TheDonn

When was that news given out?? What the hell, that sucks. Thanks for the info.

So, no news on The Center? Or did I miss it?

On Feb. 23rd, WildCard announced that The Center "wasn’t on track to launch with the level of quality we require" in Crunch #398. That was one month ago. Is there some sort of secret-squirrel Discord message I missed providing more information on when this map would launch, or has no extra information been given and people have simply stopped asking? The crunches and community managers have fully pivoted to talking about the release of Scorched Earth without a single new mention of The Center, and the last we heard, some kind of "partner" was working on The Center. As far as I know, the phrase "partner" denotes someone who is not part of WildCard working on a map through some kind of agreement, and this is concerning. We haven't heard anything for a month about The Center on the forums that I'm aware of, and "partners" usually want money for their work. I am concerned because looking at the store page for ASA, the non-canon maps are listed separate from the canon maps, and set off with the following text: "We also plan to have the previously released free DLC available: The Center, Ragnarok, Valguero, Crystal Isles, Lost Island, and Fjordur." Tinfoil-hat theory below. I am probably nuking this out by overthinking (especially my dumb theory), but at any rate what is the deal here? When is The Center launching? Is it back to the ~May timeline? Is it imminent?

At the end of 2016, this behemoth was added to game and to my knowledge has never received a visual overhaul. Who else would like to see it get a little bit of a visual remake, considering that we are playing on a elevated level of game with ark survival ascended? Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun with the game and don't really have many gripes, but I was looking at my poor gigas today and just wondering, because they still look just so rough.

So after 20-30 hours of playing ASA I can comfortably say that the level of foliage in the game is maybe, just maybe, a bit way overboard. Don't get me wrong, compared to ASE it is still a dazzlingly good looking game but so many areas are just either densely canopied or packed so much with ground growth that it slaughters anything that is thrown at it unless you can use the Nvidia proprietary tech (which most players cannot). Anyone else have this feeling? I like the new look and whatnot of the island, it really feels like a fresh experience but the performance issues that plague the client-side experience are a big issue. Instead of trying to band-aid it with upscalers or buying a new GPU, it could've been scaled back like... 10 or 20 percent and it would still look fantastic visually, but have that much less power overhead without much impact on available resources (wood/fiber/berries) for players.

This is concerning ASA. All 4 are an issue for my account, so this does not deserve to be moved to an existing thread. Those people's issues are separate to what I'm seeing, and they aren't complaining about the same thing. 1: No favorites stay on the favorites list except for one single Official server that is un-joinable even if it shows 10/70 players. 2: All official servers show up as full. If they say 5/70 or 68/70 (and anything in between), they show up as full. 3: The unofficial server list refresh only populates 20-25 servers and it is 100% random which set of 20 it picks. 4: I cannot add servers to the Steam -> Game Servers -> Add because it gives an error saying no ASA servers are available. I have restarted 4 times on unofficial from a cold start, which isn't the end of the world because the early game is fun and has its challenges. But after putting in my 4th turn of leveling to the mid-20s and taming a few things, for the server to never, ever, ever show up again after favorite-ing and playing it, is a little grating. Combine that with not being able to access official servers and having to play on unofficial only, it is a bad situation. I've allowed the app through firewalls, and it connects to servers just fine. I'm sure there isn't a solution to this at the moment because the game is too new, but just making a thread for people experiencing multiple issues at once. In all honesty many of these issues are carried over from ASE, because the server browser issues were there as well.

For me, even servers that display 15/60 people won't allow me to join, saying they are "full." This same exact problem happened with ark survival evolved, and is now happening with ASA. Of note is that I am using 100% different hardware and router, and still get the "server full" error.

I do not understand why this wasn't added but frame-gen was. Frame-gen only runs on the 4k Nvidia cards so it provides a benefit to a very small segment of users. Very small. But development time was added to the game, which has misspelled menu options, to add this.

So Nvidia proprietary tech, and nothing else? Cool beans.

ARK is an enormous mess of code. Dinos, structures, pathing, player connection and positioning, all these have to seamlessly feed from the server machine out to any computer that requests the info. WildCard has refused to region-lock servers (can still bypass with VPN, but it might help some), so these connections can come from quite literally anywhere in the world. It is definitely both software and hardware related. The game is just too complex after so many years of development to work with less bugs. My personal hope for ARK 2 is that they focus a bit more on consistency of how they code the game. Seems like there is a lack of that in how ARK is currently coded. There are creatures in the non-canon maps and some of them are coded in outside the base game, as a single example, and I don't know that it is 100% necessary for that to be the case. We've always had hardware problems too, on the client-side, getting ARK to run smoothly. I've seen it memory leak to consume right up to 16gb of vram, and at a different time, nearly 32gb of system ram. We can brute-force it with a stacked system, or strip it to DX10 and run in potato-mode, but these problems still hang around. It IS better than it used to be in 2015/16 though, but there is more that could be done. The devs seem to hold a, "that crap is in the past" approach to the current released game as they develop forward. They've done TLCs, I know, and anti-mesh passes on older maps, but fixes for simple map-related problems have gone untouched for years, if they were ever solved. It also usually took an unavoidably game-breakingly bad problem for them to step in to released content and do anything about it. Hopefully the design philosophy in ARK 2 breaks that WildCard tradition, and they spend time refining released maps, systems, and creatures.

The crap in this response thread... Holy hell. We look like a bunch of dip-asses to the rest of the world. I know a lot of people are proud to look dumb on the international stage, but many Americans aren't. Jesus Christ. Grow up.

In the past, it has been announced and/or handled. I was on a server that corrupted and we got 4-5 days offline and then when it came up, there was about a 3 day rollback, but they communicated what was happening at least. Nowadays, with the way things work, there is no telling. Still was hard to bear, because for the three days of the rollback, I had been in a building mood and built out an enormous addition to my base. Logged in and a bred creature, all this kibble I made, and about 2/3 of my base all gone as if I never did it.

I just did a fresh install of ARK, and it is 340 GB.

Maybe, eventually, speaking personally. But if it takes a similar track to ARK 1 in terms of quantity over quality, I don't know. I probably won't buy it. There are a lot of games to play, and my time with ARK 1 has scratched the hell out of that itch! I'm primarily interested in the story continuing, and I don't really have to buy the game to see that. I'm also very patient with stuff like this, so I can wait for Anthomnia to post lore videos and watch em to get my ARK lore nerd-out. EDIT: I don't think I'm alone in my hesitancy, but yeah I bet it'll still sell well enough to stay alive.

ARK players... Breeding events aren't a constant thing. They really never have been a constant thing, hell, even EVO events weren't always active every weekend. Every-SINGLE-time there is a new Community Crunch, there are a hundred-eighty comments chastising WildCard for not giving Official Servers a breeding event, and in this week's edition there is even a person bragging about how much they spent on the game, and offering that up as support of breeding-event-griping. They don't do it every weekend. We had a lucky streak. Evidently it is over! I'm not trying to salt people's wounds, but am rather ripping off the BandAid. If current 1x breeding is intolerable, there are solutions, but in ARK, enough is never enough.