Pipinghot

Or hypothetically bankruptcy, but obviously that's not going to happen either. Even if Snail-USA starts losing money he has deep enough pockets from Snail-global that it would be worth it to him to lose money as long as he can retain the IP for future deals.

As far as I know there's only 1 cave with bulbdogs on Gen 1. There are also Lunar biome caves with Ravagers. Since it's a riddle it doesn't have to be strictly literal, "hanging with some playful pups" could also mean ravagers. Obviously that's not as safe a place to leave something for you as the bulbdog cave would be, but maybe he left you something tough enough that it can handle the ravagers when you show up.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Why for you stomp on dreams. So mean.

Agreed, which is why I didn't bring it up. I think the only chance is if there's a hostile takeover of Snail that pushes Shi Hai out completely, forever. Too true. Yeah, I think any talk of there being an "agreement" between WC and Snail is just wishful thinking. As far as I've ever been able to discern it was a sale, WC sold themselves to Snail and then they figured out that was a Faustian bargain. In fairness to WC, I suspect they saw David Runyan as the face of Snail and didn't realize what lurked in the shadows. It would be easy to mock them for such a large mistake, but they're only human like the rest of us, and having a $40M settlement hanging over your head would cloud anyone's judgement. What makes things worse is that even the concept of Snail Games USA is an illusion. Technically it's an independent corporate entity but the reality is it's only a small part of the Snail corporate empire and (has been pointed out by others) it's almost entirely owned by one person. The fact that it's a publicly traded stock is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that disguises its true nature as a sole proprietorship. The reason this matters is that even my desire for hostile takeover is almost certainly a forlorn hope. The individual who owns Snail Games USA is also the same individual who owns Snail globally and has a massive bank account backing him up. It would take an organization with the size and deep pockets of EA or Tencent to be able to take over Snail, and if they don't have a vision of the ARK universe having great potential in the future there's no reason why they would consider engineering a takeover.

Yeah, just one more reason why I'm hoping for a hostile takeover of Snail. It probably won't ever happen, but a boy can dream. It's not like the original WC team was super focused on ethics *cough* $40 million dollar settlement *cough*, and they've always been part of the problem of "too much focus on content and not enough focus on quality" but... removing Shi Hai from the picture would almost certainly be an improvement for ARK's future. Our best hope is that Project Hermes (ARK in space, but also packed with blockchain/crypto/nft nightmares) fails like Atlas did. Anything that drives down the stock price and make Snail more of a takeover target is welcome. We already know that Shi Hai thinks that web3 is the future of ARK, that guy is toxic for gaming.

And that's the problem. Again, you don't have the right to speak for people other than yourself, unless they've agree for you to speak for them. You can speak about them, you can talk about the number of people who are complaining on reddit, youtube, etc. but you can't speak for them, you are not their representative. I'm starting to wonder if this is something that's lost in translation. I get the feeling that English is not your native language (that's not a criticism, I'm only fluent in one language, I respect multi-lingual people) and that may be causing a problem in this discussion. To me (and to GP) there's a strong and obvious difference between speaking for people and speaking about them. Is that difference obvious to you also, or do I need to find some other way to try to communicate why there is an issue here?

Which really makes the the price history of their stock interesting. Hmm....

Well yes, you can, but that doesn't mean you did. Hence the question. When you post a claim that can be supported with facts it helps to post links to the sources. Even if I want to believe you, trust but verify. p.s. @Frack Thank you.

Well that's the point, you don't get to do that. You don't have the right to claim that you're speaking for people who didn't vote for you, didn't agree to it, who don't know that you're speaking for them. You can speak about them, but you can't speak for them, because they haven't agreed for you to do so. You have every right to be honest about how you feel, what you like, what you dislike. You just don't have the right to speak for people that haven't agreed to it.

What do you base that on? They're a publicly traded company, where have you found information that indicates who the big shareholders are? Of course I'm not talking about average investors, people that might own 1-100 shares of stock, but the big owners. Why do you say that Snail owns 90% of the assets?

Well, you did claim you were "talking for all PC and console players." Describing that as "being on a high horse" seems appropriate. Again, I'm on your side that WC is being terrible, but we can't have an honest conversation if we don't admit when other people make good points. Being upset is not an excuse for dismissing his point when it's reasonable.

GP is making a good point, it also seems to me that you misinterpreted what he said. Keep in mind I support your right to be unhappy with WC, but that doesn't mean we can just ignore people when they make good points. If we can't admit when other people make a good point then we can't have an honest conversation.

Nope, not "wriggling out of" anything, false accusations aren't going to get you anywhere. 1) I admitted I was wrong about SP. 2) Everything else still stands. "Personally, I wouldn't count on that lasting too long. Game companies are notoriously bad at supporting games that are not the current version they're selling, worse than the rest of the software industry. If you're currently doing a play though on an unofficial, private or non-dedicated server, or in single-player, I would focus on finishing that play through. Do not trust WC to keep the game working for more than a few months after ASA is released. I mean, maybe it will keep working, I could be wrong, but the smart money says it would be a bad idea to trust them on this." Yup, that message still stands. Of course you have the right to disagree with it all you want, you can trust WC if you want to, and you can try to convince other people to trust WC if you want to. But the only wriggling here has been you trying to stick a false accusation.

I would argue that functionality deserves a D or F, but of course it's hard to agree on a grade for something that subjective. The basic problem with ARK is that the concept is so good that it has been a machine the prints money in spite of being a terrible product with terrible customer support (not the fault of the actual devs or the customer support employees, btw, these are problems caused by management decisions). WC has never needed to become a better company, their product just keeps making money no matter how terrible the decisions are by their management team (I'm looking at you, Extinction map). Compare that to Atlas, which completely failed to reproduce the success of ARK. In my view that's because Atlas fails to make people happy in the same way that ARK does, so with Atlas players actually care about the poor execution and poor customer support. WC still hasn't figured out that most of their success is because "dinosaurs are cool". In spite of the failure of Atlas they still don't understand that if Atlas had been their first game they probably wouldn't exist today. ARK was so successful right from the very beginning that WC never had an incentive to improve the quality, it's such a cool game that people have been willing to throw money at them in spite of the many failings of the game. WC never needed to get better at fixing bugs, they made money anyway. WC never needed to get better at customer service, they made money anyway. Something about the concept behind ARK speaks to people so viscerally that lots and lots of folks are willing to overlook all of the terrible stuff and keep playing anyway. Having said that, they made two absolute genius moves in the original concept: 1) Flexibility - no matter what flavor of ARK you want it's available - official, unofficial, private, single-player. You can customize the game to be whatever experience you want it to be. 2) Mod support - they wholeheartedly supported mods right from the very beginning (something many games fail to do) which also allows players to completely cusomize the game experience to their liking. Those two decisions have allowed the game to overcome it's terrible execution and terrible customer support. WC made some great decisions when first designing the game (dinosaurs, multiple game modes, mod support) and those decisions have allowed the game to flourish in spite of the fact their execution has always been bad.

In the general sense, yes, the conversations here echoed in conversations that happen on the Steam forums, Reddit, game journalism and youtubers. Is it representative in terms of being an accurate statistical sampling of how people will "vote" when they decide whether or not to spend more money on ARK products? I have no idea. Lots of people are angry or dissatisfied with WC/Snail, is the percentage of dissatisfied posters here the same as the dissatisfied percentage of players in ARK overall? Couldn't tell you. I think all viewpoints are reflected in the various conversations on these forums, but not necessarily in the same proportions or percentages that those viewpoints are held by the player base as a whole. I hope this scam causes them significant financial harm, enough that they become a takeover target by some other company. But that's just one person's opinion. The only way WC/Snail will get any more of my money is if they change course and charge $10-15 for ASA, it's not worth a penny more.

It was just a joke, I had hoped that the wink would make that obvious. I guess next time I need to include the more obvious /jk

So when you complain over and over again it's fine, but when she does it she sounds like a troll? How are her concerns less legit than yours?

I accept your apology.

In this thread my p was small, which is unusual for me... ladies.

You're arguing about something that has nothing to do with my post. if you want to have a theological debate with yourself about the meaning of a passage in Proverbs then more power to you, but I didn't quote "Proverbs", with a capital "P" which is a book in the bible. I quoted a "proverb" with a small "p" which has been in common usage for a long, long time. If you take a moment to reflect it should dawn on you that "Proverbs" and "a proverb" are two very different things. Feel free to argue about Proverbs all you want with your friend Mr. Straw Man, but it has nothing to do with me or anything I've posted.

If you say you're not going to post again it doesn't matter what your reason is, you're still going back on your word and making it obvious that you weren't being honest the first time, the truth was you were just having a tantrum. If you want to post, then post. If you want to disagree, then disagree. If you want to argue, then argue. That's what forums are for. But announcing that you're taking your toys and going home is both meaningless and foolish. The takeaways here is that it's never a smart move to say you're done posting, it just makes you look foolish when you post again. Mmmhmm. Congratulations on knowing how google works. /slow clap

Let's be clear here, can I 100% guarantee that all of the old bugs will be imported into UE5? Well no, obviously not, it's always possible that something or few things might get fixed simply by running the game under UE5. But, there will also be new bugs that are caused by importing a UE4 game into UE5, that's just normal. So if there was one or two specific bugs that caused you to quit the game well... maybe those 1 or 2 specific bug will be fixed (highly unlikely, but possible). But if the thing that made you quit was "too many bugs" or at least "too many important bugs", that's not going to be fixed. The game will be just as buggy under UE5 as it was under UE4.

So it wasn't your "last comment on this topic post", good to know you were just stomping your little foot and having a mini-tantrum. If you want to pay them $60.00 for $10-$15 worth of work that's your business, but your willingness to participate in a scam doesn't make it less of a scam. "There's a sucker born every minute" - attribution undercertain "A fool and his money are soon parted" - proverb

At one time, Extinction was going to be the conclusion but then WildCard realized they were making too much money to stop, so they extended the official story lore by two more maps. If you only count paid maps it's: The Island > Scorched Earch > Aberration > Extinction > Genesis Pt. 1 > Genesis Pt. 2 If you count all of the maps in the order they were released its: The Island > The Center > Scorched Earch > Ragnarok > Aberration > Extinction > Valguero > Genesis Pt. 1 > Crystal Isles > Genesis Pt. 2 > Lost Island > Fjordur Just a personal opinion, but my group has been playing through all of the maps in the game (not just the paid maps) and we like it better that way. You'll have to decide whether you want to pay the free DLC maps or not, it depends on how long you want to spend on your playthrough. Also, you might find this page on the wiki useful, all sorts of info about the maps (and it shows the order they were published). https://ark.fandom.com/wiki/Data_maps

If you play ASE on an unofficial/private server it's not a "long bow" at all, it's a very reasonable scenario. * Many games lose multi-player support when they stop being supported by the developer. * Therefore it's reasonable to consider (not so assume, but to consider) that this might happen with ASE, just as with other games. * Therefore, it's a reasonable idea for players to consider how important it is to them to finish their current playthrough of ASE, before this might happen. WildCard has already done something almost no other company does, they're shutting down the official servers for ASE at the same time they roll out ASA. Not even crappy EA games does this, they keep official servers up for old versions of their various franchises even when they roll out the new games. If WildCard is doing something that even EA doesn't do, then it's only smart to consider that they might withdraw support for multi-player in ASE sooner rather than later. That's not "drawing long bow" it's just thinking and common sense. You're talking in circles. As already discussed, I'm not talking about the complete recall or deletion, I'm talking about withdrawing support. And in the context of this conversation "withdrawing support" means shutting down access to multi-player. Only about single-player. I never said they "have to", don't put words in my mouth. I said it's a good idea to think about it (depending on how much you trust WildCard). Agreed, you were right about SP.