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Yesterday evening, Atlas developers Grapeshot Games released their 10.71 patch which contained a few minor tweaks and one very fatal—and hilarious—bug (which is now fixed). Upon logging back into the game, players who engaged the hostile Ships of the Damned quickly realized something was very wrong. Normally, these NPC ships prowl the open sea and are a great target for higher-level players looking for a ship battle. But after patch 10.71, these ghost ships were incidentally equipped with rapid-fire cannons with an infinite ammo supply. Players who got too close were quickly slaughtered in a hail of rapid cannon fire.
Within minutes, the Atlas subreddit became flooded with players sharing their fatal encounters with these now super-powered Ships of the Damned. In the video above, for example, Youtuber BattleNex and his crew fight helplessly against a measly level one Ship of the Damned. I love the bewilderment in their voices as cannons shred their ship to pieces, and I'm amazed they were able to kill the ship before being completely destroyed themselves. Other players didn't have the same sense of humor.
"It's fucking stupid," says YouTuber 50ten out of frustration as his galleon is obliterated in seconds by another level one Ship of the Damned. The rates at which players gather resources was more than doubled in a recent patch, so rebuilding isn't as painful as it once was. But 50ten likely lost hours of work due to this bug.
If you want a closer look, I also love Culparex's video of his crew engaging one of the ghost ships and being quickly overwhelmed.
Fortunately, Grapeshot Games was able to fix the bug relatively quickly. At some point last night, patch 10.75 was released that fixed the glitch so that Ships of the Damned no longer had rapid-fire cannons. While it was a short-lived (and very funny to watch) glitch, I'm sure that's little consolation for the unlucky sailors who lost their ships last night.
We saw this very toxic culture emerge in the [Atlas] subreddit. ...There were lots of derogatory slurs.
MisterWoodhouse, Atlas subreddit moderat
Atlas is a sandbox pirate MMO where players can do anything from farm crops to explore ancient ruins. But take a look at Atlas' most popular subreddit and it's quickly apparent that many are occupying their time with a different objective: Warring with Chinese players who inhabit Atlas' North American and European PvP servers. Over the past month, the rising tensions between Eastern and Western players has been a hot topic among the community. And while a little bit of smack talk can be okay, it's also boiled over into outright racism and xenophobia.
"A lot of it stems from ARK: Survival Evolved," MisterWoodhouse, a moderator on the Atlas subreddit tells me. "There was a pretty decent amount of East versus West tension there in the official PvP servers, but it really got out of hand with Atlas because it's a large-scale MMO-style game."
Though the two games share a lot in common, players in ARK are divided into discrete servers so interaction is limited to those who are also play on that same server. Atlas, however, stitches dozens of servers together into one massive world map that can house around 40,000 players at one time. Players start in one of several safe beginner servers and, by sailing to the edge of the map, transfer to adjacent servers that each hold a maximum of 150 players. It's similar, in a way, to EVE Online, which also has one world that everyone shares together albeit with a much bigger limit on how many people can occupy one area at one time.
Atlas' two PvP servers (one for America and one for Europe) are meant to encourage war between player-run guilds called companies. Beyond the safety of the beginner servers, anyone can kill you without consequence. But shortly after Atlas' release many began complaining about the presence of Chinese players who appeared to be highly coordinated and highly aggressive. "Literally everyone is getting shit on by them," wrote redditor 'manicscanic' in late December. "They don't care [what level you are]. They will find you and kill your raft. It's not even about skill or anything all they have is numbers completely obliterating everything they see."
Manicscanic detailed a personal encounter with Chinese players that ended in their death and the destruction of their ship—a widespread occurrence given the number of Reddit posts that echo similar stories. In both PvP servers, Chinese companies have become some of the largest and most influential. On The Kraken's Maw, the North American PvP server, a Chinese group called CTSG has claimed a significant portion of the map. On the subreddit, players frequently recount their battles with these Chinese groups. Other threads claim Chinese players are also using exploits and hacks to gain an unfair advantage in combat. As MisterWoodhouse explains, many of those discussions became hotbeds for outright racist and toxic behavior. "We saw this very toxic culture emerge in the subreddit," he says. "Lots of people were going beyond saying, 'Hey this is the West versus the East', and were getting into pretty racist comments. There were lots of derogatory slurs."
According to MisterWoodhouse, players were even going so far as to share around a list of words that they hoped would trip China's strict censorship monitors. The idea was that, by spamming these words into Atlas' in-game chat when you were near a Chinese player, they might end up getting investigated by the Chinese government and potentially arrested.
As the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment began to rise in the Atlas subreddit, the moderation team (MisterWoodhouse and two others) finally had to take a stand. Last week, MisterWoodhouse created a stickied thread warning that "Racism will not be tolerated." In that thread, he encouraged players to report any racist comments they saw and warned that offenders wouldn't be given second chances. That zero-tolerance policy has curbed the problem, MisterWoodhouse tells me, though he expects it'll flare up now and again.
"Basically I look at each situation individually," MisterWoodhouse says. "If the post or comment has value in terms of discussion or politics in the game and doesn't have any objectively derogatory slurs, I'll let it fly. They're just wanting to discuss what people are experiencing as natural tension between these two cultures in the game, and it's something that I think the game will be known for. It's interesting to see these real-world politicking going on, but we draw the line when people get into slurs or offensive stereotypes and things like that. If they're just discussing like, hey, we're going after this Chinese company or join our alliance of North Americans, it's probably going to fly."
But knowing where to draw the line between actual racism and regional smack talk isn't always easy. In Atlas, players can customize their ships in a variety of ways including painting or importing graphic designs to display on their sails. Naturally, that's become one of the ways players are displaying their loyalties to one side or the other. Some are pretty innocent, like this galleon sporting an american flag, while others subtlety hint at more troubling political stances or weaponize Japanese-Chinese history. This post, for example, shows players how to play Star Spangled Banner on their in-game instruments as they ride into battle, which is tame. But another post shows a lone Chinese player's corpse hanging from a noose (players can take prisoners and execute them), which is disturbing.
These posts also call into question what methods Studio Wildcard (which is developing Atlas under the name Grapeshot Games) is taking to prevent toxic behavior in-game. Currently, Atlas has no method for players to report one another in-game, which is baffling. Taking a quick browse through Atlas' official forums and the subreddit, I didn't have to look hard to find posts complaining about in-game harassment, griefing, and toxic behavior going unpunished.
While many players seem to enjoy the rivalry, others want Studio Wildcard to ban all Chinese players outright or give them specific Asiatic servers they can play on instead. This isn't the first time Chinese players have been accused of disrupting a multiplayer game, though. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds also faced a similar predicament when Chinese players began to flood its western servers.
There are some practical benefits to this solution, as MisterWoodhouse points out. "People definitely worry about latency when it comes to global games like this," he says, pointing out that part of the frustration with fighting Chinese players is that their high latency makes them harder to hit. He also points out that this would help alleviate the problem of players waking up in the morning to find their bases and ships destroyed by Chinese players overnight and vice versa, because each region is active at opposite times of day. But those hoping for this solution shouldn't hold their breath. Studio Wildcard already said that region locking was out of the question and releasing a videogame in China comes with its own obstacles. One solution, though, would be to base servers in other Asiatic territories with less restrictions on gaming.
For now, it seems like Chinese players are here to stay, and volunteer moderators like MisterWoodhouse will have to shoulder to burden of keeping their respective communities free from toxicity and racism. "With the ARK subreddit, we noticed that these things come and go in cycles," MisterWoodhouse says. "If there was a dominant tribe that was taking over a server and there was issues of glitching or duping, that would bombard the subreddit for a couple of weeks. But then it would die down. I think we're going to see that in Atlas."
Today brings good news for Atlas players who respond to grind with an “Oh no!” rather than the customary “Yo ho!” Reducing tedious grind is a big target of the piratical sandbox survival game’s early access update v10, launched this afternoon, and that sounds welcome. Atlas proudly declares it’s from some of the makers of Ark: Survival Evolved, and its heritage is evident in the UI, the bugginess, the grind… and how popular it’s become despite all that. Like Ark, it dreams a big dream that few games rival, even if it is a mess. So I hope enjoy a slightly less tedious dream, you wild-eyed seadreamers.
Ho ho ho! John still hasn’t returned after Christmas, missing presumed drowned in egg nog, so I’m filling in today. Valve have already blarbed about 2018’s best-selling games so we’re back on the weekly charts. Last week’s top ten was largely familiar, though catching the tail end of the Steam Winter Sale has introduced a few surprises.
On January 7, Atlas developer Grapeshot Games is hoping to push out a patch that will, among many positive changes, make eating poop a death sentence. It doesn't specify whose poop you have to eat, but I'm assuming any old turd will, come Monday, turn would-be fecal feasters into corpses.
It's probably one of the smallest changes in Atlas' upcoming 10.0 update, but it caught me so off guard, despite patch notes frequently being full of weird stuff. Fans of ARK: Survival Evolved, Atlas' spiritual successor, will be well acquainted with poop-eating shenanigans. The difference here being that any doodoo devouring is instantly fatal in Atlas.
Take a look at the Atlas subreddit, though, and you'll see that's not what has everyone cheering (for the most part). It's update 10.0's other changes that are cause for celebration, as they, combined with the previous patch, will hopefully make Atlas significantly less punishing and more fun.
Since its release back in late December, Atlas was panned for how awful it was to play during those first few days. Servers buckled under the massive influx of eager sailors, making the game borderline unplayable, resources were extremely scarce, and players were in a constant war against Atlas' aggressive survival systems that necessitate managing such granular things like your vitamin levels. Those who were able to escape dying on the starter islands found the open seas even less forgiving. True to Atlas' nature, other players were already living out their lives as murderous pirates, but even worse were the hyper-aggressive NPC ghost ships that would spawn en masse to smash your schooner to bits. Players were frequently losing dozens of hours of work in the blink of an eye.
But things have been getting better, as noted by the remarkable change in tone in the Atlas subreddit. Patch 9.2, for example, doubled the rate at which you could tame animals or harvest resources, turned off ship collision damage on PvE servers, and made sailing in general much easier. Now, ships can hold 40 percent more stuff and won't be made a sitting duck if the winds aren't blowing in the right direction (but you'll still have to manage the direction of your sails properly). The spawn rates of those pesky NPC ghost ships has also been nerfed hard.
Patch 10.0, which Grapeshot Games is hoping will arrive on January 7, expands on that with even more changes that could make Atlas a lot more fun. The resource requirements for ships has been lowered by as much as 50 percent in some cases, which will make various ship types much easier to build. Merchants will also now sell "Ramshackle Sloops"—beginner versions of the sloop that are less durable and can't hold as much, but are cheaper and provide a shortcut to get into sailing.
By and large, Atlas players seem happy with how quickly the game is changing course. Right now, the subreddit is full of posts like "Well done Atlas devs" where players are talking about what a positive change these updates are making. If you want, you can check out the full patch notes here to see what else is coming in update 10.0 and, just as importantly, what Grapeshot Games has in store for the future.
I reached out to Grapeshot Games to figure out why the hell they would make eating poop instantly kill you. I'll update this story if I hear back.
