Kyorin

You just read the highest amount it hit in the month? Why would you do that, that just makes it a terrible chart.

You are using made up numbers though so I'm not sure what your point is. Atlas would be 27076 peak players on Jan 22. And with your NMS numbers both are clear terrible trends? I hate statistics because of how easy they are to manipulate retards, but I fail to see how using imaginary numbers proves anything? EDIT - NMS was wrong, my steam charts is acting funky.

I wouldn't call soloing hard. More like tedious and not fun after you lose progress X number of times. Just comes down to who has excessive amounts of free time or gets lucky in their neighbors. Frankly the main "difficulty" in the game is due to losing progress while you are offline or due to bugs/glitches/exploits, not to things that happen while you are actually playing and that you can "get gud" about. Can't say I've seen a single soloer complain about getting killed from actual pvp combat (obviously not counting pre nerf naked fire arrow spam) or losing their ship in an ocean battle lol. Which sucks. PvE gets stagnant and boring, but PvP is full batshit retarded. Always been baffled by people that defend zero rules anarchy as great gameplay and hardcore pvp action. That's like playing an FPS where your character is still standing where you left them when you log out for other players to shoot and collect kills off of and than bragging about your kill/death ratio. Ideally some sort of combination of the PvP and PvE rules or zones would be best and than just ditch the separate pvp and pve servers.

Supposedly they're having a direction change and want to focus on making things less hell for small groups. Check the newest captains log announcement, 19. But there's going to be minimal changes until March since they're stuck working on the already announced feb content stuff. Otherwise no solid details yet on just how they're changing things. I'm willing to wait until than and seeing what their patches are like that month before losing all expectations for the game anyways. If they say this but all we get is some juggled values but no actual mechanics than I'm out.

Well to be fair he's just going off the current facts that are available. GS haven't released any road maps or actual plans. No trello. The current "upcoming" section is pretty underwhelming and is just unasked for crap content. Many of the existing systems are broken or just plain don't work as intended, but no "this is temporary while we work on something better". No concrete final goals on paper beyond vague Starbound-ish hopes and dreams. There are graveyards of MMOs that tried to use the excuse that WoW didn't start out in its current state. This just doesn't cut it when you already have a solid example to work off of. And that you are directly comparing yourself to. Also you have to go by GS/WCs track record, which so far has been identical to the path they tread making Ark. Honestly I think Atlas is worse actually, I had way less broken base mechanics in Ark once they fixed the initial performance issues.

But you don't keep plugging content from one pipeline into the main game immediately just because it finished. Every new big of content has it's own issues that are just getting loaded on top of the existing ones. That's like programming 101.

What's more important is that the claims system just doesn't work. Between the bugs or incomplete bits and the problems with neutral flags, they need to rework the mechanic from the ground up. PvP you can just kill people and work around the issues.

No they aren't. See the rest of the threads comments as well.

Dude, don't be a dumbass. Drag queens are known for how they dress. For better or for worse, they enjoy being flamboyant. I've watched enough project runway and bumped into them occasionally in RL to understand this. I wouldn't call his comment especially negative.

The first few weeks I read the patch notes with hope and interest. These last few have just been pure morbid fascination. And not even due to bugs or admin account hacking either. The neutral flags that are barely used and have a ton of issues. The (needed) heavy nerf to fire arrows while not fixing or changing spawns and alphas. Oh and regular arrows are now shit too. Floating on another players ship without any velocity to leave it. Exploit still exists because you CAN USE THE BACK LADDER to sink them still. The fountain of youth and age debuff fiasco. And than this last patch with the stone changes, large ships ramming smaller ships with no consequences, and a token nerf to the dragon that takes the full 8 hours to kill. EDIT - Oh and the invincible puckle. why are "turrets" even a thing again? Especially like a week after the dev diary saying they hated them.

I get the feeling that's what they wanted to do with Atlas if you look at the encouragement of giant companies. But it just doesn't work unless they implement more mmo mechanics and focus less on being pirate-Ark. Frankly the more I watch these patch notes the more I feel official servers will be a ghost town in 7 months unless they do a massive redesign. Either how servers and maps are structured, a massive companies/claims rework, a mixture of pvp/pve on one server, well thought out offline protections, something anyways. Using nerfs and buffs to promote the behavior they want from players will never work, you need hard rules from game mechanics.

Don't forget the overload of creature spawns in some servers. Both in the ocean and on land. That sure as hell isn't helping things either.

Well there is a sort of progression they seem to be setting up. Just the bugs and terrible balancing and malfunctioning mechanics obscure it. Freeport -> Lawless -> Company Play or owning a Claim -> Powerstone Islands, Ghost ship, Kraken, company alliances and raids Although the fountain of youth being rushed out alone and ONLY on those islands shat all over that. But I agree completely that they really need to sort things out and think like an MMO developer and not like a survival game developer. MMOs are a completely different beast, just a persistent shared world alone is a huge undertaking. Scaring everyone away to private servers is an absolutely terrible idea when you are paying a hefty amount each month for this many official servers. On unofficial they won't have any interest in your paid cosmetics since they can download a ton of mods for free.

Hate to break it to you, but it's literally an old Ark build from before Extinction. Grapeshot is is also the same core team that originally created Ark. They've had 4 years of experience with Unreal Engine 4 now, they know what the community that plays their games is like (chinese, griefers, solo complaints, tamers, how large tribes act, PILLAR SPAM), they should know better. Yet they keep repeating the exact same mistakes. So yes that sentence of mine works just fine. Also I'm not in the blind hatred crowd. However what I DO see is them pushing new poorly thought out "check out this cool new thing!!" content on top of their existing broken systems. Again. Not a single mechanic can be said to be in a good place, yet they push out new content (like the upcoming February patch) on top that have their own issues and require Dev attention to fix. You don't start a game of Jenga with half the blocks in the bottom of the tower cockeyed and halfway out.

The problem is they reused assets and copied the game yet learned nothing from Ark. Bugs from Ark that were fixed still exist, bugs or broken mechanics that are still in Ark still exist, gameplay people hated from Ark still exists, AND they removed things people liked in Ark. And to top it off they're doing the same things they did when Ark released: rushed patches that break the game and screw people over, fixing something than suddenly breaking it again later, balancing/fixing things in a strange order that breaks parts of the game, adding features in a way that feels like they don't actually play the game, silence on important issues, and so on. Kind of confused why you are so against constructive criticism. You can holler about EA as much as you like, but "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." And Atlas is full on repeating it. I bought the game because I figure I'll get $25 of fun out of it over the next few years, but damn could they have a great game if they had a better focus.

Eh I think OP stated things pretty well. He's not asking for specific balancing or buffing or asking for offline protections. He's asking for the base game to be fixed before piling more crap that's broken on release on top. A few months with no new content and an obvious focus on fixing and improving things is very forgivable if they are transparent about it. The art teams can still create new content but it doesn't need pushed to the game ASAP.

Nah I heard they're in America. Basically the company that owns the server farm is a German company. Tracing was showing the flag of the owner of the final destination, not the location the ping actually went. One of those mismatches that happens when automating stuff. That's what reddit was saying last I heard anyways.

People complain because base mechanics are still broken and they keep shoveling more on top. And they take no account of their own server limitations when adding new content. And this is an MMO (their words and goals) so many issues can't be avoided with a simple server move. You are stuck playing with everyone. And please don't tell me to move to unofficials, it's rather telling when that's the primary solution. Ark followed this exact same pattern. Many issues were never fixed and just shoved under the rug. 3 years later many of these issues still exist. That is our fear.

I'm not disagreeing, they're the ones calling it an MMO and focusing on many players in a persistent shared world though. IMO they really didn't think through just how much work an actual MMO is. Those server fees are going to make them start feeling the bite a few months down the road with the bad word of mouth growing and less incoming players.

Your last fact is opinion. Kinda lowers the impact imo. I do agree that they need to rethink something because servers just can't handle what the devs want to do though. Game needs some hardcore redesign decisions. MMOs have large scale clashes on special maps with their own servers for this very reason.

Sounds like you need to stop gaming for a year, you've become the bitter old man on a porch. Admittedly I've become rather jaded myself in my 30s now, but saying everything on steam is bad is obviously a problem on your end. I mean I'm working on the assumption you aren't a troll. Anymore it's hard to tell who has a legit opinion and who is worthless.

Because traps and fire arrows make use of your mad leet skills right?

Wouldn't be too bad if the whole wife and kid thing was implemented instead of half the mechanic. Especially with the current design where large companies will just barricade the island for funsies.

But since the exploit is still there it literally solves nothing. Until they block known exploits and put the claim system in it's final form it's beyond retarded to wipe. Also imagine every player spawning in freeports again at the same time with the current server performance.

Kinda wish they gave it some upward velocity at an angle and humorously ejected players each time they made contact with another players ship. Woulda been better received I bet. And you'd keep bouncing until you got free.