Actium Praetor

Atlas' dedicated server uses at least three ports, and three per shard plus a lobby server port if you run more than one grid square. You'll have a game port, a query port (which I suspect will be what Steam will use), an RCON port for administration, and a redis port for the lobby server if you have more than only one grid square.

And to further this, every now and then the game will gitch and superimpose a segment of Ark landmass mesh over the Atlas world. Lore-ifying that bug would probably be along the lines of "every now and then, the ghosts of the past reemerge into the present and the way the world was reappears as an apparition, if only for a moment..."

I deal with assholes on a regular basis out in public. I play games to relax and unwind. I neither need nor want assholes to be in the games I play to unwind from dealing with assholes, and PvP attracts assholes. I am not alone in this, by any stretch of the imagination. If you think that any/everyone that prefers PvE over PvP only do so because they can't handle PvP, you're one of the assholes they're probably trying to avoid. Everyone has their preferences, and the devs are trying to cast the widest net possible, which is understandable given they want to sell their creation. I only wish they understood that balancing and tuning the two play styles is completely different, instead of trying to force both PvP and PvE into the same box. That hasn't worked in the past and won't in the future.

Just logged in to check on tames and make sure everything is still where our company left it, and I was one of two players on the map square's server. Two players. A month ago we had 60-80.

Just logged in for the first time in like a week. Two weeks ago there would be 50+ people on at this time of night in our little slice of game world. Just now there were five. FIVE players. On a previously pretty active square of map. That's a 90% player count drop.

What I take from this, and of course everyone is free to weigh in, is that the stone changes were intended to be part of a larger series of changes to the build mechanics generally, but they for some reason felt compelled to implement a specific aspect of the build mechanics changes in the form of the stone recipe changes. However, if this was the case, rolling out one huge game-changing tweak without the rest of the changes that would give that one tweak some context mechanics-wise was exactly the wrong way to do it, just as rolling out the FoY questline haphazardly as a solution to a self-created problem (of players aging faster than they should have in the first month of an EA release - having players reach age 90 in a month is nonsensical within the context of the greater game) without considering the ramifications and knock-on/collateral effects of forcing a whole game's worth of playerbase to swarm a single zone was also exactly the wrong way to implement some form of age reversal before the general mechanics for handling aging and lineage were implemented. I've been a software developer for a long, long time. I've written commercial software since 1996 and have slung code as a hobby since 1981. One of the things they teach you in comp-sci is that you really really don't want to implement a change to only one algorithm if that algorithm is dependent upon a number of other algorithms unless you've extensively tested the change to make sure you don't break everything by changing one thing, until you're absolutely sure that changing the one algorithm doesn't have unanticipated ripple effects through the others that interact with it. Nothing about either the FoY implementaion or the stone changes show signs of having been carefully thought out and tested against the rest of the game proper, to make sure the changes make sense within the context of the greater whole - instead it feels like the only testing that was done was to make sure the whole thing didn't crash. It feels like a rushed patch, an attempt to throw a solution, in the case of the stone changes to a (very very) possibly nonexistent problem, or in the case of FoY at a problem they themselves created, at the wall and see if it'll stick. And all both patches did was make the game a lot less fun than it was before. They didn't improve the gameplay experience, but instead took the gameplay experience in the opposite direction. Gonna repeat that last line for emphasis. Hopefully the devs see it. All FoY and revamping the stone building tier did was make the game significantly less fun. This is not the direction you want to go with an EA title if you want it to ever reach release.

I'm my company's primary land-construction engineer. I've built the overwhelming majority of our base and its surroundings, which is essentially a tiny blip of a sandbar that's now an island fortress with guard towers and defensive batteries, a protected artificial harbor, and our zone's only functional lighthouse. (I like to build things, so if a game has a building mechanic I'm usually elbows-deep in it pretty quickly.) I was prepping for a decently big second build - a megapen for our company's large animals - when the stone change came through. I have a chest sitting there with 100 stone floors, 100 stone walls, 100 stone roofs, large and small gates, a bunch of wood and thatch components for temporary structures during the build, etc. etc. etc. Probably about twenty tons of building materials. (When I prep for a build, I fab 100 pieces at a time of each type and I farm the material up independently of the rest of the company so I don't negatively impact other players' efforts at galleon builds, etc. I'll fab up thousands of parts and then throw down a build session like nobody's business. I am a building machine.) I just don't feel like logging in now. It's like there's no longer a reason for playing. I literally haven't logged into the game for more than about an hour since and that was strictly to make sure my new video card was set up properly. Prior to that I was about 160 hours deep. And it's not just me: fellow company mates that are IRL friends say the chat in our grid square has almost gone dark and the daily player count is down by over half. it's like someone stopped the winds and the sails have all gone limp. The sea is still now, quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. It's the quiet of desolation. Of abandonment.

I'd just like it if people couldn't train a SotD onto your galleon while you're offline in PvE. We lost a lot of resources when someone did that a couple days ago...

After watching the downward spiral over the last few patches, it came to me that there's actually one simple underlying reason from a programming perspective why things are going wrong (from a social perspective, the argument can certainly be made that the developers aren't listening much to the playerbase, but that's its own issue), and how it could doom Atlas to fail as a result: They're trying to tune/balance the gameplay experience for both PvP and PvE equally, or more specifically, they're trying to apply PvP tuning/balancing to PvE. This doesn't work. This has never worked, throughout the entire history of gaming. This probably will never work. You can not tune PvP and PvE the same way. This. Does. Not. Work. PvP and PvE require, not need or want but straight-up require, distinct tuning and balance optimizations that are often incompatible with each other. What works for PvP will often break PvE and vice versa because the different play styles for each mandate mechanics optimizations that don't carry over to the other style, or cause collateral, knock-on, or counter-intuitive effects. This is why MMOs are built the way they are - whenever you see PvP implemented in a MMO that isn't "globally" PvP, it will always use a specific mechanics subsystem designed carefully around PvP that carries a similar "feel" as the PvE main system but doesn't work the same exact way. If you ever wondered why MMOs that are non-PvP often have specific PvP areas or arenas, this is why - those areas are operating under different rules with different optimization requirements. A solid example of this in Atlas is the fire arrow/bow nerfing. What was ostensibly intended to make fire arrows less of a mini-nuke in PvP when fighting other players made them next-to-useless in PvE against alphas where you actually need a lot of burst damage and a solid amount of DoT to successfully kill something with 10x your HP that can probably outrun you. By reducing the effective damage value of fire arrows and fiddling with bows to slow down their effective use, the balance change in PvP has effectively rendered fire arrows useless against alphas in PvE. The tuning that may help in one play style hurts a lot in the other. The changes to stone construction could be seen as another. Greatly increasing the cost but greatly reducing the defensive usefulness of stone structures may have helped some balance issues in PvP but essentially make stone structures uncraftable for large areas of the game world in PvE, and the lack of effective defense against aggressive wildlife means that PvE again takes it in the shorts by forcing players to build with materials the wildlife will (for some unfathomable reason) endlessly attack until they break through. Because the dev team is trying to treat PvP and PvE as the same for the sake of making life easier on themselves (as having two sets of parameters to deal with basically doubles the work required), they're damaging the playability of the PvE side a disproportionate amount by trying to use PvP-centric optimizations in PvE. You can't have it both ways. Pick a side and stick with it: either make Atlas all PvP or all PvE, alienating the other side and driving them away in the process, and build the game as appropriate, or try to shoot for the middle and alienate both sides through balance changes that may help one but will penalize the other, dooming the entire project to fail.

Translation: "We've been watching the shitstorms brewing all over the Internet and it's obvious we might have pushed a bit too hard with this one, but we have no idea how to back out the stone structure change without looking like asses."

Problem: An existing zipline that sees a lot of use develops a case of "zipline blocked" if a brigantine is brought near to any point of the zipline. Relative positions seem to not matter, but it seems like the brigantine has a large area of effect (about three brigantine ship lengths' radius) that disrupts existing ziplines. How to verify: Position a zipline near or across sufficiently deep water. Test zipline to ensure it operates correctly. Bring brigantine alongside (but NOT under) zipline but within two ships' lengths of the zipline's path. Zipline will report being blocked even though the ship is well away from it. I have not yet verified this with other ship types.

Move your ships well away from the zipline. We parked a brigantine about twenty yards off the side of an island base and had the "zipline blocked" error appear on a line we use all the time. We had to move it about fifty yards farther away before it became usable.