Sicam

Glad to see you guys acknowledging the problem and communicating with the community. Even if there wasn't a fix available yet, it was good to hear you guys know about the problem and are working to fix it. No fix is going to please everyone, and this roll back is probably going to receive a lot of backlash, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I would like to preface this by stating some facts that should be abundantly obvious. Not all Chinese players in Atlas are cheaters and not all Chinese players in Atlas are part of the mega tribe (zerg is a term used to describe the kind of mob mentality based mega tribes). For the longest time, I was against the idea of region locking China from Atlas despite my many run-ins with the Chinese zergs in other games. They are people who love games just like us and push the game to its limits. That being said, at this point I can't ignore the blatant exploiting and abuse the zerg and other Chinese factions have been participating in. Nearly every Chinese streamer I've seen has been blatantly duping resources, cheating, or using some other kind of exploit to gain an unfair advantage. Even without these exploits, the zerg itself is very problematic. A single mega tribe that plays at all hours and actively works to destroy smaller clans with overwhelming numbers, force, and organization wouldn't be so problematic if it wasn't so big and destructive. Because of how big it is, even if those in charge of the zerg were opposed to exploiting and cheating (which it seems they aren't) they would find it difficult to enforce those rules on their members. What also doesn't help is that many zerg members make large amounts of money off of streaming these games. This means that many of the zerg can focus entire days on doing nothing but playing Atlas since they are making money off it anyway. There are entire pseudo gaming companies that are run through these zergs and make tons of money off of the streams. A simple solution: make an asia/chinese server and region lock them to it. If they want to cheat/ exploit, let them do it with other cheaters/exploiters. Honestly, it would be more entertaining to watch multiple mega zergs fight each other on stream than it is to watch a single zerg kill small tribes and ruin the game for them. I would like to say that this isn't an Asia/ Chinese specific problem (being Asian american myself), but in my twenty or so years of gaming, I've only ever seen this with the Chinese or Asian countries. Region locking them would spare not only the players of Atlas a lot of greif, but also the Grapeshot staff from being overwhelmed with banning waves and complaints.

As most people probably already know, fiber is non-existent on many islands in the tundra areas. Since fiber is one of the key resources in even beginner gear, it makes these places even more hostile. In order to combat this without making these places easy to settle in, I have a few suggestions that may work individually or in conjunction with one another: -Make seaweed spawn in the waters around tundra areas. This will make players have to spec into diving and water fortitude, thus making it difficult but not impossible to obtain fiber. It also rewards building a character around their target area. -Make all islands (excluding polar) have fiber in varying amounts. In this case, a tundra island should have fiber but the resource should be fairly uncommon. Like gather certain berries on islands, it would require a sharp eye and careful scouting to stay on top of fiber needs. -Make sickles actually harvest fiber from berry plants. To balance this and to make it still feel harsh, the sickles could degrade much faster when used on berry plants and the yield of fiber can be drastically lowered. (Perhaps you have a 1/3 chance of getting one (1) fiber from each swing. If you dont harvest fiber on the swing, it still degrades the plant). -Make certain tames harvest fiber from berry plants. Since taming is incredibly difficult and most of the time completely pointless (why would I need to spend resources and time on a mount when I can walk across the tiny islands in no time at all?) I haven't tamed many creatures. In Ark survival evolved, many creatures had the specific ability to harvest fiber. One of the creatures was a bear. Since I have not tamed a bear myself, I have no idea if bears can actually harvest fiber in Atlas. That being said, since bears acted similarly to scythes in Ark, I would assume that in Atlas bears act similarly to scythes in Atlas, meaning they can collect lots of fiber but only from fiber bearing plants. Giving the bears or other creatures the ability to harvest fiber would serve two purposes: 1. It would give players incentive to actually tame creatures. 2. It would make companies in different regions appear aesthetically different. While a company from the temperate area might be conventional fighters using swords and guns, the tundra companies would typically use more animals. This creates a natural culture and world building that feels organic. -This solution is a bit trickier. Create some way to trade or export fiber from other areas without forcing players to make the trip. This would likely mean utilizing the ship npcs in a new and unique way. Essentially, you would send a boat (the amount of materials gathered would vary based on the type of ship and crew level) and send the boat out to a region with fiber. Initially, this sounds incredibly intensive and laggy, however there is a way to do this without causing too many problems. Much like how the npcs at the freeports dont actually pick you up and transport you to a different island in the server, these gathering npcs dont actually have to be present in the world to do their job. Essentially, the npcs and the ship will just be unavailable for a time while they "gather" the resources from the far area. Depending on what server you send them to, what gear you give them, and the ship/crew's level, the speed at which they accomplish their mission will change. Once the time is up, the ship and the crew will respawn in the designated area (a new structure might be needed to facilitate this, perhaps a trading post or expedition port.) with all the materials they were ordered to recover. The ship will need repairs and the operation would be relatively costly depending on what is gathered and the distance traveled. All the tools would be consumed in the process. Obviously this is a very far reaching solution, but I think it could solve many problems in one swoop. *** I understand that game balancing with a new game is a very difficult and often frustrating thing. Honestly, you guys shouldn't have advertised this game through streamers the night before it released, but that's another story altogether. The important thing is that there are many of us who are in this for the long haul. We'll complain and moan about how broken the game is, but that's kinda what we are supposed to do. We'll let you guys know when something isn't right, and hopefully we'll be able to provide ideas into what solutions we have in mind. Despite all of the backlash and poor media image, there are still those of us who really appreciate how much work you've been putting into this game in the past few days alone. Working through the holidays and fixing the major issues incredibly quickly is something many devs would shy away from. Just remember that in all of the shouts and screams of people who spent two hours in the game and quit, there are those of us who see what you are doing and will be there as you walk this game into its full potential. It will take time, it will be frustrating, but there are still those of us who know you guys will get there.