I want to start by saying that in no way is what you are about to read a recently typed report; I started typing this up in early-February and have since abandoned it, but I would like to actually get to the point of publishing it as it has some crucial points I’d like to be raised. I have proofread it, with very few revisions made to the text. Without further ado:
I have a few propositions that may help broaden the horizon of Atlas! If the “help” in these propositions is illusory, I anticipate that this will at least serve to shed some light on the few blemished components of Atlas.
At root, Atlas is an oppressive beast in its own virtual ecosystem, and manifold players have taken note of it in similar fashions. Atlas serves its operator as both a boon and a trifle. I am going to attempt to underscore the flawed attributes of Atlas; the real blemishes, not trivialities beyond developer control such as the abolition of mega-alliances, capitalizing on “alert bots”, or “stagnancy” (as a simple product of inaction).
Krelos and his encumbrance placed upon players without Krelos in the active environment
Krelos very patently and effectively skews Atlas-driven competition to a fault. He facilitates a much more fruitless procedure in which a player lacking his presence in their roster may become susceptible to swift, indefensible hits from players on a broader scale. These are the players who have Krelos and are prepared to inflict mayhem by whichever means they deem necessary. This is a crucially unfair and imbalanced technique that leaves vulnerable fledglings and rising underdogs (n-2 and below) at the crux of the procedure.
In solution, I would like to advance Krelos’s addition to the dragon leveling shard system. The only other prospect that I can think of is total removal of Krelos from the game, and though I would personally be okay with that, it would be reasonable to forecast a consensual uprising of some form if that were to happen, so making Krelos accessible universally would alleviate much of the communal strife between the class of players without Krelos and the class with him.
If the speedy aspect of Atlas is going to be exercised and foregrounded in such a thorough manner, I feel that no room should be left for vapid, sluggish tactics. It should be an immediate provision if made an immediate prerequisite for competition. In a world full of tortoises, Krelos is the hare, though unlike the lesson taught in Aesop’s lofty fable, speed is what bestows the treasure. Despite Aesop’s teaching that you do not have to be meteoric where you can be glacial and spare your time, Atlas clashes with it to enforce that you cannot be glacial where in order to win, you must be meteoric, and the theory plays out.
The induction of festive shards was an ingenious plan, and I am certain that there would be a wave of thrill if it were to be applied to the most useful, pertinent dragon ever established into the world of War Dragons. The status quo is phenomenally unfair and lacks synergy. With this in effect, there would be unlimited access to Krelos, and there would be no issue between those with him and those without him.
The conversion of waiting time to prize value in Atlas Rider Missions
The correlation between the interval of time required to wait and the prize reaped upon completion does not rectify the result, and I am making what I hope is a clarion call to revisit it, or to flag it for future consideration.
A period of 12 hours for products of 3 crafting scrolls (exponentially increasing), 75 egg tokens (increasing, not exponentially), 3 hours worth of expedites (exponentially increasing), and 150K in golden treasures (increasing, not exponentially) seems negligible, and it is. Due to this, there is little to no alacrity in the waiting process, so many players (myself included) determine its best to forgo this aspect entirely, despite what it entails.
I am going to expound on this issue at length. Click to expand if you wish to read the rest of my proposition on this particular matter. It is mostly in the form of analysis.
Theoretically, if a player were to fulfill two Atlas Rider Missions per 24-hour interval with no incorporation of diamonds to expedite the process, said player could only procedurally reap any of the following quantities:
- Crafting Scrolls - 6, 12, 18, 24, 30
Between Training Camp events, this equates to the rough results of 72, 144, 216, 288, and 360. Then, once you factor in the additional, approximate 12-hour interval, you add half of the doubled 24-hour values to each of the final values (to account for the prolonged 12 or so hours in each event; they don’t typically last a precise three days), so the resultant integers would then become 75, 150, 225, 300, and 375 at the extremum. These quantities are not as significant as they purport to be! It requires prolifically higher quantities to actually take root in the crafting process. Fortunately, there are bountiful scrolls in Atlas Event prizes, so even to the exclusion of these negligible values from Rider Missions, things seem to check out.
- Egg Tokens - 150, 300, 450, 600, 750
Between Breeding Events, the summations of each value would total up to 3150, 6300, 9450, 12600, and 15750 at peak value. Keep note that this is all assuming the prospect that the player maintained a dynamic, unflagging streak of 12-hour missions for the total of 21 24-hour timeframes—alias the time between Breeding Events—so these extrapolations are double what the Rider Missions page presents as available. The next step in the equation is obviously an utter replica of what was done with the previous item: you have to factor in the additional 12-hour period that prolongs the event to be roughly 3.5 days instead of 3. The results should translate to 3225, 6450, 9675, 12900, and 16125 respectively. Although mere fractions of dragons as you ascend to higher tiers, these values are promising to some degree, so there is not much to expostulate with, especially when you consider everything in conjunction with tokens garnered from various other sources.
- Speed-Ups - 24 15mins (6hrs), 24 30mins (12hrs), 18 1hrs (18hrs), 8 3hrs (24hrs/1d), 10 3hrs (30hrs/1.25d)
Between Fortification Events, these values would total up to 504 15mins (126hrs/5.25d), 504 30mins (252hrs/10.5d), 378 1hrs (378hrs/15.75d), 168 3hrs (504hrs/21d), and 210 3hrs (630hrs/26.25d) at the extrema. Nothing changes here; you still have to factor in the prolonged 12-hour interval at the end of the event that makes odd the sum of the even proportions. You should land on the finishing values of 516 15mins (129hrs/5.375d), 516 30mins (258hrs/10.75d), 387 1hrs (387hrs/16.125d), 172 3hrs (516hrs/21.5d), and 215 3hrs (645hrs/26.875d) as the final corresponding values. These are negligent values in the upper echelons of the War Dragons hierarchy simply due to the fact that they merely account for a single tower. You get more meritorious deals through external sources such as Trading Posts, main-game season branches, and Atlas events, so these timer missions are a candid waste of time and resources. A 12-hour wait for a gross minimum of 5.375 days and a significantly improved (but still gross; alternative definition used here) maximum of 26.875 days is only worthwhile if you play as a fledgling who hasn’t quite gotten its feet wet.
- Gold - 300000, 450000, 600000, 750000
Gold is used to perform so many actions that I feel the extra effort toward arithmetic equations would be unnecessary, but to sketch it all out, you would ideally multiply each value individually by 3 (representative of the approximate three days per Atlas Event). Then you would factor in the additional 12 hours; since the above values are multiplied to correspond with two successive 12-hour missions (to fit squarely into a 24-hour period), those values divided will leave you with your 12-hour value, which will be added to the equation with the intention of esteeming it as the final integral piece of the puzzle. You now have your final answer. Of course, determination of how the beneficence of this result differs from the total possible quantity you could accumulate via the invader base would depend on how your team’s castle system is established. However, for most, the 12-hour wait is not worth it.
Of these variables, the Egg Tokens seem to be the most promising, if not the sole promising offer of these four. A 12-hour wait does not rectify most of these values, especially when it prohibits the use of a rider by placing it on hiatus until the mission is completed. That alone is a prevalent motive for a player’s choice to forgo missions. The prizes reaped are unjustified by the time required to obtain them. A revamp would crystallize its potential.
Power creep; it’s not improving, it’s exacerbating.
As the avalanche of content continues to compile, the stretch from early-game to late-game expands. This is unsound in any respect, and has blemishes concerning both main-game and Atlas, but since this thread is predominantly about Atlas, all quandaries will boil down to Atlas. Atlas issues are more pressing anyway.
I touched briefly on this topic when I detailed what the underlying issue is with Krelos gamboling about the map. Here, I will expound on it as the final iniquity—the final “grand nail in Atlas’s Coffin”.
Suppose you are a level 84 player entering Atlas for the first time with your gold dragons at hand ready to conquer lands and make a name for yourself that would strike fear into the minds of other players. (That’s a pretty lofty task for a level 84 player, but this is hypothetical.) That’s one huge step for level 84, one humongous leap for level-84 kind. You find a castle you want to conquer, and you solicit assistance from any teammate advanced enough to tackle the quarry; nobody answers, so you go in solo, and the invasion takes root.
A couple of minutes later, after a nigh-on failed conquest attempt, you’re inundated with a flustering succession of messages such as—“You were attacked near FieryFate by DeadlyDuchess of GiveItYourBestShot. Your Primarch earned 3.17K glory. Go to your battle reports to view the details.”—and you click through these inattentively, until you come upon a message that says, “Your Primarch has been freed, please summon a new one”. You pull the same charade on a less forgiving target, and manage to prevail before being wiped, but only because you had managed to cajole someone into assisting you this time. You didn’t even make it past 1%, but you accept your earnings; this experience is really nothing to write home about. And it doesn’t get any better.
You are now a level 435 player bordering on Abyssal dragons. You have advanced, but the feeling is nonexistent. As far as competition is concerned, you’re still an underdog at the clutches of the higher-ups. Individual sniping attempts have been fruitful, but there remains something gnawing at you that makes the overall experience feel incomplete. To start with, you actually have to worry about who you hit, versus endgamers who have the leeway to be frivolous and jaunt around Atlas without constraint, which renders you a deadweight in combative scenarios involving castle defenses. This still doesn’t get better. The power creep keeps creeping upward, and the margin keeps widening. You have barely made it anywhere.
Reeling it back in; the primary pitch here isn’t solely that the game is seeing rapid advancement and underdogs are buried further down to become ultra-underdogs. That qualifies as an intended pitch, but the primary pitch is that just as a monumental amount of time is required in order to feel established in main-game, that same monumentality pervades Atlas, and once you factor in all of the primarch variations and gear (among other things), it imposes a tax on the neophyte experience and the midgame experience.
These are just a few of the attributes that contribute to the hardships connected to Atlas. I hope that this post serves its purpose. I am certain that I did not cover everything. Atlas, like manifold things, is a conceptually beneficial construct with few minor structural flaws. I feel that if these get polished, Atlas will be more idyllic.
. This exotic gear isn’t enough for me personally to grind useless glory. What are we fighting for? There isn’t really enough teams to hold the current castle’s competitively so let’s add more? Maybe s1 and up can finally get off their t2 and t3 castles they have no business owning, so good for newer teams. The upside, if PG is brave, would be limit access to new islands of castles based on APR and get rid of the current map altogether. Update the silly league structures maybe. And reset them every season. Give us some pve inside of atlas, get rid of guards and team glory, give us atlas wars. All of atlas needs an overhaul. Till then, I’m just chilling 
.