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Classic Season 3, battlemetrics, steamplayers.


ShawtyBigNutz

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After 14k hours of very successful PVP on official I took a break. I decided to come back to try Classic PVP season 3, only to remember why I left Official PVP.

1 offline raiding mechanics. I can spyglass a base and see their demo timer and tell they are offline pretty much. Why can we see enemy demo timers? This was a bad idea 2 years ago and yet it still exists.

2 offline raiding mechanics. If I am not a 123, people can see when I am not online via battlemetrics. Why has wildcard not taking any efforts to curb the tracking of players from server to server. This is some weird as form of digital DoXXing that is not stopping by Wildcard and even maybe promoted. I wonder if someone at Wildcard owns Battlemetrics.

3 offline raiding mechanics. Even if you don't use battlemetrics you can lazily track players by viewing players on current server via steam. Why not block this? Even if somone is a 123 and blank pictured with a private profile, i can get their steam id # and track them that way.

8 of us took the depths in the center on official PVP season 3. 6 of us played on the center 584 the whole time it was up and was only wiped 2 or 3 times over the 1 year before it was legacy. (we still never got those save files promised before they legacy'd it and changed it to PVE)

Day 1, got some mats up, leveled up. Made prep for a locations. logged, offline raided.

Day 2, moved on, got more done, started metal base. last member logged, offline raided'

Day 3, split up into groups of 2. 2 locations, 2 spots far apart. last member logged, offline raided.

Day 4,5,6,7,8 -now offline raided every day last member logged, generally between 6 to 24 game hours, aka 30 mins or so after offline.

I love and have supported Ark and played in several very successful end game tribes, with all the tek and every available dino. In the end tho, PVP is just really stalking battlemetrics and finding who isn't online. Not really fun, super PVE feels.

This game is like hanging out with a bunch of white kids who wants to put their **nis on the first guy to fall a sleep forehead.

(IDK maybe block the steam player tracking for this game)

Just a thought,

survivor Eyesnthedark

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The best option to avoid tracking right now is running off an EGS account, though its not 100% foolproof, it will stop casual tracking through battlemetrics. The steam tracking issue isn't an Ark specific problem either, the same thing happens in other games and its not an entirely simple thing to work around.

The offline/decay timer gets a lot of blame for encouraging offline raids but realistically it's not that hard to determine if a tribe is online. Run into turrets, die, respawn at a sleeping bag and wait a few minutes to see if there's any response. You'll get an answer either way, all the timer does is save a few minutes.

Removing player tracking and decay timers won't change the current state of the game, mega/alpha tribes will have the same bored players who have nothing else to do other scout around and raid random bases. Because ultimately that's what it comes down to, you aren't getting raided by a neighboring player on the server, its a player or two backed by the virtually the unlimited resources of a large tribe looking for something to do that isn't just another farming run. You happen to be the target because because the politics between tribes limit who can attack who, but you aren't a part of those negotiations.

I've done the big alpha tribe thing for a while and, as I'm sure anyone else who's joined a large tribe knows, you get bored. You aren't taming anything, because your tribe has lines and a tamed dino is useless. You aren't breeding anything because half the lines are basically maxed out as it is and any other lines already have breeders that the admins know and trust, because not just anyone will be allowed to have that kind of responsibility. You aren't farming blueprints because your tribe already has blueprints and likely half the good drops on your server are blocked anyway because those also happen to be the base locations to build. Plus why bother farming for them when you can raid someone else who's done the farming for you? Boss fights are scheduled and you get assigned a slot when it's your turn, if you haven't already been run through all of them. You don't build anything because only trusted builders have that rank and, what even is there to build anyway? Maybe you can place some spam down if you really have nothing better to do. So you go out and farm, you get your quota done, fill troughs for whatever you're currently raising and then you go out and look for something to do.

You have servers you can't bother because they're allied, and ones you can't touch because you don't want to start a war. So you go to some random server and do whatever you want. You have tames twice the level of anything else on the server, with carefully curated stats, thousands of c4 back home and a few hundred in your upload. So you level any base you stumble into. Thatch may as well not exist to you, your mana will flatten it without even breaking stride. Wood is a minor inconvenience, but a few swipes and its gone. Stone just takes a single c4 to pulverize and you might actually bother check the remains when the dust settles. Metal takes a bit more explosive but really only indicates that there might be something worthwhile inside. Turrets are a joke when you have 1k dura flak, and if it so happens that there's a few too many turrets to let you jut run right up to the door you can let them chew through your turtles 100k+ HP first.

Maybe not all of that applies to classic as much as official but ultimately the things you mentioned as the problems are really just the symptoms of the games politics creating bored players. As more people get tired of getting raided and either join one of those tribes or leave the cluster or the game the fewer people are left outside of those big tribes and suddenly there's going to be a lot less for all those bored players to do

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Both of you make good points. I don't think tracking will stop offline raiding, but with the enemy demo timer removed, there will atleast be the excitement of maybe they are online. I do think the HP of structures are rather flimsy compared to explosives. You can go on an extinction map and have C4 in an hour from nothing if you have the char level. Also bypassing player only set turrets with stego's and paracers with their head pointed straight up doesn't seem to help the defense side of things. Thanks for your input on this thread. I really hope Wildcard looks at these issues and considers the longevity of the game in a time where sandbox survival games are having a huge dive in player base.

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Very well said . I have 5000 all on official pvp. I have also always been baffled by the ease of tracking players. Its rather ridiculous. It's no surprise tho that it remains an issue. Wildcard benifits when players buy new " clean" accounts for raiding. 

The sheer amount of politics involved limits most pvp to smaller scaled stuff even for those of us in mega tribes.  Most raiding is done through new accounts and proxies. All our shinny toys only come out when we are threatened at home.

It's all about the status quo at this point. Stomp.the new players to avoid future competition and maintain steady relations with the other mega tribes. Boredom is the threat .

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The bigger problem is that ark is designed where you get the biggest advantage you can over your opponent, whatever that might be, before attacking them. Offline raiding is just another version of that. 

I've have some good online PVP fights. They are fun. But the thing is that it still comes down to who sees who first. Waiting in the bushes until somebody is doing a thing, and then jumping out them gives you a huge advantage, if only becaue they're distracted and their mind isn't prepared whereas yours is. Wait until someone has their nose buried in a container and then run up and bola them. Even better if they took so much weight that they are encumbered. It feels like total bullpoop to them, but if they killed you earlier it feels great to be nasty back.

Consider that the only thing that matters in this game is who has a Mana. Before that it was griffons. Before that Wyverns. The guy who drops on your thatch hut will have as much of a power level over you as he can, that means a Mana. These ultimate beasts invalidate 99% of the other dinos. 

That's another thing, so much of the joy that went into this game was undercut by this meta. Think of how much content is effecively lost because of that reason; will you ever have two tribes doing stego battles? How about catapults from the back of a parasaur? Dueling tribes on pachys wielding bows (and not using assault rifles). They put so much work into making the canopy of the trees interact differently with light, but nobody ever really see it or makes use of it because of how fliers solve everything having to do with it. Stack the huge implicit advantage of having a flier when scanning the map and you easily undercut the implicit design features of maps like The Island and SE. I mean why are there even pathways running up the mountain?

I think the problem is that the game "session" is not focused to have online players doing pvp things against other online players. Part of this is a persistent world. Offline raiding has been no solution either as you can determine by searching the forums. But what I would like to see is "Gated Content"; a server where everyone is capped for a certain amount of time to a give engram level. So you can only fight using Thatch buildings and Pachys, Turtles & Parasaurs and only the most basic gear like Bows and Slingshots. Then it goes up to Wood, and the range of dino's expands to include the next level of saddles; Raptors and Trikes, plus you can get metal tools & crossbows. Then the Stone tier, which splits into 3 biomes of saddles and armor; cold, swamp and redwood plus it gives you access to basic firearms and fixed places catapults and ballistas, so now it feels like a siege battle against castles and C4 isn't ruining the game yet.

So on and so forth up to tek tier. So that everyone knows "on this server, it's this tech tier and if you aren't on that level don't expect to compete". Does this solve your offline raiding problem. Well yes it does actually; nobody can C4 your early stone base. They have to use technology appropriate to the level if they want to break in, and that gives you a fighting chance to design your base well.

  

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All that problems could be solved if:

- there would not be possibility to transfer dinos between servers
- there would not be possibility to transfer things between servers (items and structures)

If the only things you can transfer would be

- naked player
- blueprints
- materials (metal, crystals, fiber etc...)

then game will have its own balance.

 

Best example: Rock Drake would be King of Aberration again.
 

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3 hours ago, slejo said:

All that problems could be solved if:

- there would not be possibility to transfer dinos between servers
- there would not be possibility to transfer things between servers (items and structures)

If the only things you can transfer would be

- naked player
- blueprints
- materials (metal, crystals, fiber etc...)

then game will have its own balance.

 

Best example: Rock Drake would be King of Aberration again.
 

I have always thought transfers were the double edged blade of officials. Like the internet for us.

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23 hours ago, ShawtyBigNutz said:

I do think the HP of structures are rather flimsy compared to explosives. You can go on an extinction map and have C4 in an hour from nothing if you have the char level. Also bypassing player only set turrets with stego's and paracers with their head pointed straight up doesn't seem to help the defense side of things.

 

Compared to other survival games, like Rust for example, how easy it is to get c4 and how weak structures are to it has been an interesting design choice to me for a long time. Most other games require a significant investment of time and resources to craft effective explosives and most structures are still not simple to raid. You can't just blow through a wall almost as easily as a door, and foundations are basically pointless to wipe if you intend to profit off a raid. It can take multiple sessions to even gear up and prepare for a raid, whereas in ark you can easily raid in a few hours of getting started. Unfortunately I don't think buffing structures/nerfing explosives will matter much when you take the arthro into consideration, especially now that it's breedable. Even restricting levels to limit available engrams won't solve arthro raiding as they can be whistled without a saddle to munch their way through anything.

 

20 hours ago, Zarn said:

Very well said . I have 5000 all on official pvp. I have also always been baffled by the ease of tracking players. Its rather ridiculous. It's no surprise tho that it remains an issue. Wildcard benifits when players buy new " clean" accounts for raiding. 

The sheer amount of politics involved limits most pvp to smaller scaled stuff even for those of us in mega tribes.  Most raiding is done through new accounts and proxies. All our shinny toys only come out when we are threatened at home.

It's all about the status quo at this point. Stomp.the new players to avoid future competition and maintain steady relations with the other mega tribes. Boredom is the threat .

 

Wildcard would benefit if they were buying directly from steam/egs, but most of those "clean" accounts aren't being purchased directly. Other than that I absolutely agree with you. The safety and protection that being in a big tribe affords comes at the cost of pretty severe limitations on what you're "allowed" to do in the game. You can choose to spend most of your time sitting around and occasionally venture out to stomp some unaffiliated bases, but you won't really get anything from it other than some temporary distraction from the day to day of mega tribe life.

Even when a fob does show up on your server, as you said everything is still about the status quo. So you'll either spend hours in a pointless battle only meant to drain some resources that your tribe has more than enough in reserve to replace. Even if the enemy really wants to wipe that particular location you'll just move everything out and plan to rebuild. They aren't planning to take over, just a show of strength and realistically they likely don't have the ability to hold that location anyway.

I find it more and more ironic the amount of pvp elitism you find most of those players have in big tribes, considering most spend the majority of their time on their home servers doing pve chores anyway.

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17 hours ago, slejo said:

All that problems could be solved if:

- there would not be possibility to transfer dinos between servers
- there would not be possibility to transfer things between servers (items and structures)

If the only things you can transfer would be

- naked player
- blueprints
- materials (metal, crystals, fiber etc...)

then game will have its own balance.

 

Best example: Rock Drake would be King of Aberration again.
 

That wouldn’t fix the issue it would just change the issue. Before transfers we would get stomped by the alpha on server who was bored, had no external threat, and wiping tribes. Same issue as now only difference is who is wiping me. Who cares who wipes me. What matters is I’ve been wiped! 

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5 hours ago, johnm81 said:

That wouldn’t fix the issue it would just change the issue. Before transfers we would get stomped by the alpha on server who was bored, had no external threat, and wiping tribes. Same issue as now only difference is who is wiping me. Who cares who wipes me. What matters is I’ve been wiped! 

In PVP sometimes you need to show some of your diplomacy skills.
Sometimes it works and you can live side by side with an alpha tribe.

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