My Ark Story and The Problem No One Is Talking About...

Coupixel · December 30, 2016

The story...

So on the official server we decided to spawn in to on our first time in Ark, it is ruled with an iron fist by a tribe of Chinese people (not trying to be rude, it is) who have admitted to having over 6000 hours played. Wyverns, max every dino, the works. Stuff you definitely earn putting in that much time.

Then there's us. Fresh to the game, put in about 120 hours over a few weeks, not really knowing much about the game. The alpha is somewhat nice, comes over and tries to chat with us in broken English, gives us some gear to help us out, sweet! Random Saturday, I get a call that everything we spent about two weeks to build was destroyed in about 2 minutes. They brought over a wyvern and a poopload of rockets, blew the base to smithereens, and killed all of our dinos. Something that made me laugh (I realize it doesn't mean much) was that we specifically asked if there were rules we shouldn't break to live peacefully. We were told no gigas and no ankys. That's fine, we can live with that. That was the night prior to us being turned in to dust. Either right before or right after destroying our base, they dropped a vault on literally EVERY. SINGLE. DROP. There's no way to transfer our characters off the server. Hundreds of combined hours wasted unless we wanted to stay here...

At that point, every real life friend I had playing on the server left and started playing on unofficial or Primitive Plus servers. I decided to stay behind and try to be a thorn in their side, just as a fun game for myself. For about a week or so, I was trying to build "hidden" bases all around the map, but to no avail. The render distance glitch (PLEASE FIX THIS) allows them to find my hidden bases within a few hours of being built, and then they of course destroy them in minutes. I persevere, keep playing and having fun, trying to sneakily build up to a point where I can just commit some guerrilla warfare.

Queue tonight. I'm inside a pretty well hidden base below some very large trees, impossible to see from the air, you need to be at walking ground level. I never use fire or whatnot in the night, just trying to remain hidden. I walk out of my front door and wham, dude one hit KOs me, I got knocked TF OUT! Takes all my valuables and bounces. I laugh about it, nothing too bad that I can't replace. I wake up, rush inside and start remaking everything they took. About a minute later, all the trees around my base start falling down. They are lumberjacking the entire area to reveal my tiny base. It's time for war!

I sneak out my top hatch and start shooting tranq arrows from my crossbow right in to this dudes head. This goes on for about 2 minutes, I used about 20 of my tranq arrows, landing at minimum 10 arrows to his head, and a couple to his body as well. All the while, he is trying to shoot me with tranq darts, but missing like mad. As I load up my last tranq arrow, he lands a single tranq dart on me, and I pass out immediately. I had been slowly eating stimberries trying to avoid that exact thing. When he lands a hit, my lowly 92 ptera goes after him. He force feeds me about 10 narcotics and proceeds to butcher my bird with his 323 ptera, then kills my 21 stego for good measure. As he is walking back towards me, I wake up and start sprinting for cover. Right about this time, two of his tribemates show up on max pteras and start dive bombing me, trying to scoop me up, all the while I'm dodging and firing off my pistol rounds at them. After numerous misses, one of them finally grabs me, floats slightly off the ground, tribemate whips out his prod, boom down for the count, narcotics ensue. They start talking mad smack about how good they are, bragging and putting their full ascendant flak / chitin gear on me and then taking it off. They build one of the cages and put me inside it, and start making spitting noises through the mic. Obviously smack talk goes back and forth, me mainly focusing on how terrible their aim is.

About 5 minutes later, I wake up and glitch outside the cage somehow and book it for the hills! All 3 of them start chasing me like mad men, shooting tranq darts, pistol rounds, and even a few rocket rounds (LOL!), all of which miss. Seriously guys, have you EVER played an FPS in your life? Finally, the inevitable happens, and I run out of stamina. One of them walks up behind me and prods me, boom down for the count again. New cage goes up, finally they get it right and I'm inside of it, wake up and can't do much, I'm their prisoner. After around 15 minutes of smack talk and knocking me out repeatedly, they whip out their trusty rocket launcher and blow my measly ass to pieces. I respawn and they are nowhere to be found, presumably off in one of their 5 (that I've seen) fully turreted skyscrapers that are littered all across the map. That's the end of the night for me, time to finally bite the bullet and reroll on a different server I suppose?

The problem...

Gear in Ark is absolutely insane. I realize in a game like this, putting that much effort in to getting your ascendant gear means it should be wildly powerful, but it is literally a full on replacement for any type of skill whatsoever. As I said in my story above, when I was dueling one of the alpha tribe with my tranq arrows and crossbow, I hit him in 10+ to the head and a few to the body to ZERO effect, and he manages to clip me a single time in the timeframe of about a minute. Their ascendant gear literally makes them gods among the entire server, of which every drop on the entire map is blocked off, and they have lvl200+ dinos guarding every cave to keep anyone from venturing in to those as well. This means there is absolutely no way to EVER become competitive with them. I'm honestly just curious if this is the intended game design for PvP server?

EDIT - Continuation of our story...

The continuation...

Tonight started slow. I logged on and began gathering some essentials for what I had planned. First step was a TON of wood to build a makeshift base that looked like a noob's starter base out in the open next to one of their bases. After that was done, a few of my real life friends that had heard my plans got interested and jumped on to help me gather the required materials. The next step was to finally place my fabricator that I had hidden for a few days (the Alpha tribe wipes anyone with a fabricator). A few metal/crystal runs later, we threw all the gathered materials in the fabricator and crafted 8 Poison Grenades.

The "noob base" mentioned earlier had a two door entryway that led in to a box with an opening on the top that was 4 stories tall, nothing fancy, but damn sure effective for what we had in store. We waited for about 30 minutes for a few of the Alpha tribe to log in, then started the trap.

We renamed the tribe to "Tribe of" and then the name of our bait noob player. She started talking in all chat asking for the Alpha tribe's help because "an alpha raptor spawned right in my base! :(". A few other people on the server took the bait and said they would come help, but we tried to play it off like someone already did and died (one of our tribemates left the tribe then started talking in all chat).

About 10 minutes in, a random group of two guys ambushes our bait who was standing outside the base and took all her stuff (nothing important) which initiated a battle between a few of us and the two running away on a raft. One of them ended up getting punched out, we drug him in to the base and tried to explain to him what we were doing, but he wasn't really interested, so he just kept trying to be a pain and ruin it. A few minutes later, our prisoner's duo shows up trying to break him out, so a battle broke out, which ended with his demise pretty quickly.

However, during this short battle, the Alpha tribe showed up and saw us fighting, and quickly tranq'd our bait player who had respawned, and started chasing one of our other players around the base. After a few laps around the base (it was pitch black), he got in side the base and hid behind the door, waiting for our ambush. The Alpha tribe member was a bit suspicious and chucked a few grenades in, waited a few seconds, then peaked his head in. Our player in the poison pit slams the door behind him, and the Alpha member frantically tries to escape.

It's too late, I have already thrown four Poison Grenades in to the pit. If real life emotions were transferred in to the game, those Poison Grenades probably would have knocked down the walls! My heart is racing. I hear our member in the pit scream "YES! HE'S DOWN!" and we all start shouting in the Skype call with excitement. Then my heart stops, and I see my torpor meter going up too. I pass out up top. I did a lot of testing with the grenades prior to this, and if they are not thrown correctly, they bounce HIGH, I'm talking 10-20 feet. I assume one of the four I lobbed had actually wanted to be a bouncing betty land mine instead. A few seconds later, our bait player outside the base wakes up, runs inside, strips the gear off of the Alpha tribe member, and runs like the freaking wind in to the forest and disappears.

Before I can wake up, our prisoner wakes up, comes upstairs, and strips all my gear, including my remaining narcotics and poison grenades, and jumps down. poop! It all happened so fast we had completely forgotten about him. He was in the middle of a cage, but they are so damn glitchy that he woke up outside of it. Once I finally wake up, I look over the ledge and see the Alpha tribe member and our prisoner fighting. I demolish one of our upper walls and try to make a break for the woods, followed closely by one of our other tribe members. No go, the Alpha tribe has arrived in full force with multiple wyverns and a few max pteras. We both got picked up and carried back to the beach, tranq'd, and caged.

We are dying of laughter at this point. A player with 6000+ hours played is completely naked with none of the gear he has worked so hard to get, and they are talking poop and spitting on our bodies over the mic. News flash: We played for 3 hours, and one of your Alpha members is naked. Who really wins that trade?

At this point, we start debating if we should use the gear we just swiped from them to continue our warfare, or destroy it. Using the stack of new tranq darts we had acquired to potentially get even more off of the Alpha tribe seemed like a blast, but it would be an uphill battle against all of those wyverns, and dying meant they got it all back. We choose the safer, more damaging option; we dropped it all, and waited in the forest until it all despawned. (Screenshots!) Once it despawned, our bait character (who just so happens to be my amazing wife) ran back to the beach and started laughing hysterically at them. They tranq her and put her in a cage next to us.

The next 15 or so minutes were an absolute riot. They continually tried to cage us, but we'd constantly wake up outside the cage. Every time we woke up, we would start throwing hands, completely naked, at these full ascendant wearing characters. The funniest part? They are such complete trash at aiming that multiple times, we knocked out one of their members before they got us knocked out again. At one point, myself and a tribemate both woke up outside a cage at the same time and went after the nearest Alpha, and we ended up knocking him out, stripping his gear, and running for the forest. I got a good distance in to the forest before a max ptera picked me up. I immediately opened my inventory and started dropping every piece of colored gear I could see, which including a few more ascendant pieces, as he was flying at warp speed back to the cages! (sorry, happened too fast, no screenshots for those)

When we get back to the cages, we see two things, one funnny, and one that is pretty disturbing. The funny thing is that the person who ambushed us and ruined our plan that easily could have ended with multiple of the alpha tribe losing all their gear, was also in a cage next to us, in handcuffs, screaming at them.

The disturbing thing? The Alpha tribe is taking turns drugging my wife's character, pulling her out of the cage, and eRaping a video game model. What? Seriously? All of us wake up around this time to see it, and basically make the decision that they are actually legitimate sociopaths, if not downright disturbed as people, and get a few more good laughs at their absolute lack of skills (which 6000+ hours played can't even overcome!), and log off. We had all agreed that after we did some damage to roll on a new server anyways.

About an hour after this had all happened, we all log in to see just how dedicated they are at keeping us prisoners. All of our survivors had been killed. Except one... My wife's. These disgusting people carried my wife's character back to their base and put her in a room with a bed in it, handcuffed, WITH AC UNITS, and her character was fully fed and hydrated. Words cannot describe how absolutely mortified I am that people like this actually exist on this planet.

See the screenshots of the gear deletion here: http://imgur.com/a/FX8lp

FIN STORY.

We're all planning on finding a new server to have some fun on, hopefully one not ruled by sociopathic Chinese people who have more time in this game than real life over the last year. Tonight is definitely going down in our history books as amazing gaming moments. What an absolute blast!

Happy new year everyone.

Danouk · December 30, 2016

They are trying to find a balance on everything. But the problem is that as for now they will not wipe official servers when the game comes out officially. The big problem is that any new player as you just went through yourself will have no fun at all and won't b able to ever be competitive. I am sure they aware of this so they might have a solution to this that we might find out later.

i hope they do have a solution because it's going to be very very difficult for any new player to get into the game.

Crows · December 30, 2016

Wow... this is seriously ridiculous and just goes to show that some "people" are actually, worryingly not people whatsoever. There's playing a game for fun and for competition, then there's taking a game too far to the point where it basically becomes ones reality. They're definitely sociopaths. I'm glad you caused them a bit of trouble, I'd do the same and find as many ways as possible to troll them hard.

Shrekasaurus · December 30, 2016

CRAZY STORY!!! I've never played official so I can't relate in any way, but I do understand the problems. One problem I have with the game, even in singleplayer (which is what I do) is how dumb the dino AI is and how easy it makes killing/taming them.

GP · December 30, 2016

I hope you find a good unofficial server. I believe they are the future of ARK tbh.

Suave · December 30, 2016

Oh man... gotta love trolling.

Suave · December 30, 2016

very well written BTW.

Manta · December 30, 2016

This is common and your not the only one with the exact same story. I had the exact same encounter you had, but they got me immediately.
I didn't stand a chance they in full ascendant armor, rockets, Chinese dragon horde lands on my base. Most will say, do the same thing we do,
make alliances, hide, stash things, build small etc blah blah.

Bottom-line, this doesn't work when your not a megatribe. You just can't do anything to them sustainable.
Its like shooting spit wads at a Giga. You can't build up, you can't leave the server, you can't play the game for the most part as you get locked down.

I mean if I go play, get captured, jailed and traq constantly so I cannot play or do anything, I just spent $30 for a game I can't play or make progress?
We all know its PvP and these things happen, but some of this game and its processes are really dumb and make playing difficult or downright impossible
not just in PvP.

The cross ark transfers was a good idea gone bad. Now we got super alphas farming servers to raid across the ark galaxy with impunity.
How is any one person or a med-large tribe going to counter a mega, your not. Even the alphas are falling off one by one and being replaced by these mega's.

Some will probably say, oh you don't know how to play or get better and about 100 other useless suggestions. Sorry this just isn't reality anymore and you can grind until
your blue in the face but they just come again with more resources day after day and wipe you back to zero. This is the new norm.

On our current server they [megatribe] like to let you build up again before coming back around for the annual wipe. So that's kind of fun as we at least get
a feeling we are getting somewhere again and then "bam" back to the stone age. I'm tired of grinding over and over now, its not fun anymore even with x2 & x3
that's a joke and a dumb solution to another problem not being addressed. I don't actually build up any more or do tames or anything like that now just to loose it all again.
I get a bird and just fly around until the dragons get me again. So I have become a lonewolf scout sort of but if I find anything no one can do anything about it as
they are all weak like the rest of us.

And yet I still play this damb game daily. lol

Coupixel · December 30, 2016

7 hours ago, Danouk said:

They are trying to find a balance on everything. But the problem is that as for now they will not wipe official servers when the game comes out officially. The big problem is that any new player as you just went through yourself will have no fun at all and won't b able to ever be competitive. I am sure they aware of this so they might have a solution to this that we might find out later.

i hope they do have a solution because it's going to be very very difficult for any new player to get into the game.

I'm honestly not one to think a wipe is a necessity. I do think it's hypocritical for an Alpha tribe who spends their days running around with rockets from their vault full of rockets blowing thatch, wood, and stone bases to the moon to say there shouldn't be a wipe because they have a lot of time in to the game though. So do the people they are crushing over and over again. The only difference is that the game doesn't allow any smaller tribes to overtake you when the gap is as it is on our server.

I think the much better solution is to make the drops unblockable, or at least take more effort than dropping a metal platform under it. The gear is just too strong to allow an Alpha tribe the ability to keep others from attaining it 100%, because there's literally no way to kill them without it. Skill is not required whatsoever with an Ascendant to Primitive gear gap, as you can see from my story above. I agree fully that Ascendant gear should be amazing, and make you truly powerful, but it should not be a replacement for being good at the game. I absolutely destroyed all 3 of the Alpha players last night in regards to skill, but got obliterated because of gear. Not very fun, for me at least.

6 hours ago, Crows said:

Wow... this is seriously ridiculous and just goes to show that some "people" are actually, worryingly not people whatsoever. There's playing a game for fun and for competition, then there's taking a game too far to the point where it basically becomes ones reality. They're definitely sociopaths. I'm glad you caused them a bit of trouble, I'd do the same and find as many ways as possible to troll them hard.

I still plan on doing so as well, but need to refine my strategy a bit. I also plan on recording the next battle, should be a good one ;).

6 hours ago, Shrekasaurus said:

CRAZY STORY!!! I've never played official so I can't relate in any way, but I do understand the problems. One problem I have with the game, even in singleplayer (which is what I do) is how dumb the dino AI is and how easy it makes killing/taming them.

It was crazy for sure, super fun. Easily the most fun I've had thus far!

I don't mind much of the taming/killing aspects. A lot of the dinos seem on par with strength to me, maybe a little too easy as you've stated. I like what we're seeing in regards to the different types of tames coming out.

6 hours ago, GamerPerfection said:

I hope you find a good unofficial server. I believe they are the future of ARK tbh.

I've tried a few here and there, but they always seem to have heavy handed admins or no population. I'm sure I will find a good one eventually.

2 hours ago, Suave said:

Oh man... gotta love trolling.

very well written BTW.

They definitely trolled me pretty hard!

Thanks for the kind words.

Coupixel · December 30, 2016

28 minutes ago, Manta said:

This is common and your not the only one with the exact same story. I had the exact same encounter you had, but they got me immediately.
I didn't stand a chance they in full ascendant armor, rockets, Chinese dragon horde lands on my base. Most will say, do the same thing we do,
make alliances, hide, stash things, build small etc blah blah.

Bottom-line, this doesn't work when your not a megatribe. You just can't do anything to them sustainable.
Its like shooting spit wads at a Giga. You can't build up, you can't leave the server, you can't play the game for the most part as you get locked down.

I mean if I go play, get captured, jailed and traq constantly so I cannot play or do anything, I just spent $30 for a game I can't play or make progress?
We all know its PvP and these things happen, but some of this game and its processes are really dumb and make playing difficult or downright impossible
not just in PvP.

The cross ark transfers was a good idea gone bad. Now we got super alphas farming servers to raid across the ark galaxy with impunity.
How is any one person or a med-large tribe going to counter a mega, your not. Even the alphas are falling off one by one and being replaced by these mega's.

Some will probably say, oh you don't know how to play or get better and about 100 other useless suggestions. Sorry this just isn't reality anymore and you can grind until
your blue in the face but they just come again with more resources day after day and wipe you back to zero. This is the new norm.

On our current server they [megatribe] like to let you build up again before coming back around for the annual wipe. So that's kind of fun as we at least get
a feeling we are getting somewhere again and then "bam" back to the stone age. I'm tired of grinding over and over now, its not fun anymore even with x2 & x3
that's a joke and a dumb solution to another problem not being addressed. I don't actually build up any more or do tames or anything like that now just to loose it all again.
I get a bird and just fly around until the dragons get me again. So I have become a lonewolf scout sort of but if I find anything no one can do anything about it as
they are all weak like the rest of us.

And yet I still play this damb game daily. lol

For real! We still just keep on playing, even though we have noticed the reality of the game: it's basically impossible to kill them.

Our server gets wiped about once a week to two weeks, ruthlessly. They leave you nothing. Right back to fresh spawn minus being level 1 status. It's painful to play with alpha/mega tribes who treat the server as such.

On that note though, I am almost positive the Alpha on our server is actually one of the mega tribes who use our home as a farming base to tame everything, then transfer off and demolish other servers. When I stated that they had 5 fully turreted, all metal skyscrapers, I wasn't joking. That doesn't include the hundreds of taming pens all around the map, many of them big enough for gigas and the like. We also know for certain that they at least have an alliance to a SE server, as they bring new Wyverns over quite often.

MrDolphin · December 30, 2016

Let me copy paste this :
The problem as i mentioned in probably many streams, podcast and other inteviews and talking with the community is that Ark unlike most Survival games, refuses to wipe official servers in a seasonal or within a certain period of time, That is the core of the problem, is being shown that servers populate when there is a fresh start, i assume WC doesnt wipe mostly because it uses a lot of these PVP server to do test and stress test and such. However we have finally moved from X1 to X2 . I hope in the future the community finally accepts seasonal wipes for their Official PVP servers, to keep things fresh and fair. The problem are not the players but the system which allows this.

Erisine · December 31, 2016

20 hours ago, Coupixel said:

The problem...

Gear in Ark is absolutely insane. I realize in a game like this, putting that much effort in to getting your ascendant gear means it should be wildly powerful, but it is literally a full on replacement for any type of skill whatsoever. As I said in my story above, when I was dueling one of the alpha tribe with my tranq arrows and crossbow, I hit him in 10+ to the head and a few to the body to ZERO effect, and he manages to clip me a single time in the timeframe of about a minute. Their ascendant gear literally makes them gods among the entire server, of which every drop on the entire map is blocked off, and they have lvl200+ dinos guarding every cave to keep anyone from venturing in to those as well. This means there is absolutely no way to EVER become competitive with them. I'm honestly just curious if this is the intended game design for PvP server?

I absolutely agree with this, and have brought it up countless times over on Reddit.

There is WAY too much scale between the different tiers. The mid-level tiers have almost no purpose what-so-ever in the game other than for tricking newbies into thinking there's a colorful building system and you can make pretty, theme-appropriate buildings. The only time the mid-level content gets any use is on a primitive server.

Thatch and cloth tier were reasonable starter materials back when the game didn't have 3/4ths of the dinos it has now. Hide and wood are balanced, reasonable upgrades. Stone is powerful and is significantly upgraded over wood -- both in durability and in what could originally destroy it, as is chitin over hide. But that's were the reasonable escalation ends -- primitive flak and metal building pieces are well beyond stone/chitin, to the point that they become utterly useless. It is just as easy to farm massive amounts of metal as it is to farm other materials -- and in some cases, it's EASIER to farm metal than stone.

Now here comes 1-shotting, stone-grinding dinos and post-metal tier riot and tek gear. What's even the point of playing the game at all when the only reasonable thing to do is spam-craft boxes and rafts until you level, or abuse the grinder?

The game's difficulty multiplier has had way too much of an effect on the quality of normal drops, and the devs, for whatever reason, keep releasing events and other drops that leave behind ASCENDANT gear -- which, to be quite honest, isn't even remotely balanced. Honest to God, there shouldn't be any piece of equipment -- saddle, weapon, or armor -- in the game that's over apprentice when it comes to the stat gains. I don't care that "Oh, but it costs so much more!" It doesn't matter -- it shouldn't exist in the game, period. (Dare I even mention how saddles are a 1-and-done sort of deal anyhow.)

Grognak · December 31, 2016

17 hours ago, GamerPerfection said:

I hope you find a good unofficial server. I believe they are the future of ARK tbh.

WOW... a Moderator even hates officials...

Unseen · December 31, 2016

1 hour ago, Grognak said:

WOW... a Moderator even hates officials...

Yer its sort of gold when Moderator can't even bring them self's to recommend official servers lol can blame him! lol

I personally think the ascendant gear is really not that OP at all maybe on dinos it can be a bit much but on players it make only so much difference I dont think many people understand how armor works in ark and the fact that there is little difference in damage taken between 100 armor and 200 armor. People are always saying poop like wow i found a 200 armor chest BP the fact of the matter is the durability is the thing that matters the most once your over that 100 armor mark your armor pretty much always breaks before you die. Now when we consider the cost of 100 durability between asendent and normal flack its massive it cost like 6x more sure you can take a few more hits but the cost makes it so much that only dup or idiot use it in large war the rest of us are rocking journeyman or mc gear at best not because we dont have the BP but its not worth the cost. As for just fly around getting stuff done sure some alphas rock ascendant gear but thats just so they do have to repair there armor much.

If you really did get 10x headshots he would be down unless he had stims on him. normal crossbow 70torp + 87.5ticks torp = 157.5 x 2.5(headshot)x0.05 (ascendant flak helmet) = 19.6 damage then fortitude damage reduction sound like you were on SE so lets say he had 20 thats a 30% torpa damage reduction so 13.72 so it should have taken 4 head shots to take him down with a normal crossbow. Ark does have poor hit rego so some of them might have missed but still might appear like they where in his head and this is assuming you hit him in a short period of time.

Also on a side not his head armor should have broken after 10 shots a doubt he had a 875 durability on his helmet

Coupixel · January 1, 2017

22 hours ago, Erisine said:

I absolutely agree with this, and have brought it up countless times over on Reddit.

There is WAY too much scale between the different tiers. The mid-level tiers have almost no purpose what-so-ever in the game other than for tricking newbies into thinking there's a colorful building system and you can make pretty, theme-appropriate buildings. The only time the mid-level content gets any use is on a primitive server.

Thatch and cloth tier were reasonable starter materials back when the game didn't have 3/4ths of the dinos it has now. Hide and wood are balanced, reasonable upgrades. Stone is powerful and is significantly upgraded over wood -- both in durability and in what could originally destroy it, as is chitin over hide. But that's were the reasonable escalation ends -- primitive flak and metal building pieces are well beyond stone/chitin, to the point that they become utterly useless. It is just as easy to farm massive amounts of metal as it is to farm other materials -- and in some cases, it's EASIER to farm metal than stone.

Now here comes 1-shotting, stone-grinding dinos and post-metal tier riot and tek gear. What's even the point of playing the game at all when the only reasonable thing to do is spam-craft boxes and rafts until you level, or abuse the grinder?

The game's difficulty multiplier has had way too much of an effect on the quality of normal drops, and the devs, for whatever reason, keep releasing events and other drops that leave behind ASCENDANT gear -- which, to be quite honest, isn't even remotely balanced. Honest to God, there shouldn't be any piece of equipment -- saddle, weapon, or armor -- in the game that's over apprentice when it comes to the stat gains. I don't care that "Oh, but it costs so much more!" It doesn't matter -- it shouldn't exist in the game, period. (Dare I even mention how saddles are a 1-and-done sort of deal anyhow.)

I don't think the gap between any of the Primitive armor is too wild, it's the upgraded gear from drops and caves that I'm mainly focusing on, such as Ascendant flak over Primitive flak.

You can kill someone wearing Primitive Flak while wearing Primitive Hide, but it's basically impossible to kill someone in Ascendant gear while using Primitive gear.

Coupixel · January 1, 2017

20 hours ago, Unseen said:

Yer its sort of gold when Moderator can't even bring them self's to recommend official servers lol can blame him! lol

I personally think the ascendant gear is really not that OP at all maybe on dinos it can be a bit much but on players it make only so much difference I dont think many people understand how armor works in ark and the fact that there is little difference in damage taken between 100 armor and 200 armor. People are always saying poop like wow i found a 200 armor chest BP the fact of the matter is the durability is the thing that matters the most once your over that 100 armor mark your armor pretty much always breaks before you die. Now when we consider the cost of 100 durability between asendent and normal flack its massive it cost like 6x more sure you can take a few more hits but the cost makes it so much that only dup or idiot use it in large war the rest of us are rocking journeyman or mc gear at best not because we dont have the BP but its not worth the cost. As for just fly around getting stuff done sure some alphas rock ascendant gear but thats just so they do have to repair there armor much.

If you really did get 10x headshots he would be down unless he had stims on him. normal crossbow 70torp + 87.5ticks torp = 157.5 x 2.5(headshot)x0.05 (ascendant flak helmet) = 19.6 damage then fortitude damage reduction sound like you were on SE so lets say he had 20 thats a 30% torpa damage reduction so 13.72 so it should have taken 4 head shots to take him down with a normal crossbow. Ark does have poor hit rego so some of them might have missed but still might appear like they where in his head and this is assuming you hit him in a short period of time.

Also on a side not his head armor should have broken after 10 shots a doubt he had a 875 durability on his helmet

An Ascendant helmet would not break after a few headshots, they have insane durability. I'm also pretty sure he was chugging away on Stimulants.

I did hit him in the head at least 10 times, full hit registry, blood, arrow in his head, the works. If you can have all of those while missing, then I could have missed a few, but not many.

Unseen · January 1, 2017

25 minutes ago, Coupixel said:

An Ascendant helmet would not break after a few headshots, they have insane durability. I'm also pretty sure he was chugging away on Stimulants.

um yer they do i just did the maths for you, it is possible to get ascendant flak with over 900 durability but its extremely rare i dont think I've ever seen a BP of this quality usually there more like 400-600 from memory. And not if it comes up as a rego hit then it counts. could have just swapped out armor. Ascendant player armor is not OP.

Coupixel · January 1, 2017