[UPDATE: 11/11/15] State of the Game: VAC Wave! Zero Tolerance, Reporting & Crashes.

[Jat]

Hey Survivors!

Purpose

This is a pinned topic that we constantly keep up to date with ongoing news and information regarding changes or key topics that Studio Wildcard and the ARK team are currently working and invested on. This is less about the development process and more so related to other issues that may arise during this Early Access phase, how we plan to combat them, and will also include any updates regarding on-going issues such as server-downtime or other important tidbits. This is a must-read thread!

Latest update: 11th of November 2015

VAC Wave

Hey everyone,

Our initial vac-waves are now in place and you'll start see some survivors being dropped off the face of the island! Woot! We've already had some notifications about bans going through :).

We'll continue working on our anti-hack measures to make sure we catch all the hackers and keep the ARK cheat-free!

Zero Tolerance

Aimbots, ESP, 3rd Party Cheats, “Hacking” and modifying the game in such a way to gain an unintended and unfair advantage.

We have a zero-tolerance policy for the use of 3rd party programs in ARK: Survival Evolved. Our development team has been working on anti-cheat measures in the game to prevent players from using these programs to gain an unfair advantage over others. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling-out these protections to catch cheaters and put a stop to their behaviour immediately.

Reporting!

On the 17th of August we made the announcement of a new feature which was developed for ARK, known as the Global Ban. This allows us to globally prohibit players from joining any Official Server if their behaviour was deemed unacceptable. It also came with a public-banlist which you can check out here:

http://playark.com/banlist.txt

We take this very seriously and that means that this ban list will frequently be updated as we continue to investigate and handle reports. We have also enabled player-run servers to make use of our global-banlist, or any banlist they want by adding this to their server’s GameUserSettings.ini:

[ServerSettings]
BanListURL=”http://playark.com/banlist.txt”

We expect everyone to be on good behaviour from now on and will be explicitly prohibiting:

- 3rd Party Cheats
- Aimbots
- ESP Cheats
- Anything else that modifies the game in such a way as to give an unintended advantage
- Derogatory and Personalized Harassment

It is up to OUR discretion what derogatory and personalized harassment is. If it seems like what you're about to communicate, could even BORDERLINE seem like it's going to really offend or be harmful to another player's ability to play and enjoy the game without fear of being harassed, don't say it. We understand that there are elements to the game which can cause things to get heated, however we request that you do not go overboard. In these extreme cases we will step in.

And something else we’d like to point out is that it is highly encouraged for players to make their own reports. Please send an email to:

[e-mail]

and we will try to be as prompt as possible when responding, there may be a lead time in between however we’ll do our best to keep on top of things! If you could fill out this form when sending in an email, that would be much appreciated and it would make everything a whole lot easier. From there, we’ll be in touch.

In the subject matter of the email, please state whether the issue is a REPORT, TRIBE ISSUE. The emails will generally be handled by first come first serve basis, however in some situations there may be priority handed over to another issue - though don’t worry, be patient and we’ll reach out to all of you :).

In the email itself, please include as much detail and evidence that you can provide and if you could fill out a form like this, that would help a ton!

YOUR Steam Community URL:

The Official Server you play on:

What the subject concerns:

Evidence:

Extra details:

If you could provide as much detail as possible, the more we know, the further we can get in investigating and taking care of the situation. Don’t worry about the length of the email, give us all the details, base locations, tribe names, in game names, dinosaur names, steam URLs, videos, pictures,- as much as you can! And also if you haven’t received a response in a while, feel free to bump the same message.

There has previously been a bit of a delay on some of these reports and requests, we’ll be making sure we catch up on the old ones and the new ones a lot quicker now that we’ve got some additional help! Thank you for being so patient, understanding and diligent in your reporting - we truly appreciate it.

Thank you everyone for helping make ARK as fun, fair, and cooperative & competitive a game as possible together!

DX12

It runs, it looks good, but unfortunately we came across some driver issues that we can't entirely tackle ourselves :(. We’ve reached out to both NVIDIA and AMD and will be working with them to get it resolved as soon as possible! Once that’s tackled, we’ll be needing to do more solid testing across a range of hardware with the new fixes. It's disappointing to us too and we're sorry for the delay, but we wouldn't want to release ARK DX12 without the care it still needs at this point. Hang in there, and when it's ready for public consumption, it should be worth the wait!

Crash Reports

Hey there everyone!

So we've noticed a slightly higher than average number of reports of dedicated server crashes bubbling up since 208 came out, and wanted to reach out to server owners to see if you can provide us a callstack for some of your crashes.

The callstack is the information in the big white window full of text that pops up when your server crashes! It automatically gets copied to your clipboard when you press "OK", so don't worry about how to copy it out, just click to close the box and then paste what's on your clipboard into notepad!

We would LOVE if any of you could provide us these callstacks for your dedicated server crashes, they're very important to trying to solve the crashes, especially because none of our official servers are seeing weird crashes at all right now!

Please feel free to email them to: [e-mail]

If you could include the following details:

What version of the game you’re currently running Very important!
Whether it’s a Windows or Linux server
What you were doing moments before / at the time of the crash
Have you been able to reproduce the crash, if so how:

Window's servers will also be able to get their crash-logs from this location:

...\Saved\Logs\09.12-23.30.28.crashstack

With that number being a timestamp!


Thanks a bunch!

[Lv1 Magikarp]

Thanks for keeping us upto date as always, love the game and the players of the Fairkarp server[ark-servers.net] thank you also. Never been so excited for a game for so long.

[It's Van]

I use a trainer from a website for this game. But I only play local. Do I have to worry about being banned?

[Nubsly]

Hey Guys!

Just wanted to pop my head in to stress the point of DOCUMENT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN WHEN REPORTING HACKERS.

We want to be able to ban them without hesitation, but to do that we need concrete evidence that they are actually hacking. The more you provide in terms of evidence, the easier it is for us to say "Yep, bannnnnnn".

So, if you want someone to get the ban they deserve, make sure you've got enough evidence to ensure when we get to your report we're able to bring swift justice down upon them :)

Cheers!

-Nubsly

[oXYnary]

our clipboard when you press "OK", so don't worry about how to copy it out, just click to close the box and then paste what's on your clipboard into notepad!

Just an fyi, most Linux servers will be headless, so there wont be a dialog box.

[Callous]

Originally posted by It's Van:

I use a trainer from a website for this game. But I only play local. Do I have to worry about being banned?

Once VAC is activated for ARK a trainer would fall under there "zero-tolerance policy for the use of 3rd party programs" and could cause a ban.
If you're running local, I see no need for a trainer anyway, as you have access to the 'cheat' admin commands.

[It's Van]

Yea but the trainer made it so my carry weight is 5000 and my fortitude is at 250. That way I could mine a ton of materials at a time and bring it all back to make the base i wanted.

[Buster]

Originally posted by It's Van:

I use a trainer from a website for this game. But I only play local. Do I have to worry about being banned?

If you play by yourself (local server) your fine. Its when you go on servers with people that you will run into trouble.

That said VAC is rather indiscriminate when it comes to handing out bans, so you may wish to be careful just in case, since a VAC ban can NOT be appealed.

[It's Van]

That's what I thought too. I would just like to know from a Dev what the answer is.

[KreiviGrunttila]

How about this, i own razer blackWidow wich has its own macro making software/keyboard tweaking thing, RazerSynapse. Lets say ill make macro wich i have been using to gather stone since hammering E is not fun! so i make macro that a keyboard will press E every 1sec or so.. would this be bannable offense by VAC?

[ambodnar]

What can we provide to help get fixes done for clients such as Mac or Linux?

Right now, El Capitan users are seeing white screens when clicking in the menu or once loaded into the world.

I know these platforms are not the most important, but I'm unable to play the game now and I'm starting to have withdrawls.

[Azta]

How about the ppl who uses crosshair overlays and stickers or anything else?

I mean its against the rules to use such a thing if its 3rd party program ( so a software ). But if its inbuilt in monitor or someone made it them selves.. It's allowed?! Thats the same cheat.

JukeBox even admitted on the last tournament he used it, and he even said, that you guys knew it, and allowed it. Why?

These highly rewarded tournaments should have more fairplay rules.


Anyway, thanks for the updates about DX12 and the other things! :)

Keep up the good work :)

[Leopard]

Originally posted by It's Van:

Yea but the trainer made it so my carry weight is 5000 and my fortitude is at 250. That way I could mine a ton of materials at a time and bring it all back to make the base i wanted.

I'm not too familiar with the cheat commands in the game, but isn't there an infinite stats cheat that may help Van?

[It's Van]

That just makes it so you don't use stamina or water.

[Leopard]

Bugger. Have you checked to see if you can't mod your config files so that you get extra stat points on level up or something?

[-BB-]

Originally posted by It's Van:

Yea but the trainer made it so my carry weight is 5000 and my fortitude is at 250. That way I could mine a ton of materials at a time and bring it all back to make the base i wanted.

Originally posted by Leopard:

Bugger. Have you checked to see if you can't mod your config files so that you get extra stat points on level up or something?

From patch notes for v202.0:
* Servers can now edit a multiplier for player and dino level-upgrade amounts per-stat (and also different numbers in the case of wild dinos).

This may be the solution to your problem-- you could have weight increase by 5000 for every point put in it. The only problem is they didn't tell us how to do it. The wiki has nothing about it under server config, nobody anywhere has any knowledge of it. I for one would like to play around with it, and maybe this guy could use it to prevent being grounded for cheating in a single-player game.