MagnumBonum

Title.

This game can't be hard to fix. Tek suit, etc...

I added 15 images to the Gen 2 drop locations. •Mail? •"Uploading item to ARK..." timer sometimes takes way too long; it's 1min., and people simply can't be out of options for that long in a PvP game. •Extend the timer on the drop that happens when a character is uploaded; creatures get 30mins.; 2.5mins. is nowhere near enough time to get back to a bag if something important had a timer that wasn't noticed. •Are any of the Scorched Earth caves still broken? •Perhaps a hotkey to inhibit tek punching's damage. •Differentiate personal tek helmet and other tek generator ranges. •Neutral / aggro turrets. •Make level locked blueprints show stats. •Attachments for the chainsaw and drill, weapons and weight reduction. •An item link for chat. •Actual inventory sorting per category (that would transfer). •A keep marker for inventory items retained from "drop all" or "transfer all". •Check resource health values vs. tool potential; I get less wood with a 298% chainsaw then I do with a 200%. •Are you satisfied with 10% resources (up to 100 items) from grinds? •Build schematics. Edit: •I counted about 6,400 characters on the 1,722 official servers, out of 51,000 concurrent players on SteamCharts. Surely nobody would suggest that 87% of players are offline or on private servers. A). Where are the players? B). 9 out of 1,722 servers have above 23 characters -- you don't need 1,000 servers with 0-8 characters, etc.

I do want to mention specifics on playtimes and various correlatives of entertainment. Can anybody think of a game that has similar, e.g., hourly, density of rewards? I can have fun every hour with ARK, making a base, making a crafting station, doing drops and getting some of the best items and blueprints in the game... I made a notepad entry every time something seemed particularly storyworthy to me, and events were consistent for the first 32 hours. Resources and tames should be more relevant to spread out activity importance over doing Gen 2 drops and trying to save up to trade for creature lines. A market would most satisfy this. Even better would be a real money auction house to allow people to trade for what they want. Taming creatures and gathering resources is fun, but capping out what seems necessary or relevant -- what would keep interest -- is easy to do, and items and creatures simply aren't persistent or available enough to easily have content all day every day. Taming can be fun, but it's not logically, storytellingly, an activity that somebody would want to or should do for hours every day. Resources aren't convertible or tradeable enough to keep availability balanced and activities whimsical; it's easy to get into a loop of making ARBs and perhaps not even having anything to do with them. If momentary importance could be more intense for every aspect of the game -- that's mastery, feelings of control of the direction of the character and the world, and social relevance / status -- the game would be way more fulfilling and lastingly playable, and anything could be done in about 1 month. •Resources should be rare / valuable, central, and locationally controllable. •Creatures should have levels and stats easily made available. •The world could be more living, but I don't think NPCs are necessary or even optimal; players should be enough, and servers being full would be optimal. •Bounties and similar could make resources and creatures more rewarding more often -- how satisfied are you with momentary options and storyworth?

I don't want people to post or bandwagon these types of replies; ARK and ARK 2 can exist simultaneously with different design philosophies. ARK should be a game worth playing so that people have variety between games they can choose and so that they respect the studio. This is defined by momentary controls, density of relevant options, and archetypal fantasy. The setting, selection of options, and persistent, open world are really important because more options is more strategy, and linguistic variety: depth is the definition of storyworth. Tools can be primitive, industrial, and futuristic; people can relate to the items, creatures, and world, which makes it likable, memorable, and discussable / castable. ARK is a fun option to discuss video game design and theorycrafting, and fundamentals are really important to establish fun, playerbases, and future game potential. Again, see extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation; compare momentary excitement value of this game to others. ARK is one of, if not the, best game(s) available, and Studio Wildcard is one of, if not the, best studio(s) available.

Here's a list of notions I recorded in 24hrs. of playtime recently. I want to establish some fundamentals that the studio can have to update the game to make it a quality standalone title that might not be developed in the future. Movement •Fix the character getting stuck in a forward motion / boost when activating the tek suit boost. •Remember what the tek suit jetpack toggle state was for after boost jumping. •Fix the tek jetpack not turning on when the jump hotkey is held in the air (maybe a rare bug). •Allow movement with max capacity while wearing a tek suit. I don't think trying to use an ability to move and trying to balance the limitations on how long something takes is compelling. •Allow directional control while boosting. •Allow a boosted fall consistently. •Standardize Spino / [etc.] water movement to have strafe. •Allow a Glider Suit Skin to be attacked to a Federation tek suit (plausibly also normal tek suits). •Make an autorun. The difference in playability would be huge. Imagine having one of the most fun games available to play, and one of the most rewarding activities, collecting drops on Genesis 2, requires you to hold down hotkeys for minutes for hours. People should be able to Alt+Tab and chat on forums or similar between setting vectors, and this is a difference between people wanting to play your game for hours when they start, vs. a few minutes. This logic also applies to general character and mounted movement. Building •Fix pieces not going where they're listing and taking over the location of other pieces. Some pillars simply won't go below another pillar to connect the building to the ground, and it's a waste of resources (potentially huge, especially if a large pillar line was made and can't be completed) while disallowing building. •Stop deleting bases every few days / don't auto-decay destroying anything. Even stone FOBs are extremely valuable in an immersive, interactive, open world. Notable, I went back on a server after a few weeks, and vaults were still there. I want to be able to set up a taming pen or crafting stations, especially industrial stations, on other maps and be able to play there in a few weeks. Removing bases for no logical reason intensely separates a natural willingness to play and to progress on various maps with various populations from/to a much more casual interest in (and rating of) the game. Tames auto-decay before they starve. •Improve the ability to move pieces, such as foundations, around possible placements, e.g., a pillar -- various levels, etc. UI •Add a "drop wood" button to beaver dam inventories. •List the jetpack toggle state. •Allow the zoom in and out hotkeys to be held for very quick zoom rates. Perhaps make a zoom sensitivity setting. •Have an [evenly distribute to local {refining forges, etc.}] option. •Fix items in the inventory not showing (? I haven't noticed that in this playthrough, but it used to happen a lot). •Allow UI notifications to disappear, e.g., "LEVEL-UP IS AVAILABLE!". •Fix some items not stacking into a full [e.g., vault] with a partial stack already in it. Servers •Merge servers. Player counts are incredibly variable, so perhaps start temporary servers when the game is really popular. Two recent checks had A). 12 servers at or above 20 characters; B). 25 servers at or above 20 characters -- one was on a Friday, and neither had many players above 30 or so. Here's a Saturday at 10:55PM Central, US -- 21 servers at or above 20 characters. I want to be able to play on full servers for every map -- that may seem requisite of more design to incentivize, and some might enjoy the relaxed nature of specific servers or maps not having many players, but the more logical scenario is making characters play nice (because that's the most efficient and fun, having scheduled / rules-enforced PvP); socialization is more important than by-the-(low)-numbers resource availability -- see extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. •Have low-ping servers for Gen 2 for central US; SE and Ragnarok have 27ms servers; Gen 2 has 100ms servers. PvP •Show specifically where turret ranges are. Graphics •Allow rock explosions to be turned off without disabling other features. •Allow the boost blur graphic to be toggled. Hotkeys •Allow modifiers through the client. Community •Stop ESP cheats. •Make a market. Playtimes are extremely starter centric; people make a base, get some industrial stations, and perhaps some tames, then plausibly can't find anybody with which to trade, can't find tames (e.g., a high level Giga) to do content with (and most content that rewards hexagons or element and unlocks require breeds), and plausibly get PvP'd. A market would correlate available resources and creature lines so that anybody can do any content they want. It's the difference between the first 1-24hrs. of play time and trying to play for weeks, months, or years; it's the difference between characters having all day PvP on Managarmers, and people sitting in their bases. Sound •Sound sometimes bugs when tek punching, making a loud noise. •Allow sound in background. Networking •Tighten up netcode / character accuracy. See the Wave Ray mission on Genesis 1. Try to move a full-weight character on the ground with the tek suit boost and accurately stop at a location. Other •Allow picking up items during max capacity instead of whip shenanigans. •Fix Gen 2 drop locations. Here are 3 examples. •Have a group system with invitations from anywhere -- what a huge notion. Perhaps make a group finder (a list of groups and why). •Have a loot list. Being able to check loot possibilities for, e.g., Gen 2 drop colors, to decide if doing drops is worth your time in that moment would be extremely valuable, and I think it would improve early sustain. •Allow aiming directly down. •Fix tek punch (remove the repeating startup). •Be able to hide HNLA from the radial menu so that hiding it is possible when being chased, e.g., in the air. Notes •Make more reason to be out in the world. I really enjoy, not having much, having a lvl. 20 Bronto KO'd and taming and finding a bunch of low level Mantis to kill with my Federation tek suit power punch and to harvest with my metal hatchet. Trophies / bounties could be an option, hunting specific creatures for rewards. An example of a design option is to allow characters to announce kill times of specific creatures or something to get other characters roaming. This ties in with a possibility of being able to specify types of creatures and stats (and colors) that you want, e.g., starting an event where a herd gathers and tries to protect their territory -- it could be "a stealthed breeding lair / center discovered" -- but levels, stats, and creatures should be available. •Bounties from players for tames, items, character kills, perhaps character locations announced to the bounty huntee... •"I don't think condensed gas and sand are relevant." You could make everything important pretty easily and vastly increase the number of options that a character has momentarily. •Tek suit flight up tendency? •I think drops should be increased during events. •Vastly rethink how you want character proficiency to be; I want to switch to a crafting spec, make a bunch of stuff, and switch back to go about my day; this could be true for a huge variety of playstyles, e.g., melee, speed, etc., and I don't think a daily limitation on spec switching is compelling, and I do think momentary storyworth is compelling. •Rethink scopes potentially having visibility around the scope.