Why I'm forced to break up with you, Ark.

[Salviah]

Why I'm forced to break up with you, Ark.

Hello, 

I'm a huge player of Ark since its start.

Please Ark, read this until the end because I want you to know why I, and plenty of other players, are forced to break up with you now.
I'll just tell you my story and you can judge by yourself.

When I started to play to this game, it was the most amazing gaming experience in my life. A game in early access with so much contents ? Wow, Ark, you impressed me soooo much. 
You are the BEST GAME I'VE EVER PLAYED and I thank you so much for that.

 

So we were playing, me and some friends, discovering the game at first then wanting to grow more. After playing hundreds of hours we were a pretty descent tribe, with metal base, lot of dinos (giga and stuff) and we were doing pretty great. Getting some PvP : raiding tribes, getting raided by other tribes in a fair way (by fair i mean those raids were planned, concerning people from a server to people from that same server). 
Then we get wiped by a tribe from our server (still fair) and life happened so we stopped playing for a little bit.

One day we decided to play again, we wanted to come back on our server ruled by a pretty huge alpha tribe that we known well. 
I can say that we were a bit surprised when we heard that they got wiped by an other tribe, but whatever, we just wanted to play.
It was restarting from the begining and we were growing fast because we knew the game very well.

Then we saw some guys, flying around our base everyday. We finally managed to talk to one of them to know what's going on and the guy literally said :
"We are the ones who wiped your alpha tribe, we are not active on this server yet because our main raid is occupied to wipe an other server for now. But if you want to keep you dinos and stuff, just move to an other server because we are coming soon and we'll wipe this one too."

What ? How ? Why ? We had no answer. But we wanted to keep our dinos so we decided to test some other servers to see if we can move anywhere else.

And I can tell you, it was not a part of pleasure. We tested like ... I don't know maybe 50 servers. We were just connecting with a new character and we were asking just one question : 
"Is this server nice ?"
40 on 50 servers had the same response : "no."
When we asked why, it was always the same answer : "because the server is getting raided".
The other 10 who didn't answer were full of dead bases, lagging as hell. Everything was gone, broken, destructed.
And I'm not taking of people trying to defend their server like they can by blocking any drops and obelisks.

But we had no time because the tribe would wipe us very soon so we choose to move to an other open random server.
Then we reconstructed a small metal base with some of our dinos for 2 days, hoping for the best.

Two days after, we were farming a little bit with our quetzal and ankylo and a guy arrived on his high level ptera. 
He killed us, killed our dinos, took his rocket launcher, destroyed our base in 5 minutes.
I was trying to have some answers on the chat, nobody on the server knew him. When he finally answered to my calls, his only sentence was : 
"Do you like to swallow ? "

 

So now, here are my questions : 
     - How a guy coming from nowhere can wipe a tribe with only "Do you like to swallow ? " as argument ?
     - How a guy can, because he is bored and have some stuff on his own server, come on a random server and make people stop playing ?

We can't even know where this guy comes from. He is just coming, destroying everything and then leaving.
(Don't take me wrong, it's not a pvp issue, I don't want to hear "That's what we call pvp" because I really enjoyed pvp before, when it was not a random guy coming from a random server, destroying random stuff and leaving the destructed server just like that.)

     - How an alpha tribe from an other server can come on a server and wipe the alpha tribe just like that ? 
     - How can they decide to wipe 2 or more servers, making everybody on those servers stop playing, and nothing can stop them ?

I have absolutely no problem with a tribe coming on a server with the goal to detroy the alpha tribe in place, but it needs to be a smart move, with a long planification, a lot of reflexion and farming.
Now, tribes have just no way to defend their servers from invasions. Before we could spot "the bad guys" when they were planning some bad things and defend ourselves. Now it's just them coming from "we don't know where", with all their stuff and destroying anything. And in most of the case, just leaving right after because they did that just because they were bored.

As I said above, I have no problem with raids and wipes, I actually really enjoyed it before the update to transfer litteraly everything from server to server.
Before, we raided for the stuff owned by the other tribe and things we wanted. Now there is no "rules" anymore because you can just come and go with no risk for your own tribe.

So that's the main part of my letter. 
Please, Ark, disable the transfer from server to server. Or at least, disable it for stuff and dinos. You can keep it for characters if you want. But with stuff and dinos, that's not playable anymore. At all.
(Or at least create some official servers with this option disabled, so we can choose.)

 

 

And the other thing I regret (but that's working only if you disable the transfers) is when we couldn't tell who raided our base because the tribe name was not marked if they didn't kill dinos. 
That was in my opinion an amazing thing and I'll explain you why : 

Before if you wanted to raid someone, and you were afraid of consequences, you just tried to open the base and take the stuff without killing any dino to not get caught when the tribe was not there.
It was frustrating, that's for sure, but at least this way, when you were raided, you had all your dinos left to rebuild your base. 
Now people are just raiding bases and killing everything to not fear the revenge.
It's easier to destroy everything and not be afraid of the consequences, after all, than only take what you really want.
And the fun part we had with that too, was to try to find some ways to put in place some "alarm system" to see the names when we get raid (by placing dodos with low hp everywhere for example). 
Or in the other way, when you raid someone, it was fun to try to detect all the dinos and defences put in place to not get caught.

 

So voilà, Ark, that's why i'm forced to break up with you now. I can't play anymore and it makes me really sad.

Please, Ark, stop killing your game, don't make me stop playing forever, I loved you so much.

[Salviah]

Why my topic has been moved from "Game suggestions" to "General Discussion" ?

I actually had 2 game suggestions here and it was : disable the servers transfer + get back the old system where we can't see people names while breaking a wall...

[scotte93]

I was much in the same boat. Til I realized they have changed the pvp aspect and you either get with it or get out of the way. Easiest way to get with it is to find a totally dead server and make it your home. Do all your farming and taming there and then when your feelin frisky you just take the fight to another server not risking your home base. Is it lame? It sure is and I don't like it. But it's the only real way to compete at this point. 

[Salviah]

Sadly for me, it's not Ark anymore then ... I prefer stop playing than playing on a dead server with no challenges.

[Jerryn]

1 hour ago, Salviah said:

Why my topic has been moved from "Game suggestions" to "General Discussion" ?

I actually had 2 game suggestions here and it was : disable the servers transfer + get back the old system where we can't see people names while breaking a wall...

Well, it was not titled as a game suggestion and certainly did not start off as one.   And a quick scan still makes it hard to see any suggestions.  I don't mean that in an offensive manner, simply providing my own observation.

To me, if I really wanted some suggestions to be seen and understood, I would write up the suggestions individually, title them in a way that it was a clear they were suggestions(that is, the title indicates what is being suggested), and then include the info that is specific and relevant to the suggest would be included.  Usually that starts with a concise summary of the suggestion, then a detail version, if needed, and then followed by any additional or ancillary information that might provide some context.

In the case of both suggestions, they already have been made(multiple times), so repeating them, instead of offerring support to the existing suggestions, does not really help.  Seems to me, people would want a unified voice, easy for the devs to find, instead of multiple discontiguous voices spread around and lost in the noise.  But, that is just me.

[Flaminraptors]

22 minutes ago, Jerryn said:

Well, it was not titled as a game suggestion and certainly did not start off as one.   And a quick scan still makes it hard to see any suggestions.  I don't mean that in an offensive manner, simply providing my own observation.

To me, if I really wanted some suggestions to be seen and understood, I would write up the suggestions individually, title them in a way that it was a clear they were suggestions(that is, the title indicates what is being suggested), and then include the info that is specific and relevant to the suggest would be included.  Usually that starts with a concise summary of the suggestion, then a detail version, if needed, and then followed by any additional or ancillary information that might provide some context.

In the case of both suggestions, they already have been made(multiple times), so repeating them, instead of offerring support to the existing suggestions, does not really help.  Seems to me, people would want a unified voice, easy for the devs to find, instead of multiple discontiguous voices spread around and lost in the noise.  But, that is just me.

Someone got a thesaurus for Xmas I see ?

[ILuvTheAwesomeDevs]

Hmm don't give up on ark, just find a dedicated non-official with a healthy population/admin, there are no Zerg raiding tribes on the, check out the server advertisement forum at survivetheark

[Arkasaurio]

I hear you, but I'll say that there are also a lot of players, like myself, that enjoy the transfer system. Before anyone says it, no, I'm not one of those griefing raiders, I just really like the idea of the game being one big ecosystem, even with all the current downsides. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with the current system; for one thing we should be able to see a players server record so at least there's the possibility of retaliation.

As others have mentioned, unofficials could be a good solution for you. Also aren't there still closed clusters (Island-SE-Center)? I haven't tried those myself, maybe they're just a microcosm of the same issues you're having but could be worth a shot.

[HeXiFy]

Why would they disable transferring from server to server.... that's a horrible suggestion... that would kill the game further... there would be no trade forums and there wouldn't be migrating if your server pop dies...

[Morloa]

I personally would love to see ark take a more Strategic approach to Transfers, Something like you can only bring dinosaurs over and blueprints (and the Transmitter). Adds an element of High Risk to the equation, If you wanted to raid a tribe you couldn't just prefab a base "slap it down and call yourself alpha" march your horde of bronto's and quetzals to the enemy alpha's bases. You'd have to come in advance and set up something under there noses get really creative as to where you set up your base with the Transmitter things like caves especially underwater will be used more. Kudos to VDD they may have been caught being cheaters but they found a way into a cave everyone on my server thought was blocked and operated out of it for over a week before being caught by that point they already had what they needed to setup a Base this was before you could prefab and they did it with minimal dinosaurs a Pteranadon and argy. This also allows groups of 5 guys to get in on the action far to much of the game is tailored to 50 man+ tribes, Small guerrilla tactics needs some love and this doesn't inhibit that at all. I've had more fair share in partaking in Server transfer raiding and it's honestly too easy, There's far to much going for the offensive side right now some poor unsuspecting server has less than half an hour to protect itself or stop an invasion it only takes 30 minutes to slam a base up, especially with the transmitter being so cheap and easy to acquire you can set up a base anywhere.

TLDR: Wildcard should restrict transfers to promote healthier & Enjoyable play that's not "slap it down and pound" which is the current norm. Who likes 50 bronto's being marched at your base, who likes overcoming people with 1000 Armour Flak and 500% only to come out empty handed cause it was prefabbed.

[SwishPapaSweets]

For transferring raid materials and dinos i would suggest a cool dowm of 4 to 8 hours rather than disable transfers as it lets people trade server to server. 

[AlphaCarno]

when I saw this post I thought it was gonna be a stupid complain  but man  this is just messed up.

[ShaneOfThrones]

On ‎22‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 6:36 PM, Jerryn said:

Well, it was not titled as a game suggestion and certainly did not start off as one.   And a quick scan still makes it hard to see any suggestions.  I don't mean that in an offensive manner, simply providing my own observation.

To me, if I really wanted some suggestions to be seen and understood, I would write up the suggestions individually, title them in a way that it was a clear they were suggestions(that is, the title indicates what is being suggested), and then include the info that is specific and relevant to the suggest would be included.  Usually that starts with a concise summary of the suggestion, then a detail version, if needed, and then followed by any additional or ancillary information that might provide some context.

In the case of both suggestions, they already have been made(multiple times), so repeating them, instead of offerring support to the existing suggestions, does not really help.  Seems to me, people would want a unified voice, easy for the devs to find, instead of multiple discontiguous voices spread around and lost in the noise.  But, that is just me.

Sounds like you don't like criticism and that everything this person said is true and should happen immediately (DISABLE TRANSFERS)! 

[Salviah]

Thanks everyone for your feedbacks, it's really appreciated.

 

I can understand that some of you actually like the transfers, but in this case, why simply not make 2 types of server ?

Some with transfer allowed, some with transfer not allowed so we can at least, choose.

 

And in my opinion, the transfer was a great idea to pass from map to map. And I have suggested on the "Game suggestion" forum (yeah I have recreated a post there :p) that we could link the maps on only 1 server. For example, if i'm playing on "server01 The Island" and I want to go on Scorched Eart, I can only go on "server01 Scorched Earth"

 

And for those saying "and if the server if dying, how do you move ?". My response will be simple, if you want to change server, for any case, any reason, it has to be a big decision and in this case : restart a new tribe, on a new server. Restart to grow slowly, making you some friends, some ennemies. Restart to deal with the rules given by the Alpha Tribe in place etc...

That's Ark for me, I mean, that what Ark was and tbh, it fitted me perfectly this way ...

[AlphaCarno]

On 2/24/2017 at 8:37 AM, ShaneOfThrones said:

Sounds like you don't like criticism and that everything this person said is true and should happen immediately (DISABLE TRANSFERS)! 

well tbh its kinda a problem in pve to. People have been dumping dinos on our server to keep theirs from reaching the cap. By disabling transfers it will mess up trade which is quite fun  I think that in some way limiting pvp would be a better option

[Guest BubbaCrawfish]

I thought this was going to be a thread of "My girlfriend gave me an ultimatum" thread, but alas, no...

On 2/23/2017 at 5:26 AM, Salviah said:

(Or at least create some official servers with this option disabled, so we can choose.)

That's a decent idea. Similar to the notame servers.

[Arkasaurio]

1 hour ago, Salviah said:

 

And in my opinion, the transfer was a great idea to pass from map to map. And I have suggested on the "Game suggestion" forum (yeah I have recreated a post there :p) that we could link the maps on only 1 server. For example, if i'm playing on "server01 The Island" and I want to go on Scorched Eart, I can only go on "server01 Scorched Earth"

I can't boot up the game right now to check for you, but I am pretty sure there are still official individual clusters that only allow transfers within that individual cluster. One Island, one Center, one SE, or almost exactly what you described here (at least for PC). I will mention that I haven't played them, they could be a bad experience in any number of other ways - maybe it's more fun for griefers to grief since they know players can't escape to dozens/hundreds of other servers. Alternatively, it may take some looking and experimentation, but I think you could also find exactly that (or single maps) in a dedicated unofficial server.

Does anyone else know for certain if those individual cluster servers (Island-Center-SE) are still running?

[Volcano637]

On 2/23/2017 at 2:26 AM, Salviah said:

Why I'm forced to break up with you, Ark.

Hello, 

I'm a huge player of Ark since its start.

Please Ark, read this until the end because I want you to know why I, and plenty of other players, are forced to break up with you now.
I'll just tell you my story and you can judge by yourself.

When I started to play to this game, it was the most amazing gaming experience in my life. A game in early access with so much contents ? Wow, Ark, you impressed me soooo much. 
You are the BEST GAME I'VE EVER PLAYED and I thank you so much for that.

 

So we were playing, me and some friends, discovering the game at first then wanting to grow more. After playing hundreds of hours we were a pretty descent tribe, with metal base, lot of dinos (giga and stuff) and we were doing pretty great. Getting some PvP : raiding tribes, getting raided by other tribes in a fair way (by fair i mean those raids were planned, concerning people from a server to people from that same server). 
Then we get wiped by a tribe from our server (still fair) and life happened so we stopped playing for a little bit.

One day we decided to play again, we wanted to come back on our server ruled by a pretty huge alpha tribe that we known well. 
I can say that we were a bit surprised when we heard that they got wiped by an other tribe, but whatever, we just wanted to play.
It was restarting from the begining and we were growing fast because we knew the game very well.

Then we saw some guys, flying around our base everyday. We finally managed to talk to one of them to know what's going on and the guy literally said :
"We are the ones who wiped your alpha tribe, we are not active on this server yet because our main raid is occupied to wipe an other server for now. But if you want to keep you dinos and stuff, just move to an other server because we are coming soon and we'll wipe this one too."

What ? How ? Why ? We had no answer. But we wanted to keep our dinos so we decided to test some other servers to see if we can move anywhere else.

And I can tell you, it was not a part of pleasure. We tested like ... I don't know maybe 50 servers. We were just connecting with a new character and we were asking just one question : 
"Is this server nice ?"
40 on 50 servers had the same response : "no."
When we asked why, it was always the same answer : "because the server is getting raided".
The other 10 who didn't answer were full of dead bases, lagging as hell. Everything was gone, broken, destructed.
And I'm not taking of people trying to defend their server like they can by blocking any drops and obelisks.

But we had no time because the tribe would wipe us very soon so we choose to move to an other open random server.
Then we reconstructed a small metal base with some of our dinos for 2 days, hoping for the best.

Two days after, we were farming a little bit with our quetzal and ankylo and a guy arrived on his high level ptera. 
He killed us, killed our dinos, took his rocket launcher, destroyed our base in 5 minutes.
I was trying to have some answers on the chat, nobody on the server knew him. When he finally answered to my calls, his only sentence was : 
"Do you like to swallow ? "

 

So now, here are my questions : 
     - How a guy coming from nowhere can wipe a tribe with only "Do you like to swallow ? " as argument ?
     - How a guy can, because he is bored and have some stuff on his own server, come on a random server and make people stop playing ?

We can't even know where this guy comes from. He is just coming, destroying everything and then leaving.
(Don't take me wrong, it's not a pvp issue, I don't want to hear "That's what we call pvp" because I really enjoyed pvp before, when it was not a random guy coming from a random server, destroying random stuff and leaving the destructed server just like that.)

     - How an alpha tribe from an other server can come on a server and wipe the alpha tribe just like that ? 
     - How can they decide to wipe 2 or more servers, making everybody on those servers stop playing, and nothing can stop them ?

I have absolutely no problem with a tribe coming on a server with the goal to detroy the alpha tribe in place, but it needs to be a smart move, with a long planification, a lot of reflexion and farming.
Now, tribes have just no way to defend their servers from invasions. Before we could spot "the bad guys" when they were planning some bad things and defend ourselves. Now it's just them coming from "we don't know where", with all their stuff and destroying anything. And in most of the case, just leaving right after because they did that just because they were bored.

As I said above, I have no problem with raids and wipes, I actually really enjoyed it before the update to transfer litteraly everything from server to server.
Before, we raided for the stuff owned by the other tribe and things we wanted. Now there is no "rules" anymore because you can just come and go with no risk for your own tribe.

So that's the main part of my letter. 
Please, Ark, disable the transfer from server to server. Or at least, disable it for stuff and dinos. You can keep it for characters if you want. But with stuff and dinos, that's not playable anymore. At all.
(Or at least create some official servers with this option disabled, so we can choose.)

 

 

And the other thing I regret (but that's working only if you disable the transfers) is when we couldn't tell who raided our base because the tribe name was not marked if they didn't kill dinos. 
That was in my opinion an amazing thing and I'll explain you why : 

Before if you wanted to raid someone, and you were afraid of consequences, you just tried to open the base and take the stuff without killing any dino to not get caught when the tribe was not there.
It was frustrating, that's for sure, but at least this way, when you were raided, you had all your dinos left to rebuild your base. 
Now people are just raiding bases and killing everything to not fear the revenge.
It's easier to destroy everything and not be afraid of the consequences, after all, than only take what you really want.
And the fun part we had with that too, was to try to find some ways to put in place some "alarm system" to see the names when we get raid (by placing dodos with low hp everywhere for example). 
Or in the other way, when you raid someone, it was fun to try to detect all the dinos and defences put in place to not get caught.

 

So voilà, Ark, that's why i'm forced to break up with you now. I can't play anymore and it makes me really sad.

Please, Ark, stop killing your game, don't make me stop playing forever, I loved you so much.

Hey man! I am sorry to see another good player leave this awesome game. I really wish some of the bad ones would leave so the good ones could stay. Keep your head up though. Who knows, I still have faith that wildcard will realize their mistakes and do an official wipe and disable cross ark. You know bring ark back to its glory days when it truly was the best game ever!!!

[Legday]

You can't just judge a server by jumping in and saying "Is this server nice?" and leaving at the first troll that says "no".  Tbh, that's a bad question to ask as you will almost never get an accurate answer.  It takes time to learn the political landscape of a server.

[Volcano637]

4 minutes ago, Legday said:

You can't just judge a server by jumping in and saying "Is this server nice?" and leaving at the first troll that says "no".  Tbh, that's a bad question to ask as you will almost never get an accurate answer.  It takes time to learn the political landscape of a server.

They are pretty much all bad though. Yes I know there are a few good ones but with over 600 official pvp servers why would you really want to waste all your time looking for that rare good one? That would suck, I mean you wouldn't even be playing the game just wondering around from one server to the next. Man this game is going down hill

[Salviah]

1 hour ago, Legday said:

You can't just judge a server by jumping in and saying "Is this server nice?" and leaving at the first troll that says "no".  Tbh, that's a bad question to ask as you will almost never get an accurate answer.  It takes time to learn the political landscape of a server.

Dude, anyway that was more a metaphore to say it's the same everywhere. We know a lot of players on Ark now since we started to play a year ago. They are all moving from server to server and it's always the same. And if on one or two server it's not the case yet, it's just a matter of time in my opinion.

 

 

Well, I would like to hear more about the servers Arkasaurio was talking about because if they exist, I absolutely want to try them. So if anybody has some information that would be great.

[Sheldor5]

In other games, to "transfer" your stuff between servers you have to actaully pay real money for it (World of Warcraft for example) ... with this they would make money AND decrease such bullsh*t

[Salviah]

Actually, I don't like the idea of paying with real money for something like this because to me it's unfair, but the sad truth is, yes it would help a lot....

[Sheldor5]

20 minutes ago, Salviah said:

Actually, I don't like the idea of paying with real money for something like this because to me it's unfair, but the sad truth is, yes it would help a lot....

It is also unfair to "teleport" your whole amry from a complete different "universe" (server) ... I dont know a single game except Ark (and WoW, paid) with such a "feature"

[Salviah]

I agree.