gnihar

1 hour ago, ShadowFlea said:

I sincerely hope the devs read this and take this to heart. I'm sure some will disagree but after talking to countless people and being in streams asking streamers and viewers alike why they stopped playing the same few answers keep coming up. The main answer being the devs went too “Ark” with Atlas. I think describing that would be an insult to peoples intelligence as there is a reason the recent 24 hour peak of Ark was 55,518 people and Atlas was 3,430 people.

 

The reason people were so excited for Atlas originally was the idea of a survival based piracy game. Somehow that concept got morphed into a game with a fictional AI enemy (ghost ships), animals that are far too important when it comes to raiding and hostile animals such as crocodiles that are massive and pull from the experience. It seems much easier to just add the ships from Atlas to Ark to get that same affect.

 

What people actually wanted from Atlas was a survival based piracy game without the Ark style creatures in it. Which is why Ark has more daily active users than Atlas by a long shot. What people want to see changed that will draw large numbers back:

 

• A game that doesn't feel like a job in terms of gold/food upkeep for AI.

• More AI enemies and different factions that are realistic to the lore of it i.e. AI pirates and a Royal Navy that is out trying to catch pirates (even the AI pirates) and if you are able to sink them they have loot on them such as weapons, armor, gold, supplies, etc.

• Add the possibility of the Royal Navy landing on your shores to kill/capture pirates. Maybe even a "reputation" with them that provokes more aggressive attacks the higher your reputation is. Essentially like a wanted system. Help relieve the pvp griefing when AI is also attacking people that are killing the AI navy.

• Have animals that are relevant and realistic i.e. cows, horses, parrots, monkeys etc.

• Limit the number of AI members for a company instead of the insane gold upkeep (which mostly only Megas can keep up with). Make it so it's expensive to recruit them and only takes food to upkeep them and limit it to 10-15 AI per person with a cap of 200 AI in a company or something to that affect.

• Anti griefing measures which most agree have been resolved already. Thank you for that btw!!!

 

These are just a few of the major recommendations people had to help bring life back to the game and make it something they would enjoy again.

 

For the life of me I can't wrap my mind around why the devs keep pushing Atlas closer and closer to Ark while watching the player base drop constantly to the point where I can hardly see it being profitable to keep trying to develop this game which means the game is literally dying. I would love to hear the devs reasoning for constantly taking this game down a road that clearly pushed over 55,000 people away from their game (all-time peak of 58,788 per steam). At a certain point there needs to be a realization that the current model/path for this game is not one that is conducive to a large player base.

 

I agree with most people that “you might as well play Ark instead” at this point. Minus the stability issues this game is a goldmine if it just goes away from the Ark mentality. It's clear the devs did a great job at Ark because the daily peak is literally 16x higher than Atlas. The issue is people don't want Atlas to be Ark with ships and that is how the vast majority describe it.

 

I beg the devs to take a serious look at what they are doing with the game and to take a serious look at what the community actually wants out of this game. Of course it is absolutely their decision how to develop the game and where to take it but it's those same decisions that are killing Atlas. I understand that this will most likely fall on deaf ears and will mostly get responses from trolls but at least I can say that I tried to help push the game in the right direction before watching it die.

Atlas being similar to Ark is no issue at all. Only people who are fans of “pirates” have problem with that similarity.

You are right partially though, when you quote “lack of anti griefing measures”. This is correct.

However, Atlas is failing because of 3 other things.

1. sailing to already discovred places takes too long and gets boring, which caused many leavings from game (solution:fast travel)

2. too much oriented towards Zerg companies, majority of players left due to that (some facts say that 70% or more players are buddies and solo players, who stand no chance vs megacompanies, and they left very early on)

3. in pvp aspect, raiding is too easy on land (solution: improve peformance of passsive defenses)

5 hours ago, Stupid Monkey said:

But you're not an official pvp player... 

You don't even have the game installed...

You do post a lot though (see complain x 400ish), so why bother if you don't even have the game installed? Your 1000 hours are likely on these forums rather than in-game. 

Yep - i uninstalled in june and will not be coming back at all. From my experiences and what we percieved as problematic though, devs could profit and improve atlas image.

1 hour ago, Stupid Monkey said:

Yes, yes you did... 

Dear Devs, please for the love of whatever you hold dear, do not listen to anything people like this say, good, bad, or otherwise. 

Yeah - devs should not listen official pvp players with over 1k hours in game. Actually that is exactly what they are doing, so your complaint is redundant.

Just now, boomervoncannon said:

*blinks*

This game had glory at one point?

In the first days, there were 50k players.

in month after the wipe, the game had steady 11k players during peak times, which i found barely enough, as that number should be divided by cca 2 (official/unofficial) and then again divided by 2 (pvp/pve) and then again by 2 (na/eu), and voila that was your server community.

Puckles should be by far more deadly, at least twice more. Perhaps even the relative damage should be dealt by them, not absolute numbers, to scale with sick levels and sick hp.

AI cannons and ballista should outrange player cannon.

Id be shocked if they implemented that tbh.

On 7/13/2019 at 8:07 AM, boomervoncannon said:

Nope.

We all just gather here on the forums to pretend to complain about issues in a game we don’t play, provide suggestions for a game we don’t play, and set up trades within a game we don’t play. 

Realist is the only one here who actually plays Atlas.

Why do you ask?

I provided several 90% polished solutions that would maybe restore the game to the right path.

One of them was central npc feeding, which was implemented very similarly to what i suggested.

Other 3 still havent been implemented, as the devs obviosuly find no worth in 1k hour player experiences on offiical pvp.

One of them being a done solution for fast traveling, which i posted on several places, as people are leaving the game due to boredom of sailing on already discovered places for hours (and some polls even proved that was the reason of their leaving), but nothing was done about that as to date.

Second one was regarding AI passive defenses and their buffing - still not implemented.

Third one was about scalability of war timer based on company size in personell and the number of players that are allied to the fompany, boiling down to war being a permanent state for zerg companies, and for 3 member companies or lower, war would last 2 hours which would be a minimum. Still not implemented afaik.

Until those have been addressed it is my firm opinionthe game would not be reinstated to its former glory. I stopped playing and uninstalled more than a month ago, but still keeping track.

1 hour ago, boomervoncannon said:

Okay, so when I use the site you linked and ran a no filters search, 7 of the top 20 results are officials, so that isn't meaningfully different from what I found on Battlemetrics, and the difference there works against your position, not for it. We are talking about ALL Ark servers, because we are talking about official vs unofficial. When you limit searches to USA and germany, you are applying a filter that skews results and is not germane to the discussion, that's what I meant by cherry picking the data.

Looking at ALL Ark servers, both unofficial and official worldwide, your chosen  search tool returns 13 of 20 of the most active at this moment as being unofficials.

Seems that out of quanitity there comes a quality and indeed, all server top 20 shows that 13 of 20 are unofficial.

But looking at general server population, seems that in average, officials are much better populated than unofficials. 90% of the unofficials are wastelands and do not justify their existence.

2 main reasons why unofficials might be popular at all. Wipes, and structures+ mod. Third reason might be ping availability in regions that do not host officials. Because when i ran a no mod search, only officials appearead on top 20. This in turn suggests that if officials did ie 6 month wipes, and s+ becomes a thing in officials, much more people would play them.

13 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

We aren't getting the same data output from our searches so I'm trying to figure out how our searches differ. You mention searching EU and USA, but in my search options while I have the US as a country option, there is no option for the EU, just options for each of the individual countries within it. To clarify here is the search I am running:

Going to Ark from the main battlemetrics page, applying no filters whatsoever, and running a search. The results are default returned with rank as the organizing factor. When I run this search, I get results for the top 20 that show ranks 6,9,10,11,14,and 17-20 as being official servers. by my count that is 9 of 20 showing as official. I notice you mention player count, so I'm guessing you might be viewing your results with players as the organizing factor. I prefer rank because it looks at activity over time rather than the snapshot of just who is logged in at the very moment of the search and thus is better at taking peak times for individual servers and smoothing them out, but since this is what you mentioned, I looked at it that way too. As of this writing that method of looking at search results shows only 4 of the top 20 servers as being official, so I'm at a loss as to how you're arriving at 17 out of 20. I believe that's what you're looking at, I'm just not sure how and why we're getting such dramatically different results.

I am not using battlemetric at all, as it has proven to be unresponsive and incorrect at times.

What I am using is this https://arkbrowser.com/servers?q=country%3AUnited States

This is with a filter included; you can change the server hosting country from there.

Basically it comes down to usa and germany as two biggest server providers, and seems that most people play on servers located in those 2.

As you can see, officials dominate when it comes to number of players on a server in top 20 usa, and you will get the similar result for Germany as well. Other places are way lower in population as it seems (with China nad Canada being the biggest of the rest of them).

Also only the look on top 20 in ANY region that hosts officials shows that officials hold 15-18 of top 20 places when it comes to number of people currently playing.

5 hours ago, boomervoncannon said:

We might not have exact numbers to work with, but here is something you should contemplate. Per Battlemetrics there are currently just under 50k unofficial servers compared to 1200 officials. A quick search of the top ranked servers by total activity shows that 10 of the top 20 are unofficials including ALL of the top 5. Even if 75% of all unofficials are empty wastelands, those that are not still outnumber all officials by 10 to 1, and we know that at the highest levels of activity they are at worst neck and neck. 

In the absence of an actual count, this strongly suggests there is more activity on unofficials than officials. When you cited 17 of the top 20 as being officials, you were cherry picking your data by searching only NA servers. Since the point of contention is about activity on officials vs unofficials, NA isn’t a relevant factor that should be used in searching.  You may not care about non NA servers, but for the purposes of this discussion they count.

I have stated the fact that the number of unofficial SERVERS is far greater than the number of officials. Closer inspection reveals those are either empry or have 1 player on them though. I have ran a quick check again, this time with EU and USA both. From top 20 in population count, 17 of 20 are officials in both regions. Numbers in all other regions speak otherwise, and there are no official servers anywhere else. But all other region player numbers (people who play on servers that are not physically in usa or somwhere in eu) are way lower than in said 2 regions. This again, is not a proof of anything, but it is suggests that the most healthy and populated servers are generally the officials. I dont have the data that proves that the number of official players is greater than unofficials or vice versa, and it does intrigue me. Emptiness of unofficials suggests that even if the unofficial number is bigger, the types that play it play it almost in single player, which is curious. 

7 minutes ago, Kidori said:

Since single player is also an option, counting the number of people on unofficial servers will not accurately represent the number of players that do not play on official servers.

Indeed, and I am curious about just those unofficial online types. Because now I found some unofficial servers in Canada that have better pop than official ones, but th total number of players there is way lower than that in usa or eu (where top servers are officials by a large margin).

Slash might have counted the total number of official players from battlemetric, but he might have divided that number with a wrong total (a total where single player number is included).

1 minute ago, Slash78 said:

The thing is you have no proof.  I showed you where I'm counting the official server totals.  You want to count them too, be my guest.  And it's simple math do take the number of players on the official servers and divide that by the total playing the game at the same time.  But you won't, because it will prove you wrong.  That Official servers aren't popular with the majority of Ark's active player base.

I asked for a simple thing: a total number of players currently playing on unofficial servers. I am really curious where those types are. I am now even suspecting that steam totals are off (oversized, maybe even artificially pumped). Because those players are either 1-2 per server or on offiicals (which have healthy numbers of pop on both eu and usa).

8 minutes ago, Slash78 said:

You've done no analysis.  I literally counted the official server population and compared it to players currently playing the game.  I get it, it doesn't match your perception, so you disregard it.  You'll never comprehend that Ark Official servers are not in fact all that popular with the player base.

I just proved to you that, in the top 20 NA servers there are 17 official ones, that is, 17 of top 20 NA ark servers with most people on atm are officials.

That does not prove that majority of ark players play on officials atm. But you didnt prove your claim neither.

Give me raw data, any serializable format will do, but it must be one file (not many pages), that shows the current number of ark UNOFFICIAL players. Let us see where those elusive guys are... because 90% unofficials are literally singleplayer modes or empty alltogether.

14 minutes ago, Slash78 said:

It's not an estimation.  I've started counting.

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/search?features[2e079b9a-d6f7-11e7-8461-83e84cedb373]=true&game=ark&sort=-players

 

And if you hadn't noticed, Ark's been getting up to about 65k a day lately.

 

Wrong again. Steam charts clearly say the new average is 50kish, and its due to valguero map.

And again, a quick analysis simply proves your theory wrong. Out of top 20 servers with people on in NA atm, 15-16 are officials, while most of the unofficials are totally empty.

https://arkbrowser.com/servers?q=country%3AUnited States

8 minutes ago, Slash78 said:

Yet only 16-17% of Ark's playerbase is playing on Official servers at any given time.  Your personal disdain for unofficial servers doesn't change that fact.

This is not a fact. This is your estimation. Out of 35kish people daily, very few seem to play unofficial. You might be mistaking unofficial servers count vs unofficial player count, because there is far more unofficial servers than official ones, but vast majority of those unofficial servers are empty.

On 7/14/2019 at 2:23 AM, Slash78 said:

I've had to restart on enough unofficial servers to know all about them.  You say I'm giving them too much credit, but the majority of people playing Ark at any given time are on private servers.  They have been the drivers behind Ark's success.  Not the official servers.

Wrong. Official Ark is where it is at. Unofficial ar dirty, boosted, nepotistic and with 0 sense of achievement. 

7 hours ago, wandelaar said:

The question is too simplistic to answer correctly.
Would I like a solution to lower the long-distance travel times: yes.
-|> introduce a long-distance travel mode (with a limitation on course adjustment speed + with a slow procedure to rig the sails differently, that does not allow a quick change to a more versatile combat mode)
Would I like to keep the current speed for encounters and manoeuvers: yes.

So in your poll I answered 'no' as a PVE player. And I would have answered 'no' as a PvP player as well if you would have set up the poll to allow for player reality (where players are not exclusively PvP or PvE).

Kinda like this:

It should be performed from Atlas map the moment a captain sits on the steering wheel.

It should be possible when a ship exits immediate island area, and only to the islands already discovered by that person or a tribe of that person.

The fast travel itself should look like autopilot with ship x3 the normal speed, with modifiers concerning current wind and weight (as if the travel is normal, only x3 speed and autopilot).

The autopilot on x3 should stop if a non allied object comes into its range and be disabled until enough distance is made or object destroyed, and should stop on bad weather (fogs, tornadoes), until ships exits the affected area or the effect passes.

 It should be cancelable by user, but with cooldown added case of that, to prevent pvp exploits.

To prevent possible exploit in pvp scenarios , maybe a warning to destination island on pvp servers should be issued that “xy is on its way to your island” message.

The idea of fast TRAVEL is a legit one. Note that this does not mean faster NORMAL sailing speed per se, only fast travel from 1 location to another, using autopilot.

It should be performed from Atlas map the moment a captain sits on the steering wheel.

It should be possible when a ship exits immediate island area, and only to the islands already discovered by that person or a tribe of that person.

The fast travel itself should look like autopilot with ship x3 the normal speed, with modifiers concerning current wind and weight (as if the travel is normal, only x3 speed and autopilot).

The autopilot on x3 should stop if a non allied object comes into its range and be disabled until enough distance is made or object destroyed, and should stop on bad weather (fogs, tornadoes), until ships exits the affected area or the effect passes.

It should be cancelable by user, but with cooldown added case of that, to prevent pvp exploits.

To prevent possible exploit in pvp scenarios , maybe a warning to destination island on pvp servers should be issued that “xy is on its way to your island” message.

edit: and absolutely no torrents, currents or any patticular place where you need to sail to to activate it, since in pvp it would be griefed and camped to oblivion.

A step in right direction.

Lol this games pvp settings suck so hard, barely 700 players are playing on primetime on official. All that remains there now is blood thirsty and mostly incompetent (individually, without their herd) zerg members who kill off the remaining small tribes, further diminishing th epops.

idk what would be needed at this point to restore pvp official to remotely popular status. Something revolutionary i would guess. Some big buff for small tribes like reduced war phase vs constant warphase on larger tribes, and tremendous improvements in passive defenses.

nah, it is too late already.

Everything above 10 actives is a “mega”.

it is my strong belief, based on some early game data, that majority of 50k initially played were solos and buddies up to 4 persons. Zerg took care of that in pretty much 1 month, by eithe rjoin and gradually stop playing or be raided and leave.

11 hours ago, Pant said:

Probably

Flame swivels are super effective against tames.

Because it slows the attacker down... If you make puckle towers around your base, you force your opponent to take out the puckle towers before they can open up on your base and if you build them right they will soak up more damage then any honeycomb. 

We have combat timers for a reason, can argue that they are to long but they are there. If you make passive defence too strong then raiding becomes impossible. You are supposed to defend your own base, but it sounds like you are getting out played and instead of adapting and soaking up the hints and tips you have been given you just call us retarded and ask the devs to hold your hand.

It confuses the attacker for exactly two minutes then they use cannon bear to 2 shot them. Please notice that you have to maintain, pay and feed the puckles, which is a huge chore by itself, and in return you get weak results, aka you can only stop total noobs with them. Same with cannons, no matter the height advantage the ai has, it is useless vs human operated cannon. 

Also, takes exactly 53 shells from normal cannonbear to destroy one huge wall (250 alloys), which is 2 minutes of work, not to mention from galleon which is 1 second of work. For a small defending tribe, this is imbalanced af.

Everything gets destroyed way too easy, and yes, it should be hard as hell to attack land, while pvp should be done mostly on seas.

While I was playing, we were 2 -4 guys situationally, and during that time I defended against 2 zerg raids bcause of developed operation procedures and all use cases covered case of an attack, plus ultra non noob and dedicated team with me. 4 defended vs 10 for example once (a well known tribe that attacked us), with minimal losses. On the other hand, I am a decent diplomat, and had secured alliances and friendships with local zergs all of them hehe. 

Eventually though, we would be rekt by a zerg for sure. I stopped playing a month ago, Reasons for my quitting ,many of them, lie in Polars post.

Are some people here autistic? The issue is Cannon bear outrange puckles and npc cannons. And some of you autistically reply:use flame swivels.

why would people even use passive defenses if ai defenses are next to useless is the problem here. That is the main question here. Not to mention the fact that harbors are defenseless whe epic galley destroys 230 alloy walls in 1 salvo, while 400 health epic armord glide to mortar nests and use 2 grenades to ko mortar, totally ignoring meager pucke defenses.

passive defnses should be tough to raid even if 0 people are defending actively, like in ark.

7 hours ago, zottel said:

Its more a hateful love XD i got Stuxk in there so often, that thing was a freaking maze. But abberation is yet my Favorite ark Map. The flyers Killed so much fun

Abberation is my favorite map. No one can easily raid you there and you can easily raid anyone up there drom down here.

I like the concept of abberation cave.

37 minutes ago, Pant said:

I have and i have commented on that, but thats not the topic is it? You can't nerf cannon carts because its op when an exploiter use it, everything is op when an exploiter use it... If exploiters is the problem then join me and the rest of the choir and ask the devs to do something about the exploiters, instead of all this other retarded bs.

Its not the exploit, its just the cannon operated by a player far outranges the one operated by the ai, and that is just the beginning of problems that plague atlas base passive defense, which should be more deadly like ark one.