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Wild Card disappointment


KingGalahad

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I guess this all started on Friday when I saw that there was going to be an Evo event. I thought to myself, "What have they messed up this time?" As it always seems that when Wild Card messes something up, they run an Evo event as a way to make up for it. (The fact that we have had an Evo event almost weekly since release shows how many things they have messed up) Little did I realise just how much they would mess up this weekend.

So Saturday morning, the App to pre-order Xbox servers was released by Nitrado. As I have hosted a player dedicated server since August of last year and have had nothing but issues with it, I have been looking forward to PC hosted rental servers since Wild Card first announced they would be having them available August 8th coinciding with the official release of the game. After their initial announcement came the multiple delays, first changed to August 29, as PS4 certification had delayed the official release of the game. Then it came to pass that because of having to do things differently, that it wouldn't be available until early September. Then they were "hoping" to have them available by late September. Then it would be October, hopefully sooner rather than later. Later it turned out to be would be October 25th. With October 25th being a fixed date that they assured us they would be able to meet even with the increased time caused by long certification. Low and behold I received an email yesterday from Nitrado explaining that due to issues with Wild Card, the update would not be on time and that they would be providing us with extra time on our servers to apologize for this. The fact we had to learn this from Nitrado shows just how bad the communication from Wild Card has become. Sure enough, Wild Card did announce this information, but it was buried at that bottom of a thread talking about Ark at TwitchCon. This issue has nothing to do with TwitchCon, so why was it included there and not actually messaged in a place that makes more sense? Not even so much as a tweet from anyone at Wild Card explaining that there would be a delay. Really saddening that once again we are delayed and they couldn't even bother to message us.

Then there is the entire issue with the delay of Aberration. Now when they announced on September 1 that they would be releasing a fancy DLC in October, I thought at the time that they were pushing themselves too much. The game had just been released, there were still many issues with the core game itself, and here they were committing to release a DLC within one to two months. Then come the announcement through stream this past weekend that low and behold Aberration had been delayed for "some weeks". For the people that weren't watching these streams, we had to rely on the information of the people that had. Was there any posts on here explaining that Aberration would be delayed? Nope. Was there anything on twitter? Nope. Any information we had was second hand info at best. Really sad that they rushed an announcement in September for a DLC release in October that they would have no way of making. Now with the date changed to most likely mid November, I am still doubtful they will release it then. This compounded with what appears that issues with the base game have been put on the back burner while most of their team was instead working on aberration. Yes, we understand that Wild Card is a small game studio, but the base game should receive the majority of the attention rather than a DLC. It seems like Wild Card gets excited to share news on things they have being worked on, but end up making promises that they have no way that they can keep. There is all sorts of software out there for time management. It appears they need to purchase this software so that they can better manage their time and provide realistic ETAs and therefore reduce the disappointment of missed dates.

Final disappointment with Wild Card from this weekend has to do with the Ark Collectors Edition. Casanova announced on Saturday that they have a limited number of these available and that once they were sold out there would be no more. With all the hype there has been towards the collectors edition, I thought it would be a good idea to buy one, as I was interested in having the dino dossier and other aspects of it. I ordered it. The shipping was reasonable for where I live in Canada, so I had no issues with it. Over the weekend, many others were having issues with the shipping being too expensive to where they are. Even though that wasn't an issue for me, I check my order status only to find that my order has been cancelled. No mention on my order of a refund, and nothing on my credit card indicating I have been refunded. When an order has been confirmed and money withdrawn from my Credit Card, it is sad that they just up and cancel it because of the complaints of others. Needless to say I won't be going through the bother of re-ordering this item. It would have been nice to have, but now, I'm not going to bother.

Truthfully, I do love this game. It is a great game, despite the devs. The things I don't like are the constant restarts with player dedicated servers. I have lost count of how many times we have had to start over on my player dedicated server because of issues caused by wild card. a couple weeks ago, my server got wiped again through one of these issues, but I was hopeful because I would be able to start over fresh on the Nitrado hosted server, and as such myself and most people haven't even been playing much (No point in getting too much set up when I will just have to do it again). I will actually be surprised if 50% of the people that played on my server will even return with the Nitrado servers, as most of them have since moved on to other games.

Wild Card. Fix your game. Fix your communication.

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I agree that Nitrado should have not been the one to relay to us that servers was not coming on the 25th and that WC should have notified us via social means but I guess they were in Twitch mode and could not be bothered with communication.  I thank Nitrado for notification and what they did to compensate for and issue what was not their fault.

WC should have notified as they had the info.  The weekends as you stated in the beginning is something WC always does.

But yeah they need a communication professional badly.  I would agree there, the rest well I did not get the collectors edition so I'm not affected there.  Only way is delays that I'm affected by and Aberration delay stings but I'm over it.  Typical WC is to shoot for the moon and land short and delay is always likely.

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6 minutes ago, ehuhoser said:

I agree that Nitrado should have not been the one to relay to us that servers was not coming on the 25th and that WC should have notified us via social means but I guess they were in Twitch mode and could not be bothered with communication.  I thank Nitrado for notification and what they did to compensate for and issue what was not their fault.

WC should have notified as they had the info.  The weekends as you stated in the beginning is something WC always does.

But yeah they need a communication professional badly.  I would agree there, the rest well I did not get the collectors edition so I'm not affected there.  Only way is delays that I'm affected by and Aberration delay stings but I'm over it.  Typical WC is to shoot for the moon and land short and delay is always likely.

I am quite pleased with the professionalism shown by Nitrado. The issue is entirely out of their control, and yet they are still doing their best to keep their customers happy. I will give kudos to them on that front. I agree with you that WildCard should have been the ones to inform us. 

The collectors edition isn't a huge issue for me, but was just the icing on the crap cake that Wild Card served up this weekend.

In terms of Aberration, it was not a big surprise. It would just be nice if Wild Card could actually hit one of their targets (Even when it is a vague one such as the month of October)

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I would think after playing this game for the last two years that everyone would have come to expect/understand a couple of things...

1. this game is awesome.

2. The developers communication skills are equal to that of kindergarteners.

3. Most things the developers end up releasing (although late...) are worth the wait.

4. EVO events are basically every weekend (thank god)

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3 hours ago, Goaty said:

First paragraph I read I stopped... No they don't do an evolution event when they mess up? What are hell you thinking ... they do them almost every weekend lol, at random.

Not only is there an observable pattern of evolution events after they screw something up, it's also when they have tended to have big sales. A lot of companies pull PR crap like that after screwing up and pissing off the fanbase.

 

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5 minutes ago, ChargingParacerParacer said:

Not only is there an observable pattern of evolution events after they screw something up, it's also when they have tended to have big sales. A lot of companies pull PR crap like that after screwing up and pissing off the fanbase.

 

You're connecting dots that aren't there to serve a point you've already made with better evidence. The only consistent observable pattern of evolution events is that they occur on the weekends when people tend to play more. GTA5 does 2x$&RP all the time too...are there a bunch of folks on the GTA5 forums coming up with nutjob conspiracy theories about that too? No...because that would be stupid. Occam's Razor folks...learn it, live it, love it. 

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"Shrug" It's blatantly obvious thats what they are doing if you pay even a little attention. I've been noticing it out of more and more once-happy players.

Fanboy Collective: "But there's still 40,00 players on Steam! Shuddup stoopid!"

You mean the same average that has been playing for a year or more? One would hope now that the game has been officially released the average would be 50 or 60 thousand if not actually doubled or tripled if people still believed in wildcard as much as some people want to pretend 'the majority' is.

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20 minutes ago, ChargingParacerParacer said:

"Shrug" It's blatantly obvious thats what they are doing if you pay even a little attention.

Fanboy Collective: "But there's still 40,00 players on Steam! Shuddup stoopid!"

You mean the same average that has been playing for a year or more? One would hope now that the game has been officially released the average would be 50 or 60 thousand if not actually doubled or tripled if people still believed in wildcard as much as some people want to pretend 'the majority' is.

Again, you're connecting dots that aren't there to serve a point you've already made with better evidence. You don't need to make up fairy tales about a big secretive group of mystical people who love everything Wildcard has done to prove that Wildcard has mismanaged many aspects of Ark. You don't need to pretend that there's a conspiracy behind evolution events to prove that Wildcard has mismanaged many aspects of Ark. All you have to do is drag that big rotting horse carcass out of your closet and go to town with your baseball bat, beating it with the truth until your arms get tired...and the truth is, many aspects of Ark and the Ark release were mismanaged.

I promise...you can say those things and people will believe you...and you don't even have to invoke magical fairy creatures who like everything about Ark or wild conspiracy theories that evolution events are just covert act to trick players into not noticing delays.

 

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4 hours ago, KingGalahad said:

I guess this all started on Friday when I saw that there was going to be an Evo event. I thought to myself, "What have they messed up this time?" As it always seems that when Wild Card messes something up, they run an Evo event as a way to make up for it. (The fact that we have had an Evo event almost weekly since release shows how many things they have messed up) Little did I realise just how much they would mess up this weekend.

So Saturday morning, the App to pre-order Xbox servers was released by Nitrado. As I have hosted a player dedicated server since August of last year and have had nothing but issues with it, I have been looking forward to PC hosted rental servers since Wild Card first announced they would be having them available August 8th coinciding with the official release of the game. After their initial announcement came the multiple delays, first changed to August 29, as PS4 certification had delayed the official release of the game. Then it came to pass that because of having to do things differently, that it wouldn't be available until early September. Then they were "hoping" to have them available by late September. Then it would be October, hopefully sooner rather than later. Later it turned out to be would be October 25th. With October 25th being a fixed date that they assured us they would be able to meet even with the increased time caused by long certification. Low and behold I received an email yesterday from Nitrado explaining that due to issues with Wild Card, the update would not be on time and that they would be providing us with extra time on our servers to apologize for this. The fact we had to learn this from Nitrado shows just how bad the communication from Wild Card has become. Sure enough, Wild Card did announce this information, but it was buried at that bottom of a thread talking about Ark at TwitchCon. This issue has nothing to do with TwitchCon, so why was it included there and not actually messaged in a place that makes more sense? Not even so much as a tweet from anyone at Wild Card explaining that there would be a delay. Really saddening that once again we are delayed and they couldn't even bother to message us.

Then there is the entire issue with the delay of Aberration. Now when they announced on September 1 that they would be releasing a fancy DLC in October, I thought at the time that they were pushing themselves too much. The game had just been released, there were still many issues with the core game itself, and here they were committing to release a DLC within one to two months. Then come the announcement through stream this past weekend that low and behold Aberration had been delayed for "some weeks". For the people that weren't watching these streams, we had to rely on the information of the people that had. Was there any posts on here explaining that Aberration would be delayed? Nope. Was there anything on twitter? Nope. Any information we had was second hand info at best. Really sad that they rushed an announcement in September for a DLC release in October that they would have no way of making. Now with the date changed to most likely mid November, I am still doubtful they will release it then. This compounded with what appears that issues with the base game have been put on the back burner while most of their team was instead working on aberration. Yes, we understand that Wild Card is a small game studio, but the base game should receive the majority of the attention rather than a DLC. It seems like Wild Card gets excited to share news on things they have being worked on, but end up making promises that they have no way that they can keep. There is all sorts of software out there for time management. It appears they need to purchase this software so that they can better manage their time and provide realistic ETAs and therefore reduce the disappointment of missed dates.

Final disappointment with Wild Card from this weekend has to do with the Ark Collectors Edition. Casanova announced on Saturday that they have a limited number of these available and that once they were sold out there would be no more. With all the hype there has been towards the collectors edition, I thought it would be a good idea to buy one, as I was interested in having the dino dossier and other aspects of it. I ordered it. The shipping was reasonable for where I live in Canada, so I had no issues with it. Over the weekend, many others were having issues with the shipping being too expensive to where they are. Even though that wasn't an issue for me, I check my order status only to find that my order has been cancelled. No mention on my order of a refund, and nothing on my credit card indicating I have been refunded. When an order has been confirmed and money withdrawn from my Credit Card, it is sad that they just up and cancel it because of the complaints of others. Needless to say I won't be going through the bother of re-ordering this item. It would have been nice to have, but now, I'm not going to bother.

Truthfully, I do love this game. It is a great game, despite the devs. The things I don't like are the constant restarts with player dedicated servers. I have lost count of how many times we have had to start over on my player dedicated server because of issues caused by wild card. a couple weeks ago, my server got wiped again through one of these issues, but I was hopeful because I would be able to start over fresh on the Nitrado hosted server, and as such myself and most people haven't even been playing much (No point in getting too much set up when I will just have to do it again). I will actually be surprised if 50% of the people that played on my server will even return with the Nitrado servers, as most of them have since moved on to other games.

Wild Card. Fix your game. Fix your communication.

If you post a book do us all a favor.

1. Make it worth our time to read (I only skimmed). It was not. You just took every issue that people have been crying about for days all over the forums here and on steam and made really wordy arguments that are half false for each one of them.

2. Put a TL;DR at the top or bottom so people can at least get an overview of your point.

 

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3 hours ago, KingGalahad said:

I am quite pleased with the professionalism shown by Nitrado. The issue is entirely out of their control, and yet they are still doing their best to keep their customers happy. I will give kudos to them on that front. I agree with you that WildCard should have been the ones to inform us. 

The collectors edition isn't a huge issue for me, but was just the icing on the crap cake that Wild Card served up this weekend.

In terms of Aberration, it was not a big surprise. It would just be nice if Wild Card could actually hit one of their targets (Even when it is a vague one such as the month of October)

I WAS going to pay thirty eight bucks to rent a server tomorrow for ninety days, just so my tribe of eight people could play ark hassle free and not have to worry about all the BS that pushed us there, such as grieffing,duping and server crashes because of duping,mass land claiming,disconnects,character loss, and permanent rollbacks that prevented us from playing on official servers, but now I have eight disappointed and rather pissed off people saying EFF ARK and are going to play other games not made by WC, so now I'm off to play ME Shadow Of War which I bought instead of a rented server.

Oh and one last thing, I think WC purposely sent MS and Nitrado bad code for the rented servers just to get them delayed so when Aberation comes out WC can milk it for more money.

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42 minutes ago, wrath435 said:

I WAS going to pay thirty eight bucks to rent a server tomorrow for ninety days, just so my tribe of eight people could play ark hassle free and not have to worry about all the BS that pushed us there, such as grieffing,duping and server crashes because of duping,mass land claiming,disconnects,character loss, and permanent rollbacks that prevented us from playing on official servers, but now I have eight disappointed and rather pissed off people saying EFF ARK and are going to play other games not made by WC, so now I'm off to play ME Shadow Of War which I bought instead of a rented server.

Oh and one last thing, I think WC purposely sent MS and Nitrado bad code for the rented servers just to get them delayed so when Aberation comes out WC can milk it for more money.

It sucks for Nitrado that they lost out on your business due to the bumbling of WildCard. I can't say I blame you. Ark is a good game despite the devs. I have already pre-ordered my servers, so I have them for 90 days (well 99 days, due to the extra days given by Nitrado for WildCard's error). It is too bad that I have probably lost half the players from my server due to these delays. Hard to keep interest in playing when each due date passes and we are no closer to actually getting the servers.

As for WildCard purposely sabotaging the update, it doesn't seem likely, as it doesn't really benefit them in any way, and only serves to push players towards other games at a time when a lot of other games are releasing. 

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