Tylanater

sounds like they are probably max level. You can only get a certain amount of levels after you tame something. Been out of it for a bit but pretty sure its 75 levels for a tamed creature.

On PvP you don't have to ascend at all. You can transfer your character to another server at any time via a drop or obelisk. As far as catching up the honest truth is the PvP meta is rough. You'd probably do better off on 1x servers. The grind is longer but all the sweat lords play on small tribes. All the big tribes on small tribes ARE cheating and account sharing to have 6 people on 24/7 basically. A lot more common to find friendly(ish) alphas on 1x, even if you have to transfer around a bit first.

Finally, can't believe they allowed this for basically all of ASE lmao.

A game with massive potential that falls flat at every decision.

Not as much the players as the devs fault. They designed the meta to require 24/7 playing and breeding while living in an underground safe base. Casual players stand absolutely no chance and it's impossible to even possibly compete. It has been this way for years and they devs refuse to change it so only one type of player remains active in pvp.

There have been official ORP servers since the orginal launch of Ragnarok

ORP should have been implemented better onto every server. Stop catering the game towards no lifes that can not have an offline timer of more than 3 hours.

PvP in ark has massive potential that WC has kind of squandered by not changing up the meta more in ASA. Cave building should not exist, it's way too OP and they've had to add way too OP of dinos in the game to compensate, making living aboveground impossible. Also, primitive locking other tribes by not allowing them to get artifacts or element (depending on the map) is awful design and awful for the PvP scene. The vast majority of "PvP" in ark is just offlining a base, which is player vs turret and dino AI (pve). They should have added an improved version of offline raid protection into the game for every server. Ark PvP was in it's best state at the beginning when it was PvPvE but for some reason they choose to cater to the biggest no lifes. You cannot play Ark PvP with a job offline anymore. 3 hour offline timer on your base is too much to be competitive. No job, no family, and no skipping a night allowed.

ORP (maybe disbable cave building on ORP clusters so artifacts can't be blocked so easy

Sharks are your best defense. The bleed is % based. 1 bite=5% hp for the full duration of the bleed. So even a 90,000 HP basilo would die at the same rate as a 15,000. Same can apply to land tanks as well, bleeds are great for taking on soakers/tanks.

It's way too easy to block artifacts, especially with caves being the only good base locations. Building in caves on PvP needs to be removed and land bases need to be buffed or artifacts need to be removed from caves. Prim locking every other tribe on the server is not good gameplay.

You can literally open the console command anytime in game and turn off all water, allowing you to see down into the water and find anything hidden/find spawns easy etc. You can also turn so much stuff off that you get developer white and black checkerboard on the ground instead of terrain. This is way worse than even INI and totally ruins pvp as this will basically be required with how hard it is to see in the game (which is not an issue if it's the same for everyone). You think you're hiding in a bush but on the other guys screen you're standing on a white checkerboard with no plants on it. It's so bad.

Basically no details, no trailer supposedly 1 week before launch (lol). Yeah, it's not looking good.

The anti cheat is not the problem, their policies and enforcement are the problem. There is no anti cheat software that people aren't going to be able to easily bypass. However here are some of their awful policies and procedures that makes cheating so bad in ark specifically even when compared to their peers like Rust. -Garbge reporting system. You have to leave game and go to their website. Their website video uploader does not work for the vast majority of recordings. So then you have to upload the video to youtube unlisted. -Bad philosophy on cheaters. Dollie has specifically said multiple times that they don't want to ban tribes because of individual cheaters. The problem is that this is a tribe game and so the meta is to have clean slots in your tribe that never cheat and dirty slots that do cheat. When the individual cheater gets banned (after months) they just make a new account and rejoin the same tribe and start cheating the same day for months longer. A cheater in the tribe should be a tribe wipe, be careful who you recruit next time. -Awful response time and NO transparency. Again, compared to Rust who literally posts the names of people they ban on a dedicated twitter account. Ark will not tell you if your report resulted in an action, in contrast to most other developers who will literally send you a thank you message if you had a valid report that they acted on. -They've also added multiple items and systems that DIRECTLY buff cheaters. Teleporters, cryopods, and cliff plats. Meshers couldn't have dreamed for an easier way to live in the mesh, Insanely easy to level post Extinction which means when a cheater gets banned they are level 100 again in a few hours or less. No speed limit on dinos, again in many other games if you go over a certain speed limit you will be auto banned. In ark people speed hack A TON with dinos going up to 1000% faster than intended and they do not get banned. Also good luck trying to spyglass them to get their info to report them. Also not adding unique names. They can't even track cheaters named human 123 transfering servers across their own network. The list goes on.

yes