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totrider

Pathfinder
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Everything posted by totrider

  1. We just lost a bunch of ships too, been rendering in our base about once a week to avoid decay, since everyone is taking a break. I absolutely hate decay in this game. If only you would get a few days warning via company log, you could just have it show up in your discord and at least decide whether or not you want to take action. Also, the "rules" of this system is not explained in-game, and finding out about AFTER you loose your stuff should not be necessary, whatever the circumstances. There is literally no way of figuring it out without losing anything either, as you can't exactly "see" in-game whether something is about to decay, as the timer is reset in any instance where a timer is actually present. And I know for a fact that it is a recent change causing this, as we have had a backup schooner sitting in our home port for over a month, without anyone visiting it, and without crew on board. In fact, I even checked it a few weeks ago when we "mysteriously" lost a very new ship, which we used for whaling. None of our backup ships had taken any decay damage while sitting idle and without crew. We actually believed it was enough to just be present in the grid for structures to reset as well, but again, we had to learn the "hard" way that this is not the case, as you have to actually render it in (when having multiple bases in the same grid). Now we have 2 ships left, a galleon and a ship designed for taking out SOTD and similar. This BS makes it pretty worthless to invest any major time in this game, as you cannot take even a short break from it. I get that these systems are in place to combat people who completely left the server, or placed temporary structures etc. But this is just affecting the wrong people. And it is not like you can go and say: "hey, can you like, give me back my ships which we spent hours on, to both gather resources, design, build, paint, and sail with?". We were finally getting to the point where we had a solid baseline of ships, where we could start considering investing into blueprint parts, but now we don't have any ships that we can sail in the 100 different directions needed to get all the various resource variants for said blueprints, it would just take waaaaay to long time... So... yea... just give us a company log warning for starters, it would help immensely...
  2. Yea, that is what I feared. At this point, it is more a matter of principle, and wanting to complete all the challenges that the game throws at us. But this is not a challenge, just boring. As I wrote in my post, we confirmed the route with the route on the official map by using the tools needed for plotting your own ghostship route. It was the same. Like you, i also considered that the route might not update unless you "re-tick" the quest, but we already tried that. We also tried re-logging
  3. ... great, wasted another hour on hunting an seemingly non-existent ship... great Took a look at the quest list on the Atlas, and we could see a marker for the ghost ship, but it was a bit off. For one, it was in a place that was way off from the supposed route that it would take according to the info that is available on the ship. We even checked the tools for the official server map, and it was still the same. The marker was just standing still for the entirety of us approaching it, and when we got there, nothing... We thought that maybe we had to be close enough for it to move, and it also had to be the right time of day, so we waited an entire in-game day cycle, but still nothing. I noticed that the patch notes mention something vaguely about "Improved Ghostship appearance logic" whatever the hell that means. I really hope that this is just a bug or something, cause I wont really call this "improved". The only other thing I could think of happening here, is that someone else already took it out earlier, and it is now on cooldown for respawning, as the info on the ship mentions. But how long would this cooldown be? Since we "hunted" it for an hour, and it wasn't moving since the beginning, it would have had more than an hour to respawn. Still, this doesn't explain why it wasn't anywhere close to its supposed course. I mean, it wasn't even in the right grid of the closes section of the route. Gonna take a look again tomorrow and see if the marker has moved, though I am not getting my hopes up on this.
  4. O...k.... Well, I guess I will check that out. For some reason I did not expect that to be the case, you know, knowing how the rest of the game tends to treat you, so assuming you are not trolling, it does kinda make it a lot easier. Also did think about it today before checking on my post here, but didn't get around to testing it in-game.
  5. I mean, not only is hunting the ghost ship super boring, from what iv'e seen of other people encountering it, it doesn't even seem like there is any carrot at the end of the stick here, just an empty feeling. So this is how our first go at it went, after extensive research into anything ghost ship related. Knowing the route that it takes, not thanks to anything in-game, 3 of us tried looking for it. The first thing that hits you is how annoying fog is, and I would not be surprised if the ship sailed right past us in one of the 5+ total-no-visibility fog situations we encountered in the 3 hour search. Our search started in its spawn grid, and I sailed backwards along its supposed route as best as I could. That is when the second problem hits you, accuracy. I have no idea how closely you need to follow the route without risking the ship being out of render distance, and with all the ship of the damned in the way, I repeatedly found myself way off course, probably another situation where it might have slipped past us. We also have no idea how long it takes for the ship to do a full loop around, but using our estimate of about ~4 hours+ on average to go half the route in our brigantine with 2 fine large handling and 1 BP common large weight, and assuming that the ghost ship is slightly slower, I estimated about a ~5-~6 hour average for it to make half the route. This would mean, that even in the worst case scenario, you should encounter it, at most, after ~4 hours of sailing against its route, yet we did not see it at all, so my only assumption is that we missed on the route, or our scout missed it re-spawning. I will go on and assume it is way more likely we missed it on the route though, as every grid had an average of 2-3 players playing, and most of the time, 2 of them were us, meaning that I don't expect anyone to have taken it out, so our scout at spawn had nothing to miss. Being glued to the screen for 4 hours straight without any chance of rest without the risk of losing any potential progress, along with the fact that you have no idea where the ship might be along this ~8 to ~10 hour route is just incredibly frustrating. Not to mention that after giving up, we now have to start from scratch again, and we have nothing to show for our efforts Our next step is to just have more ships stationed around to help scout it, but we are limited to 3 players, and I can't imagine how boring this would be of an undertaken if you were by yourself. So our strategy will be to use our 2 brigs to sail against the route, while having a third scout vessel at its spawn location. Even though we somehow failed to find the ship in our first attempt, at least our briggs are now on opposite sides of the square frame that the ghost ship sails through, so at most, we would have to waste 4 hours of mindless sailing. 4, very boring, mindless, hours of sailing. Commenting that "you could just do something else while looking for the ship" is not acceptable, as doing so would not only put our entire efforts at risk, but also mean that we will have to spend even more precious time on this quest. And even worse, if we get distracted, and the ship sails past us, there is practically no chance of us finding it in that sessions without spending another ~4+ hours, assuming we can keep our 2 briggs equally distanced while following the route ( I somehow doubt that is going to happen). I have a few suggestions on what I would do to at least make it less tedious. Bear in mind that I don't care about PvP concerns such as ganking players trying to undertake this quest. I remember people in Sea of Thieves messing with other people just to prevent them from accomplishing certain quests, so it does need to be considered, but that is not my job Limit the route to either a 2x2 grid area. Not necessarily the best idea, as I assume the ghost ship will attack players on sight? Add more routes. Pretty simple, have more routes, though I would still make them waaaay shorter than a trek that takes the ghost ship the estimated ~10 hours. Make a 3x3 grid frame around each golden age server where a ghost ship spawns. Makes it a lot more likely that players actually happen to encounter the ghost ship naturally, as golden age servers already draw in combat ships due to higher level SOTD. I would not let them go through the golden age area though, as those are already stressed/saturated enough. Give us in-game tools to find the ghost ship. I guess this would likely be fitting for the tarot card system or another use for the sextant?, but just anything that can lead us to it so we don't feel like we are just wasting time sailing into nothingness. Have more than one ship on the current route? I know the ship is supposed to be special, and having a new ship spawn every in-game day at 06:00, or whenever, would quickly saturate grids along the route with ghost ships, also making it so people would not bother hunting it, but just camping the spawn area. This leads to another suggestion though, just have it spawn in a certain grid and then have it sail around, requiring players to take it out before it de-spawns? Adding a specialized grid for it is obviously not ideal, but at least have an area on the map that clearly shows where it spawns so players can actually find it consistently. Who knows, maybe this might also be a good way to group up players to take on the ship alongside people outside their company? And this is not really as much a suggestion as it is just pure inspiration. Play some Sea of Thieves, that game pretty much nails it when it comes to feed-forward for world events like bosses and similar encounters. Make some kind of in universe environmental effect that indicates something might be going on there. A permanent light fog that follows the ghost ship, and appears in a sizable area around the ship, so that you can see it from far away. Or a light beacon, or sound effect/ambiance. Or as some of the Sea of Thieves encounters happen, they come to you. Obviously not the best idea given how unstable Atlas is, making you lose your ship, 100% guaranteed if you crash while at sea and just about anything is chasing you. The point is just: make some reliable, re-usable tools that can empower us to find these kinds of encounters within the game, without the need for a wiki and reverse engineering of game mechanics, just so we have a shot at actually succeeding. Make the tools a challenge to obtain as well, so we feel accomplished when we do get a hold on them. Just whatever you end up figuring out, don't keep asking us to watch paint dry, it really sucks. UPDATE: Following the suggestion of going to the marker you get by selecting the quest, we tried again, but surprise, nothing... again. This is where the marker has been within a time span of about ~8 hours (after re-checking it the day after we didn't find it the second time) : Which does not even come close to the route it is supposed to be going along as of 23/06/2019: So, I guess the marker is either broken, or just a red herring... great. I guess it was a red flag when we noticed the marker was standing still while approaching it, not to mention how it is so far away from the supposed route.
  6. Don't agree to the monthly wipes, as wipes should be more tuned in with significant changes to the core system. After all, we must not forget that this is marketed as an MMO. Regardless if it is early access or not, I don't think anyone playing e.g. WoW would be super thrilled about their character being wiped if they didn't play play for a couple weeks (which is something that happens in Atlas btw. If Atlas was wiped once a month, no one would be playing on official. If they truly want to make it an MMO, I also highly expect there to be no wipes after full launch, that is what their structure decay and similar systems are for. In terms of breeding, it has never been hard by any means, just tedious and not fun. And for Ark, a big focus of the game was to tame and breed dinosaurs in order to better do endgame content. Not really the case for Atlas. Speaking of wipes, although it is a bit off-topic, I would be way more on-board with wipes if we would at least keep our character progressions so we don't have to re-grind discoveries and so forth.
  7. Interesting, on my attempt, I had absolutely no need for fires, in fact, in the western temperate zone we are stationed, any fire would occasionally overheat the bear, so, yea. Also, I don't think breeding herbivores is impossible by any means, nor is it hard at all. In fact, no breeding is "hard" at all, actually it is super easy. It is just way too time consuming, as well as too punishing in some cases. Another reason why herbivores are way easier to breed, apart from the obvious spoil timer, has to be the weight. Most herbivores have pretty good carry weight when fully grown, so naturally, it also takes less time for them to carry enough food to enable you to go out and do other stuff. And I notice people mentioning that "this is just like in Ark", but that is obviously not an excuse, in fact, it's more another reason to improve on the system.
  8. Well, screw this I guess. After sleeping for 8 hours, I went into the game first thing in the morning to check on them, but the wolves had all starved to death, with a ton of rotten meat in the 4 troughs I had filled yesterday right before I went to bed. I checked the log, and they literally died shortly before I logged in, that is way to tight and should definitely be tweaked for carnivore breeding to be more reasonable. The bear is fine of course. Considering that they would not even be 40% grown yet, means I would have had to grind just as much food just to keep them fed, and not only that, but during the MORNING the day after, not the afternoon or evening, making carnivore breeding pretty much impossible during a weekday. For just a few extra wolves, this is in no way worth the insanity involved. For reference, the amount of in-game days that have passed seem to be around ~10.
  9. Yea, obviously the ideas I outlined should can be developed and interpreted/implemented in a lot of ways. I also don't mean that all ideas are necessary in order to improve the game flow for the current breeding process, so they are just that, suggestions. My problem with your approach to breeding is the major issue underlying with what should really just be a sub-part of the game. Yes, animals do give you a pretty good boost in gathering, utility etc., but at least on PvE, I don't see as much a need to balance players ability to play around with taming and getting better stat creatures. Anyone new to the taming system has enough to learn as it is (speaking on how you need to look for stat spikes and all the other un-explained mechanics). For the first 2 ideas, don't think of them in relation to how long it takes to breed at the moment. Remember that this is just another variable that can be balanced in relation to those options. At the very least, having the option to simply just "pause" the breed would be a huge boon for people, as it means you still have to eventually spend the dedication and time on progressing your breed, but you can do it at your own pace. And just because you could pause it, does not mean that you have to. Yes, some fanatics might consider this "un-immersive", but then there are a million other things in the game that are way more immersion breaking, so, yea. I also think something needs to be done about the spoiling rate, in some way, but since Grapeshot has previously stated that they would rather try and fix issues without having to implement new assets and game mechanics, I thought it would be a good idea to outline some ideas that would not require too much effort. Even so, if meat would spoil slower, there is also still insane consumption rate of the wolves, hence me mentioning baby food (again, also to get some more use out of cooking). Personally, I would rather be able to convert meat into what is essentially smaller portions of food, than having to harvest a ton of meat because I know half of it will rot before I get back on tomorrow. And remember, with this idea you could always still just use meat like you used to, it is just gonna be more tedious. Once a game forces you to plan an entire day around a game mechanic, I personally think it has gone too far. For Atlas, we can plan out treasure maps and pretty much anything ahead of time, and then execute on a certain day with the prepared materials or having sailed to the location. With breeding though, you can't exactly go in for a few minutes in the middle of the day and start the gestation process. When I was done writing this post, I actually thought about how similar this approach to the game is to the recent diagnosis requirements for gaming disorder/ gaming addiction (or however WHO phrases it). One of the criteria is that the person is planning their day around the games they play, to the point where it disrupts normal activities of life as well as responsibilities. So we are talking working a job, cooking and eating food, sleeping, socializing with others etc. Now, obviously it is a stretch to say that they are equal, but I still find it reasonable to say that mechanics such as Atlas' breeding system "promote" this form of behavior, or in other words, gaming addiction. Take it with a grain of salt of course, as having an actual gaming addiction is a pretty serious situation, and I am hopeful that most players playing Atlas have the mental willpower to say "no". The reason I mention this is that it oftentimes feels like certain games tell you, the player, when yo play it, not giving you the option to truly decide yourself. Yes, making a schedule will work, but even with a schedule, you have to run a ridiculously precise one for it to work, and that just makes the whole sub part of the game way less fun to do, actually, not fun at all. Obviously fun is subjective and all, but I don't see NOT interacting with the game is fun. I did go on to doing another test run on the breeding of animals again, and this time I managed to get 3 wolves and a bear, though highly inferior to the twins I would have had now, had they not died. At any rate, it is nice to at least see someone else coming with some of their own arguments/opinions on the subject.
  10. And I am even being VERY generous when i say "casual", with 542 hours in the game. But yea, sad to see people come here just to leave useless comments instead of partaking in the discussion
  11. Maybe you need to read it again then... I never got to the 10% mark as that was still 4 hours out in the future, making it take a time span of 9:30 hours. Even if you plan for it, you would need a full weekday in order to pull it off. Mine died because they could not eat from the trough yet. And I would like to have another go at the breed, but I wont be able to do it for another 24 hours because of the timer in-between breeds. I see equally as many people as you who comment on other's posts that "of course you failed, you did it wrong" and to me, that reeks of bad game design if your first go at breeding is a guaranteed failure, unless you happen to do it in a weekend with enough time set aside for it. Still, asking players to dedicated a 9:30 hour time slot is insane regardless.
  12. IRL your baby doesn't die if you leave it for an hour, dude. Also, again, this is a video game, not real life. Yea, I read that when looking up info on the breeding system. Though as far as I understand it, the icebox is for cooling your creatures, not food preservation. Even if the current breeding system is just made easier, doesn't make it better, or more fun for that matter, and I think the devs have a good opportunity here to make something that is better than the systems they made for Ark. And frankly, they kinda have to if they want the game to be more about sailing and exploration. This stuff takes time of course, so I just hope that they eventually spend that time and make Atlas a better game.
  13. To begin with, I am purely a PvE player. So yesterday, I mated 2 wolves with each other around 20:00, expecting me to be able to at least get the babies to a stable point before 24:00/01:00. I was shocked to see that the gestation would take ~3:30, and knew that there was no way of cancelling the pregnancy now. I decided to give it a go anyways, hoping that I would be able to make it work before I had to go to bed. When I went to bed around ~1:00, the wolves had about 2½ stacks of meat on them (yes, i got twins on my first go), and half a feeding trough full of meat as well. My hope was that the animals would go into some kind of stasis, where they would not eat as fast, or diminish their food slower or just something. Somewhere I read that they will become able to self feed from a trough once they reach 10%, but this morning I immediately jump into the game around 9:30 to check up on them, and in the log it says they starved to death... literally less than an in-game day later... When I left the game to sleep, they were around 2.2%, so if I had to wait for them to get to 10%, i had to stay up for around ~4 more hours, making it 5:00 in the freaking morning. I am pretty annoyed that I wasted so much time and effort on breeding, yet the game decides to punch me in the face because I need to work, eat and sleep irl. This makes me not only annoyed, but also very confused as to who this breeding system is intended for. I mean, from what I can see, it will take about ~8:30 hours in order to consider the breed a success. Even if you cut out the first easy 3:30 hours of gestation, you still need to watch over them for around 5 hours! for the safety spot of 10%. This effectively means that most people wont be able to fit a breeding session into a gaming session during a weekday, leaving it a thing you can only do during the weekend, or if you are in a company with multiple time zones, where someone else is willing to take the babies through the first 10%. What is even worse, now I have to wait more than 24 hours for another attempt? I get that you want to limit how many creatures people breed into existence, but come on, there are way better solutions to this, such as company limits. So that is my outline for why I currently dislike the current metrics and method for breeding. It is way to punishing if you fail, especially if you are just getting started. Just as a side note, I have done tons of breeding in Ark, but that was with mods enabling babies to eat from the trough from the smallest stage, as well as being able to make baby food, not to mention removal of the breeding interval timers, as well shorter growing periods. Now i am not saying it has to be like that, but the current time investment compared to the return rate is just laughable. As you can probably guess, I don't care about the "immersion" of breeding taking a "realistic" amount of time, because, realistically, their parents should be able to feed them if they are close enough, or even a surrogate parent for that matter. Not to mention that they should not be able to die overnight. Now I get that the time in Atlas runs faster, so one IRL day is several in-game days. But this is still a video game. Games are supposed to be fun, and I don't find staring into the air for hours on end fun, not to mention planning my entire day around this game. Of course, I also have some ideas for how I would personally address the current issue, so here are my two cents if you will. Some of these ideas do work in synergy with each other. 1. Make babies go into complete stasis when the person imprinting them goes offline. As long as you also limit the upbringing to the person who did the imprinting, this should be fairly easy to implement without the need for new assets. I would mean that the "wants care" timer should also freeze. Since breeding is already a very personal thing due to the imprinting and time required, this approach would work well together with how the system is currently portrayed. Sure, it would mean that you actually have to be online for your babies to grow to maturity, but at this point, it would be more viable to also start tweaking the actual time it takes for babies to grow. The gestation phase can pretty much stay the same, because it would mean that you can go through the gestation phase one day, and start caring for the babies the next time you can play the game. This would be a huge improvement in terms of respecting players time investment into the game, without completely screwing up the balance. 2. Allow imprinted breeder to "remove imprinting/allow company caring". Like the previous, this should also be a relatively easy addition to the current system. I would mainly advocate this idea in synergy with idea 1, as this would be a way for bigger and more time flexible companies to do breeding faster, but at the potential cost of imprinting. Essentially, once the original imprinter would allow company caring, you would pretty much just be doing the breed as the system is right now, where the creature will not go into stasis when the imprinter logs off, but at the same time allow others in the company to care for it. For this to be a bit balanced, you make it so that only the imprinter or owner will be able to allow/disallow company feeding, sort of like how if you have personally owned creatures, only the owner can rename etc. You could also make it possible for the rest of the company to disallow company feeding, which would effectively put the creature into stasis if the owner is not nearby, you know, in case something pops up in the lives of the others who are taking care of your creature. 3. Reduce or reset the breed timer upon failed breed. Now this one is a bit more tricky, as it means you have to hook up the parents and babies so that the parent creature checks whether the babies have died or not. This would just make it so that if you fail a breed, you don't have to wait several days in order to try again. Sure, you could just go and tame some more animals in that time in order to get more "go's at it", but to me that is just a huge disrespect to the player already willing to invest time and effort into a breed. 4. Allow grown up animals to tend to the young. This one is also a bit more tricky, and there are several ways it could be done. One way could be to just have the female parent loose its own hunger in order to feed the young. That way the female would effectively convert feeding trough food into "baby food". You can leave hand feeding in the game as well, just so you have a way to both use the parent and feed the babies at the same time. To me, this seems like something that would not only make the whole baby process less tedious and boring, but also make it way more immersive. You can pretty much just imagine that milk producing animals would feed their young that way, while non milk producing animals would imaginatively feed food from the trough straight to the babies. One way to outline the conditions for this could be for the babies and parents to be within range of the same feeding trough, or just the parent needs to be in range of the trough, and the babies would need to be in range to the parent, similar to mate boosted. It would require an icon asset to be made to indicate that the babies are being tended to, as well as for the parent which is in range. 5. Allow us to make baby food. Having used this stuff in Ark mods, I can say that I am a huge fan. In case you don't know how it usually works in the mods, baby food weighs way less than regular food, allowing you to have much more of it on the babies. It comes in a carnivore and herbivore variant, and is made using meats or vegetables. The stack size is also way bigger, due to the sheer amount needed for babies, and also to address spoiling time. You could make it so that babies will eat baby food out of the trough from as soon as they arrive into the world. I really like the idea of baby food, especially for Atlas as it would be a nice added synergy between cooking and breeding. It would also make for more use of the various meats and vegetables in the game, though I would still simplify it to something like 3 of any combination of vegetables, 2 types of meat + 1 vegetable etc. Naturally, there aren't as many types of meat as there are vegetables at the moment, so generalizing the recipe would probably be a good idea. Since you are making a separate food for bringing up babies, you can also tweak their spoil, consumption rate and so forth, without messing up any taming in the game. It would also get around the problem of balancing baby consumption rate in relation to the spoil time of their preferred food (vegetable vs meat), personally, I advocate more options and paths that you can take in order achieve anything in the game over just tweaking the variables to a point where it is either super hard or way to easy. Players want challenge and player choice in games, that is why interactive experiences like this are so liked. As game developers, we should be aiming at empowering players, not punish them for things that are out of their control. Make breeding more accessible to people, but don't completely remove the challenge of course. I really want breeding to be a fun alternative to taming, but at the moment it is just annoyingly frustrating, punishing and super boring. I hope some of these ideas resonate with the community and the devs, so feel free to discuss them further. For now, I guess I will just have to wait for another breeding weekend boost before bothering with breeding again.
  14. I have new findings. If i switch to the ATLAS tab while holding e.g. the world map or a treasure map. The lag goes away. If i unequip and re-equip the world map or a treasure map, the lag returns.
  15. Speaking as a purely PvE player, I am super concerned about the new system based on what I read. From the documented intended changes they put out, there is no mention on whether you can prevent people from building near your structures anywhere. In fact, quite the opposite, as it is stated that anyone can build anywhere, even on a claimed island. I would flip my shit if random people can just come in and place structures in an area you are effectively trying to keep clear as you use it for collecting resources. Pillar and foundation spam on lawless areas has already proven to be a freaking nightmare, as players used it in order to "claim" territory, as it would make sure no one else could build right up against your buildings and eventually, box you in, preventing further expansion. Also don't like the idea of structure decay, as it is a symptom of a problem that was "quick fixed" by adding a decay timer. It has always been a problem for people who play a lot, and don't want other people coming in and placing structures that take several days to disappear, so that you can get access to blocked building materials or just the building spot. At the same time, it is also a problem for those who cannot play often, as they have to add checking into the game as a chore they have to do every other day. The only solution to this problem is to completely disallow construction of buildings within resource areas, and to create designated areas where people can build, and then spreading these strategically over an island (yay, level design!). Sure, it does take a lot of the sandbox out of the game, but it would address issues like overbuilding and not being in control of areas you built in. Sure, it does mean that you will need a lot of areas in order to address the amount of players, but I am sure there is an answer to this as well. A problem with the game at its core is how open it is. It is great for giving players options, and it is probably one of the best features as well, but you cant just give players unlimited authority to what, where and how they can build, and expect the game to run nicely. I mean, just the rubber-banding and lag created by this is off-putting and ruins the experience regardless of what it can offer. Personally, I think the biggest problem with the current claim system is that the game itself does not reward players for opening up land to outsiders. I mean, would it be completely crazy to get an amount of gold over time (from the server), just for opening up plots of land to outsiders? Sure, taxes from the bank are great and all, but I need to designate an entire claim as being open, which might cover a lot of resources that I will be missing out on if someone else builds there, ergo, I have no interest in allowing anyone else to build across the whole thing. If I could limit it to areas void of resources such as most of the shorelines, or clearings in the forests, then that would be amazing. After all, yes, owning a lot of land should have its consequences, but opening up land to outsiders should also guaranteed immediate benefits in order to promote doing it. Otherwise, only the vast minority of the players will even use this system, as a lot of people cannot be bothered to deal with other players, and besides, the owners might not even be online/present at their claim when said players come by. It is just tedious, annoying and unrewarding by design unfortunately. And to top it off, I don't think the upcoming approach will address many of the underlying problems at its core, because it just tries to go around it instead and come up with a work-around of a solution.
  16. Exactly why I am stating what I am. If they see that people stop caring about stone after the 2x weekend, then they will see that they might want to lower the cost, but not necessarily remove e.g. organic paste outright if people did in fact build enough stone stuff during 2x. If they continue to see that people will continue to mainly build stone during the weekend, then I hope that they do something about it. After all, 2x is just a way of accelerating normal gameplay, and sure, it has a psychological effect too as many players seem to understand it as a "once in a lifetime" kinda thing almost, not a weekly weekend event acting almost like a catchup mechanic to provide those who can only play during the weekend an opportunity to also experience the official servers. This is all pure speculation of course. I have been trying to try and see why they did this change in the first place, and I have noticed something that might be relevant. It seems like a good amount of islands in the game barely have any of the original 3 components (wood/thatch, stone, fiber). But instead, they might have good amount of another combination, say, (sap, stone, metal). Maybe the metal and organic paste was added in order to make it more fair for islands with less of the original components, but instead have stuff like sap or metal. Still, I don't think I would go so far and say that it is currently fair at all, as I have yet to see any cold areas with sap or organic paste.
  17. Lions of the North (NA PvE) (most buildings were made by me, harvesting mats included) Welcome to Lion's Gate weary traveler! let me show you around. The settlement has a long story about how it came to be, which involves many trials and dangers. On a cold night where the winds blew harsh and in a northern direction, a lone dwarf had braved the seas and arrived to a seemingly uninhabited island. It was during these cold nights where wolves would roam close to his campfires in the hopes of catching him off-guard for a quick meal. It was then, that the dwarf raised a flag to claim the area as his own and erected the first structure that would act as the foundation for the would-be settlement. Soon, more travelers arrived, and the small house was crowded with hungry people who had joined the dwarf in his efforts to establish a lasting foothold and to build a small society on this distant island to the North. It wasn't long before a barracks was erected in order to house the new people. The barracks quickly became too small, so the growing collective constructed a tavern that could also be used as temporary housing. The tavern has been re-modeled and expanded over time, where the ground floor originally contained temporary work stations and storage for crafting materials. (Tavern by Hawkeye with added support from rest of group) Wild predators still roamed the island, and the inhabitants were struggling to deal with the constant threat of being overrun in the night. In order to protect the village, the dwarf imitated construction of a stone wall that would circle around the entire village. Some of the structures on the wall are still under construction, but at least the village has been completely surrounded by a protective barrier. In order to make construction of the wall easier, a small construction shack was established down the shore. To further combat the rampant wildlife, the villagers erected traps outside the wall, and also erected taming pens into the design in an attempt at making use of the wild creatures. The taming pens are completely indoors, with 3 gates that could be used to sluice in the animals to first capture them, while also protecting them and their tamers from outside dangers. There are multiple access points, so that the tamers can do what they must at a safe distance. Capturing all these animals, meant that there was now need for a barn. The barn has also been re-modeled a few times, as it eventually got too crowded and was rebuilt to make better use of the space. As timed passed, more room for tamed creatures was needed, so an indoor stable designed for low fast mounts was created. The building has 2 levels that can fit a good amount of creatures, with multiple access points for moving creatures around. Slowly, the community had grown into a small village. Trade was establish with incoming trade ships, and alliances had been forged with other inhabitants on the island. At this point, it was clear that a warehouse had to be built in order to accommodate the many goods going in and out of the port. The harbor area was also extended in order to have extra room for visiting guests. In order to safely enclose the larger animals such as elephants and giraffes, an annex was built along the wall with an elevator system that can get the creatures over the wall from the outside. On top of that, the village center was adorned with a bank and town square. At the pedestal in the center, an ancient tale was carved into the stone as a tale for future generations. The warehouse was quickly filling up with ancient texts describing ways of crafting better equipment and structures, so a library was established. The structure now holds invaluable knowledge of the past, and will hopefully serve future generations. After an agreement with another company on the island, a mountain pathway was built on the side of the mountain facing towards the village. The pathway also lead to the creation of a lighthouse that would overlook the village and their nearby allies in order to safely guide ships into port during foggy weather. Eventually, the company merged with several companies on the same island, and expanded to the polar regions The fleet There are now many ships in the Lions of the North fleet. Some of them adorn sails that were handcrafted for the individual ship. Lion's Roar: built by the company, painted by me. Unfortunately, we the original red dye on the sails would tint the applied paint, so unless replaced, the colors will stay oversaturated with red. Lion Heart: built and painted by company, sails by me Rogue: built and painted by Serafina, sail design by me High Tide: built and painted by Vopee, sails by me Leon Dorado: built and painted by Jack Herrer, sails by me Blazerunner: built and painted by me rear access upper cabin lower deck funky stair and wall setup to include diving platform Bonus The breeders house (built by Vopee) un-used sail design shore overlooking harbor downtown aerial Tropical getaway (house built by Serafina, wall by me)
  18. I don't agree, I would think that they have been monitoring how players have dealt with the changes over the 2x weekend. Well... at least that is what I am hoping, as 2x allows them to test the costs twice as fast as at normal rates, so my guess is that they might still change it. It has only been a few days after all.
  19. It is quite simple... really... this is a video game, video games are supposed to be fun. Also, they allow you to do stuff that would normally be out of reach (while trying to maintain flow etc.). PvP in both ARK and Atlas both seem to appeal to only hardcore PvP players who are willing and capable of banding together in large groups. Any other attempts at participating without a large group to back you up seem futile, and personally, I just don't have the time or will to even try engaging in PvP, hence why I only play these two games for the PvE content, and i play them to have fun with the game mechanics, exploring and leveling up to unlock new possibilites and generally just building cool stuff. Generally, this early stage of Atlas reminds me a lot of how many issues there was with ARK in the early versions. Many resources were hard to acquire until they finally implemented more means of getting them. But that stuff takes time, and I don't see why it is necessary to make more expensive than it has to without proper tools at hand. If the sub had been out, and we had more options than sailing 4-5 grids away to get paste, it would not be such a big deal, as it just meant we would have pursue the other methods. Whether it be taming or unlocking new skills etc. as this would actually add some much needed variety to the game.
  20. So, this is how I would go about evaluating if their changes seem fair and balanced (mainly taking the perspective of a PvE player): Main steps of progressions towards adventure and exploration: Cold regions: Get a claim in cold region -> build initial shelter and dying very often due to best clothing being cloth, until you get a wooden house -> only go out at day, and when not raining to achieve levels until you can make hide armor -> be able to go out during the day without freezing to death, build a proper ship -> go look for sap and bring back paste -> make fur armor, congratulations, you can now survive the weather in your cold home region and start contemplating expansion, exploration and adventure. Warmer regions: Get a claim in a warm region -> build shelter and build up stock -> gather materials and build a better ship -> start contemplating expansion, exploration and adventure. There are some players who will only settle temporarily and live on their ship, others who will join existing companies, get help etc. But this is just assuming the baseline gameloop for players to get started. Naturally, both cases have more factors like dealing with hostile animals, maybe taming etc. but I just wanted to cover my view on the gameloop from getting started until you are established in the game. Obviously people will view these two examples differently, and it it also a completely different situation when you remember that this is in fact marketed as an MMO, not a singleplayer experience. I am personally totally for the idea of another tier of structures, or changing the stone recipe to just metal, stone and thatch (metal, stone and wood is way to heavy in my opinion, let alone adding the expensive factor by keeping the cost of fiber). What do you guys think?
  21. And why is it that you think this resource change will alleviate gate spam? you do realize that stone walls, foundations and ceilings also cost paste and metal now, so it does absolutely nothing on that front except make it take a little longer for people to get the mats. If they really want to alleviate it, they should have made it feasible and less tedious to make proper walls, such as through the 4x and 8x high walls (or similar) that were in the original S+ mod for ARK, or some other more well designed means. On PvE, I spent days gathering, crafting and building in order to have a solid looking stonewall surrounding our town as a protection against alphas, with a proper gatehouse and everything. If I was starting from scratch with these costs? heck no! I would never want to go that far just to make our walls look good. At that point I would probably either decide to bite the bullet, or just make gateways which are way cheaper than a properly built wall using foundations, wall pieces and ceilings.
  22. Description of issue: Since I started playing the game, anytime I press M to look at my map and compass, my frame-rate will drop from ~40 Fps down to ~15. If the game is already running at lower Fps, the effects gets even worse. Furthermore, the lag also appears when I look at treasure maps or when I get the sextant buff. I have asked around within our company, and I am not the only one experiencing this issues, so something needs to be fixed asap. as it is making these utilities a hazard and chore to use. Sometimes, we have noticed that the Fps drop persists even after you stop looking at your handheld map, which can then be fixed by re-opening the map and closing it again. The severity of the Fps drop seems to vary, so some of our people simply didn't notice that they lost ~10 Fps whenever they looked at a map (going from ~50 to ~40). My guess is that the drop is also tied to how your settings are set up, as well as your hardware. This case, I think I remember him saying that he was playing entirely without shadows. Repro: open world map, treasure map or apply sextant buff EDIT: I have attached a dxdiag since i will be upgrading my system soon. Though i am certain this is a game programming caused bug. EDIT 2: I have just installed my new hardware and did a quick test. Sure enough, my performance is a lot better, but taking out the compass still drops my fps from ~60 to around ~30 when looking out at the ocean. DxDiag.txt DxDiag2.txt
  23. Also, IF the intention was to actually reduce structures, limiting fun is not a solution in any way. This would just make it sound like they "were not prepared for people building massive structures and plastering lawless zones with foundations to "claim" areas". Like, you can't give people unlimited space and structure limits and expect them to stay within a "reasonable" size. Like, i think we have several thousands of stone structure pieces at our town, just to make a wall surrounding the area as protection against alphas. I am just super glad that most of our stuff is built at this point, and hope that they revert this change before any new building projects become necessary.
  24. Organic paste and metal would be fine... if we could actually get it in large quantities on each island. Many islands have little to no sap, and a lot of islands have little to no metal nodes. On PvE, a lot of people are getting to the point where the tradegoods are more likely to be character skills + intelligence for crafting better stuff, or just the crafted stuff from high tier blueprints. Rarely does anyone come by, willing to trade thousands of metal and paste, because their ships can't even fit more than a few hundred before they become overloaded. Besides, that metal is more likely going to be used on high tier blueprints than being wasted on stone structures. For PvE, and people like me, who so far have enjoyed building a town for our company (solid walls of stone and many buildings of stone too), this change is probably the worst thing ever. We live in a cold region, so literally ALL of our paste is being spent on making and repairing our fur armor, which is essential to enjoying the game. Furthermore, the little metal we can get here is all used on making ship parts and cannons. Even the change for the stone gates to require 200 metal per gate has been rough on our building projects and generally just been making the game less enjoyable. I think we have around 12-14 metal nodes on our island, which is shared between a lot of people, and metal is super heavy, so making transport runs with the stuff is something I was hoping would be purely in order to make the higher tier blueprints. Simply increasing the respawn rate of the metal nodes and adding sap to all regions as another "fix" would also be the dumbest thing ever, as it would just nullify the changes in the recipe, and just result in making the pieces more tedious and annoying than it needs to be (aka. time wasted grinding resources while turning off your brain). This is another one of those changes that just scream "PvP balancing", which doesn't add anything positive to the PvE side of the game. It annoys me so much that the devs are treating the PvP and PvE side of the game equally. They may fix and balance PvP, but then make PvE players suffer for it for no reason. Practically anything in the game that there are issues with tend to be a bigger problem in PvE than in PvP. The claim system? in PvP you can just destroy people, in PvE, their area is safeguarded for all eternity. The projectile weapon nerfs? in PvE your biggest problem were animals, so making projectile weapons should have been buffed there, not nerfed. Being unable to walk on the ship of others and being stuck in limbo until you die, fly out with a glider or someone else grabs you with a hook. TL:DR The devs need to treat PvE and PvP differently, as each time they introduce a "fix" for one gamemode, they end up breaking the other.
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