Pipinghot

Translation: You're afraid of an honest discussion.

That's what we should assume. WildCard is going to be pretty desperate to get ASA published to PC as fast as possible, so it only seems logical that they're going to put consoles on the back burner until they are able to roll it out to PC.

Regardless of whether you play ARK on a console or PC, the servers are all run on the same kind of server. If you download the files for that server you will not be able to run the server on a console, it can only be run on a regular computer. If you have an extra computer/PC at that you own, you can download the ARK server files and run it as an Unofficial/server on that computer, this is true for all ARK servers regardless of whether they were servers for console players or servers for PC players. If you don't have an extra computer/PC that you own, you can download the ARK server files, rent a server and upload the files to the rented server to run is as an unofficial/private server, this is true for all ARK servers regardless of whether they were servers for console players or servers for PC players.

One can't help but wonder which part of that post confused you so much, maybe all the big words or possibly the math was too complicated for you. Is that better? Is that what you're looking for? If you'd rather trade cheap shots than have a serious discussion I suppose we can go that route, but it doesn't say good things about the integrity of your intentions. There's nothing wrong with arguing, and there's nothing that says we have to agree in the end, but if you want to have an honest conversation it will require taking a different approach. What that tells me is you're working for a company that's not very good at this aspect of their business. And before you think I'm trying to insult you, read my example below for comparison. Not saying that's the fault of your developers, it could be an executive/business decision maker that refuses to provide proper funding, or someone who fails to understand the importance of hiring people with the right skill set do this work, or whoever is leading the migration project isn't good at managing development projects, or... something else, who knows what. But really the reason why doesn't matter, the point is that one way or another your employer doesn't know how to do it properly. For your comparison, in my last job we migrated our entire data center, 30+ applications, large, multi-server applications, spread across 200+ servers, while at the same time migrating them to new technologies (most of them migrated from physical, bare metal, Solaris servers to Red Hat virtual servers). As part of this process we migrated from a single data center using backups to two brand new data centers while reconfiguring all of our applications to an entirely different paradigm having 24/7 live failover capabilities between data centers. In addition to all of the changes each of the development, operations & server teams had to make, this involved a completely new network architecture, the new networks at the new data centers were built from the ground up. We had almost 100% successful first-attempt migrations. Only 1 application out of 30 had to do a fall-back to the original data center on the first attempt, then succeeded on the 2nd attempt. This entire project (really multiple projects nested into one) was completed in 2 1/2 years with 99.9% success vs. SLA's to our customers. So if your company can't migrate a single application from 32-bit to 64-bit after 3 years then somebody, or plural somebody's, doesn't know what they're doing. I hope it's obvious that's not an attack on you, I'm not suggesting that you're responsible for this failure. The point here to give you a sense of perspective on the difference between people attempting migrations without the right skills in place vs. people who are good at it. If you are using your employer as the baseline for how easy-or-hard it is to do migrations, they're giving you the wrong perspective on how it can be done by teams with the proper skill sets and good project management. True, which I've already agreed with. And, again, I am in the business so you can drop the "anyone not in the business" arguments because they don't apply here. Yes, for distribution only, not for the technical requirements of migrating the application to a new environment. WildCard already pays for data storage and distribution for ASE, this isn't suddenly going to be a new thing for ASA. There will be a temporary uptick in the bandwidth they have to pay for, as ASA gets distributed to their customers, but that uptick will be brief and will not be a significant portion of the overall cost of the project. The bulk of the cost for the migration, both in terms of work/time/hours and in terms of dollars, will be spend on the process of porting ARK from UE4 to UE5. So you agree that ASA should only cost $10-$15 at most. In that case, what are you arguing about? They're not developing a new product. They're porting their existing product from one application environment to another, which is significantly less work than developing a new product would be. The version of UE is new, the version of ARK will be fundamentally the same, regardless of any marketing lies that they're trying to tell. Debating portions and percentages is a moot point because they're not developing a new product to bring to market. They're porting an existing product which already has an established market and trying to pretend that it's new when it's really the same thing with just a few changes. They are making an incremental change to an existing product and trying to rebrand it as new. As always, changing the cover of a book doesn't make it a new book. It barely qualifies as a new version, or a DLC, it's certainly not a new product by any stretch of the imagination. So you're not technical and you're not financial, but that hasn't stopped you from arguing that you know more about the technical and financial aspects of migration projects than someone who has experience with both. I can lead a horse to water but I can't make it drink. Stay thirsty if you want to, it's your choice.

You shouldn't have to do a full restore. You should be able to pull the specific files from the backup that you need (probably just your character file, and maybe your tribe file). Yes, there are commands you can use to give your character credit for beating a boss. I don't remember the exact command name but go to the wiki (on ark.wiki.gg, the real wiki) and look for the "console commands" page. You should be able to find it there. Or, if you can't find it, use console commands to spawn in the tributes needed to start the fight, give yourself "gcm" or god mode, then use fly to go straight to the boss and solo it in god mode. Using creative mode (the GCM command) will let you do pretty much anything you can imagine in ARK.

True, or anyone else. Unfortunately yes, just like it will be lost for PC players who don't have a machine that they can run their server on. If they did that then the other company would charge people for access to their servers, probably a monthly fee. Running an ARK server isn't free, if any company was to do what you're suggesting then that company would want to be able to make money from it. Mind you, I'm in agreement that it's crappy of them to shut down all official ASE servers, even EA games keep servers running for older versions of games when they come out with a new version, and EA is a pretty terrible company. The least WC could do is to be as good as a terrible company. But even if they did that, you cannot combine servers in ARK into a new server. Most servers would be removed, no matter what, and the people who were built up on the surviving servers would have an advantage, which would be unfair in a different way. Granted it would be better to migrate to a new server with the dinos you have, you wouldn't be starting from scratch, but it would still take a lot of time & work to move to a different server. Let's hope so. I'd hate to see players reward them for what they've been doing. Only the sales figures will tell us the true story in the end. Yup, this is a naked cash grab by a company that's financially desperate, and was bad at customer service even when they had plenty of money. Snail actually doesn't care about players in any other countries either, they have a long history of doing this same kind of stuff with other games.

Maybe I didn't completely understand your question. 1) They're going to shut down Official servers for ASE. 2) They're going to make the server files available for people to download and run on their own Unofficial servers. 3) They're not going to change the technology that can run Unofficial servers for ASE - so if you own a console that cannot run a dedicated, Unofficial server today then that won't change, your console will still not be able to run a dedicated Unofficial server after you download the server files. If that's the case, then you will need to figure out a way to acquire a server for yourself to run an Unofficial ASE server. This would be true if you were on PC also, it's not unique to consoles, if people own a personal computer that can't run ASE as a server, then those people will also have to find some way of acquiring or renting a machine that is capable of running an ASE server. If there's something I've misunderstood or haven't answered then let's talk about it. But I'm pretty sure the short answer is that you need to find a way to run your own dedicated ASE server to run the map that you're downloading from the retired Official servers.

If they did say that then I missed it. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course, I'd love to see console players gain access to mods for ASE, but as far as I know that's not going to happen.

Mods will be available for console under ASA, not ASE. The servers saves and the influx of unofficial servers will be from exports of ASE, AFAIK there still will not be any way for console players who are playing ASE on an unofficial server to have mods.

AFAIK WildCard has not commented on this question.

Nope, swing and a miss. I've played both and am plenty familiar with how often PvP is really PvB. Not to mention that PvP "can be exploited to no end".

Yes, there will be new ASA PvE servers. The game will be almost exactly like it is today, it will just be rebranded as ASA. Everything that you love about ARK and that you hate about ARK will still be there, it will just have a different name and a some minor changes.

They are one-and-the-same, which WildCard explained right from the beginning. The creature votes for each map are limited to real-world creatures, and the winner of each vote will get added to that map.

So what, PvP is almost never PvP anyway, it's really PvB (player vs. base). Most so-called "raiding" is really just breaking and entering when people are offline, that's not PvP in any true sense. Trying to debate whether ORP is PvP or PvE is a silly pointless debate, other people want it whether you do or not. If you don't want it that's fine, you don't have to, but other people to it's not your business to tell them otherwise. Yup, just like PvP is a joke and can be exploited to no end. Welcome to ARK.

Community Crunch 375: Introducing Yi Ling If you check the CC every week you'll find out the information at the same time everyone else does.

This discussed this in the most recent the most recent community crunch. "Community Crunch 375: Introducing Yi Ling" It doesn't tell all of the details, but if you check the CC every week you'll find out the rest at the same time everyone else does.

I'm great at making cave paintings, as good as any prehistoric cave man that ever lived. Mostly hand prints though, I specialize in ochre hand prints.

Most of them have been branching out into other games for a good while now. Experienced content creators know that it's usually a bad idea to put all their eggs in one basket unless they own that basket.

That would help explain why ASA has been such a desperate cash grab.

WC announced that they will have an exclusive agreement with Nitrado for hosting their official server network and for renting unofficial servers to people. No other server providers will be able to rent servers for ARK. p.s. As far as we know, privately owned servers will continue to work as-is, but as far as I know WC has not specifically committed to this or answered this question yet.

What you're basically describing is ARK2, or at least something like it. No matter what you or I (or anyone else) might want, ASA is by no means a reboot of ARK. How much of an upgrade it will be is highly debatable and has been covered by many other threads so we don't need to go into it here. What ASA really is, is migrating ARK from UE4 to UE5, reskinning some graphical stuff and adding a few new token creatures. WC has no intention of making ASA a substantially different game from ASE, no intention of rebooting anything, much less removing creatures from the game and completely changing the way each map will work. ASA is ASE with a few new tidbits, that's all it is and all it's going to be. While I understand what you're thinking and why you might suggest it, it's important to understand that nothing at all like this is going to happen. WC has already announced their intentions for ASA very clearly, and repeatedly, and nothing fundamental about those intentions is going to change. You'll just have to hope that ARK2 is more like what you're looking for.

Before we can dive into more trouble-shooting, it's important to find out whether it happens to at least 1 other person. As a server owner, I can tell you that sometimes I can connect to my server when other's can't, so we need to know about another person who isn't the owner.

On the contrary, it's your assumption about my experience that's wrong. Based on what you've written, it is you who lacks the pertinent experience in doing conversions and migrations. From what you've written you come across as someone who knows just a little about what was done and thinks that your indirect knowledge means you understand what it takes to do conversions/ports/migrations. You're using your second hand knowledge of one single, small migration project and trying to intuitively make the leap to understanding other migration projects despite not having direct, relevant experience. Just because you worked for a company that paid to have it done doesn't mean that you understand how to do it. It's an understandable mistake, we all try to intuit things that we don't have experience of, but it's a mistake nonetheless. Having said that allow me to say that when I talk about "copy/pasting" ARK into UE5 that's an over-simplification. I was deliberately over-simplifying because no on one the forums wants to do a deep dive into the weeds of a software migration project. I will stipulate that describing is as copy/pasting their code into UE5 is an over-simplification, because of course it it. But, it was a deliberate over-simplification to make a point, and the point is that it's not as hard as WC wants people to believe. Is the amount of work trivial? No. It takes real work, serious work by people who have knowledge of both the application and the migration process, and the more customization that has been done on that application under UE4 the more work will be required to migrate to UE5. But still not as much work as they want you to believe. So it's not truly copy/pasting, but it's also far, far from being a new product. The whole point of using an environment framework to build an application is that the environment framework, the game engine, does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This is the main reason that developers use UE (or Unity, Godot, GDevelop, Cryengine, or other alternatives) specifically because the engine makes the processes of building a game and migrating it to future technologies easier than doing everything from scratch. That is exactly what the game developer is paying for when they use a game engine to build their game on, making their own job easier and requiring much less work than if they did it all themselves from scratch. This would be a somewhat different conversation if we were talking about migrating from UE to Unity, that would take more work and be more expensive than the project that's actually happening. Migrating from UE4 to UE5 is the easiest, lowest effort, lowest cost migration possible when compared to migrating from UE4 to any other game engine. And that difference matters, they're not migrating from UE to Unity, or from UE to Cryengine, they're migrating from UE4 to UE5, which is highly important to keep in mind. What this shows is that you don't truly understand software scaling, nor the underlying costs of doing software migrations. Doing a migration, any migration, even for one user or machine, has a fixed cost based on the size and complexity of the application being migrated. A small application is going to take (roughly) the same amount of time & work regardless of whether it's for one person/computer or 1,000 people/computers. It's not the number of installs that matters, it's the size & complexity of the application being migrated. Naturally there will be a small increase in the total work/cost per install but it's very small on a per-install basis compared to the base cost of the migration. In the case of your company (based on your description) they did a migration of server software so it was basically one conversion. The fact that the server was serving up content for 10,000 users was rather unimportant to the migration project because they had a singular focus, convert the server application from one technology to a new one. But even if your company's project had been an application that got installed 10,000 times on every individual desktop it still would not have cost much more than $10,000. It might have doubled or even triples to $20,000 or $30,000 but it would not have cost some crazy number like $100,000,000 (10,000*10,000) because that's not how software scaling works. Instead, it it was an application, your company would have used whatever software distribution method they currently use to distribute that new version to the desks of all 10,00 users. The method is unimportant, whether that method was automated ESD (electronic software distribution) or an e-mail to every person in the company telling them to click on a link and install the new version to their computer really doesn't matters, either way that distribution to 10,000 users would not have pumped up the cost of the project by a lot because the project to migrate the software and the activity required to distribute the new software are decoupled from each other. This is another misinformed assumption on your part. According to one of the founding partners of WildCard, Jesse Rapczak, the total cost for the original development of ARK, when they were building the game from nothing into a viable product, was $1.5M. "It's too early to talk about profit since we still have a game to make and there are plenty of costs associated with all of that, but the revenue from sales has already paid for the $1.5 million cost of development over the past seven months," Jesse Rapczak, co-founder, co-creative director, Studio Wildcard explained to GamesIndustry.biz. I also remember seeing different quote from a different interview in which he said it was $2M. Take your pick, either $1.5M or $2M is close enough for this conversation. Not "millions", just $1.5-$2M. And that was the cost of building ARK from nothing. It's been a few years since then, and ARK is a bigger, more complicated game than when it was first developed, also we've seen the results of inflation in the last couple of years. But even with all of that being said, it costs significantly less to migrate a developed product than to develop a new product from scratch. If this was still 2015 then the migration of ARK would cost somewhere in the range of $250k-$750k, but since this is 2023 I'd estimate that the migration cost will be somewhere from $1M-$3M. That's definitely a lot of money, perhaps even more money than the original cost to develop the game, but by no stretch of the imagination will it cost "millions" of dollars. You certainly have the choice to allow WildCard to convince you that migrating ARK from UE4 to UE5 is harder and more expensive than it really is, but in your own words... No, it's really not. It's nothing like that. It's a company attempting a cash grab, trying to pull a grift and hoping that players will be a bunch of suckers who will pay them much more than the value of what they're providing to the players. This would be a good time to remind you that they've change their story multiple times, which is not something one expects from an honest company. 1) January - Conversion from UE4 to UE5 will be free. 2) March - Conversion from UE4 to UE5 will cost $50.00, but it will include ARK2 (a game that so far is vaporware) and you'll have to pay $20.00 each for ASA Explorers' Pass and ASA Genesis Pass. Total price = $90.00 3) April - Conversion from UE4 to UE5 will cost $60.00, but will include Explorers' and Genesis, but not ARK2 anymore, but we don't know how much ARK2 is going to cost. Total price = $60.00 + whatever-ARK2-will-cost. 4) June - Conversion from UE4 to UE5 will cost $45.00, but will not include Explorers' and Genesis at first (and if you believe they won't change things and try to charge something for Explorers' & Genesis later on then I have a lovely vacation getaway in the Sahara Desert I'd like to sell you). No further discussion of ARK2, it's disappeared from the conversation. Total Price = $45.00 + whatever-they-will-try-to-charge-later-for-DLC's + whatever-ARK2-will-cost. No matter how you slice it, all of those "offers" add up to $90.00 or more by the time you've factored in all of the prices. Even worse, they tried to pretend that their "offers" are getting better each time when they're really not. None of this is "just a company passing the cost on to the customer", they are implying (and allowing other people to say without correction) that the costs are much much higher than they really are, and they're compounding that dishonesty by juggling marketing campaigns designed to create the illusion that they're listening and lowering the prices when in reality the total cost of everything (ASA + Explorers' + Genesis + Mods + ARK2) has been $90.00 (or more) in every single pricing scheme they've concocted. On top of all that, other games have completed the migration from UE4 to UE5 for free - because it's simply not as difficult or expensive as you think it is. It's how some businesses try to work and it's up to us, the consumers, the players, to not fall for it. If we go along with it and let them get away with it, then it's as much our fault as theirs. Every person who allows themselves to pay a sucker's price for ASA is teaching dishonest game companies that they're going to be just fine being dishonest. When you pay a grifter, they just keep on grifting.

1) Can your friend, the server owner, connect to the server? 2) Can other people connect to the server?

Unless there's something I don't know, that's not an option. You can't use a beacon to transfer characters and dinos from an official server to an unofficial server. You can only use beacons to transfer if the servers are both on the same cluster, and unofficial servers cannot be in the same cluster with official servers. Yes, it might be easier if it was possible, but it's not. True, but that's the only option that WC is giving to people. The OP was "wondering if I can now switch to an unofficial with my Character and Dinos?", and the answer is no, players can't do that.