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

[Arkasaurio]

One thing to realize, regardless on where you fall for whether or not cross server transfers should be allowed, it seems clear there here to stay. They put drops on top structures, in part, so you can transfer, there's the tek transmitter, vibrant trading community (at least until the BP nerf ), and, whether the whole WC team is currently on board, it seems like it was the original vision for the game. So to me, the important question is more how to improve the system than whether it should exist or not.

But as I mentioned earlier they do have the individual cluster servers (island-se-center, no outside transfers). I mean this with no disrespect at all, but for anyone that hates the open transfer system I suggest playing those servers, making them awesome, and getting as many people clamoring for more of those as possible (realize this is not possible for all players). If those get popular enough, maybe they even bring back a number of 1 map only officials.

It's a full launch kind of thing, but I don't see any reason why WC couldn't or wouldn't incorporate those kinds of servers with enough demand. In EA, I can see the benefit of providing fewer options to cut down on variables to consider. Still, even if you're a one map diehard, 3 is a considerable improvement from the open system.

[spacejam]

3 hours ago, Volcano637 said:

That's the thing man. Leveling back up is the best part of the game. I love redoing the first 60 levels. And no that's not sarcasm. With the new xp the way it is it only takes a couple of days to get there.

i can even remember how many 60 plus characters I have hidden on dead or low pop servers. That's why I don't really care if my main gets caged or not. I have started over a lot and after I get wiped and start over I really start enjoying myself again it might seem crazy but getting myself from 1-10 in like 20 minutes feels awesome 

i like the early game grind of putting up your first base etc but i hate waiting on the levels and stuff. starting over again with a level 70 character is not much worry but starting over with stone pick and hatchet frustrates me

[Armythug]

On 2/23/2017 at 0:49 AM, Salviah said:

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

Well...At least you're getting a challenge now based on your post. lol

[Salviah]

11 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

I was most definitely not trying to be rude, rather using his line of logic to also show what could be done to combat transferral raids with the tools at hand.

Nah, sorry but we are not playing the same game. Or you didn't read me I don't know...

The alpha tribe on my old server was a very powerful, respected alpha tribe. They owned 2 servers and everybody was kind of happy with them. We (the whole server) worked together to block everything we could against the transfer actually (but is that a thing to be forced to "block" some features in a game ? I didn't know that. Because it also block people from doing boss or taking drop. Isn't this the main point of their use ?).

They got defeated on the 2 servers. Chinese attack constantly made us weak, they were hiding everywhere, destroying all they could at night. Small tribes and small bases disappeared first. Players with them. 

Then I don't know what really happened but to me, they were constantly forced to defend themselves, every minute. (Is that eventhe game ? Being on the defensive and be mean to every new player on the server because you have no choice ?)

I think they just couldn't handle that all along and somehow, they let it down because they were too tired. Everybody on my server has given up. When I came back to play, I saw what was an alive, happy, mostly friendly server before, as a dead server. 

And I can say, I can truly affirm : that is absolutely not because of the players mentality on this server.

BUT you can actually work to obtain a ptera

 

Anyway, if I'm not with the pro trading guys it's because I don't really get the thing tbh.

Since I started to play, trades exist. I have done a lot because I enjoyed that too but I didn't need to go that far to do it.  I've always done it on my own server and that was fine for me...

[Salviah]

9 hours ago, Armythug said:

Well...At least you're getting a challenge now based on your post. lol

No that's the thing, it's not a challenge when you can't do anything. 

[Salviah]

17 hours ago, Arkasaurio said:

Again, no personal experience actually playing on these servers, but here's what I was talking about: https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/152390648074411380/ Since it's from Jat, the equivalent post is probably somewhere on this forum as well.

Arkasaurio I'll try them when I'll have a little bit more time but, to me, it's exactly the idea of what it should be. I don't know how this information can't be more known by players. Thanks.

[Arkasaurio]

12 hours ago, Salviah said:

Arkasaurio I'll try them when I'll have a little bit more time but, to me, it's exactly the idea of what it should be. I don't know how this information can't be more known by players. Thanks.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes (seriously)!

[Arrclyde]

On 27.2.2017 at 0:08 AM, ciabattaroll said:

And if someone doesn't want their server wiped then they should work towards keeping it a busy and active one. There's no good straightforward solution to fixing an issue that's brought about by playerbase mentality, developer tinkering can only do so much.

Well but the developers are the one that CREATE this whole situation. All of ARKs systems are pretty "nerd centric" and aim towards a community that is dedicated to one game everyday with pretty much most of their time invested into this one game. Taming times, resource grind, persistence, server transfers and offline raiding. All those things are part of the problem that drives thousands of players away from official servers. 

Sure, one can say "the players need to band together to fight off those invaders". But that is not the solution that works for most of the people. And i dare to say the vast majority of people. WC created a system that allows a small minority to rule multiple servers at ones simply because they have the time and dedication to do so. Within these systems there is no way for a server community to fight off invaders since all invasions happen after a scout looked around for the time when most people are offline. Offline raiding and cross timezones make it impossible for normal people to fight invaders and the enormous power grind prevents recovering from an invasion. And on the other hand you have those people with much time and resources on their hands that evade each other. So big raging tribes that wipe entire servers while their defenders are offline won't attack other raging tribes unless there is nobody left to wipe. 

IF WC wants to attract the masses, the game needs casual friendly environments. Servers that prevent server invasions by making server transfers pretty much impossible, and offline protection. I know there are people opposing offline protection because they say it is abusive. But in reality it is far less abusive than a system that makes attacking peoples bases while their owners are offline possible. And IF somebody gets offline as soon as they get attacked, so what. Thta will probably happen if the one getting attacked sees no chance in winning anyways, say if the attacker comes with 10 people and 30 dinos while the one being attackt is only one person in his small base. In that case it is damn good that the attacker don't get the chance of flattening his base.... simply because they are cowards. 

The system right now needs tweeking and YES, that IS the part the developers need to step in. Unless it is their plan for the majority of the playerbase to only play SP or on unofficial servers. There need to be different kind of servers, such as no transfer, offline protection and no limit PvP servers. That way people can choose. But the way it is now it just relies to heavily on people acting nice. But there is the fact that a very small group dedicated enough has the power to make people not want to start over again for the 3rd time in a row and effectively driving a huge part of the community from the official servers. 

There is only so much players can do, and most can NOT stay only 24/7 and build huge ten layered metal bases to prevent server wipes from happening. I am all for giving players freedom, but in reality only very few can really handle "freedom" in a game well. Most can not handle it. 

 

TL;DR: Of course there is only so much the developer can do, but only the developer has the power and the tools to prevent unfair situations that effect most of their player base. 

[Sigin]

I started to play ark just few weeks ago, in free time im reading about stuff around game and more i read less i want to play ... because 2 simple reasons - offline raiding and server transfers ... if new person to game is alredy questioning his future play of this game based on way too many forum topics about broken game mechanics ignored by developers i think soem change has to happen ASAP

[ciabattaroll]

19 minutes ago, Arrclyde said:

Well but the developers are the one that CREATE this whole situation. All of ARKs systems are pretty "nerd centric" and aim towards a community that is dedicated to one game everyday with pretty much most of their time invested into this one game. Taming times, resource grind, persistence, server transfers and offline raiding. All those things are part of the problem that drives thousands of players away from official servers. 

Sure, one can say "the players need to band together to fight off those invaders". But that is not the solution that works for most of the people. And i dare to say the vast majority of people. WC created a system that allows a small minority to rule multiple servers at ones simply because they have the time and dedication to do so. Within these systems there is no way for a server community to fight off invaders since all invasions happen after a scout looked around for the time when most people are offline. Offline raiding and cross timezones make it impossible for normal people to fight invaders and the enormous power grind prevents recovering from an invasion. And on the other hand you have those people with much time and resources on their hands that evade each other. So big raging tribes that wipe entire servers while their defenders are offline won't attack other raging tribes unless there is nobody left to wipe. 

IF WC wants to attract the masses, the game needs casual friendly environments. Servers that prevent server invasions by making server transfers pretty much impossible, and offline protection. I know there are people opposing offline protection because they say it is abusive. But in reality it is far less abusive than a system that makes attacking peoples bases while their owners are offline possible. And IF somebody gets offline as soon as they get attacked, so what. Thta will probably happen if the one getting attacked sees no chance in winning anyways, say if the attacker comes with 10 people and 30 dinos while the one being attackt is only one person in his small base. In that case it is damn good that the attacker don't get the chance of flattening his base.... simply because they are cowards. 

The system right now needs tweeking and YES, that IS the part the developers need to step in. Unless it is their plan for the majority of the playerbase to only play SP or on unofficial servers. There need to be different kind of servers, such as no transfer, offline protection and no limit PvP servers. That way people can choose. But the way it is now it just relies to heavily on people acting nice. But there is the fact that a very small group dedicated enough has the power to make people not want to start over again for the 3rd time in a row and effectively driving a huge part of the community from the official servers. 

There is only so much players can do, and most can NOT stay only 24/7 and build huge ten layered metal bases to prevent server wipes from happening. I am all for giving players freedom, but in reality only very few can really handle "freedom" in a game well. Most can not handle it. 

 

TL;DR: Of course there is only so much the developer can do, but only the developer has the power and the tools to prevent unfair situations that effect most of their player base. 

The problem with this is there really is only so much tweaking that can be done without players taking accountability for their part in creating the situation we have. Let's take another player created quagmire : foundation/pillar spam. When the developers came in and made modifications to the timers on lone structures, did the playerbase go and say "yeah we made a big mess too"? No. People's responses to this was "GJ Wildcard, now I'll just double stack my pillars/foundations so that the shorter timer is rendered moot".

Now with this situation, nearly two years of alpha tribes styling themselves as owners of servers, "I wanna be uber leet solo tribe" mentality, and players being bullied off of servers have made those servers weak to assault by an unrepentantly unified front. People offer suggestions they could do, like cutting down the size of tribes, as though alliances don't exist (or the fact that people have been doing coordinated allied actions long before the alliance system was even implemented). They suggest disqualifying transferral of items, completely forgetting that Wildcard had intended for people to be able to make use of/show off the materials they obtained in scorched earth, like boomerangs, windmills, desert armor, or adobe structures; on to the island/center.

When I say there's no straightforward solution to it, it's because developers need to enact something (and it has to be something that can actually stick), and players at the same time need to acknowledge and hold true to the enacted change, rather than figuring out ways to circumvent it.

[tiryanabell]

28 minutes ago, Sigin said:

I started to play ark just few weeks ago, in free time im reading about stuff around game and more i read less i want to play ... because 2 simple reasons - offline raiding and server transfers ... if new person to game is alredy questioning his future play of this game based on way too many forum topics about broken game mechanics ignored by developers i think soem change has to happen ASAP

Well, Ark is still an awesome game imho. As a new player, why don't you start single player then try a dedicated server PVE or PVP before engaging in official PVE  or PVP. 

I understand the official PVE/PVP issues, and I don't like the way it is now (that's why I stopped playing official). That doesn't mean you cannot enjoy the game anymore, just in a slightly different way. Is that the way it's supposed to be? Probably not. But if official servers are running empty, I'm sure WC will take action, ...,  at some point.

[Arrclyde]

1 hour ago, ciabattaroll said:

The problem with this is there really is only so much tweaking that can be done without players taking accountability for their part in creating the situation we have. Let's take another player created quagmire : foundation/pillar spam. When the developers came in and made modifications to the timers on lone structures, did the playerbase go and say "yeah we made a big mess too"? No. People's responses to this was "GJ Wildcard, now I'll just double stack my pillars/foundations so that the shorter timer is rendered moot".

Now with this situation, nearly two years of alpha tribes styling themselves as owners of servers, "I wanna be uber leet solo tribe" mentality, and players being bullied off of servers have made those servers weak to assault by an unrepentantly unified front. People offer suggestions they could do, like cutting down the size of tribes, as though alliances don't exist (or the fact that people have been doing coordinated allied actions long before the alliance system was even implemented). They suggest disqualifying transferral of items, completely forgetting that Wildcard had intended for people to be able to make use of/show off the materials they obtained in scorched earth, like boomerangs, windmills, desert armor, or adobe structures; on to the island/center.

When I say there's no straightforward solution to it, it's because developers need to enact something (and it has to be something that can actually stick), and players at the same time need to acknowledge and hold true to the enacted change, rather than figuring out ways to circumvent it.

Sure it is the players that break those mechanics. And in Early Access it is their job to do that. Now it is the developers turn. Maybe by having multible factors taking into account for example pillar stacking. Those could be like this: Bigger tribes need to build bigger structures so the fast decaytimer doesn't start once everybody left rendering distance. And a structure limit Tribewise would prevent building 24 by 24 by 24 Dinograges all over the place. Just a small sketch, but way to many things in this game are relying on static measures rather than dynamic values. Nothing prevents you from getting bigger, but nothing makes it more difficult to maintain bigger. Getting food is just a minor inconvenience. It should be much harder especially for endgame dinos like Wyvern, Gigas and Rockgolems. Dino balance is another thing, to many dinos are rendered useless to quick. Even Dilos could be useful if balanced correctly. Well if WC reworks the whole kibble system (which is a huge part of the cluttering problem). 

And i won't be talking about "completely forgetting that Wildcard had intended for people to be able to make use of/show off the materials they obtained in scorched earth". Releasing a DLC for an unfinished game has been discussed to death and i am on the "they should have saved this for AFTER release. But that is also WCs problem that they have created themself without (it seems to me) thinking it all the way through. Besides having no real counter (or less efficient ones) to tools, weapons and creatures without buying the DLC. That in my eyes is just a bad business practice. But that should not be part of this discussion. 

Sure the people are responsible for their actions. That is the point. If WC doesn't realize after 2 years of early access that the player base (or should i say humanity as a whole) is just not ready for such freedom they should start realizing by now. They wanted to attract as many different players as possible, therefor they should provide a suitable environment for different types of players they wanted to attract. I believe there is no such thing as the "leet uber solo tribe", at least not to this extent. But what is wrong for single persons playing solo among multi person tribes? The only thing is that nothing but the peoples moral stops them from being nice to solo players. Especially since WC attract many younger people (and people that stayed young mentally) where there is no real moral. It is all a game right? Nobody gets hurt, right? But that somebody just got wiped hours and hours of playing because there is no system in place to protect them or at least give them a chance to recover faster, makes this person quit and not come back is far beyond their horizon. 

Ark systems (most of them) are way to static and to "hardcore"-centric to attract and hold a bigger audience. I don't say "punish big tribes for being big". I say not only weapons, tools and dinos need to be balanced, but multi person tribe vs single person player needs balancing as well. And if it would only be different types of servers. The ones we have now is a no limit server type of PvP and PvE. That just makes more problems than it solves. 

Right now i play with a group of 6 players. We started a couple of weeks ago (again after a long break) and get along pretty well. But i guess if we log in one day just to find our progress ruined over night just because we can't go online for the most part of daytime (yes all of us are adults with families and jobs) we will probably quit for a long time til things are solved. Because it doesn't matter who good and nice you are, it just takes one, immature person that wants to mess up your stuff for the poop and giggles to ruin your day. Sadly there seem to quiet a few that have fun in that pathatic way. 

Good systems can prevent many bad situations and make this game fun for a lot of people in the long run. And nobody said it will be easy to find those go solutions, but that is why there are game devs ;-) That is their job. 

[Salviah]

Arcclyde, I love you.

[Salviah]

Hello guys, 

So i'm now playing on one of the cluster server we were talking about and I bring you some news.

I didn't play that much so I can't really talk about everything on it but I can try to give you some feedbacks for now.

So the first thing I saw when I was choosing a server is that they are often all full, that's a bit boring when you have to hit the connect button 25 times, but you always succeed to connect at the end.

On the one i'm playing now, there is no real alpha tribe. It's more like a lot of big tribes and it seems to me that they are not really taking care about smaller tribes for now, so that's ok to me.

There is not the same tribes in the different maps, people seems to stay on one map and not very move to an other (at least for now), sometimes you see some people coming from an other map but they are not really doing something on others maps.

For now, the majority of the people are low level since it's relatively new servers so there is a loooot of small bases everywhere, mostly destructed because anybody with a stone hatchet can destroy those small bases.

The main conflict I see on this server is small lvl 20 tribes, whining about others small lvl 20 tribes for breaking their wooden door.

 

So for now, it's ok for me. Until now, no random guys coming and wiping the whole server. But as I said, maybe when one of the big tribe will decide to become alpha, it will be an other story.