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Ark Game Play Issues


Elof

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Ark Game Play Issues

I am an avid player with more than 12,000 hours in Ark. I have a great group of great friends that I play with on multiple maps. Many of us have played together for 4-5 years. We have an excellent community of players, all of us with many thousands of game hours.

 

I want to start by saying that I have really love the game and have enjoyed many years of gameplay.

 

Recently however, problems have been introduced to the game that are causing us to lose items, dinos, time, and more importantly players. Many of my closest tribemates have left the game citing extreme gameplay issues. All of these issues could be addressed and corrected if the will was there to do so.

 

Let me outline a few issues that have happened over the last month or so.

 

Lag. Oh my goodness the lag is unbelievable. Trying to raise dinos in a 36 hour period on an island server we have seen timers shift more than 3.5 hours. It is difficult to plan our raising when you log in after 8 hours of sleep to do an imprint before work… and you discover that the imprints have shifted 45 minutes to an hour and you no longer have time to get the imprint in before you have to leave.

 

Lag. Lag has been so bad that many of our tribemates have been disconnected constantly. It is hard to leave the base to do anything as you could randomly disconnect. Couple of tribemates have lost gear as they are not certain where they died when they finally got back into the game.

 

Lag. One tribemate in particular has been collecting wyvern eggs from our rag server and he has lost 3 wyverns that landed in the lava when on his screen he was in a nest. He has lost many pieces of decent gear and cryod dinos. Losing stuff to bugs in the game is frustrating.

 

Lag. Raising gigas I personally imprinted 5 gigas before going to bed. When I got up the next morning the gigas were no longer imprinted and now I can’t get a full imprint. I was on track and 2 of them were 100% done before I went to bed. Now I get to watch the last 3 also not get the full imprint.

 

Lag. Downloaded some cool new coloured event tames from the Christmas event to my island server only to have the server crash and roll back. I lost all of my new colours.

 

Server restarts. Random server restarts in the middle of peak time for new version updates. The week before the Chrstmas break had an inordinate amount of restarts. Every time I was in a cave or doing a boss run I had to panic to get things squared away so I wouldn’t lose anything. The amount of time it takes to set up on the obi only to have to abort for a server restart that didn’t happen on time… frustrating.

 

I don’t know how to categorize this. While on the island chasing drops with my mana, my screen suddenly locks up. I am used to lag and disconnections so I simply wait. After about 40 seconds I am logging back into the server… no death message, no notice in the logs. My mana is gone, all of my gear and stuff collected from the drops missing. Everything gone. I am simply on a screen as if I had just transferred in. I couldn't find a death beacon in the area I was in.

 

Chibis keep resetting to level 1. Many tribemates have leveled to 3, 4 and 5 only to log in the next day to a level 1 chibi. 

 

Chibis stop leveling. I get to level 2 and can't gain any more levels from the chibi no matter how many alphas I kill. I got another one to level 4 and it too stopped leveling.

 

Raising 2 gigas that made it to trough a few hours before going to bed. Upon waking the next morning to discover that they starved to death.I have raised a lot of dinos, We have 70 tek troughs and the base has been designed so that there are no spots where a dino could be without being on trough. Only two logical conclusions can be taken from this. Either the server rolled back or the gigas simply stopped eating. 

 

Tribemate was raising several dinos on Ab while being pregnant with a 150 reaper (more than 12). He had to log out for a couple of hours in a tek pod and when he logged back in, he had died and lost his reaper to radiation in the green zone??. Unfortunately he had the cryoed babies on his person (Not something we recommend) but he lost his gear and all the new babies and the 150 reaper which ended up being a red and white event.

 

While on extinction another tribe member tek flew to a purple drop we were at so he wouldn’t be cryo sick and when he tossed his giga out, it was somehow cryo sick. He lost the giga to corrupted and his saddle was nowhere to be found.

 

While on extinction raising babies, a tribe member saw some death notices show up on the screen. When he searched our bases he found that one of our bases was completely gone along with all of our stuff. Hundreds of dinos, element, and more and another base was ¾ destroyed.. This is a PVE server but someone used a tactic that literally destroyed two bases that is high up in the snow biome.

 

While farming element veins and box triber showed up as we finished and started harvesting our vein. I didn’t know that was possible.. But it is.

 

During my weekly time in of my Rag base, we noticed that 6 of 10 cryo fridges were not powered for some reason. When opening them, all of the pods had expired losing all of the dinos. Looking at the logs, we see that some electrical cables auto decayed. Some of the many hundreds of electrical cables in the base and for some reason all the pods lost 30 days of charge in just one week.

 

Logged into my main base on an island server and saw half the cryo pods were at half charge, even though the fridge was fully powered and has never lost power. I play on this map every single day. This base is the most frequented base we have. Someone at this base at least 4 hours a day.

 

Half of our base on Scorched Earth suddenly auto decayed. Even though we were playing as a group on the map 4 days earlier. Stone structures stayed where metal ones auto decayed. We lost element, dinos and gear and a lot of it.

We have put support tickets in and have been told that we could have 10 dinos at a max 150 level to replace the hundreds of dinos lost in the last few months. Honestly this has turned a lot of my group of friends off playing.

 

While ejecting the loot from a red drop on extinction, someone used a new trick to steal stuff as it came out using. Again.. Didn’t know this was possible.

 

Now we add an event that pits player vs player to chase presents that drop from the sky in a line. Routinely we have 3 or 4 people all trying to open the same present and then arguing in global chat. The Christmas event has turned players that normally can play well together into enemies. Global chat has been horrible to read as everyone is upset about the drops. Merry Christmas I say.

 

At the end of the day the game has become seriously broken. The lag on the weekends when I can commit some time has made it unplayable.  I don’t want to trash the game as I absolutely love it. However, the current fixes are not helping and in fact are making the game much worse.

 

Then when contacting support for what are rather serious issues that have ruined hundred if not thousands of hours, we are given responses that do not adequately respect this. There has to be a better way that to have policies that confront the player base when they have issues.

 

We understand that a free to play game has some limits on what can be achieved. Many of the avid players I play with wonder if there shouldn't be a pay for official server cluster that can help with some of the expenses and installing admins to monitor the servers. My group of friends would love to have this as an option. Being able to still log onto official maps but having the ability to go to a server that is actively maintained. 

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6 hours ago, Elof said:

We have put support tickets in and have been told that we could have 10 dinos at a max 150 level to replace the hundreds of dinos lost in the last few months. Honestly this has turned a lot of my group of friends off playing.

Then when contacting support for what are rather serious issues that have ruined hundred if not thousands of hours, we are given responses that do not adequately respect this. There has to be a better way that to have policies that confront the player base when they have issues.

 

These two statements are the ones that hit home to me.  Incredibly disappointing support, never in the professional word would this be acceptable.  

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Most of the autodecay and imprint issues can be attributed to rollbacks etc. Also never ever open unpowered cryofridges. Game does not know when the power went off and thinks its been more than 30 days. The time on items is checked only when you access stuff. Known issue. Would need a lot more server resources if the spoil and charge time would constantly be updated when offline or not accessed.

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I just can't disagree with any of what was posted to be honest, this game is completely taking a nose dive lately.  We've got so many issues that are important that aren't being handled, we've got server performance that's so terrible that the game is literally unplayable for days at a time unless you wanna risk the transfer to another map/server.  We spent the entirety of our day with disconnects on 458, lag, more lag, more DCs, rinse and repeat, all.. darn.. day...  Yet we got this "Gee guys we couldnt' figure out what's causing it" message on twitter.. Seriously? 

Let's not even go into the fact that many Ark players paid for a DLC that was supposedly going to launch in December, it got delayed to January, and don't get me wrong, I'd rather they keep delaying it until it's ready, but hell we don't even really know what we paid for.  Nobody in the player community has a clue what is inside that mystery flee market bag we just bought, it could have an expansion in it, or it could have a "thanks for the donations" note in the bottom of it. Who knows.  Where's the marketing, where's the hype, hell where's the sneak peeks one would expect from the Devs?  I've got friends who are looking for other titles to play citing those very same issues, my wife told me tonight, she wants to find a title with a real development team and management, so yeah not only am I losing friends i've been playing this game with for months/years,  even my WIFE is fed up, and she's a heck of a lot more patient than I am. 

So many issues, all of which have been pointed out thousands of times in the forums, on twitter, during their twitch streams, by social media, gaming news sites, and yet, the only answer to that we seem to be getting is continued disappointment. I've about had it myself, no game is worth the irritation, frustration and overall aggravation that this one has been bringing to my screen the last few months.

 

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I am flabbergasted that 5 hours has gone by and only 1 reply has happened.

People still play right, or are they like this guys tribe?

There are so many excellent points listed here, I realllllly hope someone with influence gets a chance to see what is going on.

Great game idea, love the mechanics, hate that when you jump in a cave, you often lag and plummet into the lava below. If *I* kill myself, this is all good....if the game decides to do it because of a random disconnect, lag, feels sickly due to poor servers/bandwidth...whatever....well, that destroys the enjoyment a fair bit, especially if you are bringing high end dinos and gear that represents many many hours. 

How many of you have these high end dinos and the gear to support them, but leave it at base because you don't want to lose it from server issues? I know I have some maxed tech armor that looks lovely....714 armor, massive durability....and i DO NOT WEAR IT. Because when the game eats it randomly....it is absolutely bs.

I have also experienced the awesome job of throwing out a really good bulbdog, level 400ish, that simply evaporated....this isn't the level bug that eats 450+, in my case, the bulldog disappeared and so did the pod it came from. I have never heard of this before, and again, absolute bs.

This game has so much potential, but the customer servers, the servers themselves, and the vision of this company prevents that potential from becoming fully realized.

 

ps. Really hope someone with some authority reads this. I understand the forum mods are powerless to fix these issues.

 

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Rio4201 I agree with you. I posted this in hopes that someone who develops the game takes notice. The lag before cryo pods was bad, but I have to believe that the lag and game play issues we experience today are significantly worse. My biggest complaint used to be that I couldn't breed dinos due to the server cap. Or if I happened to jump while in a cave during the server timer I could lag out and die. Today, the lag is random, nothing to do with server timer and you can't plan your adventures around when the lag is expected. I no longer play the game the way I used too. If I do any of the complicated caves, I will (Not May) lose my stuff. If I do a boss fight, I will probably disconnect and lose my dinos, saddles and gear and not be able to have it replaced.

 

I still love the game, when I can play. just have to be very careful in what I want to do and when. Its sad.

 

Ark has an amazing community of loyal and dedicated  players, many of which I know are starting to drop off with similar issues I mentioned above. What is worse, when support tickets are submitted, we are told immediately that admins will not return anything close to what you may have had. Its a shame. My tribe loses high end, breed and 100% imprinted dinos and only the person who submits the ticket can have 10 useless low level tames in return. Not the very expensive saddles or the high end gear we have to outfit ourselves with to do many of the tasks.

 

I appreciate you guys taking the time to read and comment on this. If more of us shared our experiences the Ark dev team would have to see how serious these issues are. We want to play. We all love the game. We just need the issues to be resolved.

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Im on official PvE legacy island and I have been playing here since beta. And to be honest, the server has almost no lags if I dont count the 15m save timer. But also we have NO pillars on the map. When someone new joins they usualy ask if there are any unofficial rules. The answer is always the same - do NOT pillar anything. Sure, tribe bases are big but they are evenly spread around the map and mostly consisting of one big building, sometimes people dont even build walls around (including me).

I also tell everyone, if they dont pillar they will get support/help in form of resources, lost dinos (I can easily replace them if they loose it because of bug, I have thousands of spare dinos in cryos) and guidence when asking questions. This way we can all benefit from a friendly environment and less lags.

Secondly, there are no box-tribe player. Not a single chinese. There was a time when we had a box tribe on herbivore island but they stopped playing when the game was released.

This is my little ark-heaven. Not sure if the things I wrote are directly responsible for less lags but Im just glad I can breed and go caving without the fear of being arked.

Then I join Ragnarok because I want to get a wyvern egg and it takes me 20 minutes to leave the base because of lags and rollbacking. I literally cant open the damn gate, and then the gate opens and closes 5x in a row and Im rollbacked to the other side of my room and by the time I get to the closing/opening gate the rollback happens again. Flying above murder snow without getting any damage and then BAM - 10% hp, red screen flicking, panic & chaos.

So I join aberration to get some nice reaper. Jump, fly, lag, lag, lag and then Im stucked with my drake half-body under terrain locked in place and infinitely falling while namelesses slowly munch on my 190 rock drake.IMG_20191126_064624.thumb.jpg.f11d12ff52508e1ca00cfe81c666c7ee.jpg

So I join exti to get at least something done. Half of base is missing, was devoured by a corrupted giga in the 15m ORP window and my base in forest is decayed even though I was there 2 days ago refilling generator. Not mentioning the city is laggy as hell because there are like milion structures and mostly pillars&behe gates everywhere.

So I sadly return to my island heaven and start another breeding line.

PS: if someone decide to pillar the island and be rude with no chance of negotiation, I also have like 50 brontos Im gonna rain down on his base. So far it didnt happen yet, but Im ready!

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1 hour ago, Gruesome said:

PVE North America servers

You don't experience lag? you are a lucky lucky person. When it's bad you get to do most things twice. When it's really bad, you get a disconnect (no matter that you're under water or in the swamp) and then a 15 min rollback (if you're lucky).

On OC/ASIA servers my ping is btwn 15-40. I play mostly on NA PVP and my ping is 90-100. I experience a slight delay on NA servs but it's not unplayable in any way. I think the problem is in PVE everything is just stupid built up with tons of dinos everywhere and this causes the lag. I know ppl would hate it but there probably has to be a build limit on PvE and/or reduce player amounts. 

Honestly, I don't get why people play PvE. I've taken a walk around before,  just to see and it's ridiculous. 

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Oh it's most definitely worse on a pve server, I only exclusively play pve these days and that's actually a good point to springboard off of.  PvE servers should have better hardware and system specs because it is a matter of massive amounts of dinos, structures and in a lot of cases pillars.  If we aren't gonna have active enforcement monitoring things, the pillar problem will always be a problem, but with better system specs/memory/etc, at least it would be bearable. I've been on a few pvp servers and have seen how quick they function with little to no lag except the 15 min save lag, so I stick with my original point, pve servers need to have upgraded specs and memory. :/

@Scarekrow The reason "I" play a PvE server is because toxicity is a real thing in the realm of pvp titles and servers, I'm an old man who likes to collect things, being able to raise/breed/tame and enjoy the other aspects of the game without having to worry about some 13 year old with a shoulder mounted rocket launcher killing my tame or myself is a nice convenience.

 

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I too play on PVE and on PC. I understand that the bases are overly large causing some of the lag issues. PVP is not something I am interested in. There are two game modes offered and I too don't like the drama of PVP

I am very surprised to hear that some servers are not lagging badly. Our tribe has bases and outposts on a number of different servers and since October, all of them are crazy laggy. In fact we have a large group in discord many playing on several different maps all of us in different states and countries.. and we experience lag at the same time. This suggests that there is a network issue somewhere. 

I would also suggest that the timers on everything in the game causes a lot of these issues. Timer on decay, timer for poop, timer for breeding, timer for server saves, timer for egg hatching, timer for maturation, timers on dropped items.... timers everywhere. Obviously this is much worse for PVE with the number of structures and dinos.

I also wonder if they could make structures render as one block rather than piece by piece. Meaning, once your build is complete, you can set it as one structure and only change it when you want to renovate.

Again I would be willing to pay a little extra to have PVE upgraded servers that are actively monitored and maybe have a little extra power. I am not interested in playing on unofficial servers as I like the official community trading and so forth.  I think Wildcard should offer this option to generate some extra revenues that they could put towards fixing the game issues.

I am glad to hear that some players are not having these issues!

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Some of these playability issues are really not that hard to fix such a the blinding lights on ps4 and limited amounts of commands you can do as an admin. And how the snow biome metal rocks give no metal (I know it’s a change they made on purpose but no one likes it) Not only that but it’s not free to play on ps4 at least it’s $20. I literally just made a post like this one. I still enjoy the game I really do, but why do I enjoy it I don’t know. Honestly there is not a game that has as many problems as this one.

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On 1/19/2020 at 11:09 PM, SCAREKROW said:

What platform and modes do you play? In 3 years I've never experienced this but I've only ever played pvp official on ps4. Is this a pve thing? Are you on your closest region servers?

It is a PvE thing and it doesn't really matter what region their in cause all the PvE servers are mad with lag. I stick to PvP because the lag is bearable only Lagnarok can be annoying at times.  

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As a new player only 2 or so weeks in the gameplay issues are disgusting.

 

The lag and jumping about is a constant joke causing control issues and pressing the wrong menu items or even demolishing stuff etc.

 

After a hours long login lock issue the other day im now sat here with timeout issue and not able to get on the official server... same for a friend trying to get on.

Absolute madness and definitely falls under the not fit for purpose thus my claim a refund from playstation as I purchased on the store.

I've had to do it with other games when their servers for multiplayer are rubbish.

In this day and age it's not acceptable. Even worse with a game that has been released for years!

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It is really sad.

Lost two more tribe members this weekend to Escape from Tarkov. We had two tribe members insta die on Thursday and Friday.

One was standing in front of the industrial cookers after a meat run only to die and lose all of their good armor (Crafted Tek) and their good giga used to do the run on our Valg server.

The other jumped off their drake in the red zone on ab and lost everything, including the drake as it died before he could get back to save it because there was no death beacon. He lost several really good haz suits and a few cryod dinos but because they were just deleted, he is not exactly sure which ones he had on him.

Support tickets were put in but looks like only the dinos they could prove were on them can be replaced and no gear. Problem is that the instant kill and no log entry, how can they prove what dinos they lost? So only the drake and bulb pet can be replaced and the rest of the stuff is simply lost.

These issues are getting worse and not better. We play on PVE, why would there be a instant kill anyway. I understand the issue with PVP and really hope they fix it for them. But putting such a poorly thought out solution in place with no way to track player losses is irresponsible. This is a policy designed to make players leave the game and not cultivate the ones already here. Many of us are accidentally meshing without even knowing it.  I have been pushed by reapers, crabs, drakes, manas and more while just standing in the wrong spot. Devs must have known there was going to be a lot of false positives... so why make a kill permanent with no way to recover your stuff. Sad!

Even worse our tribe leader has decided to take a break for a bit while Wild Card "figures their stuff out".  How long do you suppose that is going to be? Great game but the player base is leaving so quickly now.

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On 1/20/2020 at 10:03 AM, SCAREKROW said:

On OC/ASIA servers my ping is btwn 15-40. I play mostly on NA PVP and my ping is 90-100. I experience a slight delay on NA servs but it's not unplayable in any way. I think the problem is in PVE everything is just stupid built up with tons of dinos everywhere and this causes the lag. I know ppl would hate it but there probably has to be a build limit on PvE and/or reduce player amounts. 

Honestly, I don't get why people play PvE. I've taken a walk around before,  just to see and it's ridiculous. 

You are correct. On PVE the issues comes mostly from more and more huge bases are being build and reseted once a week. But server saves them all the same. Also have to remember that the game was not meant as pve from the start.

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On 1/20/2020 at 8:54 AM, Gruesome said:

PVE North America servers

You don't experience lag? you are a lucky lucky person. When it's bad you get to do most things twice. When it's really bad, you get a disconnect (no matter that you're under water or in the swamp) and then a 15 min rollback (if you're lucky).

Rollbacks dont happen from disconnects unless server crashes.

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Well. I guess this post was a precursor to things to come. Transferring metal from Ab to the Island and lost my toon. Guess that solves my problems with the game. Month and a half wait to get an appointment. Not sure it is worth waiting.... Very frustrating but no longer worried about how many people leave the game.

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The game seems to be broken in a lot of ways. I had to use admin cheats to force join my own tribe after a server transfer. My argy did something i hadn't seen in a while. That thing where they do that circle glitching stuck spin. My bird kept going higher and higher. Would not fly down luckily i was by a mountain. 

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