When are the changes for Alpha Raptors going to occur?

[Iint]

 

45 minutes ago, CaptainRaa said:

47 minutes ago, CaptainRaa said:

I've played 3k hours and started over many times in a lot of spots and apart from early on alphas have alway become prey for me. On 2x you can tame a mid lvl t Rex on the side of a mountain with a crossbow and a ptera and leave him in your base on neutral and he will take care of raptors. I hunted alpha raptors and killed them with high lvl pteras so I could get the loot. And just kite the rexes and Carnos away. Also build on cliffs not on low flat. It's really not that hard. Sure you will take some knocks but my base is full of alpha Rex trophies. You guys need to harden up.

Oh and none of my base is metal

On topic:  I agree alphas are a pain when starting out, I really enjoy them though.  They create these little mini-events, and break up the same old dino spawns.  I understand them killing your tames isn't fun though, when I was starting out after i put dino gates around my base I also put up a few Plant species X that could shoot over the walls from the top of my base.  That cut out the alpha problems, they will run away when being attacked by something they can't reach.

[CaptainRaa]

 
 

Yeah sorry to come across like that I just get sick of people wanting the devs to change the game coz something in it killed them or their tames. FAILURE TO ADAPT IS TO DIE.

[Iint]

I agree, challenging is fun sometimes.  But i do remember starting out an alpha raptor camping my base and killing me over and over every time I spawned.  That.... Not so fun. 

[Milsurp]

To you both, hard to survive means challenges that you have the tools to overcome, not lightning that strikes you dead without warning if you're unlucky. Also you two need to remember you don't get to judge new players through a veteran player lens. The New Player Experience is officially supposed to teach players how to play the game well before they get to face serious threats, so they have the tools to overcome those threats *if they use them well*. Ark doesn't have jack crap for NPE, it's pathetic compared to other games which also start you off with nothing and that's half the problem.

The other half is the excessive force thrown at players via alphas and other dinos they can't handle before they've learned how, apparently to fake a sense of difficulty instead of creating real difficulty. Saying that *with the knowledge of a veteran player* those challenges are not difficult confirms that the sense of difficulty is fake. Any well-constructed game will challenge new and veteran player equally all the way through. The new player will just take longer to progress as they're learning how. That's how a good game works, and I wish to crap Ark was built as a good game.

FYI I've spent several dozen hours rebalancing Ark to actually FEEL like a survival game. Players have to try fairly hard to stave off death due to starvation and exposure in the early levels, will only be getting by adequately with metal tools and absolutely need dino friends to ramp up their progression and have some chance of feeling safe while they build up to going out adventuring. And that's on Ragnarok, which is an easy map. So I'm feeling I got it fairly right (although it's been a major PITA to tune resource gathering against Ark's Monty Haul approach).

But you know what my config doesn't have? ALPHAS. It doesn't need them to challenge the player and make them try. I just wish I had the time to dig into the behavior trees and make dinos actually act like dinos, then it would be a very decent survival config. As it is, it's just way better than vanilla. 

Long story short, y'all aren't being fair to the OP and y'all don't know how good survival games work. Sorry but there it is. 

[DarthaNyan]

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

Any well-constructed game will challenge new and veteran player equally all the way through.

That fallacy (or entitlement) doesn't apply to all game genres equally. Survival game is a survival game - nightmare for new players (although in ARK's case you can tweak "difficulty" any way you want and play single player) and a cakewalk for seasoned ones.

Lets take another "survival" game as example - Don't Starve: if you are new and don't know what something is or what it does then you'll probably die, while "veteran" players dont have any troubles at all. Are you implying that it is poorly constructed game as well?

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

The New Player Experience is officially supposed to teach players how to play the game well before they get to face serious threats, so they have the tools to overcome those threats *if they use them well*.

A low/mid level (battle)trike dispatches alpha raptors easily thanks to huge knockback - tool that is easy to get and use.

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

Players have to try fairly hard to stave off death due to starvation and exposure in the early levels, will only be getting by adequately with metal tools and absolutely need dino friends to ramp up their progression and have some chance of feeling safe while they build up to going out adventuring.

Sounds like a proper survival game to me.

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

And that's on Ragnarok, which is an easy map.

That what "veteran" players say, because map is abundant with resources from both TheIsland and SE.

But it is WAY harder for new-ish players compared to TheIsland imo and there are several reasons for that.

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

But you know what my config doesn't have? ALPHAS.

But it has. You can disable or substitute spawn of any dino with another by properly configuring .ini files.

 

3 hours ago, Milsurp said:

Long story short, y'all aren't being fair to the OP and y'all don't know how good survival games work. Sorry but there it is. 

Carebear (no offense)...

[Juggernaut]

Set up some plant x or make double walled gates if they bother you. Can't make the game a cupcake. Use your imagination and survival ideas. 

[KILLOTRONJEDI]

Tip: if you are going to build a fence out of Dino gates(which isn’t the safest option) use fence foundations to snap them all together in a cohesive wall,not just a bunch of things put next to each other

[danjocon]

Alpha raptors can be easily killed with no tames. All you have to do is kite it into the ocean far enough away from the shore with a raft and bow and then jump in and pike it to death. If you want to talk about a challenge try back in the day when gigas could spawn anywhere on the center, and finding out that your little hit on the beach was right next to a gigs spawn.

[ChuckNorrisTheOrginal]

I solved the issue with the Alpha by moving my tames to the back side of the base.  I also grow a couple species X plants.  My base was pretty good until a player with a dragon from another server transferred to mine and completely obliterated my base.  He even destroyed all my workstations leaving my structures empty.  I pretty much quit after that, I played a few more times but I just raided other players then called it quits.  Here is the real irony, the player who destroyed my base for sport will one day complain about the low population on the servers and the lack of players to play with.  

[LouSpowells]

5 hours ago, ChuckNorrisTheOrginal said:

I solved the issue with the Alpha by moving my tames to the back side of the base.  I also grow a couple species X plants.  My base was pretty good until a player with a dragon from another server transferred to mine and completely obliterated my base.  He even destroyed all my workstations leaving my structures empty.  I pretty much quit after that, I played a few more times but I just raided other players then called it quits.  Here is the real irony, the player who destroyed my base for sport will one day complain about the low population on the servers and the lack of players to play with.  

No he won't. There's no shortage of people who beg for nerfs or quit when things get hard. He'll find them and send them packing too. 
 

[Glerian]

22 hours ago, Milsurp said:

Saying that *with the knowledge of a veteran player* those challenges are not difficult confirms that the sense of difficulty is fake.

Wait, are you trying to say that knowledge and experience should not make a challenge less difficult? Because I'm gonna stop you right there. Knowledge and experience should easily sort out problems that were an issue when you were less experienced and knowledgeable. You get killed, you respawn, you learn, you adapt, etc. until suddenly you aren't worried about Alphas anymore. Because you know have the know how and tools to deal with them easily. THEN you get to move on to a DIFFERENT challenge.

22 hours ago, Milsurp said:

Any well-constructed game will challenge new and veteran player equally all the way through.

No, this is silly. I actually HATE games that do something like this. Like scaling enemies. Where, as you progress the enemies throughout the game get progressively harder. Not new enemies, just the same old enemies that have higher stats. So when you run through an area you have already been, but with better gear and a higher level, it is still obnoxiously difficult. Because instead of making new challenges or creating ACTUAL difficulty, the game just lazily scales to where the battles are always the same. It's boring. I should be able to walk through the starting area like a Greek freaking God laying waste to my old foes.

Ark is different. The difficulties change and adapt depending on where the player is in the game. At first it's dinos, regular and Alpha. Then it's other players (if your pvp). Then it's tracking down and taming your REALLY good dinos, max stat rexes, therizinosaurus, etc. THEN it's the boss fights. Progressive, and different, challenges with their own difficulty that is set that become easier the stronger you become and that present with many different and varied approaches to overcome them. I would call other games fake difficult (pretty much any RPG comes to mind), but certainly not Ark.

[DeanWinchester2017]

On 12/27/2017 at 3:54 PM, Milsurp said:

How is being wrecked by a killing machine you can't stop "harder"? Hard is something you can overcome if you work at it. Alphas are totally over the top - I had to help rescue a veteran player's base from a double rex alpha spawn recently, and his dinos were kickbutt. A player that hasn't gotten to metal yet is just alpha chow. 

Just like a noob player on the beach is raptor chow when those come out. Another misguided perception that a murder machine against a stone pick is "hard" and therefore more fun lol. 

A veteran play isn't going to have problems dealing with alpha rexs unless they really don't know what they are doing. Alphas are very hard to kill without good dinos but they're not hard to deal with. Its incredibly easy to aggro them and take them somewhere else if you cant kill them. I'm guessing your definition of "veteran player" is a bit off.

[Orion]

On 12/25/2017 at 3:26 PM, ChuckNorrisTheOrginal said:

Lol, that is caveman style right there.  I might give it a try later on, I just finally tamed my first pteranodon.

 

I think the alphas may have the ability to hear my tames in the gated area.  I had a bunch of dodos jammed in a tiny enclosed wood hut and every time I log in there is usually a dino of some sort on the other side of this particular gate.  This leads me to believe the alphas and other predator dinos can hear my tames and aggro even though they cant see them.  Last time an Alpha raptor was jammed between a rock and my gate next to the dodo hut.  I moved most of my dinos behind my main structure of my base farthest from the beach and haven't had any recent problems with the Alphas.  

I'm probably going to build a perimeter in the coming days around my main keep, so hopefully that will work out.  I was actually thinking about setting up a little village surrounding my main keep with metal houses to rent to the local noobs for metal or wood etc.  A lot of the players on my server don't have too much in terms of tech,  I think I have seen maybe 2-3 metal buildings.

 

Just in case this hasn't been said by anyone else (everyone seems to love misinformation), I'll help you out here;

You're making the game out to be significantly more complex than it actually is. There is no "Line of Sight" or "Hearing Range" that Dinos abide by to detect and aggro. It's quite literally just a radius around the dino, that if anything that's in it's aggression list enters -- it will immediately hunt you. (You can test this by walking behind a Raptor, and it will aggro you once you get within a certain range of it.)

Alpha Predators of any kind of a slightly larger aggro radius than their normal counterparts.

But, again, you're over complicating it. It's just a diameter around the dino that makes up it's detection radius. Think a big circle. 

[X111]

Giga up lol

on a serious note though the island is literally crawling with alpha's and its pure enjoyment when carnivore taming, 2 gigas in 1 day with prime was a enjoyable time.

I think on one run from our blue ob base to herb island set up we came across 10 alphas (estimated), plenty of prime meat jerky for kibble.

the only thing I can think of is to build your dino gates in boxed units, its a lot of resources but it also allows for a easy taming mechanic with anything up to Yuty size.

also try and enclose your animals fully, I don't know if this is a mechanic but we found that if our walls weren't properly snapped (1 wall was on the outer snap of a foundation and 1 wall was on the inner snap) then aggressive dino's aggro'd all the time. I've built my Keep up on blue ob mountain (as close to the peak as possible) with all the correct snaps on walls and had 2 gigas stroll around the base without going nuts.

get the basics in design down correctly and life should be a dream

[Milsurp]

17 hours ago, Glerian said:

Wait, are you trying to say that knowledge and experience should not make a challenge less difficult? Because I'm gonna stop you right there. Knowledge and experience should easily sort out problems that were an issue when you were less experienced and knowledgeable. You get killed, you respawn, you learn, you adapt, etc. until suddenly you aren't worried about Alphas anymore. Because you know have the know how and tools to deal with them easily. THEN you get to move on to a DIFFERENT challenge.

No, this is silly. I actually HATE games that do something like this. Like scaling enemies. Where, as you progress the enemies throughout the game get progressively harder. Not new enemies, just the same old enemies that have higher stats. So when you run through an area you have already been, but with better gear and a higher level, it is still obnoxiously difficult. Because instead of making new challenges or creating ACTUAL difficulty, the game just lazily scales to where the battles are always the same. It's boring. I should be able to walk through the starting area like a Greek freaking God laying waste to my old foes.

Ark is different. The difficulties change and adapt depending on where the player is in the game. At first it's dinos, regular and Alpha. Then it's other players (if your pvp). Then it's tracking down and taming your REALLY good dinos, max stat rexes, therizinosaurus, etc. THEN it's the boss fights. Progressive, and different, challenges with their own difficulty that is set that become easier the stronger you become and that present with many different and varied approaches to overcome them. I would call other games fake difficult (pretty much any RPG comes to mind), but certainly not Ark.

I disagree 100% with your take on game design getting easy once you've played it. That's BAD game design, as in "the designers failed to get their product over the bar". Study up on how anything is designed and you'll find the fundamental principle of "making it as easy to use for a new person as an experienced one". But in games the point is to present a challenge, and that principle changes to "make it as challenging for a veteran player as a new one". And that's done by ensuring a new person has the same knowledge as a veteran player and has had some chance to practice before hitting a challenge which presents the risk of a serious setback (like corpse loss or dino loss). 

Also, you are bringing in a completely unrelated mechanic - level scaling - which doesn't have any relevance to what I said. Level scaling has zero to do with knowledge because every new level can bring new mechanics you've never seen before, and the scaling of enemies doesn't matter in that respect.

[Milsurp]

On 12/28/2017 at 12:53 AM, DarthaNyan said:

That fallacy (or entitlement) doesn't apply to all game genres equally. Survival game is a survival game - nightmare for new players (although in ARK's case you can tweak "difficulty" any way you want and play single player) and a cakewalk for seasoned ones.

Lets take another "survival" game as example - Don't Starve: if you are new and don't know what something is or what it does then you'll probably die, while "veteran" players dont have any troubles at all. Are you implying that it is poorly constructed game as well?

A low/mid level (battle)trike dispatches alpha raptors easily thanks to huge knockback - tool that is easy to get and use.

Sounds like a proper survival game to me.

That what "veteran" players say, because map is abundant with resources from both TheIsland and SE.

But it is WAY harder for new-ish players compared to TheIsland imo and there are several reasons for that.

But it has. You can disable or substitute spawn of any dino with another by properly configuring .ini files.

 

Carebear (no offense)...

Yes, Don't Starve is a poorly constructed game due to lack of resources and experience in game design. You're committing the fallacy of mistaking an average for a norm. "Many games pushed out have crap NPE so crap NPE is fine and anyone who complains is wrong". Subnautica is a much better example - still thin, but they walk you through how to use the tools, make sure you have a constant information source and then set you off to go do things.

Knowing how to use knockback against an alpha is gained through experience. Again you're highlighting how bad WC is at teaching people how to have fun with their game. The mechanics to deal with threats do exist but nobody's going to know about it except by trial and error or using Google. I also lol at "drowning" them because they shouldn't be swimming in the first place. Lol. 

Alphas are enabled by default. The point was the server profile I'm running is tuned to be hard in a survival sense without them. Ark has plenty of risks and rewards, it never needed over-the-top magical megadinos to add risk. It just needed the care for the user experience which I provided through server configuration and selected small Quality of Experience mods. 

Narcissistic elitist. No offense.

Also, I can't be bothered to correct the bad quoting because that's a function of the forum software, and like other software WC puts out, it doesn't work properly because nobody apparently cared enough to make it work. And it's not my job to fix it. (If it were, it WOULD be fixed. I don't let anything findable via UAT get into production.) 

[KingGalahad]

On 28/12/2017 at 8:04 AM, KILLOTRONJEDI said:

Tip: if you are going to build a fence out of Dino gates(which isn’t the safest option) use fence foundations to snap them all together in a cohesive wall,not just a bunch of things put next to each other

you can snap dino gates together without using fence foundations

[LouSpowells]

2 hours ago, Milsurp said:

I disagree 100% with your take on game design getting easy once you've played it. That's BAD game design, as in "the designers failed to get their product over the bar". Study up on how anything is designed and you'll find the fundamental principle of "making it as easy to use for a new person as an experienced one". But in games the point is to present a challenge, and that principle changes to "make it as challenging for a veteran player as a new one". And that's done by ensuring a new person has the same knowledge as a veteran player and has had some chance to practice before hitting a challenge which presents the risk of a serious setback (like corpse loss or dino loss). 

Just throwing this out there...I feel like you may have studied much different information than the bulk of game developers have for decades. Your suggestion that a developer should ensure new players have the same knowledge as veterans flies in the face of Bushnell's Law...one of the most fundamental and widely-used principles of game development. ("Easy to learn, difficult to master.") You can suggest that a player shouldn't be at risk of becoming a corpse as a beginner, but consider how many beginners died to a goomba in the first 15 steps of Super Mario Bros. 

The OP's problem is another example of this, except he has infinite lives and the ability to save progress by making a building to store his crap in...but only if he actually learns to jump over the Goomba instead of writing a hate-letter to Miyamoto demanding it be nerfed.

 

[Glerian]

On ‎12‎/‎29‎/‎2017 at 1:27 PM, Milsurp said:

I disagree 100% with your take on game design getting easy once you've played it. That's BAD game design

I think you are missing the point, or misunderstanding what I am saying, so let me clarify. The GAME doesn't get easier, per say, SPECIFIC CHALLENGES get easier, in a well constructed game. Take the critically acclaimed MediEvil game. A game that was so good that it got remade, TWICE, exactly as is with updated graphics for multiple platforms. The first boss you fight is the stained glass demon. The very first time you fight him he is super difficult to defeat, as you have relatively low health and few weapons. BUT when you come back through the area later in the game to get the chalices and face him he is really easy to kill and move on. The later game enemies and bosses are more difficult, but the older bosses, the ones you faced at the beginning of the game that gave you great difficulty, are now easier to defeat.

This is GOOD game design. It means that the developers took the time to make new and different challenges for later game play. Scaling, is when the developers are super lazy and just make the same old enemies present with higher stats. Take, as a counter point, Destiny. This is a game where the baddies just tend to be the same guys, but with higher stats. Every time you run through an area the bad guys are just as hard to defeat. Not because they are new or better, but because their health and damage scale to your own. You never make real progress. I love Destiny myself, but I love it for it's multiplayer, not slogging through the same bad guys time after time.

Ark is an example of the first one, where the challenges change as you progress through the game. Instead of lazily increasing the difficulty of the same old creatures (Alphas), the game offers new and different challenges. It is GREAT game design, where you objectives dictate difficulty. This isn't a FPS, and doesn't have an "end" per say, so expecting everything to just scale up is absurd. In the early game surviving Alphas and traversing the map are difficult. By mid game they are relatively easy, while finding and taming high level tames and getting high end gear are difficult. By late game those objectives are now easy, while breeding, leveling, and performing boss fights are difficult.

Accusing Ark of being poorly designed because one of the first challenges you face is less of a challenge as the game progresses seems mildly absurd to me.