Community Crunch 137: Code of Conduct Changes, Community Livestream Round-Up, & DevKit Update!

Can we please have wipes on smalltribes?

seriously, who here thinks wc will keep enforcing these rules after 2 months, the preliminary deadline for specialty servers ("small tribe")? hell, we get more CoC updates than game patches. easier to roll out but without the manpower, impossible to enforce. really pathetic. as popular as the small-tribe setting may be, i still smell a wipe. wc allergic to balance

When are you adding more smalltribe servers? I have been waiting over 2 hours several times to get in.

15 minutes ago, Chrissern301 said:

When are you adding more smalltribe servers? I have been waiting over 2 hours several times to get in.

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark?sort=score&q=small&features[2e079b9a-d6f7-11e7-8461-83e84cedb373]=true

you want new servers until peak hours server pop stays under half?

10 minutes ago, eESTlane said:

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark?sort=score&q=small&features[2e079b9a-d6f7-11e7-8461-83e84cedb373]=true

you want new servers until peak hours server pop stays under half?

Most EU ragnarok and the island servers are pretty much full all the time, especially in weekends and evenings.

PvE Specific Griefing

Additional rule

Intentionally filling the server tame limit via spamming tames and/or rafts

OK, seems a fair new rule, for those "Sloth Trolls" (For Example: Go Ragnarok 42 PVE, spawn on Highlands N and you will see the best example for this kind of people, more than 100 dodos on a cage, tribe name is Maja Cool...something)

But how you will apply this to "Breeders" that have literally hundreds of females to get more chances of mutations? It is not a kind of trolling too? they just want to achieve kind of notority on forums with their colors and stats, but keep servers on their limits, and there are even some "Smarts" that also have alt accounts as ally tribes to store more dinos on their bases, because they all eat from the same troughs, on ly need log 10 secs to reset timer...

Those eternal breeders are also limiting new players on some kind of way, dont you think?

I'm glad that there's finally some mention of the PVE tame cap, even if it's babysteps toward acknowledging the problem now.

The two biggest problems to solve for the PVE tame cap are as follows:

1) Large, off server tribes using other servers as "storage".   They don't contribute to a server's community, they don't interact, trade, etc.    They just arrive on server with a ton of prebuilt walls/ceilings/pillars for a base, build them in minutes and start xferring.    From then on they pop on every week to feed stuff quick, maybe xfer a few more dinos if the cap's not there.    

2) Lack of a storage option for dinos or a way to get kibble eggs without the dinos.     An advanced tribe is incentivized to get at least 2 (and probably more) of each egg laying dino in order to move up the tame ladder.   Then they're incentivized to KEEP those egg layers afterword, because you might need that kibble for imprints.    Those dinos serve zero purpose other than the occasional eggs.    

 

Solving #2 as I allude is actually a pretty simple matter: We really need some kind of (tek?) storage device that will let us upload a dino as stored data without having it degrade in 24 hours, or get us eggs without needing to keep the dino.     This would have the double bonus of not only helping the cap, but also lowering the load time for big bases where you have a Noah's Ark worth of 2+ of every type of animal that has to be slowly loaded and placed along with their buildings.

In my mind the best solution would be an easily obtained (gamma spider, and each gamma version of other map bosses) tek device that doesn't even store the dino...it's a DNA machine.    You "feed" sample dinos to it, and it'll make eggs from that dino's dna type on demand (obviously with a limit, and/or cost, like you need x amount of meat as raw material or such for it to work with).    It's important btw that these do not require a tek generator or that the generator becomes much easier to use, otherwise they wouldn't be implemented by the majority of tribes.

 

Solving #1 is a bit harder, but one OBVIOUS place to start would be a limit on dino transfers.   I love the transfer system, don't get me wrong, but there should be a cap of say 10 dinos per day per person or similar.     That would put a big kebosh on these storage bases popping up overnight with hundreds of dinos.   

Edited June 26, 2018 by Migol

37 minutes ago, Migol said:

I'm glad that there's finally some mention of the PVE tame cap, even if it's babysteps toward acknowledging the problem now.

The two biggest problems to solve for the PVE tame cap are as follows:

1) Large, off server tribes using other servers as "storage".   They don't contribute to a server's community, they don't interact, trade, etc.    They just arrive on server with a ton of prebuilt walls/ceilings/pillars for a base, build them in minutes and start xferring.    From then on they pop on every week to feed stuff quick, maybe xfer a few more dinos if the cap's not there.    

2) Lack of a storage option for dinos or a way to get kibble eggs without the dinos.     An advanced tribe is incentivized to get at least 2 (and probably more) of each egg laying dino in order to move up the tame ladder.   Then they're incentivized to KEEP those egg layers afterword, because you might need that kibble for imprints.    Those dinos serve zero purpose other than the occasional eggs.    

 

Solving #2 as I allude is actually a pretty simple matter: We really need some kind of (tek?) storage device that will let us upload a dino as stored data without having it degrade in 24 hours, or get us eggs without needing to keep the dino.     This would have the double bonus of not only helping the cap, but also lowering the load time for big bases where you have a Noah's Ark worth of 2+ of every type of animal that has to be slowly loaded and placed along with their buildings.

In my mind the best solution would be an easily obtained (gamma spider, and each gamma version of other map bosses) tek device that doesn't even store the dino...it's a DNA machine.    You "feed" sample dinos to it, and it'll make eggs from that dino's dna type on demand (obviously with a limit, and/or cost, like you need x amount of meat as raw material or such for it to work with).    It's important btw that these do not require a tek generator or that the generator becomes much easier to use, otherwise they wouldn't be implemented by the majority of tribes.

 

Solving #1 is a bit harder, but one OBVIOUS place to start would be a limit on dino transfers.   I love the transfer system, don't get me wrong, but there should be a cap of say 10 dinos per day per person or similar.     That would put a big kebosh on these storage bases popping up overnight with hundreds of dinos.   

Having 10 tames per day per person would always put the larger tribes basically in charge of tame cap as it pretty much is now... I’m a soloist for the most part how fair is that to someone if I can get 10 tames and the tribe next to me can get 100+ with all its members lol (just using the tribe numbers as an example but most can relate)

Edited June 26, 2018 by Amanda632

On 6/25/2018 at 11:33 PM, Lexire said:

It's nice that WC is recognising raft spam as against the rules now, but are we still completely ignoring tame cap issues? Rafts aren't causing servers to cap out as fast as they are, its people holding dinos on multiple servers they don't play on. Spamming tames only makes uploading your tames for a slot difficult, doesn't fix the fact you have to upload just to tame something you need. You brought out more servers and within days they were capped, how are we expected to keep playing like this? Just wait for Extinction to come out so people will move a few tames off i suppose.

It was lovely that you gave us a 3x event, but as soon as it hit my breeding server capped out leaving the rest of the weekend as a reconstruction of what happens on my main server. Waiting for a slot and trying to incubate eggs so i can sort out a dino line, having half the community scream at eachother because they want to mate. We're struggling here, WC. We can't all go unofficial or private, big tribes go down and within days we're capped again.

 

 

y breeding server capped out leaving the rest of the weekend as a reconstruction of what happens on my main server. 

 

 

Isnt this part of the issue?

 

ALso as for rafts etc, perhaps they could count towards tribe cap but not server cap? That way it only has a negative effect on the creater

7 hours ago, Amanda632 said:

Having 10 tames per day per person would always put the larger tribes basically in charge of tame cap as it pretty much is now... I’m a soloist for the most part how fair is that to someone if I can get 10 tames and the tribe next to me can get 100+ with all its members lol (just using the tribe numbers as an example but most can relate)

That's not taming 10 dinos a day, that's transferring 10 dinos a day, just to be clear.

If you understood that, I'd have to ask what a solo player is doing transferring so many dinos at once?

At the very least it forces the big tribes to do more work and still limits it to 100 a day if they have 10 people all active (rare).

7 hours ago, Migol said:

I'm glad that there's finally some mention of the PVE tame cap, even if it's babysteps toward acknowledging the problem now.

2) Lack of a storage option for dinos or a way to get kibble eggs without the dinos.     An advanced tribe is incentivized to get at least 2 (and probably more) of each egg laying dino in order to move up the tame ladder.   Then they're incentivized to KEEP those egg layers afterword, because you might need that kibble for imprints.    Those dinos serve zero purpose other than the occasional eggs.    

 

Solving #2 as I allude is actually a pretty simple matter: We really need some kind of (tek?) storage device that will let us upload a dino as stored data without having it degrade in 24 hours, or get us eggs without needing to keep the dino.     This would have the double bonus of not only helping the cap, but also lowering the load time for big bases where you have a Noah's Ark worth of 2+ of every type of animal that has to be slowly loaded and placed along with their buildings.

 

#2 is coming in Extinction with the cryochamber. Jen talked about it in the livestream. As long as you keep it powered the dino's don't degrade.

Awesome rule change for PVE sans the part where we do report it and nothing ever gets done. A lot of players don't read the CoC and/or care to follow it up due to the fact that nothing gets done. Larger foreign tribes are the biggest culprit of raft spam, giga kiting, wyv kiting, griefing and real money transactions. We report, and nothing changes. 

18 hours ago, Violet said:

We've had a chinese tribe lure a giga to an open base of some other big tribe so it could take care of most of their tames so they can breed. This went extreme.

A day later we were capped cause some new 2-people tribe joined and downloaded 40 animals at once from the obelisk.

Fix it pls. It's getting way too competitive on PVE. Or at least idk maybe VISIT EVERY NOW AND THEN.

Competitive/Toxic because no one can actually work together like we should be able to because of stuff like this and warehouse/walmart/storage/box tribes

Still hopes than WC can do as Bethesda did with Fallout 4, making some mods available for consoles... It's probably possible for WC too and it would make many people happy. 

22 hours ago, Lucian said:

The point of the mod program is to get high quality mods for Ark. They *pay* the sponsored mod authors to develop the mods as long as they are working on it and they are hitting their goals. Its always been about a partnership with the modders. They talk about it in the announcement.

I know its not what the people on console want to hear, but the mods have always been a huge part of Ark. They are not going to abandon such a large part of the community just because some platforms don't support mods. Unfortunately, that's a thing with consoles, and has been since I have been gaming.  

To be honest, the quality of mods jumped tremendously once they started the program. Over the years I have had several issues due to the mods running on my servers. Much less so with the sponsored mods.

So are they going to eventually put some of these mods in the game ? I guess i don't see the point of paying these modders to develop these game changing mods for only unofficial and private servers to enjoy. Like structures plus alone would make the base game so much better, even if they had to tweak some things for balance reasons.

44 minutes ago, Gravex said:

So are they going to eventually put some of these mods in the game ? I guess i don't see the point of paying these modders to develop these game changing mods for only unofficial and private servers to enjoy. Like structures plus alone would make the base game so much better, even if they had to tweak some things for balance reasons.

I don't doubt that eventually we will see some bits and pieces from S+, but it's going to take awhile to go through it and sort out what can be brought over.

As to not seeing the point of supporting modders... keep in mind that unofficial servers comprise the vast majority of the player base.  A healthy and well supported modding community tends to greatly extend the viable lifespan of a game, even if it's just due to the addition of new community made maps to play on (like Ragnarok).

Edited June 27, 2018 by Ranger1

9 hours ago, Migol said:

That's not taming 10 dinos a day, that's transferring 10 dinos a day, just to be clear.

If you understood that, I'd have to ask what a solo player is doing transferring so many dinos at once?

At the very least it forces the big tribes to do more work and still limits it to 100 a day if they have 10 people all active (rare).

I read that as taming. 10 per person lol and was using it as an example. 

I have an idea. Maybe some do not like it. But what if the dinos shared a lifetime? Baby, Juvenile, Adult, Old, Dead ... this life time could last 30 days or maybe a little longer. And the only way you would not lose that genetics would be to store the fertilized eggs in the freezer. This would prevent people from keeping their minds alive just because they have a color they like, or because it was the first tame server. I for example still have the first trike I took ... and that was in 2015. I keep it because I have a sentimental attachment. He helped me a lot in the beginning. Today only server to lay eggs, but still, this la ... stopped in a room of the base.

why not code the bubble to only port over the dinos and personnel of the tribe who activated the tribute? for just small-tribe servers. rules are harder to enforce than the writing of code that stops people from teaming.

Glad to see we are back to getting evolution events every weekend

6 hours ago, arrojado1200 said:

I have an idea. Maybe some do not like it. But what if the dinos shared a lifetime? Baby, Juvenile, Adult, Old, Dead ... this life time could last 30 days or maybe a little longer. And the only way you would not lose that genetics would be to store the fertilized eggs in the freezer. This would prevent people from keeping their minds alive just because they have a color they like, or because it was the first tame server. I for example still have the first trike I took ... and that was in 2015. I keep it because I have a sentimental attachment. He helped me a lot in the beginning. Today only server to lay eggs, but still, this la ... stopped in a room of the base.

This might be ok for some tribes who have a lot of time to spare and/or many members, but for most of us, especially smaller tribes and tribes who don't breed (much), it would absolutely kill the game. Imagine having to constantly replace all your kibble tames, boss tames and gatherers, breeding pairs and especially non-breedable creatures. Not only does it take a lot of time to raise them (in some cases, like Yuty, Quetz, or even worse Giga), at least boss tames and gatherers also need to be leveled and whatnot. This game already is time consuming enough, and just because some tribes can never get enough it really shouldn't become a fulltime job for all of us.

 

9 minutes ago, Eanaya said:

This might be ok for some tribes who have a lot of time to spare and/or many members, but for most of us, especially smaller tribes and tribes who don't breed (much), it would absolutely kill the game. Imagine having to constantly replace all your kibble tames, boss tames and gatherers, breeding pairs and especially non-breedable creatures. Not only does it take a lot of time to raise them (in some cases, like Yuty, Quetz, or even worse Giga), at least boss tames and gatherers also need to be leveled and whatnot. This game already is time consuming enough, and just because some tribes can never get enough it really shouldn't become a fulltime job for all of us.

 

Truth. I agree with you. I had not thought of that. I have several bred giants, and it would be boring to have to re-create.

But another idea, which I have already posted in previous posts, was that the Tames Total per tribe was something that counted ALL the tribe's dyads, adding ALL servers. Today the limit is 500 dinos per tribe, but if your tribe plays in 3 different servers, it will have a total of 1500 dinos. So change that, be 500 dinos per tribe, regardless of server. It would be a summation of everything.

2 hours ago, arrojado1200 said:

Today the limit is 500 dinos per tribe, but if your tribe plays in 3 different servers, it will have a total of 1500 dinos. So change that, be 500 dinos per tribe, regardless of server. It would be a summation of everything.

This rule would have too much of a drawback.

I am solo on my main server (Ragnarok) but have an extensive alliance. This same alliance have banded together as one tribe on an island server to ascend and will as well on an Aberration server to ascend there. 

Being that this is a sandbox game with an enormous amount of different ways to play from both a PvE and PvP perspective, your rule would make it so that the only focus could be beating the game in a very linear way, really going against the very nature of Ark.

While one of my primary focus' along the way is beating the bosses and ascending I also enjoy pushing the stats on Quetzal's and Yuty's.  These dino's get me stuff I'd have a harder time getting on just my own. Now I keep a reasonable number of tames (never go over 250 and mostly keep it between 225 and 235) but with your rule I'd never be able to tribe up on the island to ascend and would have to create my own base (more lag) and increase my overall tame number (affecting server cap and more lag) to be able to keep my dino's fed, farm certain materials I need, etc. on that ascension server instead of sharing resources/tames as we currently do.

The only true fix is better servers with a higher cap limit or a personal account tame limit across all official servers based on a unique game I.D. making it so you would need to buy multiple accounts and copies of the game to supersede that number and if you're willing to do that then you have earned those extra dino's. 

I'm really curious how you are going to be enforcing your small tribe rules, and how "Banning" alliances is going to go. Seeing as all ARK servers have a ridiculous amount of politics involved.... having 0 alliances is going to make all small tribe servers hostile as friendships among tribes are very limited.... going to be interesting. 6 man alpha tribe servers here we go!!! 

Do you guys realise how disappointed everyone was with the extinction event? lmao