IanHighlander

If you're on official servers then it's gone, max level is 450 on official.

CPU clock speed, as much RAM as you can chuck at it and disk I/O performance. Number of cores is less important if you're only going to run two or three servers as Ark only uses one full core (two threads) anyway for each server. Spec wise for mine, I currently run an HP Z820 workstation with dual Xeon E5-2643 (3.3Ghz per core) CPUs (8 cores/16 threads total), 64GB RAM and run the Ark servers on a RAID 6 array of Western Digital Black drives. I run eight Ark servers currently (not busy ones) completely lag free. Forgive the crappy phone pic:

Can I be an admin for your bank account? I spend money all day and I'm really good at it.

Make sure you've opened the same ports on your servers firewall as well as on your router. Also you may want to remove the "use raw sockets" option, it can cause various problems and instability. I've used Ark Server Manager to run all my servers for years (I currently run eight servers) and every single one of those goes available and appears in steam lists fine.

If you're using custom levels, you need to ensure you have a total of 50 levels over what you want your player max to be. This is made up of three ascensions at 15 levels each plus 5 chibi levels. For example, my servers have a standard max player level of 135, so the total max level possible with all ascensions and chibi levels is 185.

The issue is NAT loopback (also known as hairpinning), to play on a server on the same network, your router needs to support (and have enabled) NAT loopback Quite a lot of ISP routers do not support this.

Not sure you can blame Wildcard for the download from Steam/Microsoft/Sony taking ages. So many other things you can blame them for (and you do seem to make a hobby out of it), but download speeds from a third party is not one of them.

In fairness your first post on this forum was to slag off the game and call it a joke instead of actually asking for help/advice. Whilst there are definitely some utter tossers on this forum, it's not the way to ingratiate yourself to people. That aside, can you give a bit more information, what platform (Steam, Windows 10 Store, Xbox, PS4, Switch, Mobile etc), if Steam are you using Windows, Linux or Mac, the version number of the game you have installed. Do you get any errors when trying to connect? Do you see any servers in the list? Along with any other pertinent and helpful information. There are plenty of people on here including me who will do our best to try and help, but we can't if we don't know what your problem is or what platform you're on.

Over 7000 hours in Ark and never had this before, it was a new one on me when my Wyvern did it. First and only time it's ever happened in all that time though.

Not had it with Argies, but had a Wyvern nearly walk off a Wyvern egg platform when I landed there and jumped off to grab the egg, same thing though, no wander, on passive, it just walked away, did a circle almost falling off the edge and then stopped.

An admittedly old quote from Ark devs but still the case as they have previously also stated that they are unable to update to the newer UE4 engines because of the work that would be involved.

The clock speed will be what made the difference, even the slightest increase in clock speed will make a big difference to Ark servers. Core count does not.

Your crashing problem isn't port related as those are well within the allowed range of ports for Ark servers. Ark servers do utilise a second port on the main config'd port though so you need to make sure you have nothing running on 7780 as well as 7779 in your case and have both ports forward through any firewalls.

Not true at all I'm afraid. Ark servers only utilise one core (two threads) and don't even utilise the second thread fully. Almost all Ark server processing is done by the first thread, with some control stuff on the second. Ark servers never use more than one core each. You can add -usecache to your start up command which will (after two or three starts) help a bit.

Add this to your gameusersettings.ini bForceCanRideFliers=True