Tylanater

It is going to be a disaster. However, PC has been a disaster for a while and they don't seem to care. Now console players will see how bad the speedhack/aimbot/esp is. And that's before we even get to the normal inherent advantages of KBM/High end PC Performance/INI editing/Easily changing settings like view distance/ gamma/brightness/etc. Honestly console "normies" having to deal with the cheaters is possibly the only way to get enough people mad at WC enough to do something about it, maybe *huffs copium*

The real secret is you don't even need to kill tusos. Those rods will get you better saddles but on beginner a tiny more armor on a 1k or less hp argy isn't gonna do much. Just go for prim bps using prim rods, leech blood, and fish around 1.7x (honey can catch bigger but more likely to get the bps from leech)

OP is mostly describing a bug that's been reported for years and still remains unfixed. Imo it happens more on console but sometimes (more often than you'd think would be acceptable) something will decay seconds after it's tamed. Seems to have something to do with it taming while no one is in render distance. You can find many threads of people having issues with this but it's still not fixed.

Removing INI editing for visuals is one of the best things that has happened in Ark in a while, ignore all the whiners please. However, cheating is still a huge issue. Please hire more enforcement employees and consider changing how dino speed works to fix speed hack once and for all. Admittedly, I'm not 100% sure how that works exactly but it seems like dinos having a top speed limit server side shouldn't be that hard. If speedhack can go ark will be 80% saved.

Also, consider trying beginner servers, pvp or pve. You can do 2 of the 3 bosses on them and the reduction of levels and op stuff actually makes the challenge quite a bit harder. Also a lot more dinos are viable on beginner that are totally useless on normal servers.

It's an open secret that ark does not enforce the game up to industry standards and it's not really the enforcement teams fault. 1. They clearly do not have nearly enough employees (I only know of three GMs that handle pvp, they might have some more staffers but not many). 2. Someone at ark makes bad decisions to how enforcement should work. For example, as confirmed by Dollie, in most cases a cheater will be individually banned and a tribe will not be devwiped as they do not want to punish a whole tribe for the actions of an individual. The problem with that is this is a tribe based game and so what people do is just bring people in who they know are going to cheat, wait until they get banned, rinse and repeat. Some characters in a tribe will be clean, some will be cheaters and those tribes rarely get devwiped. 3. Also it seems like snail games is very likely involved with much of the cheating, some people will say that's a conspiracy but there's pretty good evidence, also it is confirmed via a lawsuit by WC that a snail game employee stole and leaked the ark source code, which is part of why there are so many cheats that are so cheap and easy to get. 4. Battle eye sucks (how tf can you not detect speedhack lol)

Windows 10 cannot play all clusters available to xbox, I believe the only crossplay servers is smalltribes and maybe some of the 1 map of each dlc clusters.

First tip: PvP is unplayable on PC due to RAMPANT cheaters. WCs anticheat can't even detect speedhack which is everywhere these days, along with desync hacks where people can soak your turrets with their bodies without dying etc. It's bad. Only play PvP on xbox series x or ps5 and if on xbox don't play small tribes because it is crossplay with windows 10 which literally has no anticheat...literally. Second tip: You'll have a rough time starting on island, they've added a lot of OP stuff to the game with the DLC maps. Also most islands are completely inhabited and spammed off by one tribe. I highly doubt you could tame, breed and kill the bosses on the island with no transferring unless you can get in good with a big tribe, even then people scout island a lot.

I'll counter with another simple question. Is a rule a rule if it isn't enforced? I recommend reporting all RMT but they don't do squat about it.

I've been astonished that they don't have live enforcement on the beginner servers for PC. You'd think they'd want to make a good impression, also seeing as those servers are often full 70/70 for a few weeks after every wipe. Like others have said it's technically a true beginner experience cause the hacking and cheating stays around on 1x and small tribes but you'd think they'd at least want to set a better image for beginners lol.

You have no idea what you are talking about then lol. Speed hack has been a rampant issue on official pvp for over a year now. Yes you can't level speed on dinos, but it's a cheat. They can fly and run insanely fast and use it on beginner to run around and auto loot your crop plots fertilizer (with another hack). They can literally speed to over 100 crops and take all the fertilizer in less than 30 seconds literally. They also speed hack PTs to get drops on the map. You can see all the drops on the map disappearing instantly and it's one guy. On official servers they can use it on stegos to run past turret walls etc. It's a huge issue and theres TONS of videos of it happening to people on youtube.

Yeah, there's also giant mesh holes on SE that were popularized when it released and still are not fixed, You can literally fly through on Pteranodons and still nothin.

I'm sorry but the "improved UI" looks so bad. It looks like a bad mobile game and the minimap is completely out of place and offputting in ark.

if you don't wanna make saddles just get 16 decent shadowmanes and 4 dieno chickens and you can kill dragon with the bleed if you are careful

INI editing should have never been allowed on official servers. Completely ruins the whole stealth aspect of the game (hiding in bushes, stashing loot, trying to blend in, etc.)

I could be wrong, but I don't think WC has ever even mentioned or acknowledged the prevalence of tracking via battlemetrics and bots, which makes me think either 1, there's nothing they can do to fix it, or 2 they just don't care to. With moderation it's clear that the enforcement devs are almost completely incapable of tracking players transferring between their servers. IE a cheating tribe will get devwiped on their tiny farm server but their main server sits untouched. Hopefully transferring won't be as much of a think in ark 2 and maybe the LDL servers are them testing the waters.

People want to play together, most players won't play if forced to be solo. There is a fair point to be made against unofficial servers spreading out the population but if removed those players would probably just not play.

There's a few different things that contribute to this in Ark 1 that they could fix in Ark 2 if breeding is even returning as we know it. Firstly, allowing players to build in massive caves, which allows them to breed with no threat whatsoever, making them the only viable base spots in the game. Pretty much no open area is viable. Cryopods are also a huge contributor. Before cryos it was nearly impossible to breed the way people do today. Changing how kibble works also had a huge effect. Before cryos + kibble change half of your tame allowance had to be egg dinos, which a lot of people didn't like, but IMO it's better than these walmart bases with 500+ gigas breeding to top stat. Additionally, infinite mutations (essentially) needs to not return at all, it's so bad for the game. A perfect tamed 150 is probably somewhere in the ball park of 10,000% worse than a top stat dino. They need to make the maximum benefit of breeding far less. +30% rider bonus is already strong enough to be worth doing some breeding. That plus like a max of 20% increase to stats is more than enough.

Big true but there's one big issue sadly. Stegos early and mid game are CRAZY op against ARB so sadly gonna be farming that like crazy still

They are prolly testing the waters for Ark 2 trying to decide how they want to tackle transfers. It's a good step in the right direction imo but I don't think it will do much for ark 1 at this point. I'm sure people already have tek on the servers and prolly huge cheating issues already. There are a lot of huge benefits though, if you don't like manas don't play on lost island and you never have to deal with them, the cheaters can't move around and if someone does get dev wiped it will hurt WAY worse than on full transfer clusters. It also brings back politics to ark which for me was one of the best parts of early ark. Every server was kinda like game of thrones with people backstabbing people etc. Current ark is just sweaties transfering, no one talks, no one knows anyone else, you'll never see them again, etc.

I'm guessing bad but hoping not. The fact is they've completely failed on the PC PvP side of things with cheaters so the question is whether the PvE will be better or not, which I'd say there's a decent chance of. I'm guessing they are going to enable full crossplay though which will mean you can no longer avoid cheaters on console. That paired with the fact that part of the reason Ark 1 cheats are so bad is because a snail games employee in china stole/sold the source code (see the lawsuit by WC about it if you don't believe) and there's prolly another dude waiting for his chance to make bank with the Ark 2 source code.

dey beeg boys

honestly there's no saving ark 1 pvp issues. Don't even have time to get to all the balance issues with all the cheating but the only savior is ark 2 (potentially). They need to change a lot that would require a new game. Base attacking/defending needs to be totally different because like you said, turrets are bad and the turret limit is bad, but without it the lag gets crazy. Most people don't even soak bases most of the time for years now, you can always just cheese your way in. Server capping literally can't be fixed with server transfers enabled, even if the cap was 30 members per tribe people will just use 3 tribes, or just tribeless people to fill the server but not help directly in fighting, no way to reliably detect which tribes are working with each other. A million more issues that were not thought out when they added them to the game that pretty much can't be fixed at this point like infinite breeding, cryos making the game to easy/lame (everyone got a pocket giga/can bring a whole raptoring brigade of dinos on a mana) etc.

The game pretending it has functional anticheat and enforcement.

They changed the collision on boats a few months ago and it's a lot worse now. You can't go nearly anywhere you could before