Balance and Stale Servers: Opinions and Thoughts?

[Rancor]

Curious to see what the community feels about the lack of balance and how fast servers become stale (Official Servers).

 

After most the players from just after the alpha version of Ark quit and moved on I spent many many hours doing solo play on official and joining tribes when it suit my needs. However most players seem to get raided once and quit so I would end up solo again. Finally gave up on the main cluster and moved to 6 man small tribes server.... Now I get wrecked by level 300 Manas (Lack of balance, 200+ argent dead in 3 seconds with no counter tame to fight it with available except another Mana ) and raided more often than on big tribe servers oddly. Found on youtube that many people still playing ARK are on the small tribe servers with hundreds of manas and tek turrets just laying untouched.  The same "disease" that affects all ARK PvP servers is how easy someone can keep everyone else down with a little head start. 

 

Transfers were supposedly implement to help keep this to a more minimal level but with little effect. Anyone have any thoughts on if there is even something that could be done to help with this? Increasing crafting structure HP so you still have something to return to after being offlined, or a shoulder mount that does the parasaur scan job secretly to help notice incoming attacks? 

 

Thoughts, comments, and opinions. Please stay civil, thank you. 

[Ronson12]

Played since early access/legacy,purely official. Been alpha on many servers and been in megas. The simple fact is officials just too grindy,even small man. we started playing unofficials for some time before we quit for instant gratification on x50 rates and i can tell you right now, the game was still a giant time sink, still sinking hours and hours in to it daily and having 8 to 12 hour battles, just took us a week to build up and breed instead of 6 months to get the same result. 1x rates and x3 small man is just too much 

after playing extinction and realising its a bad map me and my friends can't bring our selves to log in. 

100+ dinos in this game and 99% of them are useless/not used. Mana just makes no sense balance wise, wyverns pointless now, flier speed nerf was fine then they create mana? They make pigs balanced then alow owls to perma heal using stam. The list of things wildcard have done recently balance wise makes me scratch my head. 

Not a fan of 24 hour structure wiping either, it's not pvp if your opponent is asleep, its pve offline cheese. After trying conan out, which is a crap game but it had 1 good thing. 24 hour pvp but structures couldn't be destroyed between 4-11pm.7 hour window to wipe your opposition is more than enough. 24 hours just kills the player base. 

I could go on but after 1000s of hours wildcards just made us not interested,arks a second job, not a game and that's a BIG player base killer 

[Ronson12]

Also another last straw for us is, when small tribe servers launched, be moved there because officials/megas just got boring, it became like farm ville, just doing meat runs and raising, maintaining the server etc.

Got boring, anyways we went to small tribe servers, fought tooth and nail, wiped, built up, wiped, built up, to eventually become alpha, we earnt our place at the top of the food chain and kept there for months, just for someone to ddos our server offline for a full week and wipe our whole server.

Months and months of work, effort and grind all cheesed. Also been meshed. Fix the exploits or fix the dam grind atleast so people have the will to build back up. I ain't stupid, i refuse to create something for months again so some lolcantpvpddos kid can destroys it.