Quetzal mining is still too OP

[Thatch]

more stuff getting nerfed on pve because of pvp cry babies.

[Lockjaw]

41 minutes ago, Jostabeere said:

That's the thing that makes the creatures interesting in this games. They are not en par. Making everything the same and as useful as everything else is just boring. Then we can get grey blobs instead of different dinosaurs.

If we were comparing, say, a Para against something like a Rex or a Giga then I'd agree with you. But in the context of the creatures that are generally compared against each other I'd say that you just made a good argument in favor of better balance, not against it. Probably the balance issue that has come up more than anything else is Rex vs Giga. The real Rex and Giga were roughly the same size on average, and Rex actually had a far more powerful bite than the Giga. Now granted, there is room for some artistic liberty because it's a game and these are 'made up subspecies', but after a certain point you might as well not even call it a Rex and Giga anymore. If they wanted absolute freedom to do whatever they want then they might as well replace the dinosaurs with grey blobs. But I digress. This thread is about the Quetzal exploit, not the Giga...

I also want to point out that there is a big difference between everything being useful in it's own way, and everything being the same. I'd say that Pteranodons and Ankylosaurs have a comparable level of usefulness, yet they don't step on each other's toes because they do vastly different things.

[Unseen]

I've said this before but i'll say it again the only thing achieved but nerfing quetzal anky mining is putting everyone who builds far away from metal at an extreme disadvantage until there is better metal distribution unless you want half the island to be pointless to build on.... the other thing achieved is making it extremely hard to house/ protect you dinos from offline grievers who will just fire arrow everything they can. Also why would you want to make any resource harder to get when people are still or have in the past already dup tons off vaults full off it if anything they should make it easier so legit player can compete sort off. In reality a wipe is what is needed and a concentration on banning/suspending anyone who is thought to be part of a tribe ddosing servers if there hardware cant handle it then need a admin get on to any official server that is getting ddosed and just ban everyone who they believer are dossing as thats the best possible solution at this point.      

[Smash]

16 hours ago, Hornedfrog85 said:

Soooo let me get this right you actually dont play the game anymore but are on the forums moaning about something you don't do....  Right ok.  There are enough things in the game that you have to harvest without spending hours collecting metal.  For pvp it means there is more PVP.  Pve i dunno never played. 

Yes, why is that so hard to believe?  Perhaps if the game is improved marketably then my status as a non-player might change perhaps?  I have 3.3k hours in this game.  I'm fairly invested in it at this point.

16 hours ago, Samury1000 said:

What you think it's easy to catch a Quetzal. It took many many hours to knock out and many many many hours to tame and a lot of team mates. It's not easy at all. Get in a tribe or deal with it.

The first one is on the harder side of tames, but once you've got one getting your next one is considerably easier.  This makes quetzals an un-necessary slingshot for tribes that are already ahead.

14 hours ago, Jostabeere said:

@Smash If you're bored about having everything. Start to play on a new server. Don't need a punishment for all if you're bored. You're always free to start from scratch.

I would but given the amount of duped dinos and bases out there plus tribes with BPs from jump puzzles and fishing that they never should have gotten there's really no point.  That's why the servers need to be wiping because most people with 18+months in this game have about 4 years of current farming up their sleeves, but that's a different discussion.

10 hours ago, GoinApe said:

You are a complete shmuck, people like you make me want to quick ark...

What a shame that would be.

10 hours ago, GoinApe said:

"oh no a tribe that's actually good got a quetz, and I can't compete with them, and now I have to go whine to the devs about it so they can nerf it."

Boring strawman.  Did you join the forums just to post that?

10 hours ago, GoinApe said:

and ark dev reads this just know by nerfing the quetz you made tribes have to grind 100x more, which means that if you're a tribe with 4 people you have to be on 24/7 grinding, to hope that you don't get raided it's way easier to raid someone in this game than it is building up a base, and the scoop quetz made it much easier or tribes to build up and actually have a chance. Good job on screwing up another good thing on ark.

Building and gathering are integral parts of Ark.  If you don't like them then why did you stop playing CoD?  The time spent building and taming adds a level of risk to this game that makes it exciting but if you take that away it's just a really bad shooter with dinosaurs.

[Smash]

6 hours ago, Jostabeere said:

That's the thing that makes the creatures interesting in this games. They are not en par. Making everything the same and as useful as everything else is just boring. 

That makes absolutely no sense.  No one is suggesting that everything be a cardboard copy of quetzals.  Quetzals can fly, brontos can't.  See how different they are?  By making the bronto have an obvious weight advantage then you have 2 animals that are both useful occupying different niches.

 

5 hours ago, Thatch said:

more stuff getting nerfed on pve because of pvp cry babies.

While this is anti-intellectual enough to not need a reply, can I ask in what way am I being a crybaby?  Have I whined about Alphas anywhere or even PVP for that matter?

4 hours ago, Unseen said:

I've said this before but i'll say it again the only thing achieved but nerfing quetzal anky mining is putting everyone who builds far away from metal at an extreme disadvantage until there is better metal distribution unless you want half the island to be pointless to build on....

This is a valid concern.  I think in hindsight the Island is poorly designed to try and make you focus on wanting to have your base in the top 1/3 of the map.  The Centre (while having it's own issues) doesn't have this issue.  I think if they release a new map it needs to be bigger, have better resource distribution (although you can still have some areas better than others) and be easier to hide bases on.

4 hours ago, Unseen said:

the other thing achieved is making it extremely hard to house/ protect you dinos from offline grievers who will just fire arrow everything they can.

This is a separate issue.  Taming in all honesty probably needs to be x3-5 by launch.  Honestly I think we'll see it get tweaked up again.  But regardless, this just feels like 1 more reason for quetzals to not need the weight advantage if protecting tames is yet another one of its utilities.

4 hours ago, Unseen said:

Also why would you want to make any resource harder to get when people are still or have in the past already dup tons off vaults full off it if anything they should make it easier so legit player can compete sort off. In reality a wipe is what is needed and a concentration on banning/suspending anyone who is thought to be part of a tribe ddosing servers if there hardware cant handle it then need a admin get on to any official server that is getting ddosed and just ban everyone who they believer are dossing as thats the best possible solution at this point.      

The servers need to wiped anyway regardless of whether they change quetzals but if we're holding off on changes for the benefit of the game because some people have been allowed to dupe then all I can say is Conan Exiles will be out in a bit over a week...............  Hope to see you there!

[waterKeeper]

@Smash

I have done full playthrough's with your suggested no quetzal mining idea on both official and dedicated servers and I will never go back to that. 

 

Wild dinos are not challenging. 

 

I did not get attacked by other players

 

Tames suck at following.

 

Have you tried crossing the map without a flyer? Because you're asking people to that multiple times. It's awful. I speak from months of experience doing that. Literally 4 months on official  no quetz mining. And u know what I found myself doing at the end? Using the weight glitch on a paracer in scorched and so much better.

 

Everytime I played that way, it was just more grind and end up dead again at the end.

[Awakatanka]

Pvp nerf effects pve also blablabla

Pve tribes can build quicker claim more and more landd can build faster then everyone..... But it does not effect pve....

Yeah sure..

Only big animals can carry much flyingthings can carryless.. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

11 minutes ago, Awakatanka said:

But it does not effect pve...

It'll just take longer to harvest, so it does affect PvE...

[TheHarbinger1911]

just another BDSM n00b who believe in unicorns.

[Awakatanka]

30 minutes ago, BubbaCrawfish said:

It'll just take longer to harvest, so it does affect PvE...

That is real pve else you can play single player put everything on 1000 times faster.  Then its all on easy. You can claim all land no need to place structure to prevent others to build. 

 

But he.... That no fun..... I wanna show i can cheat better then the rest......

[TimeSpiral]

On 1/21/2017 at 5:26 PM, Smash said:

So it's been months since the change was made to 1/3 Anky weight transfers to the quetzal.  That's still a 3x weight advantage quetzals don't need or deserve.

When is this going to be made 100%?  When the servers all get wiped?  That would be good I guess, it will help bring back that pre-quetzal feel to Ark when this game was at it's peak.

HERE, TRY THIS:

So, it's been months since Quetzal mining was nerfed. It has dramatically reduced the amount of metal most tribes are able to collect per run. In most cases, it reduced the maximum load by 95%. I don't think the Quetzal should have the current weight-reduction buff and would like to see the Quetzal nerfed again.

I'm assuming you are going to do it, so when? I'm also assuming you're wiping the servers. All of this would help Make Ark Great Again. 

 

Yawn. 

We get it, man. You want to fight people on the ground with raptors and stuff. Cool! This game is absurdly expensive to do anything and compete on the level we currently need to. Nerfing the Quetzal again would be insanely ridiculous without some sort of balancing done somewhere else, for instance: massive reduction in the cost of everything that needs metal. 

[PuffyPony]

14 hours ago, Jostabeere said:

That's the thing that makes the creatures interesting in this games. They are not en par. Making everything the same and as useful as everything else is just boring. Then we can get grey blobs instead of different dinosaurs.

@PuffyPony You might want to reread what I wrote. it's not about the difficulty of taming a Quetz alone. It's about the comparsion between taming one or taming a Bronto.

Even if you have a friend, you still need a Tapejara that can outspeed a Quetz and can stay in the air long enough for you to tranqing it with low-level equipment.

That doesn't really change my statement. You can easily get a level 20 Tapejara (bola+tranq arrows), go farm explorer notes until its fast enough, then go shoot a Quetz. Like I said, the fact that there are now other ways to tame Quetzals than the tradition Argy/Ptera or Scorpion method means the relative difficulty of taming a Quetzal over a Bronto is significantly reduced, to such a degree that you could arguably say that Brontos aren't really worth taming at all anymore because they are overshadowed in both the PvE and PvP meta by other creatures (namely, Quetz, Turtle, Paracer). I'll grant it that the Bronto and other terrestrial weight tames face other issues such as speed and stamina, but some of this is aggravated by the fact that the Quetzal basically circumvents the issue entirely by flying.

||edit|| Some additional thoughts. I'll agree at the core of the Quetzal problem are other issues that encourage people to try to take the path of least resistance and progress overnight when, in my opinion, the game should appear more as a slower, steadier, more challenging progression. For example, the fact that the near-indestructible metal-tier structure unlocks at level 30--why? Why should such a powerful structure be unlocked at such a low level? More so, why should such a powerful structure exist outside of Tek tier at all? But it encourages people to try to take the slingshot up to this stage of technology because it is such a fundamental necessity for competitive PvP (and total insurance in PvE) as a result of the way structure progress in ARK is designed. Same goes for weaponry (to a lesser degree) and armor (again, to a lesser degree). Thus, people go for creatures like the Quetz that offer such unquestionable superiority over other tames in similar niches (Bronto, Paracer, Diplo, Argy) that those competitors are relegated to the pile of...well...not-very-good tames. IMO, the Quetz should trade mass haulage capacity for speed and mobility. Like I said before, the current discrepancy in Weight really doesn't matter when you can effectively triple it and far exceed what most people will want on a metal run, so the difference in a Bronto and Quetz right now doesn't effectively amount to much. So, I would propose going to 100% transference, buffing the Bronto's stamina and weight, and also Smash's idea of providing a more-even distribution of resources across the map.

[Dustrider]

27 minutes ago, TimeSpiral said:

HERE, TRY THIS:

So, it's been months since Quetzal mining was nerfed. It has dramatically reduced the amount of metal most tribes are able to collect per run. In most cases, it reduced the maximum load by 95%. I don't think the Quetzal should have the current weight-reduction buff and would like to see the Quetzal nerfed again.

I'm assuming you are going to do it, so when? I'm also assuming you're wiping the servers. All of this would help Make Ark Great Again. 

 

Yawn. 

We get it, man. You want to fight people on the ground with raptors and stuff. Cool! This game is absurdly expensive to do anything and compete on the level we currently need to. Nerfing the Quetzal again would be insanely ridiculous without some sort of balancing done somewhere else, for instance: massive reduction in the cost of everything that needs metal. 

Agreed. Everything worth making requires metal in end game. You are 100% right the game would need further balancing if they nerf the quetzal again.

[Jey123456]

I am one of those weirdo who do not fly on official pvp, mostly because personally i think flying is utterly broken and lazy. 

The whole quetz getting less weight transfer when carrying an ankylo is just plain stupid but sadly its a bandaid because the devs are unable to actually fix the issues plagging ground dinos. Even if stats wise ground dinos were in balance with flyers (they are not, ground dinos are vastly inferior due to the flying aspect) until we get fixed ai's able to actually follow without getting stuck on every single things, flyers will remain unbalanced. 

 

When i need a lot of metal, i form a convoy with 10-15 high lvl brontos, and walk all the way to the top of the volcano, where i farm for hours to days until the brontos are full, before walking back home, this work but the actual walk is usually filled with frustration, if anything show up to fight (rex for instance), the brontos convoy will get all messed up on itself since they want to chase the rex instead of just hitting it when its close (which result in a stuck convoy and 15mins wasted to untangle it after). You also cannot use any other dinos as protection for the convoy since brontos will step on the other dino and they both get stuck in each other and to top it off, if you have structures on some brontos, the collision mesh desync and you end up with all brontos behind the structure stuck for anywhere between 1 to 10 minutes, unable to move / constantly rubberbanding until the collision mesh resync.

 

None the less, im stubborn so i do not plan on ever flying unless i absolutely need to (like to recover a corpse in the sky) and i will continue fighting on the forum to try to get some sort of balance toward ground dinos (especially brontos because i love them ! even if they are now beaten by paracer)

[cels]

Imo the issue with the quetzal isnt so much its weight. Its the quetzals utility as a whole is completely out of whack from what the dossier describes it as.

"Too slow to be an efficient local transport, and too weak to be an effective warbird, the tribes I have encountered tend to employ it as a mass carrier. "

Right now we have them being used as speedy war quetzals. Its far from slow and far from being weak. If these were actually based purely on being useful because of its carry weight i think they would be less of a issue. If they were actually slow moreso, i dont think they would be as much of a debate on it. Im sure it will get nerfed again though eventually since its one of the more OP dinos all around in usefullness at a time when wildcard says tames are too strong and they need to be nerfed more.

The only part i find off about it all is wildcard awarding the weight reduction to those who build platforms a specific way to benefit from it. Why not just make it the same as if you were holding the anklo or whichever dino youre farming with in its claws?

[ilShadow]

On 1/22/2017 at 11:21 AM, PuffyPony said:

The more I play this game (which is kind of a funny statement, because I've played a lot), the more I'm inclined to agree with Smash. As it is, the Quetzal renders too many other weight dinos pretty much useless. Why take a Diplo with 3500 Weight when you can you can bring a 2000-weight noob Quetz that moves faster and avoids pretty much all the danger of the world below? The difference in weight hardly matters once you consider that the effective carry weights of these creatures tripled, so you're still going to be able to haul all the metal you want either way. The end result is that other high-weight tames like the Bronto and Diplo are inferior compared to the Quetz. 100% weight transference is one way to solve the issue, but I think that the other weight creatures need some serious work to help resolve the problem too.

This is because those tames are so so SLOW, i tamed a paracer because its faster than a bronto, now that i have a 3000 carry weight quetz, he just loafs about eating berries. Our perfect 120 bronto (island) only moves to collect berries. High carry weight tames are useless because of their speed, or lack thereof. Why bring a bronto to farm metal, when it takes you an hour to get there, and if on the island, all the metal is usually up high making a walking tame even more useless. The island needs a serious redesign to make ground tames more useful. It isnt that tames fault, its the fault in the design, seriously. to get to metal mountain you cant take anything too big to get through the narrow pass, there is metal on top of platuea's that are inaccesible by ground tames. 

Back when we were on a center server, we lived on blue OB island, and used trike trains and bronto's to farm metal and crystal, primarily because it was efficient enough that we didnt need a quetz or argy train to farm metal. 

IMHO center was a much better map design than the island ever will be. Blaming the Quetz/anky combo is pointless, as all that will do is increase the farm time, and unless you are built right next to metal, increase the flight time. It is pointless to nerf the Quetz/Anky combo much more, though i would accept 50% nerf from original carry weight crossover, this would at least mean you could get twice the metal you normally would.

[Plannb23]

On 1/21/2017 at 10:04 PM, Mendoza said:

I don't understand why you think they won't be able to fix a bug/exploit that allows you to trick the weight to 0%  ?

Other than they can't stop dinosaurs from falling through roofs and foundations still, I can't see why people would think that this issue wouldn't be resolved.

/sarcasmoff

[Critter]

How many hours are you guys spending on farming medal in a single run with the glitch?

 

 

[ilShadow]

17 minutes ago, Critter said:

How many hours are you guys spending on farming medal in a single run with the glitch?

 

 

The glitch is 0%, the 30% transfer of weight from anky to quetz is INTENTIONAL, and meant to be in the game, the devs put the restriction there they know about it. But with a high enough carry weight quetz, and close enough proximity to many metal nodes, you are talking an hour for a full industrial forge, sometimes considerably less than that depending on your skill level at the platform/anky combo. For reference, an industrial forge  can hold 60 slots of full stacks of metal, 59 if you want to put gas in to actually cook the metal.

[ul1sses]

After a certain point, flyers kill the survival aspect of the game. They should be redesigned.

Who don't like to farm and want fast and competitive REAL PvP, there is game called "ARK: Survival of the Fittest".

[TimeSpiral]

4 minutes ago, ul1sses said:

After a certain point, flyers kill the survival aspect of the game. They should be redesigned.

Who don't like to farm and want fast and competitive REAL PvP, there is game called "ARK: Survival of the Fittest".

"Flyers kill the survival aspect of the game", is a lol thing to say. Flyers kill it? Really? Not the metal fortresses covered in automatic machine guns? Come on, now. 

"They should be redeisgned", is a lol thing to say. Tell me more about what they should do. 

Yes. Survival of the Fittest is the "match play" version of Ark. How is this relevant?

For those saying that mining isn't dangerous enough because of flyers--and I'm surprised this isn't discussed more--but why not introduce flying creatures that are dangerous? I don't know. Farming is a time sink, and a barrier to entry. I get it. I like the industry and the ingenuity of people creating technologies to maximize the potential of in-game mechanics.

Maybe the whole idea of Quetzal platform mining was never imagined by the devs. They've already admitted that the 0%-weight transfer was being used in an unintentional way. But the fact remains that harvesting platforms constitute the invention of technology, which is awesome, and at the core of a social survival experiment. 

[waterKeeper]

8 minutes ago, TimeSpiral said:

We get it, man. You want to fight people on the ground with raptors and stuff. Cool! This game is absurdly expensive to do anything and compete on the level we currently need to. Nerfing the Quetzal again would be insanely ridiculous without some sort of balancing done somewhere else, for instance: massive reduction in the cost of everything that needs metal. 

 

This too ^

@Smash

I like where you're trying to go with your vision of ark but not how you're getting us there.

      I agree that players should be encouraged to use a variety of tames and not be coerced into using dino "x" because if you don't you lose the arms race and ultimately the game. Like when you play any other game there's a variety of means to the same end, i.e. different playstyles; ark's flaw is that it really has only one: grind while you tame the important dinos. It's saving grace and what makes ark great is that even its bug ridden, glitchy, unbalanced state, all that doesnt matter, it is a medium that draws together some of the best drama and social debauchery, namely on officials. Good and bad times, the people are what bring me back, not the virtual pets. When I play on officials, I honestly feel like I've been cast into The Walking Dead. 

 

I see quetz mining as the only bridge separating the grind from the fun; and youre trying to burn that bridge. I think you have to leave it in the game in its current state, even if it's just a placeholder,  until other methods are introduced that do the same thing or the rest of the game has to be overhauled so that you don't need that much metal to survive. 

    The problem I see is that no land dino can replace the quetz. Its not even as simple as give the bronto 100k weight. So i walk that slow ass bronto and anklio a mile to 5 metal nodes, yay 500 metal, now an hour hike to the next one. Seriously, riding slow dinos is unbearable. Even riding the Anklyo for 20 secs between adjacent nodes made me angry, lol.

    On my relatively few hours spent on player dedicated servers, hands down my favorite thing about them is how often carry weights are jacked up for all tames. I like choosing to take a tame with me, not because the game says it's the best choice, but because I have options available and I choose what's best or fun for me. I'd rather see everything else buffed, not one thing nerfed. It would be nice if either through breeding or player made items (specialized saddles, carts, etc) unlocked via engrams and such, if any dino could be adapted to filling any niche; it would add to a sense of progression in the game and more freedom. 

    The whole game would have to be overhauled to accommodate a quetz nerf, either change it all or nothing. And it's getting late for that. I'm just going to stand back and accept this iteration of ark as what it is going to be and let the devs run with it. Dont want too many cooks in the kitchen.

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

3 hours ago, Awakatanka said:

I wanna show i can cheat better then the rest.

The main point of this, is that if you nerf one aspect of the game, it doesn't mysteriously not effect the rest of the game, regardless of the mode...

 

No "cheating" about it.

[PuffyPony]

3 hours ago, ilShadow said:

This is because those tames are so so SLOW, i tamed a paracer because its faster than a bronto, now that i have a 3000 carry weight quetz, he just loafs about eating berries. Our perfect 120 bronto (island) only moves to collect berries. High carry weight tames are useless because of their speed, or lack thereof. Why bring a bronto to farm metal, when it takes you an hour to get there, and if on the island, all the metal is usually up high making a walking tame even more useless. The island needs a serious redesign to make ground tames more useful. It isnt that tames fault, its the fault in the design, seriously. to get to metal mountain you cant take anything too big to get through the narrow pass, there is metal on top of platuea's that are inaccesible by ground tames. 

Back when we were on a center server, we lived on blue OB island, and used trike trains and bronto's to farm metal and crystal, primarily because it was efficient enough that we didnt need a quetz or argy train to farm metal. 

IMHO center was a much better map design than the island ever will be. Blaming the Quetz/anky combo is pointless, as all that will do is increase the farm time, and unless you are built right next to metal, increase the flight time. It is pointless to nerf the Quetz/Anky combo much more, though i would accept 50% nerf from original carry weight crossover, this would at least mean you could get twice the metal you normally would.

Hence why I suggest both limiting the scope of the Quetz (not a complete nerf) and providing some buffs to those creatures. I agree that other fundamental issue exacerbate the issue. I can see the argument for having higher resource density in dangerous regions, but as it stands, many of the safer regions on the Island are bereft of appreciable deposits of rare resources. I think both the Center and Scorched Earth provide a better model.

I'm still unconvinced that the Quetz/Anky combo doesn't directly contribute to the issue, though. Even as the most basic level, the advantage of flight puts tames like the Quetz miles ahead of its competitors. I think there are plenty of ways to approach the issue (adjusting resource costs, fixing other transport dinos, etc), but even if these approaches are used, you're still left with the fact that a mid-level Quetz will out-haul any other creature in the game. The Quetz should be a comparable trade-off to equivalent land-based transport dinos (namely, Bronto), not an absolute upgrade that leaves other dinos in the pen. Most of the issues that people enunciate when arguing against the 100% weight transference can be addressed in other ways that will help fix more long-standing, fundamental issues with the game (like power creep).

[ilShadow]

2 minutes ago, PuffyPony said:

Hence why I suggest both limiting the scope of the Quetz (not a complete nerf) and providing some buffs to those creatures. I agree that other fundamental issue exacerbate the issue. I can see the argument for having higher resource density in dangerous regions, but as it stands, many of the safer regions on the Island are bereft of appreciable deposits of rare resources. I think both the Center and Scorched Earth provide a better model.

I'm still unconvinced that the Quetz/Anky combo doesn't directly contribute to the issue, though. Even as the most basic level, the advantage of flight puts tames like the Quetz miles ahead of its competitors. I think there are plenty of ways to approach the issue (adjusting resource costs, fixing other transport dinos, etc), but even if these approaches are used, you're still left with the fact that a mid-level Quetz will out-haul any other creature in the game. The Quetz should be a comparable trade-off to equivalent land-based transport dinos (namely, Bronto), not an absolute upgrade that leaves other dinos in the pen. Most of the issues that people enunciate when arguing against the 100% weight transference can be addressed in other ways that will help fix more long-standing, fundamental issues with the game (like power creep).

Thats part of what i am saying, nobody is going to take a bronto all across the island for metal, it just isnt going to happen, its too damn slow. Then actually getting to the resources is a royal pain with a land dino. 

The Island needs a huge rework.