Ark: Survival Evolved

Seems cool - but it was kind of a dick move for them to release a paid DLC while it was still in early access. The game is definitely worth the $20-40 dollars if you can find a decent server or have some friends to roll with. Our private server with the Center map is great, but it needs more population to make the world dynamic.

I look forward to the mods that this new pack will spawn.

Just what I was thinking. Especially since they have a sale now that nets you all ARK titles for $17.99 going on Steam, yet if I already own it, I have to spend $19.99 for just the new expansion. Dick move indeed.

Eh, considering how much they have actually supported the game over the last year and a half I think they deserve a bit of slack. Plus there's the whole ass fucking Trendy gave them which probably ate a large chunk of their development warchest.

Just thinking about the DLC makes me thirsty. Damn this map is hard.

The new map is pretty harsh on temp survival. I'm digging it so far but man, there is just some minor quality of life features they can do that would make this game a little less of a dick punch to play while still being challenging enough.

Private server for Re-rerolled members has been converted to Scorched Earth.

ID: 76.164.226.242:27060

It's a PVE server though at the moment.

I jumped on the server, started a new survivor. I'm down in South 1, will need to meet up by you guys to grab a tribe invite. Just messing around with a camp atm while I level.

It's definitely a bit harder right when you start off. Most of that seems more due to the scarcity of wood and the removal of your typical early tamable mass farming dinos. That makes gathering much harder/tedious as you now have to do that shit by hand which slows players down a bit.

The weather itself, while having a much larger effect than in the base game (especially for brand new players), looses most of its 'difficulty' once you've gotten yourself a hut. The map itself is really pretty though.

Skanda said:

Eh, considering how much they have actually supported the game over the last year and a half I think they deserve a bit of slack. Plus there's the whole ass fucking Trendy gave them which probably ate a large chunk of their development warchest.

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I thought the game was amazing and nearly finished over a year ago, then they kept adding stuff until you have a game that on release will set the bar so damn high no one will be able to even come close for years to come. The only reason I stopped playing is because they keep making it better and better and at this point I am waiting until release to dive deep back in. So yeah an income boost to these guys is welcome.

My only issue in ARK is building and movement always feels clunky to me.

so a scorched earth server is just the dlc map? i thought it was like an extra map accessible from a portal from the main map? (i've not played ark since jan..)

Kind of, sort of. It is a separate map but you can transfer between maps.

Scorched Earth Technical/Detail FAQ! (Ongoing)

Basically you upload your character at one of the Tribute Terminals and can transfer your character over to a SE server. It seems you only get to keep your levels and engrams. No items will transfer with you. Going back to The Island seems even wonkier as you CAN take items and dinos back with you.

Get ready to see Wyverns and nearly invincible Rock Golems on official servers!

Hopefully they smooth out the process a bit so it is more intuitive.

hmm may have to give this a go.

I could never roleplay like these people do..

Hatorade said:

My only issue in ARK is building and movement always feels clunky to me.

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Definitely a lot of clunkiness with the building. They need a key to rotate ceiling tiles and flip walls before you place them more than anything. There's a bunch of exploits that involve stacking way more walls than intended onto a single fence foundation which should be fixed. I never used it because it makes for ungodly ugly buildings, but people who don't care about aesthetics shouldn't be allowed to cheat the system.

My biggest complaints are the performance and the grind. On any server that's been up for a long time without being wiped, you're going to have massive fps drops all over the map from all the stuff people have built, and the decay timer was never a satisfactory solution to that. And even worse is if you build a huge base to store everything needed to efficiently farm, attack/defend, breed, etc. you'll easily slam into the 5k build limit and even on fairly high end PCs the framerate will dip into the teens or even single digits inside that base. I came back to the game for a few weeks earlier in the summer and I ended up building my own base far away from my tribe's main base because it was just fucking unbearable to be around 5k structures and a couple hundred animals. They actually had a few hundred more until an incident with a titan (easily the dumbest thing they've added to the game so far) wiped out a huge amount of the population.

The grind is what makes me quit playing though. I have no interest in playing on a private server, and the settings they use for public ones are just straight up retarded. Way too much XP is required to level, taming takes too much time even with 100% kibble, and then seeing how utterly ridiculous breeding/imprinting turned out to be was the final straw. No idea who they're designing for; I didn't even put that much time into EverQuest at its peak.

Yeah, that new base I mentioned that we built in July only needed a 9x11 foundation and it took me 2-3 hours (and several hundred thatch foundations) on a relatively flat area to get it placed without half-assing it with ceilings.

On the bright side, you can actually build some pretty decent looking structures now that they've added proper angled ceilings, railings, glass, etc.
Ignore the ugly tanks, that was taken on single player and on the official server we ran about 500 pipes to the nearest river. Not sure where the pics I took of the official server version went.

Jalynfane said:

Just what I was thinking. Especially since they have a sale now that nets you all ARK titles for $17.99 going on Steam, yet if I already own it, I have to spend $19.99 for just the new expansion. Dick move indeed.

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You don't get scorched earth in the 17.99 pack... so I get to pay 17.99 + 19.99 since i don't already own it just for the new expansion. Dick moves everywhere.

I have been playing on a Scorched earth server. We took over it and have been doing pretty good. The map is a great change of pace for ark. A LOT harder. You can transfer characters from official servers through obelisks and drops but you can't bring anything INTO it. You can transfer out and bring items/dinos with you. Harder to tame here since you dont have all the kibble and also dinos seem to be deadlier. The scariest dinos so far are the Rock Golems... hard to see them and if you are farming and one pops up, you probably lost that dino. You probably want to drink an mindwipe potion before you go in and put some a lot of points into speed and HP.

The boomerang is pretty good.... and Fire arrows are op as fuck. You can pretty much kill any dino with 2 fire arrows.... maybe 3. So be careful when shooting these around your own dinos

Did the server go down? I only see a Rererolled server running the Center and not the Scorched Earth Rerolled server.

= all good, I'm in.