DirkInSA

Don't worry about it - the switch is "redundant" to Ark and no longer does anything in the modern Ark incarnations . So putting it will do absolutely nothing - Sorry! I was just kinda "venting" in my 2nd post, that stuff is all history. My 1st set of comments around ports are relevant though!

Yeah - my thought is that no one outside of wildcard knows what they actually done with the networking stuff. I do know from personal experience that in the past is was possible to host and join an Ark server on the local LAN with absolutely no internet connection. And that is a function that is provided out of the box by the Unreal Engine (bIsLanMatch is an unreal engine parameter, and has (to my best knowledge) never been documented by Wildcard). Further, when you got this kind of server running, and you had internet with a bit of port forwarding, It was possible for internet Ark game clients to connect to that server by means of a direct IP connect on the client launch parameters. Sure the Ark game browser did not pick it up, but also there was no "cannot connect" / "Timeout" and etc. And a last bonus of that setup was that this Nat loopback that gives a lot of people(including me) gray hairs was not a thing - internal LAN clients launch with ShooterGame.exe 192.168.x.y:7777 (lan IP) and internet clients launch with ShooterGame.exe 101.y.y.z:7777 (wan IP). The only time steam was accessed was for the server to validate that SteamID of the connecting client was indeed a good ID with possesion of the game. And this commutation was initiated by the Ark server - so no arbitrary "open ports" needed there either. Somewhere and somewhy over time this functionality has been killed. In other words Wildcard has adopted an "overlay" to the networking functionality - either provided by Steam or Epic or both. And this "overlay" prevents the underlying engine from doing what it does quite well. In all events - the "detail" don't matter - the current day impact is that Ark networking is very very finicky Those were the good old days before Wildcard broke it!

The "ease" of hosting was well busted when Ark changed the way networking was implemented. I think this was just before Epic version of the game was released? But the "rawsockets", "bIsLanMatch" options were removed, and networking ONLY worked over Steam protocols - it was no longer possible to run a client / server setup using the underlying Unreal networking.

This is a problem! You have both TCP & UDP forwarded, so any 3rd party port scan should see 7777, 7778 and 27015 as open! (Even if it does not recognise what "service" is running behind those ports) So the first thing to do is maybe check with your ISP if they ALLOW incoming ports from the www to your WanIP address. I know that some ISP's block incoming connections, especially to non standard ports (i.e. not web port 80, not mail and etc.) Secondly, as @Larkfields sez, if your router does not have NAT loopback enabled, you might get it right to create and host a server but that server will not be accessible from your LAN. It will be visible on the internet and battlemetrics, but from the LAN you will not be able to join (or even see) it. From personal experience, I find the published 7777-7778 data ports and 27015 query port to be not so useful, they tend to conflict with a bunch of different games - so I rather run with a 7789-7790 and 26900 set of ports for my first map.

I aint ever done an attack on plant species - but I do agree w @ThePryBar that a agro wild bronto will DESTROY this lot. My thought would lean towards a wyvern? Dunno if breath damages plant species? But it is maybe a thing to test somewhere to see the impact? IF breath works, a fire wyvern would slaughter that lot in like 0 seconds flat.

In terms of a dedicated server (yeah I know you guys aint doing this - but), there are a bunch of dodgy settings in the server launch that is required to enable Epic join .... I wonder if this stuff is "automagic" in the Epic version of non-dedicated launch. On steam the non-dedicated launch pretty much takes the normal game "startup" config. But to ALLOW epic joins on a dedicated, there are things like "multihome" (and other stuff that has slipped through the sieve that I call a brain right now) which are required. So has non-dedicated EVER worked on Epic? After doing the hard google to go find those special Epic enabled host parameters and putting them into your (single player startup before you get to choose "host server") Ark launch instruction does it still fail? Maybe an issue w Epic is what I am getting at.

Exactly this ... Also if you stay within "render" range in your bit of the map, you will reduce bandwidth. The traffic from the server (as @Pipinghot correctly sez) is to tell your game client what has changed so that the client can render it. Obviously if there is "high traffic" of 3rd party peeps / dinos through your base area - then more traffic will ensue.

Then I for one will most likely never get to SEE my own (or any other) tattoos, cause I ain't gonna get the game!

Just a stab in the dark - but I think that the 3rd person view is a design choice because of X-Box & Microsoft involvement. I have not played X-Box, but my son has for many years now, and it seems to me that the 3rd person view "works" better on console? Following on from that comment - I wonder where that leaves Steam releases and mods and such like. X-Box, and by extension the "Windows store" versions of games, classically are not friendly to "modding" - nor even to running your own private servers. X-Box likes things nicely locked down with no chance of fiddling with the game other than how they choose to ship it. Is it the intent to run the Official server network through Game Pass? I am feeling less and less that Ark 2 is gonna be a thing on my radar - but hey I would love to be proved wrong!

You are CLEARLY not a beginner - why you messing stuff up for real "beginners"? For what it's worth - In my opinion (and I don't care where or why), if you pillar stuff then you are the "bad guy" of PVE, and the number one reason that when I play online, I do PVP.

Its to do with programming stuff - 8 bit CPU's, 32 bit CPU's and etc. Only relevant to peeps that have programmed for a living, and have done it for a long time. The 1st "generally available" machines had an 8 bit register, meaning they could address and "talk to" between 0 and 255 different things. And to get technical, they had a limit of 255 * 255 of address space to work with - which is like 64k (yes kilo bytes, not mega bytes or giga bytes). This is like MS-Dos or CPM or Apple IIe operating systems. And those are the kind of machines that "drove" the Apollo moon shots! and then came 32 bit architecture (kinda Windows 95 era), and in it's time 64 bit architecture (kinda windows 2000 era) So its an inside (to programmers) joke - with the give away being "error correction" in @Pipinghot 's post ............. ---EDIT--- And before I get well flamed - this is an huge simplification of happenings that may not be at all historically accurate. But the principle obtains LOL

I also like this thought process! I got so far as Scorched and whacked the boss there with some wild tamed wyverns (cheapest tek grams on offer = manticor). And then went back to the island to go forward ... And got well stuck because I ain't got the patience (or skill) for the massive breeding project required for boss fights. I have to say that naked start on Scorched was REALLY hard - worst start of any map I have tried! All of the maps I have gone (mostly) naked into - with the exception that later in releases, I may have gone in with an Argent as a step up from plain naked start. But in principle - my thoughts follow yours - allow transfer INTO a map where you are well established and THEN bring the big guns!

Remapped keys? Will other stuff jump with a space - or is it just the Mek thats busted?

8 bit ASCII is king! It after all guided people to land on the moon! Your jumped up charchar64 can't beat that LOL

Op's post and @Martellus speak to history is all. Read it carefully! Some wisdom there (especially around capitalism) and around how Ark got to be "Out There" as a thing to aspire to.