Official Server 255 Mutation Cap

[Zentgraf]

Do you think the 255 mutation cap is a good idea? It really felt like 255 broke the balance of the game.

 

I think capping it at 70 would be a good balance point. Tames will still be very strong at 70, but won't be so godlike.

 

If it turns out to be too low, then we can always raise the cap later. But you can't lower the cap once it goes live; so being modest with the cap at the start might be prudent.

[Dreadcthulhu]

Well the devs did mention that the levels from mutations are not going to just add more wild levels (like existing mutations do), but instead have their own "multiplier", which I take to mean that mutations will be their own separate levels, adding a specific amount to a stat that can be different than a wild level. They also mentioned that these can be used to buff or nerf different creatures.  If they choose to make mutation levels for health & melee count less than a wild level for most combat creatures, then even maxed out creatures would be a lot less OP than they are now.  Will be interesting to see how it all works out.

[acat]

I was really hoping for a change of the 255 cap. I made a suggestion for breeding long ago (link). I would have liked to see a cap of about 20 mutations per stat, could be a bit more. I think 70 is already too much. Now that we know that wildcard sticks to the old cap we can only hope that the new mutation multipliers are heavily reduced compared to what it was in ase. They should at least be cut in half imo. It could also be nice to see the multiplier decrease the more mutations you get in the respective stat, so it creates some kind of soft cap.

[Avarial]

If I spend 3 years breeding and mutating a specific dino it better damn well be OP. 

[acat]

2 hours ago, Avarial said:

If I spend 3 years breeding and mutating a specific dino it better damn well be OP. 

A good game is a balanced game.

[RealNomad]

Breeding and mutations adds longevity to the game so yes, it is a good idea. 

[Pipinghot]

27 minutes ago, acat said:

A good game is a balanced game.

That's a great sounding t-shirt slogan, but it ignores the realities of an online, sandbox, open world survival crafting game. An open world, sandbox game is always going to have a greater upside potential for becoming OP when compared to games that have a more closed philosophy.

We could spend pages discussing what constitutes "balance" in a game of this type, but that discussion wouldn't change the fact that many thousands of players feel the same way Avarial does. A big part of what has made this game successful is that it's possible for people working cooperatively to create breeding lines that make the end-game boss fights less difficult for them.

When people collectively spend thousands of hours creating breeding lines, they want those breeding lines to be OP and they want the risk of failing to be significantly reduced. The simple truth of ARK is that it's not balanced, never has been, and is never going to be (at least not in the way that you mean it). ARK is a massive time sink if you want to achieve end-goals on Official servers.

The kind of balance you're talking about, deliberately preventing OP tames, is really more applicable to unofficial servers. People (typically) are happy to find a different time balance, where they spend less time getting end-game tames but they're also less OP, because it's something they can do in a few dozen, or maybe a few hundred, hours.

Being competitive in ARK (both ASE and ASA) is always going to be built around spending the most time getting to that point. You might get what you want in ARK2, but hopefully it's pretty obvious that ASA is not ever going to be balanced in the way that you're talking about.