Best posts made by Hoi

@whatzitooya Thank you for your well articulated and thought out response. Your efforts to create a fun playing environment coupled with your neutrality and also the team moderating this server will always distance yourself from other unofficials and officials. You do us players a great service and I am grateful for it. You try to balance this game which, though a great environment created by WC is a mess on balance leaving it up to individual servers to try and create a game out of WCs sandbox.

I'm not trying to complain but I experienced ARK from a lot of different angles and I have seen what does work and what doesn't, the consequences of certain direction choices, intended and not. I can only offer this experience to you and of course you make the choice that you see best.

As I see it, the biggest single item that you're changing is a level playing field between tribes of different sizes. And this is one of the most important factors in creating a good PvP environment.

Low rates creates inequality and this inequality is the enemy of creating a good PvP environment. You want people battling at roughly the same tier and the best way to do that is high rates.

The most fun fights always had 2 main conditions:

1. Losing (or even winning) didn't have enormous costs

2. The fight had dynamics that weren't just max tier meta

I know from a server administration perspective, server performance seems critical, especially when players complain about it. But it's the game that really matters, not the server. The sluggish PvP is not related to server performance, it's related to people not having incentive or resources to PvP.

I'm just suggesting that if you give people those two factors, you'll have a far more sustainable player base than one with immaculate server performance. Low rates destroys the resources people have to PvP with and unique PvP encounters normally happen not at max tier.

If you are decided on the rates for Rag and Center, then maybe consider your rotating server which I assume will be wiped frequently to have high rates. This would both give incentive for people to play on it and create fighting that doesn't come with huge loss. Have transfers one-way.

One of the most fun PvP nights I had in ARK was fighting for a scorched earth official on rexes. We were Alpha with 2 turrets, a Paracer and flame arrows. Nooblets caught this one on his stream when we raided him here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPEWKRFfXpc

This type of fight only happens after a wipe so if you want PvP that utilizes all tiers, the only way I've seen it happen is with frequent wipes.

In the end there is one rule that is basic to Ark, the lower the rates the less PvP there is. Even on these servers, which you consider stagnant, I had some PvP encounters. I shot at people and got raided 4 times. At 5x I would have been completely sick of rebuilding. Also, I was talking to a tribe just last night about setting up a base to be raided at a pre-scheduled time. I had bred a bunch of pteradons with high melee and was going to build a base that would have let them out of the cage to help with raid defense when needed. It was a cool base design and would have been a really fun raid for whoever participated. This type of player generated content is the best kind on Ark and is impossible with low rates.

@whatzitooya

Respectfully. The change to the rates will result in almost no PvP. The grind of ARK does not "make achievements more meaningful" it simply creates a barrier to play with the time we have available. Low rates promotes inequality which supports larger tribes and overall far less content being produced by players. With less bases on the map to raid, and more of a grind to repair and PvP, only the largest tribes want to PvP. But they have no content because all the small and medium guys can't invest the time to build up.

I've played thousands of hours on officials and hundreds more on varying rate unofficial. 25 times is the best by for mature players who also have a life outside of Ark. Reducing the rates just means more grind without improving fun meaningful play.

Further, your reasons of limiting bloat don't make much sense because raid content is what keeps servers alive. Decay eliminates worthless bloat and also changing the structure limit, #of ORPs etc. Using rates to do this is like trying to swat a fly with a wrecking ball. You'll cause a lot of damage to PvP and probably only increase bloat as bored players from large tribes build meaningless random structures.

Lets look at your reasons

Slower gameplay. While it is a dramatic drop, it is still a faster pace than vanilla rates.

• Slower gameplay means more grind in Ark. More Grind means less PvP, that's an Ark basic rule. Officials have 0 large scale PvP except mega wars.

Bloat potential will be lower given players will have to dedicate more time to reach the same levels at 25x rates, and even then may not reach it. The lag period between early-game and end-game will be significantly longer, allowing potentially smaller structures, and less density given the amount of work required.

• If this were true, Officials would be bastions of small scale PvP. They are in reality the furthest from it. What this really will mean is a larger gap of equality between large tribes and small tribes. This is the very thing you want to minimize to promote PvP!! The meta for base design doesn't change based on rates. Bases on Officials look the same as bases on 25x servers. You're only changing the amount of grind needed to get there which directly benefits large tribes over small tribes. To promote PvP, you want as many players to be on as even a footing as possible. What you are expecting to happen from reduced rates won't happen. There simply won't be any smaller structures and small tribes. Look at officials, if your logic made worked, then officials would have many smaller tribes, it doesn't, it has 1 evil empire.

It will make achievements and progress more meaningful.

• Sorry but no, it just makes loss more painful.

Trading will be a thing. At 25x rates, it doesn't make sense to trade much of anything given you can go out and gather it yourself in a few minutes. At lower rates, it makes sense to trade with people who specialize in a specific resource or material. Dinos will also become more valuable given the time required to breed them.

• Again I don't get the logic. If that were true then trading would be a big thing on officials. but it's not. Still the only thing people want to trade is genetics and good Bps. You're just massively restricting access to trade goods to the largest tribes and taking that content out of reach for smaller ones, which just reduces the amount of different players that can be traded with and will result in less trading not more. If you want to encourage trading then you have to make good genetics and good bps within reach of more players. i.e. give smaller tribes more time to go get them with higher rates. Also, making Dino's "more valuable" just makes losses from PvP suck more. There is no benefit. On top of reducing PvP, you also promote a salt mine as fights actually cost player time.

This is just bad guys. I know the feeling of lookign at low server pops and trying to figure out what to do, and most of your changes are great (adding center, mod changes). But the rate reduction is bad bad bad.

Please reconsider this.

-Hoi