Pipinghot

No matter how many times you beat the bosses you can only unlock levels one time, for a total of +15 levels. You can ascend as many times as you want, but you'll never get more than +15 levels unlocked no matter how many times you do it. Let's say you do the boss fights multiple times, here are a couple of examples of what the level unlocks would look like, Example A-- Gamma (+5 levels unlocked), Gamma (+0 levels unlocked), Gamma (+0 levels unlocked), Gamma (+0 levels unlocked), Gamma (+0 levels unlocked). Example B-- Beta (+10 levels unlocked), Gamma (+0 levels unlocked, you already unlocked them with Beta), Beta (+0 levels unlocked), Alpha (+5 levels unlocked) Example C-- Gamma (+5 levels unlocked), Beta (+5 levels unlocked), Alpha (+5 levels unlocked), Alpha (+0 levels unlocked), Alpha (+0 levels unlocked)

That's the theory, but reality has shown it to be untrue. Take a look around at other games that have tried upgrading or building a new game in UE5, the simple truth is that it's not working as advertised. You talk about someone else not understanding UE5 as much as they think, but your understanding seems to be based on Epic's marketing rather than what's actually happening when people use it. There's basically no real-world scenario in which UE5 is living up to the hype. UE5 is capable of truly beautiful rendering, that much is true, but any claims of being more efficient for computers, bases loading faster, servers being more stable, etc. are looking quite overblown. Don't believe marketing hype. Except they're not doing "it all over again". They're attempting to copy/paste ARK from UE4 to UE5 and then charging people as if it's a whole new game. They're trying to charge twice for the same content. Tons of games do in-place upgrades for free, pushing out technology upgrades for free is the norm, and WC is violating that norm in a big way. This is a scam, plain and simple, and if people fall for that scam then shame on them. Nope. Those expansions were already the roadmap for how WildCard intended to expand ARK over time. It's true that Snail Games paid a bunch of money for WildCard, but that's because WildCard was desperate for money because they had to settle a $40M lawsuit for their scummy business practices. But Snail is not responsible for WildCard putting out multiple free DLC's, that was a decision WildCard made for the game before they lost their lawsuit and had to be bought out. Yup. Which, again, was part of WC's plan before they were bought out. Snail doesn't get credit for this. We could debate business models all day, but there's absolutely no doubt that they're doing something wrong, the proof is in the pudding. Behind the scenes, in boardrooms and executive meetings that we know nothing about, they're mismanaging their company and the results are obvious in their financial statements. In spite of their attempts to spin things in a positive light the investor class knows how to read their financials, and things are not looking good. The current situation is caused by Snail/WildCard being desperate for money, and trying to use the UE5 upgrade as a cash grab. Anyone who supports it is rewarding them for their grift.

The important thing to remember about the Neutral setting, is they will always jump into the fight as soon as anything else nearby is in a fight. Neutral animals will not start a fight, but if your or your other dino's get into a fight they will join.

Where did you find a picture of my grandmother? Hacker.

I'm sorry that I have to ask this but... you're making a joke, right? I haven't seen you make jokes on these forums so I'm not certain, I just really hope you were joking.

The method you use for hosting shouldn't change. If you host you own dedicated server there shouldn't be any reason why you would need to rent on under ASA. Obviously I can't guarantee that both methods will be available, but WC hasn't said anything about changing how Unofficial servers are hosted, so far it looks like this will stay as it is. I'm confused by that comment, why would you need both unless you plan to host two different clusters (one cluster of ASE-UE4 and one cluster of ASA-UE5)? They're going to be two different products, they won't mix together or interact with each other in any way, you would only need to host one or the other. I'm pretty sure that they're not going to force Unofficial server owners to use crossplay. If you host your own Unofficial/dedicated cluster that can only be accessed by Steam players that should be fine. WildCard is bragging about enabling crossplay, but that doesn't mean they'll force you to do it. Personally I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Steam is one place that they won't be able to force Overwolf on people (and I can't see any reason why Steam would allow Overwolf into their space, they don't want to do extra work to support whatever Overwolf wants when they already have their own system). When I read the announcements by WC it looks like what they're doing with Overwolf is using OW to bring mods to other platforms that don't already have them. Example, "...to introduce an industry-first cross-platform modding experience where mods created on PC are delivered directly to end-users’ consoles from a custom modding backend." And, "...we’ve got it working internally with Overwolf technology – this dramatically changes the nature of the console experience." Frankly, if they try to force OW on Steam users, that's the final nail in the coffin, I would never buy ASA if they do that. WC is very aware of the fact that the majority of players play ARK on Unofficial servers (and that many people have zero interest in buying ASA if they're forced to play on Official servers) I seriously doubt they will take away Unofficial servers with ASA. They might do something stupid, like force everyone to install Overwolf, but they know that more than half of their income depends on people being able play on Unofficial servers. I wouldn't worry too much, I'm sure you'll be able to host your own.

Unofficial servers are owned by individuals who will each make their own decision. Some will want to stay on ASE, some will want to change to ASA, the only way to know for a specific server is to ask the owner.

You have every right to like Overwolf, that doesn't change the basic fact that the vast majority of their installs were forced on players, in a truly free market they would barely exist.

Oops, yeah I see now that you asked for "starter" water mount, in that case I change mine from bary+basil to bary+shark. For what it's worth, you only need a few sharks to get your first basil. I you have 3-4 sharks on follow/neutral you can swim down to tame basils. Come to think of it, you could probably do that with 3-4 baryonyx (I'll have to try that on our next map to see if it's as easy as I think it would be).

If you really don't want to level up a character in single-player, you can look at the console/admin commands on the wiki. https://ark.wiki.gg/wiki/Console_commands You can do pretty much anything you could want to do in your SP game.

Bary's are easy to tame if you set up a taming pen and lure them into it. If you're on a map with flyers it's easy to aggro them and kite them into the pen. Even on foot it's not terribly difficult, you just need to build a pen with doorframes on the bottom level so you can run up the ramp into the pen and then exit through the doorway. For pure water mounts, I like basilosaurs. They can kill, or escape from, anything in the waters. Being immune to Cnidaria and Electrophorus stun and Tusoteuthis makes them more powerful than many people realize. They can be annoying to tame, a bit glitchy sometimes, but when you consider that they're a passive tame it's not hard to overcome the glitchiness.

Fair enough.

I'm not fond of fanatical fanboi's either, but you do realize they're part of that "community" you're talking about, even if you wish they weren't. The real takeaway here is that no game has "a community", every game has multiple communities and there are many disagreements among the different communities as to what they want.

What?!? Where on earth do you get that idea? They're just taking down the ASE-UE4 official servers and bringing up the new ASA-UE5 official servers instead. Nothing else about the official server environment will be different, the basic game mechanics and daily operations will be exactly the same, they'll just be the UE5 servers instead. Well you'd better hope harder because that's exactly what they're doing.

Yup, agreed, but that doesn't mean we players don't have the right to exchange opinions on these forums about these topics. WC is going to charge an insulting amount because they can get away with it, and they can get away with it because there are a lot of people who will be willing to spend a bunch of money just to play the same game they've already played... but (maybe) prettier. P.T. Barnum wasn't wrong...

You're arguing with something I didn't say. I wasn't discussing whether the price will be "worth the price", what I was discussing was whether the "amount they're charging is proportional to the amount of work", those are two entirely different issues/questions. Agreed, that's true. And if the history of ARK is any indication they will almost guaranteed require lots of players (probably even most player) to do hardware upgrades. Only time will tell, of course, but from where we sit today even the idea that a new release would somehow be less demanding of compute resources sounds like a pleasant fairy tale.

There's no way that actual game devs thought that. If someone wants to be extremely charitable they might choose to think that WC's management believed this even though the dev's told them otherwise, but realistically even that wasn't true. UE5 has been known to the industry for years now, the only ways someone could believe this was going to be easy would be if they were deliberately, stupidly, naive (WC is many things, but stupid isn't one of them). The reality is that WC has known for quite some time that this migration would be a lot of work, you can bet your socks that when JS tweeted that the migration would be free/easy he knew better. This is not something that just snuck up on WC and surprised them, their communications shenanigans are a smokescreen designed as a smokescreen for the fact that they knew how difficult it would be and they're juggling financial decisions behind the scenes that they don't want to fully discuss. Exactly. Anyone with any experience in the technical world would know better than to thing it would be easy, there's no way WC actually believed that. The "dishonest" part is them pretending that they're surprised by any of this, anyone with common sense should understand that this is something they've been thinking about and talking about internally for months now. That's only true if you assume that ARK needs to get ported to UE5. And even if you agree with the argument that it's necessary to do so that still doesn't mean that WC was surprised by this, nor does it mean that the amount they're trying to change for releasing the same game twice in a row is a reasonable amount. We could talk all day about whether it's necessary to port ARK to UE5, but again even if we choose to agree that it's necessary that doesn't mean the amount they're charging is proportional to the amount of work.

Valid arguments, and of course you have a right to be willing to spend money even if your argument wasn't valid. Your money is your money and you can spend it however you like. No disagreement there. That's not going to change. They're almost instantly going to be a mess again, because WildCard is still WildCard and PvP players are still PvP players - some portion of PvP players will always be deliberate cheaters, and WildCard will never care all the much about cheating, they only care about it when it's good PR. There's some truth to that, for a short while it will be stuff that people have earned, but then as soon as people can figure out how to do it there will be new stuff cheated in. That problem, quite simply, will not be fixed by moving to UE5, it's more of a WildCard-management-attitude issue than an ARK issue. They won't. The basic reasons why PvP is a mess will not change. They will seem better for a short time but very quickly will end up just like they are now. If that's the reason, "for the good of the game", then WC should be giving rebates to people who paid for a game that's rapidly going to be removed from Official servers. It's not for the good of the game, it's for the good of WildCard and their bank account. You're right, it wont. But whether it ends the game or not isn't the real issue, that's pretty much a non-argument.

That's true, from the way it's worded they're not planning to migrate characters from UE4 to UE5... which is exactly why the OP is requesting that they do so. The OP wouldn't need to ask them to do something they're already planning to do.

Nothing about that prevents them from migrating characters from UE4 to UE5. Mind you, I'm not arguing that they should, I think there are other arguments based on in-game-play reasoning that could be used to against migrating characters. I'm not arguing against the decision, I'm arguing against the idea that this specific argument is valid. It's a technical hurdle that could be overcome.

Yes, beginner servers are official. For what it's worth, there's a good possibility that the "new" servers for ASA will have the same names or very similar names with the same numbers (it might be something like ASA_899_beginner... you get the idea), so you might end up running into the same people. When they wipe the servers just look for "899" and see if it still exists.

Achievement unlocked: Mindless fanboi identified.

Well no, these are mostly your opinions but still worth discussing. Yeah, see this is a good example of "not a fact", it's your opinion. Many people will tell you you're wrong, prices is extremely releveant. WildCard told people the conversion to UE4 would be free but now they're charging $90, that's pretty darned relevant. Maybe not to you, but to lots of people. Again, not a fact, just your opinion. Actually not even your opinion, it's just a description of how you play the game. Lots of people play "HAVE OTHER GAMES" in addition to playing ARK, that's a real fact. Nope. That is "a" problem, and it's certainly real for many people, but it's not "The real" problem. Only a minority of people play Official servers, and while it's a huge problem for those people (and it's a problem that everyone should have sympathy for) it's "The real" problem for you, not for a majority of players. Seriously, do you even know what a fact is? Plenty of people have fun on the official servers. Unfortunately it probably does make sense. It's a cruel thing to do, but like most game companies they want to push people to play the newest versio of their game because that's how they make money. The minute that ASA is published and ready for people to purchase, they won't be making any more money from ARK-classic, and that means the Official servers need to support the new version that's making money. This doesn't mean I like it, any more than you do. In their previous communications they said that the upgrade to UE5 would be free and they also implied that the servers would also be upgraded at the same time. That's a terrible way to treat people, but unfortunately it probably makes sense to them because that's what's going to make the most money for them. Yes, that's exactly what they think and, unfortunately again, they're probably right. WildCard has seen a long history of players complaining and then still giving them money. The only reason WC would change their plans is if large numbers of people refuse to buy ASA. If they are able to make lots of money then they don't care how much people complain, money talks louder the complaining. In my opinion one of the reasons they're doing it this way is specifically becuase they're afraid not enough people would buy ARK2 because it's different from ARK. If they published ARK2 and no one bought it then that would be a big failure. But if they bundle ASA + ARK2 then lots of people will automatically own the ARK2 base game and they can make claims about how many copies of ARK2 they've "sold" and it makes it easier to get people to buy the DLC for ARK2. Game players are generally pretty predictable - if you sell them one game and then bundle a second game with it then a lot of people are going to play the second game also. Then, if they're already playing the second game they're more likely to buy the DLC for the second game. As a business model they are doing something really smart, it's also a pretty crappy way to treat players... but they're still going to make money becuase too many people are going to be willing to give them money for this. No, not at all. They want ASA and ARK2 to be two completely different games. ASA will help them keep making money until ARK2 is ready, and when ARK2 is "given away" to all of the people who own ASA they will be able to sell DLC's for ARK2 to many of the people who got it "for free". It's nothing like Atlas, you're comparing apples to oranges. Atlas had no connection to ARK, the theme was different, the sales model was different, there was no bundling with ARK + Atlas... and there are other differences that don't need to be discussed. Bottom line is that this is very different from Atlas. That does sound like a good idea, it certainly works well for FunCom with Conan. It seems odd that WC has seemingly never considered this. Cosmetics make a bunch of money for many games, it certainly feels like this could be true for ARK also. That's definitely not the issue, WildCard was like this before Snail Games bought them. Not true, obviously they're not afraid of the community or bad reviews, if they were afraid then they never would have decided to do what they're doing. Which is why this problem exists. If players were willing to vote with the dollars and refuse to buy this new edition then WC would actually be "afraid of the community or bad reviews", but too many players are going to complain but then give them money anyway, they know they can get away with it. At the cost of $90... apparently. Yup, unless people are willing to walk away from the game. Stop giving them money, that's your only true choice, everything else is just talk.

Agreed. We can only hope that enough people will refuse to do so that it hurts their pocketbook.

You are obviously not aware of WildCard's conduct before Snail Games bought them. WildCard absolutely shares the blame for this.