Is Ark dying ?

[Mariasviel]

i dont think so 

[Sphere]

I wouldn't say this game is dying. I would say all games are dying. Because we are dealing with an attention economy. There is a literal sea of games, and all of them are competing for your time and money. This game is a time sink, and it's also a bit costly to get into as well. This is why I setup a server cluster that allows you to take your time playing, you can walk away and come back, and your dinosaurs are still there. 25 days on dinosaurs instead of 7. 0.6x on food consumption, instead of 1x on officials. The reality is, there is only so many hours a day that you can play, and you also got to pay your bills and go to work. The reality is not so much that this game is dying, it's just that there isn't enough time to play, and new games are coming out all the time.

[GP]

12 hours ago, Brayn said:

It may not correlate to ARK having a diminishing player base... but it must say something.  I used to come to the forums or reddit around 10am EST (start of work day) and scan the first 3 pages.  I'd probably reply to a few posts on here and on reddit.  The next I'd check would be around 1pm (lunchish) and the first three pages would pretty much be full of new posts or new replies.  Any of my replies would be down on page 2-4.  Today, we're lucky to see a full new page of players posting every day.

The game has been around for the past 3 years, and the forum has been around since Dec 2015. Every game and forum that goes with it will see a drop ion activity, a drop in people posting on forums after 3 years, it is nothing unique to ARK, it is natural for any game and community.

12 hours ago, Brayn said:

As for "go to unofficials"... it's not that easy.  There's a TON of unofficials to choose from and most of them are bunk.  The 50x servers are just not my thing.  The reasonable rate servers seem to all be super low pop.  Sure you can play on them, but after a month it gets incredibly boring.

The problem there is not the unofficial servers having low pop, it's the players looking for high pop unofficial servers, they are the problem, those people. A lot of people will look at multiple unofficial servers and dismiss it because it has too low pop.... well if everyone did that then all unofficial servers would be too low pop. What unofficial servers need is for people to give them a chance, and by doing that they are automatically a part of making it grow to a high pop server. But of course not, most people see small numbers and move on because they expect to find an already developed community on a unofficial server without them making an effort to help it reach that point.

[OttoGrunf]

25 minutes ago, GP said:

he problem there is not the unofficial servers having low pop, it's the players looking for high pop unofficial servers, they are the problem, those people. A lot of people will look at multiple unofficial servers and dismiss it because it has too low pop.... well if everyone did that then all unofficial servers would be too low pop. What unofficial servers need is for people to give them a chance, and by doing that they are automatically a part of making it grow to a high pop server. But of course not, most people see small numbers and move on because they expect to find an already developed community on a unofficial server without them making an effort to help it reach that point.

problem with unofficial servers is that server browser sucks, big time. you cant filter servers regarding mods, rates, etc. also, unofficials cant match official cluster influx of new people on server, migrations. and last thing, experienced players get bored fast. ark was growing when they continued to add new animals and maps every month or so. now its stagnating content wise and bugfixes are too slow

[ForzaProiettile]

3 hours ago, SlipperySquid said:

This is from someone who was in ThePolice back in the old legacy servers that owned 131 that had over 300 people in our tribe during the raid

 

Breeding hands down killed ark PvP there is no question in my mind. It is a great part of ark and i get why the developers did it however it does not promote healthy game play for PvP.  How could breeding do all this you ask? Well let me explain <3.

 

1) Complete removal of OW Once you tame lots of dinos you start working on your breeding lines so you go out less in to the wild. Less open world PvP means less PvP encounters thus making it PvE with a side of zerging or offline raiding(acceptable strategies). While it is true these are both viable strategies of war they are not a healthy style of game play and causes more hatred then anything which turns mega tribes in to best options for defending tactic warriors. How do you defend against 66 people vs 4. You take the server down till you have more numbers. This in the long run means you rarely have to leave your base to tame more dinos to replenish your army.

2) The little guy can not beat breeding it is an endless supply of dinos that keeps the alpha on top where they would of been regardless of breeding being implemented. What this does do unlike the previous style with no breeding it makes people think they have no way of getting back at the group that wiped them. Which is totally 100% true. If we wiped a small tribe what can they do against 100-400 man alliances? Its not like they can dwindle dino numbers down since majority of mega tribes are on base defense duty. They also use the tactic kill 1 dino i replace it with 30. This turns in to a large issue for smaller tribes. 

3) Time investment - Since breeding 500 dinos all 100% imprinted to you takes a large amount of time your so invested in what happens to this dino it becomes especially apparent when players lose all their imprints wasting 100s if not 1000s of hours caring for your blood lines. Losing your character tilts you so hard because 1000s of hours lost in an instant.

These are the 3 major factors that make breeding the worst thing for Ark PvP. 

I could go on and on about breeding but it honestly is an awesome aspect of the game but it is not designed for PvP. All in all you have to make the little guys want to stay in the game and not quit as they are usually the ones quitting due to feeling useless. 

 

Next on my list of Hates that made me quit Ark

 

Alliances/Tribe limits  Let me start with something important first. I do believe the game is better played at at least 30v30 or even 20 v 50 it really lets dinos and foot soldiers shine in their roles. However the game can not handle it it does need to be scaled down. The alliance system was added in to the game back when the game had no server transfers so it is almost a 100% useless idea in the current meta/tribe set ups. All in all if you capped tribes at 20 and had no alliance system you would have to rely on what you have built to be ample defense not what others can bring in to your base when you are being raided.

Some very good points. Yes breeding has benefited mostly the larger tribes and as you say it also leads to less PVP encounters. The same is true for flyers especially with the introduction of the Quetz. People that use the Quetz to mine have little risk of PVP encounters.

In terms of large tribes and alliances I wouldn't have a problem with 30 player tribes if the servers could hold 200 people but they are all limited to 70. Its just not fair for one tribe to have that many players, it completely ruins PVP for everyone else since no one else has a realistic chance of playing on an even footing.

BTW I used to play on 131 ages. Back when there was 5 main tribes Mohawkies, The Crew,  Salvation Army  and Happy Tribe and End of Tether on there. The days when Schism still made videos. This was late 2015 early 2016. We then went off to different servers when transfers opened up and finally returned to 131 again in 2017 when we noticed the Alpha tribe on there some Malaysian tribe was really noob. We actually fought you guys quite a lot over that time. Not real big battles just sort of guerrilla actions mostly. Shooting you guys mining and killing tames where we could. One time we were raiding a base and one of you guys showed up on a Quetz naked spyglassing us. He quickly died and we stabbed the Quetz and then Wyverns inevitably showed up but didn't manage to find us.

One of my buddies solo raided one of your dragon bases on foot. It had a lot turrets but it was so poorly designed that he could sprint under the base which was on pillars and survive wearing primitive flak. He broke inside which also had internal turrets but because some of the dinos inside were on neutral he was able to use them to block the turrets and then take them out one by one. He ended up taking out 3 imprinted wyvens, he got them really low then killed them all at once By the time the emergency response got there he was already out of the building. I remember your leader Raiden went off in chat for an hour about it. He was very salty but then again I would be too if I lost 3 high level Wyverns to guy on foot with a pike.

Now that was an example of really small tribe (3 players total) attacking a larger one but again it was limited what damage we could actually inflict. We couldn't hit your main base because it was always very active so the next best thing was to harass you and hit bases that were not as active. Later on you guys ended up clearing every tree on the map with foundations which made it impossible for us to hide our little bases so we ended up moving to other servers. 

[Guest DJRone89]

17 minutes ago, GP said:

The game has been around for the past 3 years, and the forum has been around since Dec 2015. Every game and forum that goes with it will see a drop ion activity, a drop in people posting on forums after 3 years, it is nothing unique to ARK, it is natural for any game and community.

The problem there is not the unofficial servers having low pop, it's the players looking for high pop unofficial servers, they are the problem, those people. A lot of people will look at multiple unofficial servers and dismiss it because it has too low pop.... well if everyone did that then all unofficial servers would be too low pop. What unofficial servers need is for people to give them a chance, and by doing that they are automatically a part of making it grow to a high pop server. But of course not, most people see small numbers and move on because they expect to find an already developed community on a unofficial server without them making an effort to help it reach that point.

It’s for that reason alone why it’s difficult for new servers to gain population. I started hosting almost 2 years ago and had the advantage of the game still being relatively new so there were a lot less servers to choose from, meaning people were more inclined to join. People just truly don’t understand how hard hosting can be i.e. gaining/maintaining population.

I have had a lot of instances where people would join without fully reading the server advertisement properly, expecting something else, and ultimately wasting both of our time in the process. So that’s something admins/hosts have to deal with too.

As for searching for an unofficial of their liking, people aren’t prepared to use all available channels and make huge accusations that all servers have ridiculously high rates instead of taking their time to actually search for low rates.

 

[Guest DJRone89]

48 minutes ago, OttoGrunf said:

problem with unofficial servers is that server browser sucks, big time. you cant filter servers regarding mods, rates, etc. also, unofficials cant match official cluster influx of new people on server, migrations. and last thing, experienced players get bored fast. ark was growing when they continued to add new animals and maps every month or so. now its stagnating content wise and bugfixes are too slow

People looking for unofficials expecting them to match the official experience will have a bad time. People wanting to try the unofficial experience without the official perception tend to find what they are looking for much much easier.

I mentioned in a reply to GP that many people aren’t prepared to use all available channels to find servers either. There are multiple sources to choose from based on your platform. This site is one, then there are many subreddits, server advert sites, discord, Facebook groups, and for Xbox alone there are countless clubs/LFGs that are built into the XBL community browser on the console itself.

[SlipperySquid]

1 hour ago, ForzaProiettile said:

Some very good points. Yes breeding has benefited mostly the larger tribes and as you say it also leads to less PVP encounters. The same is true for flyers especially with the introduction of the Quetz. People that use the Quetz to mine have little risk of PVP encounters.

In terms of large tribes and alliances I wouldn't have a problem with 30 player tribes if the servers could hold 200 people but they are all limited to 70. Its just not fair for one tribe to have that many players, it completely ruins PVP for everyone else since no one else has a realistic chance of playing on an even footing.

BTW I used to play on 131 ages. Back when there was 5 main tribes Mohawkies, The Crew,  Salvation Army  and Happy Tribe and End of Tether on there. The days when Schism still made videos. This was late 2015 early 2016. We then went off to different servers when transfers opened up and finally returned to 131 again in 2017 when we noticed the Alpha tribe on there some Malaysian tribe was really noob. We actually fought you guys quite a lot over that time. Not real big battles just sort of guerrilla actions mostly. Shooting you guys mining and killing tames where we could. One time we were raiding a base and one of you guys showed up on a Quetz naked spyglassing us. He quickly died and we stabbed the Quetz and then Wyverns inevitably showed up but didn't manage to find us.

One of my buddies solo raided one of your dragon bases on foot. It had a lot turrets but it was so poorly designed that he could sprint under the base which was on pillars and survive wearing primitive flak. He broke inside which also had internal turrets but because some of the dinos inside were on neutral he was able to use them to block the turrets and then take them out one by one. He ended up taking out 3 imprinted wyvens, he got them really low then killed them all at once By the time the emergency response got there he was already out of the building. I remember your leader Raiden went off in chat for an hour about it. He was very salty but then again I would be too if I lost 3 high level Wyverns to guy on foot with a pike.

Now that was an example of really small tribe (3 players total) attacking a larger one but again it was limited what damage we could actually inflict. We couldn't hit your main base because it was always very active so the next best thing was to harass you and hit bases that were not as active. Later on you guys ended up clearing every tree on the map with foundations which made it impossible for us to hide our little bases so we ended up moving to other servers. 

I know of nothing of the old old days of 131 i met up with these guys on an unofficial server. I started on primitive servers and my tribe there was in the 100s as well.

I think your story is exactly what i mean. Those 3 imprinted wyverns were nothing compared to the 200+ we had over on our SE server which was where we kept all our breeding dinos and what not. Not to mention the 50+ eggs we had stored up at any given time. So who ever lost those 3 wyverns probably ended up putting 9 eggs down. The quetz as well we probably had 30 odd weight quetz imprinted to many different people within the tribe.

 

My question is did you have fun did you feel like you were doing damage to us/slowing our progress down? Maybe i am wrong and smaller guilds can still have fun. I assume all this happened before we joined the big alliances.

[mafdet]

20 hours ago, davidcostarica said:

there 3 more platforms besides steam.

With over 150 official servers going down on Xbox that is a pretty good indication that numbers are dropping there as well

[Guest DJRone89]

4 minutes ago, mafdet said:

With over 150 official servers going down on Xbox that is a pretty good indication that numbers are dropping there as well

Legacy servers losing population isn’t a true indication as people may just be switching to the standard official cluster. However I’d expect the reason for the latest great migration is to make room for the new specialty servers, any to save for any future server releases. I don’t recall Wildcard buying any more servers since the first great migration, meaning all future servers will be repurposed legacy ones to save money.

[jpcab]

8 hours ago, DJRone89 said:

Not everyone plays official.

Well to play with 10x or 50x i prefer play sims. Its official who will determinate if game is still strong or not

[GP]

3 minutes ago, jpcab said:

Well to play with 10x or 50x i prefer play sims. Its official who will determinate if game is still strong or not

It's odd that people that are so against unofficials always state unofficials as being 10x or 50x or 100x.

It really goes to show you know nothing about unofficial servers.

[Guest DJRone89]

15 minutes ago, GP said:

It's odd that people that are so against unofficials always state unofficials as being 10x or 50x or 100x.

It really goes to show you know nothing about unofficial servers.

It’s even worse that the same people quoting that all unofficials have such high rates, actually put off the people who want to play unofficial because that’s what they think they will see.

[ForzaProiettile]

1 hour ago, SlipperySquid said:

I know of nothing of the old old days of 131 i met up with these guys on an unofficial server. I started on primitive servers and my tribe there was in the 100s as well.

I think your story is exactly what i mean. Those 3 imprinted wyverns were nothing compared to the 200+ we had over on our SE server which was where we kept all our breeding dinos and what not. Not to mention the 50+ eggs we had stored up at any given time. So who ever lost those 3 wyverns probably ended up putting 9 eggs down. The quetz as well we probably had 30 odd weight quetz imprinted to many different people within the tribe.

 

My question is did you have fun did you feel like you were doing damage to us/slowing our progress down? Maybe i am wrong and smaller guilds can still have fun. I assume all this happened before we joined the big alliances.

We had fun yes it was quite exciting being chased around the map. I remember one particular occasion where we had attacked a smaller tribe on a BLDX server. It must have been allied with them because a guy on Wyvern suddenly showed up and landed outside then hopped off it and started talking voice chatting the guy from that tribe.  We waited in the nearby trees for the right moment then shot him, then proceeded to pike the Wyvern to death. After that for the next 20 minutes we were running around the nearby jungle as pretty much everyone in the mega tribe showed up on flyers and started barrel rolling randomly into trees and trying to pick us. The adrenaline rush was something incredible.

Our main aim really was to create I guess a state of fear. We would quite deliberately attack tribes that we saw typing in global knowing that they'd be online and be sure to give us a mention when were shooting up their base. We didn't try and hide our tribe name either we always used the same tribe name across all the servers we went to so that people would instantly recognise us when they were killed or saw us. It worked so well that we'd simply walk past someone's base and they'd be shouting in global that we are at there base then you guys or one of the other megas would show up but we were long gone by then.

The only bases we didn't try hitting were the alphas/megas main base because having been in a few megas myself generally there was always someone online watching over it. Everywhere else though we would have a decent crack. It was actually surprising how many bases of mega tribes were badly designed. In a lot of cases we'd use their own tames against them. Many times we'd shoot a tamed bronto and have it move to where we wanted which was right infront of the turrets then we would simply walk past and blow a hole in. Another trick was turret kiting. One player would make the turrets point at them while the other would quickly rush under it or past them to get to a place where they could take them out safely.

In terms of damage for 3 guys who didn't use dinos and ran around with prim flak and longnecks I like to think we cut above our weight for damage output, obviously 3 players isn't going to take out a mega but we did our best to keep them on their toes whenever we joined a megas server. Megas in my my opinion do make the game less fun whether your a member grinding away all day long or someone fighting one. For a small tribe to try and fight these giant groups you never stand a chance. Sure players can run around guerrilla style like we did but realistically you aren't ever going to make much of a dent to a mega tribe. The alliance thing doesn't help either. Sometimes we'd go onto a server and discover that basically everyone on that server were allied. Sometimes it would be 6-10 tribes all allied up which I always thought was quite pathetic on a so called PVP server.

I've played the game since a week after its first release back in 2015 and I must those few months were still the most fun. Everyone for the most part played in small to medium tribes, there wasn't breeding and dinos were not super death machines they are today. The max dino was level 30 so players on foot still had a decent chance vs someone on a dino to win where was now a days even a tamed wolf can nearly kill you in 1 hit even when you have flak armor on. 

[SlipperySquid]

1 hour ago, ForzaProiettile said:

 

I've played the game since a week after its first release back in 2015 and I must those few months were still the most fun. Everyone for the most part played in small to medium tribes, there wasn't breeding and dinos were not super death machines they are today. The max dino was level 30 so players on foot still had a decent chance vs someone on a dino to win where was now a days even a tamed wolf can nearly kill you in 1 hit even when you have flak armor on. 

I think foot soldiers play a crucial role in PvP however i do not think in a dino game they should be the main show. I think what you are saying here showcases how far the game has became being a Dinosaur survival game.

I feel currently both Dinos and foot soldiers do have a role to play in tribal war. Someone on foot can set up traps to lure in X or Y dino to catch them in traps so that your dinos can pounce and so on. Maybe even set up some C4 traps and other things along those lines.

 

If you came to a server on foot do you feel like you could do the same things with the new turrets? Or do you feel like there is no room in the current game/meta for smaller tribes to have that experience anymore? I personally do not feel there is room for the little guy anymore however from reading your stories maybe their is still that niche.

[Alduroth1984]

23 hours ago, ForzaProiettile said:

Unofficial has these exclusive features though:

• Lots of rules that don't make sense or fall into a grey zone.
  • "Don't do excessive damage when raiding". Lots of servers have this poorly defined rule.
• Lots of rules that can't be enforced.
  • Rules such as "You may not build within 200 metres of another base". Good luck measuring that
• Admins that blatantly cheat
• Servers that disappear overnight
• Admins that will ban you even if you don't break any rules but simply because your making people leave their server. Had this happen twice so far.
• Pseudo "PVP" servers that actually play like PVE servers due to thousands of rules on everything.

In addition they also suffer from:

• Under meshing
• Lag - especially on servers with increased rates
• Hackers. There are some servers that have BattleEye disabled.

In terms of the game dying according to Steam Charts it has indeed been losing a steady stream of players each month for the last 4 months. Then again it is approaching 3 years old and most games this old tend to lose players.

http://steamcharts.com/app/346110

 

Hyperboles everwhere....

"Don't do excessive damage when raiding", boils down to, "Only blow in/blow up stuff needed to get the loots". (Pretty common sense, IMO.)

200 meter distance (Do you have the server name for this one?)

Servers cost money to rent, or people lose interest, either way, it happens.

So admins are banning people because an individual or group is forcing people off of their server that they want to keep growing, strange....

Most unofficial servers run like, "Don't mess with me I don't mess with you". or generally people who want a wholesome raid/pvp experience instead of the, "It moves, it dies, KoS" mentality that you have on official servers.

I also hate to say, that I don't believe ANY server has, "Thousands of rules".

I feel like you've had a few bad experiences, or are crying wolf, because from what I have experienced people who complain most of the time, we're part of the problem they are complaining about.

Take care, and not all unofficial servers should be lumped together, and the really bad ones should be reported.

[MandaBear]

Even though I quit playing last year, I have still watched these forums just to see what is going on from week to week because I use to love this game. A lot has changed since then and a huge amount of people have left for many reasons. The way I personally see it is that you shouldn't count on anything changing and you will be much better off. If you do not like officials the way they are now, then do some research on unofficial. If unofficial is not right for whatever reason, then maybe its time to find a game that makes you happier until either 1. you lose interest in ever returning or 2. something changes that makes you willing to give it another shot. After enough people follow that path in the game, the developers will change their course (as it seems they have been trying to do these past few weeks) and start to make changes to hopefully bring some popularity back to a game that is no longer new by any means. 

[TracerBee]

Yes, ARK is dying.

Look at the facts, when i first started playing this game on 2015, used to have over 100k players easy everyday, was top 3 games on steam for over a year and now it's barely hitting 50k players on PC.

This is because of the bugs that destroy hundreds of hours, not pvp, the bugs.  All of my old friends no longer play this game.

And it is WAAAAAY worse for ps4 and xbox, you can check ARK's official tweets history, you can see every single person complaining about xbox and ps4, regarding server rollbacks, etc, etc. So their population must be waaay down when compared to PC.

And to add to the fact that PVP has never been balanced since the very begining, i.e the server limit, during an attack, enemy instantly joins your server and fills it up and basically offline raids you while we have over 300 players trying to help us defend, who have to be on JOIN SIMULATOR. A queue system for joining servers has been asked since the very beginning but the devs completly ignored it, along with alot of other suggestions since the begining and they're now moving on to their last expansion and ending this game.

I dont play this game as much as i used to, only reason i still have it on my PC is because of my friends, i chill out once in awhile but that's pretty much it.

 

 

Edit: If you're wondering about the bugs, the one that pissed me off the most is when ARK was officially released, i started on new cluster, spent over 100 hours breeding rexes, farming good saddles, gear, all high end for boss runs. And when we activated the terminal, all the dinos got teleported in and all the players were left out, was a complete waste, one of the many bugs i've experienced.

[Faint]

On consoles you see always over 10 ppl online per server,  but yeah,  bugs and player's toxicity made it not fun for many like you.

[Kuwegg]

On 5/21/2018 at 7:13 PM, GP said:

Yeah there's a downturn, we've seen it before with ARK, it goes down then goes back up. Sure the downturn right now is probably the biggest downturn ARK has seen on Steam but that doesn't mean it's dying.

Look at PUBG http://steamcharts.com/app/578080#All

People went crazy about the massive numbers it was seeing, but then since February it's been going down fast, doesn't mean its dying.

The thing is, this happens with ALL games. The longer a game is out the more the numbers will drop, you can't expect numbers to keep going up for a game that's been in existence for several years. New games will come out, people will play the new games, doesn't mean they will stop playing ARK entirely, but their play time would of course drop, but that's normal for gamers.

Look at when Conan got official release, there were people making statements that they are quitting ARK and moving to Conan, or people saying Conan's coming out RIP ARK. They said it as if it was anything special, but in reality it doesn't matter what new games come out, there will always be a lot of people that move to new games and either stop playing older games or reduce the time they play on them. This is nothing unique to ARK, nor is it anything new in the history of gaming.

Some people just see a decline in numbers, like on Steam, and claim the game is dying. But it's just going through a natural process of what all games will go through at some point through their lifecycle. Don't forget a lot of people have played ARK on Steam now for 3 years next month, why do you expect that all those would still be playing the game after 3 years of new games? People move on for whatever reason, so what, no need to keep claiming its dying as if the situation here is unique to ARK.

So losing players overtime is not dying?

[ProVoke]

Ark is definitely not dying, steam stats will prove that.

[LouSpowells]

5 hours ago, TracerBee said:

Yes, ARK is dying.

Look at the facts,

 

1 hour ago, Kuwegg said:

So losing players overtime is not dying?

Shut up. Both of you.

http://steamcharts.com/app/346110#3m

It's amazing to me how the same statistics and data are available to everyone, but some people are completely oblivious...as if they're purposely remaining ignorant. If I didn't know any better I'd think people are childishly making things up because they have a bone to pick.

Fact: Ark has maintained a fairly consistent average playerbase over 3 years, with ebbs and flows that follow major updates and DLC's. Anyone is welcome to provide statistics that conflict with this data...but they won't because contradicting data doesn't exist outside the frail egos of the vengeful attention-seekers here.

[Lucian]

Thanks. I was just about to post the link to the charts myself. 

Its amazing how many times this topic comes up over the years. The numbers dropped rapidly about a month ago then settled down. You know what happened? Conan launched and lots of people went and played it.

It happened when Fallout 4 came out, when Conan had its EA launch, and several other times. Some people go play another game for a while. I took a six month break myself. As far as the forums go, the game is more mature so the forums drop.

 

[flamron]

49 minutes ago, LouSpowells said:

 

Shut up. Both of you.

http://steamcharts.com/app/346110#3m

It's amazing to me how the same statistics and data are available to everyone, but some people are completely oblivious...as if they're purposely remaining ignorant. If I didn't know any better I'd think people are childishly making things up because they have a bone to pick.

Fact: Ark has maintained a fairly consistent average playerbase over 3 years, with ebbs and flows that follow major updates and DLC's. Anyone is welcome to provide statistics that conflict with this data...but they won't because contradicting data doesn't exist outside the frail egos of the vengeful attention-seekers here.

A clear downturn for the last 3 months is taking place unlike any other pattern based on this chart. But sure...

[LouSpowells]

Just now, flamron said:

A clear downturn for the last 3 months is taking place unlike any other pattern based on this chart. But sure...

 

Anyone can cherry pick data to represent whatever biased narrative they choose, and it works even better if they dismiss all relevant variables like you're doing...but that's why professional analysts don't base their conclusions solely on a 3 month period without considering any outside variables.

You are looking for evidence to support your opinion while purposely avoiding taking into consideration large collection of data, variables and trends available to you. Unfortunately for your narrative, that's not how analysis works. (As an aside, while your "last 3 months" reference is potent for confirmation bias, the short-sighted point would have been far better executed if you said "Past 5.5" months. In the past 3 months the game has lost ~7.5k players, but if you include the previous month *gasp* that number is 17.5k players. OMG!!! That's a far better misrepresentation of the data than you provided, don't you think?)

Someone who studies, analyzes, and translates data for a living would approach it much differently. Someone like that would probably start by looking at pre-Aberration (November 2017) numbers of roughly 34k average active players on Steam. Then they'd probably note that the release of Aberration saw an increase in average players from 34k average players to a post-release peak 49k average two months later. That would be an increase of 15k players making it the second highest influx of active players in the history of the game, along with being the second highest average Ark has ever seen. In the 6 months since the release, trends indicate the novelty of the new DLC wore off, and Ark average daily players have reached the pre-Aberration release numbers of ~34k...which going through trends over the years can be considered the core of the Ark player base. (Non-fairweather players)

This is when the outside variables come into play. As Lucian stated, Conan Exiles was released at the beginning of this month. It's been a long anticipated and self-described Ark competitor that has drawn the interest of many Ark players during its early access development process...and if you weren't expecting Ark numbers to drop when Conan Exiles was released then you have business providing an analysis anyway. 

Point being, as of now there isn't nearly enough evidence suggesting that the game is dying...digest on that a bit.