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phaylen

Pathfinder
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Everything posted by phaylen

  1. Sorry for the necropost. I just came back after getting discouraged after the third wipe. I understand the very big ships costing so much due to the things you can achieve on them... but 5k for a schooner? I thought I was literally bugged or that it was an "in lie of grinding pay 5k gold" type thing. No. This game hates its players. LOL
  2. So they spawn 10-15 AotD on you. They OP'ed their resist They go into the ground and return full health Post this "Patch" and subsequent "Fix" We lost 2 bears and 2 players to the Warriors whose resist is way to high. With sunken ships bugged Treasure maps stupidly OP Level 58 SotD that reward 19 Gold Everyone in Atlas will be broke in a month.
  3. Rethink the roadmap. It's counter-intuitive to how the players play the game. I know I'm spitting into the wind here and I understand the frustration of the playerbase given the lack of awareness and interest in player desires or interests, but I can't get on board with the hostility and the abuse being hurled. I know, having observed for a long time now, that the developers don't read your posts or feedback (Detrimental for a game in Early access) and that has fostered a very toxic relationship with this community which saddens me to say because I genuinely love Atlas, but I'm desperately disappointed in the direction it's taking. I wonder if you agree. The roadmap appears to attempt to dictate how we play the game. As a community that has adapted to the game, the roadmap implies we've been playing the Atlas "Wrong." To quote the official post "Essentially, we feel like players are currently spending too much time in certain areas of the game, and not enough time in the areas we think should be the most fun, such as Sea and Combat. Players can expect to experience more fun and engaging content out on the sea, and a cut back on the time spent on land or with creatures." We're spending too much time on land. We're relying too heavily on tames and breeding. We're not doing enough exploring. We're not engaging in enough combat. I feel like Atlas has done themselves an injustice. In an open world, a player base of diverse interests develops; You have those who enjoy combat with Ships of the Damned, Those who specialize in breeding high stat tamed creatures and selling them in a burgeoning marketplace, builders who primarily focus on creating fantastical archaeological wonders, explorers who are achievement completionists, treasure hunters who enjoy the pursuit of gold, resource harvesters who collect and sell resources to travelers- in an open world where our goals are self made, it is a huge mistake to shuttle us all into one linear stream of gameplay as if Atlas were World of Warcraft. We don't a want to be doing the same thing, but that has not stopped our gaming practices from complimenting that of other players. Te roadmap attempt to intercept our self made goals and forcibly divert our play style into what the developers think it should be, rather than what each of us, individually, want it to be for us. This is a game where it will take you as much real time to sail 5 tiles as it does to drive to your next big city. This is a game where, to breed a tier 3 creature, requires a 4 day, real time, marathon with intense focus. These are time investments that would typically feel cumbersome, but we do them, we've adapted to them, some of us appreciate they are not easy because we feel a sense of genuine accomplishment and real progress. But they're taking these things away. They're doing so in a manner that makes no real sense in the context of the game except to make a difficult, time consuming, long term committment of a game even harder but with less reward. Nerfing tames was their first step last night in sabotaging how we play the game. I had a level 11 Army of the Damned drop down from a finger rock someone had been digging up a chest on. It did significant damage to my level 73 bear. This was ONE Army of the Damned. Had it been any more of the 5-12 that spawn, I'd have died, my bear would have did- just like the treasure hunter after that 73 gold common map did. This has a direct effect on the economy. Because of this deterrent, less people will want to treasure hunt meaning less passive income for Island owners who find that 20% tax actually helps cover the cost of their upkeep. Tames are the balance of our combat experience. For every one of us that have been killed by a level 1 bee and been eternally humbled by the lack of proper scaling in this game, tames are the difference between death and survival on land. But spend more time at sea, they said. It'll be fun, they said. But imagine the time, the effort, the relentless grind of harvesting materials, speccing and respeccing due to the limited available skill points, and finally building a ship only to go out ad be destroyed by a random fleet of Ships of the Damned that spawn into the radius of our boat at close proximity, either clumsily spawning in on each other or surrounding us in 360 degree circumference. Rarely just one. Then the rain starts, 10 cyclones spawn, picking away at your person's health, at the ship, damaging everything on it. Then the passive ship decay. You're always slowly decaying at sea, both you and your ship. Your vitamins deplete faster. Then you cross a server boarder. You hang in limbo for 10 second or more. You may emerge being pummeled by more ghost ships or directly into cyclones. This perhaps after sailing for three hours and losing literally everything you've worked days to acquire, on top of your time. The risk isn't worth the reward. Not for the 19 gold a ship may drop. Not for that common thatch door blueprint. At a whopping 180 gigs of space, I have yet to determine what constitutes 250 tiles. Aside from a few resources easily substituted unless for mythical quality blueprints, traveling doesn't offer new experiences except a dramatic change in climate. The islands are the same with a different skin. Most of the animals across each biome are the same with a few variations in basic colors- not even patterns vary, just skin recolors. Models are repeated exhaustively, embarrassingly noticeable. That plant could be a half a dozen looking things because while the model is the same, the harvest may be different. The ships look the same- we all look the same. In contrast to ARK that has a plethora of skins and cosmetics to diversify and individualize our appearance, Atlas doesn't even afford us that. The texture from building? All the same. NPC towns seem to boast more robust building materials and options than we players do. Ultimately, Atlas has decided to push up all back in progress to compensate for their lack of content at the end game. If we are forced into their linear fashion of gameplay and they extend our road, our grind, our path to progress and end game content, that provides them more time. I took a year off, just after the implementation of the trenches and crabs. A year later I cam back and found they'd introduced Crabs and Ulfends. Nothing else really. No dramatic gameplay improvements. The same bugs that existed just after release still persist today. No quality of life or gameplay experiences, no new end game content or achievement pursuits, no new mid game content. The ongoing joke is that Atlas is a sailing simulator, and that seems to be what they're making it. Those who love the game as a foundation for something great will soon sadly realize it's potential will not be met if we move in this direction, but instead suffer at the hands of staff who clearly doesn't listen or even play their own game to understand the experiences we speak of so passionately here, or own steam, or in other mediums. We just can't get through. I know the handicapping of Tames was the first step in further limiting our ability to progress in Atlas, which is why I'm motivated to speak out here. Sorry for the TL/DR.
  4. I spend most of my time treasure hunting and am surprised that this bug has not been addressed yet. 1 out of every 3 Shipwrecks is not accessible due to the ship having clipped into the terrain. Sometime, the ship is entirely under the terrain with only the masts visible above the sand. This has been an ongoing issue making every dive a gamble. It doesn't matter is the recovery level is a 2.0 or a 20.0, you only stand small chance of actually being able to reach the chest, which may be underground itself. I know on your roadmap you've said you'd like us to spend more time at sea, as that is your intention for how we should be engaging with the game. I'm trying. But, between cold snaps, heat waves (I have 80 fortitude and it does very little), Ships of the Damned, dense fog, faster vitamin depletion at sea, cyclones, terrible low wind resulting in exhaustivey long trips and very very little reward for the risk of losing your ship, I see nothing to incentivize this.
  5. I can only imagine how difficult it is to sift through the posts or anger and outrage to find the golden nuggets of actual feedback rather than aggressive complaints so I'll start by saying I love the game. Bugs and all. I appreciate it's status as an early access release and how quickly you've addressed so many game breaking issues. I understand that a lot of your focus has been primarily on the PVP experience and bringing it into balance, reducing exploits and trying to ensure a quality, fair but still competitive experience for players of that demographic. I play on a PVE server, so a lot of those fixes, while necessary, haven't improved our experience. Here are a few things we deal with as players who don't have huge companies, fleets of battleships and have chosen to play through the adventure without the PVP element. Temperature is an issue. Investing in fortitude doesn't scale with the extreme heat we experience on every island, regardless of it being tropical or temperate. Some of us have spent 70 points in fortitude and still die from repeatedly during unnecessary daily heatwaves - and they happen every single day. We invited some new players who had not experienced ATLAS before to join us. The spawned at the freeport and died within minutes of heatstroke. Then, they chain died from it. They tried everything- Jumping into the ocean, drinking fresh water, standing under the awnings of the freeport buildings. Cloth clothes didn't help them survive. There is no ability to stave the consequences of extreme, 141 F heat daily. What we discovered is that we have to actually leave a island biome and move into open sea to escape on a boat. That means, drifting along side an island, two feet to the left it can b 141 degrees, and two feet right it can be 75 degrees. The problem here is new players do not have ships. Even houses that provide the shelter icon do not reduce the temperature, and while yo can bundle up in the cold, you can only take off so much before you just submit to the inevitable and die until it's night- that leaves nighttime the only real viable time to get anything done. Occasional heatwaves are acceptable- but at level 70 with 50 points in fortitude, in cloth clothes, sitting on an ostrich, wearing a parrot, dying from heat every day cycle is arduous. Nothing helps. Those players we invited? They quit. All three of them. Dying due to unavoidable circumstances in the first 15 minutes is a bad user experience. Pet Leveling Again we have an issue with scaling. When our pets level, they get, o the average, between 2 to 8 points of health added to their pool. That is inconsequential. Putting points into their melee may improve it 0.2% - meaning a single swipe does virtually no more damage post level than it did prior to the point investment. I understand you wouldn't want "SuperPets" that provide the proverbial "I Win" button, but the achievement of leveling a pet lacks any sort of reward. There is no sense of accomplishment in return for the effort. The gain is so minute that there are some players not even bothering to spend points gained via leveling their pets until it is actually worth it. Weight is probbably, thus far, the only thing that provides a modicum of assistance to the player. Breeding As mentioned before, temperature. temperature, temperature, temperature. It bakes a newborn on day one. We've had players build custom housing, testing with different forms of shelter to see the disparities in insulation. No matter the material of the shelter, wood, thatch or stone, death come on the first heatwave. We're trying to work around this by building out onto the sea as far as we can to reduce the temperature damage. It is not fun to wait 4-9 hours for a birth just to find that the results are nonviable due to elements outside our control. Age I'm now 88 and the Fountain of youth is well outside my reach. As a small company without outside assistance, we do not have access to the abilities or strength required to access the fountain of youth or the resources required for it. When the debuff comes in, I'll likely have to re-roll my character. I expected a much different mechanic when it comes to aging. When I chose my Family Name, I thought that implied I would have access to future legacy characters. for example, I might have to start again at level 1, but benefit from a legacy buff, as my characters child. Not only would that have demonstrated my playtime invested, but paid tribute to my achievements made throughout the game. I expected I'd have inherited all of my dead players content, but have to crawl up the ranks again to achieve her greatness! I was excited about the concept of generations and carrying a family name through the eras. The fountain of youth is indeed something at least, but it feels more like a simple reset that I have to go to great lengths to find and enlist the help of more people than I even know. It is still a disappointing mechanic in ATLAS where dying is easier than managing all the mechanics in play. We have a running joke when vitamins are low or we're minutes from heatstroke. "Eat Sh*t and die" is the quickest resolve. Hilarious as it is, it shouldn't be such a trial to simply survive that death is so often the only answer. It often feels like ATLAS is the game that doesn't really want you to play it as much as it demands you die in it over and over until you simply quit. A look at the reddit demonstrates that many share those same sentiments. It can be so unreasonably unforgiving to the player. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. And thanks for all your hard work.
  6. I'm bumping this because this is still happening. Sometimes we can. Sometimes we can't. It was okay yesterday after doing it for a couple of days and now refusing to allow crafting arrows again.
  7. We've invited multiple people to play the game on our private server- and they quit after a couple of hours. The reason? Chain death due to extreme heatwaves of 143 Fahrenheit. This happens every time at mid-day and every single player dies. Even those who come to mentor new players with 40+ in fortitude die of heat stroke. Getting into water doesn't cool the player. Drinking doesn't cool the player. Shade doesn't cool the player. Cloth clothing doesn't insulate in extreme heat. High fortitude is seeming inconsequential. Wasted points. This is a game breaking mechanic on a temperate island. It deters people from playing by disrupting their game at regular intervals and for no reason within their control. Between vitamin management, hunger, hydration and aggressive wildlife, unreal temperatures should not be a game stopper. Several players we encouraged to join us have quit because the window of actually being able to do things like build, explore ect. is so small. Please reduce these unrealistic temperatures an make fortitude more effective. Thank you.
  8. Echoing some important questions asked as well as adding. 1. When will you balance the strength of wild animals vs players in PVE? We have level 40 people killed by level 6 wolves. 2. There is an unusual high frequency of aggressive Alpha predators, including monkeys and horses which are not typically aggressive species. Will this be scaled down? 3. Why are blueprints for common items that are available via the skill trees appearing in loot instead of higher quality variations? You give us what we already have by default. 4. Why does crafted foods/drinks which requires more ingredients have a shorter shelf life than raw goods? 5. Animal utility is imbalanced. An elephant can harvest 300 berries, 100 wood per swipe, but bears, which you would think had a bonus harvest for berries or thatch does not. The common pick harvests more thatch than any tame. Most animals seem to have such a menial bonus for diverse gathering that taming them is rendered obsolete. The elephant seems to be the almost all-in-one. We have yet to discover anything that collects stone, metal, gems, crystals, thatch or hide beyond what we can with common tools. 6. Can we have an option to lose our inventory or toolbar items on death? On PvE servers, starting from scratch when sunk by ghost ships after zoning into a new area is an unreasonable penalty and deters exploration due to the extreme consequences. We're back to punching trees and picking up rocks. 7. I'm not sure it's an intended feature to have it become -60 Celsius in temperate regions. In common grade fur and by a fire, we just chain die until it's over. I understand that mechanic in tundra but it seems odd for "Temperate" areas. Temperature in general seems very imbalanced with respect to their biomes. 8. People close to a bed would rather self-kill by eating feces instead of manage their vitamin equilibrium since it resets all needs. There is no benefit to maintaining them if you can simply die by your bed instead of fill needs. There in no game mechanic or incentive to keeping your vitamins up. Do you plan to implement any buff for eating? No one wants to eat. The only consequence is over-eating which stays with the player for far too long. People would rather just die, loo their body and get on with their day/repeat.
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