What are your thoughts on Ark?

[Scheneighnay]

13 hours ago, wizard03 said:

Don't get me wrong, I feel like there should be a bit of a grind to the game here n there, but it seems like more filler with the current state of things.....How do we keep people playing? Well lets do boss fights....Good idea, how do we go about it. Let add this new mechanic that takes weeks if not months of the same thing over and over again, and when they get done. They will have 1 thing to do a boss fight. They will need 10 thingNOT ENOUGH! We need 20! of those things.
x.x

If there was a way to speed things up for hide, baby raising, and such, it would be so much better of an experiance. I guess the egg incubator and maewing was indeed a step in the right direction. As for the hide however, kinda wish we could have gotten a new dino thats best harvested strictly for hide. Granted the ovis can be op, but as for official settings, yadda yadda, its still a huge struggle.

That's the devs adapting to how most players actually play, though it's certainly not how I would like to play and I would love to find a community that conforms to the devs' original plan for the game.

If players optimize the fun out of the game and go chasing nothing but rewards, of course the devs are going to keep running with the "carrot and stick" plan that ruins the game for casual players.

[RTGLoot]

On 11/30/2021 at 11:24 AM, barnacles said:

what motivates you all to play this game

I like to put the evolved in Ark: Survival Evolved. Surviving is fun but the game mechanics offer so much more potential! Going tek and finding how to automate tasks in vanilla motivates me. Sadly I know a lot of survivors who burn out because they no longer need to survive and don’t think the game has any more to offer. Ark is a social experiment and from it I have seen servers in complete chaos, communism, capitalism, role play, or devoid of humans almost entirely, working in utopian order from all the bot’s. When I start getting bored I just play the game differently.

[maxplanck58]

34 minutes ago, RTGLoot said:

Ark is a social experiment and from it I have seen servers in complete chaos, communism, capitalism, role play, or devoid of humans almost entirely, working in utopian order from all the bot’s.

From my anecdotal experience form launch, I have seen the social experiment devolve from a dynamic mix of real cooperation and competition to the new norm of using every exploit and hack in order to ruin other's gameplay experience just for kicks.  While I won't pretend to know how the devs feel about the current state of official PvP and PvE, but I would be surprised if it is very close to their original intentions.

[RTGLoot]

1 hour ago, maxplanck58 said:

From my anecdotal experience form launch, I have seen the social experiment devolve from a dynamic mix of real cooperation and competition to the new norm of using every exploit and hack in order to ruin other's gameplay experience just for kicks.  While I won't pretend to know how the devs feel about the current state of official PvP and PvE, but I would be surprised if it is very close to their original intentions.

And that is my motivation! You have seen the experiment, now how can you manipulate it for the better? 😁

[maxplanck58]

3 hours ago, RTGLoot said:

And that is my motivation! You have seen the experiment, now how can you manipulate it for the better? 😁

"I'd love to change the world..."

Indeed - were it possible for me to manipulate Ark culture to be inspired to resist exploits and be cool, I would.

I hear that Ark is amazing on an unofficial server with a large population of people willing to play with class, and to be competitive while also being cool.  But that takes more time and dedication to build (or luck to find) than some of us have.  And while unofficial servers tend to suffer from stability issues, unofficial servers put you at the mercy of the server owner.  

[RTGLoot]

Ark being a social experiment motivates me to explore it deeper.

[Kazaanh]

ARK is one of the greatest sandbox games created, with such scope of a project i can deal with some bugs etc.

But I would liked if Devs fixed some bugs that are fixable ( like Scorched Earth caves difficulty and bugged red relic drops spawn, its not a problem to fix them because you added extinction/genesis notes to many existing maps)

Or explain why longneck reload bug exists, and why is it not fixable ( because our code is bit bad since ark1 was our first game, with ark2 we have a clear new start )

A bit more clarity would be nice to see from time to time.

 

I don't play PvP so won't comment

[Chidogz107st]

It's great I love it

 

[maxplanck58]

After several years and fresh starts across each map, every gameplay type and thousands of hours, I have adopted a new ritual to keep the game interesting and exciting:  I have found that once I have a good base established, beat that map's boss, have an army of high-bred tames and tek, the game gets really stale for me.  So I put all the tek gear away, cryo up all the overpowered creatures (gigas, wyverns, manas, etc) and limit myself to mid-tier tames and gear: nothing higher than ghillie/fur for armor, longneck for firearms, argy/owl/equus for transport, wolf-pack/allo/yuti for combat.  At least for me, I found it a lot more fun to travel on an equus with a wolf escort than an unstoppable giga or wyvern.  I'll break out the big-guns for the occasional boss-fight to make them plausible to complete on beta or alpha, but otherwise stick to the simple life with mid-game gear and tames.  I think the most fun and drama is at the very start when you are struggling to get a basic base set up and stay alive.

[esdren]

On 1/31/2022 at 7:44 AM, maxplanck58 said:

At least for me, I found it a lot more fun to travel on an equus with a wolf escort than an unstoppable giga or wyvern

I still break out my old sabertooths for crosscountry travel when im goofing around.  So much  more fun than Autopiloting on a wyv or gig

 

[KingOfAshes]

Ark has the bones of a great sandbox game with a fantastic setting offering a very customisable experience. Unfortunately the vision of the Devs pretty much always exceeds a lot their technical capabilities or what they can actually deliver in a reasonable time and lack any decent quality control. More often than not you can see watered down, incomplete features with a lot of potential that's never reached. Once you've played a reasonable amount of time and get hooked on the game loop, these become gradually more obvious and harder to ignore. There is a distinct lack of willingness or urgency around the 'quality control&performance' of the game which isn't made up by the constant injection of new content leading to frustrations that overshadow what could have been a great experience. Still, because the bones of the experience are so good, it keeps up interest  for players enough to stick around in hope that a good game might and one day turn into a great one. Though eventually, you accept that it is what it is.