Rio4201

Rapid response seems to be in the eyes of the beholder, we reported this at about 4am.. it's now 11am.

And that is why it frustrates me so much. It has become an acceptable standard when it shouldn't have. Oh well, "you got arked. it happens." "Oh well, your new car blew up before you got it off the lot.. it happens." No offense JoeBl0w13, just pointing out why I find it so frustrating. lol.

I'm sure we all find some things frustrating in Ark, and I genuinely agree with you, most problems are in fact caused by the players themselves. That transfer situation you described, I can totally relate to that, I've seen friends and tribemates do that very same thing. It is definitely infuriating but it's not my place to correct or otherwise steer them onto the right path. Generally when It try to help, they get defensive and don't listen anyways. *chuckle* In my situation, and in the situation of a few of my friends over the past few days, we did the smart thing, we checked the originating server for a downloadable character, checked the target server for the character, once determining it wasn't in either place, restarted steam, re-checked both places. After a second attempt at that, it was uninstall/reinstall of the entire game, rechecked, still nothing. I've probably been coding everything from business solution software to engine / quest / and tool applications for over 20 years, i believe in testing, re-testing, debugging, retesting.. debugging some more, and retesting again. (you get my point) But, not everyone does. lol I used to tell my boss every time he asked how close we were to finalizing a code project, "When the code tells me it's ready and not the impatient boss." Official in itself doesn't frustrate me, there are only a few real issues that genuinely get under my skin, losing a character file, that's a big, no, I rephrase, that's a monumentally huge one for me. I was working for a company and project which I cannot talk about, but we lost a few hundred thousand player files, so it kind of scarred me for life when it comes to that. The project nearly tanked before we ever truly got the title going and out of beta testing. Thankfully, it did pick up and while we didn't get WoW type player numbers, we had a respectable player base and the title would coincidentally be running even now if it hadn't been for extremely poor leadership, bean counters and market analysts more concerned about the bottom line than a stable, fun game title. I've been considering modding it up and submitting code to handle it, although as another person pointed out in this thread, in truth it's as simple as a cron job that copies and backs up the player files for the servers, it doesn't even really need to be a mod. I could actually see them putting in, if they haven't already, some playerfile maintenance routines, if the pfile is a year old and there has been no activity, they could clean em out, add in another pulse save only have it be for backups, run that cron job, and bam done deal. So many possible ways to handle it, I'm sure the WC coding team have sat down and talked about this, but as with any team, concerns for what players are gonna react like get in the way. I know I'm a huge pain in their backside. Imagine a 15 second save on top of the regular server save, there would be rioting. However an optimization pass, maybe a small push for server upgrades and bringing them up to a more acceptable standard, would help in that whole effort. You are in fact correct, I don't think any of the coders are going to generally read these forums, when I originally posted, I did so out of pure frustration and because I honestly felt strongly enough to raise a stink about it. Call me old fashioned, but these days people are scared to say what they mean or what they feel, they give sketchy, vague or sometimes completely misleading reactions to things. I've over the last few years, made it a point not to be fake about it, and to voice my opinions no matter how raw they may be. You can't truly know a player, a customer, a friend or a lover, until you and they are complete relaxed and comfortable with eachother. Then you get to see the reality and truth of things. So, in all reality, I used this thread as a way to express my frustration, knowing nothing may ever come of it, but in doing so, I feel better, I got to meet you and discuss something important with you, and I got to back up the other frustrated players who are also experiencing the same issue. So all in all, moot point or not, it all worked out. P.S - I'm glad you've been that lucky, some people have all the luck, in my experience, I have very little, but I thank the universe every day for every shred of luck it spares and pushes my way.

Caleb, have you ever been in development or worked for any larger game companies? I have. I'm not saying your opinions aren't valid however, so I'll respond as appropriately as I can to what you said. First off, yes, it happens. As for if things can be looked out for during server transfers, actually it can. Many and i do mean, MANY, game companies have fail safes in place and do incorporate a backup routine before allowing transfers to other clusters, instances, however you wish to describe a machine to machine transfer. This goes back to my finger pointing to poor design, Wildcard could and should have put the necessary effort into making this a much less likely case, yet in the past week alone i've seen 20 posts on people who've lost their characters during transfers. This clearly shows the lack thereof of effort on the development team's part to fix the problem. It isn't a point on if it happens or not, it's the point that it happens way too much on this title to be anything other than a matter of poor programming and irrefutable evidence of bad game design. Blizzard by the way, hasn't required "proof" regarding a deleted character in almost 7 years. Why? Because they have a backup system for their more than 3 million players that are actively playing. Notice, they can even restore a deleted character? Bethesda, I can't comment on. I lean heavily towards PC development and don't delve into the realm of cross platform development nor do I play on console, so I can't really say what their policies are there. What i do know however, is that on a PC platform, this is a complete and utter disappointment and/or joke. I think it goes without saying that the gaming studios can't be held accountable for a bad pipeline or other interruption of internet service that may come up. However, it's a commonality among all gaming studios who present and host multiplayer games that require persistent saves, player tracking, etc, to design and keep the system optimal to avoid data loss. If we're splitting hairs, if I can't play the game because my character keeps being mysteriously deleted due to a bug that could have been fixed but hasn't, how does that become my fault? I purchased the game, I did my part in creating the character and beginning my adventures, I paid for the DLCs, i've done my part as an end user. If I am required to keep a library of screenshots why wasn't this told to me before I purchased said game? Where's the disclaimer? Since this is by your definition a "fair" requirement or approach, then where is my fair disclaimer on the box? This then becomes a legal matter now doesn't it? Even in my early years programming, I came to a distinct realization that players don't like it when their pfiles disappear. Players also don't like being told to prove something after it's already happen, and being asked to prove it with screenshots that they can no longer get because the damn character is gone. Do you see where I'm going with this? If someone had told me that I had to take screenshots to play this steaming pile of crap, I'd have passed up that whole purchase in favor of a night out with my wife. I've written several backup functions for several different projects over the years, and with the cloud being such a wonderful thing, there's literally no reasons or excuse not to back that stuff up, period, end of story. That's why I'm frustrated, and I think that may be why alot of the others are as well. While I don't expect perfection on any level from any game studio, if you are going to put requirements like that up after I've already made my purchase, you've basically breached the ToS and betrayed my trust as a consumer. That, and the 4+ years this has been an issue clearly shows the rest of the community how much of a priority it has been for Wildcard. This shouldn't be happening, of all the things to hold most holy among the online games, the player files which keep your players actually playing should be ironclad backed up at all times.

Here's my problem with that: Fundamentally, at NO time should a company put it on their playerbase to do things that the company by all rights should be doing. It's the point behind this that I'm trying to make, because they can't manage their code and back up player saves properly, why should the end user suddenly be responsible for something that the development team is clearly responsible for? I could see if i were buying a vehicle from them and they required me to have the oil changed and tires rotated in it, but we're dealing with software and that's a whole different ballgame. Imagine what would happen if Blizzard suddenly lost their entire player database and they responded with, "Well unless you can provide screenshots of everything you owned in the game, the character level and achievements, and anything else pertinent to the character and possessions we can't help you." Their company would immediately be turned inside out, the players would massively walk away and never look back, the title would fail and the lawsuits would come rolling out. It is by industry standard, the responsibility of the game studio to save/store/update and maintain their own player database, not by legal standard, but by industry standards. Any game studio worth their salt makes that a top priority, no players = no income = no game. To be asked to provide proof that clearly should have been backed up, save/stored and accessible by their customer service team is an asinine, responsibility dodging tactic that anyone serious about the industry would find lazy and completely unacceptable. Sadly, this conversation wouldn't even need to be had, if they had simply put a failsafein, an exported save routine prior transfer, or hell, a number of them.. Back it up to cloud storage, encrypt and write a local save file to the client side, do all of the above, but do something instead of "oh we need screenshots because we don't wanna do our jobs." (Which is what this feels like.)

Friend of mine lost his 2 days ago, I lost mine last night, another friend lost theirs this morning. Welcome to Studio Wildcard and their failure to do what a billion other game companies have done well in the past. Secure player save files. Just wait until some idiot in Customer Service asks you for screenshots of all your dinos, gear and unlocks. That'll really make your night.. Because yeah, we all do that every single time we transfer.. Not to stand on the soap box but yeah I'm gonna for a sec. #1 Wildcard: Screenshots? No. How about you guys put on your big boy pants and backup pfiles more securely? There's this thing called the cloud, it might be a good idea to use it. #2 Wildcard: Fact: your bad programming is in no way our fault, so asking us to provide you proof of our characters is just a sad, unprofessional and mediocre way of dodging any responsibility. #3 Wildcard: This title has been live for 4+ years, and in that 4+ years, this random deletion of player files has existed. Fire your lead dev, quality assurance manager, and all your senior staff, replace them with real developers, not sure where you've been recruiting dev help, but I'm fairly certain it's from local community colleges under the guise of intern. Don't know about you folks, but i'm done being nice about this, I paid for a product, and so far I still haven't gotten what was promised. Tired of herd mentality of "you got arked, it happens" when it should be "Wildcard needs to answer for this crap." I don't expect perfection, but something as foundational and important as character save data? Thats a fail on levels I can't even begin to describe. Penalizing players for their poor coding and because they didn't take screenshots as "proof" of their items/engrams.. Priceless.

First off, the Devs aren't responsible for rule enforcement, that's what your enforcement team is for, aka the Server Admin. I would like to say that the Enforcement team while effective when they do take action, takes forever and a day to actually answer tickets and that certainly does need some improvement. In a perfect world, instead of being forced to uncryo 15 dinos and sit through cooldown timers, it would be nice if a development side effort could be made to allow entry into boss fights through a craftable beacon instead, that way if people want to enter the boss arenas, they simply activate a beacon in their backyards instead of having to pile all the dinos onto the pad, but that's just my opinion. In my opinion one of the biggest gripes I have is the rates and timers, the excessive amount of grind time in this game makes it nearly unplayable for those of us that work, so much so that I've seen several forced into moving into the private servers because of jobs and family responsibilities. I'm not saying make it easy, but not having to log in every single day for the sake of upkeep, or to spend 3 hours online nightly would be a heaven sent.

Lovely, more PvP changes that will undoubtedly jack up us PvE players. I hope someone at WC is keeping our PvE communities in mind before initiating sweeping changes that affect both sides of the coin.