Goombay

The official populations continue to dwindle as the most significant game changes are geared toward single-player and non-dedicated.... speechless.

Thank you @Jat!

5 hours ago, Kummba said:

U can feed berries once every 4 days to crew/tames as long as they are idle. They consume nothing at all.

OP just doesnt want to put down some chairs by himself, he wants prebuild stuff, lame.

OR he dont know about resource chest and food larder, that pay feed the crew. @Goombay

I have no idea what you're talking about, but we have over 200 NPC crew manning cannon towers and puckles spread across our island. The issue is running around to each one every day/every couple of days and maintaining them. It's a pointlessly grindy process that could be easily remedied with a centralized location to do so. I feel a tavern makes the most sense from a lore perspective (for people who care about that).

Tavern. Let us build a simple building, like a tax bank, where we can place gold and food. Make it cover the island, just like the flag does, and feed/pay all manned crew. If you want to get really fancy, make it possible to "hire" crew every once in a while, just like a freeport vendor.

For the love of god, it would make this game 10x better overnight. We spend HOURS a day running around trying to feed/pay crew, and going to the freeport to replace them.

I can't explain how big of a deal this would be. Please.

HAS SAIL VELOCITY BEEN FIXED?

HAVE SPEED SAILS BEEN FIXED?

12 hours ago, Jatheish said:

It's something we'll always be working to improve, and there will be a steady drop of changes coming throughout the Early Access period as you can never say 'enough' when it comes to both client and server performance. We made some networking changes last night, which were more tweaks to replication values that should result in increased server performance, especially in cases of large ship battles. It'll also open more ways in which we can save perf -- which is currently being investigated -- so hopefully, we can take it further in the coming weeks.

As for switching engine, there aren't any plans to do anything like that

 

The networking range changes seemed to make a big difference when loading in our harbor, great job and thanks for the reply!

9 minutes ago, Chucksteak said:

No, it wouldn't. I try to keep in mind that the only thing I know of that some of the devs worked on was Ark. I do not consider that a AAA title. It has never ran as well as it should have been able too, and that's with a 70 person max limit. 

You also have PUBG, witch ran like shit for many months in EA before they ironed it out. However the max players is 100, but we at least see a potential for 100 to work properly.

Fortnight, same thing.

Sea of thieves, super big server map, however I think only 20-50 people per server.

The irony being that GS wants this to be a Mega company only game, yet are 100% unable to deliver on this. 

Those are good examples. I wouldn't say they want this to be a Mega-only game, as they have made many fundamental design changes to restrict mega companies and encourage smaller groups.

Whether folks want to admit it or not, the idea of massive battles in an MMO context is a huge draw for people. They promised 40k+ players on launch, and that brought a ton of people in. After participating in massive sea and land battles, it's why I play the game. With technology as advanced as it is and the way the game was marketed, I simply refuse to believe this game can't handle 30-50 people in a grid without it becoming unplayable. There's obviously something *very* wrong, and it's not improving. 

The question is: What's being done?

3 minutes ago, Chucksteak said:

I have an assumption that its the UR4 engine. I have seen it do a lot of amazing things. Hosting more than 100 people in a successful way is not one of them.

A far, far, more talented dev team has been working on an mmorpg and suffering similar setbacks. I believe they had to stop thier progress and completly redo the net code to try a different tactic.

If I had to bet money, I would bet they will not be able to ever handle 100 people in a grid seamlessly. I do root for them to figure it out though.

I hear a lot about it being due to the engine. All of this is speculation, and without any experience in that domain, I have no idea. Perhaps more frustrating than the in-game lag is the lack of communication in terms of future plans. If game engine issues mean it's not going to be fixed, I think the team is wasting a lot of time and resources putting band-aids on a gaping wound while a bunch of hopeful game testers wait around for improvements. That wouldn't be good for anyone.

If you were to poll everyone to ever play Atlas and ask them what they think the most development time should be spent on, I'm very confident server and client performance would be #1 by a large margin. 

Let me preface this with saying I have absolutely 0 knowledge about coding or game engines or networking. I'm nothing more than someone testing your game providing the best feedback I can. I've spent *thousands* of dollars trying to build a system able to play the game smoothly, largely to no avail. I'm currently running an i7 8700k @ 4.8, 2080TI Founders Edition, and 16 gigs of ram @ 3200mhz.

To be fair, I get 150fps out on the sea, especially in lawless servers. But the moment I approach a harbor or populated island, it drops to 20-30. Lower than I'd like, but I can live with that.

It's the server latency that kills. our alliance organized a raid on B11 last night, with the server population reaching 59 in the initial attack. My latency immediately jumped to over 200, but I don't think that fully reflects the quality of life reduction in-game. Changing inventory slots took 5-6 seconds. The delay after reloading a carbine approached 15 seconds. Players and tames warped and rubberbanded everywhere. Grenades took 20-30 seconds to detonate. Playing the game felt like I jumped in a hole full of a wet concrete mixture and tried to wade through it.

That was at 59 players in the grid, so I'm sure you can imagine what it was like when more than 70 were there. Eventually, the server completely crashed, which is not uncommon. The frustration of playing under these conditions would force any casual player to immediately quit.

This game has INCREDIBLE potential with large-scale PVP. The mix of ground and sea combat happening concurrently, extremely customizable defenses forcing attackers to create multi-faceted strategies to overcome them. It's something I've only experienced in Planetside, and I absolutely love the concept.

Most people I talk to simply say, this is how Ark was, and it was never fixed. I didn't play Ark. I refuse to believe this can't be fixed, or at least vastly improved. I appreciate all of the recent patch notes including optimizations and memory reductions, but they haven't made a dent. The lag from early days six months ago is very close to what we experienced last night.

Would it help to cap the number of structures allowed on each island? Are there plans to improve server hardware? I think the team needs to address this problem, and I don't mean to patronize with my suggestion below:

Developers, join a grid during wartime tonight. Attempt to play your game the same way we do, and think about your experience. Maybe you already do this, I don't know. I would happily pay $15/month in subscription fees if it allowed you to upgrade hardware or hire folks to take a look at it. 

Thanks for reading, and let's work together to make this happen.

would also love to know

Credit where credit is due, Grapeshot. Well done balancing torpedoes.

Dear Jat/Dollie/other Grapeshot staff,

The Ice Cave is brilliant, well done. Cargo racks, the harpoon and new weapons as well. I’m not into tames, but the new ones are cute enough. But let’s address the torpedo in the room.

We’re all having a wonderful time loading up common schooners with one-sided 5 torpedo launcher builds and griefing legendary ships (video coming soon). But even a cursory glance at concurrent players proves this update, combined with your completely arbitrary and now-reverted bans, has mortally wounded your game.

As an eternal optimist, I think you can recover if you remove torpedos and take a moment to balance them, much like you did with explosive barrels. In my estimation, this needs to happen this weekend or you’ll face a dramatic loss in game testers. You may or may not care about this, but if you do, please continue reading.

The primary mode of PvP in your game is ship combat. Without it, you don’t have a game. Land combat is buggy, laggy, and generally unenjoyable for most people. If more than 30 people are in the grid, it’s virtually unplayable. 

The end-game objective, as far as I can tell, consists of farming rare resources, finding powerful blueprints, building a strong ship, and fighting your enemies with it. That has kept a lot of us around through the six months of testing so far.

Common torpedos on a common schooner are doing 9-11.5k damage to ships. That typically means taking 1-3 planks off a ship with anything less than 180% durability mythical/legendary defenses. If more than one torpedo lands, goodbye to half your ship, regardless of quality.

The resulting meta is common schooners with 3-5 torpedo launchers running at 15-20 percent weight. Most major companies aren’t letting their blueprinted ships leave the harbor because of this, as I’m sure you’ve heard on your Discord. Yes, the cost of torpedos is punishing, but quite easy for advanced companies to manage. I feel the most regret for smaller groups who can’t farm those resources and thereby stand no chance.

Torpedos are an interesting, visually appealing addition to the game. With some tweaking, I think they would be fantastic. But as it stands, they’ve removed all impetus to pursue your intended ship combat advancement hierarchy. 

For now, we’ll take advantage of this obviously unintended and broken meta. I do hope you’ll keep your word, listen to your player base, and make the necessary changes. If not, you may as well continue investing development time into tames and PvE mechanics, as people clearly aren’t sticking around to sail the 2-4 hours necessary to find another populated grid worth engaging. 

Thank you, and have a great weekend.

One torpedo deletes 3-5 planks, hitting for 9-11k. Most major companies are now just rolling schooners with full torpedo build.

theyve broken the game and ruined ship combat, full stop.

CHANGE THE KEYBIND TO CALL YOUR SHIP LADDER DOWN SO IT DOESN'T ALSO UNSEAT NPC'S IF YOU MISS THE RUDDER

VERY DOABLE?

5 hours ago, Willard said:

I did they are already working on it (as Dollie said on discord). Btw you cant test it with sextant and only 1 ship. You need 2 same boats going side by side with different quality sails to see its not working. We did tests multiple times, 2x lvl 1 brigs with same weight, 2x lvl 1 schooners with same weight. Results are all the same - speed of these ships was exactly the same. Problem is 1 ship had common speed sails and second 120% legendary sails

can you link to where they confirmed they're working on it?

I've played since launch, and the K camera still seems like an extremely detrimental aspect of PVP.

Let's consider for a moment your island is under attack. While building defenses, you probably want to hide turrets and assets around terrain. You probably want to set traps and have the element of surprise against your attackers in certain areas. None of that is possible with K-cam. They can see everything. Worried about going around that corner? K cam. Wondering how tall/wide/thick a pill box or cannon tower is? K cam. Climbing a tower to kill mortars but worried there might be puckles covering one side? K cam.

The idea that you can get a 10,000 foot view of the battlefield around you makes no sense. Don't get me wrong, I think third-person over the shoulder view is essential. But the K cam is completely unrealistic and more suited for a developer tool than something everyone can use. Perhaps it has a place on PVE servers, and perhaps it has a place on private/RP servers. But it has no place on official PVP servers if you want any kind of balance. I constantly use it to my advantage, and it feels wrong. It makes the game seem so unrealistic. It removes any potential for dynamic defense setups.

If you disagree, please lay out your case. I hope we can have a solid discussion about this.

bump

2 hours ago, DilBert said:

That is the only time the rename function works is when you did not name it. Once named you can not use the rename.  

Did you read what I wrote? I pressed cancel, and did not name it. That's why its name is "Schooner." This is exactly the situation where a rename makes sense, there is a command for it in game, but it's broken.

Not sure about the first one, but larger objects have definitely proven to block spawns in the past. The sneak talent reduces the aggro range of all hostile creatures to the best of my knowledge.

Long story short, dropped a new boat and got attacked by an NPC. Ended up pressing cancel and it was released as "Schooner." If you hold E on the boat, there'e a rename ship option on the scroll wheel, but it doesn't do anything. Can we expect this to be resolved?