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Picolo XL

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Hello!

This thread is about my opinion/suggestions and general thoughts about the topic "Official ARK Servers" and I would like to hear YOUR opinion and thoughts about this as well. Please do read the whole post before you judge a single part of what I say. I try to be as objective as I can which does not mean I am always right, so I am open for every comment you give me! ^_^

 

 

Before we start, I'd like to give you a (estimated) current state of all official ARK official servers:

 

 

  • ·         There are 902 official ARK servers at the moment including SotF servers. 
  • ·         More than half of those servers exist for more than 2 years
  • ·         90% of all Servers are >12 months old
  • ·         Newest servers I was able to find were the "Cross-ARK" or "ARK-Cluster" servers. (3 months old)
  • ·         80% of all servers have less than 50% of their maximum player volume online at any given moment
  • ·         Most of the servers got at least one group of people (Tribe) which has more than 1000 hours played on that server

 

 

So why is this important?

 

  • ·         Probably all servers got those "ALPHA tribes" , usually a bigger or extremely active group of people that control the server.
  • ·         Completely new or returning players that join a long existing server will find them full of structures (destroyed bases also count)
  • ·         The chance to be able to successfully (and by that I mean over a longer period of time) play on such an server is quiet low (transfers are very harsh here)
  • ·         FPS and general performance are lower on those servers
  • ·         The player experience playing on a long existing server is lower, even if there are no alpha tribes left due to raiding or quitting. (I will explain later why that is)

 

 

What do I want to say?

 

 

  • ·         Besides from playing an unofficial server (I will talk about that later) there is no good way to start playing ARK (again) on a multiplayer server
  • ·         Thinking about the future I can currently not imagine a way how the player base of ARK can be hold over years. Considering that every day people are forced to leave their server or stop playing to return after some time, this is very sad for me.

 

So what?

 

 

  • ·         What I want to give my thoughts and opinions to is how to potentially solve the issue of keeping people play the game and giving new players a fair chance (I know that experienced players that return to new servers will always be in advantage and I will consider that in the following text)

 

 

So… release new servers frequently?

 

 

  • ·         No! And the reason for that is not my opinion, it is the use of my brain.
  • ·         Every server that Studio Wildcard releases will costs a huge amount of money over time  (I calculate around 500$ per server every year)
  • ·         Every new server will follow the same concept that I mentioned earlier. First, there will be a lot of players (new and returning ones). After a given amount of weeks some tribes will become contenders for the "ALPHA tribe" status. Around 2 months after release, the server will start to slowly reduce its average player number and will later be in the same situation as every other server right now.

 

 

What you want to do against it? Wipe?

 

 

  • ·         "That’s the real question here!"
  • ·         Yes, I personally consider wiping old servers as a possible solution, but I know that this is neither fair towards everyone nor will it happen as we have seen it 2 years ago. (all officials wiped)

 

 

Let's see what you got!

 

 

  • ·         I really liked the concept of extinction servers when they were released. BUT the big problem with them is:

1.       You will not reach the end-level of the game

2.       30 days are too short for players to really enjoy the game knowing that everything will be gone within a month

 

  • ·         N°1: Take the concept of extinction and put it into a bigger interval (I am unsure if one or two years would be an option here, but I personally cannot imagine playing ARK more than 2 years without any breaks and I think 98% of all players will agree here.

 

 

  • ·         Another thing I am thinking about is how to "softly" wipe old servers so that the rest of active players do not lose their work.
  • ·         My first though here was to merge servers together but I cannot imagine that this would be possible out of several technical reasons.
  • ·         Another possibility could be, to have a timer ticking whenever the 20 most active players on a server (sorted by time played) stop playing the server for more than ~30 days. If those 20 players all become inactive, WIPE and restart. The Problem is that there will always be new players joining even within those 30 days which will lose their work.

 

  • ·        N°2: Close servers after a time (~1 year) for new players to join. Existing players can still join as long as they want. If the server reaches zero players, it's time to WIPE.

 

 

 

How to prevent the early advantages of experienced players that start on a new server?

 

 

  • ·         Fair enough to ask that, and the only solution I can imagine is to have a "Build phase" or "Beginner Protection" for new players. I do not think it would be possible to implement this for each players so I would rather go with a total PvP protection for the whole server (e.g. for the first 3 weeks after its start.)

 

 

Have we solved the stagnation?

 

 

  • ·         To be fair,  my suggestions would not solve the way every new server is going (won't repeat it again, said it twice) BUT it would give new and returning players a way to restart and retry constantly until they get bored of the game and want to stop playing. THIS would be a lot better than people waiting for new opportunities for several months.

·        

 

 

 

FAQ

 

Whats wrong with playing on a server where the big tribes got raided?

 

  • Out of my own experience it is never the same then playing on a fresh server. For me it is more of an motivational thing but remaining structures of big tribes are nothing I want to see in my first days and weeks of playing a new server (hope you understand what I mean)

 

Play unofficial servers!

 

  • Some people can enjoy those, I do not and I know alot of players who would never play an unofficial servers. The big problem with them is, you can never be sure what you get. Random wipes, unfair admins, low population, and alot more of things will prevent me from playing unofficials (And yes I have played on unofficial servers before)

 

 

I know that alot of what I say may be my own opinion but I do beliefe that Studio Wildcard and its Community needs to find a solution for the problems I am talking about.

What you saw here are mainly thoughts about what I want for this game and I hope you will respect my opinions while I will respect yours!

 

Greets

Survivor PicoloXL

(The one and only moustache man)

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1) Wiping servers solves nothing. Either the same people will be back to where they were in a few weeks and in a few months, you will be back at the exact same problem. You will also lose a chunk of players who have put alot of time into building grand castles, mutating dinos, taming, etc. Wiping to get on "equal footing" only benefits the person suggesting it usually as it gives them a potential chance to grab that good build spot, or whatever the case may be. Bottom line is if its not the same people back where they were, its someone else as the Top Dog and still the same problems.

The issues with official servers arent how old or new they are but rather:

  • In the last few months, all of the official servers were moved to Germany/Europe. Why? China and Australia have their own servers and we DID have European servers. Moving all of them to Europe did NOTHING to help the big North American playerbase in terms of lag or ping or anything else. If anything, its made connectivity for USA/Canadian players worse. Moving a cluster of servers back to NA would be a step in the right direction to work on high ping issues for NA players.
  • Lower the server cap from 70. By 20 people, most servers are crapping themselves on official. Not only do you have lag and rubber banding, but 90% of the dinosaur spawns stop and you're greeted with a massive island devoid of almost all dinos and it becomes a huge, social chat room where you're either building endlessly because theres nothing to hunt, or you're being obnoxious in chat out of pure boredom.
  • Upgrade the server hardware to handle the current loads. Clearly they cannot handle the players/spawns on official servers. Imagine if an official server DID have capacity players; all 70 of them, online at once. Our server, official PVE 441, has had 35 at one point. Half..Now imagine all 70 have massive egg farms, tamed dinos, and are breeding babies, and huge bases. Tell me the server could handle that? No, the servers need a major upgrade.
  • Come up with a solution to the massive tamed dino amounts. Apart from the cap, the moment more and more people log in with big amounts of tamed dinos, the less and less wild dinos spawn. There has to be some type of fix that allows wild dinos to keep spawning. I had suggested creating an object that a player could "store" his unused dinos in and it would literally take them off the server and not count towards caps or anything on the server. Think of it as a MP3 being stored in an ipod only the MP3 is your dino and the ipod is the cube or object that you created that only you/your tribe can access.

 

 

 

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