Wild Card out did themselves with the way they handled Ark, being a massively multiplayer survival game with building aspects good enough to keep people interested, it has gathered many people that dedicate hundreds of hours in the official servers building huge tribes and taming huge dinosaurs.
Yet there is one aspect of it that intrigues me.
A while back a feature was added into Ark that allowed players to switch servers and bring their characters and all their equipment and Dinos into a different server, this added a dynamic to the game that I’m personally not even sure if its good or bad.
Before if a Huge tribe controlled a server, it was pretty much a checkmate, if no else could compete then the server would just die eventually because Ark takes a lot of time and dedication to even get anywhere and getting destroyed time and time again, ain’t exactly fun.
But now with this feature, controlling a server is more like controlling a continent in a game like civilization, why stop there when you can lock down the whole map?
That’s what i feel has been happening within the game, other servers desperately trying to band together to protect the integrity of the server and to keep a lot of people playing so a huge alpha tribe cant log in and destroy everything since no one can fight back.
How long can players keep this up though?
I got tired of treating Ark like a second job, just to protect the server i played on, and since the tribes of that server cared mostly about themselves even they would constantly attack me rather than make sure no one attacks everyone, sure enough though, now an alpha tribe has wipe everyone out, and i stopped playing on the server.
So i wonder how other servers will continue to holdout, because the game never stops when you sleep, so every night when you stop playing, you could lose everything.
Ultimately what hurts the game is the amount of time and dedication you have to put in, to really even get anywhere, and yet it can be taken away in a fraction of the time it took to get there, and since most people don’t look for a fair fight and attack people when their offline, it brings an overall bad experience to what Ark should be, sure its PvP and these things will happen, but i feel as if eventually this type of stuff will have a good chunk of the player base stop playing on official servers, because a game that requires you to be playing 24/7 by force doesn’t sound all that appealing.
Wild Card has been doing their best to address these problems, so far they have been wiping servers that have been considered unplayable and have few people playing, its at-least one step to keep things from being too hectic,but usually wipes take months, so if you lose a server, you wont be playing for awhile if starting over doesn’t appeal to you.