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  • Introducing the Kentrosaurus & A Message to the ARK Community!

    large.DossierKentrosaurus.jpg.c7898319b5

    Common Name: Kentrosaurus
    Species: Kentrosaurus Aethiopicus
    Time: Late Jurassic
    Diet: Herbivore
    Temperament: Short-Tempered

    Wild:

    While Kentrosaurus Aethiopicus is considerably smaller than its close relative, Stegosaurus Regium, it is much more formidable in matters of self defense. In fact, it is arguably the pound for pound champion of not only the Stegosauria, but when encountered in close-knit fighting packs, ranks atop the island’s herbivorous dinosaurs in general. 

    Thanks to its wickedly sharp defensive spikes, any creature which attacks Kentrosaurus is likely to be reversely wounded in turn, and it is capable of piercing even the thickest of hides and armors when it goes on the offensive. I have personally witnessed the Kentrosaurus fell much larger predators in a single such “impaling” maneuver!

    Underestimating Kentrosaurus can be a fatal mistake, particularly when it is in a herd. When travelling in numbers, Kentrosaurus seems to grow much more aggressive, increasing the range at which it will defend its territory. 

    Domesticated:

    Survivors have seen little success in their attempts to ride Kentrosaurus, owing to its spikes and hot-headed temperament. However, a tamed herd of Kentrosaurus can defend a compound as well as take on any larger carnivore. One swing of its deadly tail can save a survivors life, or even turn the tide of a pitched battle!

    A Message to the ARK Community

    Firstly, an emphatic "thank you" to the ARK community for the love they have shown towards this game. Your creations, your feedback, and your support have meant the world to us. THANK YOU!

    We'd also like to provide our official take on the Scorched Earth Expansion Pack, and the future of ARK. Put simply: we are absolutely committed to driving aggressive development towards a solid, feature-robust game launch for ARK: Survival Evolved. Everyone at Wildcard wakes up every day thinking about how we can make ARK into a better game today than it was the day before. It’s not always easy, but our intent is ever-forward progress towards a retail release that will  be far more ambitious in scope and features than our original vision when we launched ARK into Steam Early Access in June 2015. Your feedback enables us to continually expand the game to become better than ever!

    Scorched Earth: Our original vision for ARK always included the creation of Expansion ARKs, along with the infrastructure and technical systems to transfer data dynamically between live ARKs. We determined that it is more sound to iterate on these systems during Early Access than after retail launch, given the significant risks involved if we didn't "get it right". While that meant unveiling the first Expansion early, it also means an easier time integrating further post-launch Expansions into the ARK network. We understand that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, and we appreciate the enjoyment people seem to be getting out of this initial view of how Expansion ARKs can work. Now that we have the systems in place to support them, we can ensure minimal integration issues with subsequent releases after ARK: Survival Evolved itself has launched. 

    Thank you so much to everyone who has been surviving on Scorched Earth, and we hope that the new features and content that it brings into the ARK universe will enrich all players' experiences whatever map or mode you're playing on -- and in the weeks ahead we're looking forward to seeing what modders can make with the Scorched Earth content, and the powerful new Blueprint systems coming with them.

    Regarding our upcoming plans for ARK: Survival Evolved, here's a brief outline of what's ahead:

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    - ARK v247 launches later this week, and among other things will include the fan-favorite creatures Tapejara and Archaeopteryx!
    - Breeding Phase 3 and the Boss Ascension Cycle are being wrapped up for release, and will soon make their debut along with the first Tek Tier items (Power Armor).
    - ARK Backstory!! You're going to get your first dose of ARK’s mythology with the Explorer Note system -- will you find them all and begin piecing together the mysteries of the ARK?
    - The first pass of the "Procedurally Generated ARKs" system should be coming to PC next month, and Xbox soon afterwards. Unlimited ARK varieties?! You bet!
    - As Scorched Earth dramatically expands ARK's Blueprint modding capabilities,we will be launching a new Mod Contest with the release of the Dev Kit that incorporates the Scorched Earth content.

    There is a lot more content beyond that as we head into the home-stretch of preparing the game for 1.0 release, but these are some of the things that we're particularly excited to get out to you! We're not nearly at the end of the journey yet, and ARK has much to come in order to fulfill its destiny as the ultimate Dinosaur survival experience of our collective dreams. But with your help, we are going to get there together, and every day will be ever more amazing on the ARK!

    large.ARK_archaeopteryx_Post.jpg.b73c095

    Edited by Jat





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    9 hours ago, Farris said:

    Thank you for the DLC. I'm loving it. Its hard in so many good ways.

    There is only one thing that bothers me and its the return of the REALLY LONG tames. Taming a 120 argent is now 3.5 hours if you can manage to gather 94 raw prime meat without having it spoil. Which is pretty hard on official. Taming a 120 anky is over 10 hours with berries which is more a boring chore than it is enjoyably hard. 

    My question is wether or not there will be updates to the kibble tree. Or are we just missing something, like argents eating terror bird kibble or ankys suddenly enjoying scorpion kibble or whatever. Or is it just supposed to be like this? As it is atm i can't help think its an oversight. Could you clarify this Jeremy Stieglitz?

    Yeah it is impossible to tame anything in Scorched earth for those of us playing on official. No kibble for ankylo would mean a 10 hour tame. No patchys mean no kibble for paracer, that's another 5 hour tame! Come on wildcard please answer this. 

     

    Idk who decided on the time, but the official server taming takes ages already and scorched earth makes it worst. 

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    1 hour ago, LordVargar said:

    so do you have the DLC?  simple question. and as for your PC..... my DLC,s both work fine for the 2 Xbox One's I bought my Wife and kids. Im sorry your so Salty but, honestly and sincerly i dont see anything constructive or positive a Dev can take from this. except you want it to work now and you want free DLC for a game still in development. sorry if i misunderstand but I call jaded and biased on your 2 last posts. Please understand i am not trying to pick a fight just asking you and the others to listen to yourselves for a second. And for the record i would have paid 30 Dollars easily. for a total of 60.

    If you want to have any kind of constructive discussion, it's not nice to call someone "salty". People may be irritated by that as far as I've seen. Nothing personal :) . Generarly, Xbox 1 has one specitification so its easier to optimise for devs. Thus it runs good. When I bought such powerful PC It's fair to expect 40 fps at least. In my previous post I express my frustation and disgust that to enjoy ARK again I had to buy Expansion when main game is not finished and has serious flaws that makes gameplay unenjoyable, repetitive. If DLC is good, then is worth its price. Scorched Earth is worth 20$/ 20 Euro. I don't expect having everything for free. My problem is: If you miss first release date, it's unlogical to put lots of resources for side project such as DLC, because people would see this as greed and it would delay the premiere of main game indirectly or directly.

    Devs can get to know that we, as customers, do not accept such practice and if they care about their reputation they shouldn't have released such pure PR message to community with no apologise for disappointing so many people, no promise to improve communication. The problem is that Early Access became a very convenient way to excuse any lack of content/progress, broken promises and endless development. That's why DayZ or others survival games are called "Forever Early Access games", because devs don't want to release that game in reasonable time clearly.

    Edited by Lewiatan

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    20 hours ago, DragoValhar said:

    About the expansion ARKs, I'm hoping there isn't going to be an absurd number of these.

    I finally bought the expansion yesterday after a lot of thinking on it. The content is good, it might be better priced at 15 bucks, but seems fairly solid. All the new weather effects are nuts. Some cool creatures are around to tame and travel with, Got a friend on the The Center server I run a Jerboa. Map looks great and I can't wait to manage to snag some high level wyvern eggs. 

    This all being said, I love the game, 1200 hours would tell ya that. But the way you released Scorched Earth was dirty and you know it. I don't like the Paid Premium DLC precedent this sets for Early Access Games, and I'm banking on you guys actually needing money right now. Hype Train to the max, and then at the end of the trailer on the live stream "Get it now on Steam." Flipped off my twitch app on my phone, (app eats data like a hungry giga), turn on my steam app, go to the store page and then have the price tag thrown in my face. It took me a minute to register that.. "Huh.. Paid DLC.. In Early Access..  The hell?" I pulled the brakes hard on that and a lot of people who have gotten bled dry by DLC trains like Battlefield and CoD probably did to. You guys really need to communicate intentions a bit better man. Screens have been found of Desert Biome being listed in the Core Goals. I knew I saw it in there before and pulling it out of the notes is a sneaky move. Feature Creep is a thing and I know you guys are way behind schedule at this point. 

    Long story short, I bought Scorched Earth on the hope it'll help you along in the development. Despite my very real concerns that you and your studio are headed in a bad direction. I don't want to see any more core features disappear off the patch notes to be shoved in a paid dlc and unavailable (without admin commands) to the buyers of the original game other than by trading with other people through this "gateway" or whatever. 

    Speaking of this "Gateway", I'm assuming it's the only way to get the SE items over to non SE maps (without admin commands) as both player and dino inventories are wiped upon upload to the ARK. I spoke to my Server Hosting web team and they neither offer this feature or have an ETA on this feature nor know how much they will charge. So unofficial server owners are a bit left in the cold by this. 

    Hope you take time to read this and I hope it makes sense, getting a bit late here so I may be a touch hard to understand in a few spots.

    -A concerned Survivor

    If I may give my opinion....

    I know there has been a firestorm of negativity about the paid content, but think about ARK when compared to your basic Triple-A game on the market. Let's even take a "big" game like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4. A hardcore fanboy/fangirl will maybe spend a few hundred hours on those. Some will spend more. Most will put anywhere from a handful of hours to a couple hundred. I am one of those people that can truly devote myself to a game or a franchise and run it into the ground. I gave each of those examples about 100 hours give or take. They are incredible games that cost me $60 each and got me about 100 or so hours each. I paid $30 for ARK (no damn sales when I wanted it!!! lol) and have now played in the area of 2000 hours. I paid half the price for 20 times the experience. Naturally, that is just me and you all may be different, but I certainly know a lot of players that have 500-1000 hours. There are many that have 2000+, 3000+ hours. I see no argument in charging $20 for content. What many forget is that Wildcard just had to pay out the ass to a former employer of one of the developers. Is that that consumers' fault? No. But it is the reality of the situation. These developers are not in a slave-labor camp where they can just hack away for free. This is a business, these are people that need to pay bills, and paying for content will have to happen. Aren't we all glad that they aren't charging monthly for play? They could have gone that route. 

    Another way that I view this is that we just paid for more of the core game. We don't know the mythology of ARK yet. These ARKs are obviously not just singular entities. There are multiple ARKs and they apparently tie together somehow. We weren't charged the full $60 price tag that one may expect only to be told that "the other half of the game will be out in the next year or two". Instead we paid less, got limited content early, then paid more for a more full game. And did you all forget about the Center? That was free!!! And it is incredible! 

    I understand that money can be tight for some. No one wants to spend money. Without spending money we would have no ARK at all though. Wildcard needs money to function. 

    Just some things to ponder. I will now step off of my pedestal and rejoin the peasants in running from Allos.

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    1 hour ago, Lewiatan said:

    If you want to have any kind of constructive discussion, it's not nice to call someone "salty". People may be irritated by that as far as I've seen. Nothing personal :) . Generarly, Xbox 1 has one specitification so its easier to optimise for devs. Thus it runs good. When I bought such powerful PC It's fair to expect 40 fps at least. In my previous post I express my frustation and disgust that to enjoy ARK again I had to buy Expansion when main game is not finished and has serious flaws that makes gameplay unenjoyable, repetitive. If DLC is good, then is worth its price. Scorched Earth is worth 20$/ 20 Euro. I don't expect having everything for free. My problem is: If you miss first release date, it's unlogical to put lots of resources for side project such as DLC, because people would see this as greed and it would delay the premiere of main game indirectly or directly.

    Devs can get to know that we, as customers, do not accept such practice and if they care about their reputation they shouldn't have released such pure PR message to community with no apologise for disappointing so many people, no promise to improve communication. The problem is that Early Access became a very convenient way to excuse any lack of content/progress, broken promises and endless development. That's why DayZ or others survival games are called "Forever Early Access games", because devs don't want to release that game in reasonable time clearly.

    Please don't speak for me. I, as a customer, understand they are a business and I will have to pay money to get the best product. I, as a customer, am being patient with their progress since I don't know what goes on in their studios or in their bank accounts. I, as a customer, accept that if I don't like their practices I can choose another title to play and may walk away peacefully and quietly without flaming on with negativity. What all this negativity does is paint the ARK COMMUNITY in a negative light, not the development company.

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    7 hours ago, Lewiatan said:

    You say they optimised game a bit by recent patch? Heh. I have I7-6700k, MSI GTX 1080, 32 GB RAM. Before this September update I had 39 fps on epic settings on The Island. After the patch the performance was decreased by 6 fps at least. So, where is that optimisation? The only thing they optimisaed a bit is their shiny DLC. 

    Playing on my MSI Apache GE62, GTX960, 12 GB of RAM, I noticed a jump in FPS, from floating around 30-35 to around 45-50. So maybe it's an individual setup type of thing?

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    7 hours ago, Silk said:

    Honestly, I hope you release more expensive DLC... price it higher. I'd pay $100 for a high end DLC map/server.

    Why?  Because it creates a tier of elitness that fewer people have access to which also creates a less crowded server base, and I'm fine with that.

    Pfft, bring it on bro. I have disposable income... you want to stop at 100?? Weak man. Why can't there just be a game for the 1%?! Kidding, I'm stuck at 5-7% depending on what you read that day. You want a less crowded server base? Stop being such a broke pansy and host a VPS around 250.00 a month and do some advertising. You don't have to depend on WC servers, I don't. 

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    I'm just sitting here waiting for entelodont

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    16 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

    It's not an unreasonable assumption, though how jaded does one have to be to have this as their default mindset? It's rather saddening to know that life can get miserable enough as it is, yet people would rather drag that same negativity in something that's meant to be entertainment (and often an escape from the stresses of life). I choose to believe in the opposite, but that's me. I try to have faith in people and the work they do.

    Pessimists are the worlds happiest people though, there's no end to the topics they can throw valuable input at (hah..) Whenever something goes wrong there's always a merry chorus of told you so but if they're wrong then they're pleasantly surprised.

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    19 minutes ago, MrWrath said:

    If I may give my opinion....

    I know there has been a firestorm of negativity about the paid content, but think about ARK when compared to your basic Triple-A game on the market. Let's even take a "big" game like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4. A hardcore fanboy/fangirl will maybe spend a few hundred hours on those. Some will spend more. Most will put anywhere from a handful of hours to a couple hundred. I am one of those people that can truly devote myself to a game or a franchise and run it into the ground. I gave each of those examples about 100 hours give or take. They are incredible games that cost me $60 each and got me about 100 or so hours each. I paid $30 for ARK (no damn sales when I wanted it!!! lol) and have now played in the area of 2000 hours. I paid half the price for 20 times the experience. Naturally, that is just me and you all may be different, but I certainly know a lot of players that have 500-1000 hours. There are many that have 2000+, 3000+ hours. I see no argument in charging $20 for content. What many forget is that Wildcard just had to pay out the ass to a former employer of one of the developers. Is that that consumers' fault? No. But it is the reality of the situation. These developers are not in a slave-labor camp where they can just hack away for free. This is a business, these are people that need to pay bills, and paying for content will have to happen. Aren't we all glad that they aren't charging monthly for play? They could have gone that route. 

    Another way that I view this is that we just paid for more of the core game. We don't know the mythology of ARK yet. These ARKs are obviously not just singular entities. There are multiple ARKs and they apparently tie together somehow. We weren't charged the full $60 price tag that one may expect only to be told that "the other half of the game will be out in the next year or two". Instead we paid less, got limited content early, then paid more for a more full game. And did you all forget about the Center? That was free!!! And it is incredible! 

    I understand that money can be tight for some. No one wants to spend money. Without spending money we would have no ARK at all though. Wildcard needs money to function. 

    Just some things to ponder. I will now step off of my pedestal and rejoin the peasants in running from Allos.

    What is it about you people? Money has very little to do with this. Perhaps ARK would like to move to a monthly sub, I would be fine with that. Use my sub cash to FINISH the game and not add so much content that even those of you without lives can keep up with it all. I'm not saying that it's bad to have a ton of content either, but I think most of us would like to see more than a freaking dino added into The Island. We were told about these cool things like weather effects and WC delivered... just not really on the map a lot of us started on and don't want to leave. I'll pay xx money to have those features ported if that's what it takes. I'll even buy The Island again if I can get the cool effects given to other ARKs. I will not purchase this DLC to jump start development that already exists, it's time to port the weather effects back now that they have been done. 

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    20 minutes ago, MrWrath said:

    Please don't speak for me. I, as a customer, understand they are a business and I will have to pay money to get the best product. I, as a customer, am being patient with their progress since I don't know what goes on in their studios or in their bank accounts. I, as a customer, accept that if I don't like their practices I can choose another title to play and may walk away peacefully and quietly without flaming on with negativity. What all this negativity does is paint the ARK COMMUNITY in a negative light, not the development company.

    You... the worst kind of consumer. Yes you could vote with your wallet as I am doing but on top of that you could provide feedback and yeah sometimes you have to get pretty negative when you try to be diplomatic and get the company line. I'll be honest, I like what a certain someone had to say to the community because I felt like I moment of realism was reached no matter who was right or who was wrong. Are you suggesting that if I pay for something like internet and it doesn't work so I take to social media to complain it paints me as the end user in a negative light? You might understand some of the cash flow process but I think you are missing the other half. Anyways, for me I run a server and we have a tight community but even then sometimes players will quit and later I will find out it is because they were really upset about something and my policy is to tell me about even the smallest thing that is bothering you so I can make it right but they don't and then they are gone and never come back. I think WC has thick enough skin to take some criticism so they know how to approach something like this again or perhaps address immediate concerns. If the players base just starts bleeding off and they have to scratch their heads we might simply end up with more dinos (maybe that's now what everyone wants) to try to keep the game alive when all the feedback is right here in their faces. The negative reviews aren't exactly good for an EA game and I think they will help WC and not hurt them in the long run.  

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    36 minutes ago, MrWrath said:

    If I may give my opinion....

    I know there has been a firestorm of negativity about the paid content, but think about ARK when compared to your basic Triple-A game on the market. Let's even take a "big" game like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4. A hardcore fanboy/fangirl will maybe spend a few hundred hours on those. Some will spend more. Most will put anywhere from a handful of hours to a couple hundred. I am one of those people that can truly devote myself to a game or a franchise and run it into the ground. I gave each of those examples about 100 hours give or take. They are incredible games that cost me $60 each and got me about 100 or so hours each. I paid $30 for ARK (no damn sales when I wanted it!!! lol) and have now played in the area of 2000 hours. I paid half the price for 20 times the experience. Naturally, that is just me and you all may be different, but I certainly know a lot of players that have 500-1000 hours. There are many that have 2000+, 3000+ hours. I see no argument in charging $20 for content. What many forget is that Wildcard just had to pay out the ass to a former employer of one of the developers. Is that that consumers' fault? No. But it is the reality of the situation. These developers are not in a slave-labor camp where they can just hack away for free. This is a business, these are people that need to pay bills, and paying for content will have to happen. Aren't we all glad that they aren't charging monthly for play? They could have gone that route. 

    Another way that I view this is that we just paid for more of the core game. We don't know the mythology of ARK yet. These ARKs are obviously not just singular entities. There are multiple ARKs and they apparently tie together somehow. We weren't charged the full $60 price tag that one may expect only to be told that "the other half of the game will be out in the next year or two". Instead we paid less, got limited content early, then paid more for a more full game. And did you all forget about the Center? That was free!!! And it is incredible! 

    I understand that money can be tight for some. No one wants to spend money. Without spending money we would have no ARK at all though. Wildcard needs money to function. 

    Just some things to ponder. I will now step off of my pedestal and rejoin the peasants in running from Allos.

    They could have done in-game items, it's not hard to monetize a game without diverting so many dev cycles. I know they said they did not know much about game economies and didn't want to go that route but I do not see the hard at all. If this was really about testing the addition of new ARKs perhaps there is something there but that of course raises the question as to how many ARKs will there be? Will we end up paying several hundred to have them all? You said the didn't charge for The Center and well that's one way to look at it or you could remember that it was free and by most accounts less buggy before they took over. I have talked to many players... everyone I know doesn't care at all about the 20 bucks. We all pretty much agree that we would have preferred about any other way to give WC money without diverting resources from The Island and I guess the Center, Prim +, and SoTF at this point. 

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    11 minutes ago, hawkeye00021 said:

    You... the worst kind of consumer. Yes you could vote with your wallet as I am doing but on top of that you could provide feedback and yeah sometimes you have to get pretty negative when you try to be diplomatic and get the company line. I'll be honest, I like what a certain someone had to say to the community because I felt like I moment of realism was reached no matter who was right or who was wrong. Are you suggesting that if I pay for something like internet and it doesn't work so I take to social media to complain it paints me as the end user in a negative light? You might understand some of the cash flow process but I think you are missing the other half. Anyways, for me I run a server and we have a tight community but even then sometimes players will quit and later I will find out it is because they were really upset about something and my policy is to tell me about even the smallest thing that is bothering you so I can make it right but they don't and then they are gone and never come back. I think WC has thick enough skin to take some criticism so they know how to approach something like this again or perhaps address immediate concerns. If the players base just starts bleeding off and they have to scratch their heads we might simply end up with more dinos (maybe that's now what everyone wants) to try to keep the game alive when all the feedback is right here in their faces. The negative reviews aren't exactly good for an EA game and I think they will help WC and not hurt them in the long run.  

    Not to cast aspersions, but when people resort to voicing their opinions on a companys business practices and passes it off as a product review, then yeah it paints those people in a negative light.

     

    2 minutes ago, hawkeye00021 said:

    They could have done in-game items, it's not hard to monetize a game without diverting so many dev cycles. I know they said they did not know much about game economies and didn't want to go that route but I do not see the hard at all. If this was really about testing the addition of new ARKs perhaps there is something there but that of course raises the question as to how many ARKs will there be? Will we end up paying several hundred to have them all? You said the didn't charge for The Center and well that's one way to look at it or you could remember that it was free and by most accounts less buggy before they took over. I have talked to many players... everyone I know doesn't care at all about the 20 bucks. We all pretty much agree that we would have preferred about any other way to give WC money without diverting resources from The Island and I guess the Center, Prim +, and SoTF at this point. 

    They've stated in press before that they don't plan to do any in-game monetization. Which is understandable. After all, this is a survival sandbox, not an mmorpg. On top of that they already have a merchandise button on this very community hub.

    Edited by ciabattaroll

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    1 minute ago, ciabattaroll said:

    Not to cast aspersions, but when people resort to voicing their opinions on a companys business practices and passes it off as a product review, then yeah it paints those people in a negative light.

    It's a review of a product based on opinion, I'm really not sure where you are going with this. People were happy and then a company did something to upset them so the once positive review they had of the company (reflected on the game as their creation) turns negative because that's now how the person feels about the game and somehow that's on the reviewer? 

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    Just now, hawkeye00021 said:

    It's a review of a product based on opinion, I'm really not sure where you are going with this. People were happy and then a company did something to upset them so the once positive review they had of the company (reflected on the game as their creation) turns negative because that's now how the person feels about the game and somehow that's on the reviewer? 

    It's a review of a company's dealings, not the product itself. Imagine if you will if your community were to shun you because your father was a convicted felon. Is that right? Are you not entitled to be judged by the virtues of your person and not by your blood?

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    1 minute ago, ciabattaroll said:

    It's a review of a company's dealings, not the product itself. Imagine if you will if your community were to shun you because your father was a convicted felon. Is that right? Are you not entitled to be judged by the virtues of your person and not by your blood?

    No, I reviewed the product based on what I read and expected from launch to now. The company makes games, if you are referring to the law suit or people being upset about getting charged for the DLC perhaps I could agree with you on those reviews. I don't care about monetizing the DLC but I do care that it's 1 year later and much of what I was excited about is super delayed and the DLC has been quoted as being more polished than what I'm currently playing. I'm afraid steam doesn't allow you to review a business practice just the product released on their platform. I think the DLC has positive reviews so that's something....  

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    Just now, hawkeye00021 said:

    No, I reviewed the product based on what I read and expected from launch to now. The company makes games, if you are referring to the law suit or people being upset about getting charged for the DLC perhaps I could agree with you on those reviews. I don't care about monetizing the DLC but I do care that it's 1 year later and much of what I was excited about is super delayed and the DLC has been quoted as being more polished than what I'm currently playing. I'm afraid steam doesn't allow you to review a business practice just the product released on their platform. I think the DLC has positive reviews so that's something....  

    I was referring specifically to those players.Hence why my first post on the matter was talking about people rather than a person.

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    Thank you for taking the time to address some of the more pertinent issues spawned by the Scorched Earth expansion. I feel a little reassured about the whole ordeal, but not entirely.

    Unanswered questions:

    When is your best guesstimate release date?

    Are we talking another year of development? Six months? More than one year? I don't mind games being in EA for extended periods of time, but I feel a lot better about it when there's a concrete release date rather than nothing but a "we're working on it," development limbo. I don't mind if this ends up getting delayed... but I appreciate it when I know you guys are aiming for a solid goal.

    Are all the other ARKs going to be paid as well?

    I think this is an important one... because while it may just be my imagination playing tricks on me I could have sworn that you guys were intending to release at least some of the additional maps as free updates instead of paid expansions. Not that I'll be particularly concerned about it provided you can pull off passable procedural generation, but it'd be nice to know. As a bit of early feedback... please allow us to influence the proportions of biomes when generating procedural ARKs. Please note that I'm not counting community-spawned ascended-mod content among "free" official releases.

    When do you expect to get into the nitty-gritty polish?

    I can definitely understand the merit of saving the polish for later, and the reasoning behind it has definitely been explained. However... it's not very reassuring when what I consider to be the most critical part of development - making sure everything meshes together well, that there's a decent amount of depth to the gameplay, and that it looks and feels great to play - is continually postponed.

    I don't see the sort of survival mechanics I was hoping for coming together.

    I don't see the sort of detailed ecosystems I was hoping for coming together (It's just a mish-mash of creatures with little to no bearing on each other, and dinosaurs out of the original Carnivores on PC behaved more believably than some of the creatures wandering around the ARK.)

    I'm not too excited by what amounts to NG+ in a game that is currently little more than a resource grind.

    Please... give us a more immersive experience. I would love to see dino animation and control brought up to the quality of something like Primal Carnage: Extinction.

    Are you going to take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again?

    Unless development is done in the next few months, I'm sure there will be other questionable decisions to make that you will hopefully make for the right reasons. A lot of antipathy can be avoided by explaining your reasoning in this sort of detail when we first hear about it and when it actually goes into effect. Please take the time to do so.

     

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    1 minute ago, ciabattaroll said:

    I was referring specifically to those players.Hence why my first post on the matter was talking about people rather than a person.

    As long as you are ok with a carefully worded negative review, either way I am happy to see that feedback no matter how it reaches the devs and I hope they are too. I work for a company that releases software and there are 6k of us supporting our products. I'll be the first to say that while negative feedback can be personal it's also the most useful way to influence change when you are vested in something. Walking on eggshells will not do any good and while these people that say "blah blah I don't want to pay for DLC" could have left that part out and just said, "I think we missed out on something because of" or any number of other spins you could place on that review I'm not sure it really matters. I do think had WC been very clear why they needed an influx of cash that the particular argument over charging for it might have been toned down but I'm not going to say there aren't thousands of people that are simply upset at what is a pretty low price tag. I am sorry if I misunderstood your audience. 

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    47 minutes ago, Interloper said:

    Pessimists are the worlds happiest people though, there's no end to the topics they can throw valuable input at (hah..) Whenever something goes wrong there's always a merry chorus of told you so but if they're wrong then they're pleasantly surprised.

    Pessimists are just realists who are willing to speak up.

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    5 minutes ago, callawsomelance said:

    OMG YOU GUYS SHOULD MAKE IT SO U CAN RATE SERVERS

    LIKE YOU KNOW WHEN U JOIN A SERVER SPEND HOURS ON IT ONLT TO GET WIPED BY ADMINS?

    SOME SERVERS ARE SO BAD CAUSE OF ADMINS I THINK MANY PEOPLE WOULD AGREE THAT THE OPTION TO PRESS PAUSE AND RATE A SERVER WOULD BE AWESOME!

    a little further out...

    The option to see a servers stats before u join it u wont beilve how much time I spent trying to find a sever with "good stats".

    There are various server rating sites though I'm not sure the rules on posting them here. This is probably off topic as well, if you PM me I'd be happy to send you at least one decent one I know of. I host a server and I'm pretty sure I cannot delete comments.

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    21 minutes ago, ciabattaroll said:

    It's a review of a company's dealings, not the product itself. Imagine if you will if your community were to shun you because your father was a convicted felon. Is that right? Are you not entitled to be judged by the virtues of your person and not by your blood?

    Deceptive analogy. 

    What would be more accurate is to say "Imagine if you were a convicted felon." The business practices of game creators are actually a fairly large consideration for a number of players, so it's entirely reasonable for those practices to influence the review.

    That's the catch to independent player reviews. If the devs want an impartial review of the product and the product alone, they should send review copies to professional critics. Reviews by the players for the players are going to incorporate everything that is relevant to the players... so that's not exactly something that can be considered inappropriate.

    Sure "Lol, EA DLC, this is BS" isn't exactly a high-quality review... but that doesn't mean it is entirely unwarranted or useless. It's the same kind of decision as not eating at Chick-Fil-A or shopping at Hobby Lobby, and things like Steam reviews are an excellent medium for that sort of information. Nobody really takes any individual review all that seriously, but it still gets a general message across.

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    10 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

    Thank you for taking the time to address some of the more pertinent issues spawned by the Scorched Earth expansion. I feel a little reassured about the whole ordeal, but not entirely.

    Unanswered questions:

    When is your best guesstimate release date?

    Are we talking another year of development? Six months? More than one year? I don't mind games being in EA for extended periods of time, but I feel a lot better about it when there's a concrete release date rather than nothing but a "we're working on it," development limbo. I don't mind if this ends up getting delayed... but I appreciate it when I know you guys are aiming for a solid goal.

    Are all the other ARKs going to be paid as well?

    I think this is an important one... because while it may just be my imagination playing tricks on me I could have sworn that you guys were intending to release at least some of the additional maps as free updates instead of paid expansions. Not that I'll be particularly concerned about it provided you can pull off passable procedural generation, but it'd be nice to know. As a bit of early feedback... please allow us to influence the proportions of biomes when generating procedural ARKs. Please note that I'm not counting community-spawned ascended-mod content among "free" official releases.

    When do you expect to get into the nitty-gritty polish?

    I can definitely understand the merit of saving the polish for later, and the reasoning behind it has definitely been explained. However... it's not very reassuring when what I consider to be the most critical part of development - making sure everything meshes together well, that there's a decent amount of depth to the gameplay, and that it looks and feels great to play - is continually postponed.

    I don't see the sort of survival mechanics I was hoping for coming together.

    I don't see the sort of detailed ecosystems I was hoping for coming together (It's just a mish-mash of creatures with little to no bearing on each other, and dinosaurs out of the original Carnivores on PC behaved more believably than some of the creatures wandering around the ARK.)

    I'm not too excited by what amounts to NG+ in a game that is currently little more than a resource grind.

    Please... give us a more immersive experience. I would love to see dino animation and control brought up to the quality of something like Primal Carnage: Extinction.

    Are you going to take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again?

    Unless development is done in the next few months, I'm sure there will be other questionable decisions to make that you will hopefully make for the right reasons. A lot of antipathy can be avoided by explaining your reasoning in this sort of detail when we first hear about it and when it actually goes into effect. Please take the time to do so.

     

    I think if they answer these questions and publish those answers, we would have a big win. I would certainly change my review based on ETAs that are never hit anyways and I know that sounds like sarcasm but it really isn't. 

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    6 minutes ago, DiabolusUrsus said:

    Deceptive analogy. 

    What would be more accurate is to say "Imagine if you were a convicted felon." The business practices of game creators are actually a fairly large consideration for a number of players, so it's entirely reasonable for those practices to influence the review.

    That's the catch to independent player reviews. If the devs want an impartial review of the product and the product alone, they should send review copies to professional critics. Reviews by the players for the players are going to incorporate everything that is relevant to the players... so that's not exactly something that can be considered inappropriate.

    Sure "Lol, EA DLC, this is BS" isn't exactly a high-quality review... but that doesn't mean it is entirely unwarranted or useless. It's the same kind of decision as not eating at Chick-Fil-A or shopping at Hobby Lobby, and things like Steam reviews are an excellent medium for that sort of information. Nobody really takes any individual review all that seriously, but it still gets a general message across.

    Nothing deceptive about it though. You are the product of the consummation of a relationship between your father and your mother, just like ARK is the product of the work of its developers.

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    37 minutes ago, ciabattaroll said:

    Nothing deceptive about it though. You are the product of the consummation of a relationship between your father and your mother, just like ARK is the product of the work of its developers.

    Yes, it is deceptive.

    The difference between me and ARK is that I am capable of independent thought and have a record of personal decisions that only I can be held accountable for. Such is not the case with a video game. It is built entirely off of the merits (or demerits) bestowed upon it by its creators. They and they alone are responsible for the types of experiences it can provide to the player, so of course their business and development practices should be factored into reviews... especially when said reviews are for an Early Access product where a solid assessment of developer integrity and reliability are absolutely crucial.

    Thus boasting a paid DLC in Early Access is a trait that must be attributed to ARK, the product in question. It's one thing to say "this game sux" because it has EA DLC. It's another thing to say "I can't recommend this game because it has EA DLC." 

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