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Kibble as Mechanic


Syrchalis

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What do you guys think about Kibble as mechanic?

 

I personally have very mixed feelings about it. I like the idea of specialized food for dinos that gives huge boosts to taming speed and effectiveness but isn't easy to make. I also really like the natural progression through different dinos (you get dilos to get ankylos to get carnos ... and so on).

But I feel like there is some major issues that require solving for the game to improve.

 

First, the most basic issue with Kibble - it has high upfront cost and no long-term benefit. What I mean is, if you want to tame a Doedicurus you will want to not just tame a single Dilo first, you want to tame a male and possible five or ten females, since you don't want to wait ages for your Kibble to be produced. You also can use the Kibble for two other Dinos.

However, once you have the Kibble you need and tamed the Dinos you wanted your Dilos become relatively useless (especially in PvE). They will keep providing you with Kibble in case one of your desired target dinos dies, but other than that you now have way too many Dilos for your almost-zero need for their eggs or Kibble.

There isn't a good >personal< reason to get rid of your Dilos though. Sure, you need a larger base and the server will lag more and the tame limited will be reached sooner, but why would you care? No one else cares either, right?

 

Secondly, there is no trading or at least no safe, convenient way of doing it. If there was something like a WoW Auction House (especially on PvE Servers again) then people could specialize in certain resources or kibble and get the other types from other players. If there was just one or two huge breeding pens per kibble type per server, I'm pretty sure a lot of issues would disappear.

 

Thirdly, - now this is subjective, and my personal feeling, but I would enjoy the mechanic a lot more if there wasn't THIS MANY TYPES of kibble. I don't mind five, or even ten types of Kibble, but as it is right now there is just sooooo many - 51 to be exact. This is asking for tame limits to be reached and server lags to occur. Even if there is just three tribes and each is limited to 10 dinos per type then it's already 1500 dinos just for kibble.

 

Fourthly, and again, more subjective personal opinion than objective design argument - I would like it if kibble made more sense. The progression through the dinos CAN make sense (dilo into doedi/ankylo is great, because Dilo is easy to tame and Doedi/Ankylo are the two "mining dinos" - but what sense does the Pachy and Paracer make there?) - but it would be nicer if there was a more obvious system, like "Kibble for small herbivores, Kibble for big herbivores, Kibble for small carnivores, Kibble for big carnivores, Kibble for water creatures, Kibble for flyers" - just as example. Or if you want to preserve the progression system... why not explore similar paths like the Dilo into mining dinos one?

 

I hope this wasn't too long and I don't get too much hate for this, but I really wanted to put this out since this mechanic has been bothering me in this state for quite a while and I just feel like it could be improved so substantially and rather easily as well. Please, if you have good arguments why 51 types of kibble is better than a modest 5-20 for example, let me know.

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I used to like the kibble system because it meant a tribe needed a base to hold egg dinos to get high level war tames,  so you could always spot potential threats on the server,  space and time was the limiting factor on op dinos. Now with cross ark trading and mutton, people don't even need a large Base to pull out max level tames and kibble is just for imprints really.  so yeah I would be I'm favour of making less types of kibble or making a few types of egg male the same kibble like you said. Nothing more annoying than missing out on imprint because your demetrodons just won't lay eggs,  it would help with lag and reduce the need for large Dino barns full of useless dinos that will never see the light of day.

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I'd rather just have a tech device where I upload dinos at to get eggs from. I go to the device, upload my dilo, it no longer counts towards the tame cap and now I have one dilo which produces 1 dilo egg every 20 minutes or so. Then I have set number, I'm using element in an end game fashion, and I can reduce my dino count and server lag due to a very convient machine.

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So this might seem a little harsh to those who have affection for their dinos, but what if there was more benefit to putting a tamed dino down other than freeing up space and a bit of hide and meat?  Not sure what this would look like but if done right could solve the whole way to many tames issue if there was actual benefit to thinning the herd...

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I think the best and most natural way is to design an actual food chain and based upon that you would need to manually harvest a certain amount of meat/vegetables to tame/imprint. 

 

Example;

A Rex attacks anything. so to tame a Rex you can use any type of meat of course the harder the kill the more taming efficiency you get from it. If you feed the Rex a bunch of Dodo meat, it takes an obscene amount (say 1000 dodo's) and the taming effiicency is nothing but say you kill a Bronto, now that's a little more challenging to kill so that gives more taming efficiency and requires less, say you feed it Quetzal or another Rex. Something like that. more interactive and a more natural way. For the smaller dino's you keep it in their food chain. dilo's should be fed parasaur meat or dodo or lystro

 

For a Bronto or herbivores in general, no eggs should be required but instead a cake or treat if you will made from a certain amount of vegetables, honeys, saps, etc. Items the Bronto would actually eat. Same idea. The harder the process to acquire the item the better efficiency. 

 

It may be too late to implement changes like these but I think they give taming a more active roll then sit and wait and makes it interactive to search out these dino's. 

The same kind of idea could follow into imprint from the treat aspect. I suggest requests from say a Rex like 3 prime meat of stegosaurus with 10 meat of parasaur and it's combined in a cooking pot with honey or leech blood. To me this makes imprinting more interactive and a treat that makes more sense for a carnivore. Same for herbivores but using sap, rare flowers, mushrooms, honey, vegetables, berries, etc. 

I will miss Ankylosaurus wants Ankylosaurus kibble though. 

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3 minutes ago, ArkRage said:

But what kinda eggs tho? It'd be too easy to just get say a dodo, have it lay a couple of egg and then go tame a giga with it because 1 egg equals 5-10 kibble. The eggs need their own values. Kinda like what it is at now, but the bigger the egg the better the kibble idk. 

I think it was meant as a standalone suggestion - basically leave the kibble as it is but allow you to get more with less dinos of each type.

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One good way to fix the 51 kibble thing is to allow dinosaurs to have more than one type of kibble they have affinity with. This way it cuts down on taming dinosaurs you would otherwise ignore, and offers variety to your 'kibble pathway'.

I never had an issue with trading. I always drop my stuff first as a trust, and my partner would always drop theirs next. I never had someone steal. I also never traded with anyone who I never saw talking in chat, so that could be the reason why. I was very vocal, and everyone on the server knew and liked me.

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For a long time now, I've felt that kibble was simply a bandage for how long taming takes at low rates. Turn the rates up to 3 or 4x by default and it would become a 'nice thing to have,' but stop feeling like a requirement. I personally stopped keeping dinos around only for eggs. I trade resources for dinos I need instead. I'm also willing to use just mejos or prime on the evolution weekends if there is something I really want.

I hope they someday rework the taming system to make kibble a 'nice thing to have, but not required.' I like the idea of converting it to size/diet types. Small/Medium/Large/Behemoth Herb/Carno/Pisci/Insect, etc...  (I'd also like to see it removed from the 'cuddle' mechanic or replaced with 'baby wants cooked meat/prime/crops/veggie cakes' instead)

We'll just have to see what they do with it, since they did say they are working on some ideas in this regard.

 

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A lot of these ideas are actually very good, and I hope if the devs haven't tried anything that works yet that they look into these suggestions for help. Like the one that mentioned simply having an egg create more than 1 kibble, or the one that mentioned adding more types of acceptable kibble to each dino as well. Both are cost effective methods that significantly cut down on the amount of dinosaurs that are needed. Also the crops, honey, different meats, ect. as the imprinting since it does make more sense tbh. 

 @Jatheish @Jen @Chris @lilpanda

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With carnivores they fixed the kibble requirement slightly by having the Ovis and mutton.  Currently there is no equivalent on the Herbivore side, but perhaps honey or vegetable cakes could do something similar. I would also support a much smaller number of kibble types, so have one kibble type able to tame multiple dino types like the Carno eggs do now.  in a sense the kibble range was there to encourage you to get the new dinos as they were released so that you would have their kibble.  However reducing kibble types or requirements would possibly help reduce the number of dinos collected by large tribes as they would no longer need all egg types for imprinting or taming. 

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They did mention there would be a kibble progression pass (or as they call life cycle pass), but many months have passed I am pretty sure no changes were implemented aside from aquatic mating (thanks for that!). 

To me its not a huge issue, and I did reduced the amount of dinos to just keep the couples. I also really enjoy to collect eggs for some reason, I like how they look and the different colors, it actually upsets me when they are too similar. But this is mostly cosmetic. 

I personally like the system the way it is, but it would be nice if we got an superior kibble version, perhaps that could be a single or 5 version one, with tough materials to obtain or something.  I do agree with the lack of "logic" to have the pachy go to a parecer. 

 

Cheers

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For some reason I couldn't reply to this until now...

I feel like it's just a mediocre system and improving it wouldn't cost a lot and make the game a lot better. There is definitely a lack of "structure" in ARK and this would definitely help it.

In general ARK promotes some questionable tactics (e.g. getting hundreds of dinos to lay eggs and lag the server and cap the tamed population, then not even needing them anymore but without a reason to get rid of them... you don't) and it's not the players job to act illogically and "be better than their instincts" or something along those lines.

As a game developer myself I can safely say it's the developers job to encourage and direct the players to do the right things. Why? Because it's a lot easier. Do you know of any game in which a mechanic promotes a certain behavior, because it's "optimal" but no one does it because the players decided it's bad? I don't. However I know a hundred games/mechanics that have been changed and made players change behavior.

Example: League of Legends - back in 2013 the support player's job was warding and the others only did it scarcely (outside of the pro scene) - then they gave everyone free wards and limited wards per player to 3 -> now warding is everyone's job, simply because the support player can't give a lot of vision with just 3 wards.

This is how the developers changed player behavior considerably with a simple change. Convincing people before that change that everyone can invest some gold into wards was difficult and barely successful at best.

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Theres not really too much logic to it overall. For instance, Moschops to Kapro - Moschops are not found naturally in the swamp, so Kapros would never have the opportunity to taste a Moschops egg. Other glaring issues too - Turtle into Bronto? Bronto into Sabertooth? Scorpion into Rex? (Scorpion into Frog makes a LOT more sense, but Bronto into Rex, and Turtle into Sabertooth would make more sense, especially since on the turtle dossier has a saber attacking a turtle!)

 

Honestly, what I would do would be the following..

 

1 - Tone down the imprinting kibble. Personally, having it to where the dino you are breeding imprints on its prefered taming item would be perfect - Now you won't need a group of Gallies, Pachys, Dimetrodons, ect UNLESS you were specifically raising beavers/paracers/gallies ect. For the few without kibble, it would be fine to just utterly remove the hand-feeding portion I thinks from them - There's not many dino's that DON'T have a prefered food. And if you are specializing in a certain dino, well, it makes sense to have whatever dino gives their kibble.

2 - Add that one addon that allows for cross-server trading to the game baseline. This would fix TONS of problems I thinks.

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6 minutes ago, Frogspoison said:

Theres not really too much logic to it overall. For instance, Moschops to Kapro - Moschops are not found naturally in the swamp, so Kapros would never have the opportunity to taste a Moschops egg. Other glaring issues too - Turtle into Bronto? Bronto into Sabertooth? Scorpion into Rex? (Scorpion into Frog makes a LOT more sense, but Bronto into Rex, and Turtle into Sabertooth would make more sense, especially since on the turtle dossier has a saber attacking a turtle!)

 

Honestly, what I would do would be the following..

 

1 - Tone down the imprinting kibble. Personally, having it to where the dino you are breeding imprints on its prefered taming item would be perfect - Now you won't need a group of Gallies, Pachys, Dimetrodons, ect UNLESS you were specifically raising beavers/paracers/gallies ect. For the few without kibble, it would be fine to just utterly remove the hand-feeding portion I thinks from them - There's not many dino's that DON'T have a prefered food. And if you are specializing in a certain dino, well, it makes sense to have whatever dino gives their kibble.

2 - Add that one addon that allows for cross-server trading to the game baseline. This would fix TONS of problems I thinks.

Isnt moschops kibble for purlovia, and tapejara for kapro? Or was it changed?

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The entire kibble process makes me chuckle if you think about it. It is so backwards. For example say your taming a Quetzal, now it takes 3 hours to tame it with kibble. But if you had to use raw fish, It takes 18 hours. Not only 18 hours but it also bumps up the narcotics count that you will need to almost 6000 narcotics. So i can tame a quetzal with kibble in 3 hours and a couple hundred narcotics and i get 70 bonus lvls for a speedy job. But yet Someone had the dedication and time to farm 1300 raw fish, 6k narcotics and dedicated 18 round the clock hours to taming this thing. And for his hard work, time and dedication he is rewarded with 0 bonus lvls. It's kinda amusing in hind site.

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7 hours ago, baomorph said:

The entire kibble process makes me chuckle if you think about it. It is so backwards. For example say your taming a Quetzal, now it takes 3 hours to tame it with kibble. But if you had to use raw fish, It takes 18 hours. Not only 18 hours but it also bumps up the narcotics count that you will need to almost 6000 narcotics. So i can tame a quetzal with kibble in 3 hours and a couple hundred narcotics and i get 70 bonus lvls for a speedy job. But yet Someone had the dedication and time to farm 1300 raw fish, 6k narcotics and dedicated 18 round the clock hours to taming this thing. And for his hard work, time and dedication he is rewarded with 0 bonus lvls. It's kinda amusing in hind site.

Getting kibble and having an easier tame is basically "you prepared, so your tame is easier" while using whatever is around and "winging it" will make it a hard tame. I think that's not really backwards. The only problem is how kibble is produced, the progression makes no sense and it promotes very unhealthy (for the server at least) player behavior.

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Ok so, 1 dodo egg makes 1 kibble. If you mix the egg with meat it becomes carnivorous kibble. If you mix it with vegetables it becomes herbivorous kibble.

So eggs still keep their necessity for breeding, a dodo egg will still make a fertilized dodo egg.

Apply this formula now but adjust for the size of the eggs, for egg-sample (teeheehee) if a dodo egg makes 1 kibble, then a bronto egg would make 100.

Flowers, honey, sap and mushrooms could be added to each kibble for a boost to taming speed but, it wouldn't benefit every Dino, for example:

A bronto would eat 10 kibble per bite. Brontosaurus like the flowers, add flowers to the kibble to reduce the amount eaten per bite.
HOWEVER! Diplos HATE flowers and would refuse to eat stupid flower laden kibble! They prefer sap and would eat a reduced amount if mixed with sap instead of flowers.
HOWEVER! Trikes hate sap and prefer the chewy texture of mushrooms!

And so on, and so forth.

For carnivores, remove flowers and mushrooms and replace with fish and mutton!

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On 11/17/2017 at 8:59 AM, Syrchalis said:

What do you guys think about Kibble as mechanic?

 

I personally have very mixed feelings about it. I like the idea of specialized food for dinos that gives huge boosts to taming speed and effectiveness but isn't easy to make. I also really like the natural progression through different dinos (you get dilos to get ankylos to get carnos ... and so on).

But I feel like there is some major issues that require solving for the game to improve.

 

First, the most basic issue with Kibble - it has high upfront cost and no long-term benefit. What I mean is, if you want to tame a Doedicurus you will want to not just tame a single Dilo first, you want to tame a male and possible five or ten females, since you don't want to wait ages for your Kibble to be produced. You also can use the Kibble for two other Dinos.

However, once you have the Kibble you need and tamed the Dinos you wanted your Dilos become relatively useless (especially in PvE). They will keep providing you with Kibble in case one of your desired target dinos dies, but other than that you now have way too many Dilos for your almost-zero need for their eggs or Kibble.

There isn't a good >personal< reason to get rid of your Dilos though. Sure, you need a larger base and the server will lag more and the tame limited will be reached sooner, but why would you care? No one else cares either, right?

 

Secondly, there is no trading or at least no safe, convenient way of doing it. If there was something like a WoW Auction House (especially on PvE Servers again) then people could specialize in certain resources or kibble and get the other types from other players. If there was just one or two huge breeding pens per kibble type per server, I'm pretty sure a lot of issues would disappear.

 

Thirdly, - now this is subjective, and my personal feeling, but I would enjoy the mechanic a lot more if there wasn't THIS MANY TYPES of kibble. I don't mind five, or even ten types of Kibble, but as it is right now there is just sooooo many - 51 to be exact. This is asking for tame limits to be reached and server lags to occur. Even if there is just three tribes and each is limited to 10 dinos per type then it's already 1500 dinos just for kibble.

 

Fourthly, and again, more subjective personal opinion than objective design argument - I would like it if kibble made more sense. The progression through the dinos CAN make sense (dilo into doedi/ankylo is great, because Dilo is easy to tame and Doedi/Ankylo are the two "mining dinos" - but what sense does the Pachy and Paracer make there?) - but it would be nicer if there was a more obvious system, like "Kibble for small herbivores, Kibble for big herbivores, Kibble for small carnivores, Kibble for big carnivores, Kibble for water creatures, Kibble for flyers" - just as example. Or if you want to preserve the progression system... why not explore similar paths like the Dilo into mining dinos one?

 

I hope this wasn't too long and I don't get too much hate for this, but I really wanted to put this out since this mechanic has been bothering me in this state for quite a while and I just feel like it could be improved so substantially and rather easily as well. Please, if you have good arguments why 51 types of kibble is better than a modest 5-20 for example, let me know.

You are right, they need to sort or redo the kibble system and lower how many kibbles are out there, becuase i feel this is the main factor leading to cap on pve servers, everyone hoards 10 of the same dino (myself included) so they can get kibble for 1 certian dino, of couse they need 10 different dinos to get the 10 dinos they are using to get the kibble for the dino they want, and 10 dinos for those, so to get 1 type of dino one wants one needs like 40 other dinos.

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4 hours ago, iEndWorlds said:

You are right, they need to sort or redo the kibble system and lower how many kibbles are out there, becuase i feel this is the main factor leading to cap on pve servers, everyone hoards 10 of the same dino (myself included) so they can get kibble for 1 certian dino, of couse they need 10 different dinos to get the 10 dinos they are using to get the kibble for the dino they want, and 10 dinos for those, so to get 1 type of dino one wants one needs like 40 other dinos.

And the breeders need to be sure that they have every kibble type available for the imprinting... more if they are mass breeding... and then you get into lines of creatures and needing fresh stats to mix in...

Nearly all the issues on multiplayer are because of how things scale when you have multiple people/groups... It wouldn't be so bad if you had the whole map to yourself or just a few other friends... but multiply by 50 or more other people/groups and everything gets crowded/claimed and capped quickly. Even just raising the tame rates to 4x for default would reduce some of the pressure on needing kibble, and make people more willing to let go of low level creatures since they could tame higher ones in the same amount of time. At least, that's how it has always seemed to work out on higher tame rate private servers I've played on...

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