Quetzal mining is still too OP

[Jey123456]

Just now, ilShadow said:

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.

I guess i am nobody then because thats exactly what i do, altho i dont take "a bronto" i takes 10-15 or even 20 brontos to just barely compete with a single quetz. 

[ilShadow]

Just now, Jey123456 said:

I guess i am nobody then because thats exactly what i do, altho i dont take "a bronto" i takes 10-15 or even 20 brontos to just barely compete with a single quetz. 

And how far are you traveling?

[Jey123456]

Just now, ilShadow said:

And how far are you traveling?

from east of redwood (close to green oby) to the top of the volcano. 

[ilShadow]

1 minute ago, Jey123456 said:

from east of redwood (close to green oby) to the top of the volcano. 

Thats a lot further than i would travel with the captains of getting stuck on tiny rocks. Congrats.

[Jey123456]

9 minutes ago, ilShadow said:

Thats a lot further than i would travel with the captains of getting stuck on tiny rocks. Congrats.

lol, yea, altho the rocks while annoying, are nowhere near as annoying as themself. If i dont leave them on passive and something hit me or any of the brontos by accident, they all break the convoy line and chase the target that they themself knock away, resulting in one hell of a tangled mess of brontos stuck into each other that takes 10+mins untangling. If not for the fact that i can carry 60-80k metal ingots in one trip, i couldnt possibly do it, and even then, in the same time it takes me, i could do it with a single decent quetz (vs my 15 top level breed brontos) and quite frankly would be less annoying. But whats the point of ground dinos if not to use them, its not like flyers are the "next step" you can have them from the begining (and a single ptera out-transport a single bronto over distance lol)

[Smash]

30 minutes ago, Jey123456 said:

lol, yea, altho the rocks while annoying, are nowhere near as annoying as themself. If i dont leave them on passive and something hit me or any of the brontos by accident, they all break the convoy line and chase the target that they themself knock away, resulting in one hell of a tangled mess of brontos stuck into each other that takes 10+mins untangling. If not for the fact that i can carry 60-80k metal ingots in one trip, i couldnt possibly do it, and even then, in the same time it takes me, i could do it with a single decent quetz (vs my 15 top level breed brontos) and quite frankly would be less annoying. But whats the point of ground dinos if not to use them, its not like flyers are the "next step" you can have them from the begining (and a single ptera out-transport a single bronto over distance lol)

Yep.  All this needs to be vastly improved.  I think at some point they seemed to put in some fix where dinos leap over rocks now when they get stuck but it's still not great.  My biggest frustration with this is how dinos tend to get stuck on each other.  It would be nice if you could bring some escort dinos that weren't just going to get in the way.

Nerfing quetzals needs to accompany buffs to plenty of the others.  I'd be happy for them to quadrupple the Brontos weight.  It would bring it a long way up towards being a decent hauler.  What I'd like to see would be a setup where you take a bronto, paracer, anky and a couple of escorts mining and that setup should be balanced so that it is more efficient at mining that using a quetzal, but your quetzal should be good at getting those hard to reach nodes or for doing quick runs where you only need a 1k metal quick.

I've posted previously how I'd balance the game with a quetzal nerfs.  Feel free to check it out

 

[Awakatanka]

I would make them the slowest flying thing there is, that way it is a danger to fly without escort. Then other people can shot it out of the air with the other flyers. Little bit like real planes.   The big cargo/bombers where slow flying planes in ww2 just make it like that. Risk reward.....?????!

[Awakatanka]

I would make them the slowest flying thing there is, that way it is a danger to fly without escort. Then other people can shot it out of the air with the other flyers. Little bit like real planes.   The big cargo/bombers where slow flying planes in ww2 just make it like that. Risk reward.....?????!

[Mendoza]

4 hours ago, Awakatanka said:

I would make them the slowest flying thing there is, that way it is a danger to fly without escort. Then other people can shot it out of the air with the other flyers. Little bit like real planes.   The big cargo/bombers where slow flying planes in ww2 just make it like that. Risk reward.....?????!

Quetz should fit their dossier description and be a lot slower. Then I'd add in the game a rex level untamable aggressive flying creature that is faster than everything but the Ptera to make the skies more interesting...(bombers in WW2 needed escort so why not the Quetz?)  There just needs to be more risk vs reward for flying.

I agree with Smash, The Island map needs an overhaul of it's resource distribution among other things.

For consistency's sake however I would like to see all creatures have 100% carry weight, this includes Quetz, Shoulder Mounts and Beavers - grinding is just part of the game and I'm ok with that! - If grinding is Soooo bad, then I think there are better methods to solve this issue than weight reductions. For one thing the devs finally made x2 gathering official, that's a step in the right direction. Other methods as previously stated would be to have a serious look at all the costs of everything you can craft and make that far more balanced.

Even if there was 100% weight on the Quetz, It still wouldn't stop people using them to mine as it is far far quicker... All it will mean is more trips for those that wish to get more... I don't really understand the argument that Alphas will get further ahead if 100% is applied.  Alphas will always be further ahead regardless because they will be subject to the same law of weight as everybody else is whether it's 30% or 100% -- ignoring 0% when it's finally fixed.

[LilNastyGurl]

The number #1 reason people use the Quetzal/Anky combo is because the Quetzal is the ONLY creature who can assist moving the Ankylo. Once that changes, other methods can pop up. Leaving the Ankylo on the nodes will probably get it killed, including if you play on Official and don't leave it in the Volcano. 

For example, if a larger land creature was capable of grabbing the Ankylo, that would be a good alternative to it, and there would be less opposition to toning down Quetzalmining. That 264 base sprint speed is the main reason.

[Thatch]

The quetzal, an air base you can always fall through

[TimeSpiral]

17 hours ago, Smash said:

Yep.  All this needs to be vastly improved.  I think at some point they seemed to put in some fix where dinos leap over rocks now when they get stuck but it's still not great.  My biggest frustration with this is how dinos tend to get stuck on each other.  It would be nice if you could bring some escort dinos that weren't just going to get in the way.

Nerfing quetzals needs to accompany buffs to plenty of the others.  I'd be happy for them to quadrupple the Brontos weight.  It would bring it a long way up towards being a decent hauler.  What I'd like to see would be a setup where you take a bronto, paracer, anky and a couple of escorts mining and that setup should be balanced so that it is more efficient at mining that using a quetzal, but your quetzal should be good at getting those hard to reach nodes or for doing quick runs where you only need a 1k metal quick.

I've posted previously how I'd balance the game with a quetzal nerfs.  Feel free to check it out

 

I'm just going to say it: Quetzal mining still takes too much time. If me and my brother log in, and he has a couple hours to play, it takes about half of that to fill the forge up and process all the resources. How much longer do you want it to take? For real. I'm really asking how much more time you want people to spend farming. Because that's what you're saying. You're saying: "I want farming to take much-much longer than it does now."

I mean, our current discussion usually go like this, "Okay, so for tonight's play session: we'll do a metal run and then we'll work on [INSERT NON-FARMING PROJECT]."

You and yours' suggestion seems to encourage a conversation much more like, "Okay, so, for this week's play session we're going to take a--I can barely get through this--a convoy of brontos up the mountain, load them up with metal (am I building a ramp up on to the bronto or is the Anky walking too?) and then we're going to farm metal and manually take it from the Anky's inventory, into our inventory, then in to the bronto's inventory, then we're going to walk it all back, then we're going to put the metal back in our inventory and then we're going to put it in the forge."

To what, fill a forge two or three times? YUCK.

That doesn't sound ... hmmm ... what's the word I'm looking for. *looks around* Ahhh, here it is. Fun. That doesn't sound like a fun thing to do. Lol.

Are you imagining some epic quest, where you and your tribemates grab the giga, a couple fliers, a few brontos, some Anky's, and trek into the mountains, fighting off wild dinos, setting up small camps, cooking food. Maybe an enemy tribe scouts you, sets up an ambush and there is this awesome fight: clubbing, whipping, picking, sniping, some tames die, but eventually you fight off the attackers. You give a speech to boost morale, and you push on. Finally, as you breech the mountain top, and the setting sun dapples the ground around you through the changing trees, you see the metal nodes glistening. You set up you perimeter, set you guards, and the start ravaging the Right Trigger (or whatever it is on PC) to swing that tail. Then, every two seconds, you have a team empty the Anky and take it to one of the brontos. Then, on the way back, it's just as action packed and exciting, you unload the bronto and build 10 metal walls, 1 turret, and a few hundred bullets, and now you're out of metal.

What is far more likely to happen: some bullpoop glitch or DC occurs and you lose everything for free. Lol. 

I'm just confused. 

Without Quetzal mining, or something faster and simpler, the endgame in Ark would be unplayable. 

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

On 1/23/2017 at 10:02 PM, Smash said:

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.

There's various counters to that, such as the cold and the spawning of more dangerous dinos. It's done fine for so long, yet now it becomes "poorly designed"... O_o...

[Clark]

It's not OP, they need to revert it back so that you can unlimited weight it.

[ilShadow]

1 hour ago, BubbaCrawfish said:

There's various counters to that, such as the cold and the spawning of more dangerous dinos. It's done fine for so long, yet now it becomes "poorly designed"... O_o...

Compared to the center it is very poorly designed. More than half of the metal nodes are designed to be gotten by a flyer, they are either through too small of a pass, or on a peak or plateau that can only be reached by air or building up to it.

Where as the Center, you can build almost anywhere and walk to metal fairly easily with extra nodes on top of random plateau's. The center is an all around better design than the island.

On the island, quetz/anky is nearly a must, unless you want to spend a few hours attempting to march a band of bronto up a mountain.

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

1 hour ago, ilShadow said:

On the island, quetz/anky is nearly a must, unless you want to spend a few hours attempting to march a band of bronto up a mountain.

Umm, actually no, it's not a must... We used to have mining outposts sitting in the treelines below the mountain... If what you were suggesting was true, you'd have had to rely on the quetzal mining to function, which it isn't...

[ilShadow]

Just now, BubbaCrawfish said:

Umm, actually no, it's not a must... We used to have mining outposts sitting in the treelines below the mountain... If what you were suggesting was true, you'd have had to rely on the quetzal mining to function, which it isn't...

Note the NEARLY

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

Just now, ilShadow said:

Note the NEARLY

Just because you aren't easily able to get resources, which there is nothing stopping you, doesn't mean the map is badly designed, or that it comes remotely close to "requiring" quetz mining...

[Smash]

21 hours ago, TimeSpiral said:

I'm just going to say it: Quetzal mining still takes too much time. If me and my brother log in, and he has a couple hours to play, it takes about half of that to fill the forge up and process all the resources. How much longer do you want it to take? For real. I'm really asking how much more time you want people to spend farming. Because that's what you're saying. You're saying: "I want farming to take much-much longer than it does now."

There's a few points I'd like to make here.  The first is that farming only takes as long as you put into it, and ultimately it doesn't matter what the gather rate per hour is if everyone has the same issue.  If people just scale down their expectation of what a base should be then you don't really need to spend all your time farming, just build a base that can only hold 3 quetzals instead of 10, keep all your non-flyers outside, etc.  Use stone for the non-critical parts of your base.  Everyone just needs to scale down.  Now will other parts of the game need to be tweaked because of this?  Sure, these things don't happen in a vacuum, off-line raiding still needs to be properly did-incentivized, and perhaps how much health the tiers all have reviewed, but in my mind those are all good things. 

2nd, and I hate saying this because it's somewhat of a strawman, but I can't help wonder why so many people play this game if they find the key part of it so utterly un-fun.  I mean the gunplay is mediocre, the melee combat is garbage and the dinosaur combat, while adding an original component to the game is fairly boring "Let's just chomp each other until someone dies" or "Whoever has the most birds wins".  Why not just play a game like Battlefield 1 or Overwatch?  They have none of the boring stuff and tonnes of the stuff you seem to think is the core part of the game.

3rdly, my aim isn't necessarily to make farming take longer, I just don't think that Quetzal should be the the penultimate dinosaur for it.  If the quetzal was more niche but ultimately land pack animals still had a use for more bulk mining then I'd be reasonably happy with that.  That is however more of a secondary objective.

21 hours ago, TimeSpiral said:

You and yours' suggestion seems to encourage a conversation much more like, "Okay, so, for this week's play session we're going to take a--I can barely get through this--a convoy of brontos up the mountain, load them up with metal (am I building a ramp up on to the bronto or is the Anky walking too?) and then we're going to farm metal and manually take it from the Anky's inventory, into our inventory, then in to the bronto's inventory, then we're going to walk it all back, then we're going to put the metal back in our inventory and then we're going to put it in the forge."

To what, fill a forge two or three times? YUCK.

That doesn't sound ... hmmm ... what's the word I'm looking for. *looks around* Ahhh, here it is. Fun. That doesn't sound like a fun thing to do. Lol.

You're not really thinking outside the square here are you?  Why would you take a convoy of brontos to the volcano if you only really needed 1?  If the bronto had 10x it's current weight you might only need 1.  What if there was a more efficient way of transferring dino contents that didn't require dropping 50 stacks having someone pick them all up and then putting into into the new dino?

Imagine if pathfinding was better or the terrain had less stupid rock?

Imagine if dinos didn't get caugt up on each other?

The quetzal nerf doesn't have to happen in isolation.

21 hours ago, TimeSpiral said:

Are you imagining some epic quest, where you and your tribemates grab the giga, a couple fliers, a few brontos, some Anky's, and trek into the mountains, fighting off wild dinos, setting up small camps, cooking food. Maybe an enemy tribe scouts you, sets up an ambush and there is this awesome fight: clubbing, whipping, picking, sniping, some tames die, but eventually you fight off the attackers. You give a speech to boost morale, and you push on. Finally, as you breech the mountain top, and the setting sun dapples the ground around you through the changing trees, you see the metal nodes glistening. You set up you perimeter, set you guards, and the start ravaging the Right Trigger (or whatever it is on PC) to swing that tail. Then, every two seconds, you have a team empty the Anky and take it to one of the brontos. Then, on the way back, it's just as action packed and exciting, you unload the bronto and build 10 metal walls, 1 turret, and a few hundred bullets, and now you're out of metal.

While you're obviously being facetious here, you're not far off the mark and since you play on Xbox I'm happy to inform you that before quetzals this was largely what happened..... and it was fun!  But I'm obviously not the only person with this vision.  Every spotlight video has these exact sort of scenes.  It's just that since quetzals you just go "Meh, quetzals/pteradons do it better" and never bother to try the new things out.

On 24/01/2017 at 4:43 PM, LilNastyGurl said:

The number #1 reason people use the Quetzal/Anky combo is because the Quetzal is the ONLY creature who can assist moving the Ankylo. Once that changes, other methods can pop up. Leaving the Ankylo on the nodes will probably get it killed, including if you play on Official and don't leave it in the Volcano. 

For example, if a larger land creature was capable of grabbing the Ankylo, that would be a good alternative to it, and there would be less opposition to toning down Quetzalmining. That 264 base sprint speed is the main reason.

Agreed, but this is a reason to add dino pick-up methods to other dinos, not to keep quetzals OP.

18 hours ago, BubbaCrawfish said:

There's various counters to that, such as the cold and the spawning of more dangerous dinos. It's done fine for so long, yet now it becomes "poorly designed"... O_o...

Just because it hasn't been high on anyone's radar doesn't mean that it's only just become an issue.  The Center release helped highlight it at least in terms of resources.  It has plenty of other issues.  I'm hopeful that Ragnarok is amazing and becomes a core map.

 

[Davide6100]

I don't see this as too much of a problem to be honest. I think that more people would be less likely to play if this was not a possibility. Grinding for metal would take so much longer and the amount of time spent getting metal on the game would be too much. Lots of tribes would have to spend at least double the amount of time grinding for metal which would surely take some of the fun out of the game.

[Jey123456]

57 minutes ago, Davide6100 said:

I don't see this as too much of a problem to be honest. I think that more people would be less likely to play if this was not a possibility. Grinding for metal would take so much longer and the amount of time spent getting metal on the game would be too much. Lots of tribes would have to spend at least double the amount of time grinding for metal which would surely take some of the fun out of the game.

grinding for metal would take longer, but thats the same for everyone, you wouldnt need as heavily metalwalled / defended base if the enemy didnt have such an easy time crafting weapons / explosives. Its not just the metal in that case tho, trading is basically dead, since its easier to get whatever you need, than to trade with someone (except for dinos and humongous qty of stuff but even then). 

 

CP, grab a frog in swamp cave, come out with poop ton of it, metal / obsidian / crystal grab an aky with quetz, stone grab a doed with quetz, wood use beaver with its ultra fast harvesting and ability to carry multiple times more wood than a mammoth, fiber grab a bear and end up with more than you can ever need (unless your making 50 ascendant bronto saddles). Just about every resources that once was a bottleneck that kept everyone more or less at similar rate were give a way to obtain in absurd quantity relatively easily. Then we wonder why people all have huge bases, tons of dinos and servers lag. 

 

Most resources have no value in "regular use quantity" theres not really any raid incentive on the resources side, raids nowaday happen for the sake of destruction. No need to be careful about how much it cost you to blow someone base since it took you minutes to get enough to make 10 times more explosives than youll need for it. 

 

I really miss the days when crystal and obsidian were rare, 2k metal was huge, stone base were safe from dinos (thats the whole reason why stone was added in the first place xD), turrets were an actual investment, 50 turrets on a base was beyond insane. Players on a server constantly traded with each other for all sort of resources since to get enough of a resource the best way was to specialise. Now, well everyone can get everything so trading is as dead as it can be. I have not actually traded with anyone in so long, i gave plenty of stuff, and received plenty of free stuff, but never any actual trade since those with the stuff to give, dont really want anything anymore.

[Davide6100]

2 minutes ago, Jey123456 said:

grinding for metal would take longer, but thats the same for everyone, you wouldnt need as heavily metalwalled / defended base if the enemy didnt have such an easy time crafting weapons / explosives. Its not just the metal in that case tho, trading is basically dead, since its easier to get whatever you need, than to trade with someone (except for dinos and humongous qty of stuff but even then). 

 

CP, grab a frog in swamp cave, come out with poop ton of it, metal / obsidian / crystal grab an aky with quetz, stone grab a doed with quetz, wood use beaver with its ultra fast harvesting and ability to carry multiple times more wood than a mammoth, fiber grab a bear and end up with more than you can ever need (unless your making 50 ascendant bronto saddles). Just about every resources that once was a bottleneck that kept everyone more or less at similar rate were give a way to obtain in absurd quantity relatively easily. Then we wonder why people all have huge bases, tons of dinos and servers lag. 

 

Most resources have no value in "regular use quantity" theres not really any raid incentive on the resources side, raids nowaday happen for the sake of destruction. No need to be careful about how much it cost you to blow someone base since it took you minutes to get enough to make 10 times more explosives than youll need for it. 

 

I really miss the days when crystal and obsidian were rare, 2k metal was huge, stone base were safe from dinos (thats the whole reason why stone was added in the first place xD), turrets were an actual investment, 50 turrets on a base was beyond insane. Players on a server constantly traded with each other for all sort of resources since to get enough of a resource the best way was to specialise. Now, well everyone can get everything so trading is as dead as it can be. I have not actually traded with anyone in so long, i gave plenty of stuff, and received plenty of free stuff, but never any actual trade since those with the stuff to give, dont really want anything anymore.

Yeah i know, I remember when it was like this too. The game was still very fun but the grind was real aha. I did like this version of the game but prefer it now tbh

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

3 hours ago, Smash said:

I'm hopeful that Ragnarok is amazing and becomes a core map.

I may have to look at this, but the island should be as it is though. I'd even like them to re-release the previous version of it where there was a lagoon where the swamp is as it is in SotF.

I would also like to see bigger maps, with more craziness in them. New maps are always good as it gives variety and option, but to simply keep changing maps over and over makes things get too much in some respects. Too many changes make it end up, odd, somehow... I don't know how to explain it.

 

I find I enjoy playing on SotF simply for the drop down looking around at various places where we made epic bases.

[TimeSpiral]

7 hours ago, Smash said:

There's a few points I'd like to make here.  The first is that farming only takes as long as you put into it, and ultimately it doesn't matter what the gather rate per hour is if everyone has the same issue.  If people just scale down their expectation of what a base should be then you don't really need to spend all your time farming, just build a base that can only hold 3 quetzals instead of 10, keep all your non-flyers outside, etc.  Use stone for the non-critical parts of your base.  Everyone just needs to scale down.  Now will other parts of the game need to be tweaked because of this?  Sure, these things don't happen in a vacuum, off-line raiding still needs to be properly did-incentivized, and perhaps how much health the tiers all have reviewed, but in my mind those are all good things. 

2nd, and I hate saying this because it's somewhat of a strawman, but I can't help wonder why so many people play this game if they find the key part of it so utterly un-fun.  I mean the gunplay is mediocre, the melee combat is garbage and the dinosaur combat, while adding an original component to the game is fairly boring "Let's just chomp each other until someone dies" or "Whoever has the most birds wins".  Why not just play a game like Battlefield 1 or Overwatch?  They have none of the boring stuff and tonnes of the stuff you seem to think is the core part of the game.

3rdly, my aim isn't necessarily to make farming take longer, I just don't think that Quetzal should be the the penultimate dinosaur for it.  If the quetzal was more niche but ultimately land pack animals still had a use for more bulk mining then I'd be reasonably happy with that.  That is however more of a secondary objective.

You're not really thinking outside the square here are you?  Why would you take a convoy of brontos to the volcano if you only really needed 1?  If the bronto had 10x it's current weight you might only need 1.  What if there was a more efficient way of transferring dino contents that didn't require dropping 50 stacks having someone pick them all up and then putting into into the new dino?

Imagine if pathfinding was better or the terrain had less stupid rock?

Imagine if dinos didn't get caugt up on each other?

The quetzal nerf doesn't have to happen in isolation.

While you're obviously being facetious here, you're not far off the mark and since you play on Xbox I'm happy to inform you that before quetzals this was largely what happened..... and it was fun!  But I'm obviously not the only person with this vision.  Every spotlight video has these exact sort of scenes.  It's just that since quetzals you just go "Meh, quetzals/pteradons do it better" and never bother to try the new things out.

Agreed, but this is a reason to add dino pick-up methods to other dinos, not to keep quetzals OP.

Just because it hasn't been high on anyone's radar doesn't mean that it's only just become an issue.  The Center release helped highlight it at least in terms of resources.  It has plenty of other issues.  I'm hopeful that Ragnarok is amazing and becomes a core map.

 

I guess the simplest response is: tell the mega tribes with a bead on us and our allies to bring less stuff because we're going to scale our bases down because dudes think Quetz farming is OP. I'm using "us" as an example, but anyone with big-time enemies is in the same boat. Scaling back. Lulz. Might be the dumbest thing you've ever said, with all due respect. 

You keep talking about the vacuum, and how additional nerfs would bring along all this other cool stuff--sounds all good, in theory, but what you're talking about is Ark after a full wipe of all official servers--which isn't scheduled to happen, and they've said specifically it won't happen. So, instead, when we have a segment of people QQ'ing constantly about "Quetz OP yo plz nerf" they end up nerfing it, and that's it. Nothing else changes. It's just a nerf. This--whether you like it or not--increases the amount of time needed to farm because I can promise you: scaling down our bases is not an option if we want to survive. In fact, growth is necessary. Lots of it. And our bases are not small. 

[skeeta]

So, what is the thinking behind the Quetz having any kind of weight reduction at all? What was the justification given when they were first introduced? Having only just found out about the mechanic I must say my first reaction was "what?, I must be understanding this wrong". How did WC explain away the lost weight? 

As someone new to the game I find the whole concept to be ridiculous to say the least. In my mind there should be a choice of ways to mine. Slow and ponderous on ground based beasties that can carry huge payloads, quickly on smaller walkers that can carry less or quicker still through the air on flyers that can carry even less. 

So you can take one trip, two trips or three trips respectively to move the same amount of stuff and if you want to take the danger reduction of flying into account too then those figures can maybe be changed to 1, 2 and 4 trips. The point is, I'd have thought there'd be a price to be paid for using any flyers as opposed to their ground based counterparts and each player should decide for themselves if it's worth paying in the circumstances at the time.

This isn't meant to offend anyone. It's just the musings of a guy who's just found out about this and thinks it's mental at first glance.