I know it's nothing new - Sadness of megatribes

[jaypak]

good post rika, wee like for you

[natman]

Very good post Rika

I feel with u, but i think hoping on the players to change the way they play wont get us very far. We need to think about what was different in the past, before megatribes existed and we enjoyed the fun u  and others in this thread described. we need to understand the reasons why these megatribes exist, and search for solutions to the problem.

The first really big tribes came up when transfers became a thing. all official servers together in one huge cluster with no restrictions to transfer from one to another. this inevitably has to lead to a small amount of megatribes controlling all of the servers. which, as you guys described, is a problem as they prolly wont be nice, the game doesnt provide good oportunities to lead a guerilla war, and even if u try to go that route, u have to work several times harder than they do and still wont ever achieve more than to be a little nuisance to them.

But it is alright that a big group has the advantage over the small group. anything else would be stupid. the problem is the space that lays in between a megatribe and a small tribe. the possibilities the game provides for a big tribe vs the possibilities it offers to small tribes. if it was all closer together the chances are more evened out while still making group work and time investment worthwhile (im coming from primitive, where stone tier was max and we had no guns or explosives, felt much more balanced than base game)

so yeh... my ideas would be  1. to get end game and early game closer together  2. to form smaller clusters (maybe 8 or 12 servers per cluster), which would remove the need to form huge tribes  3. to further restrict transfers (maybe character only?)  4. to further restrict tribe and alliance sizes. of course people can still work together when unallied but it makes it harder and requires more coordination and such

whatever the future brings, it should be the devs interest to make their official standard game enjoyable for the majority of players, not only for a little group, and they should form their game towards that overall goal.

[Rika]

I'm sorry I couldn't follow this here for a time, caught a cold and I'm still sick.
I just wanted to thank you guys/girls for all that answers and discussion.
I'm really glad that,  unlike in other threads I read about this topic, not a single one of you guys told me
to f* off if I can't bare it or L2P or something like this.

This makes me really really happy and gives me somehow back my faith in ARK's community.
I hope that some day this madness will stop, maybe our work can be a step into the right direction =)

Full of gratitude (and cough candies)
Rika

[TomServo]

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

I think the biggest issue right now is there isn't enough servers, the megas are on top of each other and keep purging the servers because there insecurities. It does suck but it's nothing new on official pvp.

I'm in a friendly 3 man tribe and we haven't been raided yet, playing on a bldx farming server. At any moment , if they apply themselves, we're gone.... it's just a fact. You really have to get at peace with loosing everything at any given moment or play pve.

If you set "tribe limits" like on tribe members or Dino caps ,they will just break into smaller tribes and ally to circumvent whatever limitations you suggest to impose. ... I think the main issue is lack of servers, if/when wildcard releases more places for us little tribes to hide, the better our chances of survival.

[Critter]

Between megatribe invaders, current alpha tribes, up coming wannabe alpha tribes on servers, ark pvp is just a big game of thrones. Only difference is no one gets their tally cut off. 

[Taconite]

On Xbox and probably PS4 for that matter, things are much more relaxed. On legacy my tribe was one of the alphas (3 in total) and we had 20ish people in each. We didn't wipe anyone that we didn't have to. If a tribe started getting big or had auto turrets we made sure to talk to them regularly to find out their intensions and if they are good people. Even back when I was a small 6 man tribe we were able to build up decently well and when we got wiped it wasn't by the alphas either. It was mostly transfer raiders. 

Now on the new servers we are allied with all of the large tribes on our server and we simply eliminate threats when they present themselves but other than that I consider our tribe Glorified pve players. We spend most of our time grinding and breeding but you can be sure that if someone knockes down my front door they are going to get a face full of buckshot. 

Oh and back on legacy there was a guy on my server that was a 2 man tribe (him and his girlfriend) that built a base bigger than a lot of alpha bases I've seen

[onetwothree]

The reason the mega tribes are foundation wiping people so much post-release and telling people to leave the server is very simple:

 

Wildcard did not release even half the number of servers that were required for the games launch after deleting everybody's legacy servers or dooming them by announcing they would be reviewing and deleting more every 3 months.

Many MANY ark players simply could not get a slot on a server in their geographical region AT ALL and weren't interested in playing with a high ping on some server on the other side of the planet. Arks servers perform very badly as it is since WC are obviously not buying high quality architecture (Nitrado is literally one of the least respected company's in the business)

 

On top of this, some game modes\regions were hugely under represented compared to the number of players wanting to play in those modes\areas. Primitive players had their entire game mode wiped off official.

Large tribes found half their members unable to even log into the game due to slot cap issues and so were forced to either purge their servers or watch more and more members stop playing ark or leave the tribe\play elsewhere...

Ark PvP is set up by the developers with a certain ruleset. Players will play the way the developers rules force them to play. 

If the server is bought on the cheap from a dodgey company like Nitrado which run multiple servers virtually on the one piece of physical architecture then they are going to run poorly, performance will suffer. You don't have to look far for the reasoning WHY even western mega-tribes are behaving like Chinese wipe-on-sight alphas on their home servers.

The promised optimisation that was supposed to happen before launch simply did not occur. Every raft, every structure,every player online and every Dino tamed just adds to the load the server has to push around and they weren't up to the task even during legacy when the servers were mostly empty. This is why more band-aid fixes like the platform saddle suddenly costing 19 tames and similar are being pushed through despite customers clearly stating this was not the direction they wanted the game to take.

You can't fault people for being ruthless when their hands are being forced by WC. I am a nice guy and literally never attack people first under any circumstances but was in full support of foundation wiping every player that was not us after half my tribe wasn't even able to log in of an evening for over a week...

 

While we are on this subject: why are most servers 70 players max post launch instead of 100 during legacy?

I mean we all know the answer already but I would love the elusive WC company representatives to tell us why the scale of the game got cut down?

[Chazinho]

You have to survive and if having a 70 man tribe and an alliance of 400 people then that's what's going to happen. The sad story is regardless of how powerful you really are it only takes a ddoser to role up and raptor your whole day up. I disagree about people being a slave to an alliance the main rules are don't start wars without permission and just be ready and there to help other tribes when the time comes. 5 man tribes do survive nowadays you just have to branch out to an alliance and make sure they have your back. I'm not understanding what people thought this game would be like when they first started playing I've always felt it would get to this stage. And imo it's not a bad thing theres other servers and gametypes for everyone. There was nothing worse than being on a server where there was a fairly sized alpha and you couldn't do anything to wipe them before cross tranferring. Now people have come to the realisation that they need to somewhat recruit different timezones because there's always going to be a threat. 

[rancz]

1 hour ago, Chazinho said:

 Now people have come to the realisation that they need to somewhat recruit different timezones because there's always going to be a threat. 

Oh yeah I can see that happening ''guys there a 2 man tribe that just made a stone base with 2 dino, call for backup''

[Salidus]

I like the having people from different time zones makes playing during nights I can't sleep less boring. Besides right now all the mega tribes are worried about other mega tribes any threat real or perceived are wiped out. Sadly the little guys get stomped on. Should even out as we get more servers I hope

[Xtm059]

On 9/13/2017 at 12:44 AM, Yster said:

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. 

 if this were the case society would have never progressed

 

derp

[xdevtax]

as we get more servers i just see the mega tribes taking them over. Why only control one if you have the means to control more?

[Jaric]

I'm confused. If you raid another tribe why would you not raze their entire base to the ground and slaughter all their tames? To do otherwise would seem to create an enemy with the capabilities to return the favor.

I play PvE exclusively, so perhaps I'm missing something, but based on what I see from this game the only options I'd entertain on a PvP server would be friendship or total destruction.

[Salidus]

When we had a metric crap load of servers there were servers where you had only mid level alpha tribes on them. These got raided sure but in the end there were way more servers than all mega tribes can control. Sadly we are not there yet.

[Currahee]

On 9/13/2017 at 1:44 AM, Yster said:

because deep down inside there is more "bad guys" than good. 

If that were the case we would have never made it out of caves, let alone to where we are now.  Don't fall for the hype.

[Salidus]

Btw new tame nerfs they have will only push the mega tribes to splinter off "alliance" tribes so they can raise dinos. I'm more interested in seeing the devs address mesh issues. Kind of sad watching streamers lay in(not behind) a rock to avoid turrets and defenses.

[Gromo]

People that say "that's just the way it is, nothing can be done to help" have such a defeatist attitude it's disgusting. I think there are certainly things that can be done to help newer, small tribes at least get a foothold to where the game is enjoyable.

Without a doubt there are ways to calculate appropriately timed raid cool downs or at least HP buffs to structures that have been recently raided. I don't mind getting raided, hell I don't even mind offline raiding, what i mind is spending weeks building up a base, getting wiped and then having no chance at even getting back to where I once was let along progressing past that.

since i know people will probably totally rebuke the  "raid cool down" idea since it has been talked about many times already, Why not a resource gathering/taming buff? If a certain % of a base is destroyed you should get a 2x  buff to help you rebuild. 

[ForzaProiettile]

8 hours ago, Salidus said:

When we had a metric crap load of servers there were servers where you had only mid level alpha tribes on them. These got raided sure but in the end there were way more servers than all mega tribes can control. Sadly we are not there yet.

Thing is 90% of those servers were "dead" and average players count of 10 or less. Even then most of them were still controlled by the mega tribes as farm/breeding servers.

[Salidus]

Thing is 90% of those servers were "dead" and average players count of 10 or less. Even then most of them were still controlled by the mega tribes as farm/breeding servers.

Well I was apart of a larger alpha tribe so we didn't get abused as much. I've also been on Chinese servers where instead of killing us out right let us leave and take our pteras with after timer was up. Guess I got lucky

[Jaric]

People that say "that's just the way it is, nothing can be done to help" have such a defeatist attitude it's disgusting. I think there are certainly things that can be done to help newer, small tribes at least get a foothold to where the game is enjoyable.
Without a doubt there are ways to calculate appropriately timed raid cool downs or at least HP buffs to structures that have been recently raided. I don't mind getting raided, hell I don't even mind offline raiding, what i mind is spending weeks building up a base, getting wiped and then having no chance at even getting back to where I once was let along progressing past that.

since i know people will probably totally rebuke the  "raid cool down" idea since it has been talked about many times already, Why not a resource gathering/taming buff? If a certain % of a base is destroyed you should get a 2x  buff to help you rebuild. 

Not saying it couldn't work, but you'll have people trying to exploit it depending on how big the buff is and how much you have to lose to achieve it.

[BradbotXp]

Mega tribes are the scum of Ark.

[ForzaProiettile]

9 hours ago, BradbotXp said:

Mega tribes are the scum of Ark.

They are indeed the chief thing ruining PVP from a competitive viewpoint. A tribe limit of 10 and no/minimal alliances would make this much more competitive.