Another Levels & Experience Question

[rainy 0]

I only saw one mention of this WAY down in the forum several pages deep but the defaults for player and dinosaur levels which are installed on your servers are VERY different from the defaults shown on the Ark wiki. I understand that the game updates frequently and it may be difficult to keep up with the changes, but it's apparently been like this for a few months and if it's intended there really should be some kind of warning about this somewhere. Perhaps on the Wiki.

 

I would like to update the values to match the default values (found here: http://ark.gamepedia.com/Levels), but I don't know if that is possible without a character wipe. What will happen if these values change? Will our character's current levels change to match the new setting? What about engram points?  It looks like the new values would be higher than the current ones so maybe it would work since it probably wouldn't be taking points away.

 

I'm a little paranoid now about auditing all of the values in the configuration against the wiki pages.

[Ryan Pennington 359]

I can't say for certain whether or not the values from the ARK wiki page you linked are indeed the defaults baked into the game. Even the "official" wiki is community contributed and has repeatedly had outdated information (although this page was last updated October 27th by perhaps someone knowledgeable) There's unfortunately very poor official documentation for most of the Game.ini and GameUserSettings.ini overrides. That values that we are using are coming from a collection of sources including the official list and the ARK server manager tools. You are free to modify these values and roll back to a recent data restore point if you don't like the changes. Unfortunately, this is not something that I have a firm answer for you. I will consider updating the player & dino experience / engrams gained values to the ones in the linked document; however, if these are constantly changed, you have to keep with these changes as a server owner and adjust accordingly.

[rainy 0]

I'm sorry, after closer examination it appears that the XP values for players are actually correct (at least for the first 80 levels), it's just the admin UI starting at zero, rather than 2 that threw me off. I understand why it's that way in the config files but I'm a programmer and it still took me a bit to realize what was going on so maybe that's all that needs to be clarified. 

 

Once I realized that, I was able to tweak the values for dinosaurs on my own server and also add the extra 9 player levels to match the wiki page without any problems. 

 

Thanks for the quick response.

[Ryan Pennington 359]

It starts at zero because that's what's in the .ini file. I have no additional information as to why it starts as zero but maybe someone else in the community does.

[rainy 0]

It starts at zero because the values in the .ini file are an array and that's probably how it's represented in the game's code as well.

 

The tricky part is that ExperiencePointsForLevel[0]=5 actually means "the total experience points needed to advance at level 1 is 5" 

 

ExperiencePointsForLevel[1]=20 actually means "the total experience points to advance at level 2 is 20" 

 

And so on. 

 

I believe the wiki chart confuses this even further because it shows the amount of experience required to reach the level instead of the amount required to level up FROM that level, which seems to be what the .ini file represents (offset by 1). 

But the main thing is that the values you have in the .ini file for players are correct, I was just reading the charts wrong.