ARK: State of the Game

5 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

I'll be playing on both

Of course you will. I cannot blame you.

@Jat will there be legacy rag servers?

38 minutes ago, Titus said:

Exactly my point legacy will bleed into extinction that is my whole point. I'm not complaining just want people to realize that this legacy thing is a band aid

More like a life saving tourniquet . This may not be your favorite solution but it's the best middle ground for the WHOLE Ark community. Any other option would have lead to lot more PO'ed people.

I also have no idea why you're so sure you're server is going to die off. Maybe it's not the go to choice on day one for people who don't know anyone currently playing Ark, but there's a lot of folks who don't buy EA that are going to go play with their friends (who do buy EA) on legacy servers. Also, over time the difference should become a lot less pronounced, as legacy servers are getting all the updated code, eventually most of duped/glitched/etc. advantages will fade out. I really think a strong community move would be wiping very low population servers every quarter, no matter the game mode or cluster (not unofficial of course). Might encourage people to make their servers decent places to play.

Or maybe you're right and overtime the whole player base moves to the new servers and legacy completely dies. All that means is there aren't enough people interested in playing there. If that vast of the majority of the player base doesn't care to play legacy it probably shouldn't even exist, but at least WC is letting the community vote with their feet (play time) rather than just wiping (or giving no new servers).

Hi everybody!

I want to know if they ll open more Servers (Ragnarok, The Center, Island) for PC, on the release date 8th August

Thanks!!

21 minutes ago, Arkasaurio said:

More like a life saving tourniquet . This may not be your favorite solution but it's the best middle ground for the WHOLE Ark community. Any other option would have lead to lot more PO'ed people.

I also have no idea why you're so sure you're server is going to die off. Maybe it's not the go to choice on day one for people who don't know anyone currently playing Ark, but there's a lot of folks who don't buy EA that are going to go play with their friends (who do buy EA) on legacy servers. Also, over time the difference should become a lot less pronounced, as legacy servers are getting all the updated code, eventually most of duped/glitched/etc. advantages will fade out. I really think a strong community move would be wiping very low population servers every quarter, no matter the game mode or cluster (not unofficial of course). Might encourage people to make their servers decent places to play.

Or maybe you're right and overtime the whole player base moves to the new servers and legacy completely dies. All that means is there aren't enough people interested in playing there. If that vast of the majority of the player base doesn't care to play legacy it probably shouldn't even exist, but at least WC is letting the community vote with their feet (play time) rather than just wiping (or giving no new servers).

people are still duping and not by ddosing. Every time they patch people find a new way to cheat. spreading out the player base like this is only bad for everyone. PVP i understood completely pve on the other hand it is a serious mistake. New players wont be on even ground no matter what unless u separate people by experience but even then ull get smurf accounts. its going to work initially like day 1 after that the gap between the experienced players and nubs will grow. Jaded experienced players with new players = people are going to get griefed. With arks stellar track record of fixing issues and amazing customer service this is a recipe to loose a  large player base and hurt the game as a whole. 

4 minutes ago, powertrip9000 said:

people are still duping and not by ddosing. Every time they patch people find a new way to cheat. spreading out the player base like this is only bad for everyone. PVP i understood completely pve on the other hand it is a serious mistake. New players wont be on even ground no matter what unless u separate people by experience but even then ull get smurf accounts. its going to work initially like day 1 after that the gap between the experienced players and nubs will grow. Jaded experienced players with new players = people are going to get griefed. With arks stellar track record of fixing issues and amazing customer service this is a recipe to loose a  large player base and hurt the game as a whole. 

Yep, true, but duping has been a problem at some point in pretty much every competitive online game with gear since forever. They do have find a way stop it, and no it's not going to be perfect out of the gate. Is it better than years of compiled duped, exploited, or otherwise now unavailable stuff, absolutely. And besides, they kept their word on not wiping, maybe they will keep it about having everything cleaned up by launch .

People will get griefed, people will always get griefed. Hey I'll probably engage in some light griefing (just a little friendly hazing) on launch. However, throw new players into the servers as they are now (or allow open transfers), it's way worse. Likewise, wipe all the servers and those vets are going to salt the new earth with their saltiness.

There was no perfect solution for all parties here, but this absolutely seems like the best compromise.

For PVE this does not seem to be the best. Seperating the servers like this is going to defeat the purpose of trying to create a community. Trade is going to be limited, no new players coming into the servers will isolate whole groups of people and you can no longer meet others without starting over completely. I think that the PVP servers really need the legacy and new seperation, but as for PVE I think they need to be left alone. Go ahead and clear the empty servers, but completely isolating whole groups of people is not the way to make anyone enjoy anything in a  PVE environment. 

52 minutes ago, Arkasaurio said:

More like a life saving tourniquet . This may not be your favorite solution but it's the best middle ground for the WHOLE Ark community. Any other option would have lead to lot more PO'ed people.

I also have no idea why you're so sure you're server is going to die off. Maybe it's not the go to choice on day one for people who don't know anyone currently playing Ark, but there's a lot of folks who don't buy EA that are going to go play with their friends (who do buy EA) on legacy servers. Also, over time the difference should become a lot less pronounced, as legacy servers are getting all the updated code, eventually most of duped/glitched/etc. advantages will fade out. I really think a strong community move would be wiping very low population servers every quarter, no matter the game mode or cluster (not unofficial of course). Might encourage people to make their servers decent places to play.

Or maybe you're right and overtime the whole player base moves to the new servers and legacy completely dies. All that means is there aren't enough people interested in playing there. If that vast of the majority of the player base doesn't care to play legacy it probably shouldn't even exist, but at least WC is letting the community vote with their feet (play time) rather than just wiping (or giving no new servers).

52 minutes ago, Arkasaurio said:

More like a life saving tourniquet . This may not be your favorite solution but it's the best middle ground for the WHOLE Ark community. Any other option would have lead to lot more PO'ed people.

I also have no idea why you're so sure you're server is going to die off. Maybe it's not the go to choice on day one for people who don't know anyone currently playing Ark, but there's a lot of folks who don't buy EA that are going to go play with their friends (who do buy EA) on legacy servers. Also, over time the difference should become a lot less pronounced, as legacy servers are getting all the updated code, eventually most of duped/glitched/etc. advantages will fade out. I really think a strong community move would be wiping very low population servers every quarter, no matter the game mode or cluster (not unofficial of course). Might encourage people to make their servers decent places to play.

Or maybe you're right and overtime the whole player base moves to the new servers and legacy completely dies. All that means is there aren't enough people interested in playing there. If that vast of the majority of the player base doesn't care to play legacy it probably shouldn't even exist, but at least WC is letting the community vote with their feet (play time) rather than just wiping (or giving no new servers).

life saving tourniquet? More like life support where the plug can get pulled anytime. Why do I think legacy will fail? Why would anybody buy the game to play by the devs own statements buy an inferior product. They said down the road they would recode the servers to fix problems. We have been down the road so much it's lost its substance

THIS IS NOT A BUG REPORT. THIS IS A DISCUSSION THREAD.

REFERENCE OP:

ARK LEGACY: Prediction of he Slow Death of Servers.

This DISCUSSION thread is a collection of my predictions for the recently posted decisions post-launch for Ark and the Legacy Server decisions. I will outline what I believe the short and long term effects will be for veteran players of Ark here. Quotes from the OP will be colored Red for clarity. Post your thoughts in a reply here.

We’ve got important and exciting news to share! First of all, we’ve finally completed our game for the console disc retail submission! It was a very long and arduous process, our boss fight or so to say, and your feedback throughout this process has been highly valuable. It was a very tight deadline to make the ship date, and the team has been intensively grinding through singleplayer-oriented refinements for the posterity of the disc-based version. All that aside, we were able to resolve many issues, as well as considerably improve the game through various changes and implementation of new techniques and it’s now time to move onto refocus our development efforts on the live game, as well as address some key topics within the community:

Having development work on the disc version is expected, but the game will still go through many, many patches over it's lifetime. There is no possibility that the disc will ship free of bugs and such. Console players will (like PC players do now), experience the same issues that have plagued the game. I forsee console players complaining about running out of hard disk space in short order, even if Ark is the only game installed. Essentially this means that since the game is being released on 3 different platforms, the teams will be split amongst these 3 platforms - ie: I predict there will be little to no change over the long term in terms of focus. Short term, there may be some focus work for specific platforms every so often as major problems crop up. Having a game released for 3 different platforms, and the apparent focus on development decisions to cater more towards console players in terms of QoL and ease of play, controls, other means that it is quite likely PC will (as with many multi-platform games) continue to receive the least amount of resources, while taking the brunt of first-patch pay-to-test (PC will get patches first, bug reports will be collected, then some fixes pushed out, after which the consoles will receive the partially fixed version). Since patch submission for consoles is more strict than PC this is understandable. I would imagine console sales will dominate PC sales as well, so financially this is also understandable.

Will the Official Servers be wiping?
Short answer: No -- but read the long answer! 
We had previously released a statement a year ago informing players that our Official Servers would not be wiping on the retail launch of the game. We’ve thought long and hard about the decision, taking into consideration the various points brought up by the community, the internal members of the team, as well as the general discussion that has taken place on the internet through various press/media outlets and will be sticking to our initial decision. It is clear that some group of players are for the wipe for, and some are against it, all for legitimate reasons; and we took it all into account.

We ultimately decided that we would not wipe and we would rather pay the cost to launch an additional new PvP and PvE Server Cluster network (alongside but separate from the current PvP and PvE Legacy Cluster), where players will get to have a fresh experience on the ARK; across all four maps with no influence from any of the previous servers. At that time we'll be rolling out the new server code and infrastructure necessary to prevent critical issues such as server crashing exploits, duping, and DDoSing, so they will not affect the batch of new servers (as well as the legacy ones, going forward).

Thank you for including in brackets that Legacy servers will also get updates. Notice the wording here "going forward". What I predict happening here is the reason why I chose the title of "slow death" for this post. Since the game price has jumped substantially, WCS only real option was to do exactly this - release a brand new cluster that is cut off from the Legacy servers. As everyone knows, a fresh uncluttered server will perform significantly better than those dirty old grungy legacy servers. WCS wants to maintain as good a performance level for the initial sales rush as possible. This will prevent most product refunds, and give newer players an equal footing to start out on. Don't mistake this for it being anything different than current servers however - within a few days you will have experienced players claiming the "best spots" on the new servers. By that time however the new people will have likely passed the refund window. Such is gaming these days. 

There is an extremely worrying wording in the above paragraph: "new... infrastructure... with no influence from any of the previous servers". To understand why this is a critical point of contention you first need to understand how cluster virtual machines (VMs) work for multi-server hosting. In a typical datacenter you will have groups of VMs running distributed across multiple physical machines. For example, PVE1 to 10 will be running on a cluster of VMs that is operating in Dallas, while PVEoc10-15 will be running in Sydney as an example. Inside these VMs are resources assigned to it based on the amount that WCS has agreed to pay for. This is called Provisioning. There may also be an optional Over-Provisioning for extra resources during peak times, or when some major event occurs (large war, or something). This provisioning covers connectivity bandwidth, cpu, memory, storage and a host of other optionals that may or may not be paid for. When WCS says that the new servers will be completely separate from the Legacy servers it could very well be that the VMs that run the new servers may exist on the same physical machines within the data centers, but that are separate and opaque to the legacy servers (essentially they cannot see eachother or interact in any way). Data center VM level infrastructure (often called Distributed Compute) is designed this way to allow multiple clients (Wildcard, others) to run their desired servers in tandem, while all sharing from a huge resource pool and Pay-For-Performance service model by the hosting providers (eg: Amazon Web Service, owner of the data center physical machines). Now that i've explained somewhat about this, I can now explain what my predictions are for "slow death of Legacy".

Server performance is based on how much money WCS chooses to pay for whichever cluster in question needs. If WCS wanted to make official servers perform better, they simply would have to pay more money for the resources (to a point, game code also has a large influence in this). Quite often you will see OfficialServerX with 30 people online and a generally equivilant development and age to OfficialServerC with the same people online have vastly different performance levels. If you look closely, you can see where the server is actually being hosted. Odds are that the 2 servers are not located in the same area geographically, or perhaps simply not part of the same group of VMs (cluster) so they do not share the same level of resource pool. WCS, by their statement above appears to be giving more priority for the non-legacy servers. This makes sense financially, because paying for resources to upkeep those dingy Legacy servers is far more expensive than fresh shiny new serers that are still in Thatch Age. VM resources can be adjusted on the fly without restart, and it is transparent to those playing the game. What I predict happening here is that over a length of time, the Legacy servers will continue to be "resource pool starved", causing the performance to drop ever so slightly over time (the same way human food and water consumption is stealth nerfed by minute ammounts over months right now in Ark). This will cause players to leave the servers slowly over time, and leads to the next paragraph below...

Our current set of Official Servers will be rebranded as “Legacy” and indicated as such on all platforms. We will also be taking steps to remove some of our ‘ghost town’ servers, where the player population has remained near-zero for an extended duration of time. We’ll take a look at the statistics and will be repurposing 10% of the lowest count servers across all platforms. Once we know which servers these are; we'll preserve the save files and upload them, so if you so wish to use them, you can. Players will also have time to move through Cross-ARK to a different secure Legacy server. Every three months we will be taking a review of the Legacy Officials to see what the numbers are like and may consider repurposing more ‘ghost towns’, however, the goal will be to preserve any place with human activity.

By starving the costly old dirty legacy servers, they push more and more of them towards the arbitrary "10%" mark. As the servers reach this mark, they will decomission them. Some of the old players will move to other servers, many will not and simply stop playing ark. In either case, it is financially prudent to do this. Older players already paid for the game, and are significantly needier in terms of support tickets as well as cost of VM resources to operate their server's mega-lag-bases. I don't fault this, its really the only way they can proceed. Supported further by the comment about revisiting and culling the botton 10%ers every 3 months or so.

What I predict here is that when new players join Ark for the first time, you can be assured that the servers listed nearer the top of their server listing will absolutely be the Non-Legacy servers. In fact, it could be that the Legacy servers simply do not show up for new players at all, that they would have to keyword search for them to find them (if they can join them at all, who knows). Of course, WCS wants to promote their shiny new servers to the newbies. That's not the issue. The issue will be lack of fresh blood to keep Legacy servers populated. What new player - given the choice between a shiny new ferrari, and a crappy dirty pinto with keymarks spelling "Pillared lel" scratched all over it would in their right mind choose to join the "pinto" server? It doesnt take a stretch of logic to know the answer to this. Legacy will have their old time players. Those players will slowly stop playing. No new players will join the legacy servers. Legacy servers will regularily be purged due to low population.

This cycle will be repeated again in the future I assume, with the current Legacy servers being a long distant memory, and the new legacy servers being the servers that are opening up in August on retail launch.

The rest of the dev post is irrelevant to this DISCUSSION.

The TLDR Prediction is: Legacy servers will be purposely resource starved, to cause and causing player exodus and new players will join new servers, causing Legacy servers to be culled over time due to low population. Long term vets should be prepared with an exit strategy for when their Legacy server is designated for culling.
 

This to me is the best solution...great job 

52 minutes ago, The1ProdiG said:

For PVE this does not seem to be the best. Seperating the servers like this is going to defeat the purpose of trying to create a community. Trade is going to be limited, no new players coming into the servers will isolate whole groups of people and you can no longer meet others without starting over completely. I think that the PVP servers really need the legacy and new seperation, but as for PVE I think they need to be left alone. Go ahead and clear the empty servers, but completely isolating whole groups of people is not the way to make anyone enjoy anything in a  PVE environment. 

First, I'm not english speaker, so sorry if some part of that iI'll write is not clear.

I spent more than 6 month playing in PVE official server. In this moment i have many bred dinos, mutants, hight stats, and primarly this dinos are for trade. With this change, with the time, all will be trash because Legacy servers will not have new players with will can trade.

Basically, after this anouncement i decided that i just play for keep alive my dinos if something change, but, i dont have intentions of continue with breeding, taming, or whatever that can be destroy with the time cause I think this thing of legacy is just the agony of the old servers.

I hope they change that, PVE dont need a new cluster of servers like a PVP.

Sorry bad english, i dont like use google translate,..

NA PVE 795 Scorched Earth 

2 minutes ago, KiolLman said:

 

First, I'm not english speaker, so sorry if some part of that iI'll write is not clear.

 

I spent more than 6 month playing in PVE official server. In this moment i have many bred dinos, mutants, hight stats, and primarly this dinos are for trade. With this change, with the time, all will be trash because Legacy servers will not have new players with will can trade.

 

Basically, after this anouncement i decided that i just play for keep alive my dinos if something change, but, i dont have intentions of continue with breeding, taming, or whatever that can be destroy with the time cause I think this thing of legacy is just the agony of the old servers.

 

I hope they change that, PVE dont need a new cluster of servers like a PVP.

 

Sorry bad english, i dont like use google translate,..

 

NA PVE 795 Scorched Earth 

 

 

 

 

for someone that doesn't speak English you articulated your point clearly. Well said.

I want to know if they ll open more Servers (Ragnarok, The Center, Island) for PC, on the release date 8th August

I figured something like this would happen, and I'm both glad and saddened that it turned out to be the case.  I'm glad because it'll keep all the duped bs and such that has infested all the servers (PvP and PvE) from infecting the new servers, but sad because in order to stay connected with the growing future community (new players are not likely to be joining a legacy server), I will have to start over on a new server.  I have every intention of keeping my dinos alive and my base up until the server is marked for wiping and re-purposing, as I wish to keep them immortalized in Single Player where I can look back at all the good times for nostalgic trips down memory lane.  I've grown attached to a fair number of them and am proud of my base.  However, that won't likely be for a while, as my server is fairly active.

@Jat If I can make one request....  Would you be willing to upload the saves of the PvE legacy servers periodically regardless of wiping/re-purposing?  I REEEEEALLY want to preserve my dinos and my base from my server in singleplayer mode, but if my server remains active enough, it'll be a lot of upkeep to do in addition to the upkeep that will be required on the new servers I'll be starting over on.  Though I said I had every intention of maintaining them, I would still like to NOT have to be juggling between two worlds, when the act of preserving one is just simply to have something to look back at.

Thank you for providing clear and clarifying communication on many subjects that the community has been concerned about. You guys rock, and I wish you a successful release.

With regards to the ARK Dev Kit update, please can we have some extremely detailed change notes? Given that there has been a significant number of changes to the game, many mods (mine included) are currently broken. In order to quickly fix, these change notes are invaluable to us modders. In particular, change notes around the new hibernation mechanisms.

Here's to the future and the continued growth of the ARK community.

Absolutely perfect, well done wildcard, its hard to please everyone but I think your decisions going forward come pretty close. Keep up the good work. loving your recent updates as well game is running stable and one by one the bugs/glitches are disappearing . the whole legacy idea is really very clever, it would have been cheaper for you guys to wipe or just leave so appreciate that you are looking after the current users while providing a clean experience for the new ones.

3 hours ago, Titus said:

The more I think about the angrier I get. Stringing the players that helped make the game along on these legacy servers is just wrong. Just admit it this legacy thing is just a PR maneuver to curve negative feedback for your game release. Your not investing in a separate server platform your buying time. It will be a huge slap in the early access players face when you start ditching legacy servers. Players are a lot more forgiving when they are told the truth and not get strung along.

Yes, isolating us because of the reason given in the OP make me feel like we all are treated as some kind of offenders. I dont see it fair.

I was expecting the reason for the split was give the new players the opportunity to feel the game without the influence of the old community, and because of that isolate them *temporary* in a new cluster.

But the reason goes much more far, is like they think we all that will play in legacy are not good ppl.

Im not clearly saying the reasons, you can read at the OP and deduct it, because I had a warning issued by mod for saying he taboo words, that are on the OP post and in the Jeremy's interview at PCGamer. Im also pretty sure that the reasons give will happen again in the new cluster. Computing has this caveats, sec by default does not exist.

Im very dissapointed at this moment, and considering leaving my experience as steam review and uninstall the game.

Just in case if anyone wants to read more on this i'll leave this here...

http://kotaku.com/ark-survival-evolved-studio-reverses-plan-to-wipe-the-1797058373

1 hour ago, Zed38 said:

The TLDR Prediction is: Legacy servers will be purposely resource starved, to cause and causing player exodus and new players will join new servers, causing Legacy servers to be culled over time due to low population. Long term vets should be prepared with an exit strategy for when their Legacy server is designated for culling.

They don't even need to be purposely resource starved.  No new people will join Legacy servers anyway which means a slow population decline regardless, and once low enough they will be re-purposed into "New" servers.  Since the pop decline is obvious then you will also get the people who may be happy staying on old servers, will also jump sooner rather than later since they know it's coming.

This was all obvious many months ago.  I said it before, the writing is on the wall for the death of current servers, wipe or no wipe.  The only question is how long each server will last before it dies.  But they are ALL dead.

32 minutes ago, arkark said:

Yes, isolating us because of the reason given in the OP make me feel like we all are treated as some kind of offenders. I dont see it fair.

I was expecting the reason for the split was give the new players the opportunity to feel the game without the influence of the old community, and because of that isolate them *temporary* in a new cluster.

But the reason goes much more far, is like they think we all that will play in legacy are not good ppl.

Im not clearly saying the reasons, you can read at the OP and deduct it, because I had a warning issued by mod for saying he taboo words, that are on the OP post and in the Jeremy's interview at PCGamer. Im also pretty sure that the reasons give will happen again in the new cluster. Computing has this caveats, sec by default does not exist.

Im very dissapointed at this moment, and considering leaving my experience as steam review and uninstall the game.

1+1 does not equal 100000567, your stretching a very long bow here. noone is saying your bad people they just want new players starting out on a level playing field free of the dupers, how do you do that short of wiping? if you want to play with the new servers go play, if you want to remain on your current one stay, you should never ever be able to transfer from legacy to new because as soon as you do that the new servers will be full of duped content. you will even be able to play both but on the new servers you will be a new player and have to build up like everyone else. I honestly cannot see what your issue is here 

50 minutes ago, xraptor69x said:

Hi off topic but i have tried twitter for hours (with no reply from WC as i'm sure you already guessed) but has anyone else noticed that there are NO dinos spawned on lava island on the centre map or is it just my server? thx in advance

I think you should open a post in the bug section commenting that. I guess this is because the large quantity of dinos added to the lava cave that prevents others spawning, but going back to the main topic, Im so dissapointed with the split decision reasons that I really dont care.

So here is what I understand.  Legacy= servers made before August 8th           New Servers= Made after August 7th

Legacy will get all the new content. BUT will not be allowed to transfer to New Servers

3 minutes ago, Pachycephalosaurus said:

So here is what I understand.  Legacy= servers made before August 8th           New Servers= Made after August 7th

Legacy will get all the new content. BUT will not be allowed to transfer to New Servers

That's about right

2 minutes ago, KPkrew said:

1+1 does not equal 100000567, your stretching a very long bow here. noone is saying your bad people they just want new players starting out on a level playing field free of the dupers, how do you do that short of wiping? if you want to play with the new servers go play, if you want to remain on your current one stay, you should never ever be able to transfer from legacy to new because as soon as you do that the new servers will be full of duped content. you will even be able to play both but on the new servers you will be a new player and have to build up like everyone else. I honestly cannot see what your issue is here 

I cannot respond to you without mentioning the words for which I got a warning issued some hours before. Sorry.

I can only say that the reasons given in OP are much likely to happen again in the new cluster.