banggugyangu

That's the whole point.... it IS optional content.... and regardless of your opinions of pay2play, pay2win is worse in every aspect... What you're suggesting is to allow players who pay for the features to be in competition with players who don't (and thereby cannot use those features.) in the same server. This...is....BAD.... it serves no purpose but to spoil the overall feelings the playerbase has about the mod in a manner that's simply not fair to the mod developer unless that mod developer intentionally designs it that way. No matter what anyone's feelings about paid mods may be, the overall opinion of pay2win is definitively worse in every way. And again... you keep saying the content "should be optional".... but it IS optional.... You're not EVER forced to purchase premium mods...

While I agree that it's many reasons, thus the point of my response, the problem with blaming premium mods comes down to the fact that you do not have to buy the mod... period... As I stated before, if a player does not want to buy a mod, there are a number of other servers they can play on without buying the mod. It would be different if that weren't the case, but it is... I regularly filter unofficial server list by servers using one of my mods, and I hop on and play on the server while chatting with other people to get a feel of how they like my mods. Because of this, I see a LOT of unofficial servers. There are FAR more unofficial servers that don't have any premium mods than those that do. There are plenty of options for a player that doesn't want to buy a mod. Now, to clarify something. I'm not saying there aren't SOME players that have gotten pissed off about having to choose between "play with my friends on this server?" and "I don't want to spend more money!" But it's not a significant number. Of the people leaving ASA altogether, I would estimate that those who use that as a deciding factor are maybe 5% at best. And I want to make this clear: Mod devs that put the work in to make a polished mod DESERVE to earn money from their mod. I'm not saying that players MUST buy them, but they definitely deserve to earn the money from those willing to support them. If CurseForge would have let mod devs monetize with ad revenue, this would be a much smaller issue, as we would be earning money from downloads on free mods, but we don't have access to any CurseForge ad revenue for ARK mods whatsoever. This may be a hot take, but if you don't think that a good mod dev deserves to earn money from his/her mod, then you don't deserve to play it. And again... I'm saying this as a mod dev with 0 premium mods. Also, their "fix" is to make premium mods pay2win... which is 100% the wrong idea altogether.... The problem with the pyromane isn't that the pyromane costs money... it's that the pyromane costs money to USE, but it's present regardless, and people can pay to USE it on servers where others don't... Making premium mods the same will do nothing but present the same negative perspective against those premium mods that the pyromane has received.

I'm sorry but what "fix"? I don't think you're talking about the same thing I'm talking about. I'm not trying to act like ASA isn't struggling, but the REASON ASA is struggling isn't premium mods. The primary reasons ASA is struggling are 1: The abysmal practice of implementing pay2win tech in a game like ARK. 2: The MANY broken promises from Wild Card regarding ASA. 3: WC's inability to meet a single launch date in the history of their whole company. 4: The massive performance issues that are even worse than ASE had, and ASE was already a performance nightmare. Premium mods are NOT the problem. Again... you are not ever forced to buy a premium mod. You just simply can't play on a server that uses them without buying them. Choose a different server. There are a plethora to choose from.

I'm sorry, but that argument simply doesn't hold water.... You aren't forced to buy mods... If you don't want to pay for a mod, then don't pay for it. It means that whatever server has that mod, you're not able to play on, but that's the decision you have to make. And I'm sorry, but making a mod properly is a LOT of work... people that spend the time to make something worthy of being premium deserve to be paid what that is worth... Also, you're making a very large blanket statement speaking for a lot of people that simply don't agree. There are MANY players that are happy to pay a few bucks to their favorite mod's developer as thanks.

I would definitely do a file integrity check on your game in steam. While you're at it, I'd suggest checking for GPU driver updates. "blurry" map is usually not an issue on ASA like it was on ASE, so dunno there.

On these two notes: 1, blaming mods for problems present in the vanilla game is short-sighted and foolish. If they try to claim that problems don't persist in the vanilla game and that these problems are mod-specific, that's just foolish. 2, I don't think any of us developing mods trust WC or SG to actually do the right thing. Most players know this as well. I personally trust some of the mod developers far more than I do WC or SG. 3, Curseforge is a dumpster fire most of the time. My mod descriptions consist of a very brief description of the purpose of the mod and, if not in a complete state, the fact that it's not finished and a description of what it will become. From there, everything else about my mods are pinned in mod-specific channels on my Discord server. I get complaints about this all the time, but I WILL NOT be changing this approach for a couple reasons. First and foremost, I'm not charging for my mods. Creating mods takes time. To make your mods good, it takes more time. As such, to see any return from my mods, I need to direct traffic to my monetized platforms. This includes my YouTube/Rumble channels and my Discord server. With the exception of any mod I may make that completely overhauls the game entirely (full conversion mod), I won't be making any premium mods at all. The second reason why I won't change my approach, however, is centralization of information. It's far easier to control what information is available about my mods within the confines of my Discord server which I have full control over. By centralizing all information about my mods to that server, I have a single place to keep updated. I have a single place where people can ask questions and get a timely response from either me directly or members of my Discord community that are eager to help. This is substantially more efficient in every way than trying to update CurseForge. My Discord server also has community servers for various games that I pay for out of my own pocket, but any members of my Discord community are free to play on. I can't do anything about the piss-poor mod loader integrated with ASA. I'll give WC props for integrating a mod loader into ASA, but the execution is bleh, indeed. This gives even more reason to NOT focus on the CurseForge page of my mods, and instead focus on what I actually can control.

Reaper queens... Grab an explorer's note and hunt reaper queens. They give tons of exp. Otherwise, hop on a strong reaper, don a gas mask, and farm wyverns. Wyverns are faster kills, but reaper queens are far more experience per kill. A level 50 reaper queen should give about 50k exp without the explorer note buff. It's still gonna be quite the grind, but it's doable. Also, pop other exp buffs prior to get even more.

I'd say your next steps are finding an actual server cluster to post this and not the official ARK forums.

Well, the problem there is that they have the massive overhead of 1000s of official servers on a game with no residuals... They NEED the microtransactions just to attempt to stay out of the red. Add to that the fact that Snail Games is notoriously terribad with money... But as I said... releasing this as just regular premium mods would not end up with any less sales numbers, but would certainly also not end up with all the horrible PR they've gotten over the way they have actually released it all.... Same for the pyromane and any other things like that. They'd realistically sell more due to the more positive public opinion, instead.

Captain Fatdog's traps are hands down the best

Yeah, but the baffling part is: It'd be far more widely accepted if they took the approach of a premium mod... Enough people LIKE the content that they'd buy it as a premium mod. Good content will sell.

The grass is so high you can't see them anyway

What's baffling to me is that Wild Card already has a framework for microtransactions here. They could release all this stuff as regular premium mods, which would require that all players on a server using them would need to purchase the mod to even play on that server... problem solved... Premium mods are fine (given they're of a level that warrants their cost...) because everyone has to pay to play altogether.

I'm sorry, but this is a very apples:oranges comparison. Candy Crush isn't a multiplayer game. Yes, you can pay to win in single player games, but there's an underlying issue with pay2win content in multiplayer games that just isn't present in a singleplayer game: The advantage offered to those who play over those who don't within the ecosystem in which those players are supposed to be competing. It's one thing to pay to skip puzzles in candy crush. Is it stupid? Absolutely. Is it unfair? meh... Maybe, but who cares? If I played candy crush and suffered through the puzzles while some whale dumped $100000 to not have to solve a single one, why does it matter to me? How does it actually affect me? It doesn't. If I'm playing on a server in a PvP game where I'm going up against players that essentially have God mode because they funded Snail Games' CEO's newest car, well... that directly affects me... I'm now at a competitive disadvantage in a gamemode that's all about the competition with the other players. You cannot accurately compare the two situations to one another because of this. Pay2Win in singleplayer is whatever. Pay2Win in multiplayer is bad 100% of the time. (An "MMO" that doesn't really involve interactions with other players is still single player... before someone tries to bring up the games with that whole concept.)

This was the divine era of gaming, IMO...