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The Center : Needs updates or good as is?


jamescoolcrafter15

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The Center : Needs updates or good as is?

Hello everyone, there is a really old discussion thread that you can access here, and that is the main basis behind this post. That thread has since died out, so I thought I'd try to revive it with this new thread, which will continue on that old one. The 2 threads will be very similar, and that is for good reason. So a shoutout goes to @SirPeter, the creator of that original post.

So The Center was the second map added to ARK: Survival Evolved, and it is a great one, but that is mainly in the aesthetics. Once you get past all of the terrific views, the map starts to get stale and all of the problems start to be noticed. Don't get me wrong, I still love the map, and I even find myself playing it to this day, but it still needs fixes and improvements to become a fan favourite.

This thread will outline all of the issues, bugs and things wrong with The Center, and it will also try to brainstorm new things that could be added.  This post is a discussion thread so feel free to add your thoughts and ideas down below. I will add all of your comments to this post, as well as credit you.

First, let's talk about things which is the map is missing, issues with the map and the bugs associated with it.

Issues and Bugs

  • The Center has many holes to get under the map, as well as areas where you can mesh through the map.

The Center has many meshing spots and map holes. This makes it really difficult for the average PvP player to play without getting trolled, raided, or falling through the map. There are areas in the Cliffside Cavern and The Center (floating island) where you are able to reach normally unaccessible areas and build in them. I recall there once being, possibly still there, an area where you can build under the map that even has Kairiku spawns. Anyways, the terrain needs to be fixed to prevent meshing and kill barriers need to be put underneath the map to prevent people from purposely trying to go there.

  • Many of the resources on the map you are unable to harvest.

This is one of the problems I find with the map, and although some may not think it is that serious, it downgrades the maps quality far below others like Ragnarok and Valguero (both of which have custom resource harvestables). A few examples of unharvestable resources I can think of on The Center are mushrooms in the Redwood Forest (which in my opinion should give Rare Mushrooms) and a lot of the bushes and reeds in the Swamp.

  • The map does not receive updates.

Studio Wildcard is constantly coming up with new maps and updating old ones, but apart from the Redwood Update, The Center has barely seen any updates, ever. Personally, I think the map should get some more love from the developers, and we will also be brainstorming ideas for a potential new update later in this post.

  • The map has no unique features.

The Center does not have anything unique associated with it apart from the map itself. It is just that a map. It has no unique items, structures, weapons, resources, creatures or anything else that fits inbetween. Heck, even Ragnarok has unique harvesting nodes and creature variants, even new mini-bosses.

  • The map has no lore or story associated with it.

Personally, with a map as beautifully crafted as The Center is, I found it a real shame that there was no lore associated with it. Don't get me wrong, Ragnarok and Valguero are just as deserving for lore, but this is Center specific map so I won't get into detail on those maps (both of which deserve lore as well).

  • Parts of the map (mainly rocks) strangely become invisible and visible depending on where you are.
  • The height limit is too low to the ground.
  • Grass goes through the floor when building in areas with high vegetation.
  • Caves have tremendous overspawning which ruins them.
  • The overspawning of the cave creatures makes the map extremely laggy.
  • The game thinks that the underwater bubbles are still part of the water.
  • Basilosaurus dies in the lake under the floating island and in the underworld, because the game still thinks that it is deep underwater.

New Ideas

  • Fix all of the previously mentioned issues.
  • Make creatures spawn in the Underwater Bubbles.

Currently, no creatures spawn in the underwater bubbles. I think that spawns for certain creatures in them should be added.

  • Make Achatina spawn in the ruins.
  • Add more creative ruins instead of the normal, overused ones currently on The Center.

Similar to how Ragnarok has dungeons, traps, buttons, castles and harvestable wreckage, I think The Center should have more unique ruins.

  • New Aberration biomes, on caves (and maybe above ground as well?). Add in Aberration Spawns into their deserving caves.

Ragnarok has Scorched Earth. Valguero has Scorched Earth and Aberration. The Center needs Aberration.

  • Make the animals in the Underground World Aberrant variants.

They are literally found underground.

  • Improve on the spider nest cave. Maybe make it so if you shoot the eggs they explode and thousands of baby spiders pop out and attack you. The nests should also give Silk.

The Spider Nest has the potential to be an extremely unique area. I'd hate to see the idea be wasted.

  • Add Griffin spawns on the Floating Island.

It makes sense that Griffins should spawn up there. It would also give more of an urge to actually go there.

  • Add passive creature spawns in the Lava Oasis Cave (formerly West Lava Cave).

The gave is filled with grass, flowers, mushrooms, and pools of water. This would be a great area if passive mobs spawned here.

  • Add Icthyornis spawns on the Iceberg.

It really does make sense.

  • Ragnarok has some huge trees in some of the jungle lakes which you can build Redwood Tree Platforms on. Valguero has some of these as well. It's about time these come to The Center's Swamp Biome.
  • Maybe a new floating archipelago biome?

Perhaps this could be placed over the edge of the world? I already said that the height barrier of the map should be increased, so maybe this could be found really high up?

  • Maybe not a Scorched Earth biome, but definitely Scorched Earth resources (salt, silk, ect.....).
  • Make the thunderstorms less common.
  • Add new Rough Waves weather event.
  • Add a tides mechanic to all of the water-land areas.
  • Improve the Redwood Mountains Biome.
  • Add more underwater biomes and add underwater engrams.
  • Fire Wyvern spawns on Lava Island. (Bruvas78)
  • Sulfur spawns on Lava Island.  (Bruvas78)
  • Mantis spawns on Lava Island. (Bruvas78)
  • Death Worms on Half-Burnt Island. (Bruvas78)
  • Ice Wyverns on the ice mountains. (Bruvas78)
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The center is in much better shape than Ragnarok, which is horribly optimized and runs like crap in areas.  Honestly my problem with all of the unofficial arks is that other than Valguero they have all released half finished, so they just have gigantic empty looking areas where you can tell the mod developers just copy pasted flat areas like the desert on Ragnarok.
 

The center is just kind of a mess based on its design, it was clearly made to be a hot zone for taming 150 Dinos easily.  The islands are all weirdly shaped and the map just isn’t very aesthetically pleasing.  Like the whole redwoods area (which was added in later) is very clearly just slapped into the edge of the map and looks so out of place.

i don’t expect any touch ups on these unofficial arks after a few months of their release, especially since official arks which need some love like scorched earth also get ignored.

 

Also you might not remember this, but the center was near unplayable for almost a year straight due to a cave over spawning bug back in the days of early access.  I don’t think they fixed that until around the time of the general optimization of ark.

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1 hour ago, RipRavage said:

The center is in much better shape than Ragnarok, which is horribly optimized and runs like crap in areas.  Honestly my problem with all of the unofficial arks is that other than Valguero they have all released half finished, so they just have gigantic empty looking areas where you can tell the mod developers just copy pasted flat areas like the desert on Ragnarok.
 

The center is just kind of a mess based on its design, it was clearly made to be a hot zone for taming 150 Dinos easily.  The islands are all weirdly shaped and the map just isn’t very aesthetically pleasing.  Like the whole redwoods area (which was added in later) is very clearly just slapped into the edge of the map and looks so out of place.

i don’t expect any touch ups on these unofficial arks after a few months of their release, especially since official arks which need some love like scorched earth also get ignored.

 

Also you might not remember this, but the center was near unplayable for almost a year straight due to a cave over spawning bug back in the days of early access.  I don’t think they fixed that until around the time of the general optimization of ark.

It's crazy because The Center was made by one dude and Ragnarok was made by a team of people.

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40 minutes ago, jamescoolcrafter15 said:

It's crazy because The Center was made by one dude and Ragnarok was made by a team of people.

Its all about keeping the modders interested in supporting their work.  I'm assuming the Ragnarok team got frustrated and moved onto better things.  Ragnarok was broken and turned into the lagfest it is by general Ark updates, not a map update, so I'm assuming it very frustrating for these mod teams to continue work on their maps.  Look at the mess on Valguero around the Halloween update, raptor overspawning was crashing Valguero servers because of the event, thats gotta be a major morale destroyer for the people that worked on that map.

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11 minutes ago, RipRavage said:

Its all about keeping the modders interested in supporting their work.  I'm assuming the Ragnarok team got frustrated and moved onto better things.  Ragnarok was broken and turned into the lagfest it is by general Ark updates, not a map update, so I'm assuming it very frustrating for these mod teams to continue work on their maps.  Look at the mess on Valguero around the Halloween update, raptor overspawning was crashing Valguero servers because of the event, thats gotta be a major morale destroyer for the people that worked on that map.

You need to look at what happens to the mods after mod authors are hired by WC.

Examples:

Primitive plus

Center

Ragnarok 

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11 minutes ago, Aylana314159 said:

You need to look at what happens to the mods after mod authors are hired by WC.

Examples:

Primitive plus

Center

Ragnarok 

I know what happens, they gut the mods turning them into a shell of what they used to be and then stop supporting them, effectively killing them.  They really cut the legs out from under the Valguero team when they cut rock drakes, reapers, & griffins.

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I started on the Centre not long after release, then moved servers when my original was deemed legacy. I've only just (in the last 6 months) moved to Ragnarok due to immense server lag, server down time and disconnects.

I love the Centre, but it's only since I moved that I've realised that it lacks on so many Dino's. For such a large map, I don't see any reason why spawns can't be implemented. Griffin's on the floating island is a great idea for one.

Fire Wyverns spawning over burnt Island with sulphur nodes.

Ice Wyverns over one of the snowy mountains.

Mantis on Lava.

The chance for a Death Worm on the burnt side of half burnt Island.

Cliff platforms should be an unlockable engram too. The jungle isles were built for them!

 

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Ah the Center, spent a year in 711 pvp on Xbox before legacy became legacy. Think I spent most that year lagging my socks off. 
 

my problem with the Center and also with Ragnarok is generally they look rather stupid. Just biomes next to biomes for no sake other then to include them. There’s no flow to the maps at all really. But that was a design issue rather then bug.

back on topic the likelihood of them updating any old maps is about as likely as them fixing any of the other five year old issues.

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16 hours ago, RipRavage said:

Its all about keeping the modders interested in supporting their work.  I'm assuming the Ragnarok team got frustrated and moved onto better things.  Ragnarok was broken and turned into the lagfest it is by general Ark updates, not a map update, so I'm assuming it very frustrating for these mod teams to continue work on their maps.  Look at the mess on Valguero around the Halloween update, raptor overspawning was crashing Valguero servers because of the event, thats gotta be a major morale destroyer for the people that worked on that map.

Ragnarok was looking great until WC got their hands on it, Jackson Lawrence was hired I think to work on Extinction so looks to me like a lot of pressure was put on him to get it finished, the initial release on PC was good as was the first update with the south west isles, after that there seemed to be a big drop off in quality with some areas left looking bland and a lack of optimisation which was in no doubt down to WC saying "that'll do, get working on Extinction"

He's currently working on a new map called Apex and has been streaming it on his twitch channel, no doubt sometime in the future the console players will feel entitled enough that they want it in the game and it will go down the same route as all other mod maps that have been made official ?

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3 hours ago, Bruvas78 said:

I started on the Centre not long after release, then moved servers when my original was deemed legacy. I've only just (in the last 6 months) moved to Ragnarok due to immense server lag, server down time and disconnects.

I love the Centre, but it's only since I moved that I've realised that it lacks on so many Dino's. For such a large map, I don't see any reason why spawns can't be implemented. Griffin's on the floating island is a great idea for one.

Fire Wyverns spawning over burnt Island with sulphur nodes.

Ice Wyverns over one of the snowy mountains.

Mantis on Lava.

The chance for a Death Worm on the burnt side of half burnt Island.

Cliff platforms should be an unlockable engram too. The jungle isles were built for them!

 

Love these suggestions. The Center has always been my favorite map. I did tweak spawns to have more variety.

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3 hours ago, LE4SoDeadly said:

Just biomes next to biomes for no sake other then to include them. There’s no flow to the maps at all really. But that was a design issue rather then bug.

Have you even looked at other maps?

 

The Center was islands so different biomes made sense.

 

Valguero design made no sense to me in terms of biome distribution. Massive redwoods biome and so so tiny swamp.

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6 hours ago, Bruvas78 said:

I started on the Centre not long after release, then moved servers when my original was deemed legacy. I've only just (in the last 6 months) moved to Ragnarok due to immense server lag, server down time and disconnects.

I love the Centre, but it's only since I moved that I've realised that it lacks on so many Dino's. For such a large map, I don't see any reason why spawns can't be implemented. Griffin's on the floating island is a great idea for one.

Fire Wyverns spawning over burnt Island with sulphur nodes.

Ice Wyverns over one of the snowy mountains.

Mantis on Lava.

The chance for a Death Worm on the burnt side of half burnt Island.

Cliff platforms should be an unlockable engram too. The jungle isles were built for them!

 

I've added these to my post!

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I actually love the center, but it’s only new feature is skull island and underwater bubbles and floating stuff... combined with the over-spawning cave that restricts The whole Top island.... Not worth it, but compared to all the other “island maps” (Rag, Val, Center, Island, and some modded ones like Hope) Center is probably my favorite spare the fact there is no EN’s or Dossiers.

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22 hours ago, yekrucifixion187 said:

How? 

It's a free map. Very unlikely you get new game buyers for a few modifications on an old map. 

There's no money in it unfortunately.

Unless you fixed a LARGE amount of maps and bugs it won't really affect the rating and by extension the money, but if you do fix a LARGE amount of bugs, then I think their ratings will soar, I mean think, every new map makes it better of corse but if you fixed the bugs I think it would take a lot of thoes lower ratings and brig them up, currently Ark is seven is the steam store I think. I think that lots of bugs being fixed would bring it up a lot any if Ark was third, well that would be a lot more money.

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