RyuujinZERO

Correct, destroying the settler's structures re-enabled building in the water. Specifically it was preventing construction in water. Even though the settler's thatch floor itself was on land. I feel bad for all those settlers who claim that land-owners are abusive and waiting for an excuse to demolish their stuff... this is a legitimate reason to evict people

Eventually after scouring our island, we located the problem. A single thatch floor the other side of the island built by a settler. To help illustrate the scale of things, I drew a red circle, that entire region was giving the 'Nearby enemy foundation' message because of that one thatch floor. The griefing potential for this is absurd! - A few well hidden pillars could prevent a company from building any shipyards.

Historically swimming tames did not consume or need stamina to swim, only if they were mounted. So I can see how if you were expecting them to tread water indefinitly, this might catch you off-guard. The infinite swimming thing was really just a holdover from ARK anyway, where griefers would try lure people's animals into water so they'd drown. But the seas in ATLAS are so different to ARK it seemed like it was about due a rethink on the logic of that.

Likely related to same issue many people are having where structures placed in water report (erroneously?) 'Too close to enemy foundation'

I'm having the same problem. ANYTHING you try build in the water says 'Too close to enemy foundation', but if you scoot it up out the water it's fine. This obviously means I can't build shipyards at all. It has nothing to do with ACTUAL proximity to enemy foundations, it's all to do with whether it's touching water. I have tried everywhere on my island and unless someone pillared every inch of water on my island and was mteiculous to make sure it didn't overlap land, this is a bug.

Open the sails to full before you release it. Often if a ship is built too shallow, the sails will pull it clear before it suffers catastrophic hull damage. It'll definitly take a dink at the back when it drops, but you should be able to get it out of there. Galleons don't ride all that much lower in the water than a brig, if you've had a brig out of that yard it'll probably be fine. Remember though, at the end of the day the price of a new shipyard and galleon skeleton is the tiniest fraction of the price of a sea-ready galleon. If in serious doubt, build a new yard and galleon frame and start over before you plank it up and commit more resources. If you think the yard and skeleton is expensive, you havn't seen the price of the planks; or how many you need.

Go kill yourself. ...no, really. That also fixes this bug - As others have observed reinitialising your character fixes it, this solution may be more expedient in some scenarios. It's possibly teleporting between beds may have a similar result.

When you join a party in an MMO, or shooter looter, how do you feel that a random party member (Usually the party creator) is arbitrarily designated as 'Team leader', and has the power to do certain administrative functions? Does it make you seethe that they are YOUR LORD, and YOUR OWNER, that you are THEIR PROPERTY? Or do you just politely (or impolitely) ask them to do something if those administrative rights need exercising? (Hey, SSJDouchenozzle69 is griefing, kick them from party plox!). That is basically the function of a landlord in ATLAS PvE. Someone with Administrative control of the island; if someone tries pillar the resources? - They can remove them, which you can't on lawless. A good landowner can still feel a little like a homeowners association, true; like perhaps the landowner has decreed that a certain patch of nodes be left open and unobstructed to serve as a resource hub for the local community, and you really wanted to build there, and have certain planning stipulations on where you can build. The 'bad landowners' you are concerned about are, true, a problem. But they are in this context no different to SSJDouchenozzle69 getting assigned party lead in some other game and proceeding to have his buddies vote-kick you for the lulz. However, they are the exception and not the rule. Most landowners I've met have been quite reasonable, some even make the 20% bonus produce available to the island community, effectively turning the 20% 'landowner bonus' into social welfare. On my island I even hire NPCs to man turrets to provide defence against Alphas, and run anti-SotD operations, thanks to ammo provided by the 'anti-tax' funds. If we were to flip the switch and go back to something like the old system, but everyone has 1 old-size flag; I'd be quite content in terms of the land i could own and house I could build on it. But with no central planning and organisation for the region, SoTDs will run rampant as it's unlikely anyone will want to stump up the resources to go kill them, and most the resources will get built over or blocked off as everyone makes the best use they can of their tiny spot of land, essentially resulting in a tragedy of the commons. (As tends to happen on lawless, hence the increased respawn rate of materials to compensate) Of course, I can understand why people who fancy themselves 'Free people' or 'pirates' would chafe at the notion of living in a micro state that has things like town planning, social welfare and organised militia, but let's not kid ourselves. Your problem isn't with 'bad landowners', it's because you have a libertarian freedom fantasy you want to act out in ATLAS (And like many people), overlook that ATLAS is a game about the age of sail; colonialism, merchant empires and yes, pirates. By all means, enjoy your lawless lifestyle. I salute it, but let's not try and pretend it's 'better' place to live than a well managed microstate.

It's kind of silly when you consider that (IMHO) it's easier to fight whales than SotDs; probably cheaper too, and whales give exponentially more gold. A red Lv30 SotD galleon gives around 150g and will likely need around 80-90 large cannonballs to sink, a whale, even post nerf is around the 1,000g mark and will need around 30-40 harpoons to kill. Now, SotDs can give you some sweet ass crew (That level 30 galleon will likely drop 4 or 5 level 60+ NPCs), and it drops high end ship component blueprints, so it's not ALL downsides. But those benefits are far less significant on PvE than PvP since most the stuff you'll be fighting are... *drumroll*... SotD's, making the loop entirely circular and self contained and irrelevant if you arn't fighting SotD's to begin with. Gold is the universally valuable commodity to PvE play.

By definition would a PvE player not naturally be unhappy being in PvP at all? However, I'll give it a shot. My friends can certainly attest, i have a HUGE hangup with PvP, i will go to huge lengths to avoid it, there have however over the years been a few scenarios in which I was ok with PvP: 1) Ultra-large scale, tactics driven PvP: WvWvW in Guild Wars 2, Auroria in Archeage for example. This isn't PvP for PvP's sake, it isn't 'some guy getting his jollies trying to kill me', it's a war with a goal and I'm just a cog in that, and, apparently I'm ok with that. My dislike of PvP it seems largely comes down to an aversion of being part of someone else's dominance fetish. 2) PvPvE. ie. Asee-teph in Allods Online: For context this was a zone in a less played MMO, in which the player is essentially an officer in a larger force for their faction. Their goals are primarily PvE related, capturing locations with the assistance of an NPC force, moving the battle lines in the process. But other players are trying to carry out opposing goals to advance their lines. The combination of narrative, atmosphere and gameplay made this palatable to me, despite the small-scale PvP nature of it. Soldiers at war, not psychopaths rubbing one out over their opponents corpse. 3) Crew-level, personal goal based combat: ie. Star Citizen, Archeage, Allods Online: These encounters are way less structured and yet oddly, perfectly parallel what ATLAS should and could be; fleets of large ships with multiple crew-members, working together to carry out a goal; whether trading, piracy, escort. In Archeage I actually tended to serve on a combat escort ship! - Our ship was the one actively engaging in PvP on behalf of the convoy. This begs the question: Why does ATLAS PvP bother me then? Simply because not once did we ever end up in a scenario like that IN ATLAS. Every 'PvP encounter' we lost, was not 'my defeat at the hands of my better', it was someone taking a pick to the bottom of my boat at 3am! And don't try tell me it took my enemies 6 hours to destroy 6 hours of work, we both know that's total bollocks, a galleon can be defeated by a guy uninterrupted with patience and a bundle of flame arrows; or, it could, i dunno if that meta is still active

Very much this. ATLAS chooses to make itself unfriendly to small groups of players with limited time; while offline everything you have built and own can and will be destroyed on PvP and you land taken, and the time invested into building anything is considerable. if you only have 2-4 hours after work every day in which to play, it could take you and your friends days to build a small ship, or reasonable base of operation and have it be gone by the next morning. If I were to play almost anything else; from Anthem to Factorio to Overwatch to Elder Scrolls Online to No Man's Sky, I could walk away and feel like I made some sort of progress, that I got both entertainment value and I have gained progress towards something more. in ATLAS your progress is ephemeral, cut down randomly, often while you're not even there to defend it. It doesn't have to be this way, this is a conscious decision on the part of the devs. Take Archeage for example, another high-seas-heavy sandbox; in that you can 'summon' your ship freely, and unsummon it when not in use, while the map going through a fixed cycle of peace and war, you can lose your land to PvP, and take other peoples. But it doesn't happen 'whenever they please' but at a fixed time every week where the PvP-claim region descends into company alliance warfare. I'm honestly not sure whether to chalk this up to incompetence, or malice; whether it simply never occured to Grapeshit that there was another way, or whether they knew they'd be creating a skinner box, in which players would be compelled to keep logging in, pulling their levers, simply to avoid the inevitable punishment. This is why me and my company stopped playing official, put simply, ATLAS is not a game that respects your time or you.

You must have a different definition of 'small company'. Our 'small company' before we gave up, were too small to actually crew more than a single brig, let alone 3, and we were one of the larger companies in our zone (not withstanding the inevitable Chinese zerg presence). The player base has fallen off a cliff since then so...

Something like this OP

I had this happen too; but I didn't die. I got teleported into some howling void with no skybox stuck in perpetual falling (This was on a private server)

It continues to surprise me, the game has been steadily losing 4-6k players a week for weeks, you'd expect this to form a curve - a percentile loss over time, but no, just a straight 5k average. If that pattern continues the would be literally no players in 4 weeks; of course that isn't how it'll work... In theory... But in theory the player churn should have slowed by now too, and it has not. A month from now we can safely say the game will be at its floor number, maybe as little as 500-1000 players peak if this trend continues. Once the player count gets there it'll be MUCH harder for the game to recover as they will no longer be trying to preserve the existing base, but win back deserters who quit, and attract new blood, in an already poisoned environment (See steam reviews). The game was on sale last week and even reduced price failed to make a dent in the falling numbers

If you didn't 'hop' out the water you'd be unable to climb up the side of rafts, small structures at the waters edge, onto tidepool rocks etc. However, the fact it activates every time you surface, like if trying to climb onto a shallow inclined beach is a pain in the ass; literally if a crocodile is biting it and you're trying to run away. Game needs a manteling mechanic.

We're in the same boat. We havn't been actively playing for a couple weeks now, just keeping our claim refreshed, waiting for them to fix their shit. But today we logged in to find someone had claimed and demolished our entire base despite our efforts. We were probably gonna quit anyway after reading they were making it so you'd have to log in every 3 days to protect stuff, but, far as I can tell even the 3 day protections aren't working properly because the moment our bodies weren't on the server, POOF, there goes 2 months of game time. So yeah, fuck this. ATLAS, you had a lot of potential, and there was some REAL love put into stuff like the ocean mechanics (So gorgeous!); but your game designers don't have the same love or competency as your artists, and I don't think you'll ever get un-fucked and you definitly don't respect our time, the last of our company have collectively agreed, we're out.

I was running a private server and something similar happened with a player getting spontaneously teleported off the side of the server grid. I figured it must have been a glitch in the dedicated server, but that sounds similar in the server failed to properly track coordinates

Large speed + 1 small sail of your preference. The smaller sail doesn't make a HUGE impact next to the large speed sail, so you could use small handling to improve precision handling when docking and stuff. The ability of a large handling sail to be closer hauled to the wind doesn't make up for the vast loss of speed difference between handling and speed (Believe me, I tried... that was a painfully boring journey), you'll always want your primary sail to be speed. Arguably under some very niche conditions. There is no such thing as a lower threshold to weight, any weight you add will slow the ship down. By about 50% weight that is a 20% reduction in speed I believe, 33% by 75% and so on exponentially to complete immobilization at 100% If you have a ship and are routinely running it above 50-60% weight, a medium or large weight sail MIGHT result in a net gain over a speed sail... might, depending on some other factors. Small weight sails are completely worthless providing only a fraction the gains of a medium or large weight. Basically weight sails are so incredibly niche that it's reasonable to never ever use one. Speed sails typically offset MOST the penalties of high weight, and provide a significant boost at low weight

Because if you play you'll get to feel like a pirate god too, crushing your foes beneath your heel in your galleon! Your saw that streamer doing it so it must be true. Of course, the dream your being sold is that of the mega, odds are you're going to be the fodder some streamer is grinding up for the viewers, not the streamer himself with dozens of lackies helping grind what he needs to do all this.

OPs theory is way too optimistic. I think it's for the streamers. Easier to pop structures are more cinematic for streamers, half these weird changes directly benefit pvp streamers and their entourage while putting their victims at a disadvantage. Streamers are the cheapest way of advertising your game to a large audience and grapeshot seems to take advantage of this. Remember how in the early weeks their twitter would never even address people's concerns or issues? All they ever did was plug pvp streams/videos. /cynicism

Um... dictatorships and monarchies are two different kinds of autocratic government. Maybe 'despot' was the word you were looking for? ...I'll see myself out. Do continue your rant

I'm not sure the devs know what they want it to be. They keep using that word 'MMO' and even talk about roleplaying and other RPG elements; yet it has more in common with Rust than any extent MMORPG. But, it doesn't actually need to be that way a few simple balance tweaks as I listed above, would establish an foothold in MMORPG territory and definitly make the game more playable for a very large audience. And, that is what they need to remember; MMORPG's... no, games in general, live and die on the 'casual majority' as much as people curse them, not the 'hardcore'; there was at least one MMORPG that tried to sell itself as a hardcore MMO, for hardcore raiders and, it's tale is not a happy one. (Which was a shame because it actually wasn't that hardcore, and was pretty damn fun. But, it was grossly mismarketted and mismanaged for too long to be saved)

ATLAS describes itself as an MMO; it's right there on it's store page: This leads to a lot of people defending the game's current structure as being ok, and that solo players/micro-companies shouldn't be able to play or to even just leave; because it's an MMO and therefore is solely about working together with other players. I intend to demonstrate why this view is inherently wrong in proven MMO models. It's true MMO's allow players to work together; or against each other, on an unprecedented scale. World of Warcraft, EVE, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy 14, Elder Scrolls Online, etc etc etc. These are examples of financially successful and stable MMOs, and they all have something in common; they're about 90% solo PvE content. Epic raids in conventional MMOs like WoW, or EVE's thousand-man wars between mega-orgs, or it's emergent territory control might be what they are most famous for, but that is actually a tiny fraction of what they offer and why players, you know, play. Most of your time in WoW or Final Fantasy 14 is more likely to be spent doing solo story quests, leveling, exploring, unlocking content. Even in EVE, for the typical casual player they're probably going to be in low-sec doing safe trade runs, mining or taking NPC mission contracts, this isn't accidental, because this is those games 'resource gathering' phase, where you get the tools, resources, levels and experience needed to tackle the harder content. Then, when your schedule and preferences allow, you get together with friends or strangers and you do the group content; dungeons, raids whatever, and achieve the next level of progression; raid gear, titles etc. The point I'm getting at, is that everything in ATLAS is over-tuned and lacks progression. When you land on a beach you don't encounter a wolf, who deals 10-20% damage a hit, you encounter a dozen wolves, each of who can kill a fully armoured and armed player dead very easily; and who can three-shot a player armed with a spear and cloth armour; not to mention the frequent alphas who you need advanced weapons to have any hope of taking down even as a group. When you go to sea, you don't encounter undead scout-ships that a sloop with a cannon has a fighting chance against, you meet hordes of ships of the damned that even a brig with a full crew is threatened by. When you are ready to move on and find people to do group content, there is noe asy way to find them. Everything is tuned on the assumption there isn't one player, but a dozen in a pre-baked company for every situation, and those players are fully outfitted with the best gear for the job. ATLAS would be much more approachable - for everyone, and probably more successful as an MMO if they broke the content up more. The fix is simple, it'd look like this: Golden Age ruins and maps should be your dungeons; your PvE group content. Exploring a random island should be balanced as 'solo' content, where a lone explorer properly equipped, doesn't have TOO much to worry about from the wild animals, particularly in the more temperate climates. It doesn't matter if such encounters are trivial as a group, the 'standard' islands aren't there to be a serious blocker to playing, they're where you build up the tools, resources and vessels needed to engage with the group content - like in a conventional MMO; and that group content should pay off with the best loot, so it provides a clear path of progression: Solo/Small group play on islands for basic tools -> Treasure maps/SotD as small group for treasure/better blueprints -> Golden age ruins as large group for further advancement -> Raid bosses PvP then add an extra layer of danger, and allows players to shortcut the loop a bit potentially by stealing other people's loot/blueprints/resources... full disclosure, not really my bag, I'm a PvE player. But that doesn't significantly change things; PvP is disrupted by overtuned PvE too; Ships of the Damned or cyclone walls interrupting naval action, or hordes of wolves getting dragged into a ground battle, so the islands would still serve as the place to gear up and prepare for other challenges even if you are under greater threat. Not that any of this matters, schizoid design philosophy will continue even if a better path exists, but, just throwing it out there.

Not to mention I can't remember reading any pirate tales about a monthly geriatric suicide run through ruins guarded by monsters of legend in order to reach the fountain of youth.