How do you lure more players to your server

[Boo]

I am just wondering, I've seen so many people on completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ servers that were running in someone's living room, with poor connectivity, permanent rollbacks, crashes, bad config and completely inactive admins, that had outages days long.

Yet having a high performance dedicated box on 1GB/s network (central EU) where even people from US have ping around 40 and basically server which never lags (not a single rubber-banding effect since it was launched, for months), with sort of classic configuration typical for private servers (5x tame, 4x exp / harvest / structure and dino decay) with standard mods (ORP, etc) that are basically everywhere doesn't seem attractive at all.

All players I had on servers were quite happy and always said that the server is brilliant with perfect config, however sooner or later they left, mostly because of DLC, some of them left because they just didn't have anything to do, they reached 9x lvl, made bad-ass huge base and as there weren't many active players and all of them mostly friendly, there was no PvP challenge as well.

No new players are joining (I assume it's because of low amount of online players).

How does all these crap-servers out there do it that they have 50+ online players all the time? I tried registering the server on all public server lists, made a youtube video, spammed steam form for server advertisement, reddit... nothing.

What is the trick to lure people on server?

[Irishrover13]

Add me on steam me and we can take the lads/lasses are thinking of moving.

[Boo]

Ah, ok but you would have the server mostly for yourself, we really don't have many active players now... You can find the steam group of server here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/area51ark

[Irishrover13]

I will check it out.

[GobboKirk]

Keep an eye out for the people asking for server. If I was I'd be more interested in an invite post than some random server advert post.
Ofc that's me so might not be true for everyone.

[Nefhis]

As server owner too, my experience says that don't mind what you do. At last people leave server for the reasons you mentioned before, dlc, nothing more to do, don't like some mods, multipliers... you can't make everyone happy.
If you want to have people all time, the only thing you can do is keep on announcing your server, every day.

That is my experience at least

[Ussikene]

@Nefhis thats true, im owner of one server almost 1 year and still i dont undestand the point what the players want or not want. We have tried different thing, pvp, pve 10x 100x rate, annunaki etc. What i have seen that most of ARK players dont want to spend so much time to get something done but they just want everything fast and easy. Im not sure but for me who likes the challanges and low rates and im happy when i finally im able to finish something. Im still dont undestand point why everyone wants to have a private server and then they complains that they have a few active players. We all here love ark and why we cant make a good community and setup some good servers where everybody are happy.After new DLC came out we were one of the first server who offered it and we had everyday over 20 activer players online, but now we have only 5 person active, and i cant tell you the reason why it happened again :)

[Panicsferd]

I don't own a server myself, but I think I either looked at the forums of an admin looking for players that had similar things I would have liked, or I put a forum post myself looking for a server.

I managed to then find a first server that was hosted by someones, but this was awhile ago and he didn't host again... but then I find another server that has been going on for quite some time now - but their island/center server now with the DLC that just released doesn't have as much people as it did in the past.

I hate to say it on this post, but that Is one downside to the DLC (I don't own it myself) is that it can seperate the community and maybe that is why the server you possibly host yourself has seen a decline in players recently.

For me when I look for a server, I look at where it is (so I get a good ping), what the rates are and then finally if it is displayed what their wipe procedure is and when the last time the server was wiped? A server that I am currently playing on wipes like every 3 or so months (possibly sooner if the players ask and or need the map wiped if there is too many abandoned strucutres and the server is lagging) .

For me having a wipe happen every three months isn't that bad, since the rates are reasonable for me (x10 tame and I think resources is x5?) so it isn't that much of a loss when the server wipes every three months since it can be fairly reasonable to get back to where you were pre-wipe.

[Natjur]

Events.....most server get boring after awhile, by having server events (rewards are just costumes, nothing that effect balance) it keeps the players there.

Also having a cluster server, when the players can switch between your three servers (SE, the center and the island) keep it fresh as they have 3 maps to play on instead of 1

[TheSkunkyMonk]

Its a funny one, people like the idea of their character being on an official server probably in the hopes they can transfer him if the need arises, sadly this isn't the case. another thing with non official servers you never know how much cheating the admins do, its rare for an admin to mine the stone for his own fort, or get the gear for all those charges to destroy a foe which is quite a off putting prospect. I really do love Ark but until character transfers are allowed official to official I think my Dino hunting days may be over for awhile. if they do implement this could someone please send me a message.x

[Panicsferd]

Originally posted by Natjur:

Events.....most server get boring after awhile, by having server events (rewards are just costumes, nothing that effect balance) it keeps the players there.

Also having a cluster server, when the players can switch between your three servers (SE, the center and the island) keep it fresh as they have 3 maps to play on instead of 1

That is what the server that I have joined has.

They have a cluster of the three, so there is a center/island/scorched server and I think they actually managed to fix the ark transfers (or the devs fixed that?) but even with the ark-transfers I still noticed that there is still more people on the DLC map versus the other maps, which can seperate the community between those that have it and those that don't.

It can be similar to another game I play alot, Arma 3. They had a paid expansion release this past july and it did the same thing - but it didn't bother me that much since I wasn't that much of a MP player on that game and mainly in the editor and whatnot.

[GobboKirk]

Originally posted by Pantang:

Its a funny one, people like the idea of their character being on an official server probably in the hopes they can transfer him if the need arises, sadly this isn't the case. another thing with non official servers you never know how much cheating the admins do, its rare for an admin to mine the stone for his own fort, or get the gear for all those charges to destroy a foe which is quite a off putting prospect. I really do love Ark but until character transfers are allowed official to official I think my Dino hunting days may be over for awhile. if they do implement this could someone please send me a message.x

In general admins should stay away from anything but event based PvP if he/she wants to keep an active PvP server.

[Panicsferd]

Originally posted by GobboKirk:

Originally posted by Pantang:

Its a funny one, people like the idea of their character being on an official server probably in the hopes they can transfer him if the need arises, sadly this isn't the case. another thing with non official servers you never know how much cheating the admins do, its rare for an admin to mine the stone for his own fort, or get the gear for all those charges to destroy a foe which is quite a off putting prospect. I really do love Ark but until character transfers are allowed official to official I think my Dino hunting days may be over for awhile. if they do implement this could someone please send me a message.x

In general admins should stay away from anything but event based PvP if he/she wants to keep an active PvP server.

that is why I am somewhat glad the unofficial server I found doesn't have these admins or mods that abuse their powers and the even the mods themselves are more active because they actually play on the server, so most of the time if something is wrong (and if they arn't too busy enjoying the game themselves) they can help you right away since there is at least a mod on who can possibly help or get in touch with the admin if he's not too busy.

also for my terms, the admin is normally the person who is actually hosting the server and the various mods are those that are under the admin that are able to help moderate the game and even help if they can, otherwise the admin will have to help.

[Shackled]

Have less rules in place that will keep people going "where the fk is the admin"

just stop pillar spam.
MAYYYYYYBE no killing of passive dinos

[Archie]

Originally posted by GobboKirk:

Originally posted by Pantang:

Its a funny one, people like the idea of their character being on an official server probably in the hopes they can transfer him if the need arises, sadly this isn't the case. another thing with non official servers you never know how much cheating the admins do, its rare for an admin to mine the stone for his own fort, or get the gear for all those charges to destroy a foe which is quite a off putting prospect. I really do love Ark but until character transfers are allowed official to official I think my Dino hunting days may be over for awhile. if they do implement this could someone please send me a message.x

In general admins should stay away from anything but event based PvP if he/she wants to keep an active PvP server.

Usually this is the case. That's why I've never advertised our small tribe's server which I run.

No matter what, we all probably have that mindset that the admins will use cheats. I didn't use cheats for about 800 hours in our private server, nothing. Even if a bug claimed a dino from me. The one time (recently) that I did spawn things in, was when I demolished a project I had been building for about 3 months out of pure metal (basically a tall 33x33 tower on Dead Island) to start a new project in the redwood forest, and since I'm now much more time constraint than before (2-4 hours a day as opposed to 8 hours, I took a 3 month break), I calculated the total materials used for the metal build and converted it to stone and wood, then spawned in structures until it ran out. My mates of course knew of it and I said "well it ain't a bad idea, if you guys wanna scrap a build let me know". I was only able to build the wall with those materials.

But I don't think I'd ever advertise our server. If I do anytime at all, it'll have a big disclaimer stating the type of gameplay we do and that the owner viciously plays as well.

[Teralitha]

It seems you identified your own problems. No pvp. No incentive to pvp. Probably had the no offline damage mod too I bet. = boring.