Why I quit Ark, Game health issues and easy fixes

[dkr724]

TLDR AHEAD. but no summary. so. if ya wanna know... ya gotta read it.

Hey guys, so to start off this isn't a complaint post, there's a lot to love about ark, but there are also a lot of poor mechanics that make it, well, not very much fun. But it could be, some things I'll talk about here are already mods implemented on private servers, others are poor mechanics that only benefit players with no life, and even for them I'm certain the mechanics are quite dull. The three big issues I'd like to tackle here are, time sinks and dinos, communication and PvO, (player vs Offline), and tek tier usability. Ark is a game I WANT to love, but it's got serious game health issues.

Issue #1-2 Time sinks and dinos. Time sinks are a huge issue in this game and at the core of that is taming and breeding dinos, Taming and breeding in this game is ridiculous, any decently level tame takes an exceptionally long time, especially without kibble, babies are a nightmare to raise, especially early on due to bugs that cause them to stop eating and die unless force fed, and these issues have long reaching effects, especially in pvp, if you took 4 hours taming that rex for example, a dino largely useful for pvp purposes you aren't going to want to risk it dying, which encourages PvO moreover it increases the power gap between new and old tribes, as well as large vs small tribes and makes everyone extremely overprotective of their tames, you can kill one person's tame in fair combat and suddenly they're crying in chat and the whole server is after your head for pvping on a pvp server... because tames are so damn valuable due to TIME and naught else.

Fix. Mostly this is a numbers fix and a simple thing to do, first Dial back tame times, all of them, to between 1 minute (a dilo with prime) to 2.5 hours ( giga with raw meat), depending on method. Next, and I know people would want my head on a pike for this one since it would nerf a lot of current tames, but it would be a healthy change. Remove dinosaur wild level. whaaaaat? simple. By removing dinosaur's wild level and standardizing their stats, it would provide specific use to specific dinos, they can still gain levels and players can choose what stats to boost, but they would all have the same base to work from, would be simpler to balance, and with no varying levels the only determining factors are your taming effectiveness and how you invest your points, that said Taming effectiveness should be reworked to be like imprinting, giving a percent boost to the dino's stats when ridden by it's Tamer/parent, this boost would be applied to its stats after point investment making each point more worthwhile and keeping taming effectiveness quite valid. Breeding times should also be dialed back to under a day, still should be longer than taming times but with each 1% of imprinting give 1.25-1.5 times the amount of stat boost as the same % of taming effectiveness.

Lastly I feel mutations should be separated into stat and aesthetic mutations, should be easily identifiable, cap out at 2 stat mutations, but be significant, for example 1 attack mutation would give the dino a 10% boost to melee base stats and melee gains per point, however two mutations of the same type, say 2 attack mutations, would give diminishing returns, while 1 mutation would grant a 10% boost, 2 would only grant a 15% boost. natural mutations would be random and rare, say a 2% chance, unless the parent had the mutation in which case it would have a 70-80% chance of passing that along,  A tek tier lab could be added that allows players to extract mutagens from parents who have them, learning that mutation and allowing them to pick and choose mutations and apply them to eggs, overriding any natural mutations at the same. time allowing player to both adjust and optimize stat growth and colorations of their dinos. natural colors would also be learnable/usable.

 

Issue # 2 Communication and PvO- while streamlining taming and all the aforementioned adjustments are a big part of discouraging  PvO, the other issues are that it's simply far easier, safer and  simpler to raid people while they're offline and unable to fight back. Pvp, at it's best is some of the most fun you can have in ark, but it takes a lot of resources, puts dinos at risk that you would hate to lose due to tame times being terribly long, and is just easy to avoid. many people have held of raiders in siege for hours only to be completely destroyed minutes after going offline, lets face it if someone wants to ruin your day and kill all your stuff in ark, they can, and there's nothing you can do about it, save being a mega tribe with hundreds of fully loaded auto turrets. the fix? encourage pvp by making tribe structures and tames invincible against weapon/tamed dino damage for 2 real time days starting say 5 minutes after the last tribe member is offline, the 2 day timer is simply to keep inactive players from leaving their stuff on a server for weeks or months on end, and forces players to actually fight each other FAIRLY. I know some private serves have mods that do this, because IT'S A GOOD IDEA. I also feel global chat should be gated behind walkie talkies, of course you would still be able to talk locally, chat bubbles would still be there always, but for long range communication you would need to have a walkie talkie out and then would be able to chat on two frequencies, global or tribe, though your chat bubble would still be visible to other players in range. so. careful. Lastly give players who have been captured a way to die. not immediately, but give us a toggle in main menu, that will set a death timer for 5 hours later, preventing permanent player caging, since PvO would be disabled, there would be no further call for this feature.

Issue 3# tek tier accessibility. tek tier, the end game equipment that is pretty damn awesome, but you need to challenge bosses frequently in order to maintain... and that's where it gets ridiculous, getting element is a huge risk with little payoff on the whole aside from VERY durable structures. element expires, is consumed stupidly fast and is generally too heavily gated, once an alpha tribe has constant access to it they are cemented in invincibility, because once they control the caves, they control the server.

The fix? simple. Make Element a craftable tek engram, and remove the spoil timer. something like 10 electronics and 10 polymer=1 element. this would make it so that players are never totally out of the game, and would be able to always fight back. again encouraging PVP. while it would make the alpha stronger too, it helps them overall less than it helps everyone in general. assuming all my suggestions were implemented together.

Thoughts?