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story time The life of starting new on an old server


Picolo XL

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The life of starting new on an old server

Hello there,

 

first of all, I am not here to cry about anything I just want to share some storys.

 

So my 3 mates and myselve are playing ARK for ~2 years now.

Untill january we had a 6 months break but then decided to come back to the game. We began to look for opportunities in form of official servers to play on, we found some potentional servers and started playing on them since january. The first 5 servers were a failure, On some we got raided after a day on others after 1,5 weeks.

The "problem" we have is, that when we play, we "PLAY", that means at leastv 14 hours a day and in a very productive way.

 

The last server we got on we had a better chance. We made an "kinda-alliance" with the existing 12-man alpha tribe" and started to grow bigger and bigger.

We started on February 19th, and 2,5 weeks later this is were we stood:

 

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(Missing some giant hatchframes with turrets and 3 more roof layers on this screenshot)

For us and the existing alpah tribe, this was a very impressive work, considering that we were only 4 players from which only  2 have over 2500 hours playtime.

Sadly enought it seems that it was too good for the alphas tribe to still consider us as allies.

 

Just when I went offline tonight, they came with 12 players. MY mate managed to defend our base for 1,5 hours 1 vs 12. In the end he gave up (Dropped everything, it was an offline raid & they broke our alliance did not deserve any loot). They lost around 20 pteras, 1 rock golem and around 20 turtles, their loot was some thatch xD

.

The thing I want to point out with all of this is, that old servers (Talkign about PvP here) are once again just no option to start playing on. I can udnderstand that people say "you just have to play more and better", but I think we did more then anyone else would have done, and still we were nto able to defend against masses of turtles, 250+ rock golems and more which that alpha tribe has collected in a time long before we even started playing there.

 

For us, we now gone again into the phase of "Waiting for new servers". Sadly they are rare, but we are still so into the game and would start all over again right today.

 

Hope I was able to give you and maybe some devs a lil' heads up on how the game works PvP wise at the moment.

 

To conclude this: The Alpah did not damage our base at all, so we decided to do their job ourselve, enjoy :D:

 

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Yep, anyone new to Ark or coming back after a hiatus and restarting are pretty much I#($) on a PVP or even a PVE server. From a PVE point of view: the official servers are filled with pillars. The reasoning usually being that its "protecting" the spawn spots. So each official server as its own self designated police force that dictates where you can and cannot build. So a majority of the time a new player is regulated to an undeseriable or non optional location due to the pillar spam.

In addition to this, you have the tribes whos non active tribemates, that is to say, a person who used to play but doesn't play anymore but had built a ton of crap, still going around refreshing their old tribemates base but not really using it. Thereby, screwing more newer players out of a potential build spot because the tribe feels they now lay a claim to the spot the person who no longer plays, once had. Does that make sense? Think of it as a dog who pisses on a wall to mark his territory. The same thing applies here. You can see the tribe's many buildings and obviously its not being used (no dinos or very few) but you can also see it keeps getting refreshed.

You also have the extremely awesome platform and dino caps in place so many new people will never be able to to put bases on any dinos like brontos or quetzs and are at the mercy of "established" players or landlords if you will, killing off a few dinos so they, the new person, can tame something.

To make matters worse, there is NO limit on the amount of players that can join and start up on an official server. So you could, in theory, have untold amounts of 1-2 person tribes starting up all over the place on the same server.

The thing is, even if new servers are introduced, after a few months or a year, the new servers will be in the same spot current ones are.

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50 minutes ago, JetJaguar said:

The thing is, even if new servers are introduced, after a few months or a year, the new servers will be in the same spot current ones are.

Totally agree with that. I already made a threa about how stuff can be fixed (even tho I am not familiar with PvE). Jat actually answered me on twitter for some of the sugestions I made. The big probleme is, that such general problems are not in the focus at the moment.

But I also think releasing the game with such an unfinished server/game mechanic is not good. In my opinion I would rather wait 2 months longer for the release and have a long-time working system then bringen up some new servers on Release date, which will follow the same old path as so many others.

Another thing that I would actually consider (even before we got raided) is the big "evil" server wipe. I know it was stated  long time ago that there wont be any wipes, but considering all those duplicate bugs since christmas... I feel like having a completely new start would help alot of players and the devs.

 

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I think the developers don't have a consistent design idea. The design of ARK so far seems to be "throw everything cool we can think of into the game and hope it sells".

As they don't have a subscription model, anyone playing the game, unless it sells them more copies, is actually bad for business.

I think the fundamental problem with the PvP design of this game, is that in a persistent world, you need a way to match people to other people of similar level/skill/development.

PvP is only fun if you have a chance to win and a chance to lose. If the power difference is to big, it's not fun for either party.

PvP games have 3 solutions:

- Wipe often. Usually every "match", like in RTS and FPS games. Sometimes a bit slower, in Survival of the Fittest type games.

- Have a ladder or Tier system, where you only fight people similar to you. All games with any kind of persistent world seem to do this.

- Have a very shallow curve, so people just starting have a good chance against people who have been playing for years.

ARK is not going to be able to do the first or last one, so they need to device some Tier or Ladder system. For example, you can only fight the tribe directly ahead of you, and you go up a rank if you manage to have all of them dead at the same time.

That's not the solution, as then you can prevent going down in rank by never having everyone online in your tribe. But something like that is the direction ARK needs to go I think.

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14 minutes ago, CCRogerWilco said:

ARK is not going to be able to do the first or last one, so they need to device some Tier or Ladder system. For example, you can only fight the tribe directly ahead of you, and you go up a rank if you manage to have all of them dead at the same time.

That's not the solution, as then you can prevent going down in rank by never having everyone online in your tribe. But something like that is the direction ARK needs to go I think.

I like the general idea of something like that, even though I doubt this could be implemented easy.

Also you still would have the problem over just too many structures (especially on PvE) placed on servers after a while.

I would defenitely support a subscription model, something like you subscribe and then you are able to join a total of 5 different official servers or sth. like that. I also would suggest something like an Raid-Protection for new tribes and even shorter and mroe restricted auto-demolish timers.

 

There is no simple solution to all of this but I think most of the players would agree that there need to be something done.

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12 minutes ago, CCRogerWilco said:

I think the developers don't have a consistent design idea. The design of ARK so far seems to be "throw everything cool we can think of into the game and hope it sells".

As they don't have a subscription model, anyone playing the game, unless it sells them more copies, is actually bad for business.

I think the fundamental problem with the PvP design of this game, is that in a persistent world, you need a way to match people to other people of similar level/skill/development.

PvP is only fun if you have a chance to win and a chance to lose. If the power difference is to big, it's not fun for either party.

PvP games have 3 solutions:

- Wipe often. Usually every "match", like in RTS and FPS games. Sometimes a bit slower, in Survival of the Fittest type games.

- Have a ladder or Tier system, where you only fight people similar to you. All games with any kind of persistent world seem to do this.

- Have a very shallow curve, so people just starting have a good chance against people who have been playing for years.

ARK is not going to be able to do the first or last one, so they need to device some Tier or Ladder system. For example, you can only fight the tribe directly ahead of you, and you go up a rank if you manage to have all of them dead at the same time.

That's not the solution, as then you can prevent going down in rank by never having everyone online in your tribe. But something like that is the direction ARK needs to go I think.

I think that pretty much nails it. 

Though i must admit that "matching people of the same level" is pretty difficult with the free choice of servers. Wipe often doesn't appeal to me either, because it won't change anything in power distribution. The strong will be strong again after the Server wipe, and the weak (or slow, or few) will be weak for a long time after Server restart. 

Persistence is a huge problem when it comes to too many people of too different playtypes play within the same environment. My thought would be the power balance should be closer together: Bp-weapons and equip need to be only a little better than the primitiv ones (but everything else like wildlife and bosses need to be adjusted accordingly), dino level need to be adjusted so that it actually is worth taming a low level dino other than keeping them for the egg farm. On the other hand a perfect kibble tamed or breed highlevel dino should mean something. Times are important too. To many things take way to long unless you have the manpower and the will to put in double digit hours per day into the game. And last but not least, offline raiding needs a stop put in front of, otherwise the average gamer will lose interest in the game pretty fast. 

I think that there is no perfect solution for all the different types of players and playstyles. I guess it would be best to have different servers in place (like normal PvP/PvE and hardcore) that have some kind of adjustments. Like Vanilla server that has these hard rates, and others that have offline protection, closer balance and less power gaps for dinos and items. We should not forget that if you can raid only when someone is online, defense can't be as strong as vanilla ones since it doesn't need to hold somebody off while nobody of its owner is online. 

I feel a little pity for the devs right now. The right kind of balance seems to be a nightmare. But on the other side, although they could care less about people playing their game since they have those peoples money, i don't think that it would be a great feeling for any dev to know their game is only and mostly played in SP or heavily modified unofficial servers since most people can't make such a commitment to play on official because of time and demands. 

My guess is we will see something happen during Beta and before release. Just because nobody will be playing official long time after release if things stay like now (there are not even as many people playing on officials as some people might think). 

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11 minutes ago, Picolo XL said:

I like the general idea of something like that, even though I doubt this could be implemented easy.

Also you still would have the problem over just too many structures (especially on PvE) placed on servers after a while.

I would defenitely support a subscription model, something like you subscribe and then you are able to join a total of 5 different official servers or sth. like that. I also would suggest something like an Raid-Protection for new tribes and even shorter and mroe restricted auto-demolish timers.

 

There is no simple solution to all of this but I think most of the players would agree that there need to be something done.

i definitely would not, and so none of my people i play with. It is not about the money, it is what you get for it. I barely pay a sub for MMOs these days (none at this time actually) but paying for a game that you will have to start all over again and again, because you lose all your stuff and Dinos again and again? No way. I would rather rent a server for a whole year that has like 70/100 slots than paying one month for the game in this state. 

But that is just me. I don't always know when and how much time in one go i can play, since it is just a hobby when i have time to spare, not planing for it ahead of time in my life. So a sub would be almost the worst idea they could ever come up with. 

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24 minutes ago, Arrclyde said:

i definitely would not, and so none of my people i play with. It is not about the money, it is what you get for it. I barely pay a sub for MMOs these days (none at this time actually) but paying for a game that you will have to start all over again and again, because you lose all your stuff and Dinos again and again? No way. I would rather rent a server for a whole year that has like 70/100 slots than paying one month for the game in this state. 

But that is just me. I don't always know when and how much time in one go i can play, since it is just a hobby when i have time to spare, not planing for it ahead of time in my life. So a sub would be almost the worst idea they could ever come up with. 

Defenitely understand your opinion and I know that there are alot that think the same way.

I would have no problem to play on an unofficiall, but as someone already mentioned above, they are mostly heavily modded, what I do not like at all. Also as you said 70/100 slots would be perfect, but sadly unofficials do not have the same appeal as official servers. You get your smaller player base but even then you can not play PvP in a style as you have it on official servers (without knowing your opponent too much) I had a server myselve for half a year and the players sadly never grew bigger then 20.

 

I do not say subscribtion would be THE solution, I just say for me it would be one option. Still, it remains that there is alot that needs to be done

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4 hours ago, Melcreif said:

Why not build on an extinction server? I'm actually thinking it's a pretty cool idea, especially for someone who is playing a ton...

The thign is, if you are playing a ton, you usually plan to stay longer then a few days. We played one extinction period when it came out and it was nice. But that is nothing we would consider a full-time solution

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54 minutes ago, akamurk said:

Someone should start a mega tribe and wipe all alpha tribes. 

Then what? That mega tribe now rules, same thing. The difference now is theres 20 old mega / alpha tribes who are salty. Helloooo ddos and server trolling.

 

If anyone has ever played a game called Tibia, on pvp.. they will understand. Even with a shift in power, the new guys usually do the same stuff. (And that games a lot more unforgiving than ark.. you think this is a grind ?!)

 

 

Thanks for the read @Picolo XL. You usually make good threads to read and think about:)

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6 hours ago, akamurk said:

Someone should start a mega tribe and wipe all alpha tribes. 

Wouldn't this mega tribe be doing the same thing as the alpha. Ark is a very unforgiving game and I think it would be beneficial if there was something that gave some explanation of how to start of to new players. 

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All that needs to happen is wipe the servers and make bases / dinos invincible or give everything a massive buff if a tribe is offline.

People are going to think twice about raiding an online tribe regardless of how small they are. Ive seen numerous small tribes hold off large ones for so long that raiding just for the lolz isnt profitable. 

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5 hours ago, booned said:

All that needs to happen is wipe the servers and make bases / dinos invincible or give everything a massive buff if a tribe is offline.

People are going to think twice about raiding an online tribe regardless of how small they are. Ive seen numerous small tribes hold off large ones for so long that raiding just for the lolz isnt profitable. 

There is somethign called ORP = Offline raid protection. I played on those servers for a long time, but the devs lost interest in fixing alot of problems, so that now those servers are a big mess. That is kinda sad for me to see, because in general I liked the mechanic very much

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5 hours ago, booned said:

All that needs to happen is wipe the servers and make bases / dinos invincible or give everything a massive buff if a tribe is offline.

People are going to think twice about raiding an online tribe regardless of how small they are. Ive seen numerous small tribes hold off large ones for so long that raiding just for the lolz isnt profitable. 

That is pretty much it. The whole "persistence" system was a nice idea on paper, but in reality it is flawed because of the simple fact that most people can't handle so much utility/freedom in a responsible manner. I bet you a fortune that this system (and offline raiding in particular) drove far more people away from official PvP servers than it held. 

Actually i don't think it should be removed completely, But i think it deserves its own server type, something along the lines of "no limit PvP" or "outlaw PvP". And another type called "carebear-PvP" you know.... just so that the "cool kids" know which type of PvP server they should chose and which not. ;-)

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Hmm honestly what where you expecting? You build up in a very short time up to a point where the alpha realized that, if you continue to grow at this pace, you will overtake them.

So naturaly they did not wait for that to happen. The reason why Alphas are mostly not "nice" is because the nice ones got overthrown often...

Maybe your best bet would be to join a bigger tribe... maybe it would have been an option to merge with the alpha and play as a team?

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1 hour ago, sal said:

Hmm honestly what where you expecting? You build up in a very short time up to a point where the alpha realized that, if you continue to grow at this pace, you will overtake them.

So naturaly they did not wait for that to happen. The reason why Alphas are mostly not "nice" is because the nice ones got overthrown often...

Maybe your best bet would be to join a bigger tribe... maybe it would have been an option to merge with the alpha and play as a team?

Im not saying I was expecting something else. We had an alliance with them but I played long enought to know that this ment nothing.

Still, this is not how I think the game should be. We have currently 3 different offers of big alpha tribes which we could join, but we do not want to do so. We are a small group of 2-4 players and we wanne play our own game. The fact that this is not possible on any existing official server is, wht I beliefe has to change in a way that allows smaller groups AND casual players to still be able to build up and get on a level where they can compete.

 

The biggest difference between a new and an old server to join is:

- On a new server you play to compete with all the other players

- On an old server you just play to not get raided / at least you can hope so

 

I beliefe that exactly this has to change. Either by finding a constant way to provide new servers by recycling old ones (Yes im talking about wipes) or by balancing the current mechanic with stuff like ORP, and other PvP restrictions.

Im not saying I have the perfect solution for that, but I think many people have different idea, that could be combined to create something better.

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25 minutes ago, Picolo XL said:

Im not saying I was expecting something else. We had an alliance with them but I played long enought to know that this ment nothing.

Still, this is not how I think the game should be. We have currently 3 different offers of big alpha tribes which we could join, but we do not want to do so. We are a small group of 2-4 players and we wanne play our own game. The fact that this is not possible on any existing official server is, wht I beliefe has to change in a way that allows smaller groups AND casual players to still be able to build up and get on a level where they can compete.

 

The biggest difference between a new and an old server to join is:

- On a new server you play to compete with all the other players

- On an old server you just play to not get raided / at least you can hope so

 

I beliefe that exactly this has to change. Either by finding a constant way to provide new servers by recycling old ones (Yes im talking about wipes) or by balancing the current mechanic with stuff like ORP, and other PvP restrictions.

Im not saying I have the perfect solution for that, but I think many people have different idea, that could be combined to create something better.

Even if you wipe the server and everybody starts fresh you will not be able to compete with a tribe of 10+.

Imagine the game would be designed in a way that a 4man tribe can challenge a 10 man tribe that had a year of time to buildup. How strange would that be? That would mean that there is no incentive for buildup. But buildup = Ark =)

I guess what you guys should do is hop on the new "no-tame" server. There is a limit for the tribe size and they are fairly new so no year old alpha tribes.

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1 hour ago, sal said:

Even if you wipe the server and everybody starts fresh you will not be able to compete with a tribe of 10+.

Imagine the game would be designed in a way that a 4man tribe can challenge a 10 man tribe that had a year of time to buildup. How strange would that be? That would mean that there is no incentive for buildup. But buildup = Ark =)

I guess what you guys should do is hop on the new "no-tame" server. There is a limit for the tribe size and they are fairly new so no year old alpha tribes.

No-tame servers? U serious? xD

We both have 2700+ horus playtime (3k on me, 2,8k on my mate) we know how the game works PvP wise. You CAN compete against a 10+ man tribe, we were ruling over several servers when we started on them with everyone else, we were a 2 player tribe against several 5-7 player tribes, experience and the will to play alot and to play effective still got us in alpha position. The thing I ask for is to make it possible for new players to start fresh on older existing servers. And for this there are several suggestion above already. If it is still not possible to implement anything for that, then I would still ask for a frequent release of new servers (as I mentioned above, maybe with recycling older ones). You can not compete with a 10 man tribe that has 3 months more time spend on the server before you even join, BUT you defenitely can compete with one that started at the same time as you did, even if you are only 4 players. (Not saying that this would work for every 10-man tribe, there are good and bad ones)

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1 hour ago, DoJoStarfox said:

Play on a server with ORP enabled. Problem solved.

1. We were alpha on one ORP server for 8 months, yes they work.

2. The devs have abandonned those servers from their inetrest, there is sitll alot of stuff to be done (rafts,dinos that do not die,etc.)

3. Those servers are filled with people that play there for longer then a year now, I still got friends there, we gave our alpha-base away to another tribe when we left out of time issues. We coudl easily come back to them but we want to start fresh and not join some lame alpha tribe. COMPETE and not PvE-farming.

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1 hour ago, Melcreif said:

Just curious, PC, XBOX or PS4?  We play on an XBOX server and I can tell you at least on XBOX what you are looking to do is possible.  Not easy, but possible...

PC,

of course it is possible, with alot of luck and with you having luck of joinign a server with a bad alpha tribe. If you read my first post I mentioned that we joined mroe then 7 servers since january, and we played good on every single one. It was just not possible to compete with players that have months ahead of you.

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