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ARK: Survival Evolved |OT| Early Access to the Land Before Time

M

Mobius and pet octopus

Member
After playing this game for about a week... I just don't see why my friends play this so much. All you do is farm in this game or wait on dinos to become tamed. Base raiding... meh. More like overwhelming attack on a base with minimal people and defenses. And yet they play this game... what feels like 24/7.

I remember sinking a lot of time into minecraft, but at least in minecraft I felt like I could do something with a short amount of time. And crafting a base felt simple to accomplish.

Leveling to me, feels shallow. The combat feels shallow, really shallow if you're trying to melee and slightly less when you have a gun. Base building feels fairly shallow but less than other areas. The map itself... honestly I don't think it is even that interesting of a game to explore around in.

I've never before been so confused about a game my friend's are sinking time into. I just don't get what keeps them coming back. I got someone with 200+ hours in 2 weeks. I just don't get it
cry.gif
 
S

Seventy_X_Seven

Member
Surprised the OT is so dead. Anyways, I got a decent sized crew ready to commit to one of the new primitive servers they just added. If anyone is interested add my to steam, same ID. Thinking of setting up where the future snow biome will be.
 
S

Soi-Fong

Member
Seventy_X_Seven said:
Surprised the OT is so dead. Anyways, I got a decent sized crew ready to commit to one of the new primitive servers they just added. If anyone is interested add my to steam, same ID. Thinking of setting up where the future snow biome will be.
Click to expand...

Think it's really because of the optimization issues more than anything. With my 780 Ti and running at the absolute lowest settings, it was still unplayable with constant frame rate drops.
 
X

xMuku

Member
Soi-Fong said:
Think it's really because of the optimization issues more than anything. With my 780 Ti and running at the absolute lowest settings, it was still unplayable with constant frame rate drops.
Click to expand...

Try the Ark specific drivers the devs released. It may help. I have the 750ti and I run on Medium - High at the moment. Also crank the shitty ground clutter down, it is way to hard on the GPU.
 
U

UpDownLeftRight

Banned
Game is dying. Been logging a lot of hours since launch day and while its a solid foundation to start from the devs show little interest in expanding the dynamic of the foundation and only add content instead, where major systems need vital reworks.

Two teams and all that I know but there's very little excuse. Been playing o official server PvP 180 EU for a long time now and it's unfortunately still a huge mess. Yes I know officials are hell but this is where the main playerbase will be, so it needs to be good.

Raiding is too easy, but even more problematic is how raiding versus an offline tribe is just broken. I could raid a massive tribe alone if I wanted and wipe them to the ground simply by using the server browser and wait for them to go to bed. It happens everywhere and is tho number one fault with the game.

By default it's PvPvE but it's incredibly broken. I was lucky enough to have joined a server with minimal PvO trolls but time played it's part. The tribes that were friendly were obliterated in a night over a month ago. The taming times combined with farming requirements meant none of these could catch up now that a tribe had started server wide war and had 5+ members at all times.

It's been well over a month since then. The alliances I was once a part of have all left the server due to the poorly balanced mechanics that left them defenseless permanently. I merged with a tribe that are protected for no reason from this same tribe trolling the server despite never helping them.

They own the server now. There's maybe 3-4 people just trying to get whatever revenge they can at this point against them but they have no chance being raided 3-4 times a day by a group of 20+. The server hardly ever gets close to half full and this server used to be nightmare to get into. They are all following similar patterns too.

They need to do something fast because this is one of the fastest dying communities I've had the displeasure to witness. If it wasn't for the fact I like our TS group I'd have been long gone over a month ago.
 
M

Mirk

Member
For anyone still playing I have a server running. IP 167.114.211.165:21120

It has a custom config with:
downloadable character from other servers
player pointier on map
up to lvl 90 dino spawns
3x xp
2x harvesting
2x taming speed
.5x water and food depletion

Beware though I set this up so non player dinos are strong.
 
H

hepburn3d

Member
Local host!!!!!

Amazing. Haven't logged on in a month. It's so much better now!!!! Custom sliders are nice. Gonna give this another bash this weekend.


We couldn't get LAN to work then a 2gb update came out, just now, and now it works :)

Co-op survival exploration game. I am happy.
 
Crayon

Crayon

Member
I got this as soon as it came out for linux. I've never played and survival/minecraft thing so it is very novel to me and I played the shit out of it for like two weeks before things got busy around here. My so played alot, too. I'm actually about to burn this this desktop down and switch to steamos and the only save she's concerned about me preserving is the local file she plays ark on.

btw: can anyone confirm I grabbed the right files and didn't miss any? From the "/saved" folder I grabbed "LocalProfiles" folder and "SavedArksLocal" folder. Is that all I need?
 
S

Sarcasm

Member
After putting in fifty hours I got bored of them just adding in dinos. Has it changed or is it still the shitty watch the bar drop survival?


They really need to work and add to the core game not just add dinos.
 
H

Hidden One

Member
I bought this game today and put 5 hours into it..It's amazing. Optimization is pretty bad but it is early access so that's to be expected. GTX 970 on high settings gets like 30-35 frames. But I messed with the settings a bit and I get 40-50 now.
 
J

jacobeid

Banned
I just upgraded froma 7850 2gb to a 970 and I'm thinking about picking this game up. I noticed some posts above about the game being CPU heavy, but I'm still rocking my i5-3570. Will I be ok or should I wait until the game is further optimized?
 
Z

zer0blivion

Member
I convinced a couple of my friends to buy this, and bought a copy for another friend. We've got a nice little tribe going on, on a private PvE server in Canada. We tamed a stego, even though we're too low level to actually make a saddle for it. We had a storage box outside with no pin on it and when I logged in the other day, I found a note in the box. It said something like "I noticed your stego didn't have a saddle, so I left one in your box for you. BTW, if you don't put a pin code on your storage, anyone can access it." That was a pleasant surprise.

The last update added Sasquatches. I've heard they're pretty rare, but I saw 3 of them hanging out fairly close to our base. We tamed 2 of them. One level 51, one level 72. They seem kinda OP. You don't need a saddle to ride them. They are fast as hell and have a ton of stamina. They are a passive tame, so even a level 1 could tame them, provided they have enough mejoberries and patience. You just sneak up behind them and feed them berries over and over. I named mine Sam Squanch. Bonus points if anyone gets that reference.

I'm really digging this game so far.
 
G

GRaider81

Member
zer0blivion said:
I convinced a couple of my friends to buy this, and bought a copy for another friend. We've got a nice little tribe going on, on a private PvE server in Canada. We tamed a stego, even though we're too low level to actually make a saddle for it. We had a storage box outside with no pin on it and when I logged in the other day, I found a note in the box. It said something like "I noticed your stego didn't have a saddle, so I left one in your box for you. BTW, if you don't put a pin code on your storage, anyone can access it." That was a pleasant surprise.

The last update added Sasquatches. I've heard they're pretty rare, but I saw 3 of them hanging out fairly close to our base. We tamed 2 of them. One level 51, one level 72. They seem kinda OP. You don't need a saddle to ride them. They are fast as hell and have a ton of stamina. They are a passive tame, so even a level 1 could tame them, provided they have enough mejoberries and patience. You just sneak up behind them and feed them berries over and over. I named mine Sam Squanch. Bonus points if anyone gets that reference.

I'm really digging this game so far.
Click to expand...


That's awesome
 
H

HeeHo

Member
I play on official server 338. I'm pretty dang new. I have a GTX750 and AMD 6300 3.5 processor and at first my game ran like absolute poo poo and I even did a steam refund request. I looked on the steam support page for this game and it has tips to get better FPS and I applied the changes and I consistently get around 45 fps with medium high settings. It does severely dip to 20 or lower sometimes but only for a split second and I'm assuming it has something to do with the server or the game trying to load.
 
Z

zer0blivion

Member
HeeHo said:
I play on official server 338. I'm pretty dang new. I have a GTX750 and AMD 6300 3.5 processor and at first my game ran like absolute poo poo and I even did a steam refund request. I looked on the steam support page for this game and it has tips to get better FPS and I applied the changes and I consistently get around 45 fps with medium high settings. It does severely dip to 20 or lower sometimes but only for a split second and I'm assuming it has something to do with the server or the game trying to load.
Click to expand...

I assume you're talking about this:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/615086038682526144/

A friend of mine did this and it allowed her to play on her laptop. She also had to put everything on low, and it looks like crap on low settings, but it's at least a playable framerate.

Edit: I wish this thread was more active. I hope a lot more people get on board once it's more optimized/leaves early access.
 
H

HeeHo

Member
Yeah, I'd highly recommend anyone look at that before attempting to play the game. I have tried to put it on lowest settings to see my FPS but wowzers, it WAS really butt ugly. Still the game is fun enough to do it I think.

I'm level 16, not in a tribe. Just captured my first dino, a parasaur, (usually they are too fast for me but this one got stuck running against a rock) and I'm just gathering enough hide to make a saddle.

Something odd I noticed when I first started playing last weekend was that there like, virtually no enemies on the server I was playing on, it was weird. It was really rare to encounter anything but now there is almost an abundance. It made me think that meat and hide were rare.
 
abracadaver

abracadaver

Member
DirectX 12 support is planned for this friday with a 20% performance gain

How are they even doing it? I remember other devs saying that UE4 does not support DirectX 12 yet
 
X

Xyber

Member
abracadaver said:
DirectX 12 support is planned for this friday with a 20% performance gain

How are they even doing it? I remember other devs saying that UE4 does not support DirectX 12 yet
Click to expand...

Well, I've seen other UE4 demos released recently with DX12 so there is some way to make it work. It probably won't give the same benefits as a game developed with DX12 in mind from the start, but will probably help a bit with CPU bottlenecks that are often present in MMO games.
 
Z

zer0blivion

Member
Had anyone been playing for the free weekend?

I finally levelled up to where I can make Pteranodon saddles. It really opens up the world for exploration.
 
1

120v

Member
i've been playing off and on for about two weeks. surprised i haven't had any issues... looks and runs smooth (970, i7 4970... which i don't necessarily consider "a beast of a rig")

i just hope they touch up the controller support. which i'm not betting on, because it's surprising it's there at all... but i primarily play on my TV. would be nice for something more... playable
 
W

Wired

Member
First a heads up, the game's on sale for €18,66 / $19.99 on the Humble Store. If anyone's interested.


Anyways, started playing ARK about 10 days ago and I have to say I'm a bit obsessed even though the performance leaves a bit to be desired. However to be fair I don't have the best computer, it's an i5-3570K (stock clock) with 8GB of RAM and a GTX 680.

Now to my question, finally:

I'm running the game of an SSD in Low Memory mode, 1080p with Resolution Scaling reduced by about 30% and Medium/High settings I manage to get about 30-40fps most of the time which is at least playable. However I am getting serious dips here and there and some areas really kills the frame rate.

I was playing around with the thought of buying a GTX970 or 980, but I'm not too sure it's the best idea. I'm not swimming in money right now and spending it on upgrading my aging computer might be a impulsive short-term move, it might be smarter to save up and wait until the new cards drop and just buy a new computer instead.

That said I've read about how RAM hungry the game is, and another 8 gigs of ram is pretty cheap. But what kind of benefit, if any, would I get from it as far as ARK is concerned?
 
U

UpDownLeftRight

Banned
Wired said:
First a heads up, the game's on sale for €18,66 / $19.99 on the Humble Store. If anyone's interested.


Anyways, started playing ARK about 10 days ago and I have to say I'm a bit obsessed even though the performance leaves a bit to be desired. However to be fair I don't have the best computer, it's an i5-3570K (stock clock) with 8GB of RAM and a GTX 680.

Now to my question, finally:

I'm running the game of an SSD in Low Memory mode, 1080p with Resolution Scaling reduced by about 30% and Medium/High settings I manage to get about 30-40fps most of the time which is at least playable. However I am getting serious dips here and there and some areas really kills the frame rate.

I was playing around with the thought of buying a GTX970 or 980, but I'm not too sure it's the best idea. I'm not swimming in money right now and spending it on upgrading my aging computer might be a impulsive short-term move, it might be smarter to save up and wait until the new cards drop and just buy a new computer instead.

That said I've read about how RAM hungry the game is, and another 8 gigs of ram is pretty cheap. But what kind of benefit, if any, would I get from it as far as ARK is concerned?
Click to expand...

Little to none, the only way to get good performance across the game is to literally brute force it with a high end gpu AND a high end processor, which even then, you're going to be limited in areas. There ARE however, a number of factors that are causing these drops and depending on how you are playing they may be able to be eliminated to some extent.

Firstly do you play online? There are two major factors at play with the dips here. Firstly, player buildings having swamped the server and causing these spikes as they are brought into view, however they also seem to cause the server to lag so there's little that can be done on your end. Secondly, harvesting. If anyone is swinging a bronto or even stego tail at a huge load of bushes anywhere within your remote vicinity then this will cause enormous lag spikes, typically pausing for 5 seconds or more. You can also cause this to happen playing alone.

If you play solo you can have a bit more control over a separate issue, the dino spawn count. The dino's are always being calculated when playing solo and are another big factor in causing severe lag spikes. There's actually a whole bunch of other factors of performance that are botched beyond belief last time I checked such as resolution scaling (the game demands insane amounts of power to run at 60 with internal resolution at max even with everything else turned way down)

It's been a long time since I played so maybe some of this and more is fixed by now, I'll be trying it later tonight actually to see if it has improved but I'm doubting it personally. The game just generally perform a lot worse than it should and requires disproportionate amounts of power to pull off what it is actually doing.
 
U

UpDownLeftRight

Banned
SatelliteOfLove said:
I've had this on wishlist for a while, but heard the performance chugged. What's the lowdown on if thats gotten better lately and if so how much?
Click to expand...

It's actually still getting worse. I tried it again for the first time in a few months recently and maintaining a good framerate is still pretty tough. Unless you have a very modern high end gpu and a high end CPU it's going to get really rough. My system is pretty old in parts, mostly my gtx 580 but with 3gb of VRAM it has held up well. Processor and Mobo is more than enough for this game, but even then, it's not possible to turn resolution scaling to max for me without landing my FPS somewhere in the 20's and everything else on minimum, we're talking ps2 graphics at this point pretty much. I can run most settings on max with resolution scaling 3/4 of the way up at around 40fps, but then you have jaggies that give early ps3 days a run for their money.

Take from that what you will, but, if you happen to be rocking a 980 or something like that you should be able to get reasonable fps with decent graphics. I will point out though, that I can run Star Citizen on this thing at above 30fps on medium/high yet ARK demands more somehow.
 
G

gossi

Member
SatelliteOfLove said:
I've had this on wishlist for a while, but heard the performance chugged. What's the lowdown on if thats gotten better lately and if so how much?
Click to expand...

Performance is terrible. I have a decent gaming PC but struggled to get to 30fps. Graphics look nothing like trailer as you have to scale them back to Playstation 2 levels for performance reasons.
 
H

Husker86

Member
I have an i5 and 2500K and run ShadowPlay while playing. I get low 20 FPS. Weird thing is, I'm having a blast and not really bothered. I should note, though, that I don't play PC games much (or many games at all for that matter), so I'm not conditioned to high FPS.

I'm having a lot more fun with this game than I thought I would. Much more fun being in a tribe and having a home base.
 
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