Adfax

1 minute ago, CamsterAu said:

Play pve? Much nicer over here

God no.. That would be missing what I regard as the most important part of the game.

I might as well be playing Minecraft, or lego if I went on a PVE server.. Where is the fun?

This game has a lot of problems, but one that might go overlooked is how the claim system impacts player mentality. 

You see, although a claim is just a spherical zone in which you can build, people get the impression that they now "own" the islands they have claims on.

You do not own anything, even in real life.. Not really; it is all just an idea in your head. An idea that is encouraged by the claim mechanic to make people absolutely cancerous to anyone going near their land. Always with max tax rate, always having the cannon towers open fire if you go near.

When I can't get near an island without being fired upon because of delusional cretins, we have a problem. Especially for smaller companies who have significant amounts of work they could lose from the process, and the pop-in range being too close. I mean, it would be fine if it were SOME islands that did that, and SOME that did not. But when the default is just to openfire on anyone approaching, then you're not exactly encouraging adventure. 

Some people say "announce yourselves", but to do so is to put yourself in significant danger. If I say, "here I am guys, just here to get some treasure", they now know I have a treasure map for their island; all they need do is kill me and then the gold is theirs. It is a system that just puts the adventurer on the backfoot, but that the cretins feel justified in enforcing. 

How the system should actually work? If you attack someone, then you attack back. Going near an island that someone HAS to go near to get whatever thing they came for, is not, in my opinion, fair for opening fire on them; and it isn't smart either. If you think it is? You're going to make a lot of enemies very fast.

Now lets take a lawless zone for example.. People don't own entire islands, but they may put cannons around their base, or stuff they want to protect. This is a more reasonable approach. Not hogging an entire island that people may NEED to go to for whatever reason. 

Imagine if someone accidently kicked a ball into my front garden, and they just hopped in to quickly grab it, and I just shot them out of nowhere. Seems like a very logical approach... What if it is just the mailman?.. What if they're just approaching to ring the doorbell? Is it okay to kill them if they put a single step on my property? Yes, let me take your life, and all your possessions because you came near our building....

Get a grip people. This is an idiotic approach.

Anyone I see doing this, i'm going to actively make an effort to break into their base. And I suggest anyone else do the same. This type of play can't be encouraged for the good of this game. Even the devs are planning on making changes to make people more neutral regarding their claims. They're going to have their work seriously cut out for them.

There isn't enough space on the game to hog entire islands; if you want to kill your game, go ahead and be greedy. It just shows a serious lack of foresight on your part.

If someone attacks you, it is an act of war, even if it is an automated cannon.

Agreed on scrapping age.. They need to stop trying to fix the unfixable, with something as unnecessary as an age mechanic.. Look at how many players they lost trying to crowbar the FOY in. .. 

The issue isn't the FOY, it is the stakes you put people under when pursuing it that is the real problem. Don't hold our characters hostage, and force to pursue something we might not want to do.. It works fine with the vitamin system working like that, since it is only a small task to undertake.. Having to sail the ocean for hours for the POTENTIAL of removing the debuff is ridiculous. 

And there are all walks of people who dislike the age mechanic for different reasons; it impacts cosmetics, stats, time spent, all these people are just going to be furious at the game for what is essentially no reason.. Because you want a bump map and a debuff on a timer. Just drop it and save your game.

7 hours ago, azmoodeus said:

To me it just seems like most features in this game have been more of an afterthought or just "this feature would be cool lets do it". Most if it lacks depth or any considerations to "what if" questions. It feels like an amateur mod that was cooked up without any real playtesting to see if the features were fun or feasible. Examples being sap requirement to stone structures which arctic regions already desperately need for their armor to even remotely survive. I mean just look at the patch notes where in one they buff discovery points to 3 per zone and then just a small hotfix later they reduce it back down to 1 per. It screams a divided development team and everything seems rash and not thought out.

I agree with OP on the aging mechanic on all points. It doesn't belong in a MMO (as the game is advertised as). Also placing the fountain of youth just a few meters in front of the powerstone altars just screams lazy. "Meh fuck it lets just place it here, it'll save us some time"

That seems like an accurate estimation. It is crowbarred in to make the game appear more innovative. In actuality, it is just a bump map and a debuff on a timer. 

You don't just put something in the game because it seems cool, you put it in if it works with everything else. The age mechanic takes away from the game far more than it puts in.

What the devs should practice isn't innovation, but exnovation. Ark's formula proved successful as a base to build from; it should've been set as the standard. The age mechanic messes with this formula, making it worse overall.

9 hours ago, Olthoi said:

They just need to turn it off until they figure it out.  The concept of an age mechanic is cool, if implemented properly.  At the end of the day though, that's not the hook for me.  But the mechanic as it is, is certainly reducing my enjoyment of the game.  So a game "feature" that isn't that important to me is affecting all of my playtime.  Its not fun the way it is.

I spent my entire play session last night on a raft headed to a FOY for death runs.  Only to realize once there the FOY wasn't active.  That wasn't fun.

Grapeshot:  I understand its early access.  But you see how miserable this feature is working?  Turn it off and work on it offline.  Test, test, test.  Because in the interim it affects 100% of the players, whether they like the concept or not.

I'm failing to see why it is a cool concept. 

Infact, no one has explained why it is a good idea... I can't see any implementation of it where it will make the game a better experience. 

We're at a point now where the devs are clinging onto a mechanic that much disdain has been expressed toward. They are seemingly determined to twist and malform their game to fit this needless mechanic in the game.

It is the reason FOY is seen as such a problem. It is the reason there has been such an uproar over the debuff. It takes away cosmetic options in the game by making your character look either too young, or too old relative to what you might ideally want. AND it  might take away your character, forcing you to replace them over and over.

All these different groups of people are annoyed by this mechanic.

Would the FOY be such an issue if people did not feel their character was being held hostage? The frustration from the FOY really comes from the stakes; the reason people pursue the fountain in the first place.. It might actually be an enjoyable challenge if it felt more optional.

All issues people have with the age mechanic come to a head when participating in the FOY quest.

-People afraid of losing their characters

-People wanting to be free of the debuff

-People pursuing cosmetics

-People who have lives outside of the game

All of these people just get annoyed by this ridiculous quest, which on the surface seems like it is the problem. In reality? It is the reason you have to pursue this quest that is the real issue.

The age mechanic only takes away; it doesn't put in... In the end, it is just a bump map that progresses over a short period of time, with a debuff on the final 10 years. We don't need it, we don't want it; please stop ruining your game by trying to crowbar it in whichever way you can.

1 hour ago, Daigari said:

For a day of real time, each element of the building should lose 5% of its strength

Thus, in 10 days, the abandoned building will lose half of its strength, and in 20 days it will fall apart completely

This will solve the problem of garbage on the servers, and to some extent solve the problem of uncontrolled mass development of huge territories.

Repair of buildings can be carried out with their own hands, or with the help of NPC personnel

To repair with the NPC, enough to put the necessary materials in the ship  resources box installed in the house

Each NPC staff should not serve more than 100 elements of the building in real day

Each NPC personnel must receive payment on an equal footing with the sailors of the ships

In order to avoid misunderstandings, one NPC should serve no more than 100 stone elements (or 200 elements of wooden elements) is not faster than a day, so that when the war, 20 NPC did not rush to fix one gates, until until the the resources.

Buildings with reduced strength should receive more damage during the assault, but not much, so as not to facilitate the assault.

 

This is my vision of game mechanics, in my opinion the most close to real life.  Of course, all these calculations-only my opinion.

God no.

People don't want age mechanics in the pirate games. We don't want them for our characters, and we don't want them for our buildings.

16 minutes ago, Nari said:

You can take a poll. Doesn't have to be everyone that left for these specific reasons but obviously for accuracy the more the better. If the numbers line up even slightly then guess what? There's another pound of correlation to add to scales. You still have more work to do. That's the issue with jumping to conclusions on topics like these. Its difficult to build an accurate representation of reality.

People who use the forums are in the minority. The player numbers are a much more accurate indicator; especially given the timing.

There are instances I've seen on forums where the general people posting are misaligned with the general majority who play the game. Not for this game as of yet, but I've seen it in other games. It is pretty rare, but it happens.

But of course.. All avenues should be utilized for a more accurate estimation on what the correct course of action is.

7 hours ago, Envie said:

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." -  Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones.

 

Give me something for the pain, and let me die ... geat last words for my own exit from this game. And in the end, a pig is what did me in too. RIP Baby Superpig.

Atlas was both, at times, awesome and horrible. There were exciting moments where small bits of hope shined through the ugliness of it's "Early Access" alpha status. Sailing the high seas with my man in search of treasure, narrowly escaping huge storms, watching dolphins arc alongside your ship ... this part of the game is really well done and has a lot of promise for a solid future game. There were times of fun and laughter - seeing a crewmate accidentally hang himself from a noose, or capturing an enemy in a gibbet and forcing them to sing bawdy pirate songs to get released. Political fights of massive proportions including inside betrayals. Trading with neighbors for precious resources - even if just lowly fruit or vegetable seeds worth their weight in gold. These were the good bits.

Sadly, the good bits get drowned as quickly as a sailor lost in the open sea of what becomes a vast ocean of problems the game has this early on in its life-cycle. I'm not sure why game developers choose this route for their games these days. In the old days of EQ, WoW etc, you had to be invited to closed beta testing to experience this level of early/broken gameplay. Now, in modern gaming times, you PAY to play this sort of broken gameplay. It's bad. I'm too old for this. Figuratively, and literally in real life. 

There are just far too many glaring flaws with Atlas for me to be able to continue at this time on the public NA/PvP server. There are hundreds of players everywhere, still struggling to make it work ... but as the bigger fish eat the little fish ... so too do the majority of 'casual' players slowly start to dwindle away in just a month since it's release. Large mega-guilds....  alliances of sharks feeding on all the available smaller companies are beginning to starve, and turn on one another. And this is, at the bigger picture level, how the game will die before it's even completed development. More and more 'refugee' companies (small outfits of friends that can't survive in claimed territories) washed up on our lonely lawless island ... tired and wrung out to dry, having lost everything to bugs or predatory players with no further agenda than wiping them out because. Pirates. That sort of food-chain goes against the equilibrium needed in the predator-prey relationship but humans are, notoriously stupid, as always. Gamers are even worse. They'll prey upon everyone else and then proclaim the game is dead because they won. What exactly have they won in a game not even finished where all the smaller groups of players have already quit? 

But before I lose the point  here,  in the bigger picture, let me shrink it back down to the real problems, and sadly it's not even the PvP at all. That's actually going along as expected.

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die." 

Ahh, the Fountain of Youth! 

 I thought that particular game mechanic would be the most painful blow ... and it nearly was. Our characters were 100 years old now and looked like prunes with a horrible multi-stat debuff! This was insane. Adding insult to injury in an already buggy/laggy game - they decided to introduce this ridiculous 'Quest' to get a youth buff to reverse the aging mechanic they designed and implemented without providing any way to counteract it with children/lineage as was promised in the game mechanic they were developing. Seriously - who thinks this stuff up? "Oh hey, we'll put this insanely difficult game mechanic in (FOY) to challenge (read: punish) the players for a broken game mechanic we didn't even finish yet!" Wow. just. wow.

So ... My man spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing from one Freeport to a nearby golden age region, to the next. Over and over he did this with a sort of insane determination most gamers don't have. I certainly don't. I tried to stay awake until 3 am to participate in this spectacularly bad 'event' ... but over and over we died trying to run the gauntlet of high-level monsters. Sometimes he would arrive in a region only to find the FOY had moved on to the next. Sometimes the lag was so bad we couldn't even move or swim let alone evade the high-level monsters. Parking a ramshackle nearby meant it would be inevitably destroyed within hours either by previously mentioned high-level monsters, or players. Or both.

But then, he finally made it. In a fluke experimental run to just find out the FOY location or if it was even still there on one particular island, he managed to outrun dozens of Chinese players that had come ashore en masse to run the gauntlet too. Like the running of the bulls, he finally avoided the chaotic aggro of fire elementals, gorgons, and dozens of high-level lions, bats, etc. etc. ... you get the picture. He was rewarded with the promised mythical youth regeneration.

Me? I was offline trying to hold our real life together. You know, taking care of our kids, cooking a meal, being tired and making coffee for us. I watched him try to quickly run my character up the beach too from my PC as the opportunity had finally come! But then, our two beds on the sloop were instantly destroyed. Probably the fire elementals I'm guessing. Not players that time (amongst half a dozen lost sloops already lost)...

So now my dude is young, and I'm still a 100-year-old crone with a crippling debuff and a young man husband invigorated and ready to go again! Well, this wouldn't work in real life and I can assure you it's not working in this ridiculous game. I'm disheartened and disappointed and he really did try. He even started the whole process all over again this weekend, albeit rather deflated this time because it was going to take days, again, to get that lucky shot at making it alive to the FOY without losing yet another (or half a dozen) sloop.

But that wasn't what finally did me in. In the end, like Robert. It was a pig.

 

"My memory. - Murdered by a pig." 

Because he had spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing to various FOY regions, my man told me not to bother coming with him - just hold down the fort at our island base - keep our tiny company intact and try to avoid getting into fights with our fractious neighbors in a lawless region. We weren't in the mega-alliance anymore - we "retired" literally and figuratively as both players tired of claimed territory issues and old/debuffed characters too. We'll just hold a small piece of some lawless island until we get rid of this old age debuff! Famous last words. 

So, to keep myself entertained, I started taming animals. I tamed a bear so our crew-mates could gather fiber and outfit their ships and we could build a small base. I tamed two lions ... The Cadillacs of destruction I rode around proudly on our island, greeting neighbors ... and sometimes eating them ... accidentally or otherwise.   We had a strange truce with the Chinese ... talking in short sentences on both sides to keep the language barrier to a minimum. Refugees from other companies and alliances moved in up the beach and we traded materials. I even had a cow to give us milk! Life was simple. 

And then came the pigs.   The War Pigs. 

It was an addiction, really. First I tamed just one or two out of boredom and for fun... then a few more ... and then before I knew it we had a whole pack of pigs - I think I stopped counting at 10 of them. I selectively tamed only level 25+ wild pigs so they would level up to 50+ and become mini-tanks of death. Kept in a pack and all on neutral stance, they were lethal guards against anyone who tried, accidentally or otherwise, to even lay a finger on our base. Just try to fight 3-4 wild pigs at once, you'll see what I mean.

Finally, I had two or three level 60-65 impressive males I was proud of and their 'harem' of lady pigs. Why not try to breed them? And so I did. The first two never made it through gestation ... a server rollback or reset aborted that effort, literally. Another pair kept glitching through the walls and wandering off ... I'd find them down by the beach several times. Maybe guard duty was more important than making little piglets. Who knows.

And then it finally happened. We were about to eat dinner and my phone alarm beeped... gestation was up on another two females! I half-heartedly logged in while we were eating to check. Lo and behold, we had piglets! Two males... tiny and nearly dead. It was too hot! (we live on an eastern tropics island) ... we spazzed out and tried to get them to follow us into the shallow pond next to our base to cool them down ...  The lions watched from their cathouse roof, licking their lips.

One piglet (the superior leveled one, sadly) died immediately. The other barely survived with a few hitpoints to spare. We lovingly hand fed it. At first, it could only hold 5 or 6 berries in its tiny inventory ... but as the hours passed it grew and could go longer and longer ... the stacks of food grew. It ate chickpeas and turmeric, and berries galore! We were succeeding! Through heat waves (barely surviving each one in our covered breeding barn by a nice cool waterfall) and cold nights lighting torches and then snuffing them out before dawn and the inevitable heat to come that day. I nursed this tiny piglet. 6 hours later. Yes, six. It wanted to "cuddle"... the first level of imprinting! I was rewarded for all my hard work with a piggy cuddle and a measly 7% gain on imprinting. No increase to health or other stats other than the slow progress it had already been making. It was 6% matured by then. That's it. Roughly 1% maturation per hour. You do the math there. All this - for a pig? It was 3:30 am. I was exhausted. My man was off trying to find an island with corn ... the pig's 1st preferred food. Perhaps that would help our little piglet mature faster! I had to go to bed. 2 more sows were gestating and would have piglets in 5 hours! They have a 10-hour gestation stage. 

Well, you can already guess how it ends. Little baby Superpig died while I was sleeping. He either starved or died in a heatwave which happens every other in-game day or so on our island. He lived for less than 10 hours of real-life time when his gestation period was just as long. His total maturation process would have taken ten times that. The six hours I spent hand feeding and guarding him, adjusting the temperature in his barn ... wasted. 

I didn't even bother to get up for the 'birth' of the other pigs. Why bother? They would just die too. 

I've read the forums here extensively ... all the stories of the baby bears people spent equally insane amounts of time trying to keep warm with packs of penguins and dozens of campfires. The losses to glitches and server resets too. I guess I thought maybe pigs would be a little easier. More hardy perhaps. Why is this how they want the game's breeding mechanic to be? Why doesn't the MOTHER PIG care for the newborn infant as they do perfectly well in real life? I don't understand why a human player has to hand feed and watch a baby animal with 25 hitpoints die from being too hot, or too cold, or starvation because the humans had to sleep. This is insanity.

~~~

The Fountain of Youth is insanity. The pig (or any tamed animal) breeding is insanity. I'm ashamed to even admit I spent so many hours doing this I was exhausted and didn't do the dishes or get a decent nights sleep for days on end. This is ridiculous. This is not 'extreme survival game' fun. 

And so, my time in the Atlas world has ended. I'm sure it matters very little to the mega-alliances out there doing their shark tank thing. It probably matters even less to the developers of this game who designed these horribly broken mechanics which punishes me for being a 'casual' player and therefore unable to get to the Fountain of Youth or to raise a humble pig from birth to adulthood unless I either don't sleep for days on end or have 3-4 friends dumb enough to take shifts and help me out (which I would never ask friends to do). It's a pirate game... but the only thing getting pirated here is my sanity and I didn't have much of that to start with since I seem to enjoy subjecting myself to ridiculous early access survival games a lot.

 

"Give me something for the pain, and let me die."

I'll never make it to the Fountain of Youth.

I am going to release the lions today. I will put them on aggressive stance so they can at least still hunt and feed themselves. My apologies to all the little lawless refugees and Chinese farmers on our island they will probably eat. When they finally do get taken down -  at least they will have died free spirits!  

The pigs? King Henry, Sir Walter, Prince Humperdink and their harem of ladies... Bertha, Gertrude, Big Betty, Brunhilde, Fannie ... and many others... They become the property of our tiny company. There are a few good guys in there I know will feed them and keep them guarding the docks while they plunder for treasure. Feed the bear, she is happy and fat. Milk the cow, or the lions will eat her I'm sure. 

My character is 100 years old. She wants to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea and erase the pain and enjoy the few memories of the sea she had... maybe one day this atlas will be a place to return to ... maybe when pigs fly! 

 

Oh, the glorious war pigs. Enjoy life, my noble friends! 

 

 

PS: If you're a Game of Thrones fan like me, here's a tribute put to "War Pigs" that is really well done and one of my favorites by Zurik to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F_PDWZxNBA

 

So what you're saying is :

"STOP THIS MADNESS IN THE NAME OF YOUR KING!"

Just now, Nari said:

Fair enough. Except for one thing. A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true.

There is no way of knowing the premise is true unless we ask every person who left the game, and they told us the truth. 

In this particular case, the devs have to make decisions; they don't have the luxury of determining if something is certainly true or not. In which case, all they have to go on are liklihoods. 

It would be foolish of them to ignore this one given the amount of indicators.

8 minutes ago, Nari said:

If I had the energy and desire to pour into this theory then I would but I don't. Which is why I instead opted to point out the flaws with the reasoning and correlations. But since I don't plan to offer anything other than that I'll digress.

The reasoning is sound. The only time it wouldn't be sound is if it were said with 100% certainty. Lets be honest here, what the evidence suggests is pretty much certain. People have been complaining about these issues on reddit/steam/official; if it were not one of the main contributing factors to why the game is declining in population, i'd eat my hat.

6 minutes ago, Nari said:

Re-read the OP's last sentence. They conclude and imply that the specific reason(s) for the decline are due to the changes listed above. They used correlation AS causation. Whichas I stated before does not hold water on its own.

Ah, now I could say you're making a strawman by assuming the OPs intentions, like you attempted to do to me when I assumed yours. 

Read the last sentence again and you'll see that the OP said nothing certain. They said "I think I know".

Did they say "this is killing the game"? No. They're letting the evidence speak for itself. And it speaks volumes.

No one said correlation is a CERTAINTY. It is just highly unlikely that high correlation doesn't indicate the true cause.

If the op came out and said "this is definitive proof that this is killing the game", then yes. In that instance, that would be false.

4 minutes ago, Nari said:

Because the logic is flawed XD

But it isn't, correlation is an excellent indicator. It just doesn't prove certainly; but what does?

It is one of the few things the devs have to go on. .If they can't trust that, they'd have to take random stabs in the dark, and where would that get us?

Just now, Nari said:

Yes. read the comment again

Correlation != causation. Full Stop. At least this is a better attempt than others. Full Stop. Nowhere did I try to discredit the data or the points that OP highlighted.

Right, but WHY did you post it. That is what we're talking about here.

2 minutes ago, Nari said:

If you see someone pushing on a door that say pull how is pointing that out to them not helping?

Are you denying that your motives were to attempt to discredit the OPs evidence?

That you were just making a neutral statement, that "correlation is not always causation"?

2 minutes ago, Nari said:

straw man

Dictionary result for straw man

/ˌstrô ˈman/

noun

noun: strawman

1. 1.

   an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.

At what point was that my argument exactly? I'm not saying the data is invalid or contaminated but simply not processed thoroughly.

I'm stating the assumed motives behind the statement you made. 

If you were trying to help OPs case, you'd have never said what you did. 

1 minute ago, Nari said:

Nice strawman argument. You get my point and at this point you're just trolling your bait.

How is it a strawman? 

Are you not attempting to discredit the evidence by bringing to everyone's attention that correlation isn't always causation?

Saying that doesn't help the OPs observations, so either you're putting forth a neutral statement, or you're skeptical of the evidence.

4 minutes ago, Nari said:

It merits more research yes, but is not enough to hold water.

You could walk in a room after hearing a scream, see someone covered in blood holding a bloody kitchen knife, and a dead body with a fresh stab wound.

You couldn't say for sure that person killed the victim, but the circumstances that would have to unfold for them not to be would be highly unlikely.

And lastly, you'll have to provide a counter theory to the loss of all those players.. What reason do you have that such a significant amount of players left around that specific time?

1 hour ago, Nari said:

Coloration != causation. At least this is better attempt at using data to prove a point than my buddy shawn over there...

Correlation doesn't ALWAYS prove causation; however it is enhances the likelihood that the cause is true.

It is almost like you're attempting to discount this evidence entirely. That would be foolish.

I find myself asking... "Is it worth killing your game for an age mechanic?"

2 hours ago, CamsterAu said:

I disagree, having age based on level is a terrible idea. And what you fail to realise/mention is that FoY is not going to be the only solution to old age, it's simply the only option they have rolled out as of yet.

Tying aging into the servers passage of time is a good solution to the issue of quitting players bodies and buildings screwing up everyone else's gameplay

Or... Just have them disappear after a certain amount of time?

Why ruin the game with this stupid mechanic, if that is all they wanted to do?

3 minutes ago, Fathom said:

Just put a FOY in all of the Golden Age ruins.  Done.   Next topic.

They should just remove age, the game really doesn't need it.

It adds literally nothing.

8 minutes ago, Envie said:

 

Ok, sure, they could just decide to leave it out entirely - that would be ok too. Very few MMO's have ever tried this particular kind of mechanic. I actually like the idea in theory. I like it far more than the stupid vitamin and temperature balancing act mechanics. I'd rather have aging/dying/lineage than those. 

But the point is, if they're not done with the lineage/family feature, they shouldn't have put aging into Early Access at all - wait until they have it done. But to add insult to injury, they add an even more stupid mechanic (FOY) than the aging debuff in the first place! 

All it equates to is a bumpmap that progresses over a period of time, that eventually builds to a debuff that forces you to do something you don't want to have to do. Something difficult and annoying; at the threat of losing your character (in the future) and a debuff (currently). 

1 hour ago, Envie said:

This is the really baffling part for me. 

Why, exactly, are we being punished for a game mechanic they have not even implemented yet? If they're not going to turn aging and the debuff off, at least say "Oh hey guys, we're sorry we haven't finished developing this aging/lineage feature yet, here's the Fountain of Youth buff to counteract it until we are finished developing it... " Then put the thing in ONE  location ... and LEAVE IT THERE PLEASE.  At least give players the chance to get to it without hundreds of players cramming into each zone every time it moves and causing massive lag due to hundreds of shipwrecks, players and high-level monsters everywhere. 

Please, developers, TURN OFF the aging mechanic and debuff until you get it working as intended. This FOY thing is just completely broken and a terrible idea. You're sinking your own ship here.

Or just turn it off entirely.. 

Try to think about what an age mechanic brings to the game.. Just try. It adds nothing to the core of the game, only ruins the look of people's characters, by either having them older or younger than they want them; and forcing us to commit to this annoyance just so we don't have to endlessly reroll over and over.

1. People hate losing their characters they've grown to love

2.People don't like being given a character to customize, only to have elements of that customization to be ripped away by a mechanic that adds nothing to the game.

3.People don't like being forced to do stuff they don't want to do, to maintain something that they've always had.. As someone described.. The age mechanic is just the vitamin mechanic but 100x worse.

30 minutes ago, Nox said:

Right now, since the information isn't publically availed, the only people who get early alerting on the location of the FOY are people in very big alliances.

The net result of this is that those people rush the location and then by sheer force of numbers are able to overcome or divert the 6-7 level 120 alligator spawns or the 12 level 160 wolf spawns etc.

So now your superfriends alliances can send in enough bodies to distract the 12 fire elementals at 07 (yes, really 12), the 8 crocodiles at c6, the .... 

This is so un-fun, and god awful bad that it makes you as developers look utterly incompetent.   Forgive me if that sounds harsh, but I've been at this for 2 days.  I know people have lucked out and done it, but really I'm supposed to spend hours and hours running naked into this garbage for what?  because you couldn't finish the primary game mechanic which was family so you put in some half baked garbage that is just stupid?

My other option is to live looking like a prune with a perma debuff and not get the buff.  This really does feel like you are forcibly excrementing right down player's throats. 

The fire elementals whose fireballs go through water, the wolves that have an attack range longer than polearms and attack through structures and wall clip, the gorgons that stun you for 25 seconds, the tigers that do 125 damage a hit to wooden structures.

I don't honestly think you could crank out game design this bad if you tried, this is really some gift you have.

 

I'd rather they just took age out. I've yet to see anyone tell me what it brings to the game.

It has no place in the game, and they've forcibly crowbarred it as some means of innovation signalling. 

They need to understand you should not innovate for innovations sake, they're losing sight of what their game should be about.

Age should be turned into a character creator slider, and fountain of youth should just be scrapped; or changed into the fountain of knowledge or something, and give people a buff if they optionally want to pursue this absolute trash. 

Don't hold our characters hostage, and force us through the the shittest game development I've ever seen.