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Do people enjoy 3+ Hour Tames?


LilNastyGurl

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One of the first things that caught the attention like many people playing ark were the taming times. They seemed ridiculous to me when I first started playing and honestly even now that I've spent at least a few hundred hours playing on official servers it's still pretty ridiculous to me. I know it can feel rewarding to get a dinosaur after waiting hours but it's incredibly boring. If anyone is like me and I'm sure some of you are, you probably load up netflix, hulu, youtube or whatever to get you through a long tame. If these things that occupied my interest while I tamed didn't exist I would've dropped ark. Whenever I start a tame I pretty much stop playing the game for the most part. Sure there are tames that allow you to run off and do other things but for the most part many players just don't risk it and stay with their tames. After getting the hang of taming I decided to tame a quetzal which failed twice and finally succeded on the third try, it took hours upon hours to finally get the tame. It felt really good to finally get the tame but took an unreal amount of time searching for the quetzal and taming it. The quetzal tame left me feeling pretty burnt out but eventually I decided to tame a gigantopithecus. I decided to go for a high one a lvl 145, so I made an enclosure and captured it on my boat. 5 hours into the tame and also 5 hours into Daredevil season 1 I got booted off the game. When I came back on the gigantopithecus was outside the enclosure somehow and began wandering. I decided to simply lure it back and trap it again to finish off the tame. Unfortunately the gigantopithecus became bugged and was stuck in runaway mode even when I said skip it and let him out to wander. The taming reset and instead of restarting hours of progress I stopped playing. I lost hours of my time with nothing accomplished within ark due to server problems. I know many people will simply say to save the kibble which is difficult to get for this particular creature. I'd like to talk about kibble frankly though since I brought it up, it's overpowered. The gap in the amount of time you normally have to wait and even the benefits of a normal tame compared to a kibble tame is insane. If you kibble tame a high level large dinosaur such as a rex you have nothing to worry about short of a giga or alpha rex. Taming a low level dino and playing smartly with it can allow you to take on it's max level wild counterpart while a kibble tame at a high level allows you to kill other dinosaurs horde mode style.The fact that there is no good medium for all creatures between a normal tame (meat or berries) vs a kibble tame is beyond me. The taming in this game is what scares players away from official servers expecting people to sit for hours not actually playing the game but instead just having their characters on screen staring at their wrist is crazy. No one likes it when people play games while acting as if their time is more important than others or just too important in general. People who behave like this tend to be full of it but oh my goodness this game makes me incredibly empathetic toward those people. This wasn't the first time this game causally wasted hours of my time due to a bug during a tame. It sucks to have a tame ruined in any way with no in game return on your invested time that you can't get back. All you can do is stare at your clock in dismay and drop the game for a few days or forever maybe. Kibble taming in this game is overpowered and passive taming to put it simply is broken with little to no signs of it getting better. I've had too many passive tames get stuck into panic mode only to not get them. I've never played any other other game that I could play this long and get nothing accomplished except GTA 5. Except in GTA it's your decision because your having too much fun blowing things up and trolling friends to do any missions. It's all too possible for a bug to give you a bad day in ark to justify the time sink into taming and a lot of people truly just don't have the time and would rather play a game that won't end up wasting it. I'm getting to the point I've had too much time wasted and kind of want to drop the game before it waste anymore. I'm sure many people after playing ark get where I'm coming from. What do you guys think about the taming time and taming in general.

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I agree with him. The taming/breeding times are generally a bit on the long side.  That said, the official servers are attempting to produce a more 'MMO' feel where things take time, to make a player feel more rewarded when they do accomplish something.

Luckily for us, Wildcard has exposed plenty of options to custom fit the game to your time/playstyle.  I suggest seeking out some unofficial servers with 5x, 10x or 20x taming or higher and seeing if you like taming/breeding better when it's faster paced.

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press enter once an a while please xD

but you do have lots of good points

i feel like one of the main problem with taming is theres no option to drag the dino to your base so you can work on other stuff while waiting for the taming. and in relative safety and not in some random part of the island curled up hoping thats not a giga you hear. 

 

 

 

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I agree, they're long as the sausageens. Like Mystalias says above, there are options to shorten them. But I do like to pose the question, because even with a 5X speed, it can still take hours...

What would you do to change them? 

Now it has to be feasable, of course. And "make them more fun" doesn't count, because that's difficult to quantify. I personally endure the long times by roleplaying my way through them, that my toon fought an animal to a standstill, and rather than kill it, he shows mercy. The long times are the animal coming around to my influence, and learning to trust me (short times make it feel more robotic). But that's just me. 

I get burnt out easily and don't enjoy my tames when all I do is club them and tab out to watch netflix. The enduring memories are the ones where its me holding a pike, at night by a campfire, fending off danger and praying that alphas don't wander around the corner. If all you think of is how many hours of your life it will cost you with nothing to show for it, you could argue that ALL your time in this, and any game, is a waste. Fun is what you make of it. 

But that's getting a little too zen. still, try and think of the earlier question, what would you change? it's fun to think about!

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I find it more 'fun' to tame a lot in a day when that's my aim. Just grab a stack of mejos and prime and head out to see what the world has created today. I can never do that on official without spending a long time gathering fertilizer/eggs, growing crops, making kibble...   So on official I tend to buy or trade for dinos (or inherit them like I mentioned in another post).  On my busiest taming week a few months ago, I maybe got two or three new creatures in the course of days.  On a good 20x server, that's a couple of hours and I get to the fun part sooner, actually using them to do things.  (I also tend to use them more and be a little risky with them since I know replacing them is merely finding another one...)

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I second the Please, use the Enter key  ----  make paragraphs !

One of the reasons I don't do taming is due to the time it takes.  Yes, I know it will help in gathering items needed for building, but I just don't want to sit for several hours taming. 

But for me, the main reason I hope they change it is for players who have lives, families, jobs that takes a big chunk of their time and so don't have the hours to spend on taming.  That is something that I am hoping the devs think about, focus on a way to fix it so it doesn't take so long, but not make it so easy that a player doesn't feel a sense of accomplishment.  As some have stated, after spending that time fighting off other dinos, hunting meat for the dino they are taming, or collecting berries for the herbivores, they feel a bond to that dino and a sense of accomplishment.

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15 hours ago, hazarddex said:

press enter once an a while please xD

 

but you do have lots of good points

i feel like one of the main problem with taming is theres no option to drag the dino to your base so you can work on other stuff while waiting for the taming. and in relative safety and not in some random part of the island curled up hoping thats not a giga you hear.the reason taming take

I agree on one part, paragraphs would help to make that much more readable.

 

However, for taming, you can kite many things to a better taming sport and/or a pre-built taming pit.  I do understand there are exceptions to that rule, such as official PVEs full of pillars; glad I don't have to deal with that.

I usually have 1 or 2 taming pits as part of my base, especially if I have built in a location that is ripe with different types of animals, for either kiting in or dropping in stuff I want to tame; of course dropping in is not an option on PVE.  And, I usually have a few public taming pits around the server in strategic locations; I leave all of the doors unlocked so anyone can use them.

But, on the center, I have built in some pretty big ruins and have used those to kite in argies for a long a distance, bring them in to the top section where I don't have anything, and drop them there; which works out pretty nice.

Or, last night, I found a descent 135 female argy, so I kited it to the beach(would have been a long kite to anywhere else), dropped it there, put up a fence, went and got my kibble(was not planning on taming an argy or anything else at that time), returned, put on the kibble, and then would go off and do things, coming back to check on it as needed.  Of course, this might not be an option on an aggressive PVP server.

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There is an unofficial server that pretty much (stupid really) had taming times relatively close to the official settings but opted to make max dino wild levels low(50). 

They just wiped the server 30min ago after a long and gradual decline in the player base to just a few people. Due in no small part to this and other nepotistic issues.

Unfortunately, they're coming back with official taming times and other settings later today and will be gradually over 5 months+ increasing the wild dino level to 120(seemingly) as well as the tame times etc similarly increasing(yet no plans to make them go above a few multipliers only.

Sadly they think they'll gather lots of people(even still). But yet fail to realize that the majority of tamed dinos over the last year were admin force tamed ones by the owner and their friends.  Most just didn't bother with taking 2+ hours for low level dinos only.

 

But see, that's fine if you want a private server where you control and decide for your friends or the few that might like such settings.  Most people gravitate to the faster times because they just want to spend their time in game actually doing other things besides managing an unconscious dino.  Taming is just one aspect of the game's onion layers.  Official times are grooming and satisfying a certain segment of the player population but 20 times that number of unofficial servers are with settings that are more subordinate to a wider audience of players that are not as desiring to be constrained to long hours of taming or breeding.

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I see the topic got merged with another one. That's a good sign that this is being looked at now :)

I think that a scaling taming time might be a nice thing. Low levels be rather fast (2x basically), high levels maybe taking as long as they currently are.  Lets people build up the egg farm just a little bit quicker and replace lower level lost creatures faster so it's not agonizing to lose Petey the level 8 parasaur.  High level creatures would be there for the taming challenge and bragging rights (as well as great stats) and people with less time could settle for a good middle ground (60'ish being about 1.5x maybe)

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PVE player. I tend to tame a lot when I just started, but now that I have the essentials, I just wait for people timers to run out and claim them. Heck, I don't even claim them anymore.

if I do fancy a tame. I usually do it in a pen, put a timer on my phone and then do other stuff and come back and narc that Dino up again

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I played a server with x1 tame for about 6 months.  It's certainly more a PvE thing.  There is a place for it and I enjoyed building up my dino egg farm and getting to the point where 120 kibble tames were the norm.  You can also make your life easier with taming pens.  My base was in the oasis so we often kited T-Rexes, spinos, brontos etc into the canyons and tranqed them from the cliff.  Then you just put tranqs and kibble on it and leave it be.  yes, someone can come and take your kibble but if you play PvEvP you can guard against that somewhat by having turrets at your pen set to tamed/players only.

But now that I've done that I wouldn't go back to it.  I've since moved fully into PvP and play mainly unofficial.  Most servers seem to rock 5x gather and 10-15x time.  That seems to be a bit of a sweet spot, more than that means that PvP requires no investment and less means that tames tend to take too long and you get trolled.

Official PvP servers need to tweak up the rates.  I'd say x3 everything x5 tame would probably improve the game immensely.

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The tames are long for a reason....... I have a family,work 50 hours a week, and still can find time to take the Dino's that are needed to become alpha. The official servers are not meant to be played alone. This game is 100% a tribe based game and If it was not for my tribe mates I wouldn't have ever been able to become Alpha on our current Center server. I built a large trustworthy tribe over the past 6 months and it's totally paid off. All in all quit being loners and play the game the way it was designed to play. If you don't like it don't play official. If they dumb down the tame times it will completely ruin the official servers because who would care if they lost that 150 quetzal that you tamed and only took an hour or two. 

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I joined a tribe so others could slave away at the taming processes. My evil plan succeeded. I ride their dinos, and I only get yelled at if I kill them on accident. "WHY WOULD U TAKE THE REX TO SNOW BIOME.. WHY.. AND U GOT TRAPPED IN ROCKS AND EATEN BY DIRE WOLVES??".

I've tamed plenty of low level dinos to contribute to our Egg farm, But I refuse to go for perfect tames like they do because I am NOT spending hours and hours on a single dino lol

 

We had this amazing kid from Greece in our tribe that just LOVED taming, despite the tame times. I remember in one day he had tamed 2 high level queztels, some dolphins, and two argies. I logged in, seen them all, and I gasped for air because WoW...

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What I would really like to see are more ways to invest time before the tame.  Right now we have kibble, which requires taming, housing, and feeding egg layers, building and fertilizing a crop farm, and either babysitting a cooking pot or building an industrial cooker, all of which take hours upon hours of investment.  However, nobody goes from 'I want to tame an Argent!" to having the kibble for a 120 in one sitting.  Building up to getting that tame may take multiple days for multiple people, but in the end a significant amount of time is saved on the tame itself.

Here are some random thoughts on other things we could gather/craft beforehand and use to make taming either easier or more interesting with time invested before the tame instead of during, or to further reward prior planning on how/where the animal is knocked out:

1. Time-release Narcotics Capsules:  Automatically gives the animal a shot of torpor every time it eats.  Crafted very inefficiently from narcotics, so it wouldn't be a good idea if you were short on them.  Optionally could reduce taming efficiency compared to a straight kibble tame.

2.  Appetite Stimulant Aromatherapy:  Increases the rate at which the animal loses Food (makes it eat faster, and tame faster) but also attracts/spawns wild dinos who's appetites are also stimulated by your tasty looking tame, requiring you to defend it.  

3.  Chemical Hallucinogen:  If fed to an unconscious wild dino who is allowed to wake up, it will think the closest tribemate is it's mommy, and will follow it for until the effects wear off, although it would remove any taming progress.  However, it will not defend itself if attacked (could either just be passive or flee if attacked)  This would allow moving a potential tame to a safer place without needing a flyer (including larger tames).

Obviously the potential benefits would need to be balanced against what the items would cost in farming time/resources, but it would allow some of the pain of taming to be removed by gradual investment up front.

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4 hours ago, BossFi said:

If you have to babysit a tame for 3hrs then that's just stupid.

If you could fill up a dino with meat and remote feed the narcos at the start then log out the game and come back in 3 hours that would be easier and I could live with that. If not then I'm not sure I want to buy this game yet. I'll stick to sotf.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't real time continue while you are logged off?  That would mean your dino is lying around tranqued and easy prey for whatever comes along and something will come along, that is pretty much a given.  You are not there to protect it and you will return to a dead and eaten dino instead of a tamed one. 

I'm on Single Player so time is stopped for me while I am logged off. 

 

@Kalone

I don't think the taming should stop, slow down maybe, but to stop would just lengthen the taming process.  I like to some extent the imprinting aspect.  The only problem I can see with that would be that it would be imprinted on the one who tamed it, that could interfere if it was to be a tribe tame. 

 

 

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8 hours ago, Kalone said:

What I would really like to see are more ways to invest time before the tame.  Right now we have kibble, which requires taming, housing, and feeding egg layers, building and fertilizing a crop farm, and either babysitting a cooking pot or building an industrial cooker, all of which take hours upon hours of investment.  However, nobody goes from 'I want to tame an Argent!" to having the kibble for a 120 in one sitting.  Building up to getting that tame may take multiple days for multiple people, but in the end a significant amount of time is saved on the tame itself.

Here are some random thoughts on other things we could gather/craft beforehand and use to make taming either easier or more interesting with time invested before the tame instead of during, or to further reward prior planning on how/where the animal is knocked out:

1. Time-release Narcotics Capsules:  Automatically gives the animal a shot of torpor every time it eats.  Crafted very inefficiently from narcotics, so it wouldn't be a good idea if you were short on them.  Optionally could reduce taming efficiency compared to a straight kibble tame.

2.  Appetite Stimulant Aromatherapy:  Increases the rate at which the animal loses Food (makes it eat faster, and tame faster) but also attracts/spawns wild dinos who's appetites are also stimulated by your tasty looking tame, requiring you to defend it.  

3.  Chemical Hallucinogen:  If fed to an unconscious wild dino who is allowed to wake up, it will think the closest tribemate is it's mommy, and will follow it for until the effects wear off, although it would remove any taming progress.  However, it will not defend itself if attacked (could either just be passive or flee if attacked)  This would allow moving a potential tame to a safer place without needing a flyer (including larger tames).

Obviously the potential benefits would need to be balanced against what the items would cost in farming time/resources, but it would allow some of the pain of taming to be removed by gradual investment up front.

+1 for all of this.

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