Ringo O'Rourke

Have you tried the pillar stack/ceiling/ladder thing? You stack 3 pillars up, put a ceiling on the top, run a ladder from the ceiling down, climb the ladder, place the next stack of three pillars a little forward on the slope, add a ceiling, add ladders etc. etc. You end up with a staggered series of pillar/ladder columns, but it works to get you up. I don't know if that's exactly your issue, but if it is, that might work. And have you tried the glider suit for coming down from the mountain? I think it's in the armor tree.

There is definitely going to be a short term dip in the player numbers because of the resource respawn issue. We've been online a few hours less a day since it happened, since there's little you can do without resources. At some point you have to repair, build something new etc. I'm sure others have the same experience. The question is whether the short term dip becomes along term one. Which means it has to be patched soon.

Obviously it was not working as intended. Foundations blocking resource respawn for huge distances is handing griefers a massive trolling tool. As much as Wildcard is widely regarded as sometimes trolling their own players, there is no way that was their intention.

People voted with their feet to build in lawless. My friend and I took one look at the claim system before we even played and knew it would be a horror show. And it was. If Grapeshot takes away the lawless option people are going to vote again with their feet...and it's not to go to claim-land.

I think the devs had in mind that voice is overwhelmingly primary and that chat is at best something you use sporadically (for example, just for global map chat). Perhaps for the ARK scale of server community, that was okay. But ATLAS is at the MMO scale, and at that level you need a robust text chat system, as you just can't voice chat with everyone all the time. Especially for trade, personal messaging via text is a must too.

Love to see this for the northern/southern polar zones: a sled pulled by a tamed wolf (only usable in snowy climate).

The issue with flags in PvE is the contesting timer. It's made for PvP, as in, oh, the countdown has begun I have X amount of time to prepare for a fight and defend my base. In PvE it means, oh, some schmuck wants my land, now I have to camp the base continually for the next three weeks until he gets tired and goes away. So much for sailing! A pillar claim system that is modified to prevent spam is a far better system. It should have X number of days decay based on log-in or interacting with the objects, and could even have a resource tax based on size of claim. This way whether your claim is preserved or not is down to you, not your neighbour. 20 years of PvE game design has pretty much shown any interactions between players can be a cause of grief. Some things aren't worth worrying about, but land claims are fundamental in Atlas. It needs a system where other players don't affect you directly.

I'm starting to wonder why did they make a PvE version of their game in the first place if they don't actually want to deliver a PvE game?

I was in a polar zone last night with literally 5 people online (according to the ESC menu player count). Myself, my neighbour, two Chinese talking in Global chat in squares and numbers, and a random fifth person. What happened? Literally ten minutes after the square chat spam started, the fifth rando claims in global: "I hoped you enjoyed stealing from my raft". The south pole, man, the south pole.

The absolute worst is when you aggro a bird like a vulture or a seagull. You can't get away from them. They relentlessly ding you in the head for miles. I'd say it's probably the most annoying thing in the game, and was added for this reason (joke). They even however about if you're underwater, then you ding your head when you surface.

The 2x is great. It basically allows you to say more. Which is what the game is all about.

My friend and I have a base on a lawless island, mind our own business, share when someone asks etc. We're veterans of survival games, and think Atlas has a ton of potential. We love sailing around the world for rare supplies, and hunting for treasure. However, if the clusterf*ck that is flag claims with all its built-in passive-aggressiveness, and seeming imperviousness to bug-fixes comes to Lawless, we're probably out. After the horror show of the last two weeks we just don't think that the system will ever work. That there will be someone somehow always trying to grief you. For the record, my friend and I are veterans of PvP games, DAoC, GW2, the up-coming Camelot Unchained, Planetside 2, the Rising Storm games etc. But when we play PvE we expect that passive-aggressive schmucks that you can't kill in PvP won't be able to interfere with your game.

Yeah, and above all that it just feels cheap. It's clear the entire sailing system was designed to operate with 0 speed against the wind. You can just feel it when you do sail against the wind, it just feels wrong. And it's odd that a studio like Wildcard, who fancy themselves design virtuosos, would add something that feels cheap like this.

In survival games you will die and have to start over. That's the genre. It's like Hidden Object Games, or Racing Games. If you don't like picking shapes out of mass of other shapes, don't play Hidden Object Games. Ditto for Racing. My friend and I, who are playing Atlas, used to play almost exclusively MMORPGs. But after about 2015, we felt the genre had just petered out, so we tried these new things called Survival Games. We rented a server for the both of us to play on, and played a bunch of them including ARK, Empyrion, Don't Starve, 7 Days to Die, and probably others I can't remember. We grew to love the base-building, the crafting, and yes, the losing everything and starting over. It was challenging. A lot like the early days of MMORPG's actually. For us Atlas is actually a godsend, despite it's rough state at the moment. It's the thing we were waiting for, and were ready for.

And if the controlling tribe wakes up one day and doesn't like your face, and puts/removes you from the whitelist (however it works), we know what will happen. Your buildings will be deeded over to the controlling tribe. In effect they can foreclose without cause. That's a recipe for grief. (Don't see how else this system can work). The flag system is just not going to work, ever. Unless of course, "working" involves such things happening.