ARK: Survival Evolved Forum

I have been reading a lot of peoples reviews, and it seems this game has fast become a stupid hack fest, and the Devs are not doing anything about it.

When I play online, I always play fair and never grief or cheat, so I am having grave doubts about wasting both time and money for a game that is going to just cause a lot of frustration.

For $30 it might just be worth playing solo and avoiding multiplayer all together. It seem they took an awesome game and let it fall to ruin by allowing all the losers and shallow minded morons who cant play a game without hacking and cheating and ruining the game for everyone else.
Can anyone tell me if this is an accurate assessment? Are there good servers where all the resources are not all coveted and people dont just go around and destroy anyone who joins and try to set up?

Thanks for any feedback to this, I think a lot of people are being put off this game because the Devs just dont give a s**t about this issue.

Also - I just saw this guy hafeejkhan8 post about 100 spam posts just before I logged on, I am guessing he is also pissed about the lack of hacker proof tools that have been employed? Maybe a wake up call to the Devs??

U get bad servers & good servers its just a matter of if u can be assed to to find them, but the game is really good worth a buy

Alright, so to put it simple this is what you can expect. The opening game play will leave you breathless on graphics. Though I do feel like they tweaked it with more bill boarding so it's not as nice as when it started. But the performance is waaaaay better than the launch and it's only gotten better. You will still find annoying glitches from time to time, but for the most part this is where you and your friends will get immersed.

You will enjoy building and feel the intensity of hunting dinos for the first time. But this is where you will start your frustration. Official servers lag bad. Because of this lag some of your dinos will float into the sky and hover just out of reach or launch 200 feet away never to be seen again. This is of course frustrating because you can not harvest them at this point. So fight for nothing. You will then return to your hut/cabin with berries for your tribe and enjoy crafting. After several hours you will all want to take a break for food. When you all log out the cave trolls will appear and destroy your based, kill you and not even bother looting you because your so low your inventory isn't worth it. But hey, they had fun killing/trolling low levels.

At this point you all log back on to find it broken and your dead. Start over, this time tame a dino and make a pen with the hut/cabin. Bam, it's also dead and gone.

To to sum it up, expect lag and trolls on the official servers. Yes you can occasionally get a good server but at some point even in there you will be targeted while sleeping. No one in this game seems to raid when it's a fair fight or when you can fight back. And when they rarely do it leads to bad blood.

On the other hand if you make a custom private server for you and your friends you will have weeks of fun adventuring, everything grand you build will remain, it's possible to have pet dinos without some angry tribe killing them every time you log or their on passive. You will have much more fun with the game (which is still ultimately worth buying) but will eventually miss the idea of fun fair pvp.

Custom Server = Fun everything, lacks pvp
Official Server = Can be fun if you run into a hostile same level tribe and you poke at each other with spears in open 2-3 v 2-3 combat. Laggy, worse trolls you'll find in any game. (Some servers have awesome tribes who fight them though)