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So, Scorched Earth is kinda pay2win?!


DomiDarko

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1 hour ago, Astroneer said:

@Thalantyr You're missing the concept here. Scorched Earth supplies a new and more challenging experience from the base game. I reckon you might have access to relatively strong weapons or mounts with Scorched Earth, but you are also subject to a more treacherous environment and acquiring said weapons or mounts is a difficult and lengthy process. You can blame 'Pay to Win' all you want if it makes you feel any better, but the developers stated in the past that there would be paid downloadable content, however, it would not give players an advantage over others that chose not to pay for said content. To me, and as for any other reasonable individual, the developers have kept true to their words. Maybe next time build a safe pen for your mounts ;)

I haven't missed any concept. I'm stating based on personal experience. Primitive Game Mode, as that's what I was referring to above and stated a few times, you have ZERO defense other than structural defense. We used stone fence foundations with dual/triple walls on each, a one-foundation-wide 'bubble' so that attackers would overheat and drain down in health fast, followed by pillars placed right through that one-foundation-wide bubble, followed by another set of dual stone walls with an Adobe inside for the base. Outside of that we had multiple rows of spiked walls, multiple levels of ceilings by using foundations to stack them with spiked walls on top, followed by the actual tames themselves that were always anchored correctly and on the right aggressiveness.

I don't disagree with you that Scorched Earth is a lot harder of an environment but that's irrelevant to this discussion. You don't need to dig in to farm this stuff. The question is whether Scorched Earth makes ARK pay to win? Eg: Do the dinos/items from SE give you an advantage? Yes, they do. Flame Arrows do.

If they introduced Flame Arrows into The Island would ARK be Pay To Win? No it wouldn't. However, at the moment they're only available via SE and they are ridiculously overpowered. This isn't just about my base, that was taken down by a horde of Chinese players streaming their attack over the net. I'm talking about what I DID to other tribes back on my original Island server. We didn't even build a decent base, no tames, just a 2x1 Stone Wall building and then transferred back Sulfur & Cactus Sap from SE over and over again, making Propellant & Flame Arrows.

We took down multiple L200+ Giga's, Quetzals, Rexes, Argies, Pteranadons, etc. Everything you can think of. It took nothing. The Flame Arrows drop them so fast it's just not funny. Could we have done it without the Flame Arrows? Maybe, probably, but it made it a hell of a lot easier and faster. Did it give us an advantage over the players on there without Flame Arrows? You're damn right it did.

As I said earlier, this is a combination of offline raiding, primitive game mode flaws & items that only come from Scorched Earth.

There's other things like Oil Jars that you can throw at a wall then light on fire, damaging the dinosaurs on the other side. We've reported this to Wildcard as a bug and it still exists. Who has access to the Oil Jars? People that own Scorched Earth. Does it make raiding another players base easier? Yes, it does, especially when comparing what the player without Scorched Earth can do back to me... fire Stone Arrows? Pike my dinos to death? lol...

TLDR: Flame Arrows need a nerf and it may become less Pay To Win.

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On Sunday, October 30, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Thalantyr said:

I haven't missed any concept. I'm stating based on personal experience. Primitive Game Mode, as that's what I was referring to above and stated a few times, you have ZERO defense other than structural defense. We used stone fence foundations with dual/triple walls on each, a one-foundation-wide 'bubble' so that attackers would overheat and drain down in health fast, followed by pillars placed right through that one-foundation-wide bubble, followed by another set of dual stone walls with an Adobe inside for the base. Outside of that we had multiple rows of spiked walls, multiple levels of ceilings by using foundations to stack them with spiked walls on top, followed by the actual tames themselves that were always anchored correctly and on the right aggressiveness.

I don't disagree with you that Scorched Earth is a lot harder of an environment but that's irrelevant to this discussion. You don't need to dig in to farm this stuff. The question is whether Scorched Earth makes ARK pay to win? Eg: Do the dinos/items from SE give you an advantage? Yes, they do. Flame Arrows do.

If they introduced Flame Arrows into The Island would ARK be Pay To Win? No it wouldn't. However, at the moment they're only available via SE and they are ridiculously overpowered. This isn't just about my base, that was taken down by a horde of Chinese players streaming their attack over the net. I'm talking about what I DID to other tribes back on my original Island server. We didn't even build a decent base, no tames, just a 2x1 Stone Wall building and then transferred back Sulfur & Cactus Sap from SE over and over again, making Propellant & Flame Arrows.

We took down multiple L200+ Giga's, Quetzals, Rexes, Argies, Pteranadons, etc. Everything you can think of. It took nothing. The Flame Arrows drop them so fast it's just not funny. Could we have done it without the Flame Arrows? Maybe, probably, but it made it a hell of a lot easier and faster. Did it give us an advantage over the players on there without Flame Arrows? You're damn right it did.

As I said earlier, this is a combination of offline raiding, primitive game mode flaws & items that only come from Scorched Earth.

There's other things like Oil Jars that you can throw at a wall then light on fire, damaging the dinosaurs on the other side. We've reported this to Wildcard as a bug and it still exists. Who has access to the Oil Jars? People that own Scorched Earth. Does it make raiding another players base easier? Yes, it does, especially when comparing what the player without Scorched Earth can do back to me... fire Stone Arrows? Pike my dinos to death? lol...

TLDR: Flame Arrows need a nerf and it may become less Pay To Win.

I wonder. If all SE craftables were made available in TheIsland/Centermap.... but at an exponentialy higher cost. (And i mean excruciatingly OMFG painfull cost) (Not SE dino's), would pple still consider it p2w?

Some would still say yes since some pple opinion of p2w win is 'any' advantage however small.

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1 hour ago, Vesuvoous said:

I wonder. If all SE craftables were made available in TheIsland/Centermap.... but at an exponentialy higher cost. (And i mean excruciatingly OMFG painfull cost) (Not SE dino's), would pple still consider it p2w?

Some would still say yes since some pple opinion of p2w win is 'any' advantage however small.

There's a post from one of the forum moderators, assuming not a developer, that Wildcard had said that they've tested everything from SE with The Island and it's all balanced correctly. That was in reference to Wyverns, Rock Golems, etc. Obviously things like Flame Arrows were missed in that balance check. I think 'any' advantage that you gain from real currency is effectively pay to win. Games like Dota2 do cosmetics really well. They make people feel like their character looks good but it gives no advantage. Scorched Earth clearly has items that are only available to those with the DLC purchase (unless stolen by those playing vanilla).

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It depends on how you define "win" in a sandbox game. If you mean that to become the strongest in a PVP world, I think that's been fairly addressed. If you mean to get all the explorer notes on the history of the Ark (which is how the OP defines it I gather), then I think there are some important semantics to clarify.

Scorched Earth is like a second release. If you want to know the Halo story, then you need to buy more than the original Halo game. This is how story in series often works. You don't "win" halo when you get all the story line, so perhaps the word choice shouldn't be 'win'.  However if you want to learn the whole story, you will need to own the series. Same with Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. 

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Flame arrows or not, if a good tribe wants your tames dead it's going to happen... Now...if you want to talk leveling the playing field... How about the devs give us an auto arrow turret that we could load with the arrow of our choice? A few of those mounted around your base would stop pretty much anyone trying to kill your tames.

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I know that to a lot of people pay-to-win is a very dirty phrase. But here's my view of it: If play-to-win means playing with more skill than your opponent, then it's a good thing and that's what a game developer should be aiming for. But pay-with-your-time is just as unfair as pay-with-your-money. The only difference is that it caters to a different audience.

That being said, until I see a SE tame that can beat down a Giga in a fair fight I can't see any of the SE tames being pay-to-win. Flame arrows on the other hand...

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  • 3 months later...

I think the flame arrows are very powerful and only available on SE and so you could argue you need both to win... this is a cost. 

But I think the overall benefit to the game of having a way for "relatively" small tribes to be able to take on alpha tribes a bit, can only be a good thing.  So many people leave ark because the alpha tribes 'own' the server, and now thanks to flame arrows this is no longer the case since the smaller tribes can fight back.

 

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Yeah scorched has been pay to win since it got released. It was worse when you could only transfer from scorched and not to. Great gear like flame arrows, whips, flamethrowers, homing rockets and good tames like Wyverns and Golems are only available to you if you pay for the dlc and they give you an advantage over players who have not paid for the dlc. Its honestly disgusting.

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On ‎10‎/‎28‎/‎2016 at 6:39 PM, Sov said:

Most people dont consider those a form of winning.  Most would consider winning as becoming and maintaining status as server hegemon (i.e. alpha).  Like life, there is no winning since it is open ended.  Since everyone will die sooner or later, and mankind itself will one day go extinct, there really is no winning, only survival in the present.

 

"To survive a war, you must become a war!"  - John J. Rambo.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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