100 Turrets Is Not Enough

[Zyrah]

Hello ARK community.

I would like to start this thread off by saying that I'm not trying to harm the reputation of ARK or Wild Card, nor do I try to place the blame on any one person in Wild Card Studios. 

As we all know, the update that limits the amount of turrets you can have on your base is here. They have added in the HUD that shows your Turrets in Range count, and soon it will hard limit the turrets to where they won't work if more than 100 turrets, plant X, heavy turrets, or Tek turrets are in range.

100 TURRETS IS NOT ENOUGH

Now anyone and everyone who has ever gotten to the point where they have more than 100 turrets on their base (which is the vast majority of the players in the community) knows that 100 turrets is not enough to defend against ANY attack at all. The one's who have had thousands of turrets on their base AND have still been raided and wiped know more than anyone that 100 turrets simply is NOT enough.

As if it were not hard enough to defend your base when you are online when there is a server player cap and you can't get your tribe mates online to defend against 50+ attackers out of a 70 player limit, I know for a fact that Wild Card didn't take in to account the offline raids. Now, before I go any further, I am part of a decent sized alpha tribe on official PVP servers for Xbox One. With that being said, we have times were the may only be 1-2 members online, sometimes none. Our base has 100s of turrets and Plant X, much of which is 100% necessary to cover all of our dinos and buildings. Also having been in tribes that are my size AND larger, I have been on many raids, trolls, and server wipes. I know what it takes and requires to do these things, and I know what it takes to defend from these things as well. I have to use repetition here 100 turrets is not enough.

A BEACH BOB THAT JUST DOWNLOADED THE GAME CAN TAKE OUT AN ALPHA SIZED BASE.

I mentioned earlier that I truly believe that the Ark developers have not taken into consideration offline raiding. Why do I think this, and why does it matter you may ask? I also mentioned that I've been on countless raids, wipes, etc. and from experience I can say that it takes ONLY one stego to get in a base with 300+ turrets on it, take out the generator, and kill every dino there with a rex or giga and all you need is C4, a good set of flak, a high hp stego with a decent saddle, and a decent rex or giga. I've done it countless times, I have watched YouTube videos of other people doing it, my friends do it, my enemies do it, EVERYONE does it. While this method is far easier while offline, it can be achieved while the defending tribe is online as well, especially if there is only 1-2 defenders against 3-5 attackers (most troll parties consists of 3-5 players).

How can someone who just started playing take out thousands of hours of work put into a base by several other players even up to 100-200 players? Starting out from level one, it takes an average day-to-day player minimal time to get to level 65 which is the level that you unlock C4 and the C4 detonator. During that time from level 1-65, they can tame stegos and make stego saddles, which is all you need to tank turrets. So they can raid any small base with just a stego, some grenades and a pike. A little more leveling doing this and they hit level 74, which unlocks the Primitive Rex Saddle, which they could already have several rexs tamed up by the time they unlock the saddle. Then all it takes from there, is just grinding up a bunch of C4, which doesn't require metal at all, so it's a pretty straight forward and easy grind for C4. Then they take there stegos and they blow pillboxs on a medium-large sized base, they blow the main base, and if the have enough c4, they can blow into the vaults and take or despawn the contents. Then after they get the turret boxs and towers down with their stegos, they can proceed to eat the tames with their tamed rex(s). And the next day, that tribe of 20 people who have put collectively 1000+ hours into making that base, get online to find that within a few hours of them being offline their entire base was broken into and all of their tames were killed.

So why do these tribes have 1000s of turrets on their bases and why does it matter if there's a limit? Do you really have to ask? It all comes down to DPS or damage per second. It is a heavy factor in not just ARK, but a large variety of games that we play and enjoy. It's not just about killing the tames and players that are attacking your base, it's about killing them quickly enough so as to minimize the amount of damage they can cause to your base and tames.  100 turrets cannot achieve this goal, whether the defending tribe is online OR offline.

Some might say, "Well, just nerf the stegos." In theory, that's a good idea, but what about building in caves? Cave's take 6x damage, but can still be among the hardest thing to raid, given that you can't fit your traditional soaker tames like the Bronto or Paraceratherium in the majority of caves. So you would NEED a smaller dino such as the stego to make raiding these caves even possible. Which is just another flaw of the 100 turret update, that makes some caves nearly, if not completely, unraidable. This is called imbalance.

With all of this being said, while we know that the ARK developers are trying to reduce server lag with this 100 turret limiting in a 10,000 unit diameter, will it actually reduce lag? My theory says no.

SPAM IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

Just like we have seen tribes spam foundations, pillars, and more structures to prevent spawns of creatures or to prevent people from building near their base, with a 100 turret limit they could spam turrets towers. Now I know this sounds crazy, but imagine this. A very well built up tribe will have a large access to oil which is needed to make gas. While generators, ridiculously, use 800 gas in 8 days (whereas it was 800/16 days, and even more before the last time it was unnecessarily nerfed), tribes who have access to lots of oil can make very large amounts of gas. So what's to stop these tribes from making turret towers outside their base for 50,000 units in every direction, using exactly 100 turrets on each tower, and each tower spaced properly to allow the full 100 turret cap on each one. Guess what? That's still the same amount of turrets that were on their server, just spread out! Therefore, no server lag is eliminated, which makes the turret limit update a shag! Absolutely pointless! And what if that same tribe decides, "Hmmm....that's not enough!" And then decides they'll spam these towers ANOTHER 50,000 units in every direction.

So, if they have 100 turrets on say an 8x8 metal box. Then 10,000 units North, South, East, and West, they have towers with 100 turrets, and then another 10,000 units out from there, they have more towers with 100 turrets, and on and on and on, guess what? That easily hits 1000 turrets without even breaking a sweat for medium to large size tribes and at the end of the day, it's the same amount of turrets, just spread out. So by the developers logic, which is on a basic level, 'more turrets = more lag', then that means that these servers will still have the same amount of turrets, and guess what? The server will have the same amount of lag. That's kinda funny isn't it? Speaking of "lag", I have another point to make.

ALSO, they have proceeded to announce that they will be making the Tek turret deal 2x as much damage, as well as adding in the new Heavy Auto Turret and increasing the amount of inventory slots the turrets have and increasing the turret damage by 2.2x. This all sounds cool, but here's some very major issues that are not and have not been addressed.

• Tek Turrets require a Tek generator to run, and uses element shards as ammo. One element creates 100 shards, now this isn't a bad trade off except when you look at the requirements for boss fights, especially in the Spino Sails department. What's so hard about Spino Sails? The Spino spawns (which have been promised to be fixed, and have yet to be fixed). On a profitable level for the amount of tames and equipment such as armor, weapons, saddles, etc. to do a boss fight, you don't get that much element. Take the Island boss fights for example. The hardest fight by margin is the Broodmother, but for how stupid hard this boss is to defeat, the amount of element you get for your hard work and potentially lost gear and dinos is a measly 7 element for easy, and a horrible 74 for Hard. THIS NEEDS ADDRESSING. The Alpha Megapithicus is relatively easy, and has a good payout of 110 element, but requires 10 spino sails to initiate the fight. I can guarantee that you will not find more than 1 spino spawned in at a time, and it sometimes takes days for me and my tribe to find enough spino sails to do a fight. This is imbalanced, and needs addressing before the Tek turret even becomes relevant.
• Heavy Turrets. They sound cool, doing a staggering 4x the amount of damage of our regular auto turret and holding 96 slots of bullets versus the traditional 24, but then you look at the cost of these turrets, and the optimism fades rather quickly. It not only costs the materials to make your regular auto turret, but it also takes an additional 200 electronics, 150 Cementing paste, 400 metal ingots, and 50 polymer. These are not cost effective. Not to mention that they shoot FOUR bullets at a time. This means they drain 4x as fast as the regular turrets and therefore make them obsolete for most players to make, whether they are in a large tribe, or a small tribe. And if that isn't enough to make you want to jam your hands into a toaster, they require a staggering 100 engram points to learn, and even worse require a level 100 character to make. RIDICULOUS.

THE NEW GENERATION (AND PC)

Up until this turret update was announced, lag and disconnection was a big complaint among the ARK community, but these complaints come more frequently and more specifically from console players. As you can probably imagine, a game that was built and optimized for PC is not going to run as well on an Xbox One or a PS4 system due to their already out-of-date and, relative to the game's requirements, sub-par specifications. For PC, I can safely say that I haven't even had frame rate lag. I have a custom built PC, and yes it was more expensive than I sometimes like to admit (although I don't regret it). However, some people simply don't have the money to buy a pre-built or DIY a computer or they simply can't justify spending that much. Which is where a console comes in. As everyone and their parents and grandparents know, the Xbox One X was released not too long ago, and one of the blockbuster titles for the Xbox One X was ARK: Survival Evolved. Microsoft isn't lying when they claim the Xbox One X to be "the most powerful console to have ever been created." Because it is. It has the GPU equivalency to the nVidia GTX 1070 (which is the GPU I have in my PC) and a hefty Octo-core(8) CPU for the well known price of $499.99.  

I just happen to have the Xbox One X and play ARK on it. When I play ARK in my base with 600+ turrets of any kind, along with over 400+ dinos, my frame rate barely even drops. I don't lag on any server except Ragnarok servers, which is already an issue addressed by Wild Card and has nothing to do with the console or servers except for the map itself not being optimized at all. That's a development problem, not a console problem, and not a server problem. I have been in bases on the Island, Center, and Scorched that have 1000s of turrets and just as many dinos and while my frame rate did drop, I did not lag or disconnect at any point. Frame rate is a console/system factor, not a server factor.

Also, I have seen the specs of the servers by Nitrado that are used to host the ARK official servers, and they are top of the line servers. Unfortunately, I could not find where I had seen the specs at (one of the ARK devs tweeted some of the specs not too long ago, but I'm not scrolling through hundreds of tweets to find it).

Here's the point I'm trying to make here. If I don't lag in my base of over 600+ turrets and 400+ dinos, not even frame rate lag on the Xbox One X, that means that the turrets are not a problem. It's the console that's the problem. We, including the developers and players, have to accept the fact that consoles are just not designed to play a game of this scale. They can, but at a cost of performance. Can you see the pattern though? I don't have any issues, frame rate, lag, disconnecting, or otherwise when I play ARK on a PC or Xbox One X, but I do on the regular Xbox One and PS4. That makes it a system problem, not a server problem.

So with all due respect, this turret nerf will be game-breaking on an irreversible and unplayable scale, and on behalf of the vast majority of your player community (PvP) have to insist that the ARK developers do NOT go through with this update and I among others will not stop voicing our opinion of this game-breaking nerf until it is either scrapped or released and cannot guarantee that I will continue playing ARK: Survival Evolved if the update is released.

POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO THE 100 TURRET LIMIT

A big counter to many arguments when it comes to a player complaining about the way a developer goes about making their game and its updates, is "How would you do it?" So I'm going to give only a few easy and in theory, very possible alternatives. 

The ARK devs stated that there are many things that cause the turrets to generate lag, including the red lights on them and the flash of turret fire. Naturally, there is two alternatives to make the turrets less laggy.

• Take the red light off the turret, as it creates lag and serves no purpose.
• Program the turrets to not show the fire flash if a certain number of turrets are being fired. Logically, nobody is going to be looking at the detail of their turrets going off when they're being raided. That's a fact, Jack.
• If the lag comes from the sheer amount of turrets going off at once, then perhaps limit the amount of turrets you can place on one structure. Say, you can only have 1 auto turret per ceiling, or only 2 turrets per large metal hatch frame. This would be much more effective, while not leaving every base in the game vulnerable to two trolls with stegos.

This isn't even everything that I could come up with for this post, some of it has slipped my mind, and other bits I've just not mentioned because if this isn't enough then there's no amount that can change anything.

Thanks for reading and all hopes for the best,

Zyrah

[Ezerix]

So many things you just said were so horribly wrong, it makes your entire statement suspect. I do agree that this recent turret update is a heavy change, and would have preferred a more timely systematic approach, perhaps limiting to 500, and then adjusting to find a balance between server load, and practical defense, but wildcard is famous for either not nerfing things that need it, or slamming down the nerf-hammer like Thor after he's had a few. Your first point that it's already hard enough to defend when 50 players come to hit you, is true but not far reaching enough. If 50 players come to hit you, and you don't have 15 or 20 to defend, you are dead. That's it, no more. If they had the organizational capacity to gather this many people together at one time, for one purpose, the only real question is how much are you going to make it cost them. Even if they lose many tames, they will transfer in more. Even if you push them back, they will return, likely after you and your friends need sleep, or real life obligations come a calling. So throw that argument out the window. Secondly, if you are defeated by a beach noob with a random tamed stego and a primitive saddle, and you call yourself the server alpha, you deserve it. Stegos have good amount of health, and  forward armor, but as any worthwhile player knows, what makes the stego into a bullet soaker is the ability not to get shot off of it, It's imprint, and it's saddle. to help with this transition, WC introduced the heavy turret. You cast shade on this too. The cost is well worth it. and just pull down your old turrets and make the adjustments. We've known the cost of these things for a while. if you haven't been saving for them, either you just don't care (which is completely fine it's a game), or you weren't planning ahead. They hold 96 slots, and shoot 4 bullets, so if you fill this thing up, which does take time, it will empty exactly as fast as a regular turret, with pushback. You cannot complain about the loss of dps, then also complain about something with more dps. a kill tower with 50 of these is the equivalent of one old school with 200. You offer tek turrets as a cool alternative but bemoan their cost in boss fight materials. From your comment on spino sails, i assume you play on Ragnarok. They are definitely weird, but you can force the spawns. I gather about 6-10 every hour and a half when i farm them, i promise you there is a way, just use your imagination. Also, Lystrix is by far, the easiest boss. She has the lowest health, and burst dps. Use megatherium, imprinted ones, they stay alpha mod the whole fight, she goes down like butter. I'm not saying you are wrong to have misgivings about this patch, personally i think it was hasty and overdone, using a broadsword when a scalpel would be more effective. That being said, stop complaining about it. They aren't going to change it anytime soon. Instead, work it to your own advantage. We've been throwing kinks into the devs plans since day one, we're a horrible people known as gamers, and we rock at what we do. It'll take some planning, but i know you can make a base that turns away most threats. Which at the end of the day is what they are for. Not for actually stopping a threat, but making people weigh the cost, and buying you time to get back on. Sorry about the partial, hit enter on accident.

 

 

[LordSquidward]

Stegos armor got nerfed, so I dont think that they are such a big threat as before

[Dylan1602]

58 minutes ago, Ezerix said:

but wildcard is famous for either not nerfing things that need it, or slamming down the nerf-hammer like Thor after he's had a few. 

I really enjoyed that 

[yekrucifixion187]

3 hours ago, Zyrah said:

So, if they have 100 turrets on say an 8x8 metal box. Then 10,000 units North, South, East, and West, they have towers with 100 turrets, and then another 10,000 units out from there, they have more towers with 100 turrets, and on and on and on, guess what? That easily hits 1000 turrets without even breaking a sweat for medium to large size tribes and at the end of the day, it's the same amount of turrets, just spread out. So by the developers logic, which is on a basic level, 'more turrets = more lag', then that means that these servers will still have the same amount of turrets, and guess what? The server will have the same amount of lag. That's kinda funny isn't it? Speaking of "lag", I have another point to make.

How can you not see this? It's not amount of turrets, it is amount of turrets firing simultaneously in a condensed area. 1000 turrets spread out means only 100 turrets firing simultaneously. Then you are out of their range and the next set can take over. Your method of spreading turret towers actually makes it more of a trek to get to the main base while also reducing server lag. It's a huge win. 

[Japy]

Can I be devils advocate here for a second..

What if the idea of the limit (besides lag reduction) is to make it harder on the alphas? Why should a tribe of 50 people be able to wipe other servers out completely yet remain completely safe from any attacks by hiding behind a million turrets? The OP mentions not wanting to lose 1000s of hours worth of work to some noobs.. How do you think small 5 person tribes feel when an alpha tribe comes in and wipes everything they have spent 1000s of hours on (with only 5 people) out? 

Why should the rich get richer while they keep the little guy down? ;-)

The game is about survival after all.. If you're in an impenetrable base how is that surviving? Add back in the anxiety of not knowing if your poop will survive the night. That's what brought you to this game to begin with. At least it did for me.

If I complain that bigger tribes wipe mine out you may reply by saying get a bigger tribe. If your alpha got wiped by a small tribe then maybe you should expand your player base to include people in different time zones to watch your poop around the clock. Safety in numbers should only apply when you're online.

I conclude this by saying I understand Why people are scared of the change. I thoroughly enjoy being a turtle base builder in top down RTS games, and it wasn't until supreme commander and warhammer 40k (the video game) held me down and forced me to adapt to a zerg offensive strategy did I come out of my comfort zone and discover how fun it can be to change it up.

Just giving some food for thought here. Change isn't always bad. If it means you can't build a death star out of turrets you'll figure out another way to defend your poop.. Be creative.

[Jungnur]

Lol, you guys keep flaming him when he's pointing out great points, the heavy turrets are not enough,a few bases on the server have already fully converted and we raided them with 2 stegos that a had mc saddles. Fully drain in 15 min, no problem at all on our end, we ended up using 10 cakes per stego. My tribe has been holding off as much as possible on the conversion because we know the day of reconning is upon all large tribes. The only counter we have thought up and are implementing is placing rows of 50 turret towers that overlap fields of fire, by the time we finish we will have approximately 15000 turrets up and most an area of about 100 times our base will be just towers, I know a few ally tribes on my server are planning similar. My recommendation is lock down spawns so nobody can make it off the beach or to an ob without getting torn up.

[iAmE]

On 12/14/2017 at 9:49 AM, Japy said:

If you're in an impenetrable base

There is no such thing. No base ever created in the history of Ark is unraidable. 

Here's some food to throw in. Defenders are already at a heavy disadvantage compared to attackers assuming that the two forces are on equal footing. This change simply butchers the balance even more lopsidedly in the attackers favor. 

[isu]

Stegos are still OP like a hell, even with heavy turrets:

 

 

[Jungnur]

30 minutes ago, iAmE said:

There is no such thing. No base ever created in the history of Ark is unraidable. 

Here's some food to throw in. Defenders are already at a heavy disadvantage compared to attackers assuming that the two forces are on equal footing. This change simply butchers the balance even more lopsidedly in the attackers favor. 

Exactly it should never be easier to attack then to defend, but this update made it more so

[Jungnur]

31 minutes ago, isu said:

Stegos are still OP like a hell, even with heavy turrets:

 

 

Exactly what I mean literally no disadvantage for attackers now, wildcard needs to seriously buff turrets and inventorys on them, how about increase damage by double on heavy turrets but make them shoot only 1 bullet per shot and triple Tek turret damage whilst increasing the limit to 250

[SmokeyB]

You all just need to get more creative with your base locations .  Like the underworld in the centre can still  be made near impossible to raid with rows of turrets every 36 foundations . Or ice cave on the island try crawling under that gap with a row of tek turrets shooting at you .

The only thing this really limits is the alphas that throw huge bases up in the open and just rely on sheer number of turrets to defend it . 

Now location matters , which is in a way an advantage to the alphas over the little guys as the alphas can build wherever they want but the little tribes will be wiped for blocking caves etc

[Masurao]

2 hours ago, Jungnur said:

 My recommendation is lock down spawns so nobody can make it off the beach or to an ob without getting torn up.

I'm actually more than pretty sure that doing something like that is considered pretty illegal in this game. Then again, considering this change could make actions like this run rampant, I feel like there's a much larger problem developing just over the horizon...as per usual...

[spicer1209]

Lost me when he said beach bob is someone who grinded up 65 levels to being able to make C4 and tame a high level stego. Wut

[Jungnur]

35 minutes ago, Masurao said:

I'm actually more than pretty sure that doing something like that is considered pretty illegal in this game. Then again, considering this change could make actions like this run rampant, I feel like there's a much larger problem developing just over the horizon...as per usual...

It is illegal to block spawns them selves I don't believe there is anything about blocking the areas around spawns, that said it would have the same effect, and the only difference is in one case they are instantly killed when they spawn and in the other they are killed upon leaving the beach 

[iAmE]

23 minutes ago, spicer1209 said:

Lost me when he said beach bob is someone who grinded up 65 levels to being able to make C4 and tame a high level stego. Wut

Considering you can hit level 80 or so just running to survivor notes from the beach in an afternoon, and a high level stego isn't even necessary to tank turrets.

To tank turrets all you need is a decent stego, and the ability to make veggie cakes. 

[Jungnur]

Just now, iAmE said:

Considering you can hit level 80 or so just running to survivor notes from the beach in an afternoon, and a high level stego isn't even necessary to tank turrets.

To tank turrets all you need is a decent stego, and the ability to make veggie cakes. 

True, if you can hit enough notes quick enough you can easily start raiding with stegos with a few hours on a fresh spawn

[Baton]

On 13.12.2017 at 11:01 AM, LordSquidward said:

Stegos armor got nerfed, so I dont think that they are such a big threat as before

9 dmg to 120 armor imprinted stego

[BIZMOxFUNYUNZ]

I agree the 100 turrets limit hasn't helped at all with lag. This is the worst thing that ever happened to ark. In my opinion. I hope they change it back or figure something out. Like turn off the red light and fire animation. 

[Sphere]

It has not helped at all with the lag? But I heard about instances where the whole server would freeze up if you approached a base and had all the guns shoot.

[Krizdug]

Quote

 

  The one's who have had thousands of turrets on their base AND have still been raided and wiped know more than anyone that 100 turrets simply is NOT enough.

 

 

 

 

So no matter what you have turret wise on a base if somebody has the time/will it’s gonna get raided...so we might as well have a cap on it and reduce lag.

[DarthaNyan]

On 12/23/2017 at 9:21 PM, iAmE said:

There is no such thing. No base ever created in the history of Ark is unraidable. 

There were and probably still are some bases that are impossible to raid. Because they are under the mesh/world.

On 12/23/2017 at 9:27 PM, isu said:

Stegos are still OP like a hell, even with heavy turrets:

 

 

So many rock golems on passive when they could have contributed to base defense...

[Daedros]

Lol, yeah. One whistle, and those passive Therizinos would've torn apart the Stegos. Therizinos ignore most Armor and Damage Reduction.

[VoidScape]

Nothing in Ark is forever. Even in PvE someone will find a way to trash your base. lol

[Mortus]

I feel like the ease of crafting c4 charges and how easily they destroy metal structures have led to a meta that is heavily biased toward active defences, IE turrets. Base structures even metal ones are weak, very weak, so much so that unless heavily constrained by terrain an attacker that is fairly equipped can blow through a bases defences at any point they choose with ease, meaning the only effective base designs currently are those that have as many turrets as possible on all sides, walls seem to only exist in the current meta to prevent sniping and not to be any significant obstacle to attackers getting  close to base structures.

What I propose is a system of Fortifying structures. All static structures would have 10 levels of fortification, this means foundations, pillars, all wall and ceiling panels, etc. To add to a components fortification one would add additional material to that component one placed and would gain an additional 50% base HP and 5% explosives resistance per level thus fortified structures could then require significant effort to blow into and/or wipe away completely. If should be mentioned that gates, doors, windows and all structures that open would not be able to be fortified, these would remain weak points so even mega alpha tribes that can grind metal and cementing paste for days and fully fortify every last piece of their base structure would still have a level of vulnerability. This will now mean you can more strategic build your base fortifying some areas to use primarily passive defences while focussing more of your active defences around more vulnerable parts of the base such as doors and gates, or setting up kill zones in an attackers approach. If this is true I would hope that base designs become more clever and not so much just who gets to the most defensible places first, or who has the most c4.