Envie

We discussed this at length and we know the hard work involved in running a private server. We chose the public PvP server to see what alliances and wars there were to be had ... but sadly the game is making that very difficult to do or enjoy. And no, you being admin on a privately run unofficial server will kill any remaining joy you had in it. The solution here is for the developers to revert the recent changes, eliminate the aging debuff (until they have better options such as the lineage/child feature they promised) and encourage players to come back and try again without the recently added absurd broken game mechanics. They're bleeding out here.

As far as I can tell, you never go beyond 100. Have been sitting at 100 years old for the past week. The debuff is harsh. It doesn't get worse though. Going to the FOY, even if you did like sailing, is really bad. Really. Bad.

I have considered this idea as now that the modding community is also starting up, there will likely be fixes to breeding that make it more tolerable on private servers to actually get somewhere with a breeding project. It's just disheartening that the mega public servers, which we joined to be a part of a larger political community and economy, is too broken to make it possible to do either of those things. I'm sure once things stabilize and there are good mods in place, I'll reconsider my decision to quit and will seek out a good unofficial server to join.

This is so awesome, thank you! I love your pack of pigs (great names!) and appreciate their well-wishes to mine who shall continue to live on with my company on their island as well. I may return to pig farming one day, if they decide to fix breeding to a way that makes any sense for players. Good luck to you and your porcine pack of delicious friends!

Love this, thanks for the encouragement! I know it's not the end yet. Perhaps just a long hibernation is in order ... I will ask the bear how that's done.

Thank you for actually reading it - it's long and I wanted some symbolic eulogy that might make sense for some. My War Pigs ... symbolic for everything wrong with Atlas but a testament to the gamer spirit that hopes for something better! Dear Developers: Please fix your terrible fountain of youth game mechanic first. Then fix breeding and all the other design flaws, thanks.

"My memory. King Robert Baratheon - murdered by a pig. Give me something for the pain, and let me die." - Robert Baratheon, Game of Thrones. Give me something for the pain, and let me die ... geat last words for my own exit from this game. And in the end, a pig is what did me in too. RIP Baby Superpig. Atlas was both, at times, awesome and horrible. There were exciting moments where small bits of hope shined through the ugliness of it's "Early Access" alpha status. Sailing the high seas with my man in search of treasure, narrowly escaping huge storms, watching dolphins arc alongside your ship ... this part of the game is really well done and has a lot of promise for a solid future game. There were times of fun and laughter - seeing a crewmate accidentally hang himself from a noose, or capturing an enemy in a gibbet and forcing them to sing bawdy pirate songs to get released. Political fights of massive proportions including inside betrayals. Trading with neighbors for precious resources - even if just lowly fruit or vegetable seeds worth their weight in gold. These were the good bits. Sadly, the good bits get drowned as quickly as a sailor lost in the open sea of what becomes a vast ocean of problems the game has this early on in its life-cycle. I'm not sure why game developers choose this route for their games these days. In the old days of EQ, WoW etc, you had to be invited to closed beta testing to experience this level of early/broken gameplay. Now, in modern gaming times, you PAY to play this sort of broken gameplay. It's bad. I'm too old for this. Figuratively, and literally in real life. There are just far too many glaring flaws with Atlas for me to be able to continue at this time on the public NA/PvP server. There are hundreds of players everywhere, still struggling to make it work ... but as the bigger fish eat the little fish ... so too do the majority of 'casual' players slowly start to dwindle away in just a month since it's release. Large mega-guilds.... alliances of sharks feeding on all the available smaller companies are beginning to starve, and turn on one another. And this is, at the bigger picture level, how the game will die before it's even completed development. More and more 'refugee' companies (small outfits of friends that can't survive in claimed territories) washed up on our lonely lawless island ... tired and wrung out to dry, having lost everything to bugs or predatory players with no further agenda than wiping them out because. Pirates. That sort of food-chain goes against the equilibrium needed in the predator-prey relationship but humans are, notoriously stupid, as always. Gamers are even worse. They'll prey upon everyone else and then proclaim the game is dead because they won. What exactly have they won in a game not even finished where all the smaller groups of players have already quit? But before I lose the point here, in the bigger picture, let me shrink it back down to the real problems, and sadly it's not even the PvP at all. That's actually going along as expected. "Give me something for the pain, and let me die." Ahh, the Fountain of Youth! I thought that particular game mechanic would be the most painful blow ... and it nearly was. Our characters were 100 years old now and looked like prunes with a horrible multi-stat debuff! This was insane. Adding insult to injury in an already buggy/laggy game - they decided to introduce this ridiculous 'Quest' to get a youth buff to reverse the aging mechanic they designed and implemented without providing any way to counteract it with children/lineage as was promised in the game mechanic they were developing. Seriously - who thinks this stuff up? "Oh hey, we'll put this insanely difficult game mechanic in (FOY) to challenge (read: punish) the players for a broken game mechanic we didn't even finish yet!" Wow. just. wow. So ... My man spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing from one Freeport to a nearby golden age region, to the next. Over and over he did this with a sort of insane determination most gamers don't have. I certainly don't. I tried to stay awake until 3 am to participate in this spectacularly bad 'event' ... but over and over we died trying to run the gauntlet of high-level monsters. Sometimes he would arrive in a region only to find the FOY had moved on to the next. Sometimes the lag was so bad we couldn't even move or swim let alone evade the high-level monsters. Parking a ramshackle nearby meant it would be inevitably destroyed within hours either by previously mentioned high-level monsters, or players. Or both. But then, he finally made it. In a fluke experimental run to just find out the FOY location or if it was even still there on one particular island, he managed to outrun dozens of Chinese players that had come ashore en masse to run the gauntlet too. Like the running of the bulls, he finally avoided the chaotic aggro of fire elementals, gorgons, and dozens of high-level lions, bats, etc. etc. ... you get the picture. He was rewarded with the promised mythical youth regeneration. Me? I was offline trying to hold our real life together. You know, taking care of our kids, cooking a meal, being tired and making coffee for us. I watched him try to quickly run my character up the beach too from my PC as the opportunity had finally come! But then, our two beds on the sloop were instantly destroyed. Probably the fire elementals I'm guessing. Not players that time (amongst half a dozen lost sloops already lost)... So now my dude is young, and I'm still a 100-year-old crone with a crippling debuff and a young man husband invigorated and ready to go again! Well, this wouldn't work in real life and I can assure you it's not working in this ridiculous game. I'm disheartened and disappointed and he really did try. He even started the whole process all over again this weekend, albeit rather deflated this time because it was going to take days, again, to get that lucky shot at making it alive to the FOY without losing yet another (or half a dozen) sloop. But that wasn't what finally did me in. In the end, like Robert. It was a pig. "My memory. - Murdered by a pig." Because he had spent days building ramshackle sloops and sailing to various FOY regions, my man told me not to bother coming with him - just hold down the fort at our island base - keep our tiny company intact and try to avoid getting into fights with our fractious neighbors in a lawless region. We weren't in the mega-alliance anymore - we "retired" literally and figuratively as both players tired of claimed territory issues and old/debuffed characters too. We'll just hold a small piece of some lawless island until we get rid of this old age debuff! Famous last words. So, to keep myself entertained, I started taming animals. I tamed a bear so our crew-mates could gather fiber and outfit their ships and we could build a small base. I tamed two lions ... The Cadillacs of destruction I rode around proudly on our island, greeting neighbors ... and sometimes eating them ... accidentally or otherwise. We had a strange truce with the Chinese ... talking in short sentences on both sides to keep the language barrier to a minimum. Refugees from other companies and alliances moved in up the beach and we traded materials. I even had a cow to give us milk! Life was simple. And then came the pigs. The War Pigs. It was an addiction, really. First I tamed just one or two out of boredom and for fun... then a few more ... and then before I knew it we had a whole pack of pigs - I think I stopped counting at 10 of them. I selectively tamed only level 25+ wild pigs so they would level up to 50+ and become mini-tanks of death. Kept in a pack and all on neutral stance, they were lethal guards against anyone who tried, accidentally or otherwise, to even lay a finger on our base. Just try to fight 3-4 wild pigs at once, you'll see what I mean. Finally, I had two or three level 60-65 impressive males I was proud of and their 'harem' of lady pigs. Why not try to breed them? And so I did. The first two never made it through gestation ... a server rollback or reset aborted that effort, literally. Another pair kept glitching through the walls and wandering off ... I'd find them down by the beach several times. Maybe guard duty was more important than making little piglets. Who knows. And then it finally happened. We were about to eat dinner and my phone alarm beeped... gestation was up on another two females! I half-heartedly logged in while we were eating to check. Lo and behold, we had piglets! Two males... tiny and nearly dead. It was too hot! (we live on an eastern tropics island) ... we spazzed out and tried to get them to follow us into the shallow pond next to our base to cool them down ... The lions watched from their cathouse roof, licking their lips. One piglet (the superior leveled one, sadly) died immediately. The other barely survived with a few hitpoints to spare. We lovingly hand fed it. At first, it could only hold 5 or 6 berries in its tiny inventory ... but as the hours passed it grew and could go longer and longer ... the stacks of food grew. It ate chickpeas and turmeric, and berries galore! We were succeeding! Through heat waves (barely surviving each one in our covered breeding barn by a nice cool waterfall) and cold nights lighting torches and then snuffing them out before dawn and the inevitable heat to come that day. I nursed this tiny piglet. 6 hours later. Yes, six. It wanted to "cuddle"... the first level of imprinting! I was rewarded for all my hard work with a piggy cuddle and a measly 7% gain on imprinting. No increase to health or other stats other than the slow progress it had already been making. It was 6% matured by then. That's it. Roughly 1% maturation per hour. You do the math there. All this - for a pig? It was 3:30 am. I was exhausted. My man was off trying to find an island with corn ... the pig's 1st preferred food. Perhaps that would help our little piglet mature faster! I had to go to bed. 2 more sows were gestating and would have piglets in 5 hours! They have a 10-hour gestation stage. Well, you can already guess how it ends. Little baby Superpig died while I was sleeping. He either starved or died in a heatwave which happens every other in-game day or so on our island. He lived for less than 10 hours of real-life time when his gestation period was just as long. His total maturation process would have taken ten times that. The six hours I spent hand feeding and guarding him, adjusting the temperature in his barn ... wasted. I didn't even bother to get up for the 'birth' of the other pigs. Why bother? They would just die too. I've read the forums here extensively ... all the stories of the baby bears people spent equally insane amounts of time trying to keep warm with packs of penguins and dozens of campfires. The losses to glitches and server resets too. I guess I thought maybe pigs would be a little easier. More hardy perhaps. Why is this how they want the game's breeding mechanic to be? Why doesn't the MOTHER PIG care for the newborn infant as they do perfectly well in real life? I don't understand why a human player has to hand feed and watch a baby animal with 25 hitpoints die from being too hot, or too cold, or starvation because the humans had to sleep. This is insanity. ~~~ The Fountain of Youth is insanity. The pig (or any tamed animal) breeding is insanity. I'm ashamed to even admit I spent so many hours doing this I was exhausted and didn't do the dishes or get a decent nights sleep for days on end. This is ridiculous. This is not 'extreme survival game' fun. And so, my time in the Atlas world has ended. I'm sure it matters very little to the mega-alliances out there doing their shark tank thing. It probably matters even less to the developers of this game who designed these horribly broken mechanics which punishes me for being a 'casual' player and therefore unable to get to the Fountain of Youth or to raise a humble pig from birth to adulthood unless I either don't sleep for days on end or have 3-4 friends dumb enough to take shifts and help me out (which I would never ask friends to do). It's a pirate game... but the only thing getting pirated here is my sanity and I didn't have much of that to start with since I seem to enjoy subjecting myself to ridiculous early access survival games a lot. "Give me something for the pain, and let me die." I'll never make it to the Fountain of Youth. I am going to release the lions today. I will put them on aggressive stance so they can at least still hunt and feed themselves. My apologies to all the little lawless refugees and Chinese farmers on our island they will probably eat. When they finally do get taken down - at least they will have died free spirits! The pigs? King Henry, Sir Walter, Prince Humperdink and their harem of ladies... Bertha, Gertrude, Big Betty, Brunhilde, Fannie ... and many others... They become the property of our tiny company. There are a few good guys in there I know will feed them and keep them guarding the docks while they plunder for treasure. Feed the bear, she is happy and fat. Milk the cow, or the lions will eat her I'm sure. My character is 100 years old. She wants to swim to the bottom of the deep blue sea and erase the pain and enjoy the few memories of the sea she had... maybe one day this atlas will be a place to return to ... maybe when pigs fly! Oh, the glorious war pigs. Enjoy life, my noble friends! PS: If you're a Game of Thrones fan like me, here's a tribute put to "War Pigs" that is really well done and one of my favorites by Zurik to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F_PDWZxNBA

Is your character 90-100 years old with the age stat debuff on it? Have you built ramshackle sloops and gone to the regions where the fountain of youth is located to try and get the debuff removed? If you've done all that and still think it's an ok game mechanic that isn't broken to the point of making people hate the game, then you are a one-man survival game master I guess.

Ok, sure, they could just decide to leave it out entirely - that would be ok too. Very few MMO's have ever tried this particular kind of mechanic. I actually like the idea in theory. I like it far more than the stupid vitamin and temperature balancing act mechanics. I'd rather have aging/dying/lineage than those. But the point is, if they're not done with the lineage/family feature, they shouldn't have put aging into Early Access at all - wait until they have it done. But to add insult to injury, they add an even more stupid mechanic (FOY) than the aging debuff in the first place!

This is the really baffling part for me. Why, exactly, are we being punished for a game mechanic they have not even implemented yet? If they're not going to turn aging and the debuff off, at least say "Oh hey guys, we're sorry we haven't finished developing this aging/lineage feature yet, here's the Fountain of Youth buff to counteract it until we are finished developing it... " Then put the thing in ONE location ... and LEAVE IT THERE PLEASE. At least give players the chance to get to it without hundreds of players cramming into each zone every time it moves and causing massive lag due to hundreds of shipwrecks, players and high-level monsters everywhere. Please, developers, TURN OFF the aging mechanic and debuff until you get it working as intended. This FOY thing is just completely broken and a terrible idea. You're sinking your own ship here.