Running your very own ARK: Survival Evolved game server can often feel like a thrilling experience, offering total control over gameplay and enjoying the opportunity to create a unique gaming environment for you, your friends, and any public players. But at the same time, running a game server often feels like work. Instead of spending precious free time enjoying the dinosaur survival experience for yourself, it’s more likely that, as a server admin, you’ll wind up dealing with technical difficulties, bugs, and player reports.
That’s no fun whatsoever! However, optimizing an ARK: Survival Evolved game server for the best performance and experience, both of which require careful planning and execution, can provide the ultimate survival experience for everyone involved.We’re here to provide you with valuable tips to help you achieve a seamless and enjoyable gaming experience through your dedicated ARK server hosting!
Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
First and foremost, to run the ultimate survival experience for you and your friends, you must choose the right game server hosting provider. It’s the foundation for the whole experience!
Look for a game server host with high-performance hardware, like NVMe SSDs, low latency, and reliable uptime. But do not focus solely on price. It’s best to prioritize quality and performance, especially for a game the size of ARK: Survival Evolved, to ensure smooth gameplay and a lag-free experience for everyone connected to the server.
Server Hardware and Resources
Invest in sufficient hardware resources to handle the demands of a budding ARK game server. This is likely all done on your server host’s end, but it doesn’t hurt to research their hardware before purchasing a game server.
ARK is resource-intensive, and insufficient hardware resources can lead to severe game lag and crashes. As such, it’s important to prioritize high amounts of RAM, a powerful CPU, and a fast SSD for optimal performance.
Server Location and Latency
The location of your game server will make a world of difference when it comes to ping and lag experienced during gameplay. For example, if you are located on the East Coast of the United States, it doesn’t make sense to connect to a SEA game server. The lag will kill any enjoyment of the game.
Instead, find a game server host that offers server locations worldwide so that you may pick one closest to your location for the ultimate survival experience with low latency.
Regular Server Maintenance
It’s occasionally essential to perform server maintenance to ensure the game runs smoothly. Regularly updating ARK and any mods in use to the latest versions makes it possible to clean unnecessary files and optimize settings for smoother gameplay.
Furthermore, an occasional server restart can reduce the number of resources in use, especially on a game server with numerous large-scale clan bases.
Implement Backup and Recovery Plans
It’s an unfortunate fact that, on occasion, game servers may crash, and players will lose progress. This is especially true on a game the size of ARK: Survival Evolved.
As such, as a server owner, it’s crucial to implement backup and recovery plans to ensure player progression, configurations, and critical data are not lost forever, which can lead to significant setbacks and indeed ensure players rage-quit the server altogether.
Regularly Clean Up Structures
A big part of the gameplay in ARK: Survival Evolved revolves around building bases of immense scope and keeping dinosaurs as pets and mounts. Over time, these structures may become abandoned as players move on to different servers or games.
Unfortunately, even an abandoned structure in ARK will eat up server resources and likely cause lag and frame drops for surrounding players.
It’s often best to implement a structured cleanup event to remove unused assets from the game. This frees up the server for new and returning players while improving overall performance greatly.
ARK: Survival Evolved Multiplayer Tips
Running an ARK server is one thing, but ensuring everyone enjoys their time and returns so your investment isn’t wasted is another matter altogether!
These ARK: Survival Evolved multiplayer tips should help foster a survival gaming community that stands the test of time!
- Encourage Collaboration: ARK is a tough survival game that thrives on player collaboration. By fostering a sense of teamwork among players, you’ll find that the server forms tribes and builds and conquers together.
- Host Community Events: Every now and then, consider organizing community events to ensure players remain engaged and excited. These events may include PvP tournaments or taming challenges for different types of dinosaurs.
- Gameplay Opportunities: The survival gaming community is quite massive, with some players preferring a vanilla experience and others wanting more roleplay opportunities. Consider providing the tools and environment for both experiences based on zones!
Conclusion
Optimizing an ARK server for the best gameplay experience requires a thorough combination of strategic decisions and ongoing maintenance. But first and foremost, it starts with choosing the right game server host. The perfect server host will feature adequate hardware resources to run an intensive game like ARK, the ability to optimize server settings through a custom control panel, and ensure fast and smooth gameplay.
With these tips in mind, you’ll be well on your way to creating an ARK server that offers countless hours of excitement and adventure for you and your fellow survivors!
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