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One of the things I like to do in this game is build on ships. Maybe some players aren't into that so give them the modular ship option. The modular ships should cost gold as they're pre-made. Non pre-made ships should be cheaper or not cost gold. I will admit due to the fact that I'm somewhat pedantic, that some custom ship builds aren't very realistic. A good example is that ship that has a massive array of cannons on the stern. One idea to combat this is to have a weight distribution mechanic. If you mass too much weight on one side it could cause the ship to tilt and have a reduced maximum speed, or affect its turning ability somehow. However this is a mechanic that given the games development to date, is probably too complicated.

I personally feel Atlas is an abuse of early access - especially for the amount they charged. In this case, Grapeshot has used this program to "pay to develop" and "pay to alpha / beta test". They clearly had no idea what they were doing and should have had the game mechanics and networking more functional before releasing it to the public. To top it all off, they simply copied and pasted Ark in order to build the game which in my opinion should have put them much farther ahead than they are now. Early access isn't a good description of this game. It should be classified as "learn as we go". If you want a good example of what an early access game should be like, check out SCUM or Valheim. Both games have a polished foundation and at this point are simply adding more content. I can't remember a single instance of either crashing. Atlas is largely broken and yet they're still trying to add content on top of it causing it to break further. In my opinion an early access game should be in a "somewhat finished, and working state" before asking people to pay for it. Atlas has never been this and I don't think they've really had a proper direction. Mostly I think their creative vision for this game is wrong and continually going in the wrong direction. Catering to the hard-core gamer and forcing players to log on each and every day to protect their investments is morally wrong as it begs players to perpetuate unbalanced lifestyles. The land domination concept they insist upon is working completely against the game and causing new players to give up as they struggle to a place to find home. They need to focus on creating a great pirate sailing experience first and foremost. Hopefully the new devs can turn things around. In the last set of notes they said they were going to focus on fixing bugs and have marginally addressed issues such as gold for ships etc. This is somewhat promising and hey, I'll take whatever I can get at this point.

Very good description and I do agree with pretty much everything. Haven’t played some of the games on your good list so I reserve my decision on those. Wow was awesome. They would do well to add factions in atlas. some people don’t like the idea but my opinion is they are dumb. If would give the little guys a chance to survive and could easily make gold actually worth something like a currency instead of a gold sink like paying for shipyards smh.

There are a lot of decisions that have been made that make me want to facepalm. If you were leading Grapeshot, what changes would you make to this game to point it in a proper direction? Here is my list: Firstly fix the bugs as the number one objective. You need to have a functioning infrastructure to build a game upon. Do all the testing on the PTR and wipe the PTR regularly instead of the main servers everyone plays on. Personally I would forget the land hoarding, land conquest aspect of the game and create a good pirate adventure game as the primary focus. Create a game that allows for healthy gaming practices. Negative things shouldn't happen to someone if they're not online. That being said there should be a mechanic to dissuade people from being offline for long periods of time tying up land, or logging off to avoid getting attacked. Slow down the aging process. You age far too fast. I have that experience already in RL. Stop catering to the mega companies. New players need a fair gaming experience if you want to grow this game. I think they should create factions in the game that a player could align with depending on their playing style: the Royal Navy (PCs), Pirate Outlaws (PCs), Wild Pirates (NPCs), Merchant Guilds (PCs) - if they want to perpetuate the land-claiming objective, and the Cursed/ Damned (NPCs?). As a player you can gain reputation with these PC groups which can gain you certain benefits either via skills, access to larger builds, quests, or ship cosmetics. Certain cells are "lawful/ crown governed" and thus easier to settle on (less dangers and less wild animals) but you have to pay tax, potentially on ships and shipyards. This could explain why you have to pay gold to build a ship/ shipyard. You could have a mechanic whereby if a player is attacked on lawful areas, the game could spawn some NPC naval ships that would attack the grieving player. This could be beneficial for starting players. If you join a faction and attack another faction, there could be a bounty put on your head. On PVP servers you could even spend gold to put a bounty on another players/ company's head. Any player can check the bounties and try to hunt down that player/ company. If they sink that player they get the bounty amount. A whole career can be made as a pirate "bounty hunter" or a Naval officer chasing down scoundrels. I think this would be a fun game mechanic. These are early ideas and after writing them, some ideas remind me of some elements of Sea of Thieves. However SoT is a functioning game with a decent amount of polish so it's not a bad idea to look to them for working examples.

yes, but you havent considered this, in a pvp server that same shipyard can be destroyed in literally 30 seconds regardless of how many ships it have built. i dunno, i think they want to give gold a meaning but they overdid it by A FUCKING LOT if you consider that the average gold you get from 1 treasure map is around 200 gold (since map quality is random). ok, but then you go kill a high level SotD and you get trash, the nice part before was that you could just skip straight to brigg and do SotD hunt for fun only, and not only that, designing your ship to fit your play style was great, now i have to be stuck with a standar crappy ship for an eternity for what?? a once in a while SotD hunt?? they have been making lots of changes since 3 years ago, and all of them were terrible, i still remember when they nerfed the carbine and then nerfed the glider, at that time those were the 2 things i was having the most fun with, making changes for the sake of making changes is nota good idea.

The last time i played i did so in the desert biome, so yesterday i created my character and started working towards moving to africa, first kick in the nuts came when i went to free port with my bear, hired 3 sailors and instructed them to follow me to the boat, the moment the last sailor jump on the boat my bear simply stoped existing, banished without a trace, i took it like a man and altered all my plans since i had to retame my bear as you cannot find bears in the desert (unless you do now), while sailing around in the process of re-taming my bear the 2 unassigned sailors i hired also went puff, simply disappeared, when? i have no idea, i only know they were with me when i departed but at some point they simply werent anymore, i took that hit too and proceded with re-taming a bear, after a rather frustrating time finding one i manage to tame one, so back to the begging right?? lets go to africa i tought, so i did all the sailing needed and finally decided on an island to stablish my base, can you guess what happens next??? yes, my new bear was gone. i dont know why this game keeps existing tbh, they keep introducing content when this basic bugs still exist after 3 years as when you try to hide a dead body under a rug, the fundamental code of the game is absolute garbage, i imagine this new team is trying to build a game from scratch using as a fundation the same piece of shit coding the past team wrote and i just cannot comprehend how they cannot realize that you cannot build a castle in a swamp. i came back after not playing the game for 2 years, i expected NOTHING from the game, and yet it still managed to disappoint me, honestly just kill this monstruosity, discontinue the project and let it die in peace.

i think they may be trying to make travelingback and fort more convenient, however in some scenarios it does the oposite, before the change if you wanted to go from the starting zone to the desert biome you only needed to sail in that direction, now you gotta go from the starting zone to northern central waters, from northern central waters to tortuga (to avoid having to cross all central waters) then use the south teleport in tortuga to go the southern side of central waters and there use a teleport to africa, the idea is not terrible but i think the sailing time is almost the same and i am pretty sure many people is confused by the new system.

i have to admit that i was misslead by your name and your first statement, i tought you would be one of those guys with huge ego that talk from their asses, but no, i agree with you, the claim system bullshit and the mega companies were a big factor in the failure of the game in pvp, an absolutely absurd decision from the last dev team i must say. also yes, un-gate all content the game has to offer, its incredibly stupid to try to force people into doing groupal content when they dont want to, imagine trying to start a relationship by forcing someone to like you when they dont, not a good idea right? also last time i played the insane ammount of discovery points given by doing those activities was absurdly high. once again, yes, the ship free design was the way to go, i have no idea why they changed it but it was a terrible decision. i havent played in more than a year but i still remember being traumatized by trying to go back to my base and then the game suddenly deciding to change the wind direction to 100% opposite to my moving direction, or how little gold you could get from killing ships of the dawn, or how your stuff would get deleted if you didnt log in in a while, its incredible how short sighted the developers have been with this game.

1. The towers need to give some protection to your buildings besides decay time and stealing protection by over claiming. I would suggest an offline protection like claimable islands where you can choose a Peace Time for your claim... but this has some other issues as well. So you Idea of at least improved building durability in the claim area is good. But amount of Claimtowers should be reduced. PvE needs maybe different balance in this point. Devs will not remove the Claim Towers.... that's pretty sure. 2. creative Players have(had) the option to build their perfect ship for special purposes(of course to gain an advantage with knowledge). Some needed tricks like placing structures before the hull to make your harbor run shielded design. But this is great content and freedom for players. WIth the modular ships this will be taken away and that's a bad idea. To balance "broken" builds i suggest to reduce the BP overall buff. Cannons max 200%, planks max 200% damage/HP buff. 3. Modular ships do not solve this problem, they make ship building just boring. You don't need creativity anymore. You don't need knowledge... you can ignore ship weight etc. They may improve the performance due to less structures... but well.... 4. barrels need to be removed from the ship combat(catapult)... it should be only allowed to drop them maunally off a ship as sea mines if you get chased. Or to destroy under water FOBs of course. If they stay with catapults the damage needs to be changed. Less structure damage to hull and sails, but maybe with a lucky shot you can kill some crew on the ship. But than you have the Issue with NPC weight and the ways you can put more barrels into the NPC manning the catapult. Also catapult reload could be changed to 1 minute... so you need to aim your shots very carefully at least.

xbox is bad idea for this game. buy pc or notebook.

let me rephrase that, after 2 years of ignoring TONS of feedback, this is the first time they come up with the idea of pretending to care about player's feedback at all. this is, in the end, just the perfect way to excuse the deletion of 1 of the 2 pvp servers to lower the game's maintenance costs, however what i find incredible is that people has the lack of diginity needed to keep playing this game in its current state even after its continuos wipes, but i guess thats just people being people.

The original was just as bad if not worse. Like I always said “they stopped making good ideas after they said let’s make a pirate game” after that is was all down hill. in order to not cater to Megas they have to get rid of the sandbox. Factions is the literal only way to do that. So if you don’t agree with factions then you deserve to get wiped by Megas. No discussions about it. you have to remember this wasn’t an awesome game even on release. It was a good idea, but never an awesome game. there is a reason it is on steams bottom 100 list called the hall of shame.

Dollie. It was pretty obvious, that she had no idea about the game whatsoever.

I can take this game in spurts. I try it, I enjoy it for a few weeks, then the bugs make me delete it. This has been going on for years. It's like a smouldering dumpster fire that you keep lifting the lid to see if it's finally safe to play. To Atlas, early access is an excuse to get paid to develop or have people pay to alpha test your game. After Atlas I was very reluctant to pay for another early access game. However since then I tried Valheim and SCUM, both early access games. They're totally playable games in my experience, and a much better example of what early access should be. What Grapeshot is doing should be a crime IMO. If there was justice someone would start a class-action lawsuit and get everyone's money back. Not that this would ever happen. All this being said, my main gripe is their expectations of players. They seem to expect players to be on this game every day or so or lose their tames/ crew etc. This promotes unhealthy gaming habits which is bad for most people. So clearly their moral compass is broken. You look at the directions they're taking and you scratch your head. Even if the game wasn't full of bugs, their decisions leave you with little or no confidence. I try to take away from the game what I can enjoy, but it only lasts so long. It was/ is such a great idea with tons of potential. I feel to realize this potential they need to fire their team lead and get someone else to lead them in a proper direction. I have little confidence this game will be great even after a few more years. I hope in that time there will be another developer who will create kick ass pirate sailing survival game. Until such time, we have to sate our appetites with whatever we can squeeze out of this game for as long as we can stand it.

Nice idea to delete all feedback about issues of the game. This would be like steam forum where there are only 20 pages of topic shown and the older ones get deleted. Maybe the rest of the Player Base and young people is happy with Discord... i can't see any benefit in Discussion there - it's a total spam desaster with chatted opinions instead of detailed feedback that everybody has access to in a good sorted way(forum).

Wow this is the first time the Dev Team ask about feedback in this forum in more than 2 years i follow this game. This is amazing and very positive. Unfortunately there will not be much feedback anymore because most players left this forum because they felt like it's useless to participate here. I myself refuse to participate in the Discord Spam channels because that is complete unorganized feedback - spam - trolling etc. My opinion is no - because i would expect to have very laggy connections on both sides. I heard about Players in Season 5 joining the NA from Europe and it was quite ok. But with the lags the game has even without the connection lag... Depends on where the servers will be located, or if the Devs can manage to improve the connection for both sides. For the amount of Players left it will be good though to migrate the servers. But this is fighting the symptom instead of the real illness. Does this question bring me back to Atlas? Most likely not. Even with new Corona lock downs i will most likely not reinstall this game duing this winter. The new updates don't look promissing for me. Yeah it's great to get new stuff(corrugated meat that can be eaten)... but my feedback of the past year here was to improve the added stuff, fix bugs(of this new stuff) and make balance changes in the first place. A new map with portals - well no idea about this, i don't know ark... but so far players loosing tames and ships in the portals... map gets smaller in total. It's still all the same islands just placed another way again. What about reducing the mountain heigths of those islands to avoid abuses and silly mechanics like building restrictions for defenses and glider nerf(which i think is a good mechanic). Players need islands with natural bays that can be a good basis for a protected harbor without massive structure spam. What about BP changes to avoid balance issues with level 60 ships and cannons with 350% damage, useless mid tier BPs(grey or mystical only) etc. (drop rate/reduced crafts)... land defenses are pretty useless against ships. What about changing the repair kit costs and the stupid usage mechanic of those. If you play a brig you only need to repair the upper planks, in the new ships you have to run through this small decks and search the damaged planks... risking to sink in 1 minute when 2-3 on different decks are leaking or destroyed. What about barrels on ships? Made so many Players quit the game and no fun to fight on the sea. What about Player customization of the new ships - structur limits everywhere, not allowed to place cannons on front or rear etc.? What about the nerfed farmhouse every player(group) now needs 4-5 diverse farms for less output(Most likely PVE issue only, PvP it would be better QoL so). Gold costs for ships, especially the Shooner still no like from my side. Lot's of bugs around trades(routes unfinished), farmhouse, warehouse etc. Can you now cancel a trade and reactivate later without the need of destoying the market? Building restirction radius instead of working on the basis of an overall island counter. There are so many issues around this game and all the new stuff added from Season 4 starting like Claim Towers that still offer no protection in lawless but allow others to steal your base etc. The trade islands and the buff structures that caused massive issues and got removed because of all those bugs again. This list could go on for a while but i think i have written about all this here already. So please Devs. If you want to make this game a Success aiming for a realease in maybe 2023 you should keep up with asking the community for feedback and checking this forums for lot of great ideas or even small but good suggestions. Edit: Quite funny to have a look into the steam forum too. There are still many new Players and all they ask there is questions about bugs and issues with the game that exist since beginning, got never adressed and cause very much players to leave because they can't play. Still selling the game with tag Single Player and unfinished Blackwood DLC.

Idea to devs: Make a hitching post for animals on boats or a GPS tracker so I wouldn't spend countless hours looking for animals in water while sailing

With this new update. They changed the grids to not appear to any other grid. While this is a great idea maybe for PvP my PvE server ppl don't like it. They cant see the island owners to ask if they can go farm there or for admins to be able to see who is claiming what in public Grids? Can anyone tell me a code or something to check to make all grid owners visible again to ppl not in that grid? Any help in this is greatly appreciated. Thanks

The kids that are making this game have no idea of what they are doing that's why we're still in pre-release 4 years later... They don't want to listen to any things the players have to say if you are not in PvP... From the looks of it they've got developers from multiple other games working on this one trying to make it look like all the other games they're working on... All they want to do is keep adding and taking away certain content and bringing in boats that make no difference to the ones that we've already got going and now they want to add more crap in that's only will lag out the server even more... when they decided to have the intelligence to do portals and not be able to get back to the Freeport at all I think is when they went retarded... Makes you think that the Devs are kids and have no clue how to make a GOOD game...

Do we know why they did this to the map? Seems insanely silly to me. Shit, if they wanted fast travel, just add a couple portals to the existing map. I also have no idea how to get to A5-C5. I was told you can get back to Rookie, but you can't bring anything with...so naked. I foolishly tried to sail out of rookie zone, only to go from c4 to c1. Guess you gotta portal and might as well forget all about rookie zone? Or just stay there forever? This kinda seems like just about the dumbest thing you could do, no? Maybe we're all part of some sick experiment...

They're moving towards ditching custom ships in favor of their mod system. (I'm totally against the idea, but they seem set on doing it). For now though, both options still exist.

The reason they can't is very simple. They take up too much server RAM. Basically the guys at Wild Card/Grape Shot did what they always do. They came up with a "wouldn't it be cool if..." idea, rapidly prototyped it and didn't bother to look at all the long term game design implications. Look at the Modular ships. They have minimal customization to avoid the same problem. I think they are mostly made from Majestic Kraken parts because 1) they have to minimize the impact on server RAM and 2) they simply don't have a dev team with the resources to add more modular ship parts.

Hmm. Well I guess the intent was never to be or rather give the atmosphere, of 17th? 18th century piracy land fun time? which I was hoping for. period accurate not fantasy mix mash period. I love this game I really do. I know how hard it is to make a game, and on top of that to advertise, get your game out there and most of all try to please all and make the fanbase player base happy. What I really loved about this game is the pvp and pve its fine. sure bugs but its great. building things ships look great. BUT: please I do not understand maybe you all can help me maybe its my ignorance I am sorry but We the players have great ships look period? accurate. then we have the SOTD... neon bone like speedboats? When I see them feels like I'm about to see like party people and airhorns and rum ham........ Why not make the enemy npc like real ships that the players use? and boarding npc ships? And now on to the foot soldiers of the damned?? They look at least to me, Alien exoskeleton glowing? skeleton pirate monsters? Why cant they be like us the players like people? maybe make gangs/groups of npc pirate company/hordes/gangs? That sail the seas? Like in some ways the single player mode npc pirates? Lastly, I know people will stone me because its not an mmorpg....... Could we have like a a few grids that are both pvp and pve and all players can attack npc lands, they too could have timers? make it hard. make it worth the raid. other companies could cross fire backstab during raid would be chaos... but glorious pvp :) Secondly along that grid or in it a huge island a main town of sorts full of npc/player shops. taverns, basically a place to congregate and show off :) (see below) oh and of course it would be lovely to have so be it cosmetic only gear to wear outfits, hats.... the period of flintlock had beautiful attire for gentlemen and ladies. So on that big "Town Island" all players could meet up , maybe an area where all can gather and watch a pvp duel with flintlock/swords? or pve duel? or both! I feel this town would attract more players, maybe in my mind only maybe not. just my opinion. I could be totally wrong it could be a bad idea who knows.. Have taverns drunk drinking games, you guys like to implement eye twitching fast click the mouse button mini games? so why not something like where all players can meet up and play a mini game? I dont know. Meh forget the whole thing.

So... all happening tomorrow and we don't have any beta or any info. If there is new map, does this mean that DEVs wanna us explore new map ourselves??? I mean it's cool, but... when last map was introduced, alot of ppl settled around freeports as they usually do, and then found that the idea was to go far and settle near valuable resources spots... when that revealed - all spots were already taken : ))

Dude! These guys have zero idea of balance SO, yeah, I agree that they should be putting some energy into FIXING THE BLOODY GAME !