Pipinghot

No, you don't get to twist my words like that and expect to get away with it. Again... "Even if we factor in that the customer service for Conan has degraded since FunCom was effectively bought by TenCent, they still have an overall better history of customer service and a better history of bug fixes than WC/ARK have had. Over the lifetime of these two games, WC has focused more on quantity over quality, FunCom has focused more on quality over quantity." It would be dishonest to "put aside" either company's customer service when the point you were replying to was about comparing their customer service. You've made claims about FunCom's customer service so you can't just duck out of that conversation now and pretend it didn't happen. Even if we take into account that FC's customer service is not as good as it used to be, it's still better than WC's has been. Advantage: FunCom. No, ARK's DLC is not mostly cosmetic. Almost all of their DLC's have been direct gameplay DLC's and all of them have included power creep features. And just so you understand, no one's complaining about paying for maps during ASE, so don't get the idea that anyone (including me) thinks that the original ASE maps should all have been free. The complaint about the paid DLC maps in ASE was that they all included power creep, that is the crux of the issue being discussed. This one specific DLC, Bob's, is the first DLC they've ever produced that's mostly cosmetic. All of their other DLC, for the entire history of ARK, has been functional game DLC, with only a couple of cosmetic items included in each DLC before now. In the meanwhile, Conan has been selling entirely cosmetic DLC for years. This is the first time WC has tried anything remotely like a cosmetic pack, and even now they deliberately included items that affect game play and cause power creep. Bob's has 39 items in it with 17 of those items affecting game play and some of them being OP items. So even now, when WC is putting more DLC into this cosmetic pack than they have before, it still has a substantial number of items that affect game play and introduce power creep to the game. Whether you like or dislike the Oasisaur, whether you think it's weak or strong, is beside the point. It's still true that the Oasisaur affects game play and so do 16 other items in the pack. If "Bob's" had been entirely cosmetic this would be a different conversation, but it's not entirely cosmetic, which means it's still inferior to Conan's cosmetic DLC packs. Advantage: FunCom. Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure we could spend time comparing each of the various DLC's and quantifying how many cosmetic items you get and the price of each... but all of that completely misses the point. You can argue all day long about which game gives you more cosmetics for your money but you're having the wrong argument. The point is that the Conan DLC's are all cosmetic, which means the DLC's in Conan are entirely optional. If people don't want to buy them there's no pressure on the player to do so, if people do want to then the player can decide whether or not it's worth the price, and whatever they choose their game play is not affected nor impacted. But all of the DLCs in ARK include items that cause power creep in the game, with some of them being OP items, which means that a player has to buy the DLC if they want to keep up with the power curve of the game. WC deliberately builds their DLC to create considerable pressure on players to spend the money or fall behind. In Conan players spend the money because they want to, in ARK players have to spend the money or they are weakened compared to other players. Advantage: FunCom. Then you've been extremely lucky in ARK. Many, many (MANY) people have experienced plenty of catastrophic bugs in ARK equally as terrible as anything that has ever happened in Conan. There have been multiple bugs over the years that resulted in "entire bases being destroyed", people losing all or most of their tames, losing max level characters, getting locked out of their tribe, getting locked out of the game while their entire base decays and all of their tames despawn, etc. As we've already discussed, FunCom is not as good about bugs as they used to be, basically since Tencent took them over. But (again) even if we take into account the fact that FunCom has deteriorated somewhat they still have a better track record of not-breaking-the-game than WC has. Advantage: FunCom. The difference is that every new DLC in ARK causes power creep, which puts pressure on players to buy the DLC or get left behind. That is the very definition of coercion. No one is "forced" to buy ARK DLC but if they don't then they will be weakened compared to other players, that's what coercion is. When Conan released Siptah they found out that players were able to use transferring between the two maps to gain advantages over players who only owned Exiles. After some time they decided to stop transfers so that all players on the Exiles map were on a level playing field with other players on the Exiles map, and the same with Siptah-vs-Siptah players. But in ARK the new maps include power creep on purpose, it's a deliberate part of WC's plan to coerce people into buying the new DLC/map or fall behind the power curve. WC could have introduced new maps in such a way that they did not create power creep, but instead they see power creep as a feature they can leverage, a tool for pushing people into more sales, they are deliberately coercing players to buy each new DLC by putting people at at a disadvantage if they don't. FunCom wants their players to have a level playing field, WildCard deliberately uses power creep as a way to coerce people into buying each DLC. Advantage: FunCom. False. The facts are calling you out and you're waaay off. 17 of the 39 items in Bob's affect game play, and some of them are truly OP. Technically that's 56.4% RP, but even that number overlooks or ignores just how much the power-creep items can matter in the game. Even if you were right, even if it was 99% RP (which again, it's not, that's way off) that other 1% would still matter if it was OP. Adding any power creep to a DLC is inferior to a DLC that is entirely RP. Advantage: FunCom. Eventually yes, you could do that, but only after the people who bought it early were already far ahead of you. And to be clear, there's some truth to what you're saying, I agree with you in part. Since this is more nuanced for PvE than for PvP I'll address them separately. For PvE players and single-players, if they were willing to wait until the next free DLC map was released they could gain access to the power-creep features that were introduced with each paid DLC map. That's something WildCard did that was good. But it still doesn't change the fact that making people wait for months to have access to the recent power-creep content was a form of soft coercion. It's reasonable to argue that PvE and single-players could simply exercise some self-restraint and gain access to that content when the next free DLC map was released. But this still means that Conan DLC has almost all been cosmetic, with no pressure to buy the DLC or fall behind other players, and each new DLC has been equally available to all players in the game at the same time. In Conan people all players whether PvE, PvP or single-player all gain access to each new DLC at the same time as everyone else. Advantage: FunCom. Now we move on to PvP, where things are worse. For PvP players that "generosity" meant nothing. If someone was a PvP player when a new paid DLC map was released they had two options - a) buy it right away or b) get a beat-down from people who bought it. By comparison, the only time Conan ever released a DLC that gave an advantage in PvP was when they released Siptah, and then FunCom made the decision that this was not a fair way to treat PvP players, and ever since that one release they have made sure that all PvP players in the game have access to changes that affect gameplay at the same time. Changes to thralls that affect PvP? All PvP players get it at the same time. Changes that affect weapon performance? All PvP players get it at the same time. Changes that affect attacking/defending bases? All PvP players get it at the same time. But in ARK every DLC that has ever been released, including Bob's, gives an immediate advantage to people who buy it right away. Again, using power creep as a tool for coercion. Advantage: FunCom. And again, the Oasisaur is only one small part of the picture. A significant portion of of the items in Bob's affect game play, and some of them are truly OP. That goes way beyond any discussion of whether the Oasisaur is good or not. Also again, every Conan DLC except for one, Siptah, has been 100% cosmetic whereas not one paid DLC for ARK has been 100% cosmetic. Advantage: FunCom. True. After releasing Siptah, FunCom (eventually) listened to the players, decided that it was P2W and reversed their decision, stopping map transfers so that players on both maps were on a level playing field. WIldCard, on the other hand, has deliberately ensured that all of their DLCs, including Bob's, are P2W by adding power creep to every DLC as a way to coerce people into buying them. Advantage: FunCom. True, but pointless of you to mention. Of course they're both businesses, and of course they're not charities, because duh obviously. That's neither here nor there because it has nothing at all to do with the discussion. The issue being debated is which of those businesses treats their customers better and has less predatory business practices. That's objectively false. WildCard's model for DLC is much more coercive and predatory than FunCom's, for all of the reasons listed above. Advantage: FunCom. Repeating your lousy argument doesn't make it better. Setting the bar low for WildCard doesn't argue in your favor, it simply shows that you know your position is weak and you're trying to make excuses for WildCard. If you have to make excuses like that for WildCard then you already know FunCom is doing a better job. Advantage: FunCom.

Since you bring up context, let's talk about that. The problem is that you have an overly narrow interpretation of what people mean when they complain about "the devs". When people complain about "the devs" they almost never are specifically referring to the people who sit at their desks writing the computer code. What they mean is the development company, and most of the time that means the owners, leaders and managers who make the decision about how the developers' time will be allocated - new content, bug fixes, etc. While it's true that sometimes people use "the devs" to mean the people writing the code what they usually mean is the people at the development company who make the decisions that they are complaining about. You made the assumption that @WCpromoteslazinesswas only, and specifically, referring to the people who write the code, but from the context of his post it was clearly obvious that he was referring to the leaders and decision makers of the development company, yet you started arguing about the people who put their hands on the keyboard and write computer code. This whole exchange started because you chose a flawed interpretation of "the devs" that did not match the context of the thread overall, nor the context of the specific post you were replying to. "The devs" = Wildcard, and WildCard = "the devs", for you to assume that he explicitly meant the programmers was a bad interpretation on your part, especially given the context of his post in the overall discussion. When we consider that the context of "the devs" means "the people who own and manage the development company, the people who make the decisions about how the game will be developed, managed and operated" his comments are obviosly on target. Atlas was created, owned and operated and by the same people who were responsible for the creation and operation of WildCard & ARK (specifically Jesse Rapczak & Jeremy Stieglitz, two of the four founders of WC). The reality that permeates this whole discussion is that the same people have been the owners, operators and decision makers for both games since the very beginning, which means that WCpromoteslaziness was making a legitimate comparison. When he said, "those rats" he did not mean the developers who wrote the original computer code, he meant the owners and decision makers for both games. The owners and leaders of A and B are pretty much "one and the same people" (especially when you consider that Snail and it's CEO Shi Hai are on top of the pyramid for both of these games. The people who wrote the computer code didn't do these things but, "the devs" did. The idea that Studio WildCard, Grapeshotgames and Snail are separate companies is a legal business fiction. They are technically separate business entities on paper but in reality the same people are in the board room for all of them. "The devs" who run these companies are the same people everywhere you look. A game doesn't have to be shut down to be abandoned. Atlas is zombie game. For all intents and purposes it's been abandoned, with nothing meaningful being do with it for a long time. Again, this is about context, which you have pointed out is important. In the context of their post, "abandoned" did not mean shut down, again you're choosing the wrong interpretation. It meant a game that is in zombie mode with no serious efforts made to improve or expand it for quite some time. No, you've chosen to argue against wrong interpretations of their post, your out-of-context interpretations are the problem.

No, I'm definitely not, if you think that then you've gotten confused by the give-and-take of the conversation and you need to re-read it. Ok, this is a fair point, I used a the term "game engine ambiguously. Yes, no question about it, Unreal publishes the game engine (UE4). So for the portion of the game that was written by WC/ARK devs I'm going to call that the "game mechanics engine", the game mechanics engine is a layer that runs on top of the game engine. So with this in mind, let's revisit the things I've said about ARK & Atlas. The ARK developers wrote the game mechanics engine for ARK. That game mechanics engine was re-used by Snail for the game Atlas. At the time Atlas was released it was almost entirely just a reskin of the ARK game mechanics. This means that Atlas was mostly created by the ARK devs, with reskinning and a few changes done by the new company. Now none of this means that the failure of Atlas should be blamed on the original devs that wrote the game mechanics engine, which was used in both ARK and Atlas. I've certainly never made this claim and I wouldn't support it if someone else did. Neither the UE4 game engine nor the ARK game mechanics engine are responsible for the failure of Atlas, but that doesn't change the fact that the game mechanics engine used in Atlas was created by WildCard and their ARK development team.

That was not your original point, your first comment in this sequence came from WCpromoteslaziness and you said nothing of the sort when replying to him. This is the sequence: 1) WCpromoteslaziness: "Also the treasure map system was taken from Atlas another game these rats abandoned but in that you didnt need to pay for them " 2) Zeldei: "Atlas isn't A studio wildcard product." 3) Pipinghot: "While that's technically true it misses the point that you're replying too." 4) Zeldai: "I don't disagree that Atlas was an asset flip of ark. It was also made by snail, the publisher. The point being made is that it's not the ark devs." 5) Pipinghot: "Yes it was, at the time of release." 6) Zeldei: "As you admit, it was snail's corporate decisions that were largely responsible for Atlas and Dark and Light being failures, not the actual ARK devs, which brings us back to the original point I made that you can't say ASA will fail because it is the devs who brought you Atlas. It's a misleading argument as Atlas did not fail because of ARK game developers caused it to fail. Nor is the team who made ark the same team working on Atlas. " a) So no, that wasn't your original point, in your response to WCPromoteslazines you're clearly not addressing any argument about ASA failing because it was made by ARK devs. b) I'm pretty sure no one in this thread has said that ASA will fail because it is made by the devs who brought you Atlas. I'm not going to re-read every single post in the thread, but unless you can find a quote that expresses that sentiment, you're making up an argument to argue against. c) And, even if someone did say that, it had nothing to do with what WCpromoteslazines said, nor to do with your reply to him, nor to do with the details of subsequent exchanges between you and me.

That's a pretty low bar you're setting there. Better than awful is still not good. I mean, you're making a true statement, they're better than other companies that are worse, but that still doesn't mean that they meet the bar for being "good". I've played plenty of both games, going back almost to beta for both games, and submitted multiple support tickets for both games over the years, and I completely disagree with both elements of that statement. Even if we factor in that the customer service for Conan has degraded since FunCom was effectively bought by TenCent, they still have an overall better history of customer service and a better history of bug fixes than WC/ARK have had. Over the lifetime of these two games, WC has focused more on quantity over quality, FunCom has focused more on quality over quantity. And, to reiterate, all DLC's in Conan except for the 2nd map are entirely cosmetic, whereas almost all of the DLC for ARK has involved soft coercion on players to buy them or fall behind. They're doing it because they mismanaged the company and were about $13 million in debt with severely negative cash flow, requiring them to use a variety of dishonest tactics to get players to crowd-fund their continued existence. It's not really more complicated than that.

Yes it was, at the time of release. The game engine was created by the ARK devs, then it was reskinned by the new developer. And, you can bet your bottom dollar that many of the same names that were listed in the credits for developing ARK were also listed in the credits for developing Atlas. It was not merely an asset flip, both games had some/many of the same developers work on them. It's not at all the same. ARK and Atlas have the same code base whereas WoW & Overwatch don't share any code. ARK and Atlas are two games built from the same game engine, WoW and Overwatch are two entirely different games. That's sort of true, except for the fact that even back then WC/Snail were really one company. The idea that WC & Snail are not related to each other is a business-fiction. They are technically different business entities but really they're one company. Having said that, yes, it was mostly the Snail side of the business that was to blame for Atlas' failure, but it has to be acknowledged that he code base Atlas started with was the ARK game engine. Obviously it could be argued that this was a bad choice of game engine for Atlas and that WC/Snail should have chosen a different engine, but regardless of any good/bad decisions made by their management team, it's still true that "the ark devs are responsible" for the code that Atlas ran on. Yes, the ARK game engine was a better game engine for ARK than it was for Atlas.

Except it's not entirely accurate. You've already described Atlas as an asset flip, which means you should understand that the underlying game was made by WC and then re-skinned for Atlas. One of the biggest criticisms of Atlas was that it was very obviously ARK but reskinned. Or perhaps you'd prefer to see that described as a new game using the ARK game engine, which would also be a fair description, but that game engine was still made by WC. The graphics were made by the new studio, and changes continued to be made after release, but at the time of release the game engine was made by WC. Atlas was not made entirely by WC, but at the time of release (and for some time afterwards) it's fair to say that the majority of Atlas was made by WC.

Again, it's not that simple, WC made conflicting claims about what ASA was going to be. The only time they "literally advertised it as such" was when Jesse R. first tweeted (back in January of 2023) that they were going to port ARK from UE4 to UE5 for free. Every time after that they made claims of how new stuff was going to be added, and in about half of their claims the "new" stuff they were trying to take credit for were nothing more than improvements that would automatically happen as a result of importing into UE5 (like improved pathing for wild dinos, just to name one example). Not only did they make a bunch of claims about how they were adding new stuff, they tried to take credit for improvements that were built into the game engine. Ok, fair enough, the comment that I was replying to still looks to me as though you were disagreeing with WCpromoteslaziness, but I'm willing to accept your claim that I'm misreading your intent. Having said that, criticizing people who "complain about the latter" ignores how much, and how often, WC was deliberately deceitful about what ASA would be. They spent a lot of time trying to use marketing spin to avoid being honest about what they were actually going to deliver. Even back then I was arguing that WC was spinning yarns, but at the same time I have some sympathy for people who believed their marketing lies. It's hard to criticize people who fell for a carefully crafted campaign of disinformation. And even being billed as a remaster is an overblown claim. At the time of release it has been 95%-98% imported code/content and 2%-5% new/different stuff. For WC to call that a remaster is intrinsically dishonest. WC claimed they were bottling new water, and they promised it repeatedly. But WC has not billed this as merely a "UE5 update", that's not what they've been saying. They have billed it as a "remaster", with claims of the game being recoded and/or containing significant amounts of new content, none of which was true. Being in EA is entirely relevant. When one buys a title in Early Access the intrinsically implied agreement is "You pay us now, and we're going to work on this until it's completed and ready for full release. Then, and only then, we will begin work on expansions and paid DLC." That's what an honest Early Access looks like, anything else is unethical. Publishing DLC isn't an issue by itself, but it is an issue when they're selling DLC content for a game that isn't even finished yet. And since you brought up the topic of coercion, that's exactly what WC has historically done with their paid DLC's. During the entire run of ASE if you didn't buy the DLC's you were at a competitive disadvantage. Obviously this matters more in PvP than in PvE, but each of the paid DLC's introduced new stuff that gave people an advantage in the game. That's pretty much the definition of soft coercion. They didn't "force" anyone to buy the DLC's, but the alternative was falling behind the curve. Compare that to Conan Exiles, for example, in which all of the DLC's are purely cosmetic and offer zero advantage during game play. DLC that provides any form of competitive advantage is soft coercion. Nope, never going to agree with that. Early Access means "You're helping fund the completion of the base game, which we will complete before trying to sell any DLC." Considering that ASA still has many of the same bugs that have been plaguing ASE since it was in EA, that's an extremely debatable claim. Don't get me wrong, if you're happy with how much you paid and how much you got, then more power to you, you should enjoy the game if that's what's you want. But in no way does your personal sense of satisfaction mean that WC objectively delivered what they promised. Maybe to you, but to many people it's very material. A company that mismanaged their revenue and cash flow, that then turns around and asks the public to crowd-fund a re-release of what is 95% the exact same game, that's very material to lots of people. Oh no, I prefer FunCom's model - almost all DLC's (except for the 2nd map) are purely cosmetic and don't affect game play at all. Even Isle of Siptah didn't give a competitive advantage because the two maps are separate from each other. All DLC's in Conan give zero competitive advantage and players can choose to buy as much or as little of it as they want to, that's a clearly superior model from the player point of view.

Not true. They have also said at various points that ASA is "new", making claims about lots of brand new code, all of which were obviously false. Doug Kennedy even posted it on Twitter/X at least one time. WC has made quite a few false claims about ASA, they have not been honest about what has actually been done with the product. Except that's not what @WCpromoteslaziness did. What he did was make fun of people who are buying used water and believing that it was new. He didn't buy it and then complain, he made fun of people who bought it. There is when a game is still in Early Access. There is no governing body that makes rules about Early Access, which is all the more reason that players/customers should criticize companies who do it. It's entirely unethical, scummy and generally just a crappy way to treat customers. Beyond that, ASA should never have been EA to begin with, that was also unethical and scummy, unfortunately Steam and the other platforms are find with unethical, scummy behavior as long as they get a cut. WC/Snail have made around 2 billion dollars (that's with a "B", Billion) on the ARK properties over the years, much more than enough money to make a better product and have plenty of operating revenue for anything they wanted to do. This is blatant profiteering at the expense of customers. If you want to overspend for a substandard that's your choice, but then you need to understand that other people have every right to criticize people who mismanage their own company and then need to crowd-source an inferior upgrade thinly disguised as a "new" game. Companies do need to show a profit, and people also have the right to criticize them for mismanaging their company and their products.

While that's technically true it misses the point that you're replying too. 1) Atlas was created from the ARK codebase & game engine, which was created by WC. 2) Atlas is owned and published by Snail, but Snail & WC are really one company. On paper they're two different entities but in reality they're one company. No matter what they say on paper, the truth is that WC = Snail. 3) Atlas was heavily cross-promoted by WildCard when it was new. For a long time many people believed it was a WC game, which is why they played it in the first place. 4) No matter who owns which game, and no matter who owns which company, his point is still true. "The treasure map system was taken from Atlas" - that's a true statement regardless of whether Atlas is a WC product or not.

Not if you want to play with other people/friends.

None of your business, that's why. People want private servers because people want private servers, that's all you need to know.

It's funny how their "brand new" code keeps on repeating the exact same bugs as the original code did.

Because: 1) They can get away with it and there's no one to stop them. 2) Steam allows it, because Valve doesn't care if a game publisher is ethical or not, as long as people are willing to buy a game Steam is happy. 3) There are no standards for what is "Early Access" or not, no rules, no consumer protections in the game industry. If a publisher wants to be scummy and use EA as an excuse for a junky product then no one can stop them. The only option players have is to choose whether they want to support a company that does this. You have to vote with your dollars, if you give money to companies who sell DLC's while they're still in "early access" then they'll keep doing it. If you don't want companies to do this then you have to make the personal choice to refuse to give them money. It's not much, but it's the only power you have in this situation.

Oh god, I just time travelled to 2017.