Nitrado Servers and ASA

[UDGxKnight]

As someone who plays video games purely to have fun regardless of outstanding issues (ya know, like you are supposed to). I can't comprehend all the whining. If you don't want to play the game don't play it? I had Nitrado servers for my Xbox servers and had PC players on them as well and everything worked pretty much perfectly fine, so again I can't comprehend the issue.

[St1ckyBandit]

45 minutes ago, UDGxKnight said:

As someone who plays video games purely to have fun regardless of outstanding issues (ya know, like you are supposed to). I can't comprehend all the whining. If you don't want to play the game don't play it? I had Nitrado servers for my Xbox servers and had PC players on them as well and everything worked pretty much perfectly fine, so again I can't comprehend the issue.

When your spaghetti has hair in it, you dont just eat the hair. You voice your issue with said spaghetti 

[UDGxKnight]

31 minutes ago, St1ckyBandit said:

When your spaghetti has hair in it, you dont just eat the hair. You voice your issue with said spaghetti 

Sure that’s fair. Now without letting the topic go off the rails I feel I have to offer my perspective on that out of place analogy and then move on.

Considering the state of ASE and if you are still around, you noticed the hair in the spaghetti and brought it up. Someone came and apologized, removed it, and covered it in shredded cheese and garnished it. You were like “oh cool” and ate the same spaghetti anyway. After finishing said plate you decided you wanted another plate(considering buying ASA) knowing full well you just got hair in it and it could happen again. And the cycle continues 

[St1ckyBandit]

1 hour ago, UDGxKnight said:

Sure that’s fair. Now without letting the topic go off the rails I feel I have to offer my perspective on that out of place analogy and then move on.

Considering the state of ASE and if you are still around, you noticed the hair in the spaghetti and brought it up. Someone came and apologized, removed it, and covered it in shredded cheese and garnished it. You were like “oh cool” and ate the same spaghetti anyway. After finishing said plate you decided you wanted another plate(considering buying ASA) knowing full well you just got hair in it and it could happen again. And the cycle continues 

But there's no other Italian restaurants that are good at the moment, so I might as well take my chances because I've gotten more than my moneys worth over the years from this one. 

[UDGxKnight]

11 minutes ago, St1ckyBandit said:

But there's no other Italian restaurants that are good at the moment, so I might as well take my chances because I've gotten more than my moneys worth over the years from this one. 

Exactly lol. Sometimes your harshest critics are the people who want the best out of you. I get it. 

Edited October 20, 2023 by UDGxKnight

[Pipinghot]

On 10/20/2023 at 6:36 PM, UDGxKnight said:

Considering the state of ASE and if you are still around, you noticed the hair in the spaghetti and brought it up. Someone came and apologized, removed it, and covered it in shredded cheese and garnished it. You were like “oh cool” and ate the same spaghetti anyway.

But that's not what WildCard does, they do just about the opposite of that. WC doesn't apologize and then make up for it by making it more delicious. What WC does is raise their haughty eyebrow at you as if you have no right to complain, then they tell you that hair is a seasoning that really brings out the flavor of the spaghetti, and by-the-way the hair costs extra because it's hard for a developer to figure out how to put hair in your spaghetti even though many other developers know how to make spaghetti without hair in it.

On 10/20/2023 at 6:36 PM, UDGxKnight said:

After finishing said plate you decided you wanted another plate(considering buying ASA) knowing full well you just got hair in it and it could happen again. And the cycle continues

No one in the world would accept it if a restaurant brought out a second plate of spaghetti with more hair in it, the basic response from any sane human being would be something like, "This is ridiculous. How did you screw this up twice in a row, don't you have anyone competent working in your kitchen? I want my money back." This is, in fact, how the restaurant business works, people get their meals comped all the time because of mistakes that the restaurant made, because people will never be happy with hair in their spaghetti no matter what excuses are made.

We could take this analogy to any product in the world - food, blenders, cars, lawn mowers, jewelry... you name it - and the basic facts would be the same for every product. People expect to get what they pay for and they expect it to be done right. No one in their right mind would argue that it's ok to sell someone two bad lawn mowers in a row, or two bad blenders in a row, or two bad cars in a row, it's absurd for you to argue that people should accept bad products from a video game maker without complaining about the bad product.

Every video game has some problems, but ARK is at the top of the heap for releasing buggy, unfinished products that should have had another 3-6 months of work before they were released to players.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Pipinghot

[Pipinghot]

19 hours ago, UDGxKnight said:

Exactly lol. Sometimes your harshest critics are the people who want the best out of you. I get it. 

Agreed on that point.

Earlier you made a comment about whining, when the reality is that (in my opinion) most of the complaining comes from people who love the idea of ARK (it is a beautiful idea after all) but who wish it was being made by a company that cared more about quality. WildCard struck gold when they created the concept of ARK, it's been so good at making money that they never had to learn how to be a good company. Most other game companies have actually do good work to maintain sales and revenue, but ARK is such a great concept that millions of people have been willing to pay for a substandard product, which means WC has never had any incentive to do better.

[RealNomad]

the big takeaway is that Nitrado will not have any competition for private servers and this means we are going to get screwed. Or rather people who rent the servers will get screwed. 

Edited October 22, 2023 by RealNomad

[Herbapou]

I have a question regarding servers.  From my understanding, its possible for someone to host a private server on a PC with the steam version of the game but its not possible to do this with the Microsoft store version of the game.

Is that because the tools used to host a steam version are not working with the MS store version?

Am I right to assume that hosting a dedicated server in Ark will be doable?  Note that I never understood why when I do that the server never shows up in player dedicated sessions.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Herbapou

[Pipinghot]

3 hours ago, Herbapou said:

I have a question regarding servers.  From my understanding, its possible for someone to host a private server on a PC with the steam version of the game but its not possible to do this with the Microsoft store version of the game.

Is that because the tools used to host a steam version are not working with the MS store version?

Am I right to assume that hosting a dedicated server in Ark will be doable?  Note that I never understood why when I do that the server never shows up in player dedicated sessions.

If you're running a dedicated server (a server running on a computer that you personally own, not a rented server, and your stays up 24x7) then as far as I know the client that the players use to connect to it doesn't matter.

Mind you, the players can't be on different platforms as far as I know. I run a dedicated server using a privately owned physical computer, and all of the players on my server own the Steam version of the game client. As far as I know I can't allow Microsoft players, Epic players, XBox players or PS players on my server, they all have to use the same client.

Having said that, I'm fairly sure I could have set up this server for only Microsoft players, or only Epic players, etc. I can't guarantee that's true because I've never looked into it, we were all Steam players before I even researched how to set up my server so I never looked at other platforms. I think it just depends on which network you tell your server to talk to, Steam, MS, etc. I'm betting it's some sort of configuration option that the server owner can use to chose a different platform, but again I don't know that for sure.

 

As for "why when I do that the server never shows up in player dedicated sessions" that's a separate question that needs troubleshooting on a case-by-case basis. It's quite possible that there are settings you need to change on your router in order to allow people to connect to your server, or it could be that you have something configured on your server wrong. Your best bet is to describe the specifics of what you're trying to do and what problems or error messages other people get when they try to find your server or connect to it. If you're not familiar with managing servers and configuring your network it can be pretty confusing and difficult at first.

 

 

[Herbapou]

1 hour ago, Pipinghot said:

As for "why when I do that the server never shows up in player dedicated sessions" that's a separate question that needs troubleshooting on a case-by-case basis. It's quite possible that there are settings you need to change on your router in order to allow people to connect to your server, or it could be that you have something configured on your server wrong. Your best bet is to describe the specifics of what you're trying to do and what problems or error messages other people get when they try to find your server or connect to it. If you're not familiar with managing servers and configuring your network it can be pretty confusing and difficult at first.

Thanks for the reply.  I am just using "host/local" option in ark and then "run a dedicated server".  After that I invited my friends to play on it and they join by selecting my xbox account in friends list and then join game.  I have notice that if I let this run for a few days and not restart it, it will show up in "player dedicated ark" .  We were surprise one day when a couple of players we dont know started to join in (the session is not password protected).  This is when I noticed the server was showing up in "player dedicated ark" .  After I restarted it, it stopped showing up.  For some reason it seems the server needs to be up for a few days to start showing up in "Player dedicated ark".

I would not mind hosting a server like that but I need to able to stop the server to take backups of the saved folder and also to reboot my PC.  I have 2 Microsoft accounts, one for the server and one for myself.  I log into the server account in windows to start the server then go back to my own account to work or do something else.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Herbapou

[Pipinghot]

3 hours ago, Herbapou said:

Thanks for the reply.  I am just using "host/local" option in ark and then "run a dedicated server".

I completely forgot that you can start a dedicated server using the game client. I run mine on a Linux box and do all server management from the command line, also have the game server installed so it runs as a service on the physical host.

3 hours ago, Herbapou said:

I have notice that if I let this run for a few days and not restart it, it will show up in "player dedicated ark" .  We were surprise one day when a couple of players we dont know started to join in (the session is not password protected).  This is when I noticed the server was showing up in "player dedicated ark" .  After I restarted it, it stopped showing up.  For some reason it seems the server needs to be up for a few days to start showing up in "Player dedicated ark".

Unfortunately I don't have experience running it from the game client, so there may be quirks here that' I'm not aware of. The only thing I can say is that running my server installed to a separate computer that does nothing but run the game, it still takes 10-20 minutes for it to show up for players to find whenever I have to stop/start it to do maintenance. It certainly seems like you should have a similar experience, when you start a dedicated server it should take no more than 20 minutes for it to become available to your players, since your server communicates with WildCards infrastructure just like mine does. It shouldn't matter whether it's on Steam, MS, Linux, Dedicated, etc. Any server that announces to WildCard that it's up and running should get the same treatment as any other server.

Also, I don't see a "Player Dedicated ARK" option in my game client, but that could be because I'm using the Steam version. If I was using my game client to find a server my choices are:

* Unofficial

* Non-dedicated sessions

* Favorites

* Friends

* LAN

When I start my server my players will either see it under Favorites (assuming they've added it to their list) or it always shows up under Unofficial if they search on the server name.

I'm guessing your list shows "Player Dedicated" instead of "Unofficial", is that correct?

p.s. Also, yes, always put passwords on anything that is going to be available on the internet, you never know which random people are going to find it.

3 hours ago, Herbapou said:

I would not mind hosting a server like that but I need to able to stop the server to take backups of the saved folder and also to reboot my PC.  I have 2 Microsoft accounts, one for the server and one for myself.  I log into the server account in windows to start the server then go back to my own account to work or do something else.

I know that there is a way to run the server from the command line using a script, probably inside of a batch file, it's my opinion that you should look around for a guide that will help you set it up to run that way.

The benefit of running it from a command line rather than from the game client is that you can stop the server more gracefully when you want to shut it down to do backups. I just did a quick test and used the Local/Host + Dedicated method, and the only way I was able to shut it down was to kill the command window. To my way of thinking that creates two problems: 1) it's possible to accidentally shut down that window just by clicking on the wrong thing. 2) Most programs are just fine when you shut them down this way, but game programs are usually less robust and resilient when they get shut down this way. I'd be concerned that there's a greater chance for corrupting files (especially the save map save file) when the server is shut down by killing the command window.

[Herbapou]

The choices I have on  the MS windows version to join a game are:

• UNOFFICIAL PC SESSION
• PLAYER DEDICATED ARKS
• NON-DEDICATED ARKS
• FAVORITES

I have no problem closing the server, I just click on "return to main menu" and it goes back to the main menu. It looks like the 2 versions of the game are not  the same regarding this.  Not sure what I will do on launch day, I will either run a server from the client like I do in ASE or play official until crossplay is fully up in 2024. Then I am looking to join the Norwegian Viking cluster if they are able to set there servers up for ASA.

The problem I have on official is the decay timers, 7 days on unpod dinos and some structures is too hardcore for me.  I want to be able to take vacations or stop playing from time to time.

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by Herbapou

[austinadam]

Not sure if this is true or not, but I was told an admin of a Nitrado hosted server that if they enabled movement as you level that it would increase the strain on the server and cause lag. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

 

[Kenny026]

17 hours ago, austinadam said:

Not sure if this is true or not, but I was told an admin of a Nitrado hosted server that if they enabled movement as you level that it would increase the strain on the server and cause lag. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

 

Ingot a reply from nitrado regarding the 20 player minimum. They told me there is currently massive memory consumption. Within that consumption they can put 20 users.

 

that suggest when memory optimization is in place, guessing patching is needed from the ark devs, they can lower the minimum player count. 
 

emphasis is on the currently, which tells me the are willing to low that number in the past and it is not because of making use of the monopoly they are in.

[austinadam]

Not sure if what I asked was understood but I am confused by your response. I want to know if the Movement setting is activated on an unofficial server, will it affect server performance by creating lag?