This is why we can’t have nice things. Because people will hack into those nice things and spawn dragons all over them. That’s right, Atlas is having another big, scaly problem.

These days, it’s a little frightening just how reliant we all are on technology. It all happened insidiously; we didn’t really notice ourselves becoming slaves to the machines. You still might not realize it, but just wait until you have a power outage or the Wi-Fi goes down momentarily. Suddenly, the whole family emerges. Heck, people will come down the stairs that you haven’t even seen before.

That’s the cost of progress, though. The more technology-ridden our lives become, the more vulnerable we are to its foibles. And, more dangerously, to its hackers.

This is news to nobody, of course. We’ve all heard horror stories about email scams, spyware and those sorts of nefarious schemes. We’ve all seen the messages from Nigerian princes, desperate four bank details so they can pass some of their millions on to a complete stranger out of the kindness of our hearts. The sad fact is, as our online protection and security becomes ever more sophisticated, so do their schemes.

It’s an ongoing battle, and the developers of Atlas know this better than most. Just last weekend, Grapeshot Games were forced to perform an official rollback of the servers (causing the loss of all manner of player progress, naturally), after hackers used their mysterious sorcery to gain access to an administrator account. What did they do with that access? Spawned whales, tanks and generally made a monumental mess of things, naturally.

Grapeshot issued a statement promising that they had identified and rectified the issue, but… well, apparently they hadn’t so much. The pirate-themed MMO (for the uninitiated, think Sea of Thieves from the developers of Ark: Survival Evolved) has been compromised again.

This time, even more inexplicable happenings have been reported, including whales spawning on land and a sharp influx of dragons (Atlas does have fantasy elements, but we’re pushing things a little too hard here). Most egregiously, whoever’s messing with Atlas found a way to throw in a server message encouraging players to subscribe to popular YouTuber PewDiePie.

According to the devs, this new attack was the result of a technical exploit rather than another compromised Steam account. Whatever the case, the NA PvP network had to be rolled back once more.

There are whisperings that a mysterious group known as Black Butterfly is responsible, but that’s all we really know. All we can say for sure is that Atlas players had better be wary, because it’s certainly not plain sailing in those waters just now. Not that it ever has been, but still.