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DaddyMike72

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The family and I have been playing Ark on a private server for a few years now.  We've done most things with one glaring exception.  We never bothered playing the storyline.  So recently I reset our servers and we're starting at the beginning and working our way from one ark to the next to do the full story.  My question is:  How should ascension from Island to Scorched to Aberration, etc , etc, be handled?  Should the characters keep all their levels when ascending to the next ark or should they be reset?  Going by the story of the NPC's, it seems to fit that everyone should ascend with their memories (levels) intact, but I can't seem to find any information officially on how this should be handled.

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10 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

The family and I have been playing Ark on a private server for a few years now.  We've done most things with one glaring exception.  We never bothered playing the storyline.  So recently I reset our servers and we're starting at the beginning and working our way from one ark to the next to do the full story.  My question is:  How should ascension from Island to Scorched to Aberration, etc , etc, be handled?  Should the characters keep all their levels when ascending to the next ark or should they be reset?  Going by the story of the NPC's, it seems to fit that everyone should ascend with their memories (levels) intact, but I can't seem to find any information officially on how this should be handled.

I've been doing the same thing on my private server with a group of friends, here are my opinions. I stress "opinions" because you should play the game however you and your family want to, it's your game, your server, your enjoyment, I'm not saying this is how people are "supposed" to play the game, just how we enjoy it.

 

1) Maps

Our play through includes all maps, including the free DLC maps, not just the WildCard maps, in the order they were released.  (Island > Center > SE > Rag > Aberration > Extinction > Valguero > Gen 1 > Crystal Isles > Gen 2 > Lost Island > Fjordur).

Our reason is that we think of the story of ARK as being what our characters do, we are playing our own story. The lore notes and the lore maps are the back-story, the background lore to the real story. I'm not Helena, none of my tribe mates are Rockwell, the lore notes are someone else's story. And we have decided that our story includes all of the maps.

 

2) Characters

We start each new map with brand new (temporary) characters. We play those characters until we're ready to gather artifacts, or sometimes even up to the point where we're ready to do the boss fights, and then we bring in our "main" characters to gather artifacts and do boss fights.

That may sound confusing so let me do a small example:

a) The Island: Character-A (this is going to be my "Main" character throughout the rest of ARK, even if I play other characters temporarily.

Start at Level 0, play all the way through The island, do caves, gather artifacts, beat bosses, complete The Island. Then save a copy of this character.

b) The Center: Character-B, a temporary character. Start the map with a brand new Level 0 character, play this character up until we're ready to do the artifacts and boss fights. Then import Main Chararacter-A do do the caves, artifacts and boss fights. Then save a copy of Main Character-A, which now has completed the boss fights on both maps.

c) Scorched Earth: Character-C, a temporary character. Start the map with a brand new Lvl 0 character, play this character up until we're ready to do the artifacts and boss fights. Then import Main Chararacter-A do do the caves, artifacts and boss fights.

I think you get the idea at this point.

Now, why do we do this? It is more complicated, after all, so hopefully we have a good reason for making things more complicated. Our reason is that we think it makes each map more interesting. Every map has its own "personality", some are easier, some are more difficult, and every map has its own unique combination of resources and animals that you can tame, including new animals that get introduced on each map. If you start a map with Lvl 90+ characters it's almost impossible to really enjoy the individual, unique character of each map. With high level characters and imported tames you can instantly guarantee you'll be able to set up on the best possible location on the map and to tame & harvest anything you want with almost no effort. If you do this you'll miss the quirks and unique character of each map. It's fun to explore maps when you're not riding OP dinos. For example, if you start every map with wyverns and high level predators from previous maps then there is no challenge to getting started.

For example, ovis are rare on The Center, so if you start The Center with new Level 0 characters it will take a while before you can find and tame ovis, which means you actually have to so some work to earn the ability to go into the frozen areas. We believe that it makes it more fun if we have to earn our progression on each map. If we had started The Center with high level characters and/or imported tames from The Island, we would have been able to go into the frozen areas right away without any effort or challenge.

Basically, if you import high level characters and tames from previous maps then every map is just too easy, there's very little challenge to make the maps interesting. Or at least that's how we see it.

One additional note: if you do things our way it means that your new characters on each map do not have access to tek engrams from boss fights, and we think that just feels more right on a new map. To us it felt a bit silly to enter new maps already owning high level equipment and engrams, and being able to use tek engrams right from the start. If you treat characters the way we did, you have to earn your progression on every map, and then towards the end when you bring in your "Main" characters from the previous maps you get the fun of being able to use tek stuff again while you're doing the artifacts and boss fights. We found that having access to tek engrams during the exploration process just made things too easy and a bit boring.

 

But, again, all of this is just a matter of personal preference, if you and your family would enjoy it more to only play the lore maps, or to have high level characters and animals when you start a new map, then that's what you should do. It's your server, make your game fun for you.

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15 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

The family and I have been playing Ark on a private server for a few years now.  We've done most things with one glaring exception.  We never bothered playing the storyline.  So recently I reset our servers and we're starting at the beginning and working our way from one ark to the next to do the full story.  My question is:  How should ascension from Island to Scorched to Aberration, etc , etc, be handled?  Should the characters keep all their levels when ascending to the next ark or should they be reset?  Going by the story of the NPC's, it seems to fit that everyone should ascend with their memories (levels) intact, but I can't seem to find any information officially on how this should be handled.

you should keep levels for each ascention gives an additional 5 levels and you will need that for gen 2

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We probably won't be doing the split characters thing.  It's very likely that we'll just keep progressing our characters as they are, like I said, Helena and Edmund and all seem to retain their memories going from one Ark to the next, so I don't see why we would suffer amnesia.  I was more curious if there was an official word on how the devs wanted it experienced.  

For our progression, it's going to be a little similar.  I can run 4 simultaneous arks at one time on my little server.  So what I will probably do is go, Island -> SE AND Rag -> then shut down Island once we have finished ascension there on Alpha and open up Aberration and Crystal Isle -> shutdown SE and Rag and open Extinction and TBD, etc, etc.

My thought process is while on the island, we don't know what is going on.  After going through ascension and learning how it works, we are able to access parallel Arks.  I have S+ installed on the server but have the Transmitter engram disabled until AFTER we have ascended.  Not really sure which alt maps run parallel with Extinction, Gen and Gen 2, but as we get closer, I'll figure it out.

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3 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

We probably won't be doing the split characters thing.  It's very likely that we'll just keep progressing our characters as they are, like I said, Helena and Edmund and all seem to retain their memories going from one Ark to the next, so I don't see why we would suffer amnesia.  I was more curious if there was an official word on how the devs wanted it experienced.  

For our progression, it's going to be a little similar.  I can run 4 simultaneous arks at one time on my little server.  So what I will probably do is go, Island -> SE AND Rag -> then shut down Island once we have finished ascension there on Alpha and open up Aberration and Crystal Isle -> shutdown SE and Rag and open Extinction and TBD, etc, etc.

My thought process is while on the island, we don't know what is going on.  After going through ascension and learning how it works, we are able to access parallel Arks.  I have S+ installed on the server but have the Transmitter engram disabled until AFTER we have ascended.  Not really sure which alt maps run parallel with Extinction, Gen and Gen 2, but as we get closer, I'll figure it out.

My advice to you is to stay on The Island. I mean, you have clearly not even figured out your plans. 
Clearly you will be making things worse for yourselves when you go on the journeys of ascension! You cant comprehend how much you dont understand!
Hahaha! You think you can control 4 simulations all at ones? Hmm? Devine work, but what are you up to exactly?
You are in dreamland! Its so irritating! You are like all the other ants hopelessly trying to get somewhere without knowing your limitations!
Just stay on The Island! I wont think less of you. Dont make things too inconvenient for yourself! Else you will be begging for mercy soon enough!

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14 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

I was more curious if there was an official word on how the devs wanted it experienced.

I don't want this to sound snarky or sarcastic, so please read this in the tone a friend would use with you.

Of course not, the devs don't have any opinion on how you should experience ARK on private servers, that's pretty much the whole point of private servers. The only thing WC cares about is how people experience the game on Official servers, other than that it's up to the players to do whatever they want. That's been the intent of the devs (and the conceptual creators) of the game since the very beginning.

14 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

For our progression, it's going to be a little similar.  I can run 4 simultaneous arks at one time on my little server.  So what I will probably do is go, Island -> SE AND Rag -> then shut down Island once we have finished ascension there on Alpha and open up Aberration and Crystal Isle -> shutdown SE and Rag and open Extinction and TBD, etc, etc.

Sounds good, hope it gives you the fun you're looking for. :)

14 hours ago, DaddyMike72 said:

My thought process is while on the island, we don't know what is going on.  After going through ascension and learning how it works, we are able to access parallel Arks.  I have S+ installed on the server but have the Transmitter engram disabled until AFTER we have ascended.  Not really sure which alt maps run parallel with Extinction, Gen and Gen 2, but as we get closer, I'll figure it out.

Naturally you can run any maps you choose, but in case it helps you decide it might be useful to remember the order the maps were released in the game:

Island > Center > SE > Rag > Aberration > Extinction > Valguero > Gen 1 > Crystal Isles > Gen 2 > Lost Island > Fjordur

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On 3/18/2023 at 9:52 PM, Pipinghot said:

I don't want this to sound snarky or sarcastic, so please read this in the tone a friend would use with you.

Of course not, the devs don't have any opinion on how you should experience ARK on private servers, that's pretty much the whole point of private servers. The only thing WC cares about is how people experience the game on Official servers, other than that it's up to the players to do whatever they want. That's been the intent of the devs (and the conceptual creators) of the game since the very beginning.

I guess that's my biggest ignorance.  I've never played on the official servers so I don't know how they handled it there.  When I first started Ark, the reputation of the public official servers was horrendous, so I played Singleplayer.  Then friends and fam wanted to play together so I built a linux server for the sole purpose of running 4 instances, Island, Rag, Crystal Isle and Flavor of the Month.  I've been thinking of swapping the mobo and ram for even more instances, but... meh... time will tell.

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6 minutes ago, DaddyMike72 said:

I guess that's my biggest ignorance.  I've never played on the official servers so I don't know how they handled it there.  When I first started Ark, the reputation of the public official servers was horrendous, so I played Singleplayer.  Then friends and fam wanted to play together so I built a linux server for the sole purpose of running 4 instances, Island, Rag, Crystal Isle and Flavor of the Month.  I've been thinking of swapping the mobo and ram for even more instances, but... meh... time will tell.

Dead right - that's exactly how I have proceeded for a looooong while. As @Pipinghot sez - the "order" of going forward is nowhere cast in stone! From my personal experience at this lot (and my very little server is only OK running three maps together),  I have chosen a "Home Base" map. This is where all the real business of breeding and crafting high level saddles and so on happens. And that map is ALWAYS started. The other maps I kick off depending on who wants to do what. In my case Rag is my Home Base ... but again that's very much up to you! There is merit in @SunsetErosion comment of keeping the Island up. (and yes he was making jokes - no trolling you!). If you have a really decent base there with all the kit then by all means use it!

Your issue may be that if you have run Island, Rag  and Crystal Isles for a bit then some "segments" of your community will be attached to one map or the other. And you have already kinda skipped SE by running Rag (most if not all of SE is incorporated inside of RAG). And Crystal Isles is waaaaay down the release line ;)

NOTE: when you get to some of the later maps - your wee server may not deal with 4 maps at a time. Genesis II in particular WILL bring the thing to its knees. And Fjordur ain't so brilliant either.

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Yeah.  We discussed this when

2 hours ago, DirkInSA said:

Your issue may be that if you have run Island, Rag  and Crystal Isles for a bit then some "segments" of your community will be attached to one map or the other. And you have already kinda skipped SE by running Rag (most if not all of SE is incorporated inside of RAG). And Crystal Isles is waaaaay down the release line ;)

Yeah, we discussed this.  My wife loved being on Ragnarok.  Our best friends (my brother from another mother if you will), quite enjoyed the setting of Crystal Isles, I even added the code to allow Rock Drakes to appear in Apotheosis, though I guess the spawn container for the caves themselves was removed by WC.  I hung out on the Island doing my super breeding so they could all stomp around in 20/20/20 Str/Sta/Mel dinos.  And our kids kind of floated about going from map to map.  The fourth map was more a dino resources map, brought up for a time so that people could go hunt and tame whatever unique mobs belonged to that map.  But we all agreed that we would start over and work on doing the story progression with DLC content sprinkled in.  So I backed up the maps we had worked on and shut them down until we finished the whole story. 

Which DLC gets loaded is based more on what it shares with the current 'stage' that we're in.  Like you said, Ragnarok has much the same things as SE.  Similarly, Crystal Isles has Aberration qualities to it.  I would run Center with Island, but our characters, in an RP sense, don't know they're on an ark yet and so wouldn't know they could access others (we're all old-school AD&D players, so RP plays a _small_ part in decision making). 

I also cranked down the xp gain quite a bit so we don't out-level 'tiers' of dinos too quickly.   We had a bit of fun being 'stuck' on parasaurs with raptor packs following to shred things that got too feisty (I get that some people don't like that raptors are glass cannons, but I mean... a six pack of imprinted prim-saddle raptors will melt Theris and Rexes, maybe in PvP it's a different story).  Best XP gain is from hunting/fighting and crafting XP is negligible (no cranking out Narcotics and watching the levels roll in).  We're now starting to creep up on the 70's and I'm banging my head for not bringing over at least my base pair of breeding rexes because RNG has not been nice on the rex tames' stats.

Sorry, TMI I'm sure.

Anyways, since we're rolling up on the 70's and seeing the finish line not too far off, I was considering how to move into SE.  Amnesia or fully cognizant and wondered how WC had handled it.  Now I know.  Sort of.  They didn't.  So we're gonna be keeping our memories/levels and just keep progressing.

Thanks for all the input.

(Edit:  While I have been consistently running 4 maps on my server for the past 2 years, I admittedly have not loaded either of the Genesis maps or Fjordur on it yet.  When Gen I came out, I had no maps that I wanted to shut down so we rented space on a server to play that one, though nobody seemed inclined on actually playing the story element because we just kept skipping over that part and since we couldn't loop it into our cluster, we lost interest and shut it down.  Hence the wipe/restart.)

 

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7 hours ago, DirkInSA said:

There is merit in @SunsetErosion comment of keeping the Island up. (and yes he was making jokes - no trolling you!). If you have a really decent base there with all the kit then by all means use it!

True, I have progressed along most maps through development, though I didnt do it storywise, online you can just hop on eg. Abberation and buy your way into bossfights getting the engrams and achievements you need. I tried to play it as authentic as possible though. Getting the solo kill and achievements for at least the gamma bosses on all maps... Alpha solo bosses are a real struggle online...

Also every map has its own functionality and I have bases on a lot of maps...

Island because its my (new) starter base when I decided to go big again and main base + I builded it out so big that it has super functionality and it looks really nice :)
Island because the map is awesome and because its peaceful, nice community on there to trade with, one of the best community servers around in my opinion...
Island because its a starters map and I like dragging new people into Ark whenever I can... Lots of other reasons to keep a good base on Island...
Scorched Earth to get easy deep sea loot crate loot, Wyvern trap for milk , was my oil farming base also, before I got on Gen2, still very optimally functional so I still use SE to get oil...
Ragnarok one of my smaller functional bases, I could get rid of it, but in case I want to tame something standard new or something I go there... (higher wild dino level curve...)
Valguero same as Rag, but mainly I only use it as a backup server for important breeding lines etc. got a toon on there that I forbid to travel to another server etc. In case for whatever reason something happens to my main character and all...
Aberration getting Drake eggs, venom, Reapers, Basilisks... Not that much a functional base though...
Extinction Somewhat outdated also, but still functional for cloning, so element, DUST, Purple OSDs for leveling gigas or whatever. 
Gen1 Very outdated now after defeating Boss, used to farm missions endlessly. Now I harldly use it for anything...
Gen2 Map to go, must have a base there these days... Recourses, ELEMENT, server boosts, stryders, missions for good loot etc...

Now that I write it down I reasize some of my bases on maps I have low functionality for..
But I have so much stuff on them still, it will be a struggle and time-consuming effort to get everything off those servers and rebuild their functionality on Gen2...
But I should do that, I mean I only get DUST on Ext just to power my generators on AB... EG...

About the earlier posts...
Should have put up a "spoiler alert" for the OP :)
Voiceover was missing, though it maybe wasnt creative or representational enough, for a certain character in the Storyline anyway :/
 

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Usually I don't touch or dwell too much on trolling situations (aside from giving a mild appraisal of the troll), but after comments and going back up re-reading, I'm guessing this comes from the Rockwell fight later on.  Not knowing that, it sounds quite a bit like trolling.  It sounded like someone telling me and mine that we should just stick the island and not play the game.  The "running 4 simulations at once" bit hit me as "DILO?  I've been running 4 ark servers for 2 years, I don't THINK I  can, I KNOW I can."

So for thinking it was a troll... Oops, my bad.

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On 3/20/2023 at 11:23 AM, DaddyMike72 said:

I guess that's my biggest ignorance.  I've never played on the official servers so I don't know how they handled it there.  When I first started Ark, the reputation of the public official servers was horrendous, so I played Singleplayer.  Then friends and fam wanted to play together so I built a linux server for the sole purpose of running 4 instances, Island, Rag, Crystal Isle and Flavor of the Month.  I've been thinking of swapping the mobo and ram for even more instances, but... meh... time will tell.

Roger that. So I guess the thing you might find most useful to know is that even on the Official servers WC does not have, and has never had, what could be described as a guided plan. ARK is technically an RPG, since there are levels and the world has a backstory, but there is no such thing as a specific progression path that WC enforces, or even encourages.

ARK, to put it in RPG terms, is fundamentally a "build your own adventure" game. On the Official servers it doesn't have a beginning, middle and end, it just all exists at once and players can go do whatever, whenever, wherever they want. Once a map exists it's just part of the universe, any map is fair game to go to at any time, and any map is available for players to think of as their "main map" based on their personal preferences. The only thing linear about the game is the chronological order in which the maps were released. If a player specifically desired to read the background lore notes in an order that tells the story of the historical NPC's then that player could guide themself to do things in a specific order, but even that's entirely voluntarily. To play the game that way on Official servers would be to ignore the free DLC maps that have been part of the release schedule. For example, from my time playing on Officials, I have 8 characters on 4 different clusters, and 6 of them have never set foot on The Island.

Hope this helps.

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