ARK: Survival Evolved devs throwing money at BattlEye for Linux support, good news for Arma 3 too

Would it really have hurt them to delay the release if BattlEye is only going to take "a few days"?

Would it really have hurt them to delay the release if BattlEye is only going to take "a few days"?

Probably not, but we do have to respectfully remember how little a market share we are. They do need to have the majority in mind realistically.

It's really not that big of an issue for the gain we will get afterwards.

ARK devs W.T.F?
From Steam:

5 million dollars worth of ARK players cannot connect!

Let's try some math! If 9% of the players are on Mac/Linux and nearly 3 million copies have been sold (closer to 2.7 million at the end of 2015). That's roughly 243,000 clients that can't connect. At $20 each that's roughly 5 million dollars worth of players can't connect.

We looked at the numbers internally, and it was part of our decision: We do not have that many sales on Mac/Linux combined, and the number of active players on our official servers is really, really low from those demographics. Like orders of magnitudes less.

We actually do a lot of work internally to support a very small number of overall purchases/players of the game on Mac/Linux, compared to our overall sales.

Kind of a bummer, but yeah.

They actually seem to don't care much about us lol.
Another:

Well you lost this user to your "urgent" decision and will be asking for a refund.

That's your right, hopefully they grant it.

ARK devs W.T.F?
From Steam:...

Honestly it sounds pretty rational, I'm glad they're actually working on a solution rather than just completely ignoring the community like a few other devs I could mention. Granted, if the game was finished I think a rage would be more justified, that said I understand how frustrating that must be if you play the game frequently. However, as the boss points out, the game is still in early access, so one should always be prepared for things to break when the devs are making major changes.

Edit: After reading the comment below, I will admit I've changed my mind somewhat ^^; I forgot that this is one of those Rust style games where things can happen to you and your stuff after logging off; add this to the reasons I don't feel like trying those kinds of games. But yeah, that's kinda F'ed.


Last edited by HadBabits on 10 Feb 2016 at 2:21 pm UTC

They should of waited until it was working for mac/linux.
The game requires you to log in and take care of your dinos everyday. If not they literally starve to death. And some dino's take 10hours or more to tame, and for that 10 hours someone must be logged in constantly with it to feed it and look after it. Some people have literally 1000's of hours invested and everything they got could be dead/gone after a few days of not being able to log in. Even more so if they are on a pvp server. I really feel for the affected people. You really get attached to some of ya dinos and feel a real sense of loss when 1 dies.

If they really couldn't wait they should of warned users before hand so they could organize someone else to care for their dinos and bases. Or make some other arrangements.

Lucky I play on a private server that we don't enable BE on.

The Arma 3 Linux port is being done on Eon. I'm not sure physically porting BE to Linux will help at all with bringing BE to Eon.

I don't see a reason that an eON port wouldn't be able to communicate with a native BattlEye.

ARK's Linux support is so piss-poor that after 43h of playtime, I finally gave up when yesterday, I tried to log in and without success, due to Battleye. Thanks but no thanks.
The worst part is that the game got advertised (don't know if it still does) as FULL STEAMOS SUPPORT and FULL STEAM CONTROLLER SUPPORT!!! Nope, linux version is missing a hellova lot of features and optimizations when in comparison to the Win brethren. Also SteamController support is a joke - they simply implemented xbox360pad support and slapped the default config on it.
Very poor going from the devs in my opinion... but that's just my opinion. Rant's over. :)

I think they should let linux/mac players log in to the server without battle eye till they have it done. Btw, how many cheaters could have linux/mac players? if they are only 1-2% of the amount online players? Don't let them log in is like ban all mac/linux users because you can't proof they are innocents and you think they could be cheaters. Simple apply it on windows players and wait till you can apply it to linux/mac users. But ban them from all servers is just stupid and against logical.

Would it really have hurt them to delay the release if BattlEye is only going to take "a few days"?

They want Windows users to test a patch before actual Linux release. Windows users are familiar with unstability and bugs, so just let them test the game :)

Those of you complaining about performance probably haven't played ARK in the last few weeks. They've begun optimizations as summer release draws near and I haven't had any performance issues. It can even run rather smoothly on integrated if you turn everything down to console peasant settings.

Those of you complaining about performance probably haven't played ARK in the last few weeks. They've begun optimizations as summer release draws near and I haven't had any performance issues. It can even run rather smoothly on integrated if you turn everything down to console peasant settings.

Really?

I just tried it on my 980ti and I still consider the performance to be pretty bad. On High at 1920x1080 it still struggles to stay at 60FPS, and utterly kills the FPS at any higher resolution on Linux.

Medium and below look terrible too.

I must correct this post as most of the servers of ark are NOT YET affected by BattlEye. Most of the unofficial servers run without it so linux users can still play. The official servers use BattlEye though.

My dinos on the 204 server will still probably die now :( i was not there for 3 or 4 days and now i cant feed them :/

Really?

I just tried it on my 980ti and I still consider the performance to be pretty bad. On High at 1920x1080 it still struggles to stay at 60FPS, and utterly kills the FPS at any higher resolution on Linux.

Medium and below look terrible too.

Yes, boss. At first I played it on an A10-7870K w/ DDR3-2400 on fglrx-updates. I ran ARK at lowest settings, 1280x720 getting ~20 FPS.

I now upgraded that same system with an R9 285 (ASUS Strix) and latest AMD Radeon Crimson and it's perfectly smooth at medium preset, 1600x900. I could probably try turning it up to high preset but I don't want to be back down in 30 FPS territory.

That is why it baffles me whenever I go reading about ARK online and everyone is complaining about performance. I guess I just got lucky with my configuration?

It's still early access, as long as the intended features are working when I buy it after full release, I'm not bothered.

This guy understand it, early access is early access, its anoying than many people gets mad because they expect their early-access game to works as a finished product.
Anyway, back to the topic, those devs are great, they look like they care for mac/linux users if they are wiling to spend their own money on this project.


Last edited by edo on 11 Feb 2016 at 5:01 am UTC

ARK devs W.T.F?
From Steam:

and the number of active players on our official servers is really, really low from those demographics. Like orders of magnitudes less.

I'd love to play Ark, really. But the game wouldn't even play at 2fps for me, even though my rig should play the game fairly well.
You can't gimp a game for a specific platform and then complain when nobody on that platform plays your game

For comparison, on Windows, I used to get anywhere between 40 and 60 fps.. that's a shame.


Last edited by Tux1c on 11 Feb 2016 at 7:35 am UTC

"Why isn't this EARLY ACCESS game working flawlessly for an OS used by less than one percent of its playerbase?!?!?". Could some of you be more entitled? Anyway - great news. I've had a good feeling about the Arma III port and this only brings it closer to actually becoming official.