Recent reviews by Bamski

We'll send you screenshots, Xbox players ;)

ASA only looks better than ASE, but honestly, even as bugged as ASE was, that game still out performs this one.
The only fixes Wildcard favour in fixing are the exploits. The bugs you see in game today WILL be there in 7 years time - don't forget you've already seen it happen.
Communicating with the development team is IMPOSSIBLE. You just can't. You can write support tickets which rarely get attention, and it's not the development team who receives them, it's power-hungry enforcement staff who's sole purpose in reading tickets is to see who they can ban. Honestly, if your ticket is anything other than to report someone breaking the Code of Conduct, expect nothing more than an automatic response, followed by nothing happening.

Now, the "fixes" mentioned above. The only fixes that gets any effort from the development monkeys at Wildcard are those to stop people exploiting functions Wildcard put in the game in the first place. Not a week ago they implement an exploit fix, which deleted every players' stored materials (did I mention they don't test their patches before pushing them live?). This resulted in the official network been down for many, many hours. In the end they pushed a second patch to fix the problems with the first patch which was meant to patch an exploit which then got undone. They probably think that exploit is resolved, but we'll let them think that, as getting in touch with anyone that matters is impossible.
The only time you will get any form of a response from anyone in the actual development team is on their Discord channel - and that will come in the form of a witty innuendo followed by some random custom emoji. They are as useless as the moderators put in place on the Discord channel. Who, just like their enforcement team, scout the chat looking primarily for people whom they can ban. For those familiar with Discord, Slowmode in the norm there, as 16 moderators cannot handle that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of rightfully angry players on a daily (yeah, daily) basis.

I will say that, just like the old Ark, this game requires a LOT of input and your time. You're probably thinking "why is this guy hating on the game yet he himself has 1000s of hours buried into it??" -I start from launch because I was amongst many of the fools who fell for the tripe fed to us about how much this one will be better than the last. Every day you play, the more devoted you become to what you did the previous day, and when you've been playing for a year or so, its a hell of a lot to lose if you just decide to not play anymore. So you're just hooked. I want join my girlfriend in playing games that we used to play together, but Ark has got it's claw into me because I feel committed to keep going, to keep rolling through all the ♥♥♥♥ that's thrown at us every day.

If you haven't already bought this game, seriously consider what's I've just written because making that plunge into madness.

Wildcard don't care about you. They care about your wallet.

If you intend on playing this game at all beyond the stage of your starter hut - don't bother.
The end game content is that bugged, I don't know how it ever made it out of beta, let alone cost what it does.

There is a lag every 15 minutes when the game saves. You get used to this, but it is annoying. Many players are also kicked from servers during this phase. As well as that, the servers have a maximum capacity of 70 players, but anything over 20 players connected at once and you're going to have problems. The lag will be much more persistent than just every 15 minutes, it gets so bad that the servers begin kicking everyone. If you were on a flying mount went this happens, you better pray that you're alive when you eventually get to log back in. If you were out of your base for whatever reason, there's a high chance that you're going to have been eaten when you get back on. If you get back on, that is. The server can take a long time to come back online.

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Word of advice to anyone thinking of buying Ark - Don't waste your money on a game like this. The servers have atrocious performance, especially the Genesis 2 servers. Studio Wildcard do absolutely nothing to rectify the issue either. The developers spend most of their hours been egoistical in their Discord group either arguing or trolling people who try to mention anything wrong with their servers. Absolute farce of a game and Ark II will be the same situation, just better graphics.
The problems Ark has had over the years have never been put right (I have enough hours of my life invested to be able to speak such facts!).
Also the year 2022 is bringing an end to ALL events on Ark 1 - after this year you will have to make do with the default 1x rates, and believe me when I say you don't want that. I would be as bold to say that all support for the game with come to an end too, but honestly it was never there to begin with.

I've tried to warn you..