The devs just killed Ark!

[AngrySaltire]

52 minutes ago, lvirusl said:

Your logic would be sound if they were still in EA. When the game opened up on steam they had 80k avg players according to steam, in last October they had 44k.  Thats almost a 50% drop in players since its first release on steam in EA, and subsequent full release. Granted there was a large jump when they released this latest DLC but every game does. We have yet to see the after effects of that release. Just as before when the game went from EA to full release i predict we will again see the ratings plummet and players leave shortly after the changes begin to sink into the mainstream player base. While the new players don't know any better yet. The new player will stick with it for a bit and then too join those that decided to leave.  Now i don't know how you measure success but if a game has a larger player base in development then it does after release, I would consider that a failure. Wildcard had their chance, but instead they chose mom's spaghetti.  

I am not talking about success here. I was just showing that over the time the player population, while showing generally downward trend (as seen by the gradual decreases with each trough of the population fluctuation) has remained relatively stable given the three years that its been out. Of course the games player population decreases with time, I would be surprised if it didnt.

My overall point was that people are still playing the game despite people constantly saying the devs have killed the game. Take this thread for example. 'The devs just killed Ark'. Yet despite the devs killing Ark, the game has hit an all time high of 100k players. You mention the peak hit on steam release during EA. It hits similiar levels since official release and leaving EA in Dec 2017 (Aberattion release), Jan 2018, and June 2018 and now the count today exceeds the EA peak. Of course the player count will drop when the Extinction rush ends, probably back to pre extinction levels, maybe lower given the general trend.

Edit: Jist want to add in the disclaimer that we are only talking about the Steam data here, xbox and ps4 could be telling a completely different story or even the same.

[jpcab]

the game is decreasing....its nothing like it was one year ago. No new players....one year ago beaches were full of bobs...now??? only vets remain

[iAmE]

 

 

9 hours ago, Olivar said:

Wasn't the flyer nerf going to kill Ark?
Or the wyverns from Scorched Earth?
Or did I miss the killing of Ark when the Gryphons from Ragnarok got released?
Or maybe the game got killed during the elemental access from Aberation?

To be fair, at least all of those were debacles that required significant developer attention. If Ab and the flyer nerf issues hadn't actually been addressed after the fact, it may have killed Official Ark. Just universally. Ab on release basically didn't work at all past the blue biome and breeding. The flyer nerf was so horribly done that the first iteration made all flyers minus wyverns slower then speed brontos, and Wyverns couldn't catch a fleeing wild Phiomia. 

Though it does get a bit boring reading the "XX is going to kill Ark". It is a bit of a trope at this point, as we've seen, it will be hard to kill Ark because Mods can usually fix whatever the devs screw up on.

It also shouldn't inform the opinion that these issues, both the ones currently, and previous ones, weren't significant gameplay issues that required significant attention. 

[Lucian]

3 hours ago, jpcab said:

the game is decreasing....its nothing like it was one year ago. No new players....one year ago beaches were full of bobs...now??? only vets remain

Yet somehow we just hit an all time player record.

[iAmE]

5 minutes ago, Lucian said:

Yet somehow we just hit an all time player record.

It's to be expected with a new expac. The influx of players never really stays. The game has been on a very steady decline, losing roughly half it's playerbase over the last year. 

How much of that is due to the game naturally having very limited content, mismanagement of the game and/or other factors is debatable. 

[Lucian]

13 minutes ago, iAmE said:

It's to be expected with a new expac. The influx of players never really stays. The game has been on a very steady decline, losing roughly half it's playerbase over the last year. 

How much of that is due to the game naturally having very limited content, mismanagement of the game and/or other factors is debatable. 

I get amused when I see this argument. It hasn’t lost half it’s player base unless you are cherry picking the data.   

When you look at the whole chart for Ark it has been remarkably consistent over the years. Ark has up and downs as people come in and out or people switch games. But dying? The data has never supported that. 

Go take a look at the charts for Conan Exiles or No Man’s Sky to see what it looks like when a player base leaves. Games had a super high peak, then fell off the map. Ark has been in the top 10 on steam for years. 

[iAmE]

3 minutes ago, Lucian said:

I get amused when I see this argument. It hasn’t lost half it’s player base unless you are cherry picking the data.   

When you look at the whole chart for Ark it has been remarkably consistent over the years. Ark has up and downs as people come in and out or people switch games. But dying? The data has never supported that. 

Go take a look at the charts for Conan Exiles or No Man’s Sky to see what it looks like when a player base leaves. Games had a super high peak, then fell off the map. Ark has been in the top 10 on steam for years. 

Dying simply means that the population is trending downward. And yes, prior to Extinction, it had lost roughly 40-60% of it's population compared to the same times last year. The data is consistent with ups and downs, but the general trend has always been down, with a marked decline beginning last year. The data isn't cherry picked, it's easily accessible on multiple different sites, and Ark hadn't been on the top ten for steam until the expac came out. It actually had fallen off that list early this year after Ab hype died.

Just because the game is not dead (Which is what NMS/CE look like) doesn't mean that the game is not trending downward, or "Dying". The only difference is you seem to think that everything is perfectly fine if the game doesn't lose 90% of it's playerbase within a month. Hate to say it, but cases like CE/NMS are exceptions, not the rule. Most games simply have a gradual decline. As Ark is having. 

[Moozoo]

Ark Official PVP is a last man standing game.
Since people respawn the method of eliminating them is to wipe and grief them until they quit.
The only game I know of where the goal is to get everyone else to quit.
Adding the Mek is just like when they added the giga. First to get it wipes out everyone else and then proceeds to hold down as many servers as they can.
The solution to Mek's wiping you is to get them first and wipe out everyone else and keep going until everyone else quits.
As far as the stats go They include PVE mode , single player mode, solo lan server players and of course unoffical pvp servers with enforced be nice rules.
I'd love to see seperate stats for each type of game play.

[iAmE]

3 minutes ago, Moozoo said:

Ark Official PVP is a last man standing game.
Since people respawn the method of eliminating them is to wipe and grief them until they quit.
The only game I know of where the goal is to get everyone else to quit.
Adding the Mek is just like when they added the giga. First to get it wipes out everyone else and then proceeds to hold down as many servers as they can.
The solution to Mek's wiping you is to get them first and wipe out everyone else and keep going until everyone else quits.
As far as the stats go They include PVE mode , single player mode, solo lan server players and of course unoffical pvp servers with enforced be nice rules.
I'd love to see seperate stats for each type of game play.

Meks got nerfed a bit ago. The Titans are  the new "OP". 
 

 

Official PvP though has a pretty ambitious goal. Despite the fact that the game mode encourages heavy ecocide, it's offset by having so many servers that you can't actually hold down or defend them all properly. Group A beats group B, but Group C might wipe Group A, and Group D might wipe Group C and by the time that happens, Group B is built up enough to wipe Group D, perpetuating a non-stop cycle. It's actually quite ambitious. 

[Sphere]

6 hours ago, jpcab said:

the game is decreasing....its nothing like it was one year ago. No new players....one year ago beaches were full of bobs...now??? only vets remain

That's an issue for all games.

[Rotix]

It’s almost like all games through this. Is this why I can’t find anyone on Diablo I? 

[placeeboeffect]

Well I just had the last straw today! Got insided a couple weeks ago in a bigger tribe and now after a while of grinding and getting a decent place built someone just walked in with a Mec and completely wiped it out in 5 minutes. Wild card just lost another 10 regular players to their b******* mec

[Dylan1602]

Your base must just be ass because we're fighting ADA right now and they've pulled 2 titans on us which we've killed and roughly 4 meks which have all died.

[d1nk]

On Friday, November 09, 2018 at 11:34 PM, SaltyMonkey said:

Can we collectively make a list of everything that has “killed” this game?

Giga nerfs.

Flyer nerf.

Raft nerf.

Turret nerf.

Heavy turret.

Plant Z.

Bullet soaker balancing.

Pteranobombs.

Dont forget:

Dino stat 1.0

Melee nerf

Dino stats 2.0 rebalance

Reskin tlc1/2

Center Release

SE Release

Abb release

Abb teleport addition

[placeeboeffect]

We got wiped nobody was online everybody was working... Actual jobs, the base design wasn't total ass they overwhelmed everything we had we had no chance this is happened too many times so me and my friends are completely done

[Dylan1602]

We all have real jobs as well, and we just won a 20 vs 45 lol

[KrakenOverlord]

7 hours ago, placeeboeffect said:

Well I just had the last straw today! Got insided a couple weeks ago in a bigger tribe and now after a while of grinding and getting a decent place built someone just walked in with a Mec and completely wiped it out in 5 minutes. Wild card just lost another 10 regular players to their b******* mec

the mek really isn't that serious. They can't even damage metal or tek anymore; and turrets actually target their rockets and such.

[ZombiePlague]

Okay you get wiped over and over it happened on every server on every dlc. You have to build smart. You don’t talk in global chat. You pre build everything you need in metal while hiding in a small stone base and pray no one finds you.

I think on average my tribe of 6 people got wiped off ever server we moved to for 3-4 days. It’s all about building under the radar till you get being enough to start wiping other tribes.

Now I agree the meshing needs to be fixed. But the mechs and the cryo-pods are awesome. Yea some balancing prolly needs to and will happen. But you can’t throw a cryo-pod down in a space to small for that tame to normally fit. Plus cryo-sickness means a second tame thrown down will be unconscious and take bonus damage.

You need to put up heavy turrets in side your base on giant hatch frames. You want them up in the air inside your base to shoot down on any invaders. Also for the mechs try to hide bear traps around your base to give your turrets time to destroy the mech.

[placeeboeffect]

It doesn't help that none of us are level 100. So that shoots your idea to sh#t. And the mek is so broke it can destroy indestructible redwoods. We constantly do the prefab thing too. Also the rocket run/mek/Pokeballs method ruins anything we put up. Having one or none on during a raid us commonplace.

[ForzaProiettile]

On ‎11‎/‎22‎/‎2018 at 7:32 AM, placeeboeffect said:

We got wiped nobody was online everybody was working... Actual jobs, the base design wasn't total ass they overwhelmed everything we had we had no chance this is happened too many times so me and my friends are completely done

You got to remember there is always someone in some place, keeping tabs on you. Offline is the perfect time to strike.