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Veteran PVE player looking to dabble in PVP


Wesmanee

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So my buddy and I are veteran ark players and thinking about getting into the PVP ring and laying down the pain on some poor souls. My question is how far can 2 players reasonably expect to get in a game dominated by megatribes. Any tactics we should employ? We both know ark mechanics inside out, have decades of FPS exp, and are vaguely informed on pvp metas etc. Which we could brush up on via youtube.

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I went the opposite route: I was a veteran PvPer in the early years (before manas) and made the switch to PvE after the alpha tribe on our server got abusive.  I have jumped back to PvP a few times, but a lot seems to have changed.  Here is my prediction of what you can expect:  unless you get taken in by a relatively big tribe, there will be no base building.  If you build it, they will find you.  You might have a base for a few days, maybe a week or two, but then you will wake up dead and all tames and progress will be gone.  After all that time in PvE, the first one will be a shock.  There will then be some apprehension when logging in: will I be alive?  You will keep asking yourself: how do they keep finding me?  The map is big, the forest is dense - but they will find you.  Every exploit, hack and element of imbalance will be used against you to crush you.  If you do survive with a structure for more than a week, the alpha tribe is letting you live and waiting for you to fatten up a bit before they raid you.  Some will just raid you for kicks, and block all obelisks and drop locations so that you can not easily leave the server to find a friendlier one.

The only way to better your chances for long term survival is finding a rathole - live between two rocks with 1 foundation, a smithy and a ptera.  They will eventually find you, but you will last longer.   There will be some fun in skirmishing with other people living in ratholes, but then all the sudden you will get throttled by a guy with white hair named 123 on a mana.

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What a terrible existence. Subjecting one's self to that kind of torture on a daily basis... Where do I sign up? All jokes aside I don't expect it to be too pleasant. It's what's kept me away from pvp all these years. But the itch to get into a intense skirmish has to be scratched at some point and it's a whole different version of a game I know and love that I have never experienced. I might seek out a server that wipes every 30 days that has a tribe limit. 

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Non-official servers might be the way to go.  Offline base protection is an option, and I have heard of maps that are PvE away from the resource sites where your bases and tames are safe, but PvP near the valuable resources for some good competitive fighting. 

Official PvP servers for many players offers consistent and constant loss: you grind, you build up and then everything is wiped out while you are at work or asleep.

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@Wesmanee if you go that route I have some recommendations, though I'm no guru on it.
Unofficials have various interesting attempts to combine pve with pvp.

1. One that I've tried out before that did NOT work well, at least not for me, was the admins simply declared it was supposed to be a generally peaceful server, and they had a rule that you were not supposed to totally wipe people out on raids. Soo basically I was supposed to be able to primarily pve it and get some pvp when I felt ready. The concept is great!! .... but the problem was the admins went mia and then everyone got wiped and the server depopulated.

2. I've heard of un-official clusters where some of the maps are pvp enabled, and some are pve, and you build your base in a safe zone and transfer to pvp maps to war it out.. was interested in the concept, but never got around to seeing how it works.

3. The last one I tried was pve but on the weekends the whole map switches to pvp. You can upload a transmiter load of your best bps dinos etc. But your structures might need to be rebuilt, and you're never going to build up vast vaults of stuff like in normal pve, unless you defend it. It was interesting because the people who worked hard to perpetuate their pvp game weekend to weekend had actual pve style breeding programs to bring to their pvp games...

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We use to have the ability to declare wars in PvE - it was a really cool option: both tribe leaders would have to agree.  We would go to war with a friendly tribe with the understanding that we would not attack each other's bases: either meet at a certain place to have a rumble, or we would go to a common arena to fight.  We even had a jousting track!  It was a really fun option - I am not sure why WC eliminated it.  Maybe there was some exploit that people were using.

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32 minutes ago, maxplanck58 said:

We use to have the ability to declare wars in PvE - it was a really cool option: both tribe leaders would have to agree.  We would go to war with a friendly tribe with the understanding that we would not attack each other's bases: either meet at a certain place to have a rumble, or we would go to a common arena to fight.  We even had a jousting track!  It was a really fun option - I am not sure why WC eliminated it.  Maybe there was some exploit that people were using.

Yea it got exploited, there was a really big thread discussing that here... I think the jist of the exploit was some nefarious actor coming to a server under the pretext of making a trade, this guy would set up alliances to facilitate trading, then start declaring wars. The wars draw in alliances, then other nefarious actors show up and wipe the server lol. So it was a bad design, combined with people not understanding the bad design. Most of the thread was a debate on whether the fault was the design, or people not protecting themselves with understanding all the consequences of allying with randos. It'd be a really cool feature if they could fix it, or if they could bring in pvp in one of those other ways, e.g. setting up a new official cluster that is pve and pvp linked servers. I got a fridge full of rexes and some of them need to die, lol.

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23 hours ago, Wesmanee said:

So my buddy and I are veteran ark players and thinking about getting into the PVP ring and laying down the pain on some poor souls. My question is how far can 2 players reasonably expect to get in a game dominated by megatribes. Any tactics we should employ? We both know ark mechanics inside out, have decades of FPS exp, and are vaguely informed on pvp metas etc. Which we could brush up on via youtube.

My suggestion to you is first understand that pvp is an insanely complex thing in ark. Foot pvp is very skill based while Dino pvp requires a huge amount of head knowledge and situational awareness. In many cases it’s like a Starcraft game a Dino counters a base defense system while another Dino counters that Dino and a flyer counters that one! So again like Starcraft your army needs a correct Dino composition. And on top of all that no one battle is the same and there can be 100s of possible tactics. 
 

My advice, is to turn to twitch tv find a bunch of pvp streamers on official servers get active in their communities watch what they do and try to test and repeat it in single player or your own server with friends. This will be your training. If you are lucky and you get to know the streamer they might let you play with them and they will teach you in a manner far better than any forum post or video. 
 

 

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