WARNING Before You Transfer

[Azmeaiel]

lots of us are losing characters today.

 

[Azmeaiel]

2 hours ago, DAAX1 said:

This all seems weird.  I've been playing video games since i was a kid on the original NES.  I built and gamed on a PC when I was in my teens and have owned every version of playstation.  I've have never, in like 25 years of gaming on multiple platforms, had data loss at any level happen on any system unless I did i myself on accident. 

I don't understand how this is happening - the character file shouldn't be very large or store all that much information - and there are network protocols that can guarantee data transmission.  Also, why don't I have a copy of my character file on my PS4? A loss would be more like a server rollback instead of feeling like you lost the keys to your house, car, bank account, drivers license, social security etc.  I'm no programmer or network engineer - but that's my 2cents. 

This has always been an issue in the game, have played for many years and have seen pretty much all the long time players lose multiple characters due to transfer faults. This far in and still seems to be very little done to stop people losing sometimes years of work due to a transfer fail.

[arkark]

5 hours ago, MostSpy said:

Update:

Character losses are still happening as of this update, and its not server specific.

Platforms:

• PC (confirmed)
• Consoles? looks like console players are reporting issues too?

I think that if you give more detailed info about what is going on they will be able to address it better and faster. How many chars you know were deleted, any common behaviour that the players that lost the char experienced, any error message or screenshot, if the spree of character deleted happened all on the same server, if all the deleted chars were high-end chars with lot of missions or just normal chars, if it happened on official or unofficial...

And tag the right people, Dollie, Ced..

[Swordguy]

9 hours ago, DAAX1 said:

This all seems weird.  I've been playing video games since i was a kid on the original NES.  I built and gamed on a PC when I was in my teens and have owned every version of playstation.  I've have never, in like 25 years of gaming on multiple platforms, had data loss at any level happen on any system unless I did i myself on accident. 

I don't understand how this is happening - the character file shouldn't be very large or store all that much information - and there are network protocols that can guarantee data transmission.  Also, why don't I have a copy of my character file on my PS4? A loss would be more like a server rollback instead of feeling like you lost the keys to your house, car, bank account, drivers license, social security etc.  I'm no programmer or network engineer - but that's my 2cents. 

There are so many choices Wildcard has made with this game that screams of incompetence - your toon only ever being stored in a single location being one of them. They never accounted for server crashes with this choice. But thats not the worst part, because servers only saving their state every 15 minutes is also a bizarre choice in combination with how your character data is stored; it has created a haven for dupers and real world sales for virtual items. Wildcard then have to use time and resources to find the duped items and remove them. Meanwhile, players lose their toons to server crashes just after transferring and wildcard is apathetic. But, transfer you toon off of a server that crashes right after, and now your toon is duped when that server comes back online. Now more recently they decided to break something that didn't need fixing, and transferring to Ragnarok is impossible. In the 5 years this game has been online, WC has wasted so much time and energy fixing things that they've broken, and continually adding new content without fixing what's currently broken. 

ARK itself is a great game when it works, but I swear WC must have a revolving door of developers who are constantly learning as they go. Story of ARK since day 1.

 

example: piles of new toons abandoned on Rag as people continually fail to transfer on or off server.

[Massaker0102]

My Tribe an ne have the same problem we cant do nothing atm

 

[Dockside1973]

I have had the character stuck on there for about a week unable to transfer, don’t look for an official reply here, support for the very limited oc servers is non existant. I have never seen an official reply on why or if there is an issue even when sending a ticket.

oc servers disappear on a regular basis, wildcard do you have any comment or support regarding 1011 extinction server

[crickets]

[DAAX1]

10 hours ago, Swordguy said:

There are so many choices Wildcard has made with this game that screams of incompetence - your toon only ever being stored in a single location being one of them. They never accounted for server crashes with this choice. But thats not the worst part, because servers only saving their state every 15 minutes is also a bizarre choice in combination with how your character data is stored; it has created a haven for dupers and real world sales for virtual items. Wildcard then have to use time and resources to find the duped items and remove them. Meanwhile, players lose their toons to server crashes just after transferring and wildcard is apathetic. But, transfer you toon off of a server that crashes right after, and now your toon is duped when that server comes back online. Now more recently they decided to break something that didn't need fixing, and transferring to Ragnarok is impossible. In the 5 years this game has been online, WC has wasted so much time and energy fixing things that they've broken, and continually adding new content without fixing what's currently broken. 

ARK itself is a great game when it works, but I swear WC must have a revolving door of developers who are constantly learning as they go. Story of ARK since day 1.

 

example: piles of new toons abandoned on Rag as people continually fail to transfer on or off server.

I agree, from a player perspective it seems like there are some questionable technological choices. I'm not a dev, so I have to stay in my lane in terms of criticism.  I'm sure it's much more difficult to fix some of these things than it seems.

I can't tell if the game is just too heavy for current hardware/technology (ie it's ahead of its time and the design was over-zealous, which is admirable) or they never got the foundation of the game right and are having a difficult time making changes/updates without a negative affect to something else, in which case it's unlikely they will change anything that would adversely affect the game's core or risk player data.  Maybe is a scaling issue, i don't know. 

All I have are my experiences playing games and I can compare Ark to those experiences; and I can tell you Ark currently has objectively bad gameplay for what its trying to accomplish. On a ps4 pro with settings on low and fiber internet i get like 5-15 frames a second and get frequent spikes where it can take 10 seconds or more to look around standing still.  Non-game-related technical issues at critical times during gameplay ruin something that may have taken hours or months to work up to - and now losing the character feels like starting over, if i'm even willing to commit to that, i'm not sure yet.

For example today, some friends were determined to help me get tekgrams again since mine were wiped and I've been waiting for my support appointment.  We collectively had about 10 disconnects getting 5 ppl to the area, ppl dropping out of the skiff, falling to death, getting them back in, searching for dead bodies/loot/tames, etc.  Fast forward 1.5 hrs, I summoned the desert titan, teleported in to the "arena", and personally got the last shot/kill on the titan. No tekgram rewards.

For a game that uses time as a difficulty setting and structure-building as a core mechanic - it's absolutely disheartening when you lose to non-game-related issues.

There are so many great things about Ark:  cool game design, fun gameplay mechanics, huge worlds to explore, breeding functions, taming functions, base building, tribeing, allying, the ability to give people things, and structure building to end-game.  I'm even convinced there's a story in there somewhere but that hasn't become clear to me where I'm at in the game.  I really hope WC are up to the task of getting the game functional.

[Muucow]

As the title stated. any chance you devs have any form of plans to actually fix character transfers? and character download timeouts? 4 minutes to try downloading characters each time you move servers then to be bombarded with downloads failed(with the attached ss) is a touch rediculous.

*edit to add tags* @Jatheish@Dollie@lilpanda

***edit*** character was lost after the failed download.

[CandyMan3071]

I am Sick and tired of having to come back to this website just to post a topic about another bug in your broken game. Today I was transferring over to a different map on ps4 official to get some cementing paste and when I was transferring back I lost connection to the servers. No big deal however when I load back on the server I was waiting and waiting for my character to show up in the download list. I HAVE SPENT 4 HOURS WAITING AND STILL NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. I’ve lost my highest level character that also had tek grams and if I do not get my character back Tonight my tribe will kick me because all of our cryo poded tames are in my ark as we were recently raided. Please I don’t want to lose my character of be kicked from my tribe because of a game bug that is not my fault.

[xirael]

Stuck on Downloading Transferred Character... .. .

Issue is been going for like 4 days now, currently facing dino decays , a lot of people facing this problem too, any news?

[slimpickins2250]

Anyone else having trouble transferring from server to server?

[MostSpy]

The information all paying customers need to know about customer data backups:

Key points to this discussion:

1. This has been an ongoing issue for YEARS & WIld Card knows all about permanent "character losses."
2. Wild Card REFUSES to implement customer data backups, referred to as "character backups", which results in irrecoverable "character losses."

Key people responsible:

• @Dollie - ARK product manager - in charge of what gets developed.

Like always, they will release some monkey patch soon and still wont "backup customer data.", aka "character backups"

[MostSpy]

The information all paying customers need to know about customer data backups:

Key points to this discussion:

1. This has been an ongoing issue for YEARS & Wild Card knows all about permanent "customer data loss."
2. Wild Card REFUSES to implement customer data backups, referred to as "character backups", which results in irrecoverable customer data, referred to as "character losses."

Key people responsible:

• @Dollie - ARK product manager - in charge of what gets developed.

The data / key facts:

• 6,001 character backup mentions source
• 10,001 character lost mentions source
• 20,000+ estimate* tickets. An unknown number of tickets logged, considering that most dont participate in the forums.

Here's why it's such a big deal:

• Reduced company revenue.
• Reduced customer retention.
• Reduced reputation and viability.
• Increased support overhead.
• Reduced customer satisfaction.
• Customers can spend hundreds or sometimes thousands of hours building up their data, for all that work to be deleted and lost forever. Causing stress and enourmous amounts of lost time and work.
• All genesis missions are deleted.
• Boss engrams are deleted.
• Acsensions are deleted.
• Character levels are deleted.
• Any other character related data or achievements are deleted.
• Association between customer data and game assets is deleted (referred to as imprints & tribes)
• When a fix is implemented by customer support, they never fully return all of the lost data to you.

Disclaimer:

This post is not a personal attack on any Wild Card staff. It's an important issue that the entire player base and future players should know about and needs some sigificant awareness to get Wild Card on the same side as it's customers rather than doing their own thing and ignoring every problem customers have. This post IS NOT intended to be a bug fix request or any request addressed to Wild Card because there is already more than an adequate amount of support requests submitted (see key data above.) This is a post for General Discussion and I would appreciate if the power abusing mods would not abuse their powers and delete this post, move it or ban me again for raising it. This will be screen shotted and sent in an official request when the mods decide to abuse their powers on this forum again.

[Rigs]

Two of my friends have lost main characters trying  to transfer, i nearly lost mine but found it on previous server, took me 6 times to come back to my main server, was lucky not to lose character,  this needs to be sorted i have trades piling up...

[Hkkill454]

I play on oc crystal isles 881 and I transferred to the island 342 today and when I try to return to server 881 after about 5 minutes in downloading serviver screen I get downloading transferred character failed 007 - failed while downloading transferred character with code 0 and msg: refcodeo-0.   I can return to the island and I can go to other maps but I can't return to 881 were all of my stuff is can anyone help

 

[Beatlesgirl88]

4 hours ago, slimpickins2250 said:

Anyone else having trouble transferring from server to server?

yep haven't been able to go back to my home server for almost two weeks every day I try several times it just says downloading failed.. I can go between crystal isle 1416 and rag 436 no worries last week it let me log into extinction forthe day then I went to transfer back to SE and since then nothing stuff on maps without my tribe or dinos or stuff 

[IPPOTheAnna]

be careful, i play on 882. Also on OC. After several attempts to connect I lost my character. Even my low level dummy characters and ark data inventory was gone. I filed a ticket but I dont think they read this. Maybe they just dont care since we already paid when we purchased the game.

[MostSpy]

On 10/3/2020 at 8:40 PM, arkark said:

I think that if you give more detailed info about what is going on they will be able to address it better and faster. How many chars you know were deleted, any common behaviour that the players that lost the char experienced, any error message or screenshot, if the spree of character deleted happened all on the same server, if all the deleted chars were high-end chars with lot of missions or just normal chars, if it happened on official or unofficial...

And tag the right people, Dollie, Ced..

The reality is, that character backups dont exist, character loss is a long-term problem that has existed for years and there are literally hundreds of posts and probably in the vicinity of thousands of reports. Adding an additional post with screenshots about a well known issue that Wild Card is very well versed in wont fix anything as your suggesting. Its a Data Backup problem that they simply refuse to fix.

To suggest character data backups is some new issue they dont know about, is absolutely ludicrous....

Here's a tag for you @Dollie

[Hkkill454]

I don't understand how they can just let things like this slide especially since are base will Decay and we will lose everything you have worked so hard for

[xirael]

They need to freeze the decay timers seriously ....

[Muucow]

@Dollie@lilpanda@Jatheish the server transfer issues are completely out of hand, cant transfer in or out of OC servers without losing characters. OC-207 oc-884 are all but inaccessible from anyone that managed to transfer out before trying to get back. lost my main char on 207 last night to this horse patootie issues have been worsening over the last 4 so called "optimization" patches that have been rolled out presumably untested.

[TR-8R]

Sadly nothing you can do , the customer service will not help you with that , you hold nothing significant in dev eyes .

[Annoyed]

Having the same issue, cannot transfer back into any of the OC servers, the survivor list just hangs on loading or eventually returns an error saying it cannot retrieve survivor list. Though i have no problem transferring into NA or EU servers. How can something so prominent to the game not be resolved??!!? All the hours I've put into the game, only to be sabotaged by the creators....

[Fabianlacey]

I lost my 131 character transfering from aberration to  genesis . And half of my tribe mates are stuck on other servers can't transfer back in to genesis . anyone know  wy is this happening.is wild card fixing this any time soon?

[Bessovitch]

I can't come back to my valguero 1057 server since Friday October 2 at 2 p.m. I am stuck on Extinction 1019. I have already lost 10 giga eggs, and all my creatures will starve to death in no time. i had 4 giga growing teenager. i will lose everything because of the last update !!!!! 

so much time spent losing everything, because of the bugs !!!!!!