Inigo

You're that puppy that gets left on a county road in the middle of BFE that sits there obediently knowing his owners will definitely come back for him any time now, with treats.

Sean Murray, his crew who made No Man Sky are a good example. They took every verbal beating from their playerbase, pro critics, news organizations, everyone. Because they made outlandish promises, said everything was going to be there on launch day, and we got an Early Access title for full price with a whole lot of nothing, and they suffered. They suffered so hard, having literally no playerbase, but they said they were going to commit to making the game what they promised everyone it was supposed to be. And they did, they admitted they wanted to quit and move on to other things, but they stood by their conviction and turned that dumpster fire into an amazing game, and it took time. But they kept at it. And it has a massive amount of content now they havent charged anyone extra for. They worked it out, they found a way, and they accomplished it. They kept their communication with their customers and players and media outlets going so everyone knew what they were doing. And literally everyone had respect for that, they repaired their broken reputation by taking their blows for their mistakes, and making good on what they said, and it's truly respectable of them to do that. On the opposite side, we have Grapeshot, a "studio" made to turn an ARK DLC into a standalone, that flopped hard because it was a complete mess. And their response to the game flopping on PC? Silence... And then... Well lets put it on Xbox. And more silence. Silence silence silence, and then we come to find out theyre not even working on the game, they all went back to Wildcard to start work on a new DLC. When the entire employee base of a Studio fucks off without a word to their community, to work on another project. That's a serious lowball move, a big fuck you to the people who supported your idea by funding your Early Access.

There are so many things wrong with this post.... Like all of it. You've missed out on the entire horribly mismanaged, miscommunicated, and now abandonned dumpster fire that people paid for and were let down. It's nice you're new and plucky and have a positive outlook because you havent had all the negative experiences pile up yet, frankly you havent been here long enough to be critiquing any part of the community on anything. People had hopes for this game man. It turned out to be a horrible money grab, and when the player levels tanked because of the complete buggy and horrible mess that it was, they decided to wipe the servers and push the game to console rather than actually fixing anything. And they take that nice big chunk of change from console release and go back to ARK. Please explain to me, since you're an expert on how people should feel and behave, why ANYONE should be happy about the state of the game or developer behavior.

Ohhh I remember release day, our server Official 434 had 3 mutual alphas, we were in a big ass stalemate, where whichever one started aggression would incur the wrath of the other 2. Prob like 30 people active in each tribe, SE came out, and each one of us went to a different SE server in a bid to control one for ourselves. That didnt work out so well on 737, so one of the other tribes from 434 asked us for our help on 746, and we fought off a 90 man chinese tribe for like 10 hours for ownership of that server, by that time the 3rd tribe had joined us, and there, we were all one tribe. Home server we were all segregated still until word started trickling down that server transfers were going to be opened completely we merged on both servers. Cuz back in those days you couldnt take anything from The Island to SE, but everything on SE could be taken to The Island, so we used our SE server to raid everyone without consequence, it was beautiful showing up on a server with Wyvs, hordes of raiders, and just wrecking it, and they couldnt retaliate.

Atlas Devs on social media: Everything is great! We're doing awesome! Much progress! Great features! Such success! We did good ARK DLC LOL Also ATLAS Devs

Ahhh the woes of playing a survival game on official servers. Could always join any of the private servers with boosted rates.

Look here folks, ATLAS got sidelined so they could port this hideously optimized contentless bread sandwich to Console. It got sidelined again so the devs could go back and help Wildcard push out another DLC to keep itself floating. If they cared by any means they would have let Wildcard do its own thing and kept focusing on their new brand and getting it where it needs to be. Clearly its evident they dont fucking care, it's EA, it's not under the mother studio name, so if it fails, oh well, they can wash their hands of it. If you want to see what Devs that dont care about you or your purchases look like, then look no further, ATLAS is the wagyu beef of mismanaged apathy. Now, take No Man Sky for example. FUCK THAT GAME, they fucked everyone over on release. HOWEVER, theyve been working non-stop for years to make it into what they had promised, and its years late, BUT look at a team of people who made bad decisions and made good on them and keep cranking out more content for free, because the reputation they rebuilt is keeping them afloat. That's respectable, good on them. Still havent touched it since release day, but good on them. ARK? So many Day 1 exploits that are so deeply built into the game they have said they cant fix them without rebuilding the entire game(assuming they know how), cheaters are so rampant, they have zero official server support, it's garbage, that game lives and thrives because its a canvas for the mod and private server communities. ATLAS has already sunk, and they keep trying to dive the wreckage to bring it back, but they forgot they made 2-3 sharks spawn on every shipwreck, so theyre getting FUCKED because theyre a buncha naked beachbobs.

Holy crap this is extra special...

ATLAS is actually a bad game simulator.

pretend you're having fun.

That's a really big IF. There really hasnt been anything substantial added to the game since single player was added to pander to that crowd. Theyre sidetracked with console and potentially other projects, the core game is constantly sidelined by B.S. The whole game is a patchwork of random things made to look like a game. It's completely soulless. There isnt any reason for any of the things, like why subs, torpedoes, etc are gated behind bossfights, all the additional stat/progression boosts are gated behind trivial mundane tasks. Ships have minimal customization, your whole existence in the game revolves around land, animals for farming and bases. Having and sailing ships and hoping you encounter other players is just a perk at this point. Ships have no value for a decent company, most with bears and elephants, rhinos can farm out the resources to create numerous ships every single day. A ship lost is just meh, I'll have another on efully built and kitted out in 30min. This game needs to take a note from EVE Online, have a core region, core faction where there is a sense of "safety" where the carebears can carebear it up, have bounties, trading, contact missions, etc. And the further away you get from that region, the more lawless it gets, the resources arent as scarce, you have rarer resources that actually have specific uses that make them worth fighting for if it is controlled. That would give people who want to war and PVP incentive to have and control resources for personal use and trade, it would give an actual avenue for casual players to exist in a PVP world without too much care for getting sunk, but still the possibility of it, and give incentives for activities beyond just farming resources and SODS where you can actually spend substantial amounts of time on the water actually doing something worthwhile gain. That takes work and planning and isnt feasible for this group of Devs if they cant just CTRL+V features.

My Idea for ATLAS: Announce Full Release, make some more quick money further abandon the game. Move onto a new development studio with a new name and same people and make a brand spanking reskinned game survival game.

Well another interesting game mechanic, is if you have a forge on your ship, you can just stand around the forge and dump your buckets into it, it magically works. dont ask my why or how, but dumping buckets into the forge was the way to bucket water on any brig or galleon because you dont really have to move, so no travel time. you fill up bucket, dump it onto the forge, rinse/repeat. So with enough guys you can outspace the water intake.

I feel like realistically this thread should just be like an entire gesture to ATLAS in general. Bad Game mechanics? Lets start with basic ship parts. They needed to force people to "explore", so they made higher tier BPs require numerous different types of the same material to make shit. If they wanted a good mechanic, Different woods/metals would have different weight/speed/attributes so you could actually design and build ships around certain builds, do you want something lightweight and weak, or do you want heavier denser wood/metal that is slower but tankier? or a mix for something moderate? It was nice they had different sail types, but speed sails were broke since forever. lackluster ship types. NOW! How about those grapple hooks eh? You're in a hot pursuit of an enemy ship, one of your friendly ships cuts off their route, and force them into you, one of your boys on deck grapples their ship, and suddenly you both stop moving, completely dead in the water. That's cool, somehow a ballista with a rope can destroy all momentum and render your sails inoperable. Sharks(2) spawning on fresh ship wrecks? have you even run someones harbor and sunk like 10+ ships and tried to dive that shit in the heat of a battle? It's fucking ridiculous. like you're in a bloody harbor and suddenly 20+ sharks. Allowing people to pack 16+ cannons on the side of a ship with no counter balance. Greatest game mechanics ever. Animals. How about this kicker. During a TPG harbor raid we(Idiocracy), ran a Brig with 12 cannons (each manned by players, specced into cannon reload, which makes them fire like machine guns), we sailed that bad boy into a huge TPG harbor, harbor wall, wall cannons, mortars, etc. We sunk like 4 galleons, 8 brigs, tons of schooners before they were able to respond. And when they did, we had already gotten hammered by mortars, shot by wall cannons, we got stuck on a rock on the way out of the harbor when a gally and 2 brigs show up and start donking on us HARD. Well we got unstuck, manage to sail away with 3 ships chasing us, we were missing all of our lplants on both sides, part of our top deck, had some of our rear and foreward planks, but literally both side of the ship were missing, we were sailing a skeleton of a ship that was filling up fast. 14 guys bailing water with buckets, we sailed that ship 2 zones, while being chased, ironically the ship went really fast without any planks on it, and we were able to outpace the water coming in. We had to scrap all the cannons, the all the storage boxes, everything, so we could build a smithy and start making planks. WE HAD NO PLANKS. That ship escaped, and survived. We almost lost it to the lag from the zone change though, first zone change, everyone lagged, and suddenly the plankless ships water went from the bottom of the ship to the top deck, but 14 guys bailing water, we had that shit taken care of. SKELETON SHIP BOYS. WE DID IT. Great game mechanic.

It's a legit game mechanic, rather than dealing with people perpetually respawning when you're raiding them, if you are able to knock them out and handcuff them, you can take one of the fighters out for a good while.

The ponies on the roadmap are direct asset flips from ARK Mod content.

Can't say I ever experience that issue, I always woke up on the boats, as did our crew members. We actually utilized that a lot during huge PVP raids because people would always have live feeds of the player tracker up watching who entered their sectors. When you're raiding any of the large companies that can materialize 10-20 people really fast, keeping them unaware was often best. 1-2 new players entering a sector wasnt terribly alarming, and almost garnered no response from whoever owned the sector. But you know 2 brigs packed full of cannon bears and crabs with 15+ peoples offline bodies all logging in the second you got to the shore was hilarious, slapping down beds, offloading the critters, building the FOBs. Good times.

But I want that level cap right now....

I've played Rust on and off, never quite caught me as much as say 2015-late 2017 Ark PVP did. That Ark network transfer, 24/7 warfare, wiping one server after the next, using all the resources gained from previous server to invade the next. It was so beautiful. You'd logon for the day and everyone would be like "Hey! We're fighting on this server tonight! Come grab some shit and get over here!" Every night it was a server raid somewhere, ransacking servers one after the next. The chinese servers were the best, you'd crack one base and walk away with like 30k rockets and asc gear up the wazooo. Did get into some pretty good fights in Rusts, and I have to admit, my experience with cheaters in Rust was far less than Ark, DayZ, Scum, even Atlas.

Grapeshot Games studio has no official website for themselves, it was made exclusively to push out ATLAS with a recycled ARK build/content. Still published by Intrinsic and Snail Games. Not sure if it was to distance themselves from Wildcards history, or if it was such a crap-shoot they didnt want Wildcards name further ruined by this thing. From what I understand Wildcard and Grapeshot still share the same office building but is still its own entity(technically).

The best part is when we were talking about Grapeshot games working on other games, and I was like nope, they sure arent. So he posted a screengrab of Studio Wildcard, with ARK and ARK DLCs... Why isnt the ATLAS DLC listed there too? Oh... shit... it's because theyre different studios... Sure proved me wrong.

No. nope. They have no other games to work on, this is literally what this entire studio was made for, was making this game. That's not how studios work, usually studios build up a portfolio of games they have made and keep going from there. They dont usually create little side studios to get away from their chinese overlords they sold out to to pay off their court ordered debts, and then technically poach a 2017 mod version of that game from said previous studio, and release it as a brand spanking new game. [Edit: nevermind, it looks like they never really escaped, Snail Games still publishes it in different store fronts(like Microsofts), or intrinsic in some others(egyptian publisher). I mean saying that's how all studios work is a pretty huge stretch. It gives us a pretty good insight into how little you really know about any of this. Usually game designers dont port a game to another platform until their game is already in a pretty respectable state, and most of them give themselves proper time to port it over if its not all ready to go at once. A good example of this is made for console games that get ports onto to PC. Most developers on average give themselves at least a year to port the game over after release, because console platforms are very different and generally break the game if they dont do it right. They took a buggy broken mess and ported it over to console. It wasnt a great decision. They basically cronenberged it.

u mad bro? This game is most definitely not about piracy and sailing, it's about carebearing it up, turtling it out on islands, abusing freeports to stash your goods, breeding bears for your cannons, grinding away at SODs to get those SWEET FUCKING PERCENTAGES on your BPs, farming tons of mats to fund your land war. Sailing is unfortunately the only means of transportation, and is dreadfully boring. Transporting tens of thousands of mats? Biggest concern? Fucking tornadoes. Fighting SODS? Biggest concern? Fucking tornadoes.... Chasing player ships? Biggest concern? Those motherfucking Tornadoes. Looting any ship? Biggest concern? EVERY FUCKING SHARK. Fighting players? Biggest concern? Man I gotta go through them tornadoes to get to their turtle base so I can drop all these bears and crabs.... I lied, the game is about tornadoes.

That is the only remotely accurate thing you have said so far. 12-15k of 50k is definitely not .5-1%, it would be 24-30%. HUGE difference I admit, you got me there, the math is sound. You are right good Sir. Unfortunately I distinctly recall saying 12k was .5-1% out of 1,000,000-2,000,000. And yes, the percentage of players playing, actually does matter. You cited Rust. Rust is a game title that is 7 years old, and still has a much higher percentile of players still playing and is still growing. Rust is pretty dedicated to bug fixes, content growth, anti-cheat(including hardware bans)., and sustains itself on more than just selling units of the game. All of the things that ATLAS developers do not do. Rust is thriving.

Can confirm this mostly works. I've used this method before when I had critters stuck. Worst case scenario I had was they fell under the map sometimes when they would render in and start following.