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Turrets 2: Electric Boogaloo (Or, what are we actually doing?)


TheRightHand
Message added by Jerryn

You can find the Technical reasons for the change here:

 

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I hated the idea of this update at first. I’m one of the people who abused the turrets by having way to many. I think to make people like us happier y’all should make it so we can make 4 of our old/current turrets and craft them into 1 of the new turrets. You could either do this by simply allowing it to be crafted this way in the fabricator or by allowing turrets to be placed in the grinder then having it give back exactly what you put into it. The grinder option giving you exactly what you put in should only work that way for turrets though.

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2 minutes ago, Zederia said:

And when it.. does?

Should be released tomorrow:

On 11/21/2017 at 6:35 PM, Jen said:

 

Update on Turrets

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A few days ago we announced a big change to the game wherein we would be limiting the use of turrets within a radius on our Official Servers. We have been keeping track of all the feedback, reading all the threads, and we understand that this is an important change. Therefore, we'll be making some modifications to our initial plan in order to deal with the concerns that have arisen, as well as ensure a smoother transition to the new turret system for all players. Here's what's going down:

We are no longer hard-limiting turrets on the 5th of December, that timeline has changed. We still plan to hard-limit them, but it'll be pushed further out now that we'll be introducing a new kind of turret into the mix. Here's the new plan:

PC players can expect the new "Heavy Turret" on the 27th, it will launch with an active server-side turret limit specifically for "Heavy Turrets". We'll take the time to monitor player feedback and our official servers to see if there's anything that we missed, so then we'll have time to consider how to fix and address those concerns. This means that if you're over the visual limit on your regular Auto Turrets, you'll be fine (for now). However, you won't be able to place the Heavy Turrets, unless you're within the limit. We recommend taking advantage of this time to slowly transition your base to using the new Heavy Turrets over the old ones. 

When Aberration releases on the 12th December, it will have the turret hard-limit enabled on that map from the get-go. This means that neither regular Auto Turrets or Heavy Turrets can be placed on Aberration above the limit. After some time -- likely in the latter half of December -- this change will be enabled on the other maps, however, we'll be providing 2 weeks notice beforehand so you can make any adjustments as necessary. The idea is that you can immediately use the Heavy Turrets in the meantime to prepare for the change while ensuring your base remains well-defended.

Console players can expect to see the arrival of the Heavy Turret when the Aberration launches. By this time, the Heavy Turret would have gone through multiple balance passes. The reason we opted to take this route is that we want to make sure it's in a good state before it went live on the console. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to rapidly iterate as we do on PC, due to the cert process. Console will ultimately follow the same hard-limit activation as PC, albeit several weeks after the hard-limit is activated on PC.

For those who hadn't seen some of our previous dialogue on the change, you can check out this short blurb post by Senior Technical & Gameplay Designer, Kayd Hendricks (aka TheRightHand). He covers what are our current thought-processes are, as well as shares some information that we had discussed previously.

 

 

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I honestly feel these are much needed changes and in the end will be better than the current spam turret meta. A lot of the people complaining also don't understand that when you compact the amount of power you can put in a certain area you also increase the damage capabilities of your defenses. 

I also agree that if using 100 of the new 4x turrets which are essentially 5x stronger than the current live turrets is not enough then chances are balancing needs to be done in other areas. There will always be some lame or gimmicky tactic that will crop up from time to time, but as long as the dev's are fast in responding to these things then balance should overall be better going forward.

The next issue is one I see that TheRightHand touched on and that is the limitations of the UE4 engine when it comes to multi-threading. It can be done, but requires a lot of time and effort on the game designers part to break the processing in to chunks and then distribute those chunks to work across X amount of cores.  UE4 gives you the tools to do this, but they are far from optimal and I think a lot of developers would agree that this type of core scaling is something that should have been baked in from the beginning. If I remember correctly there have been some UE4 updates that help with multi-threading, but this game being built on an earlier version could mean that updating to it would also be a timely process.

What that means to us is that the ability fro multi-threading is probably coming, but at a slow pace. I say this because getting more cores working will only help performance across the board. It will allow for more actions at less of a crippling cost (since we are hard limited to cores atm). I don't see this game going away any time soon and I feel they have a roadmap model that plans to support this game for many years to come. So be patient, watch as the game continues to add new features and continually improve. Then if barring that wait for the technology to continually improve to the point it doesn't matter. Either way we win.

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On 11/22/2017 at 10:49 AM, Ranger1 said:

I would like to think that this obvious mistake was unintentional.  Unfortunately, considering the channels history and format,  that would be highly unlikely.

Looks like he was actually under bidding it according to the new image showing you only get 100 turrets to defend the building area on herb island. Maybe you shouldn't tell people their opinions are invalid until something comes out, because after all, you were speaking purely from a totally bias opinion yourself. It's cool, people are just plain wrong sometimes.

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1 hour ago, Hobofetus said:

Looks like he was actually under bidding it according to the new image showing you only get 100 turrets to defend the building area on herb island. Maybe you shouldn't tell people their opinions are invalid until something comes out, because after all, you were speaking purely from a totally bias opinion yourself. It's cool, people are just plain wrong sometimes.

I always try to admit when I'm wrong about something Hobofetus, however that pic doesn't change my point that the example that had been given wasn't taking some critically important details into consideration.

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On 21/11/2017 at 2:56 PM, Jabroni said:

blablabla only People in favor are beach noobs or PvE Players blablabla

See what I did there?

Also for everyone to understand. This Change is not to Change the meta and make bases easy to raid. Its to make Servers less laggy if anything.

Well its gonna be cool for us solo players been able to take out alpha tribes lol

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So in the pictures its going to cost 100 engram points for the new turrets.

 

I hope all those that are level 100 and can not mindwipe get a re-roll?  also what level will these new turrets unlock?  100 engram points is a lot and usually for 90+ level engrams, if this turret is not below level 80 it wont change the fact you will need 100+ regular turrets to defend your base until you get to said level.

 

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24 minutes ago, DarthaNyan said:

" a little bit longer " when translated from WC language usually means "never" - they used to have a section in patchnotes that was called "a little bit further" and nothing got implemented from it.

So using your judgement the turret update will never come, lmao, someone will have egg on their face.

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1 minute ago, DarthaNyan said:

Turret limitation will probably come, but new Heavy Turret will probably look, feel and perform underwhelmingly.

So now your saying turret will come, so the original post was just a jab at the "Further Out" list not the turret itself. By the way Tek Tier used to be on that further out list, i'm pretty sure that got implemented.

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8 minutes ago, GP said:

so the original post was just a jab at the "Further Out" list not the turret itself

exactly.

8 minutes ago, GP said:

By the way Tek Tier used to be on that further out list, i'm pretty sure that got implemented.

But DX12 (20% perf gain, "works and looks great"), Dynamic-length bridges and ground meshes for all items ("almost ready" for several big updates in a row)... They also did something with TrueSky after 2 years but i'm not sure if that addressed that random GPU's driver crash.

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6 minutes ago, DarthaNyan said:

exactly.

But DX12 (20% perf gain, "works and looks great"), Dynamic-length bridges and ground meshes for all items ("almost ready" for several big updates in a row)... They also did something with TrueSky after 2 years but i'm not sure if that addressed that random GPU's driver crash.

Ok so lets please keep this thread on topic then, as your jab at the old further out list has nothing to do with Turrets, and your claim that nothing on the further out list got implemented, which is factually incorrect, has nothing to do with the turrets, so please keep this on topic.

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On 11/20/2017 at 2:51 AM, ciabattaroll said:

If there were even a smidge of truth to this statement I'd be seeing less "ARK is a laggy unoptimized piece of mess" posts and reviews around. After all, the supposed sentiment is that people would rather have their lag than lose their turrets, right?

For far too long the community hasn't really bothered to extend their hand on this so-called compromise though. People keep complaining about pillars, Wildcard tries to do something about it, then players go and look for ways around the fixes they do for pillars. Players complain about servers hitting tame caps, Wildcard implements limitations, and players go and start making alt tribes or dumping their dinos off on other servers, perpetuating the problem. For a person from the community preaching about compromises you'll have to pardon me for being jaded on that as I've yet to see where the players actually do partake in this alleged compromise.

Mounted miniguns have never needed power and they also had the benefit of having a range further out than automated turrets. They also have the bane of not being able to damage unmounted tames. The upcoming patch will nerf their range to be in line with automated turrets, but also allow them to actually damage unmounted tames.

Excuse me but both of you are jaded. Since when are we tackling this issue from a relationships perspective Anyway (First poster).  First of all, the actions of other players navigating past Wildcards attempts to relieve complaints, like the tame cap, is to not be left in the blame of the players or by referring to them as the faulted if referenced to a relationship. That blame still lies with the company because that means that they haven't actually resolved the complaint lol. If the company doesn't have the necessary recourses to resolve it properly, the time, etc-   then.. western ideology is it's still their fault lol. Businesses that are successful adhere to this.. and it's partly why they become successful. 

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2 minutes ago, Critter said:

Excuse me but both of you are jaded. Since when are we tackling this issue from a relationships perspective Anyway (First poster).  First of all, the actions of other players navigating past Wildcards attempts to relieve complaints, like the tame cap, is to not be left in the blame of the players or by referring to them as the faulted if referenced to a relationship. That blame still lies with the company because that means that they haven't actually resolved the complaint lol. If the company doesn't have the necessary recourses to resolve it properly, the time, etc-   then.. western ideology is it's still their fault lol. Businesses that are successful adhere to this.. and it's partly why they become successful. 

There has only been so much software advancement that Wildcard either can do or are willing to do to try and ensure smooth gameplay. If the technology or technique just isn't available to them then after bringing advancements comes placing limitations. If players would rather circumvent those limitations rather than adapt to them for the sake of improving or smoothing over gameplay then how is that the developers fault? That's like saying it's the parents fault if they give you a bicycle and protective gear and the first thing you do with it is ride yourself off a ledge.

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35 minutes ago, ciabattaroll said:

There has only been so much software advancement that Wildcard either can do or are willing to do to try and ensure smooth gameplay. If the technology or technique just isn't available to them then after bringing advancements comes placing limitations. If players would rather circumvent those limitations rather than adapt to them for the sake of improving or smoothing over gameplay then how is that the developers fault? That's like saying it's the parents fault if they give you a bicycle and protective gear and the first thing you do with it is ride yourself off a ledge.

The analogy is more like this man; a credit card company telling its customers that "Hey, it's not my fault that there's bad people out there. So if someone steals your credit card and uses it.. your liable for the charges". Guess where my business is going? If we're thinking fromcthe businesses perspective, the company has to be responsible or.. quite frankly they won't make it lol. 

I understand that hey, they may not have the resources to resolve the complaint properly. It's probably not cost effective and I get that. However, the blame still doesn't lay on the customers (players).

 

 

ive said it again and again. I want this company to be successful and to grow. I understand like for all of us.. it's all a learning curve. I want them to make ark 2 better than this after having learned from their mistakes from ark 1

 

 

**edit. IM sure they are excited for ark 2. They can design the game better to relieve many, if not most, of the complaints in ark 1, to which they couldn't fix in ark 1 because it was not cost effective. I know most are complaining greed, but as a consumer all I see is a better product. I'm excited !

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43 minutes ago, Critter said:

The analogy is more like this man; a credit card company telling its customers that "Hey, it's not my fault that there's bad people out there. So if someone steals your credit card and uses it.. your liable for the charges". Guess where my business is going? If we're thinking fromcthe businesses perspective, the company has to be responsible or.. quite frankly they won't make it lol. 

I understand that hey, they may not have the resources to resolve the complaint properly. It's probably not cost effective and I get that. However, the blame still doesn't lay on the customers (players).

 

 

ive said it again and again. I want this company to be successful and to grow. I understand like for all of us.. it's all a learning curve. I want them to make ark 2 better than this after having learned from their mistakes from ark 1

 

 

**edit. IM sure they are excited for ark 2. They can design the game better to relieve many, if not most, of the complaints in ark 1, to which they couldn't fix in ark 1 because it was not cost effective. I know most are complaining greed, but as a consumer all I see is a better product. I'm excited !

Thats... not even anywhere near close an analogy man. Players make pillars into these territorial markers or griefing implements, and cry to the developers to fix a problem that the former is causing. Players are the ones that bring servers to their dino and building capacities, or build up "super dense structures with high concentrations of turrets", then go on about how ark is a laggy and buggy mess.

Maybe the game is wholly buggy. Maybe it might even just be something that is, by it's own hubris, too heavy for our current times. I know that with things like high poly count walls and the expensive strains turrets put on servers don't help matters. With all this said and done the point remains that, be it by a lack of technique or a lack of technology, it's just not possible to let everyone have infinity dinos with infinity structures with no hits on performance at all; and sitting there complaining about such while insisting on staying as part of the problem isn't helping matters any.

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On 2017-11-20 at 12:35 AM, ciabattaroll said:

I get your concern about coverage, but their concern is on server performance/framerate. With that in mind I don't see how telling them to let you spam turrets helps fix their concerns.

They can increase the damage in a way that we don’t lose DPS, the damage should be 10x per 1 shot.... not 3.4x per 4 shots.... this is literally less dmg than we initially had... the new turrets don’t even track properly or shoot nearly fast enough... every offline base there is can be wiped with flak and 180 movespeed right now...

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8 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

Thats... not even anywhere near close an analogy man. Players make pillars into these territorial markers or griefing implements, and cry to the developers to fix a problem that the former is causing. Players are the ones that bring servers to their dino and building capacities, or build up "super dense structures with high concentrations of turrets", then go on about how ark is a laggy and buggy mess.

Maybe the game is wholly buggy. Maybe it might even just be something that is, by it's own hubris, too heavy for our current times. I know that with things like high poly count walls and the expensive strains turrets put on servers don't help matters. With all this said and done the point remains that, be it by a lack of technique or a lack of technology, it's just not possible to let everyone have infinity dinos with infinity structures with no hits on performance at all; and sitting there complaining about such while insisting on staying as part of the problem isn't helping matters any.

 The analogy  I provided is from a business perspective by the way, and it graciously fits the example I provided in my second post. Your suggesting something different, so here's one pertaining to that specific argument  

If WC doesn't proclaim fault for the exploits players are finding or navigating through, then their product is not only flawed but they have set themselves up for failure. Mark my words. Blizzard didn't take this approach when they implemented cross realms. They resolved server depop issues responsibly, and PROPERLY resolved the issue. The issue was caused by players, but the company took responsibility and proclaimed fault because the product was flawed in such ways. They developed the technology, and fixed it PROPERLY. You could argue they did it half assed at first, but eventually they got it right from the perspective of most. So, do you see the dam difference here now between a successful company and WC from a business perspective? Are you even sure WC is proclaiming its our fault, or do they realize it's their product? 

 

If you want to get technical, It's a survival game. What kind of game play, mindsets, and attitudes do survival games support? Especially as a sandbox mode? Are you suggesting WC was surprised players would navigate past half assed fixes for game mechanics? In a survival game of all games? Perhaps they should have theorycrafted all these issues such as Dino tame caps and pillar spamming as they developed the game. The company is young, and as I said they've got a learning curve- but saying we're at fault for our ability to navigate past fixes that should of been fixed or designed to not be able to have been navigated through to begin with, is asinine man. Product. Failure. Not a big deal, but fix it right. And if I find a way past it, it wasn't fixed right. That simple. We caused it cause you didn't fix it. At the end of the day the company loses. Not us. lol. So from a business perspective, who's at fault? The product. They are. Or they wouldn't be continuing to attempt to fix the mechanics. So I'm assuming they are proclaiming responsibility, liability, and blame.  

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