The Body Count

[Snipsnip]

Just be careful of the tribe name cooldown timer. Before we realised the time between being able to change tribe name had been lengthened, my wife and I went raiding on server and changed our name to Kmart Mummies. We had to wear that name for days, needless to say neither of us said anything in global the entire time. 

[Melcreif]

On 5/11/2019 at 11:21 AM, Snipsnip said:

Just be careful of the tribe name cooldown timer. Before we realised the time between being able to change tribe name had been lengthened, my wife and I went raiding on server and changed our name to Kmart Mummies. We had to wear that name for days, needless to say neither of us said anything in global the entire time. 

LOL awesome!  Didn't matter, we were wiped anyways. I'm guessing someone already knew where we were located.  We had minimal defenses just a Velo but it was fun and a good learning experience LOL.

[Kaprosuchus]

I got bored once and joined some high activity unofficial server with close to normal rates, managed to build up and put together a enforcer and climbed to this dudes house because he had some blind spot on the underside of his base, got into his base broke the WOODEN platform out from under his cryofridge.  anyways i got banned for not following the correct rules of engagement.  tldr; unofficial pvp often sucks.

On an official pvp i was on the beach and i tend to heavily boost weight early on instead of movement speed like alot of others so i had a hut's worth of crap in my backpack. some guy tried to pick me and missed i jumped into the water. he managed to grab me, got stuck and boloed off the ptera before he thought to drop me. clubbed him unconscious and drounded him. couldn't kill the ptera because it was too high level but it was on passive so i just left it.  He asked me to join his tribe. I told him to do some unbecoming things to my anatomy and he brought a managarmr over and killed me.

[caleb68]

I had just woken off the beach not too long ago, and managed to make myself a few tools while running off into the water to avoid a small herd of compy that came after me.  I had felt like I was starting to get somewhere, as I had just placed my first wood foundation a small storage box and a bed.   I was off collecting materials in the nearby forest when I heard a rustle in the brush, I pause for a moment, thinking perhaps a dilo was coming up on me, as i'd seen a few around this spot,  then I near more rustling around me, and chirping sounds, I slowly started backing away, heading toward the beach as I watched to see if it was something that may attack me, or if I was just being overly cautious.  

The rustling sound got louder, more chirping, and then... they started emerging out of the brush, 1, then 4, then 7, all charging me like some enraged beast, 10... 15... 18.. I started running but they followed relentlessly... yes... I was being chased by a small army of …. dodo...

[ForzaProiettile]

On ‎5‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 5:53 AM, Melcreif said:

ForzaProiettile I bet you'd know the answer to this one.  If you raid a base with the idea of being secretive and you are killed it'll show up in the tribe log with your current tribe name.  Now if you changed your tribe name once the raid is over, which tribe name will show up in their tribe log the next day?

As Snipsnip said it will show up as the old name. This also works for dinosaur names btw. The reason for this is simple, for whatever reason the ARK devs store this data as plain text rather then in a dynamic fashion by say linking tribe and dino id's. I guess its a performance thing but it does result in outdated data not being updated when other variables change such as new tribe names.

[ErjiaOVO]

Edited April 24 by MackTheKnife

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[covenantgrunt]

I used to run a band of pirates called the Flying Squirrel Clan. We were small, tight knit group that focused solely on the goal of raiding and making people cry when you take away their pixel house and pixel tames. As a little tribe in the world of megatribes, we mainly used to raid bobs., Our favorite prey was the 6-12 man tribes, just big enough to have a decent base, but small enough for us to crush like ants. We participated in some of the great alliance wars of ARK as mercenaries, and skirmished with megas ourselves in some bold adventures. But for most part we stuck to raiding bobs as smaller scale pvp was what we enjoyed most.

Our standard tactic was the old extortion and shakedown routine. We would find a juicy base, then show up with guns and dinos demanding a tribute. Give us stuff or we wipe. Or at least that was the idea, in practice it often lead to unexpected outcomes. Some of which I will share below.

Adventures on Island 38 - We arrive with a standard scouting group,  wyvern and pteranodons. We do what we call "aggressive scouting". Attacking the beach bobs to see what the alphas response is like. We also talk in global, promising bobs who give us info on turret bases half the loot in exchange for snitching, we cared for the pvp more than the loot. 

We find a loudmouth guy, leader of a local tribe called Kazabe that wants to take us on. Exactly kind of rude asshole  we love to raid, we leave friendly and respectful people alone and even help them sometimes. He has a thick base with many heavy turrets and plant x. . Kazabe tribe leader  thinks he can fight us because he has many dinos. He engages us with a pack of raptors and rexes. We laugh as our battery turret kills him off his dino, And the turret and the wyvern shreds the raptors. He tries to attack us with flyers. Our snipers bring down his argy and his pteras.

Kazabe leader loses all bravado and panics in global chat, he call for alphas. I decide to call a retreat. We dont know how strong the alpha is and we can ill afford loses, our rock ele is one of our only 2 for example and we have less than 7 wyverns. We are very good at retreating through practice, the rock ele gets hidden underwater. And the wyvern is skyboxed. We lose one member during the attack when during retreat when he gets picked by a Kazabe members ptera. Kazabe changes tune and begins gloating about how they crushed the griefers. This angers us and steels our resolve to crush this tribe. We tell them this is not a fight they want, all they have to do is pay us a tribute and we will go away. There is no version of this fight where they walk away a winner, people like us are a nightmare for small tribes like them..

We begin to make their ARK life a living hell. We launch an offline attack during Kazabe's downtime that night, destroying half their turrets and sniping and kill many of their dinos. We would have taken down the base but get spotted by alphas wyvern. This time we do not run, we fight back kill the alphas wyvern and then extract. Telling the alpha to stay away from our business.

8 hours later our main force return to the server. We see that they have repaired some of the damage and replaced destroyed turrets. This time he has many tribe mates online and a fierce battle ensues. I was not online for it, but from what I was told we break into the base and bring down the genny. The alpha does not respond to his cries for help for some reason. All his dinos get meat ran. I get online during end of this battle to find a thoroughly wrecked base, I  C4 all his turrets before leaving.

2 days later I come back to server and see that they are repairing the base again. I kill all the fresh tames they have, and destroy all his turrets again.

A week later I come back and repeat the process. Eventually they are reduced to no turrets and just a half destroyed metal shell and no dinos. A month later Kazabe tribe leader has given up. Battlemetrics reveal he has not played ARK since.

Island 38 part 2 - We return to 38 once more. Our scouts have found a base at one of the big 10 10 icebergs with lot of turret towers and dinos. We deploy rock drake, stego,  therizino, wyvern and more in anticipation for a major assault. The drake is first to make landfall on the iceberg, followed by wyvern air dropping the stego. Turrets are firing, bullets being soaked. C4 goes off as our ground team clear spam and sets up battery heavies. Enemies are taken by surprise, they rush us in fur armor and argies. Our wyvern and ground pvpers annihilate them.  First turret tower goes down, our therizino moves in for first blood as their dinos parked outside begin to die. We are stoked, the battle is going in an awesome way; And then....they surrender. 

They tell us they will give us whatever we want if we leave. We ask them to power down turrets so we can see whats in their base. Also we ask them to tribe in one of us into their tribe, so we can use THEIR quetzals to move loot. We pop corn fuel from gennies for security. As we go through their vaults for loot, our guy in their tribe sees their  therizino. It has good colors and stats and we want it. Unclaim the theri and give it to us we say. They dont want to do it, its a gift they say. We pressure them and they relent and unclaim it. Few mins later the betrayal happens. Suddenly our guy in their tribe gets kicked. The base doors closed, trapping our people inside. Our wyvern rider reports griffins firing at him, they called the alphas. But enemies make one fatal mistake. They trapped me in with my rock drake. I begin to meat run their entire dino pen. Nothing survived. We blow our way out to find our wyvern battling an enemy wyvern and griffin. We also spot a gunboat approaching. It's time to retreat. We split up with the wyvern carrying the captured therizino and me heading underwater with my drake. Both the drake and the wyvern the prize therizino make it to a drop and extract. But unfortunately we lose our stego and the therizino we brought. Our ground pvpers die and lose their kits, while keeping the alphas forces busy buying the drake and wyvern distraction and time to escape.

Later this tribe cries in global, why did you kill our dinos and destroy everything. We were going to give you everything. They keep denying that they called the alphas and tried to backstab us.

Some random rag server - We find a juicy bob base in the desert with gigas, rexes, turret boat outside and more. We begin to prepare for a major battle and start setting up a FOB. Suddenly our FOB crew gets spotted by a ptera. We give chase with wyvern and zap and kill the PT. The guy plummets to ground on chute. Right as our ground pvpers are rushing him with bolas and flamethrowers, he speaks on voice. Please stop, dont kill our dinos, we surrender. This was a DILO moment, we did not do anything and the guy surrendered out of blue. Apparently they had been getting bullied hard by griefers, tribe morale is all time low and they are at a breaking point. They thought we were YSS and after defending night after night they are in no mental condition to get FOBed on by a megatribe. We kept the charade up instead of telling the truth that we are just bobs. We tell him that YSS demands tribute from him.

This time though we take no chances, because of the backstab on island38, we ask the guy to tribe one of us in and give him owner. As we go through his base we find a lot of loot. Its just me and a friend on server, and we are waiting for more people to come so we can port all that loot out. We see unknown pteras in the sky, and people asking questions in global. Other tribes on server realized something is happening. We ask the guy to play it cool but other tribes dont buy it. We need turrets back online for security and we reactivate some of  them. 

I also ask my friend who now has owner to kick everyone from that tribe and invite me in so we can defend this base till our extraction crew arrives. We tell that tribe's people to just chill for 2 hours and we will give them their tribe and base back once we are done. But my friend is big dumb and instead he kicks himself while removing their members...Now we have no one in that tribe to reinvite their guys back. The turrets are up and we cant get the loot either. The tribe leader guy is very sad and curses us a lot. I feel bit bad too, having stolen the guys tribe like this and losing it through stupidity. We leave servers empty handed and with guilty conscious.

Island 436 - We were doing some raids with a streamer friend. He played in a duo and his style was perfect for bob raiders like us. On 436 south1 metal mountain beach area we found a thick bob base from a tribe called Nomads we thought would make good content for him. The Nomads had many turret towers with heavies and level 400+ therizinos. We were undergunned in comparision, with just an argy, 2 pteras and 2 trikes for soaking. But that did not matter, we were not expecting to wipe the base that day, just needed some content for twitch. Lacking any DPS dinos we were relying on our mad skills to overcome the theriz. A fierce battle ensued in which we managed to pick the theri riders and kill them. They unburied a basilisk which we took us by surprise and we were thoroughly unprepared for, but we managed to plant Z the rider and kill the basi. Eventually our ground pvpers were sniping their pteras from outside. Our trikes were battering down their turret towers. We could actually take down this base it seems. We breached one side of base walls with C4 and found much good loot and this is where things went bad. While some of our ground pvpers kept the enemy busy, we wanted to get some loot out while the battle still raged. It was at that time a reaper king arrived and basically killed everyone in that base. The reaper rider was a  member of megatribe Citadel, and a friend of Nomads leader. We had no chance against the guy, I managed to retreat with a surviving trike and the argy and hid them.

We decided that we should offline them. The next morning we arrived at a time when they ought to be asleep according to our battlemetrics analysis. As we were soaking turrets however they came online and fierce ground pvp ensued. They did not have much dinos left so it was mostly foot pvp. We dominated them and destroyed more towers, but eventually had to retreat due to running low on veggie cakes.

Same day we returned in evening to pressure them and prevent rebuilding. We arrived to find they had more theriz. Apparently their friend in Citadel dropped them off earlier that day to replace ones they lost. We were bit pissed because we struggle for every bit of scrap we have, and we keep seeing all these bob tribes that get so much free stuff just handed to them. It was one trike vs 3 theriz but we still fought. And somehow we killed every single theriz with no loss to us. One theri rider was literally sniped off, the other 2 died to plant y and battery turrets. We resumed soaking, and then the reaper king emerged, their CItadel friend had loaned it for defense. But the Nomads were not as skilled with the Reaper as a megatribe player would be. Our turret killed the rider off the reaper, we grappled it but we had no light pet and could not kill it as we were low on ammo. We retreated for another day.

It was at that time I realized we were quite toxic to them in chat, and offered the leader of Nomads an apology. As I talked to her I realized they were like us, a small tribe trying to survive in world of big tribes. She was also on verge of quitting ARK because of all the toxicity and I empathized. She also explained she was only experienced player in her tribe, hence bad choice of location and helping train up her tribe mates. I admired her tribes tenacity and felt official pvp would be a poorer place if PVP oriented small tribes like hers keep quitting. I made an offer, we would help them instead and maybe even go raiding together. I then did something I find funny and sad to this day, I gave nomads some turret ammo, and essentially refilling their turrets that I soaked. In months that followed we came to their help few times, and they grew to a 25 man tribe on a rag server, before eventually getting wiped and quitting some time around Extinction and all the bullpoop that came with it.

 

 Defense of red obelisk - During late 2018 our home server of center88 was coming under increasing amount of attacks from YSS and their allies like Vendetta. We were bobs and generally stayed out of megatribe wars and counted on our alphas Sentinels to defend the server. We did take part when major battles broke out, but for most part we tried to stay out of it, as a small tribe we could not afford the losses a megatribe could. But things were not going well for Sentinels at time. They suffered huge losses in TPG invasion recently, and YSS was coming to the server in ever stronger waves. Sentinels were forced to retreat and hide in their caves instead of contest YSS in open. They would have to wait until reinforcements arrived from their allies BBoom BItch from island 185, and only then they could muster enough forces to take down YSS attackers. YSS loved to focus their attacks on red obelisk teleporter. We also had our teleporter there, right beside sentinels.

On one particularly bad day Sentinels defense of red ob had more or less collapsed. YSS snipers were firing into the TP itself. Sentinels only had 3 or 4 people online at time and were cowering in the cave behind the TP. It was up-to us bobs then, to defend the TP until BBoom Bitch arrived.

We sprung into action sending in our stego first through the teleporter, from our underworld cave to red obelisk. The stego would absorb sniper fire, and the stego rider would shoot back suppressing the enemy snipers. Then came the poison wyverns, their riders ducked beneath the wyverns bodies before the teleport to shield from snipers. We only had a handful of good therizinos, and no good rhinos at all. So instead we deployed our old but still good spino. We deployed pteras and we deployed raptors !

It was a crazy battle. And you can see part of it in this video uploaded from YSS side.  We bobs managed to defend the obelisk for an hour, till BBoom BItch reinforcements starting coming in. In the end it was for naught though, as YSS next day one shot the ob and everything around it with a racer nuke.

 

[Aushegun]

This thread reminds why I don't play PvP. I just don't have a bully mentality. Never have.  I read these stories, and none of it sounds fun.

Thank goodness ARK has a PvE mode.

[Melcreif]

11 hours ago, ForzaProiettile said:

As Snipsnip said it will show up as the old name. This also works for dinosaur names btw. The reason for this is simple, for whatever reason the ARK devs store this data as plain text rather then in a dynamic fashion by say linking tribe and dino id's. I guess its a performance thing but it does result in outdated data not being updated when other variables change such as new tribe names.

yeah thanks I'm guessing they were allied with another big tribe I'd never heard of who was aware of our location.  We were foundation wiped a few days later, just the dino gates remaining.  The base was pretty well hidden, but not well enough.  Next time we'll do better!  Already started to get gear prepped for the next attempt at raiding.  We've also learned the hard way if you don't want to get found out, don't die LOL

[ForzaProiettile]

On ‎5‎/‎15‎/‎2019 at 2:57 AM, Aushegun said:

This thread reminds why I don't play PvP. I just don't have a bully mentality. Never have.  I read these stories, and none of it sounds fun.

Thank goodness ARK has a PvE mode.

It's not about having a bully mentality its about playing strategic with the aim of dominating others. There is nothing more fun then PVP in this game. It is ARK at its finest especially if you take the harder route and mostly choose to play on foot while fighting other players using dinosaurs.

Definitely challenging and a lot of hardwork but always fun and rewarding at the end of the day.