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Has Wildcard Truly Learned their Lessons?


Swordguy

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Before some people get their panties in a bunch, I love ARK and have over 10k hours into it. The design and style of ARK is ingenious and unique. But, as anyone who's played ARK for long enough knows, you haven't mastered ARK until you've mastered the bugs, which is oddly what makes the game even more satisfying in a masochistic kind of way.

I remember ARK during early access. Constant disconnects and server crashes. game patches always brought new surprises, like logging in to find your base half destroyed by trees that had grown back, or Doeds and Anky's no longer able to harvest stone and metal. The dino rebalances that seemed phoned in. No offline damage protection. Getting stuck in foundations. Spawning into objects. No /suicide command. Thousands of places to get stuck in geometry. Salmon killing spino spawns unless you kill all the salmon. I could go on and on with pages of weird bugs and/or annoyances if I spent enough time on it.

If I could describe ARK as anything, I'd say it most resembles a patchwork quilt.  

It still rains indoors unless your base is no taller than 4 walls high. Beehives spawn perpetually inside of each other with no queen. S+ mod is required to make ARK feel like a non-alpha game, and Wildcard thanks them for their hard work by breaking mod support in the most nefarious ways. Official servers have less support than a 20 year old indie game. KBD mod is required to give dinos the real TLC they deserved years ago. All dinos are psychic, knowing exactly where you're aiming your tranq arrows/darts (i.e. fake AI). 

If you're playing Vanilla Ark: you are playing a game that never made it out of alpha. I played on legacy/official for years and years until finally dipping my toes into unofficial with mods last year, and I will never touch vanilla ARK again if you paid me to; it's embarrassingly vanilla and broken in so many ways. 

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In short, wildcard from 5 years ago clearly were shooting from the hip and learning as they went. As time progressed they've clearly learned and improved, but ARK itself is so top heavy that they'd need to start from scratch to make Ark run stably and efficiently, and this is what I assume ARK 2 is going to be.

But I wonder; how many of the developers at Wildcard today were there from the beginning? How well is the code documented? How much of ARK 1 will they try and copy/paste into ARK 2? (ARK 1 quirks and bugs are so unique that if they copy/paste anything into ARK 2 we will notice it.) 

I really wonder if Wildcard has what it takes to do ARK properly this time from the ground up. It's now 2021 and they still fumble about breaking things that have no reason to be broken. will ARK 2 really be a different experience than the last 5 or so years? I really hope so, because ARK 2 is going to have some lofty expectations weighing on it. 

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tbh the history and the story so far says they have and havent .... some things are better BUT they have 'used / stolen' other peoples ideas and mods to make their game better yet some core things STILL exist after many years AND bugs still keep cropping up while adding QOL things - i HOPE and i really mean this, that they have and will have learnt from ARK all the 'wrong' turns they can avoid with ARK2 - however in the same vein i am not preordering it or getting hyped over it either ....

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The lessons they're learning are probably not the lessons you would like them to be learning.

Millions of copies sold across multiple platforms must have taught them they have a successful product.
Microtransactions on mobile must have taught them a new way to generate income.
Continuing to release patches that need to be patched must have taught them they don't need to be too thorough with QA.

I hope that you can separate the sections within WC.  Devs, QA, community management and company management.  And with Ark2, there are probably investors to think about as well.

I don't for one microsecond hold the devs and QA responsible for the negative things that you're talking about.  They're set goals by management.  They have to produce what they're told, to a budget (staff and time) dictated by management.

My concern with Ark 2 is that they've already taken on some "big names".  Big names = big money.  That means less money available for devs and QA.

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On 1/15/2021 at 1:08 PM, Swordguy said:

If I could describe ARK as anything, I'd say it most resembles a patchwork quilt.  

It still rains indoors unless your base is no taller than 4 walls high. Beehives spawn perpetually inside of each other with no queen. S+ mod is required to make ARK feel like a non-alpha game, and Wildcard thanks them for their hard work by breaking mod support in the most nefarious ways. Official servers have less support than a 20 year old indie game. KBD mod is required to give dinos the real TLC they deserved years ago. All dinos are psychic, knowing exactly where you're aiming your tranq arrows/darts (i.e. fake AI). 

If you're playing Vanilla Ark: you are playing a game that never made it out of alpha. I played on legacy/official for years and years until finally dipping my toes into unofficial with mods last year, and I will never touch vanilla ARK again if you paid me to; it's embarrassingly vanilla and broken in so many ways.

I have been largely on official for most of my playtime (9k hours) as well.  For roughly the last year I have been on an unofficial cluster and it has been great, a few mods, and some boosted rates.  S+ felt like cheating at first, I'll admit.  After a time though, for me it started to feel more the way the game should be played.  Resource pulling, breeding, storing items, etc...  The ease of playing doesn't make the game "worse" or "easy mode," which is what many say, just more fun.  You spend more time doing things that you find fun.  Hell, even I rejected unofficial for years because of the flaky nature in general of unofficial:  Make a base, and 2-3 months later the server is shut down.  What I've come to find is that the mods and a slight boost over official make all the bugs and glitches that INEVITABLY cause losses easier to bear.  Any version of ARK is easy as hell if you have an Anky and an Indy Forge, even Official.  It's just all in what you are trying to get out of the game, I feel.  But I digress.

.......................................................................................

About WildCard learning a lesson:  Emphatically no.  After countless releases, I will have to see it to believe it.  So many small things that sat unanswered and/or unfixed for years, and were only fixed with major reworks like building, kibble, dinos, taming, etc...  Core items of the game.  How long did it take for them to make a few simple steps to make griefing harder for Official PvE servers?  How long did it take for them to add an .ini for flyer speed leveling to the base .ini?  How long did it take for the half-assed integration of S+ items?  Those are a few examples.  A book could be written about it.

I play the game and love the game.  As you described, it gives a wholly unique experience:  The scope of this game stands unmatched in my 25 years of PC gaming experience.  I can't say why these things get broken and never fixed.  I'm almost certain they have the resources and know-how to make timely fixes, because when some bug, glitch, or exploit is easily replicated and game-breaking, it is nerfed/fixed/patched out quickly.  But soooooOOOOOO MANY THINGS EXISTED AS A THORN IN THE SIDE OF THE GAME FOR LITERAL YEARS before getting a simple fix.  It all plays to my theory of WildCard dev mindset regarding QA being: "GOOD 'NUFF!"

I love all the guys from the community team.  @Cedric, @Jatheish, and @Jen (when she was here), among others, are pillars of communication between the dev team and us all.  They do a great job of keeping live events fun and happy!  And the dev team specifically have accomplished an Herculean feat with this game, despite the bugs and problems.  But if they were willing to increase the polish level and be a more focused and tighter QA-minded team, they'd have been doing it these last almost 6 years.  They don't currently, they haven't, so they will not do so in the future.

Hope I'm proven wrong, but ARK is ARK.

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Sadly I am not certain that they will. All these sales from DLC's has told the devs that player want even bigger ridiculous OP creatures. It started with the Giga that was 2x the size of the Rex and then it was the Titanosaurus and then that wasn't big enough so they threw in the Titans and Giant Turtles. They'll probably be Super Titans and then Giga Titans you watch.

 

The other thing I doubt they have learned is map balance. Why play on a crappy map like SE where you can't even farm efficiently because of the heat mechanics when you instead could play on a very unbalanced map like Ragnorok which has all the same creatures as SE but at much better levels and with the farming efficiency of The Island. The dev tendency in this game to create hybrid maps of others with all their best bits cherry picked leads to map imbalance. The players might love these new maps but that doesn't that they are in fact good for gameplay or balanced.  Every map should have some drawcard that will ensure its viable and worthy of playing on. I think a nice touch would be to give each actual server some unique characteristics. So now no 2 servers would be the same, even if the map was the same. A basic example:

Server 1: The Island

Unique Characteristics:

Herbivores tame 1.5x faster.

Wild Dinos inflict 2x damage.

 

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In order to get the kinds of things you are talking about, they would have to monetize the game more (i.e. subscriptions, premium accounts or microtransactions).

This of it like a business. They make their money releasing expansions and that requires a focus on content. More bang for your buck in each release. It's not about making the game smooth, bug free, tight, perfectly balanced. 

 

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If there is one thing history has definitely shown us, it's that people enjoy the enjoyable parts of Ark enough that it's kept a business running for years despite anything negative you might say about it. 

 

With that in mind, I would say it doesn't really matter whether they've 'learned their lesson' or not. It only matters if people will buy Ark 2. Unless it's worse than Ark 1, people will. People love Ark. I don't even get the whole righteousness of people who keep asking that question, anyway. They've learned as they go, and they keep learning as they go. The idea that they should somehow hold back on doing anything further and just stay in a rut "learning their lesson" is so laughably naive and misconcieved. What exactly are you expecting? That they should accept that they are unfit to make games anf just pack up their stuff and go home? They should take a bunch of programming e-courses to get better? They should just dream up some money so they can "hire better programmers"? I don't get what the thing that people who keep bringing this up for discussion are expecting.

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5 hours ago, Fresiki said:

If there is one thing history has definitely shown us, it's that people enjoy the enjoyable parts of Ark enough that it's kept a business running for years despite anything negative you might say about it. 

 

With that in mind, I would say it doesn't really matter whether they've 'learned their lesson' or not. It only matters if people will buy Ark 2. Unless it's worse than Ark 1, people will. People love Ark. I don't even get the whole righteousness of people who keep asking that question, anyway. They've learned as they go, and they keep learning as they go. The idea that they should somehow hold back on doing anything further and just stay in a rut "learning their lesson" is so laughably naive and misconcieved. What exactly are you expecting? That they should accept that they are unfit to make games anf just pack up their stuff and go home? They should take a bunch of programming e-courses to get better? They should just dream up some money so they can "hire better programmers"? I don't get what the thing that people who keep bringing this up for discussion are expecting.

To your first point- Ark is a unique game, maybe the most unique game I've ever played. If there was any real competition to it I think people would leave.

Some games like Conan or Dayz are similar but again, nothing is quite like Ark. WC kind of has a monopoly going.

Conan's armor sets and building system is better imo but Ark has friggin dinos. Dayz's map is way bigger and has a much more robust weapon line up and shooting mechanics, but Ark has friggin dinos.

It's my opinion that people would have dropped this bug filled lag fest a long time ago if something else emerged that checked the ark boxes.... but nothing has.

To your second point- yes maybe they should take some programming courses or hire better programmers.

I never had major issues with Rag, Val, or CI, yet Gen and Ext are some of the worst performing online experiences I've ever had, even to this day. Not to mention the constant delays or the fact that every event seems to break something with the game.

The concepts WC has invented over this games life cycle have been nothing short of fantastic, but Ark 2 needs to deliver in the execution as well.

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On 1/22/2021 at 12:17 AM, St1ckyBandit said:

To your first point- Ark is a unique game, maybe the most unique game I've ever played. If there was any real competition to it I think people would leave.

Some games like Conan or Dayz are similar but again, nothing is quite like Ark. WC kind of has a monopoly going.

Conan's armor sets and building system is better imo but Ark has friggin dinos. Dayz's map is way bigger and has a much more robust weapon line up and shooting mechanics, but Ark has friggin dinos.

It's my opinion that people would have dropped this bug filled lag fest a long time ago if something else emerged that checked the ark boxes.... but nothing has.

To your second point- yes maybe they should take some programming courses or hire better programmers.

I never had major issues with Rag, Val, or CI, yet Gen and Ext are some of the worst performing online experiences I've ever had, even to this day. Not to mention the constant delays or the fact that every event seems to break something with the game.

The concepts WC has invented over this games life cycle have been nothing short of fantastic, but Ark 2 needs to deliver in the execution as well.

I agree with most you're saying, if not everything. They do have a monopoly, and so they'll have the same monopoly with Ark 2. If some competitor rose up out of the woodworks, that would cause some competition that might ultimately serve customers in the long run, but that's still a moot point. There are no competitors now, there is no such competition, so there are no such lessons to be learned for them at this point. The notion I was responding to was the notion that they should just "rise". It's not clear exactly how one does that. It's not exactly clear what the problem with Ark is. When I load into a server with a full inventory and everybody's poop hangs, what exactly causes that? Isn't that obviously due to the way different systems are coded into one another, making it so that my local client experience somehow affects everyone elses experience. Maybe there's a different way to build a system from the ground up, and maybe they've already learned that lesson, but can't really do anything to implement it into the current game due to, well frankly, "physics". Things like the amount of time it takes to rebuild a core system that other systems might be resting on in a live game that has an active playing base while trying to appease shareholders and customers all at the same time. There's stories about games getting overhaul patches way into their lifespan. Diablo 3 for example, recieved massive overhauls far into it's life span. A few years after release it was no longer the same game. Such occurrences are super rare though, and the feasability of doing something like that is obviously directly tied to how the game is designed from the ground up. We're talking about it generally here, but the devil is in the details. Either, you can do some changes and everything else that runs on top of it will run fine, or you can't do those changes because it breaks the entire code.

My whole point is, if you don't know how to ski but want to learn, you put your skis on and go skiing. If you fall on your ass, you get back up. If you fall onto somebody else with your ass, you're gonna piss them off, sure. But the only way to learn how to ski is to keep getting up and doing the actual skiing until you suddenly know how to ski. Now if a bunch of systems in a game were coded in mathematically sub-optimal ways by inexperienced developers, the only way for them to get better is to keep making a game. People keep saying they should "fix Ark 1 first", I say that's dumb. That's like a child's idea of what right vs. wrong is. Like take the way stats/mutations work, where if you get enough mutations into a stat or spend enough points into it, it will revert back to 0 again. Explain to me which words to change in the code to make it so that never happens, for example. Or why do I get a 10 minute lag spike/disconnection if someone transfers onto my server with a full inventory? Why exactly does my character bob when it goes out of water? These weren't features they coded into the game. These are artifacts of how they did code the game, but they never intended for these  things to be features. The things just happened because of how they decided to practically solve the problem of making the game they were envisioning. It's not clear to me what you do about that when the product is complete. It's not even clear that all problems are even fixable to begin with. So the whole "they should fix Ark 1 first!!!!!!!!!!" side of thinking just seems rly dumb to me. Like kids trying to have opinions about politics. It's cute and all, but if you think anybody in a position of power would listen to or even consider that crap, cmon....

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The real question is: this is Ark 2 (a real game) or "Atlas 2" (another copy/pasta scam). The "big actor" already points to (probably) overmarketing/overhyping and underdelivering as is so common in the market.

Just imagine if Vin Diesel is like HNL-A giving you stupid missions with no background story or logic... It is good to remember that no old Ark player will abandon 10 maps and hundreds of hours invested building and taming for an "ordinary" experience limited to one map (and probably no good mods for like a year). 

In the end WC/Grapeshot/Instinct are red flags by themselves. Ark 2 will be a "redemption" game or another stain in their already flawed reputation with the community. Personally, I hope for the best (I truly want a "better" Ark in the market, because it doesn't exist in any form), but I can't hype or think anything will be better (they proved they can make everything worse over and over again).

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I love ark, Not fond of wc but hey it's a package deal. I have almost 13k hours in Ark but I doubt I will pick up Ark2 not getting hooked on something

that has a parent track record for being crap. Ark is crap, the dlc's are crap, atlas is a steaming pile of crap( of which I have all listed)

( gen 1 servers ran flawlessly for ages then slowly declined, now they disconnect, kick and crash like the rest)

I do not in any situation think WC has learned anything. Nor do I think Ark 2 is going to be a dream come true.

I will keep slogging away in Ark 1 and waiting on something better to entertain me and take my money which I will gladly give.

Myself, my sister, best friend her hubby and kid.. countless other friends and tribe mates will all gladly give our $$$ for something

decent, but I don't think Ark 2 will be that something. They still make excuses and try to fix things and make them worse in Ark 1.

( new cryo pod UI) 

That's just my thoughts.

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