MMaas

52 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

You have no idea. There are probably less than 10-20 support people working thousands of tickets.

If you don't give them something. What do you expect? lol You get nothing.

Funny to see how in other threads WC is defended with frases like "ARK made billions so WC is doing a good job" but meanwhile is too cheap to hire a full support staff and leave the forum to "volunteers".

9 hours ago, wizard03 said:

The only thing you can do is just try to run around with your GF on a short leash.

You might try to get another xbox, tv, and then go online. Its about the best way. But yeah, tethering super sucks.

Of course the first option is most realistic
[TrollMode=off]

We kind of tried the second option but you need a 3^rd device to act as server or join another server.
So we joined official servers but that killed our couch coop game completely and playing official servers introduced us to the world of rubbebanding and lag like even our worst nightmares are getting scared of.

I'm afraid with all the focus to ARK 2 we will never see this fixed anymore.

What made you think they would not release an early acces? Look at ARK, never left eraly acces.

Some people gave me advice after that update how and where (not magma pitt) to go to farm shards. They all complained the spawn was broken.  My experience however was that with just an Anky there was more to farm than what they told me to expect while the magma in the same area did not do anything and the doedi was rather dissapointing.

Depends on the platform I gues?
Steam, Epic, Xbox//Gamepass, and maybe someday in the distant future PS, all have their own policies.

8 hours ago, SarahMonette said:

So.  How's those non-Event slow imprint rates worken out for ya all?  Feeling it yet?

Thanks to the desmodus I can skip 7 imprints on my Giga's, feels like a permanent event
As does the incubator for taking away the timer on eggs, as does the maewing for not handfeeding babies anymore...

It actualy sucks: Mass breeding "difficult" babies is not an accomplishment anymore.

(Wonder what  the next lemmon will be...)

2 hours ago, Stewbawl said:

...
3) fun.  do i need an equus? maybe, they can be used as a morter & pestle if you have a saddle.  probably not, i've got a chem bench now and hardly ever craft on the go, and now mostly i travel by flight anyway.  do i breed them anyway? yes, i have a plethora of ponies and i will hidalgo race tribemates across the map at the drop of a gauntlet just for funsies.
...

No.
You need a Unicorn!
Your chem bench won't lasso those dodobunnies in to your egg dispensor and neither will your morter and pestel

14 hours ago, SarahMonette said:

And what about the children's charity?  What happens to it?  Those kids in the hospital.  It's an event here on ark to help them.

No one is stopping you from making direct donations instead of through organised charities that are mostly tax deduction constructions.

7 hours ago, SarahMonette said:

It was not the lag that pushed the players away.  It was not even that the game is to graphic heavy to most people's ordinary pc's.  It was not crappy servers.

Ark 1 has no where to go with your pets once you've caught them and bred them up.  

All that held this game together was the excitement of getting a colorful high level on a populated server and the bragging rights it gave you.

This game is empty of meaning without the events.

That is your opinion.

In all fairness, the poor performance of the game is for quite a few people a reason to give up on ARK.
Several tribe mates did, I've put ARK on hold a few times for that as well but kept comming back.

I did not come back for the colours, I gave up on Farmville long ago and never liked My Little Pony or the Carebears. I never came back for the boosted rates and people claiming they only can breed during events just breed either too much or to dumb.

In my opinion ARK took away it's own meaning by replacing specific dino abilities by simple tech, unlimitted server hopping and overpowered dino's. Dimetrodons are useless now, who need argies when you just can teleport yourself all over the place or drag a magma all over the place with a skiff? Who needs smart planning if you can do minibosses with just one half decent Giga and most Alpha bosses with only 20 top rexes and no support?

ARK has been catering to mass breeders and speedrunners more and more, trading has taken over the actual gameplay and that is just getting boring. Even base building is simplified with ocean platforms and huge flat area's on new maps. Every idiot and his granny can build a mega base within no time now.
New maps with closed servers are the best part of the game to me and many others and the moment servers are open first there's a boom in imported topstat dino's and then people start spreading thin when there is not enough dealing going on.

(Note: This is all said with official PvE in mind as It seemed to me OP is not even considering PvP for competitive purpose.)

8 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

Current, past, future player base. 

2 have already paid. One will.

I know by now you are about as stubburn as I am, but you are kind of loosing what this discussion was about and are just spamming replies.
The numbers you throw around now have not much to do with the ammount of people playing ARK.
Do the math: Grossed revenue diveded by the cost of 1 copy...
It is just not relevant.

This discussion was intended about how transparency could improve the game experience. A positive experience should be reflected in a consistent growth of players, not the rollercoaster the graph is now.
Steamcharts and personal experience on the PS platform indicate the current player numbers are boosted by freeloaders that drop the game as soon as next months giveaway is announced. Whatever the busines model may be, it does not depend sold copies and returning players.

2 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

You got me. I guess they are broke by now.

BS and you know it.

Point is not broke or rich, point is that sales in the past do not reflect the current loyal playerbase.

2 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

The sales that have sent Ark to a 1 billion dollar franchise.

History. That's not realy relevant to the current playerbase
See Steamcharts: Almost 100k higher peak than at a paid new map launch, 60% of the growth is already lost...

Several people on our PS server got DC'ed and could not come back, that was how we were warned about an upcomming update. After the update there was the server maintenance, it was very ARK to get the "... 15 minutes..." warning when just back in the middle of giga hatching...

14 hours ago, Joebl0w13 said:

And? Their sales don't seem to reflect bad will and transparency doesn't seem to enter the equation.

What sales? It's been a giveaway game on most platforms recently.

11 hours ago, TheDonn said:

Hopefully the design philosophy in ARK 2 breaks that WildCard tradition, and they spend time refining released maps, systems, and creatures.

I share the hope but am afraid that is a leadership issue.
Also the announcement of partnering with a studio that recently showed a huge lack of quality assurance by releasing the GTA trilogy in the state it was is a sign nothing will change for the better.

On 7/17/2022 at 2:44 AM, Joebl0w13 said:

To people playing the game legitimately. None of it should matter.

It does matter. It can make the difference between giving up reporting bugs or trying to make an accurate report, between another false cheater claim or a valid one.

"Need to know" is a sign of weakness and arrogance. Maybe transparency is wasted on the masses or abused by a few but is that a valid reason to treat the interested users that are of good will like they are the wrongdoers?

14 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

It's not my fault you can't keep up.

Als ik deze discussie in mijn eigen taal ga voeren hou jij het ook niet bij, bijdehandje

No use even trying to keep up with your assumptions about me not having paid attention to certain discussions. Clearly you did not read what I said there: Good information will reduce the ammount of false reports.
We see things just very different and it is a waste of my time to edit that wall of text point by point.

So I'll admit defeat, overlord of twisting words.

54 minutes ago, Metalace said:

Yay now fix the problems you caused with this so called update fix... everytime I open my inventory i crash!!!! Ps5 user and I load into game let it fully render and open inventory and BOOM game crashes! You might as well extend the event till the end of August because its nothing but crash crash crash!

CE-108255-1 or CE-105799-1? Those are so common since a few months I don't even bother to report. Dismounting and inventory check is the most common crash on our PS5. Right after the update it happened "only" 3 times in 4 hours.
The issue could be hardware or software related, local or server,  but ARK is the only game that has these crashes so frequent. Even Warthunder, Fallout 4 or 76 and  a bugfest like Cyberpunk 2077 do not crash so often as ARK does and it is getting fairly annoying to get so little response on bug reports. A so called indy FPS shooter like Hell Let Loose is giving a far more stable gameplay, never chrashed.

Official PS server performance is also very random, there used to be a 20~40 ping on EU servers (while playing from EU) with a low even as good as 9 on launch of Fjordur! Every afternoon (or morning in USA) the ping rises to 70~90 with an absolute dissaterous high of 130~180 last evening (or afternoon in USA of course)! This is kind of weird given the fact that player numbers have dropped roughly 30% on average during the day and barely reach the cap lately.

(And no, not expecting any response of WC to this remark... Why would they care. I'm an ARK addict, I will play no matter how crappy the game delivers.)

6 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

tl;dr;

Don't start an argument you can't finish.

I might, I just don't care if it has to be full lawsuit style.

6 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

That's not necessarily the case. Most of the time, these exploits have multiple ways of being achieved. Giving details about the exploits, or their fixes, just gives ammo to exploiters for finding different methods to get the same results or directly ways to circumvent the fixes themselves. Not only that, but fixes are not always pushed to all platforms at the same time due to certifications and whatnot. Giving details would just encourage and publicize these exploits on platforms that are not patched yet.

If there are multiple ways, then don't report it as "fixed" until all is fixed.
There is a healthy middleground between the generic "several" and full details.

5 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

You ignored part of what I said and by doing so you missed the point, for many types of cheats (not all of them, but many) there is more than one way to accomplish that cheat. I'm guessing you don't have a professional background in programming or IT, which means you're not familiar with how complicated systems are behind the scenes and how many different ways it can be possible to accomplish the same goal using different methods.

Just because WC was able to fix one method of accomplishing a cheat does not mean that they have fixed every possible method of doing it. Knowing that ONE method of accomplishing a cheat was fixed lets cheaters know that that particular cheat is possible, which then lets them know that they might be able to accomplishing their same goal using some other method.

As I said before, I've been in a tribe that had people who constantly looked for new ways to cheat. When WC fixed one method they immediately started looking for a new method. The reason I left that tribe was that the tribe leaders weren't willing to kick the cheating members. It's important to note, these people were not creatively working hard on figuring out new ways to cheat. Each individual cheater wasn't spending dozens of hours figuring things out. They were just looking for efficient ways to cheat the game and most of the time they were sharing info with other cheaters they knew from previous tribes and servers they had been on. They only knew about the cheats that were discovered by their friends and former tribe mates. There is a word-of-mouth system among cheaters and the more people that a cheater knows then the more cheats they know about, but none of them know about all the cheats.

Just because one method is fixed doesn't prevent people for looking for new methods, that's why most game companies will not explicitly talk about many types of cheats.

Well no, it's not the same, you're ignoring a great deal of the reality of what was happening.

Apple did that for marketing purposes, to pretend that they were better at security than MS. That was during a time when the vast majority of hackers hated MS and were trying to hack them while ignoring Apple as 'the good guys'. Apple wasn't any more secure, and they weren't any better at fixing hacks, than MS. They just enjoyed the false perception that they were better because basically no one was trying to hack them.

As time went by, and hackers started to think of Apple more and more as being one of 'the bad guys', Apple lost this advantage and the cracks in their false appearance of better security practices started being exposed by reality. Apple stopped doing what you're talking about because Apple discovered repeatedly that full disclosure made them more vulnerable to future hacking.

It was "security by obscurity", when no one is trying to hack your OS then the OS looks like it's really good. It's an illusion, and it was an illusion that Apple took advantage of in spite of not being any better at security than MS was.

You're conflating hackers with cheaters. Neither of them are stupid, but they have different goals and different things they're willing to do. Most cheaters do so because they're looking for convenience, not a creative challenge, they want ways to save time. While there are people who work hard at figuring out new ways to cheat & exploit the game the vast majority of cheaters are just looking for shortcuts to make the game easier. There is a limit to how much time & effort most cheaters will spend spend individually, their knowledge of cheats is limited to what they and their friends know. Giving too much information about which specific cheats & exploits have been fixed only serves to make them more aware of more types of cheats are possible.

You've obviously never spent any time in customer support for a game, or even paid much attention to people complaining about cheating on the forums. A great deal of the time when people don't understand how something is done they just assume it's a cheat. "I can't figure out how that happened, so obviously they were cheating." This happens all day, every day, in every game. There is always a constant stream of reports about cheating in every game, because there are always many people who don't understand how other people might be better than they are.

Publishing more information about fixes wouldn't have any affect on players reporting cheating, that's wishful thinking.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this sentence, it's rather garbled.

Again, there's no such thing as "the community", the players are many communities.

Beyond that, yes, WildCard is definitely "taking us for dumb cashcows only that are happy when you feed them just enough to not starve", as a general attitude about the game, but not on this particular issue.

WC is a pretty terrible company, but they're not terrible on this specific issue. They have a long history about being terrible at caring about cheating, but that doesn't mean they're terrible about their style of communication when they actually do take actions against cheating. They're generally terrible at customer service, but that doesn't mean they're terrible about this issue. They're generally terrible at making quality of life fixes to the game that would prevent people from losing many hours per person because of glitches that should have been fixed a long time ago, but that doesn't mean that they're terrible at this particular issue.

I'm not a fan of WC in general, and playing on the Official servers is a time-sucking nightmare. The only reason I'm playing ARK today is that we can play it on a private server which gives me the ability to overcome the major flaws with the game. They'll never get my money for ARK2 because their core company culture hasn't changed - in fact the longer that the CEO of Snail Games running the show it's only going to get worse.

But... with all that being said it's still true that WC is not worse than other companies on this particular topic. Every game company refuses to give specific details on some of the things that they patch/fix because they know that giving away too much information just opens the door for more bad from cheaters.

Talking about other games makes perfect sense because it helps people to understand how things work. If every game company does something then there are probably good reasons for doing so and it's important to discuss and understand why they do so. Even if only most, or say half, of game companies do something then it's still important to discuss and understand why they do it.

There's not one single game that discloses everything, and there are very good reasons why they don't. Giving out too much information is a great way to make a game more vulnerable to additional hacks, exploits and cheats.

Tl;dr
Sure you touched on ever word yet?

27 minutes ago, Pipinghot said:

When you tell cheaters something new, something they didn't know was possible, you have just informed people who want to cheat that now they might be able to find a new way to cheat something they would have never known about.

Excactly: WAS possible but no longer is.

This discussion is kind of the difference between MS an Apple in the ancient days. Where Apple tended to announce every possible hack even before it was fixed, MS was not even acknowledging issues untill they fixed it.
Things have changed by now, I know, but in those very same days Mac OS was the platform with the least issues. It never hurted me to know there were certain security risks in some programs, awareness helps to be more secure when needed.

In my opinion hackers are not all stupid idiots, more the opposite. The (ab)use of flaws in programs can be a fun and creative process, most of the people involved in this don't need to get more ideas. Hackers are in fact the people with the ideas.

There is more to gain in making the other users aware so at least they recognize hacks: Less false reports, more (timely?) accurate reports.
And the trust of the community that Wildcard is not taking us for dumb cashcows only that are happy when you feed them just enough to not starve.

And for the people that have no clue or just don't care? That's not the group you are doing it for, it is for all the other people it should be done.Also, pointing to other games does not make sense. Some (actualy most) companies are more communicative, others are worse. But that does not matter since we are just discussing ARK and how to improve the experience.

8 hours ago, Joebl0w13 said:

Exactly what is that going to change. How will it help you? And exactly how is that going to do anything to prevent cheating?

Trust.
Trust that making reports is not a waste of time. As well as not wasting time on reporting the same over and over again.
Trust that GM's do enforce in a structured way and not all on their own.

They do.
Compared to the actual staff they are hero's!

3 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

I understand why they don't. They would be spammed by people with their issues. There are no direct lines to a GM for a reason.

Fair point, given the toxic behaviour of some players. (I try to be not one of them but it's hard sometimes )
It is indeed more the job of a community manager.

Oh, wait... Community managers here do not communicate either