MaxPower

There are ramps... and stairs! To get a ramp press T while placing a roof. You can cycle different types for most of the building blocks.

Well as Phant0m quoted, the store page alludes to quest, sub-quests and rewards. So yeah, you're correct to wonder if they're in the game yet... especially since the Steam Early Access description says everything in the features second listed on the store page is in the game. On this feature that seems to be a bit of a stretch.

If the game is going to require you to have a group of 50 working together to enjoy it, including the PVE game, its not going to last long. Don't underestimate just how many people don't want to be a slave to some guild/clan/tribe/company leader they don't know and not everyone (in fact, most people) don't have 50 friends to play with. Even Ark, as grindy as it was, didn't force you to play with large groups to enjoy it. Sure, official PVP was pointless without a decent sized tribe but PVE was still enjoyable solo or in a small group. If that wasn't the case, Ark wouldn't have been as popular as it was/is.

This is honestly one of the biggest issues with the game right now. If they want to let animals aggro you while you're online and in your house.... whatever, fine. At least I can do something about it. Its complete BS however that I have to worry about a damn snake ripping my wood house apart while I'm offline. The devs could solve SO many problems in the game right now with a single change: Offline raid/damage protection.... but I'd settle for animals not attacking my damn house while I'm not online.

I see what you're saying and I don't disagree with the why, I'm just not sure this is a workable solution. Honestly, this (and #1) could be solved by simply having offline raid protection. You wouldn't need a safe port to park your ship if the damn thing couldn't be sunk while you're offline. Yeah. As you mention, the one really odd thing about the skill system is that while it seems to be set up to encourage player interaction (you can't learn to craft everything thus need to get stuff you can't from other players), it's also sort of counter intuitive in that while I can buy a pistol from someone if I don't have the Firearm tree.... it doesn't do me much good unless I learn skills inside the firearm tree, which will teach me how to craft the pistol. That doesn't make sense. I play WW2OL myself back in the day but I also played a ton of Star Wars Galaxies. Galaxies had issues but one thing they did REALLY well was the economy. I'm not sure I've ever seen an in-game economy function quite as well and they did it similar to how the ATLAS devs are trying: You had one character per server and could only learn a limited amount of skills. However, when you learned a combat skill you didn't also learn how to make the weapons used for that skill. After all, I don't need to know how my pistol is made in order to use it. It made sense and, for all its faults, Galaxies had a thriving economy. Combat focused characters wouldn't ever touch crafting skills and would instead go off and buy their weapons from crafting focused characters that rarely touched combat skills. That's how you drive a player economy and if that's going to be the objective here, the current skills need a huge re-write. If that's NOT the objective by the way, than why the hell is the tree so restrictive? That's a bit of a side track tirade but I do agree with what you're saying about skills in general. In a game like this I want to win battles because I'm better, not because I choose smarter when unlocking skills. Seems like the current system was a "We need to do something, anything, different than Ark....." sort of move that was thrown together at the last minute. It doesn't make much sense and it feels out of place.

Absolutely agree. If the devs have such a hard on for trying to force everyone into large companies, than have separate servers for those of us that don't want to be slaves. Have a server(s) with a company cap of 20-30 people, so solo and small group players aren't at such a disadvantage. As to the OP's suggestions: 1. You seem to be suggesting this as some sort of offline protection. If that's the case, there are better ways to deal with ships being blown up while the entire company is offline. The problem with such a buff is that, while it might protect your ship when you're offline... it'll also give you a huge advantage against out of towners in your home region, which will itself be exploited significantly. Players would just hang near their island and kill anyone that comes near as those other players would stand no chance. Sorry but this is one that has no chance unless its a relatively small buff and only in your claim. 2. A reputation system would be cool but the penalties would have to be extreme to have an impact on larger companies. 3. There are a lot of issues with this one. The freeports are suppose to be starter regions, not safe zones for established players. You'd have so many ships clogging up the ports if established players could hide their relatively free... which would make the regions unplayable. 4. I agree that you should be able to unlock more than you currently can but 90% might be a bit much. I'd be happy with being able to unlock 50-60% of the tree. 5. I very much would like to see something similar to this and it ties in with #7. The problem is that ships take so damn long to build and you can easily lose them on the first trip out. Its sort of fun and novel at first... but it'll be REALLY annoying if it happens a lot, which it could. Even with 2.5x harvesting it took a buddy and me a couple days to build a Schooner. It would have been quicker if we didn't have to search for gems to make alloy, but it still would have taken several hours. If this damn thing gets sunk by a SotD the minute we take it out of port, I'll be pretty pissed. So honestly, I think its one or the other. Either offer some way to at least partially recover a sunken ship or make ships a bit easier to build to loses aren't the end of the world (again, this is more a solo/small group issues so I'm sure the devs don't care). One idea would be to have an NPC salvager in the ports that can "salvage" your ship for you at the cost of a certain amount of gold. You'll get it back damaged and without any of your items that were in it, but the basic ship will be there. Seems a reasonable solution to me and in PVP it would give an incentive to not have your ship captured.... which could add a new element. 6. Honestly, this ones a no brainer and the reason why I'm not currently playing PVP (and why I never played Ark PVP much). Don't mind getting my ass kicked or having my ship sunk by another player, that's part of the game. However, I don't want it happening while I'm sleeping or at work. That's just BS. 8. This one I disagree with, at least in PVE. There needs to be MORE NPC enemies to battle on the open ocean.... not less. The one way they can be made rarer however is by adding regular NPC ships.... which I very much hope is on the agenda. 9. This one actually boggles my mind. It seems the devs really want trade to be a central aspect of the game (which is why the skill tree is the way it is)… but they don't have any actual mechanics in place for it. Not even a basic player to player swap system. It'd seem such features should have been high priority. 10. Seems perfectly reasonable.

There is certainly a lot more grey in the PVE than you usually see...

Honestly, its be pretty stupid if they didn't.... The rest of your feedback is pretty fair but this particular one is fitting an annoying pattern I've noticed: People complaining about ANYTHING that can kill them. Look, this is a survival game... there are going to be dangers in the world and you shouldn't be able to outrun or overpower everything.

1. While its a starter zone, its not a safe zone. Learning that dying has consequences is important to new players so I don't agree with this suggestion. 2. That's not going to happen. The whole points of starter zones is to give new players someone to get started... its not to give people a place to hide their ships. If ships didn't decay quickly in freeports the region would be overrun with ships and would become unplayable. 3. What do you want sorted out exactly? There are a lot of reasons to not like the current system but simply saying "It sucks, fix it" isn't meaningful feedback. 4. There seems to be issues where certain creates spawn in huge swarms, which I hope they fix. Although don't expect the islands to ever be safe because they won't be. 5. Completely agree. You shouldn't be able to loot other players or their storage/workstations in PVE.

But see that's just it... it DOES have a lot to do with it being an in-dev game. Its not about defending the devs, its just reality. Perhaps you're too young to have played many in-dev games but there is a pretty simple rule that us older guys know: Do not invest time in an alpha/beta/early access game if you're not prepared to deal with huge glitches and risk losing all your progress. The simple fact is that during development, things are going to go horribly wrong. Its inevitable and if you lack the ability to understand or deal with such issues, don't play the game until its finished. I lost a couple ships that I spend a lot of hours on too but you don't see me whining about it. Why? Because I knew full well that since the game is still in an alpha state there was a high likelihood that really bad things could happen.... because they always do. I didn't even spend any time creating my character since I expected it to get erased by accident or for the servers to get wiped. That's the reality of development and people need to understand what they are playing. I'd also point out that there are good reasons why the decay rate in freeports is so high. Its so you can't hide there as a higher level... they're suppose to be starter zones, not safe spaces for you to hide your ship.

The problem is you lack an understanding of how games are made. Very few games these days are built from scratch. Ever bought a COD, Battlefield, Assassins Creed, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect or GTA game? They're all built on top of the previous version of the game and likely share a LOT more code than you would think. Atlas does the same with Ark, its just a little more obvious.

Eh, perhaps not. The NPC ships could be based on the current player ships with some minor alterations... and the NPCs already exist as does the basic AI code to make them work (the ghost ships AI). We also don't know what they've been working on already. I'd like to think its always been the plan to add more NPC ships into the game (otherwise PVE is going to get boring quickly).

I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make or how that has anything to do with my comment. Not all games are the same and while Fortnite might be in a better state than ATLAS (the original Fortnite release was pretty poor... and I mean the pre-battle royale release), its also a SIGNIFICANTLY simpler game with a whole lot more money and manpower behind it. There are plenty of examples of early access games that were released long before they were feature complete. Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, 7 Days 2 Die, RimWorld and Space Engineers all come to mind and there are plenty more. Again, I'm not really sure what you're on about other than trolling at this point.

There are dangers in the world, otherwise there wouldn't be much point to the game. No one ever promised you'd be able to sail around the world without getting attacked by anything.

Yeah the system doesn't need to be removed, just significantly tweaked. I think it'd be fine if they slowed the rate of increase/decrease and removed death as a penalty for vitamin issues it'd be fine. You should just get buffs if you're vitamin levels are balanced and negative buffs if they aren't. Right now its just easier to die every once in a while than properly manage your vitamins. That's not very fun.

I'm alright with looting workbenches and containers since you can actually do something to prevent that (pin code your containers and place workbenches inside). If you don't, its your own fault. Looting other players corpses on PVE though is definitely BS. Someone lured an alpha snake over to my buddy the other day and then looted his corpse after the snake killed him. That seems wrong on a PVE server.

Uhhhh that's actually exactly what it means. Early Access titles are unfinished games that are still in a state of active development. Since ATLAS is in a state where a significant amount of content is still to be added, it'd generally be considered to be in an alpha state of development. It even says on the ATLAS store page that they expect the game to remain in development for another two years. With that said, I don't actually agree with the OPs post. The Ghost Ships were definitely not functioning correctly (which is being fixed, hopefully) and the skill system is complete BS right now.

Agreed. The lawless areas are the only option a lot of people have to build a ship.... making them claimable would be a horrible idea. They're find just like they are.

They're going to be making changes to the ghost ships in a patch later tonight to prevent this (you can see the changes in the patch note thread) but doesn't sound like a rollback is going to happen.

Pretty sure the path with the fixes to the Ships of the Damned hasn't gone live yet....

I'd agree that you shouldn't be able to master everything. However the current system is drastic overkill. The problem is that the game has no mechanics to establish a trade based economy (no real way to sell items and services to other players) and interactions with other players are always problematic in open PVP games. Most MMOs don't have open PVP and have much easier ways to trade items between players. Most players will simply be forced into large companies, which will have no need to engage in any sort of trade/economy. The ones who are punished by the system will be solo and small group players. Agreed. I tend to find most group leaders are a-holes I don't care to deal with. I'm not playing Atlas or any other game to be someone else's slave. I'm playing to play with my friends and that's it. If our group, which is 2-4 people depending on whos on, can't play at least PVE without relying on other players... we're not going to play at all.

I'd also like to say that I feel the changes to the skill system are overly harsh. I don't mind not being able to unlock everything... but its a bit ridiculous right now. Its a common theme but not everyone wants to join a large company and be forced to associate with a bunch of random d-bags. I much prefer to play with 2-3 friends and do our own thing. Yet it seems every aspect of Atlas's design and changes like this are telling us to group up or get lost. I have no idea why the devs are so in love which trying to force everyone into large companies but that's just not going to fly for a lot of people. The same was true with public PVP in Ark, which was pretty much impossible without a decent sized tribe. However, at least solo players and tiny groups could play PVE in Ark without too much of an issue. You weren't forced to associate with people you didn't want to in order to enjoy the game. The same should be true in Atlas.

Its not just that its a garbage fix... its a garbage system. The entire concept isn't viable and heavily favors large companies that have the ability to protect their land 24/7. The casual/solo/small group player is pretty much screwed. Seriously, people keep throwing out ideas they think will be magic bullets to fix the claim system but the underlying issues always remain. It doesn't really matter if the claim time is 30 minutes or an hour and 40 minutes. It doesn't matter if people get one claim or 50. Your average play will still have a very hard time maintaining a claim since the system is flawed at a basic level and only favors large companies that have a 24/7 presence in the game world. Honestly, if the devs want everyone to join an alpha tribe/company to have any chance (which they clearly do), they should just have a faction system you can join when you create a character. There could be three or four factions and each one could get a non-PVP home region (perhaps a freeport and eight surrounding map areas) where its just free building (like Ark) for members of that faction while the rest of the world would be contested territory that's up for grabs. If you didn't want to be in one of the factions it could be an option to be a privateer instead. This would let people form their own independent companies while still giving solo players some natural built-in allies and safe havens.