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Disabling uploads/transfers without notice needs to STOP.


DirtyPop84

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1 hour ago, Joebl0w13 said:

 

She's such a clown.

The server didn't restart because it's a jerk... I get that ark isnt life or death but you'd think they'd have a little more humility than to make stupid jokes about screwing their playerbase over for the 1000th time.

A tweet like that just speaks to their extremely cavalier attitude towards fixing the game and the players that pad their pockets.

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2 minutes ago, St1ckyBandit said:

She's such a clown.

The server didn't restart because it's a jerk... I get that ark isnt life or death but you'd think they'd have a little more humility than to make stupid jokes about screwing their playerbase over for the 1000th time.

A tweet like that just speaks to their extremely cavalier attitude towards fixing the game and the players that pad their pockets.

Shoot The Messenger? - Toronto Realty Blog

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I'm trying to see if people who have lost their items got their items restored.

I personally feel that closing download without closing the countdown timer on items is not only careless, but is the final nail in the coffin for my trust in the company to care about player's time.

I've been on Official PVE since 2015, over 17 thousand hours on record for my Ark playtime. If items lost in terminals due to Wildcard locking downloads today (and forgetting to lock the countdown timer) are not restored.

This maybe the last straw.
I need Wildcard to be considerate of the time spent on our virtual items.

Why did the countdown in the temrinal items not pause along with the transfer lock?
Is there plans to restore the items?

I cannot trust my time, my virtual items on an officially-run server, to a company who is going to be this careless with player's time.

 

The decay timer should have been paused along with the download lock.
Unless this company and product I have loved for over 17k hours of my life, really really do not give two poos about my time.

I am overwhelmingly disapointed.
I was hoping Wildcard was better than what I have seen happen today.

Sure Ark has alot of broken code, mishaps like the crash that wasnt in Wildcard's hands... but disabling transfer w/o disabling the decay timer was a "choice".

Your company chose.
Your company forgot to care about our uploaded items, which is time, time players can never get back.

I cant trust you guys with my finite real life resource anymore (time), if you dont restore the items lost today.

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P.S. I wont be looking at replies because Wildcard usually doesnt reply, and I am not interested in the usual "jokes" from the community who likes to tell me I shouldnt be playing Ark and other "you are annoying" comments.

Lost time is not something I throw away, nor will I want anyone else to decide the worthlessness of my time.

I am deeply disappointed at the carelessness shown by this company today, which is probably far worse than past carelessness I have witnessed and suffered through.

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as you well know, many players who are passionate about ark, last night, had the same problems that we had on server. On xbx in the tribe 2 characters were lost and together with them more than 350 dinos and at least 40 bp. then there are lucky people like me who have only seen their inventory timer expire, expire without being able to do anything. and I guarantee you that it was very unpleasant, given the limited time I have to play ark. this is why I am here to request a refund of our boys' taming and bp. I'm sorry to be too sincere but it is right that you remedy the huge mistake you made but not putting high multipliers, returning everything.

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12 hours ago, Firebaall said:

I see no issue with removing the timer, personally.

It would go a long way in servicing the playerbase, independent of it's initial intended use.

It really comes down to whether you think the obelisks should be used as storage. If one intends for them to be used as storage then removing the timer is not a problem, if one intends for them to only be used briefly for transferring materials then removing the timers is a huge problem. It's all a matter of the game publisher's intent.

It's not their "initial" intended use, it has always been and will continue to be their intended use, which is why no one should ever expect that timer to be increased. WC is not going to change their intended use which means they're not going to change the timer.

12 hours ago, Firebaall said:

This is Wildcard's responsibility to correct, especially since customer service refuses to replace items lost in this manner.  

It's a real kick in the teeth, and we deserve better.

Agreed, but that's basically a separate issue. The solution is to freeze the timers when they're working on problems, but if they're not going to do that then you can be sure they're also not going to increase the max time.

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5 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

Agreed, but that's basically a separate issue. The solution is to freeze the timers when they're working on problems, but if they're not going to do that then you can be sure they're also not going to increase the max time.

Yes, the solution is to freeze the 24 hour timer.  It always was.

The fact that this isn't the first time this has happened, and happens frequently, is proof that they are not only incompetent but blatantly negligent as well.  

...and they don't care at all.  

If they did, customer service would be working diligently to replace these expired items, no matter how much "work" it is to do so.  Or, the devs would be making a change to the upload timers.

...they aren't.

I can tell you from experience, last month, all I got were copy n' paste replies from their "customer service" reps.  I want this issue acknowledged, and fixed.

5 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

It really comes down to whether you think the obelisks should be used as storage. If one intends for them to be used as storage then removing the timer is not a problem, if one intends for them to only be used briefly for transferring materials then removing the timers is a huge problem. It's all a matter of the game publisher's intent.

It's not their "initial" intended use, it has always been and will continue to be their intended use, which is why no one should ever expect that timer to be increased. WC is not going to change their intended use which means they're not going to change the timer.

What I "think" obelisks "should" be used for is irrelevant.  

What does matter, is that they work as intended and as described.  When they don't work (especially due to your actions), take measures to ensure your customers don't suffer due to your development team's willful negligence.  

There is no excuse for this, and no excuse for not replacing all lost items.

I happened to be lucky this time, but others have suffered a lot of time and effort pissed away, without any accountability on Wildcard's behalf.

Changes need to be made here, and Wildcard needs to address this.  "Sorry" isn't good enough.

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18 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

They could. Just like they can change resource multipliers for special events, they could build internal tools that would allow them to change/freeze the timers.

The storage timer is a config entry in the .ini files, it's not that hard to build a tool that will let you change that config on any number of servers. It's not entirely trivial, there's actual work involved in making a tool that does this well, but it's very do-able.

Well, it's already available. The dynamic config currently support the following settings:

BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier
BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier
BabyImprintAmountMultiplier
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier
CropGrowthSpeedMultiplier
CustomRecipeEffectivenessMultiplier
DinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier
EnableFullDump
GUseServerNetSpeedCheck
GlobalSpoilingTimeMultiplier
HarvestAmountMultiplier
HexagonRewardMultiplier
MatingIntervalMultiplier
MatingSpeedMultiplier
NPCReplacements
PvEDinoDecayPeriodMultiplier
PvEStructureDecayPeriodMultiplier
TamingSpeedMultiplier
TributeDinoExpirationSeconds
TributeItemExpirationSeconds
XPMultiplier
bDisableDinoDecayPvE
bDisableStructureDecayPvE
bPvPDinoDecay
bPvPStructureDecay
bUseAlarmNotifications

So, all that was essentially required, was adding the following to their dynamicconfig.ini:

TributeDinoExpirationSeconds=0
TributeItemExpirationSeconds=0

And uploaded items would not have expired as demonstrated in that clip:

However, this is not really "pausing" them, as it just tell that specific server to not cleanup expired uploads until you change it again. Basically, when you change it, every uploads that are older than the current set expiration times are deleted based on the initial UTC timestamp at which they were uploaded regardless if you extended it or not at some point. Perhaps it could have minimized the losses, assuming their clustering system that is different than unofficial ones support them the same way. 🤷‍♂️

 

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7 hours ago, Firebaall said:

Yes, the solution is to freeze the 24 hour timer.  It always was.

The fact that this isn't the first time this has happened, and happens frequently, is proof that they are not only incompetent but blatantly negligent as well.  

...and they don't care at all.  

If they did, customer service would be working diligently to replace these expired items, no matter how much "work" it is to do so.  Or, the devs would be making a change to the upload timers.

...they aren't.

I can tell you from experience, last month, all I got were copy n' paste replies from their "customer service" reps.  I want this issue acknowledged, and fixed.

Yup, agreed with all of that. And for those same reasons they're not going to make any changes to the obelisk timers.

I'm not arguing against the things you want, it's just that they're simply not going to do anything to make the problem better.

7 hours ago, Firebaall said:

What I "think" obelisks "should" be used for is irrelevant.

What does matter, is that they work as intended and as described.  When they don't work (especially due to your actions), take measures to ensure your customers don't suffer due to your development team's willful negligence.  

There is no excuse for this, and no excuse for not replacing all lost items.

I happened to be lucky this time, but others have suffered a lot of time and effort pissed away, without any accountability on Wildcard's behalf.

Changes need to be made here, and Wildcard needs to address this.  "Sorry" isn't good enough.

That didn't mean "you" as in you personally, it mean the general "you", which in this case really means the intentions of the developers. That's why in the following sentences I said, "If one intends...", referring to the general, not you specifically.

With that cleared up, their intent is entirely relevant, and based on their intent it should be obvious that they're not going to change the timers on the obelisks. Furthermore, asking them to do so is asking for the wrong thing since that solution also creates potential additional problems.

Asking for the wrong solution to a problem isn't really asking for a solution, whereas asking for the right solution to a problem is actually asking for a solution.

Now, I don't think that WC will ever bother to create a tool that would allow them to freeze the timer on the obelisks, if they were willing to do that they would have done it already. But I also don't think they'll ever consider, even for one minute, extending the timer on the obelisks.

I agree that they should devise a solution to this problem, but the simple reality is that they won't, because they've proven a zillion times that accountability and customer service are nowhere near the top of their list of priorities. I also agree there's no excuse for failing to address this problem... or the many others that they've failed to address.

Anyone who's thinking about ARK2 should consider what kind of company they're dealing with.

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6 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

Well, it's already available. The dynamic config currently support the following settings:

[snip]

So, all that was essentially required, was adding the following to their dynamicconfig.in

Yup, which is exactly why I said they could do it if they wanted to.

All they would need to do is build a tool that lets them input a list of servers that they want to pause (obviously not inputting them manually) and then have the tool restart those servers with the new setting. Such a tool could/should include a log or display listing of all servers that are paused so that they don't accidentally leave the timer paused on servers when they're done working on problems. It wouldn't even need a true developer, this is the kind of tool that any competent scripter could create, tools of this kind are created by operations teams thousands of times per day all over the globe in every industry.

This is obviously something they could have done at any time over the years, but like many other problems that destroy and abuse the time of their players this isn't an issue they care about. The bottom line is that WC has never cared about the amount of player time that they set on fire with problems that they never bother to address.

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Also, updates that are not fatality critical should come in a planned day (like Tuesday or Wednesday  :) ), and giving far more 15 minutes to players. Use the main menu of the game to better announce incoming updates and network issues.

 

 

Quote

bDisableDinoDecayPvE
bDisableStructureDecayPvE
bPvPDinoDecay
bPvPStructureDecay

Those should be set to 1/true when there are such network issues. Also when network is down and server are still running there should be a shutdown and a save restore when the network is back.

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Just now, DodoEmperor said:

Also, updates that are not fatality critical should come in a planned day (like Tuesday or Wednesday  :) ), and giving far more 15 minutes to players. Use the main menu of the game to better announce incoming updates and network issues.

WoW does/did it best. You know you can't play on Tuesday. They are patching. Easy to plan around. Of course, they use PTRs and heavily test before patching.

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I do not play wow.. but I am not sure tha someting like  dodos PRT/spamming  server will be usefull. Too many freedom and too many ways to cause problems and getting wrong stats about the patch.

 

There are 3 things that hurts really this game: server crashes, lag spikes (no game saves, just random ping-pong spikes on some servers, mostly the island/extinction) and never-ending unplanned updates.

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I don't agree with having no other choice than to join Twitter or Discord to get information. I agree with the 24 hour timer being paused. People are losing hella time invested and hella supplies. It seems that the survival aspect of the game has "evolved" and now we have to survive against the devs, service providers, and other technical craziness as well. LOL.

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3 minutes ago, DirtyPop84 said:

It seems that the survival aspect of the game has "evolved" and now we have to survive against the devs, service providers, and other technical craziness as well. LOL.

Evolved? It's been that way since the start lol. 

Used to be worse.

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1 minute ago, DirtyPop84 said:

LOL I've never had a problem until now. Guess its just time to grind obsidian and metal until Ark Survival Disabled is back to normal. 

It's always been Ark: Survive the Devs.

I've died and lost stuff far more times (100 to 1) due to the game being buggy than the game as it's supposed to work.

When encountering something like an alpha I don't think: do I have enough health? Can I do enough damage? Is my saddle good enough? What other dinos are around that might join the fight? 

I think, what if I DC, what if the game dashboards me, what if the servers are taken down out of nowhere, will it glitch through that rock, trap, up the mountain, will it de-spawn, will my bird walk off if I jump off it, will the server crash?

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So...

No surprise, Ark customer support is an absolute joke (as usual).

Contacted them about getting this issue addressed, all I could get out of them were the typical canned (copy and paste) responses, and a misdirection to a server outage report page.

I'm sure Wildcard is using AI customer support bots at this point.  They are utterly useless, and massively incompetent. 

Requests to have senior support look at the ticket were 100% ignored, and they closed all my follow-up questions saying that the ticket was already "answered".
 

If these responses are from actual people...  They have the easiest, laziest job ever.  Unreal.

 

 

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On 5/7/2021 at 7:31 PM, Joebl0w13 said:

It's always been Ark: Survive the Devs.

I've died and lost stuff far more times (100 to 1) due to the game being buggy than the game as it's supposed to work.

When encountering something like an alpha I don't think: do I have enough health? Can I do enough damage? Is my saddle good enough? What other dinos are around that might join the fight? 

I think, what if I DC, what if the game dashboards me, what if the servers are taken down out of nowhere, will it glitch through that rock, trap, up the mountain, will it de-spawn, will my bird walk off if I jump off it, will the server crash?

Yeah dude... my wyvern does that walk off after dismount thing lmao. Will I get stuck under this Alpha Carno's pinky toe even though I'm on a Wyvern? Hahaha.

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On 5/5/2021 at 7:37 PM, Firebaall said:

I agree with that, if the reasons are to catch cheaters unaware.  The problem is, they are making legitimate players suffer, and that's not acceptable.

 

IMO, pausing 24 timer is the least they can do.  The least they should do.

I'm not sure why they even have a 24 hour timer in the first place.  It does nothing to stop duping.  They should retire the timer 100%, and be done with it.

the reason the timer is even there in the first place is to make it so the obelisks are not somewhere you can just store your most valuable items in forever. Someone could just make a bunch of accounts and store all their items in the upload and never have to worry about losing it

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1 hour ago, HoganRyan01 said:

the reason the timer is even there in the first place is to make it so the obelisks are not somewhere you can just store your most valuable items in forever. Someone could just make a bunch of accounts and store all their items in the upload and never have to worry about losing it

Depends on the view, If you look at what Ark has been doing since the official release they are changing so many features for casuals which is a good thing. This would be yet again another casual feature they could give to the game to improve it.

They are already trying to increase the speed in which players get back in to the action, No timer would improve this even further. 

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