Ark: Survival Evolved - 10 Ways The Developers Are Destroying Their Game

1. No moderators on official servers

Rampant hacking, racism, verbal abuse, and threats are constant in the global chat of Ark: Survival Evolved. Players record video evidence of hackers in the act and are met with zero response from Steam or developers. Entire servers have been rendered unplayable due to this unmanaged invasion of game-breaking hacks.

Players that work for hours upon hours in the extremely time consuming acts of capturing, taming, breeding, and raising dinos are left out in the cold. Their weeks of hard work building up egg farms is pointless when a player can spawn in 50 RPGs and proceed to blow everything to pieces.

The most common version of hacking in Ark is an online subscription service that grants you aimbot, ESP, and much more. How are we supposed to take the developers seriously when they allow something like this to exist unmoderated?

Hacking aside, the majority of player names and tribe names are extremely racist. It's not long before you find tribes referencing the Nazis, KKK, and others. Players are threatened with abuse and griefed nonstop. The first thing players did when allowed to paint their own dinosaurs was cover them in swastikas.

2. Starvation

You can eat 50 lbs of berries and be hungry within 5 minutes. This constant irritation doesn't add to realism or game play. It's another issue on the long list of content padding Ark is rampant with. Forcing the player to constantly look for food unless their max level, when players can make cheeseburgers that last for the entire day, is ridiculous. The balance between low and high levels is nowhere to be seen.

3. Original Dinosaurs being made irrelevant

In the current version of the game tribes only need to use a handful of the dinosaurs in the game. Most have little to no purpose in taming besides generating eggs that you use to make kibble to tame other dinos. The kibble system has recently been made pointless: a tribe can tame a quetz and a giga-rex with prime meat and wipe out any tribe on the server. Why tame a T-Rex for over 2 hours with kibble when you can tame the best dinosaur(G-rex) in the game in 1.5 hours? Why tame a Megalodon(shark) in 6 hours when you can tame the best water dino(Mosasaur) in 2?

4. Wasting time making temporary content instead of finessing current content

Raptorclaus? Dodorex? What?

5. Unable to transfer characters between official servers

Why do players have to start from scratch and grind back up levels just to play with other people? This policy of blocking players has been brought to the forefront now that hacking and server invasions are becoming more common. The leveling experience is an excruciating grind. This is a huge turnoff to new players that already struggle with constant griefing from super tribes.

6. Quality control/bugs

I can't remember how many times I've heard of players disconnecting for no reason and falling through the world. You can't play for a day without losing your hard earned items and dinos to glitches that have not been fixed for months. Players can look through the world and under walls to gauge player defenses. Players can log out to force their character to fall when being carried. The list goes on and on while the devs roll in their pre-release money.

7. Making explosives easy to get

There are two things killing the dedicated player. What's the point of making a huge intricate base when a player can spend 10 minutes farming and blow it to the ground? Rockets are now cheaper than c4 and do more damage. They can decimate any structure and make base building into a waste of time.

8. The 75% nerf to dinos hp and dmg

This wiped every major tribe on every server in less than a day. Guerrilla fighters and terroristic tribes are now able to 1shot dinosaurs that used to be walking fortresses. Dinosaurs that were bred for multiple generations, literally taking real life days to be raised, are now instantly killed by the weakest guns in the game. I recently watched a level 1 player kill a brontosaur with a stone pickaxe in less than 10 minutes while the dino's owner was offline.

Gathering dinos were the hardest hit in this nerf now that they no longer procure resources at any worthwhile speed. Why spend hours taming something when you can gather almost as quickly on foot with a tool?

9. Showing the game name of players that kill you

This random point ruins one of the most fun parts of the game. Oddly enough, instead of actually helping you kill the real culprit, most of the time it's used to frame other players. Being able to rename your dinosaur and tribe to being the same as another's literally starts wars. Trolls get more out of this than they would if they were able to do things in secret.

10. Showing player's Steam names in global chat.

This is the greatest flaw in Ark. Being able to track players through steam to see when they log in and out and planning raids accordingly has ruined this game from the start. It takes less than a couple of hours to find the steam names of an entire tribe and wait for them to log out. Knowing steam names also allows for players to spam false cheating reports and constantly send abusive messages to players and their friends.