Re-balancing the Fliers, Mk. 2!

[Taung]

2 minutes ago, Havokpaintedwolf said:

i like there vision for wyverns "king of the sky'......with low stamina. either the dev that came up with the idea was in a severe car crash before work and has undiagnosed brain damage or has some form of early onset altzheimers or they really are that clueless because they dont play the game they made. you cant have a creature be "king of the skies" and be slow and have low stamina the two concepts mix like oil and water.

I tend to agree with this, although I think I saw some footage of some really nice high end wyverns where the stamina didn't seem to be too big of an issue.  Not sure on the stats but I believe spartans was using them.  

[Juparan]

I think i'll have to log today to feed the dinos. I would like to see some "changes" soon.  

[kak]

It is just so ridiculous we have to keep reiterating the same point almost a week after the patch. This should have been fixed or rolled back by now. smh

[Havokpaintedwolf]

3 minutes ago, Taung said:

I tend to agree with this, although I think I saw some footage of some really nice high end wyverns where the stamina didn't seem to be too big of an issue.  Not sure on the stats but I believe spartans was using them.  

but still wyverns were balanced before the nerf theyre incredibly difficult to get and even harder to raise add onto that there turn radius is so awful it almost seems like you cant turn sure a minor slow down was perhaps needed so other fliers like argies or pteranodons have a chance to exploit there shameful turning circle but other than that nothing was needed.

[Taung]

4 minutes ago, Havokpaintedwolf said:

but still wyverns were balanced before the nerf theyre incredibly difficult to get and even harder to raise add onto that there turn radius is so awful it almost seems like you cant turn sure a minor slow down was perhaps needed so other fliers like argies or pteranodons have a chance to exploit there shameful turning circle but other than that nothing was needed.

I'm just commenting on what I think I saw.  Our 185 hatched wyvern is utter poop now, so feelsBadMan

Edit: I like the word poop magically appearing in my post.  I think we should start putting Styrofoam on all hard objects so children can't stub their toes on them.

[CzechShark]

PvE players do not want to hold "W" to fly to their base with resources for 45minutes! PvE players want to build beautiful structures and raise babies.

Why nerf PvE? We for the most part log into our servers to hang out with friends and build as we please. Then when we feel like it jump on our Thylo's and explore the map, or jump on our OPed wolves and kill the caves 

If PvP is the problem why not nerf Quetz to 100HP that works for me if i got my SPEEEED!

[DaGuRu420]

First off, post's like these should be made BEFORE you make massive changes, otherwise it gives the impression you don't know what you want with your game and are backpedaling when poop hits the fan. This has been a huge issue the entire time I have played this game, we aren't opposed to change, if we aren't blindsided by it. Try making more extensive patch notes, or maybe including a list of buffs and nerfs in each major release.

secondly, as has been said before, there is a reason the industry norm is to make a series of small nerfs and changes as opposed to one giant nerf followed by consecutive buffs, despite the anger it causes in your player base, you essentially give players no time to adjust to these changes. (the game is currently un-playable in my opinion as it takes 20 mins to fly halfway across the island with a quetz, something I MAY have been willing to deal with had these changes been made slowly) These massive changes with no communication also make it seem like you do not value user feed-back, small changes allow more opportunity for feedback from the community, a massive change like this gives us no real control to base ideas from, where-as sharing your thoughts with your player bases,taking suggestions, making small changes and repeating provides a much more solid platform for us your users (and testers really as this is still early access) to come up with ideas that will help you meet your goals. It's early access and you have a huge pool of testers to take suggestions from, use us! (for example if your going to make massive changes to an entire group of dinos, maybe return ALL levels, as my pure weight quetzal is now in desperate need of stamina)

Third, while I do agree that fliers eventually needed a nerf, if you want to encourage players to spend more time on the ground then your focus really should be the gameplay experience on the ground, I have honestly wanted to play as a kind of nomadic player with a base on the back of a bronto, but the collision on these larger creatures makes that extremely frustrating and unsatisfying. It seems like you are trying to force us to play a certain way by breaking a different part of the game, as opposed to fixing whats actually wrong. (increasing the weight and dealing with collision and movement on these bigger creatures would go a long way) 

Forth point, please please PLEASE begin balancing pvp and pve servers separately, the gameplay and focus is drastically different with pvp and pve servers and the way you guys balance the game now it feels like you do not care about the pve community at all.(kind of un-related to this patch, im actually looking forward to when fliers are balanced and they all actually fill thier intended rolls, just an issue i have felt for a long time)

Lastly, and this is just my personal opinion, I get were your coming from, I'm betting a lot of you guys are thinking "why do we even make new creatures if no one is going to use them," but I have to say this is just NOT the right way to encourage people to use new creatures/ features of the game. Instead, slow down, please, we don't need new creatures every month, take the time to work all the kinks out of the creatures you have, make them worth having as opposed to nerfing everything but what you want us to use. 

In all honesty your overall approach to your patches has been very dissatisfying, you continually make drastic changes to the game without consulting or even informing your playerbase, decisions that are so obviously going to upset people, that it seems you would rather avoid/ ignore your player base as opposed to making a game that they enjoy. Overall it is rather upsetting as the BIGGEST flaw with Ark, isn't gameplay, graphics, or the optimization, rather the lack of communication and understanding between the developers, and the players they are actually making the game for.   

[Irkalla]

3 hours ago, Pach said:

While I suspect they are indeed losing players, let's keep in mind:

April 2 was a Sunday, weekend, so more people will be playing anyway.

People are more likely to have days off close to the weekend.  So Wednesdays are likely always "lows", and weekends "peak".

So we don't know how much of that is actually reflecting people leaving, and normal weekday drops.  Would have to compare to previous week's...

Not to mention many people are on spring break right now,  it's warming up and people are excited to get out and about,  especially those of us in the northern hemisphere.

[shadow25990]

@TheRightHand What you think about the idea, that you could implement more different stats for the specific saddle. For example when you craft a saddle, you can choose between the following :

Survival = +10% armor, - 10% Weight

Traveler = +10% stamina , - 10% attackdamage

Sprinter = +10% movementspeed, -10% stamina

 

Or something like that. And the different rarity ( green, blue , epic...) adds 1% each.

You have taken the opportunity to manipulate all stats. I think that is why the most player are upset. But with this idea, there would be at least the possibility to make small adjustments to all stats.

 

[Zederia]

11 minutes ago, Irkalla said:

Not to mention many people are on spring break right now,  it's warming up and people are excited to get out and about,  especially those of us in the northern hemisphere.

speak for yourself, I rather stay inside, despite the weather lol

[CzechShark]

Just find a game that doesnt force you to duct tape down "W" while u watch a tv-show.

[KatkillaNAC]

Im going to try my hardest to restrain myself from getting aggro and yelling at you how pissed off i am with the flyer nerf. And not only that some of the other changes you guys have made. Like the new T-rex roar is horrible, it sounds like my grandmother is doing it.. The old one was perfect, what possible reason was there to change it??? And the wolf attack sound is rubbish to, the original was perfectly fine. Ok so back on topic.. The flyer nerf has 100% completely RUINED the game.. I shudder at the thought of even using any of my flyers now, like taking my Quetz up to the volcano used to take 2 minutes tops to get there, now it takes 10-15 minutes, no exaggeration. I dont even touch my Argies, Pteranadons or Tapajeras now, they make me sick to use them. I dont understand why you would create a SANDBOX game and then start taking away options and choices from us, we are no longer allowed to upgrade our speed stats, and are forced to have a turtle speed bird. You are turning your sandbox game into a linear joke. All the flyers i have tamed because they had usefulness are all now nothing more than paperweights. The fun factor has just been sucked from the game. All flyers are now obsolete tames, just useless dinos wasting space in my base. I heard that the whole nerf came about because PVP players were unhappy with the game mechanics, and thats fine, so why dont you just make the nerf for PVP servers only. PVE had no issues at all with the flyers, so exempt us from the change, we dont need to suffer. All the flyers were perfectly balanced the way they were, so please just return it to the way it was for the PVE servers. The game has turned into an absolute joke and i have lost interest in even playing it, flying anywhere has become a chore, an unbearable chore. Give us back the ability to upgrade speed stats, and stop the stamina strangling. Also please give us back the ability to stand on the back of flyers in the air to regain stamina, like the Quetz. Things like that are what made it such a cool flyer, and why i would go out to tame them, because they were the workhorse of the sky, for doing metal runs, carrying big loads of dinos on a platform on their back, or moving large amounts of resources. Now theyre useless and i avoid using them like the plague. If you wanted to alter things on such a massive scale, why not do it on a private server and have like 20-30 of your friends play on it to give you feedback. Instead of going live with it on all your servers and pissing off your entire customer base, all the people who paid money for the game, for a certain product, that you have now completely changed, and broken. The game is now broken and not fun, its ruined and a complete JOKE. Please LISTEN to your customers or i guarantee your servers are going to become very empty...... thanks for your time.

[Moon78]

I like specializing mounts, tamed wyverns need more than you are saying you will do or you wil have to make wild ones easier or have no stamina because we dont have stamina to go one on one except on the ground with no special attack, we cant even use the hard attack twice when fighting them which means we can only attack the ones of same type.

Our group happens to use a lot of different dinos for different things, thats fun.

I like to travel the map fast as I am always helping others or going on adventures so having a tanky dragon who could at least get a-b without stopping would have been nice , a ptera who cant carry anything doesnt help much either when helping in emergencies.

To vent in regards to this I spent a month getting a good ptera egg so I could do milk runs and I had hatched it (got my first twins ever) and two other eggs just hours before you raptored us and I had to waste a whole weekend not killing the now worthless babies. I am not happy. I do want to suggest trial servers before you raptor us in future so you can tweak stuff, I would do trial servers even for short events to test stuff that would be an interactive and exciting way to see what works and what doesnt.

Btw I also spent a month getting dragon eggs and now I cant hatch them because I cant get milk and everyone is so demoralized they dont want to try.

I certainly hope with your hints of 'balancing' on other tames that you take into consideration the horrible task it is to breed anything and time spent on such things and how when you take away everything they were bred for after your loyal players spend countless days on generations it hurts in a way that would take too many explisitive words to type. Do you mind giving us a month or two notice to stop breeding a type before you raptor us next time? <working on rexs now, please dont make them worthless too>

[Dai]

7 hours ago, Myj said:

Just use a land dino to commute, man. There are many that are extremely fast, and WAY nicer for a commute than a flyer now. Keep in mind there are other options, if the flyer nerf broke the game for you then don't use them, try and find another solution. Just because you can't keep doing what you always have doesn't mean you lost the means to do it at all. There are other ways, just experiment a bit and see if something tickles your fancy. You may even like it better!

Pleasant enough response, I commend you. Your suggestion should raise all kinds of red flags for TheRightHand (ARE YOU LISTENING?) who has just dictated a change that rendered the air game unplayable. Please balance the flyers, by all means, but give us a toggle that allows us to re-enable the movement speed stat increase control.

[Volcano637]

6 hours ago, slayerofzombs87 said:

no it wasnt. to you maybe in my opinion it was plain stupid and not needed

And you have the right to your opinion just like I do.

as far as how harsh it was then maybe, but the fact that some sort of nerf needed to happen was a good idea

[Dai]

5 hours ago, tidalblade said:

I am quite frankly ecstatic that you have made this thread(it is a very big relief). I'll post here what I was writing for the other thread as it was being closed, although more targeted now that you have explained some of the reasons behind the nerf.  Also repost, because 20 pages.

"needing to have distinct roles"

This is fair, albeit inconsistent with the way land and sea dinos are veiwed.  See Rexes/gigas/brontos.

"trivializing the land dinos "

Every big raid I have watched has included land dinos, BUT I think the reason the things you mentioned, "snatching, C4 bombing, and Quetz Grenading," have become so prevalent is because of things like quad-wall, 400 auto turret metal cube super fortresses.  These fortresses stem from another issue; the time investment this game takes.

This brings us to a simple question:  Do you, as the lead designer, want un-killable bases or not?

If you do, you have come slightly closer to that.  If not then no change to any dino aside from an alpha titan is going to make land dinos viable on a fresh un-harassed base.  The ability and ease of making a solid wall of auto turrets prevents land dinos from having an impact on a raid unless at least some of those turrets are disabled.  Perhaps make a turret limit.

Some issues other players have brought up:

-Ptera's being able to fly to fast to be targeted consistently by auto turrets, or to be shot down by players.

The turn speed of turrets is deliberate because it is a very simple numerical value that can be adjusted, so if this was a problem it could be solved surgically.

Players being difficult to target on fast flyers is a legit concern, if being to fast to target wasn't a legit defense.
Perhaps increasing the projectile damage multiplier to TAMED flying creatures could address this. Personally one-shotting someone off a Ptera from half a mile away with a 0 travel time projectile is as unbalanced as an incredibly fast bird swooping in, picking a player off a dino and dropping them to their death(which btw is an amazing strat, clearly intended by the designers).

-Using Pteras to blitz in, pick players and drop them.

Personally I appreciate this play style, but if this intended style was for some reason unintended it could easily be surgically addressed by removing the ability of Pteras to pick up players, or give a sizable speed penalty when a player is in a Pteras grip.

-Using Birds to soak turret bullets.

An increase in projectile damage to tamed flyers might be enough to address this, and/or increase the bullet capacity on turrets.
Create an Anti-Air turret that target only flyers(so quetz can't carry a turtle over to soak 20k dmg before the quetz takes any dmg) and have an even further boosted flyer damage multiplier on it.

To be honest an Anti-Air turret addresses all of these 'problems'.

Flying creatures allowed players to negate/byepass 100% of the dangers in the game.

Firstly this is not true, and while it is not true it also assumes there will be danger to the player if they are not allowed to fly.
It is true that the player will encounter ~100 % less OBSTACLES when flying. But much of the MEANINGFUL endgame content excludes flying creatures, or carries a healthy risk factor even when using a very strong flyer. Examples of this are: PVP, Bosses, Sea content, Wyvern hunting/raising.

What IS ignored or passed over when talking about how all danger is avoided while flying, is that players face little to no danger past a rather early point in the game because of the progression curve. If a player has a 250 Ptera, they most likely have land dinos to match. Any land dino used for speed, and around that level will face no danger from any other land dino aside from a giga or alpha rex. They will be able to outrun, tank and kill anything else they encounter.

I have recently seen some people on these forums say, 'good you should have to interact with wildlife you shouldn't be able to simply bypass everything while you are playing.'

What this argument ignores is that ARK is a huge game where many, many people spend huge amounts of time (I have 570 hours), and (this isn't necessarily a knock on the game) huge amounts of time are spent doing white-noise tasks, like farming, waiting for tames, raising dinos, and building. Increasing the amount of time it takes to do all of those things by making people run around a bunch of rocks, harmless dinos, trees, and pathing problems is not the way to make the game more enjoyable.  Instead of seeing the same thing as we fly by very fast, we will see the same things as we run by much more slowly.

I will concede that pteras were too strong(not too fast), to a point that argents were of little value.  What could be done is remove the 'c' attack on pteras and give it to Argents, and reduce the health of the ptera slightly.  This at leasts puts a mid-high teir flyer as the preffered scout/battle mount, instead of having a first teir flyer be the preference until the player gets a wyv.

I'm leaving out the glaring problem of hard capping all flyer speed, effectively making the breeding of flyers, ESPECIALLY Quetz, 7 days of wasted time.

As someone mentioned before, this is a sandbox game, where customization is paramount. Arbitrarily removing one group of dinos ability to be customized reflects poorly on you as designers. If flyers are limited, every dino should be limited. Or not.

I actually wrote this post before you made this thread, but:

Also please stop making the same mistakes countless companies have made before you. It is not 2004 when updates and patches were closely guarded secrets. This practice only hurts you as a company. I'll use Blizzard as an example, EVERY change, big or small is detailed(values, equations, everything) in patch notes for the player base to understand what is being changed, AND they also give explanations about why the changes were made and what the changes are intended to address.  They provide this information BEFORE the patch is ever sent out live.

45 pages and nearly 80k views, wowza

what they said ^

[Twin]

@TheRightHand  You stated that our opinions are being taken into account.  Please let us know a simple number.  How many pro nerf comments have their been in the two threads so far and how many comments are unhappy with the nerf?

 

[Havokpaintedwolf]

9 minutes ago, Twin said:

@TheRightHand  You stated that our opinions are being taken into account.  Please let us know a simple number.  How many pro nerf comments have their been in the two threads so far and how many comments are unhappy with the nerf?

 

but accepting feedback would mean they have to do.... work! *shudders* much better if they pretend the community is happy with the nerf.

[spacejam]

10 minutes ago, Twin said:

@TheRightHand  You stated that our opinions are being taken into account.  Please let us know a simple number.  How many pro nerf comments have their been in the two threads so far and how many comments are unhappy with the nerf?

 

That's not just a simple number, that require a fair amount of effort counting numbers etc

[WickedlyDelish]

The nerf is less me being worried about how fast stuff is, aside from not being able to reach your body in time, and more about the stamina loss. Wyverns are all about special ability damage and with one-two shots taking all your stamina they are pointless. 

[Twin]

5 minutes ago, spacejam said:

That's not just a simple number, that require a fair amount of effort counting numbers etc

 

Actually it's a pretty simple number as in 15% pro 85% against.  You just read through the comments and have two counters.  Lets say we'll call one counter for and the other counter against.  If you read a for comment you advance that counter.  If you read an against counter you advance that one.  When you are finished you add the two numbers and figure out the percentage of each.

[rororoxor]

Stamina of wyverns should be kept the same, stamina drain should be decreased for the breath attacks.

[Lucian]

Just now, spacejam said:

That's not just a simple number, that require a fair amount of effort counting numbers etc

Not only that, what would it prove? Some tiny fraction of the player base that actually goes to the forum posted were motivated enough to post some comments. It's a terrible decision making tool. 

 

[kak]

1 minute ago, Lucian said:

Not only that, what would it prove? Some tiny fraction of the player base that actually goes to the forum posted were motivated enough to post some comments. It's a terrible decision making tool. 

 

Well IDK, maybe they can use the pisspoor numbers of online players. Most people are just sitting around waiting for this to be rolled back.

[Twin]

1 minute ago, kak said:

Well IDK, maybe they can use the pisspoor numbers of online players. Most people are just sitting around waiting for this to be rolled back.

Well it appears 39107 people have fixed the problem themselves by installing the Classic Flyers Mod