Pipinghot

Anything is possible, but if we're going to speculate we should speculate on the side of the most likely scenario. The possibility that large numbers of player have moved from steam to console is a very small one: 1a) ASA was released on Steam before console, so most people who own both items, a console and a PC-that's-good-enough-to-play-ARK would have bought ASA on Steam. Remarkably few people who own both of those items would have waited to play it on console. 1b) To be fair, the release of ASA on PC was pretty awful, more buggy than most people expected and with much worse performance on good machines at first than most people expected. Maybe, just maybe, a bunch of the people who got refunds on Steam turned around and bought the game on console, but that's a pretty big stretch. There's nothing wrong with being pedantic, details matter and what you're saying is technically true, but that technical detail shouldn't make anyone think that there's some alternate narrative about the game that we haven't discovered, there's no compelling reason to believe that there's a different story than the Steam figures tell us. I mean, it could be true but that's almost certainly wishful thinking. The most likely scenario is that the data from Steam demonstrates the overall pattern for the game on all platforms. Now it's my turn to be pedantic. That's not financial reporting, that's Snail's PR fluff piece where they try to put their own positive spin their financial reporting. If we want to discuss financial reporting then it needs to be limited to just the Q3 financial report and information provided by independent analysts, not the marketing department at Snail. PF spin pieces are not where people should look if they're hoping to find an honest assessment of what's going on. Where are you getting 100k from? There were never 100k daily players for ARK in 2023. Looking at the Steam chart using a 1 Year view, ASE had these daily daily player counts https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346110,2399830#1y Feb 27, 2023 = 75,697 Mar 27, 2023 = 73,447 Apr 24, 2023 = 69,526 May 29, 2023 = 70,615 Jun 25, 2023 = 72,446 Jul 31, 2023 = 66,034 Aug 28, 2023 = 61,055 Sep 25, 2023 = 75,908 Oct 30, 2023 = 65,068 Nov 27, 2023 = 45,768 Dec 25, 2023 = 39,891 No where in those numbers is there any place where 100k fits in. There weren't 100k playing on any given day and there certainly was never a place where a drop of a third would equal 100k, so where are you getting that number from? That's true, but it's old information and only covers 6 days, from launch on Oct 25 to Oct 31. To quote their own fluff piece, "From initial launch through October 31, 2023, units sold surpassed expectation by 1.6x". One week of good sales is not the same thing as a game that's performing well. Everyone should pay attention to the fact that WC/Snail have not published any information about sales since this time. If the game was continuing to sell well they would be finding ways to brag about it all over the place, but ever since that press release from Nov 14, 2023 there hasn't been a peep out of them about how the game is selling. That silence alone tells a story. On Nov 14 they also said: "To date, we have sold more than 600,000 units." but of course they didn't make any mention of the large number of refunds that people asked for. That sales figureis technically true but deliberately ignores the fact that it's a gross sales figure, not a net sales figure after refunds. And again, they haven't said a single word about sales figures since Nov 14, 2023. It's been 2 1/2 months with nothing but silence about sales performance. In the meanwhile, Palworld had sold 8 million copies by Jan 27, 2024. If ASA was continuing to see great sales figures and great revenue for WC/Snail they would absolutely be bragging about it, and yet... silence. That's true, it will be interesting to see when the Q5 results tell us, but it's just about guaranteed that it's not going to be as good as WC/Snail want people to think it will be. We don't know the facts until the facts are available, but looking at their communications (or rather their lack of communications) since Nov 14 the odds-on bet is that sales have been pretty lame since then. That's awful advice, it's the sort of thing that pump-and-dump hucksters say. WC/Snail is not Gamestop, Snail's share price is not being pushed down by institutional investors or any other form of stock market skullduggery. I'm not suggesting that Snail is going to go out of business, and they might even turn things around, people can buy and sell whatever they want to. But investing in a individual stock requires a lot more thought and knowledge than simply, "Hey their price is low, that sounds like a good time to buy," because it's also a really good time to potentially lose money on a floundering company. Unless you're a sophisticated investor that understands how to analyze a company, the idea of buying Snail stock right now isn't any better than playing craps or roulette, it's nothing more than gambling. That's 100% fair, you should enjoy what you enjoy. In no way am I trying to suggest that you should be unhappy with ASA or that you should play another game. But your personal enjoyment of a game has nothing at all to do with the OP's question, or with player counts, or with sales, or with the future success of the company.

No, it's not. If you pay attention to the forums and Discord lots of people have been having lots of problems with the servers, including plenty of streamers and youtubers with great computers. You've just gotten lucky. If you haven't had problems with the servers that's great, count your blessings, but lots of other people have.

That argument would be true if it was only skins, but it's not. I'm 100% in favor of games selling cosmetics, I love it when people who pay for cosmetics help to support a game I like, that's a win for everyone. But what you've overlooked is that the pack for SE will also include a creature. A creature that may (or possibly may not, if you believe WC) give players an in-game advantage. If it doesn't give an advantage, any advantage at all, then it won't be P2W and will be good for everyone just like skins are. If it turns out to be 100% true that the new creature doesn't give any advantage then I'll be as happy as anyone else to see it added to the game. But if there is even the slightest advantage to owning a creature that people have to pay a fee to own, then that's a P2W feature. And, if that turns out to be the case you can be certain that WC will introduce more P2W features in the future. That's the thing about P2W features, they start small and then grow. In every game that introduces P2W features they only get worse over time. The game rapidly gets to the point where people who want to win have to pay extra money to stay competitive otherwise they're going to lose even if they're good. And even when playing PvE it turns into a game where the game is designed to prey on people's impatience and (many) players pay money to beat the game faster. This is the economic model for hundreds of mobile games, punishing people with painful time barriers and selling them "solutions" that allow them to progress more quickly. Even if this one element from my post turns out to be a non-issue, the other elements of my previous post are all still true. Shi Hai wants to morph ARK from a game into a platform, complete with a player-to-player market in which people sell things to each other with real money transactions to buy assets that make a difference in the game, with WC/Snail taking a cut of all those transactions. That's the 'nickel & diming' I was referring to, not harmless skins, but creating an environment that punishes people with time barriers and "encourages" them to spend money to get past those barriers.

Swing and a miss. The lottery is random, people are not. Yeah, because you're playing the same game twice. That's not an assumption, it's an observation which should have been self-evident to you. No matter what order they bring out the maps you'll still be playing a game you've already played. That intrinsically leads to boredom. And my point about Rag still stands. It made the game easier, which was in fact part of the reason of it being released. The free DLC maps were intended to be "catch up" maps for people who had not bought the paid DLC, so they could get assets in the game (like wyverns, for example) that they had not had access to if they didn't buy SE. The order of the map releases was directly related to the order in which new creatures were added to the game, if Rag is in the game then there's no reason for people to play SE unless they deliberately want to make things harder for themselves, the only reason to play SE is if you want to get tames that are not available somewhere else, the moment those tames can be gotten on Rag people will lose all interest in playing SE. You didn't simply ask a question, you proposed an idea for discussion. If you only want people to agree with you then don't start a public discussion. No, it's more than just that. You're trying to ignore the point, which is that there is an underlying logic to the sequence of the maps in the game.

After playing on both official and unofficial servers, and doing lots of breeding, I strongly disagree with that idea. Speeding up egg laying for fertilized eggs matters a lot.

I think they should drop in the same order they did the first time. If Rag dropped before Center and SE then both of those maps would become unimportant. If they granted your wish then you would still be complaining about being bored when Center and SE get released. The problem isn't the map order, the problem is either a) you're bored because you're playing the same game twice or b) playing "modded, boosted" is making it too easy and fast.

Someone probably used meshing to sneak into your base.

Their support will continue to be as good/bad as it is now, it's not going to get better when transfers are opened up. In other words, transfer at your own risk, be prepared to lose things, including possibly your survivor.

Laying on a bed is the same as sitting in a chair. Your food and water consumption are drastically reduced, but if it's in a spot where there will be freezing or overheating that will shorten the amount of time your character will live. Your best bet is to do an experiment, put down your chair/bed, get on it and then check on your character after 15 minutes, then again in another 15 minutes, this should tell you how fast your character will use food/water in that spot.

While the people in this discussion might agree with you that you "shouldn't" have to, that doesn't mean we have the power to make it possible. This is a discussion in the General forum, which means that it can only be a discussion between players. We can agree with you, disagree with you, give you ideas and suggest workarounds, but whether you should have to do this or not we can't change anything for you. So, for future reference, if you want to suggest a change to the devs you have to post it in the Suggestions forum, that is the only place where ideas might get communicated to the devs. As far as WildCard is concerned, the General forum is only for discussions among players and the devs never get anything from here. If you look at the Suggestions forum you'll see there are a lot of ideas there that don't happen in the game, so you should post there if this is important to you as long as you understand that the chance of any specific idea getting added to the game is pretty small. I'm not trying to discourage you, in fact I encourage people to post suggestions, it's just important to be realistic about it when you do. I understand that it can be frustrating when the owner of your server doesn't want to make changes to server settings, but you still have an option available to you. If it was me, I would simply tame more egg layers. That's basically how it's always been done, if you want more eggs then get more egg layers. Whenever I start on a new map I tame at least 10 females of each type of egg (and sometimes more than 10). If I don't have enough eggs I keep on taming more low level females until the egg laying becomes enough. If you want to stay on your server, and the server owner won't change a setting for you, then this may be your only option. Oh boy, after reviewing this thread I see there's more going on than I realized, starting with some mistaken assumptions and bad communications (and I'm not saying that was all you, bear with me). Let's start with one item that is you - when you're discussing a variable that can be set in the config files, it's important to list the variable by it's exact name. In this case the variable is the "LayEggIntervalMultiplier", but you never said that. In your first post you talked about the Hatchery, and then starting with your second post you've talked about "the egg laying multiplier". The problem is that there is more than one config setting that could be described as "the egg laying multiplier", which caused some confusion. If you had typed, "LayEggIntervalMultiplier" in your very first post this whole thread would have gone much better. When you're asking for help it's important to be as specific and accurate as you can. Why was that confusing to the rest of us? Because people have either never heard of the LayEggIntervalMultiplier or it's been so long ago they forgot it has ever existed. Speaking for myself, I thought that "the egg laying multiplier" was a description and you were referring to the MatingIntervalMultiplier. If you had given the exact variable name then I would never have made that bad assumption. When I read your sentence, "they didn't have an egg multiplier until this game ASA." that made me go do a more detailed look at the wiki page for Server Configuration and I found the variable, "LayEggIntervalMultiplier". Now here's the funny thing, that variable was added to the game in patch 218.0 back in Oct 2015 and, as far as I know, it never worked and was removed from the game even before I started running a server. I didn't start running my own server until 2017 and I don't remember knowing about this variable, or if I did know about it I also knew that it didn't work and so I've never used it on my server. My own memory of that variable is lost in time and space. I've looked at my server config files, and this variable doesn't exist in any of my configs nor in any old backups of configs. I have backups of my config files starting in October of 2017 up to the present, and this variable isn't in any of them. Now that we've reached this point where I understand the variable you're talking about... I strongly suspect that it still doesn't work. My guess is that this is another piece of evidence that proves WildCard lied about "rewriting the code" when they released ASA. ASA is basically a copy/paste of ASE with some changes made afterward, it's not truly "rewritten" or new code. Somehow they managed to pull this old variable from their code repository and add it back to the game. Mind you, in spite of the fact that ASA is mostly a copy/paste of ASE, it's possible that they brought back this variable on purpose and that it works, but I doubt it. Until someone is able to test and verify that it works, we should assume that it doesn't. And if I'm correct that means your best option is to tame more egg layers. Now let's talk about the bad information we gave to you. After re-reading the "Egg Farming" article on the wiki it reminded me that only dodo's lay unfertilized eggs based on pooping, all others lay eggs on a schedule. 1) When a female comes out of statis "there is a 1% chance for an egg to be laid" 2) "A mate-boosted female creature will have a chance to lay an egg every 17 minutes." 3) "An Oviraptor set to wandering provides a buff that reduces the egg laying timer from 17 minutes to 11 minutes 20 seconds." [ Note that the Oviraptor must be set to wondering, if it's not on wandering then it will not give the boost ] https://ark.wiki.gg/wiki/Eggs#Egg_Farming So I apologize for giving you bad information earlier. This is what happens when you've been playing a game for so many years with so many changes, it's easy to remember things incorrectly (which is why I just now went to the wiki to double-check my memory). This information reinforces the idea that you will want to tame more egg layers. With only a 1% chance of laying an unfertilized egg when they come out of statis, it will help you to have more females that could lay an egg.

Yeah, as you have discovered @SunsetErosionis right. The Phioma is the only creature that poops super fast when you feed them stimberries. That's basically the whole reason to tame phioma, so we can get extra poop to put into crop plots or to convert into fertilizer.

I agree with you that the eggs & babies don't show up visually until someone logs in or rezzes them in, but the server keeps track of them even when no one is on line. When someone logs on and rezzes in the base, the server rezzes in all of eggs and babies that should be there, and it shows them based on how long they would be laid/alive. So if 1 egg was calculated to be laid 4 hours ago it will be more matured than an egg that was calculated to be laid 1 hour ago. Likewise, a baby that was calculated to be born 4 hours ago will be older (and more starved) than a baby that was calculated to be born 1 hour ago. What this also means is that the OP can use enhanced breeding settings to get lots of fertilized eggs that they can use to make kibble. Even if they're logged off for many hours the server will still calculate all of the fertilized eggs that should be in the egg collector when the player logs in.

I already explained this up above: "the egg laying multiplier only applies to fertilized eggs from mating, there is nothing that will cause unfertilized eggs to be laid when no one is logged in to the server." There are two different categories and they have different rules. 1) Mating & fertilized eggs Mating and fertlized eggs can be modified by using the server configuration. Mating and fertilized eggs will happen even if you're offline, these processes are not suspended when players log out. 2) Pooping and unfertilized eggs Pooping and unfertilized eggs cannot be affected by any server configurations, these processes are what gets suspended when no one is logged in (and if people are logged in they need to keep the creatures rezzed in).

You can do your little passive-aggressive facepalms all you want, the facts are the facts and Shi Hai has said what he's said. If you want to be "excited" about microtransactions that's certainly your choice, I guess you like it when game companies nickel & dime you to death.

Again, that setting is only for survivors, it does not apply to creatures.

Your post raises questions that need to be answered: 1) When you say, "Used 800 narcos" do you mean 800 narcoberries or 800 narcotics? Many people have made the mistake of accidentally using berries instead of narcotics. If you're using berries then it takes a lot more than 800. 2) Did you also use taming food? From what you said in your post it looks like you might have only given them narcs but left out the taming food. Narcotics don't tame anything, they only keep it knocked out while the taming food does the work. 3) If you gave it taming food, which taming food did you use? The amount of narcotics you need changes a lot depending on which food you used.

All of the egg multipliers only apply to breeding, they are for fertilized eggs only. The "PoopIntervalMultiplier" is for survivors, not creatures. If you look at the wiki the description says, "Scales how frequently survivors can poop."

I feel your pain, ARK can be frustrating when your tribe mates are not active. It sounds like you need to look for a mod that will collect poop and eggs, and then ask the server owner to add that mod to your server.

That's technically true, but also meaningless. They haven't officially announced it (yet), but anyone who thinks this isn't coming down the road is wearing blinders. This is the future of ARK that Shi Hai is working towards, just because there's no "Confirmation" as of this date doesn't mean anything. We already know what he wants for the future, the only questions are how how fast, and how much? Shi envisions a future where everything is on the table, including players selling in-game assets to each other (like creatures breed for boss fights) using RMT's (real money transactions) and by embedding blockchain/NFT's into the ARK system it will become possible for Snail to get a cut of those RMT's. Shi doesn't see RMT's as a form of cheating, he doesn't want to prevent it, his long term goal is to encourage RMT's just as long as Snail can harvest extra profits from it when it happens. For example, Shi Hai said: “However, at Snail Games, we believe that we have now reached an era of WEB 3.0, and the ownership of digital assets is the most important issue for our fellow users.” "Plus there’s the question of monetizing content, one of the benefits blockchain brings to the Web3 table." "NFTs are part of that puzzle." Anyone who wants to build blockchain and NFT's into a game is not doing it to benefit the players. He pretends that this is for the benefit of content creators, but if you read interviews or watch the videos at conferences when he speaks, it's painfully easy to read between the lines and see that what he really cares about is WC/Snail getting a cut from everything exchanged between players. His goal is to commoditize and monetize every possible player-to-player transaction you can imagine. This has been publicly available knowledge for quite some time now and lack of "Confirmation" doesn't change the underlying truth. https://venturebeat.com/games/snail-games-chairman-talks-property-rights-in-the-metaverse-at-gamesbeat-summit/

This is the next step in Snail Games goal to commoditize and monetize every aspect of ARK. Shi Hai (the CEO of Snail Games, which for all intents and purposes owns WildCard) doesn't think of ARK as a game, he thinks of it as a platform with multiple different ways to make money, most of which don't involve trying to make a better game. 1) Premium mods - instead of WildCard having a sponsored mods program that costs them money, which is what they used to do, mod makers have the chance to sell their mods to other players... and WIldCard/Snail get a cut. 2) Cosmetic packs from WIldCard/Snail - really just microtransactions, but they don't want to admit it's micro transactions. Starting with the very first pack that's coming out with Scorched Earth there's going to be a creature that players can only get by buying the pack. To anyone who's paying attention that's not really cosmetic anymore, it's a new creature that looks like it will give players an advantage for owning. They're starting to test how much people will complain if they sneak P2W features into their "cosmetic" packs... and WildCard/Snail gets all the money from it. If this pack sells well enough you can be certain there will be more important "content" in the future that can only be owned by buying future "cosmetic" packs. 3) Player created content - whether it's just a costume or some other form of "endless client-side functionality" this is WildCard getting players to do work that WildCard/Snail will make money from, disguised as supporting creators. People create stuff and sell it on the ARK platform... and WildCard/Snail gets a cut. 4) Eventually, somewhere down the road, Shi Hai (CEO of Snail Games) has said that he wants to introduce NFT's into ARK which would allow players, for example, allow players to breed and sell creatures to other players. And since every single creature will have a unique blockchain-based identifier... WildCard/Snail will get a cut. You know how WildCard pretends that they care about players selling creatures to each other for real money? They don't really care, they just want to get a piece of the action when it happens. The changes that are coming to ARK are all about turning ARK into a platform that "allows" people to create and sell things to each other... and WIldCard/Snail will get a cut. Of everything.

Thanks for the explanation, that helped, now I can answer your question. So here's how it works - the egg laying multiplier only applies to fertilized eggs from mating, there is nothing that will cause unfertilized eggs to be laid when no one is logged in to the server. Some background - the laying of unfertilized eggs is tied directly in pooping, every time a creature is scheduled to poop there is a chance they will lay an unfertilized egg instead, which means that they can only lay eggs when the game allows them to poop. Pooping only happens when creatures are rezzed in, which means it only happens when there is someone logged in to the server and the creature is within range of the player. If no players are nearby then pooping is suspended, and because pooping is suspended this also means laying unfertilized eggs is suspended. If you're logged into the server but you're on a different part of the map, like if you go on an expedition to tame something, the pooping and laying of unfertilized eggs is suspended at your main base because there's no one there to keep the creatures rezzed in. The creature could be on the other side of a wall, inside a box, on a higher or lower floor, etc., but as long as the creature is within range of the player it is able to poop, and able to lay unfertilized eggs. This is why, for example, if no on has been online for a while and you log in you will see lots of creatures in your base pooping during the couple of minutes after you log in. They've been "waiting" to be rezzed in by a player so they could poop. Laying unfertilized eggs is somewhat random, and I don't think anyone outside of WildCard knows the formula that calculated laying unfertilized eggs. This means that when you first log it you might have 30 creatures all poop within the first minute or two of you logging in but no eggs, or you might get lucky and have 20 poops and 10 eggs. There's no way to know what you'll find until it happens. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be someone in your tribe. If any player on the server gets close enough to your base that they cause it to rez in as they travel past, then the dinos that get rezzed in by that player can poop or lay eggs. If you were on a server that had a lot of people logging in all the time and moving around a lot then you would find eggs waiting for you in your base when you log in. But if you're on a server with only a few people then you're only going to get more unfertilized eggs when someone from your group is logged in. To make things better for you there are two good options and one mediocre option. 1) Find a mod that will automatically collect unfertilized eggs. There are multiple mods that include an egg collector for unfertilized eggs. 2) Make sure everyone in the group understands how the game works and them make sure they all understand that everyone needs to take responsibility for collecting unfertilized eggs. If most of your tribe ignores unfertilized eggs and sticks you with the responsibility for collecting them, you're almost always going to be short on eggs/kibble. 3) Build a chair and stay logged in, sitting on the chair, even when you're away from your computer. You consume food and water much more slowly when you're sitting in a chair which means your survivor can sit in a chair for a long time, and this allows eggs to be laid in your base when you're away from your computer. I don't remember exactly how long a character can live sitting in a chair, and of course it depends on whether your base experienced a lot of cold or heat problems, but it's a long time. Then again, you can put all of your stuff in a box and just have your survivor sitting in the chair with nothing at all in their inventory so if they die you won't lose anything. Just having someone sitting in a chair, keeping the base and the creatures rezzed in, will give your tribe more poop and a lot more unfertilized eggs. Hope this helps.

My answer is that there's no such thing as the best creature (unless you want to really stretch things and count my own survivor as a creature). There are so many differences among creatures and what they're good for that the entire idea of their being a single, best, creature is a non-starter.

No, unless something has changed you can only get sails by killing wild spinos (same with all other animal trophies).

We can agree to disagree. Having said that, if you actually want to suggest this to WildCard then you need to post it in the Suggestions forum. The General forum is for players to discuss/argue/help among themselves, the devs never even hear of discussions that take place in the General forum. Suggestions is for suggestions.

You're saying "server", but from your description it sounds like you're playing single-player. In order to give you a better answer can you clarify this, what mode are you playing? Are you on an official server, a non-dedicated server, single-player or...?