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Yo!
Trying something new here, this is more of an informal blog-style post where I’d like to do a bit of a post mortem on recent events. That could be following a large update, a tradeshow, an announcement of a new feature, etc. My aim with these kinds of posts is to provide some additional insight, it will be less about what’s coming/promotional content and more real talk from myself.
Fair warning, my musings can be pretty verbose. Unlike the Captain’s Log, these won’t be made on a regular basis, but when I feel they might be necessary -- keep in mind, at indie studios people tend to wear many hats and whilst I am the Lead CM, I also work on the development side of the project, this was also the case for ARK too
For the first Post Mortem, we can talk about Patch v10, bug reports, late-night deployments and the timelines surrounding them, support tickets, as well as rollbacks.
Patch v10
So! This was a pretty big update, it dropped later than we intended due to some personal problems (people being sick), and then needing the extra time following that for people to get everything ready, as well as our QA team to run through it all. The delay did allow us to bring in more tweaks and fixes, which is always nice.
I am not going to go into much detail about the patch itself because we’ve had two Captain Log’s which share the notes, but I do want to address some of the feedback and reports we’ve received since. If you want to know what came in v10, as well as our big announcements for the week, you can read about it on Captain’s Log #16:
So this patch didn’t come without its flaws, and to be honest, it would be delusional to think any major one would, especially whilst we’re in this highly iterative state. Our development team, including QA (yes they exist, and they work damn hard and are often underappreciated in this industry), aim to catch and resolve every patch-related issue before it gets out to you, but we’re human and sometimes things can slip through the cracks -- whether that’s due to design, lack of numbers (tens of thousands are much more likely to identify problems!), or just something that was overlooked.
Our style of development is to work hard, fast and get the changes out to you guys as soon as possible, though we still run checks to make sure it's stable and it meets our release goals. We don’t like to sit on updates, if it checks out, let’s get it out there! Hence the frequent late-night deployments, though some nights aren’t as lively as tonight, lol.
Our goal is to ensure that ATLAS feels like a vastly different experience in a short period of time due to the improvements and changes we’re making on a frequent basis. This means that comparing ATLAS day 1 will be very different to ATLAS day 30 and then again to ATLAS day 100, so on so forth. This will come in the form of optimisation, bug squashing, rebalancing, and new content. This is how we develop titles as a studio, especially during Early Access. We find it effective and enjoyable. Sure it comes with its frustrations, and there could be adjustments made to our processes but the same could be said about any style. Not that we won’t make changes should we deem them necessary, but what you’re experiencing now in terms of the pace and size of updates, is most likely what you’ll be experiencing throughout Early Access. Updates coming at you harder and faster than the busted Ship of the Damned did in v10.72 . (Note: That patch did go through QA, sadly we didn’t expect our change to effect SOTD and had it patched out as soon as possible. My condolences to any seafarers who lost their lives and had their boats sunk).
Now onto the hot topics! I may not cover everything, but I’ll try to cover what I believe are the important ones to address. If you think I’ve missed something, get at me:
Discord: Jat#0001
Twitter: twitter.com/Jatheish
Reddit: /u/Jatheish (not Jaton… also that was JATonreddit guys.. not Jaton…)
Additionally, you could also reach out to Dollie! My co-captain on all things Community. You might recognize her from the forums, Discord, or from the Official ARK PVP Community. We’ll do a proper introduction post for her on Monday, in the Captain’s Log.
Discord: Dollie#0001
I won’t reply to everything, in fact, I probably only respond to like 20-30% but I do read the majority of my messages, unless it gets super chaotic and impossible to keep up with. E.g you crash my browser/phone/discord (which has happened far more often than I’d like). This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway, I would like to reply to everything, but I learnt very early on that is not possible. I remember when I first started at Wildcard in 2015 and tried to respond to every Facebook and Steam comment. Mental. I will respond to the critical reports, assuming I am still actively investigating it (or the team is).
OKAY. Now we’re really onto the hot topics. Sorry, I did say my musings can be pretty verbose. It’s crap when there are platforms with a word limit! Thankfully, I don’t think that’s the case on the forums, but I guess we’ll find out.
Lawless Regions: Spawns, Resources, Temps. and Weather
Shortly after launch, we temporarily hacked up a change which turned Lawless Regions into Homeservers and enabled some special settings on them which prevented Alpha Creatures from spawning, it had faster respawns when it comes to harvestables, and weather events (or might have just been rain) were disabled. In the latest update, we removed these changes and have set it back to our initial design. These servers are meant to be unclaimable land to allow players to gain a foothold once they’ve left Freeports, but they’re meant to be a temporary area before setting sail into the wide ATLAS!
Based on our investigation thus far, resources are certainly respawning on these grids, and the signs point to the structure spawn-prevention radius causing confusion and leading to the reports. This system is native to the game but wasn't present during our initial launch due to Lawless Regions being listed as Homeservers, so from a technical point of view, it's intentional, however, I know better than to rule out possibilities for other issues (hence they're investigating). There's an argument that the radius itself needs to be adjusted, so we'll have to think on that. Keep in mind that this can change, whilst there may be some things we’re unlikely to change, it doesn’t mean that we’re set in stone. We’ll keep you posted if we have any updates!
A quick note about the weather systems, these are the initial Early Access launch systems we have in place. We’d like to take it further, beyond just having fog, cold, heat, and rain! Though we believe there are certainly other things we need to prioritise which will have more of an impact on the game… such as volcanoes and of course the holy trinity of: bug fixes, optimisation, and balance! Plus. seeing that we’re on the topic of weather, I think I should mention temps too. Yes, they suck in some places, and we have resolved a lot of these in the most recent patch, as well as made it more clear when you’re experiencing a certain weather event, but there are more fixes to come, hopefully in the coming days. One of our designers is meticulously going through all the various biomes (we have a lot) and adjusting the temperature time of day and armour insulation values to make sure we’re hitting the sweet spot.
Combat and Creatures: Guns, Melee Weapons, and Armour
The overall goal with these changes was to ensure sure that weapons were more effective against higher armoured players, whilst not making the lower tiers completely worthless. The primary change you should notice is that the weapons themselves are more piercing and have had their base damage reduced to reflect this. Clearly, this had some knock-on effects on how players dealt with creatures (tamed and wild), which we expected but to know the full extent of the changes it is best witnessed in a live environment. The gameplay/balance team are consuming your feedback and will make adjustments when necessary, it’s possible that there may be some potential tweaks too with some multipliers which are being looked at right now. Not going to confirm anything is being changed right this instant, but just acknowledge that we’re aware of the feedback and it is actively being discussed internally.
Tamed Creatures
I figure this needed its own mini mention itself. ATLAS isn’t a taming orientated game. Yes, we have it, and we plan to expand on it, as well as introduce more creatures for you add to your arsenal, however, the creatures themselves are meant to be supplemental and not the main focal point. Prior to v10, we felt like certain aspects of the creatures made them too strong. Primarily how quickly they could restore health via shovelling food down their mouths and consuming corpses -- mechanics we weren’t really keen on with ARK either but for legacy reasons are necessary to that game. It’s understandable that we may have overshot with this update and we’re happy to bring some baselines back up, but it’s not likely we’ll adjust those healing mechanics. At this time, we’d rather have creatures that are inherently more powerful than having immense regen. Though we do understand the need to manage your tame’s health and we’ll be investigating additional ways we can do this beyond the skill/feat system. Something we’re toying around with now is the idea of custom cooking recipes for individual creatures (or more broad recipes that can affect multiple creatures) to heal em up. It’s safe to say that you can expect changes and content coming in the days/weeks/yadda yadda ahead revolving around this.
PvE Exploits
Not going to share what the exploits are, that would be unwise…although I suppose for those of you who weren’t aware, you might be with my post.
Just wanted to say we are well aware of what’s happening and are exploring ways to deal with it. The obvious solutions won’t quite work due to some backend stuff, however, we are actively looking into a more delicate and effective solution. In the meantime, quit being jerks and griefing each other, otherwise, I might have to set Amberenix (our Game Master) on ya!
I think that covers most of what I wanted to discuss about v10. I realise that doesn’t cover everything, but then we could literally be here for days on end and right now it’s 8 a.m and I’d like to get some rest soon haha. We had some hotfixes and patches go out today following the release, mostly just to resolve things that had been overlooked/missed in the update and some exploit fixing… as well as deal with the menacing rapid-firing Ship of the Damned that we introduced ourselves.
Which kind of brings me to another topic...
Server Deployments and ETAs!
Typically when we have a release candidate that’s ready to go out, we announce it via a server broadcast in-game. The release candidate usually will go through some basic smoke checks to make sure everything is running smoothly. Assuming we do not encounter any problems and the fix checks out, we then begin the deployment immediately. Unfortunately, sometimes we run into issues that were unexpected and have to deal with it, or a player report has just come in and we want to get it fixed prior to deploying, saving us needing to deploy multiple times a night -- unless it calls for it. As for the comments asking why we don’t keep builds in QA for a week at a time, well, to be frank, running a full playthrough of all our content and having QA check every nook and cranny for every update would take longer than a week. It would increase our development time and is not incredibly useful to us in our current development cycle, and as mentioned previously, we don’t want to sit on updates. If we believe a patch is ready, we plan to roll it out as soon as possible.
It’s not our intention to get these times wrong and we don’t plan to make you guys wait, it’s just how it happens. I will say though, as long as I’m around during the deployment process I will be keeping the Discord and Twitter fully in the loop when it comes to actual-actual deployments, as much as I can. In essence, if it’s mentioned on either of those platforms, it’s probably going to be incoming. This is when it comes to specific deployment messages such as: in 15 minutes major version etc is incoming and not in related to the larger ETA timelines we share (i.e 4 hours).
It’s no secret that we’re not the best with time management, there’s no point hiding it. It is definitely something we need to improve on and I’ll be encouraging the team to do so, it’s been a quibble of mine for ages and not just because of all the hate messages I get about missed ETAs, but because I know how frustrating it can be.
For those of you asking why we even bother giving you these inaccurate ETAs and not just say the moment the patch is ready to deploy. Well, when we share these ETAs, we believe they are accurate at the time and then XYZ thing happen. Some players would like to be informed ahead of time so they can try to plan out their day around our ETAs (to their own risk... might I add, I always get messages about folks taking off days from work or skipping dinner to hang around for a patch, I don’t recommend doing it! Even if we were the best damn ETA-deadline hitters in the world, ya never know what could happen and if you do decide to, hey that’s on you man :P). For those of you who don’t want to be informed and would rather wait until the very moment we are deploying, then I’d recommend ignoring our general broad ETAs and look out for the ‘15 minutes’ to deployment ones, those are the most accurate -- and especially if they’ve hit social platforms like Twitter/Discord, but ya, the criticism around how we handle this is warranted.
As for late night deployments, well I think I’ve covered this a few times with this post but just to reiterate. We don’t like to sit on fixes and updates. If we’re confident in something and the team is available, we’re happy to set it live. Whether that’s at 4 AM or 4 PM. It’s a little more chaotic at the moment as we’ve just launched and soon enough we’ll have some more structure and planning to it, but generally, you can expect the same frequent updates. ATLAS launched as an early access title and we plan to update it often, and regularly with meaningful changes.
Rollbacks
Moving on from that, let’s discuss rollbacks as this was mentioned today shortly after the Ship of the Damned patch was released and some players, unfortunately, had their ships sunk. First of all, I’d like to apologize profusely for that. I feel for anyone who suffered a loss, it definitely sucks and we’ll always do our best within our process to ensure we’re able to avoid those scenarios as much as possible. When it comes to rollbacks, it is something we explore as an option in the event of a catastrophic game failure, as they could potentially introduce other problems. This means things such as an unintended wipe, data deletion, game content not being cooked properly, etc. There are other scenarios, but not feasible to list it all out. Just know that as a team we do not take these decisions very lightly, and everything is handled delicately on a case by case basis, if we determine that a rollback would be warranted, we would inform players as soon as possible.
I know that doesn’t make up for the loss of boats, creatures, etc in the event that a deployment goes awry; please understand that due to the rate that the game is changing, this could also happen due to a balance change, or the introduction of new content. A lot of players had their boats sunk early on by the insane fire arrows (which may still need to be looked at), or cheaply sunk with metal picks; it could happen for a number of reasons and is a downside when playing a highly iterative and ever-changing title.
On that note, we will do our best to ensure that we avoid these situations. Having a patch screw you over sucks, having a rollback sucks, so let’s stay away from both if we’re able to!
Support Tickets, Player Reports & Bug Reports
As of yesterday, we launched our support ticketing system. Right now we’re helping out folks with Company Ownership issues and Players getting stuck, though hopefully, the latter is not as necessary anymore due to the recent v10 changes. Over time, we’ll be increasing the options for how we can support players as we identify more areas where it is necessary and implement more tools to tackle these. Please note, that we’re always going to be leaning on the side of technical solutions to game problems versus direct Game Master intervention where we can help it. We’re a small team and our resources are better funnelled into development.
We’re also going to be actively investigating player reports as they come in. I primarily want to shut down cheaters who are using hacks/3rd party progs or ridiculously exploiting unintended game mechanics to gain an unfair advantage over other users. Please keep in mind the final verdict of these punishments comes down to us, in a sandbox environment, monitoring your game is best done on a case by case situation. There is no silver bullet, but we will certainly invest time and resources into dealing with this. Not going to go into details because it’s best left close to our chest - but it won’t be tolerated. This isn’t solely just limited to cheaters though, but also ‘toxic’ users. That word is probably overused now and has lost some of it’s meaning, but to be clear; we understand when people are joking between each other, we know there’s an element of banter when playing a competitive game, especially one of pirating and world-conquering nature, however, we will not tolerate outright harassment, discrimination etc on our servers and have already taken action against multiple companies/individuals.
And finally, bug reports!
Right now the reports are coming in from a variety of different platforms. The forums, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, Youtube, etc. We’ve got our eyes spread around but are looking into a more effective way to accept reports, as well as show you that we’re aware of them. Whilst I was working on ATLAS pre-launch, I know the ARK team created a custom bug report system on survivetheark. I’m looking to do something similar based on the Support Ticket system, but hopefully more customized with better user permission management, highlighting things like developer response, and upvoting. Not sure how much of that is doable based on our current systems, but going to be exploring it as an option with Chris. We’ll see how things pan out with the Support Tickets and Report Players system, if it holds up well then we can look into implementing the bug reports area. In the meantime, continue as you are -- we’ve got enough coverage around the multiple platforms and you can be sure that your reports are being investigated!
OKAY. I think I have covered everything that I wanted to talk about in this blog post. It’s a lot wordier than I anticipated. If you prefer seeing posts like this, let me know and I’ll probably end up doing more in the future, but maybe not as wordy -- this was more so as it was the first and there was a lot to say.
Anyways, take it easy, and here’s hoping you all continue to enjoy sailing the seas of ATLAS!