Sleepinator2000

I feel for you, recently experienced this myself as the original occupant of an island that has switched owners a few times, the latest tyrant is doing everything in his power to make life there intolerable for the previous occupants without any warning. One of the only negative experiences I have had on PVE actually. He strikes me as a PVP refugee just looking for someone to fight within the limits of the PVE rules. Not much of a stretch to imagine he is the type that got exterminated and persecuted in PVP.

Best comment I have seen in a while. The disposable income portion of your statement would be merited if they had any kind of monetization system that could tap into it, but they don't. This is a one-and-done business plan, where their only source of income is through hype and new customers locusts.

For new players (or prospective players) who actually pay attention to the forums (and that is certainly a minority of the current playerbase), all the complaining probably inoculates them fairly well. If I read these forums and then chose to discover the game anyway, i am sure my first reaction at this point would be - "It has some rough edges, but this is way better than I expected." That was my first reaction back when the rough edges included insta-death mountainclimbing, incomprehendible UI, super insane vitamin depletion, and almost constant freezing and frying conditions, and most of those have been improved or fixed since then.

UPDATE: It took me two months, but I figured this out. Although the silhouette is identical at the edge of the gunwale curve, gunports are walkable, but planks are not. Just replace your forward plank with a gunport and you will be able to walk over it, just like the old days.

Spend about half my time playing solo on public servers, even though 3 other group members are sometimes available. Most solo time is spent preparing for map hunting via gathering maps, or long-range re-positioning for the same. I tweaked a Galleon to act as a high-speed mobile deployment base, and I am not as allergic to long range travel as the others, so it is something of a group service to make the time they can invest a little more exciting and rewarding.

^ THIS is how you actually get the problem fixed. This is worth 1000x the whiner posts. I hope the mods notice this one!

The Red Alert will only apply to currently selected groups on your hotbar, so for instance if you want to unseat your left gunners, select only the left group, hold N until the timer on the hotbar counts down, and then release, then immediately hit the chill command ";". The chill command applies to everyone on your ship including tames regardless of current group, you may want to substitute hyphen "-" which puts everyone on neutral instead of passive.

Just put the lantern on your belt. Only your armor unequips when you don the diving suit, nothing else.

If that worked, a ballista/harpoon probably would have worked as well, with no risk of damage.

When you select a group, if you press and hold "N" for 3 seconds they will all unseat on button release. They will also become aggro, so you should have your finger on the ";" and hit it instantly to calm them down before they start chasing seagulls. To reverse the operation, press and hold "right shift" and they will all return to their most recent position. Obviously the above isn't as good as the unseat command you describe, but it does the trick until they give us a better suite of whistles to work with. I don't suggest you hold your breath waiting.

At risk of getting perilously close to "speed up sailing", I think a nice replacement suggestion for the currently broken mechanic on Speed Sails would be something to mitigate the slowdown associated with low winds. Something where a perfect +200% speed sail would have no slowdown in terrible winds, and a +150% would only see half the current slowdown. I wish I could take credit for the suggestion, but somebody else thought of it before me. I think the real boredom kicks in when some people have to sail really far (7+ zones), but there are only a couple good reasons to do that: Whaling (if your base is equatorial), High Level Maps, and resources. I think Whaling is fine as it is, both a benefit and risk associated with polar life. I also think that resource distribution is fine as is, scarcity is the bread and butter of other trading games like EVE online, so really maps is the one place that could get some love. Two ideas to improve maps: Make them chain - Instead of always having every masterwork send you 8 zones of pure boredom away, have it send you up to 2 zones for a lesser treasure with an additional reward of the next map up the difficulty chain to the grand prize. Map quality could simply be an indicator of how many links there are built into the map chain, and boosted maps always add one more link to the chain, and always end on a Golden Age Ruin. Make maps last A LOT longer on activated merchant shops so that enterprising map hunters could make a reasonable living just hunting maps, shipping them afar, and selling them closer to the region they could be used. This idea would probably be mutually exclusive with the above idea about map chains, since it would eliminate far maps.

Depends on how much you want to invest. I suggest a dedicated Schooner with speed sails, minimal accoutrements, two blueprint Ballistas facing rear, a diving rig, around 400 ballista bolts, and a carbine for pulling. Get some good fur armor and you can go Polar where the whales hunt you, not the other way around. Try to put alot of your sloop levels into +damage. You can easily outrun any whale even in a sloop, but you need the speed to cover alot of ground while hunting for them. Stick with the prevailing winds and you'll cover more ground. Once you kill one, use your diving suit to stay warm and avoid shark aggro while chopping blubber. Don't forget to loot it before you start choppin.

Did some breeding recently, and man you guys have a thankless job. I think it would be great if they added some cooking recipes that could accelerate some of things you folks do via the troughs. Make them expensive/rare components so they aren't just a straight up gimme, but at least you could get an excuse to get away from your sweatshops, or find someone who likes to do harvesting/cooking to help you out.

I believe that many of these are to replace duplicate islands in many of the zones, although I haven't downloaded the latest PTR. Is there anyone who can confirm that many of these are swaps?

When I am hiking and I look at a scrawny patch of trees and the first thing to come to mind is "I wonder what kind of thatch that produces?"

I agree that it seems to have gone backward at some point. It has been a real rollercoaster since January. I actually thought performance was pretty good after the wipe, but player made content just keeps piling up and bogging down everything, which probably forced their tweaks to deal with it. The hitches I see now when a new island comes into view are brutal and jarring, and I know that at least some of those islands are completely vacant.

If the above image is indicative of what you are seeing, I see the same thing upon first loading with a very high end video card. This became more pronounced after some patches about a month ago, probably because of rendering optimizations. It is a pretty typical loading optimization to start with a low LOD (level of detail), and then gradually swap/replace with the higher resolution textures as system resources become available. If your video card has low VRAM (<4GB), you might never get all the high resolution textures loaded in a scene.

Saw an enormous hitch (like 30 seconds long) about a week ago where someone's entire base disappeared in the zone I was in, so yes.

When it used to happen to me, I'd just keep building whatever I was working on and ignore stuff falling apart elsewhere, then only when I was certain that I was done with the new project would I go around and fix up the battle damage. Maybe it was luck but the one thing that never happened to me was having an infinite loop of triggering remote collapses. Primarily because I was very careful when placing fixes, so I never had to re-destroy them.

Yes, when I used to see it (many months ago), it would only happen when someone was destroying something, not just out of the blue. Knock on virtual wood, we haven't seen it since then, but we also haven't been renovating anything at our base. I am pretty sure that you have to reach a critical mass of pieces within a certain radius before you start seeing this happen, but once you do, it will probably happen alot in the exact same spots every time. I am pretty sure it is either related to attach point chains, or duplicated object IDs. It is almost certainly exacerbated by some kind of optimization between play sessions or server restarts. I still see a somewhat similar problem with losing foundation support on Galleons if I just leave the Galleon alone for a day.

I'd choose: install base second chance critical mass less jaded beta test

I find that varies by quality. I think of maps like a Spirograph. You can draw a circle around the place you pick it up with a radius based on the quality: Less than 5 quality will almost always be within 1 zone, so if you have to travel, you only have about a 12.5% chance of it sending you back to your original zone (about half of the low quality maps are in the same zone you are already in). Greater than 20 quality will almost always send you somewhere 8 zones away in a random direction, but you can't get further than 8 zones away on a 15 zone map, so the lines cross, effectively doubling the chances that it will send you back to the region you came from.

I suppose it depends on your frequency of play and playstyle. I spend most of my time hunting higher level maps. If I haven't been on for a week, I do indeed have to go "farm" a couple big islands so that I have a starter set of maps to pursue. Once I have that however, I pass close to islands enroute to the maps, especially at night (the bottle glow has increased visibility at night). If I am attentive, and a little lucky, I can usually find one decent map per zone, which lets me perpetually chain them up, and over time I can develop clusters of them to make my long journeys more worthwhile. *if* they were to reduce the quantity or quality of the maps from their current level, farming would become a permanent requirement, and would indeed increase the tedium of maphunting.

They have burned through so many PC customers at this point, and the patience and goodwill that went with them, this really is the best way to get another large group of people filling their coffers and potentially building interest in the game. Your enthusiasm and certainty of a crossplay wipe is refreshing, if a bit misplaced. Did they wipe ARK when they introduced crossplay?

Welcome to ATLAS! As you progress, you might find the quantity of treasure maps is less of a concern, right now they are presumably all challenging to you and your wife, but eventually you will find that only a small percentage of them hit the sweet spot between challenge and return on investment. I would love to have storms be more localized so that a skilled sailor could see and avoid them from farther away. The current implementation is really just 3 minutes of bullshit. It does deliver on the tension, but in a way that seems cheap.