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ARK has become a pay-to-win game because of the ARK blackmarket


ChrisGamingYT

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11 hours ago, ChrisGamingYT said:

Regardless the best and easiest way to end it all is to disable all server transfer permanently, and do a global wipe. Only way for ARK to get new players that will stick to the game rather than stop after a week because they never had a chance to go anywhere.

Do you truly believe its for the best that the community be paralyzed in such a manner as to disable any and all trade via transfers? That is like forcing a xenophobic agenda on modern economies by refusing them free trade options with other countries.  The excitement of foreign travel, support and overall exploration would end, along with any Official-based diplomatic relationships between trips. Despite the fact that it is already difficult enough to even gauge if your character will survive the transfer nowadays regardless.

 

This is a social experiment...and one that some people would demand fail with practices such as these - being a complete and utter shutdown.

 

To top it off, you want this for PvE as well..? You do realize that - as odd as it is to admit - the black market is something that was going to happen in a game like this regardless. Is it unfair? Of course it is - especially with how abused it has gotten.

 

As it would turn out though, many people will just pay others to grind and tame things for them when they haven't the time nor desire to do it themselves. It's how life works. 

 

 

 

 

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On 4/23/2020 at 6:34 AM, ChrisGamingYT said:

ARK has become a pay-to-win game because of the ARK blackmarket

there is a ARK blackmarket out there where you can buy OP dinos and without those you have no chance to win, therefore ARK has become a pay-to-win game

 

time to open your eyes WILDCARD, and end all server transfer + global wipe on official

 

I know the black market guys are going to attack me like savages because they're going to fear for their wallet, all I have to say is bring it on, you don't scare me

you can not win ark either way

 

and the blackmarket where is it dude

these 2-3 sites that sell poop for 5 euro you can do by yourself... or a discord channel from some guy...

 

there is a maximum level cap of 450 for a reason so it can not be overshot and this limit is on the horizon now again like it was on legacy

and everybody knows the stats on the different clusters that go around

 

and you do not trade on discord for money, you trade ingame and can meet in the discord and there is a serious trading discord aswell but i never used it where you can buy stuff for ingots or tek structures or smth, but not real money.

you get colored dinos and very good stats, op stats if you want so, but everybody knows this stats and everybody has this stats on pve, and on pvp you do not share your line anyway!

 

as always there are some scrubs making money with a product thats not their own, and you have the scrubs that buy it.

 

especially on pvp because you start from ZERO after a wipe or starting new, yes i get you, but it is only pvp people that tryhard

 

and i get you in terms of wipe on pvp servers, maybe once every 3 month or every 6 month would solve all problems on pvp not only dino/structure selling for real money.

 

you have to imagine 90% of all pvp players do not buy dinos because it is not common to buy dinos and they dont even have money to spent on dinos, they die anyway so wasted money right.

 

you talk about your world because you know about it.

the ark pvp world is not only buying dinos and pay to win.

but i understand that you can make a monopol on pvp with this, but again, this world is small.

 

on pve tbh... there are so many colors and so many dinos, you can not have everything.. right..

 

so please do not take some things so serious and as "everyone" would do it.

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@PhotekPlays Wildcard does not enforce real money trading unless it's in the client. You need so much proof that the guy/tribe is trading with IRL money that it's nearly impossible to report it.

They only act if the seller says INGAME in the ARK client that he will sell you something for $$ and even then it would still be hard to proof unless you actually buy it and use that to report. So you would have to spend your money just to get rid of someones probably fake account that they just used for trading.

And those fake accounts can just be bought from russian and chinese traders for nothing. 

If a normal person can play detective, why can't Wildcard? If they hired a single person that only does this, buy random stuff online for IRL money meet up with the seller, get closer to them or just instantly ban them it could already help with the cash trading. 

It's true that only a small part of the community is IRL money trading in the west but the Chinese and Russian market is flooded. Most Chinese player know where to buy and many do it.  Such shortcuts are not frowned  upon in many Asian countries. We in the west hate P2W but in most Asian countries P2W is as normal as farming normally. Money has a way different value in Asian countries than in the west. (If you are interested about this, you can read about it online.)

I have a good ingame friend who came to the EU servers because the Chinese were unplayable. He told me that everyone was just farming 24/7 to sell the stuff for IRL money. 24//7 wyvern egg, dungeon and everything worth anything was grinded like crazy and if you tried to interfere as an outside it would lead to harassment. This was also PVE not PVP, I can only imagine that the PVP trading was way worse.

Another Chinese guy I sometimes traded with a year ago always told me the IRL prices for  dinos, newest Giga = 5 Australian $, High Anglerfish stat 2 Australian $. The market is gigantic in the east and many people would do a lot of shady things when it comes to money as you all know.

Just look at Bert the rex/Basilo breeder getting hacked, all his lines were sold on the market. He never sold breedable basilos but the hackers got them and sold them. And what did Wildcard do? Ask Bert yourself....

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7 hours ago, PhotekPlays said:

and the blackmarket where is it dude

these 2-3 sites that sell poop for 5 euro you can do by yourself... or a discord channel from some guy...

Sounds like you did no research. Huge sites selling top stat (not even available from the FB sellers who are selling on market top stat not 4 or 5 gen ahead top stat) plus all structures, resources, etc. 

Not for 5 euro either. 20, 30, 50+. Sounds like you just don't want to see it as it's a simple google search to find.

I wish WC had the funds and commitment to shut them down but they lack both.

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The core problem is the power gap between tamed dinos and endgame lines. Tamed dinos are so weak as to be utterly useless against bred endgame lines. There is nothing wrong with bred dinos being stronger but the difference in stats right now is way too much.

The game is lot easier than it used to be for new tribes. Anyone get heavy turrets, decent flak, C4. With some effort anyone can get TEK unlocked and get transmitters, tek turrets and all that good stuff. But the one thing that you can't get is lines. it took several years of effort by massive number of people to create the lines that exist today.

Your only option is to get them from a friend in a megatribe. Or buy them through RMT. This is the main reason why officials is still unwelcoming for new or smaller tribes. To play the game you are completely dependent on being some megatribes good sides, or have to shell out real money to some shady online seller. Everything else like I said is doable if you are smart and willing to grind. You can farm up heavies in a day. And get TEK in a week by doing Extinction and Genesis content. But you cant get mana lines, giga lines, racers and all the vital dino lines you need to compete in pvp. That's the main thing that keep new tribes from prospering and makes officials such a dead environment with so little fresh blood and competition.

This is why the enormous RMT black market exist. The solution to shutting these guys down would be to solve the underlying core problem and buff tamed dino stats. I would recommend increasing wild dino spawn levels to 300. And increasing the frequency of high level spawns. This would give a new tribe a chance of starting out with something that has at least 80 or 100 points in a desired stats, instead of 30 or 40 as they normally do. Megatribe lines would still be lot better but at least you would have a fighting chance instead of your manas and rhinos being food for theirs.

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all servers wiped? that'd be enough for me to stop playing.  over 2 years breeding / taming on official.

doing that won't fix the problem.  they'll just come back and do it again. doesn't stop anything.

now...

far as you guys saying they just buy another copy of ark... your wrong about that...

  • Main Account - they purchase ark and all DLC.
  • Secondary Account - They play the game on the Secondary Account via 'Family Share'.
  • Secondary Account gets banned - They make a new Secondary Account and start playing again via 'Faimly Share' without having to buy anything.
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3 hours ago, caleb68 said:

all servers wiped? that'd be enough for me to stop playing.  over 2 years breeding / taming on official.

doing that won't fix the problem.  they'll just come back and do it again. doesn't stop anything.

now...

far as you guys saying they just buy another copy of ark... your wrong about that...

  • Main Account - they purchase ark and all DLC.
  • Secondary Account - They play the game on the Secondary Account via 'Family Share'.
  • Secondary Account gets banned - They make a new Secondary Account and start playing again via 'Faimly Share' without having to buy anything.

Please don't spread false information. You can not play ARK on official servers with family share accounts.

The way people get throwaway accounts for stuff like cheating is through websites like g2a that sell steam keys, you can pick up ARK for as low as $2 with all DLCs. 

On official 6man servers and official pvp servers RMTers usually play on their main accounts. They are affiliated with some well known tribes on official servers. Admins, leaders, breeders in several prominent tribes engage in RMT as a source of side income. They are not even trying to hide what they do. You can look up ancestry of certain popular RMT giga lines for example, and trace it back to the tribe that bred it, and even individual people in that tribe who i shall not name here.

 

  

3 hours ago, Neurodynamic1 said:

Ummm pretty sure anything you can get from the "black market" you can just as easily trade in game for. I've got all the op dinos and bp's I could ever need from just trading poly, ing, and other resources for it. 

Maybe on PVE. Good luck getting a giga line on PVP without paying real money. Or being a long time vet that has connections in megatribes, which new players dont.

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3 hours ago, covenantgrunt said:

Please don't spread false information. You can not play ARK on official servers with family share accounts.

You obviously haven't used family share, or tried using it wrong.  I can play ark on family share.  Just can't play on both pc's at the same time, family share doesn't allow that.   In fact I can play any of my steam games on family share.  But Hey if you want to tell me I can't do what I'd been doing via two pc's for over a year now, that's fine by me, guess my steam is special.

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1 hour ago, caleb68 said:

You obviously haven't used family share, or tried using it wrong.  I can play ark on family share.  Just can't play on both pc's at the same time, family share doesn't allow that.   In fact I can play any of my steam games on family share.  But Hey if you want to tell me I can't do what I'd been doing via two pc's for over a year now, that's fine by me, guess my steam is special.

I think he meant that you can't enable familly share, log off your current account and log with a second account on the same PC. That's been blocked years ago to prevent the alts spamming. You are forced to buy another copy of the game for each account you want to use on the same PC.

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1 hour ago, Darkholis said:

I think he meant that you can't enable familly share, log off your current account and log with a second account on the same PC. That's been blocked years ago to prevent the alts spamming. You are forced to buy another copy of the game for each account you want to use on the same PC.

most people who are doing the tradeoffs for cash are using 2 pc's sometimes 3 (a miner pc, where they can run 6 instances), been like this for years in mmo's.  They won't sell on their main, they sell on alts, alts get banned, their like 'meh big deal', and their main, base, and mass stored dinos are safe.  while some of the alts look like they have a ton of dinos, you aint seen nothing.  These guys will setup multiple bases across multiple alts and alliance them so they can feed all of them on one account.  We had a issue with one of them setting up camp on our island server, and it was proven they were the actual seller, when the GM wiped their bases and dino's it DC'ed everyone on the server.

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7 hours ago, caleb68 said:

You obviously haven't used family share, or tried using it wrong.  I can play ark on family share.  Just can't play on both pc's at the same time, family share doesn't allow that.   In fact I can play any of my steam games on family share.  But Hey if you want to tell me I can't do what I'd been doing via two pc's for over a year now, that's fine by me, guess my steam is special.

You can not play on OFFICIAL SERVERS with family share. Try connecting to any official pvp server with your family share account. You will get an error message saying this is not allowed.

 

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12 minutes ago, covenantgrunt said:

You can not play on OFFICIAL SERVERS with family share. Try connecting to any official pvp server with your family share account. You will get an error message saying this is not allowed.

like i said, apparently my steam is 'special' as I had been doing it for a year. you seemed to of missed that part.

oh look! i did it for 1 1/2 hours just awhile ago, go figure!

Edit in: oh a FWI for you, I always play on official.

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10 hours ago, caleb68 said:

like i said, apparently my steam is 'special' as I had been doing it for a year. you seemed to of missed that part.

oh look! i did it for 1 1/2 hours just awhile ago, go figure!

Edit in: oh a FWI for you, I always play on official.

Hmm very interesting. Are you able to play on official PVP servers with steam share ? Or just PVE ?

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3 hours ago, covenantgrunt said:

Hmm very interesting. Are you able to play on official PVP servers with steam share ? Or just PVE ?

i don't play pvp, just pve,  i did try it for awhile, but got tired of the 'hey they are offline now, lets wipe them'. seemed every time i logged off, even if just to step out for lunch, i'd come back to find myself wiped off the map. went to pve, never looked back.

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This isn't going to change anytime soon. 

MMO's have been combating RMT for over two decades, and have yet to completely win the fight. There comes a point where locking things down makes the game less fun, and so ARK developers clearly decided they were going to lean as far toward anarchy as possible. The only problem with this design philosophy is that the people playing the game live in the real world with monetary systems and free markets. Where there's a demand for something, that demand will be fulfilled. Where it gets squirrelly with ARK is that those selling the best dinos have an incentive to harass and grief new players, to make the game unbearable enough for them that they give in and start spending real money. It's a make work project of sorts, and it exists in most pvp games to some extent. 

Because of how ARK is designed, this isn't going away. The only real solution is to go unofficial, where the server owners make a profit from selling more unofficial servers, and who is to say they aren't motivated to contribute to the newbie hell on official pvp? Sounds crazy, but its not too far from reality.

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On 4/24/2020 at 6:44 AM, Fukushu said:

@PhotekPlays Wildcard does not enforce real money trading unless it's in the client. You need so much proof that the guy/tribe is trading with IRL money that it's nearly impossible to report it.

They only act if the seller says INGAME in the ARK client that he will sell you something for $$ and even then it would still be hard to proof unless you actually buy it and use that to report. So you would have to spend your money just to get rid of someones probably fake account that they just used for trading.

And those fake accounts can just be bought from russian and chinese traders for nothing. 

If a normal person can play detective, why can't Wildcard? If they hired a single person that only does this, buy random stuff online for IRL money meet up with the seller, get closer to them or just instantly ban them it could already help with the cash trading. 

It's true that only a small part of the community is IRL money trading in the west but the Chinese and Russian market is flooded. Most Chinese player know where to buy and many do it.  Such shortcuts are not frowned  upon in many Asian countries. We in the west hate P2W but in most Asian countries P2W is as normal as farming normally. Money has a way different value in Asian countries than in the west. (If you are interested about this, you can read about it online.)

I have a good ingame friend who came to the EU servers because the Chinese were unplayable. He told me that everyone was just farming 24/7 to sell the stuff for IRL money. 24//7 wyvern egg, dungeon and everything worth anything was grinded like crazy and if you tried to interfere as an outside it would lead to harassment. This was also PVE not PVP, I can only imagine that the PVP trading was way worse.

Another Chinese guy I sometimes traded with a year ago always told me the IRL prices for  dinos, newest Giga = 5 Australian $, High Anglerfish stat 2 Australian $. The market is gigantic in the east and many people would do a lot of shady things when it comes to money as you all know.

Just look at Bert the rex/Basilo breeder getting hacked, all his lines were sold on the market. He never sold breedable basilos but the hackers got them and sold them. And what did Wildcard do? Ask Bert yourself....

Awe really? Poor Bert. I'm sorry @BertNoobians this is the first ive heard. 

 

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@Swordguythe problem with unofficial servers is that some random guy/group is ruling over everyone and if an unofficial grows larger and larger they WILL to 99% implement some sort of monetary system either to ''keep the servers going'' or just to make profit. You can see this in many unofficial World of Warcraft servers where it's possible to P2W or buy endless amounts of everything on the most populated WoW unofficial servers.

I personally would NEVER trust some random guy owning a huge unofficial cluster that asks for money. They won't ask for money in the beginning but at some point most of them do as the server grows and they will remember who paid and who didn't.

IMO it would be horrible to only have unofficial servers even if many older games worked like that at some point monetizing became way easier and many used it for their popular servers, it slowly creeped it's way in. Nowadays Bob who has his own server in Rust suddenly wants his 4 members on the server to pay for it and ''making a profit wouldn't be that hard'' is what Bob thinks if he only had some more members....

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27 minutes ago, d1nk said:

Awe really? Poor Bert. I'm sorry @BertNoobians this is the first ive heard. 

 

it wasnt so bad, but yes there are some traders getting very very thick wallet on rmt sites from selling the basilo now. while previously there was not much interest in this dino.

rmt traders are so confident and careless that they use the same name in discord and in game. not sure that they are the way the are depicted in this thread. maybe the latest are a bit more carefull. with past rex tradings i spoke with many of them, some keep there identity secret but i knew. if they beg you often or daily for the latest rex stats then you can be pretty sure they are a real money trader.

i also worked together with the owner of a large chinese trading website to combat rex rmt with free rexes. it helped a bit but until the rmt people obtained a better rex.

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On 4/25/2020 at 9:41 AM, caleb68 said:

You obviously haven't used family share, or tried using it wrong.  I can play ark on family share.  Just can't play on both pc's at the same time, family share doesn't allow that.   In fact I can play any of my steam games on family share.  But Hey if you want to tell me I can't do what I'd been doing via two pc's for over a year now, that's fine by me, guess my steam is special.

Oh really ?

I just tested if you can play ARK on official servers with family share. You get a message saying that official servers do not allow account sharing.

ree.png

I am not calling you out as a liar, its just that your claim run contrary to everything knowledgeable people say about this game. I play in a megatribe, we have deep, vested interest in running alt accounts. And no one has managed to get family share to work with ARK. If you are telling the truth we can test it. Send me a message on discord, my discord is Squirrel_CMDR#0811 . You will join an official island server with your family share account. Then I want to see you join the same server with your main account.

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4 hours ago, covenantgrunt said:

Oh really ?

I just tested if you can play ARK on official servers with family share. You get a message saying that official servers do not allow account sharing.

ree.png

I am not calling you out as a liar, its just that your claim run contrary to everything knowledgeable people say about this game. I play in a megatribe, we have deep, vested interest in running alt accounts. And no one has managed to get family share to work with ARK. If you are telling the truth we can test it. Send me a message on discord, my discord is Squirrel_CMDR#0811 . You will join an official island server with your family share account. Then I want to see you join the same server with your main account.

in other words you are calling me a liar, regardless of your statement at the beginning of your text. "if you don't do this your lying" is basically what you just said. Honestly i could care less if anyone believes I can do it or not, doesn't hurt me either way.

 

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There are currently people who are exploiters for higher as well, they know the mesh points and other exploits and they use them to wipe whole bases for money. Since you rarely see a rollback for this kind of thing anymore it makes it worse. and people are willing to spend thousands to get someone wiped if its a hard raid and they want them off. I personally think they should make some sort of tracking system to see whos behind the buying of all these dinos and whos beihind the wipe for hire market. not sure what exactly you would track at the moment though

 

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