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Weigh In: Public Beta.. What's Next?


Cedric

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Another alternative suggestion for how you could fix cave meta without major changes to the game or high degree of work on part of the developers. Simply add a tek version of the cannon, it would work just like the cannon except it can shoot thru the terrain and objects like the railgun. Limit its range to to slightly less than turret range. Ammunition should be slightly more expensive than mek cannon ammo. This way if people are just camping forever in a cave you have option of using artillery to dig them out and force them to come outside and pvp

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People out here complaining because of not being able to raid caves is just not true. Theyre 6x damage and can get any dino on now with cryos. What would tempt me to build on land more is some more counters against golems, literally grind for days and days for bullets and someone rocks up on a golem while youre offline there is literally no way to defend against them. Whats the point in turrets of they have such little effect and the bullet grind can be real hard as solo or smaller tribes

 

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15 hours ago, BillGatesAF said:

As a pvp player with over a year played. I can honestly say that caves are the most broken thing in ark. My solution would be either to have a huge land entrance leading directly into caves to where you can actually make a solid push. Or just remove cave building. Cryopods are a thing now so there shouldn't be a problem with not having enough room and to the people who complain about getting new mutations should be in a big enough tribe to expand their bases to a size that is able to have dinos out.

So you think only big tribe should be able to breed competitively? That's a really crappy outlook IMO. Having space to store breeding dinos is a very legitimate reason for caves, and unless a solution is found for storing/managing breeders without caves it will heavily effect Official PVP servers negatively. 

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This is going to be an unpopular opinion and I am sure I will receive a lot of hate for it. First and foremost, I agree that the cave meta is a plague on the game. It has completely ruined griefing because only wiping Tp's gets boring very quick. However, there is no one solution that will change this. Every cave needs to be nerfed differently. I am not going to rant about how the current titan meta, turret limit, or tek Tappy meta punishes everyone who lives outside because there are already plenty of posts. Some caves need to crouch points or it will be completely unfair for anyone attempting to defend. The glowtail/Portal cave on abberation is a great example of why removing crouch points will be bad. On abberation there is not much of a variety of DPS dinosaurs other than megalosaurus. If they removed the crouch point in that cave the attacker would be at an unfair advantage because they could walk racers up to the turret wall while someone in tek leggings throws Z Plants completely rendering abberations main DPS dinosaur completely useless. Megalosaurus do not nearly do as much damage as a giga so killing 140K+ health racers with over capped saddles is already a challange as is.

Most of the caves that are publically regarded as over powered do not even have a crouch. Island Carno Cave, Island Easy/Hard Water Caves, Center Ice Cave, Center Pearl Cave, Rag Mushroom Cave (Not so much now), and SE Church are all near impossible to online raid. Most of these caves have existed in legacy but they were not as popular of a location as they are today because of a lot of reasons. 

- The TEK teleporter is a huge reason why cave life is so convenient. I am sure a lot of you legacy players remember when the teleporter consumed element based on how much weight was on it. If they reverted this change, it would be even harder to bring everything inside the cave, not to mention it would fix the spam teleporting to crash servers when you are under attack.
- Most tribes did not have nearly as many 0/0 0/0 dinosaurs as there are now.
- After the flyer nerf there was not a single dinosaur fast enough to not get shot by turrets.
- Most of the dinosaurs were not nearly as powerful as they were today.
- Guns were also more viable on legacy then they are now thus removing any incentive to actually PvP. 298 damage is simply not enough to kill anyone currently. I believe they should revert the fab sniper back to when it was possible to shoot quickly without cheating.
- There was no Owl/pocket dino meta

Most of the recent updates in the last 3 years have catered more for PvE players and removed any reason for players to actually want to leave the cave and PvP. Why would anyone want to leave the cave if they know that people are outside aimbotting, people are flying in tek suits, people are using snow owls/Manas/Pocket Giga, Heavy turrets with plant Y spam, Compound bows desync often for high ping players, and finally the plantz weight increase that completely ruins any chance of actual foot PvP. The game as a whole needs a complete re-work, not the caves.

 

 

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As someone who has played this game practically since it went into early access up to the cave meta I'll give my thoughts on the subject: 

-Caves have always been there. On legacy and for awhile after official release they were mostly used for storage of War stock. There were a few notable tribes who would live in caves full time but they were primarily used for dino storage. This is still the case today however now they're storing 0/0 females used for mutation breeding (which people did not know how to do on legacy/early official) instead of war dinos, which now sit in cryofridges. As long as mutation breeding exists in its current state, i.e. where hundreds of clean females are needed to push mutations, caves will be necessary as they are the safest place to store your breeders. As for a solution to this, I personally like the idea of a tek dedicated dino storage or something similar which allows you to breed without having to have your hundreds of females out in the open. You can change how mutations work but as long as mutations exist there will be need a for hundreds of breeders to maximize your chances, so I believe addressing how to store those dinos is the most effective use of Dev time. (Side note, cleaning up the amount of dinos sitting out on a server also helps to increase server performance)

 

-The second issue is the turret limit. While it was implemented to increase server performance I think most people who still participate in large scale pvp/raids can agree performance is the same as it always was. The thing the turret limit did do, however, was limit the number of surface base spots which were viable. For example, on the island, Herb island, Spiral, 10/10 etc all used to be viable to good base locations however with the turret limit I do not feel these can be properly defended anymore. You can look at other maps as well and any player who has played this game for an extended period of time can tell you about all the spots on legacy which were popular build locations that are no longer viable due to the turret limit. This also plays a part in the cave meta because most caves have a single entrance/choke which maximizes the value you can get from a turret wall. My proposed change would be a drastic increase or out-right removal of the turret limit, however other changes would need to be made to compensate for the load this puts on a server.

 

-Dino stats is another issue which contributes to the current meta. On legacy/ early official mutation breeding simply was not a thing and stats were much lower across the board. For example, everyone remembers the God Rexes from legacy, and the issues/ community outrage they caused. Current Rex lines are approaching the stats that God Rexes used to have in an entirely legitimate fashion. Racers are now routinely 140k+ HP. Put simply dino stats are higher than we have ever seen and base defenses have never been buffed to compensate for this. I'm not sure what the fix is for this but it's another reason increasing/removing the turret limit at the least is not a bad idea.  

 

-The death of Ground PvP is another factor. Why leave the comfort of your cave only to get CC'd to death by snow owls? Crowd Control in general has gotten out of hand but it's just one factor. Tribes have better BPs now days then ever before and the current cap on weapon damage is simply too low. It's the reason that ascendant gacha crystals became necessary for pvp for a time. 

 

Of course there are other things that need changed like titans and Meks, but they've been spoken about enough I think by now the Devs are aware. The take away from my post I hope is this: There are many changes needed to the game, some in core aspects of it, that need to be made if you want tribes to successfully transition out of the caves and back on to land. While you can accomplish this in "easier" ways like disabling caves altogether or adding some sort of punishment/hindrance for building in them. If you want to do this right you need to address the multitude of reasons that cave bases became so prevalent aside from just Titans, Meks, etc. 

 

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The few things with cave meta atleast on smalltribes from what ive seen and experienced myself i wouldnt really say that titans are what makes people build in caves. Its more of what people call "Friends" (another word for alliance) where u can go togheter with other tribes to grief/raid another tribe. To be fair i would say that is perfectly fine but people abuses it to its fullest to rotate fobs day after day and or fob several spots at a time putting the defending tribe in a severe disadvantage(100% lose situation) if not living in a cave.

 

The other things i would say makes people build in caves is timefactor, breeding and the ability to defend the base solo as a cave can allow a tribe to have downtime or the 1 guy that stays online at night to defend the cave in a 1v6.

 

1)So atleast on smalltribes i would say Change/add some rules and enforce it harder to stop people from abusing the friends(alliances) to rotate fob/fob several spots at same time. 

2) Change the current member limit from 6 to like 10-12 members

3)remove the abillity for quetsalz, pacers, plesi and mosas to use the hatchframe builds.

 

Other than that maybe try out changing the tek turrets to work like heavys so they can hit every shot and not be dodgeable above water or change the heavy turret drain from 4 bullets per shot to like 2.

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Bring turret cap up some. Lots of big spots cant be built in properly anymore because you cant fit the amount of turrets you need to defend it.

Make titans not transferrable. Titanosaurs arent, so why the hell are creatures that are 100x stronger able to be?

Turn off ext creature transfers to ab. Manas and gas bags completely ruin the ab experience and a lot of previously good spots.

 remove weapon damage or raise it by 100. 298 fabs cant  do poop to 2k dura armor.

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On a standard cube base, if you count each face as an equal fraction of the whole, (so 5 approachable faces total), then a turret can only ever cover 60% of the approachable sides, maybe a little more if it's elevated. A turret on a death wall in a cave can always cover 100% of the approachable side.

So 60% coverage vs 100%. That's the problem.

To fix you could scale cave turret damage with the above math. Reduce cave turret damage by 40% so it's a case of 60% coverage versus 60% damage. OR do the reverse. Increase turret damage by 40% for turrets by default, with a modifier that cancels it for turrets in caves (the latter gives a positive spin to it, rather than a flat, anger inducing nerf)

Flak needs a serious global cap. Can you create a volume on each server that reads all flak pieces, and if (durability > 400){ durability = 400}? Soakers should be the only answer to 6 turrets or more, because flak running a base where only 60% of the turrets can hit you is a serious draw.

Another alternative is a non-tek offline protection object that does not apply to cave structures. This also has the benefit of being a buff rather than a nerf, so more positive for PR. MTS uses ORP objects

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1) Apply the 24 hour transfer penalty to animals transferred in cryo as well, this prevents people living in caves to transfer in and out of their cave without commitment.

2) Remove building in artifact caves.

3) Building in 6x zones also reduces turret fire rate by 1/2 or greater.

4) Gacha's will not produce materials inside of 6x zones. Alternatively, remove the ability for Gacha's to produce element dust.

5) Widen cave choke points to allow at minimum a Trike or Stego to walk into the cave.

6) Nerf Velos inside of 6x zones. Either make it so they don't eat while on turret mode, or apply a timer to how long they can "shoot" for before needing to reset, or make them take flyer based damage from ranged sources.

 

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Titans are strong and that one more excute for people to build in caves, but even if you nerf titans people wont leave the security of caves, because right now caves are tooooo hard to raid and impossible to grief

to fix it i recomend nerfing forest a bit(make it so mek bubbles prevent it pinking for eg), nobody wants to play outside when you can lose every dino you have outside of a tek bubble

and nerf caves overall, best way would be to rework the entrances, make big open spaces like the entrance of ice cave on the center, remove crounchs and water ways

or

reduce damage given by turrents + structures take even more damage + increase railgun damage(to everything inside caves) and reduce cost

But the ideal would really be make big entrances for all caves, i know you want the caves to be "hard" for PVE, but now with cryopods it doesnt even mater because you can uncryo a dino inside

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Where do I begin, the main reason why caves are "meta" is mainly for the annoyance of 2 or 3 major flaws in the game. One major one would be the use of hatch frame quetzals and or hatch frame racers. You need to make it so hatch frames are not allowed to be used on platform structures as you can use them on outside towers or bases with either tek rifle or just running it down mid. Another major issue with outside bases are obviously titans, why build-out in the open when you have to worry about 3 titans running down at your base? Obviously,  you've nerfed them but there isn't enough buff on defenses to be able to mass defend against them effectively when you can just build in a cave and not worry about them! Now this last point refers mainly to 6 man but can be referred to official as well, the tek tape meta is trash but for any outside tower, it can be dropped with racers running down mid with tek tape support spamming the hatch frames to break the turrets. YOU NEED to limit Tek tapajaras per tribe or make them not do damage to certain structures because tek tapajaras are broken and you can just spam hatch frame turrets and break them within minutes. As for Killing the cave meta, the cave meta is dead because you still do not and cannot release a proper fix to meshing. Its very sad when the "safest" place to build isnt safe at all, just because of externals factors that you HAVENT made better since the game released. You want to fix the cave meta yet there's no reason to change it, if anything make every cave accessible by anything the size of a paracerethium, like PEARL CAVE for example on center, it is easier to mesh the damn cave than to raid it legit and thats a HUGE PROBLEM.  Fix the mechanics of the game and it will be fine, the turret limit change was also a huge deal for land bases as they killed the majority of the halfway decent spots. Majority of your maps you have released have barely any good PVP spots as your maps cater to PVE players. There is a multitude of issues and I believe you are going about this the entirely wrong way. 

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why touch meta when the game is still broken ? spend time to breed a dino together, nmy player uses a new steam account to undermesh and take your dino stats.

defense turrets barely work with high pin while other attack mechanisms do work under high ping.
velos stance changes to passive on server restart.
big tribes can attack with 40 tapejara and destroy a 50 turret defended base in under a minute.

best is you join a big pvp tribe and talk with them and participate in attack and defences and dont listen to 1 tribe only.

we cannot simply loose bases again because you want to adjust some game variables.

 

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1. Remove ability build in artefact caves. 

2. Limit amount of mutation. 140hp racers is cancer. 500+ dmg giga or 900% dmg rhino was intented be so strong. 

3. Make different turret limits for regular/classic/6man servers. It's stupid when ppl on 6man forced raid same quantity of turrets like 50 ppl on regular while they attack tower/tp/wall 

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Limit titans to extinction, double turret cap for land bases, half tek tapi fire rate limit to 10 tek taps. Fix the fact that tek tapis don’t get shot in lag, reduce mek bubble range to maybe half reduce their damage to spam. make cave entrance a bit wider like trike size racer is too much and reduce turret cap to 70 for caves. Reduce all dinos stats by 30% so a giga with 500 melee would go down to 350 or 30k hp on a racer becomes 20k meaning soaking will be a bit more challenging and not just crazy op dinos as they are becoming now due to people being much better at breeding. People have also been suggesting fixing mesh biting which I disagree with. It would actually just make caves harder to raid. Say you were trying to raid an ice cave I could sit with my auto clicker giga biting at the crouch point. You wouldn’t die unless you came out but you would be unable to come out plus any Dino you threw in wouldn’t get shot due to me los it then I would just kill it. It would also make it so you then can no longer throw your own giga in the other side and rage mine. Meaning the only way to kill me giga would be to shoot it and I can swap out forever and you would be unable to hit me with your own giga or do anything. You could also make it so dinos in caves mature 20% slower to reduce people’s breeding in caves and as an incentive to have an outside base. Back to the earlier point about land bases. How the raptor do you expect me to defend a good old spirals base on island or a desert plat base or castle plat on rag when I can only have 100 turrets per area? Why would I spend 700 turrets+ defending one base spot when that won’t even cover everywhere due to the limit when I could have 100 turrets and island ice cave entrance and be unraidable? You need to make it so you can have 200 turrets in that area and then we can have much stronger defences around land bases making it so it’s actually worth having them. One cave that wouldn’t get nerfed by the wider tunnel and turret limit though is center ice. You can have 2 turret limits facing the water not to mention 200+ velos along the wall when entering up through the water so that needs to be nerfed somehow. That and the drop down is untouchable you can sit there with 3 Gigas and there’s nothing the enemy can do to get past so that needs some serious nerfing. Then there’s the issue of hatchframe quetzes and racers why would that be necessary just remove hatchframes from platform dinos plain and simple. It’s stupid someone can completely block my turrets sight with a quetzal or racer although a similar effect could be created with ceilings so a better solution might be to make it so you can’t build as far out as you currently can on quetzes or racers limiting it to the 2x3 foundations that fit on a racer/ quetzal and whatever dimensions fit on a bronto and other dinos.

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You want people out of caves?  DIsable titan downloading on non extinction maps, remove tek saddles, fix the mesh, disallow hatchframes on platform saddles, nerf mek shield range, cap player movement speed.  Make bigger plateau like areas for people to build on,  I'mprove coverage so people can protect their cleans for breeding.  

 

The lazy way is to ban cave building and kick people out. 

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4 minutes ago, DODORANCHER said:

You want people out of caves?  DIsable titan downloading on non extinction maps, remove tek saddles, fix the mesh, disallow hatchframes on platform saddles, nerf mek shield range, cap player movement speed.  Make bigger plateau like areas for people to build on,  I'mprove coverage so people can protect their cleans for breeding.  

 

The lazy way is to ban cave building and kick people out. 

How would capping movement speed increase outside bases? That’s just cancer 

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fix meshing, one of the reason we build in a cave, is because velos will pop their head through the wall and then meshers cant do anything anymore, that and titans, turret limit, actual space to place breeder dinos,  caves are essential. and they are not impossible to raid, we raided many caves, you just need to be smart about how you do it and you will see it aint that hard.

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After playing 8,100 hours and reading these 3 pages....

Changes:
-Add a tek item to breed dinos inside of(cryofridge that breeds and mutates and doesnt have a flimsy 70 capacity.) 
-Disable uncryoing/downloading dinos in any and all caves
-Velos Cannot shoot in turret mode in caves. 
-disable teleporters in caves
-Increase turret limit by 2 or 3 times.
-Disable floaters on ab, and titans on all maps but their own.  

maybe:
      -place turret limit in caves or disable them altogether. 
 

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Well, since mel rushing bases is a thing because of the duping exploit. I think cave building should be allowed in every cave other than crouch point caves and make it so you cant throw gigas out in caves. Mesh biting is seriously aids to go against.. titans were the original reason to cave builds now its meks and valentine's day chocolates! Fix op meks and take all vday candies off servers. Also meks shouldn't be allowed on abberation. It's insanely hard to counter them without gigas. If you increase damage done to meks by turrets. That will help solve some of the big issues with mek rushing. Make swinging the sword cost a percentage of ele each swing along with the booster on the feet.

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