Interesting Era idea

[Melcreif]

I've been playing Ark since about the beginning when it was first introduced on the Xbox.  I've played official and dedicated and to me dedicated has the most to offer from the standpoint that you can play the way you want to play without being dictated to by the masses.

My brother just purchased a Nitrado Server for Ragnarok with the idea that he had was to play in such a way where era's actually matter.  Meaning Thatch for awhile, then eventually moving up to wood, eventually moving up to stone, etc.  At the same time moving from stone tools to metal tools, guns, etc actually takes quite some time.  One way to accomplish this would be to set resource gathering quite low, but then it makes the game it too much of a grind.  His thought was to reduce XP increases by less than 1 for your character, making it take longer to get to the different stages of the game.  As Official stands you can literally go from Thatch to Stone in a few hours making Thatch completely irrelevant and a stage you could completely bypass.  Wood is basically the same way.

Would people find this kind of setup compelling? Or do you like the fact that you can go from nothing to stone and metal tools in a few hours?  Just an interesting idea and I wanted to see what other folks thought about that sort of setup.

[ItzGreenDawg]

Is this PvP or PVE? In pvp having to build in thatch or wood puts new players at even more of a disadvantage, in PVE all I see this causing is more grind. I see that some may want to spend more time building in those materials and using stone tools however I think this would be a very small portion of the players. As far as I can gather a lot of people move from official to dedi servers to reduce the grind, this is going the opposite direction. I would say you may find a player or two, but not very many.

[Melcreif]

So it is PvP but there won't be grind so much for building as opposed to leveling. He's also going to leave xp for killing the same just reduce it for crafting and gathering.

[ItzGreenDawg]

so that just encourages the behavior of "kill everything" more than crafting and gathering. To accomplish the stated goal of making the building periods taking longer to move to the next material type you would have to slash xp gain across the board. 

 

When I refer to the grind there are several different ways to grind, some do it to gather mats, some do it by getting tames, but the end result is the xp which rewards you with unlocking new engrams. With taking longer to unlock these engrams it results in new players to the server being at a disadvantage for a longer period of time. I hate to be a negative nelly, but I like poking holes. Perhaps a better way to accomplish this is to institute "building seasons" by turning off all engrams except the material of the week or how ever long you want to do the season. but it would only allow everyone on the server to build in that material for the stated time frame.  

[Melcreif]

Hmmm interesting idea and don't be sorry because it's exactly why I pose the question to see how others liked the stages idea. Yours is interesting and id love to hear other ideas!

[ItzGreenDawg]

Well I'm kind of a co admin for my friends server, he bounces ideas off me and I try to help him out with things. You can feel free to spit ball ideas with me too.

[ItzGreenDawg]

Another idea here would be to move the engram levels higher for the building tiers, maybe move wood to lvl 25 stone to 50 and metal to 75 and leave xp gain where it is

[Melcreif]

So we actually went with your first idea and have removed the tier items we don't want available yet. The only challenge with this approach though is by design you can't really remove Engrams on the Nitrado site, but instead you have to start from zero and add in the ones you do want. It's fairly cumbersome and slow but he's added in most of the basics and will add to that over time. Thanks for the great idea, we're enjoying it so far! The other interesting little glitch is those loot boxes that spawn on the beaches. They do have metal tools and weapons in them and they can be used for a bit but eventually disappear from your inventory which is an odd bug!

[ItzGreenDawg]

I forgot about those, but you can do custom loot drops and only include items that you want available. I haven't done it but I know that it is possible, so I don't know how intensive this is but it may be worth looking into

[Melcreif]

Yeah I know he's looking at doing the loot drops as well. We played a bit last night and it was interesting only being able to build in thatch and figure out ways to make your base dependable with that limitation. One guy built up on the land bridge at Viking bay and used rope ladders to the effect where it's virtually impossible to reach his base without fliers which nobody of course has yet. The Pteri and Argen saddles aren't added to the Engrams list yet but of course they are a level 35 Engram and nobody is close to that. My thought was go for taming a Griffin early game could be a huge advantage and no need for a saddle. This could be fun but we've got a ways to go i think to get it all ironed out!