Ringo O'Rourke

Yeah, that's rad and inspiring.

Ship construction should not be balanced for tames. Period.

If the mat cost for building is balanced for tames then we have Ark 2.0, not Atlas.

Always cut your sails down to 10% before you cross a border.

You crossed the border there at full speed, which moves you farther into the next grid before the load in completes. If you are crossing only at 10% (or better yet 0% sails and coasting on momentum), you aren't going to be very far in when you finish loading.

Works to help avoid SoTD, and it should work for whales too.

If Atlas has ambitions to be more than Ark with occasional ships, than something has to be done to challenge tames as the most essential utility in the game. One way to do this, in keeping with the theme of the game is to make NPC's more useful.

Give NPC's more carry weight. It doesn't have to be the in the thousands like tames, but say let each NPC carry 250. To make them more viable off-ship, and again, as useful as tames, let them be paid in food only, or at least mostly in food, while working on land.

Finally, consider letting NPC's wield gathering tools. Again, they don't have to gather on the order of bears, elephants or rhinos. But at least let them be in the same league as tames in this ability.

Making NPC's more useful in this way would also reward those who specialize in the game's main selling point, sailing ships, through the Captaineering skill tree. It would also allow more people to specialize in sailing, if NPC's were as useful as tames.

Planks are by far the most tedious part of building a ship.

Hulls and decks and fairly quick to gather for. Ceiling pieces, walls, railings, doors, cannons etc. may add up to more total materials than planks, but they are far less tedious to work with. Each of these pieces do not cost much on their own, and you are placing each piece in turn as part of your ingenious ship design. This makes them far less monotonous, though in total they cost more.

Planks, however, are just a straight up farming grind. One piece after another swallowing your time that just goes into a predetermined spot on the side of the ship. It's even tedious on a 2x weekend.

The devs have stated their goal is to make becoming a pirate faster and less tedious. One definite way to make that a reality is to nerf plank costs,  a lot.

Yep, it sucks that tames are now the optimal way to play the game.

And when you don't want to play that way, and play a different way, what happens? You feel like you are wasting your time, and so play something else.

(I know, I know, no one forces you to play a certain way. But the design of the game sets the "rules" as to what is the fastest, most efficient, most productive way to play the game.)

I'd like to see Nation vs Nation (aka Realm vs Realm) as the PvP in a PvP/PvE set-up. Never been a big fan of the Eve model which replaces factions with large guilds.

Nation vs. Nation is better in my opinion for small groups as you are not at the beck and call of larger guilds, and can contribute in your own way.

Yeah bookshelves are a great QoL addition. If you regularly do flotsam, SoTD, AoTD you have to start throwing out BP's because you amass so many. Somthing that stacked them would be great.

I'm worried though about their compensating changes for the stone-sap debacle. It could be a case of the "correction" being just as bad as the "mistake".

Sap nodes everywhere will just take away some of the pleasure of trading, living in difficult biomes or traveling to harvest. Leave this in the game for those who like it. 

I really, really hope Grapeshot does not make the Tundra easier to live in. This means not adding sap.

Most people who go there willingly (as opposed to be forced to go there because of lack of claimable land), do so because they enjoy the solitude or the challenge.

My friend and I went there for both. We are veterans of survival games, and loved building our base up from nothing against the elements, even when the wolves were OP. We also enjoy the small community of like-minded people that has developed, with each person contributing as they can, but also minding their own business. This is what we left the more populated zones for.

I fear that if sap nodes are added to the Tundra, and fur armor is easy to craft, all the problems that infest the easier zones will come to the Tundra. It will no longer be the place of solitude and challenge that it is.

Keep the Tundra hard, cold and sap-free. 

The problem with cyclones is that they just ruin whatever you are currently doing, and you just have to sail through them for 10 minutes. 

Fights with SoTD's, hunting flotsam etc. A cyclone starts? Oh well, ten minutes of dodging spouts with nothing to show for it.

Apparently the main mod on the Atlas reddit doesn't even play the game. (Not sure if this is 100% true, but that is the word in the subreddit).

So the moral is: don't overly rely on the Atlas subreddit in taking the pulse of the playerbase. It's going to be skewed.

A reduction is meaningless for the quantities of blocks you have to produce to build a base.

It needs to be reverted

24 minutes ago, darcek said:

The people have been heard!

 Stone Structures crafting costs have decreased by reducing the metal cost by 55% and reducing the organic paste requirement by 25%

No it's still a punch in the face, instead of a punch in the face and nards.

Mistake. 

They should have done nothing about sap, or removed it entirely.

This is just a red flag in front of a bull.

10 minutes ago, Notorious said:

Or get off land and go trade or farm resources. When player owned shops come it will help balance the problem.

If you live in Tundra you already do this. That was why you live in Tundra, you want it a little more difficult, and that includes weekly trips for sap.

No one in Tundra wants it to be made easier to live there. Adding sap to Tundra trees would just mean an influx of the griefers we left the temperate zones to avoid.

If Grapeshot is deadset on killing their game with this sap for stone patch, then at least switch paste in fur armor to another rare mat (I don't know, maybe salt?). Then at least Tundra players can ride out the decline of the game until it's time to move on.

It's a ridiculous change for PvE. Absolutely no justification for it...unless the goal is to add more arbitrary hassles like FoY debuff, Fog + Cyclones + SoTD while sailing and so on. If that's so, mission accomplished.

8 minutes ago, Percieval said:

Sure it has. If you want it easy, go play unofficial. 

The issue is not wanting it easy. The issue is not wanting it dumb.

The FoY debuff is dumb design. Fog + Cyclone + SoTD making the selling point of the game, sailing pirate ships, a hassle is dumb design.

And now making a basic block of the game, stone walls, require one of the games rarest mats (organic paste) is dumb design. Again, not because it is hard, but because what, maybe 20% of the islands in the game have the mats for organic paste available to them. 

It just gives the players more arbitrary hassles to overcome.

We are close to quitting too. 

Each patch just makes the game less and less fun.

At some point you just make the calculation it isn't worth the effort anymore

You need Sap/Organic Paste to live on the Tundra, literally. You just can't make it without a regular supply. Most Tundra-ites either go to a Freeport to stock up, or have a destination in another zone where they pull in as unobtrusively as possible to harvest.

We do the second, and now I'm expecting either:

1) the sap nodes will already be harvested every time we sail to gather them.

2) The proprietors of the island are going to be become much more possessive, and it will be a huge hassle to get the sap we need.

If sap for stones is going to be permanent, then you need to change the paste requirement for fur armor. Don't make it easy to get, we live in the Tundra for the challenge. But don't make us deal with the sap-camping crap we know is coming.

This is ridiculous. I thought it couldn't get any worse after the all-court effort to make sailing a drag (fog + cyclonse + SoTD).  But they pinpointed an equivalent for base building.

Organic paste is the rarest commodity on the Tundra, and you need it to live. Putting it in stone recipes is a kick in the nards on the order of the FoY.

Why are you making the game such a hassle? It's supposed to be fun.

Yep, with fog + cyclones + SoTD, sailing has become a drag. In a game about sailing.

Sailing in a game should make you feel like this:
 

This exact thing happened to me a few days ago. Except I had some bonus fog added to the deal.  It's almost like they don't want people sailing.

55 minutes ago, rurickjames said:

 

Having zero experience with ARK coming into Atlas, I was not expecting (nor have experience with in any game) taming.  I was, as you say, expecting more on the ship side.

Frankly, other than horse & cow/bull, having other tames makes the game feel...odd.

Yeah, just judging by my neighbours on my island, people are prouder of the bear or the elephant they've trained, or even the horse they can ride in circles on  a little beach, than they are of their ship.

It's a real shame actually. 

Having tames at all in the game was a mistake. 

The game should be about sailing, and all the taming and breeding mechanics should be there with ships for to you play with. (I don't know what they would translate to, maybe carpentry, and getting special wood etc.).

There's a reason the forums are filled with people talking about tames, but much fewer threads talking about ship design.

That's because sailing and ship design, for a game based on sailing and ships, is woefully underdeveloped.

So this happened to me last night on a tundra square.

Fog: Okay, I can handle that. Just be more attentive, look for SoTD silhouettes, and maybe reel in the sails a bit. It can't get worse can it? Yes it can.

Cyclone: Okay, in addition to fog. At least I can see the spouts in the fog and can maneuver between them. Oh, they're much closer together than I've ever seen them, with 2-3 almost spawning on top of each other. Okay, I can take a little damage and repair once the rain stops. It can't get worse, can it? Yes it can.

SoTD: Let me get this straight. You give me fog, tightly packed cyclones and now at least 3-4 SoTD in proximity? Fog + Cyclones packed together make it almost impossible to see the SoTD soon enough to avoid them. And now with the new SoTD behaviour they aggro on you sooner, and never let it up. Did I mention I was in a sloop?

There was absolutely no way to prepare for this situation to mitigate it, or once I was in it to escape it by skilled execution. It was just an impossible, screw-you moment. But surely Grapeshot wouldn't add anything remotely approximating impossible screw-you design to the game would they? Why, yes they would....FoY. Have a crippling debuff unless you want to lag wizard cheese endgame dungeons with the zerg while you can.

Without decent, non-punitive sailing, ATLAS is just an inferior ARK with worse tames on cramped islands. But yet, sailing is set up with moments of guaranteed failure you cannot prepare for. As the FoY example illustrates, this is not a bug, but a feature of ATLAS.

Therefore I ask you, with sailing designed to be a frustrating crapshoot by Grapeshot, why not just continue playing ARK which is superior in all other aspects?