Ark is dead unless devs balance the game

[Trikky]

Finally the devs got around to fixing long standing bugs and maybe some optimization.
How about some balance of game mechanics ?
Unless that is fixed there is no reason to continue Ark or start over on the new servers.

1)  It takes months to build a properly defended base and then some guy with a ghillie, a bit of c4 and a shield tears it all down
 - fix ghillie and shields so they can not tank a lot of bullets
- fix c4 and rockets, so it takes a lot more to blow up foundations, walls and gates

2) Dino balance! In what world can a tamed frog kill a wild rex, or even a tamed one ?
- dinos should be re-balanced according to their species, both tamed and wild.
- less reliance on stat pumps and more reliance on the actual "realistic" dino size / power

3) Tribe balance.  Stop zerg tribes and allow smaller tribes to survive.
- tribe size should be limited to max 10 players and max 1 alliance (or none). Otherwise 2 to 3 person tribes have no chance of survival.

4) Server transfers. Stop people from transferring fully geared FOBs and weapons and reking bases in 5 min.
- Server transfers should be limited to players, dinos, bp's and raw materials only ( no finished products). You wanna raid a server then work for it !
transfer in raw materials - > build a smithy, chem bench and a Fab - > make walls, c4, and weapons etc ... -> raid server
- Right now it is just too easy to pop into a server with a tonne of war gear and a pre-assembled FOB, in the middle of the night, when most people are asleep, and destroy bases that have taken months to build in a matter of minutes.

5) There is A LOT more, but this would be a good beginning

Unless proper PvP balance is achieved, the devs can do whatever optimization and bug fixes they want, Ark will still NOT be an enjoyable game for a lot of people, especially with the way PvP has gone in the last 6 to 12 months, with ever more powerful weapons and dinos designed especially to kill your tames, destroy ur buildings and your hard work.

EDIT: BTW, I am part of an alpha tribe, we have held (and still are) our Official PvP sevrer since day 1. Fought off a lot of raiders and invasions. Seen 100's of people quit the game, especially from smaller tribes, for the reasons I have outlined above. So, I do know what I am talking about.  

[Tagman]

Is the prophecy true? are they going to optimize the game so i can play it? I feel blessed   

[Kiisuno]

I love bursting peoples bubbles you do realize this game is not just PvP right? they do offer PVE servers for this very reason not everyone wants to play PvP. You play on a PvP Server in ANY GAME your looking at total wipefest and destruction because you refuse to dedicate the time to actually play on a PvP server. There is also Single player mode for those who actually want to play the game without any issues.

Now lets recap

1) This game is not just PvP. You dont like losing your work play on a PvE server problem solved (just make sure you actually play or you will lose your dinos and bases due to PvE Decay which is fair so dont even start complaining about that)

2) Dino balancing? Realistically? Really? invalid argument next issue

3) Tribe Balance? Again this game is not just PvP i highly recommend you switch to a PvE server.

4) This i agree with server transfers are a joke even in PvE servers, a new server goes up and everyone immediately downloads 100s of building materials and claims everything within the first 3 minutes of the server being live. Luckily they are making new servers that can not connect to the legacy servers when the game launches (smart move on there end here)

Not trying to sound rude but your entire complaint is based around PvP and your making it sound like this game is nothing but PvP. And reading your arguments states that you dont grasp what pvp means (Player Vs Player) as in if you want to survive on a PvP server you have to dedicate your life to it just like everyone else does. Since im assuming you have a life just play on a PvE server where you can be more casual and actually enjoy the game. And if you want to PvP that option is available on the PvE Servers by terms of agreement between tribes, to where you can even set a time limit to how long your tribes are at war with eachother. 

[BeardO]

15 minutes ago, LastStandman said:

Most of his points are valid, and if the devs can create mechanics like ORP which is specifically for PvE,

What?  ORP (Offline RAID protection) was created for PvP wasn't it?  I mean the word Raid should give that away.

[BeardO]

5 minutes ago, LastStandman said:

Are you serious? It's not for PvP servers at all. It's for PvE servers entirely. It's to prevent offline PvE players from getting trolled. It keeps their tames alive and their base intact. Literally had nothing to do with PvP servers lol.

Yeah I'm serious, makes no sense that it was designed for PvE.  But then again it's Wildcard so I guess it shouldn't come as a shock that they do poop ass backwards.

[Balteraxe]

Its more like, the more they try to 'balance', the more gets unbalanced

[Ulta]

4 minutes ago, LastStandman said:

Are you serious? It's not for PvP servers at all. It's for PvE servers entirely. It's to prevent offline PvE players from getting trolled. It keeps their tames alive and their base intact. Literally had nothing to do with PvP servers lol.

Which is dumb because offline raiding is just a cowards way to get free stuff with minimal resistance. PVP is the one that needs that mode moreso than PVE. Those raiders need to work more to raid. I wouldn't complain as much if base defenses was actually a viable method, but defenses in PVP ARK just isn't cutting it cause as the OP said, C4 and rockets.

Many people know there's more to ARK than it's pvp, or even it's officials. Especially in the forums. But unfortunately, ARK PVP official is WC's flagship. If THAT sucks, then it leaves a terrible first impression to new players, and makes old players just leave if no balance is thrown into the mix, leaving those left to kill each other, get bored of no challenge, and then leave themselves. SOTF did it near perfectly and I hope it comes back. That should have been ARK's flagship for it's PVP side, not the unbalanced mess official PVP is now.

Ark probably won't die though. Not because it's official PVP flagship game is doing good. Heck no. It'll be because of the OTHER modes, especially PVE, where you can actually experience all of the content WC made for the game (well except for bosses since they are impossible at the moment). WC would be smart to focus on the modes they made that are actually fun and succeeding in keeping it's longevity, instead of trying to keep the boat with many holes in it afloat. They probably won't do that of course, so they NEED to step up their game when it comes to balancing their flagship mode before it becomes the games undoing.

[herrdrakener]

The OP has a point.  ARK is EXTREMELY difficult for new players to get into right now.  Both PvP and PvE official servers are a joke.  The only people who could enjoy official PvP servers right now are ComancheMongolHun raiders who drink the blood of their enemies and rip out and devour the still-beating hearts of their captives for nourishment.  Anyone else is going to get weary of repeated wiping  and pillaging by stronger players.  Only a very lucky few run into that rare server that has an Alpha tribe that is A, nice, and B, bothers to enforce rules against excessive attacks on newbies, and even then, there's still cross-server transfer raiders to worry about.

As for official PvE, most servers are severely overcrowded, some to the point of severe lagging, and the already established tribes frequently claim huge tracks of land for themselves via miles of pillars.  Very often even spawn points have huge bases built right on top of them, so that new players coming in are stuck trying to figure how to get out of an enclosed, locked base.  Just finding a place to put down a little thatch shack can be hard enough; good luck finding a space for an actual base of your own.

This leaves only unofficial servers for new players, and these have their own problems.  Unofficial servers may be run by jerks, they may suddenly be shut down by admins who lose interest in the game.  If you have a bad internet connection like me, there's also the problem that many unofficials run numerous mods.  I can understand why people like mods, but I don't want to spend God knows how long downloading God knows how many mods just to take a look at an unofficial server.  And you may or may not enjoy the mods and settings an unofficial server has.  If you're lucky, you have a friend you can join on his own server, or you can try to set one up yourself if you're computer-savvy enough.  If not...

In other words, finding a unofficial server you like can be quite a challenge as well, (even if you are more fortunate that me in having a good internet connection that downloads mods in a snap).  Altogether, these pose some pretty serious hurdles to newbies to the game.

[Trikky]

BTW, I was NOT talking about ORP.
I dont think it is a good idea, especially in a PvP game with players from dif. time zones.
BUT, explosives, armor, dinos and structure health should be rebalanced so a well defended base can not be raided as easily as it is now.

[X111]

laying siege should not be a walk in the park, how many historical sieges happened in less that 20minutes.

 

there's no resemblance between a 11 day giga raising and and 5 month base build just for 1 to be destroyed in minutes.

if a giga takes 11 days the targeted base should take twice as long

we need bigger and better defence options such as cannons, effective land mines, active defensive drones, blast doors/shutters etc etc

as it stands, I signed back on to my PVP account, happily noted that my C4 hut on boat was still there, decided MEH and built a 1x2 thatch hut in front of a irritating tribes gate uber hard with current pillars, used double foundation trick, hit gold when they came out in force with 2 gigas and 3 wyverns, surrounded the hut and went in for the attack. C4 is beautiful when used properly, never seen so much swearing in my life

 

why wait for them

[10,000 Jelly Doughnuts]

 

44 minutes ago, LastStandman said:

You should read up on what ORP is and why it was created. Then it will make sense. I'm not going to explain it to you though.

ORP-PvP servers were before PvE having ORP fyi. My cluster (PvP-Orp) was created 2015 may I think, when leeches were out. Way before this was given to PvE

 

[AzureJ]

This game is not gonna die anytime soon. It takes time, and the thing that ultimately ends a game is not bugs or unfairness/balance, it's boredom. And their player base is far from bored. I bring it up only because the title of the topic does not seem to be...accurate? True? Not sure what the word is.

[natman]

5 hours ago, Trikky said:

Finally the devs got around to fixing long standing bugs and maybe some optimization.
How about some balance of game mechanics ?
Unless that is fixed there is no reason to continue Ark or start over on the new servers.

1)  It takes months to build a properly defended base and then some guy with a ghillie, a bit of c4 and a shield tears it all down
 - fix ghillie and shields so they can not tank a lot of bullets
- fix c4 and rockets, so it takes a lot more to blow up foundations, walls and gates

2) Dino balance! In what world can a tamed frog kill a wild rex, or even a tamed one ?
- dinos should be re-balanced according to their species, both tamed and wild.
- less reliance on stat pumps and more reliance on the actual "realistic" dino size / power

3) Tribe balance.  Stop zerg tribes and allow smaller tribes to survive.
- tribe size should be limited to max 10 players and max 1 alliance (or none). Otherwise 2 to 3 person tribes have no chance of survival.

4) Server transfers. Stop people from transferring fully geared FOBs and weapons and reking bases in 5 min.
- Server transfers should be limited to players, dinos, bp's and raw materials only ( no finished products). You wanna raid a server then work for it !
transfer in raw materials - > build a smithy, chem bench and a Fab - > make walls, c4, and weapons etc ... -> raid server
- Right now it is just too easy to pop into a server with a tonne of war gear and a pre-assembled FOB, in the middle of the night, when most people are asleep, and destroy bases that have taken months to build in a matter of minutes.

5) There is A LOT more, but this would be a good beginning

Unless proper PvP balance is achieved, the devs can do whatever optimization and bug fixes they want, Ark will still NOT be an enjoyable game for a lot of people, especially with the way PvP has gone in the last 6 to 12 months, with ever more powerful weapons and dinos designed especially to kill your tames, destroy ur buildings and your hard work.

EDIT: BTW, I am part of an alpha tribe, we have held (and still are) our Official PvP sevrer since day 1. Fought off a lot of raiders and invasions. Seen 100's of people quit the game, especially from smaller tribes, for the reasons I have outlined above. So, I do know what I am talking about.  

1) good point. Explosives make anything below metal useless and even metal is rather easily destroyed. But i dont really see a way to balance it properly to make it harder for trolls while keeping it resonable for the small tribe against a big one. Btw, the durability of ghillie was reduced in one of the last patches.

2) while i understand your idea, that would make the meta more one-sided and boring in my opinion

3) 10 members and one alliance is too little i think, but the idea is good. People say nothing can stop the players from making alliances, and that is true, but it would still make it a bit harder and especially more tactical demanding for the attacking party, and that is exactly what we need

4) true, it is too easy to come from an unknown server, wipe and vanish. But as LastStandman already said, being able to only bring raw materials would mean you could not transfer back crafted items from a cross server raid or for trading...

I think that creatures should get reduced stats for a limited time after transfer so they would need to be protected and cant be used for a raid right away. Also a tribe shouldnt be able to transfer unlimited amounts of creatures. Afaik every creature has an own drag weight. So if the total amount of drag weight one can transfer per day or whatever was limited, one could still transfer many smaller dinos, but the larger they get the less can be transfered at once.

[Shoosty]

They've been balancing the game incrementally for the past 6 months, and every time they do, people get annoyed or quit.

The game is an open world survival game where grinding is a huge aspect of anything you want to do.  Any balance change simply leads to a new meta where the tribes with the most people or the most leverage grind out whatever the new thing is.  

And every time they make a drastic balance change, every one who invested time and effort to get whatever the old thing was, winds up feeling burned.

If they want balance in PvP, they need to wipe those servers every three months, and they need to police constantly for exploits, whether they're map exploits or dupes or aimbots or anything else.

And even then, people are going to complain about imbalance, because whatever the best strategy is, some one some where will do it more and better than some one else.

[wildbill]

41 minutes ago, Shoosty said:

They've been balancing the game incrementally for the past 6 months, and every time they do, people get annoyed or quit.

The game is an open world survival game where grinding is a huge aspect of anything you want to do.  Any balance change simply leads to a new meta where the tribes with the most people or the most leverage grind out whatever the new thing is.  

And every time they make a drastic balance change, every one who invested time and effort to get whatever the old thing was, winds up feeling burned.

If they want balance in PvP, they need to wipe those servers every three months, and they need to police constantly for exploits, whether they're map exploits or dupes or aimbots or anything else.

And even then, people are going to complain about imbalance, because whatever the best strategy is, some one some where will do it more and better than some one else.

I like this idea of a wipe. That is why they created the extinction servers.

I think it would be cooler if instead of a fixed time limit, they make some kind of goal that must be reached and maintained for a certain amount of time. Not sure what that would be. A dumb example would be to control all the obys for a week. If no one transfers out of the obys for a week other than one tribe, they "win", and the server is wiped.

The winning tribe gets some kind of reward and starts fresh on the server. One possible reward is your dinos go into the ARK for a week where you can download them back to the server or to a fresh servers. The losers lose all their dinos.

[Majew]

i never understood "fair" pvp. its pvp people will find any advantage they can.. why do i need to play "fair"? because your a smaller tribe? your not as good at pvp? there is not such thing are "fair" pvp. pvp isnt going to happen on your terms..

[Arkasaurio]

Some good ideas in this thread, and some that are terrible (imho).

My contribution: if they could fix the way the game renders (including all exploits) so that small bases could be effectively hidden, I think that would do a lot for smaller tribes and solo players.

While I think a lot of these ideas could potentially help, once a max sized tribe has established a thorough foothold, if they go against a smaller less established tribe, that can never be balanced (nor should it) - it's the game version of asymmetric warfare. Pretty much every successful group that's been on the wrong side of an asymmetric conflict did one thing really well, hide.

The issue is that hiding is pretty difficult to do, there's only so many good spots, and of course they're known at this point, but if trees and rock formations actually obscured they way they're supposed to it opens up a ton of new possibilities. I'm not sure it's even possible to balance and open world survival game to the point where an alpha, or simply much bigger and more established tribe, can't pretty easily knock down a small tribes base if they're offline, so I think giving people more options to hide is the way to go. If there's a meaningful time investment to have to find you, it's that much less likely big tribes are going to spend it tracking you down until you're actually a threat, and if it's PvP that's kind of the point.

[DR0Pthe123]

i really like your only being able to transfer raw materials idea that would make griefing from other servers a much less common thing too!

[DR0Pthe123]

That being said I hate your tribe size balance. I think that is a terrible idea and would make things chaotic and miserable and I am not even in an alpha so I have no alterior motive for saying that.

[seventhirteen]

allowing magic portals where huge tribes can bring in whole armies was a horrible mistake, character transfers I can understand

[ciabattaroll]

7 hours ago, LastStandman said:

Most of his points are valid, and if the devs can create mechanics like ORP which is specifically for PvE

ORP isn't specifically for PVE. It was initially created in order to curb, if not hopefully eliminate, the long standing player mindset of just attacking a tribe when all their members have gone offline, hence the initials standing for Oflline Raid Prevention.

[Oldskool]

Ark is far from dead. No matter how bored of the game i get. Few days break an im back on haha. Love this game

[tidalblade]

12 hours ago, Trikky said:

Finally the devs got around to fixing long standing bugs and maybe some optimization.
How about some balance of game mechanics ?
Unless that is fixed there is no reason to continue Ark or start over on the new servers.

1)  It takes months to build a properly defended base and then some guy with a ghillie, a bit of c4 and a shield tears it all down
 - fix ghillie and shields so they can not tank a lot of bullets
- fix c4 and rockets, so it takes a lot more to blow up foundations, walls and gates

2) Dino balance! In what world can a tamed frog kill a wild rex, or even a tamed one ?
- dinos should be re-balanced according to their species, both tamed and wild.
- less reliance on stat pumps and more reliance on the actual "realistic" dino size / power

3) Tribe balance.  Stop zerg tribes and allow smaller tribes to survive.
- tribe size should be limited to max 10 players and max 1 alliance (or none). Otherwise 2 to 3 person tribes have no chance of survival.

4) Server transfers. Stop people from transferring fully geared FOBs and weapons and reking bases in 5 min.
- Server transfers should be limited to players, dinos, bp's and raw materials only ( no finished products). You wanna raid a server then work for it !
transfer in raw materials - > build a smithy, chem bench and a Fab - > make walls, c4, and weapons etc ... -> raid server
- Right now it is just too easy to pop into a server with a tonne of war gear and a pre-assembled FOB, in the middle of the night, when most people are asleep, and destroy bases that have taken months to build in a matter of minutes.

5) There is A LOT more, but this would be a good beginning

Unless proper PvP balance is achieved, the devs can do whatever optimization and bug fixes they want, Ark will still NOT be an enjoyable game for a lot of people, especially with the way PvP has gone in the last 6 to 12 months, with ever more powerful weapons and dinos designed especially to kill your tames, destroy ur buildings and your hard work.

EDIT: BTW, I am part of an alpha tribe, we have held (and still are) our Official PvP sevrer since day 1. Fought off a lot of raiders and invasions. Seen 100's of people quit the game, especially from smaller tribes, for the reasons I have outlined above. So, I do know what I am talking about.  

I think the real "problem" is that you are trying to figure out how to create balance between a 2 week old tribe, and a 2 year old tribe.  It simply doesn't work that way.

The way it is now is fine, it is the essence of the type of brutal punishing PVP this game has had since day 1.  If you want toned down PVP, you are going to have to find a PVE server that players will want to PVP on.  Tribe wars are possible on PVE servers.

If you want PVP balance, you will have to wait till the new servers open in August, when everyone starts on the same level.

[ArkCreation]

11 hours ago, BeardO said:

Yeah I'm serious, makes no sense that it was designed for PvE.  But then again it's Wildcard so I guess it shouldn't come as a shock that they do poop ass backwards.

players get raided in PvE servers. Its indirect raiding through the use of kiting wild dinos like titanos and gigas into the base and then aggroing the wild dino like a titano to kill your naked survivor and damaging passive dinos nearby. A giga doesn't need to aggro like this, you just pull it and things die.

[ITSNOTEASY]

Balancing.. this is a huge one. things are to hard to do and there has to be some sort of balance to even the playing field.