IGacha

On 4/2/2024 at 9:31 AM, VillaNovan84 said:

Hey folks at Wild Card.

Terrible job, once again, when it comes to rolling out your product.  Not sure whose in charge of planning and deployment involving releases or in ordering the correct number of official servers, but they apparently need to be reassigned or let going because given my customer experience with Ark Ascended and the lack of official servers to play on as a paid customer and a game pass subscriber, not ensuring that those of us who purchased your game and play it by investing real life hours definitely shows what Wild Card thinks of its loyal based vs. people who will try the game out for free, then ditch it because it’s “flavor of the week” on game pass is over.  
 

I can not begin to express to you the disappointment and frustration of myself and other players who voiced their frustrations and disappointment in Discord over not being able to get on to an official server on launch day after buying ASA months ago and then paying the $30 for Bob Tall Tale content only to be delayed by the last minute client roll out that definitely impacted the ability to get on a server before they filled up.  Given the expectations set by Wild Card during ASA’s initial launch of not wanting console players to be “left in the dust” by other players who had release day access in getting started, when console players didn’t, I was very disappointed, but not surprised that Wild Card learner nothing from its mistake of not ensure that this type of player experience was not repeated during other releases like this one (actions and words not the same), and yet it was but even worse then before because after playing nearly the same for ASA additional content for Aaron game and  DLC that was released as free yesterday on Game Pass and collecting another $30, people couldn’t get in, either via the Ob on an Official Server they were a member of or through a new character because Wild Card did not “plan accordingly” to the fact that on launch day, in addition to ASA’s existing customer base, ASA was free to play on Game Pass on console, with someone posting WC’s gratitude over the last several hours about the overwhelming interest or success in the game, or words to that effect, when in fact limiting the number of Official Servers to a level well below your company paid customer base was and is going to create a false or misleading image of “overwhelming interest” (and a lack of sincerity on what WC really thinks of its loyal supporters) when it was in fact a problem on WC’s end because it’s really because the folks in charge of resource planning and deployment “short changed” Wild Card and its consumer base to the point of creating “Very Dissatisfied” customers like me. 

Wild Card has a great product in Ark as a survival game, but continues to score “F”s and “D”s with it’s lack of Customer Focus Culture” (Microsoft had a whole “CFC” initiative once upon a time) and inability to set the proper customer expectations, especially with it comes to game releases, release days, announcements, resulting in a “Very Dissatisfied” customer experience overall…

VN84
 

 

The last part is the worst. Its actually a great game but 80% of the playerbase wants to play on week of release of new DLC and have to spend 50% of the time just waiting on the menu to get into a server

Its crazy how normalized this has become.... I reinstalled the game this morning cause scorched looked really good only to find every single server was full and after 3 hours of waiting I just cant put myself thru this again. Idk how you guys do it but when you are spending more than half the time looking at a "joining server" screen it doesn't matter how good the game is because its mostly just a menu simulator at that point 

2 hours ago, Steve1234 said:

So of all the many bugs and whatnot I've encountered so far in ASA, the official servers list keeps saying no sessions found even after hours of waiting, restarting the game/console etc. I just don't know how to resolve the issue. Any help on the matter would be appreciated! TIA!

I have the same problem too I thought it was because servers were updating but its been over 15 hours 

For me server went down 10 mins after my eggs hatched and havent been able to join for 2 hours... rip 

On 11/24/2023 at 3:48 AM, ugoat said:

The servers (XBOX) just constantly give "Lost/timeout connection to host" when I click join. Has this been talked about? My tribemates can join but I only get this message and haven't been able to join for 2 days after I was initially able to. If there is no word on this and isn't being addressed then I want to apply for a refund.

Same for me man, game was running just fine all week and now on Extra Life every time I join server its "connection timeout" for the past hour. Did it ever start working for you again? 

So ASA released on xbox today and the game looks great, no problems with crashing or lagging or anything at all it was the most fun on ark I've had since I first started in ASE 4 years ago. I was lucky enough get on right when the day 1 servers came on and played for about 3 hours, got a base setup and farmed a good amount of metal and I decided to log off for an hour to walk my dog and get some food. I have now been spending the last hour just trying to log back in with no luck at all and I cant help but feel I wasted all my time progressing on that server that I now cant even play, unless I want to spend the next few hours simply trying to log back on to the server. Something as simple as a server que would help this process DRAMATICALLY. I love game so far and am really impressed with how it looks and plays like a high-end game, but when you cant even play the game because of this archaic server system it really creates a lot of unnecessary stress and just heavily cheapens the experience.

And ppl wonder why others use pillars on official pve all the time

To be fair it wasnt promised, they know better than that by now 

On 11/8/2023 at 2:01 PM, Arkolucious said:

PVP vs Offline it is most time - or against such a less powerful enemy, that it does not matter if he is online or offline.

I think the whole FFA-Idea makes people play the lowest risk in 99% of the case - but PVP could actually be more vivid and more fun if it gets managed by the gamerules somehow in a more balanced way. The huge imbalance between time investment you need to do, to actually start pvp besides of bob fights with wooden spears compared to the actual PVP is a problem. Popular PVP-Games try to create balanced matchups with different  skill-level-matchmaking....and if you get rolled over - you can just start over again without any delay and need to recover and farm stuff back. The pvp conditions against your enemies are somewhat balanced and fair and it is immediate upon request.

This just does not apply to ark and this genre - so this is one huge reason.

I have always thought about how this could be fixed and how to avoid to sacrifice the openworld feeling of the maps and the huge freedom players have besides pvp.

 

Maybe deviding a pvp map like Island into different PVP-Zones - mb based on popularity and/or resources/dinos available - or shifts randomly. So the easy lowlevel zones allow for a more moderate approach of pvp - or may be only 2 days in a week, a time limit with some days of peace between them. While in other zones it stays as extreme as it is.

Whenever you enter such zones you get a warning - stay there and you get tagged for pvp even you return to the beginner zone. So the strong tribes would duel each other, while beginners have a little more room ot breathe.

 

Just an Idea - many other concepts could be possible.

PVP zones actually sounds like it could be a really fun idea. I only ever played PVE because I dont wanna start from scratch 100 times but if everything outside of the PVP zone was safe I would definitely try it out 

On 11/11/2023 at 1:10 PM, Coomren said:

This is straight facts. I'm tying to build a compact and detailed base. Especially including the new smaller quarter structures. However, 5500 is so low that I cannot build more than the external shell of the base.

However, if I was to just build a large box with large walls and super high ceilings it would mean that I would be able to have a bigger, uglier and more obstructive base.

I do really hope that the limit is increased soon because I am currently at the cap with less than half a functional base.

5500 is not low at all. Unless you are building a 50x50 mega base then 5500 is more than enough to put as much detail as you could ever want in you build 

21 hours ago, Traslo said:

is it just me or has ascended basically made Doedicurus the rarest animal on The Island? All of its spawns are now just steep cliffs, and it's basically impossible to find one, even a low-level one.

Doeds are one of those creatures you see all the time until you want to tame one 

16 hours ago, G0AT said:

I dont understand why people hate on ASA, can anybody explain to me becuase i got no clue

How about you read the comment right above yours 🤣

On 11/3/2023 at 9:32 PM, TheHatedConsolePlayer said:

Speechless ATM. So, title...^^^

As an xbox player who always had to deal with playstation getting updates and releases from other games ahead of us, I say thats karma 🤣

7 hours ago, TheHatedConsolePlayer said:

I've been reading through comments and it has me a bit concerned/confused. 

It, to me, reads like there will be Xbox only and PlayStation only servers. 

However, people are commenting saying that the wording is different for PlayStation and MAY NOT mean the same thing. 

If there are not PlayStation only servers then I have no choice other than to not play the game. Already teetering on the fence as is. 

Any clarification would be appreciated.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who would like to know from the comments I've seen. 

Thanks. 

On ASE "console specific servers" meant xbox and playstation separately. Crossplay will be a feature eventually, but I imagine the definiton refers to xbox only and playstation only servers for the time 

On 11/8/2023 at 11:48 PM, Penguin73 said:

Xbox player. I thought about what I would do if I were playing. Does that count? 🤣

Xbox player too, I booted up the island on ASE and tried to figure out routes from spawn to good building spots to get there before they are all pillared off 🤣

On 11/2/2023 at 7:16 AM, Rashaka1 said:

Here is the sad part about the game....  This is going to be LONG.  Sorry no TLDR.

 

Let's just assume the launch was 100% A okay and there were zero bugs at all, which is honestly laughable atm but let's just pretend...

 

The fact that if you want to run your own server you either must A) Own your own server hardware and run it out of your home or other colocation, or B) You must run your server through Nitrado which is honestly the worst of all the complete trash servers hosts out there.

Here's a small list of the things I hate about Nitrado considering I've run servers since day 1 of EA for ASE.

-No ability to place warnings for your players that a scheduled maintenance is about to happen.  You get a built in 5 second warning and that is it.

-No ability to schedule a maintenance at an exact time.  You pick the hour that you want and you pick a 10 minute window in which their servers randomly choose a time in.  So if you pick 1-10 then your server will restart anywhere between x:01 and x:10.  So at best if you pick 9am for your server reset you need to tell everyone to log out roughly by 8:45 so they don't get screwed out of a server save..

-No ability to have the server perform a world save before shutting down.

-No ability to upload your own ini files.  They have an editor that you have to use and copy paste your info into it.  

-No ability to decide when your server updates.  Just because new server software was released doesn't mean you can update.  You MUST wait for Nitrado to decide to allow the update on their internal systems first.  That can take as many as 3-5 hours.  Until that happens you can not update your server to newer versions.  Since you can't control when Steam updates the client this means some updates will cause a server/client mismatch which makes it so you can't even log in to play and you have to wait as much as 5 hours to update the server so you can play again.  GG if you only have less than 5 hours to play on that day....

 

I could go on and on about the hot trash that is Nitrado and the BS of Wildcard forcing us to use this trash company because they wanted to make more money off the sales of server rentals....

 

Now let's move on to the game...

When you actually get into the game itself.  Many of the biggest things about ASE that we all loved were all the mods that existed and most of us were huge fans of Structures Plus mod.  Orionsun, the prick that he is, more from personal experience with him than the average player, has already stated that because he works for Wildcard now that he's just too busy to get his mod updated to work for ASA even at the most basic of levels.

Which means benefits of that mod that fixed Wildcard's failure to understand it's customer base won't be available in ASA until someone else makes it happen in a mod.  This means no stacking foundations which is one of the most used features in all of the mods in ASE.  Then you have all the quality of life stuff like glass structures that have the same health as metal in case you wanted a nice view for your base but you didn't want the wall to be 1 shot by a lone dilo...

No more pickup gun that has a zero wait delay to pick up structures, no more mass transfer materials omni tool.  No more pulling in resources or crafting items by pulling resources from nearby boxes.

 

No more mass storage outside of that aweful looking vault that you don't get until SUPER late into the game.  That's right, the metal box that everyone loved was part of S+.

 

This also means that you are limited to 75 slots in your crafting benches which means most of the mastercraft and ascended recipes are not able to be crafted because the crafting materials are so insanely high that you can't put that many of them into 75 slots which means it can't be crafted if it requires a smith bench to craft.

 

The weather inside the game is all over the place and unless you have insanely good gear and are willing to keep 2 sets of gear on you at all times it's basically impossible to survive some days due to the massive temperature spikes that can go as high as 55 degrees Celsius and as low as -20 degrees Celsius at the drop of a hat.

 

They also felt the need to remove the ability to improve you or your dino's movement speeds.  Granted you can turn this back on with an ini setting, but if you don't you may not realize that this makes NPC dinos harder to fight because they don't waste points in movement speed anymore which means all their other stats can be higher so more health and more attack power at the same levels as before.

 

Most of the ini settings we are used to don't work properly anymore.  Simple things like changing the crafting cost of items or simply removing certain types of dino spawns from your map because you find them annoying don't seem to work at all at the time of writing this.

 

The map is very barren.  There aren't anywhere near as many dinos as there use to be.  I also understand that you have to be in an area for a while before it will completely populate.  It's just not happening.

 

This is basically ASE with a coat of paint slapped on it and most of the stuff we loved stripped out of it.  I could honestly go on for hours about all the things I'm not enjoying about this game right now that don't have anything to do with the insane amount of crashing that I've been dealing with.  I just thought people would like to have an idea of what this game is going to look like once the crashes have stopped.... 

Played ark for 4 years on xbox and so never used any mods and only played official so server providers dont meant anything to me. Most people I know are like this as well so when you say stuff "we" loved about the game, know that its only true for some people. 

2 hours ago, Leprekan said:

Feel free to share a list of the reliable servers. Ours is crashing every hour or two and rollsback. That's when it's running well ... Last night it was offline for 7 hours and is presently offline again for 2 hours. 5247 is the server. No communication from Wildcard about it just a blackhole where we spam refresh hoping we didn't lose another mount and set of gear. This is truly unplayable and I was there for day 1 of the ASE launch which showed Wildcard cared back then.

Im only speaking from years of experience on ASE official servers. I play on xbox so I havent been able to play ASA yet I thought the same rules would apply but apparently not since everyone seems to be having issues with servers on ASA. The times I experienced outages like that on ASE official servers is was usually because someone was duping and crashing the game, people griefing by throwing all their tames out, or having too many bases and players within render distance. For ASA it sounds more of a stability issue than an overload one so I would just try and find times that the servers are most stable and try to play during those times. Once we get ASA on xbox I'll see for myself what its like and if I can give any useful info then 

The amount of traffic is probably the biggest problem that effects official servers, other than that they are the most reliable so if you pick a low pop server you should be fine 

What an emotional day it was for us Ark players. You guys really did close the servers with grace and it was very much appreciated by us who spent long hours over the years building up our little worlds. Just wanted to thank you for that, it really shows how much you guys care about us ❤️. Looking forward to ASA and what's to come 🙂

I cant find any saves for crossplay official servers (Win10/ Xbox) 

On 8/27/2023 at 12:44 PM, Smorz said:

What about xbox official server saves? will there be a save available to take to single player? nitrado?

They will be on single player cause that would make the most sense 

So if I am a xbox player my save file will be on single player yes? 

As long as we get to keep characters and bases I wouldn't mind paying for a (new) remastered game. But $60 is too much, half the price would be fair, and DLCs should carry over as well.  

The transparency is appreciated!! It might be a little disappointing that the game release got delayed, but not nearly as disappointing as it would be if Ark 2 was released in a bad state. An ambitious project like this takes time to do properly, especially with a small studio. Take your time!! We ark players are here for the long run  

If we can choose to mate we should be able to choose to abort