Nox

furthering this suggestion - how trees would be set up in my imaginary skill system is that skills that are intended to be level locked, are just level locked. The bonuses in the trees wouldn't be predications, they would be 'branches' [engineering] Architecture Construction efficiency I - reduces cost of construction II - further... III Durability I - bonus durability to constructions II - further bonus, and now buildings have a damage threshold (can't be damaged with stone tools) ||| - etc. Decoration I - unlocks fancier versions of base items || - more etc. Thatch construction Wood construction (requires level 10, thatch construction) Stone construction (requires level 20, wood construction) Shipwright Ordinance

They host on AWS, and yes they ignore downed instances. Sometimes they get reset when the servers are patched but that's just luck. So far, the devs seem terribad.

Hi. I'm nox. Ex game designer, grumpy old man, and apparently person of poor impulse control who keeps playing this "game." So anyhow, I had a brainstorm and wanted to share it with everyone. I know the devs won't read it, but I had to say it. This is how I think skill trees should work in this game. First everyone has 3 'core' skill trees - Survival Gathering Combat And three 'scholastic' skill trees - Engineering Agriculture Crafting Finally, everyone has two 'open' job skill slots that can be selected by the player, out of a list of specializations. These give access to cheaper versions of the other skill trees, more accessible specializations. For example you might have a job called "Mounted Man at Arms" - and it has two primary tracks, combat and horsemanship. In combat it goes deep into 1h/shield, shallow into 2h, and teaches horsemanship. Another job might be "Light Infantry" which teaches light armor bonuses, stealth, archery, 1h, run speed, stamina recovery. ------------ Every level the player gets 1+Level/10 core skill points which can only be spent on core OR on job skills. They also get 1+level/10 skill points to spend on scholastic OR core/job skills. Also, any level where the player raises their INT, they get bonus 1+INT score to spend on scholastic skills. _______ Benefits of system - 1) It's forgiving. the player gets just a few points the first few levels, so spending them poorly doesn't make a difference in the end. 2) It's naturally broad. The player gets lots of points near the end so can trivially diversify. 3) it's interesting 4) it's sensible 5) it's orthogonal 6) It sucks less Thanks for ignoring this post devs. The rest of you, thanks for reading. Feel free to make fun of me.

Honestly calling this mess of a tangle a 'skill tree' is sort of an insult to trees everywhere. It's more like a "skill maze", "skill knot" or perhaps "skill hurricane at a yarn factory". Rather than a made tangle of point sinks, it should be linear progressions with bonuses available as branches- like every good game has.

in b4 white knights defend the game with some post about how you suck. Yeah man I am fighting right now to keep my friends interested. They've lost more shit in the past day and a half than any other game we've ever played and the devs sound completely retarded and out of touch about it. And i3 on us PVP is down AGAIN and the devs seem totally unaware - this is starting to look like incompetence.

Classic dev. "We tested this!" Mind you - these are the same devs that leave regions down for 10 hours locking players out for the whole day causing them to lose all their stuff as well. Classic dev. "We tested this!" Mind you - these are the same devs that leave regions down for 10 hours locking players out for the whole day causing them to lose all their stuff as well.

Because we can in ARK, and every other game that doesn't eat the corn out of shit, to put it bluntly. If I want to play with my wife, having game mechanics that prevent that is straight up shit. The game being viable for small groups takes nothing away from the zergs, it only takes something away from people who aren't zerg players.

Same here. We had a more or less effective two person team where she was gathering, combat, taming and I was engineering, crafting and shared gathering skills. We logged in today to find we were both at -30 skill points. Ok so between the two of us we can do what? What things will we no longer be able to do with two people?

The current skill system is laid out somewhat poorly. The practical and crafting skills are intermixed, and there is a large amount of 'skill taxation' where off-point and secondary garbage skills are required to get the primary and valuable skills. The costs of skills are also prohibitive in that players who try to maintain viability to produce items on part with need for level, can't also have practical skills such as combat and gathering. An example of practical skills being skill taxed by craft skills is in taming, melee weapons and armor where to learn to use these types of armors you have to learn to craft them, which is nonsensical. To learn to ride horses you have to learn to breed animals which is equally nonsensical. To learn to pilot ships, you have to be able to build them. The sole exeption of course is melee weapons which is unlocked in the middle of unarmed combat - which in my opinion is equally senseless. The entirety of the skill tree system is pretty much completely fucked and needs to be redone from the ground up without skill taxes, mixed crafting and practical use and costs that don't lead the player to late game gaps of several levels saving skill points to get the next skill.

Clearly someone took a hammer to the face here and just picked values at random not understanding gameplay, or perhaps never having played ark or any other game with advancement and perhaps is also bad at math and probably also has poor impulse control. I did not personally feel that the skills were 'too easy to get' unless this was supposed to be a game where you have 3-4 alts so you can log your alt in to make a pistol or log your other alt in to build a structure. I'm 20, and with our 2-person team I don't have enough points to be useful. I can either take building -or- smithing, and neither is something we need all the time. Do I give up the points in gathering bonus? How about my ability to do any melee combat? hm?

No - those servers I listed the actual region servers are down. If your character is in one of those regions, you won't be able to log in to that server cluster -at all-. Region is L5, I3 etc. Server cluster is "NA PVP". If you made a new character, you can log in to a region that is up without any problems.

I've documented this in another post - and also posted it on their twitter account for visibility.

I've responded to their twitter account - maybe they honestly do not know that these regions are down. Feel free to help bring awareness to this. They haven't actually said "oh right those are down" so I don't know if they are aware.

I've also alerted them on twitter and posted it publically in response to their thread to raise the awareness. I don't know if they are maybe not integrated with ops on this but it seems odd to me that they wouldn't know the game was half broken.

I've notified @playatlas on twitter. Hopefully they will respond. The change region is called 'change atlas world' on the map view I believe. but that is only available to you if you are logged in. From the main menu the option is "join new atlas" however as I stated, that does not actually work if you are alive, and won't work at all if you're in a region instance that is down.

There is some really - really weird stuff at the bottom of the well in the newbie area.

hmmm does it use ABC files? Modified ABC? Sounds like it might. If so, dang I might have a new passtime

Stuff like this just encourages PVO. If anyone can easily trash your items in a short time, there will be times when you're sleeping. I guess noone here played ark that is suggesting this is ok, or heard of it, or any other pvp mmo.

The system is not really well done. Vitamins being full being toxic is really the problem. If that weren't the case, then the system would be robust.

It's remarkable to me that they have left servers down for so long without even a restart.

There's also a numpad key you can use to scroll around while zoomed in - numpad 8? play with it

L5 appears to actually be hung, not crashed if that matters to you. On US PVP I3 E5 G6 M10 A11 D12 F12 and M12 are also actually crashed. Many of the starter zones and lawless zones. Any people in those zones are also locked out of the game.

So a clarification for people unable to get onto servers - The launcher button that claims you can change regions doesn't actually work. You can test this on a server that you can log in to. You will log into the same region you were last in. If your character is in a down/stuck region server you will get a failure to connect, because it's not actually changing your region it is trying to connect you to your old one. The only way to change regions that I am aware of presently is to die, and then at the death screen to choose to change regions. Obviously you can't die if you can''t load a region in which your character was last alive.