Polar Express

Great work devs! I’m very happy with everything you are implementing. This update and wipe will bring back players. The pve guys need to chill. They can now play on the PvP server in relative safety and the sense of community they foster should be brought over to pvp. The protections you are intending will level the playing field a lot more for all sized companies while also rewarding mega companies. Whole Islands will effectively become mega companies of seperate companies by force. As a PvP player (as part of a mega company) I invite PVE players to join in and at least try it out. You have a place and I have seen how you work together on places like darksideRP etc on your streams. that is what this game needs and I believe that is what the devs are pushing for in an organic way. To those players who want “private places” or to play solo. I am sorry. I wish you luck. May I t be the first to advise you that some servers are suited to that play style. By all means come play on pvp. Your one man company will still be a welcome addition to anyone’s upkeep costs reduction. Just at least try it out. You can check a lot of my past posts on the general discussion posts and see that this update contains a lot of content that I, and a lot of PvP players have been urging for. We want all players to be able to play and for PvP actions to be more purposeful and less random. Offlining was also something that chased a lot of new guys away and I am very happy this has been addressed. I believe this captains log’s content introductions should be explained by the devs more in writing on places like the wiki and steam news updates with specifics layer out in more detail in order to see results when it comes to getting this game back up the ladder on most played/popular. We want this game to succeed. I want grape shot to make more FAT CASH and I want that money to mean more content and a game to rival something like EVE in regards to player loyalty. Start handing out steam keys to streamers and start showing them the great work you have done. A lot of streamers played at launch for a couple of hours and put it down saying it was broken. I believe most of the things they bitched about have been fixed in varying degrees. Also try wiping it every couple of months through EA ( maybe a player poll every couple of months) in conjunction with big updates if you can. This is a tried and true recipe for getting player base up. This isn’t ark. If people are actually playing pvp and you release stats at the end of every couple of months it will feel like the players achieved something during that wipe ( maybe reward skins for seperate achievements- for both PvP and pve related achievements) and run each wipe with a series number. Looking forward to seeing everything in the dev stream in action. And looking forward to pve players coming over and at least trying the new pvp servers. Good work.

I’d like to see the ability to unclaim your own ships as admin for your company be implemented if possible. We have a shit tonne of ships and rather than just scuttling them I’d like to give them away or trade them with other players with some kid needing to sit there for hours and hours waiting for the claim flag to do the job. 1. This would also be good for PVE/Roleplayers so they can trade ships with others as a business or whatever. 2. Additionally in PvP people can demand someone surrender their ship and if both parties agree the ship can be handed over without the need to wait hours and hours. 3. Smaller companies can trade bigger companies fully levelled ships easily for alliance purposes so the bigger company won’t need to care how many ships it loses in PvP if their allies are just creating them and levelling them to hand over. Hopefully this will lead to the focus coming off raiding and moving to more sea battles. Im in a mega company btw ( for any haters out there so don’t bother with the toxic shit posting) this is just an idea. I’d like to see people work together more and I believe the current way of trading ships is essentially only based on pvp mechanics when it really need to be. I appreciate any input.

I’d love a wipe. The games gone stale over the last few weeks. I’d support regular wipes aswell. Maybe every two months or whatever. I would like some skins and items that I can spend money on aswell. The claim system needs some work too. I’ve posted a number of ideas on how to get everyone into the game with less focus on all companies constantly destroying each other ( I’m in a mega and lately all we have been raiding were offline small/ mediums) I’m sick of wrecking some kids shit while they’re offline. I want the player base back. Id like some PVE zones around free ports that PvP mega companies claim tax from and fight other mega companies for control over. That would mean mega companies would actually have a reason to fight mega companies and the solos/ small groups and PVE guys can just do their thing farming or building ships for mega companies to get back out into PvP sectors and keep fighting. All the things I’ve mentioned above would essentially need a wipe. I believe these ideas would also bring back a lot of the player base on a clean slate without all the benefits we took advantage of when the devs rolled out game breaking parches. Just my opinion.

I’d say your intro line could be re thought to sound less agressive. But the points are all good ones. I have some mates playing on darksideRP and they say it’s been a lot of fun. I think the Devs put a lot of Rp stuff in the game ( neutral claims, the alliance system, taxing and tax banks, farming, cows, chickens, the incoming NPC run player market vendors, notes, even gold to a degree) but on official we just concentrated too much on pvp ( in the pure sense of destroying other peoples stuff for the sake of it) i regret that we mis intemperate the devs’ and chased away a lot of the player base with our behaviour. If people wanna play COD or rust then all the power to them, but I don’t think this game will live long if we keep being toxic arseholes to each other in game. good post my dude.

Discord is a massive issue especially when you have a lot of people. It was fine when I was in a smaller group but when we merged into a mega and started using their discord we all had a lot more crashes. This game plays really well on my OMEN gaming laptop but goes to aids on my freshly wiped MSI which I consider to be strange (because I bought the OMEN as a meme while I was overseas and forgot my MSI). I have all the same drivers and both are 16gb ram with same gtx 1070, 8th gen i7. All steam games are on ssds and discord is the only other program I am running while playing atlas. I never really thought about it before but the second I joined a mega my game went to shit. I wonder if it’s discord or too many entities. I will test this. I do hope they manage to bring the player base back. I felt kinda sorry for the smaller groups we were raiding when I joined the mega. We didn’t need the mats or the land or anything from them. It was completely random and we just offlined and stone aged smaller groups. I regret this now because I may have been a part of the problem with this game for most of the player base that left. I have posted a number of ideas in other threads recently on how we can split megas and smaller groups up fairly as well as include pve players on the main servers (feeding taxes,ships and equipment from Pve sectors surrounding mega company controlled free ports) being a mega company on an empty map over the last few weeks has kinda killed the fun of this game. I hope the devs implement something that will bring everyone back( big and small and even solo companies)

I believe this would easily be balanced if they decreased the number of SODs in a sector by half or more. That way even if they render in a couple of ships length away you shouldn’t be fighting 3-6 at a time.

Get rid of fast travel. I’m in a mega company. I prefer big fights at sea. I don’t give a shit about raiding. Raiding is usually just offline PvP against stone walls. I want people to actually be there to fight back. The main way the devs can force this is by making people truley care about their claims. My company has been top 3 since launch. We sail around and drop claim flags everywhere we go. When we raid(offline or not) we claim because that is how the game ranks companies. I don’t agree with this. Gold should be the measure of any pirate’s wealth/power. If my company wants to hire a smaller one to go greif a group then it should cost my company gold to do. Fast travelling is an easy mode way of playing this game. It detracts from the fear of dying in PvP. If my company wants to pvp then we should need to play to live. Not just play to win. The Chinese run out naked and try to punch players to death and die in so many times I can’t count. There is no penalty in the game for that because the know they can just fast travel or respawn easily. A lot of people in this thread have a lot of good ideas.

You’re dead right. Johnny will just have to walk...

Lol but......but........but....... git gud or go play pve (I’m pretty sure that’s the cut and paste MLG, try hard response in most threads) hahahaha this game is awesome. Enjoy it my dude.

F i s h o i l .

I wish they’d wipe it all now. And bring in regular wipes. Maybe 1 month or 2 month cycles. This game has had too many drastic changes where people (myself included) took advantage of the dev’s oversight and exploited it to get ahead. I think it would be welcomed on the most part and like games like rust the devs will see an increase in player base on wipe days. This way they can add bigger updates aswell without everyone getting butt hurt that their stone walled mega base isnt as OP as it was before the update. Just my opinion tho.

Lol they should just drastically lower the amount of skill points you can get overall. That way Johnny will need to trade, or team up with people Johnny doesn’t know/ like in order for Johnny to get that rihno he really wants. Just my opinion.

Agreed. Make bear tier 3. I would be bothered if they didn’t add tier 2 fiber tame tbh. Most of the resource gathering mounts are tier 3 anyways. The bear is pretty op as it is . You can tank high level treasure maps with it, it’s fast, it’s strong, it carries a lot and has high HP even after the patch. I’m able to clear out yetis easily with it and tank alphas no problem. The only real counter to a player mounted on a bear is distance and lions. To add to all this you can use it to raid. I would however like if they changed the need to learn taming in order to ride creatures. I’d like it if someone in my company could tame things and everyone else just needs to learn riding without the need to learn taming aswell.

Good points man. This is how many of us feel. This is why a lot of members in these forums get so annoyed when it feels like the devs are making the same unnecessary and unpopular choices over and over again. I feel like this is the “best worst game” of this quarter. I may be going out on a limb here but I believe this is the kind of game most people have wanted someone to make for the longest time. Buying into early access for a lot of people is a feeling like they get to beta test something that could potentially be amazing. The average gamer wants more than kill streaks and KD ratio rinse and repeat rebrands of COD. This game has that potential in my opinion. It needs clearly defined game implemented hierarchies to let people know where they sit in a map with 40000 potential players from across the globe. The devs have put so many “RP” based functions (claim system, tax system, alliances,rudimentary trading systems etc) that we as a player base need to find out how to make them work to essentially partake in a giant social experiment of sorts. The devs can’t leave everything up to the player base to figure out though, because at the base line level (with the anonymity of being behind a key board across the planet from the guy you are offlining) humans are genarally too stupid to figure out how to work together for any extended length of time. The devs need to look at the core ethos of the game to put in checks and balances other wise their game will fail. They need to understand what it is they are selling here. EVE from what I have heard (I have never played it) has done a lot of this right. The game is just too difficult to understand for many of us. Now we have a game in atlas with fairly simple concepts ( who doesn’t understand how colonies worked in the 1600s -colonists were “good guys” and pirates were the “bad guys”) people need to understand that not everyone can be the boss of their own colony straight away, and at the same time, not everyone should be a pirate all the time. The devs need to learn and the players need to learn. This game could be amazing if it stopped failing so hard.

Why not just make it so you can’t spawn in a remote bed that’s far away from your current grid unless another member of your company is in close proximity to it (5 tiles away) that would mean if you weren’t already in the “fight” you can’t just respawn and fight immediately unless your team “holds the ground” near your spawns. This may mean a mega company will have 5,10, whatever number of people spawn in to combat assuming one of their players is in proximity to the bed. But if a smaller company is better at PvP they should technically have a chance to win if they kill all the bed campers on the other team. This idea in conjunction with respawn timers on beds will give the actual impression that you are “winning the fight due to spawn attrition” rather than fighting a never ending Zerg that can spawn on 10+ beds around you without any end in sight. If you lose the fight in PvP you shouldn’t just have to wait 1 minute to respawn. It should have an actual effect on the flow of a fight rather than just sitting there spamming respawn.

Ignore the trolls complaining about smaller groups and solos. This game has a lot of solos and that’s totally okay. Some of the trolls don’t even own or play this game. And to be “realistic” you really should play a game before your opinion matters.

Small groups don’t need more than 1 claim imo. 5- 10 players can easily play on a single claim. I don’t know why people want whole islands. The game has so many mechanics in place to encourage cooperation with other groups. People just don’t use it often. Everyone complained about the trailer saying the game isn’t like that. In reality it’s nothing like that because no 5-10 companies are gonna get together on PVEor PVP and make the town the trailer was showing. I set my claim to neutral with allow aeveryone to build and people were too afraid to be in my claim. Id really like smaller groups to work together more. Tie that in with the protection of a mega faction and PvP servers get a lot safer for the little guy. Just my opinion. A lot of the toxicity is the players. Everyone thinks claiming vast areas and whole islands with a 4 man group is a good idea. I just think they deserve to get raided for being greedy.

Just turn the free ports into nation capitals for the big companies to fight over. The smaller groups can build in the sectors around these nation capitals with a passive tax levy added to the nation capital’s bank. All the squares directly surrounding the nations capitals are PvE with a forced neutral 1 claim limit per company excluding companies with more than 25 players. The passive tax could be based on the number of players living within those surrounding sectors. Make certain materials only spawn in PvP areas so pve players need pvp players. additionally make a way for “pirate” companies to have an offline raid and decay protection and make them no collision ( a limit of 10 ships per “pirate company” ) so they won’t need land or a claim but will need to pull into an island to gather materials or attack others to obtain them. Give the big companies who own the territory capitals some form of faction/ territory specific buffs and specific cosmetics (fortitude buffs,gathering, bed respawn timer buffs or ship health etc.) for the whole company. I belive this will allow for the bigger companies to need the smaller companies and vice versa. Just some ideas. Really good thread OP. Thankyou

Hey my dude. i read and bumped your other thread concerning the state of the game and it was well written. The inclusion of the videos of blatant hackers/ exploiters was also a good inclusion. I hope the stuff that was laid out in the most recent captains log works to help get a lot of the player base back as well as adding a lot of new players. They did point out that they realise they can’t just cater to mega companies or streamer companies (by extension) and realise smaller and medium companies make up part of the player base too. Which is good imo. I don’t know if the devs are trying to piss people off essentially. I just think they were focussing too much on the hardcore PVP aspect of the game. The player base for atlas and ark I don’t believe are specifically the CSGO, PUBG and Rust types. Which is good sometimes. In ark you can generally talk to other players (in my personal experience which may vary from server to server basis) rather than just being required to KOS lest you be KOSed first. I came to atlas (from playing mostly Rust on australian servers) with that in mind and the intention to change my play style. This seemed to suit atlas for a while until the stone update went live. Then offlining by a number of wannabe MLG (I’m assuming former ARK mega tribes became rampant and chased off a number of smaller and medium groups. That made discourse with a lot of the player base ( and therefore some game mechanics that I believe should be crucial to this game ) like trading and neutral claims with smaller groups living on them together to help defend etc disappear. Id really like to see the devs bring in a system that rewards large companies by turning them into what you’d essentially call a “government” with smaller groups ( civilian population) living on their land to reward those “governments”. I then hope the bigger groups will be rewarded for only fighting other bigger groups rather than smaller groups. I think the latest captains log may be addressing something like what I described above, which will hopefully bring smaller companies back to the game on a fair playing field. Keep up the good fight buddy. And thanks for the insight. It’s a shame to see such a cool game die due to such small mistakes on the part of the devs. I hope they can fix it.

Also realist. Do you work for Bethesda or something? Get lost if you’re gonna sit there and spam crap all day. I see you in every second thread spewing vitriol. It’s EA and you don’t play so your opinion isn’t worth much to players trying to voice their own in game concerns regarding the game they’re actually playing and actually own. Youve got no dog in this fight mate. Buy the game and come play in the pool with the other kids, rather than sitting on the side talking shit and trying to give your opinion on a game you don’t even play and therefore have no experience about. i know you’ll get salty and reply with something edgy in an attempt to discredit what I’ve said so I’ll precede your rebuttal with this. Your opinion doesn’t matter to me. You don’t matter to me because you are not someone I need to worry about. You won’t raid me and you can’t kill my character in game. You can’t claim my territory flag and you won’t sink my ships. You won’t do anything to me other than post some more goofy shit under a quote of this message. That won’t affect me either. I hope you’re enjoying the game bro. Please feel free to respond any time. I probably won’t read it. Because your opinion doesn’t matter to me. xoxo

It’s a real shame but I think the devs are turning this game into a shittier version of rust or ark. It had so much promise to focus more on working together despite companies and allegiances but the try hard MLG no lifers came to town and offlined the neighbourhood. People keep saying it’s a PVP game but I came to atlas from rust trying to play a game differently. Sadly now I have reverted to the same old toxic KOSsing fire arrow meta wanker that this game needs you to be in order to play it. It’s a real shame and I hope they can fix it. Until then we will “PVP”walls of offline players and run the MIN/MAX Tryhard BS the game devs keep catering towards. Building something for 3 days and having someone come and ruin it in 15 mins while your offline is the path the devs have made for the players. It is still EA so there may be hope yet but I really doubt it... really a a massive shame.

You seem like one of the chumps I railed by ramming cheap as Fuck ramshackles into their brigs. Can’t do that anymore since the cry babies lost their shit and squealed to the devs to change it. If ramming and sinking a brig with a ramshackle is too cheap and nasty to have in a PvP game or getting wolves to attack your ship by aggroing it and standing there while it sinks your shit then why hasn’t offline raiding been patched yet? Is that not in the same spirit senpai? also please send moar rage. That didn’t take you long to take the bait. Send some freinds too so I can hear what they gotta say. ps, I’m australian. I play rust with the Chinese you guys get so salty about and cry in the forums. They hack, so we git gud. Difference is you people in NA and EU are generally pretty bad so you cry about and call hacks and “quit anyways” rusty moose is like rust PVE compared to any aussie server. Git gud scrub. luv you

Moar please.

Lol all these kids saying if you don’t like it then go play somewhere else are the no life low life’s doing all the offline raiding. I gave up on official a long time ago after being offlined a number of times in the polar.... like seriously why bother raid some hermit in the polar.... they raided an empty base twice after I closed it up with nothing in it. To the kids saying get gud and go play on unofficial. You will have no one to offline soon. You turned this into rust. enjoy PVPing walls at night chumps. The games nearly dead. ps, don’t mention pve. I’m back on rust. See you there soon?

I tried to get to the fountain of youth at h6 yesterday. I lost connection due to 255 ping and the server had 150 players in it for 4 hours. I couldn’t even log into NAPVP because my character was still in the overpopulated h6 sector. So I could change my spawn region and I couldn’t resume playing because my character was in the AIDS LIMBO happening in H6 for 4 hours. That meant I couldn’t play the damn game AT . ALL. To the devs, please consider the fact that you have 1000s of players on your game all trying to enter a 150 player sector at the same time. Maybe it would would have better to activate all the fountains at the same time for even just one day so that the vast majority of players with characters over 90 years old (a lot of your player base atm) have the chance of attaining the damned well thing so they can carry on with their lives. You are doing a great job with this game, Ive enjoyed my 350 + hours playing it despite some of the issues, additionally I accept this is early access and will have some growing pains. Keep up the great work. Well said my dude. I agree.