Arrietty

I crashed and when I got back in, you didn't respond, so... not sure. ? If you jump back in, I'll help out. Just need to get you to a safe place first, and over to our shack by red so you can quick-travel.

Hello there everyone. I am still new to this game and had some simple questions I would like to ask the devs and the community if you know the answers. I'm typing this as a response because the site is currently acting weird and will not let me create a new topic but I really want to get these questions out there. I recently bought this game on PS4 and I'm in love but im trying to make sure I don't lose this love. My first question is I keep hearing about server wipes. I play on a pve server and have leveled a good bit since I started playing. my concern for server wipes is not losing my built settlement and items but my character in general. I know this game is still in alpha build, but when the official game releases next month will I be losing my character? I do not mind at all rebuilding all my stuff. that's the easy part. I just want to know if I will still have my character after the official release? Also when a server is wiped does it delete your character or just reset the server? My main concern is just losing my characters levels.

First, you're responding to someone on my particular profile, not on the forum itself (Thus I and perhaps Arrietty) are the only one(s) that will see it unless others specifically come here.

As to your questions... that's all it is: TALK. There's a lot of TALK about everything, and a lot of people are -hoping- there will be server wipes because at the moment, PvP is a dramatically chaotic mess with too few people with too much power. Bit like the real world. Maybe too realistic for their taste... not to say I wouldn't like to see an adjustment, but...

Long ago, Wildcard stated they wouldn't wipe the servers. Everyone's been clinging to those words since then, and they created Survival of the Fittest for those who want periodic server wipes. I don't understand why so many people aren't just flocking there instead of begging for -all- servers to be wiped (But, I've yet to try Survival of the Fittest, so there may be very good reasons... I wouldn't know).

In terms of PvE, people want wipes because there're too few people building too much and having too many dinos (So dinos won't spawn). This problem has been erased with the most recent patch involving Wildcard deciding wild dinos will no longer be limited by player-owned dino count.

Wildcard seems to be taking great pains to ensure they don't HAVE to wipe servers by trying to give everyone a little of everything they want. Their toughest challenge is going to be finding a way to satisfy people who want PvP, but don't want to be constantly massacred by huge tribes, and for whatever reason won't go to Survival of the Fittest.

In terms of the launch date: Don't worry. It won't be released next month. Our server has a joke about their "15 minutes 'til update" message on official servers: "Don't worry! We have a few more hours."

Wildcard's sense of time is almost always way off. Some major updates are postponed by not hours or days or weeks, but months. Many of us stand around waiting for the servers to go down so we can come back in and do things, and we end up standing around for hours when we were told in the message it'd be half an hour or 15 minutes.

We do this to ensure we don't die during the crash, or lose an in-progress dino to something weird from the patch. This is deeply annoying, and it wouldn't be -nearly- as bad if they'd issue an update message stating: "Sorry! We ran into some last-minute problems with the update... stay tuned for a new launch time!"

Anyway, moral of the story: I imagine we have months if nigh another year or two before Wildcard's really ready to launch... with the number of bugs and crashes and glitches and people falling through floors and rocks to their deaths and......... there are a myriad of issues they need to solve before they even consider it playable to the normal user, let alone ready to exit Early Access.

Don't take this the wrong way. I adore ARK. It's amazing when it works well and it's unparalleled by any other game in my opinion. But it has -A LOT- of kinks to be worked out before it's ready for the general public. We're all just early adopters and self-abusers by sticking around through all the nonsense that happens and still getting back up to rebuild everything we just lost and get back to it.