Pipinghot

This is where I do my pro bono work.

Well, it is a tribe based game, so if you're trying to PvP solo you're taking your life into your own hands. After all, you wouldn't expect to win 1v15 in a first person shooter, you wouldn't expect to solo-win a 10-person battleground in WoW (or equivalent RPG's), you wouldn't expect to solo a 5-person dungeon in WoW (or equivalent RPG's). The very fact that you can even attempt group content in ARK is an improvement over other games. Single-player is the specific game mode that WC designed to allow people to play the entire game solo, the other game modes were fundamentally conceived as being group/team game modes, so if you choose to solo-play a group mode then it's up to you to accept responsibility for your choice. I'm not criticizing that decision in any way, it's perfectly legit to try any game in hard mode if that's what you want to do, but it's on you when you do so. Yeah, I get that. That's part of the reason why I'm doing my playthrough on a private server with people who are my RL friends. Yeah, all of that can be frustrating if you want to play the game in chronological order, agreed. All I can say about this is that it's a natural consequence of ARK being a survival game rather than a standard MMORPG. You have to be at the leading edge of the power curve if you want to win in PvP. Having said that, even with traditional MMORPG's it's difficult for a character to be competitive at PvP as the character is progressing through the game. Pretty much every game has their PvP in groups of levels, whether it's Lvl 30-50 in a group for battlegrounds or +/-10 levels in open world PvP. Open world PvP in most MMO's (just like in ARK) consists mostly of ganking lower level characters than in 1-vs-1 duels between evenly matched characters. Only rarely do evenly matched characters meet for a duel at high noon and square off for a fair battle, mostly it's ambushing vulnerable opponents. The major difference between standard MMO's and Survival MMOs' is that you don't lose everything in standard MMO's. But otherwise, power creep applies to almost every game. It's important to note that you're mixing two different conversations here. Comparing ARK to Rust is a valid path in a discussion, and I agree with what you have to say about Rust, but it tells us nothing about whether KoS is rising in ARK compared to the past in ARK. What we were discussing was comparing ARK in 2016 to ARK in 2019 to ARK in 2023 is the comparison we were discussion. It's true that Rust does things differently but that doesn't tell us anything about the frequency of KoS vs non-KoS in ARK over time. That's the exact same advice that was given to people in 2016. Talking in public has always been an invitation to get wiped, meeting a stranger in the open world has always meant the risk of instant combat and a KoS. None of that is even remotely new. But, as we've agreed, there's no true data that we have to answer this question either way. All we have is anecdotes and feelings. Is KoS more common now than 2016 or 2019? Unless someone is able to get WC to share their data no one can answer that question. This is an interesting idea that I haven't seen anyone else describe. I don't think it matches the lore, but I like it and if it makes you happy to make that your story as you play then more power to you. We should each enjoy the game on your own terms. On this point I think you're tripping yourself up and making the game less enjoyable for yourself. To illustrate what I mean let's talk about the lore for a minute. When you find the notes on The Island they have been left by people who lived long before you (and me, and everyone). There is not one single player-character in ARK that ever met any of these people face-to-face on the island. They're historical characters who we know about but no player has ever met them because they lived on the Island long ago. Again - You certainly have the right to imagine that your character is living in their time, if that makes the game more fun for you, but that's not what the lore/notes say. To say that you are a contemporary of Mei-Yin or Helena on The Island is like saying that you fought beside William Wallace at Stirling Bridge (or pick any historical reference that makes you happy). We are reading their notes specifically because they are people who lived before we ever arrived, they are people from the historical past of The Island, not living in our present time. The game is fundamentally designed around the idea that these are historical people who lived in the past. So, while you have the right to imagine yourself living along side them (which I still think is a fun idea) you can't expect the game play or the game mechanics to support your decision to use the lore in a way that the designers never intended. No one has the right to tell you that your idea is wrong, but you also don't have the right to complain that the game doesn't support your custom crafted story idea for yourself when the game was explicitly designed to support a different story. To draw rough analogy, there are many D&D campaigns in which the DM and the players put their campaign into the Lord of the Rings time period, with their characters even participating in some of the important events & battles of LoTR, but those campaigns are custom crafted stories for the fun of those players, none of them would ever write a letter to the Tolkien estate complaining that their characters aren't listed in the books. If you want to re-interpret the lore to tell yourself your own personal story, you should, that's creative and interesting. But at some level you have to accept that the game is not going to support your re-interpretation of the lore, the game design is going to support the lore created by WC. And that's ok, as long as you don't expect the game to bend to your will. That's true... but only because it's a game. Let's talk about this for a moment. It sounds like you played games in the TBW (time before wikis) so you probably remember what it was like when RPGs were half-game and half-puzzle-solving-mystery. You might even have played games in which you needed to find and understand the lore/notes in order to progress in the game. People loved those game so much that lore books. clue books. puzzle solutions books, etc. immediately came into existence. Which is to say, a sizeable portion of players hated being required to solve puzzles so much that they didn't even want to play/finish the game unless they could find some way to progress without having to do all of that stuff. Heck, it got to the point that the game publishers themselves start publishing these books and lots of games had these clue books published side-by-side with the game. Game publishers discovered they could make a ton of extra money publishing a game and a solution book on the same day, with many players buying both the game and the book at the same time just so they wouldn't have to solve all of the puzzles. And what brought a stop to all of that? The internet, with it's cheap and easy way for players to share solutions, eventually leading to wiki's being a standard feature of gaming. Now, try to imagine playing ARK in an environment where there was no such think as the wiki, where players had to find and understand the lore/notes in order to figure out how to tame dino's, what artifacts are for and how to spawn boss fights. How many people would play that game? Would you? (I know I wouldn't). That is the reason why "much of it will only be discovered near the end game of each map" or indeed why many players never bother to find it at all, be cause the wiki exists and because people simply wouldn't play the game if lore discoveries were required to progress. A small number people, pretty close to zero, would have played ARK if that was how it worked. It would have failed and we wouldn't even be having this discussion. So it's tremendously important to understand that some things happen simply because it's a game. You can play almost every RPG or MMORPG without ever reading a single line of lore. You can play many games... big, big games with lots of back-story... without ever paying attention to quest-text or anything an NPC ever says. But that doesn't change the fact that the lore tells a story that was specifically designed and intended by the game designers. The story lore of ARK tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the people we're reading about are historical characters who lived in the past, that they are indeed the prologue to every one of us. And the fact that it's a game, which means you can progress in the game without being required to find, read and understand the lore before progressing, doesn't change the fact that this is how the lore was written. We don't meet Rockwell until Aberration, and the only reason we meet him is because of what happened to him. If he had not been transformed by Element he would have been dead long ago. We don't meet Helena until Genesis, but only because she was the first Homo Deus, she became a human consciousness within the ARK system. If she had not done so she would have been dead long ago. With all of this said, I'm still not saying that you're wrong for imagining yourself as one of their contemporaries - as long as you don't try to blame the game for refusing to support your personal vision. If re-interpreting your personal game experience makes if more fun for you then you should do it, if re-interpreting the lore with your own personal twist is more fun than you should do it, but you can't blame the game for failing to go along with your personal re-interpretation. It's up to you to figure out how to do both things, make your own interpretation and still enjoy the game. if you re-interpretation is making the game less fun for you then you need to consider whether you're, to some degree, shooting yourself in the foot. I've run out of quote boxes, so I'll just refer to actual quotes: 1) "For me the story is a single survivor trying to achieve their one objective of finding the mysterious AI that contacts you on the island. That survivor has to deal with both aggressive and friendly tribes, but not become too side tracked to lose sight, or else they may end up like Rockwell." For you that's valid, but it's not how the game was conceived nor fundamentally designed (except for SP). The NPC's we're discussing didn't exist as "single survivor"s, they existed as people living in a multi-populated world. In some cases, the fact that they were not merely single survivors is an important part of their stories. Some portion of their importance specifically because they were not single-players, they were participants and leaders in tribe-based PvP. If these important NPC's had tried to solo-PvP we would never have heard of them. 2) "Ark SP or PvE can be a co-op or single player game from beginning to end yes. And yes you are right that none of the mentioned NPC's have completed the entire story line. But these are NPCs...and where they fail, the survivor (you) are supposed to succeed." We're supposed to succeed only because we are not contemporary with them, it's explicitly because we live after they did. If it wasn't for Helena we wouldn't respawn, we'd all live a single life and disappear when we get killed, just like all of the people who lived at the same time as Helena and the other NPC's. Those unknown people all lived single lives until after Helena uploaded herself into the ARK's. The contradiction here is that you claim you want to live in the lore, but the lore explicitly states that your choices are not true, and then you complain that the lore doesn't support your personal vision. Again, this is like saying that your D&D character went to high school with Frodo and went to Mt. Doom with him, and then complaining that the author of LoTR is raining on your parade by refusing to support your personal vision. 3) "Let's not forget that while our NPC's may have not beaten all the maps they still experienced their own PvP. The issue however is that the documented PvP in the notes speaks of mei-ling riding in on a raptor fighting off squads with guns." There are two responses to this: a) Right, because when she was alive that was something that was possible to do and now it's not because things have changed over time. b) Or alternatively... yup, that's normal, it's something that happens in every game's story. There are always characters in story-based games who can do things that the characters can't. Whether you play Warhammer, Conan Exiles, ARK, WoW, etc.... there are NPC's in the back-story who have done things that no player-character has ever done in that game. Whether it's Gandalf casting spells that players can't, or Conan solo-defeating enemies that players can't, or Rockwell using element to become an insane demi-god, there are always things NPC's do that player-characters can't. And conversely there are things the player-characters do (like finishing the entire game) that the NPC's either can't or haven't done. This is what differentiates your story from their story. Our player characters and our stories are always different from the stories of the NPC's, this is true in every game. You are not Rockwell and he is not you. You are not Mei and she is not you. We're not playing their story, we're each playing our own story. 4) "That poop just straight up does not happen in any ark battle, let along 2v1s with a power gap. The story writers were completely clueless to how battles actually happen in this game, which is why I now claim that not just solo PvP, but PvP in general is broken. PvP is not as intended." This sentiment also has two reasonable responses: a) Every game has differences between the lore and the game play. If you expect your character to be exactly like the NPC's in the lore then no game will ever satisfy you. Understanding the difference between the NPC's in the backstory and the actual gameplay experience of being a player-character is important to enjoying any game. b) Or... you're just not as good a she was, that's why she has left lore notes that are part of the game and you haven't. Get on her level, defeat lots of enemies with a raptor and you too can become part of the lore backstory of the game. Obviously that answer is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. It's important to remember that there are lots and lots of NPC's that you've never heard of. There were many, many people who died as complete unknowns during the time of Gaius, Helena, Rockwell, Mei-Yen, Diana, etc., people who never left explorers' note, people who's names no one will ever know. The NPC's we know by name are extreme exceptions, people who accomplished legendary things in their own lifetimes, that's why we know who they are. It should be extremely hard, and quite often impossible, to equal the feats that NPC's have accomplished otherwise they wouldn't be important enough to know their names in the first place. They became known to us specifically because they were epic people so if you want your character to join them in the pantheon of greats all you have to do is become epic too. 5) "This was a heck of a writeup, Mr. Pipingshot and to be honest I've had a few beers so there may be some lack of coherence in there. I appreciate that you put real thought and effort into your post as well. I'd love to keep this conversation going..." Glad to, I enjoy discussions like this. "...but if we do I'm down to keep it a little shorter and maybe down to one point at a time, so we don't burn ourselves out on just the forums lol." I'm good either way. If you want to discuss specific points individually feel free to break up your response into multiple posts.

The upgrade to UE5 will definitely affect ARK(1), but as Larkfields pointed out that doesn't necessarily mean it will be smaller, it might well end up being bigger.

Haha no, not this guy. Other than my two-week-long attempt to lure my tribe back to PvP I never tried PvP solo. Reasonable people can disagree, having tribe mates to talk to while playing makes the game better for me. But I can certainly understand that other people, like yourself, feel differently. Sure, I see your point. Playing the story in PvP and playing the story solo (or on a private server which is how I play) are entirely different animals. If you truly want to play the game in a specific sequence than that particular approach doesn't work in PvP. I disagree, KoS has always been just as prevalent as it is today (except in the very early months of the game). There have always been people who try to talk first and others who shoot first and ask questions later. But since this isn't something that can be proven one way or the other, it's heavily influenced by personal experience, we can agree to disagree. On this point I strongly disagree. For me the true story of ARK is the story that players experience as they play the game, no matter what mode or sequence they play it in. The explorers' notes are the prologue, the back-story, to help enhance the setting, mood and tone of the game for the players. Mei-Yin's story is not my story or your story or any other player's story, it's the background lore that helps establish the setting of the story that we're actively playing day-by-day. This is why, for example, my friends and I are playing every map in sequence, not just the lore maps. As far as I'm concerned The Center, Ragnarok and the other free DLC maps are just as much a part of the story of ARK as the lore maps are. The lore notes are nothing more than background exposition to help establish the setting, the story is what each and every one of us experiences as we play. I would argue that the main heroes/villains are the players, the members of our tribes/alliances vs. the members of tribes that we fight against. If I play a role playing game (using D&D as the classic example) I don't care about what the NPC's have done unless their individual tidbits of lore enhance my enjoyment of playing my own story with my friends. The same is true of ARK. I am the story, you are the story, the maps and the players are the true story, all that lore stuff is prologue that sets the stage for us to play out an experience our stories in the game. I would argue that "Solo PvP based on a story perspective was" never "the intended way to play, from a story perspective." And the fact that no one has ever done it is a pretty darn strong argument in favor of my position. ARK SP or PvE is and can be a single-player game from beginning to end, PvP is not, can not, and never has been. It's important to remember that none of the NPC's that you're talking about have experienced the game from beginning to end in story mode. Not one of those characters played all of the maps and beat all of the bosses in order, their stories all diverge in various ways from that single, simple narrative. The very characters that you are using as the basis for your argument have never done the thing that you're using them to describe.

I completely understand that feeling, the desire to not let them beat you down creates some crazy feelings. When I first started ARK it was on PvP, we were doing great and having fun until a mega-tribe wiped out everyone on our server, including the alpha tribe, which of course included wiping out months of our time. My 8 tribe mates decided right then and there to move to PvE and it took me another two weeks of trying to rebuild and lure them back to PvP before I threw in the towel and joined them. We did try PvP again at a later time, on one of the small clusters rather than the main cluster, and that was fun for a while. We even became the alpha tribe on that cluster but it still created burnout and I left before we ever got as far as boss fights. I just couldn't enjoy the time struggle between family, work and trying to play ARK as a PvP game.

I disagree with that. ARK was originally conceived as a tribe-based game, with SP mode intended for solo story play (and PvE eventually added because players yelled about it until they listened). Playing solo in PvP is pretty much the one way they never intended the game to be played. No one would try playing solo against a full football team, or solo against a full baseball team, but people do it in ARK even though that's the hardest way to play the game (except for the sheer lunacy of hardcore, I'm only counting sane people here). Playing the story line in PvP is still do-able with a tribe, although even that is harder than playing the "normal" way. Trying to play the story as a solo player in PvP isn't broken, it works exactly how one should expect it to work.

Dear diary... Joking aside, sorry it didn't end up being as fun as you had hoped. Even so you've given it a good, solid try and you now have the experience of having done it. Also, it's better that you reached this point after 3 weeks rather than 3 months, it was interesting to read your progress reports.

Understood, I wasn't making fun of you, just having some fun with the game in general.

Dear Diary...

That is both fun and... an intriguing possibility. That would be evidence that AI is still more artificial than it is intelligent, despite what some researchers at google might think.

It's possible to accidentally select a whistle group, even if you've never assigned any dino's to any whistle groups. If you accidentally select an empty whistle group then you're guaranteed to not be able to whistle any dino's. You'll need to go to your Tame Groups page and see if there is an "Active Group" number showing. If you see a number then you need to used your tame group keys to un-select so that you have no tame groups selected.

Dear Diary, Day 1: Really looking forward to this challenge. Dear Diary, Day 2: Woohoo! this is so exciting. Dear Diary, Day 5: Ok, I've settled into my daily groove, looks like this will go according to plan. Dear Diary, Day 12: Wow these people are good at finding my base and wrecking my stuff. 12 wipes in 12 days. Dear Diary, Day 18: Why? WildCard, why on God's green earth did you add detection radar to parasaurs?!? Why do you hate me so much? Dear Diary, Day 35: So. Many. Jerks. They. Must. All. Die. In. A. Fire. Dear Diary, Day 112: So tired. Can't focus at work. I'm dreaming in 1920x1080 resolution. Dear Diary, Day 135: When was the last time I ate? Do I still have a job? Why does my family look at me like they're afraid I'll eat their brains? Dear Diary, Day 157: I should have chosen an easier quest, like maybe bring peace to the Middle East, or curing cancer. Dear Diary, Day 181: Speaking of cancer, *#@)$@$&%!(@# parasaur radar. Oh my %*#@#(@#($ god. Dear Diary, Day 203: I think I just met Helena in real life. At the grocery store. In the produce section. I don't know why I was surprised that asparagus is her favorite vegatable. Dear Diary, Day 228: What is reality? Are we all just sentient programs? Has my mind permanently entered the ARK metaverse? Earth is just a dream...

Our Lady of the Perpetual Respawns

Nunnery's?

I don't think anyone's saying you can't... well ok I pretty much said that. But a better way of phrasing it would have been, "it's not worth it". I mean, I got the "Insane" achievement in Warcraft back in the day, and about 10 minutes after I finished it I realized that it had been a big waste of time even when compared to how much time I spent playing WoW in the first place. Obviously your mileage may vary, but even if you can do what you're saying you probably won't feel like it was time well spent.

Well, you asked for updated advice, and the updated advice is that tek is part of the game. You either need to accept that you're going to get bent, folded, spindled and mutilated by people with tek, and that it's impossible to hide because of parasaurs, or that you're going to need to join a tribe in order to work your way through the sequence of maps on PvP. The very idea that a single person would be able to play enough that they could not only survive, but have a base containing enough animals to beat bosses on each map without having animals from the later maps is a pipe dream. If you start on the Island using only Island species you're never going to be able to build up enough to advance to Center or Scorched Earth, much less complete all of the maps. You could work your way through every map in PvE, or PvP in a tribe, but to do is solo... as Joe said, life is too short.

I'm with you. It's security theater, like the TSA, it provides a comforting illusion of security but not the real thing. (With apologies to any TSA employees, it's not your fault that your agency is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, a super expensive way to make people feel safer even though they're not.)

This may sound cliche, but there really aren't any must-have mods, it depends on what parts of the game you like or dislike, or want to change for your own aesthetic reasons. We can certainly tell you what mods we're using when we play, but it would help if you give us an idea of what you like/hate/want - are you someone who likes building a lot, do you want to make your game look different with skins, or maybe a steampunk feel, do you want to automate processes like picking up poop and eggs, do you want the flying experience to feel different? There are so many mods that do so many things it would help to know what you're looking for. On my private server for my friends and me, we use the following: Structures Plus (S+) Upgrade Station v1.8i Super Spyglass (Open Source) JP's ArkNav GPS HUD CKF Remastered Immersive Flight (Reborn) (edited) We have also, at various times, used some of Eco's mods, which give you buildings & skins from specific cultures, on our current map we're using eco's Empires – Tokugawa.

Again, there's no definite time frame, it all depends on how many tickets people are submitting.

What environment are you playing, Official, Unofficial, single-player, Steam, Epic, etc. ?

That sounds like they did a rollback on the server, which means they restored your player file from when the low level character was there. I suspect that based on the way ARK saves character files that you won't be able to get your character back, but the only way to find out is to open a ticket.

Which is why I mentioned mods in that same post.

[Edit:] Sorry Dirk, I didn't realize I was replying to a different person when I wrote this, I thought I was replying to the OP again. Didn't realize my mistake until after I posted it. Hmm... some more ideas, in case they help. Even if we don't consider the "Size on disk" there's still something going on with your system if the full "Size" is 402 GB. As I say, I have multiple mods installed and my total size is 353 GB. In addition to the disk space stuff, this might help you to compare: 140,491 files, 12,181 folders If you have more than those numbers then you definitely have something installed under ARK that's eating up your drive. And regarding compression (Size on disk) - is your install on a hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD)? If it's an SSD you should consider checking the box for the drive properties that says, "Compress this drive to save disk space". SSD's are fast enough that (in my opinion) it's worth the slightly longer loading times to have stuff on my games drive auto compressed. This will cause games to take slightly longer when they're loading up, but I've never had any problems with performance issues while actually playing the games, once the game starts the compression does not interfere with game play. My games drive is 2TB and I enabled compression for the entire drive. Or, if you don't have a separate games drive, you can enable compression for any specific folders you want (like you could enable compression for everything under your "Steam" directory). But, regardless of whether you want to allow auto-compression or not, there's still that basic issue of taking up 400 GB rather than 353 GB. Either you have something extra installed that you forgot about or there is something going wrong on your system. One possibility is that you've unsubscribed from mods in the past but you never deleted them from your drive. Steam doesn't uninstall mods when you unsubscribe, they just sit there still taking up space.

ARK is big, like really, painfully big, but if it's using up 400 GB on your machine then either you've subscribed to a lot of mods or there's actually something going wrong on your machine. For comparison, on my machine the full install is 353 GB (Size on disk 211 GB, according to Windows) and I have all of the maps and multiple mods installed (and I have multiple mods installed, it's significantly less without the mods. So... 1) You honestly should investigate whether there's an issue with your disk/windows/configuration/etc. 2) If you're absolutely certain that there's nothing wrong with your machine/setup, then look review your mods to see how many you can unsubscribe and delete. 3) If there are any of the free DLC maps that you're not using and not playing on (Center, Ragnarok, etc.) unsubscribe from those maps and delete them from your machine, they each take up a lot of space.

This is just my opinion, of course, but I don't see any reason to expect it. 1) Company culture - WildCard is still Wildcard. Their company culture hasn't changed since the beginning, nothing about the company culture has changed since they were bought by Snail Games, even with a different parent company they're still managed by the people who started WC to begin with. 2) Follow the money - the business model will still be the same. When a game makes money based on server performance then server performance will be a top priority, when a game makes money based on selling more copies and only a small minority of players actually play on the Official servers then server performance will never be a top priority. WildCard is in the business of publishing the game, they are not in the business of providing top performing game servers.