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The pursuit for the fountain of youth ... nice Idea but the execution is poor. Right now I don´t know what is more frustrating, experiencing that the underperforming game-engine get its neck snapped as soon as you come close to the Island. Or realising that the entrance-tunnel is either blocked by cobras and shit or if you somehow made your way throu the FOY is already gone. Ahh, and the best part is that you have to do this shit every month oO I fail to see why dieing over and over again in stop-motion like framerates is supposed to be a fun game experience.

The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea. <a href=""> By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 (Wikicommons) By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. The Chinese port of Fuzhou, starting point for the great Tea Races, in about 1860. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. Charles II (1660-1685) granted the monopoly that helped get English trade with China underway. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. The 1850s American clipper Lightning, sailing out of San Francisco, was more than capable of matching the finest British vessels of the day for speed. Image: Wikicommons. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. Donald MacKinnon, skipper of the Taeping, and one of the finest masters of the clipper era. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. Loading tea at the Chinese port of Canton. Image: Wikicommons. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper under full sail. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. Anjer in Java, one of the waystations on the clipper route–though the fast ships sailed non-stop from China home to London, San Francisco or New York. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. Taeping (left) and Ariel race neck-and-neck up the English Channel, three months out of China. The wind remained fair, blowing from the southeast, as the racers headed for the English Channel. Gradually they strung out into a line, luck or determination slightly favoring Ariel and Taeping over Fiery Cross and Serica. Still together after 97 days at sea, the two leaders ran up the Channel in sight of each other, both logging 14 knots for most of the day as they made for Deal and the Tea Race’s unofficial finish. At eight on the morning of September 6, Ariel was spotted signaling her number by watchers on the shore, and not ten minutes later Taeping hove into view to claim second place. Serica was less than two hours behind, with Fiery Cross an unlucky and (to Robinson) humiliating 36 hours further back. Even then, the racers seem to have been reluctant to abandon their chase. With Keay unable to afford the latest tug, Taeping nipped into the London docks 25 minutes ahead of Ariel. He and MacKinnon agreed to split the premium of 10 shillings per ton awarded to the first ship home each season. The Tea Race of 1866 caused an enormous stir in the sporting and nautical circles of Britain. Ariel and Taeping had left Fuzhou together and arrived home on the other side of the globe still together, Ariel‘s winning time being seven thousandths of one percent faster than her rival’s. The Tea Race was never so close again in its 30-year history. Sources Leeds Mercury 13 June 1866; Glasgow Herald 7+12 September 1866; George Campbell. China Tea Clippers. London: Adlard Coles, 1974; Howard Chapelle. The Search for Speed Under Sail. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968; Arthur H. Clark. The Clipper Ship Era. An Epitome of Famous American and British Clipper Ships, Their Owners, Builders, Commanders and Crews 1843-1869. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911; Basil Lubbock. The China Clippers. Glasgow: James Brown, 1919. See it at the Smithsonian for your self! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-tea-race-of-1866-8209465/

I gave this a negative review on Steam in Feb 2020 and had every reason to never come back, which felt like a tragedy because I bought five copies of it so I could play with my wife and kids. The moment-to-moment gameplay was fun an engaging (which made it so we put in ~300 hours and felt like we got our money's worth), but the macro game was chaotic and genuinely soul-crushing and we just had to stop playing. Out of sheer curiosity last week, I read some of recent the patch notes from after I quit playing, and to my utter surprise you had addressed every concern I had in my review, so I took it down and switched it to positive. There is still a long ways to go, but this last year has made me optimistic about ATLAS again. I gave a fair amount of the new content a try-out in single player and creative mode so I could see how things would work and play out and I'll give PvP and PvE a try when I have time. I'd like to start off with some compliments about this game, so you guys can get some insight into what you're doing well and what makes ATLAS fun. 1. It's beautiful. Your modeling, design, effects, everything is just absolutely stunning. I like that it's UDK as well, because it means my kids can play it on their cheap-o computers and enjoy it with me on my monster gaming rig. I'm a bit of a sucker for pretty scenery and your game is very nearly at the top of my list for well-crafted beautiful scenery (you're honestly going toe-to-toe with Guild Wars 2 and Breath of the Wild here) 2. I love the volume of content, and honestly can't get enough of it. I love sailing out to a new zone because I need aged wood, or a different kind of fiber. If you added a dozen new types of fiber, and trees (hopefully with unique models to match), I would absolutely take my time to go exploring to find them all. It makes exploring feel emotionally rewarding, and makes me feel content with the time I spend in game. So long as I avoid the wiki, it's just impossible for that to get old. 3. The micro mechanics of the game are fun. Sailing is engaging and I feel like I'm rewarded (with lower repair costs, and combat advantages) for being good at it. Base building is fun to place and design your outpost, so much so that I am motivated to go gather more materials for it. Building and designing a ship makes me feel invested in its survival. I mention these first because I feel like understanding what you do well helps you play to your strengths as you explore new mechanics, and code, and features. So, here are my observations and suggestions. I've put a lot of thought into these so I hope you see this for what it is: someone who is absolutely rooting for you and your game. 1. Individual player interactions with devs is bad. I know most people in engineering are not sociable by nature, but this is currently the #1 point plaguing your steam reviews. Get a dedicated support person. They can write bug reports for you, interface with customers, make social media posts and do light advertising for you—in short, get a community manager. A good one will pay for themselves. Have someone help players feel like their concerns are being addressed because my personal interactions with your support was. . .well, lacking to say the least. Your devs are busy, resources are tight, and I get it, but I truly believe this should be your next financial investment so you can start building the community around this game, as opposed to most of us just dying off after a while of playing because we're frustrated. If you already have a community manager, then I am not seeing any real benefit from them and you should look at one with a different skill set. 2. Early access is a generally poor decision for a game in the MMO genre. Wipes are needed, frequently, in Early Access, stuff gets lost—it's part of the social contract. However, MMOs require a huge time commitment from their players, and many MMO players are ready and willing to devote entire days to playing their game of choice all in the pursuit of character development and in-game wealth. Because of this, early access will naturally poison your developer/player ecosystem. There are few remedies to this that have worked inside of the MMO genre. You already tried the first one: wipes means newer players have a better chance at claiming an island, but it disenfranchises more established players and the ones who are genuinely desperate for their friends to convert over to their MMO of choice. The few MMOs who have tried this eventually die off. I think the best approach is two stages: public test realm, and tailored migrations. Public Test Realms are inherently imbalanced and indifferent to exploits. Players can start with nothing, mid-game stuff, or late-game stuff whenever they want and play with other people in a public arena. This fixes some of the problems with Early Access because a player can always just hop on PTR and play the parts they enjoy without the typical MMO investment. They can kind of do this on single player, but, yeah, tether distance makes that not-viable and it limits the content they can explore. More importantly, not having it means that the only place you have to test experimental features and new ideas is your production public servers that some players have invested close to 1000 hours into. See the problem? Having a PTR means you can test a feature that is risky with little to no risk to your players—like having character migrations from one version to another. I hope this is a simple thing (especially since ARK already had the player transfer and dino upload, so there is a kind of migration path forward there). It's disheartening to lose your Galleon that you spent hours upon hours making, upgrading, designing, filling with crew, and became your virtual home. Really, making it so crew and ships can be stashed before a wipe would mean the world to established players, and the key feature here isn't for the players at all, but for the devs down the road. I know external storage isn't exactly conducive to UDK, but solving that is probably essential for an MMO in the long term. The PTR also gives you the mechanism for gently removing broken game mechanics, and for offering consolation prizes to users who invested in a mechanic that ultimately doesn't work with the final game (which items often become collectables down the road). More importantly, having this would open up the user base to the more common MMO revenue streams, like paid for cosmetic skins and titles. Without having a culture and expectation of migration and data preservation, attempting to introduce either of those would likely incite a riot or boycott. I think this two-stage approach will help fix most player complaints and problems much quicker, and to some extent would address all the other suggestions or problems listed after this. 3. The servers feel generally empty. Even when I make it to another player's base, it feels like I'm walking through a museum. Having more players and well-established companies help alleviate that, but some of this needs to be put into the feel of the game. A simple fix would be to add in freeport style NPCs as purchasable upgrades for player bases. This is a sensible thing to do with the upcoming trade system updates, you're already putting in this kind of effort, why not apply some of it more generally? It's a small thing and it may not seem like it's worth the effort, but taking the time to add in animation trees and some rudimentary patrol paths for NPC characters would make the whole game feel much more dynamic. Something like more noticeable idle animations on vendors, and if you're really feeling ambitious, having them respond to the animals nearby could help Atlas feel more like a living world of exploration, rather than an archeological dig. Even if it's just a meaningless animation, a harvester NPC from the farm would go a long way to fixing this feeling. One suggestion I have that could also help this, which the game seems well suited for is borrowed from an ultimately failed MMO, Shadowbane. In this particular game, any skill or ability past level 20 was simply not accessible until you joined a clan. Player-made cities were the hubs of trade as a result, and everyone was intrinsically motivated to clan up. It made for some very fun social play, and since you already have player base building as a core mechanic, why not extend that into a social fleet building? I know a lot of players would moan about it, but if you think about it critically, does it really make any sense that murdering seagulls gives me the ability to craft a large speed sail? Learning skills from well-established player ports would create incentive for an entirely new kind of exploration—other people. That particular mechanic will never get old and will require a lot less dev time to develop (still needs some care and attention so it doesn't develop into a toxic community). I think the best way to implement this would be to have high-level skills (basically anything that gets upgraded in the current skill tree) come from tome drops that you need a port-specific NPC to decode to gain the skill (in addition to regular level requirements). I'd break up “Esotery of building” to individual building tome skills as well, so that individuals are inclined to clan up with strangers to get access to ports and companies are motivated to take in strangers because they have tomes/skills not found in the clan. As fun as it is to have a character that can do it all and be it all, MMOs just don't really need that. Everything should be split up into specialties and only the most dedicated players who are willing to create multiple toons for their account should be able to do that. ***This is a side note for future reference*** What killed Shadowbane, apart from bad business decisions and the market just generally moving onto the next-gen, was that clanning up was to heavily incentivized. In Shadowbane you could capture other clans cities (which took typical MMO levels of effort to build in the first place), and make them swear loyalty to you. The result was that one or two players would become the effective emperors of the MMO and it would eventually work it's way out of a PvP environment. The only solution that they could get to reliably work was to force a reset and everyone would have to start over periodically. Even putting in a taxation system only reinforced this dreaded cycle, because emperors had more money and resources and it would snowball into server-wide kingdoms. Putting constraints on it didn't work either, because they'd just have one of their long-term clan mates control a not-officially-affiliated clan and they'd just do tandem raids and city captures. Knowing their pitfalls can give you a better chance at preventing this, and some of the pirate theme could help. Reversing it so that each player-captured base requires upkeep from the conqueror seems a pretty sensible constraint, and allowing captured companies to mutiny after a certain time has passed would probably be enough. History is probably the best educator for this, and the factors that led to the collapse of the British Empire are probably your best bet (expense for making war to reclaim rebellious colonies, and just sheer distance involved in punishing those who rebelled, which you can easily emulate in the ATLAS environment) *** end note *** 4. It's been mentioned at great length, but the gold cost for building a ship just doesn't make sense. I could see justification for it at 1/10th the current rate, but in its current form, it's just nonsense. Honestly, you should hot-fix that out ASAP. I think an alternative to it that achieves what you were after would be a patron/loan system for a ship, where you can rent one and get a commission as a privateer. Make it the start of your power stone quests and in true pirate/privateer form make players obligated to fulfill the quests of the commission, otherwise your patron hunts you down for failing to pay your debt. Existing random-generated maps are a great first draft implementation, and you could expand it to doing trade hauls as you build out that system, that way you don't just increase your server load without increasing your player count. Formalizing this and enforcing it via mechanics could even make it possible for existing players to sponsor new players and give them a commission and a ship (which you'd want the rewards to be essential to unlock certain game mechanics to get the seasoned players onboard). Now for the last problem on my list. 5. Persistence and Instances. There's no possible way everyone who plays ATLAS can get their own island, and even trying to find a good spot for a PvE base can be challenging. It's also a core gameplay mechanic, and a fun one. The decay timer solves your needs and alleviates this problem to some extent, but it puts a time bomb into our experience. We know we'll lose everything sooner or later, contrast that to other MMOs I've played where I come back after 3 years and I'm filled with nostalgia at my armor, gear, and items in my bank. I will never have that with your setup, and I am honestly concerned that the game will never make it out of Early Access for this reason. I also need base of operations on land. I think armored docks are a step in the right direction, but I think the ultimate solution is instancing and zone specification. I don't see any real technical reason why H3 couldn't be a PvE zone, and H4 a PvP. It's good to have that blend so players can kinda pick and choose what kind of game they want to play that day without having to maintain two separate characters. It gives the Pkers more prey, and it enables PvE-centered players (like myself) to be careful, wary, and pick up some PvP skills along the way without fully committing to the pwning noobs cutthroat environment common to PvP games. It creates some excitement and keeps me from getting bored from staying in my comfort zone to long. Risk vs Reward becomes the player's guide, and that's something you can tune behind the scenes to ensure you have a welcoming and engaging gaming community. But, instancing could work just as well. It's a cheap and dirty way to make the world have less boundaries, and would make most players indifferent to another world-size shrink. In my head, for ATLAS, it would look something like a zone labeled “the unknown.” As soon as you sail into it, you're given some navigation options. “Use a chart” could take you to a specific player/company base (sharable amongst friends of course) charts, “Follow the stars” could take you to a random player base of someone who is currently online, “Pillage” would take you to a player base that's specifically in a PvP capture window, and “Explore” would generate a random bare island. Of course, to save on costs, you'd want to limit the “random” islands to the ones you've already made, and so it doesn't become to comfortable make them only spawn base_ resources. That way, you could limit what you store in an economically IOP provisioned database, and map it to static assets. Long load times are acceptable for these regions, and a single island could be smaller in size so more would fit on a single host, because they will implicitly spend a long time in them and it would be something they could actively choose to go to, and you could put the servers you're running or hosting it on in a cloud autoscale group with a shared data drive that loads the instance when a player travels to it. That way your costs better match your usage. If you're willing to take the risk, you could even have this data exclusively stored and hosted client-side (so it really only is available when a company member is online), and just put in constraints on what resources can leave the region (like, players have to register a ship and cargo manifest before it can leave to ensure nothing impossible or unlikely makes its way into the public, and the item count and value could put a throttle on how long it takes for the system to approve their manifest). That lowers your operations costs, and then it merges the three different systems you're maintaining: PvP, PvE, and single player. It really is just about which resources you have at your disposal, more Dev, or more Ops? If you have more Ops, you probably want the autoscale group with shared data drive. Anyways, sorry for the long read, hope some of this is helpful.

Rethink the roadmap. It's counter-intuitive to how the players play the game. I know I'm spitting into the wind here and I understand the frustration of the playerbase given the lack of awareness and interest in player desires or interests, but I can't get on board with the hostility and the abuse being hurled. I know, having observed for a long time now, that the developers don't read your posts or feedback (Detrimental for a game in Early access) and that has fostered a very toxic relationship with this community which saddens me to say because I genuinely love Atlas, but I'm desperately disappointed in the direction it's taking. I wonder if you agree. The roadmap appears to attempt to dictate how we play the game. As a community that has adapted to the game, the roadmap implies we've been playing the Atlas "Wrong." To quote the official post "Essentially, we feel like players are currently spending too much time in certain areas of the game, and not enough time in the areas we think should be the most fun, such as Sea and Combat. Players can expect to experience more fun and engaging content out on the sea, and a cut back on the time spent on land or with creatures." We're spending too much time on land. We're relying too heavily on tames and breeding. We're not doing enough exploring. We're not engaging in enough combat. I feel like Atlas has done themselves an injustice. In an open world, a player base of diverse interests develops; You have those who enjoy combat with Ships of the Damned, Those who specialize in breeding high stat tamed creatures and selling them in a burgeoning marketplace, builders who primarily focus on creating fantastical archaeological wonders, explorers who are achievement completionists, treasure hunters who enjoy the pursuit of gold, resource harvesters who collect and sell resources to travelers- in an open world where our goals are self made, it is a huge mistake to shuttle us all into one linear stream of gameplay as if Atlas were World of Warcraft. We don't a want to be doing the same thing, but that has not stopped our gaming practices from complimenting that of other players. Te roadmap attempt to intercept our self made goals and forcibly divert our play style into what the developers think it should be, rather than what each of us, individually, want it to be for us. This is a game where it will take you as much real time to sail 5 tiles as it does to drive to your next big city. This is a game where, to breed a tier 3 creature, requires a 4 day, real time, marathon with intense focus. These are time investments that would typically feel cumbersome, but we do them, we've adapted to them, some of us appreciate they are not easy because we feel a sense of genuine accomplishment and real progress. But they're taking these things away. They're doing so in a manner that makes no real sense in the context of the game except to make a difficult, time consuming, long term committment of a game even harder but with less reward. Nerfing tames was their first step last night in sabotaging how we play the game. I had a level 11 Army of the Damned drop down from a finger rock someone had been digging up a chest on. It did significant damage to my level 73 bear. This was ONE Army of the Damned. Had it been any more of the 5-12 that spawn, I'd have died, my bear would have did- just like the treasure hunter after that 73 gold common map did. This has a direct effect on the economy. Because of this deterrent, less people will want to treasure hunt meaning less passive income for Island owners who find that 20% tax actually helps cover the cost of their upkeep. Tames are the balance of our combat experience. For every one of us that have been killed by a level 1 bee and been eternally humbled by the lack of proper scaling in this game, tames are the difference between death and survival on land. But spend more time at sea, they said. It'll be fun, they said. But imagine the time, the effort, the relentless grind of harvesting materials, speccing and respeccing due to the limited available skill points, and finally building a ship only to go out ad be destroyed by a random fleet of Ships of the Damned that spawn into the radius of our boat at close proximity, either clumsily spawning in on each other or surrounding us in 360 degree circumference. Rarely just one. Then the rain starts, 10 cyclones spawn, picking away at your person's health, at the ship, damaging everything on it. Then the passive ship decay. You're always slowly decaying at sea, both you and your ship. Your vitamins deplete faster. Then you cross a server boarder. You hang in limbo for 10 second or more. You may emerge being pummeled by more ghost ships or directly into cyclones. This perhaps after sailing for three hours and losing literally everything you've worked days to acquire, on top of your time. The risk isn't worth the reward. Not for the 19 gold a ship may drop. Not for that common thatch door blueprint. At a whopping 180 gigs of space, I have yet to determine what constitutes 250 tiles. Aside from a few resources easily substituted unless for mythical quality blueprints, traveling doesn't offer new experiences except a dramatic change in climate. The islands are the same with a different skin. Most of the animals across each biome are the same with a few variations in basic colors- not even patterns vary, just skin recolors. Models are repeated exhaustively, embarrassingly noticeable. That plant could be a half a dozen looking things because while the model is the same, the harvest may be different. The ships look the same- we all look the same. In contrast to ARK that has a plethora of skins and cosmetics to diversify and individualize our appearance, Atlas doesn't even afford us that. The texture from building? All the same. NPC towns seem to boast more robust building materials and options than we players do. Ultimately, Atlas has decided to push up all back in progress to compensate for their lack of content at the end game. If we are forced into their linear fashion of gameplay and they extend our road, our grind, our path to progress and end game content, that provides them more time. I took a year off, just after the implementation of the trenches and crabs. A year later I cam back and found they'd introduced Crabs and Ulfends. Nothing else really. No dramatic gameplay improvements. The same bugs that existed just after release still persist today. No quality of life or gameplay experiences, no new end game content or achievement pursuits, no new mid game content. The ongoing joke is that Atlas is a sailing simulator, and that seems to be what they're making it. Those who love the game as a foundation for something great will soon sadly realize it's potential will not be met if we move in this direction, but instead suffer at the hands of staff who clearly doesn't listen or even play their own game to understand the experiences we speak of so passionately here, or own steam, or in other mediums. We just can't get through. I know the handicapping of Tames was the first step in further limiting our ability to progress in Atlas, which is why I'm motivated to speak out here. Sorry for the TL/DR.

I feel like realistically this thread should just be like an entire gesture to ATLAS in general. Bad Game mechanics? Lets start with basic ship parts. They needed to force people to "explore", so they made higher tier BPs require numerous different types of the same material to make shit. If they wanted a good mechanic, Different woods/metals would have different weight/speed/attributes so you could actually design and build ships around certain builds, do you want something lightweight and weak, or do you want heavier denser wood/metal that is slower but tankier? or a mix for something moderate? It was nice they had different sail types, but speed sails were broke since forever. lackluster ship types. NOW! How about those grapple hooks eh? You're in a hot pursuit of an enemy ship, one of your friendly ships cuts off their route, and force them into you, one of your boys on deck grapples their ship, and suddenly you both stop moving, completely dead in the water. That's cool, somehow a ballista with a rope can destroy all momentum and render your sails inoperable. Sharks(2) spawning on fresh ship wrecks? have you even run someones harbor and sunk like 10+ ships and tried to dive that shit in the heat of a battle? It's fucking ridiculous. like you're in a bloody harbor and suddenly 20+ sharks. Allowing people to pack 16+ cannons on the side of a ship with no counter balance. Greatest game mechanics ever. Animals. How about this kicker. During a TPG harbor raid we(Idiocracy), ran a Brig with 12 cannons (each manned by players, specced into cannon reload, which makes them fire like machine guns), we sailed that bad boy into a huge TPG harbor, harbor wall, wall cannons, mortars, etc. We sunk like 4 galleons, 8 brigs, tons of schooners before they were able to respond. And when they did, we had already gotten hammered by mortars, shot by wall cannons, we got stuck on a rock on the way out of the harbor when a gally and 2 brigs show up and start donking on us HARD. Well we got unstuck, manage to sail away with 3 ships chasing us, we were missing all of our lplants on both sides, part of our top deck, had some of our rear and foreward planks, but literally both side of the ship were missing, we were sailing a skeleton of a ship that was filling up fast. 14 guys bailing water with buckets, we sailed that ship 2 zones, while being chased, ironically the ship went really fast without any planks on it, and we were able to outpace the water coming in. We had to scrap all the cannons, the all the storage boxes, everything, so we could build a smithy and start making planks. WE HAD NO PLANKS. That ship escaped, and survived. We almost lost it to the lag from the zone change though, first zone change, everyone lagged, and suddenly the plankless ships water went from the bottom of the ship to the top deck, but 14 guys bailing water, we had that shit taken care of. SKELETON SHIP BOYS. WE DID IT. Great game mechanic.

Let me preface what I'm about to say by making clear that it is not an absolute or binary thing I'm describing, but more a tendency or a sort of sliding scale. I have noticed over the years that games which focus on PVP tend to have low levels of immersion. I think there is a perfectly valid reason for this. Balancing PVP content appropriately is a mostly technical pursuit within the realm of game development, wheras creating immersion tends to fit in with storytelling as a game design function. Storytelling tends to be generally regarded as part and parcel of the pve experience of a game, so even in games that have both pvp and pve, most development teams tend to focus more heavily on one aspect or the other of their game. I don't think there is much question that Atlas is being designed primarily with pvp in mind, and I say that as a mostly pve player in Atlas. Keeping this in mind, it has been my experience that it is a rare game indeed that is able to execute both pvp and an immersive storytelling experience well simultaneously. One is a more technical challenge while the other is about creative asthetics and artistic craftsmanship instead of numbers crunching. It would be great if Atlas suceeded in doing both at a high level, but I think right now this development team is perhaps struggling to craft a game that is compelling for either pvp or pve players, so if I were you I would tend to temper my expectations for a more immersive experience. I say this as someone who would love to see all the things you describe come to pass in Atlas, as I would very much like to play a version of Atlas that had them as well. I just think we shouldn't hold our breathe waiting for those things for the reason I've put forth. But one can always hope, and it's good you have contributed your desires to the discussion, because this development team seems to be looking to it's playerbase right now for input on how we would like to see the game shaped going forward.

**NOTE -- Originally posted to Reddit on May 31, 2019 My fellow Texians...I come to you with sad news from the Republic of Texas of grid F10. When I joined my crew this night, it was reported to me at once that members of the Jazz Cabbage nation were issuing threats and warning our small island residents of a pending attack. My captains reported that messages were exchanged and it was indicated to the aggressors that our governor (myself) was not yet available for comment. The reply from Jazz Cabbage was flatly that there was no time to wait for a reply. A black and red brig flying black sails was soon reported off our southern harbor. Before we could man our stations the brig parked behind our harbor walls and opened fire into the harbor. This hostile action was utterly without provocation but my crew and I were more than eager to return them with a warm Texas welcome! We raced to our ships! I tried to calm my crew and urge patience as I sprinted to the harbor walls. But in our haste to make a good showing and offer our visitor a stand-up fight we already had ships pulling out away from their docks. Afterall, it was just a single brig and we easily outnumbered her. Based on recent experience we hoped for a fight where we might squeeze out an advantage. Giving honor to her namesake, the brig [TXS] Davy Crockett was first into the fray! Thinking back to our Texas hero of history, Crockett was one of the last defenders of the Alamo of 1836. He and the men of less than 200 fought to the very last and the Crockett sailed into battle hoping to stand toe-to-toe with her enemy....for better or worse. As the two brigs circled outside the range of our harbor cannons and mortars, the galleon [TXS] San Antonio mustered all hands to action and pulled out from her moorings. But her inability to maneuver in such tight quarters with dueling brigs took her far out of range of her cannons and fighting the wind to beat back to the fight. As for myself, I took command of the galleon [TXS] Alamo and made ready to push off. I suddenly realized that her crew were yet off-island on leave to the nearest Freeport. (ie: she was severely under manned...only her forward-most cannons were manned and ready. She was not ready for battle!) Seeing my delima, I abandoned the Alamo and swam for my personal flagship, the brig [TXS] Rio Grande. She was a sixteen-gun brig with a mix of both large and medium cannon. Not an ideal fashion for a war brig, but I hate only being able to fire in straight lines abeam. As the Rio Grande pulled away from the docks and rigged full sail, the Crockett sank under the far superior firepower of the offending brig. Her captain eagerly cursing us all for our slow response and call to arms. Totally understandable, but I was however in no place to remedy the loss. We sailed now with a singular focus...Victory or Death! The galleon San Antonio was making for the hostile brig, Grimm Reaper, and the Rio Grande came out to meet her head-on. We passed gunport to gunport and my crew let fly a full salvo of cannon....as did the Reaper. Planks and armor were shredded instantly and several crew cried out as even some of my cannon were destroyed! The fire swivels on the Reaperswept my decks as we passed and my forward sail hand leapt to his death with his uniform on fire! I too, was a casualty with that first pass...and my ship limped forward to a stop as the sails came down and her guns fell silent....I had issued an order to fire a broadside, not a standing order to fire at will... *sigh* When I woke after what seemed like an eternity, the crew was all about in chaos! Below decks were filled with smoke and debris littered the gun deck from stem to stern. The spray of the ocean rushing in from the forward bulkhead made the run amidships treacherous but I did my best. With planks in-hand I returned to the forward compartment and waited for the debris to clear and slapped planks into place. Now back to the fight, or so I thought. As I came above deck, the Reaper was firing again. Her cannons landed devastating blow after blow and I barely made it to the ship's wheel and issued all guns to free fire before I was cut down once again. My ship and her crew would fight without me for the next two-minutes! While I was out, the San Antonio finally got into range on the Reaper and the two were exchanging fire. The captain of the Crockett made it aboard the Rio Grande and was attempting repairs when I found my way out of the surgeon's cabin. I asked him to demo the ship's wheel so I could put one on the middle deck out of harm's way. We accomplished the change of command in brief order and I resumed control of the ship, only now being below the deck armor I had no visual to my surroundings. None the less, I issued the order to go to full sail and I pulled up the Atlas map to see where the fight was. I was sailing blindly under full sail directly ahead. As my view cleared, I realized that the Rio Grande was entering the harbor at a full gallop. Her sails pushing her to speed with nothing to stop her but that large shipyard directly ahead! We plowed into the shipyard and two more planks disintegrated in the collision. What a fool I was for not checking my bearing before issuing the order to go all ahead! Damn the luck! I pulled what resources I had and loaded the smithy. Surely two planks was not beyond my ability to repair and get back into the fight! But only one could be fashioned from the materials at-hand. And where once you could demolish structures to regain materials in time of need, now an unanchored ship somehow expels all demolished materials without even so much as a single fiber to be put to good use. I blame the loss of the Rio Grande on poor preparedness, unlucky navigation, and a shell-shocked captain. Dieing two times in three minutes while fighting a sinking ship is stressful work! That's my excuse anyways. But the battle was not over. I abandoned the wreck of the Rio Grande and whistled my crew to follow me to the Alamo. We boarded and I hastily made her ready to sail. As we pulled out of the harbor, I began assigning crew to battlestations. I placed one on the wheel and directed her to take a southern heading....last time I looked at the map that's where the fight was. As I finished making ready the crew, I checked our bearings and announced my intention to bring the Alamo into the fight even with a reduced crew. My other captains were now weary of the battle as the San Antonio was all but lost at this point. As the San Antonio went down we all gathered on the decks of the Alamo...this would be our last stand. We approached the enemy brig and she made sail as if to run....but we paralleled her course and slowly closed range, almost matching her speed perfectly. She led us by a boat length, which made us easy prey for her long range cannons but she was just outside of ours. We needed more speed or I would have to take the hits until we could bear away and fire. I tried to trim the sails but the Alamo was being stubborn in the light air...and no more speed was to be had. We ran along on a southerly course and we matched heading changes in unison. Our cannons opened fire under orders but the shots fell behind the Reaper while hers found our forward planks and decks. It was obvious by then that the brig was slowly pulling ahead of us -- she was slightly faster. Up ahead I saw a chance to possibly turn the running sparring match into a broadside brawl where would have the upper hand of more cannon...a fleet of Ships of the Damned appeared directly in our course ahead....two galleons of low/mid level and an assortment of brigs. I steered directly for them and told the crew to prepare to receive multiple incoming cannons. I then had our gunners stand down so as to not waste ammo on the glowing fleet. The Reaper realized what was happening and angled toward us. She passed through our firing arcs and I attempted to land a manual sighting salvo to not very great effect....and she took up position behind us on our stern. We passed through the ghostly fleet and the night sky illuminated with their glowing cannon fire. Half their cannons scored hits on the Alamo and as we cleared the two galleons I cranked hard to port...or at least as hard as a galleon will go to port. The maneuver was almost perfect! The Ships of the Damned had been caught mostly unaware as we sailed through their midst but they turned hard in on us in pursuit......and rubbed railings with the brig as she gave chase. We were attempting to tack across the wind but the Reaper had loaded bar shot and was ripping our aft sails to pieces! We were slowing....and even though the brig got tangled up with the galleons and other fleet of the Damned, she broke free and closed on us rapidly. We lost our two aft sails and I tried to reverse back into the fleet of the Damned once more. The Reaper took up close quarters on our aft and my captains fired medium cannons and ballista at her dark hull. Our aft planks melted away and on all three decks above the waterline one had a clear view of the engagement! Our broadside cannons were useless and our efforts at repairs were spent. All around us cannon fire was still sounding...the brig and galleon both were sending ships of the Damned to the depths in rapid succession...but our two vessels were locked in mortal combat. In a last ditch effort, we dropped sail and waited for the boarders. As my captains yelled the enemy was coming aboard, I raised the forward handlers and pulled hard to port once more trying to out-turn the brig while she sat with her sails down and officers attempting to board us. The move worked ever so slightly as the brig broke off for a moment raising sail and trying to avoid our large cannon as we turned....she was just too fast and we barely landed anything more than glancing blows. However, seeing as we still had some kick left in us, the Reaper turned in and went for the kill. There was no boarding action to repel nor any last hooray to be had. Once again, the Alamo was lost. We had been soundly defeated by a far superior ship in every manner. If there had been a chance for us to leave our mark by sending the Reaper to the bottom it was only in our minds alone. The reality of the engagement was that we were outmatched before the first cannon was ever fired. I give much respect to the shipbuilders of the Reaper and her crew, yet I hold very little for her commander and for the manner in which the battle came about. There was no patience to await word from our leadership about the diplomatic issue at hand and the commander of the Reaper took it upon himself to enforce some unwritten rule of wrong-sided allegiance which we were wrongly accused of breaking. And to add further insult, it was plainly clear that at any time the superior vessel could have called off the attack and disengaged after seeing we were clearly outmatched. Had the alliance between Wendigo and Jazz Cabbage been so eager to win our favor in a fight with YT, which they claimed was their honest intent, and being the good sports that we Texians are...we would have gladly taken our lumps and retreated back to our harbor to lick our wounds, salvage our wrecks and entertain a parlay for our allegiance. But none of that happened...and in our defeat we still sportingly accepted our losses and returned to home base to begin salvage and recovery operations. All the while discussing our need for better investment in ships and cannon. But unfortunately, the night was not yet over.... ...to be continued...

Sure, when you buy a product you expect it to work. But if the company selling the product warns you up front that the product is not yet fully functional, then you bought it with that understanding. Either way if you buy it you are still a customer and not an employee. At no point whether the product works or it doesn't, does Maytag have the right to expect me to help fix the refrigerator. If they sell me the refrigerator with a clear warning that the ice maker doesn't work yet and online feedback and input from me may help it to work better in the future, then I have the option as a customer to participate by offering said feedback or not, but under no circumstance am I ever under any obligation to do so. I agree that the EA concept is flawed and a problem in the industry right now. I think studios are being greedy and shortsighted by seeing that they can flip what used to be a cost center in testing to a profit center in EA without stopping to consider the negative ramifications to a game's reputation in the market place when they do so with a far from finished EA game. I think at the moment Atlas is most definately a poster child for this sort of thing. I think by contrast Satisfactory released to EA in March with a game that was out of the gate far closer to a finished product and felt far more like I was getting my money's worth than Atlas did. Contrasting the two reveals one of the problems with EA: it is too all encompassing of a label. The consumer does not know whether he is getting a really enjoyable very playable game at a discount with a few bugs and some content not yet added, or a dumpster fire 2 years away from completion like Atlas. Some clearer standards of disclosure at a minimum are in both the consumer's and ultimately the industry's best long term interests. So I agree that the mixed bag nature is very much a problem. Because of the short term upside to studios, it's unlikely EA will ever just go away, so I think focusing on reform is the way to go. Going back to the refrigerator analogy, I think if Maytag wants to sell you a fridge that is not yet fully functional, there should be requirements that they disclose more clearly and specifically what works out of the box and what doesn't. I also don't think that hurling invective at those that decline to participate in the "job" of making the game better is a very useful or fair approach. This comes across as particularly selfish when you are exhorting others to make the game you are not yet playing better before you buy it. At a minimum you should refrain from it until you have actual skin in the game, and even then I'd consider it poor form. Either way I categorically reject the notion that anything I pay for as a leisure pursuit is a job for me. On this subject I refer you to Mr. Mark Twain: "Work is composed of that which a body is obliged to do. Play is composed of all else."

Cannons are incredibly light at the moment, I can fit 20+ large cannons I want on a schooner and still have plenty of weight for ammo and being stupid fast/nimble. I would love to see the current cannons made extremely heavy x3-4 the weight - make them blockade or true siege weapons and add lighter cannons for quick pursuit/merchant defense/harass ship setups. this would actually force players to think their setups rather than just make gun bricks. weight distribution management on ships would also be an amazing feature, where having too much uneven weight would make you turn poorly in a specific direction or even sink you even if you’re not over your global cargo limit.

Its a fine balance thats is for sure. I never built one, just know from people who have. Handling sails can be quite effective if used right. I've seen 5 brigs engage a Galleon that was heavy on handling sails (masterwork) and he was able to maintain speed while driving into the wind at angles the brigs with speed sails could not. Straight line down wind the brigs were a little faster. Turn into the wind and the Galleon would have won that fight if the brigs (I was one of them) did not break off pursuit once we ran low on mats and cannonballs. The Galleon dominated the wind. We were the pursuers, but since he used the wind to his advantage we were constantly tacking back and forth, breaking formation and allowing him to single ships out. He almost sunk our schooner once and a brig another time. Luckily the ships were well stocked and we did not allow the galleon to move in for the kill shot. That fight lasted almost an hour and I think we planked him 5-6 times at most. EDIT: Change that to 3 brigs and a schooner as I think about that fight a little more.

**This is my critique/review of the game so far, its mechanics, concepts and implementation. This is not at all about the technical side pertaining to programming. Net code, exploits and glitches/bugs are all assumed to have been logged and are being addressed. Also, I apologize for the length as it violates my own advice of not making a post that is longer to read and respond to than the average amount of time one spends taking a shit** What we have so far with Atlas A great framework for an MMORPG. The map size is vast, its beautiful. Yeah, its chalked full of native UR4 assets, but that's your benefit to using UR4 (I like seeing my PUBG rocks and trees, its comforting). The sea, while not quite as good as Sea of Thieves, is pretty awesome and makes up for a lack of polish by having a fully functional "under the sea" environment (I personally think this might be the biggest asset Atlas has, the potential of what can be done here is just massive). The ships, although overly limited in options for the time being, are also done very well and I think they look and feel fantastic. Far far beyond anything SoT has been able to produce. The sub looks fantastic! The dynamic weather, although a little unpolished is such a welcome addition to an MMORPG. A hardcore PvP aspect reminiscent of Diablo II. You die, all your gear stays on your corpse to be lost or recovered as you are able to do. It is a welcome throwback to add risk to death. The Condition for "winning" in Atlas Is currently amount of land "claimed". This is a solid tried and true concept for any MMORPG. The basic idea is "King of the hill". What we can do in Atlas Objectively speaking, we can only Build, Destroy, and Kill. Any action taken is in pursuit of one of these goals. This was the first breakdown in Atlas gameplay. The WinCon and what we can objectively do are separated. I could go to your island and throw down flags, thus progressing with my WinCon. I don't have to build anything, or destroy anything, or kill anyone to accomplish this. Additionaly there is no tangible reward or incentive for "winning" (yes I know you get a front of ship figurehead for aesthetics). This is unrewarding, unstimulating, and leaves me wanting to do any of the 3 things I can do that are all vastly more rewarding than fulfilling the WinCon. But the concept is still solid. We just need winning to feel more like winning, and losing feel less like starting over from scratch (as this will fatigue the community). Some people have called for factions, they probably came from WoW. Some people have called for combining PvE and PvP, they probably played real MMORPGs where this is truly the best setup. Some people are calling for a small team style companies, while overs still covet the Megas. What all parties are trying to articulate is a desire for a tiered system with varying degrees of the WinCon where a sense of success or progression is attached to it. Its basic human psychology. Casinos have been using this since they were created to make people addicted to gambling. What we are missing so far in Atlas NPCs. The current AI slaves are a disincentive to cooperate with other people. A good MMORPG design should continually encourage and reward cooperation and competition. Where are all the townsfolk? Where is the auctioneer? Why is there not a bank or warehouse, and the NPCs to run them? Towns/Cities. What is a Freeport? Why is it a deserted ruins with a waterfall? I feel like there should be a purpose, I feel like it should be community related. Combat. It needs a lot of polishing. I'm fully aware there is a ton of time until release but this is 2019 after all, I feel this could have been better out of the gate. Economy. Make Gold Great Again. The gold sinks currently available are disappointing, What do I NEED this gold for? A solid mechanic is to require some purchasable items in common crafting. Another idea, more in line with the direction we are going is maintenance fees. This puts limits on build size and sustainability. I would also have re-specking a character be a gold sink that only ever gets more expensive, or at least has a flat rate high enough to be a deterrent from day to day re-specking. The other humanoids. 40% of the map is sea, 40% of the map is Air, and 10% is land. Where are the Atlantians? The Pathfinders can breathe above the sea and struggle below, so half the map is conducive to this existence. Should there not be an inverse to this? If we can build structures in the sea, something should be able to utilize them. There seems to be ample conditions for more races to add diversity. I could be way off on this one I admit. End Game content/objectives. What exactly is there available for me to do at lvl 50 or 100 that I cant do at lvl 10? For that matter..... What is the point of levels? What is it I get from gaining levels, or max level, albeit they are currently almost just given to you. There is nothing currently locked behind a level. I don't necessarily find this a bad concept, just curious why bother even having the levels? I feel skill should always trump time invested in a game, so why cant everyone start with the stats of a lvl 100 to distribute as they see fit? My suggestions I think "King of the Hill" is the correct concept. I just think we need to identify where the "hills" are and reward appropriately. This would be my suggestion below, I feel it allows for all play styles without compromising anything. 1. Turn free ports into fully functioning towns with the basic assets of a decent MMORPG. The player shops are already said to be coming, lets just finish the job. 2. Add in the "King Hills", aka CASTLES. These should be pre-built epic structures that must be taken, be it 24/7 or weekly or monthly w/e. Think Lineage II style sieges. The current owner should be entitled to some form of taxes from a set surrounding area. These can be located in free ports for several of them, or on an added island in a free port grid, or added to the islands in the golden age ruins grids. These are the alpha prizes, hence the tax reward. Owning these is what puts you on the leader board. The Castles should be ranked, with possibly 1 or a small number of them ruling over the others or a set of the others. These structures should be susceptible to damage, but never completely destroyed, think ESO type castles in the PvP area. A company can only hold 1 at a time. 3. The islands (on colony settings) are the small hills. These should be 1 claimable per Company and ranked. The act of taking a better ranked island relinquishes your claim on the lesser ranked island. Think Drow society in Forgotten Realms, loosely. This provides incentive to move up in rank as the higher ranked islands are just better, bigger, nicer or w/e you reap more from taxes. All island owners will be able to tax the island under their claim (opposed to the castles which draw a tax from many islands). The small companies and solos that settle on the island would remain indigenous to the island unless they chose to move, as they don't control any of it to begin with and are not entitled to earn taxes. - This creates dynamic and appropriate WinCons based off of the original concept that rely on the 3 core things one does in the game. - This creates a space and incentive for bigger clans to fight for control of bigger hills, while providing a disincentive for them to go around displacing all the smaller companies in an endless land grab that offers little to no reward. - This preserves the concept of "colony settings" as I think that will be a successful space for the medium size companies to exist in harmony (not in peace) with each other and the bigger ones. Misc. Thoughts BPs should not be OP enough to discount strategy and skill. Melee weapons should have a place somewhere noticeably above harvesting tools. Cannon walls on ships....lets acknowledge there is a keel and it has a limit. I have to believe this is doable. Can tames be useful without becoming the meta and a requirement? (imho tames are SOOOO lame and belong in Ark) I have to believe the UI can be better. Exploits....exploits.....exploits.....this can never, WILL NEVER, be a good game as long as exploits exist. I believe the "empire settings" would not be necessary with these changes. Thank you for your time, -CS

the solution is usually never a hard cap. It is almost always better to de-incentivise he placement of heavy cannons through things like the reduced weight while gun ports are closed etc. Imagine how effective that would be if the cannons actually had an appreciable weight like they should. how many shotguns would you see if cannons weighed 300kg instead of 100? I'm guessing a hell of a lot less. If a cannon weighed 300 with the port open and 160 with it closed, most people would have only cannon ports and one pursuit/follow cannon because otherwise they would move like slugs and be unable to actually chase prey.

Give us actual fore & aft gunports- limit cannons to 2x the amount of gunports. (So you can optionally have the additional layer on top deck if you choose to add the weight). Make large cannons 1.5x heavier and access to bar-shot. (So they're viable as a long range slow) Large cannons were never meant to be a ship vs ship meta that out-shined medium cannons. Large cannons are predominantly designed for land siege and pursuit/escape vectors (front/rear). The imbalance of damage they caused on ships atop their added range for only 40 extra weight made them way too viable as a total replacement for mediums.

2nd round: I found land!!! got my first base built up and all ... Yey!! But I feel like continuously fighting with snakes, I kill one and 3 new spawn beside. Is there a no spawn zone or timer? I think something should be reworked here. Is there be a turret defense system I do not know of? Would NPC or tames guard the land? I have not spam foundations on little plot to get resources spawn back but does it make a difference? From the land - I am too stupid to find seeds ... need a competence for that even tough I know what a farm plot is... I just did some. Really the skill tree need a serious make over... Soloed my first treasure for some greens and few gold and found out you need 2 types of same material to build green stuff that you cannot even equip without skill... Stupidly silly that you can craft something you cannot even use ... That whole skill tree is getting annoying and what you do at lvl51 when you need another skill? however material diversity looks like a good idea - forces you to travel. Some mobs are really OP like cats. Cannot escape them whatever you do - too fast with jumps and pin down and massive damage... need to ease a bit here or have them drop pursuit on shorter distance. Players need to be OP to stay in a game - it is a game right? Weapon swap - 10s to swap a bow to pike -Really, I mean really?!?! ... I would just throw the bow on the ground and grab my pike - 2s ... not 10!!! Auto target is very bad ... mobs run through your char and you are locked on a target that is behind you... Remove that!!! And how mobs can charge through you on the first place... Sea crates - it should not be possible to claim sea zone - remove that, make the buoy drift to shore somehow or decay - ships decay and they are not all the time in high seas. Blue prints - WTF you give blue print that I cannot use. In Ark you compensated unlearned Engrams with blue prints but here I need to learn the skill to use a blue print ... Does not make sense. A blue print is to allow you to make something you would not know otherwise. Ship damage - Have a mapped key that shows HP of each ship parts with some color code. So annoying after each storm or zombie encounter to go everywhere in the ship to check on damaged parts. I noticed the spy glass shows that but not practical... However the captain chest thingy is great idea, no need to have the materials in inventory. Food system ... Again this needs to be overhauled completely. I found myself with no hunger but vitamins depleted ... Just have veggy and meaty bars, 4 vits + hunger + water is really not good.... not at all. Compass - I guess I need to practice using the compass (in the game, I used some in RL) but this is not straight forward here. Map - Why did you think it would be a good idea to show my location with a red cross when the whole map is red with claimed land... Guys - talk to each other when designing or have a test team of some sort... Else I am having fun although I am not sure where to go / what to do. Noticed the missing part on my compass but not sure what that is ... for now will get more green equipment and see from there. That was my 2nd entry, will have more I guess

I left my dock and was sailing between my group of islands in the fog the other day, also the EU PvE and I start to come under fire from a SOTD. I thought to myself: "Maybe they come closer in the fog?". I managed to get away through the shallows (it got stuck) but I was shocked to see it so close. And it would re-aggro anything that came close once it was there. Maybe they should implement a pursuit timer? After x amount of time they break aggro if not taking any damage themselves?

2nd round: I found land!!! got my first base built up and all ... Yey!! But I feel like continuously fighting with snakes, I kill one and 3 new spawn beside. Is there a no spawn zone or timer? I think something should be reworked here. Is there be a turret defense system I do not know of? Would NPC or tames guard the land? I have not spam foundations on little plot to get resources spawn back but does it make a difference? From the land - I am too stupid to find seeds ... need a competence for that even tough I know what a farm plot is... I just did some. Really the skill tree need a serious make over... Soloed my first treasure for some greens and few gold and found out you need 2 types of same material to build green stuff that you cannot even equip without skill... Stupidly silly that you can craft something you cannot even use ... That whole skill tree is getting annoying and what you do at lvl51 when you need another skill? however material diversity looks like a good idea - forces you to travel. Some mobs are really OP like cats. Cannot escape them whatever you do - too fast with jumps and pin down and massive damage... need to ease a bit here or have them drop pursuit on shorter distance. Players need to be OP to stay in a game - it is a game right? Weapon swap - 10s to swap a bow to pike -Really, I mean really?!?! ... I would just throw the bow on the ground and grab my pike - 2s ... not 10!!! Auto target is very bad ... mobs run through your char and you are locked on a target that is behind you... Remove that!!! And how mobs can charge through you on the first place... Sea crates - it should not be possible to claim sea zone - remove that, make the buoy drift to shore somehow or decay - ships decay and they are not all the time in high seas. Blue prints - WTF you give blue print that I cannot use. In Ark you compensated unlearned Engrams with blue prints but here I need to learn the skill to use a blue print ... Does not make sense. A blue print is to allow you to make something you would not know otherwise. Ship damage - Have a mapped key that shows HP of each ship parts with some color code. So annoying after each storm or zombie encounter to go everywhere in the ship to check on damaged parts. I noticed the spy glass shows that but not practical... However the captain chest thingy is great idea, no need to have the materials in inventory. Food system ... Again this needs to be overhauled completely. I found myself with no hunger but vitamins depleted ... Just have veggy and meaty bars, 4 vits + hunger + water is really not good.... not at all. Compass - I guess I need to practice using the compass (in the game, I used some in RL) but this is not straight forward here. Map - Why did you think it would be a good idea to show my location with a red cross when the whole map is red with claimed land... Guys - talk to each other when designing or have a test team of some sort... Else I am having fun although I am not sure where to go / what to do. Noticed the missing part on my compass but not sure what that is ... for now will get more green equipment and see from there. That is my 2nd entry, will have more I guess Just my things after 40h of game: - Food system: 4 bars of vits is a joke. Make 2 for veggies (berries/vegs) and meat (meat/fish), with water that would be plenty. I actually just get my toon killed to start afresh each time the food/water/vit runs out, as good and less annoying - in Ark a piece of meat and all is OK. - Ship decay: so much grinding to lose a ship out of nothing... as good keep with ramshakle sloop... Just lost a perfectly usable ship by stopping on freeport to repair, not even to log out... (lowest health on a hull plank was 1.2k, not even used out ... will not keep players long here- too much grinding involved and not enough reward - Claimed land: best way to keep players away from actually developing in the game. Who ever had that idea should be hanged and never spoke about ever again. you base player is solo players, this is just what will send them away. - Fight: what is the idea behind locking on target? you can see nothing around or move freely. Very annoying and useless. make a C attach as in Ark. - CD on tools: that you have CD on weapons while in combat make sense, but on tools while grinding materials? Really?? or even on weapon out of combat... - keyboard mapping - if you remap WASD in QWES you cannot stir the ship even if the test on top left says so - Age: what is the point? you get pass reproduction age even before you can build you first ship... beside, 100 years pirates - really? - Material grinding - any plan to increase the amount per swing? Else, I must say the sailing feeling and the sea rendering is really good but does not outweigh losing a 4h grind-ed ship Forgot to say, water barrels are way to heavy. There should be 2 sizes at 200 and 500 capacity.

Myth's Folly Part2: The Folly of Myth's Folly Arrr...Myth's Folly. She was a fine one. Our maiden voyage with her was a blast. She was fast...very fast. But also a bit of a big bottomed girl that wasn't as nimble in the turns as the Silver Mermaid. With my matey captaining the wheel, and me in the lookout mast on the sails, we deftly dodged the SOD patrolling the areas from region to region. Our destination was the tundra regions just below the polar zones. We had been in the tundra once before in the Silver Mermaid. We were underwhelmingly equipped for our first voyage into the tundra. Sailing there during the early days was easy because the Ship of the Damned had not appeared yet. There was plenty of room available, but no fiber. We had issues with vitamin D deficiency. Fishing requires sap, which is oddly missing from the tundra regions. While I spearfished in the temperate zones, the water was too deathly cold in the tundra for spearfishing. We needed bait for fish, but no bait was available. Thus, we repeatedly died from exposure to the weather, vitamin D deficiency, and unrelenting wolves. We had to abandon it, but we vowed to return. Myth's Folly made stops in several island chains while we acquired saps and fibers. Our plan was to go into the tundra, and become Nordic privateers. We would bring the saps and fibers, and make regular missions to reprovision when necessary. Perhaps we would bring these resources to the region and trade with other residents. Part of our provisioning before leaving the tropical island was crafting fur armor so we could survive the cold, cold travel. What a plan! We congratulated ourselves on our foolproof planning and our masterwork dodging of the SOD. We weren't engaged once. Once we reached the tundra zones though, we noticed a stark change. The global messaging was as coldly silent as the air. We noticed miles and miles of unclaimed flotsam. Interesting...all this unclaimed treasure. We had plans of returning to collect the flotsam, but first, we needed to find a place to settle. We quickly realized why it was so quiet. Half dozen of Ship of Damned appeared into view, one after another. A menacing whale was splashing around. With me in the crow's nest, I navigated us through to the nearest land. It was tense, but we made it without being engaged. The land had changed quite a bit since we last visited. All of the open land was claimed, however, no one built any permanent structures. They claimed the land, then abandoned it. We found a place that we found suitable, then took one of the abandoned spots. No one contested. After setting down on land, we ran around inspecting the resources. We admired the view. It sure was open, free, and... **desolate** ...compared to the tropical region we had just come from. Quiet. Very, very quiet. As I was running around admiring the vast openness and the beautiful snowy vistas, I saw a wolf in the distance. I thought I should dispatch it before it caused trouble, so I pulled out my pistol... ...and was promptly killed by an alpha wolf. With daytime light and snowblind, I did not see its telltale glow. I revived on the boat, but now I was without my protective fur clothing. I could not run to the area where I died without bone chilling exposure that killed me within minutes. My matey attempted to retrieve my items, but he had the misfortune of running into a wolf pack that also killed him repeatedly. We managed to retrieve his items, but not mine. We ended up abandoning it; with the spare saps we brought, I crafted new armor. We decided this was not going to work for us after all. We wanted to explore a different area down south. The winds were blowing to the west, so we planned to go over one region, then head southernly. We dodged the SOD as before, but we ran into a very large cluster near the region boundary. My matey and I were both on edge as we skirted so close to them. How close was close? We weren't really sure, but each one we dove through felt like we were cutting the knife's edge. Normally when passing through region boundaries, I jump off and take a look in the next area. Because there were so many ships at the border, we skipped this safety process. So we zoned over...and promptly ran into trouble. There were two green and one yellow Ship of the Damned on the other side. Despite our best maneuvering, we clipped the notice of one of them, then all 3 were in pursuit. We already had full open sails and were running as fast as we could. Myth's Folly was a fast girl, but in this case, we were overwhelmed. Our inexperience with ship repairs did not allow us to react fast enough, and she was taking on too much water. We should have made an emergency stack of replacement hull plating. We were sinking and we didn't know how to save the ship. Myth's Folly sank to the bottom of the deep water in the Tundra. My sailing matey and I drifted in the sea. The island chains were too far away to swim to. We would surely die of the freezing water or sharks first. The 3 Ships of the Damned were still floating between us. After they sank our ship, they no longer cared about us. Since we were going to die anyway, we pulled out our pickaxes and attacked their corrupted hulls. Eventually a shark came along and ended us, but we were satisfied with our final FU to the forsaken ships. I sometimes think about the treasures that went down with Myth's Folly. Did anyone ever find our sunken ship with gold and thousands of pounds worth of jewels, crystals, and saps? Or did it disappear forever under the darkness of the deep sea? Despite this, I think of returning to the tundra. A place so inhospitable, it is a challenge to tame it. Perhaps someday we will return again, and conquer it.

Most people choose PvE because it allows them to play casually, balancing their gaming hobby with other aspects of life (i.e. work, family, school). Currently PvE is broken, so that these casual players can have hours of work erased; hours that are especially precious because this type of casual player is often too busy to invest a significant amount of hours into a game. I used to be a no-life PvP gamer, it was great, and I miss it; but I have other focuses I must attend to. So, I was having great fun with this game on the main PvE server until my schooner I had spent many hours pimping out was gone over night. Rational will not allow me to continue to invest time into this game if I cannot advance to the more diversed gameplay that becomes available at higher levels. Please fix this exploit so I can continue my pursuit of becoming a successful Explorer of Oceans and Sinker of Ghost Ships.

Grabbing the ladder while in the water does at times feel like it’s own mini game, but with a much higher penalty for failure if a shark is in hot pursuit. I have found with practice I can time it decently most of the time but I’m by no means automatic. I haven’t experienced the glitching to the right you’re describing though.

Simple fix, damage fall off for guns. Meaning at long range bows will be more powerful than guns. And melee arguably doesn't currently have a place in this game given the trash can physics and ai. And again, not everything should be a mirror of reality, its a game and some realism has to be sacrificed in the pursuit of a fluid and enjoyable gaming experience.

Well I like the reply and the streamer you watched must be of high caliber, but I stand by my statement. We are a fairly small company that basically turned the behemoth company back by mass killing of the invaders and sending out our schooners to sink all of there sloops, there schooners and a brigantine was in hot pursuit of our schooners but they were having a respawn of the mates problem and there numbers were dwindling on land... it put a bind on the beds available to those that we were taking down on land... the cooldown period was killing them... also if you are not actively watching your island for squatters you are not paying attention to your lands...

Agreed with OP. Learning how to sail in a direction against the wind is a basic sailing skill. It is a tactic in ship pvp to force boats in pursuit to make a mistake turning into the wind. Perhaps this should be a pve only boost? Though it doesn't make sense to me to get a forward boost against the wind unless there is a motor attached, which is a modern invention. This diverts from the 16th to 17th century feel of the boats - the Golden Age of Piracy. Sigh.