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Ark Flier Nerf: The Numbers


Regulator331

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I am of course talking about the most recent steam review numbers:

As of about 3PM Eastern time when I checked today they had fallen to 49% positive in the last 30 days.  If memory serves me correctly less than a week ago they were over 70% positive.  To satisfy my own curiosity I decided to look at the 20 most recent positive reviews and the 20 most recent negative reviews and get a total amount of hours played from the people posting positive reviews and the people posting negative reviews.  These numbers will be constantly fluctuating  as reviews are added on both sides but when I counted it, it was 8025 hours for positive and 16,870 for negative.

Those numbers aren't even close.  Just looking at those it should scream at you "HEY WE HAVE A PROBLEM HERE".

At the end of the day Ark belongs to the developer, they can do with it as they wish.  They dreamed it, they coded it, they did the legwork.  I am only a fan.  However I since I did purchase it (I honestly don't care about the money/refund) and more importantly invested an unhealthy number of human hours playing on official servers (I care deeply about this) I am going to give my two cents:

Pteras and battle quetzs needed to be nerfed.... any sane person would admit that.  However, what has been done to all fliers and by extension Ark in general is Bull poop.  Fliers may not have been what you envisioned them but lets be honest, your envision is probably not what your fans want.  My wyvern took me a significant amount time of getting wiped and rebuilding to get to a point to where I could finally go get an egg and raise one.  When I finally got to that point of raising it took 4 days of losing sleep in real life to keep it alive plus imprint it.  Currently he sucks so bad he isn't even fun to go meat farming with.  The fun using him and my other fliers is gone.

Honestly the whole issue goes deeper than the flier nerf.  To sum it up the best I can in one sentence:  as a developer you don't seem to care/respect that players have a life outside of the game.  (This is based on official servers as it is the official way of playing).  I have never seen a game take up a so much of a person's life in a negative way.  Case in point, your current vision of breeding in this game requires me to set timers in the middle of the night to feed/imprint it or it will die.  This isn't just logging in and grinding in for an item on the players time, this is directly cutting into your players sleep.  Taming/breeding is at best boring and at worst a multiple day commitment.  You could say that you don't have to imprint it....... but every gamer out that wants the best stuff possible.  At the end of the day however we (gamer's) play this game with the intention of having fun, not because we want a commitment and full time job within the gaming world.  Now gamers are varied and will have a different idea's on what makes Ark fun.  But I think we all have a common idea of what is not fun.   

I questioned maybe what your vision of fun is different from mine but then I looked at your game trailer on Steam so lets talk about it.  It shows people riding dino's, exploring caves, shooting a trike in the face with a pistol, and a cool crafted base among other things.  All of those things most fans will universally say are fun.  The problem is, that is not Ark.  At best it might be 5% of Ark.  The video doesn't show the other 95% of what Ark actually is:  Hitting E to collect fiber, taking a pick axe to a rock to get stone, taking a hatchet to get wood.  Logging in to instantly die to a high level raptor that you have a 0.01% chance of escaping.  Standing around for multiple hours narcing/guarding a tame.  I could go on and on and on, but point is that is the meat and potatoes of this game.... the farming can get ridiculous and I'm pretty sure you are aware that is not fun because you don't show that in your trailer.  In fact the farming can get so ridiculous that I am fairly certain that during a tribe war it puts you at more of a disadvantage to snipe someone than the person that you sniped.  It will take him just a few seconds to respawn compared to the amount of time it will take you to go farm another bullet.  Fliers may have been a crutch, call it what you want, but it made the farming tolerable so you could focus more of your time on the more fun parts of the game.  Not to mention that most of your metal and required end game resources are all concentrated on top of a mountain.  Nobody wants to spend an hour walking a slow bronto all the way across the map.... not including time having to stop to fight, and farm.

Rather than nerfing fliers into the ground what have happened was make the land dino's more accessible and more useful.  Case in point the raptor, a fan favorite because everyone has watched Jurassic Park.  He still sucks just as bad as he did before you nerfed fliers.  People have been asking for him to get some love for over a year now.  You will not instantly see a big diversity on other dino's now that fliers are nerfed, the people that still play will now all be using rexes with the occasional spino or giga.  I highly doubt you will see people try to farm titanboa eggs to tame a high level gorilla.  Not to say that people would't want one but most of the dino's are not accessible enough and not useful enough.  

At the end of the day I am not a game designer, and I have no control over what is done with Ark.  However as a gamer to take even more time to do even less work in a game that was already time intensive is just not fun and I think a lot of people agree with me just based on the steam reviews alone.

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First and foremost: This is a well-worded, and well thought-out post. You've said what some of us are feeling, and did so without being rude, vindictive, or mean. You worded it a way that makes sense, and that many people can relate to.

That said, I'm on Xbox and haven't actually experienced the nerf yet. But from what I've seen, I can understand why WC felt the need to implement it. I agree that there should have been some trade-off between "the fliers" and "making the land dinos more available".

I often take a longing look at my Allo pack, or my wolf pack, and think "I really want to go hunting with them right now", but then I discard the idea because I know what a logistical nightmare it is to find a viable path with no small rocks, or trees, or dilos, or dodos. I'm actually bored with using fliers. But taking more than one or two land dinos out at a time is a somewhat daunting prospect, if you want to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.

Still, I'm doing my best to remain open to the nerf, because of a seemingly unrelated reason: I'm a creative writer. (If anyone else told me how to write my stories, I'd be furious, so I try not to get too worked up over the way WC wants to build their own game. Kind of like what you said. xD)

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Tha game is currntly not mature enough to nerf/discard flying.

With the current non existing pathfinding, stucking problems (dinos stuck into each other and to the terrain objects like trees), awful following mechanism forcing people to the land in big caravans is somewhat not reasonable thing to do... 

Flyer caravans even worse, if anyone tried to have couple birds on follow, he will knows it...

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