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I represent Clan FMF, a community of gamers. I have read the original post and all comments carefully. It is awesome that both PVE and PVP are getting new clusters giving all players the option (yes it does matter). Not to mention at a considerable cost to the developer. With how responsive Wildcard is I felt it necessary to give my opinion. We are very active on ARK particularly on PVE at the moment. Watching the well established eventually legacy server Tribes complain here about the doom of their servers with the announcement of this decision is amusing with what we have experienced relatively new to ARK (2 months). They basically run a monopoly by pillaring the entire map and build laggy inconsiderate megastructures which no one can do anything about because it is PVE. Now they are upset that rightfully so many old and new players come August 8 will go to the launch servers for better opportunity and not deal with them; forging all new relationships (even if the outcome is eventually the same). Reading the comments I see a bunch of bully's angry they are going to lose their stranglehold on other people and ultimately no one is going to play/trade with them. But developers did you a solid and let you keep your operation. Now everyone has an option and you are upset? You will have to go to the new servers un-touched by dupeing etc. for meaningful trade where it is a level playing field. Or stay where you are and trade with each other and continue to give other new players a hard time until they too get fed up. Which is what the bully's obviously wanted anyway with the way they were conducting themselves (kiting things into base, blocking pathways, etc.) speaking from our own experience. And before someone tries to go there..no we aren't scrubs, we worked hard and obtained Gigas and Boss Rexes just for you griefers. The "nice tribes" who will no doubt have a rebuttal are a minority, small and few in between. We applaud Wildcards decision. To those PVE bully's upset, you clearly wanted the server to yourself. Enjoy the pile of dust you created, knowing this was early access.

@Titus @KiolLman @Zed38 I invite you all step out of your conspiracy theories for a minute and into a new player's experience. You just bought the game and log in, you don't like PVP from bad experiences in other games and decide to try out PvE. You load on to the server and arrive on a beach. You start running around and the starve alert goes off, you make a campfire and try to place it... to close to another player's foundation. You go up over a hill and as far as you can see Pillars all around a huge base. Or maybe you spawn in and you are inside of or under someones base. Behemoth gates surrounding you. You try to figure out how to get out and can't. You can't harvest enough stuff to make anything to level, you can't figure the maze out to get out, you probably don't even realize that you should get out because you're new to the game. You starve to death and respawn in another spot, again surrounded by gates, but this time they have left signs telling you to go up the stairs and through the greenhouse. You go and start trying to build a hut to stay the night. You can't place a foundation/campfire/sleeping bag anywhere because its all pillared. The current PvE servers are full of this and I've experienced both (also been spawn locked literally inside of someone's gate so I couldn't even move, trouble tickets do nothing for the stack of bodies stuck in the gate). The new servers may get there, but at least those trying the game out in the beginning will have a chance to build and explore. If you're concerned about your server then talk to the people on there and see if they are leaving or not. Do something to make the server inviting to new people. Or just stop playing for a few weeks and wait for new servers and quit whining about it on the forums. New PvE clusters are necessary and I have no fears of the existing servers I play on going away. You also may want to go read the Kotoku article where they claim Wildcard was ready to announce a complete launch and had a change of mind, instead deciding to go with a data transfer to new infrastructure supporting better network security and server performance. The legacy servers will be just fine resource-wise, you can put your tinfoil hats away. The trade market may or may not bloom, but that it up to people the run the trade markets and what they want to do. If your server has an average 10 online, that is nowhere near the status of "remained near-zero for an extended duration of time" and I doubt you will need to be concerned.

Update: There have been a few posts regarding the release date and why some retailer sites are displaying a different date to what we initially announced. This is because we're currently working on getting the game through PlayStation 4 Certification at the moment (as all platforms will need to release simultaneously). As soon as we've got a definitive update to the release date, we'll let you know officially. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, Survivors! We’ve got important and exciting news to share! First of all, we’ve finally completed our game for the console disc retail submission! It was a very long and arduous process, our boss fight or so to say, and your feedback throughout this process has been highly valuable. It was a very tight deadline to make the ship date, and the team has been intensively grinding through singleplayer-oriented refinements for the posterity of the disc-based version. All that aside, we were able to resolve many issues, as well as considerably improve the game through various changes and implementation of new techniques and it’s now time to move onto refocus our development efforts on the live game, as well as address some key topics within the community: Will the Official Servers be wiping? Short answer: No -- but read the long answer! We had previously released a statement a year ago informing players that our Official Servers would not be wiping on the retail launch of the game. We’ve thought long and hard about the decision, taking into consideration the various points brought up by the community, the internal members of the team, as well as the general discussion that has taken place on the internet through various press/media outlets and will be sticking to our initial decision. It is clear that some group of players are for the wipe for, and some are against it, all for legitimate reasons; and we took it all into account. We ultimately decided that we would not wipe and we would rather pay the cost to launch an additional new PvP and PvE Server Cluster network (alongside but separate from the current PvP and PvE Legacy Cluster), where players will get to have a fresh experience on the ARK; across all four maps with no influence from any of the previous servers. At that time we'll be rolling out the new server code and infrastructure necessary to prevent critical issues such as server crashing exploits, duping, and DDoSing, so they will not affect the batch of new servers (as well as the legacy ones, going forward). Our current set of Official Servers will be rebranded as “Legacy” and indicated as such on all platforms. We will also be taking steps to remove some of our ‘ghost town’ servers, where the player population has remained near-zero for an extended duration of time. We’ll take a look at the statistics and will be repurposing 10% of the lowest count servers across all platforms. Once we know which servers these are; we'll preserve the save files and upload them, so if you so wish to use them, you can. Players will also have time to move through Cross-ARK to a different secure Legacy server. Every three months we will be taking a review of the Legacy Officials to see what the numbers are like and may consider repurposing more ‘ghost towns’, however, the goal will be to preserve any place with human activity. To be clear, if you're playing on a Legacy Server you will not be able to transfer to the new Official servers and Legacy servers will still receive total and complete support (just like the New Officials) in regards to Game Updates and future ARK Expansions, so you can expect to see future DLC servers added to the Legacy Cluster. Ragnarok: Console debut and development The new official release date for the Ragnarok Free DLC on consoles will be on the 8th of August when ARK launches for retail release. The team spent time discussing when would be the best time to release the map, for both technical reasons, as well as the experience itself, and this was the chosen date. We understand that some may find this news frustrating as you’ve waited a long time for the map, however after conferring for quite a while on the topic, we believe this is the best decision for the map’s arrival on console as; First of all, it allows the Ragnarok Developers to get the latest version of the Dev Kit and incorporate our latest changes to the game, which will have a significant impact on the console experience concerning performance, visual fidelity, and stability. Secondly, by focusing our technical workforce on the other aspects of the game (in addition to Ragnarok) such as server stability, crash exploits, duping, DDoS, we will be able to ensure a much smoother experience for when the map is available. Finally, with our recent decision in regards to whether there will be a wipe or not, this seems like the smartest decision, to avoid this awkward situation of where servers that have only just been online for a couple of weeks become legacy. The new date will also result in the map debut on console will be much farther ahead in its development than the map that was initially released on PC as the Ragnarok Developers have carried out a significant number of bug fixes, QOL changes on the map, and more! We will be doing a PC patch soon to upgrade to the latest version of the map (which is available in the Steam Workshop for Unofficial Servers!) so that you guys will also be able to enjoy their improvements! PlayStation 4 Update! It’s happening! Yes, we’re serious. We’re currently working on the latest PS4 patch with Abstraction at the moment, and while it’ll be tough, we should be set to release it this Friday (probably going to be a late evening patch). We’ll keep you posted how that goes! Thank you guys for being so patient with us over the past few weeks, we understand how frustrating it is not to receive updates, but now we are wrapped up with certification and this tight deadline, we’ll be able to go back to our standard development pipeline and therefore include you with our updates Console PC-Hosted Servers Yup, you heard it. As of the 8th of August, we will finally have support for PC hosted dedicated servers on console. We won’t be renting or hosting them ourselves, it isn’t a commercial venture for us, but we will be doing the technical work needed to get this underway. Initially, they will be available via Nitrado! (It’ll come to other third party hosts once we go through this initial technical-iteration phase, as we want to ensure its stability). These servers will be available on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 and if you haven’t realised, here’s why this is so awesome: No need for a second console to host private servers! Complete access to all of ARKs custom server config settings, which will let players change the rules on their custom ARKs The option to create cross ARK Clusters for the ultimate ARK Experience -- allowing travel across four Maps Create a backup of server save files, allowing players to try something new without the fear of losing data The servers will result in higher performance due to better optimisation Player servers will now be able to support a larger pool of players, up to 100 concurrent users! At a later date, these will also be Play Anywhere compatible! For those of you wondering about repurposed console Legacy Official Servers, you will be able to take the save file and set up an Unofficial Server using this. Nitrado will be contacting those who show interest in console servers on the 8th of August via email, you can notify them here: http://nitra.do/arkconsole Let them know if you are keen, so they can properly estimate demand! Development Kit! Oh modders, how we love you so much, we hope you can forgive us for the delay and understand as developers yourselves our reason for doing so. Fortunately, we come bearing good news! Jeremy is prepping the latest version of the Dev Kit right now (literally!) and we will have it available to download later today via GitHub, and soon after that via the Unreal Launcher when we are confident in its stability. You’ll be able to keep up with the latest information on the Unreal Forums in regards to any relevant/cool changes! That should be what we wanted to discuss for today. Hopefully, it helps clear the air with what’s been going on and the direction we’re heading in. We're looking forward to a fun ARK launch with everyone in the weeks ahead! All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

ah crap, i hoped, that you could use the same method on your pc as on your xbox to make them a dedicated server as we aren´t many, i don´t think it is necessary to rent a server, my second xbox never let me down but thx 4 replying!

So Jat, would you like to face your paying playerbase and explain to them WHY you and WC are ignoring all the down servers?

Oh, and he has said it throughout this forum as well.

I don't think current PC (Steam) will be playing with Xbox. It will require the Windows Store version of the game, which will be different than the Steam version. As Jat said earlier in this thread, they are different games, though they seem the same. If I am wrong, please correct me and provide a link to support it, but anytime they talk about cross play it specifically references Windows Store version.

Really? To suggest new players to join existing PVE players at this state would mean subjecting WildCard to be the developers who's game is overrun by cheaters? That's a bad, bad stigma. WC made a smart move to add a fresh experience for new players. And they also didn't wipe. This is already doing a lot, so please quit the QQ.

Purchase? Unless you are changing platforms(like Steam to Xbox or Xbox to PS4), you don't need to repurchase the game.

Thank you

If you wipe 377 just keep my base on the swamp cliff and we're golden hahaha

finally some solid answers

They will release on 8th August at official release. It wouldn't make sense to release new servers after official release.

I'm pretty darn sure that WC wouldn't needlessly disable crossark within the new server clusters. Sure they can't do anything with Legacy servers, but unless they backtrack their thought that cross ark was a good idea to begin with (and it isn't on PVP, PVE it's fine though) then I don't foresee them disabling crossark for the new servers. Even though personally I'd rather see crossark disappear for PVP, and stick around for PVE. But that's a different topic for another thread.

No...? When have you ever been able to transfer from single to multi player? 8th August, it's in the first post.

Well. I didn't expect you to handle it in that way. Legacy is definitely a smart move. You'll please the pro-wipe pitchfork-mob without punishing anyone. The console part doesn't really affect me, so I didn't read it. But overall it seems that you managed to handle the situation pretty well so close to the release. As said, I honestly didn't expect it.

I like the idea of PVE Legacy servers and seperated new servers. I'm pretty sure a lot of old players (me included) will create a new chara on a new server and play together with new players. And im also sure that the trading market will be bloom like the Legacy PVE market one day And who knows, maybe some day Legacy + new servers will be open for traveling/trading to each other when new servers become like Legacy in a year or so. Thanks a lot for the statment!

First, I'm not english speaker, so sorry if some part of that iI'll write is not clear. I spent more than 6 month playing in PVE official server. In this moment i have many bred dinos, mutants, hight stats, and primarly this dinos are for trade. With this change, with the time, all will be trash because Legacy servers will not have new players with will can trade. Basically, after this anouncement i decided that i just play for keep alive my dinos if something change, but, i dont have intentions of continue with breeding, taming, or whatever that can be destroy with the time cause I think this thing of legacy is just the agony of the old servers. I hope they change that, PVE dont need a new cluster of servers like a PVP. Sorry bad english, i dont like use google translate,.. NA PVE 795 Scorched Earth

THIS IS NOT A BUG REPORT. THIS IS A DISCUSSION THREAD. REFERENCE OP: ARK LEGACY: Prediction of he Slow Death of Servers. This DISCUSSION thread is a collection of my predictions for the recently posted decisions post-launch for Ark and the Legacy Server decisions. I will outline what I believe the short and long term effects will be for veteran players of Ark here. Quotes from the OP will be colored Red for clarity. Post your thoughts in a reply here. We’ve got important and exciting news to share! First of all, we’ve finally completed our game for the console disc retail submission! It was a very long and arduous process, our boss fight or so to say, and your feedback throughout this process has been highly valuable. It was a very tight deadline to make the ship date, and the team has been intensively grinding through singleplayer-oriented refinements for the posterity of the disc-based version. All that aside, we were able to resolve many issues, as well as considerably improve the game through various changes and implementation of new techniques and it’s now time to move onto refocus our development efforts on the live game, as well as address some key topics within the community: Having development work on the disc version is expected, but the game will still go through many, many patches over it's lifetime. There is no possibility that the disc will ship free of bugs and such. Console players will (like PC players do now), experience the same issues that have plagued the game. I forsee console players complaining about running out of hard disk space in short order, even if Ark is the only game installed. Essentially this means that since the game is being released on 3 different platforms, the teams will be split amongst these 3 platforms - ie: I predict there will be little to no change over the long term in terms of focus. Short term, there may be some focus work for specific platforms every so often as major problems crop up. Having a game released for 3 different platforms, and the apparent focus on development decisions to cater more towards console players in terms of QoL and ease of play, controls, other means that it is quite likely PC will (as with many multi-platform games) continue to receive the least amount of resources, while taking the brunt of first-patch pay-to-test (PC will get patches first, bug reports will be collected, then some fixes pushed out, after which the consoles will receive the partially fixed version). Since patch submission for consoles is more strict than PC this is understandable. I would imagine console sales will dominate PC sales as well, so financially this is also understandable. Will the Official Servers be wiping? Short answer: No -- but read the long answer! We had previously released a statement a year ago informing players that our Official Servers would not be wiping on the retail launch of the game. We’ve thought long and hard about the decision, taking into consideration the various points brought up by the community, the internal members of the team, as well as the general discussion that has taken place on the internet through various press/media outlets and will be sticking to our initial decision. It is clear that some group of players are for the wipe for, and some are against it, all for legitimate reasons; and we took it all into account. We ultimately decided that we would not wipe and we would rather pay the cost to launch an additional new PvP and PvE Server Cluster network (alongside but separate from the current PvP and PvE Legacy Cluster), where players will get to have a fresh experience on the ARK; across all four maps with no influence from any of the previous servers. At that time we'll be rolling out the new server code and infrastructure necessary to prevent critical issues such as server crashing exploits, duping, and DDoSing, so they will not affect the batch of new servers (as well as the legacy ones, going forward). Thank you for including in brackets that Legacy servers will also get updates. Notice the wording here "going forward". What I predict happening here is the reason why I chose the title of "slow death" for this post. Since the game price has jumped substantially, WCS only real option was to do exactly this - release a brand new cluster that is cut off from the Legacy servers. As everyone knows, a fresh uncluttered server will perform significantly better than those dirty old grungy legacy servers. WCS wants to maintain as good a performance level for the initial sales rush as possible. This will prevent most product refunds, and give newer players an equal footing to start out on. Don't mistake this for it being anything different than current servers however - within a few days you will have experienced players claiming the "best spots" on the new servers. By that time however the new people will have likely passed the refund window. Such is gaming these days. There is an extremely worrying wording in the above paragraph: "new... infrastructure... with no influence from any of the previous servers". To understand why this is a critical point of contention you first need to understand how cluster virtual machines (VMs) work for multi-server hosting. In a typical datacenter you will have groups of VMs running distributed across multiple physical machines. For example, PVE1 to 10 will be running on a cluster of VMs that is operating in Dallas, while PVEoc10-15 will be running in Sydney as an example. Inside these VMs are resources assigned to it based on the amount that WCS has agreed to pay for. This is called Provisioning. There may also be an optional Over-Provisioning for extra resources during peak times, or when some major event occurs (large war, or something). This provisioning covers connectivity bandwidth, cpu, memory, storage and a host of other optionals that may or may not be paid for. When WCS says that the new servers will be completely separate from the Legacy servers it could very well be that the VMs that run the new servers may exist on the same physical machines within the data centers, but that are separate and opaque to the legacy servers (essentially they cannot see eachother or interact in any way). Data center VM level infrastructure (often called Distributed Compute) is designed this way to allow multiple clients (Wildcard, others) to run their desired servers in tandem, while all sharing from a huge resource pool and Pay-For-Performance service model by the hosting providers (eg: Amazon Web Service, owner of the data center physical machines). Now that i've explained somewhat about this, I can now explain what my predictions are for "slow death of Legacy". Server performance is based on how much money WCS chooses to pay for whichever cluster in question needs. If WCS wanted to make official servers perform better, they simply would have to pay more money for the resources (to a point, game code also has a large influence in this). Quite often you will see OfficialServerX with 30 people online and a generally equivilant development and age to OfficialServerC with the same people online have vastly different performance levels. If you look closely, you can see where the server is actually being hosted. Odds are that the 2 servers are not located in the same area geographically, or perhaps simply not part of the same group of VMs (cluster) so they do not share the same level of resource pool. WCS, by their statement above appears to be giving more priority for the non-legacy servers. This makes sense financially, because paying for resources to upkeep those dingy Legacy servers is far more expensive than fresh shiny new serers that are still in Thatch Age. VM resources can be adjusted on the fly without restart, and it is transparent to those playing the game. What I predict happening here is that over a length of time, the Legacy servers will continue to be "resource pool starved", causing the performance to drop ever so slightly over time (the same way human food and water consumption is stealth nerfed by minute ammounts over months right now in Ark). This will cause players to leave the servers slowly over time, and leads to the next paragraph below... Our current set of Official Servers will be rebranded as “Legacy” and indicated as such on all platforms. We will also be taking steps to remove some of our ‘ghost town’ servers, where the player population has remained near-zero for an extended duration of time. We’ll take a look at the statistics and will be repurposing 10% of the lowest count servers across all platforms. Once we know which servers these are; we'll preserve the save files and upload them, so if you so wish to use them, you can. Players will also have time to move through Cross-ARK to a different secure Legacy server. Every three months we will be taking a review of the Legacy Officials to see what the numbers are like and may consider repurposing more ‘ghost towns’, however, the goal will be to preserve any place with human activity. By starving the costly old dirty legacy servers, they push more and more of them towards the arbitrary "10%" mark. As the servers reach this mark, they will decomission them. Some of the old players will move to other servers, many will not and simply stop playing ark. In either case, it is financially prudent to do this. Older players already paid for the game, and are significantly needier in terms of support tickets as well as cost of VM resources to operate their server's mega-lag-bases. I don't fault this, its really the only way they can proceed. Supported further by the comment about revisiting and culling the botton 10%ers every 3 months or so. What I predict here is that when new players join Ark for the first time, you can be assured that the servers listed nearer the top of their server listing will absolutely be the Non-Legacy servers. In fact, it could be that the Legacy servers simply do not show up for new players at all, that they would have to keyword search for them to find them (if they can join them at all, who knows). Of course, WCS wants to promote their shiny new servers to the newbies. That's not the issue. The issue will be lack of fresh blood to keep Legacy servers populated. What new player - given the choice between a shiny new ferrari, and a crappy dirty pinto with keymarks spelling "Pillared lel" scratched all over it would in their right mind choose to join the "pinto" server? It doesnt take a stretch of logic to know the answer to this. Legacy will have their old time players. Those players will slowly stop playing. No new players will join the legacy servers. Legacy servers will regularily be purged due to low population. This cycle will be repeated again in the future I assume, with the current Legacy servers being a long distant memory, and the new legacy servers being the servers that are opening up in August on retail launch. The rest of the dev post is irrelevant to this DISCUSSION. The TLDR Prediction is: Legacy servers will be purposely resource starved, to cause and causing player exodus and new players will join new servers, causing Legacy servers to be culled over time due to low population. Long term vets should be prepared with an exit strategy for when their Legacy server is designated for culling.

Ragnorok on legacy is going to spread the server population so thin that every server will be low population

so what's the problem? Now we have depopulated servers and what? Who needs to maintain depopulated server?

Low population servers have been wiped before, right? So really is there any change to the current situation? There has always been the threat of a wipe on a low population server. Now you just know that it will be the bottom 10%. Just a bit more specific. Just don't be the bottom 10% and you are fine.

You will have the chance to move to another Legacy server, or the option of downloading the backup and go unofficial/offline. However unfortunate that may be, I think it's pretty fair. You'd only have to rebuild your base (they will probably compensate somehow) if you want to stick with official. Unofficial/SP would make no difference if you were playing solo or with a tribe of 3 on an empty server, imo.

They have officially stated that legacy servers will continue to be supported though.

lol been playing on xbox since day one stop complaining lol WC great game keep up the good work.

I don't think you have made your point, or maybe you think it is just obviously right? Those that think there should have been a full wipe can play on the new servers. Those that think there should be no wipe can continue to play on the legacy servers. Both sides of the argument get their way. What you don't get is to tell the other side what they have to do. So maybe that is really what you don't like about this decision?

Any and all servers are always at risk of becoming low pop and getting wiped. New and old, there has always been a risk of people abandoning a server. Nothing has changed.

I have updated the announcement to include an important change. There will be a new PvE Cluster on Launch, and the current set of PvE servers will become Legacy, similar to changes for PvP.

My 9yo son loves the decision about PvE servers and the fact that dinos we tamed together will stay with us. We gonna play ark more. Thanks @Jat

For PlayStation, the reason you're not able to host on your own PC is due to security reasons. It requires secure tokens to communicate with the service which we're not able to distribute publicly but can do so to authorised host providers. For Xbox Play Anywhere, it's certainly a possibility that you'll be able to host from your PC but it may not be the full PC-style dedicated system, we'll have to see how it goes. We'll have more news on this to share later on.

I will send a positive review to balance it out lol

The one thing, will Ark be on PS5? It's gonna have better specs than xbox one x and surpass your average pc. Coming out in 2020

I've edited the post once more: Legacy Servers will still get COMPLETE SUPPORT, the only difference is you will not be able to transfer to the new PvP cluster. You will get access to the Ragnarok map on launch, and any future DLC beyond that.

@Jat I realize its still a little early for info on it, but I would appreciate a post at a later date detailing PC console server hosting no rush though

It's laughable that WC would even consider not creating a new cluster for PVE

It has been stated, a few times, that the decision on specialty servers has not been made yet.

Can you link that, from what I heard they decided to wait on Ragnorok so they didn't have to have 200 servers or whatever for three weeks then roll out new ones.

no bud, new servers = full servers = more lag than the game can handle after three to four weeks the servers slow down and their are too many dinos and big builds to count = none of your benifits for the record I do play pve and like to play the game without other ppl killing me just for clothe hat or because theyre cave man bored but thanks for your not helpful input here your sec. chance to face palm.

I have been telling people that all day nobody wants to hear that or believe it. First like minded post I read all day.

The more I think about the angrier I get. Stringing the players that helped make the game along on these legacy servers is just wrong. Just admit it this legacy thing is just a PR maneuver to curve negative feedback for your game release. Your not investing in a separate server platform your buying time. It will be a huge slap in the early access players face when you start ditching legacy servers. Players are a lot more forgiving when they are told the truth and not get strung along.

Laughable that PVE doesn't get a new cluster. I do not play or like PVE whatsoever, but it's a travesty that anyone who does has no choice but to continue playing with dupers. LOLOLOL enjoy that!

Except that the game is being release. And with it a batch of better running servers. Other than that exactly the same.

Listen friend would you rather invest your game time on a map with an unknown expiration date or use your game time to play with some security and confidence in the future of your server? I don't know about you but from here out I feel like an hr played on "legacy" will be an hr wasted starting over on the new servers. To me if I do continue to play its a clear cut choice to jump ship and I am a tek tier pve and pvp player. I don't like it but I'm looking with some vision and being realistic with my gaming time