Pipinghot

It seems like it should be that way, but somehow ARK has made around 2 billion dollars of total revenue (if you add up all of the different version - Steam, Windows, consoles, etc.) since it was first released. People have been complaining about server performance on official servers since Day 1, but it's still here. A game that has always been plagued by bugs, poor customer service bad performance on official servers, has somehow made the owners of WildCard & Snail a whole lot of money, more than most of us will ever see. If poor server performance was truly a chicken & egg scenario then WC would have gone out of business a long time ago. The sad truth is that the official servers have always had terrible performance and yet the game has continued selling and making money.

Considering they haven't made as much money from ASA as they had hoped (a lot, obviously, but still not as much as they had hoped based on a lot of their PR before the release) you should assume that official server performance will continue to be bad for the forseeable future, and probably always. It's worth remembering that ASE has performance issues for the entire history of the game, this isn't something new. Official don't generate revenue, they are essentially an advertising expense so that WildCard can say, "Hey look we have official servers", and like any company they try to keep their expenses as low as possible. It might get a little better, if they make enough money from console releases and from their next paid DLC, but it's never going to be better than ASE was and probably never as good as ASE.

This has always been normal for ASE, twins and triplets have identical mutations. I don't know for 100% certain that it's normal in ASA, but considering that the vast majority of the code in ASA is the original code from ASE imported into UE5, my educated guess is that it's normal for ASA also. I'd be pretty surprised if this was something they chose to recode, doesn't sound like something important enough for them to spend time & money changing.

That's still not different from ARK, not in a way that really matters, WildCard could already do that with pillars. WC already has the option to limit how many structures a tribe could put down, or the size of the land a tribe can build on, or any other way of limiting their ability to claim. The problems with any alternative system that's ever been proposed is that they all lack flexibility and/or they ignore the fact that ARK is a sandbox game. Example: Is a tribe of 3 people who are really active less deserving of claiming 10,000 tiles of territory than a tribe of 6 people who are barely active? Why should 3 players who are highly active get fewer pylons than 6 players who barely log in often enough to keep their base alive? Example: What if a tribe has 10 people, and they get pylons based on their tribe size, but then 6 of the people leave the tribe. Should the people who are still playing have some of their buildings destroyed because some people left their tribe? Why should they be punished for losing tribe members if they're still able to maintain their base? Example: What if a tribe wants to allow their neighbors to expand a building by 5 tiles? A system that uses a large amount of land per pylon would prevent people from engaging in this kind of cooperation, and a system that uses a small amount of per pylon would be identical to the current system of pillars. There are many examples and scenarios that we could discuss, but the fundamental flaw of any alternatives are that they lack the flexible, dynamic characteristics that the current system offers. Even if you believe that the current system has problems the alternative solutions like your pylons example all introduce new, different problems if they are used instead of pillars. The whole point of using a different system should be that it fixes any problems with the current system and does not introduce any new problems. Getting rid of the current problems only to introduce new problems doesn't actually fix anything, it just creates different problems.

People have been asking WC to fix this since the day otters were introduced. I feel your pain, but don't hold your breath waiting for a fix.

Also @Noricha Question: How exactly is that different from pillars? In ARK you can build an object on the ground that claims a zone of terrain around it for your tribe. Or... in Starcraft you can build an object on the ground that claims a zone of terrain around it for your tribe. If there's something different between those two things please explain.

But they're not going to.

So you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no idea what it's like to play on an official PvE server, and yet you're trying to tell other people that everything's fine. Arguing from a position of ignorance is not only silly, it makes your arguments moot. Playing on a server with no more than 8 people is radically different from paying on an official server, or even a public unofficial server with a large population. A problem may not affect you, because of your specific circumstances but it's still a problem that affects a lot of other people. Don't tell other people that their problem is fine when you don't know what the experience is like for them. No, it wasn't "doom and gloom", it was honest, legitimate feedback and valid criticisms of changes that caused more problems than they fixed. "Slightly more reasonable" can still be unreasonable, just less so. If it's not reasonable then it's still no reasonable, even if it's "more reasonable" than it was before. Including .ini options only affects private servers, it does nothing for people on Official PvE servers. If you don't play Official PvE servers then you shouldn't be telling people on those servers that the changes are fine for them, that's for them to decide. A positive step that only occurred because of all that "doom and gloom" you talked about. It doesn't change the fact that WC was planning to make cryopods worse and only did a course correction after lots of people pointed out why it was going to be a bad change. And remember, WC had years of experience with cryopods in ARK-SE, this wasn't some new concept that had never been tried. It should have been obvious to WC that they were on the wrong path without tons of people explaining it to them. Again, that only helps for private servers. These changes might mean it's not a problem for you or your server, but that doesn't mean it's ok for others.

It was, you were just lucky enough not to see it before.

Do you have any addons installed? Have you tried using a different browser? I've found that some games don't do a good job of supporting every browser. For example, there are a couple of games that I can't use Firefox to submit support tickets, found 1 game that I can't use Firefox or Brave to submit a ticket, their support site only works with Chrome. This is especially true if you have addons installed, but even if you don't it's worth trying a different browser to see if you get better results.

They haven't this after all these years, you can just about guarantee they're never going to. WC doesn't care about customer service, they only care about pretending to care about customer service so people will keep buying their game. You should think about spending your money with a company that actually cares about how much time you spent building up that character.

Which takes us back to my earlier question to the OP, "Who are 'they'?" I like your hypothesis, it seems like a good explanation, was just hoping that the OP would have given us his source to help the conversation.

They probably got eaten by the mesh auto-detection. You might be able to get them back if you submit a ticket to support.

Fair point. There have been so many changes in the game it's requires constant reality checks to see what information is current and which is out-of-date.

That's not incompetent, it's deliberate and accomplished exactly what they wanted it to. Really it's just greedy and showing that they don't care about players once they have your money. Greed and incompetence are not the same thing. They've been getting "called out" on social media for years, they don't care. The only thing that matters is whether they got your money, and the only real choice you have is to not give them more money in the future. WildCard/Snail is not going to change their corporate culture.

Who are "they"? Have never heard this before from anyone who is knowledgeable about the game. I don't mean for this to sound like I'm making fun of you, I'm not, just consider this a lesson in choosing carefully who you listen to.

Welcome to WildCard & Snail games. Where every decision is designed to sucker people into spending money without actually providing them with a well made product. If you're new to ARK get used to that, it's their SOP for doing business.

You always have the ability to claim wild creatures, it's called "taming".

Yes, things will aggro on it. Considering that typically argentavis are found at higher altitudes you might not have to worry about that, but if there are hostiles in the area you definitely want to think about luring the argy to some place more safe or finding a taming trap design that will protect it during taming. The basic rule of thumb is, if a creature will normally attack the species you want to tame, then it will attack the animal during the taming process. For example, most predators will just naturally attack argy's when they're all running round in the wild together, so if you knock an argy out where they can attack and kill it, they will. This is not a 100% ironclad rule, but it's a good place to start when you're thinking about taming things. For example, a dilophosaur may be small, but they're still a carnivore and they will happily attack nearly anything you have knocked out that's laying on the ground. If you have not built a taming trap, or your taming trap is small, or if it's a design that might allow hostiles to attack your tame, you can also get a lot of help from spike walls. If you're going out on a taming expedition, it's a good idea to carry a dozen spike walls with you (assuming you can carry the extra weight) so that you can place them on the ground all around you to help avoid being surprise and ambushed.

Thank you for letting me know your previous reply wasn't sarcasm. I was concerned that maybe my answer had possibly not helped with what you're looking for. Just to clarify a little bit, in the big picture you're right. Progressing does mean "moving inland, getting higher level dinos, and beating the bosses", but not in a rush and not before you're ready. What I was trying to get across is that all progress requires being prepared. A big part of preparation is trying to develop enough knowledge so that things won't go badly, but also making sure you have backups in case the worst happens. ARK wants to kill you and destroy your stuff, which is what a survival game should be trying to do to you, and in order to progress you have to overcome obstacles. On a side note, regarding the levels of your tames, I accidentally made an assumption that I think might have been wrong. When I talked about "Lvl 50 pteranodons" I was assuming the settings that are used on official servers, where the max level is 150. That's how we have things configured on my private server. But on official servers (and my server) it's not possible to find a Lvl 1 dino, so if you tamed your pteranodons at Lvl 1 that means you're using different settings. So, for what it's worth, you probably don't need to wait until you find Lvl 50's to tame, I'm betting anything Lvl 20 or above is pretty decent with your settings. Basically, whatever the level range is in your game, you want to try to look for creatures to tame that are at least 1/3 of the max level. So on my server, with max level being 150, we never bother with anything lower than 50 even when we're starting a new map. Then, later as we get more established, we look for even better wild creatures to tame, and eventually we get to the point where we're only interested in Lvl 135-150. Obviously those numbers will be different for you but you get the idea. It's still good to tame low levels for eggs for your kibble, but if you're going to ride/fly/fight with them you want something either above average or close to the average level when you first tame them. I don't know if this has been mentioned in this thread, but taming traps are your friend. There are lots of good videos on designs for taming traps, some of the traps are multi-purpose others are tailored specifically for difficult-to-trap-and-tame creatures. Start with basic traps of 2x2 or 3x3 for taming things like anky's, doed's, raptors, or whatever is next on your list. Even just a plain old square trap with a ramp that you can lead things into will make your taming efforts much more rewarding, the only difference between different traps of that type will be how many walls you have to add for the prey you want to catch. You can make something as smalle as a 1x2 that's only 1 wall high for anky's, doed's and other small dinos, then 2x2 with 2 walls high for things like wolves & raptors, and so on for bigger prey. Of course you don't need a trap to tame pteranodons, they're easy to tame using bola's and a crossbow, but then you can build a taming trap for argentavis and use your pteranodon to lure the argy's into it. There are a couple of different good designs for this, just look up argy taming trap on youtube. No matter what kind of server I'm no (official, private, single-player) I constantly throw down taming traps to capture anything I think is important to tame without having to worry about other wild dinos interfering or causing problems during the taming process. Sometimes you can just run around shooting at the creature you want, but other times you want the benefits offered by putting a trap down first.

Hmmm. I think I detect a note of sarcasm here.

I suggest that you think of "progress" differently. Progress in ARK doesn't mean you just run out into the wilderness and hope for the best, it means building up enough supplies and extra tames that when something goes wrong you have the ability to recover from the losses and keep going. For example, it's better to have 3-5 pteranodons that were Lvl 50 when you tamed them than to have 1 ptera that was Lvl 150 when you tamed it. If you only have a single ptera and it gets killed, well then you're out of luck until you get another one. But if you have multiple pteras you have a much better chance of immediately flying out to get the stuff from your body. Also, make sure you have extra resources so you can make new armor & weapons, or have extra armor and weapons that you can immediately use when something bad happens. It doesn't matter whether we're discussing tames, armor, weapons or other equipment, a big part of being successful in ARK is to have extra resources so you can recover from bad things happening. As you have already discovered, ARK is full of dangers that want to kill you, kill your tames, and cause you to lose stuff. The first key to being successful at ARK is to learn how to be prepared, in advance, before things go wrong. Sometimes that means you have to slow down your progress until you have enough reserves built up. If you only have 1 good fighting mount, don't go someplace where losing that mount will be a big problem. If you only have 1 good flying mount, don't fly some place where losing that flyer will be a big problem. It's important to remember that those people who have made the videos you're talking about have done all these things. They've lost tames, they've lost equipment, they've lost materials, and they've all developed strategies and methods for making sure they can keep being successful even when bad things happen. They didn't just magically make progress over night because they felt like they needed to, they did the work to build themselves up so they could be successful. Wishful thinking won't help you progress, planning and preparation will.

Yeah, back when humans tamed dinos in real life they were very different from what we have in the game. Why can't we have dinos act like they really did when people hunted and tamed them?

IIRC, that file gets updated and potentially overwritten quite frequently. I'm pretty sure that I've edited it in the past and my edits were destroyed. Instead, I edited the DefaultInput.ini and that's how my changes got saved. (And, of course, make a backup of the existing DefaultInput.ini before you edit it). I'm a bit fuzzy on this because it's been a couple of years since I did the editing on my system, but I'm pretty sure that's how it worked for me.

Again, not all tribes are the same, this is the opposite of a creative solution. Different numbers of people, different amounts of activity, different amounts of tames, different amounts of wanting to build and interesting base. ARK is a sandbox game, the intent of the game has always been to allow players as much flexibility as possible with the GM's only getting involved if a tribe does excessive pillaring or if they block resources that WC considers critical. If you think someone is violating the CoC then submit a ticket. For all other pillar issues reach out to the people and talk to them.