Starting on a official server worth doing or do private?

[narokusama]

Curious if it ok to start on an official server after all these years or all the space and people gone away?

[🦊 Hermit]

Firstly, official servers are unregulated and broadly toxic, so I would recommend you avoid them for that reason. Second, all official servers are going to be axed in a few months anyway, so while you will be able to download the save file to keep your progress, you will have to play it on an unofficial server or in your single player games regardless.

All told, may as well just save yourself a lot of trouble and look for a good unofficial right from the start, one with good admins and rules so you won't have to deal with the toxicity, and one which will be more long-lived than officials currently will be.

[Grimlock7]

No point, the official servers will be closing down in a few months anyway. If you want official servers after that you would have to buy Ark Survival: Ascended (ASA) most likely. Best stick to Private or unofficial servers. There are vastly more unofficial ones that are trustworthy.

[narokusama]

Originally posted by Grimlock7:

No point, the official servers will be closing down in a few months anyway. If you want official servers after that you would have to buy Ark Survival: Ascended (ASA) most likely. Best stick to Private or unofficial servers. There are vastly more unofficial ones that are trustworthy.

How is unofficial or private becoming more trust worthy

[🦊 Hermit]

Because most of them have rules, active admins who enforce those rules, and a community who is friendly and supportive.

By contrast, officials are anarchy, filled with RMT and cheating, barely regulated at all, and the community is toxic. Plus recently some reports have emerged (seemingly with video proof, although I haven't watched it myself so take it as you will) of unfair bannings by the game publisher for tribes who dared to attack their in-game strongholds.

[GimpKong]

If you got the game recently. Refund. The official servers wil shut down in august and the game will have no support.

[william_es]

Originally posted by GimpKong:

If you got the game recently. Refund. The official servers wil shut down in august and the game will have no support.

And the official servers shutting down will have no effect on all the rest of us playing on unofficials.

The game has over 8 years of extra content added. It's not "losing support", the game is now finished. They're done. They have put the period at the end of the sentence, the cherry on top of the sundae, or whatever analogy floats your boat. The game is still fun to play, and will remain fun to play.

You can start on officials, but lets see how many hours you last before you get sandblasted off the server by some alpha tribe threatened by your godlike presence (because if they don't stomp on you pronto, you can overthrow them an hour a later... or last that's what they seem to think).

When you're tired of being curbstomped, you can look at the many many unofficial servers.

[Mason]

No, don't bother with official. They are closing all official servers in a few months, with still no mention of it on their store page. They're still conning people into buying their game without even so much as putting a disclaimer that they are closing them. All they did was address it in a few community updates and they think they can just sweep it under the rug and forget about it. The internet never forgets... people need to be warned.

[Dyspeptic Icarus]

Official has always been a: "Don't bother."

They are shutting down soon so only people mad are the peeps who treat it as the mafia, and slide money around on it like crazy.

I only really like playing on officials back before it started going downhill, and stopped resetting. Resetting made ARK bearable.

[Mason]

Originally posted by Icarus:

Official has always been a: "Don't bother."

They are shutting down soon so only people mad are the peeps who treat it as the mafia, and slide money around on it like crazy.

I only really like playing on officials back before it started going downhill, and stopped resetting. Resetting made ARK bearable.

Personally I'm not really bothered by them closing official servers. I've played the game for many a year, most of my playtime being on official PS4 servers. Official was good when there were no cross server transfers. But once they opened all servers up to transfers it was a complete and utter mess. Mega tribes with huge numbers and multiple servers they had claimed as their own, and endless resources made it impossible for even alpha tribes to compete with them. We were wiped a few times by tribes that were connected with Mega tribes. And hell.. new players, or solos really had no chance. Nooblets called it years ago and that's exactly what transpired.

And that's one stain ark official has always had since cross server transfers were a thing... this bs "black market" where you can buy whatever for real money.

So frankly I could care less that they're closing official. But we can't deny the fact they're being shady about it.

[Wolf]

it depends on the server. on our official cluster, there is an "alpha" tribe who will be continuing the cluster as is, so we will all continue as if nothing happened... except the name may change a little :)

[Dyspeptic Icarus]

Originally posted by Zero:

Originally posted by Icarus:

Official has always been a: "Don't bother."

They are shutting down soon so only people mad are the peeps who treat it as the mafia, and slide money around on it like crazy.

I only really like playing on officials back before it started going downhill, and stopped resetting. Resetting made ARK bearable.

Personally I'm not really bothered by them closing official servers. I've played the game for many a year, most of my playtime being on official PS4 servers. Official was good when there were no cross server transfers. But once they opened all servers up to transfers it was a complete and utter mess. Mega tribes with huge numbers and multiple servers they had claimed as their own, and endless resources made it impossible for even alpha tribes to compete with them. We were wiped a few times by tribes that were connected with Mega tribes. And hell.. new players, or solos really had no chance. Nooblets called it years ago and that's exactly what transpired.

And that's one stain ark official has always had since cross server transfers were a thing... this bs "black market" where you can buy whatever for real money.

So frankly I could care less that they're closing official. But we can't deny the fact they're being shady about it.

Hell, yeah. Cross-Server Transfer ruined Ark for me; it was fun raiding peeps solo versus a 20-30 person "megatribe." Get a rocket launcher, and run around on a runner; nuke metal, and stone bases while they were offline.

Then Cross-Server transfers happened, and you had huge megatribes of hundreds of people; actual IRL political anarchy, and facism broke out. I joined a smaller megatribe of about 90 or so people. Half the time was grinding kits, and breeding dinos.

Those dumb-ass frost dino cyber ♥♥♥♥♥... Manas? Literally OP for anyone who didn't have a kitted out, and 300-400 stat dino to kill it in one shot. Managed to steal a frost owl, and absolutely obliterate a servers combat manas though once.

---

That was fun, but Cross-Server got worse, and worse & it took very little for server alpha to be toppled by a single guy with a triceratops, and a ♥♥♥♥-load of cakes.

[Grimlock7]

Originally posted by narokusama:

Originally posted by Grimlock7:

No point, the official servers will be closing down in a few months anyway. If you want official servers after that you would have to buy Ark Survival: Ascended (ASA) most likely. Best stick to Private or unofficial servers. There are vastly more unofficial ones that are trustworthy.

How is unofficial or private becoming more trust worthy

By Trustworthy I mean, not all unofficial servers are dodgy, some might think official is the way to go and unofficial is bad or something, I mainly mean, there are unofficial servers out there that are well known and provide an experience sometimes even better than the official ones in terms of content and moderation.

Unofficial has always been better than the official servers anyway. The majority of the community play on unofficial over official as well. Official servers had less moderation and alpha tribes controlling the servers anyway, it was unbearable and toxic

[retsam1]

Originally posted by narokusama:

Curious if it ok to start on an official server after all these years or all the space and people gone away?

Others have spoken to various parts of all this but its a bit of a moot point to play on the 1800ish official servers since in August, they're all being shut down and your only option is to play unofficials.

For 8 years the majority of the player base have played on said unofficials for a myriad of reasons but the core reason being the way Wildcard manages them(or more aptly doesnt manage them arguably). This is why there's currently around 70,000+ unofficial servers where most issues that people have frustrations with become non issues there.

Originally posted by narokusama:

How is unofficial or private becoming more trust worthy

For one, remember that there are unofficial servers that have lasted longer than some official ones and come August, that number will increase.

Secondly, the fact there are literally 35x more unofficial servers means you have better chances through due diligence of finding servers that best match you and obviously servers not run well are not going to have folks using them. As a general rule, server owners who focus on community vs spamming adverts to chase player numbers are the ones that tend to be of better quality.

So its not a situation of "becoming more trust worthy" plenty have been so for a long time and its made a good circle of motivation and competition of servers offerings. Its a player's market thus if you will.

But keep in mind, some of that is going to also change come August when allegedly Ascended releases. Obviously there will be some unofficial server owners who will switch to Ascended and not maintain their unofficial Ark 1 servers. But even if that occurs, and 90% of those unofficials were to stop for Ark 1(which isn't going to of course happen), that 10% left is still 3 times more servers than the official offerings are at the present time.


So all in all, you've many different choices to consider.