basilmemories

you're the mvp

I'd love for ark to end up in non-snail hands, but Snail will get to keep the IP unless it gets botched so bad that snail sells it off to recoup costs... which can only really happen if asa tanks. So the options are: 1) the servers for ase close with no info about how to download saves for single player, much less non-nitrado hosting, and we all just accept it and buy asa and get locked into a monopoly on unofficial servers unless we're daddy warbucks and can host a server rack in our basement, which we're never allowed to even try and recoup the costs for. We put faith into a company that hosted their game on servers so bad that you get lag every 5 minutes for the entirety of their existence, that has a parent company that bans players when they play too good against teams that snail games like, and that haven't shown us any active dev streams or active video and refuse to, giving us the Linus tech tips "trust me bro" guarantee. Doing so allows said parent company to continue limping along, with the paying customer vaguely hoping that they get better with the added money. I mean sure they could, and by that token my cat could learn to use a toilet by himself, but the closer reality is that in both cases, the affected parties are going to keep making a mess of things. 2) The bad life choices of the aforementioned companies happen, but we don't encourage it. We just don't buy the game, we continue to make it VERY well known why we're not buying the game, we call out questionable company and moderation practices, and we show where other games and companies have done really well by their communities and their games. Ark doesn't have to be THE Dinosaur Survival game. Snail games doesn't own the ideal of dino survival. If Ark dies... so what? like break it down. when pve people (hi, yup, still here and complaining), said that our time and efforts would be wasted, the general feedback was "so what?" when pvp players had an issue with bias on the part of snail games, the feedback was "so what?" When people wanted to host on non-nitrado servers for asa without buying a full server setup, the feedback was "so what?" When people had issues about paid mods and overwolf, the feedback was "so what?" When the console players listed their many, many valid issues with everything going on, the feedback was "so what?" So we let Asa fail, and snail sells off the ip rights to try and make some money back, and if they don't, or if it doesn't go to wildcard... so what? They, piece by piece, destroyed nearly anything we should care about in the game. So why should we care if the hollowed-out husk fails? After all, didn't they tell us that if didn't like it, we could vote with our wallets?

you magnificent bee, I read your entry! you got my vote. I've always loved this bird and their story still breaks my heart.

okay but they haven't really gone in depth about what that qol IS. what we do know is what we're losing by them not including the dinos and tech from the maps not being available from day 1. So unless they're going to shove maewings, incubators,cryos, netguns,gas-powered birds, and a slew of other factors in or add structures that replicate their functions, we're at a net neg on qol. NOW. if they want to look at other survival games and give us better/quicker looting and language support, building skins/make vanilla structures easy to staple skins onto via mods and not have to add more bloat in the build menu, add more accessibility features for various blindness and color blindness features, add more hotkey setups for gamma settings, let us do weird industrial/automatic electrical features without it being locked behind tek, make building less painful/can build multiple tiles at once. In short, look at those other survival games and their quality of life features and steal them outright... great! i'll be really happy! But they need to TELL us they're doing it and SHOW us they're working on it. like, i'm not going to believe they're working on something until i see screenshots of in-game landscapes with the stuff placed down on the map. show me that good new water, show me that better lighting, show me all this work they've supposedly done on the island. If this thing is meant to drop a few months from now, they should at least have SOME of the basic features baked in and working. You know what makes me have less confidence? showing good renders of assets that have been just scaled up and not in the environment. Because that's the last part you work on, and them flashing that in front of us is like dangling keys in front of a toddler. Like I get it, the island might be bugging out REAL HARD with the lighting in some places, or some of the physics might be going sideways, the best thing they can do is pull a coffee stain studios and TELL US where the problems have been. Right now they're doing like what i did in the ancient times of being a teenager and a group of people expected something from me, but i couldn't admit that i was in over my head. I'd just go "OH UM. IT'S. HERE'S AN IN-PROGRESS THING, YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE THE REST OF IT WHEN IT'S READY? WHEN? OH.... SOON." However I never made anyone have to commit to my mistakes by slapping their old projects out of their hands and demanding they use the new version. Oh sorry, slap the old projects out of their hands and swear i'd take pictures so they could re-create those projects again at home. possibly. if i ever figured out how to make the camera work. Look over here, aren't these keys sure shiny?

well good for you, we're losing ALL our quality of life features with asa! no cryopods, no maewing, no incubator! You'd better be fine with 3-4 large groups taking over any given server and slotcapping the dinos from keeping them out all the time, and making some areas crashfests with bases that explode your computer once you try to gaze upon them.

pretty much this. Also the number one and two ways to get wyvern eggs are ALSO behind dlc: owls and gryphions. Yes there's traps, but we're getting "enhanced ai". the old methods of catching anything may be bunk because a ten-ton wyvern might now realize that it should land and walk out of a trap.

Idonno, a lot of the strategies are "exploit the bad pathing or ai to lure the dino into a trap", while I want better ai, i'm afraid that with the current taming times/difficulty it going to be a very large hurtle for new players to get over. which sadly, they're going to need a lot of to balance out existing players they're burning on the handling of ASA. Frankly I'm still waiting on water. like give me some tides or flowing rivers, good rain, or fantastic waterfalls. Gimme scum-laden ponds with a gentle sheen of swampish oil on the top, or physics so you can make your own fountains and pools. I will legit throw down the FULL 60, no further complaints, take my baby gigas on ase out behind the shed myself and old yeller them, if they let me have water features i can create and that work. To quote the meme, once again i am asking for a friggin fish pond.

This is great in theory, but like all theories, you have to test them ans see if they work out and sadly... when I've seen this applied, it doesn't tend to work out. In a perfect world, you could vote with your dollar, devs and publishers would see the numbers and go "aw man, we messed up" and try and correct course after asking the playerbase where they went wrong JUST to make sure they got it right. However! this is not a perfect world, and more often than not when you say nothing and just either a) not buy something, or b) stop paying for something... well, dev teams aren't mind readers, and while they COULD proactively use a downturn in currency as an opportunity to reflect and do better, more often than not they go "well nobody TOLD us". or chalk it up to any number of other factors. Which, okay then, people do like they're doing now, and let it be known that the team really haven't made up for their issues in a substantial way (and, you know, then kept releasing posts that feel like a combination of radio silence, and trying to distract us), and NOW we get "well vote with your dollars". It really feels like this catch 22 that gets summed up as "stop complaining and just give us money." In all cases i've seen this, it's not ended well. good studios get tarnished and have to work for years to rebuild their reputation, if they ever recover. Indie games run by one major figure get labelled as that person having the ego go to their head. The honest truth is that yes, this critique COULD and CAN be said better, but people critique something because they ultimately care about it. what you don't want people to do is to stop caring, because then they will just leave, take their money, and the community that keeps games, especially "live service" games, worth playing... will just evaporate. And then why would people pick up a pretty, but dead game? Why would people want to spend time in a beautiful, lifeless world? I mean, take a look at New World, ask how they're doing, and how much they had to spend just to try and stop the continuous bleed of players away from their creation.

yeah this is my biggest issue with wildcard's "solution" of hosting your own. Look, I've been a guild leader, ran gaming groups, currently manage a home and the wonderful glorified herd of cats in it, and have professional experience in making sure groups of people stay operational. I also know the physical costs of dedicated hosting because sometimes dedicated hosting is a part of that. And let me say the following, with what money and with what free labor do all these people think that everyone on official just HAS LYING AROUND TO START AN UNOFFICIAL CLUSTER? You know what the costs are? costs vary from number of max people, to framework, to how many maps you want to host. If you have only one map and 10 people, you could be looking at under 160$ a year. hooray! great, that's ONE map and only TEN people, that's barely a boss run and only if everyone is on at the time. plus unless you code in some server benefits for donation (extra time and cost for hosting/cobbling together the page and payment systems), you're footing that bill yourself. So now take that basic figure, and multiply it by the number of maps ark currently has, that's 12, plus any popular custom maps you want to throw in. So do basic math and multiply 160 by 12 and... 1920$, that's approximately the cost to host a cluster of 12 maps, each one with a max player count of ten people per map, for only one year. Let me say that again, one-thousand, nine-hundred, and twenty dollars, per year, with you having to administer and debug your own errors, as a "solution" to replicate the official server experience. WELL HECK EVERYONE, WE SOLVED IT, WE SOLVED THE PROBLEM, EVERYONE JUST NEEDS TO DUMP A LITTLE UNDER TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR AND A BUNCH OF POSSIBLY UNTRAINED, UNPAID ADMIN WORK INTO PRIVATE HOSTING. (man i wonder why so many unofficial servers close in under a year? Oh wait.) Like this is why people on official are upset. We don't want to run our own servers, if we did, we would already be running them. it's not like where I have a great idea for a map, open up the editor, then close it two hours later because the tool is unintuitive. We know the path to running a server, just we don't either have the time or the money to do so.

oh no! but for real, if they wanted to win me over, they could show me the center with the rivers fixed and not looking like the t-1000 hemorrhaged all over them. I love the center and scorched earth... if they were just done a bit better. Nobody beats the center's redwoods, and Scorched earth can do desolate beauty so well. If they wanted to really prove why i should be dropping 60$ to start again, instead of just making an ase private cluster, they need to bring out the big guns. Or like, apologize, drop the price for existing users, fix the steam page so that new players know official servers are dying off, and then doing rolling closures as server populations fade, but that's hard I guess.

ooh, one whole image of one asset. oh yes, this perfectly justifies shutting down servers with years of work and memorials to dead players. Oh yes, so sorry for my "tone", I have zero sympathy for a company receiving the criticism they should be getting, for the mistakes they continuously refuse to own up to or correct.

Sup Wildcard, I noticed that you didn't update any of your ark 1 listings to include that you're shutting down a major feature (official servers) in a short while, which means that people buying it today are being given false advertising. Since you have chosen to stick your heads in the sand last week, this week, and most likely next week as well, I flagged your entry on the steam store, will be doing the same on any platform you sell the product. ...And I highly suggest everyone do the same.

So when are you going to update your steam page that the original game is getting nuked from orbit in a few months? At this point if you don't do it soon, I might honestly flag the listing for fraudulent advertising. Also cute of you to try and throw a distraction and not mention the backlash that is STILL going. Why even debut this bug if we get under a few months to work with it before our efforts are wiped?

don't talk about yourself that way

hey buddy, guys, pals. I don't think you're getting the message here. I play on official because my pve self is attached to an entire network of servers that i can hop to if one gets too toxic, or if someone basecamps, say, the metal cave in the desert on 194 and nobody ever does anything about it, despite all the tickets we send in. you know, stuff like that. What i'm saying is that the server network gives an out if the wildcard team fail in some way. I can't do that on an unofficial server, or even a cluster. on unofficial I just have to hope that the people running it are good at what they do, or don't play favorites, or don't one day decide to tank all of my hard work because they felt they didn't get enough donations to think it's worth keeping the whole thing up. I've yet to see unofficial setups last longer than a year, ever. But hey, i get to try and host my own now and also hope that my small group of friends will join in and help keep the server up while also trying to deal with your janky code? OH THAT'S THE SOLUTION I'VE ALWAYS WANTED, except not. Not in the slightest. if I wanted that headache, I would have already have done it. So hey, let's talk in your language, the language of money. for 60$ i would pay to have a FULL transfer of ALL my stuff and various bases to ASA, that is reasonable. However you're going to pave all the time I've put into this and time is money as they say, so... 0$. Zero Dollars would I pay for this product, where I have to start over again. for the issues that you are raising, and the choice you are forcing me and others to make, you should discount ASA by 100% for existing users. Those are the only two legitimately ethical choices, and the only choices I won't talk endless garbage about you making.

so hold on, you first go that this is an upgrade, which is great! because let's be real we all knew a delay on ark 2 was coming, and honestly, that's fine. I'm anti-crunch and take your time. but then, THEN, oh now it's going to be 90$ to get the same thing, plus a product i might not want anyway, and if i don't want to upgrade... well tough for me, because you're shutting down the servers. and even if i had the money to upgrade, i STILL couldn't take the years of hard work that me and my tribe with me, again, let me know if I got any of this wrong. on TOP OF THAT, now mods will be little paid dlc packs, because you can bet your bottom dollar that everyone is going to not make it a "suggested" payment or a "pay-what-you-want", it's going to be some cold hard cash... and you retain 50% of the profits. so you do nothing, load our system with more bloatware, and probably don't set a max price, and get paid for modders to fix your mistakes and pass the cost on to us. again, TELL ME WHERE I AM WRONG. I'm sorry, when did this become the EA forums, and when did this become The Sims 4?

and yet i would take it over a carno-giga clone that looks like a wet sausage formed into a dinosaur. any. day.

yes. Non sarcastic answer, I really don't see the use for this guy considering we already have one useless carno, aka... the carno. The giga is your all-around bitey boy, the rex is your boss dino, the yuty is the bard, and carnos uh... have tiny arms. Even the allosaurus and it's pack bleed effect doesn't really see much use, so the carno's weaker bleed is honestly a joke. So why are we putting in this new guy again? Ah yes "he bite real good". Excellent, ship it. Perfect reasoning there. Like at least 90% of the finalists are new body types, this guy is yet another two legged chomp child. give him interesting abilities or put him in the bin. Or like, deck him out in glorious feathers, I will 1000% vote for a worthless creature with gorgeous plumage.

Rag 194 did the same thing

Hey there, could you please allow ark data downloads on valguero 554? I've put in a ticket days ago, and I need to be able to transfer over with my character. Otherwise I'm going to lose my base and creatures. I wouldn't bug you guys here but. You know. The thing where every other Avenue hasn't worked.

....you're using the source that says that covid-19 is a chinese bioweapon? Yeah nah, that's not a reputable source. Stop dogwhistling for the white nationalists in the room and bring some actual proof.

[citation needed]

No I mean, if the tame is inland and you can't kite it to the boat.

Alots made entirely of money, I didn't know that ark could be bought with the bartering system!

That doesn't work real well for land tames.