Re-balancing the Fliers, Mk. 2!

[Massmerize]

Just now, Tohrazer said:

This is a good post, the center right now is borderline unplayable

thank you very much... i love that my time got appreciated.

[DomiDarko]

5 hours ago, TheRightHand said:

...

There were also PvE implications. The ground game was essentially trivialized. You could live on the back of a Quetz perpetually after getting one, never even having to land... ever, really. 80% of the game was easily ignored because the air is safer, more straightforward, etc.

...

80% of the game ignored? You've seen everything before you're able to get a Quetz and you need to be level 60 for the normal saddle as well. Most achievements have to be done on foot/land based creature, because you can't bring a Quetz in caves, boss arenas or in the ocean and of course you almost can't find all explorer notes while in the air, because you can't see them through the trees.

And don't you think people get bored themselves when they just fly around in loops, doing nothing but resource-runs? I love to be on my Spino/Rex/Therizino, but for searching better creatures to tame or get materials I love my Quetz (yeah, still love it because of the Classic Flyers-mod ).

People would use ground creatures more often for exploring/transfer if you just fix the issues they have. Some examples:

• Most land creatures get stuck on every pebble/tree

• Dire Wolves and Sabers can glitch into the butts of Rhinos/Dire Bears and totally immobilize them.

• Stunning creatures like Microraptor/Thylacoleo/Purlovia mostly mean instant death. Sometimes they also bug out your mounts as well (couldn't mount my flyers and had to put them to sleep to fix it)

• Good luck swimming on a land based/semi aquatic creature to herbivore/carno island! Cnidaria & Electrophorus = Instadeath for you and your mount. Rafts don't work as well because of Leedsichthys.

I just can't imagine playing PvP with only land based creatures because you can't avoid turrets or have to take abnormal longer routes because people blocking pathways.

I think a movement speed cap would be better than nerfing to nearly zero. I had to figure out everything besides the Quetz but about 200% movement speed seems to be ok, maybe 220. And please give us server owners the option to do it OUR way, because now it seems people go to work and spending their money on servers to just even have more work.

4 hours ago, Zend said:

At least give us autopilot my finger hurts from pressing down W for 30minutes flied from Carno island back to West 2 on the island map.

Right shift for toggle sprint and put a coin between your W and numbers 2 & 3! If you're able to cheat than get infinitestats, steer with your right hand and lay your head in the left one. But don't fall asleep like I nearly did before the Classic Flyers-mod has been realeased!  

[invincibleqc]

@TheRightHand Why are you changing values again? You announced Base Speed buff, and now that the majority of players had read them you sneakily null the entire Base Speed buffs? Wyverns was from 690 to 790 base speed when I first checked and now it is from 690 to 690... This is shady.

[Vita]

All this nerfing of fliers yet people can still put a single foundation on a quetz driver and be invincible

[Tohrazer]

1 minute ago, Massmerize said:

thank you very much... i love that my time got appreciated.

You also made a great point about how punishing it is being on land and sea, I had to land my flier earlier to get sta back and some dino ran up and stole some valuable items, then whilst I was chasing that one another came and stole some more stuff... etc.

 

Honestly it just made me determined to build towers to take rests on, being on land is horrible and in its current state nothing will make me want to travel around on land, they need to add land incentives and bonuses rather than just making flying less appealing.

[Sigin]

I think changes are generally fine, only quetz should get weight nerf and not buf, it makes paracer and bronto completely useless even without new weight buff ... also i hope you will reset levels of all flyers when patch hit us, because many of us did put points in stamina when they needed it and now they will be just wasted

[SamuelOrNoah]

Here is something I am annoyed with and every time I reach out to the devs I get no response. My alliance has attacked official server 453 THREE times. The first time they legit (apart from the duped resources) defended and kicked us off. A week later we came back with 3x the members as part of the SWARM alliance. Chem B approached the alliance saying they are good at PVP and want to take out spartans so we agreed (not knowing they all spawn in with 500C4 on their bodies). On this invasion we successfully broke into black knights base on lava island, (this was with legit farmed C4, we had 3 dragons with 200 C4 on each one. This is very easily farmed with 11 mega tribes under one alliance) yet as soon as we broke in the server went down, rolled back about 3mins prior to when our wyverns were all in the sky and the C4 on them dropped off the bodies, then all 110 of the members that were in the tribe on that server got globally banned. If I recall when he enemy alliance were attacking MERCOSUL on server 35 when they were caught hacking and cheating (not just resource exploiting) they were given a TEMPORARY ban from that ONE server, not a globally ban. How comes one side of the fights progress is rolled back and then GLOBALLY banned when the other side gets a slap on the hand and told they have to wait another week before they can attack the server. Then another tribe in our alliance attacked 453 another week later, again successfully broke into BK base, this time because the devs didn't have an excuse to roll it back, no "duped" resources they decide to reset the server to day 1, then tried to restore their mistake by finding a more recent save....which was on say 8000 (ark is now on say around 18300). We then go on the server a couple days later and find guess what! The servers back to its original state!!! How amazing!!! So we have spent time, resources and (as WC will be very pleased to hear) money on their game to re-wipe the server, our progress is lost. Whenever one of our 500 members posts a ticket against spartans it seems to be ignored, we have evidence of them duping/aim botting/ glitching under the map, there was a reading video leaked about a spartan tribe duping on server 587 yet nothing bad happens to them. We understand they have streamers and youtubers that get you new players hence more money but what kind of devs that like their community "expressing their concerns" ignores them and does what's best for them. Unless things change I will only see the devs as thieves at the malicious greedy bitches at the moment. if you would like an exchange of our evidence we can arrange a meeting, I will bring my leaders that have the evidence and we can go through and show you every single bit but we just need you to actually reply and take action to BOTH sides, I would not be salty if we got the same punishment as the enemy did on server 35 but having two seperate punishments depending on what side of the fight you are on is outrageous. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my rant and I hope the game will improve not just in content and PVP, but the devs bias and getting involved with tribes gameplay.

Noah (to reiterate we have kicked anyone associated with duping out of the tribe so it is now a legitimate force fighting against the devs pets which will probably end bad for us and you (when the community that's not involved with the high end wars see what's really happening unless things change)

 

[TurboTechie]

Being a developer on a dedicated server within a community the nerf would be ok as long as admins of unofficial servers were given the ability to either turn these nerfs off or at least let admins control maximum speed and stamina settings.  The nerf is acceptable under certain situations but not giving at least some control over the nerfs to admins of unofficial servers is a bad move in my opinion.  I understand that there is a vision for the game itself brought on by the creators and lots of ideas, implementations, flow work, etc....  But please don't be like some other games that are restricting what admins can do with their own servers.  By giving admins of these servers the options to enable or disable and make changes is what will keep the game alive by allowing players to play different configurations thus keeping things interesting.

With these nerfs we have actually had players quit playing. That is why I believe unofficial servers should have options that can be tweaked not hard coded.  While official servers can run with the nerfs and other configurations needed to ensure a game playable with the vision sought.

Just my two cents.

[invincibleqc]

Current values in case they get sneakily changed again:

[nightfeathers]

4 hours ago, TR-8R said:

God , not this logic again , we do not ignore ground , we use air because they allow us to bypass those bases blocking the way , plus it is a mean for moving around and scouting . However we still have to be on land to farming / taming .

If you get a rex , you are pretty much being ignore by everything except for large dino , more so when on a Giga , is that fun ?

No one ever live on a Quetz , everyone stay in the base .

So much agreement here! I can't speak for PvP, but in PvE getting around by land on a crowded server is IMPOSSIBLE. People block routes. I tried to hunt earlier in hopes of maybe hatching a baby tonight and I couldn't get anywhere! My giga literally cannot swim out far enough to go around the beach bases, and there are cliffs in the way preventing me from going around them by land. In twenty minutes of hunting the small area of beach available to me I got 8 stacks of meat. 8 stacks. That is completely useless for raising babies. My other option is taking out a flying dino, except I can't now because they lack the stamina to kill much of anything. My wyvern, who is now a level 130+, was beaten severely by a bronto. Not because she doesn't have the power to beat it but because she ran out of stamina so fast she could neither bite back nor retreat thanks to more player walls. I had to sit there and let her get beaten on until she recovered enough to fly to safety. Now, yes I could have kept attacking and retreating but wyvern's are not meant for guerrilla tactics.

Breeding dinos is my favorite game mechanic. Which by the way is accomplished ON LAND. If i can't feed my baby dinos, I have no purpose in playing Ark other than maintaining a very sad museum of what once was. My argents have never sat unused this long because they are the dino that has kept me playing the game since release day. Now? I barely look at them because they have no purpose anymore.

In the entire time I've played Ark, which I bought release day and haven't stopped playing since aside from a few days here and there, I have never seen anyone put a whole base on a quetz. Never. I've never heard of anyone doing it. If I had seen it I wouldn't complain. Why? Because their play style is none of my business first. Second, if your entire base is on a quetz, you are severely limited in space. That's the inherent and reasonable cost of doing so.

There's this attitude about fliers versus land dinos that I'm really struggling to understand here. Why is it so important that I play the game the way someone else wants me to? If I wanted to destroy my land base and live on my quetz, why shouldn't I? What exactly is so important about me using land dinos? Maybe I don't like them as much as fliers. Maybe the fliers are what made Ark unique for me. If people stop using fliers altogether are you going to release another patch to force them to use fliers? Why can't you just let people use whatever dino they want to use? How does that impact anyone but the one using the dino?

And to forestall this argument yes I know PvP is different. I just wish the devs would see that. Maybe there are reasons for it in PvP. I wouldn't know because like I said above I don't play it. But PvE is not PvP. We need a way to get around bases that block all routes to and from certain places. On my server there is a lot of trade between players. We tend to help each other out a lot. We can't do that now because we are on the Center map and it's so big it takes at least 15 minutes to fly from one side to the other. More if you're on a quetz or something similar in speed. And as I mentioned, walking is not an option in many cases, not just due to blocked routes.

One other point I want to make and then I'll stop as this is getting very long. Ark is a grind. It's always been a grindy game. Now with fliers slow and having to stop so often and all these other changes? All you've done is make the grind worse. I barely had time to play and get anything done in a day. Now if I ever want to expand my base again I'd have to take a day's play time JUST to go harvest metal or obsidian or whatever it is I need, and haul it home. There is no fun to be had in harvesting materials, of any kind. The fun lies in using them! So if the birds must be nerfed like this, or even if they're improved a little, I would like to ask you to please reduce the amount of difficult to find mats used in recipes. Things like metal and obsidian, unless one is very lucky, are not going to be found in one's backyard. The distance one must go, by land or sea or air, makes speed important and when 1-2 of those options is taken away it takes away the fun for everyone.

[usrevenge]

Not enough.

 

You need top cap speed from leveling, not remove it. Pteradon should be able to outrun wild wyvern the fact that you said otherwise means you aren't listening to feedback and it means my whole tribe will most likely quit.

Here is your nerf based on old values that keeps balance.

Pternadon cap movement speed 200%. Barrel roll cool down, cannot pick players from mounts.

Argentavis no change, cap 225% speed

Pelagornis add a glide ability.

 

Quetzal restore quetzal mining, nerf health and health per level by 25% remove stamina regeneration when you jump off and stand on it.

Wyvern cap speed 150%  cut damage to tames by 20% 

Tapejera should don't seem to need changes to me.

And there you go. Pteradon are useful but aren't a primary pvp flier. Quetzal mining survives which means people can actually build. Fliers in general are useful so people can raid and get to different places on the island but the cap speed means it doesn't happen nearly as quickly. 

 

[invincibleqc]

1 minute ago, nightfeathers said:

My giga

People are still using gigas for meat runs? My power theriz gather way more meats than my 100% imprinted gigas, while being faster and also able to swim good distance. You should try, they are awesome (till their nerfs).

[Sigin]

1 minute ago, usrevenge said:

Quetzal restore quetzal mining, nerf health and health per level by 25% remove stamina regeneration when you jump off and stand on it.

In other words: "Give me back my miner that can carry literally endless amount of collected resources" - yeah ... that seems like totally not op and exploit, right?

[Majic]

Getting Off The Ground

5 hours ago, TheRightHand said:

Feedback us! If you have some thoughts on where these are going and want to take your own shot at proposing some values, go for it. I'm glad to look over anything that gets proposed, as long as you've got some reasoning behind it.

I think the nerf was necessary, though I agree with those who suggest it was putting the cart before the equus, so to speak, given the nature of the "ground game".

Players haven't simply been using fliers to "bypass content", but rather choosing a superior option when confronted by significant problems with other options.

By all means tweak the fliers and hopefully make them serviceable and worthwhile, but if you're going to nudge people into the ground game, fix the ground game.

To wit: PATHING. It desperately needs attention, because a world full of wild dinos constantly running in place against rocks and fallen trees not only looks asinine, it plays asinine. It likewise makes absolutely zero sense to form a pack train when half your dinos get hung up on every little snag or bump in the terrain every step of the way.

Bad pathing is not an easy problem to solve, and a lot of major, already-released games suffer from it for the entirety of their runs simply because their developers prove unable or unwilling to deal with it, but it is not an insoluble problem.

Please coordinate with the engineers responsible for handling pathing, and the asset designers whose work necessarily affects pathing, to bump this up the priority list so players won't have to keep working around it. Any improvement will be a welcome improvement.

It may not be easy, but it will definitely be worth it.

[nightfeathers]

2 minutes ago, invincibleqc said:

People are still using gigas for meat runs? My power theriz gather way more meats than my 100% imprinted gigas, while being faster and also able to swim good distance. You should try, they are awesome (till their nerfs).

People that don't have time to get the required resources to tame a theriz do! In my case I was in the middle of raising a (formerly) much sought after theriz when this update went down. I've forced myself to log in and feed it in hopes of a future update fixing this fiasco but so far it's looking like I will never know if they are better or not. (And to answer the obvious question the giga was an incredibly lucky inheritance from a tribemate that left. Otherwise I would not have that.)

[iAmE]

5 minutes ago, Sigin said:

In other words: "Give me back my miner that can carry literally endless amount of collected resources" - yeah ... that seems like totally not op and exploit, right?

Considering that Quetzals have a weight limit, and they have to obey that weight limit, they aren't literally "Endless". 

[invincibleqc]

2 minutes ago, Majic said:

Getting Off The Ground

I think the nerf was necessary, though I agree with those who suggest it was putting the cart before the equus, so to speak, given the nature of the "ground game".

Players haven't simply been using fliers to "bypass content", but rather choosing a superior option when confronted by significant problems with other options.

By all means tweak the fliers and hopefully make them serviceable and worthwhile, but if you're going to nudge people into the ground game, fix the ground game.

To wit: PATHING. It desperately needs attention, because a world full of wild dinos constantly running in place against rocks and fallen trees not only looks asinine, it plays asinine. It likewise makes absolutely zero sense to form a pack train when half your dinos get hung up on every little snag or bump in the terrain every step of the way.

Bad pathing is not an easy problem to solve, and a lot of major, already-released games suffer from it for the entirety of their runs simply because their developers prove unable or unwilling to deal with it, but it is not an insoluble problem.

Please coordinate with the engineers responsible for handling pathing, and the asset designers whose work necessarily affects pathing, to bump this up the priority list so players won't have to keep working around it. Any improvement will be a welcome improvement.

It may not be easy, but it will definitely be worth it.

Being easy is not really the problem here. A pathing system that reproduce the steps of a player by the creatures that follows him would take a lot of memory as it would need to constantly track and save every movement at all time in case you put a dino on follow later on your path. On crowded server, that might also results in more CPU usage meaning more server lag as it would have to accomplish more tasks every frames. While I think this would be awesome, I'm not sure that technically they can come with a clean and optimized solution for this and that following into straight line (only calculating a viewvector from 2 points in the 3d space) is definitely faster.

[DeningWei]

36 minutes ago, invincibleqc said:

@TheRightHand Why are you changing values again? You announced Base Speed buff, and now that the majority of players had read them you sneakily null the entire Base Speed buffs? Wyverns was from 690 to 790 base speed when I first checked and now it is from 690 to 690... This is shady.

Shady indeed

[DeadlyxTwinky21]

6 hours ago, TheRightHand said:

 

• Wyvern - Lord of the skies. Low stamina, moderate move speed, poor agility, but extreme power and versatility. 

.

Cant have extreme power when you don't have enough stamina to use it, wyverns are useless in any sort of major fight now since you can only use the breath twice at most before being forced to land, considering all the trouble that goes into raising them they should be the most dangerous mount in the game. Tamed ones should be as fast as wild ones and you should have enough stamina to actually fight. Mine went from 2.5k to 500, thats nearly nearly an 80% decrease in stamina. I can no longer fight anything that will take more than 1 breath attack or even get anywhere in a timely manner, it takes 3 landings to get from my base on Cragg Island to the volcano.

[Majic]

1 minute ago, invincibleqc said:

A pathing system that reproduce the steps of a player by the creatures that follows him would take a lot of memory as it would need to constantly track and save every movement at all time in case you put a dino on follow later on your path.

That would be a great reason for not designing a pathing system that way.

There are better ways to do it, and I entrust Wildcard to figure out the best methods to use and get them into the game.

[tolle79]

so the nerf for PvE is because you dont agree with how people are playing. Who cares if they are spending 80% of the time in the air. Its PvE. You should be happy because they are still playing your game regardless if you like it or not.. Get over it. 

[Sierge]

Right Hand this nerf is garbage!!!  The game was fine until you started nerfing.  Try taking some time and FIX THE BUGS in the game from the beginning like dinos falling through floors!!!!  FIX the building system so that it doesn't rain inside houses!!!  Also this new patch gave us FOG and RAIN inside the underwater bases!!!!  How about a set of stairs or ramps that can be used inside the underwater bases?????  In plain English there is a lot of poop you could be fixing rather than nerfing!!!  Also you could have at least given us back the points we put into speed on the fliers that just plain sucks!!!

[GeertJan]

With all the Balancing of the Flyers can we get a Option to reset the points spend? 

Allow us to feed them Mindwipe Tonic ore give a full reset of all points when the next update is put in.

with the change in stats we like to think over the points we spend on health stamina and Damage and not just the lost points in speed.

breeding a new Bird and getting it max level will take weeks and now you dont know the full impact of the change.

[invincibleqc]

4 minutes ago, Majic said:

That would be a great reason for not designing a pathing system that way.

There are better ways to do it, and I entrust Wildcard to figure out the best methods to use and get them into the game.

True, but the only other way I could think of would be walk-able data linked to the maps so that clients can predict/render the movements but this only revert the issue. This would be more costly on clients, rather than the server.

[TheLastNerb]

5 hours ago, BulletForce said:

 The devs want all the dinos they put into the game to have a valid use and for players to use them, not just a select few.

That's kind of how progression works... The top of the line dinos get used more. Why use stone tools when you can use metal? Why use a bow when you can use a gun? Thats how dinos were. As for my analogy, now your stone tools are better than your metal tools. If something is harder to get, it should perform better, period. There is no point in taming the best flyer in the game, it is useless for farming, taming titans, etc.