Woody714

While I have seen gameplay online, I waited until I could complete The Island before actually playing on Scorched Earth. I have tried other DLC maps like Lost Island and Fjordur, but this is my first run on Scorched. So...the environmentals...is it all just arbitrary or is there rhyme and reason? I thought there was logic involved...different storms affect things different...but the canteens! So I notice whenever water is placed in the inventory instead of the hotbar, it "evaporates" I would guess. I have even had jars and canteens just break...ok. So, now I have water just disappearing as soon as I place a canteen on my hotbar. Is this logical or is it just more randomness designed "to enhance the player experience"?

One axiom I remember from my many factory, warehouse and retail jobs is "The beatings will continue until morale improves". That seems to have been adopted by Wildcard when they ramped up the schadenfreude programming right alongside a "Quality of Life" update in August a couple years back. You can gripe all you want, but it only seems to get worse over time. One way this manifests itself that totally infuriates me is when "the game" does stuff like spawning in dinos and bugs right next to a tame. Coupled with that is the general way that "the game" seems to have zero respect for someone working hard and trying to do the right things. So while searching aimlessly for gigas to kill for their hearts, seeing as how I only need a tueso eye and a few gigas hearts to finally finish this map after three years of progress destroying game crashes, I stumble across the first tapejara to have more than 2 digits worth of levels. After the usual silly chase, I get it knocked out and actually build spike walls around it. Just as soon as I do, "the game" spawns in meganeura to ruin it. Like wow...I actually go to the effort to build spikes and...nope. For the community, those that are not paid schills to deflect the direction of the conversation, do you really find that this schadenfreude programming enhances the game. or could you really just get along without it? Fastener University baby...

I'm a bit split and surprisingly sympathetic to Wildcard. In the past, it felt like something odd was happening, but I thought it was just small company growing pains. I had no clue about the underlying drama until a couple months ago. I sure had lots of opinions on the game, lol...very passionate ones. My lingering frustration as a single/pve player does not really match the current situation. I suppose, after much learning and trial and error, that my main issues stem from general crappy performance on old gen consoles and the lack of save point control for console users. While seemingly impossible currently on Xbox, at least PS4 has something ...however cumbersome. I bought the game twice already...including the expansion packs...minus Gen for one of the systems. Now I pay $15 per month to play it on Xbox. I think I could ditch the "Ultimate" since I owe it and save $5 per month.. Anyhow, constant crashing led me to switch between systems. I also lost everything several times to poor updates and bad game crashes that wiped my character. I have come to accept that console performance is never going to be great, but what is not acceptable is losing everything because no one thinks to allow a proper save and recovery system. I can play with lousy graphics and maybe a touch of lag here and there...but losing everything several times really makes me question how I spend my "fun money". I would hope that any newly revamped Ark would include something to make me feel secure about investing my fun time and fun money into Ark. Since I have never had a "next gen" console, I have no clue how well they currently run the game. if it is seemless, I would indeed feel bad about having to buy the game all over again. Personally, I supported paying, I think I said upwards of $100 for a version of Ark...that actually worked well. That is excessive, but the parts of this game that work and that I like, I really like. I still have no clue why a single player can control absolutely every aspect of the game except for mutation rates...but what do I know? :-) So it is obvious now that making an old gen friendly revamped Ark is not feasible considering what UE5 can do for the next gen consoles. For we old gen console owners who have been putting off the upgrades...for whatever reason, maybe the time is now and honestly... a UE5 remaster and hopefully a few dozen good fixes will be worth the money. And hopefully they are serious about "longevity" and this fix lasts at least 5 years.

Imagine that...Woody714 logging on just to gripe again. I cannot believe the touchy sentiments and the audacious social engineering in society today. It is so bad that a mature adult in his 50's (quantify mature as you will) cannot type the words "Ammo" and "Raw" in game. My eyesight is poor. Using smaller versions of larger words enables me to actually read them on the GUI. Megatherium becomes "Meg", megalodon becomes "Shark" etc. you get the idea. Anything more than about 6 letters is very difficult for me to read easily. Furthermore, with the volume of materials to be "processed" in one's inventory, shortcuts like "Raw" instead of Raw Meat are very useful in searching for a specific material...I have used these shortcuts for several years now. Since I play on both PS4 and Xbox One, I can say I have noticed differences in the "censorship" between the platforms. The last time I used the PS4, I think I was actually able to label a folder "Ammo" instead of "Ammunition". When I switched back to Xbox One, I noticed right away that "Ammo" was seemingly forbidden. I was certainly annoyed, but since you don't have to access the ammo folder very often, I dealt with it. Suddenly this morning, I notice that I cannot use the word "Raw" when trying to sort raw meat in my inventory. Wow...too much, guys! I use that one alot. I understand that you are trying to maintain an appropriate environment for online gameplay. While I don't agree with the choices made in regards to censorship and the online community, I can understand blocking obviously offensive language. When the touchiness and social engineering begin to focus on innuendo and so forth, where does it stop? One sure way to draw attention to anything is to forbid it. The same folks who would try to insult someone or be offensive generally will be the first ones to try even harder to defeat the challenges of censorship. You are not eliminating a problem, you are drawing attention to it and amplifying it. As a mature (ah hem) adult who plays offline and solo in the privacy of his own home, I am getting annoyed at the increasing levels of difficulty of the non-gameplay aspects of Ark. I quit playing right before the Thanksgiving event when my Xbox one would not stop crashing and losing my progress. I missed the entire Winter Wonderland Event as well...the last one and my favorite, because I decided to play Grounded for the first time. Wow...what a breath of fresh air that was. A game can crash and no progress gets lost...who knew? It is getting a bit cumbersome having to decide if I should play after any given update, or do I lose my entire play through just by logging on? Is the game gonna work today on Fjordur or will I lose 2 hours of progress again? Should I even try to build a base, or can I stomach playing a map for 2 months living on a bare platform with only 4 dinos in play? The game has real issues, but it is still a beautiful and unique experience and apparently worth the torturous efforts needed to continue. Please don't make it anymore technically difficult just because a few people cannot behave online. I imagine Wildcard has the right to define it's morality as it sees fit, but it is hard to imagine that the words "Raw" and "Ammo", used in proper context, can be that offensive. Enough of the diatribe. In the spirit of morality, I will refrain from risking any offense to anyone and leave this forum to log on to The Island where I plan to murder baby Tek Parasaur for their useful bits. smash baby penguins in the head with a wooden club until their cellular membranes collapse in a runny heap and yield a tiny amount of polymer...and I might even break the bond of trust with a few mounts and tame a troodon. Totally not offensive at all...

I like the baryonyx for caving. It's an awesome mount. But yeah...

Yeah...that. I have hard time understanding why this has to be a thing. I have no idea why the game would have to function differently for PVE than for PVP in this regard. This has made breeding for mutations absolutely miserable in the past. It is such a strange thing to try to learn that I ended up starving and then harvesting THOUSANDS of baby dinos. I no longer play with single player settings, but even with PVE, I would get frustrated trying to simply figure out how to actually cull my own brood. Friendlly fire on...friendly fire off...single player on...single player off...those 4 options of experimentation cost 20 minutes of game loading time just to attempt one kill. So here we are again. I noticed poor progress on taming fjordhawks. I figured it might need an alpha kill or maybe a tame sacrifice. Then I saw a few videos. Phlinger Phoo, Syntac, FenderFTW and CJ CheeseDJ all seemed to have luck using tamed ovis. I actually had a pair so I bred some. I sacrificed at least 6 ovis on 3-4 occassions and not one bite of taming happened. It's been two weeks...really? Nerfed already? Sorry, I got Arked hard at least twice and lost 2 days to building and losing a boat that got stick on one ice pebble and something else I seem to be blocking from memory. Gee...I guess I should have hurried along a bit. Honestly, if a horde of angry beaver do not return to that valley and I cannot tame at least one level 25 from standing in a trap and shooting beaver, I am at a loss and y'all can keep the dang fjordhawk. P.S. Please stop listening to Syntac when he says something is broken. He has played from day one and he is probably just bored.

Also had a busy day in the ocean looking for loot...ok a rex saddle. No joy on that, but I visited the sunken ship and brought home another artifact and killed 3 or 4 alpha megalodons and an alpha mosa. The chibi is at about 640,000 xp.

I finally polished off some ok base level rexes for clean breeding and expanded the regular stego base to 6 females. Just finally got those guys polished up yesterday or the day before. I'm playing on Lost Island. I still have the Aberration Cave and Labyrinth to scour for artifacts and then hopefully a rag tag team of rexes, stegos and or tek stegos, yuty, daedon and possibly some bleeders like allos can take out the gamma dinopithicus. I need that Tek Rep for crafting, lol.