Advice for the newcomer ?

[Dalkamyr]

Hey guys I'd like to have your opinion on picking a server ??

Here's the thing:

I'm lost in the sea of possibilities when it comes to ark servers. There are Soooooooooooooo many modes and maps and mods to choose from, it becomes very confusing.

My few hundreds of hours of gameplay have been on ragnarok with a few friends of mine and we mostly played pvp servers and pve servers. We generally went for servers that had reasonable harvest, breeding, taming and xp rates... Nothing too exaggerated and generally low population for better smooth play without lag. So generally like 20-40 people were online at once on those servers.

The things I loved:

- I absolutely LOVED pvp although we never did as much as I would have liked to... Often times servers had low pop, or weird rules that hindered pvp... And so very often pvp felt a lot like pve in the end
- I loved ragnarok except for atrocious lag and glitches. I hear the other maps aren't as bad. It this true?
- I really enjoyed the progression in gear/tames/base building/breeding etc... Although I always felt like the game has so much grinding, you end up not doing much pvp because it feels like it takes ages to gather up what you need to go out and actually do pvp...
- I absolutely loved the graphics of the game, it is orgasmic!!

Things I hated:

- we kept hopping from server to server which I absolutely hated. Every time I felt close to finally being ready to fight the bosses and access tek gear and stuff my friends got bored because there wasn't any pvp on our pvp server and we would change server and have to start ALL OVER again... Somehow they were never attracted to the "end game content". Although I did share in their desire for more significant pvp.
- I hated how it was soooooooooooooo hard to find a decent admin or admins for a specific unofficial server. We didn't fall on admins of the abusive type... But More of the unskilled and clueless type who would either mess up everything by adding or removing  mods on a whim screwing the astonishing beautiful base I had built... I remember a time I was building a huge tower and one morning everything got messed up because of a s+ update and all of a sudden a bunch of items were just gone from my tower... Many times the lack of diligence on the part of the admins would absolutely waste weeks worth of work...

- I NEVER played official because I only heard the negative sides of official and whenever I read the positives I'm never quite convinced.

So here are my questions I'd like answers to:

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different maps that are available according to you?
- offline raiding or no?
- clustered or no?
- servers with wipe cycle or no?
- how on God's good Earth do you find a server with FUN and regular PvP? The type of pvp encounters you'll remember in years to come... Not the we pillaged a base because their owners were "OFFLINE kind...

[SkepticXIII]

Offline Raiding is a pretty big deal in ARK ever since it started, Both on officials and Unofficials. Sometimes is good to join servers that have ORP because that guarantees you that your base will still be there when you log in next day, the downside of this tho is that if the server pop is mostly from a different timezone than yours well it becomes a PVE experience.

Clustered servers are great since you get to experience different maps and can hop in to pvp and leave. I personally hate the wipe cycle because it makes all your work on your base completely irrelevant, and about a ''FUN'' server usually its up to the player base and activity try joining a high pop server thats always a good sign.

[ForbiddenCities]

Hi Dalkamyr!

I've been playing on official pvp servers since 2015.  Throughout my game experience I've played long stints on all of the maps except Aberration.  My tribe's role/station has varied from single person hiding in a hole in the wall, to leader of an alpha tribe running a server to part of an undefeated mega alliance where I got to experience being a spy gathering intel of trolls or enemy tribes to huge battles with painful, mind-numbing lag that goes with a maxed out server.  

And my opinion at the end of the day?  

Although official does have a lot of perks - the game's timers make it so labor intense that to get anywhere you can't have much of a life.  And with turrets there's non-stop filling generators and crafting bullets.  And let's not even go into the necessary meat runs to feed the never-ending rotation of breeding animals.  While all of that gameplay can be fun, in a farmville-kind-of-way, the things that I really enjoyed where the interactions with other players and tribe mates.  When we would all try a new map out for the first time, running the labyrinth, fighting a boss for the first time, coming up with server competitions like drunk boxing or races.  But with official we didn't have enough time to do those things because of all the CONSTANT upkeep.

On the flip side- I did try PvE but hated how the maps looked with lots of builds and very little resources.  I've tried some other dedicated PvP servers but also ran into the issue where the boosts were too much and the game became boring very quickly.  The challenge of official servers is a draw yet the tediousness of the grind can drag it right back down.  And honestly I just wanted to experience something a bit different.  So I switched to Primitive Plus DLC.  

NOW- there's lots of people who hate prim+ because it's like the red-headed step child of wildcard and doesn't get enough attention.  There are some that say it's dead.  But I've honestly really enjoyed the hours I've put into it b/c it feels like a completely different game.  And as for the balance- I started a roleplaying server where the goal is to focus on player interactions through beautiful pve quality towns and outposts across the map and then use a combination of offline protection and admin commands to allow other players to interact or run the towns with an added level of protection.  There's no saddles for flyers or large carnivores so resourcing can be a challenge and since it's still pvp even in a town you can get attacked by a bandit or mercenary.  The admins are only there to facilitate the towns functioning- they are not there to interfere with pvp.    

I don't know if I can convince you to try prim+ or my server but if you are at all interested we have a Facebook page and a discord server where you can see some pictures of the builds currently being worked on.  Once a town is finished we'll be needing players to help test out the mechanics through game play- running shops and events.  

• Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ForbiddenCities
• Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/335316103713243/
• Discord: https://discord.gg/Xnecebx
• Server Address: [US]Forbidden Cities,RP,Medieval,TradingPost,InstatTame