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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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24 minutes ago, Jerryn said:

Let's get back on topic.

If you want the developers to hear you, then offer some constructive input.  Maybe consider the idea of compromise and thinking outside of the box.  Up to you how you use or waste this opportunity.

ETA:  Just in case it needs clarity, constructive input does not mean you have to agree with the developer's vision.

It's seems to me that bases of medium and large tribes are going to grow exponentially given the nature of this change. These tribes will now spam turrets over a much larger area. They will need to do this as I think most of the player base is in agreement that 100 turrets will struggle to defend all sides of a large building. So we will end up with many clusters of 100 turrets surrounding the main base area of 100 turrets in the middle. How do you forsee this type of base setup built across multiple locations by all medium to large tribes impacting on performance? Also the impact of vastly increased land claim by these tribes?

One suggestion that would soften the blow of total base defense reconstruction is to allow players to pickup and replace fully grown plant x. Like you can with auto turrets

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Really Glad wildcard is trying to compensate us with a new turret and possible a knockback effect for the turrets,its nice to see them listening to concerns of the community.Not to sound like everyone else complaining about the topic but could we get another look at the exact turret amount? 100 isn't really enough for a large base. Even a extra 50 slots will go a long way for a large base.

Thanks for working with the community on this game changing patch Wildcard.

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PvP players, real advice, keep the pressure on, but don't make everyone discount your point by being openly hostile! We went from the announcement of 100 turret limit, to at least getting heavy turrets in just a couple days. To me, that's a major step in the right direction and shows promise. Do I think 100 turrets that are 4x is strong replaces a 2K turret wall, of course not, but it does show that they are considering these things. In a weeks time it might be 300 turrets and the heavies are 6x as strong, with additional nerfs to certain tank dinos... who knows.

The point is, WC needs to come further in the defensive direction for balancing so keep telling them that, keep that feedback they're asking for strong. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend like they aren't even thinking about the balance issue with making this change, because clearly with heavy turrets and the suggestion that more changes are probably coming they are. Just keep making constructive suggestions and asking them to go further, but reddit/twitter are probably better than the official forums anyway ;-).

Really though, I am pretty concerned about the damage done to the community in just a couple days if this goes live in a way that makes bases incredibly easy to raid, even if it get's improved quickly. Devs, if anything shoot for overpowered heavy  and regular turrets and cut back as needed. Damage is much less from raiding being too hard for a little while than defending being completely impossible for even a few days.

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The dev's don't actually play the game.
In most other games constant patches are to address game balance to make the game fun for the majority of its player base.
In ark most patches are game bug fixes or new content.

The few game balance patches are only for those that grief or those that dominate (i.e. 0.001% of the player base)

 

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23 hours ago, Olivar said:

Thank you for the update and incorporating some of the feedback that was provided between all the salt!

However:

Please be very careful about touching the veggie cakes!
They are currently the only viable means of getting Therizinosaurs to take on bosses and dragons depending on the difficulty.
Reducing their powers will set back ALOT of people because of the increased losses they will sustain.

Sorry to say this, but the whining of the PvP about the cakes does not warrant the destruction of boss fights in PvE.
If you change the cakes, then you need to change the boss fights and their damage mechanics

This. As it stands, we as a tribe of two will probably find it impossible to kill alpha dragon if you nerf cakes. We got it to 15% hp last time with inferior statted Theriz, it killed the first one within 30 seconds of landing, 15k hp and a 100+ armour saddle gone, THAT fast, even with Yuty buff. If you make cakes any worse, dragon will be almost purely a player count fight. A large player count shouldn't be essential for bosses. If you touch cakes, touch the % damage dragon does as well.

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1 hour ago, Wallbuilder said:

This. As it stands, we as a tribe of two will probably find it impossible to kill alpha dragon if you nerf cakes. We got it to 15% hp last time with inferior statted Theriz, it killed the first one within 30 seconds of landing, 15k hp and a 100+ armour saddle gone, THAT fast, even with Yuty buff. If you make cakes any worse, dragon will be almost purely a player count fight. A large player count shouldn't be essential for bosses. If you touch cakes, touch the % damage dragon does as well.

Completely agree. This is the only thing that affects me in particular in this situation as a PVE player in a small tribe. I really hate it when PVP balancing leaks over into the otherwise fine PVE gameplay. Admittedly it's not "fine" but workable, because there's only a couple viable ways to take on the bosses and it's not through intelligence or skill. Then again Ark was never overly pushing either of those things in the base game. Survival of the Fittest was where I used to get my PVP kicks, and that required careful planning. 

PVP official though, its always a numbers game. Number of Rexs, number of tribemates, number of turrets, number of hours you can sacrifice of your life, etc. It's why i walked away from PVP over a year ago. So please, devs, don't screw over the boss fights for us. I'd love them to be revamped, but that's not actually feasible without a complete AI overhaul. So leaving them as they are or introducing new tools for us to take them down in smaller tribes would be nice. Because as it stands we can't use any of the unique or special dino attributes or debuff attacks as an intelligent player would normally do, because the bosses are immune to them to prevent alpha tribes from steam rolling them. And you can't take large dinos or platform dinos in or flyers in. So there's literally zero chance to create a unique or fun strategy using building or a combination of assaults. You're forced to just take a pack of Rexs for the Broodmother and Megapithecus, maybe some guns and rockets. And Therizinos with veggie cakes for the Dragon. Rexs work too but expect casualties. 

BUT.. the point is that as it stands its still all viably completed even if its a grindfest rather than actually fun or challenging because of the mundane nature of the task caused by the limitations to create an artificial challenge. Nerfing veggie cakes however would mean we'd have to go back to the Rex pack method for the Dragon and expect to breed up several new ones each time we attempt it. For PVP, I get that you don't want obtaining Element to be easy, but in PVE it's not really detrimental for people to have large extravagant TEK bases. I only continue to do the bosses as it is now because I need Element to constantly fly around the map like a super hero and "live" out my childhood fantasies of coming to a naked stranger's rescue on a beach from a rampaging Triceratops. 

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Edit: As the lag is mostly happening on the new official servers due to most of the huge alphas beeing there, is it possible to not add the limit on legacy? Due to the lower population threres no problems with lag and I haven't seen too many extreme bases lately. Most of the huge duper tribes went to play on the new official servers. 

 

Thats good and all, but please consider adjusting the limit a bit either way. 

Theres so much to cover on any decent sized base, 100 turrets won't be able to cover every spot on that base, no matter how strong they are. Those turrets could oneshot anything and there would still be an easy way to break in since there will be weakpoints, especially when you also want to place some turrets on the inside.

What many people forget is that you dont just have to cover 4 sides. Maybe you've built your base on pillars. You should really place some defenses below the base then, and with the pillars blocking the turrets in many directions you're going to need a lot of them.

Your roof also has to be protected very well, or people are just going to drop things on top of your base which would be way faster than just walking up to it -> you need defenses with enough burst damage to kill that thing within a few seconds before it lands on your base. 

Then you are going to need turrets inside of your base, in most cases AT LEAST 4 per room to cover any dead angles. 

 

A 100 turret limit will force you to leave huge weakspots in your base no matter how you build your defenses. In my opinion 500 (up to 1000 depending on how it affects performance) would be ideal. That way you actually have enough seperated defense units that can fire from different positins to cover all of your base + It wouldn't make Plant X useless like they would be with the 100 limit. 

 

 

Here's my last post on the older thread. I still believe what I said there is should be considered, even tho I changed the numbers a bit:

On 20.11.2017 at 6:56 AM, Dama said:

From what I read in the OP the problem is tribes bases with 10.000 if not more turrets. I'm okay with a limit but it shouldn't be as low as 100, I believe 700-1000 (anything higher than 100 is better) would be reasonable and would still increase server performance. 

With a higher limit like that you can still defend a large base properly. I think increasing the limit and adding those "Heavy Turrets" will improve the performance and people won't be as unhappy.

hint: make the heavy turrets a slight bit better cost/performance wise than the regular turrets, this way people are encouraged to use a few heavy turrets rather than spamming regular ones. Also make them unable to shoot rockets or players so regular turrets dont become useless.

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1 hour ago, Dama said:

Edit: As the lag is mostly happening on the new official servers due to most of the huge alphas beeing there, is it possible to not add the limit on legacy? Due to the lower population threres no problems with lag and I haven't seen too many extreme bases lately. Most of the huge duper tribes went to play on the new official servers. 

 

Thats good and all, but please consider adjusting the limit a bit either way. 

Theres so much to cover on any decent sized base, 100 turrets won't be able to cover every spot on that base, no matter how strong they are. Those turrets could oneshot anything and there would still be an easy way to break in since there will be weakpoints, especially when you also want to place some turrets on the inside.

What many people forget is that you dont just have to cover 4 sides. Maybe you've built your base on pillars. You should really place some defenses below the base then, and with the pillars blocking the turrets in many directions you're going to need a lot of them.

Your roof also has to be protected very well, or people are just going to drop things on top of your base which would be way faster than just walking up to it -> you need defenses with enough burst damage to kill that thing within a few seconds before it lands on your base. 

Then you are going to need turrets inside of your base, in most cases AT LEAST 4 per room to cover any dead angles. 

 

A 100 turret limit will force you to leave huge weakspots in your base no matter how you build your defenses. In my opinion 500 (up to 1000 depending on how it affects performance) would be ideal. That way you actually have enough seperated defense units that can fire from different positins to cover all of your base + It wouldn't make Plant X useless like they would be with the 100 limit. 

 

 

Here's my last post on the older thread. I still believe what I said there is should be considered, even tho I changed the numbers a bit:

I strongly agree with this guy... 100 turrets is not enough no matter how much dmg they do... even if you boost them to x10 dmg it will still not be enough to cover your base and provide even half decent defense... DEVS please reconsider the 100 limit... every single person here will tell you 100 is not enough... most people would probably vote for 1000 or more... so maybe we could meet around the middle and go with 500 limit with x4 dmg new turrets could be optimal to keep everyone happy... we will still get better performance and players will not be totally unhappy.. going form UNLIMITED to 100 is not even funny :D

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i dont think you guys understand the lag isnt just the turrets servers have been perfectly fine with 1000s of turrets the island server is usually fine its not the turrets causing the major lag ragnarok has 255 ping constantly please just dont get rid of your playerbase everyone will quit when this turret update hits just ignore the turret thing and work around something else you know this is what a base looks like with 100 turrets you guys will officially ruin ark doing this update

 

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57 minutes ago, Olivar said:

watched that video for 10 seconds before turning it off again....
Man he's annoying to watch.
So what's the gist of that video?

indeed he is annoying but he shows a base with the range with 100 turrets and shows how easy it is to raid its more for the devs he kinda settles down in the middle of the video

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1 minute ago, ooStuStu said:

Would it be possible to add a setting to dinos that are on neutral that would not allow them to be kited off so easily? maybe "defend area" .. so once engaged they would not be kited off? Dinos for defense are not really a viable option unless you are riding them or there to control them

I'd sell my favourite Otter for this feature.
Would make most dino's such better perimeter guards if they could roam around the base.
Like use their current location as center point when giving the command, and they just patrol in a sphere of radius X from said point.

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3 minutes ago, Olivar said:

I'd sell my favourite Otter for this feature.
Would make most dino's such better perimeter guards if they could roam around the base.
Like use their current location as center point when giving the command, and they just patrol in a sphere of radius X from said point.

I would fear if they were patrolling we would end up with the same problem we have with turrets ... however if they are engaged (wall blows up) then ... having them kited off a cliff or into the ocean would be much more difficult ...

 

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Just now, ooStuStu said:

I would fear if they were patrolling we would end up with the same problem we have with turrets ... however if they are engaged (wall blows up) then ... having them kited off a cliff or into the ocean would be much more difficult ...

 

Aah, you kind of want to tether them to a spot.
+1 to that as well :D

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12 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

There are how many posts, reviews, etc. from players going "fix the lag". This change is one of those that aims to help do that, and you are basically saying that those people in essence just need to suck it up because you are selfishly fine with the game being laggy.

1. The whole Ark community complains about lag. This change will only affect PvP players though. 

2. Out of all the things there are in this game that can be reduced, changed, improved or whatever, they go for the literally only defence this game offers to PvP players. Turrets and their amount are what makes the difference between pretty much any tribe out there, especially the ones that dont have people online 24/7. 

I also dont think you realize how drastic going down to 100 is? Like, yes, I see there will be buffs and changes and we discuss it here. But do you actually realize (doubt you Play official PvP) how much of a pushover a 100 Turret base actually is? Its the amount you put on a small little crafting base that you dont really care about. And no matter how much they buff the turrets, you still need a certain amount to cover big bases/areas.

People here have all right to be upset. I dont think you understand how much time it takes to grind turrets, set them up and fill them up. It takes days.

 

The flyer nerf while being good in a lot of ways was handled so poor. Instead of removing the pteras pick ability and weight and some Speed, or making the Quetz rider vulnerable while nerfing HP. They did a movement speed and stam nerf to all flyers and called it a day. Didnt really listen to any Feedback just like with pretty much any big change. Most people simply dont expect much when they read "only 100 Turrets on December 5th"

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43 minutes ago, ooStuStu said:

Would it be possible to add a setting to dinos that are on neutral that would not allow them to be kited off so easily? maybe "defend area" .. so once engaged they would not be kited off? Dinos for defense are not really a viable option unless you are riding them or there to control them

This! That would be so incredibly useful for a variety of things. Just have a powerful dino that attacks anything in a certain area but is on a sort of chain, and won't follow past a certain point. Like a patrol setting or a guard area setting. I can literally think of a dozen uses off the top of my head for this sort of thing, and it makes it way cooler! Imagine putting down a powerful dino to defend resource claims, without inhibiting the resources to spawn. Or dinos that patrol your base to kill anything that steps inside. Or have a dino walking around behind you while fishing to keep back any dinos, but won't run off chasing one halfway across the map.

This would be a GREAT addition to the game.

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22 minutes ago, Jabroni said:

Out of all the things there are in this game that can be reduced, changed, improved or whatever, they go for the literally only defence this game offers to PvP players. Turrets and their amount are what makes the difference between pretty much any tribe out there, especially the ones that dont have people online 24/7. 

It's also the one thing they have objective proof of that slows down the servers. Using actual data from the servers they identified that turrets, and turrets alone, were responsible for a significant portion of the lag. So the fix is to reduce the number of turrets. It's a needed change to help deal with the serious issue of server lag. And yeah, beefing up the turrets is probably going to go a long way towards balancing the issue. Fewer turrets in an area, but the turrets themselves are more powerful. You will just have to be more selective about how you place them.

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49 minutes ago, ooStuStu said:

I would fear if they were patrolling we would end up with the same problem we have with turrets ... however if they are engaged (wall blows up) then ... having them kited off a cliff or into the ocean would be much more difficult ...

I don't think so, really. Most large tribes are already dino capped anyway, so the number of dinos in an area almost certainly isn't going to change. They will just actually be doing something now instead of all crammed into a base and set on passive. And that would almost certainly solve the turret issue. If you can use the tames you already have to fight off attacks, it would make the game even more dynamic. Right now having dinos guard your base is completely useless, as they can be kited off into the middle of nowhere. But have them tethered to your base so they can only be kited so far then return and we got something.

And you can even arrange it to where the point your dino is allowed to follow is within turret range. This would be pretty legit. Heck I think all you would have to do is change the current neutral mechanic a bit to deny indefinite following. That way, no matter where the dino is, they never wander far from that spot to attack other dinos. They can sit there until either they are attacked OR a structure the player controls is attacked, and then they will attack any hostile dino or human in a radius of X units. Once the threat is eliminated or leaves, they return to their original spot.

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This game is gold seal full release now. You should not be asking us things like this. You should be properly play testing and checking QA in a closed test environment. Stop moving test patches into a live environment to see how we react. Use the money we gave you to be a real development company and higher some damn testers and buy good servers.....

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On 20/11/2017 at 8:10 AM, AJ1996 said:

The new turret is a nice idea, but the turret budget of 100 is still way too low, I would say if you had to have a turret limit, make it 1000. We're a small alpha on ORP official and have managed to smash the limit you've given us, god knows how larger tribes are going to cope, we need big bases to stop Dino's etc from being sniped, and the only way to defend these large bases is with plenty of turrets, if the turret cap stays at 100 I think you're going to lose a lot of players, Its too much work down the drain having to pick up 900 odd turrets, and like I say this is coming from a small alpha tribe, there's going to be tribes who are so much worse off

i agree and this turret limit isnt going to solve anything at all, spikes cause lag the next thing you will see is everyone spamming structures to keep people out. this 100 turret limit is a joke, meaning the server lag and frame rate will be even lower @TheRightHand you guys actually need to start putting polls on updates.

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On 11/20/2017 at 12:52 AM, TheRightHand said:

Hey everyone, it's me again, that guy who says stuff, and then tries to make sure other stuff gets done. It's a crazy time!

So, here's what's going down for sure:

Advanced Auto Turret - BobCorp has provided me with authorization to distribute the BobCorp Automated Laterally Attenuated Nano-Cell Electronic Defense system.

This is a new turret we'll be introducing along with these changes that will essentially be a bigger, beefier turret, allowing for people who still need that damage density to populate their turret slots with turrets that are much more powerful. We're aiming for about a 4x increase in overall effectivness and cost for these things, along with disabling their use on rafts/boats. Construction costs and ammunition costs would be similar.

We opted for a new turret because of a few things:

- It conveys the power of the new turret clearly without needing to add any new functionality to anything else.

- It doesn't create a sudden need to change the balance/functionality of existing turrets in any way, and thus rebalance all sorts of other stuff that could potentially break. We're aware we have already done a lot of that, let's not push it farther.

- Existing turrets don't get a sudden, massive buff.

- We can scale the cost/maintenance/upkeep of the new structure without inconveniencing everyone who isn't pushing these upper limits.

- If we need to introduce any specific kinds of modifications to this new turret, we can do it without impacting anything else.

So yeah, that's why that.

In addition, this stuff:

We're coalating feedback that we're getting along the way to develop a better sense of what exploits may exist or severely disproportionately effective tactics might need additional adjustment. For example:

- Stego Armor Plates are going to have to block less damage from either bullets, or turrets specifically.

- Veggie Cakes may need a more prohibitive delay on their use in combat.

- Adding knockback to either the new turret, or both new and existing turret to offset specific movement speed + shield + rocket/c4 configurations may be in order.

These are just examples of things that we'll be seeing how they play out and what kinds of impacts they might have outside of just the general pvp game (for instance, veggie cakes and Therizinos are a good way to fight the dragon right now.) and whatever we decide to act on, I'll make a post about it sometime before December 5th.

I also want to take this opportunity to address a couple of things I've seen in comment threads:

With the exception of some really really large dinos (dinos like the Bronto) we disable idle animations on dinos on the server. Idle dinos also only tick once every 4 seconds or so instead of every frame. Idle dinos, while expensive, are only expensive in a general sense. Things like their animations have next to no cost on the server, and we use paralellized animations, which means most animations aren't even run on the main game thread (They're much faster.)

Dino head tracking is client-side, not server side. It has no cost on the server.

The vast majority of the servers that people play on are very expensive, custom-built servers with top of the line 8 core/16 thread cpus running at 4ghz, 64 gb of ram. We pay out the nose to make sure your servers are powerful.

The ARK Server also only uses 2 threads on the CPU. This is because the version of Unreal that we built the game on did not support multi-threading/paralellization. We have integrated Paralellized animation, and networking, so our networking overhead and cost of animation work are done on a 2nd thread. We're doing more work to try and thread more elements of the server, but it is incredibly complex and difficult work to do. Running 3 instances per server only takes up 6 cores at most. Having less instances per box would have no impact on the performance of each individual server.

We do a lot to make the game run as smoothly as possible, while still enabling the kind of freeform, open-world experience that the game was designed to be.

Anyways, I'll do a follow-up sometime later in the upcoming week about any things that we've decided we're going to do for sure. For now, TLDR:

Adding a new, more powerful turret that'll be able to replace about 4-5 of our current turrets.

Making Stego Armor Plates take more damage from turrets.
Still collecting feedback and looking into additional measures.

Thanks for your time, and your patience.

- The Right Hand

I feel like people who are built on alpha rock or any other formation they then become weak for the fact they have less area to place anyway so now people built on higher ground to help against raiders now have to move to a different location to be able to defend the base and Dino's you should figure out how we can get 100% of our materials back from the massive structures we have built a lot of people have already quit  and I'd like to be able to continue playing without being a meat run 

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1 hour ago, ooStuStu said:

Would it be possible to add a setting to dinos that are on neutral that would not allow them to be kited off so easily? maybe "defend area" .. so once engaged they would not be kited off? Dinos for defense are not really a viable option unless you are riding them or there to control them

I've not done this in awhile but

Set your defense dinos to aggressive.
Hop on a Doed, and whistle them to follow the Doed.
Load the Doed up so it can not move and put it also on aggressive.
You can set the attack range to control how far they will go from the Doed.
When you log out the defense dinos will still follow the Doed and return to it.
There was a server bug where a server restart would clear the follow command. But they fixed it awhile back.

 

 

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