The Ark Experience / free loot

[annette123]

The Ark Experience / free loot

Hey folks! Just wanna share my experience I've had when playing ark with the rest of the community :)

Today I decided to make myself a Cryofridge by hopping over to Valguero from Genesis since you can't make them on Genesis (makes total sense). I got all my supplies needed, loaded them up after waiting 15 minutes, plus 8 more minutes since the crystal in my inventory just magically split into stacks of 1 between my base and the upload module. Yay for time wasting!

On Val, I had to die a total of 47 times just to clear green obelisk. Anything and everything continuously fell into the chasm directly onto green obelisk, especially dinoticus, raptors, microraptors, and terror birds. Oh did I forget to mention the TWO gigas that fell in after I cleared the raptors, etc? Yeah. Fun. Honestly, I don't mind the challenge, what I do mind though is...

After a literal hour of that, guess what? Lost connection to server. Not only that, but it's the "cannot connect to host" glitch...reset router, hard reset console, still couldn't connect.

45 minutes of that goes by while I search reddit for a solution, then the alarm on my phone goes off, the one I set 2 HOURS ago when I was still on Gen. Don't worry, it's just my imprint timer for 4 ravs and my giga egg I've waited 2 whole real time days hatching lol no biggie! It's Ark right?

I read on reddit that this has been a known issue since earlier this year-wait, no, 2016...5 years ago! And it's still not fixed, classic Ark. They had a solution though; load single player and wait 5 minutes for textures to load because apparently that's something that just can't be fixed in a 5 years time frame from a developer who has 4 DLCs priced at 20 a pop.

It worked, I was back in Val so I grabbed my materials to make the cryo and headed down to green ob once again, fought off two terror birds and led a rex away. The instant I crafted the cryofridge guess what happened? Yep, lost connection, cannot connect to server, AGAIN! So everything I've spent 2 hours trying to do is literally laying on a sleeping body right on top of green ob for the taking by anyone who stumbles over, great. Luckily most servers are dead and there was only 3 others on.

5 minutes of hard restart on console, 5 minutes of loading Ark and seeing all these wonderful developers and publishers names pop up for the umteenth time in 2 hours reminding me who's to blame for this boiling aggravation I'm beginning to have, 5 minutes of sitting on single player so textures can actually load. Finally log back into Val, upload my cryofridge and character and Im back home on gen, phew.

Nightmare over right? Let's check the damage back home on Gen since I missed that alarm...

3 of my ravs missed their last imprint, so only one has 100%, four real time days days of dealing with them growing up and this is what I have to show for it. Oh, and my giga egg hatched and the twins died. More time wasted, brought to me by Abstraction, Wildcard, and the like, duly noted.

Not my worst day on Ark by any means, but I am angry, but nothing I can do, somewhere along the line I've accepted this as just how Ark is even though I wouldn't put up with this from any other games I play, but I digress.

So I decide to just carry on, so I hop on my now only imprinted rav out of the 4 I thought i would have just a mere 2 hours earlier, put my best saddle on her and head out to lvl her up. She got 7 lvls in less than 10 minutes, I was finally starting to feel some sort of progress for once today woo hoo! Now I'm actually playing Ark instead of just trying to connect, its a start.

I was in mid combat on my rav fighting a raptor when I die out of nowhere, "You killed yourself" pops up. Uh ok, so I run to my death marker only to find no body, none of my gear, my only chainsaw, my mastercraft armor, my best sword, just...gone.

But wait! Let's check the tribe log because I can't find my fully imprinted rav that I was able to salvage from today's garbage-fest around my non-existant body either. "Anti Mesh has destroyed your Rav at X Y Z"...you have to be kidding me.

Wild Card...you have to be KIDDING me.

I've put up with this game for so long, sooo long, since beta when it was released on Xbox where my first experience was spawning on Island beach and instantly dying to a giant snake before I could even move my character. I've seen so many friends and tribemates flat out quit this game completely, but I've always tried to stick it out.

Well I can't stick it out anymore.

I'm done, done defending this game, done being patient that things will get fixed or patched, done getting constantly frustrated by a game that refuses to allow me to actually play it.

I. am. done.

I refuse to support developer Wild Card and I can no longer defend this product anymore. You have a game that is completely unplayable by any standard of the definition "playable".

And it's not just cuz I had a bad day, I did have a bad day; the bugs, the crashes, the disconnects, the stuff that just doesn't work as intended. Losing connection to host anytime I wanna teleport somewhere on Gen, or being killed by a lvl 5 wild dino because I'm frozen after coming out of a teleport and all i can do is listen as my armor breaks and my character death yells, getting stuck inside ceilings and walls and floors and doors and anything and everything...you seriously can't fix these issues?

I put up with it every time I try to play Wild Card's Ark.

No more, I just can't.

I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, I'm sure it does, but I've never once ran into someone meshing in Ark that directly affected my play, not in 5 years of playing this game, but I've lost 12 tames to this new anti-mesh system since it's been implemented and today was just the final straw. The perfect storm of hard crashes, unable to connects, lost progress due to no fault of my own, and flat out being cheated by the games own anti-cheat measures. Had it been my first experience with all of these things I could have looked past it, but I've been dealing with this for too long and I'm just not enjoying this anymore.

I wanted to play Ark today, but all I get is frustration, constant issues, and setbacks that have nothing to do with me or my play style or abilities.

I went from playing daily, to hopping on every other day when a tribemate or two would join me, to only hopping on to reset decay timers because everyone else quit playing a long time ago, to wanting to play but having to sit through 5 (FIVE!) updates before I can, to not wanting to play at all anymore because it just gets too frustrating to deal with, not the actual concept of the game, but the problems that never get addressed and we, the supporters of this game, just have to swallow.

This negative experience rests squarely on the shoulders of Wild Card and the team that remains ignorant of the rampant bugs and problems that have plagued this game since day one.

There is a patch almost every day or servers go down for 15 minutes nightly, or I can't play the game because it has the third update for this week. Oh and we all know once Ark finished updating you'll have to update Scorched Earth too!

And when that's done, Extinction has an update...

and when that's done, Aberration has an update...then Genesis...and by the time I can actually play I'm soured on the experience all together.

And for what? Nothing meaningful actually gets fixed. Oh you mean metal now stacks 300 instead of 200? Wow! This changes everything! Now when my rav get's blipped out of existence I can rest easy knowing he was carrying a full inventory of metal in stacks of 300...big whoop!

Wild Card is not fixing anything that is broken. Wild Card is more concerned about releasing the latest new DLC map that they can charge 20 bucks a pop for than fixing anything that makes this game unplayable, and that includes issues that have gone on for YEARS.

Wild Card doesn't care that one of its two modes, PvE, is 100% unplayable due to the rampant pillar placement taking up any available build space on any server you join.

Wild Card doesn't care that there are people selling glitched and high level dinos, basically making the only other game mode, PvP, a pay to play to even compete with any tribe past a certain size and level.

Wild Card doesn't care that the systems they've put in place cause their supporters to lose not just tames, but significant time and effort, and in my case patience with the game all together.

Wild Card doesn't care. They do not care.

I realize that now. Most of everyone I used to play with realized that a long time ago and moved on to other games. I used to be in one of the biggest tribes on my server, today I now play solo. Everyone I know has given up on this game. Servers sit at 3/70, even the new map Crystal Isles has half full and sometimes a quarter full sessions. Everyone has moved on and not even free content is bringing them back because they know if they jump back on it will be the same old Ark with the same old issues.

It's been half a decade and the things that were wrong then are still happening today, we just have new maps to experience it on and instead of losing tames to fights they just get blinked out of existence for no reason or fault of the player.

And I know this probably won't stay up, heaven forbid you actually face criticism from a long time fan just telling you the truth of their experiences with your game. But I don't care, this is a goodbye from this long time supporter either way. You think words hurt your image, but the real damage is done by you to players like me who wanted to like your games but just hit that breaking point of what they're willing to tolerate to enjoy something. That's the real business killer here.

Anyone that reads this and wants free cryoed tames and loot you can go to Arctic NW corner of the map barrier on 351 and its all yours, I've uninstalled this game prior to writing this and will not be coming back, not tomorrow, not next week. All my progress will decay or get wiped, I am finally willing to just accept this as I just don't have the energy to care anymore.

I can be patient no longer, Wild Card, you have finally lost the support of this fan not just for Ark but any product with your name attached to it. You are this generation's LJN, and like I did with LJN's games back in the old days of NES and SNES i adamantly and wholeheartedly refuse to spend a single penny of my money on your products moving forward.

Thanks for the memories.

- once one of your biggest fans

PS while trying to post this tonight guess what, your website failed to load. How absolutely ironic. The full ark experience in a nutshell, even the website doesn't function! I've made the right choice to finally throw in the towel, no question about it. One day you guys are gonna pull the curtain back and reveal that every server and website you run is just powered by a single potato with a coat hanger through it...it's all just so bad! I can't support this anymore and can't believe I've tolerated it for as long as I have, enough is enough...im done

[GreenRoc]

1 hour ago, annette123 said:

all i can do is listen as my armor breaks and my character death yells, getting stuck inside ceilings and walls and floors and doors and anything and everything...you seriously can't fix these issues?

I feel your pain, i have been in similar mental states many times.

If there were another game with dinos this beautiful, animals to breed, places to explore, trees and rocks to harvest, houses to build, I would go play something else, but nothing ticks the dino box without sacrificing some of the other game desires I want, no other game gives me the same joy that Ark gives me.

I would suggest Wurm Online, probably the closest thing to Ark imo, but no dinos sadly. Breedable creatures, rectangle houses to farm for and build, trees to harvest, but no dinos. Sad, no dinos.

I wish Wildcard would make places safer, and fix so many !@#$ing bugs.
And why is anti mesh on PvE anyways? What if I wanted to build underground on PvE? What harm is that?
huh? Why? I HATE that. Instantly lose a tame and due to what? Because their nose went inside a rock? That anti-mesh deletion system needs major overhaul.
I agree with most everything you said, empathize, sympathize, except the pillar part.

My expewrience with pillars on PvE:
It takes alot of death runs to find a spot on official PvE without pillars.
There's alot of unpillared terrain on every map. Val in the green forests seems to be plethora of space to build from my experience. No noob spawns near most of the areas east of the green obelisk (only one is deep in a canyon). Your post shows me you can do death runs (I hate death runs, but it is sometimes the only way to achieve certain tings). That Val obelisk is stupidly dangerous, but it is the safest of the three Edit to add after reading: Ah, you uninstalled. Been there myself. To find a place in Val is void for you it seems.

Safest is relative. I wish there were noob islands with transfer terminals on every map, and no one can build on (and no dinos spawn at, 'cept maybe dodos and jerboas). Even if just a teeny floating isle, it would be better than what currently exists for new players. Beginner maps arent for new players imo.

I havent bought Gensis and I dont plan to. Damn those X variants are some tasty eye candy, but the gameplay is far from anything I would be safe to play. Adrenaline hurts me, and Genisis seems to be in the opposite direction of what I want. I want to build bases, stay in one place, go my own direction. Not be guided by a questbook or made to move around without a base.

My heart aches for your story.
I totally can relate to how you feel.

I hope you find a game to satisfy you like this one can.
I personally havent found Ark's equal in the pleasure I get.
Ark is also the most infuriating, from non-game mechanics.

With love and empathy,
Green Roc

[overborg]

Sad but true. WC has done a completely disgraceful job with the game. piling bugs on top of bugs - fixing next to nothing. As Ive said before, this game could have been game of the decade, instead it will barely be remembered by very few gamers. 

You are correct in saying the WC doesnt care - about the game experience or their paying customers at least. They are a disgrace to the gaming industry and community.