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03 - Sails and Camera issues. So basically when we are sailing, center of view attached to steering wheel, and it also distanced for some numbers. The problem here is - sometimes it placed so bad, with totally wrong height, to close to the sail, so the sail blocks up to 50% of ocean ahead. So the only thing left for me is to sail with constantly holding LMB. But this season - LMB view got like this: I didn't fight it yet but I'm not sure how to aim from this far distance. This one need to be checked out. The solution is simple. Each vessel should have a central view point, independent of steering wheel and being placed somewhere in the center of ship and a bit above the sails and distanced that much so most of our ship never blocks the view.

Part 2: Big round of applause, guys. Whatever you tinkered on in the network code corrupted some regions on the unofficial server I play on. We need to wipe, too, as it's totally FUBAR Bravo, clearly the best people on the job. Appreciate all the hard work downloading freebie assets and pushing out bad netcode. If I seem bitter, damn right I am. This team takes the wrong turn every chance they get, and when I try to go to private hosted grids to get some semblance of a good game, they still manage to cock that up. I want to like Atlas, I want to enjoy it; they're hellbent on going nowhere fast with it.

I play more than 15hrs a day, today I lost my second boat that disappeared. Claiming things from other players that stopped playing is not wrong, but I'm playing a lot of absurd hours a day and having your things in decay timer, this is very wrong. If I forget to walk with some boat on a different island he will disappear, this is very wrong, I am not an absent player or who has given up the game. I can not do several boats on my base, this system punishes even players who go online for many hours. This is wrong, we should take boats from those who stopped playing, but the boat if we do not take it to navigate sometime it disappears. This is very bad, don't it makes me want to create more different boats.

No... thats wrong... the skill he got is the Veteran Pathfinder... you can see it in his Screenshot... so dont tell him nonsens with missing mats.... the skill you get for killing the Kraken v1 looks like the Submarine and is called Explore the Depths https://atlas.gamepedia.com/Special_Skills he simply was on the wrong Kraken kill...(nothing wrong.. because you killed it.. but its the wrong for the Sub)

Upon retrospect and at the risk of contradicting myself, I wonder if Atlas was really advertised as a "pirate game". What do you think? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm itching for a really good sandbox MMO pirate survival game. Sea of Thieves is a really good polished game, but has no continuity is too repetitive. I don't want to ship battle other players all day. I'd like something more immersive. Maybe my expectations of this game are wrong and I simply bought a game that wasn't what I was actually looking for.

So it seems as the breeding system works, and the baby system works.. BUT, we are running into a MASSIVE road block. We bred a baby bear and we're sitting here, with 3 different types of food in it's inventory... It's health is dropping faster than it is going up. Like, unless I force feed it, IT WILL DIE. I understand how the breeding system in Ark works. The baby would stay at stupidly low health that would gradually increase as it matures. This is not happening. The bear WILL DIE if I don't force feed it meat. What the hell is wrong with this? Am I doing something wrong? Again, I know it's hp is supposed to be stupid low. When it popped out, it had like.. I dunno, 15-20 hp, somewhere in that range. It keeps dropping down to 5, then starts dipping into 4. That's when I start force feeding it to keep it from dying. I have no idea what's going wrong with this. This is more needy than an actual baby. Wtf.

U know guys... what I really love to see in release version - is reworked weather engine. Because weather (along the ocean and ships themselves) is the CORE of sailing game! It should be cool. It should bring spectacular view. It should require us to deal with it!!! What should be done: - Removed "Waves" (both cold, heat and fog) because they just makes no sense and doesn't brings anything to the game (seriously - If I hunt SotDs during fog I just stop, go alt+tab and watch youtube, and if I sail somewhere - I just sail). - Removed 3D clouds. We're not in flight simulator, where 3D clouds matters. - Wind rotation system should be canceled. - Pacman with 100500 tornadoes - should be canceled. --- - New skyboxes added, with different types of weather. So everyday we experienced something different. Bright sunny days. Partly cloudy. Gloomy gray. Drizzle. Heavy rains etc. Also snowstorms, white mist in cold areas. With spectacular sunrises and sunsets, rainbows after the rains, st. Elmos before storms. And all that kind of stuff. - Steady wind (most of the time it's average strength, but rarely goes to calm or hurricane). It's fine for me if it will be random direction and strength every grid. It should change it's strength and direction from time to time (not that often). - Deadly thunderstorms with lightning strikes risk. Damaging planks if you point wrong angle to waves, or go full speed, and damaging fully opened sails. - Tornado should land rarely. It should be large, single, predictable, avoidable (at all costs) and deadly to pass through. --- Maybe some weather skills allowing us to predict the weather, or check one at neighbor grids. Maybe some +xp bonus for ship - sailing through dangerous conditions.

First of all, just to be clear, I'm laughing in agreement w you about the money. I only had 1 warehouse and 2 to 4 consistent trading partners and gold was not an issue. I gave away 3 schooners, 3 brigs, a galleon, over 60k, kept about another 150k+ in reserve plus I owned a brig and a gally and kept around 100 NPCs on hand. I can only imagine on PvP owning Control Points + multiple markets + multiple islands + using alts (to keep the income on all sides of the transaction) + having large groups actively farming Treasure Maps... I'm sure theres some VERY wealthy Companies.. Second whats a "War Deck"? Lastly though, I disagree w your conclusion. Remember that for some people "more" is just never "enough". Your assuming people will behave logically. Economists used to to call this the "Rational Markets Theory", I think, (I may be wrong on the name) but the important part is that its usually wrong. Theres going to be, FOR SURE, someone or group who wants to be the richest. #1 just for bragging rights or out of megalomania or to show off on Twitch etc... Like I stated in previous posts, it won't be out out of a NEED for the gold but the desire for more.. more, more, more that will move them to expand into these Lawless Tower spots... A closing example; I knew a guy on PvE who had THREE markets/warehouses to HIMSELF on PvE. He had to jam them into wierd spots and refill them quite often BY HAND when he took mat losses, because he couldn't squeeze in a farm. Guess what? He still wanted a 4th... or more.. Made zero sense to me and me being satisfied with ONE market made zero sense to him..

I am a solo and you are clearly in a mega company. Likely abusing several thing as megas are wont to do. Since you seem to be speaking for me, let me help you out on some details. For starters you are wrong. I can prove it very easily. Most megas are currently full roster. Meaning there is no issue inviting people currently. Certainly not to the point where you have trouble maxing out membership. When you say "Literally NEVER going invite new players able to come in and scuttle all the boats in the harbor." You are "Literally" wrong. The main #1 reason we do not want to be in a mega is because of what you are advocating for more of here. WE DO NOT WANT A FUCKING DICTATOR WHEN WE PLAY A GAME. You want to lock me out of more things after you invite me to your company? Oh YOU can say what boat I sail. YOU can say when and where I can build. You can say what doors I can and cant use. YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF IS WHAT YOU CAN DO! At least with that I must own you view. Your idea would make people leave your precious mega more than it would attract anyone of use to your cause. You want the solo players to join bigger companies? Take away the threat of restricting our in game access. All doors, boxes, buildings, boats should be unlocked to every company member 110%. Basically, everything I can do as a solo I should still be able to do as a member of a company. Else why would I join people and lose content? Do I look like a slave? Do you want to be a slave? I'm not trying to be a dick. Would you join my company if I told you everything you could and couldn't do? If I had 200 people and said hey, "this is your schooner, there are many like it but this one is yours." I believe you would tell me to go fuck myself. I'm just saying, please don't be so attached to your fake shit I game that you want to oppress people to get your jollys off. Knowing full well you were all 100+ against 50s-80s, you took 200 people to fight 35? Well, I guess I hope it was a rewarding experience. Megas sure sound like a blast.

@Nacona Hehehe, sorry to say, that is absolutely 100% wrong.. We have like, more gold than we can spend, to be honest. So its not about gold, but trying to make a "chain" through a few grids where we have been able to conquer some warehouse spots... .This has been done by a lot of activity and hard work by us, so I do not feel bad about it at all. The devs have made this into a game where a lot of activity is rewarded, so I see nothing wrong with it. Also, goes without saying, that if someone has 3 warehouses in g3, it might benefit them to actually have a WH in i-1 too, instead. Also, it is supposed to cover up for the fact that the trade system is very limited at the moment, seeing that people can only trade within 2-3 grids. So it is a win-win situation we are looking at, for us and another active company, to be able to haul resources we dont have in a current grid etc. Cheers

Not sure about that, but It'll probably be my last message here this season. I've been watchin quest skills and felt weird about them. I mean in all other games, you do some stuff, gather skills and armor an then go for the high-end bosses. In Atlas we do high-end bosses first and then get skills and stuff to do... nothing with those I guess, because we've done everything already. 37 - High end skills comes in wrong time and wrong place. I just wanna mention I speak about PVE, so maybe in PVP, ppl are doing all those quest to be able to fight eachother more effectively. But right now we have the following: - Veteran Pathfinder. This skill is a reward for Kraken V2 and brings us all feats CD -40%. We could use this skill to fight Kraken V2, and also all other high level battles. But we've got one after we done everything. - Exploer the Depths. This skill is a reward for Kraken V1, and gives us a Submarine, so we would able to go Trenches. While it's fine on our way to Kraken V2, it also gives us opportunity to obtain Majestic Kraken we could use to fight Kraken. So again - it comes late. - Treasure Master. Comes after I dig lvl-16+ treasure, and increase my melee durability tools by 100%. I mean... I use those tools a lot while building my base in the beginning. After that I don't use them at all, and there is no problem to bring out tools to smithy and repair all. - Ghost Hunter. For destroying ghost ship. It raises your gold from treasures by 20%. The problem is - first you do treasures alot preparing to Ghost Ship mission. And only then you kill Ghost ship. You probably don't do any treasures after that. - Scourge of damned. For sinking lvl-50 damned Galley. With this skill armor anyway get destroyed in 3-4 deaths, so I don't feel any profit from this one. Oh and armor easily repairable, and all high-level inland content doable naked. - Friends of Mermaids - gives your stamina recover faster. I don't know if in PVP ppl are actually do their fight with melee weapon, loosing and regaining stamina. In PVE - we need to down and rise stamina to manage our stomach level. Better stamina recovery - less stomach level we will loose. - Blue Whale Killer - gives you prone and crouch speed bonus. Not sure if in PVP it gives you any advantages, but in PVE it's just... as is. - Sperm Whale Killer - you do realize we don't kill SPERM whale for this quest right? So it gives you ability to tame more effectively. The problem is, we first tame pets to get our level, skills, and now - money for ship, and only then receive ability to tame more... - Squid Killer - gives you vitamin bonus boosted. And again - we do all stuff where we could use this bonus (sailing global, do hard fights with damned armies etc) first and then - receive this bonus to do... nothing. Squid is high end game content. - All Rejuvenation bonuses - are just free boosts to our pathfinder. Usually 1 or 2 came before we hit high-end game content, so it fine. - Veteran Explorer. Better speed with overloaded state could be useful when we gather resources around the world, building, etc. We get one AFTER we done all those things. - Harvest boost... I mean c'mon, we harvest in the beginning. Even without windmills after few weeks our storages are full of all kind of resources. And you gives us harvest boost after we done with last boss in the game. So we could harvest more for no reason right? - Instant equip. In theory we can explore the world and after that go fighting, so it might help. (But practically we go for the fights long before that...). Oh and this skill is active one, and gives you ability to instant equip anything once in 10 minutes. Not sure if I have any good solutions for that. One of possible solution - make all high end reward just awesome cosmetics, and all boosts move to some other ways to get (not high end ones), or even you should get rid of them all (I mean except submarine).

I know PVE isn't your priority right now, but I just wanna mention PVE seas battles: 36 - PVE seas battle issues: While I do that a lot with old fashion way (the way it suppose to be), there are some issues made terrible wrong and I don't like it. I guess all made wrong: All cannons aims JUST parallel trajectory. Do 100% synchronized volley. Cannonballs flies 100% accurate and parallel trajectory and lands exactly spot I send them to. Please tell me, are we playing actually sea pirate game? Not those old fashion arcade machines in 90's with games like TYRIAN??? I mean, I do love TYRIAN but I wanna play sail age ships, not those arcades... Parallel trajectory sometimes doesn't allow me to AIM enemies boat with all my cannons. It's like some of my guys aiming enemy's boat, while another ones - just to waters with no reason. They have turning cannons, you know? Synchronized volley is nonsense. 100% accuracy is nonsense. Non of these ships were that good. Current cannonballs speed is nonsense as well. I mean some damned ship even can dodge my fire. It's like cheating. For hundreds times I saw the situation when damned ship is moving, I aim just a bit ahead and the moment I shoot, damned ship does instant stop, letting my cannonballs fly ahead. Then continue moving. So I just wanna repeat what I told before. All cannon stuff should be like this: - When I aim - I see large round area where my balls will randomly land (it's not necessary I see that with UI graphic, but it should exists around my aim point). - When I shoot - my cannons do random volley within 3 seconds. - My cannonballs flies at least 10 times faster than it is now and land in wide area around my aim point. So instead of this: It should be like this: Cannonballs land area way larger that enemy ship and goes wider with distance. So a lot of cannonball will miss - it's fine. With skills I can reduce cannonballs lands area and volley time. Some skills with gunmen also help to aim. And damned ship should work the same way. They should do same long volleys, fast flying cannonballs with wide hit area. Don't make it arcade, with cannonballs dodging. Better damned ship - less volley time and hit area range. And please DON"T DO THIS MACHINE GUN high level damned ship. I do understand you wanna them be cool, but I really don't like to see lvl-56 damned Galley with 3 second reload time. It's like those bosses in arcades. Oh and I found funny issue. Damned ship CAN NOT pass through another damned ship wrecks : )) and just stuck there lol!

I think that you may be going about this the wrong way. If you are wanting monetary compensation from GS for intellectual work, I truly believe you should contact the studio directly and apply for a job or solicitate your consultation services. I could be wrong, but I do not think that there is a precedent for hiring an unverifiable person from a forum off of a promise of an idea. I believe you said you had experience in the game creation industry, this will help greatly. If you believe you have a multi million dollar "Idea" that would work for any game. Well then my friend, you should take your industry experience and your idea and go make a game and get that paper. Don't even let a terrible studio like GS get a chance to fuck it up. If you believe in this game and want to improve this game with your ideas, then you should get on the public game forums and discuss them in detail. Get enough positive feedback and it will most likely get implemented in some way shape or form. However you will be the only person that knows it was your idea. Maybe some of us will know as well. Keep in mind that GS hasn't released any games yet. They likely have not turned any profit. Their team is small, and greatly lacking in talent when compared to almost any other game studio out there. What they DO have is a lot of ideas that sound really cool. What they DONT have is any proof that they can carry these idea through to fruition. I will give you my personal view on this. Ideas in and of them self are not worth anything. Even after being shared with a group and refined into a better idea, it is still not worth anything. Money is only made when an idea is acted upon and a product is produced and sold successfully. So let me ask you. Do you really have an idea that these guys can do anything with? They have yet to implement their own ideas in a profitable way.

I do understand that it's fun to do custom ship building, to set your design etc, but current ship building system leads to this: I mean it also some king of fun, but... as for me, totally wrong, and ruin all sailing age romance. Most of all - current ship system made the way, that we just need 3 ships. - Small and fast one - Schooner. - Battle ship - Brig. - Large carrier and fast one - Galley. All different purposes of ships made by our customs. Wanna more armor - add roofs, walls and ceilings armor as in picture above. Need more firepower - add some guns to deck and custom floors, etc. So we have like base (Schooner, Brig and Galley) and infinite amount of ship types - all your imagination came to. BUT!!! All of this: "I make ship for my playstyle" will anyway lead to only meta. And if you wanna survive, you'll anyway need to build a meta design. Usually it stupid looking. New ship system with modules leads us to more real like ships. I mean from the picture above to these: The only thing DEVs made wrong with Ramming Galley is made it all from "blocks". What they should do is: a) - Keep current frame, planks/gunports, decks (and current way to paint all). b) - Instead of separate sails - introduce "rigging". One piece of equipment, contain all masts, cables, ropes, ladders, flags, AND SAIL SPOTS were we then put sails of our choice (square or triangles). No more weight sails. c) - Each deck should have square holes - those are spots for modules. The modules I see: - Cockpit - wide back part of ship with our room (bed for respawn, chest for gold, steering wheel on top of it) - Berth (for crew, the more we have, then more crew we can hire). - Cargo hold (for all our stuff. More we have - more cargo we can carry. All cargo holds connected together AND CONNECTED TO DINGHY. We can easily oneclick transfer cargo from ship to dinghy, which also have storage box). - Ammunition - just one requires. Storage box for all our firearms balls, bolts, etc. - Supply - just one requires. Small room with mess table, grille, food storage bags and water barrel. - Small and large cages for tames transfer. No more tames in decks and no more elephants in sloop (also no more tames loosing in waters). - Masterworks - just one requires. Small room contains smithy, mortar and pestle, and some kind of small forge. - Outside attachements. Maybe some pirate stuff, like armored room for valuables. Prison - for hostages, etc. I dunno. Just because each ship has limited size of deck - we can not put all... I mean, with large frigate we can, but smaller ship, requires us to think - what do we need. So all our customization will be within our choice. Wither we need fast cargo vessel (then we have just few berth for sails crew, and else in cargo holds), or war machine (then - alot of berths for gun crew, and gunports) etc.. d) - Add some beautification layer (like lanterns set, some figures set, head figure etc). And most important for DEVS. All those modules, rigging, beautifications might be in different styles. Like southern style. Nordic style. Etc. And DEVs can either sell addition styles as DLCs (I would buy all), or even put them to "lootboxes" and sell lootboxes. So more real income will come for game support. That Atlas I would gladly play. With NO shotguns ships. NO roof covered rhombus ships. NO six masts vessels. Yes to jib and mizzen sails. Yes to boardside battles. Definitely NO to this!

Will you add the ability to use deck swivels for modular ships? We will be adding additional modular railings in the next few patches. A Modular railing with swivels is planned to be included. I wonder about the feedback from the "PvP" community on discord about this... railings with swivels faceing to the sea to shoot fire on other ships at close range? Go to PvP server and have a look how Players place their swivels on Deck of a Brigantine to secure it from being borded... on a modular your only protection against this is to hope that the enemy will hook the railing and face an issue that he can't climb over it... Your road map made me consider you change the modular ships that way you can build wood structures and swivels + cannons on it... but this proofs it wrong... So tomorrow is patch day... I made sure my PvE base is running the last month by joining the server once a week and unanchor all ships for a moment... It's also sad that you don't consider to change the islands... it would be appreciuated to have islands with a "harbor" bay with a decent whater depth. Small Islands are great, but who will play on them (PvP) if every peace of it can be shot by a mortar ship for example? Also I suggested to lower most of the high mountains of islands... they are of no use besides having very safe bases up there with lots of effort to get your resources up there. Reduce their height to the current defence structure building restriction... they can still be defended. Yes, the islands may not look that unique anymore but for the game play it will be a lot better. I hope you will fix the modular ships most hated bug -> the auto destroy once a modul gets to 0 HP and there is most likely more damage hiting this structure or it receives splash damage... somewhere in this points your ship scuttles... And hopefully the new patch will change the repair system of modulars back to old one with resources... that would make the ships playable... even with their low turning speed.

Hi, I have to say, as a returning player, there seem to be something fundamentally wrong with the system as it stands. I come back after a hiatus of 6 months or so, and am starting from scratch. I discover to my "horror" that to build something as simple as a schooner, I have to gather 5000 gold?! In addition to the other resources. Ok, that is what it is, I get that it is related to the trade system and that is fine. I suppose that this means it should be relatively easy, compared to diving and digging for treasure, to raise the 5000 gold. Right, so I build my marked. Bit expensive, but that's ok, because I am going to make a killing, right? Ok, the marked doesn't work without a warehouse... Ok, that makes sense, I suppose, so I gather the materials for a warehouse and am finally able to put it down. And this is where the logic chain breaks down. I cannot put down my warehouse, because there is apparently another one in the vicinity. I cannot see it though, which suggests, that since I have a fairly good view from my spot, the exclusion range of a warehouse is quite large. This means, that it is almost impossible, or at least very very difficult, for a small single-member trading company like myself, to get some trade going, because there isn't room to get started? There is something very very wrong with this system, if I am required to join a large trading company just to get into the trading system. Seems to me, that the exclusion range on e.g. warehouses should only apply within a company. The same goes to some extend for farmhouses, quarries, mines etc. I get that logically, there has to be a limit to the automated resource gathering in an area, but since real estate in this game is limited, it makes it incredible difficult for new players to get started. You find a nice spot, build a nice base, get ready to build a larger ship. Only to discover that you cannot put down essential structures because you're within the exclusion range of another structure that does not even belong to you. I really do not know what the intention with the system is, but there seems to be some major flaws in it.

Yeah but that is the thing. It pretty much is ark. I know people don’t want it to be and they think it is something else, but it is way too late for that. They even have animal breeding which is something that took a while before it even came to ark. The added weight reduction already which also took a long time to add to ark. They are implementing all of the things that made tames awesome in ark. And if you think about it in the next big update they are adding a giant crab. A tame that will be able to carry as much weight as a quetzal, or as I like to call it the “land quetzal”. i get that people don’t want it to be this way but it already is this way. Way too late to go back now. The hit the overdrive button with tames and its only going to speed up from here. it would take way too much time and way too much skill to get the npc’s to be able to harvest like tames do. Especially to automate them. They couldn’t even do that with tames, so it really isn’t going to happen. bottom line is tames are not only here to stay but they will become more important each day. they already made the foy easy and soon they will be changing the claim system. The players might have had a vision for the game, but they were just wrong. Doesn’t mean they were wrong to have a vision for the game. It just means their vision was wrong. this is the reality of it. Really take a second to look at the changes that are happening and have happened. If you really think I am wrong then ok I won’t argue. But really take a step back and look

Source: https://gameanalytics.com/blog/16-reasons-players-leaving-game.html I suggest u read up on this and tell me on how many of these points u see do these devs fail, and don't just blame it on EA or the fact that this is still EA and they might be doing as the article suggests, they are doing it completely wrong. Keep in mind they should have plenty of experience of how they fucked up Ark in EA the last 4 years or so and then they even have the guts to throw such a shitshow of code at us with their own stubborn design choices and inability to use their eyes and brains at the same time to comprehend what this community was asking for when it was necessary. They might be fixing some stuff players have been asking for but in half ass way and far too late while still pumping out new features while core mechanics are still broken as fuck. Read it before u reply, yes it is a medium long read but it sure sums up how not to do it, and if u reflect how Atlas is being developed after u read it u will start to understand how bad it really is. Nathan Lovato Nathan is a game design expert at GameAnalytics. Currently founder and game design instructor at GDquest. Players leave games. According to Marc Robinson’s 2013 GDC talk, “On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session.” On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session! Click To Tweet And as you know, our first duty as professional game designers is to create compelling experiences. We make games for the players to enjoy and play! If they leave our games too fast and too often, we have failed. Thinking of the reasons why players are leaving your game is a great opportunity to put yourself in their shoes. Not only that, your financial success largely depends on the size and fidelity of your audience. In particular if you are monetizing your game with in-app purchases. The data science team here at GameAnalytics recently unveiled the results of their latest study. The report shows that a strong player retention is correlated with your game’s financial success. In particular keeping your very first players entertained. This means that it is critical to retain users if you want to make a living off of your work. There are but a few reasons why players are leaving your game. The 2 most important ones are frustration and boredom: the archenemies of flow. If you don’t know what flow is already, it is a mental state characterized by the feeling of energized focus and a complete absorption in a given activity. That is a state of deep enjoyment, if not passion. That is the state we want our players to fall into with our games! Regardless of the genre we going for. This is, once again, our first duty as game designers – approached from the angle of positive psychology. A good player retention boils down to a design that calls for flow; a fluid and deeply rewarding experience. And please do not mistake that for a casual and grinding-based game! Your game’s progression could feature many chosen bumps and still look fluid to the eyes of the right audience (as in the Die and retry genre). In this article, I didn’t want to simply list cliché design mistakes that we are all aware of. Instead, it is a checklist. The notes below are a collection of potential reasons why your players might leave the game, ordered from the most to the least important one. Make sure to double check them all to keep players in the zone! Why are players leaving your game? Or rather, why are they either frustrated or bored to the point they quit? Here are a few reasons. 1. Your game intro sucks In pretty much every domain of their lives, people want to get started. They don’t want to wait before they can get a taste of what your title has to offer. From the very moment they start your application, you should give your users a reason to stay. At all times! Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression of your game. This impression will stick with them, even if they don’t uninstall your game right away. You can check our previous article for a more detailed rundown of the topic: How to create immersive intros. Your title screen, your loading and your first level will make up for the players’ first impression Click To Tweet 2. Your game’s sessions are too long We now have busy lives. Or maybe we don’t. But our modern society makes us feel like we haven’t got time anymore! Chances are your players are overwhelmed with notifications and other polished apps trying to grab their attention. If you are creating a game for grown-ups, they likely have a day job and a family taking most of that time. They cannot afford to play for hours in a row. It shouldn’t take a whole hour to go through a meaningful chunk of your game. Nor to reach the next checkpoint. This doesn’t mean that you have to follow the trend mobile games established, where 2-5 minutes long sessions is the norm. If you target experienced gamers, you can still get away with half an hour long sessions. And well, if you aim for the mobile market, you will have to make it possible for the users to play for as little as 3 minutes if you aim for a large audience. The right session length of a desktop game depends on the type of project you are working on. But even MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV made it possible for busy players to clear a normal dungeon in 15 to 30 minutes. MMOs tend to account more and more for the needs of a whole range of target users rather than a specific profile. 16 Reasons why players leave: Your game’s sessions are too long Click To Tweet 3. You are not targeting the right audience for your project It wouldn’t be efficient to target 60 years old players with a Beat Them All. Although this point is game design 101, it is always a good reminder. As designers, we build a framework of experiences for others. Because we can’t please everybody, we have to pick a target audience. That is to say a group of people whom we know will be interested in our creations. We have to study that audience. We have to go seek some of those individuals, get them to try out our product and give us feedback early on during development. Picking the wrong audience also means dilapidating your marketing budget. Trying to appeal to the wrong users is utterly dangerous! It wastes both your time and your money. 16 Reasons why players leave: You are not targeting the right audience Click To Tweet 4. You are targeting a saturated fringe of the market Alright, let us imagine that we nailed our audience: women of age 40 and above, mostly unexperienced players, who have some free time. With that hypothesis, we are creating the next fresh match-3 games. It is an original title, highly polished, it receives great feedback from the press and we are starting to build up a small fan base already. Chances are it won’t work. Why? Because there are already plenty of good puzzle physics and match-3 games available out there. In particular, big companies like King have a large and faithful audience already. People won’t easily switch to other similar games, regardless of their quality. We work in the entertainment industry. Although our games are our creations, they are still products sold on a market. Whenever we bring a new product out there, we have to make sure that it solves a need. There is no real need for new match-3s today. And even if your production matches the quality of your competitors’ games, a company like King has something you will hardly outweigh. It has had a lasting positive relationship with its users. 5. You didn’t run enough tests Nowadays, buggy games and software tend to be the norm, sadly. It is even surprising to see AAA titles released in a highly polished state, bug free! Yet bugs are a plague. Any quirk hurts the viability of your product, the smoothness of the experience it offers. Bugs frustrate the players (even if some are pretty funny!), thus can push them to uninstall your game. We must have end users try out our games very early on. Almost from the very first prototypes! As independent developers in particular, we cannot track down every single bug in our games alone. Even if we take the role of a tester, we still have an exhaustive understanding of how our creation works that hinders our ability properly track down all of its defects. 6. Your tutorial slows down the player Dark Souls 2’s tutorial is quick and accessible to all players, yet it is optional. A tutorial shouldn’t force the experienced player through a long, boring, patronizing first game session. As the tutorial is often the first taste the player will have of your gameplay, it is critical to pay great attention to it. Here, I just want to stress out the fact that your tutorial should take in accounts the whole audience you are targeting. If you are making a JRPG or an FPS, a fair part of your end users won’t need a tutorial at all. Don’t force them through it! Dark Souls 2 offers us an example of a great tutorial, contained in a both well-designed and optional area (you can run through straight through the main path to reach the game’s hub city). If you want to learn a few more insights about what can break your tutorial experience, Ernest Adams compiled 8 Ways To Make a Bad Tutorial. 7. Your game is too hard to pick up. As independent developers or in small teams, we tend to do our own testing. We also balance our gameplay accordingly. However, the game’s difficulty should be calibrated against our target users’ skills, not our own. Iterative beta testing and the use of game analytics are key to staying objective with our game’s balance. If the game offers an unfair and punishing first experience, the player will likely leave. Unexperienced users in particular. This is also true if your controls are unresponsive or imprecise. Poor controls make your game hard to pick up and unpleasant to play. Uninstalls in the later stages of the game Our first goal is to prevent players from leaving in the early game. Otherwise, they won’t play. But we also want them to keep playing until the later stages! On average, only a fraction of your players will ever see your game’s ending. They will quit the game before they reach that point. So here are some reasons why players may leave your game in the later stages. 8. Sudden rises in difficulty Unwanted difficulty spikes will ruin the user’s experience. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that your game shouldn’t be hard. However, it should be fair at all times. The Souls series is a solid example of an unforgiving game with a beautiful difficult curve. It even lets the player choose his own difficulty, without knowing! Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac are both very hard, and were successful. 9. Grosbilling or a backfiring grind Being invincible for a few seconds in a Mario game feels great. Because it doesn’t last. Do not forget that your game’s challenge has to match the player’s skills in order for him to stay in a state of flow. Flow is what will keep the player on your game ultimately. And it’s a tough balancing act! In Skyrim, I remember reaching a point where dragons became a formality. My skinny thief could slay them with a single slice of a knife. This broke the immersion and the epic dimension of the universe for me. Guess what? That is also when I stopped playing. 10. The game relies too much on grinding, lacks intrinsic rewards Grinding is a powerful tool. Used well, it boosts your player’s feel of skill progression. It offers concrete, quantifiable series of material rewards for the player. But grinding isn’t enough to make a great game. Blizzard, the masters of grinding, still spend ages polishing the core mechanics, the visuals, and the background of their games. Diablo 3 is not only a hack and slash: it is a beautiful, dynamic action game. World of Warcraft features dozens of unique regions and dungeons to explore in groups! Although grinding is central to those 2 games, it is only present to reinforce their respective main qualities, their core gameplay. 11. The game requires a big time investment to become enjoyable This used to be an issue with MMOs: The 4th Prophecy and other Dark Age of Camelot required the user to invest a lot of time before they could really enjoy the depth the gameplay had to offer. Once again, not all players nowadays can invest that time in a game. And as I showed above, most modern MMOs are adapting to this new user profile. Final Fantasy XIII is an example of a single player game that features a 30 hours long tutorial. The game systems are shown one by one to the player during that period of time, along a linear path. Only thereafter, the game offers a huge open level. That is the main critique it received. Your game should always offer some entertaining content early on. The specifics of social and Free to Play games The points outlined above should ring true for a wide range of games. Not all games are social, so that is why their specifics are coming last in this list. Retention in Free to Play games have been and are being analyzed over and over. Most reasons of poor retention in Social Games are straightforward and easy to find on the Internet. Below, I have tried to pick a few not-so-intuitive reasons. 12. A toxic community In “Social Games”, we can read the word “social”. Most of the time, those games are not really social: they bear that name only because they integrate interactions between the game and social networks. But multiplayer games generally offer a way for players to communicate with one another. Be it through a general chat, in game emotes and interactions, or private messaging. Well, you should carefully track how your community builds up and evolves if players can chat in your game. An aggressive community towards rookie players will scare most of your new users away! Real social games need to have good community management. 13. Resources are too scarce Zombie catchers makes it easy for the player to find more game accelerating resources by simply playing more. That is one of the plagues of Free to Play titles. What people call Pay to Win, or as I like to call it, Free to Pay. If we give non-paying players too few resources to make good progress, they will soon feel frustrated. Be it in the early or later parts of the game. Monetization strategies that revolve around forcing the users to pay don’t work. Throwing prominent ads at them to buy some more resources will result in the players leaving the game. As Seth Godin explains it very well in Permission Marketing, the users have plenty of alternatives to choose from. You are building a relationship with them. The design of your game shapes that relation. 14. Your game sessions feel empty Following on the last point, social games players want to engage in a variety of activities in your game. Each gameplay session should feel lively and rewarding, regardless of its length. Using our previous example once again, Zombie Catchers stays fresh by alternating fun hunting based gameplay and some simple shop management. You can play for a few minutes and enjoy multiple gameplay phases. 15. Your game punishes inactive players The 21st slide from Kongregate’s talk summary at the Casual Connect Asia in 2013 says it all. On one end, making it dangerous for the player not to come back to your game often will force him to get into a playing habit. However, people need to take breaks. At any moment, your users may have to stop playing because of an important upcoming event. An exam maybe, or a birth…They also need to go on holidays sometimes. When they come back to your game, if they have lost their progress, their resources and their headquarters, they will likely quit. Instead you can reward an old user for coming back after a long absence! Fortifying their appreciation of the game. 16. Updates are not coming fast enough Let us end with an easy one: social and multiplayer games need to be kept alive. If you want to retain users on the long run, you need to keep them busy or give them a reason to come back. Regular and substantial game updates, every 1 to 3 months, are key to staying in the mind of your users. If your updates are slow, chances are your users will not only uninstall the game, but they might also forget to check it again later. Summary To sum up today’s article, players leave your games for 2 key reasons: Boredom Frustration, or anxiety Those are your greatest enemies as a game designer. The antagonists of flow.

I've been bashing my head in on my desk trying to get a server up and running for like 4 days. I believe I have the server running perfectly now, but the problem is, I cannot access the server from the external IP address, only the local machine IP. I am an expert Minecraft server admin, so I'm pretty familiar with forwarding ports, and getting a server up, but this is doing me in! I have forwarded the ports that I know of on my router. Every time I check for the open ports on Open Port Check, it says they are closed. (My Minecraft server ports are open). The Atlas server settings are so complicated, I feel like I MUST be missing something here. I started out doing this myself, but finally found Atlas Server Control and have been doing everything in that now. I have spent hours googling and reading and there are hundreds of people struggling with the same thing but no answers, at least not that have helped me. For the sake of security, I will obscure all but the last 3 digits of my IP addresses for this discussion: Local machine IP, which allows me to connect: ###.###.###.102 Router's public ISP IP address: ###.###.###.201 I have a Linksys EA8300 router if it matters. Here's the information on the settings that I have: The game ports are as follows, as set in the ServerGrid.json / Shards in ASC: "Port"=57560-57590 "GamePort"=5760-5790 "SeamlessDataPort"=5003 Redis is using 5018 (Successfully, I think?) Here are my router settings: https://i.imgur.com/B85rAzC.png Here is the settings in one shard of my server: https://i.imgur.com/rj9vKMz.png (Note, although this screenshot shows my local machine ip address in the IP field, I have tried both public and local IP address in the shard IP. I'm not sure what's supposed to be here, exactly. The ASC wiki says "internet facing" ip, but that doesn't work either.) When I use the Steam server interface to look for the server, and use the local IP (###.###.###.102:57560) I see my server fine. After forwarding the ports on my router and adding rules to my machine's Windows firewall, Steam says "Server is not responding" when looking for the public IP ###.###.###.201:57560 Here's all that I've done so far: Went through all the json/config files and ASC settings to make sure the ports and IP's are right. The only question I have is whether the server/shard's ip should be public or local? (...###.102 or ...###.201?) I've tried both with no success but it's not clear to me what that should be anyway. I have checked several times that my port forwarding settings are correct on my router. I have tried all kinds of different port settings, not just the current ones listed here. I have checked and rechecked the Windows Firewall (and disabled it) and had no luck. I have downloaded and looked at CurrPorts to see the traffic from my machine and what ports are being used. I see some questionable things in there, but not sure how to interpret them or if they are a problem. Mainly, ShooterGameServer.exe is using 0.0.0.0:5003 for each shard. (remember, this port is the "SeamlessDataPort" in the shard settings.) I also notice that ShooterGameServer.exe is using 0.0.0.0:5760-90 (shards GamePorts!). I think this is suspect, but I don't know what settings are causing this. (Here are some other screenshots that might matter: ShooterGameServer.exe using both 0.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1 on various ports. If this is wrong, I'm not sure how to fix it: https://i.imgur.com/8RADTWV.png Atlas Server Control.exe using remote port range of 47555-47590 for TCP, but the local port is constantly scrolling through higher ports. I have no idea what this means. I have tried forwarding the 47555-90 range to no avail. Port check says they are closed. https://i.imgur.com/tkpoVVW.png I have tried every which way to write the rules for Windows firewall rules. I've tried specific ports, port ranges, all ports, turning off the firewall. I have even added rules that say allow access on all ports to ShooterGameServer.exe, Atlas Server Control.exe I've come to the conclusion that this probably isn't a windows firewall issue, but something I've done wrong in the settings. Any insight/help is appreciated. I really want to get this working, but I can't seem to figure it out. Thanks!

Problem solution: Active server admins suspending those reported or known in violation, conditions of suspension is player removal of violating structures or permanent ban placed upon offender. Repeat offenders also permanent ban. I don't see how this could be a difficult thing to enforce, server admins exist to police the server community and try to help solve player problems. Players policing players by spamming "no build here" blocks is just as wrong as griefers spamming "no resource here" blocks. Wrong is wrong not matter how you want to justify it. Maybe even give a 36 Hour warning to all players to remove "offending" blocks instead of some drastic code re-write that could causes players to "get stuck forever" on something they did wrong. That way admins would not have to remove all the block or wipe the server. I am sure most of the community is reasonable and will abide. Once everyone is on the same page and the blocks are gone it will be all the more easy to spot the griefers and deal with them accordingly.

With us very soon reaching the sub 1k player count and possibly another all time low, I noticed that atlas world now has dark side and radioactive as servers now. good idea for more than one reason. Before if someone looked at the steam charts for atlas they would see 1200 players and think that was a good number. First of all that is a very pathetic number to begin with. Next when you look at atlas world you can see the difference between official and unofficial servers. darkside has more than official pvp, official pve, and radioactive combined. don’t get me wrong I am not praising darkside because 600 isn’t good either but having said that only 100+ on pvp and 200+ on pve is just abysmally embarrassing lol. might take another month to reach the all time but I need to remind everyone that player numbers only go up after a wipe. That is the only time for the whole 3 plus years of this games development. Never any content or update has grown the player count. Only wipes. having said that, the new devs supposedly said they wouldn’t wipe. If they don’t player counts will never rise and only get smaller. If they do wipe that means they were liars and should not be trusted or respected. also, if they do wipe remember I told you they will change the map as an excuse for the wipe even though nobody asked or has ever asked this whole time for a map change.

Hey guys and ATLAS supporter/devs, I'm writing this topic cause of frustration that is caused after every update. Why am I frustrated? Pls don't get me wrong! I'm quite satisfied with the frequent updates for ATLAS! But it's the way they are deployed that fu***s me up. In the last days while playing on PvE EU Siren we get a little bit upset because the time you (the devs) give us to finish our current business (taming, sailing, fighting, farming) is miscalculated! You're curious why I say that? It's simple. The server gets an update which is rly nice don't get me wrong. It's says that the server is gonna be updated and we don't have to update our client which is also not bad. But here it comes. The message displayed ingame says ... "deploying in 20 minutes ..." -> server is down after only 10 minutes. That's wrong I think, ain't it? 20 minutes till update leads to 20 minutes for get your shit together. But how are we supposed to do that when the server goes down after only 10 minutes! Where are the 10 minutes? I admit that is not the key point that leads me to write this post. It is the update policy that sometimes the patch is not deployed after a couple of minutes! It's deployed at the moment we are reading this message!!! We had spent hours to get our shit together. We sailed over the whole map cause of taming a rhino in a more easier region. Now our rhino was killed after I left our base for farming! Why you ask? It's because it was at passiv mode. I changed it after I left the base and after getting kicked for a instant update it was killed by a giant snake while being passiv!!! I know that somebody are gonna say "Don't cycle it to passiv and you are good!" but that is wrong! The pets damage on wild animals is horror. A giant snakes kills an elephant if it is high enough because nobody is riding it! I'm not asking for respawning our rhino cause many animals are just useless so that your energy for taming is wasted! A tamed bull harvests thatch like a stone pike! A tamed ostrich is bad too! A rhino farming metal from metal veins is also useless! The only animals that are working properly are bears and the elephants. We lost 7 hours of taming this rhino after realising that it is only good for farming stone and flint. Pls devs change this update policy so that others don't have to get the same frustration as we get and fix things that currently making the game worse! I'm happy that you are fixing performance but in my opinion it would be better to get a better mechanic while playing. I don't need 100% smooth playing in an ea game. I need better content. I'll hope you (devs) get some of my intentions and maybe change them. Also that update policy! Just say in 5minutes comes the patch and everything will be better then just instant updates. Thx for reading hope you find it usefull

I found 3 Treasure maps on the starter Island (m7) all 3 treasure maps lead to the same location, but are rotated in a different manner, I read a few forum posts and people are saying that the person experiencing this bug HAS to be on the wrong island, my treasure region is M7 my current region is M7 I am standing where the 'X' marks the spot and have wandered all the way around this island to see if the X was in the wrong spot, but still cannot find any beacon, I have also Dug every near to where the X and all I find is water spouts, what am I doing wrong???

I play PVE. Without any markets I already got 2 schooners and now - 22K gold, so tomorrow I'll go for this new ship. Playing solo. So it's not really big deal, actually. I might sound terrible wrong, but I kinda like this new addition. And I've got few reasons for that: 1) - You need to earn your ship, means you feel some rewards for your efforts. When you start global sailing with schooner, after that slow piece of crap, you'll feel really gr8 and improved. You feel your progress in the game. Before that - you was able to get a Galleon as starter ship, and simply didn't care. 2) - With expensive ship cost you have to take a really good care of your ship, you need to carefully think of design and paint, you need to name it cool, because it will accompany you for a long time. Before that - no one even bother. (ah man, I put this ceiling to the wrong spot, let me scuttle my ship and build another one). I personally even got in to sail painting this patch. 3) - No more "art ships" in harbor. A lot of ppl were building harbors, piers, then create like 20 of ships, park em there, and never sail anywhere. It affected game performance bad. Also no more "beds ships" in Goldens. 4) - Some survival element is back, because loosing your ship is much more painful. So you need to bring caution measures. The only problem right now - is game instability. I personally lost my first schooner first day I got it. There was game crash, and I couldn't log in until my ship was sunk, and only after that I was able to enter the game. I couldn't get another 5K gold in time. Right now I fine, doing 19.5 knots full downwind, earning money for treasure maps (highest one so far I've got is lvl23.5). My "Polar Fox" Schooner : )

I’m a solo and I only have a few hours in the afternoons to play. I’ve been doing solo since the beginning. I never got the whole breeding thing. I loved ark for playing around with generations and points etc for Uber dinos. But seriously 8 hours for each imprint?! I only tame with crops so where I’m currently located I have to worry about heat and nothing I can do about that but it’s short lived. Luckily I can leave them after 3.5 percent but I might get two possibly three imprints. It’s not really even worth it anymore. If your still insisting on the imprinting system to get the better animals then give us a break on something else. I’m one of the few lucky enough for a market so for once I don’t need money for routine maintenance thankfully since I don’t have any really good bear for maps for now but man this time around has been a massive struggle. Paying for ships is just wrong. Seriously wrong. At least make it scaled. Common being whatever and mythical being like ten times that. At least base the system on something like that. You can’t keep making walls for us solos who’ve been here literally since day one. I am seriously thinking after the next wipe of not coming back. Make taming and/or breeding a little easier so I can attempt to make a ship big enough to actually get odd resources and and bears for BPs for them. Please start thinking about everyone instead of huge groups who are the ones that end up leaving because it’s gotten to easy or dull. Give us a break on something!