Community Crunch 355: ARK Roadmap, EVO Event, and More!

1 hour ago, TheSlayerNL said:

So, our free Upgrade has been changed to a seperate game and paid.
 

would have been much worse if they forced upgrade on base game

the game runs like trash on top level hardware and is buggy as hell

the upgrade will run even worse, and I mean much worse, and expect bugs of pre alpha build magnitude

ALL MODS of base game broken

ark is currently 500GB, after upgrade will be 1TB ?????

a bunch of players who currently struggle to run the game at 20fps would no longer be able to play the game they paid for after upgrade

forcing the upgrade would have been the absolute pooptest move ever

Edited April 1, 2023 by frenchiefries

13 minutes ago, acat said:

Wildcard: You might not like ark2, so we upgrade ark1 so its set for many years to come.

Also Wildcard: If you want to get the upgraded ark1, you have to buy it together with ark2.

Seems a little paradox to me. Also contradicting jeremys post stating it would be a free upgrade.

 

That entire roadmap just screams we desperately need money!!! Cant even afford to leave the servers running as legacy servers like you did before. Not that i care, i like fresh starts and stopped playing ark long ago because of the insane cheating exploiting and real money trading going on. But i do understand if other ppl care (even tho some seem a little too attached to their pixels).

 new ark will be is own game not a upgrade it will be on ue5 the old cod is to far gone to be move out of the old game new ue5 new ark 1  with new anti cheating in it   all theys players ho are  mad ether buy tam with money or there just mad ethere way if the up date ark 1 we  no they still be mad  buge that will be add sow wild card make a new ark 1 in ue5 you are all still mad sow no  mader  what RD wild card took you all me mad donot lie it is true you all no it 

Edited April 1, 2023 by kingblades

This UE5 update “ASA” needs updated character creation and a lot of overhauls to be worth charging us all over again… It needs ALL the legacy creatures to be TLC’d also… Make it ARK we knew, but add all the things it should of had before along with a fresh new look and then I’ll feel it is legitimately worth recharging for.

Please actually add enough to the game that it is worth charging us all over again, besides just adding another Story-DLC, or it’s not really worth investing the time and money back into to just start that same grind all over again.

6 minutes ago, kingblades said:

 new ark will be is own game not a upgrade it will be on ue5 the old cod is to far gone to be move out of the old game new ue5 new ark 1  with new anti cheating in it   all theys players ho are  mad ether buy tam with money or there just mad ethere way if the up date ark 1 we  no they still be mad  buge that will be add sow wild card make a new ark 1 in ue5 you are all still mad sow no  mader  what RD wild card took you all me mad donot lie it is true you all no it 

They literally called it an upgrade themselves at wildcard. And no im not mad, as i said, dont care about the wipe. I do think tho that the business practice is very bad, full of contradictions and ignorance for the playerbase. It only shows how desperately they need money. 
Also pls dont take this as an offense, but you should work on your writing skills or use some assisting programs, it is very hard to read what you say 🙈

People just have to get over the shock first. Those who say they are done with Ark will return after a while.

People complained about the game being unstable and a lot of other technical issues. What is being done now is quite simply a repair of the game. But not only that. It will be a new experience. At the same time, it will also be a base for further development of the game for the next several years.

What people choose to overlook, or for other reasons refuse to realize, is how much content, innovation and graphical power they get. As well as brand new servers.

But.. It comes with a price. You have to give up years of hard work.

We must not forget that this is a company. The economy must be balanced. Like most games that get remastered, they cost money. It has almost been 8 years since Ark was released. I would think that is an acceptable amount of time. Even if it costs money. And if you look at it objectively, I think you can see it too.

When it comes to paying for the Remastered DLC. Look above. It is exactly the same financially. Don't forget the projects that are underway, regarding the expansion of Ark's business model. The alternative would be alot of microtransaction an half the effort.

Edited April 1, 2023 by UCOSGaming

So we have to pay to play ark 1 again when we've been waiting for ark 2 seems greedy to make people pay for what they've already bought. Also is meshing fixed ? Biggest factor as to why I will not play ark 1 anymore and I'm certainly not paying for a remake of a broken game where the only way people can raid on official is mesh

3 minutes ago, UCOSGaming said:

People just have to get over the shock first. Those who say they are done with Ark will return after a while.

People complained about the game being unstable and a lot of other technical issues. What is being done now is quite simply a repair of the game. But not only that. It will be a new experience. At the same time, it will also be a base for further development of the game for the next several years.

What people choose to overlook, or for other reasons refuse to realize, is how much content, innovation and graphical power they get. As well as brand new servers.

But.. It comes with a price. You have to give up years of hard work. We must not forget that this is a company. The economy must be balanced. Like most games that get remastered, they cost money. It has almost been 8 years since Ark was released. I would think that is an acceptable amount of time.

Even if it costs money. And if you look at it objectively, I think you can see it too. When it comes to paying for the Remastered DLC. Look above. It is exactly the same financially. Don't forget the projects that are underway, regarding the expansion of Ark's business model. The alternative would be alot of microtransaction an half the effort.

Yet meshing will still be in the game they never address the meshing wonder why

Guys stop investing time and resources into the first game, it is done, let it rest.

You really need to focus everything you have on the second title; remastering the first game at this stage and then charging money for it is only going to be a waste of time since very few people will have the desire & goodwill to buy the same game again at full price, what kind of steam reviews are you guys honestly expecting from ASA?

They won't be good, I'm sure of that.

Set clear goals for the future, commit, and give it everything you got.

I get the feeling you are floundering, still trying to invest in the first game since it is the easiest and clearest thing to do, Ark2 is new terrain, it will be difficult and unknown, but it's the only lucrative way forward, get on it.

Ok, now this is exiting !

For ARK 2, I believe that it is a good decision to delay the game if it is not polished. Wildcard is not the small studio that they were in 2015. Since then, they have made millions and had a tremendous growth. People now expect them to make games that meet the industry standards, and not to release an early access buggy proof of work. This takes time.

For ARK UE5, this is what I'm most interested in. I am not going to discuss too much the monetization part of it, since I am fine with it. I have more than 5k hours in the original game (many of which on official servers for which Wildcard has to pay monthly), and it cost me in total about 100 dollars. I am fine to pay again for it, but I understand why other people aren't. On a positive note, at 50 dollars the entry ticket, it will discourage people from cheating (contrary to the current game with free accounts). Furthermore, if it allows them to make money for ARK 2 development, I'm all the more ok with it.

Now, for the rest of the announcement, I am going to discuss a few key points :

-Cross platform gameplay : Amazing, I simply hope that controller players won't be at a disadvantage, and that they WILL NOT implement aim assist.

-Cross platform anti cheat : We have to see how it is implemented, but overall, it cannot be worse than Battleye that does not work anyway..

-New official servers : Yes, good ! Many official players want a cluster wipe anyway, the current one is dead. However, if simply wiped without balance changes, the situation will soon be the same as it is now, see my following points.

-Balance changes 1 : They announced balance changes for caves, and this is interesting. With current official breed lines, only a few base spots are viable. If the breed lines were to be wiped, those spots are clearly too OP. However, not all caves are OP, many of them, even with fresh breed lines, are perfectly raisable (see MTS for instance). I hope they will not simply ban cave building.

-Balance changes 2 : Linked to the previous one, I feel like something that killed Official is that there are only few viable base spots per map (usually one alpha and one or two betas). It means that for say X tribes, you need X/3 servers on the cluster. There are only few players per map, and other than during FOBs, you rarely interact with other players. This is boring, and more spontaneous PVP would be better. If there are more viable base spots per map and less servers, it would increase the amount of players per server, and be really good.

-Balance changes 3 : So, in my previous points, most problems are solved with less op breed lines (because in turn, more base spots become viable). So I think that one of the most important balance change would be to limit the max number of mutations per dino by a REALISTIC number. Right now, it is only limited by the maximum level of a dino, which is stupid. Dinos are too strong. It makes most base spots worthless and encourages RMT (real money trading). I really hope Wildcard comes up with an idea that does not kill breeding, but at the same time limits the current infinite stat growth of dinos.
-Balance changes 4: Finally, Wildcard mentioned a queuing system. I believe that if well implemented, it could be insane. First, it would solve the current joining simulator on capped servers. But for PVP balance, it can solve the problem of "capping" servers in order to have an advantage over the other tribe. If they implement it with a condition like "IF server is capped, THEN in the queue, order people by increasing number of people online in their tribe and then by decreasing order of time already in queue", it would mean that if a tribe is at a disadvantage (in terms of number of players), their players would have the priority for joining over the other tribe.

Edited April 1, 2023 by Beleth

1 minute ago, YogurtZD said:

Yet meshing will still be in the game they never address the meshing wonder why

Yea it is weird to worrying how they dont mention the extreme cheat and exploit problems they have in ark:se at all in the roadmap. No point in a new ark version if that doesnt get solved.

11 minutes ago, Beleth said:

Ok, now this is exiting !

For ARK 2, I believe that it is a good decision to delay the game if it is not polished. Wildcard is not the small studio that they were in 2015. Since then, they have made millions and had a tremendous growth. People now expect them to make games that meet the industry standards, and not to release an early access buggy proof of work. This takes time.

For ARK UE5, this is what I'm most interested in. I am not going to discuss too much the monetization part of it, since I am fine with it. I have more than 5k hours in the original game (many of which on official servers for which Wildcard has to pay monthly), and it cost me in total about 100 dollars. I am fine to pay again for it, but I understand why other people aren't. On a positive note, at 50 dollars the entry ticket, it will discourage people from cheating (contrary to the current game with free accounts). Furthermore, if it allows them to make money for ARK 2 development, I'm all the more ok with it.

Now, for the rest of the announcement, I am going to discuss a few key points :

-Cross platform gameplay : Amazing, I simply hope that controller players won't be at a disadvantage, and that they WILL NOT implement aim assist.

-Cross platform anti cheat : We have to see how it is implemented, but overall, it cannot be worse than Battleye that does not work anyway..

-New official servers : Yes, good ! Many official players want a cluster wipe anyway, the current one is dead. However, if simply wiped without balance changes, the situation will soon be the same as it is now, see my following points.

-Balance changes 1 : They announced balance changes for caves, and this is interesting. With current official breed lines, only a few base spots are viable. If the breed lines were to be wiped, those spots are clearly too OP. However, not all caves are OP, many of them, even with fresh breed lines, are perfectly raisable (see MTS for instance). I hope they will not simply ban cave building.

-Balance changes 2 : Linked to the previous one, I feel like something that killed Official is that there are only few viable base spots per map (usually one alpha and one or two beta). It means that for say X tribes, you need X/3 servers on the cluster. There are only few players per map, and other than during FOBs, you rarely interact with other players. This is boring, and more spontaneous PVP would be better. If there are more viable base spots per map and less servers, it would increase the amount of players per server, and be really good.

-Balance changes 3 : So, in my previous points, most problems are solved with less op breed lines (because in turn, more base spots become viable). So I think that one of the most important balance change would be to limit the max number of mutations per dino by a REALISTIC number. Right now, it is only limited by the maximum level of a dino, which is stupid. Dinos are too strong. It makes most base spots worthless and encourages RMT (real money trading). I really hope Wildcard comes up with an idea that does not kill breading, but at the same time limits the current infinite stat growth of dinos.
-Balance changes 4: Finally, Wildcard mentioned a queuing system. I believe that if well implemented, it could be insane. First, it would solve the current joining simulator on capped servers. But for PVP balance, it can solve the problem of "capping" servers in order to have an advantage over the other tribe. If they implement it with a condition like "IF server is capped, THEN in the queue, order people by increasing number of people online in their tribe and then by decreasing order of time already in queue", it would mean that if a tribe is at a disadvantage (in terms of number of players), their players would have the priority for joining over the other tribe.

Very valid opinion! For balance change 2, my theory is the bigger the cluster, the bigger the tribes, the more they dominate entire maps and keep them clear. Such things dont happen on the smaller official clusters as much. Regarding point 3, the breeding, i think it would be best to only allow ppl to breed for color mutations (cuz some ppl love that 🤷‍♂️) and otherwise just combine stats of the wild tames into one creature. I could also live with a mut cap of 20, as it seemed to have been planned originally.

Edited April 1, 2023 by acat

If official servers are a huge money loss (we know they aren't free for the company) they could just shut down legacy for real 2 years ago (maybe allowing the few active players to transfer) and review 2 times a year unpopulated/unplayed/empty servers (still giving a reasonable time and a chance to leave them) and not spreading randomly new servers on any map. Everyone knew that a day ARK1 official clusters will be no more, but everyone hoped to get a realistic deadline, with removing first unused servers and not just 2 months after the last community creature addition, not after the co-founder and lead developer words.

But hell, the co-founder and lead developer of the game said it was free upgrade and no-wipe at all... Everyone believed him.

But this is not about a new DLC (which is fine, new content means new work that must be paid), or the fact you decided to sell the engine upgrade.. This is the fact you are forcing all players buying it, re-buy all DLCs, deleting everything on Official just the same month of the new paid version launch and not even with all maps. And what about QoL? Let's be honest: most of them looks like just coming from most used mods on unofficial servers.
What about crossplay? You added it on SOTF, and 1 month literally after console launch you removed it because - as it is obvious - gamepad vs keyboard&mouse it's not a fair game.

This is even too cruel for being an April Fools prank, people are rage quitting, deleting bases from official and removing ARK2 from Steam wish-list.

Edited April 1, 2023 by darkradeon

Could someone clarify whether these changes:

Balance passes (e.g. Cave Entrances, MEKs, Aberration Creatures, more breedable creatures, etc)

are exclusive to the ascended version or if it is intended for both Ark survival evolved and Ark survival ascended?

Thanks.

It would be a pity to miss out on more breedable creatures.

2 minutes ago, Apgamen said:

Could someone clarify whether these changes:

Balance passes (e.g. Cave Entrances, MEKs, Aberration Creatures, more breedable creatures, etc)

are exclusive to the ascended version or if it is intended for both Ark survival evolved and Ark survival ascended?

Thanks.

It would be a pity to miss out on more breedable creatures.

Those changes will only come to the new game, the original ark:se will not get them.

40 minutes ago, acat said:

Yea it is weird to worrying how they dont mention the extreme cheat and exploit problems they have in ark:se at all in the roadmap. No point in a new ark version if that doesnt get solved.

 

I think i does.

This is from Ark's Roadmap:

- Cross-platform Anti-Cheat

6 minutes ago, UCOSGaming said:

 

I think i does.

This is from Ark's Roadmap:

- Cross-platform Anti-Cheat

Yeeh, i ignored that because it could just mean they keep the anti cheat systems they have now. And those anti cheat systems are completely useless, at least on pc, i dont know much about consoles. Making console players use battleeye like pc players have to, wont change anything. I would have expected a proper paragraph or at least a full few sentences about the issue. That short note is too little information.

Edited April 1, 2023 by acat

This has to be a joke…this is just pathetic and a money grab. It’s completely unfair for us to have spent years of our lives playing a game and investing in builds and Dino’s and a community just for it to go poof…I knew the game would die eventually, I gave  it about 5 years to slowly die, but cutting the cord like this is just sad. We deserve better than this. We didn’t like the lag but this is not what we wanted. If it was free for the people that already own it then I would be a bit more understanding, but to make us completely pay again for the game we already have is just insane. I can’t afford that, I know most people can’t. Only desperate or rich people will buy it as soon as it comes out. Us poor people will have to say goodbye to not only all our stuff but we have to say goodbye to Ark. everything over the years will have been a waste and pointless. We spent way too many days and nights staying up way too late then we should’ve because you made the game way harder than it should’ve been to raise Dino’s and now I for one regret spending so much time on a game…a broken game at that. We were loyal to you even though it was broken….and this is how you re pay us? I haven’t even gotten the chance to finish the game, I wanted to be able to wield mjolnir  but you never gave me the chance….you never gave any of us that have real lives and don’t spend every waking moment on ark the chance…what a waste of my life

Edited April 1, 2023 by LadyWildtree

It's an April Fool guys =D

 

7 minutes ago, Rohh said:

It's an April Fool guys =D

 

Can you prove that? 

If not, I'm deleting everything as soon as I get home. 

Por un lado esta bueno que tenga una remasterización pero por otro lado sera posible descargar los datos de mis dinos y colocarlos en mi host/local? no quiero perderlos

12 minutes ago, Rohh said:

It's an April Fool guys =D

 

proofs? otherwise please stop

a joke or a prank is supposed to be funny. this is not funny. and server total shutdown is cruel too.

I think this will mark the end for this game, I have played since pre release on PS4. I and most people I talk to have no interest in restarting just for better graphics, we will simply just stop playing ARK.

ARK 2 will be delayed and delayed until 2025 at least (you know Wildcard lol) and its an entirely different game that is not appealing to everyone anyway...

R.I.P ARK and Studio Wildcard.

@StudioWildcard could you at least put the Survival Evolved code on github so someone can try to fix it? There are a gazillion of pro and amateur devs that know how to deal with Unreal Engine 4 spaghetti code.

Actually Ark 2 in late 2024 can be possibly not April's Fool part.

12 minutes ago, oGlitchedX said:

I think this will mark the end for this game, I have played since pre release on PS4. I and most people I talk to have no interest in restarting just for better graphics, we will simply just stop playing ARK.

ARK 2 will be delayed and delayed until 2025 at least (you know Wildcard lol) and its an entirely different game that is not appealing to everyone anyway...

R.I.P ARK and Studio Wildcard.

It's by far not just better graphics.

And a little thing about people, that will serve you later in life. Don't believe everything they say.