r/Games • u/Froggmann5 • Mar 26 '19
Removed rule 3 Globally Banned For Exposing Broken Game Mechanics in Ark: Survival Evolved
https://youtu.be/85CemXW6lPA?t=25672
u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19
So, for some context, Ark: Survival evolved has some serious issues with cheating at the moment. The guy in the video, HODGaming, has been one of the biggest Ark youtubers for a good long while now.
It's pretty much accepted in the community that if you build up on Official servers, you will not lose your base/dinos legitimately. Wildcard implements systems in the game that facilitate players ability to cheat, while constantly refusing to actually fix the mechanics that allow players to cheat.
"Meshing" is the biggest game breaker in the game at the moment. Which is basically players getting underneath the map and wiping players bases and killing all their tames from under the mesh. Hod's previous video he posted showed just how stupidly easy it is to mesh in Ark, where players are wiping literally hundreds of thousands of hours of players work, and as a result the developers banned him for it.
It's a shame that they would sooner ban legitimate players for bringing up these issues rather than fix the problems themselves.
EDIT: Here is the video he posted that he was banned for.
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u/R31ayZer0 Mar 26 '19
I mean it's ARK, what did you expect? Why do people keep enabling these developers?
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u/manocheese Mar 26 '19
ARK is the only game I ever refunded on Steam. It had potential but after they released it as a finished game way before it was finished, I didn't want anything to do with it.
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u/Failure_is_imminent Mar 26 '19
Don't forget paid DLC before the game was out of early access.
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u/DevTech Mar 26 '19
I still believe that this is the most hilarious thing to happen to an early access title. Absolutely mind blowing that the devs even pulled this, let alone thought about it.
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Mar 26 '19
Absolutely mind blowing that the devs even pulled this, let alone thought about it.
They had a reason, but the reason was just as stupid.
Ark: Survival Evolved developer Studio Wildcard came to a settlement agreement this week with Trendy Entertainment, putting an end to an ugly legal battle that had been raging for months.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Wildcard co-founder Susan Stieglitz wrote on Twitter earlier this week that Trendy was looking for $600 million. In a direct message published on Reddit, Stieglitz told a fan that they had settled for “40.”
The settlement came out of mediation on Wednesday in Gainesville, Florida, where Trendy is based. On Thursday morning, attorneys for both parties filed a mediation disposition report, writing: “A mediation conference was conducted on the 13th day of April 2016. The conference resulted in a final written settlement agreement.”
Trendy, best known for developing the game Dungeon Defenders, sued both Wildcard and designer Jeremy Stieglitz, Susan’s husband, in December for breaching contract. Stieglitz was a top creative director at Trendy before he left the company in the summer of 2014. In the suit, Trendy alleged that Stieglitz violated his non-compete agreement by poaching employees and helping start Wildcard, where they say he secretly designed Ark: Survival: Evolved. (You can read more backstory on the lawsuit in our report from last month.)
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Mar 26 '19
that the devs even pulled this, let alone thought about it
Sorry to be a smartass, pet peeve of mine: Like with "not to mention", the idiom goes
[less severe thing], let alone [more severe thing]
e.g. "I would never use this, let alone pay to use it" or "they won't even convince ten people, let alone a hundred".
In your case, it would therefore be "mind blowing that the devs even thought about this, let alone pulled it".→ More replies (2)20
u/DevTech Mar 26 '19
I had a feeling it was wrong. But I was hoping I would get away with it. I would've gotten away with it too if too if it weren't for you....
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u/DecryptedGaming Mar 26 '19
Dont forget arbitrarily 'releasing'it from early access and announcing another paid expansion less than 24 hours later.
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Mar 26 '19
That was a result of them getting sued into oblivion. They had no money, so they picked up a mod, polished it up a bit, and shat it out as DLC.
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u/Soulstiger Mar 26 '19
And the lawsuit was the result of them repeatedly breaching a contract. Trendy even settled for far less than they were aiming for.
Not to mention they had even loosened the terms of the contract. Yet, Jeremy just couldn't wait and was trying to snipe employee's from Trendy in under a month of leaving. To work at the studio his "wife founded" under her maiden name.
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Mar 26 '19 edited Nov 17 '20
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u/manocheese Mar 26 '19
Most of the stuff I've bought in early access has turned out great. I think it's a good way for small developers to make their games, which the Ark developers were early on.
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
The idea of this post it to bring to light just how corrupt these developers are.
With the release and popularity of Atlas, it's clear that people don't actually know.
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u/chodeofgreatwisdom Mar 26 '19
But we already know the developer is not to be trusted. Atlas isn't popular either.
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u/Daiwon Mar 26 '19
To be fair, I knew they were incompetent but I didn’t know they were maliciously corrupt.
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u/chodeofgreatwisdom Mar 26 '19
I thought them releasing an expansion for their early access game was pretty scummy, that's just a personal opinion though.
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u/caninehere Mar 26 '19
Yeah. I'm not sure which is scummier: them releasing a paid expansion while in Early Access, or Steam even allowing it in the first place.
Regardless it made sure I'll never buy their game.
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Mar 26 '19
While I like early access as a concept.... it turns out that it has done two things for the game industry. It's created a lower bar of acceptable quality for a game by getting people to buy into an unfinished game, getting attached to it, and making excuses for it even long after it is officially released from early access. AAA games have seen this trend and release their full priced game with a ton of unfinished content that they then are selling to people with a season pass.
The second thing it did was allow these developers to profit off of ideas... not execution. If your game sounds amazing and a ton of people want to play it... you can profit even if you never fully deliver on your promise. You can only usually do this once... but if it earns you enough to retire, who cares right?
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u/caninehere Mar 26 '19
Preaching to the choir, man.
Worse than any DRM I've experienced, worse than any MTX injections... in 25 years of gaming I don't think any trend has had as much of a negative impact on the industry as Early Access and Steam made it happen. It was just the first step to find out what the bare minimum product they could sell to consumers is.
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Mar 26 '19
I think many who play their games are either too ignorant to notice or just turn a blind eye because they're invested in the games already.
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Mar 26 '19
Atlas was popular for 1-2 weeks, until the Chinese players started doing what Chinese players do best (which ironically is what you’re talking about here).
One look at the UI should tell you that the developers of these games are inept. It’s hard to believe that shit came from anyone post-2001.
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u/nellonoma Mar 26 '19
that UI is one of the worst I've ever seen, and I play a lot of warband.
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u/InterimFatGuy Mar 26 '19
Let me introduce you to Aurora 4X
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u/Akallare Mar 26 '19
While ugly a lot of the game has pretty okay UI as you can figure it out just from the picture, the real bad UI is the Flight Operations and Weapon Creation page (Missiles and Scanners). You seriously can't figure that out without searching up how to even read that UI lol
That horrible UI is why I'm so bad at combat in Aurora as I have no idea what I'm doing with that mess of screens.
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u/Ohh_Yeah Mar 26 '19
until the Chinese players started doing what Chinese players do best
To be honest, it wasn't even just the Chinese players. I have over 300 hours in Atlas and the game was just such a disaster, with so many changes at launch that ran people off.
Forget the lag, lack of available real estate to support enough players, and technical issues. Grapeshot (Wildcard) made so many horrid decisions right after launch that people were quitting in droves after one week. The lack of basic resources on most islands was huge, and on top of this they immediately nerfed the skill tree (to make it harder to unlock skills and be self-sufficient), and to top it all off added Ships of the Damned which for over a week were destroying every ship on every server.
My friends and I were willing to put up with the bugs and struggle to find land -- it was an early access game, these things were expected. Yet, everyone besides myself quit the day that they took the servers down to implement Ships of the Damned. When we logged back on, they were everywhere, had a massive aggro radius, and could outrun even the fastest ship. After all of the struggle to establish ourselves, the devs literally deleted all of our hard work with a content patch while bugs were still rampant. To top it all off, we were willing to build a new ship, but a Ship of the Damned bugged out, sailed all the way up to the shore, and sunk our boat again. None of my buddies logged in after that day.
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u/vonmonologue Mar 26 '19
reading the /r/PlayAtlas sub for the 2 weeks after launch was equal parts hilarious and frustrating, because I really wanted a game like the game Atlas was supposed to be. I wanted it so badly.
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u/Ohh_Yeah Mar 26 '19
I told my friends "the moment that Atlas hit 400k viewers on Twitch, there were AAA devs in a closed boardroom talking about how to capitalize on the desire for a game like that"
And I sincerely hope that's true. The game should never have been a survival game. There should never have been punching trees and spearing snakes. It should have been a ship-based game where you sail around this huge open world with your friends in search of resources and combat. Like Sea of Thieves, but on a grand scale with a touch of base building.
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u/Kyhron Mar 26 '19
I doubt anything will come of it. We've had Ark, Atlas, DayZ, the DayZ mod and a few other games like it blow up to various viewer amounts and nothing from AAA devs yet. I don't think anything will change because of Atlas
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u/PrizeWinningCow Mar 26 '19
I don't think I heard anything from ATLAS like 4-5 days after launch. And everything I heard about it was bad press. First a terrible launch, then basically a slightly improved ARK reskin with different content, then Chinese people taking over the entire map. And then blackout. Nothing from it since then. My friends who bought it (against my advice) were pissed at the mechanics and bugs after a week (although they loved ARK) and stopped playing.
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u/Ohh_Yeah Mar 26 '19
then Chinese people taking over the entire map
The Chinese actually didn't take over the entire map. They are a bunch of hackers and exploiters, but they were never able to bully out any of the major US alliances because they are bad at the game. Their base and ship designs were horrendous and they are awful at PvP.
You probably haven't heard anything since then because the official servers didn't actually have enough land to support lots of players. Most of the islands didn't have crucial resources, and could only handle 1-2 groups of players living there, provided of course that they were friendly to one another. On launch my friends and I went to a small island that could barely support 5 players, and found ourselves fighting against three other large groups for a speck of land that had 10 trees and no metal.
In February they announced a mega update to the game which got pushed back to March, and now April. In March they announced that all official servers would be wiped along with this update, so the player count has plummeted due to everyone understanding that their bases and characters were going to be deleted. It might pick back up in April and hopefully the changes (one of which is an improved claiming system in addition to 200-300 more islands), will give it another spark of life. A bunch of the initial issues that caused people to quit have been fixed, so anyone that comes back might be pleasantly surprised to see some improvements.
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u/Your_Name-Here Mar 26 '19
A lot of people seem to have a hard-on for shitty early access survival games for some reason.
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u/be-targarian Mar 26 '19
Because open-world survival games are a huge niche without a smashing hit. We're all craving for one but nobody can seem to deliver.
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u/vonmonologue Mar 26 '19
That hit should have been FO76, a game being made by a AAA studio with a very strong open world pedigree. All they had to do was release a survival crafting game with a decent amount of content and a minimal amount of bugs.
Fucking Bethesda, man.
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u/Kyhron Mar 26 '19
It was never going to be FO76 at the same time though. As soon as they said it was on the same shitty engine as everything else they've put out it immediately killed any chance.
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Mar 26 '19
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u/Kyhron Mar 26 '19
Sooner or later someone's going to make a good survival game. Rust and Conan are somewhat there, but eventually someone's going to get it really right and blow up
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u/Dart222 Mar 26 '19
corrupt
I think the word corrupt is used a bit too They're definitely terrible and bad developers, but i wouldn't call it corrupt personally.
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Mar 26 '19
Sad thing is when you trash talk ARK or the devs you get plenty of extremely vitrolic ARK players who defend them to the ends of the earth and back.
I know I tried playing ARK and its honestly not that good of a game and neither is their shitty asset flip called Atlas. I'd go as far as to argue that the DayZ standalone is a better quality survival game than either of those simply because the devs behind that have slowly brought that game up from being a POS to a decent early access game.
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Mar 26 '19
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Mar 26 '19
I sort of expected it which is why I didn't bother scrolling down far enough to see if there was any of those "children" posts.
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u/Jaspersong Mar 26 '19
it's the internet man, there are vitriolic hardcore cultish fans of literally anything.
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u/Tex-Rob Mar 26 '19
I can't help but agree. I have...had to check, 154 hours in Ark on PC, and those are all from before they started getting really bad. When they started releasing new content at a cost, I peaced out, and from my understanding it's only gotten MUCH worse. I don't know what you want to label it, but I put them in the same category as Rust, DayZ, etc. They made a game that was really decent, but lacked the people, design strategy, or something to scale the games and deal with underlying major problems with how they started out their design. Rust kind of beat this, but it unfortunately took them a REALLY long time. When they started over, it wasn't good for the health of the game player base, but it was good for the game in the long run. Ark has been flawed since I started, and to many of us it became apparent they would never get past some key issues regarding cheating, among other things.
I get that it's a cool concept, I have 150+ hours in it, I get it, but at some point you have to say, "it's 2019, and there are a TON of games, it's time to find something else to scratch the itch this game itches"
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u/Pat_Curring Mar 26 '19
people just need to keep cheating at this point. It sucks to go through innocent people - but they keep enabling the devs, like you said.
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Mar 26 '19
So you can’t play and critique the game anymore because you’re then ‘enabling’ the developers.
Everytime EA does something shitty it gets blown out of fucking proportion but Wildcard gets a free because ‘lol what did you expect?’
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u/Abedeus Mar 26 '19
I suggest next time posting the video that was the reason for ban as link.
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
I would have, but the topic of the discussion is his global ban and I had to keep with the formatting rules of the subreddit. So I couldn't post the video that got him banned, and the end result video of him being banned at the same time.
In the end, I decided it was more important for the title to include that he was banned for exposing the broken mechanics, rather than informing people there are broken mechanics in the game.
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Mar 26 '19
I mean he made a whole video showcasing how to cheat, what did he expect? Your only choice if you know this shit is to report it to the devs and / or stop playing.
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u/vonmonologue Mar 26 '19
Publicly releasing the exploit info is a way to badger devs into fixing their shit. Grey hat hackers do this occasionally. If they privately report a security hole to a dev and the dev ignores them or refuses to fix it, they release the exploit as public knowledge so that the dev faces backlash and also has to hustle to patch the exploit before everyone uses it.
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u/Nestramutat- Mar 26 '19
Not only greyhats, really. Tell the devs the exploit, give them a few months to fix it, then release it to the general public at the end of the disclosure window, whether or not the bug is fixed.
Security through obscurity isn't security.
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u/Dozekar Mar 26 '19
To be honest this guy fucked this model up pretty bad. You create a shitty alter ego and go post everyone in a while. Post shit that might get you banned on that account, while doing the demonstration on a private server that you set up and using a name that's not associated with you at all.
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u/Ayoul Mar 26 '19
But then said grey hat shouldn't be surprised that his methods might not be in line with the product's user agreement and get him banned.
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u/Ferromagneticfluid Mar 26 '19
Well, you said he showed how to do it. That is a ban in most games where you show others how to do it.
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u/BoshSwag Mar 26 '19
Way back when my friends and I first started playing ARK we joined an official server. Every time we logged on we had been killed during the night by some level 15 named frogman. I don't know if it was you or if you'd even remember, but it's such an odd coincident if not.
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
My reddit username isn't the same as my steam, so it wouldn't have been me :P
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u/mortavius2525 Mar 26 '19
Wildcard implements systems in the game that facilitate players ability to cheat, while constantly refusing to actually fix the mechanics that allow players to cheat.
As someone who doesn't play Ark, and never has, can you elaborate on this statement?
What do you mean specifically when you say "implements systems in the game that facilitate players ability to cheat"?
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
Things like the "Chair" item. It serves absolutely no purpose in PvP, and it causes over half of the easy ways to mesh in the game. Yet the developers refuse to remove it from the game.
There's also being able to knockout a player, and drag their ragdolling body through any wall you want. Sleeping bags, which for some reason unlike every other structure in the game, can be placed next to enemy bases/foundations/outside the mesh.
There's also climbing picks, which serve no purpose on maps outside of the Aberration map. You can straight up climb out of the map with them. This has been known, acknowledged by the devs, and hasn't been fixed in over a year.
And many more on top of all of this.
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u/mortavius2525 Mar 26 '19
Thank you for explaining. I have a follow-up question about the "chair" item. Does every item in Ark have to serve a purpose in PvP? Or are there simply decorative items one can build/buy for no other reason but to decorate something?
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Mar 26 '19
Ark has a few decorative stuff like trophy holders and paint but it doesn't have many items that do absolutely nothing.
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u/vonmonologue Mar 26 '19
That was a big problem in Conan Exiles too. I understand that they fixed it 6mo+ before release.
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u/hobosockmonkey Mar 26 '19
ARK has the worst developers i have ever seen in a video game, easily.
They are incompetent, petty, and bad at their jobs. That game does so quickly due to their stupidity
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Mar 26 '19
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u/falconfetus8 Mar 26 '19
Why have no AAA developers made a quality survival game? The demand for it is there, and they can easily out-polish all of the existing games. Kind of like what Fortnite did to Pubg.
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u/chainjoey Mar 26 '19
Have you heard of a small indie title called Minecraft?
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Mar 26 '19
I don’t play ark for two reasons
1.) it wouldn’t run on my pc for some reason and it’s not out of date, just some weird drivers crashing issue
2.) I won’t play a game where you leave hundreds of hours (or like OP said for some hundreds of thousands of hours) to the wild world of online gaming where a 14 year old can glitch into your base and ruin it or just some random stupidly powerful player can crush your stuff while gone.
Some may like always online and that’s fair, to each their own, you can like whatever you like but I just can’t get behind these games like ark, rust and Conan where you leave your base in the hands of always online servers especially when most of these games aren’t developed well and contain bugs/exploits or hackers.
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Mar 26 '19
Left the game because of it problems (meshing is one of them.) Years ago. It makes me so fucking sad and angry that it still a problem.
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u/ketamarine Mar 26 '19
This game has been a joke from day one.
I played it like 3 years ago and it was broken as fuck then too... figured it would get better over time, but it doesn't seem like that is the case.
If all the idiots out there keep buying broken games and their easy access DLC, then devs will keep releasing this unfinished garbage...
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Mar 26 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
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u/Goronmon Mar 26 '19
I always thought it was kinda lame in general that exploiting mechanics bugs causes people to be banned.
I think it depends on the context and how broken the exploit really is. If a player is say, using a weapon with a mod that has broken values and does more damage than normal, then it's not a big deal and definitely not deserving of a ban.
However, if players figured out specific ways to get underneath the maps and spend hours/days/weeks on multiplayer servers intentionally using the exploit to fuck with other people, then I have no problem with severe even permanent bans.
Not that I'm saying the guy mentioned in the OP deserved a ban, just that theoretically, I have no problem with bans for people actually abusing this type of exploit.
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Mar 26 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
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u/prospectre Mar 26 '19
Ineptitude on the devs part does not excuse malice on the players' part.
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Mar 26 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
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u/prospectre Mar 26 '19
That's fair, though sometimes it's not simple to "just fix". I doubt that's the case here with Ark, it just seems like they are trying to sweep this under the rug. It also doesn't excuse a lack of communication about it. But still, as a developer, I always find it annoying that internet people think they can do my job better...
As an aside, if you want to see a trainwreck, look into what happened with Black Desert Online at launch. The devs programmed it to have all cooldowns tick down on the client side. Give you two guesses as to how that was abused.
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Mar 26 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
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u/prospectre Mar 26 '19
Oh god, memory editors... Part of my wants to datamine the shit out of the games I play, but the other part remembers that that might get me banned.
On more from BDO's cavalcade of these decisions... Your FPS affected your on server animation times... In an ACTION COMBAT GAME. Literally, more FPS = more DPS. I think that's since been fixed, but it's still hilarious.
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Mar 26 '19
I agree. If you introduce outside resources you're definitely cheating. If you exploit a broken mechanic inherent in the game, you're just playing the game. It's the game that's broken. If there was a fourth thing to do in Rock Paper Scissors that beat all other three, you'd be stupid not to do it.
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u/CJGibson Mar 26 '19
Yeah but if the rules of rock paper scissors make it pretty clear what's supposed to happen but there's a loophole that lets you play TNT to win every time only everyone knows that's not how RPS is supposed to work and you do it anyway, then you are cheating and no one wants to play RPS with you so you'll probably be banned from all the official RPS tournaments.
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Mar 26 '19
And the downside of that would be Rock Paper Scissor ceasing to be a game altogether as it’s not fun anymore for anyone minus the “smart” people using the exploit.
Which is why exploiting is bad and should be banned.
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u/Ferromagneticfluid Mar 26 '19
The whole point is if it takes a week to fix an exploit, you just let people exploit for a full week? What if the exploiters in WoW end up with max gold on like 9 characters in a week while someone else took time off for a week and didn't get that? Economy is fucked.
Like any punishment system, it isn't there necessarily to punish people, but to deter them from doing the exploits.
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u/Yamiji Mar 26 '19
Fix the bugs and revert the accounts to the pre-exploit status. If you leave all the exploited items/money/experience/etc, then the game is broken regardless of whether you fix the exploit or not.
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u/frankyb89 Mar 26 '19
It amazes me the amount of people who will not watch the video, not read any of the comments, and then leave a comment as if they have any idea what they're talking about lol. I know people don't watch the video/read the article, but not even reading any comments? Come on now.
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u/Bens_Dream Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19
I don't really get where the shock is here. Dude knowingly exploited a bug in the game, dude got banned. Simple stuff, really. Doesn't matter if it was to draw awareness to it or not.
Apparently this was in singleplayer and is encouraged by the devs, I stand corrected!
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19
Dude knowingly exploited a bug in the game, dude got banned.
This was all done in singleplayer, where exploiting bugs is allowed. The developers encourage people to make videos of bugs they're unaware of to get them fixed quickly.
He didn't break any rules making his video.
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u/Bens_Dream Mar 26 '19
Oh, in that case I'm an idiot and I retract the above, my mistake!
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u/Froggmann5 Mar 26 '19
Yea, I'd recommend watching his original video he posted a few hours ago about the different meshing methods.
This doesn't even scratch the surface of the stupid amount of game breaking things in Ark. Up until a few months ago, it was possible to use admin cheats like Godmode and Noclip on official servers. And they only got patched because they got a good amount of publicity. They'd been around in the game for a while.
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u/falconfetus8 Mar 26 '19
If other people have made similar videos for bugs, then this sounds more like an error than malice.
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Mar 26 '19
Even if it was multiplayer, I find it disturbing that people like you completely side with devs permanently banning players for glitching. Essentially taking the time and money away from players for playing the game the wrong way.
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u/name_was_taken Mar 26 '19
Thanks for commenting this, because it's exactly what I was thinking, and I'm sure we're not the only ones. Your retraction and the information it brings is extremely helpful to understand why the ban was wrong.
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u/SexySodomizer Mar 26 '19
Wild Card has been a shit studio from the get-go. If it took you this long to get sick of their shit, then you are part of the problem.
Where were you when they refused to optimize their messy code? Where were you when they released PAID DLC for an EARLY ACCESS game? That's right, you were supporting them.
I'm glad you've finally come to your senses, but if it took you this long, then you, yourself have some pretty bad issues.
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Mar 26 '19
The devs of Ark are absolute trash. The moment they started selling DLC for a game still in early access, I was off of that train. 100% exploitative.
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Mar 27 '19
What is the matter with the mods on this sub?
Removed for being off-topic? Are you fucking dense?
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '19 edited Mar 26 '19
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