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Weigh In: Legacy, New Servers, and New Modes


Cedric

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I play on Legacy PvE since before it was legacy. Over 2.5 years now.

The community is great on our server and on others. Like many other players I agree that WE supported you from the start. Tested your game, reported bugs/glitches, we all stayed through the ups & downs of the game. We deserve some love from WC. Wiping us all would be a slap in the face to your most loyal players.

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6 hours ago, crazfulla said:

Whatever new servers you make, they MUST wipe on a regular schedule. Let me explain why I believe this is necessary.

The problem with existing servers is that they have been around so long that many of them are controlled - or "owned" in their words - by a single, massive tribe. Small tribes servers are no exception. This means that you are paying for 70 slots on a server that as few as 6 people will realistically play on regularly. I'm not sure about you guys but that doesn't make much sense to me.

Any new tribes that try to build up on these servers who join these servers will quickly and repeatedly be crushed. This is frustrating for almost everyone, but in particular, how do you think new players to the game will react to this? Punishing them for their inexperience... Most I imagine would move on to another game. There are plenty out there like Fortnite, World of Tanks etc in which you can just drop into a match that only lasts around 15 minutes. Quick, fresh and fun.

Take a look at how server wipes work in Rust for example. Whenever official (and many unofficial) servers wipe, they are packed full of players trying to get ahead on the competition. It has been a long time since we have seen that kind of excitement in Ark. People lose interest after a while, the game needs to be fresh and exciting to entice players to come back. In their most recent patch, due to overwhelming demand, Facepunch  added a way to filter servers in the server browser by when they were last wiped - that is how important this information is to Rust players.

There are a few reasons I stopped playing Ark. Meshing, lack of time to play, but a lack of fresh servers has always been the main problem. I did try unofficial for a while, thinking that it may be a better option, but those servers are unreliable. They often have the day cycle slowed down to a halt, so you think it is a fresh wiped server but it isn't. They can go offline or even reset without warning. And that's not to mention the rampant admin abuse. People want a reliable alternative, but there simply isn't one.

That's why I believe the MTS servers have taken off recently. They have responsible admins and a nice balance of rules and settings to cater to those who don't have all day to sit on the game. And above all, they are relatively fresh. Notice how some Youtubers like Muntage and SixShadows made a specific point of starting out on the scorched earth server when it came up, as it was brand new and isolated from the cluster for two weeks.

The old Extinction servers (now referred to as Arkpocolypse - presumably to avoid confusion with the Extinction map) were extremely popular back in the day because they afforded players the chance to build up alongside everyone else. If you got wiped, it wasn't as disheartening because you could just start up again next month. And no one tribe was ever capable of getting to a point where they controlled a server. It was great fun for new and experienced players alike. The day they adopted procedural maps however, they died, and I don't think they ever recovered. Not because the servers themselves had any significant problems, but because the procedural map generator wasn't as good as it perhaps should have been.

What kind of servers do I want to see? I'm not sure. A lot of different things have already been tried, and approximately all have failed. I fear that anything else you try will eventually, inevitably fail as well. Unless of course you commit to wiping them every 1-2 months.

Players in Ark have an unhealthy level of attachment to their base, their tames etc. People need to let go, to separate the game from reality. Take the game back to when people liked to just have fun and didn't take things so seriously. Take it back to when people could build up and feel like they might have an actual chance at survival. Take it back to when Jayex23 started his tribe and everyone left because he was a dictator. That was the golden age of Ark. I miss that.

 

Edited to add, I made a petition for those who think official needs to be wiped. Please sign.

http://chng.it/6xttjGG6bh

The only problem for that is you just built up and everything you are doing will not stay, and just that will make people less playing, less try hard. I don't even want a gameplay like that, i don't think i will play on a 6 month wipe server, and for few friends too. I realy think wipe when there is only 1 tribe on the server is ok, then just wait this time. As you said, if only 6 ppl play the server, just wipe it, but if you add a timer in your server, you already know you can destroy absolutely everybody who come to start because you know it will not stay forever, hope i get understandable :D

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So it may be oblivious to WildCard and that is not a shot at them. I’m not sure how invested you are in Xbox but let me say this. The official servers are a disaster. They need to wiped. There is an absolute ton of duped loot in the game. Recently the megas went at it and when one side meshed the FOB they found over 40 Valentine’s Day chocolates. These are obviously duped along with the insane amount of 256 level meks that Everyone has on Xbox officials. I have proof of all of this and more. I am heavily invested in ark and want the best for it. The best move is wiping the Xbox official servers. 

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I stay on legacy servers partly due to the lower population. I find the people that play legacy are generally more open to discussion about trading space if you want to build in an area they have pillared off. I also find that though some areas are pillared it is actually less than I've encountered on fresh servers. They come across as more mature players in my experience. I've made lasting friendships with people I've met on my server and we've had some fun times in the thousands of hours we've played. It takes a lot to tailor build your base appropriate to the location you have and it is a gut punch when you have to move and rebuild when you had no intention of leaving.

I did not have a good experience when the scorched earth server I was playing got migrated. In fact I haven't returned to scorched map since then other than to fly the desert for loot crates.

When you pour thousands of hours of your free time into farming, building, taming, breeding, raising, imprinting, trading, exploring and fighting you hate to see it taken away. True it's just a game and they are just pixels but they still took thousands of hours of your life that, when gone, you will not get back. No one likes to have their time wasted.

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Ark saved my life.

Ced you gotta understand bro your most dedicated player base might be on legacy. 

I got hit by a drunk driver in 2016 and I was restricted to my bed and pissing and crapping all over myself. I was a 4x natural body building champion, personal trainer, and fitness director. It was all taken from me.  I had 3 reconstructive operations and was in a wheel chair for nearly a year.

depressed in bed my 19 year old son brought me his ps4 and showed me this game ARK Survival. I started playing. The work, the struggle, the effort, to build my base and tame dinos reminded me of what it's going to take to get out of my depression. Ark revealed to me what was already inside me - a tenacious mofo who will never quit.

 Every morning I was in so much pain. But I would wheel my self to the kitchen and make a cup of coffee and turn on my ARK server 629. You wiped it! 

People say its just a game but to me it's more than that. I sent you guys a nasty response when you said you wouldn't help me transfer my stuff to official. I apologize - I overreacted. 

 

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Ced, I have been an ark player for over a year starting on Legacy, keeping that base on the island and starting on official when we first started hearing about decommissioning of servers.  We moved from official island , to scorched, to Ragnarok, and then to center. Each experience on official was worse than the next. We didn’t have the same “community” on official as we did in legacy. So far we have survived the great migrations on 537 as we have people that play and we work as a community to help each other and new players. We never saw this on official, or at least the severs we visited. Several of our members have been there since beta and have Thousands of hours invested in their bases and Dino’s. They are the ones that are the first to help, especially new players. Sure we like to see new maps and stuff, but not at the convenience of wiping others out to get new content. I would be in favor of a subscription to keep my legacy server and would probably get the download if you close it down and host it myself. Living the island life     -Mao Noel

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A bit of a qwerky game mode could be a progression type server cluster. As an example they could do monthly rate progression. 

First month 1x second month 2x third month x3 up to say 10x making the appeal of restarting after being wiped higher. In my head this seems cool but i do feel like practicality it could be pretty lame.

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I think there is a need for new servers, whether they be specialized or the same official servers. I personally like the idea of 2-3 man tribes with slightly boosted rates so that people don’t team up and run a server. PvP servers are currently unplayable for new players or people who want to play again because you can’t go a full day without being wiped by somebody who has a global tribe that can play and progress at all times. Everyone obviously wants new servers, but mixing it up a little might be the way to go

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On 6/15/2019 at 3:14 PM, Hobbitt said:

Honestly Ced the main problem with Official, further than meshing, is that it's too difficult to play unless you are apart of a large group.
I think there are loads of players that just want to play Ark, but on Official servers so the progress they make is reputable, on PvE and PvP.

SmallTribes was a good attempt and it was so much better than playing against Mega Tribes. Initially the servers were really successful because people do want to play without Mega Tribes. That said, there were still 6 man tribes that are very good in PvP and 6 man tribes that "teamed up" and with just 2-4 players it was hard to compete, near impossible.

It's too hard to survive against larger tribes or groups of trolls but I think SmallTribes was a step in the right direction, if we could change these servers settings, in favour of the "smaller" sized tribes to make it easier to survive and compete, I think it would be a lot more efficient in hosting the type of server we wanted. Here are my suggestions that I think could improve SmallTribes servers.                                                          ------- or entirely build a new game mode from scratch with.

Small Tribes Update

  • Stronger Turret Damage (Harder raiding and easier defending, it's too easy for one group to raid another, so much so they are able to wipe entire servers in such little time.)
  • Lower Gathering, Exp & Taming rates (Consistent 3x actually ended up being too much and with 6 people, making progress came so much faster than to those with 2-4 players - Arks early days, with slow rates, actually made things more valuable and attacking more risky opposed to tribes having tonnes of throw away tames they can raid with.)
  • Specific Raid Times (Specific raid times, for example; Raiding is only allowed on Weekends - Ark is demanding and this would give breathing room for those who can't dedicate as much time.)
  • Offline Raid Protection (Offline Raid Protection helps against players that only want to troll.)
  • Lower Maximum Player Tribe Count (As said previously, 6 players whether they team with another 6 or not, is a huge advantage against actual small tribes. Preferably 3-4.)
  • Extinction Titans Untameable

I really think some focus should be put on those players that want to enjoy surviving and aren't trying to wipe entire servers or solely trying to troll others, but still have the option to PvP, removing the chance of PvP removes the reward you feel for the effort and dedication you put in.

Whether it's an entirely new game mode or a 2.0 version of SmallTribes, something similar to these settings could be used to make something closer to the golden age that was the early days of Ark.

 

 

If we don't get to see anything like this I would also love to see a PvE mode that allows PvP on weekends or when a new mode is introduced for PvP some type of "grace period" comes with it and raiding is disabled for a week or two? Anyway I really hope this gets a read, thanks for the ongoing support to make Ark playable to the rest of the community that haven't found their place on Official yet.

@Cedric Please read.

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On 6/15/2019 at 7:14 AM, Hobbitt said:

Honestly Ced the main problem with Official, further than meshing, is that it's too difficult to play unless you are apart of a large group.
I think there are loads of players that just want to play Ark, but on Official servers so the progress they make is reputable, on PvE and PvP.

SmallTribes was a good attempt and it was so much better than playing against Mega Tribes. Initially the servers were really successful because people do want to play without Mega Tribes. That said, there were still 6 man tribes that are very good in PvP and 6 man tribes that "teamed up" and with just 2-4 players it was hard to compete, near impossible.

It's too hard to survive against larger tribes or groups of trolls but I think SmallTribes was a step in the right direction, if we could change these servers settings, in favour of the "smaller" sized tribes to make it easier to survive and compete, I think it would be a lot more efficient in hosting the type of server we wanted. Here are my suggestions that I think could improve SmallTribes servers.                                                          ------- or entirely build a new game mode from scratch with.

Small Tribes Update

  • Stronger Turret Damage (Harder raiding and easier defending, it's too easy for one group to raid another, so much so they are able to wipe entire servers in such little time.)
  • Lower Gathering, Exp & Taming rates (Consistent 3x actually ended up being too much and with 6 people, making progress came so much faster than to those with 2-4 players - Arks early days, with slow rates, actually made things more valuable and attacking more risky opposed to tribes having tonnes of throw away tames they can raid with.)
  • Specific Raid Times (Specific raid times, for example; Raiding is only allowed on Weekends - Ark is demanding and this would give breathing room for those who can't dedicate as much time.)
  • Offline Raid Protection (Offline Raid Protection helps against players that only want to troll.)
  • Lower Maximum Player Tribe Count (As said previously, 6 players whether they team with another 6 or not, is a huge advantage against actual small tribes. Preferably 3-4.)
  • Extinction Titans Untameable

I really think some focus should be put on those players that want to enjoy surviving and aren't trying to wipe entire servers or solely trying to troll others, but still have the option to PvP, removing the chance of PvP removes the reward you feel for the effort and dedication you put in.

Whether it's an entirely new game mode or a 2.0 version of SmallTribes, something similar to these settings could be used to make something closer to the golden age that was the early days of Ark.

 

 

If we don't get to see anything like this I would also love to see a PvE mode that allows PvP on weekends or when a new mode is introduced for PvP some type of "grace period" comes with it and raiding is disabled for a week or two? Anyway I really hope this gets a read, thanks for the ongoing support to make Ark playable to the rest of the community that haven't found their place on Official yet.

 

2 hours ago, Hobbitt said:

@Cedric Please read.

Lower gathering and specific raid times also the stronger turret damage is not what people want, i explain.

Lower gathering for solo player is just impossible, a big amount of times is needed to start correctly, and with big tribes on the server this will be even harder, then less player.

Specific raid... People want to play the game any times of the week, pvp is a big part of the game, if you can pvp only the week end, then the rest u just farm ? in pvp server ?

And stronger turret damage will just make impossible again for solo player to raid, as you maybe know that rushing with beer and c4 is a classic, that's how solo people can pvp and raid, that's why you just need to add the offline raid proction, which is the best idea, to make turret much stronger, because you are just not there to defend.

Please stop promote things u think is good for you and not for everyone, ty :D

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On 6/14/2019 at 9:51 PM, Cedric said:

....

Legacy players, what makes you stay on legacy?  The community you've built up?

Maybe that keeps us from what we have built and bred for years!

If you could finally give us the opportunity to take something over, we will come over.

On 6/14/2019 at 10:28 PM, BlackTiger said:

Legacy servers will be gone anyways in the future, there is no point for them to stay online. Shut all of them down.

If legacy servers no longer exist, which servers will be shut down next? :-)

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On 6/14/2019 at 1:51 PM, Cedric said:

Weigh In: Legacy, New Servers, and New Modes

We've been receiving feedback that the community is looking for new adventures. This may come in the form of new servers with the original experience or new servers with a twist.  You've been heard!

Let's discuss some relative numbers.  Consider the amount we have servers now as 100% of the servers available for discussion.  In order for new servers to be established, we'll have to take from that 100% (what exists today).  Currently, we look for low population servers or legacy servers when we want to open new types of servers - as we did recently. 

Legacy servers won't be getting support (mesh detection, enforcement, maps, etc).  There will be mixed feelings on this but do not expect legacy to be around forever.  With that in mind, what types of new modes/servers would you like to see?

Legacy players, what makes you stay on legacy?  The community you've built up?

YES, NEW adventures without lag, here's my money.

Legacy should have never made it into full release.  No new content for Legacy if your not going to delete them. 

I play PVE to build megacastles with dinosaurs, I love maps with less lag (Scorched Earth seems to be the best performing map still).

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Ark is an amazing game but you guys focus way too much on pc. I play ps4 ark and it’s getting to the point in the official servers that you can’t start fresh, this sucks. I personally don’t want to invest so much money in a pc. I bought ark two years ago for $60 and was expecting the same attention as pc mainly because we both paid $60. It sucks to see all the new servers (Conquest and Classic) come out and not be able to take part in them. Console needs love just as much as pc... I mean I paid $60 for the game just as the pc players did.  

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“Legacy players, what makes you stay on legacy?  The community you've built up?”

 

Well that is sort of simple, it is our Home.

I am a player that started playing Ark since early alpha on the server i still play on today. Why is it a “legacy” server in the first place is a question in it’s own way.

One of the starter servers where everything was tested, wiped even, the place where the game came to be to what it is today. And what do those players get as a thank you, a lockdown of the servers into a “legacy server” cluster.

Servers that run without management of WC and are being run by the people that play on it. If there are problems it gets solved within the server population.

New people (still quite a few new players who join the legacy servers) get help from the more veteran players, by advise, even gear or some starter dino’s.

Nothing so toxic as all the stuff we here from the so called official servers.

Even outside the main server i play on, there is a group chat created by all the people from different legacy servers to be in contact and help eachother where and whenever they can, in other words quite a large community build around the legacy servers out there.

 

With all that stuff it just feels as home, where we legacy players spend hours in a friendly environment and spend our time with the stuff we have spend many hours on, base building, breeding etc.

 

It is all that, that keeps me playing Ark on a legacy server. Will that be removed then it would mean a big/great community feeling will be gone and most likely me quitting Ark for good. As with all the hours i have spend in the game i don’t want to start all over again from scartch, maybe if we can move our stuff over or just a full copy of the server to a “official”server.

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more a sensationalist post that does not add value, but increases rivalry between the new and legacy server. The server is deleted only with low population. Just read and see the official note of the Wild Card. This is the basic premise and many people who are on the new server have already seen some "new" servers becoming legacy and some "new" servers being deleted directly because they have failed to qualify for legacy. the term non legacy or new as you prefer to interpret this writing for those who can read whether or not liking the situation.  If you like your server? invite friends and learn how to share map space and features, everyone has the right to play. This is how Alpha tribe  helps who enters 504 island. Next Saturday, for those who play in the 504 island will have boss dg alpha combo and access alpha cave teck.

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