Hello my fine feathered friends, this is Songbird and welcome to my channel where I make videos about sandbox survival games, especially building occasionally tutorials and plenty of let's play adventures. I am here to give an update about a situation that I had addressed in a previous video. I made a video on how to fix the tether on non-dedi servers in Ark Survival Ascended, and that video became one of my most viewed videos. Obviously this is an issue that a lot of people in the community care about, a lot of people wanted a fix to the issue because yes, dealing with the host tether when you are hopping into a friend's world for a multiplayer session can be really annoying. The fact that you can only go a certain distance away from your friend before being teleported back to them, it is very annoying. This was a setting though that was in the game rules as it was called, but that video was also very controversial because apparently the setting did not work reliably for everyone, it only worked for some people. I got some comments saying thank you this worked great, and I got other comments saying this didn't work nothing changed. Some of them were not very polite about it, some of them were calling me names and implying that I knew that it didn't work and was being a clickbait or something, which is never my intention. But I left the video up because I was still getting comments from some people saying that it worked, but I did state that if the setting was ever removed, I would pull the video down because since the setting still existed, obviously it was supposed to work, and so I was hopeful that eventually Wildcard would get around to fixing it so that it would reliably work for everyone. Well, it appears they decided to go in a different direction because the setting has been quietly removed. It's no longer in here at all, so I have pulled that video down. I am now releasing this video as an update just to let people know. So I decided to look back through the patch notes and see if I could figure out when this change was made. I haven't tried to host an online multiplayer session in a while. I usually tend to play either in single player or on servers, so I wasn't sure when this had come through, but reading back through the patch notes which are posted on the Discord, on the Ark Official Discord, I saw this patch here from February 12th, version 34.65, minor version for PC clients, fixed a crash, extended tether distance for non-dedi games from 180 to 800. So it would appear that they extended the default tether at least for PC. This is a patch note for PC clients specifically. It says that they extended the tether distance to 800, which yeah, that's great. It doesn't say that they removed it from the settings UI, but apparently they must have. I don't have access to play the game on consoles. I don't own a gaming console. I am a PC gamer only. So my console gaming friends, I would appreciate if you let me know, does this setting still exist for you? Is this still in game or not? And for those who play the game with non-dedi sessions, if you are on PC or if you are on console, have you noticed a difference in the tether distance since February 12th? I would be really curious to know how that went and if that same change was applied also to consoles or if it was applied only to PCs. I know that consoles are a lot stricter about things that can cause instability issues. So it isn't just that it isn't that nobody likes the consoles or the console players get the leftovers or whatever. It's the reason why they're pickier about settings and changes and slower to make them for the console versions is because Microsoft, who owns Xbox of course, and Sony, who owns PlayStation, are much pickier about the changes they will allow because they want games to be very stable on their platform. Everything is supposed to be plug and play. You're not supposed to need to mess with settings or fixes. You're not supposed to have to deal with any of that technical stuff. You can't access INI files in single player on consoles. That's part of the attraction of consoles for some people is that they seem much simpler. On Steam PC, particularly, it's the Wild Wild West. If you change a setting and it makes your game crash, well, that's your own dang fault and you shouldn't have done it. And I get people joining my Discord all the time and going, "I changed this setting and now my game is crashing." Or, "What setting is it that affects this because I was messing around with my settings and now it takes over a week to imprint a baby?" Whatever. Stuff like that. And it's because of the fact that you can change settings for PCs and they don't have a certification process that things have to go through to make sure it won't mess up the game for you to change things. So I don't know necessarily if this extending of the tether default is a good thing or not. I don't know if it's gonna cause more crashes or not. I don't know if this is also on consoles or if it's just a PC thing. And to be honest, I make videos like this occasionally just to help people out, but this is not the focus of my channel. My channel is not about the technical stuff, settings, and server setup and stuff like that for how to set up an Ark server. I've made a few videos like that to help out the community, but mostly my channel is about actually playing these games, doing builds in these games, doing tutorials about actually playing these games. So I'm not going to be making a ton of videos on every little update like this, but I figured that since the last video I did about the tether was so widely viewed, it would be a good idea for me to make an update video rather than just remove the prior video and not say anything about it. So anyway, that's why I'm making this video. I hope that I in some way clarified things for you if you would like to see more content about survival games, because my channel is not just Ark anymore. I also have videos on Enshrouded and I've got videos coming out soon for other games as well. I have some Palworld videos. I am working on a video about Nightingale, and yeah, so I would love to have you join our community, come hang out, talk about games with us, always down to talk about building in games and playing survival games. I love this type of games, and I hope to see you around. So if this video was helpful in any way, then I'd appreciate it if you hit the thumbs up button. It really does make a big difference in the algorithms, and if you watch this all the way to the end, I'd appreciate it if you put a thumbs up emoji in the comments. Thank you so much. Have a great day, my friends.
