ARK needs a Firewall Evolved

A buddy of mine encouraged me to purchase ARK Survival Evolved last week and I finally got around to installing it. The game is still in early release and there is no tutorial, but it seems to be pretty straight forward…beat up on things – tree for wood, rock for stone, etc and craft better and better stuff. There's hunger, thirst, and temperature seems to make a difference. I'm enjoying my single player experience pretty well. Actually, I had desired to purchase this when it first came out, but I've started holding off on early release games until I hear some feedback…there are just so many of them and my Steam library is overflowing.

Well, everything seemed to be going well with my single player mode, but when I tried to hook up with my buddy, trouble began. By trouble, I mean I was unable to connect to his server. Not only that, I realized I could not see ANY servers official, unofficial, or my friends.

So he tried to invite me and still no joy.

Thus proceeded a 2 hour long ordeal to get my game client to work and connect to any server. Steam validation, firewall changes, you name it. I researched on Google and Steam, and no joy. This is just like how things were with Dark Souls II – I couldn't even get that game to play on my gaming laptop – only on my backup machine.

Well, I suppose I'll have to come up with something. Maybe try the game on my backup computer, but this pisses me off. I am really starting to wonder if this is my ESet security suite. It seems to work well, but for some reason on a couple of games, I have major issues.

Anyone else use ESet security – firewall and antivirus? I tried turning off the firewall since I have a NAT, but no joy. My backup computer uses Zone Alarm and that never seems to have issues and I'm seriously starting to think I should use that on my game machine as well.

So anyway, I am reinstalling the game now. We'll see if that helps, but if not, I'll look into trying Zone Alarm. I also need to check my router since that handles my NAT and make sure things don't need to be adjusted there.

Why is it that most games just work, but others cause so many issues?

If anyone has a recommendation for a firewall/antivirus to use on a gaming machine, please let me know in the comments.