So I've seen a lot of activity around this topic and I thought I would post my opinion cause why not. I'm going to break this down into three parts. Reasons for a wipe, What to do before a wipe, and what this should achieve.
REASONS FOR A WIPE:
Many people are agreeing that the Official servers have become stale and are pretty much just a playground for tribes in the big alliances. Dino breeds have become suuper strong - good job breeders - but have gotten so strong that they remove competitiveness for smaller tribes. most servers are either getting griefed every day or have huge tribes built on them with heaps of spam. I am making these comments as someone who has played in mega tribes, started in a smaller tribe recently and am currently playing in a alpha tribe in one of the alliances. Also grand scale PvP is pretty horrible abused by DDoS attacks and server capping.
the official cluster also has some pretty major points of inequality between new and old tribes. things such as the new kibble system where older tribes benefit from A) still having working old kibble that is much easier to make then new kibble and B) having already got a lot of tames such as griffins and rock eles with the easier kibble system for them
NOTE: I believe this should only effect PvP, I do not play on PvE servers and can not speak for them.
WHAT TO DO BEFORE A WIPE:
It is important that things change before a wipe is even considered otherwise everything just goes back to where it was before.
1) limit Tribe size to 20 player tribes
2) Rework alliances to not be two ways and instead be given to individual players who have normal alliance perks within the tribe.
3) make tribes exist across all servers. example: if I was in tribe X on server 1 and then joined server 2 I would still be in tribe X with all the same people.
*
4) rework the necessity for foundation spamming. foundation spamming is a pretty fundamental and defining part of ark pvp. it contributes to the unique war scenarios where you see tribes pushing against each other to gain ground. It is important to keep this fun PvP style alive but remove the server lagging foundie spam that creates it. I suggest introducing an item that has a lot of hitpoints and locks enemies out from building in the area around it, this area should be 5X the size of a single foundation.
*
5) cap out a dinosaurs mutations at 20. currently there are ways to endlessly mutate dinos.
*
6) reduce the cost of crafting ARBs.
*
7) hard cap the player speed at 150%.
im sure there are more changes that could help make ark more fun post a wipe.
WHAT THIS SHOULD ACHIEVE:
1, 2, 3) These changes will shrink the sizes of tribes and a tribes effective player count when PvPing. this should almost entirely wipe the competitiveness of mega tribes and would also cap the extreme growth rate that you see some of the tribes achieving. This should hopefully also stop the Slot capping meta and without that hopefully also reduce the need for DDoS attacks.
*
4) this should clear up lag on servers whilst also retaining the fun style of PvP that foundation Spam produced. I would think that the item that protected an area would also have the ability to be powered to further increase its hitpoints.
*
5) this would be a soft cap on the dino stat growth rate. it would still be possible to have competitive stats as you can find wild dinos with better base stats but it would also stop any dinos from becoming too strong. 100Khp paracers come on.
*
6) this should hopefully counter offline raids a bit more, offlining will always be meta as it is the easiest way to wipe a base.
*
7) this shoud just make true PvP without dinos a little more interesting, we really don't need little women with underbites running around faster then any dino in the game.