encountered are pretty chill, however, getting bullied by Chinese players is starting to get old. Having to worry about losing things to game mechanics that you have no control over is also, getting old. I'll deal with offline raiding, despite it being cancerous to MMOs and survival games alike. I'm perfectly fine with PVP or the environment being tough to deal with. But this resistance from Grapeshot dealing with simple things like players driving up boats into shipyards and using weight exploits to sink and "loot" ships isn't ok.

Please, for the love of gaming... do something about this. There are literally 100s of posts about it. Address already.

Rant over. Feel free to add ranting yourself.

 

No.

Just now, Ellentro said:

This might honestly be the most hilarious part of the thread. Where Wildcard, against four years of impeccable record of not testing or even playing their own games, tries to actually imply that they playtested the Ships of the Damned mechanic and thought it was fine. 

 

I mean, I don't necessarily disagree, the quality of feedback has been poor, but at the same time, Wildcard has never tested anything in any of their games ever and trying to imply that they have is laughable to a disgusting degree. 

I think they only tested how they fight other ships, not them existing in the game world. Which doesn't make much sense either because they face rape sloops into non-existence.

7 minutes ago, Lethality said:

This is a very different game than ark... when you've got whatever 40,000 players, but also a persistent world between them all... it's not the same game.

And therefore, the game design philosophies have to be very different. In order to make large companies work with lots of specializations, they can't also make lots of specializations available to solo players. 

There has to be a choice made, for the integrity of the design... and solo players I don[t think are going to win this one. They can't, unless they're re-tooling the whole game.

Or perhaps that's why they also allow private servers? Can't you set up your preferred rules that way, and ignore public servers?

That's quite possibly the stupidest reason I've ever seen regarding game design. You can solo play or duo play in literally every MMO ever created, including games like Rust, ARK, etc. Large companies already benefit from specialization, pre and post patch, changing the requirements for skills barely effects them. There doesn't need to be a choice made, the game should be playable solo and should get progressively easier the more people band together, like literally every other survival game in the history of survival games.

Private servers cost money, forcing players to purchase a server to make it playable is actually stupid. I'm fairly certain people would rather refund at that point than do that.

If they rollback 7.0 I think they can save this sinking ship that people are jumping off from. ( No pun intended )

It's a shame it's ended up like this.

I think in about a week this game is going to have a solid 3K people playing it. Everytime they make a "fix" they break some other aspect of it. It's about to hit life support at this point.

what.

I agree, they really do need to level out the animals so we can actually explore some islands.

Bump, wanna see what people think

Hostile Animal Spawns - Currently there are lawless islands with entire colonies of things that want to kill you. I understand adding predators to islands outside of freeports but currently it's at insane levels. Either change the spawn rates or make it some they kill each other some it thins out the herd. I don't understand why a croc doesn't try to eat a wolf....

Ship Decay Rate - Ships erode over time but currently I think it's a little steep. Dropping the decay by about 40-60% would really be nice. It would really help out people that work, all players to put time elsewhere, and still make ship maintenance a necessary part of sailing around.

Vitamin decay vs food decay - Food does not decay while the player is not actively doing something, so if your sailing along, your vitamin levels are plummeting while food doesn't. This seems like a major oversight, but I think the remedy to this would be do decrease vitamin decay by quite a bit. Keeping food is already hard, so increasing food decay would actually make it even more of a chore to stay alive. Make it challenging, not impossible.

Resource Respawn Rates - Islands outside of freeports are sometimes barren of resource because people have populated them with structures and left. Please decrease the no spawn ring around structures so new visitors to islands can actually partake in exploration and gathering. I know structure decay is there, but it's not working / being effective.

Exploration - Where is my incentive to explore beside building ships? Give us things to do, reasons to go out and do things other than farming materials.

Discoveries - Add surveying and about 300% more kinds of flora and materials. The Age of Exploration involved discovering things, not just islands. Having a sailing game only about piracy is boring, add more "meat" to the game.

Trading - I don't understand how trading is added in the game. Yes you can do it with players but what about the ports? I suggest adding copper and silver currency to the game and allowing players to make coins. ( Meaning being in a large company has perks ) Give freeports goods and supplies to sell to players for all 3 currencies ( copper, silver, gold, for example ). This gives players incentive to return to freeports and interact with new players and recruit them, as well as offers items to all of the above. This creates traders and give pirates an incentive to pirate at sea.

Ships - Add more kinds, there are all kinds of ships from this era. If you add my trading suggestion, then trading vessels will be something to think about. Galleys were also used during this time and would be fun from a crew ( both player and AI ) and gameplay perspective. Galleys had rams, so it would add some fun gameplay around that, and used oars and sails, often latin sails.

I might add more to this list, but I think a lot of this would really be cool additions. Please feel free to leave comments below.

Happy sailing.