I know it's nothing new - Sadness of megatribes

[Rika]

I know many people will come telling me to just play PVE (I like diplomacy on pvp and PvE is full of problems too (pillaring with foundations)) or l2p. That's always the easiest answer.

I think it's just so..well.. sad.
There are so many people smarming over the megatribes, offering to be their slaves (whether on youtube or forums or ingame), just to have a little, tiny crumb of success in this game while throwing away their pride. Where's the fun if you didn't develope yourself to that point? Enslaving yourself to farm stuff to maybe be able to c4 some noobies in stone bases - who maybe finally managed to get a trike woopie! - with the safety of your 500people tribe on your back.
Guys, don't you all remember the times (I got somewhat 2000hours), when there were the small tribes? When an alpha tribe dominated with maybe 10 players?  When servers closed together to fight chinese invaders off but then parted to their old ways?
I played at times where you didn't raid (only) for fun but to get someones stuff. That meant cracking him up, killing him when he tried to defend and killing the tames that are aggressive on you. But not coming and wiping everyones efforts in a few minutes, or even telling them to raptor off and leave the server (they must've been really sausageheads to get that "punishment")
It was about diplomacy: you saw someone taming something? Yeah you could screw him, but the most people chose to help him and form friendships that way, keep your friends close but your foes even closer. Someone built to close at your base? You tried to discuss it friendly first, before giving them a lecture. You could befriend yourself with the alphas without croaching into the deepest darks of their butts. They even gave you stuff before you knew what an alpha even was, so the servers kept lively. Damn, we could trade, we wouldn't be scared to ask for an argentavis saddle in exchange for something to be found out that we even are on a server and that we are simply existing.
Now  ALL servers are kept by megatribes for them alone, not allowing anyone except them to play on it, screw that!

All that megatribe-poop, no matter which one, evil empire, black knights and how they're all called, comes from the fear of loss and the lazyness to put some work into things. Understandable , it's human to choose the way of least  resistance,  but it could be so much more fun than ganking nubs, duping your poop and killing other peoples fun =/

I joined a tribe with 6 people in total. My boyfriend and me started together back then. He's a new player somehow. He made a long break when I didn't back then. We have two other experienced players, but they have a real life too. (family, jobs,studying and stuff) and then we have last but not least two newbies, total newbies. Bought the game to have fun with their two friends. So we did our best to serve it to them. We just couldn't . Everyday we had to change the servers because you get literally hunted while online, not just being wiped offline, until we learned that really every server belonged to evil empire. The two freshstarters are currently not playing anymore,  understandable: we rebuilt our stuff in many different ways across 4-5 servers for a week. Just to always get threatened to leave the server or instantly wiped while our mothers get insulted in really bad ways.  We moved for the sake of our "freshmen" to an unofficial server, but it's just not the same for them. It's hard to explain, I don't know how to put into words, but it's just not "official". 
There isn't even a way to build up on another server to get revenge, that's what we tried. Evil-Empire everywhere.
It's  not about them particularly, it's about any megatribe that's out there.  If not them, another one will do it.

It's natural you need to form an own megatribe to effectively fight other megatribes.
It's just sad that you only have the choice of unofficial servers if you don't want to be one ant of a million.
Vicious circle I guess.
New players will never experience the fun on officials that I did, neither will I do it again.
I dont think wildcard could do anything about it, just we, as the community, can. There's no need of whining about transfers or possibilities. It's our choice to make the best out of this sandbox. It's our choice to not dupe. It's our choice to be toxic or welcoming to others and maybe make new experiences. It's our choice to forget damage we endured through single douchebags sometimes and keep our friendlyness. It's us making this game.
If all just could go back to that fun it once was, to that colourful game I used to know, but that would mean risk of losing things, putting real effort in getting big and having to be sometimes a good guy.

Thanks a lot for reading!

Sincerely yours,
Rika

[YUSHOETMI]

Yeah the game has lost a lot of its meaning when it comes to pvp. I used to play pvp exclusively and hated on pve with a passion, was with numerous tribes and all where alpha, we ran a server as multiple tribes and never fought each other but kept trading open and helped each other as one big tribe, but some of the other tribes in the alliance just loved raiding the smaller tribes that would join, mostly as a show of force but often just for fun, I mean what fun is it to raid a guy with 3 dodos and a chest full of thatch. 

When they would raid the smaller tribes, my tribe and a few others would either take them in or farm for 5 minutes to give them more stuff than they lost and help them, but the day after they'd be raided again. 

I just don't see the point to pvp anymore, if you're gonna raid somebody then take what you need and leave the rest, hell we have raided tribes without even touching them, just rocked up on dinos and told them to unlock their chests, took what we needed and left the rest for them, we could have foundation wiped them but why? To waste the days they'd spent building it? Would I like that happen to me? Maybe empathy is a bad thing. 

So yeah I play pvp still, but I mostly play pve now with my wife and a few friends where raiding isn't an issue and we focus solely on building and taming. Funny how opinions change. 

[Rika]

It's nice to read that I'm not alone!
If we were just more, more people thinking like this, ark would be a different feeling, but in an awesome way.
I mean yeah, the raided guys would eventually take revenge on you, but you just prepped better for that case.
And you thought about that in the first place! So you're taking the risk. Weighing consequences for gain or so =)

[ForzaProiettile]

I posted a detailed thread about this not long ago but it was mysteriously moved to some dead end part of the forum by the mods presumably so less people would read it given that they whole heartly support mega tribes (they think a max of 70 players in a single tribe is good for the game )

It was about life inside a mega tribe from the view of a bunch of PVP players who had never been in a tribe larger then 5.

Here is the thread for those interested:

 

[ArkCreation]

23 minutes ago, ForzaProiettile said:

I posted a detailed thread about this not long ago but it was mysteriously moved to some dead end part of the forum by the mods presumably so less people would read it given that they whole heartly support mega tribes (they think a max of 70 players in a single tribe is good for the game )

It was about life inside a mega tribe from the view of a bunch of PVP players who had never been in a tribe larger then 5.

Here is the thread for those interested:

 

Yeah I definitely think 70 players is way too much. The great experiment, the no taming server had a max of 10 tribe members last I checked. Which I enjoyed playing on. It seemed to play better having 10 tribe members. Given the fact you didn't have dinos, a couple of decent pvpers could handle a larger group. Of course how you play was different. But that is one thing I wish the other pvp servers had. Was a smaller limit to tribe count. I figure if you're going to have an alpha tribe, having an alliance would serve the same purpose for all the players you play with. I think sole control of a server is a good way to kill off any chance of new players coming in and playing. Usually what will happen they have the choice of going to an unofficial or a private server they have to pay for. 

Yeah I think its sad too and I appreciate the effort put into you're post here Rika. I never got into the pvp gaming of this very long. Too much tension and drama for someone like me who suffers from anxiety to deal with 24/7. After a time we just wished on the no taming server someone would come wipe us so we can do other things instead of worry when we were going to get wiped.

Which comes to the major issue with pvp community. Wiping vs raiding. Like its been said, if someone is being a douche, I'm sure the server would agree that his base should be wiped. Including his/her foundations. Wiping is part of the raiding and some players in the community do not separate the two.

I just found that pvp on Ark has always been vengeful and bring out a truly dark side to one's character when playing these types of games. Not saying it reflects 100% outside of the game, but I can tell you ever since I started playing PvE my attitude at home has changed for the better. Reasons why I still play PvE is to avoid the kind of person I became when playing pvp. And my wife and kids like me better when I'm not upset at my computer screen that they simply wouldn't be able to understand unless they were there when it happened. It can become a second life, which is a very dangerous thing if given the time to germinate that kind of life. This can lead to abandonment of what is really important in life, you're family.  I probably went off on a tangent here and off topic, but there ya go.

[ForzaProiettile]

Part of the problem is Offline Raiding. Unless you play this game 24/7 which is basically a requirement to survive for long on an Official Server you have little chance to avoid being wiped while Offline. If you ask me they should find a middle ground in between ORP and No ORP something along the lines of: when offline your base structures have 3x health and your turrets do 2-3x damage. This still allows smaller tribes to do some damage to tribes 10x their number if they go about it smartly,  while encouraging raiding to taken place while the tribes are online.

I also enjoyed the no taming server. The lack of dinos was interesting especially the lack of flyers which to me rip all the balance out from this game.

My ideal PVP server would be as follows:

• No Flyers
• No Gigas
• No Titanosaurs
• No Squids
• Dino level capped at 60 or so with player character's balanced accordingly.
• Tribe limit of 10
• No alliances
• No Auto Turrets
• No RPGS
• No Tek
• Maybe even no Metal structures
• Partial Offline Raid Protection (Structures have 3x HP, X Plants do 3x dmg)
• Platform dinos would not be able to have structures built over the driver. 
• No OP hitscan weapons in particular the sniper rifles. Players just use bows and arrows which use real projectiles and melee weapons.
• A few more siege options could be added to make things interesting.

 

[ArkCreation]

5 minutes ago, ForzaProiettile said:

Part of the problem is Offline Raiding. Unless you play this game 24/7 which is basically a requirement to survive for long on an Official Server you have little chance to avoid being wiped while Offline. If you ask me they should find a middle ground in between ORP and No ORP something along the lines of: when offline your base structures have 3x health and your turrets do 2-3x damage. This still allows smaller tribes to do some damage to tribes 10x their number if they go about it smartly,  while encouraging raiding to taken place while the tribes are online.

either this or something else. I would love to do away with offline raiding entirely, but I know the scheduling of enough members to be online when the opposing tribe is online can be a nightmare.

[BookofBlade]

Hey OP if you are on PC I recommend checking out the official ORP servers. They are EU but as a US player I still get good ping and from my time there it appears to have much of the things you remember fondly. 

[Rika]

Quote

Hey OP if you are on PC I recommend checking out the official ORP servers. They are EU but as a US player I still get good ping and from my time there it appears to have much of the things you remember fondly

That may be true, but they're only legacy servers right? means no support and some day they will shut down?

Thanks for all the postings until now! =)

[BookofBlade]

46 minutes ago, Rika said:

That may be true, but they're only legacy servers right? means no support and some day they will shut down?

Thanks for all the postings until now! =)

No crossark5 is a new launch cluster all orp

[Jkyle37]

7 hours ago, ForzaProiettile said:

I posted a detailed thread about this not long ago but it was mysteriously moved to some dead end part of the forum by the mods presumably so less people would read it given that they whole heartly support mega tribes (they think a max of 70 players in a single tribe is good for the game )

It was about life inside a mega tribe from the view of a bunch of PVP players who had never been in a tribe larger then 5.

Here is the thread for those interested:

This was a great post

 

[IamTANK]

16 hours ago, Rika said:

I know many people will come telling me to just play PVE (I like diplomacy on pvp and PvE is full of problems too (pillaring with foundations)) or l2p. That's always the easiest answer.

I think it's just so..well.. sad.
There are so many people smarming over the megatribes, offering to be their slaves (whether on youtube or forums or ingame), just to have a little, tiny crumb of success in this game while throwing away their pride. Where's the fun if you didn't develope yourself to that point? Enslaving yourself to farm stuff to maybe be able to c4 some noobies in stone bases - who maybe finally managed to get a trike woopie! - with the safety of your 500people tribe on your back.
Guys, don't you all remember the times (I got somewhat 2000hours), when there were the small tribes? When an alpha tribe dominated with maybe 10 players?  When servers closed together to fight chinese invaders off but then parted to their old ways?
I played at times where you didn't raid (only) for fun but to get someones stuff. That meant cracking him up, killing him when he tried to defend and killing the tames that are aggressive on you. But not coming and wiping everyones efforts in a few minutes, or even telling them to raptor off and leave the server (they must've been really sausageheads to get that "punishment")
It was about diplomacy: you saw someone taming something? Yeah you could screw him, but the most people chose to help him and form friendships that way, keep your friends close but your foes even closer. Someone built to close at your base? You tried to discuss it friendly first, before giving them a lecture. You could befriend yourself with the alphas without croaching into the deepest darks of their butts. They even gave you stuff before you knew what an alpha even was, so the servers kept lively. Damn, we could trade, we wouldn't be scared to ask for an argentavis saddle in exchange for something to be found out that we even are on a server and that we are simply existing.
Now  ALL servers are kept by megatribes for them alone, not allowing anyone except them to play on it, screw that!

All that megatribe-poop, no matter which one, evil empire, black knights and how they're all called, comes from the fear of loss and the lazyness to put some work into things. Understandable , it's human to choose the way of least  resistance,  but it could be so much more fun than ganking nubs, duping your poop and killing other peoples fun =/

I joined a tribe with 6 people in total. My boyfriend and me started together back then. He's a new player somehow. He made a long break when I didn't back then. We have two other experienced players, but they have a real life too. (family, jobs,studying and stuff) and then we have last but not least two newbies, total newbies. Bought the game to have fun with their two friends. So we did our best to serve it to them. We just couldn't . Everyday we had to change the servers because you get literally hunted while online, not just being wiped offline, until we learned that really every server belonged to evil empire. The two freshstarters are currently not playing anymore,  understandable: we rebuilt our stuff in many different ways across 4-5 servers for a week. Just to always get threatened to leave the server or instantly wiped while our mothers get insulted in really bad ways.  We moved for the sake of our "freshmen" to an unofficial server, but it's just not the same for them. It's hard to explain, I don't know how to put into words, but it's just not "official". 
There isn't even a way to build up on another server to get revenge, that's what we tried. Evil-Empire everywhere.
It's  not about them particularly, it's about any megatribe that's out there.  If not them, another one will do it.

It's natural you need to form an own megatribe to effectively fight other megatribes.
It's just sad that you only have the choice of unofficial servers if you don't want to be one ant of a million.
Vicious circle I guess.
New players will never experience the fun on officials that I did, neither will I do it again.
I dont think wildcard could do anything about it, just we, as the community, can. There's no need of whining about transfers or possibilities. It's our choice to make the best out of this sandbox. It's our choice to not dupe. It's our choice to be toxic or welcoming to others and maybe make new experiences. It's our choice to forget damage we endured through single douchebags sometimes and keep our friendlyness. It's us making this game.
If all just could go back to that fun it once was, to that colourful game I used to know, but that would mean risk of losing things, putting real effort in getting big and having to be sometimes a good guy.

Thanks a lot for reading!

Sincerely yours,
Rika

problem is a lot of these people are kids with no or twisted morals or they have super low self esteem. that the feel that making someone else more miserable than themselves makes them feel good about themselves for some reason. i mean seriously it takes a pretty crappy and pathetic person to get joy from other people's misery.  i mean seriously if your an alpha tribe with loads of tames and weapons and a big base  how much of a threat could that solo guy with one bird and a trike in a 4 x 4 stone base really be? are they just  that cowardly that one guys scares them? or are the super greedy and think only they have a right to play on that server ? or are they just crappy people?

[IamTANK]

14 hours ago, ForzaProiettile said:

I posted a detailed thread about this not long ago but it was mysteriously moved to some dead end part of the forum by the mods presumably so less people would read it given that they whole heartly support mega tribes (they think a max of 70 players in a single tribe is good for the game )

It was about life inside a mega tribe from the view of a bunch of PVP players who had never been in a tribe larger then 5.

Here is the thread for those interested:

 

i saw that post when you first posted it b4 it was hidden. it was a great read for me. thank you for writing it.

[Yster]

ORP has just way to many bugs atm.. 

the only thing about PvP thats get me.. and I guess this might be for all.. Is the size of tribes.. tribes of 10 people should be max.  Honestly Alpha tribes of 70 players, are normally 10 - 15 players and the rest are slaves.. 

 

But if the world would fall to a zombie apocalypse, this is proof of what the world would become.. because deep down inside there is more "bad guys" than good. 

 

 

[TubsTheBear]

I don't believe that this is what would become of us.  These are that people that would quickly be dealt with because they show that they can't be trusted.  They survive in Ark because death is not permanent.

I agree with the original poster and am in the position of refusing to join a mega tribe.  A few of my friends and I went our own way with this cluster and unfortunately lost out to 2 mega tribes when our allies decided to stay out of it.  I have the option to join these tribes but I refuse to as I don't want to be one of those people that just bow down and do whatever is easiest.  This seems to be the problem with a lot of people.  They want to play the game but don't see an option but to be part of the mega tribes.  More people need to stand up and say we have had enough and band together to get rid of what so many people have identified to be the scourge of Ark.  

[Thorium]

You should try unofficals. May take you some time to find one with decent admins, but then you will not have this problem and many more.

[TubsTheBear]

to me going to unofficial's is just giving up.  I will continue to try to sway people on official.  One day someone may see that they are just adding to the problem instead of making a solution.

[Thorium]

1 hour ago, TubsTheBear said:

to me going to unofficial's is just giving up.  I will continue to try to sway people on official.  One day someone may see that they are just adding to the problem instead of making a solution.

As long as you have fun that approach is fine.

However if you say it's just not fun the way it is, you should change something instead of waiting for change. In my experience waiting for somthing to happen, which may never happen, is just lost time.

And you are not going to change people, it's just not happening.

[madplow44]

They need to reduce the tribe/alliance size again 70PPl per tribe with 10 tribe per alliance is like have no restrictiction ... 

They need to limit at 40 ppl per alliance , It s more than enough , if you want you can have a 40 ppl tribe or 10 tribe with 4 ppl in alliance .

[reidmarc]

I have no idea where you all are getting the 70 member tribe limit from. I can tell you that 'if' there is a cap, it's over 100.

[madplow44]

v265.0

- New Server Option: Tribe Size and Alliance Size Limits! The new tribe member limit is defaulted to 70 players and the new alliance per tribe limit is defaulted to 10 on official servers (MaxAlliancesPerTribe=# and MaxTribesPerAlliance=# in Game.ini). Note: Values may be off by 1 (looking into it!), so just pick your number and then add 1 to it.

 

Read patchnote sometimes

[Khayman]

After playing on official servers and dealing with PvP megatribes dictating where you can build, how many dino's you can have and requiring to pay tribute just to be able to play....NOOOO THANKS.  Went unofficial and will never go back.

[reidmarc]

16 minutes ago, madplow44 said:

v265.0

- New Server Option: Tribe Size and Alliance Size Limits! The new tribe member limit is defaulted to 70 players and the new alliance per tribe limit is defaulted to 10 on official servers (MaxAlliancesPerTribe=# and MaxTribesPerAlliance=# in Game.ini). Note: Values may be off by 1 (looking into it!), so just pick your number and then add 1 to it.

 

Read patchnote sometimes

Just took a screenshot and cropped it. This is from an official server.

so....check mate.

[madplow44]

2 minutes ago, reidmarc said:

Just took a screenshot and cropped it. This is from an official server.

so....check mate.

Lol Wc fail again , or perhaps this count the members in alliance too

[10,000 Jelly Doughnuts]

On 9/12/2017 at 1:51 PM, Rika said:

That may be true, but they're only legacy servers right? means no support and some day they will shut down?

Thanks for all the postings until now! =)

There are new servers. One of each map so far. Most are always slot capped though  (and people are wiping to clear room)