With the addition of new creatures and features, each ARK patch normally brings excitement and delight, but not v256. With every addition comes change; on Friday the 31st of March, patch v256 was released, introducing 4 new creatures, Tek, underwater structures and a huge nerf to the flyers of ARK: Survival Evolved.
Say Goodbye to the Kings of the Skies
So you’re all probably wondering what Studio Wildcard did to their bird beasties. In an attempt to balance the game and keep players “grounded”, developers decided to significantly reduce the stamina levels of all flying creatures in ARK: Survival Evolved. Players are finding that their high tier Pteranodons and Quetzals cannot make flights nearly as long as their used to before being forced to land and regenerate stamina. Since the nerf, a large portion of the community has made it clear on ARK forums, Reddit and all other forms of social media that they are hacked off with the changes.
Due to this nerf in flyer endurance, players now believe all flying mounts to be “useless“. Some frustrated players claim on forums that even their high level flying mounts are unable to make it to herbivore island (and small land mass close to the mainland). What does this say about low level flyers? How far can they travel and is it even worth the tame and grind?
“I’m all for nerfing, but my previously level 400 pteranodon with close to 50 points in Stamina can barely make the flight to herbivore island from the mainland with the new values.” – 3mptylord ARK-Forum.
But not everyone hates this downgrade. There are a select few in the community that are glad to see the flyers fall. Many people find flying mounts annoying and feel they have an enormous advantage in PvP and PvE against land based creatures and mounts. Many people are responding to the complaints with strong answers that do make a lot of sense. Maybe the nerfs are justified.
“Use a boat or build a raft half way between to land and recharge on. Other dinos cant get across so easily, why should birds?” – BulletForce ARK-Forum.
April Fools?
Many players are wondering whether or not this nerf was an april fools joke from Studio Wildcard. So far there hasn’t been any response or message from Wildcard addressing the nerf, aside from a singular sentence in the patchnotes for v256. Sadly, it seems that this is not a practical joke.
We believe that this flying nerf is both good and bad. We think that something had to be done to the over-powered nature of flying mounts, but reducing their stamina pool in such a devastating manner was a bit much. According to an official report, developers Wildcard will take into account the community’s concerns and make changes accordingly. We can only hope that they adjust their nerf to be both balanced and playable.
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What is your opinion? Did flyers need a nerf, or have Studio Wildcard taken things too far? Below you’ll find the reveal trailer for all the exciting things patch v256 has to offer. Read more about the patch here.
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My little rant follows:
The day after Studio Wildcard nerfed the fliers I stopped
playing.
I really enjoyed this game clocking up over a thousand
hours, putting up with many servers full of self absorbed
egotistical bullies in order to establish a base. Then
hunting for the right server after I had learnt all I
needed to in order to go it alone. It was great, a real
adventure.
I eventually gravitated towards PvE mainly, playing for
hours at a time & had a number of fliers I used to both
hunt, gather & transport materials over great distances.
This meant I had time to enjoy the experience & felt I was
being immersed in the game rather than working for it.
To spend the amount of time now required to attain the
same level of productive game-play I was used to would mean
I would have to sit in front of a computer all day without
any other interests.Not happening!!.
I’ll wait until the end of this year & if the nerfs aren’t
reversed I will uninstall the game & not play anything
from Studio Wildcard again as I consider them unreliable
as developers who succumb to the desires of the few rather
than the many. Kind of 1% behaviour. Not cool.
I’m not playing anymore & I’ll reconsider if the nerf is reversed.
This was a ridiculous decision made without any forethought & so I just don’t play.
I’m certain they have lost a lot of players because of this & the only reason I found this page was I ran a search to see if they reversed it.
Nope, *** you Wildcard.
I for one have a really popular server, I am in a forum with many other servers, we all agreed to quit the game if they do not reverse the birds nerf, that includes the quetzals ability to regain stamina in the air while your not riding it. We never play PVP, this nerf should not have reached the PVE players, this was an uncaring nerf, one not thought out and one with intentional purpose to hurt or even damage the community. I truly believe that after wild cards lawsuit they cannot recover and want to end the game and run with the money. It is to easy to make the game unplayable and end the game and run with the money. Wild Card knows this, they know the value of the birds, this was the ace in the whole that got the world into this game, they also know it will kill the game. Put it all together people Wild Card is in a jam, they need money and they are preparing to bolt with our cash, the moron in wild card, put the company name under his wife’s maiden name so he could get around an agreement signed with another company, he broke it got sued and not is in trouble. Wild Card does not care, we have all moved on 20 plus servers, to the tune of 1000 players, more are following, we are asking sony for a refund, once sony gets the pinch, it will filter down to wild card, we are hoping to damage the company and not allow him to run with the loot, it may not work but at least we tried. The game is done, servers are going dark, RIP ARK it was fun, now its not.
Not only did the nerf cut flyers stamina literaly in half, it also prevents players from putting any level points into thier speed, meaning that all flyers are permanantly slow, with no way of changing it. Players can literaly cover more ground faster on foot than even the fastest flyer after the nerf. Hence players calling them useless, and they are!
Im ok with making it harder to get a op extremely fast bird, but this makes it impossible to even get a reasonably fast one!
The flyer nerf is TERRIBLE and needs to be revoked! Seriously, they were the real reason my dad and I started playing this game before it released.
-We saw my cousin riding dinos and said, “That’s cool and all- but we’re busy with Minecraft.” Then, he hopped on a pteranadon (we thought it was a pterodactyl at first) and we knew we had to play the game!
If people want a “more realistic” style of gameplay, then no players or tamed dinos should get experience points! (But as one user said- put those people on a special server for that!)
I still tame, breed, fight and use my other land dinos (as well as use all of my flyers about equally). But nerfing flyers like this has taken 90% of the fun out of the game (as well as make parts of it impossible!). It’s most people’s childhood dream- to fly. Why kill those dreams?
If they don’t reverse the flyer nerf, my dad and I will probably move on to Conan, when it comes out.
P.S. Studio Wildcard has been great in the imagination department… but throughout the time ARK has been available, it has repeatedly shot itself in the foot on purpose. Might be time to move on from a game where Devs truly don’t care about their players.
I don’t believe the flyers needed a nerf at all. I’m referring in particular to pteranodons and argentavis, although some of these issues can also be applied to quetzes and tapejaras.
I have been in many PvP situations and while pteranodons provide a strong role in pvp battles, the majority of the important work is still done by siege Dino’s like Brontosaurus, gigas, redes, turtles and titanosauruses. Being picked by a ptera can easily be countered if players are prepared with a whip and parachute.
In real life too think of the incredible strength that comes from air support when infantry and tanks have been in battle.
The air has always been a place of relative safety and convenience when travelling great distances.
Regarding the stamina nerf, how many birds in nature do you see having to stop for stamina? Especially when they are escaping danger?
Also scouting on a pteranodon is stealthy in many cases, but I’m a solo player and even I have spotted scouts on many occasions. In many cases the pteranodon has been to fast to identify the tribe, but this is their strength and shouldn’t be taken away. Rather it would be better to adjust the difficulty in taming and breeding pteranodons. Think about how expensive a fighter jet is to acquire in real life? Greater time to tame and breed and require scarcer kibble resources would be a much better option imo. I also feel one of the major reasons pteranodons speed is seen as over powered is because turret targeting as it exists at the current time is too slow to shoot them above a certain speed. This is more of an issue to me, as well as the damage each shot does to them. An additional type of air defense perhaps? Land defense turrets as well as air defense turrets just like real life???
My little rant follows:
The day after Studio Wildcard nerfed the fliers I stopped
playing.
I really enjoyed this game clocking up over a thousand
hours, putting up with many servers full of self absorbed
egotistical bullies in order to establish a base. Then
hunting for the right server after I had learnt all I
needed to in order to go it alone. It was great, a real
adventure.
I eventually gravitated towards PvE mainly, playing for
hours at a time & had a number of fliers I used to both
hunt, gather & transport materials over great distances.
This meant I had time to enjoy the experience & felt I was
being immersed in the game rather than working for it.
To spend the amount of time now required to attain the
same level of productive game-play I was used to would mean
I would have to sit in front of a computer all day without
any other interests.Not happening!!.
I’ll wait until the end of this year & if the nerfs aren’t
reversed I will uninstall the game & not play anything
from Studio Wildcard again as I consider them unreliable
as developers who succumb to the desires of the few rather
than the many. Kind of 1% behaviour. Not cool.
I’m not playing anymore & I’ll reconsider if the nerf is reversed.
This was a ridiculous decision made without any forethought & so I just don’t play.
I’m certain they have lost a lot of players because of this & the only reason I found this page was I ran a search to see if they reversed it.
Nope, *** you Wildcard.
I for one have a really popular server, I am in a forum with many other servers, we all agreed to quit the game if they do not reverse the birds nerf, that includes the quetzals ability to regain stamina in the air while your not riding it. We never play PVP, this nerf should not have reached the PVE players, this was an uncaring nerf, one not thought out and one with intentional purpose to hurt or even damage the community. I truly believe that after wild cards lawsuit they cannot recover and want to end the game and run with the money. It is to easy to make the game unplayable and end the game and run with the money. Wild Card knows this, they know the value of the birds, this was the ace in the whole that got the world into this game, they also know it will kill the game. Put it all together people Wild Card is in a jam, they need money and they are preparing to bolt with our cash, the moron in wild card, put the company name under his wife’s maiden name so he could get around an agreement signed with another company, he broke it got sued and not is in trouble. Wild Card does not care, we have all moved on 20 plus servers, to the tune of 1000 players, more are following, we are asking sony for a refund, once sony gets the pinch, it will filter down to wild card, we are hoping to damage the company and not allow him to run with the loot, it may not work but at least we tried. The game is done, servers are going dark, RIP ARK it was fun, now its not.
Not only did the nerf cut flyers stamina literaly in half, it also prevents players from putting any level points into thier speed, meaning that all flyers are permanantly slow, with no way of changing it. Players can literaly cover more ground faster on foot than even the fastest flyer after the nerf. Hence players calling them useless, and they are!
Im ok with making it harder to get a op extremely fast bird, but this makes it impossible to even get a reasonably fast one!
The flyer nerf is TERRIBLE and needs to be revoked! Seriously, they were the real reason my dad and I started playing this game before it released.
-We saw my cousin riding dinos and said, “That’s cool and all- but we’re busy with Minecraft.” Then, he hopped on a pteranadon (we thought it was a pterodactyl at first) and we knew we had to play the game!
If people want a “more realistic” style of gameplay, then no players or tamed dinos should get experience points! (But as one user said- put those people on a special server for that!)
I still tame, breed, fight and use my other land dinos (as well as use all of my flyers about equally). But nerfing flyers like this has taken 90% of the fun out of the game (as well as make parts of it impossible!). It’s most people’s childhood dream- to fly. Why kill those dreams?
If they don’t reverse the flyer nerf, my dad and I will probably move on to Conan, when it comes out.
P.S. Studio Wildcard has been great in the imagination department… but throughout the time ARK has been available, it has repeatedly shot itself in the foot on purpose. Might be time to move on from a game where Devs truly don’t care about their players.
I don’t believe the flyers needed a nerf at all. I’m referring in particular to pteranodons and argentavis, although some of these issues can also be applied to quetzes and tapejaras.
I have been in many PvP situations and while pteranodons provide a strong role in pvp battles, the majority of the important work is still done by siege Dino’s like Brontosaurus, gigas, redes, turtles and titanosauruses. Being picked by a ptera can easily be countered if players are prepared with a whip and parachute.
In real life too think of the incredible strength that comes from air support when infantry and tanks have been in battle.
The air has always been a place of relative safety and convenience when travelling great distances.
Regarding the stamina nerf, how many birds in nature do you see having to stop for stamina? Especially when they are escaping danger?
Also scouting on a pteranodon is stealthy in many cases, but I’m a solo player and even I have spotted scouts on many occasions. In many cases the pteranodon has been to fast to identify the tribe, but this is their strength and shouldn’t be taken away. Rather it would be better to adjust the difficulty in taming and breeding pteranodons. Think about how expensive a fighter jet is to acquire in real life? Greater time to tame and breed and require scarcer kibble resources would be a much better option imo. I also feel one of the major reasons pteranodons speed is seen as over powered is because turret targeting as it exists at the current time is too slow to shoot them above a certain speed. This is more of an issue to me, as well as the damage each shot does to them. An additional type of air defense perhaps? Land defense turrets as well as air defense turrets just like real life???