Drowning people and stealing dinos on PVE

[ishootpaint]

On 12/5/2018 at 8:39 PM, Cinnamongod said:

OP? In what way? You do realize this is about PVE right?

 Flyers were OP before the nerf even on PVE. Killing alpha rexs with ease on a ptera seems a bit OP. I didn't like the flyer nerf much after it happened but after the dust setteled I enjoyed the game more because everything wasnt trivial. 

 Yes, i can still kill an alpha rex with a ptera but it would take so long it is actually more time efficient to go get a more appropriate tame from base like a giga or wyv. Flyer nerf happened, and its never going back to the way it was.

[LouSpowells]

Body dragging/drowning sucks. When possible it's best to log out in a safe place, and if it's a crash/DC you'll want to get back to your body ASAP or request a tribe member to do it. That said, if it's not a player it will usually be a dino that eats the body. If you don't get back in time, the belongings are gone. It sucks, but it's a reality of the game.

...but now this is turning to another dumb flyer nerf argument? Let's break it down as simply as possible:

In early access the creatures hadn't been balanced. Wildcard was up front that balance passes would occur prior to release. Prior to release, the balance passes were made. Mechanics in pre-release don't always make it to release, especially unbalanced and broken mechanics. The people who are still complaining about this are demonstrating that they can't wrap their heads around the concept of early access. In the future these players should avoid all early access games for the sake of their own sanity and as a personal courtesy to early access developers.

[banggugyangu]

On 12/5/2018 at 8:58 PM, M4rt1n said:

The truth about the flying speed nerf is wc was unable to optimise servers to load buildings in time so players were able to fly inside buildings to steal stuff.  So the answer from wc was to nerf speed on all flying dinos.  Which ultimate resulted in extremely boring travel times, esp on pve.  The nerf to carry dinos on pve is obvious, as it was being used to grief dropping dinos into peoples' bases, similarly the nerf to loose aggro by trailing flyers is because it is being used to grief.  Flyers have never really been op, just useful.  In extinction they're necessary, which means alot of time spent boringly travelling.  Until you get a mana at least.  Or Tek teleporters.

All too often, wc has pandered to pvp players, giving them the ability to jail other players and disable them almost permenantly ingame.  A very ignorant and antisocial way of playing what is supposed to be a competitive game and turning Ark pvp into almost pure griefing.  With almost no pvp at all.

Offline raiding protection resolved alot of the griefing.  But the game almost seems to be designed to allow it and cater for it.  It is honestly beyond me why anyone could find ark pvp to be fun.  At least on the scale that playing soccer or hockey or golf for example is fun.  You don't get to kill people in those games tho and really for most pve'ers this is the core issue, allowing people a context to 'in fantasy', commit crimes that in almost every country in the world would put you on either death row or long term prison.  Pvp in Ark caters for the type of people who simply do not function well in society.   It's a very sad reality, that parents and politians even allow this type of pvp in computer games to even exist.

It's one thing to have a game where you run around with the sole purpose of killing other players using a character that is fairly balanced ie Cod, Battlefield etc than to allow the more pernicious and offensive griefing tactics that are prevelant in mmo games like wow pvp and ark.  But each to their own.  I do agree that overall the game seems to continually cater for pvp side of the play rather than pve, it seems devs pander to those who complain the most and it seems to me at least that ark pvp is really just a game of bullying, griefing and abusing other players.  Not actually competition or fun.

I'd also say that pve servers can hold a stable server population for years.  Pvp servers continually fluctuate as people scrabble to get a foothold that ultimatley falls to servers and players to allow.  On many players seem to think they griefing and pk'ing is actually pvp.  And on most others, it is simply pure frustration at being continually bullied and slaughtered by impossible odds that results in people griefing in any way they can.  ie pillering, foundations over spawns, near other buildings.  Sure you can make explosives or use dinos to destroy them.  But for the most part, it isn't being done to reduce other tribes ability to access resources, it's being done purely to spite all the other players.  On pvp servers it can be resolved.  On pve servers it cannot and pillers, foundation'ing metal spawns etc is commonplace.  On extinction at least, dinos actually destroy structures which is good at least, reducing alot of the pillering.  Timers also reduce it to a degree, but simply building a ladder on a piller extends the mass pillering to a week allowing people to log in, fly around and refresh, log out.. and goto next server to grief.. as seems often the case.

As simple fix for this would be to allow players/tribes a very limited number of buildings in more than one location, this would cause alot of issues, but it would also completely wipe out anyones ability to just piller entire areas.   Give people say the max circle of the dino leash as the max area of their base.  Not including building upwards. And limit them to building say 2-3 bases on a server.. no more pillering no more griefing.

Without derailing the thread too much, the problem is not the number of structures in an area.  The problem is the horrendously flawed building system in general.  Each structure is a static entity, mesh, and actor.  A better optimized system would have the structures forming dynamic meshes as you build them.  They can be pre-defined meshes, so that it's easier on wild card, but this is the real fix.  Rather than limiting the number of structures a tribe has in a given area, they could cause the structures to utilize fewer meshes and thereby be better optimized for lesser performing systems.  Alongside this, a fix to the problem you stated would be to pre-render colliders for each structure on map load.  These pre-loaded colliders could be rudimentary blocks.  Colliders are invisible, so no worries about rendering problems.  This would fix numerous other issues, such as the bug that plagues the UWP version where sometimes (read: often)  the game stops loading destructible geometry.  In that situation, even if the geometry isn't loaded, you would still be able to interact the same as normal with the stuff that exists on the server, despite not seeing it.  Those 2 changes together would improve performance across all platforms by a significant margin, and solve the issue of people clipping through structures that haven't yet loaded in.