Okay, so, I tried to play some Ark: Survival Ascended with my buddy the other day. We’ve been hyped about it, you know? Figured we’d hop on, build some stuff, tame some dinos, the usual. He was going to join my game, as always. Sounds simple, right? Wrong.
So, I started up a non-dedicated server, like always. I sent him an invite through the game. Nothing. Crickets. Tried it a few more times, and still, he can’t get in. This is weird because we’ve done this a million times before with no problem. We tried to find my name through the friends list but I never showed up. I then changed the setting from “private” to “public”, but again I never showed up on the list. It became frustrated. We started getting the dreaded “too far from host” message over and over.
First things first, we checked our internet connections. Both of us were solid. Then we made sure the game was updated, and all the mods were good to go. Still nothing. I even tried setting up a dedicated server just for us, and I could join that one fine. But my friend? Nope. He kept getting a “connection timeout” message, even though he could join other servers just fine.
I started digging around online. Turns out, lots of people are having issues with the friend invite system in this game. Some folks can’t even find the invite option. Others are getting a “joining failed” error. It’s a mess.
- I found out that in a recent update, the default tether distance in non-dedicated games was changed from 180 to a whopping 800. That’s great for exploring, but it seems to have caused some bugs and performance issues.
- Some people suggested forwarding UDP ports, including the query port (27015 by default) and two others. I’m not really a network whiz, so I haven’t messed with that yet.
- There were also mentions of connection issues with dedicated servers, which is what I was trying as a last resort.
Honestly, I’m stumped. We tried restarting our computers, verifying game files, even sacrificing a goat to the internet gods (just kidding… mostly). Nothing worked. It’s super frustrating because we were really looking forward to playing together. So, if anyone has any ideas or has dealt with this before, please let me know. I’m all ears! I just want to get back to taming dinos and building epic bases with my buddy. Is that too much to ask?
