Ark is an amazing title, it offers you creativity, imagination, a really nice time sink and if you are lucky you get to build a really fantastic community. However, there are a few major things that are definitely detracting from the curb appeal it should have and player retention.
1. Server stability
This is huge and it's a behemoth of a problem. The servers are barely keeping up with the title, many servers are so lagged that you just can't viably play, especially in terms of pvp, you need to be able to react quickly and precisely if you want to be successful in that game mode. This game is based around cooldowns, timers and timing in general, when the servers aren't able to keep accurate time it wreaks havoc with those of us who breed/hatch/etc.
2. Character Storage
Another large issue, how the character files are stored, backed up, and implemented when connecting to a server. There's some disagreement on the best possible method for doing this but I still firmly stand on the side of cloud based character storage. One of my biggest fears and it's happened twice now, is my character getting deleted during a transfer from one map to another. Thousands of hours of work suddenly just gone, the dinos you may have been bringing with, gone. Gear.. gone. If there's one almost instant player killer, it's having a toon the player has invested their time into suddenly vanishing. When it happened to me, it took an act of God (my wife) and a whole lot of very close friends from Ark to get me to reinstall it and log back in. In a perfect world, a character menu that connects to an account based cloud directory with a server list to select from would be much easier to handle.
I know duping is a commonly exploited thing on this title, but with the right checks in the right places, cloud based would definitely be more ironclad than the current implementation. Store the character file, backup char file, and current inventory list to the cloud upon entering that selection menu from in-game, once that's set, the next time the player logs in, they can go right to char selection and server selection, select their character, choose their destination and head to that server.
Honestly, I can think of a million different things that would improve this title, segregation between pve and pvp changes to the title, more QoL things like cosmetic items, decoration, integrating more tek dinos into the game as we continue to evolve into the next rendition of Ark, etc. But really the two key things right now that are plaguing this game are the servers being shoddy and the fear of losing characters on using a transfer system Wildcard encourages us to use to visit these maps which have unique resources. The only way you can really eliminate that kind of traffic is to either design maps that encompass all the latest and greatest dinos and features, or fix the system.
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Rio4201
The truth about what Ark really needs.
Ark is an amazing title, it offers you creativity, imagination, a really nice time sink and if you are lucky you get to build a really fantastic community. However, there are a few major things that are definitely detracting from the curb appeal it should have and player retention.
1. Server stability
This is huge and it's a behemoth of a problem. The servers are barely keeping up with the title, many servers are so lagged that you just can't viably play, especially in terms of pvp, you need to be able to react quickly and precisely if you want to be successful in that game mode. This game is based around cooldowns, timers and timing in general, when the servers aren't able to keep accurate time it wreaks havoc with those of us who breed/hatch/etc.
2. Character Storage
Another large issue, how the character files are stored, backed up, and implemented when connecting to a server. There's some disagreement on the best possible method for doing this but I still firmly stand on the side of cloud based character storage. One of my biggest fears and it's happened twice now, is my character getting deleted during a transfer from one map to another. Thousands of hours of work suddenly just gone, the dinos you may have been bringing with, gone. Gear.. gone. If there's one almost instant player killer, it's having a toon the player has invested their time into suddenly vanishing. When it happened to me, it took an act of God (my wife) and a whole lot of very close friends from Ark to get me to reinstall it and log back in. In a perfect world, a character menu that connects to an account based cloud directory with a server list to select from would be much easier to handle.
I know duping is a commonly exploited thing on this title, but with the right checks in the right places, cloud based would definitely be more ironclad than the current implementation. Store the character file, backup char file, and current inventory list to the cloud upon entering that selection menu from in-game, once that's set, the next time the player logs in, they can go right to char selection and server selection, select their character, choose their destination and head to that server.
Honestly, I can think of a million different things that would improve this title, segregation between pve and pvp changes to the title, more QoL things like cosmetic items, decoration, integrating more tek dinos into the game as we continue to evolve into the next rendition of Ark, etc. But really the two key things right now that are plaguing this game are the servers being shoddy and the fear of losing characters on using a transfer system Wildcard encourages us to use to visit these maps which have unique resources. The only way you can really eliminate that kind of traffic is to either design maps that encompass all the latest and greatest dinos and features, or fix the system.
Anyhoo, that's my 2 cents on it.
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