Where are all players?

[Bagheadt]

I see a lot of people are playing, but i can't see any server with at least one player in it? Where are you people?

[🦊 Hermit]

If you're looking in the game's server browser, that is known to have severe issues and doesn't display servers very well. It's often recommended to use a third party listing site such as Battlemetrics to look for servers instead.

Also, bear in mind that servers can be clustered together on this game. So while there may be servers with only a few people on them, it's possible that server is clustered with a number of others all running different maps, and players are spread across all of them. So the community they are a part of may be quite large, speaking in Discord or whatever - it just looks like it's small because they're spread across multiple servers.

[dagger]

Players are out there but keep in mind the game is over 8 years old and official support was shutdown Sept 2023 by the developer.

Where my cluster would get 30+ peak player numbers a few years back I now see 6-8 spread across 12 maps. Many clusters are made up of multiple maps that players transfer between so per map numbers look lower. A lot of clusters also link the map chat so players on different maps can still communicate on global chat.

There are around 43,000 peak players in the game over the past 30 days. This is about half of what it was back in 2023. This is the nature of an old game with players taking breaks with other games and coming back in cycles. I constantly see my players leave for 3-6 months to pop back on and play ARK more.

[Bagheadt]

Originally posted by dagger:

Players are out there but keep in mind the game is over 8 years old and official support was shutdown Sept 2023 by the developer.

Where my cluster would get 30+ peak player numbers a few years back I now see 6-8 spread across 12 maps. Many clusters are made up of multiple maps that players transfer between so per map numbers look lower. A lot of clusters also link the map chat so players on different maps can still communicate on global chat.

There are around 43,000 peak players in the game over the past 30 days. This is about half of what it was back in 2023. This is the nature of an old game with players taking breaks with other games and coming back in cycles. I constantly see my players leave for 3-6 months to pop back on and play ARK more.

I didn't realize the servers were shut down when i posted this... So most players are playing the newer Ark game now?

[dagger]

The only servers shutdown were official which was a small portion of overall servers (less than 2,000 official servers Sept 2023 compared to the current 40,000 unofficial still running)

I will not say most are playing the new game version. The community is split currently between the two games. However the new game is still early access and will not have all of the original maps releases until 2027 per the current updated road map https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/articles.html/community-crunch-440-ark-survival-ascended-content-roadmap-r2429/

[retsam1]

Originally posted by Bagheadt:

Originally posted by dagger:

Players are out there but keep in mind the game is over 8 years old and official support was shutdown Sept 2023 by the developer.

Where my cluster would get 30+ peak player numbers a few years back I now see 6-8 spread across 12 maps. Many clusters are made up of multiple maps that players transfer between so per map numbers look lower. A lot of clusters also link the map chat so players on different maps can still communicate on global chat.

There are around 43,000 peak players in the game over the past 30 days. This is about half of what it was back in 2023. This is the nature of an old game with players taking breaks with other games and coming back in cycles. I constantly see my players leave for 3-6 months to pop back on and play ARK more.

I didn't realize the servers were shut down when i posted this... So most players are playing the newer Ark game now?

1. No. Opposite. You can see here on this comparative graph(evolved is the top line):

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346110,2399830#6m

2. While the 1400ish official servers shut down in Sept 2023 for Evolved, there are still over 30,000+ unofficial servers. Always with this game, the majority of the player base played on unofficial servers. Even now with Ark Ascended the majority of the player base play on unofficials as well.

3. Remember the in game server list system cannot comprehensively show all servers and has been a mess for many many years. Many instead use the battlemetrics website instead as it also has a robust search filter system and secondary stat/info pages for server activity:

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark?sort=-players


4. Keep in mind as well that servers are often part of server clusters(ie maps you can xfer to and from freely on that cluser) so player concurrency on one server listed isnt necessarily indicative of the over all populace concurrently of a specific server community.

Time of day and day of week also factor of course.

5. The core flaw of Ark Evolved(and Ascended) is ecocide. Because of that, many players tend to prefer small-medium pop communities as they prefer to be ducking and weaving between rocks and trees to avoid predators instead of ducking and weaving between mall sized bases and dino parking lots just to find a green spot for a campfire.

[Goritude]

If u are looking for a good PvE server with great community I'd suggest Maelstrom Gaming.

https://maelstrom-gaming.com/#servers

[Bagheadt]

Originally posted by retsam1:

Originally posted by Bagheadt:

I didn't realize the servers were shut down when i posted this... So most players are playing the newer Ark game now?

1. No. Opposite. You can see here on this comparative graph(evolved is the top line):

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346110,2399830#6m

2. While the 1400ish official servers shut down in Sept 2023 for Evolved, there are still over 30,000+ unofficial servers. Always with this game, the majority of the player base played on unofficial servers. Even now with Ark Ascended the majority of the player base play on unofficials as well.

3. Remember the in game server list system cannot comprehensively show all servers and has been a mess for many many years. Many instead use the battlemetrics website instead as it also has a robust search filter system and secondary stat/info pages for server activity:

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark?sort=-players


4. Keep in mind as well that servers are often part of server clusters(ie maps you can xfer to and from freely on that cluser) so player concurrency on one server listed isnt necessarily indicative of the over all populace concurrently of a specific server community.

Time of day and day of week also factor of course.

5. The core flaw of Ark Evolved(and Ascended) is ecocide. Because of that, many players tend to prefer small-medium pop communities as they prefer to be ducking and weaving between rocks and trees to avoid predators instead of ducking and weaving between mall sized bases and dino parking lots just to find a green spot for a campfire.

I checked a lot of the unofficial servers, and most of those were empty for me as well. Maybe it's because i'm playing this game from europe, i don't know.... But i could barely find a single soul out there, and the one's i did try to join all gave me errors and crashed my game for some reason. I'm just gonna delete this, too much trouble. But thanks anyway.

[retsam1]

Originally posted by Bagheadt:

Originally posted by retsam1:

1. No. Opposite. You can see here on this comparative graph(evolved is the top line):

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/346110,2399830#6m

2. While the 1400ish official servers shut down in Sept 2023 for Evolved, there are still over 30,000+ unofficial servers. Always with this game, the majority of the player base played on unofficial servers. Even now with Ark Ascended the majority of the player base play on unofficials as well.

3. Remember the in game server list system cannot comprehensively show all servers and has been a mess for many many years. Many instead use the battlemetrics website instead as it also has a robust search filter system and secondary stat/info pages for server activity:

https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/ark?sort=-players


4. Keep in mind as well that servers are often part of server clusters(ie maps you can xfer to and from freely on that cluser) so player concurrency on one server listed isnt necessarily indicative of the over all populace concurrently of a specific server community.

Time of day and day of week also factor of course.

5. The core flaw of Ark Evolved(and Ascended) is ecocide. Because of that, many players tend to prefer small-medium pop communities as they prefer to be ducking and weaving between rocks and trees to avoid predators instead of ducking and weaving between mall sized bases and dino parking lots just to find a green spot for a campfire.

I checked a lot of the unofficial servers, and most of those were empty for me as well. Maybe it's because i'm playing this game from europe, i don't know.... But i could barely find a single soul out there, and the one's i did try to join all gave me errors and crashed my game for some reason. I'm just gonna delete this, too much trouble. But thanks anyway.

1. I specifically in the link set it for players. At the time of posting, there were lots of servers with lots of players.

2. Being in EU and checking as you claimed at, I assume, around the time posted, wouldnt reflect typical peak times for various EU countries(ie later evening). Worse, its a Monday.

That's why I specifically mentioned time of day and day of the week to be mindful of...

That said, checking the link now, top 3 player concurrency servers are in germany with plenty of players, one having over 70.... and its only 7pmish there atm. That's just one example of course.

3. As I told you in my other post, if you're looking at singular servers and ranting about server populations without taking into account that various servers by player owners are actually clusters(ie more than one server(map) linked together so players can play across those maps), isn't accurately vetting the player population concurrency for those communities.

4. If you were encountering connectivity errors or crashing, that's a completely different issue and being that crashes are symptoms not causes, the variables specific to you would have to be scrutinized as to why. 9 times out of 10 as we've seen here for years, its rig issues, mod related issues(be it misunderstanding time outs when downloading mods or other mod issues(some can be tied to servers poorly managing mods but a server using mods that has 30+ players on it wouldnt indicate there to be an issue on their end typically :P), or a combination of both.

So all in all, Im highly skeptical that you did any meaningful due diligence for servers searching via the link provided.

But I get it. You seemingly just came to rant. You've only put in all of 36 minutes total worth of time to playing and just seemingly its not a game for you.

Best of luck.

[Patryk "Antixus" Broniewski]

Bagheadt - to aswer your Q from mine point of view. It toke me some time to find server with NO Wipe option.
12 maps are in one closter, currently are 130 ppl acrose all servers.
If you want you can join - 86.56.153.51:28120,
all servs start with TLS name, so easy to find in search browser.