krazmuze

12 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

I’ll remember you said this once you’re ingame and after a month everyone you know is bitching about the complete lack of content  beyond one boss, one dungeon and powerstones. This is another one of your statements that has most people who have actually played rolling their eyes at what you’re saying.

But you are forgetting the modus operandi of the devs.    They will start hyping the next megapatch a month after the xbox goes live proclaiming they fixed all the bugs leading you to believe it will be here shortly when they know full well it will take them months to release, then months to fix before they give up and move on to the next megapatch.   It is the promise of content that drags people along so they hopefully do not quit....

I  do not think XBOX is a cash grab - they always made clear it would be part of EA and not something after it leaves EA.  Doing it one year in (EOY late fall is my prediction) is reasonable expectation.

I think instead what it is doing is buying them time.  It will take time for XBOX to figure out what PC already figured out.  It will take time for the new lead designer to figure out they do not actually know how to take ARKs raft engine and make it do all kinds of piratey ships and do piraty things with - like board.  I mean did they ever figure out for good how to get seagulls stopping to use the poop deck from sinking your ship, and if they did how long did that take?

3 hours ago, GlennFiddich said:

Harvesting without 2x is not done by most players, so just make 2x harvesting permanent.
 

This never works.  In fact they already did this - the 2x is actually 4x.   

The reason it never works is that all MMOs use the 2x weekends to encourage people to get back into the game and catchup rather than going off to play the shiny new game.   It is a promotional activity specifically for player retention and acquisition.

So if they make the 2x permanent which is actually 4x, they will shortly thereafter starting doing new 2x weekends, which is actually 8x.   

And you will be here posting again about just make it permanent again.   Then the cycle repeats 16x, 32x, 64x....

30 minutes ago, DocHolliday said:

  Make all players max level.  This is EA after all and we are testing.  

So they release without ever having tested the leveling progression and balance and player retention because everyone is max?   You can play on PTR or any unofficial if you prefer a faster pace.

5 hours ago, Cpt.Yarrr said:

Tons of people asking for the same, do not put anymore effort in this, waste of energy trust me. Try and find a game that suits you, GS completely lost it and their "promisses".

I stopped playing when they crashed single player over the summer to the point it would not load for more than a month.  I still kick the ball here because I would really like to play a pirate game someday.   But the latest roadmap I predict is 18mo of work - given each megapatch in the past was about 3mo of work and the roadmap does not even start until xbox which for sure is EOY.  And that is if they do not decide to yet again pivot from their 'plans' since it now seems the megapatch of the summer for SP, WPE and Blackwood will never get fixes since they focus on MMO XBOX.

3 hours ago, Jack Shandy said:

At the last wipe we knew where we wanted to go, what mats and where to get them, even the route to take. It took us under an hour to have a bank and the flag down on our chosen island...

If WPE is implemented the entire purpose of it is that it is not that easy to take an island, they will not be empty where first come first flag rules.   Need to defeat the wild pirates first.

3 hours ago, Forb Hidden said:

They changed it because many people drive to a golden age island with theyr ships and killing AoD to fast lvl up the ships. 

So now it's impossible to get a treasure without tames.

This is something they need to fix for their stated goal of making this a pirate game.  Pirating means melee/ranged attacks on pirates guarding the treasure.   Archer attacks on your skeleton archer opponents, followed by the hand to hand battle is very much part of  pirate fantasy.

If tames are the only way or best way to do something, then this is not a pirate game, this should not be ARK2.0

1) you can already throw out a line and reel in a flotsam

3) there are already feats that increase the visibility radius of the treasure marker

6) there already is vitamin boosters that give little food

7) rigging cannot be climbed, but you can attach a rope ladder to the crows nest to accomplish the exact same thing

@Dollie

There is already a way to flag read posts without having to make a trite post - the emoticons that people can add to the bottom right of posts.   Just make one that is dev only,

characters are tied to servers

Being off work hours is not an excuse when your job is to communicate.   If you are communicating to your players then you are working, it is irrelevant what time it is.    You was not working so it did not count? Really?

The reason everyone is upset is that a Q&A session interacting with the devs is what twitch chat livestreams are for.   The fact that you think you had to go to discord to talk to people is what is wrong - that is what is supposed to have been done in the livestream.   

We should not have got prerecorded half hour of pitch slides   Next time do it live half hour of slides then take actual questions about the presentation.   

I challenge you to go to the Q&A thread and document how each question was answered on the live stream.    But cat whiskers and side jokes about hats?  Really?

It is single player you have access to the console and can use admin cheat commands to level your character and give you anything you want to get started.    If you saved your character template you will not have to reposition the sliders at character create.   They only recently added character import/export but this is to move your single player character from one map to the other - but this is not for transfers with online.

Does not matter what Jat and Dollie age are  and where they prefer to hang out.    It is their job to communicate on the official communication channels of the company - which includes this forum.   if they are unwilling to do that - then either fire them or close the forums.   

Not clear from the stream if they are doing WPE - they said absolutely nothing about it.   If they was planning on doing it for XBOX release - think they would have mentioned it rather than saying no new content for a while - just bug fixes.

1 hour ago, Realist said:

even if the Xbox players can stay connected it will be the biggest grief-fest in the entire history of gaming lmao

Possibly, but then at PC launch they did spawn nakeds into floating piles of drowning bodies being fed on by bullet time gators...over and over and over and over.... 

for sure they are trying to get out this fall to get those XBOX XMAS dollars.   Just like they announced last year right before XMAS so they could cash in on presents.

Their roadmap is backwards, adding new XBOX players to give new bad reviews on top of steam before implementing their roadmap is a bad idea.  

Hope you packed your toilet paper for that roadtrip, best stop in a Costco and stock up on those thousand sheet rolls.

1 hour ago, Realist said:

Is it crossplay with steam or windows 10? 

Yes crossplay with steam, they made a big point about adding more players to existing players - there will not be an XBOX server.

6 hours ago, Forb Hidden said:

Adding islands is one thing. Remove/replace some is another.

It was clearly stated in the last log that it was a remove/replace.   People built on the old islands would need completely wiped to virgin ground and everyone will need their discovery points wiped.    We did not wipe the grid when we did such a replacement for our unofficial server,  instead saved the database with the deleted cleaned out island, before adding the new one ; but we did wipe the characters with admin restoration support.  That would be a support nightmare on official servers.

Difficulty is normally set to 0.2 if I recall...

On 8/12/2019 at 10:59 AM, pfg said:

I'm just wondering why all the new islands were added either equatorial (already kinda full) and polar/tundra (lots of unclaimed already) rather than temperate. It just seems to me that having more islands in a more habitable area would be better - any info on why those regions have been picked ?

Surely it takes them a long time to make new islands, since the bulk of their work was equatorial in the last island update as well as artic caves that is the biomes they was working on that they would already have new assets for.   No doubt they are working on the other biomes too - since they have stated their goal is copy paste removal - that is something you cannot do partially.

On 8/13/2019 at 2:33 PM, Tater Tot said:

With all the new islands being added, will there be a wipe of existing islands? 

The new islands are not additions, they are replacements.  Their entire purpose is to remove the amount of copy paste - you can only do that by wiping existing islands.   Now does that mean they will  wipe only the replaced islands, all of the islands in those grids, or all of the islands on the map, or all that and wipe your character?  What do you think?

On 8/10/2019 at 5:19 AM, Dollie said:

many existing duplicates have been removed

2 hours ago, Winter Thorne said:

If you've been playing since December, think back to how that was, and realize it will be like that again some day.  There won't be any place for WPE, so the idea is all done at that point.  It's a concept that needs a rethink.  

But WPE is more for when the population is decaying like it is now in a death spiral - people leaving because people are leaving.   WPE on official makes sense to stem that loss by providing those who remain something to do until people come back instead of leaving themselves.   They surely did not develop it solely for single player to have more fun - the game would need a complete rewrite to not feel like you are soloing an MMO.

It is useful also for the new server that WPE makes sense, it slows down the land rush giving more people a fair chance.

3 hours ago, Realist said:

crossplay with steam is a very different story that most definitely needs a wipe.

Actually is that even  possible - wouldn't that require XBOX code to logon to steam server authenticate?   Would (has?) Microsoft ever enabled that?  Is Minecraft like that or is on just all platforms without crossplay?

Yes if it is crossplay that only WIN10 PC players that bought it on the Microsoft XBOX store - then they are a new player playing on the new XBOX server since they are logging on with their XBOX store account.  No wipe just a new server.

Of course you have not seen Microsoft promote XBOX Atlas - it is simply not available on console for them to promote.  It would be a huge mistake on M$ part to promote these devs will release something by such and such date.  But surely a contract that once it is available they will promote it if they do crossplay is the reality, why would they promote something that does not do crossplay when that is the WIndows 10 gaming push?

It may not be the devs choice if Crossplay is done, if they are being promoted by Microsoft (as Ark was) then it is possible that part of that contract is Crossplay since Microsoft badly wants to merge Windows 10 PC gaming with Console gaming.

There is no mechanical reason for a wipe with crossplay is just comes down to they will surely make more sales if XBOX think they are buying a new game rather than a stale map.  XBOX gains surely will be greater than PC leaving - because PC already left and those that did not - well they already have your damn money.

There absolutely is mechanical reason to wipe characters if islands are replaced - even if a rescue boat of admins shows up to clear the area (as would be expected on unofficial - but is stated policy that they do not have hand holding admins on official)   Discovery points are tagged by ID per char.  Do you give people credit for islands that do not exist giving them more DP than possible?    Do you risk ID database corruption because of dangling  references?  Do you risk complaints that the procedural resource algorithm rearranged where stuff is like happened with last map change which was a good reason to wipe so people could fairly relocate?   On our unofficial when we did it we wiped the characters as it was the only way to make the work and that was with time consuming admins giving everyone their levels and stuff back which is not going to happen on official..   It is much better for everyone if things are wiped for this case and the facts show that players do come back from a wipe, they just will not stay if the new map and rules does not make the game better.

WPE is not a mechanical reason to wipe as it is designed to only appear on empty islands.    However they have already shown in the interest of fairness they will wipe - Colonies was not a reason to wipe as they could have just erased all the flags and made it a free for all (which is what most unofficial did)   They did it out of fairness so that everyone has a chance to claim the islands without fighting someone already being entrenched.  WPE is the exact same argument about fairness - old players did not have to PVE fight to take an island.

So if Crossplay comes and WPE comes and island replacements come?   They are going to wipe.  Or you can believe that PC PTR is testing the WPE and new islands for XBOX servers, and PC servers will not get them so no wipe.