Pipinghot

I agree, and personally I hope it hurts them financially, I'm just not confident that it will. Considering the history of bs that WC has already committed I just don't think the comparison to how Star Wars Galaxy hurt themselves will hold up.

No one asked for all of the other crappy stuff that WC has done and yet ARK is still here. People have been predicting the death of ARK, right here, on these forums, since about 2 months after the game started in Early Access... and they've all been wrong. * Released paid DLC while the game was still in Early Access (because they needed money to settle a lawsuit). People predicted that would kill ARK, and yet it "worked out really well" for WildCard. * Went from Early Access to full release while still being packed full of bugs and failures. People predicted that would kill ARK, and yet it "worked out really well" for WildCard. WC is, quite frankly, a crappy and greedy company, on par with the worst years of EA games and yet things have "worked out really well" for WildCard despite their many failings. This is a game that has made over a billion dollars (with a "B") just on Steam alone, and goodness only knows how much on other platforms. No matter how much WC abuses players people keep buying the game, no matter how bad their customer service is people keep buying the game, no matter how bad the official servers are people keep buying the game, no matter how many times they "change their mind" (lie) about things like this people keep buying the game. So, again, you can cherry pick examples of games that failed or that didn't listen to the community, but those examples ultimately don't mean anything. Personally, I'd love to see them take a huge financial hit for lying about this. I'm not bothered by the idea that they would charge some reasonable amount of money for upgrading to Unreal5 but I am bothered that they lied about it, and by the fact that this is basically buying the entire game a second time (and bothered by my own prediction that ARK2 will not, in fact be free if people buy ASA, that will turn out to be yet another lie). But I'll be surprised if that happens. WC's ownership & management has a long history of not caring about their players and still making money anyway, at this point there's no compelling reason to believe this time will be any different. Only time will tell.

Uh oh, didn't occur to me, good catch. Will be interesting to see how the week plays out.

Then again, it worked really well for World of Warcraft and other games that rebooted the game starting with classic. We can take turns cherry picking games that succeeded or failed, but really only time will tell whether WC is betting on the right horse. I strongly dislike what they've done, but I'll bet it turns out to be financially smart.

What happened to that is WildCard has always been voracious for players' money, this is the same company that charged for DLC while the game was will in Early Access.

Yeah, Overwolf is awful, I feel for all of the platforms that will be forced to eat that pig. True, and while I never believed for a minute that the conversion to Unreal 5 would be free, I also didn't think they would try to charge this much. I was expecting something like $30. Even my cynicism feels naive now.

I think they're betting that server wipes + Unreal 5 will gain more players than it loses. Or rather, will make enough money from people who stay spending money + people who come back spending money, and honestly they're almost certainly right. People have been predicting that they've killed the game since the first couple of months of early access and it hasn't happened yet. For every person who feels ripped off there's another person who feels like it's a chance to enjoy the game anew, with fresh refreshed graphics.

Harvesting animals plus at 3 good combat animals to ride on during your daily adventures. As long as you can harvest fiber, thatch, wood & stone efficiently to get started, and you have a couple of combat animals to ensure that you can survive your first day, you'll be fine.

Well it's time for all of the laughing or crying, depending on your point of view. After seeing WildCard talking and talking about how the conversion of ARK to Unreal 5 will be free now... it won't. Yup, you get to pay for the same game, again, to play it in Unreal 5 (and who wants to guess how long the current version will exists on Official servers). And yes, they say that this new purchase will give you access to both ARK-Unreal5 and ARK2, but if you believe that I have some swampland in Louisiana to sell you. You're going to pay $50 for ARK (again), $20 for Explorer's Pass (again), $20 for Genesis pass (again)... and then somehow you're still going to end up paying for ARK2, I guarantee it. From today's Community Crunch ARK: Survival Ascended is a next-generation remaster of our beloved ARK: Survival Evolved, harnessing the power of Unreal Engine 5. It will be released on Xbox Series S/X, PC (Windows/Steam), and PlayStation 5 by the end of August 2023. The base game will include The Island, SOTF, and all the “Non-Canon” DLC maps (which will be added to ASA over time). Xbox Series S/X and PC players will only be able to get it via an ultimate-value bundle known as the ARK Respawned Bundle. This bundle includes ownership of both ARK: Survival Ascended AND ARK 2 and will be priced at $49.99. This bundle will be available to purchase from the end of August for up to 1 year (after which ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK 2 will be sold separately). Additionally, the bundle will provide players access to an exclusive 1-month closed-beta to ARK 2 in 2024 before the rest of the general public can play ARK 2. PlayStation 5 users will be able to get their hands on ARK: Survival Ascended as a standalone next-gen game at launch in August 2023 for $39.99. All the expansion packs will be sold separately on all platforms: $19.99 for Explorer’s Pass, which includes Scorched Earth, Aberration (Q4 2023), and Extinction (Q1 2024). $19.99 for Genesis Pass, which includes Genesis Part 1 (Q1 2024) and Genesis Part 2 (Q2 2024).

Nice explanation, +1 for you.

Is that true even if you're playing Local/Host ?

To put it in less technical terms, the computer still has to "talk to itself". You can see this by pinging 127.0.0.1 on any computer (also known as "the loopback address".) https://www.howtogeek.com/789017/what-is-the-127.0.0.1-ip-address-and-how-do-you-use-it/

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that. * Every Battlefield game in the franchise... ever. * A significant portion of EA's history as a company. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-worst-pc-game-launches/ It's really easy to forget how bad lots (and lots) of games were once they start working properly. Or it's possible you've just been really lucky and haven't played any of the many terrible games that the industry has released over the years. https://whatculture.com/gaming/10-blatantly-unfinished-video-games-that-were-released-anyway https://www.gamepressure.com/editorials/broken-games-that-were-never-fixed-despite-promises/zb461 https://www.pcgamer.com/the-15-worst-pc-games-of-all-time/ The point is the industry is full of bad games, if you've been fortunate enough to avoid them then good on you, I envy you. I don't know if this will make you feel better, but that's largely true on PC also. If you don't spend some money for a pretty high-end PC you have to drop disable or reduce the various quality settings (sometimes by a whole lot) to make the game playable. The number of people who don't have to reduce settings in order to enjoy ARK are few. I'm not defending WC, they're a bad company in plenty of ways, and I too have posted plenty of criticisms of them on these forums. The only point I'm making is there are a bunch of companies and a whole bunch of games that are just as bad as most of the bad things about WC & ARK. @Joebl0w13 and Woody - have either of you played Conan Exiles on any consoles? Since Conan is the game that has the most in common with ARK (that I can think of), I'm curious how console performance on Conan compares once you start building a big base and having lots of tames (thralls).

Yikes, that's awful. Serious question - why would anyone want one? It's hard to imagine why anyone would want a console that's windows, but worse. As far as I can tell, just about every game on the planet plays better on a PC than on a console, and for the few exceptions you can attach a controller to a PC anyway.

Wait, are you actually complaining that a thread you started in the "General Discussion" forum resulted in a... general discussion? In one section of the forums that's true, that's exactly what the "Suggestions" forum is for (just like with many other games). Regardless of whether we have had a general discussion about other workarounds to the problem, you should definitely post any suggestions you want to make for the devs to read in the Suggestions forum. They don't (as far as I know) read the General Discussion" forum, this is a place where players basically discuss things among themselves. Hopefully someone who has more experience with your model of Xbox will be able to help with that. I mean, I hope it's obvious that we all feel your pain. We may have given you answers that don't make you happy, but nothing in that implies a lack of sympathy. That does sound wonky, not sure why it's doing that to you. Just as a workaround, since you have access to admin commands, are you able to use the give XP command to make your second character Lvl 89 also, so that you don't have to grind up a second character?

My guess is that it will show up faster in the future, but ARK is never super-fast. I don't know why this is, but in my experience when you start ARK server it take anywhere from 2-20 minutes before anyone is able to see it through Steam or through the game client, with 10-15 minutes being the most common time range. I've had much faster response times hosting servers for other games, so I assume this is caused by decisions WildCard has made (which is to say, their A&A infrastructure is either under-powered or configured poorly), but that's only a guess based on the fact that ARK is significantly slower for servers to show up than other games are.

Your startup looks good to me. In case this is useful to you, I'm running on Linux and this is what my startup looks like (note: I'm running ARK as a service). Service Path = /etc/systemd/system/ark-dedicated-theisland.service ExecStart=/mnt/raid/steam/Steam/arkdedicated/ShooterGame/Binaries/Linux/ShooterGameServer TheIsland?listen?SessionName=MyTheIsland?ServerPassword=<#####>?AltSaveDirectoryName=Island?MultiHome=192.168.1.15?Port=7777?QueryPort=27015 -NoTransferFromFiltering -server -log -clusterid=MyCluster If you're going to run other maps in the future, or if you're thinking about running more than one map at a time, you will definitely want a separate AltSaveDirectory for each map. If they all go into the same directory it can cause problems and you will find it much harder to troubleshoot. If you're not planning on doing those things then the AltSaveDirectory doesn't matter. You can say that it's simple, but this is the thing that causes the most problems for people setting up their own server in their own house. It's actually harder to find a server when you're trying to play from inside your own home network than it is for someone connecting to you from the outside, coming in from the internet. If your server is running, and the logs show that everything on the physical server and the game server are ok, that leaves networking as your most likely problem. If I had to be money I'd bet that the networking configuration is what's causing your problem. I'd like to ask a follow up question about something you said in your first post: "The server launches but does not listen on the port it's using nor is it able to be seen anywhere not even locally" * Does that mean you have asked someone else, someone who is not inside your home network, to try and find your server? Or does it mean that you tried it locally and assumed that someone outside of your home network would not be able to see it?

Short answer: The more often you log in the more that you should use raw meat. If your life/job/family require you to log in less often then you want to lean more heavily on cooked meat. Longer answer: It depends on how active you are while the babies are growing up and how many you like to raise at one time. The main reason people use cooked meat is that it allows them to be logged off for a longer period of time between feedings. But this logic only works if they leave enough food to keep all of the babies alive while they're logged off. Raw meat - 50 food, 40 stack size, 40 min spoil time * 2000 food per stack (at first, with less per stack as the stacks start to spoil) * Trough with 60 slots = 120,000 food max possible, in reality much less than this because of spoilage * No matter how many stacks you put in the trough, the trough will finish spoiling after 26.67 hours Cooked meat - 20 food, 50 stack size, 80 min spoil time * 1000 food per stack (at first, with less per stack as the stacks start to spoil) * Trough with 60 slots = 60,000 food max possible, in reality much less than this because of spoilage * No matter how many stacks you put in the trough, the trough will finish spoiling after 66.67 hours Unless you want to spend time doing the calculations, just make sure you have enough troughs to keep your babies alive for the amount of time you usually need to stay logged off and then make sure you top the troughs off when you do log in. Note #1: In the past I've seen an equation that calculates how much max food value a trough provides when you consider that stack each stack in the trough provides less food as the meat in the stack starts to spoil, but I couldn't find that equation in my old notes or spreadsheets. My "gut estimate" would be that you should assume a full trough provides about 50% of the ideal maximum. In other words a full trough of raw meat realistically provides about 60,000 food and a full trough of cooked meat realistically provides about 30,000 food. Again, that's a gut estimate because I can't find or remember the actual calculation. Note #2: These times are the base times. If you are in the habit of using preserving salt in your troughs then you can make the food last longer. I would venture that, for most players, it's well worth keeping salt in your troughs. Note #3: If you really care about this question you should do a couple of small experiments that would help you decide what's right for you. First, hatch a single baby, fill a trough, then check on the trough every couple of hours so you can figure out how much of the food value the baby actually gets to eat until the whole trough spoils. By doing this you don't need to spend time doing abstract math, you can simply observer the results of your test baby to decide what you need. For example: If a full trough gets eaten by a single baby in 12 hours, well then you need 2 troughs per baby every day. Conversely, if the trough is only half-eaten by the time you get to 24 hours then you only need half-a-trough per baby per day. You get the idea. Note #4: It's also important to remember that food, eating and spoiling are only calculated when things are rezzed in. If you log off for 1 hour, then log back in and rez every thing in, the game will start by doing two calculations: 1) How much meat has spoiled from each stack during that time and 2) How much food does the baby need. The game then spoils that much meat per stack, from every stack, all at the same time, and it drops the food value in the baby by that amount all at once. If the baby does not instantly starve, the game then has the baby consume food from the trough. What this means is that you lose more meat to spoilage if you log in less often than you would loose if you log in more often. If you stayed logged in the whole time, with your characters sitting in a chair, then the babies eat meat regularly, consistently, and you don't lose any extra meat to spoilage. But if you log off and log on, every time you log on and rez in your base, the game does the calculations and you lose a little extra meat to spoilage before the baby eats. And if you take a long time between logins you increase the chances of babies starving to death before they get to eat. This is why many tribes make sure they keep someone logged in, sitting in a chair in the baby nursery, at all times, because this is the best way to reduce the amount of spoilage and to prevent babies from starving.

Well, for starters that's a bad choice of comparison. The physical world has tons and tons (and tons and more tons) of examples of products companies that failed or harmed consumers during the 20th century "when reputation mattered". Looking backwards through rose colored lenses isn't doing yourself any favors. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/07/11/50-worst-product-flops-of-all-time/36734837/ https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-21-worst-product-flops-of-all-time.html https://www.al.com/news/2016/02/25_most_dangerous_products_in.html The reason we have organizations like the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Consumer Reports, Underwriters Laboratory, OSHA, and so many others is specifically because "building brand reputation" is a game of smoke and mirrors that has very little to do with the actual quality of the products. And beyond this, the games industry has a looong history of anti-consumer practices right from the very beginning. You could... https://www.thegamer.com/game-breaking-bugs-famous-video-games/ ...write a book... https://www.thegamer.com/20-game-glitches-that-completely-ruined-games/ ...about all of the games... https://screenrant.com/worst-bugs-video-game-breaking-pokemon-mega-man/ ...that treated players like human trash... https://www.ranker.com/list/why-people-hate-ea/john-saavedra ...while making tons of money... https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/how-electronic-arts-stopped-being-the-worst-company-in-america/ ...along the way. Again, rose colored lenses are not your friend.

Understood, creating saves for some platforms is easier than others. But... that doesn't change the fundamental reality that games sometimes have problems. It's just as frustrating to me, and to others, as it is to you, but reality is reality. We all feel your pain, but our sympathy doesn't fix your problem. Agreed, it's ridiculous in any game, not just ARK. But... reality again. Even games that create auto-backups can have lost data or corrupt save files, I've had that happen to me in multiple games that were supposed to be backing things up. Don't get me wrong, if the need to make manual backups means that you don't want to play a game, that's a valid choice for you to make. I've had problems with quite a few games over the years that required manual backups and in some cases I didn't enjoy the game enough to do it, I just quit playing them. If that's the choice you want to make then I won't try to tell you that you should keep playing. The points that I'm making are a) this isn't unique to ARK and b) if you want to keep playing, which is entirely your choice, then manual backups are a solution that would let you do so. If you don't have enough space on your XBox to keep multiple manual saves, why would the game be able to keep multiple auto-saves? Disk space is disk space regardless of whether it's manual or automated. If you have to buy flash drives to make backups manually then how do you think the game would make automatic backups for you? Those are sincere questions, by the way, I'm not just trying to be argumentative. I don't own a XBox but I play on PC and from what I've been told the folder structures for the save files for ARK are basically the same. On my PC the save structure would be: ..\Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Saved As far as I know that's also true on the XBox, so to save a specific map would mean making a backup copy of the folder for that individual map. On my computer these folders look like this... The Island = ..\Saved\SavedArksLocal (451 MB) The Center = ..\Saved\TheCenterSavedArksLocal (146 MB) Scorched Earth = ..\Saved\ScorchedEarth_PSavedArksLocal (91.8 MB) ...and so on. I could make a backup of all of my map folders at once on a flash drive, or multiple copies of any specific, individual map if I was playing on the same map a lot. And assuming the disk space usage on XBox is comparable you could do the same thing. Yeah, I understand those feelings (and I think most other people here do to). The decision is yours.

If you're playing single-player you have the ability to back up your game, and the fact that this has happened twice before should demonstrate how important it is to do backups. Everyone here can feel your pain, if feels like you shouldn't need to back up your game when it's single-player on your machine, but the reality is that it is necessary. This isn't unique to ARK, it's necessary for plenty of other games too. You can fight against reality or learn to do what you must in order to protect your time from being wasted.

Roger that. So I guess the thing you might find most useful to know is that even on the Official servers WC does not have, and has never had, what could be described as a guided plan. ARK is technically an RPG, since there are levels and the world has a backstory, but there is no such thing as a specific progression path that WC enforces, or even encourages. ARK, to put it in RPG terms, is fundamentally a "build your own adventure" game. On the Official servers it doesn't have a beginning, middle and end, it just all exists at once and players can go do whatever, whenever, wherever they want. Once a map exists it's just part of the universe, any map is fair game to go to at any time, and any map is available for players to think of as their "main map" based on their personal preferences. The only thing linear about the game is the chronological order in which the maps were released. If a player specifically desired to read the background lore notes in an order that tells the story of the historical NPC's then that player could guide themself to do things in a specific order, but even that's entirely voluntarily. To play the game that way on Official servers would be to ignore the free DLC maps that have been part of the release schedule. For example, from my time playing on Officials, I have 8 characters on 4 different clusters, and 6 of them have never set foot on The Island. Hope this helps.

You ca not export characters from Official servers, which means you also can't import them to your private server (this applies to both dedicated private servers and local/host games). And, of course, you can not upload your private characters to the Official server. Having said that, if you have a character that you've been playing in local/host mode, yes you can transfer that character to a private-dedicated server that you own. And you can copy characters from your private-dedicated server to your local/host game. For that matter, you can transfer your entire map back-and-forth between your local/host game and your private-dedicated server, and the other direction also. Once you set up your "own server to play online", you will have to take some time to learn where the files are stored for the game, and then you can transfer your character/tribe/map back and forth as you wish.

It's possible but it would take a lot of work, and boy do I mean a lot. ARK is designed for PvP to be fully destructive, to completely wreck your opponents, destroy their buildings, kill their dinos. If you don't want that then everyone will have to agree to your rules, and then play by your rules. The problems is that it's human nature for people to interpret rules in a way that is better for them and worse for their opponents. You would have to constantly use admin mode to spy on people to make sure they're following the rules, and you would constantly receive complaints from players claiming that other people are breaking your rules and should be punished. This means you'll either be punishing people on a regular basis (which will make them mad, even if the punishment is fair) or you'll be spawning in replacements for stuff and animals that people lose, or some combination of those two things. Keep in mind that on the Official servers, where the game automatically enforces most of the rules, WildCard has to employ full time support staff who do nothing but respond to player tickets. Even if you're only running a single map you'll have people complaining about each other all the time, and if you run multiple maps it will be much worse. You can use ORP (offline raid protection) but that still won't solve the problem that ARK is fully destructive, the game automatically allows people to destroy anything they can. If you want people to agree to a set of rules that are less brutal than the built-in game mechanics you will constantly be involved in resolving disputes and argument about what's fair. And so far we're only talking about people with good intentions, people who are actually trying to follow your rules. In addition to these problems you're going to have (some) people join who fully intend to vandalize your server. They'll get powerful enough to do some raiding and then try to destroy everything they can before you kick/ban them. For some people, they find it much more fun to ruin other people's fun than to simply play by the rules you want to have on your server. What you want to do is technically possible, but it would stop being fun for you within a couple of weeks.

I'm pretty sure you claim the baby, then unclaim it, then mount the megaloceros and have the megaloceros kill it while mounted. Or, if you use tame groups, put the megaloceros into a tame group by itself, select that tame group, and whistle Attack My Target. Depending on the species you're using for XP you might want to weaken them before you have the megaloceros attack.