Why don't more people play Aberration?

[anubis3691]

I just didn't like having to start over again lol. Took one of my secondary characters over, 70-80 level I forget. The struggle was just more than I cared for. Perhaps I'll give it another go in the future but as of right now still trying to accomplish other things on other maps. We had actually just started on a Ragnarok server for the first time right when in launched.

[Rufiosghost]

I don't play Aberration and have no desire to do so. I respect the map and have enjoyed some of the new stuff I can spawn into other maps (climbing picks are badass especially), but a big part of the appeal of Ark for me is dinosaurs. I like the idea of surviving in a realistic world with real prehistoric animals. Like being dropped on Isla Nublar. 

Aberration added a lot of unreal creatures and isn't a realistic world. It's just a very different feel and eliminates what drew me to the game in the first place. I'm not gonna try to convince anyone they shouldn't play it—if a mysterious sci-fi project gone wrong is their thing, they should have fun with it—but it's just not for me. 

[ChargingParacerParacer]

I didn't and won't buy it because WC has made too many decisions I disagree with that thdy stubbornly refuse to fix. Ecen if I did want it one map isn't worth 20$ it's 5$ to me at very most and the map is the only real thing you get when buying. The rest can spawn in for free.

[jlhanna2]

We like Ab.  We have a Story Ark Cluster of Island, Scorched, and Ab.  As you can imagine, the island gets played the most.  To be honest, the casual players do not like the difficulty of Scorched and Ab.  They are by far much more difficult than the island.

That's what I like about Ab.  It changes the way you have to play the game by not allowing flyers.  Map is very dynamic and offers a lot of exploring!

[CARB0N]

majority are noobs and abberation is a pVE map. once you get a grip on a server theres no getting rid of you

[Cowgirl]

Another reason I don't have much interest in playing is the map is just too 3 dimensional for me. I would get lost for hours and hours.

[MIGhunter]

Aberration is great but it had to be clustered. You can't bring stuff unless it's clustered. Tek is useless cause you need tek from other maps to use it.

As for sci-fi. We already theorized from the beginning that the arks were alien in origin

[BoneDead01]

For me I don't really like it it's a good map but if certain base locations are taken then u going to have to build in a spawn which is bad for PvP I think it's more of a map for pve players cause its more of a challenge for Pve players I stopped cause the only locations I could build at were spawns

[BoneDead01]

AB is the hardest map, hands down.  At least at first.  Until you have good crabs, a good anky (pops with 290%+ melee) and rock drakes, you're going to struggle.  Once you can spend some hours hitting the surface drops you will have an incredibly easy time.  
I can see why it isn't like and probably won't be liked.  It is a huge departure from the dino base game.  It's more sci/fi than dino game and the next expansion will be even more so.  It also has a TON of broken features and those broken features do not become evident until mid-late game.
- broken kibble tree.  There isn't kibble for every resource dino.  At least you had golems for stone and mantis for metal/flint on SE.
- there are tons of locations that glitch your character or dino in a falling animation, causing you to lose tames or spend an hour waiting to die.
- there's tons of places that glitch your dino or character under the map, causing you to lose tames or all of your gear.
- the boss fight provides very little reward for the tames required to beat it and as we've experienced, often causes the majority of your tribe to DC upon entry.  No element for completion and completing it doesn't even unlock the replicator.
- wild species Z is flat out broken on PvP, allowing a level 20 stego to offline tank an entire base.
- rock drake eggs become impossible to acquire over time due to every nest becoming glitched and not producing eggs... in addition to how glitched wild drake spawns are.  Getting mobbed by 10-15 drakes upon grabbing or moving an egg is a little ridiculous.
- most of the cool new dinos aren't breedable.
- Reaper queens flat out don't impregnate you a solid 20% of the time and it can take hours to get one to spawn above level 50.
The map itself has a lot of potential, but unfortunately it was released unfinished and suffers the same lag and other core game issues that have never been addressed.

That is also one of the reason I don't play I think it's pointless for a couple new dinos and a harder time when I can play island rag center or scorched and grow within 2 days then later when I'm bigger I can start on AB later and get more members in tht server plus there should be a better way to lure people to AB

[Turtal]

I have aberration but theres something about it just makes. Me not want to play idk why but it feels boring plus i get like 20fps on it even on low and I get 70 on other maps on medium

Sent from my RNE-L21 using SurviveTheArk Community mobile app

[Aaronwilliams]

No its because you cant play on the map EVERY WHERE is pillared and i mean EVERY WHERE (that you can build) so even if we wanted to play aberration we cant.

[GreenXemas]

There are quite a few reasons why I do not like Aberration, my friends and I were renting a server for PS4 up until about a week ago and we only played 2-3 days of Aberration before we quit:

1. My friends and I felt that there were too many Nameless.

2. I personally was extremely disappointed in the lack of breeding Reapers.. That was my biggest draw, something similar to "Aliens".

3. We also felt that the radiation zone was just too big.

4. Difficulty curve was pretty harsh.

5. Getting lost in the winding pathways, at least me and my friends did.. Idk about anybody else.

6. No importing, only exporting was another downside.

Those are all the reasons I can think of right now.

[LPTF]

13 hours ago, DarkSoul996 said:

Been glued to it since it released by now the novelty is beginning to wear off. I loved the challenge when I was new to the map and the new mechanics i.e. crab and reaper taming, glide suits etc. Now that we've gotten everything there's very little left to work towards and half the content is useless. Rockdrakes make the glide suits and climbing picks pointless now, I never found the elevators particularly useful. One good drake and a few dino gates and getting pregnant even solo is a cake walk. All that remains for my tribe to do is defeat rockwell and the engrams don't really entice me enough to want to spend the next few months breeding boss dinos. Overall I think it's an amazing map and they did a great job with it but i feel once you build up momentum you can achieve everything a little too quickly and we're a 3 man tribe on officials.

I think that post sums it up perfectly for a huge number of people out there. So many people on our server have been and gone. Our other servers were ghost towns for a while there, but now they're filling up again as people come rushing back.

Aberration is a wonderful map in terms of visuals. Absolutely magical. But in terms of game play, it sucks. Our small tribe has done everything there is to do several times over. There is almost no reason to do boss fights, as the engrams are pointless and there is zero element dropped. So what are we supposed to do? Breed the couple of crappy dinos on the map that are breedable?

Another major reason for people leaving, at least on OC servers, is lag. It's absolutely horrible. The worst I've ever seen in terms of consistent, never ending 200+ ping times that I've ever seen in more than 3k hours spent on official servers. And the worst part is that Drakes are completely broken when any kind of lag occurs. Anything above about 80 and rakes become unpleasantly glitchy and difficult to use. Above 100 and they no longer glide. Above about 120 or so and they no longer climb. All you can do is hop and glitch your way along. It's absolutely rage inducing.

Add to all of that the fact that big parts of the game on aberration are missing. Dinos wanting kibble that doesn't exist. Hugely important parts of the game like red crystals being largely impossible to harvest with dinos, and yet there's virtually no good quality picks anywhere to be found on the map. Dinos glitching into the ground all over the place.

It just feels poorly thought out and very unfinished.

And finally, Wildcard has, as usual, treated their customers with contempt by absolutely refusing to communicate with them about any of the issues or what they're doing to address them. Users would forgive almost all of the above if it was just acknowledged by Wildcard and time frames given for fixes. So, so simple, and their customer base has been SCREAMING out for it for YEARS, yet they continue to refuse to do it.

I'm so, so disappointed in Wildcard. I really wanted to believe they would get it right this time, but instead, they've gone so horribly, horribly wrong.

[Yster]

Its the same as Scorch Earth was in the beginning, then they released Ragnarok. it contains all the SE dinos and bio dome, so why bother with SE anymore? 

It was new and everyone played it.. I guess soon there will be more maps, free maps that contains all the Aberration Dinos. Ragnarok is huge.. I cant see any reason going to Aberration other than get some Dinos tamed and moved to Rag.

And Honestly.. Aberration was poorly thought out.. I mean releasing a DLC where you just copied and paste other Dino's AI.. so you'll need kibble to tame Dino's that doesnt even exist on on the map was a joke to be honest.. But .. seeing that your suppose to be able to move around maps and not only have a base on Aberration, its was acceptable I guess. We had a large kibble farm on Ragnarok, so it didn't bother us as all, but if your not playing on a official server or cluster with all the maps. that's one of many mistakes WC made. moving eggs around in the beginning. 

So if you feel like aberration is a real challenge, you never played SE when it first came out. 

[GrammatonCleric]

I've spent around 300 hours on Aberration already.

Besides what was already said by multiple players, I'm gonna add that:

1. The game crashes way too often. There are certain areas that I completely avoid because I KNOW the game is going to crash

2. The fact that WC doesn't allow players to turn off earthquakes completely is the reason I'm gonna stop playing.
Turning the camera shake slider all the doesn't change the fact that your character is still affected by the map shaking. The amount of times I've died by falling if cliffs as a result of my character continually bouncing around as a result of earthquakes is absolutely ridiculous.

3. After killing Rockwell, EVERY SINGLE TIME, you WILL despawn, lose ALL your gear, including the trophy and boss rewards, and there's no way to get it back.

It's a fun map in the beginning because of the challenges it throws at you, but I cannot forgive the devs for making it so annoying late game.

I kinda regret getting the season pass after playing aberration

[Brayn]

15 hours ago, DarkSoul996 said:

Been glued to it since it released by now the novelty is beginning to wear off. I loved the challenge when I was new to the map and the new mechanics i.e. crab and reaper taming, glide suits etc. Now that we've gotten everything there's very little left to work towards and half the content is useless. Rockdrakes make the glide suits and climbing picks pointless now, I never found the elevators particularly useful. One good drake and a few dino gates and getting pregnant even solo is a cake walk. All that remains for my tribe to do is defeat rockwell and the engrams don't really entice me enough to want to spend the next few months breeding boss dinos. Overall I think it's an amazing map and they did a great job with it but i feel once you build up momentum you can achieve everything a little too quickly and we're a 3 man tribe on officials.

For rockwell, don't bother breedig boss dinos.  All you need is 5-7 people on 15kHP, 1.5k stam rock drakes with 50ish armor saddles and 200% pump action shotguns.  Any other dino is a liability.  Shame considering we've been breeding spinos like mad for the fight.

[Cymas]

I actually didn't plan on getting Aberration but my friends did and the season pass was on sale so I figured why not.

What I like about the map:

Spinos everywhere! They're my favorite Ark animal and I've long felt they were marginalized because everything is about rex, giga, wyverns etc. Well, not anymore. Beautiful glowing spinos filling every river, so many to tame so little time. Finally it doesn't take weeks to hunt high levels for breeding.

In general I do find this map is a nice mix of the less popular animals alongside some of the classics. I do think the devs backed themselves into a corner a little bit with resource gathering animals though, which limits their choices unless they add completely new animals to replace them. This makes for a lot of redundancy which isn't bad in itself, and having the standard set of harvesters does make it a little more familiar.

Say what you will about the devs, their environment/creature designs are beautiful. The map is gorgeous and alien, always something new to look at. It makes me wish they would revisit The Island map and do another terrain update because they have gotten so much better at map building. The new creatures are well done, if not particularly balanced. I really like how they did multiple lantern pets, everyone has a favorite. I love featherlights, one tribemate adores shinehorns, and the other collects bulbdogs. We haven't seen any glowtails yet.

The story is interesting, and I get more invested in following it with every new revelation.

But, there are a lot of cons to this map:

Lack of rain and a huge majority of the map being essentially uninhabitable makes for a lot of overcrowding, especially at the lake. Competition for resources is fine on PVP, but as a PVE player I find it more of a frustration, especially when people are highly inconsiderate about their builds. I'm using the water tank "trick" just to avoid the hassle of neighbors, but it is severely limiting.

Radiation zones hamper travel and artificially raise the difficulty level; I would probably be very frustrated with this map if I didn't play a modded unofficial that lets me upgrade primitive gear. Even more baffling, the fact that some animals are immune to it and some aren't. Mostly anything that would be actually useful (ie resource gathering) is not immune, transparent as tissue paper devs.

With the mix of old and new animals and inability to transfer, the lack of an herbivore "prime" is an even more glaring flaw in gameplay than ever. The kibble tree was not revised for the Aberration map, forcing players to babysit unnecessarily long tames with very few alternative options. Also, I find it extremely annoying that Aberration does not internally display what animals are and aren't available when learning Engrams. The comparative lack of diversity on this map, while it makes sense from a lore perspective, also means players will run out of things to do fairly fast since the longevity of any map is directly tied to the creatures on it and their availability.

And the things that aren't necessarily good or bad:

The decision on what animals made the cut and what didn't is sometimes puzzling. This map would be perfect for thylas, yet they are very conspicuously absent. I know it's mainly because of rock drakes, but still. Another 5-10 different species would have been nice, this map seems much more focused than the others in that sense.

No hard hat to protect you from the rain of wild animals from above, as the AI still doesn't prevent them from walking/running off of cliffs.

Overall I think Aberration is fun but not a map to "live" on. I'm glad my unofficial is a cluster with Ragnarok, this isn't a map I can see myself spending a ton of time on long term. I guess that's fine with it being a DLC, but my standards for content are just a little bit higher than what we got.

[Thorium]

21 hours ago, KingGalahad said:

A lot of the other features while interesting just seem like fluff. The element crafting costs are ridiculous, combined with the fact you can't even take element out.

The crafting costs are fine. I allways get way more resources than i can craft into element because the nodes need to recharge. You get 3 element per crafting for resources that are pretty easy to get in large quantities. Only red gems are a little bit dangerous. But not realy a problem. For element ore, there is a large deposit in a cave in the rock drake trench, with no dino spawns at all.

For the element not transferable: I don't have that problem because i am on a unofficial cluster with ticket mod. We can transfer element. ^^

[Jrminot]

I play aberration quite a bit on my own unofficial cluster. Due to the way the map flows and it's size, I don't think it would be a very good map for large amounts of people (ie. Official). I really do enjoy it as a map though.

[Spaxx]

Because Wildcard doesnt release enough Server (the same poop with every map)! We playing since release on EU Server and now we have a 150 Ping with 200 mbit Connection and laags like hell. Try to play properly with Rock Drakes and these laags....

Not enough (pve) Server for every Map

70 Players are to much for the most Map(s)

70 Players are to much for the Hardware 

You can only trade Dinos between aberration server. We Upload a mc Ravager bp and tryed to Download it on other aberration server. At the end we even cant download it on our server where we upload it. So the bp was lost... 

[AngryGamer666]

Im playing it solo on an EU PVE map and still loving it, the tribes on our server are fairly friendly and trading is good. I've just got a bred 230 spino for 600 oil i farmed and now started exploring into the blue areas. I think as with all these maps larger tribes get bored faster because they rush to be the best too fast. I do get killed a lot which can be hard when a solo player but i have also learned to keep my armor and weapons in my spino until i need them and carry sleeping bags and campfires too

[qbddbq]

For me personally, it became impossible for me to advance through the map due to a nasty glitch which still isn't fixed. When I open the emote wheel, the light! emote isn't there, which confines me to 1/3 of the map. Unless anyone knows how to fix this, AB won't be played by me.

[Doth]

On 1/21/2018 at 3:30 AM, Brayn said:

AB is the hardest map, hands down.  At least at first.  Until you have good crabs, a good anky (pops with 290%+ melee) and rock drakes, you're going to struggle.  Once you can spend some hours hitting the surface drops you will have an incredibly easy time.  

I can see why it isn't like and probably won't be liked.  It is a huge departure from the dino base game.  It's more sci/fi than dino game and the next expansion will be even more so.  It also has a TON of broken features and those broken features do not become evident until mid-late game.

- broken kibble tree.  There isn't kibble for every resource dino.  At least you had golems for stone and mantis for metal/flint on SE.

- there are tons of locations that glitch your character or dino in a falling animation, causing you to lose tames or spend an hour waiting to die.

- there's tons of places that glitch your dino or character under the map, causing you to lose tames or all of your gear.

- the boss fight provides very little reward for the tames required to beat it and as we've experienced, often causes the majority of your tribe to DC upon entry.  No element for completion and completing it doesn't even unlock the replicator.

- wild species Z is flat out broken on PvP, allowing a level 20 stego to offline tank an entire base.

- rock drake eggs become impossible to acquire over time due to every nest becoming glitched and not producing eggs... in addition to how glitched wild drake spawns are.  Getting mobbed by 10-15 drakes upon grabbing or moving an egg is a little ridiculous.

- most of the cool new dinos aren't breedable.

- Reaper queens flat out don't impregnate you a solid 20% of the time and it can take hours to get one to spawn above level 50.

The map itself has a lot of potential, but unfortunately it was released unfinished and suffers the same lag and other core game issues that have never been addressed.

This is everything I was going to say except there are methods we found out to get impregnated 100% of the time. 

Also the charging stations are glitched so element runs take way longer than they should.

[dv8ndie]

My Island/SE/Aberration cluster players seem to prefer the Aberration server.  90% of my player base is playing on Aberration since release.  It is a great map.

[Skirpnasty]

On 1/21/2018 at 6:41 AM, Crows said:

I only play Aberration. I'm sick of the other maps purely because of Gigas, fliers, Brontos and Titans on official PvP servers. Aberration is much more balanced even though it has its vulnerabilities. 

Couldn't agree more. It is much more balanced because of the steeper difficulty. 

Simple things like just being hostile to another survivor legitimately have to be weighed for risk/reward. You can't just swoop in and out on fliers and the risk of counter attacks is actually real, because you spend a large percentage of time being vulnerable. 

Your tames actually die, often. Which means you have to be tactful about most everything you do, and continually invest time in taming and breeding. 

It's nice that the PVP is generally on a smaller scale, it feels how the game is intended to be played. Survival and protecting what you've worked for, rather than impossible odds and mega tribes wiping the servers.