ATLAS_NOTES.md

• ATLAS boasts 40k players playing together (it's actually mathematically closer to 33k but 🤷). This sounds great, but it's absolutely misleading, possibly even false advertising. The actual implementation is hard-capped 150 player server zones stitched together.

• The lie here is that it is never 40k players even remotely together. The picture that appears in your head is not possible. The zone system is just a fancy way to implement a server browser. It's a novel way to implement a server browser, but it's not a 40k player open world.

• The reality is that zones are centered islands separated by large areas of water. Action is centered mid-zone, and edges are clearly meant for inter-zone traversal, not interaction. This not only changes map density, but means island interactions are 100% isolated to zones.

• If each zone is isolated by design, then each set of players are also isolated. Interactions never bleed across zones, only carried inventory does, which means there is almost no shared experience between players in zone A and B. They fundamentally are not playing together.

• This is not at all different from ARK today, where you can already swap servers. By that standard, swapping on official ARK servers enables for infinite concurrent players. Would it be ok to sell ARK as an MMO with 40k+ concurrent players? (No.)

• Ok so let's set aside the lie. Let's talk game theory with 40k players: you have 150 person servers stitched together but have to traverse servers to accomplish goals. In a "40k player" world, each server is at capacity, so you must wait at each exit for slots to open up.

• With each new zone in your route, it becomes N times slower to travel. With a larger crew (5+ players), it also becomes much slower to wait for slots. Inter-zone travel will be a barrier to gameplay; players will tend to stay in the same zone as a result.

• In other words, the more servers approach the "40k player" limit, the more players will isolate themselves because crossing servers becomes significantly more complex. The larger the world, the less players will want to play together out of sheer logistical difficulty.

• But also this: 40k assumes servers are all evenly populated, which is not real. In reality, players have common goals (freeports, high level quests, controlled territories) that keep them clustered. The major resource for these zones will be player slots, not bullets.

• What will happen is larger companies taking control over the full game experience, blocking access to important portions of the game by simply being connected. Have a quest or home in G3? Well you aren't guaranteed access-- the zone could be full for hours or days.

• Players aren't going to hang out with nothing to do, so if they have no access to inv, they will disconnect. This means that you won't get even 40k distribution across all nodes, you will just have fewer players playing in the world. 40k is a lie no matter how you slice it.

• Now this is the important part, let's talk solutions. It's early access, can't they just fix it? Yes, but not with the grid architecture that is fundamental to the current ATLAS design. The problem is the same with any max limit per zone.

• The design is such that each individual server handles capacity for a node. This is a technical restriction that means the larger the max, the more processing a single server must handle. Raise limit to 300 and servers must be much more beefy (PS. the scale is not linear).

• Capacity is something that needs balancing and 300 may be too high, but two notes: (1) ATLAS already has considerable trouble handling capacity even with 150, as did ARK (with under 100). (2) This architecture is not easy to change if it maxes out.

• TLDR: ATLAS has a technical architecture that is fundamentally unable to support the experience they want gamers to have. Larger studios spend years solving these problems (see Destiny's netcode) and need complex systems that Wildcard doesn't have the experience to manage.

• This was evidenced by the rocky launch, but also just a realistic observation about the life of an indie studio that is still cash-strapped. The ARK engine can't support the game they want to make, and making this game needs a ground-up rewrite, but that isn't happening.