The Great TEK Wall, A Big TEK Problem.

[Iimmy]

So Lets Talk About TEK

I've logged 2500 hours in Ark, been playing since Day 1.

I've been in Mega Tribes, Alphas, Betas, Small Groups, Primitive Groups, Unofficial Tribes. I have now retired to Official PVE to save my poor aging heart.

A majority of patches spanning the last 6 months or so has literally *screamed* about a new TEK Item. I can tell you that I've never fired a TEK rifle, or used a TEK trough, Powered my base with a TEK generator or used a TEK saddle. Why? because I now play SOLO PVE and I've never been able to do a boss, not technically true, I play on Official with a very casual friend. 

More telling is the last 3 servers I've been on, nobody uses TEK, Nobody. Even the last few Mega tribes on PVE not a single soul uses TEK items, simply because it's simpler not to. The risk/reward far outweighs it's usefulness.  Sure a TEK generator would be useful but farming and breeding for an extended period of time to potentially bug out or simply lose the medium monkey or easy manticore fight, whereas I can spend a half hour farming oil and fill up my generators to last for weeks. 

Currently on my server there isn't one teleporter, generator, redundant tek saddle, no one uses the armor and weapons because they are completely superfluous, totally unnecessary.

Not only that the sheer amount of planning and breeding is unobtainable for the small-ish tribes and SOLO players that make up the majority of my server.

You have alienated a hugh % of your playerbase with an artificially 200ft tall gameplay blocking wall. Wouldn't you want your complete player base to see your hard work?

You must have realised by now (although it's not apparent by your consistent focus on this useless TEK) that most of your players don't/can't use it? The only people that seem to be excited about TEK is You Wildcard.

Some of the main issues;

- How do small tribes and SOLO tribes function and obtain gear on Official especially, although not exclusively on PVE?

* We trade items, or we farm a great deal and pay the price for wanting an item we can't get by other means.

* Issue: Element Cannot be traded as it cannot be transferred, TEK items can be transferred but can't be built without the engrams.

- So we can trade for some of the more useful tek prebuilt items (eg: the transmitter)?

* We can't even use this without knowing the engram, and we can't get the engram. So a trade wont work and maybe one of your tribe members has completed the bosses so he can use this but you can't, it's ridiculous.

 

So how do we solve the Issue?

A couple of options present themselves. Making the items unuseable without the engrams is an obvious and ever present tactic used by Wildcard as an attempt at blocking off content unless you grind and grind for weeks thus pushing up playtime, but WC it's hurting you more than us.

-  Let the engrams be learnable as the regular engrams are, maybe at higher cost. Obviously they still require element to build or maintain which keeps boss battles a necessity but doesn't put up a huge wall to content. You don't have to be able to transfer element (which could be a bad idea) but at least then the traded items could be used. This is probably the easiest solution that makes the most sense.

- option 2, scale the bosses. IE: really scale them based on the amount of players that enter. So you could enter an arena SOLO and it would scale accordingly, the fight is still challenging but not impossible for a solo player.

I'd like to hear your reply @Jatheish @Jen  or any other WC dudes. 

Epilogue: The Game is released now, no more EA, as it stands the hard dragon (now it can ghost through your tames) is just impossible. This is not fun. Remember that concept "fun" back when this was a dinosaur taming game? not a sci fi alien laser beam shooting t-rex game with "mixed" reviews.

Cheers

Limmy. 

 

 

 

 

 

[PaleoJoe]

Do you make use of all 100+ dinosaurs, or only a few?

Just because they add something it does not mean everyone will use it. For example, I never used the cage outside of a joke on someone. Useless item there.

[ShadowAngel]

@Iimmy I'm with you on this one. Tek tier right now as is totally useless. Too hard to get/maintain for what it does.

My only hopes are that new DLC's ability to mine element will mitigate this.

[Ulta]

I agree that Tek is for the most part useless when it comes to the core of ARK. PVE it's a fun little thing ot try out, though Tek armor is gimmicky at best, it's not even great armor wise. And everything else is just 'grind-alleviating' or it's just...gimmicky and requires too much effort to upkeep for most on officials.

However, sorry to say but Dragon CAN be defeated, even on Alpha. Many people including myself have done it, with the right team and set up.

 

[Iimmy]

16 minutes ago, Ulta said:

I agree that Tek is for the most part useless when it comes to the core of ARK. PVE it's a fun little thing ot try out, though Tek armor is gimmicky at best, it's not even great armor wise. And everything else is just 'grind-alleviating' or it's just...gimmicky and requires too much effort to upkeep for most on officials.

However, sorry to say but Dragon CAN be defeated, even on Alpha. Many people including myself have done it, with the right team and set up.

 

Despite that being a teeny point at the bottom of the post, still, show me. Show me post patch you completing dragon on Hard (nevermind the fact my main point was for 1 or 2 man tribes but anyway) I'm very curious to see this post latest patches.

 

[Cowgirl]

I have 3 tek doors and one regular dino gate but I bought those from my neighbors who don't really do boss fights right now. The only tribe that REALLY did bosses on my main server quit for the most part (one guy logs on sometimes) On my side server (I had to move my animals from my SE server to it during the purge) a few do boss fights I hear.

[Hemplethwaite]

I totally agree with the OP that Tek is not relevant to most players the costs do by far outweigh the benefits and the breeding and grinding required to get to a level where you can even contemplate taking on a boss is also restrictive for most casual players. 

I suspect their testers and main feedback group have far more free time to play than those of us who have to work for a living, as the game design is really towards it being a time sink and the only way to get anywhere is to be online for the majority of your waking life.

[ChargingParacerParacer]

The ONLY reason I have any Tek engrams unlocked is because I read how to spawn in the actual leveled bosses on the wiki and cheesed the ever-lovin' poop out of them. Doing bosses the "proper" way of going to get all the tribute stuff then raising pretty much only Rexs to have a big numbers game against the 3 bosses is pretty much the most boring sounding things to do in this game, right up there with marathon grinding enough for 10 industrial grinders by yourself.

Agreed too that the Tek stuff is an underwhelming reward; I do like the Tek grenades and the generator is neat since you don't need wires but its definitely easier to just cook gas. The actual Tek crafting table itself is impractically large though useful for it's 600 slots. I haven't bothered using the other Tek stuff because it honestly doesnt interest me to begin with.

[Goaty]

Tek is used by ALOT of people. Tek is fine how it is for Pvp,  but u doubt they will change it without changing it on pvp, please don't assume no one uses tek, because alot do...

[ComradeRyu]

Tek is used by many people, myself included, make an alliance and join allies in bosses if you dont want a tribe big enough for it.

 

Again, this game is made to be played in groups, stop demanding that they cater to your entitled needs. Go play single player or use your own server where you can adjust settings.

[Olivar]

We're a small tribe, 3 people basically.
We're able to down all gamma bosses, and alpha broodmother, granting us access to TEK and Elements.
However, the only Tek pieces we are using at the moment are the building blocks to secure our base, and that's it.

We have no interest at the moment in crafting the weapons, saddles or advanced building blocks such as the generator, teleporter, forcefields or utilities like the feedingbox.
Not that we cannot do it, but because the combined resources and the maintenance cost is simply not worth it for us.
Collecting black pearls as small tribe is really a pain.
And the benefit....well it's minimal for us.
We're just happy to have the fancy walls for our base to keep us save against most things, but we mostly keep running around with Ghillie suits and snipers/shotguns.

[Tombolo]

As small tribe or even play alone you can earn tek engrams.

- trade items for good rexes/ breed some buying some decent eggs if not have time to breed yourself an good line

- make an alliance who can do that bosses have the dinos and go  with them to bossing just for engrams (work this thing, we make in this was and some less powerfull players have the engrams in this way and they farm easy spider for some engrams)

-pay somebody to do for you the boss when you are with them 

-easy spider is kinda easy can do with thyla, bear, wolf, mega, therizino, rex, spino, allo, carno so you can farm some element with them 

[MrDynamicMan]

6 hours ago, PaleoJoe said:

Do you make use of all 100+ dinosaurs, or only a few?

Just because they add something it does not mean everyone will use it. For example, I never used the cage outside of a joke on someone. Useless item there.

Do you PvP? It's really useful to lock up enemies when they try to raid you. Best way to cut down on their ranks.

likewise, tek is used. Tek shields are an absolute staple of large scale defense and FOBs. There are tons of modern tier weapons used, and even the Dino roster for PvP is currently very diverse. 

[Extraterrestrial]

5 hours ago, Hemplethwaite said:

I totally agree with the OP that Tek is not relevant to most players the costs do by far outweigh the benefits and the breeding and grinding required to get to a level where you can even contemplate taking on a boss is also restrictive for most casual players. 

I suspect their testers and main feedback group have far more free time to play than those of us who have to work for a living, as the game design is really towards it being a time sink and the only way to get anywhere is to be online for the majority of your waking life.

Just wait until the inevitable microtransaction store

[MrDynamicMan]

9 minutes ago, Extraterrestrial said:

Just wait until the inevitable microtransaction store

There won't be micro transactions.

[Oli4]

I'm a (pretty much) solo PVE player and I managed to farm lots and lots of element(read:20+vaults of element) by soloing most bosses. I have teleporter pads+transmitters+tek troughs everywhere I want + tek base. Biggest issue I have is that wildcard keeps making bosses harder to do solo(spider+monkey is still easy to solo, dragon/manti are way harder now since they changed the stucking method). For Manticore I bought most of the talons from other players for tek items and/or dino's and caves with thyla/tek gear so I could obtain all 3 artifacts in +-5 minutes.

I've noticed that most people are afraid to do bosses, especially on PVE. I took over 150 people to bosses with me and like 80% of the people never did any bossing before because they were afraid of dying. Just try it out on a local game, and don't be afraid to lose some rexes(they are super easy to breed on every x2 weekend anyway)

[Weiss]

We hardly have any tek in our island pve base because we don't like the look. out in the open there is a generator with troughs that I never want to miss out on again, everything else is hidden (I do want a rex saddle for decoration though)

We are a tribe of 3, we defeated broodmother and ape on all difficulties, manticore on all difficulties pre-patch and easy post-patch (pretty sure the more difficult ones will be no problem either, but now it's annoying), I am confident that any of us could solo these.

We teamed up on our first run of manticore and ape with other tribes that invited us to see how they worked. We traded for rex eggs and raised either a bunch at a time when all three of us were available, or less when only one person was able to log in and feed (even before 2x weekends). It took some weeks to get two teams set up.

We did easy ape and broodmother mostly with our old tamed rexes and grey saddles, and only lost the ones under lvl 200. We did medium brood with 4 tamed rexes and the yuty hardly alive, then started using the new team with the old rexes mixed in so they'd die.

Our problem really was that we were afraid to attempt the bosses. But one successful run gave us confidence to try it ourselves.

With the tek troughs and 2x weekends it's a cakewalk to raise a new rex team in case the run fails, even solo. Only imprinting, as always, sucks.

We will take the dragon on next, see how it goes, and take our allies with us for the engrams. They are preparing for the ragnarok bosses and will take us with them for their attempt. In case of failure we will rethink and try again.

[Palenor]

Here is how this whole TEK thing worked on our server.

Granted only a few of us on the server regularly run the boss fights. 

Basically, three tribes have allied up to run the Boss fights, (by the way, we have a grand total of 2 persons in each of these three tribes).

We run the easy bosses to keep the element flowing for us. When we need extra butts in saddles for the mediums/hards. We advertise on the server for others to join for the engrams.

We provide the Dinos/Armor/Weapon/Bullets etc.

Others gain the use of TEK and now have the engrams, but little or no element to make/run things.

Meanwhile, we have lots and lots of TEK gear and items and element more than we can use.

We trade the other folks on server/off server for other items we need. This can be other DInos/Blueprint upgrades or even just raw resources, ingots, poly, crystal, black pearls and even boss tribute items if needed. On the server, we even trade for element straight up for these items.

This gives us time to concentrate on getting more element and not on basic resources needed. Everyone wins.

This way everyone can get and use TEK gear and obtain items.

[Shoosty]

14 hours ago, PaleoJoe said:

Do you make use of all 100+ dinosaurs, or only a few?

Just because they add something it does not mean everyone will use it. For example, I never used the cage outside of a joke on someone. Useless item there.

1) Tek isn't like a dino.  It's like 20 or 50 dinos.   Seriously, it's a huge amount of content that the vast majority of the game population will never see.

2)  Choosing not to use something because it doesn't suit you is not the same as being unable to use it.  I probably don't ever want to use the Tek Rex saddle.  But the Tek Tapejara saddle is quite interesting.  Most people don't have either option.

3)  Cages are extremely useful if you want to keep snails or beetles.  They're also useful in PvP.  

[IamTANK]

7 hours ago, Tombolo said:

As small tribe or even play alone you can earn tek engrams.

- trade items for good rexes/ breed some buying some decent eggs if not have time to breed yourself an good line

- make an alliance who can do that bosses have the dinos and go  with them to bossing just for engrams (work this thing, we make in this was and some less powerfull players have the engrams in this way and they farm easy spider for some engrams)

-pay somebody to do for you the boss when you are with them 

-easy spider is kinda easy can do with thyla, bear, wolf, mega, therizino, rex, spino, allo, carno so you can farm some element with them 

thylas are not permitted in boss fights.....

[Ulta]

12 hours ago, Iimmy said:

Despite that being a teeny point at the bottom of the post, still, show me. Show me post patch you completing dragon on Hard (nevermind the fact my main point was for 1 or 2 man tribes but anyway) I'm very curious to see this post latest patches.

 

Doing a quick search on the forum is your friend. Look at page 3 of this thread. I DID do it with a 2 man tribe, but I wouldn't recommend it by any means. You'd need probably 5 at the least. This wasn't on official (and neither was the other guys), but the stats and such @Olivar used is vanilla, whereas my test had weapons and saddles that would be extremely hard to get official without living the game (for the saddles anyway, the weapons I'm not sure of).

But that's all I'm giving since this thread is about Tek. Nice suggestions on how to make it probably viable, though I doubt WC will do it since they are anti-fun.

[Iamkemical]

Just did gamma and beta brood for the first time last night.  Two main players in the tribe with a third we can bring in when needed on PVE official.

Yes it took some time to go out and find the rex's and breed them to combine all the good stats.  Most of my time went to this.  You can just go on the forums and buy 2 of those boss killer rex's and skip all the time i spent finding the rex's.  With the x2 weekends you can easily raise 4-5 rexs and only log in every 6-7 hours to fill food.  You could kill gamma with 8-10 of those super rex's easy.

Rex's we used are born with 9.6hp and 350 melee so not super rex's by any means, also had a rider on Yuti for the buff.  

As others have said most people are scared to do the boss fights. I was.  Really the broodmother was not that hard on beta or gamma.  Havent done the other bosses yet to have any say about them. 

In regards to the tek items i could careless about 90% of it.  Really its the generator and trough i am interested in.   

I dont want them to nerf the boss's to the point they are a cake walk, than there would not be that sense of accomplishment.  

[ShadowAngel]

I should elaborate on my post:

14 hours ago, ShadowAngel said:

@Iimmy I'm with you on this one. Tek tier right now as is totally useless. Too hard to get/maintain for what it does.

My only hopes are that new DLC's ability to mine element will mitigate this.

Coming from PvE solo viewpoint.

I'm fine with difficulty of the bosses, i'm fine with engrams been available only after defeating them. What I'm not fine with  is constant grind needed to keep TEK operational. Make it so TEK won't use element for repair and function(except cloning chamber and shield generator, these thing are OP and should be costly to use ) and i'l be happy to run bosses and use TEK items. 

[Lewiatan]

I have never attempted to obtain TEK items, because it reguires so much effort that it is not worth your time or nerves. For me TEK Tier is shiny toy you get bored off quickly.

However, the main reason why I couldn't care less about getting TEK items is how boss fights are done in this game and how many dinosaurs you need to breed and imprint for weeks to attempt boss fight. 

You need to breed a lot of perfect Trexes for weeks and to reach that stage you have to grind a lot. Then you have to deal with non-exsisting pathfinding of AI to move dinosaurs to obelisk and when you are in the boss arena... The side, which has more HP and dmg/s than the another, wins. There is nothing exciting there. 

Firstly, WC would have to work on serious Quality Of Life update of boss figths and reduce the grind to encourage people getting Tek Tier items.

[Iimmy]

So what I've taken from this so far from the replies

* The people who have access to TEK barely use any of it.

* Despite the fact I talk about being SOLO and not having time to breed armies of rexes people have still brought up the fact they have "done" it with 3-5 people

* A boss was done with 2 people not on official, with mega saddles that would be hard to obtain normally. 

* TEK is too much effort to maintain, to much effort to obtain.

* breeding mentioned over and over, this was not the point and stands against the original point of solo and unable to spend hours and days breeding.

 

Still seems a majority think its mostly useless and not worth the effort and impossible for a huge % of the playerbase to even obtain.