user1

1. To you. Gomez and his wife are having fun after 1000 hours. Is it your position that they aren’t having fun, or that they shouldn’t be having fun? I can't reliably tell whether other people are having fun. I definitely don't. I believe them when they say they're having fun and there is nothing wrong with that. That still doesn't miraculously make me have fun, though. 2. No signs of improvement is overblown hyperbole to anyone who has actually followed the patch notes. Say you have no faith in the direction of the design, or that’s gone from bad to worse, but your statement heavily implies they’ve just let the game sit there with no effort at refinement. Numerous technical improvements have been made and new content has been added. You don’t have to like these things or consider them sufficient, but on its face the statement comes across as bile for the sake of bile. Signs of change, yes. Plenty, actually. Improvements? Not so much. 3. No argument there. This has been stilted since day one and giving large clans exclusive chat access to devs that other layers don’t have isn’t likely to correct it. Right 4. It is entirely possible to ignore tames. The amount of development resources so far put into land based tames for a supposedly sailing oriented game doesn’t make much sense to me, but no one is making you use them. Ok, then. Do a purple treasure map without using tames. Let us know how that went. 5. It’s funny that you mention fog and doldrums because I feel like I experience noticeably less of both of these than I did during the early days. Yes you want them both to go away completely, I get that, but if any developer tries to make his game by doing only what his players want, he’ll never get anywhere because players want contradictory things. There’s also a well known phenomenon where players want something made easier, then when it’s made easier the challenge is gone and they get bored. So there’s a balance needed there that isn’t easy to achieve. Is GrapeCard doing a good job finding that balance? Who knows, but Jat’s involvement of late here on the forums directly contradicts your assertion. It is still noticeable to the point of driving me up the walls. I don't care if they tuned it down a notch. I am not talking about notches. Turn that shit down to 10% of what it currently is. 6. What I said about entertainment per hour applies to the industry overall, not Atlas specifically, and any fair reading of my post would understand that. You ignored it because you gave an Atlas specific answer. There is a reason people over the age of 5 don’t play with blocks , they don’t find it entertaining. Within any industry there are going to be some failures. If Atlas turns out to be one of those, so be it, but it does not change the fundamental point about MMO’s overall. "I play polo and i am having a hard time to understand why you find playing tennis expensive". If people want to compare gaming with a visit to the movies to prove how cheap gaming is in comparison, it is adequate to compare it to online streaming to show how expensive it is in comparison. 7. I’m not gonna argue that Atlas needs more content that isn’t time sinks, that’s something I’m in complete agreement with, but that is tempered by the knowledge that all MMO’s have significant time sinks because players can always chew through content far faster than any development team can create, refine and test it. *Having time sinks *Having TOO MANY time sinks There is a noticeable difference there Also, if they actually enabled emergent gameplay (like, for example.. start with players being able to repair their allies ships) or self sustaining PvP (by not letting the loser of a war become damaged beyond recovery), this would be far less of a problem. 8. Clearly you’re very salty. I’m not gonna ask why you’d continue to play a game you don’t like, I’m gonna ask why you’d continue to post to a forum for a game you’ve clearly decided is hopeless. Given that there is clear proof in the form of Gomez that some people are enjoying it, not everyone agrees with your point of view completely, so how would you define what you’re currently doing as anything besides intentional toxicity? Because if i kept silent about the things they do that i hate, they wouldn't know how pissed i actually am.

The game is absolute and utter garbage. We've watched this train wreck for 8 months now and there are no signs of improvement. The balance is dominated by blatant favoritism towards larger companies. The majority of your play time has more to do with taming than with ships. Player wishes are outright ignored (How do you like the fog and doldrums so far?) And if you argue that you would get more hours of entertainment for a cheaper price than with watching a movie, i'd recommend you buy some wooden construction blocks. They might not be the most flamboyant form of entertainment, but the hrs/$ ratio is nearly unbeatable. For 15€ a month me and a couple friends can watch netflix 24/7, and that's what you should compare this to. You provide your own seating, hardware and snacks, so you can't really compare gaming to a night out at the movies, price-wise. That we are even still playing this crap after 1000 of hours can easily be attibuted to the fact that the majority of the playing time consists of time sinks, so after 1000 hours we're still nowhere near getting any of the shit done which we had planned. Except for the fuckers who cheated their way to level 100 and were allowed to stay there, while many of us are still struggling to even get there to this day.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

If they can't be replaced by something non-taming-related, then yes. Even just one would be too much. At least now i know what to expect from the ark company. Apparently, the key point in pirate life seems to be the baby cuddle intervals. It is funny how this important part has been left out of almost every pirate related narrative ever. I guess that was just bad storytelling. Or those just weren't fantasy pirates, only the regular, totally boring kind of pirates. Now if you'd excuse me, i have to go collect some fucking berries so my bear won't starve. I'm just kidding. I stopped playing this shit a week ago.

Actually i never meant to imply the fantasy theme was a bad thing. I only find it unfathomable how that fantasy term is used as a cheap excuse for having a stupenduous amount of taming related content in the game, and little beyond that. "Look, fantasy pirates don't use ships for that. No, really. What they really be using is...... *drumroll* BEARS". Having what you consider to be a "pure" pirate experience without all the romanticism that comes with the theme probably wouldn't be any more interesting than being a real pirate on the somalian shore is these days. Them trying to sell their shortcomings as being in tune with and practically required by "the lore" kinda ticks me off. Pirates plus sea monsters and krakens and mermaids and heck even dragons is A-OK in my book. Pirates plus bears and armored infantry tortoises and elephants and chicken however is not.

Seriously, what the fuck. So just because every game studio behaves like absolute shit nowadays, we should let them get away with it? Get fucked! The game was sold as a pirate survival MMO, too, but it is nowhere near that. Instead, we have this travesty of a fantasy petting zoo and larger-corp-auto-wins "PvP". Neither does it make a difference whether it is 50.000 people each paying 20€ or 20 people each paying 50.000€. If you need the HELP of your customers to even get your game launched, you better pay some extra attention to what they fucking want, instead of displaying that dictator attitude and doing whatever the fuck you want with it.

Listen here, kid. Nobody needs your permission to express their opinion here. If you don't like what he says, feel free to fucking ignore it. If i told you to shut the fuck up, go away and never come back, would you feel obligated to follow that advice? Neither does he. Because this game is in early access, so it is not finished yet. Yet we still gave our money to GS, so it is only fair that we get to know the direction this game is heading, because we kind of invested our money into them making the game. We are not mere customers, mind you! If it weren't for our monetary support, development of this game would have gotten shut down months ago. The only thing that tells us not everything is going down the drain is GS not getting tired to repeat that they "are taking this game very seriously" and they will "continue to work as best they can". But in reality, this could as well be just lip service, because so far they have only managed to release one pile of bullcrap after another. This game has a looooooong way to go and i do not see them taking steps into the right direction at all. Wait until you learn about books. Boy, are you going to hate those.

The biggest single thing that separates blizzard from grapeshot is that blizzard has a history of always continuously working on their game's balance. They do not always get it right on the 1st attempt with what they're doing, but they keep doing it, and in the long run, imbalances will be dealt with. Moreover, they have a strong knowledge that when you let one group of players fuck over another group, you are probably going to lose both groups in the end. As to my knowledge, the total number of perceivable things grapeshot did in order to remedy the current terrible balance nightmare is: 0 (zero) And they seem to live in constant fear of doing anything that would weaken the mega corps, presumably because they imagine that those are the largest part of their player base and they can't afford to lose that, right? The way i see it, the primary reason they want me to play the game at all is so that i can be farmed by bigger corps. The fun of many is more important than the fun of the few, right. But i'm having none of that any more. Let's hope they continue to find enough of those few who are willing to sacrifice their own fun for the greater cause (read: greater corps).

Concerned parent? Probably not. Butthurt troll? Most likely yes. Even if it ain't so, there is one very simple solution to the problem of your kid being exposed to vulgar language: Get the fuck outta here! Studies show that more intelligent people are often prone to swearing more than their less intelligent fellow humans. It also helps with stress relief. So if you complain about the wrongdoings of your little hellspawn and attribute their bad behavior to using and being exposed to foul language, think again. Oh, and please stop your attempts at doing harm by abusing the court of public opinion as a weapon. Thank you. P.S.: Where i'm from, when your underage child walks into a strip club, you don't get to sue the owner of the strip club. You get to go to jail for neglecting your child. <°)))><

The way i see it, we are all collectively being punished for being so stupid as to pre-purchase the game in the first place. This is a classical pre-purchase problem, where as soon as the devs got your money, they will turn 180 degree and turn the game into whatever fucking ridiculous direction they want, while your influence on their decisions as a customer is almost exactly none. Well... Lesson learned. The best we can do now is to make sure noone else has to fall for this by themselves any more. When i paid for the game, it was still bound to become an MMO, something that seems to have gone overboard since.

So that mod miraculously imported all by itself then? Given that the dev's apparently didn't lift a fucking finger to throw this into the resource pool. What i do believe is that the amount of planning that had gone into this is approximately zero. That wouldn't deviate too far from the usual proceedings.

Truly the pinnacle of MMO design: Single player content. Thank god the devs spent their days tinkering about some solo content i outright refuse to even recognize for the sole reason that it's not even really part of the game when it is not running on the official server network, instead of taking care of obvious glaring balance problems. This whole new massively single player always-on-drm game thing completely took me by surprise.

^This. The difference between trash tier and godly tier is a bit much right now and should probably be more in the ballpark of like 25% at most, instead of what feels like 5000% now. @boomervoncannon High end gear should be meant to give you an EDGE in combat instead of putting you in a whole different ballpark. Having a 25% dmg advantage in any competitive shooter would completely turn around the balance so that nobody is going to use anything other than that +25% dmg gun eventually. Even just having +2% damage is going to make a hell of a difference.

Tell your friend to do as follows: Open your Steam library. Right click on Atlas and select "Properties". Go to the "Local Files" tab and click on "Verify Integrity of game files". Wait for the progress bar on the new window to complete. It will presumably say something like "xy files compromised" and a hidden download will start in the background. You will not be able to see this on your steam downloads, but there will be a % number on the Atlas item in your steam library. Wait for this download to finish!!!! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Do NOT attempt to start the game before that download is complete or you will have to start over from the beginning! After that, just start the game normally. You're welcome.

I beg to differ. Mega corporations did not "get killed off". Nothing has been done to weaken mega corps in any way shape or form, ever. The one sole reason why they have mostly vanished is that nobody is willing to provide "content" to them by repeatedly dying over and over and handing over all their possessions any more. Mega corps are dying out because they can't find any victims any more, because nobody keeps playing under these conditions. No more people = no more victims. No more victims = frustrated mega corps = more people leaving. If we had fair ground so that small corps could have a reason to exist in the game other than to provide raiding targets for the megas, maybe there would be fewer people leaving. But given their track record, grapecard probably can't be arsed to even think about doing anything remotely reasonable regarding balance issues.

if you want to load the maximum possible weight without sinking, you put 6 containers on your ship. the trade off is that you will lose a lot of speed. if you want the optimum distribution of weight and speed you only use 2 or 3 containers. do the math. it adds up. using 2 containers filled to the brim will be faster than loading the same weight on a ship with 0 containers. it will also be faster than using 6 containers on an empty ship. there are more possible values to observe than just min and max. more often than not, the optimum lies somewhere between. also you shouldn't do comparisons based on % of weight. rather do absolute amounts, like 10 tons.

Time sinks: Spent tens of hours looking for the ghost ship. Got nothing to show for it. Spent days looking for that missing discovery point in A1/B1 but cannot find it. Again, for all my time spent, i got absolutely fucking nothing. 50% of the time, there is no wind. When there is wind, there is going to be fog. No loot, only blueprints. What's up with that? Only 4 different ship types Having to feed the tames. Having to use tames. Is this still a game about ships and pirates? Alliances are worthless. I can't even help repairing an allied ship. Or fast travel to their boats for doing treasure maps together. Too much focus on big corps. Most higher tier content is unattainable for small corps. Offline raiding People walling off areas and building huge fucking disney castles on top of treasure spawns Game balance is tied for the worst i ever had the misfortune to witness in any game i have played in my entire life Losing tens of hours of progress because my bear fell into a crevice or i couldn't get to my dead body in order to retrieve my all legendary loot due to 5 fire elementals guarding it Sorry for breaking the single point per post rule, but that would probably just get me banned for spamming.

How about you start with the RTFM thing? Today i learned that crybabies consider it trolling when they get told to look up stuff on their own. Because things are ALWAYS somebody else's fault. "I don't know shit, and it is YOUR fault for not telling me." Bite me. RTFM!

You just need to step on them, and the timer might be 10 day-ish. Or not. idk. If the wiki is so useless, how come that i'm not here asking stupid questions on multiple occasions each day? Because back in my days, we RTFM and then we STFU. Nowadays, it seems that when someone doesn't know about a certain thing, it is everbody else's fault but theirs, and they can't be bothered learning it. Instead, they expect to be spoon fed every bit of information thats relevant to them. This is still early access, you know? This game is not perfect, in fact far from it, but sometimes you only got yourself to blame for being stupid. RTFM!!!

This is early access, so it is to be expected that not every information is presented in its final form in the game just yet. Have you considered reading up on what info is available already? You already found out that there is a forum. What if i told you that there's also a wiki?

I could send you a pile of elephant dung, tall as a mountain, for even smaller cost. Think about the endless hours of fun you could be having with it. Would that raise me to the same demigod level in your belief system? I'd argue that's money well spent. Well. Better than certain other things, at least.

You don't need to hoard thousands of blueprints on your ship. Bring them to your base, build some bookshelves and store your BPs there. Same goes for maps. You are not meant to store them indefinitely and in large numbers. And if you want to know about the strange weight calculations, i recommend you read up about the floating point arithmetics in modern x86 CPUs. 280 slots are plenty if you don't carry a metric fuckton of white BPs at all times. Things can of course always be improved, and i'm all for it, but i suppose there is QUITE the amount of other things that are far more pressing right now.

I never said that having 2x weekends was a particularly good solution to the problem. Anyway, if the rates were equally as high during periods where people with a job cannot play, the no-lifers would still be even further ahead of the rest. A feasible way to address this problem would be to implement diminishing returns, in such a way that each successive time period sunk into playing the game yields lesser and lesser results, until the difference between spending another hour of playing or not is so infinitesimally miniscule that it hardly makes any difference at all. This tipping point should ideally be reached after spending an amount of time at playing the game, which can realistically be reached by a vast majority of players, which i estimate to be at roughly 4h/day. If you insist on abusing your ability to spend quadruple the time on the game that other people can, you should not be surprised to see player numbers plummet until it is only the no-lifers left and the game eventually dies from mass player extinction. If there is a portion of players whom you do not provide equal opportunity at keeping up with everyone else, you are going to lose that portion of players eventually. Grapeshot has shown on multiple occasions their inability to avoid screwing over smaller companies and players who spend less time on the game. Don't further encourage them to keep up with this bullshit! Even the basic concept of grinding/levelling is detrimental to the idea of PvP, because the winner of a conflict is not determined by who is playing better, but by who has been playing/grinding more.

* pirates * diminishing returns * alternatives to using tames

That's basically a much more elaborate way of saying the same thing that i always say, which is that the game design is a steaming hot pile of horseshit. If it weren't for the 2x weekends, the 24/7 welfare/preschool faction would be even further ahead of the rest of us, though, because grapecard doesn't know how to do diminishing returns, so everything always scales linearly. Double amount of people: double the outcome. Same with double amount of time. There is not even one mechanism in the whole game which acts as a slowly accumulating antagonist to any one process in the game. Which is basic game design 101.