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It would be cool to have a friendship mechanic were you could pet your creatures and there friendship level would go up, and maybe they would get a slight buff to all stats if there friendship meter was full, and it would be awesome if when you opened a creature’s behavior settings you could select, “make best friend” and that creature would be your best friend/favorite creature, they would get a best friend buff, you would see there stats at the top right of your screen, and you would be able to take them anywhere, to any single player/multiplayer server, now obviously there are limitations to this, you would not be able to best friend creatures like a giga, but all in all this would be a very cool and exciting feature to add, it would make players want to explore more, tame more creatures, and enjoy ark more all together, and I hope someone at ark sees this and at least considers/passes the idea around, thanks for reading.

It’s no secret that power creep has been a strong issue for some time now. And by some time now I mean years. New content in the form of new creatures and items render existing creatures and items obsolete, shifting the meta in a very negative way, making for an unengaging, stale meta where players only use certain items, tames and playstyles. We see this in both PvE and PvP. Players in both modes have zero incentive to tame a large chunk of the roster of characters (dinos) because they are utterly useless. In PvE usually just taming them “just because” or just to “catch ‘em all”; and in PvP, simply ignoring them. Most dinos. at one point or another, have been outclasses and outgunned by these newer, shinier creatures with shiny paintjobs, more useful abilities, powerful attacks and creative taming methods. One example of this is the Tropeognathus/Astrodelphis dilemma. Tropeognathus released in June 2020 with the Crystal Isles DLC. It is a pterosaur with a jet and grenade launcher saddle. It does barrel rolls and launches grenades effectively functioning as a mesozoic fighter jet. Just under a year later, the Genesis 2 releases; and with it, the Astrodelphis. The Astrodelphis is a newer fantasy creature. Basically just a space dolphin alien thing. It’s main “ability” was it’s saddle, which held the same function as the Tropeognathus saddle, turning an otherwise just about useless creature into a fighter jet. However, especially on release, Astrodelphis and it’s saddle were incredibly overpowered. It did everything Tropeognathus did and better. Just like that, in under a year, a new creature was useless, obsolete. Example 2. Archaeopteryx/Sinomacrops. By this point you should see where I’m going with this. These newer creatures keep contributing to already insane power creep by completely invalidating creatures that have already existed in the game for years by having completely shiny, new paintjobs and doing what the existing creatures do and much more. ARK would be much healthier if we used the creativity from creature votes and poured that into a round of TLCs for several creatures. This would make the game much more fun to play, incentivize taming creatures that are otherwise ignored, and encourage a return to classic Dino-PvP not the absolute toxic, unbalanced cesspool that is current PvP. I’m not saying never add new creatures, I’m saying it’s not fair that X creature (new) renders Y creature (old) obsolete. X creature gets * Awesome Design/Model * Fresh Abilities * Introduces New Mechanic(s) to shake up gameplay * Engaging Taming Method Y creature gets * Outdated, boring model *Boring taming method (KO) * No abilities beyond an alternating attack animation (Bite/Claw Swipe) *MAYBE a roar (does nothing except MAYBE make small creatures poop) Like I said, we should use the creativity from these votes and update the dinos already in the game instead of trying to vote in dinos with abilities that you could EASILY give to an already existing dino in a TLC. Example- Hatzegopteryx/ Quetzal. Everything the Hatzegopteryx would have been able to do the Quetzal could also do. Why introduce the Hatzegopteryx and leave the Quetzal as useless as it is? Another Example, Diplodocus/Barsboldia Sicinskii. I loved Barsboldia from the Ragnarok vote. It didn’t win, but it was still great. However. Maybe instead of adding in Barsboldia, you could give all its abilities (movement speed completely unaffected by weight, weighing more makes you do more damage, gaining different buffs based on what you feed it etc) to the Diplodocus, refreshing the game and FINALLY doing some justice and Diplodocus. Slap a remodel on there, and give Diplodocus a new, actually engaging taming method, and bam. You have effectively created a brand new creature out of one that has been in the game for years. So much better and more balanced than introducing brand new creature that looks great and has great abilities and ignoring old creature that looks boring and IS boring. To wrap up, we need to go back and revamp pretty much all creatures with new models, abilities, mechanics, and actually engaging taming methods before adding in dinos with all of those things and further contributing to power creep.