Pipinghot

4 hours ago, MADxHAWK said:

its so unlikely like a spider

A couple of reasons:

1) They're not really supposed to be spiders, per se, they're supposed to be ancient arachnids (more on this in a minute).

2) Most spiders have pincers, not fangs.

Araneomorphs (spiders with mandibles that look like pincers rather than looking like fangs) comprise about 93% of spider species living today. The fanged spiders that you're fond of are only about 7% of all living species and they've always been a small minority, spiders began with all pincers and only evolved fangs later.

Araneomorphae include the weavers of spiral webs; the cobweb spiders that live in the corners of rooms, and between windows and screens; the crab spiders that lurk on the surfaces of flowers in gardens; the jumping spiders that are visible hunting on surfaces; the wolf spiders that carpet hunting sites in sunny spots; and the large huntsman spiders - all of which have pincers.

It's worth remembering that the ancestors to spiders were sea-dwelling arthropods (like the sea scorpions and horseshoe crabs). So... lots and lots and lots of spiders with pincers and only a few spiders with fangs.

3) They're based on the earliest, most ancient arachnids, not modern spiders and not even the earliest known spiders. Yes, they look more like ticks than a modern spider, because that's what the ancient species looked like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonotarbida

Trigonotarbida are not the ancestors of spiders, they are an extinct spider-like order of arachnids. I'm listing them here because they are the oldest land-dwelling arachnids, from about 50-125 million years before spiders evolved.

3) I get it, this is fiction, but even so...

Obviously ARK is not a nature documentary, we could list about 1,000 things in ARK that have nothing to do with historical dino's and other creatures. So it's understandable that you might still want to see fanged spiders in the game, something that is more scary to you. I'm not trying to tell you that you're wrong for wanting something like this, but instead I am trying to answer your question, "Why the Araneo wasnt made like a real 'creepy' spider?"

It's because they were never intended to look like a modern spider, and especially not one with fangs, they're intended to look like the oldest land dwelling arachnid species that would have existed along with the dinosaurs, a little bit spider-like, but not really spiders at all.

15 hours ago, XxFuzexX said:

Tek engrams don't work, upon beating the boss and unlocking the engrams, they don't appear (file size to big, cannot upload evidence) this is happening to me on PS5 ASAP edition

By the way @Yggdrassilis not joking, nor making fun of you. It's an old bug that you usually have to die and respawn before your implant gets updated and you get access to the engrams. Using fast travel won't work, logging off and back on won't work, you have to die and respawn.

50 minutes ago, TonyTempah said:

New premium mod idea. Never go unlogged with autologmaticasuarus. Keeps your base timers up while you touch grass... 

Now at the low-low price of only $55!!!

17 hours ago, Nannatilly said:

I have a base on server 5356 which I am unable to protect from the despawn timer due to an XP Party keeping the server full 24/7. Today is day 9, in 3 days my entire base, tames, mats and a thousand hours of my life will be scavenged and disappear. I'm sick of this kind of thing happening. Is there anything that can be done?

This is a pretty lame complaint. Your post implied that the server had been busy non-stop for 9 days or more, "24/7", when really it was just the 1 busiest day of the week. Yeah, it can be hard to get on to servers during the weekends because that's when most people have time to play. If your only goal is to keep your base alive then you should do it in the middle of the week when it's easier to log on.

4 hours ago, Zeldei said:

Probably related to DLC costing money. People hate that. Companies should work for free, obviously. 

You still haven't figured out that capitalism works both ways. Consumers have every right to expect a good value for their money and, if they don't feel they're getting a good value, to vote with their dollars.

ARK isn't a charity, they have to earn their money.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

Quite a bit of the "commentary" on asa being a "bad game" is entirely disingenuous toxic fandom.

That's a disingenuous response that tries to ignore the many valid complaints that people have, and the reasons they have for being unhappy with ASA/Snail/WC.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

They are bad faith actors mad right from the start that it costs money and never got over it

Good point, I mean when have people ever been mad at a company that lied to them and tried to charge $90 for an upgrade that was announced would be free, and which many other games did for free. Gosh, can't imagine why any of that would bother people.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

or people upset that their rigs aren't good enough.

Another good point. It totally makes sense that people should spend hundreds of dollars just be able to play a copy/paste of the same game they already played once, and to also have the privilege of playing for P2W DLC. What a reasonable argument.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

Every time there is a DLC, no matter how cheap

Also a brilliant point, after all a $5 P2W dinosaur is so much cheaper than a $20 P2W dinosaur, people should be grateful for getting such a bargain on their crappy "content".

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

And if they don't get it all free, they throw a tantrum and say "it's bad!"

So many good points, if people don't believe they've been provided with a good value for their money it's obviously important to blame the consumers. Just like we, as a capitalist society, never give refunds for defective blenders and never provide recalls on defective car components at no cost to the consumer. I don't know why more people don't agree with your logic that in a capitalist system people should be happy with whatever crappy products a company wants to sell them, no one has a right to criticize bad or abusive business practices. Why? Because capitalism, that's why. Apparently. According to your "logic".

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

All the stuff about "the code" or "bugs" is ultimately secondary to the cost and difficulty of running the game.

Yeah! You tell 'em. It's not their responsibility to produce a better product so more people will want to buy it. Players are obligated to give them money to keep their company running because it's difficult to run a game. Even though we live in a capitalist society the poor, abused people who run Snail/WC are operating a charity and they have every right to expect people to give them money regardless of what the company produces. As gamers, we consumers are obligated to treat companies like charities and give them money no matter what, because their business is difficult. Whether the game is good, or honest, or satisfies their needs and desires as consumers is "ultimately secondary", what really matters is that companies in a capitalist society should be treated like charities because what they do is difficult.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

The game will never be bug free. Neither was ASE.

Again, you're either overlooking or deliberately dodging the point that this is what WC told people. WC claimed that ASA would be new code that resolved the old bugs, none of which was true. They knowingly, deliberately lied when they made those claims. You shouldn't be surprised that people are unhappy that these were lies.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

Why don't I crash all the time? Hmm? Magic? 

Why can't we live on red herrings? You obviously find them nutritious.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

No, I don't need to rethink what I wrote.  The logic is fine.  ASA is worth the price and objectively an upgrade over ASE in many metrics.

No, it's not objective, it's subjective, and that's the point. For you, it's worth the price and feels like an upgrade, for many, many other people it's a scam in which Snail/WC tried to sell the same game twice with, as you have already noted, the old bugs still in place. Re-releasing the same game with the same bugs and a new name is not objectively an upgrade, your view on that count is purely subjective.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

ASE was never going to be updated. Major bugs STILL EXIST and will never be fixed.  It only gets worse while ASA only gets better.

ASA would pretty much have to get better considering how miserable it was when released. Getting better than complete garbage is hardly something to brag about.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

I never said ASA was bug free or did not have issues.

I never said that you did, you're making up an argument that doesn't exist to argue against.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

But the issues do not make the game unplayable or bad.   The pros outweigh the cons.

According to your subjective judgement. For many people the game is bad and the cons outweigh the pros. Again, you're either unable or unwilling to accept that your feelings are just that, feelings, there's nothing objective about the claiming it's an upgrade and lots of people disagree with you. What Snail/WC promised and what they delivered are two significantly different things, that's a massive con (in both senses of the word) that drove away a lot of players.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

And many complainers are totally disingenuous and complain because they can't afford the game or the rig to run it well. You discount that, but it's completely true.

Most the people who say they "can't afford" to upgrade their machines for ASE don't mean it literally. What they really mean is either a) they have no interest in spending a lot of money to upgrade their computer just for the privilege of playing the same game a second time or b) they resent the various deceptions and lies that Snail/WC has attempted and they have no interest in spending that kind of money to support a company that has treated them poorly. Again, Snail/WC promised that it would be a new game, with new code, with all of the old problems being gone, and none of that was true. So yes, they do phrase the issue as not being able to afford a new computer (and in some cases that's even true) but for most people the subtext that you're either overlooking or ignoring is that they choose not to spend money on an upgrade just to play the poorly optimized game, with the same bugs, twice.

ARK has always been poorly optimized, it runs worse that most of the games on the market when put side-by-side on comparable hardware, being "asked" to spend money upgrading their computers to play a game that the development company has done a terrible job of optimizing is not going to inspire people to spend money.

During the ASE time period, tens of thousands of people had to upgrade their computers to play ARK, and they spent that money because they found the game inspiring enough that they thought it was worth their money to do so. That hasn't happened nearly as much with ASA, a significant number of people found ASA unworthy of spending upgrade money before it was released, and many who purchased it have found it didn't deserve the money they spent in order to play it. That's not disingenuous, that's not "toxic fandom", that's consumers in a capitalist society exercising their voice.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

People playing on systems that are years out of date and don't or just barely meet system requirements.  People playing on settings that are above their means.

That was true for ASE too and people were willing to spend that money because ASE inspired them to do so, that has happened a whole lot less with ASA.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

Discussions are rife with people giving it a bad review because they have paid DLC. It's absurd.  Nonstop complaints about "ASA SHOULD HAVE BEEN FREEEEEEEEEEEE!"

If you're being honest you have to admit that's exactly what WC announced they were going to do. That's what happens when you tell people something is going to be "FREEEEEEEEEEEE!", they expect you to keep your word. And then when Snail/WC reversed that decision they started a series of mind games and marketing lies that eroded the faith of many, many players. If players are unhappy about spending money on ASA it's Snail/WC's own fault for setting those expectations.

 Even after Snail/WC reversed that public announcement and tried to charge $90 for the free upgrade (and by the way, plenty of other games lived up to their promises and did it for free, another point that made a lot of people unhappy with ARK) they stated or implied on multiple occasions that it would be one price for everything other than the possibility of new maps that would be paid DLC. But then that turned out to also be untrue, instead of selling new maps as the DLC for ASA they sold P2W content that was painfully buggy and doesn't live up to its promises.

If you can make yourself truly be objective, you'll see that most of what people are really complaining about is the dishonesty and lack of transparency from Snail/WC. If they had done what they promised, a) made the upgrade to UE5 free and b) sold new maps as the DLC for ASA, then the vast majority of those complains wouldn't exist. The people who are responsible for the complaining are the people who made the decisions to pull a bait-and-switch and spout a bunch of marketing lies that were transparently dishonest.

10 hours ago, Zeldei said:

I run the game fine. If I can run it fine, it can't be an unsolvable issue.

And again... Plenty of people with high-end machines have had lots of problems with ARK, it's not about potato computers. You've been lucky, that's good, good for you. But just because you've been lucky in no way gives you the right to be dismissive of people who have experienced many problems with the game.

1 hour ago, Zeldei said:

It is not bad though.  It's a good game that has some issues. The same issues that ASE had.

You should re-read your own posts and think about them more. A game that has "the same issues that ASA had" is not an upgrade to many people.

It's a perfectly valid argument to say that adding new buggy content on top of old buggy content is not an upgrade, that's just more of the same bad practices. What Snail/WC promised people was that ASA would not have the same issues, they lied and said that was going to be new code that fixed those problems, so it's pretty understandable that many people were quite disappointed when they discovered that those issues still exist. It was not new code and it didn't fix those old issues, those are broken promises by Snail/WC.

Obviously you have trouble understanding this idea but for lots of people that's not an upgrade, it's a scam.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

No. It's a good game that poor people can't afford to play, so they review bomb it.

You obviously missed the point, which is not surprising since your argument is based on terrible logic. It has nothing to do with money, whether people are rich or poor is completely beside the point and has absolutely nothing with whether people wanted, or continue to want, to play ASA. There are lots and lots of people who would not agree with you, people who don't believe it's a good game. That fact should be obvious from the number of people who bought ASA and have stopped playing it after buying it. Even if your argument was good (it's not, but let's pretend for a moment) all of those people, people who 'could afford to buy it' and then stopped playing because they disliked it clearly don't agree that it's a good game. Lots of people feel ripped off by the game.

The thing is you don't want to admit that people have legitimate reasons why they refused to buy ASA in the first place, or if they did buy it they have legitimate reasons why many of have been disappointed after they bought ASA. Whether you like it or not, people review bomb a game because they don't like being lied to and/or because they are disappointed with the game they bought.

Having said that, it's obvious you are satisfied with what you bought and feel that you got your money's worth. That's great, and I don't mean that sarcastically. Any reasonable person should be happy for you that you are satisfied with the product you bought and that you're enjoying the game. A reasonable person should also be capable of understanding that other people have reasons for disliking the game that have nothing to do with being "poor people".

That's the cognitive dissonance, you're happy and you're either unable or unwilling to understand that reasonable people can disagree with you and dislike it, so instead you make up nonsense answers about 'the poors'. Whether you like it or not other people can dislike things that you like, and other people can be unhappy with purchases that you are happy with.

You're entitled to your own opinions. I can't stress that enough, your opinion about the game belongs to you and no one should ever try to tell you whether you should like it or not. But what you're not entitled to your own "facts". The real facts are the people have quite a few good reasons for disliking ASA or for avoiding it in the first place. For you to blame all of that on them 'being poor' is a garbage argument.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

People do this all the time in all kinds of games. It's literally a sour grapes reaction.

People have all sorts of reasons for liking or disliking games. Some of the reasons are more understandable, some of them are less understandable, but if you assume people review bomb games because 'they're poor' then you're always going to be wrong and misunderstand the real conversation about each of those games.

 The smartest thing you can do is take people at face value. If someone says they didn't enjoy the game play then... you can be pretty certain they didn't enjoy the game play, regardless of whether you enjoyed the game play. If someone says they feel like the company misled them or lied to them then... you should assume that's true for them, even if it's not true for you. And so on. People can like or dislike things in disagreement with you for many reasons, none of which have anything to do with them 'being poor'. Blaming it people being poor is one of the worst possible arguments.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

More people play ASE because it's an ancient game with low system requirements that requires no financial investment.

It's obvious you would like to believe that, but your desire doesn't make it true. People have a variety of reasons for preferring ASE over ASA, none of which have to do with their own personal finances.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

And people are allergic to companies making money, so they flip out any time there is a paid DLC, as if people should work for free.

Not true. When people complain about money it's because they want is to feel like they got a reasonable value for their money. This is true with blenders, cars, light bulbs, games... you name it, with everything. People complain about the cost of DLC when they don't feel that they got a good value for their money, no matter how much money they have.

There are multiple reasons why people might think a game/DLC is not a good value - maybe it includes features that were promised in the base game, maybe it's P2W, maybe it's so buggy that it feels like they're being sold garbage, etc. While it's true that there are always a few knuckleheads, the vast majority of people understand that making games costs money, what they want a customers of that game is to feel like the game company worked at doing a good job and giving them a reasonable value for what they've spent.

And again, you might be happy with the quality of the game and the DLC, but that doesn't mean other people have to.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

Performance wise, the game rarely even crashes now. I got 1 crash in like 300 hours of gameplay.  Upgrade the potato and the game will run better. I run it on a LAPTOP, of all things, and it runs fine.

And lots of other people have had different experiences. Game can be unstable and perform poorly even on high-end machines, something that quite a few youtubers with darned good computers have complained about at different times since the game was released. Obviously youtubers are not any more important than anyone else, they are only an example to demonstrate the idea that high end machines can still have lots of problems with a game. If you want to try to play the game of using individual examples, I have two RL friends who spend lots of money on their computers, always having the most current, high-end machines, and both of them have problems with ASE crashing a lot. Snail/WC are bad at optimizing their game for low end machines and they are bad at testing it for performance on high end machines. Every release causes a whole new set of issues because they don't have a good testing program.

We could spend pages discussing all of the different reason these things happen, but that discussion doesn't matter. The point is that blaming "potato" computers shows that there are a lot of problems with the game that you don't understand.

On 11/1/2024 at 12:50 PM, Zeldei said:

ASA is an upgrade that will have identical content and more.  Having more players doesn't mean it's actually a better game.  Just cheaper and easier to get into.  And lots of people are hostile on principle and wouldn't buy it no matter what. 

Maybe it you paid more attention to those principles you'd understand why 'being poor' is such a bad argument.

4 hours ago, Zeldei said:

There aren't nearly as many people playing ASA for the aforementioned reasons: a lot of poors.

Someone has a bad case of cognitive dissonance.

9 hours ago, DirkInSA said:

So: Did the peeps that bought into ASA get their monies worth? Is the "new" game worth it? Does it improve the old ASE experience?

I'll just leave this here, for no particular reason...

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346110,2399830

4 hours ago, Zeldei said:

If wildcard gave them a free DLC they would complain about it. 

They would still find a way to make it P2W.

On 10/12/2024 at 3:32 AM, Reprobos said:

so its done with the download survivor not the laod chacater? also i saw someone talking about i must have a tribe and i wont be able to access buildings and storages after teleporting? 

Yes, you upload your character (and dino's and other stuff) on one map. Then then you switch to the other map you download them on the other map.

If something goes wrong (and that's always possible with ARK), the wiki has a page of "Console Commands" so you can use those commands to gain back anything that you lose if the game glitches.

For example, if the game glitches and you lose your character, you can create a new character and give yourself the experience to get back to the same level you were before. Or, if you transfer between maps and the game won't let you access your buildings there is a command that will force the game to make your character the owner of the tribe and get your access restored.

Obviously you don't want to use console commands to "cheat", your goal is to play the game rather than just spawning in a bunch of stuff for free. But in single-player the console commands are a very powerful way to make sure that the game doesn't rob you when glitches happen. Basically anything that goes wrong can be fixed with console commands.

It's rare that something goes wrong (for example, I've been playing for years and I've never lost anything when transferring between maps, I've had 100% success on single-player, private server, official PvP and official PvE), but when you consider that tens of thousands of people play the game it's important to realize that it could happen to you, just like it's happened to lots of other people. When you're on an official server and something goes wrong chances are you're out of luck and whatever you've lost is gone, but on single-player you can overcome just about any bug and you never have to have your time wasted by glitches.

On 10/22/2024 at 4:27 PM, BugRaport said:

Will you delete official servers on 1.5 Ark Survival Ascended once Ark II (Two) is released ?

They will keep ASA official servers up as long as the game is making money. The day that it stops being profitable to have official servers for ASA they will turn the servers off, just like they did for ASE.

No matter what they say, no matter what anyone says, this is how it works. Game companies (almost) never support servers unless the servers are helping them make more money, that's just how the game business works.

Until that day comes, and course none of us knows when that day will be, you should play the game because you enjoy playing the game. If you hope that the ASA servers will be up forever, they will not, you might as well quite playing now. If you enjoy the game then keep playing it for as long as it's fun, as long as you understand that the ASA official servers will eventually be shut down.

1 hour ago, TonyTempah said:

Another reason for share prices to spike is if someone buys a bunch to generate a mini run. Either way I suspect shenanigans.

Agreed. Stock price manipulation is the most obvious answer, not hard for them to do with the price being so low.

11 hours ago, TonyTempah said:

For those that haven't played Ark from the beginning, it wasn't perfect back then but, it was better.

Too true, they had the chance to be a good company... 9 years, and a $40M lawsuit settlement, ago. Sadly that ship has long since sailed.

On 10/11/2024 at 5:46 AM, TonyTempah said:

It's not a counter argument, it's a fact.

And yet you presented it as a counter-argument, essentially implying that he was wrong for having that opinion.
"Woah there my king. You need to walk back from the sea's edge a bit", that's not merely a recitation of the facts, that's editorial commentary on someone's right to criticize industry practices.

Even with you expressing a minor degree of agreement, "Doesn't mean I like it or disagree with you but, it is a thing now." you were still addressing his opinion as though it was an invalid point of view. That's a counter-argument, not merely a presentation of a fact.

On 10/11/2024 at 5:46 AM, TonyTempah said:

You will have the last word, as usual but

Aww, how adorable, it's always amusing when someone accuses someone else of wanting to have the last word in an attempt to have the last word. Best wishes for you that it will work for your on your next hill.

11 hours ago, Guerrerocalavera said:

As far as I remember, the surface was dangerous, but not going to the extreme, because if you stop anywhere, at least 3 reapers are unearthed. In Evolved there were, but you didn't get 3 in one place

I disagree with this part, or maybe you and I just had different experiences. I have had plenty of times on ASE when 3 or 4 reapers could spawn nearby when I landed. (Sometimes there would be even more, but I think that is probably the result of other player kiting them to a location to get them away from drops.)

11 hours ago, Guerrerocalavera said:

I feel that the spawn is broken, since if they kill you for bug or similar, there is not even time to escape when you return, because the reapers bug you, it's a certain death. If you ask your Dino to escape, their artificial intelligence simply doesn't help.

If you're having problems with lag or with your mounts & reapers being buggy, that's fair, it would be one of many ways that bugs make the game less playable. Heck I one lost a drake because a reaper emerged from inside the mesh of a wall behind me when I landed. Bugs are always bad, but I don't think the number of reapers you're seeing is unusual.

5 hours ago, TonyTempah said:

1) because I can, that's my opinion and 2) because it illustrates that our opinions, although fun to share, matter little to the outside world. I am not a fiscal legislator and have no intention of being one. The state of media entertainment business methodologies are not my Windmills.

You're missing the point. He expressed a point of view on how he believes things should work and you responded with "the market has accepted it" as if that was a valid counter-argument when it's not. You presented it as if the market accepting a scam some how magically transformed it into not-a-scam.

Even when lots of people fall for a scam, it's still a scam.

9 hours ago, TonyTempah said:

The Market has accepted that charging for Early Access is standard business practice.

Why are you arguing about "The Market" when he was expressing a personal opinion about what should or shouldn't happen?

Lots of things are standard business practices that shouldn't happen. Businesses (like individuals) will usually do whatever they can get away with unless someone has the ability to stop them from doing it, that doesn't make it right. Nearly every business regulation ever written was explicitly designed to stop a 'standard business practice' that was shady or worse (insider trading anyone?). Monopolies area standard business practice, unless someone step in to break them up. Listing EBIDTA on quarterly reporting is a standard business practice, and yet plenty of people (like Warren Buffet, for one example) have described EBIDTA as a scam, and Forbes once published this criticism:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedgavin/2011/12/28/top-five-reasons-why-ebitda-is-a-great-big-lie/

So, being a "standard business practice" is in no way a valid defense of the ethics of that business practice, all that means is that they can get away with flim-flamming their customers because no one who has the authority to stop is has bothered to do so. If anything, EA is a prime example of how weak our consumer protection law are where the world of gaming is concerned, but in no way is it an example of how things should be done.

A scam is a scam, no matter how 'standard' it is.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

I think the (potential) concern with Premium mods is the fact that most of them are being sold as 'early access' but that hasn't been yet established as a genuine issue.

Sure it has been, it's been a genuine issue for years now, across the entire game industry. The original concept of EA was nice, on paper it allowed indie developers (people who did not have deep pockets funding their work) a way to get enough funding to see their project through to completion. But the reality is that it is almost exclusively used to "allow" people to pay for the privilege of being beta and alpha testers for game makers who are only too happy to "test in production". EA has led to a hailstorm of problems, ranging from barely-ideated game concepts making money, to projects that died on the vine because they weren't really indie developers but instead were established companies using the EA label as a way to get away with using EA to test their potential revenue stream before canceling game, to outright rug-pulls that were never intended to be real games but which allowed their devs to rake in a bunch of cash before saying how "sorry" they were that it didn't work out.

Something that should have been a boon to hardworking and upcoming devs was almost immediately turned into a constant stream of low-integrity publishing and many outright scams. EA is used as a "get out of jail free" card by developers to publish material that shouldn't even qualify for alpha or beta testing, but they're charging people to essentially debug their code for them, otherwise known as "testing in production".

When we're discussing the problems with premium mods in ARK, none of this is new, it's all well established. These are well known problems in the industry so of course they're also problems within the specific subset of premium mods. The very idea of selling premium content as part of EA is intrinsically a genuine issue, there will inevitably be the same set of problems for premium mods as there are for the world of Early Access games as a whole.

Anyone who is arguing that this is a new situation or something we don't know enough about, anyone who suggests that we don't have enough information to make reasonable judgements about the problems with premium mods in ARK is being myopic, whether intentionally or not, all they have to do is look at how EA has affected the industry as a whole.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

As such, my concern has always been around the completion rate of such projects. It's also the reason why I believe they should not be listed as Premium unless they're either completed or at the very least 80% completed as a customer protection measure.

Agreed. Which ties into the primary cause for all of the problems with EA products - there are no rules and no one to enforce them (and there never will be).

The only industry participants who could create and enforce rules are the platforms (Steam, Epic, etc.) but the problem is they have just as much of a financial interest in failed dishonest EA products as they have in the successful ones. Even if an EA product is a scam of some sort (a rug-pull, an asset flip, a game that's charging people to beta test their 30% finished product) it still makes money for everyone involved, including the platforms, so they have zero incentive to enforce any form of ethical restrictions that might cost themselves money.

If we drill down to the premium mods for ARK we see the same problem. When ARK is the mini-platform for their mods, WildCard has zero incentive to enforce any rules, restrictions or restraints on the mod creators, because WildCard makes money no matter what. They make more money from successful mods, but they still make money from mods that are either failures or scams. The only time WC would ever have any incentive to step in would be if a mod was a huge scandal, something that rocked the world like "The Day After" rocked the gaming industry. And, if we're being honest, the chances of a single, specific mod having that much affect on the ARK platform are practically nil, in order for a mod to have that much impact on the ARK ecosystem it would have needed to be a huge success to begin with.

So you're right that this is a concern, and its a concern that will never be adequately addressed, which is one of the driving forces behind so many people complaining about premium mods. WC can't enforce reasonable rules (or rather they won't, even if they hypothetically could), which means players are left hanging in the wind if they buy a premium mod that is more trouble than it's worth, or even if it merely fails to live up to expectations. When there is a problem, a well known problem, that people know won't ever be fixed, it leads them to complain - hence the number of people who dislike premium mods as a fundamental concept.

People like to be able to donate to mod makers, at their own discretion, but lots and lots of people actively dislike the idea of payment for mods being mandatory.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

Now, just to clarify about Premium mods being 'enticing', I was not referring to WC, but rather the Modders putting out these products making them enticing.

Fair enough, thanks for helping me put that into a better context than the way I interpreted it. With your better context in mind I'll revisit your previous comment, "Also, coerced and enticed are two very different things and Premium Mods are trying to be enticing."

The makers of mods are hoping their mods will be enticing, but that's out of their control. In order for a mod maker to overcome the negative feelings that lots of ARK players have towards premium mods, that mod maker will need to already have their own reputation that is independent of Snail/WC, and that means they have to get their mods in front of large numbers of player before their mod becomes premium. No mod maker has the ability to entice people to purchase their premium mod, especially not on Snail/WC's platform, unless the players are already favorably inclined towards that individual mod maker. Any mod maker who has not established their own reputation will only be able to entice players who are already happy with ASA/Snail/WC, and the player charts for ASA have demonstrated how rapidly that number of players is diminishing.

Which is to say, no matter how much a mod maker wants to make their premium mod enticing, they're putting it up on a platform that people don't trust.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

WC mostly like and benefit from advertising this ''game content'' to gain/retain players without added cost/investment to produce it. I think we've seen this before with Bathesda's creation Club and Premium mods where it hasn't all been doom and gloom as originally predicted.

Do you mean the same Creation Club that lead to a class action lawsuit? Umm, sure, so much better than originally predicted. How many class action lawsuits have you ever heard of coming from gaming consumers? People are constantly complaining about games and going blah-blah-blah about lawyers and lawsuits, but it's 99.999% hot air, gaming related lawsuits from consumers are practically non-existent... and yet Creation Club had one. The fact that Creation Club was a giant enough fiasco that a class action lawsuit actually happened shows exactly how much that "gloom and doom" was spot-on correct.

Even if we want to pretend that a major lawsuit against the platform provider doesn't factor into this conversation (it does, obviously, but for the sake of discussion we can pretend that it doesn't) there's still the general issue that most mods are underwhelming and there's no way to try a mod to see if it's worth the money nor to compare it during game play to other mods of the same ilk.

One of the joys of mods is being able to try them out and play with them for a while, then decide which one you like and (hopefully) donate to the mod that you decide to keep on your server. If you look at ASE, there are at least 18 different spyglass mods by 12+ different mod makers, that's a lot of potential experimenting before you even decide which mod you want just for your spyglass, which barely scratches the surface on all of the mods that are possible with ASE. And basically none of that is going to be possible with ASA unless you want to buy a whole bunch of spyglass mods before you even have the chance to find out which one has just the right mix of features that you like. A major mod takes even more time to fully understand and evaluate.

This now takes us into the realm of multi-mod servers. A player hears of a server that sounds like it has a good community, but that server runs 6 mods. Now the player has to buy 6 mods, in advance, mods that they don't even know they like, in order to join a server they don't know if they'll like, just to find out if the community on that server lives up to its rep. It doesn't take much common sense to see that that's a pretty unpleasant prospect for any player who likes to experiment or who likes to look around for a server that they'll enjoy.

So even if we're not talking about "gloom and doom", even if we're not concerned that a bunch of mods will be sold for more than they're worth, or that they'll never be finished, or that they're rug pulls, the basic system of mandatory advance payment for mods makes the entire ARK ecosystem less friendly for players. And, as noted before, this is stacked on top of the fact that WildCard themselves are already selling P2W DLC that's painfully buggy, which is pretty much adding insult to injury.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

However, the cornerstone in all this are still the Modders themselves given monetisation is optional and they have complete control over their mods.  As such, I do have certain trust and faith in the Modders themselves regarding the ethos and dedication to see their project through to completion. There will always be some that do and some that don't regardless of monetisation.

True, and it's the "some that don't" that are a big reason for the distrust of paid mods. Another big reason is that Snail/WC don't stand behind the mods in the same way that Bethesda does for Creation Club.

Even Creation Club, with its dubious history, is better than what Snail/WC is doing with premium mods. What we're seeing in ARK is exactly what happened with paid mods under Bethesda's watch before they moved to Creation Club. Bethesda announced a system for paid mods in 2015 and almost immediately cancelled it when there was massive pushback, pushback based on all of the same criticisms being directed at ARK's paid mods system. It's worth remembering that Creation Club, even with its problems, is better than their original plans for paid mods, and yet what Snail/WC is doing in 2024 is the same thing that Bethesda cancelled in 2015. It was a bad idea 9 years ago and it's a bad idea today.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

I understand a lot is always being said and theorised about what WC/Snail might do regarding monetisation to increase revenue streams, however I'd rather deal with what's in place now and/or if something is officially proposed/announced instead of 'potential NFTs etc'.

You've missed the point about the NFT thing. The point is that Snail/WC have no standards about paid mods, they have no intention of monitoring and managing the quality of the paid mod system. Again, it's not even as good as Creation Club, it's as bad as the paid mod system that Bethesda cancelled in 2015. Snail/WC have long demonstrated that they don't care about cheating, they care about creating the impression that they care. We're talking about a game in which the publisher (Snail) has a clan with company employees that has been publicly documented to be cheating and then banning players who document their cheating on youtube. This is not a company that can be trusted to care about the interests of either the modders or the players. The only thing we can trust Snail/WC to do is to monetize mods every bit as much as they can get away with while being completely unconcerned about whether they've created a platform that's good for both players and modders.

The reason for mentioning the NFT thing is to demonstrate that the only thing Snail/WC cares about it getting their cut, getting their piece of the action.

To ignore things that are going to be proposed or attempted is to be voluntarily short sighted. Failing to push back against Snail/WC now, when even their original system of paid mods is already bad, is only inviting them to do the worse things that they are already considering for the future.

There's no doubt that Snail/WC want to se a future, as soon as possible, in which all mods are paid, and specifically all mods are paid for under their own platform. Forget patreon, forget Paypal, forget donantions/payments under every other system. What Snail/WC want is for force all mods to be premium with the only payment option being their platform so they get a cut of everything. Failure or refusal to see that future is to be deliberately myopic.

15 hours ago, KingOfAshes said:

I don't think there is a divide and conquer master plan in place by WC/Snail. They can barely plan and release an expansion pack in a competent manner, let alone do some grand strategizing and playing 4D chess to manipulate. It's just people have many different views, priorities and ways of valuing their time and money which is why you have different reactions to these things.

It's a false equivalence comparing manipulating people to playing 4D chess. A person doesn't have to be smart to say to another person, "Don't listen to the people complaining, they're not on your side like I am." In no way does that require a sophisticated strategy. Playing a game of "divide and conquer" is one of the oldest and most basic games in the book, young children do it to their parents every day of the week.

On 10/3/2024 at 5:01 AM, KingOfAshes said:

Now, the argument around ''liking/disliking'' free over paid optional, addon content is a pretty moot one because of course everyone prefers freebees.

Note: I'm going to reply to your points in a different order, with my goal being to (hopefully) make the context of my comments more logical and sensible.

With that said, I'll begin by saying it's definitely not "pretty moot", for reasons that follow.

On 10/3/2024 at 5:01 AM, KingOfAshes said:

However, if you want to turn your Hobby time into a job or make money off it on the side (Premium mods), then you have to follow a whole different set of rules which include obligations towards the people who are no longer just fans, but paying customers. And yes, that includes criticism, expectations and timely deliverables. Commissioned mods are a similar category.

This is the key. There is a world of difference between making mods a hobby/passion project, and making them as a profession endeavor. Each approach has different perks and responsibilities.

Hobby = almost all perks (fun, satisfaction), no responsibilities (you have no further obligations unless you decide that you want to keep it going). If people donate, that's great, it's a bonus on top of the hobby that you already enjoy. More donations are even better, but as long as it's a hobby the modder knows that they may or may not make any money and they also have no obligation to maintain support of the mod.

Professional/job = reverse the above. If someone charges for a mod, as a cost/fee in exchange for using the mod, they now have an obligation to provide a product that works like a product, and they have an obligation to support it to the best of their abilities. Nothing in life is perfect so it's still true that we, as rational adults, we still need to be aware that if a mod doesn't make enough money to support its creators they might stop supporting it. But if they're honest people then they also stop charging when they stop support, only scumbags unethical developers charge for software that isn't supported anymore and might stop working at any time. Even professional software loses support eventually, and with game mods a player should understand the risk that it might be sooner rather than later. But even so, there is an onus on the mod creator to meet their professional obligations if they're going to charge for their mod.

This takes us back to the "like/dislike" question. What people dislike about being coerced into buying premium mods is that there is no accountability in the system, no recourse for them as consumers if the premium mod is bad, buggy, or even just fails to live up to its own description. It's already bad enough that WC sells their own DLC's that are buggy & P2W, but it's doubly insulting if someone pays for a premium mod from a third party that is buggy and/or P2W, or even simply fails to make the game better.

Why do people use mods? To make the game better. Now "better" can mean a lot of things, one person might find it better to have more dinos, another might find it better to have more automation in the game, another might find it better to have different flight models, etc., but whatever expectations the players have for how a mod might improve their game what they all have in common is that they to know they're going to get something better than vanilla ARK if they're paying for an add-on. And being "better", in all of those cases, means it needs to be less buggy than the base game, what nobody wants is for a mod to increase the bugginess and unplayability of their game.

The real issue with premium mods is not related to 'preferring freebies', it's whether or not the premium mods will actually improve the base game. So no, liking/disliking premium mods is not "pretty moot", because the reasons that people dislike premium mods are not merely rooted in just wanting something for free.

On 10/3/2024 at 5:01 AM, KingOfAshes said:

Granted I used to mod many years ago for a PC game called Company of Heroes and DOW, but back then and my team won 3 years in a row best mod awards in ModDB  with millions of downloads (that's how far back I'm talking lol), so many things have changed in the gaming space.

Back then, there was neither a way to make any money off it (barely the odd donation to run the web page and forum), but at the same time these were passion projects and hobbies and needed no monetary incentives. The creation itself WAS the reward and the time spent on them was fun hobby time for us enthusiasts. We always did it simply because it is rewarding to create something and implement it in a game you love and play. I think and hope that it still holds true today for most modders.

It's a shame that modders in the past didn't have better tools available to accept donations, and just as importantly it's a shame that the general culture of game players wasn't more focuses on donating money to modders as a way to encourage their continued passion. You and your cohorts didn't run your community for money, but of course it would have been more rewarding (emotionally, as well as financially) if more people had donated.

I agree with you that it's cringey to say, "Modders should be paid for their time", I would go even further and say that this statement is just plain wrong for the majority of modders, in large part because most of them not professional software developers and don't know how to professionally support a product, but of course it's still nice to see people support them. As a player who appreciates modders I've made it a habit to "buy a cup of coffee for" (translation: donate to) modders who make good content that I enjoy.

if I donate to a mod, then as a player I have no expectations and no rights.  Whether I donate $5 or $100, they could drop support for that mod the next day and they would be within their rights. But if a mod is a premium mod with mandatory payment, then that mod had darn well receive professional support.

On 10/3/2024 at 5:01 AM, KingOfAshes said:

Also, coerced and enticed are two very different things and Premium Mods are trying to be enticing. Coerced implies you are manipulated into buying something against your will, which is untrue for Premium mods but is certainly true for Fantastic Beasts (which should not be confuse and bundled up with mods) so far.

I disagree what WC cares about making premium mods "enticing", that's not really their goal. What they really want is to make prem mods mandatory. Their eventual goal is to make all mods premium and to guarantee that they get a cut of every transaction, and they don't care for one hot minute whether the mods are good or bad. The individual modders might care about this, but WC doesn't. If they thought they could get away with it, WC would make all mods premium in a heartbeat.

Shi Hai (the guy who runs Snail, which are the de facto owners of ARK) has gone on record in various public interviews saying that he wants ARK to be a platform, not just a game. This is why, for example, they published an American West themed mods complete with railroads and cowboy hats, to show players that "anything goes" in ARK. It's "a platform", after all, not just a game, so who cares if anything in the WC add-ons makes sense. It's also why they published that absurd Mickey Mouse mini game. Anything goes, as long as they get a piece of the action. What Shi Hai, Snail & WIldCard want is for anything and everything to be bought and sold through their own company platform and for Snail/WC to get a fee for every transaction that takes place.

Shi Hai went on record (in a publicly available interview, that you can find if you want to) as being in favor of NFT's being part of the ARK platform/ecosystem. Most players (other than the cheaters) see the selling of dinos for RMT's (real money transactions) as a form of cheating, but not Shi Hai. He wants to see people selling dinos to each other for real money, as long as Snail/WC gets a piece of the action. Everything under the sun is fair game, and they don't care about quality even one tiny bit, as long as WC/Snail gets their cut.

The real issue here is not players vs. modders, it's not freebies vs. premium, it's not whether modders should be paid for their time, it's Snail/WC trying to "divide and conquer". They're trying to sow division between modders and players by telling the modders "we're on your side", artificially creating two sides that were never opposed to each other in the first place, all in support of their eventual goal to have everything in ARK become a transaction from which they can skim a piece of the action.

2 hours ago, TonyTempah said:

I'm facing palming the situation.

Thanks for the confirmation, appreciate it.

On 10/2/2024 at 8:09 AM, TonyTempah said:

Interesting. I have little experience with small tribe servers but considered it a few times. Given that you can't ally from a game mechanic perspective, how does mega tribes allying by actions manifest itself. Do they all come together to wipe a tribe? Take turns at attack over time? 

Question for you, are you facepalming me or facepalming the people who cheat on small tribes servers? I'm not arguing, I'm asking, I genuinely don't understand your response. Is there something about that answer that you disagree with or find hard to believe?

It's a sign from the gods, they're trying to save you from yourself. Consider yourself lucky.