Ark at its most fun

[maxplanck58]

With a traditional job & family, my life allows me to Ark about 4 hours a week.  So I haven't seen every angle of Ark: I have done just about everything except luck into an alpha tribe or participate in any big tribe battles.  I have also yet to try unofficial servers or mods.  So I am sure that there are a lot of experiences that I am missing, but here is where Ark is the most fun for me:

Starting fresh:  those first days where you have to pick your battles, find a good location to build a base, and defend it while you improve on it.  Before getting good tames, the maps are HUGE, the dangers are many and you have to be smart and careful.  

At least for me, as soon as you get a flyer, the maps get small.  As soon as you get a wyvern or giga, the threats become forgotten.  Other than boss fights and alpha genesis missions (excluding PvP), there is little to no danger.

What stage of the game do you think is the most fun in Ark?  What should I try next?

[Cowgirl]

My favorite was running around eating things without a worry, but now that there are wild gigas and titans I cant do that anymore lol, I also really enjoy event colors, Easter event is my weakness. If you like the beginning you might consider doing dino overhaul X. I watched some youtubers play and you are definitely never fully safe, losing tames is standard in that though so you dont want to if you get attached to your pets. 

[St1ckyBandit]

A friend and I had an ongoing fued with another tribe back when Rag first came out. We had some fun aerial battles with our griffins against their wyverns.

The game was way more fun without manas and the overabundance of tek.

I don't know about "fun" but I'd say I'm most enthusiastic about the game after a wipe, when I find a new base spot to build up and see if I can make work. Those are the days I cant wait to get home and jump on every day to progress the base bit by bit.

[wizard03]

1 hour ago, maxplanck58 said:

With a traditional job & family, my life allows me to Ark about 4 hours a week.  So I haven't seen every angle of Ark: I have done just about everything except luck into an alpha tribe or participate in any big tribe battles.  I have also yet to try unofficial servers or mods.  So I am sure that there are a lot of experiences that I am missing, but here is where Ark is the most fun for me:

Starting fresh:  those first days where you have to pick your battles, find a good location to build a base, and defend it while you improve on it.  Before getting good tames, the maps are HUGE, the dangers are many and you have to be smart and careful.  

At least for me, as soon as you get a flyer, the maps get small.  As soon as you get a wyvern or giga, the threats become forgotten.  Other than boss fights and alpha genesis missions (excluding PvP), there is little to no danger.

What stage of the game do you think is the most fun in Ark?  What should I try next?

Mostly solo here, but got to say that its hard to get to that one point, cause Im usually focused on the end game. So while its defiantly a bit harder early on, the end goal is usually what drives me anyhow, even after that "poof" its easy now. Moment.  

[Zoopshab]

This is a big point because they need to consider in game design: the length of a play-session for the average player. 

Ark is very bad with regard to this because of the combination of how long it takes to tame a dino. See you need to
1. Acquire resources (if you were freshly wiped from your last logon you need to start fresh). So get up an running with a crafting station to have the stuff ready to do the taming.
2. Do the taming which takes hours.
3. Now that you have your tame, log off and having it killed while you are offline. 

A persistent world does not not in any way favor casual gameplay. The solution is not offline raid protection, that creates base spam and clutters the island. I find it really unfair and lame not so much that your base can be blown into while you are offline; resources in a container are replaceable. But the fact that your 2 hour tame can be murdered, that really just doesn't "feel right" with the game. 

Now during the holiday seasons it was 2x resources and taming, and I found that was about the right amount of time to find a tame and obtain it with intention; What does a direwolf do and what are you going to use it for this play session.

Think of it like metal rocks. If you want metal you have to goto the mountain and harvest metal rocks. An anky is not unlike a rock. Its a resource. Loseable, spendable, replaceable. If you goto the mountain and tame an anky, it should be doable in one play session and if you lose it when you log off "oh well". The snowballing occurs when alpha tribes are able to save their tames and start with that time investment already accomplished each logon.

Snowballing is almost never a fun mechanic in any video game. The only exception I can think of is playing Slark in Dota, and even then he's fragile and you can lose the momentum easily (i.e. can be countered). Also the game only lasts for up to an hour. This is possibly why so many people are calling for server resets. But this doesn't really solve the problem.    

[Pipinghot]

On 1/12/2021 at 5:22 PM, maxplanck58 said:

With a traditional job & family, my life allows me to Ark about 4 hours a week.  So I haven't seen every angle of Ark: I have done just about everything except luck into an alpha tribe or participate in any big tribe battles.  I have also yet to try unofficial servers or mods.  So I am sure that there are a lot of experiences that I am missing, but here is where Ark is the most fun for me:

Starting fresh:  those first days where you have to pick your battles, find a good location to build a base, and defend it while you improve on it.  Before getting good tames, the maps are HUGE, the dangers are many and you have to be smart and careful.  

At least for me, as soon as you get a flyer, the maps get small.  As soon as you get a wyvern or giga, the threats become forgotten.  Other than boss fights and alpha genesis missions (excluding PvP), there is little to no danger.

What stage of the game do you think is the most fun in Ark?  What should I try next?

I like best the two "ends" of the player experience best, being new with the challenges you described and at the end of a map when you're doing caves & boss fights.

For you, with a very limited amount of time, the only way you're going to experience the end-game stuff is by finding a strong tribe that will take you in and let you contribute/play on your available schedule or play solo (like "local/host" solo) and then use mods to handle all of the repetitious & time consuming tasks that make the middle game so boring.

Using a mods that picks up eggs/poop for you or feed babies for you when you do breeding or makes inventory management easier are pretty amazing and they let you focus your time on the aspects of the game that you enjoy the most while handling the tedious busy-work for you.

If you decide you want to try that I recommend:

Structures Plus (S+)

Super Spyglass (Open Source)

JP's ARKNav GPS HUD

ARK Settlements (lets you build NPC villages that harvest resources and let you trade with them as if you were on a server with other people)

...any other mods that you want to try for building aesthetic structures (Like Eco's mods) or add cool elements to your map (like the Stargate mods do)

 

The beauty of playing local/host or any Unofficial server is that there are so many ways to customize the game experience to optimize the fun for yourself. You can make the game easier, harder, or just different as much as you want. Personally I dislike Official servers, I dip my toes in them about once a year just to remind myself of how aggressively tedious they are with all of the busy-work tasks and other annoyances and then I go back to playing the Unofficial server I share with some real life friends. When you play Official servers ARK is one game, when you play Unofficail or local/host it's essentially many different games and you can decide exactly which one you like best.

[yekrucifixion187]

Hatching to see if I get that stat or color or combo I'm looking for. 

That's when I enjoy Ark the most.

Beating a new boss for the 1st time is up there too.

[JJacky]

The most fun I've ever had was pvp before extinction came with its OP manas. People used a lot of different mounts back then and combat had a lot of variation. Now all you see is mana everywhere. Boring af. No amount of nerfing can fix this dino because people will just mutate it to sillyness.

The best thing that has ever happened to me was the day when I found out there are actually offline protected servers in this game :) I haven't looked back ever since.