Good job making PvE actually PvE!

[Midnight_]

PvE has come a LONG way over the years. WC has worked (even if it seemed slow to many) to make PvE actually PvE. I had a thread about this in an attempt to outline how it was note PvE to help WC see how they could make it PvE.  Some of my threads are here: 

 

 

It took over 2 years but they finally added kitting dinos in the griefing section of the CoC. I had a long conversation with a GM in a ticket filed against offline raiders that about 3 months after SE was released were systematically going to all SE servers and wiping any and all tribes built in adobe. GM had to say "we will take no action" (as said in one of my threads above.) To which I asked "Can you please suggest to the dev team that we get offline raid protection for PvE servers to remove the PvP style game  play? They did it!!!! 

Ark has been progressing so well in making PvE servers PvE and it is great. Another great thing that is going on now is pillar spam removal. I did not believe it. I was sure WC would not address this but I was told by a good friend that GM's are wiping tribes that pillar spam well beyond the immediate area of their bases. When I started playing on my new island server a couple months ago I noted 3 specific tribes that had literal seas of pillars in several areas of the map. Nothing built in any of those areas other than a 1x1 hut with a bed to use to refresh the pillars. Took about a month then a GM came on the server and...:

3 mega tribes got wiped. For abusing pillars to prevent people for building on the map. All 3 had 8-13 render distances of pillars through out the map for EACH tribe. And the GM destroyed all structures owned by each tribe. It was fricken Christmas!  

• Offline raid protection
• acknowledgement that deliberately kiting dinos is griefing 
• removal of pillar spam\

WC has made PvE actually PvE now. I am very happy with what they have done I think they have moved in the right direction with all this. It's great. Good Job Wild Card! ?

[Ninjasharrk]

The pillar spam delete  makes me happy , maybe I can actually check out se now

[NightSlayer79]

I lost two bases on legacy to rock ele kiting. Pillar spam has always been an issue in this game, nice to see that they are trying. A new-ish issue I see as a big problem is the dino limit and dino storage bases. You have  people that don't play on a map storing 500 dinos and making the whole server hit cap. Makes it very difficult for anyone to play on a map.

[zeroBurnAcidCool]

so then its confirmed this mystery update i am getting is legit? cause they said it only happens on Tuesdays so that makes me think this is not legit..

Well hope what ever i made doesn't go poof... oh well i guess right..

[NightSlayer79]

Good point.

[Vynlann]

Thats great. Honestly I let my dinos decay on a beginner server because I couldn't find a home for a non-beginner server. One of 3 things happened if not multiple on all the pve NA island servers I checked out.

- Substantial lag, I punched dodo's, if the dodo didn't respond within 1 second I refused to play on it (I know this isn't a me issue because I even connect to EU servers just fine and never had this issue until official)
- Tame cap (most servers I encountered weren't at tame cap, as I tried taming the dodos that weren't lagging, but the community said they were so either they were lying which I want no part of or they're telling the truth which I still want no part of)
- Pillar spam to the point I can't find even a small little 1x1 area to build up let alone anything more.

It was usually the tame cap concern, but more commonly afterwards was the lag. The lag probably results in having hundreds of dinos in several locations. 

This is a step in the right direction. I hope their next goal is to solve tame cap problems in some fashion without causing a negative impact. Probably the kibble rework since that's why most people even tame hundreds of dinos, even then most people won't kill off their dinos. Dino aging is probably the more common solution for pve servers at least Making dodos die within a week or 2 and gigas last upwards of like months (6 or so) for very rough examples.

 

[Jacira]

Tame cap.

/thread

[ChargingParacerParacer]

Now if only they could stop having crappy balance changes that are only good for PVPers.

[Cynestra]

As a newish player being told server after server was at tame cap is disheartening at best.  I know it has gotten better since I started playing and hope things continue to improve.  One thing I think might help is changing or eliminating the 24hr timer for when items and Dino’s are uploaded or at least changing it so that people have a chance to get items and Dino’s from other servers.  Just a thought.

 

 

thanks

[Milsurp]

To the OP: eh, I think it's better than it was in the early Early-Access days. No, it's nowhere near what other game makers are doing. 

The 10-billion-pound giganotosaurus in the room is dino AI. Here's the things they absolutely need to fix to make PvE even adequate, let alone "good". 

1. Their aggro / flight code appears to not have any terrain checks in them. That's why a running dino will run over cliffs without care. The dino object is completely unaware of the cliff as it hasn't updated in time. 
2. Their dino abilities were built up over time, being released with different dinos. So they don't have animations for all the other dinos that could use those abilities. Kapro/megalosaurus grabbing, for example. Every dino that has the size and jaws for it should have that going, to make fighting dinos far more scary. 
3. No distinction between prey defense and predator attack directions. This boggles me because they made different attacks for different prey animals which normally do not face their predators. Tail attacks are the example, they should be keeping their tails towards the attackers and swinging them back and forth quickly while they try to flee, not turning to face their attackers and windmilling their tails up past their heads. (most even swing their tails in the right manner when running, so the base action is already built in.)
4. Dinos having different abilities when wild or tamed. They should have the same abilities and use them to the fullest. For instance, PvE would be hella more exciting if dinos ran or charged you at full speed. 

Fix these four things, and we have ourselves some PvE I'll gladly call "good". Adopt Immersive Taming in place of the ridiculous "beat-down bonding" taming, and I'll call it really good PvE. 

[Lucian]

1 hour ago, Milsurp said:

Dinos having different abilities when wild or tamed. PvE would be hella more exciting if dinos ran or charged you at full speed. 

I second this. Thyla climbing up to get you on a rock would be awesome. 

 

One of of the first mods I played was a Dino overhaul mod that had the Dino’s sprint. It was terrifying. The first Dino I found was a Rex on the western shore. I didn’t even have a chance. 

[AndrewLB]

On 9/27/2018 at 4:02 PM, Vynlann said:

Thats great. Honestly I let my dinos decay on a beginner server because I couldn't find a home for a non-beginner server. One of 3 things happened if not multiple on all the pve NA island servers I checked out.

- Substantial lag, I punched dodo's, if the dodo didn't respond within 1 second I refused to play on it (I know this isn't a me issue because I even connect to EU servers just fine and never had this issue until official)
- Tame cap (most servers I encountered weren't at tame cap, as I tried taming the dodos that weren't lagging, but the community said they were so either they were lying which I want no part of or they're telling the truth which I still want no part of)
- Pillar spam to the point I can't find even a small little 1x1 area to build up let alone anything more.

It was usually the tame cap concern, but more commonly afterwards was the lag. The lag probably results in having hundreds of dinos in several locations. 

This is a step in the right direction. I hope their next goal is to solve tame cap problems in some fashion without causing a negative impact. Probably the kibble rework since that's why most people even tame hundreds of dinos, even then most people won't kill off their dinos. Dino aging is probably the more common solution for pve servers at least Making dodos die within a week or 2 and gigas last upwards of like months (6 or so) for very rough examples.

 

 

While I agree with the kibble rework, wildcard tried the dino life cycle thing and it just wasnt do-able. Think about it, you spend two weeks of hell raising a giga/tuso/mosa and after a few months it dies of old age. Also, what if you're breeding a line of dinos only to have ones with epic stats that you haven't been able to combine, end up dying of old age? Its hard enough to find high stats, and sometimes to breed that stat into a line takes weeks or longer.

 

One thing i'm noticing in this thread is that the majority of suggestions would result in players getting screwed over. Keep in mind, the vast majority of people who have played ark for longer than a year tend to have a lot of dinos, and they are doing nothing wrong by owning them. They are simply playing the game within the confines of the rules given to us by Wildcard. Every day there are ignorant people popping onto servers, screaming bloody murder becuase they can't build in the spawn zone, not understanding that 500 people had that idea before they did, and first come, first served. Then they rage about pillars because they want to build on the beaver lakes on ragnarok or right on crystal/metal on a mountain top. Or my favorite, instead of listening to people who tell them there is plenty of land outside the spawn areas, they wedge a base in so close to yours that you're blocked from building in your own base.

 

Server performance can be improved in many ways that don't involve punishing players for playing within the rules they are given. First off, Nitrado sucks. If they're charging for servers that can host 70 players at once yet when more than 20 players are online, the server slows to a crawl, logic dictates that they're not upholding their part of the deal. Or too many arks are being run per server.

Also, high ping players can absolutely cripple server performance. Somehow wildcard doesn't quite understand this simple concept and allow anyone to join a server regardless of their ping or where on the globe they live. On every server i play on, as soon as we see a few 'box tribes' log in, server performance quite often becomes unplayable. Drakes dont fly, ping goes through the roof, and the lag spikes become horrible. There is a reason why just about every other game made at a minimum kicks high ping players, or more commonly they region lock. As i type this, a number of players with tribe names like [][][][][] just logged in to aberration and my ping went from 23-28 to 60-80+.

 

Lastly,  a few months prior to aberration being relased, a developer for wildcard, The Right Hand made some comments about lots of these problems stem from a relatively flimsy netcode backend. He said they were going to do a significant overhaul to it after they release aberration.. I haven't heard a word about this since. My guess is that got shelved along DX12, dynamic length bridges, and bugfixing.

[Ninjasharrk]

I had that issue but if your on xbox come to island 488 we have lots of space and a nice community 

On 9/27/2018 at 6:02 PM, Vynlann said:

Thats great. Honestly I let my dinos decay on a beginner server because I couldn't find a home for a non-beginner server. One of 3 things happened if not multiple on all the pve NA island servers I checked out.

- Substantial lag, I punched dodo's, if the dodo didn't respond within 1 second I refused to play on it (I know this isn't a me issue because I even connect to EU servers just fine and never had this issue until official)
- Tame cap (most servers I encountered weren't at tame cap, as I tried taming the dodos that weren't lagging, but the community said they were so either they were lying which I want no part of or they're telling the truth which I still want no part of)
- Pillar spam to the point I can't find even a small little 1x1 area to build up let alone anything more.

It was usually the tame cap concern, but more commonly afterwards was the lag. The lag probably results in having hundreds of dinos in several locations. 

This is a step in the right direction. I hope their next goal is to solve tame cap problems in some fashion without causing a negative impact. Probably the kibble rework since that's why most people even tame hundreds of dinos, even then most people won't kill off their dinos. Dino aging is probably the more common solution for pve servers at least Making dodos die within a week or 2 and gigas last upwards of like months (6 or so) for very rough examples.

 

 

[CptBogan]

Really a friendly official server I don’t believe it ?