Lets talk about the fact of way too much servers out there

[Toni]

At the moment there are 18 800 ARK Servers out there  (based on arkservers.net)

Based on steamdb.info, there are 27 000 - 70 000 players online.

So this means each server out there has an average player count of  1.44 - 3.72 player per server. For a multiplayer game, this is a way too low playercount.

 

The above fact is causing the following since a long long time:

- New players are going to servers which have very high rates (Because they do not wan't to invest much time for farming). Most of this players doesn't know that such servers with very high rates, do need wipes very often. Finally this players get frustrated because they loose all their stuff because of wipes.. .and then they are leaving ARK completely.

- Admins with decent rates (because they know about technical things and want to provide a long time server without lagg) do not have any chance to get new players.

In other words... new players are going to bad administrated servers...instead to the good ones.  (One of the reasons why many players complain about unofficial servers).

Have a look at all the forum posts of yesterday. So many admins which tryed to host Ragnarok but runned into problems because they simply do not have the knowhow how to host.

 

Solutions for that problem:

1. Add licensing back for the dedicated server (Additional steam account and additional copy of ARK needed to download it. No more anonymous steamcmd downloads. )

---------> Acceptance: Long time admins wouldn't care about this little more money to spend.  Hobby admins would not even try it. They would join existing servers.

---------> Impact for Wildcard:  18 800 servers x additional copy of say 25$ =  470 000$   --->  Nice, isn't it?

---------> Impact for Community: Way less servers -->  Way much fun because no more playing alone  --> Way higher quality of servers (More admins which know what they do than admins which are simply trying out some things because its for free)

 

2. Remove 50% of the official servers

----------> Acceptance: Maybe a little complains by the community ^^

----------> Impact for Wildcard:  Save much running-cost money

----------> Impact for Community:  Way better average playercount for private servers. --> More fun on private servers

 

3. Add a average server fps indicator to the serverbrowser (Very simple to technically implement)

----------> Acceptance: Only positive effects

----------> Impact for Wildcard: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. Not single overloaded servers. Players already see the performance of the server before they join.

----------> Impact for Community: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. No more overloaded servers. No more empty servers (Actually 82% of the servers empty. Based on ark-servers.net Statistics).

 

Think about that Wildcard.  What i described above is a Win Win solution for 90% and more out there... and it would generate you more money (Which for sure you will use to give us more content after the release ....so Win Win for all)

 

Edit: 06/17/2017:

 

 

 

[DarkCloud]

8 minutes ago, Toni said:

At the moment there are 18 800 ARK Servers out there  (based on arkservers.net)

Based on steamdb.info, there are 27 000 - 70 000 players online.

So this means each server out there has an average player count of  1.44 - 3.72 player per server. For a multiplayer game, this is a way too low playercount.

 

The above fact is causing the following since a long long time:

- New players are going to servers which have very high rates (Because they do not wan't to invest much time for farming). Most of this players doesn't know that such servers with very high rates, do need wipes very often. Finally this players get frustrated because they loose all their stuff because of wipes.. .and then they are leaving ARK completely.

- Admins with decent rates (because they know about technical things and want to provide a long time server without lagg) do not have any chance to get new players.

In other words... new players are going to bad administrated servers...instead to the good ones.  (One of the reasons why many players complain about unofficial servers).

Have a look at all the forum posts of yesterday. So many admins which tryed to host Ragnarok but runned into problems because they simply do not have the knowhow how to host.

 

Solutions for that problem:

1. Add licensing back for the dedicated server (Additional steam account and additional copy of ARK needed to download it. No more anonymous steamcmd downloads. )

---------> Acceptance: Long time admins wouldn't care about this little more money to spend.  Hobby admins would not even try it. They would join existing servers.

---------> Impact for Wildcard:  18 800 servers x additional copy of say 25$ =  470 000$   --->  Nice, isn't it?

---------> Impact for Community: Way less servers -->  Way much fun because no more playing alone  --> Way higher quality of servers (More admins which know what they do than admins which are simply trying out some things because its for free)

 

2. Remove 50% of the official servers

----------> Acceptance: Maybe a little complains by the community ^^

----------> Impact for Wildcard:  Save much running-cost money

----------> Impact for Community:  Way better average playercount for private servers. --> More fun on private servers

 

3. Add a average server fps indicator to the serverbrowser (Very simple to technically implement)

----------> Acceptance: Only positive effects

----------> Impact for Wildcard: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. Not single overloaded servers. Players already see the performance of the server before they join.

----------> Impact for Community: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. No more overloaded servers. No more empty servers (Actually 82% of the servers empty. Based on ark-servers.net Statistics).

 

 

Think about that Wildcard.  What i described above is a Win Win solution for 90% and more out there... and it would generate you more money (Which for sure you will use to give us more content after the release ....so Win Win for all)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You make a lot assumptions with no data to support your theory in your "Acceptance" and "Impact".

 

Edit: If players want to be on a populated server they can find the servers that are populated, a lot of times though populated servers are run by Mega tribes and wipe any new players for fear they could be a potential threat or amusement, or to keep the player count down. Which makes dead servers a good place for new players to learn the game and be able to transfer their goodies to other servers, or a place to those who can't stand up against the mega tribes to build up(speaking from official with the state of the game in mind).

[usdiver63]

You also have to take into consideration the different play styles. 

Some players want a server for only themselves and their friends.

Alot of the serves on arkservers.net have not been played in months or are brand new and looking to get more to join and build up their server. 

Some it is also that the servers can be customized to fit exactly what the owner/admin wants. and that might not be what everyone else wants.

In the end players will go where they want to get the most enjoyment out of ark.

[powerstuck]

33 minutes ago, Toni said:

3. Add a average server fps indicator to the serverbrowser (Very simple to technically implement)

----------> Acceptance: Only positive effects

----------> Impact for Wildcard: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. Not single overloaded servers. Players already see the performance of the server before they join.

----------> Impact for Community: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. No more overloaded servers. No more empty servers (Actually 82% of the servers empty. Based on ark-servers.net Statistics).

 

Everyone knows that FPS is the thing that measures how many pillars there is on a single ark map. 

 

/sarcasm off

[Psaimon]

 

Quote

Alot of the serves on arkservers.net have not been played in months or are brand new and looking to get more to join and build up their server. 

Wich is one of the problems Toni seems to be adressing.

 

[Mahnogard]

Most people who want to play on official servers aren't going to be happy when they lose options. They do NOT want to play on unofficial. Surely you've seen the discussions on that? The inverse is also true.

My Center + Rag cluster that I play on is no one's business but my own. Honestly, if I could opt out of it showing up on the listing, I'd happily do so, but I can't prevent it from being indexed automatically if it happens. Since it's whitelist, it can't be filtered out like password-protected servers can. In fact, an "unpublished" option would be a far better option than bs measures to reduce the number of servers. I guess I'm a "hobby admin" even though I DO know what I'm doing, I just don't want to play with a bunch of other people, and I certainly wouldn't go play on another server. I have my server for a reason.

Any FPS indicator would have to be translated to a performance consistency rating, because many players won't understand that servers should be running at / near 30fps, not 60.

[LockeCPM4]

11 minutes ago, Mahnogard said:

Most people who want to play on official servers aren't going to be happy when they lose options. They do NOT want to play on unofficial. Surely you've seen the discussions on that? The inverse is also true.

My Center + Rag cluster that I play on is no one's business but my own. Honestly, if I could opt out of it showing up on the listing, I'd happily do so, but I can't prevent it from being indexed automatically if it happens. Since it's whitelist, it can't be filtered out like password-protected servers can. In fact, an "unpublished" option would be a far better option than bs measures to reduce the number of servers. I guess I'm a "hobby admin" even though I DO know what I'm doing, I just don't want to play with a bunch of other people, and I certainly wouldn't go play on another server. I have my server for a reason.

Any FPS indicator would have to be translated to a performance consistency rating, because many players won't understand that servers should be running at / near 30fps, not 60.

Just block the steam query port on your modem/router. That should make your server "unlisted" and still let people find it. Worked for me by accident.

[Mahnogard]

1 minute ago, LockeCPM4 said:

Just block the steam query port on your modem/router. That should make your server "unlisted" and still let people find it. Worked for me by accident.

It's rented, not local. I don't have a spare box and my gaming computer is too much of a multi-tasker to continue using it as a dedicated, so for now I rent instead.

[10,000 Jelly Doughnuts]

6 minutes ago, Mahnogard said:

It's rented, not local. I don't have a spare box and my gaming computer is too much of a multi-tasker to continue using it as a dedicated, so for now I rent instead.

You can use a poop computer to host a server. AFAIK, a good GPU isn't required to host a server, so you could use something that has a half-way decent CPU

[BeardO]

Does it matter how many servers are out there?  Find the one you want to play on and ignore the rest...easy

[LockeCPM4]

13 hours ago, BeardO said:

Does it matter how many servers are out there?  Find the one you want to play on and ignore the rest...easy

This.

[Nowtarfu]

My server is just for my family to play on. I don't want a bunch of people on it that I would need to babysit. Our play style is casual, testing limits and capabilities, and attempting to implement what ever our imagination shows us. We play when we want and at our own speed. Ark is a great platform for all of these.

Requiring a license with an additional copy of Ark and another steam account would be disastrous to the community. Not everyone plays your style and I am happy that Jesse at Wildcard elaborated on this during one of his E3 interviews. There is probably more play styles than there is platforms to play on. So why limit or drive up cost for other play styles that also include small private servers? Anyone with any business sense would not want to do away with their sales and customers. 

Hold out a little longer. After the game has been worked and either closer to or shortly after release, Wildcard might look at their server counts and remove, realign or reassign servers with lower player counts. If Official servers do realign, this could increase player counts. Though I do not play official servers, I do see that there are a lot of them. A detailed review and an as needed adjustment to official servers is probably due. 

Have a great day.

[Griffin1984]

I believe a big issue here is the single player mode taking waaaaaay to long to load.

This has made it nearly impossible to do for casual solo players, so they rent a server just for themselves. If this would be fixed, i'm sure server count would decrease

[IanHighlander]

Your stats are skewed and there's no way you can get accurate ones. I for example run five Ark servers at home, none of which are listed on Arkservers.net or anywhere else and none of which are publically accessible. Admittedly this is just for my wife and I, my kids and the odd friend that pops round sometimes, so not really a massive impact on the discussion, but you haven't taken into account that there are a large number of people out there like us that don't want to play on public servers, have no interest in dealing with the large number of idiots out there that ruin the game for people who want to play for fun and run their own private, non-listed servers deliberately for exactly that reason.

[MarkTheArkadian]

Thats a stupid thing todo.

Why? Cause official servers often cant deal with 100 People being in it.

Also cutting officails down would mean big tribes take over servers That remains and the New People get 0 chance to buildup

[TheNeoReaper]

19 hours ago, Toni said:

At the moment there are 18 800 ARK Servers out there  (based on arkservers.net)

Based on steamdb.info, there are 27 000 - 70 000 players online.

So this means each server out there has an average player count of  1.44 - 3.72 player per server. For a multiplayer game, this is a way too low playercount.

 

The above fact is causing the following since a long long time:

- New players are going to servers which have very high rates (Because they do not wan't to invest much time for farming). Most of this players doesn't know that such servers with very high rates, do need wipes very often. Finally this players get frustrated because they loose all their stuff because of wipes.. .and then they are leaving ARK completely.

- Admins with decent rates (because they know about technical things and want to provide a long time server without lagg) do not have any chance to get new players.

In other words... new players are going to bad administrated servers...instead to the good ones.  (One of the reasons why many players complain about unofficial servers).

Have a look at all the forum posts of yesterday. So many admins which tryed to host Ragnarok but runned into problems because they simply do not have the knowhow how to host.

 

Solutions for that problem:

1. Add licensing back for the dedicated server (Additional steam account and additional copy of ARK needed to download it. No more anonymous steamcmd downloads. )

---------> Acceptance: Long time admins wouldn't care about this little more money to spend.  Hobby admins would not even try it. They would join existing servers.

---------> Impact for Wildcard:  18 800 servers x additional copy of say 25$ =  470 000$   --->  Nice, isn't it?

---------> Impact for Community: Way less servers -->  Way much fun because no more playing alone  --> Way higher quality of servers (More admins which know what they do than admins which are simply trying out some things because its for free)

 

2. Remove 50% of the official servers

----------> Acceptance: Maybe a little complains by the community ^^

----------> Impact for Wildcard:  Save much running-cost money

----------> Impact for Community:  Way better average playercount for private servers. --> More fun on private servers

 

3. Add a average server fps indicator to the serverbrowser (Very simple to technically implement)

----------> Acceptance: Only positive effects

----------> Impact for Wildcard: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. Not single overloaded servers. Players already see the performance of the server before they join.

----------> Impact for Community: Players would automatically be better distributed over all servers. No more overloaded servers. No more empty servers (Actually 82% of the servers empty. Based on ark-servers.net Statistics).

 

Think about that Wildcard.  What i described above is a Win Win solution for 90% and more out there... and it would generate you more money (Which for sure you will use to give us more content after the release ....so Win Win for all)

 

Edit: 06/17/2017:

 

 

 

All I heard is i'm in an alpha tribe & we want you to throw more players are way so we can make them stop playing your game.

[Toni]

8 minutes ago, Antitheft2 said:

Your stats are skewed and there's no way you can get accurate ones. I for example run five Ark servers at home, none of which are listed on Arkservers.net or anywhere else and none of which are publically accessible. Admittedly this is just for my wife and I, my kids and the odd friend that pops round sometimes, so not really a massive impact on the discussion, but you haven't taken into account that there are a large number of people out there like us that don't want to play on public servers, have no interest in dealing with the large number of idiots out there that ruin the game for people who want to play for fun and run their own private, non-listed servers deliberately for exactly that reason.

Maybe your not listet on arkservers.net  ... but there are some other sites which does add you automatically if you run a server... and your servers are shown in Steam server browser and ingame browser. 

Maybe an option "Do not show my server on serverbrowsers" would make the situation better.

 

Because of the massive amount of servers... the ingame Server browser needs more than 2 minutes to load all servers out there.

[IanHighlander]

10 minutes ago, Toni said:

Maybe your not listet on arkservers.net  ... but there are some other sites which does add you automatically if you run a server... and your servers are shown in Steam server browser and ingame browser. 

Maybe an option "Do not show my server on serverbrowsers" would make the situation better.

 

Because of the massive amount of servers... the ingame Server browser needs more than 2 minutes to load all servers out there.

Happy to be corrected, but as far as I'm aware, being on any server list (and you won't find any of mine on any that I'm aware of), relies on the query port being accessible from the outside world. All my Ark servers are on a seperate internal network with no ports open to them at all through any of my firewalls. A quick scan of any server list sites shows one reference to one of my servers from a considerable time ago (so much so it's the wrong IP number) which was when I was actually trying to get one of them to appear for a friend to play externally a few months back.

Please show me anywhere you think my servers may be listed because I'm curious to see if you're actually right (I don't think you are, but happy to be corrected). To my knowledge they don't show up in the server browser for anyone outside my network.

[jayden5021]

I think the problem is not enough of the servers people are wanting... For example with the release of Ragnarok

[Voidstar]

problem is that there are LOTS of empty servers. hosts probably paid the hosting service for a year or so..so why shut them down...

Official servers need to get better so that most of the palyers gather there

[DeningWei]

Sounds like you aren't attracting players to your server.  Forcing the number of servers down isn't going to help you.

 

Official servers are doing well, there are plenty of players on there.  No official servers need shutting down lol.

 

As for unofficial servers, well that's just people's choice if they run a server without any players currently online.  It's a free market.

[Toni]

3 hours ago, Antitheft2 said:

Happy to be corrected, but as far as I'm aware, being on any server list (and you won't find any of mine on any that I'm aware of), relies on the query port being accessible from the outside world. All my Ark servers are on a seperate internal network with no ports open to them at all through any of my firewalls. A quick scan of any server list sites shows one reference to one of my servers from a considerable time ago (so much so it's the wrong IP number) which was when I was actually trying to get one of them to appear for a friend to play externally a few months back.

Please show me anywhere you think my servers may be listed because I'm curious to see if you're actually right (I don't think you are, but happy to be corrected). To my knowledge they don't show up in the server browser for anyone outside my network.

If you have it only in your LAN without portforwards... then all is ok. Thats what other people which only host their own server should do too

[Toni]

2 hours ago, DeningWei said:

Sounds like you aren't attracting players to your server.  Forcing the number of servers down isn't going to help you.

 

Official servers are doing well, there are plenty of players on there.  No official servers need shutting down lol.

 

As for unofficial servers, well that's just people's choice if they run a server without any players currently online.  It's a free market.

 

Show me an EU private server with all rates max x3 and no mods which has more than 20 players?  After you found none.... again think about who's fault it is if such a server doesn't attract any players anymore.

I do not wanna host high rate servers which needs wipe all few weeks / months. I wanna provide a LONG TIME experience to my players... decent rates + structure decay is solving all the wipe problems.

But because many players made bad experiences on private servers (wiped or simply removed because admin has no more money), many players choose high rate servers. So if they loose their stuff... the invested time is smaller!

If they would add a licensing back like i said in the op. Then the cost for hosters would increase = such admins with not enough money (kids) do not even host it for 2 months. So the result would be -->  more long time servers, less wipes or disappearing servers --> Luckier players! 

Admins have to think before start hosting... at the moment that isn't the case... its simply to cheap !  I'm not a fan of licensing generally... but this game seriously needs it to make it again a multiplayer game for low rate servers! !

[BeardO]

24 minutes ago, Toni said:

 

Show me an EU private server with all rates max x3 and no mods which has more than 20 players?  After you found none.... again think about who's fault it is if such a server doesn't attract any players anymore.

 

If a server doesn't attract more than 20 players then it's because players don't want to play on that server.  Maybe they want higher rates, maybe they want mods.  Maybe they are already established on another server and have no reason to move.

The beauty of ark servers is that you can tailor them to fit the way you want to play.  A lot of people like playing high rate with wipes because there is less grind and you get to experience the trill of survivial again.  Face it on a low rate server, once you hit say level 60, there is hardly anything to worry about from a survival stand point.  Higher rate servers also encourage more actual PvP as you aren't afraid to to head to head and lose dinos that you spent an entire day taming or raising.  One the best servers I played on prior to sticking to a private was a 3x gather (prior to ark bumping up rates) and a 20x tame.  You still needed to grind for resources a bit, but again you weren't like nope not risking this rex that took 16 hours to tame.

[Teddansen]

Dear game providers: stop providing your game to soo many people, it makes it so people have options to either play alone or with a small group or even a lobby full of people . That's just not cool, we don't want options we just want to wait in que's for hours and to finally log into a server that has soo many people in it that we can't walk twenty feet without rubber banding 74 times.

What were you thinking Wildcard?  

Availability is not the key