A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite amicable multi-rider sauropod, the Diplodocus!




This Wednesday on 28th of October the ARK will be undergoing a brief seasonal change where the air becomes cooler, the days shorter & the nights longer, the moon a certain shade of red, bats and other nasty creatures appearing above-ground, carvable pumpkins sprouting up, rumors of powerful undead beasts roaming the land -- and emerging from the mists, the mythical Dodorex makes its appearance at last astride an army of bloodthirsty zombie Dodos, with limited edition treats for those Survivors brave enough to take on the many tricks of ARK: Fear Evolved!

A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite amicable multi-rider sauropod, the Diplodocus!




This Wednesday on 28th of October the ARK will be undergoing a brief seasonal change where the air becomes cooler, the days shorter & the nights longer, the moon a certain shade of red, bats and other nasty creatures appearing above-ground, carvable pumpkins sprouting up, rumors of powerful undead beasts roaming the land -- and emerging from the mists, the mythical Dodorex makes its appearance at last astride an army of bloodthirsty zombie Dodos, with limited edition treats for those Survivors brave enough to take on the many tricks of ARK: Fear Evolved!

Hey Survivors,

Phew... that was a ride! ‘The Last Stand’ Tournament ended today in a blistering 5-hour marathon of poo-throwing monkeys, questionable referee decisions, nerf-batted bosses, numerous failed box-men attempts (THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!), and a partridge in a pear tree.

Before we discuss our mistaken referee call, let it be written that when the dust settled and the last dino fell violently to the ground in a series of grenade explosions, Tribe ‘Terra Nova’ (fun TV show btw) was left standing above all others. Here are the winners of ‘The Last Stand’, and congratulations to them and all the participants for fighting tooth and nail to survive!



Now about that referee call: Approximately midway through the match, one of our GMs was notified that there was someone hiding on top of the dragon. This in itself isn’t an exploit or glitch, but the GM was informed that this individual could not be damaged. The GM tried to damage the clever player -- appropriately-named ‘Brainiac’ of the venerable ‘Goon Squad’ Tribe -- and seemingly also thought Brainiac could not be damaged. Thus the GM, after conferring with the devs, decided to teleport Brainiac off of the Dragon, believing it to be an “embedded collision” glitch that renders a player invincible to any outside projectile.

Upon reviewing the records it appears now that the player COULD in fact take damage, and what had been thought to be invincibility was in fact just mild de-sync of animations that can occur when a player is on such a large moving object. Brainiac employed a novel tactic that was surprising! We made a real-time call based on the information we had available at the time, but in hindsight - it was the wrong call. So that we’re clear: Hiding on top of the Dragon, or any other creature, is not a glitch in Survival of the Fittest, should not have been grounds for the GM to move that player, and will not be so going forward.

‘The Last Stand’ results remain standing; as a live sporting event the referee’s call does not invalidate the entire 5 hour gameplay -- all the Tribes that participated played very long and hard for their victories.

However, we do want to address it - we made the wrong call and that ought to be dealt with. Furthermore, let’s be frank, those poo-flinging monkeys were devastating at such an early point in the game - we hadn’t seen them appear so early before, and weren't aware of how much they could hurt unguarded players. So with the referee’s call being mistaken, and so many excellent Survivors eliminated early via The Monkey Reign of Terror, we’re going to host one last Mini-Championship Round to see how events play out with improved balance and without GM mistakes. We thus present to you:



The ‘Bonus Round’ will be a 3-hour SotF match hosted next Sunday, November 1, from 2pm EST to 5pm EST, and will be livestreamed by our dearest caster, the most excellent BikeMan! All the Contestants and Streamers who competed in 'The Last Stand' Championship Finale game are invited into this high-value Mini-Championship, and the prizes will be as follows:


$12,000 cash
In-Game Golden SH Custom Trophy with your names


$6,000 cash
In-Game Silver SH Custom Trophy with your names


$2,400 cash
In-Game Bronze SH Custom Trophy with your names

We can't go back in time and change the past (even with a souped-up DeLorean travelling at 88 miles an hour), but we can change the future -- and will do what we can to make it fun for those who played and those who watched. The “Last Stand Bonus Round” SotF build will be deployed on October 25, so Tribes will have a full week to practice without fear of last-minute balancing changes.

We will continue to iterate and refine SotF as a competitive experience, and we'll get better with our casting techniques, infrastructure, and how our GM’s interact with the game. We really appreciate everyone's support of ARK and SotF, and we plan to grow the mode along with players' interest in it.

We look forward to seeing the contestants from 'The Last Stand' Championship in next Sunday's Event to show us the truly epic gameplay and strategies that we know they're all capable of. And we’ll promise you this about the ‘Bonus Round’: among other things, you won't be viciously murdered by feces in your face, nor will GM's be crimping your ingenious strats! We love you Goon Squad!

All the best to ARK fans and SotF fans alike,

Wildcard Jat and the Studio Wildcard Team

Hey Survivors,

Phew... that was a ride! ‘The Last Stand’ Tournament ended today in a blistering 5-hour marathon of poo-throwing monkeys, questionable referee decisions, nerf-batted bosses, numerous failed box-men attempts (THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!), and a partridge in a pear tree.

Before we discuss our mistaken referee call, let it be written that when the dust settled and the last dino fell violently to the ground in a series of grenade explosions, Tribe ‘Terra Nova’ (fun TV show btw) was left standing above all others. Here are the winners of ‘The Last Stand’, and congratulations to them and all the participants for fighting tooth and nail to survive!



Now about that referee call: Approximately midway through the match, one of our GMs was notified that there was someone hiding on top of the dragon. This in itself isn’t an exploit or glitch, but the GM was informed that this individual could not be damaged. The GM tried to damage the clever player -- appropriately-named ‘Brainiac’ of the venerable ‘Goon Squad’ Tribe -- and seemingly also thought Brainiac could not be damaged. Thus the GM, after conferring with the devs, decided to teleport Brainiac off of the Dragon, believing it to be an “embedded collision” glitch that renders a player invincible to any outside projectile.

Upon reviewing the records it appears now that the player COULD in fact take damage, and what had been thought to be invincibility was in fact just mild de-sync of animations that can occur when a player is on such a large moving object. Brainiac employed a novel tactic that was surprising! We made a real-time call based on the information we had available at the time, but in hindsight - it was the wrong call. So that we’re clear: Hiding on top of the Dragon, or any other creature, is not a glitch in Survival of the Fittest, should not have been grounds for the GM to move that player, and will not be so going forward.

‘The Last Stand’ results remain standing; as a live sporting event the referee’s call does not invalidate the entire 5 hour gameplay -- all the Tribes that participated played very long and hard for their victories.

However, we do want to address it - we made the wrong call and that ought to be dealt with. Furthermore, let’s be frank, those poo-flinging monkeys were devastating at such an early point in the game - we hadn’t seen them appear so early before, and weren't aware of how much they could hurt unguarded players. So with the referee’s call being mistaken, and so many excellent Survivors eliminated early via The Monkey Reign of Terror, we’re going to host one last Mini-Championship Round to see how events play out with improved balance and without GM mistakes. We thus present to you:



The ‘Bonus Round’ will be a 3-hour SotF match hosted next Sunday, November 1, from 2pm EST to 5pm EST, and will be livestreamed by our dearest caster, the most excellent BikeMan! All the Contestants and Streamers who competed in 'The Last Stand' Championship Finale game are invited into this high-value Mini-Championship, and the prizes will be as follows:


$12,000 cash
In-Game Golden SH Custom Trophy with your names


$6,000 cash
In-Game Silver SH Custom Trophy with your names


$2,400 cash
In-Game Bronze SH Custom Trophy with your names

We can't go back in time and change the past (even with a souped-up DeLorean travelling at 88 miles an hour), but we can change the future -- and will do what we can to make it fun for those who played and those who watched. The “Last Stand Bonus Round” SotF build will be deployed on October 25, so Tribes will have a full week to practice without fear of last-minute balancing changes.

We will continue to iterate and refine SotF as a competitive experience, and we'll get better with our casting techniques, infrastructure, and how our GM’s interact with the game. We really appreciate everyone's support of ARK and SotF, and we plan to grow the mode along with players' interest in it.

We look forward to seeing the contestants from 'The Last Stand' Championship in next Sunday's Event to show us the truly epic gameplay and strategies that we know they're all capable of. And we’ll promise you this about the ‘Bonus Round’: among other things, you won't be viciously murdered by feces in your face, nor will GM's be crimping your ingenious strats! We love you Goon Squad!

All the best to ARK fans and SotF fans alike,

Wildcard Jat and the Studio Wildcard Team

Tune in at 2PM EST on www.twitch.tv/survivetheark for The Last Stand Championships!


Hey Survivors!

We’re now at the end of our Pre-Championship phase, after a week of intense battles we’re excited to prepare for our Championship game! The 5-hour match will be going live with Alex “Goldenboy” Mendez, Studio Wildcard’s Kayd Hendricks and Bikeman as they shoutcast “The Last Stand” tournament finale on ARK’s Twitch channel from 11 am – 4 pm PST, Saturday, October 24. With 250-plus survivors, including 70 Twitch streamers such as Anthony, Ellohime, SeriousGaming, and Fairlight, and more than 160 qualifying contestants -- players will wage all-out dinosaur warfare for a fantastic trophy and more than $75,000 in cash & prizes and get involved with the process by influencing the outcome of the game with your Evolution Event votes! (The server will open to contestants, for Tribe setup, at 12pm EST.)


Final Qualified Players

Just a reminder that teams are not locked for the Finale -- during the Finale pre-match lobby, qualified players will be granted the opportunity and plenty of time to swap or combine Tribes with others who are also playing in the Finale. Keep in mind that the tribe maximum is set to 6 PLAYERS and alliances will not be tolerated during the event, those found to be forming alliances during battle will find themselves escorted off the ARK by security ;).

All qualified Survivors should be on the lookout for a special friends request and an invite to a private Steam Group. It’s very critical you accept both the friend request and the group invite as it’ll be a place where we’ll be able to directly inform you about anything regarding the Tournament. Those will come out from tonight and tomorrow. If you do not receive one by Thursday Evening please do not hesitate to contact Wildcard Jat and he will sort that out for you.




Survivors will be competing not only for this fantastic trophy with their names embedded onto the plaque, pride, and bragging rights, but also a whole heap worth of goodies from our fantastic sponsors! Special thanks to NVIDIA, Logitech, CyberPower PC and special thanks to Nitrado for hooking us up with a beast machine to host the server on!

And as for a more detailed look into what will be awarded to the winners….


$24,000 - Cash Prize ($4,000 each)
Syber Vapor PC from CyberPower PC! (1 Each)
G410 Atlas Spectrum Logitech Gaming Keyboard (1 Each)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti (1 Each)
Unique Survival of the Fittest: The Last Stand 1st Place Trophy (1 Each)


$12,000 Cash Prize ($2,000 each)
G402 Hyperion Fury Logitech Gaming Mouse (1 Each)
Unique Survival of the Fittest: The Last Stand 2nd Place Trophy (1 Each)


$6,000 Cash Prize ($1,000 each)
G440 Logitech Gaming Mouse (1 Each)
Unique Survival of the Fittest: The Last Stand 3rd Place Trophy (1 Each)

And every participant who participates in the Grand Finale will receive a 100$ Steam Giftcard!


Each ARK: Survival of the Fittest tournament has been modified with new creatures, life-threatening events, and more. Changes for “The Last Stand” include:

Three Boss Creatures! At key points through the match, each Boss makes an appearance available for taming at the central platform. That includes the Broodmother, the Dragon, and the previously unrevealed Giant Ape, who can easily smash through forests and throw huge boulders to demolish survivors and their dinosaurs.

Six Player Tribes: Stay in competition longer as extra-large teams have more chances to claim victory!

Improved Competitive Game Balance! This time, you won’t advance by hiding in a box.

Six New Evolution Events: The world-altering events are triggered by player-voting so that the audience can participate in the action!

Acid Rain: Seek cover! This red-tinted rain won’t quench your thirst, but it will chew through your armor and slowly sap your Health!

I Love You, You Love Me: Mate-Boost effects are doubled! An ideal time to launch your assault with gender-paired creatures, but be careful about wild mates, as they can be extra dangerous.

Hail to the King: A powerful explosive item is dropped at every player’s position… use it wisely!

Food of the Gods: This extra-special Mega Loot crate contains instant-taming Feed.

And two more “Secret” Events that will revealed specifically during the Championship match!


Welcome to the nineteenth issue of the ARK Digest! For those who missed the previous issues, check out the Announcement forum section on the Steam Community Hub and be sure to catch up with what you’ve missed as there is tons for you to catch up on!

ARK Digest 19!

A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite friendly formidable fisher, the Ichthyornis!




Our next Pre-Championship is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 2PM EST! We are expecting another exciting round of Survival of the Fittest so be sure to tune in on www.twitch.tv/survivetheark which will be casted by the acclaimed cameraman and always-hilarious shoutcaster, BikeMan and he will be joined by the venerable TangentGaming!

And for those who are curious, we have already begun revealing our list of qualified players for the Grand Finale, which you can check out here!

The Last Stand Finalists




We are very excited to announce that in the next major content patch v. 220, we will be bringing Mammal Breeding and Babies to the ARK! Similarly to Dinosaurs, Survivors will be able to start a furry family of baby mammals! This will be the first pass and as we go along we'll make more improvements and changes to the system, you'll be able to read more about how it works here!

Mammal Breeding

A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite friendly formidable fisher, the Ichthyornis!




Our next Pre-Championship is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 2PM EST! We are expecting another exciting round of Survival of the Fittest so be sure to tune in on www.twitch.tv/survivetheark which will be casted by the acclaimed cameraman and always-hilarious shoutcaster, BikeMan and he will be joined by the venerable TangentGaming!

And for those who are curious, we have already begun revealing our list of qualified players for the Grand Finale, which you can check out here!

The Last Stand Finalists




We are very excited to announce that in the next major content patch v. 220, we will be bringing Mammal Breeding and Babies to the ARK! Similarly to Dinosaurs, Survivors will be able to start a furry family of baby mammals! This will be the first pass and as we go along we'll make more improvements and changes to the system, you'll be able to read more about how it works here!

Mammal Breeding

We are very excited to announce our first pass of creature breeding and baby dinosaurs being pushed to the live game! Survivors will be given the opportunity to pair two members of the same species together, even across Tribes if you’ve got a particularly well endowed creature, and the resulting offspring will have random selection of traits from both parents, along with a degree of arbitrary mutation! Your new tiny friends will grow dynamically in real time and will need to be cared for to reach their ultimate potential.

You’ll be able to selectively breed for your desired qualities and we hope to see some hardcore survivors progressively raising generations of Dinosaurs that have more refined collections of high-end traits than that which could ever be found in the wild - though be warned survivors, as this rewarding process cannot be accomplished with minimal effort. With the dangers that exist in the ARK, incubating an egg and then raising a small helpless baby Dino in real-time from hatchling to adult is no tiny task! Good luck Survivors ;)!




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qukgMJDCCI

The Terror of the Deep, also known as the Mosasaurus Suspirita makes it’s way to the ARK! Contrary to popular opinion, the Mosasaurus, not the Ultramegalodon, is the largest creature that lives within the ARK’s vast ocean.

It is an enormous deep-sea marine lizard that grows over 50 feet long, spending most of it’s time below, only surfacing to breath or chase prey with an engulfing chomp. Due to it’s large size, tribes often opt to build mobile aquatic bases upon it’s back and it’s strength ensures that the Mosasaurus is the most powerful and ideal oceanic escort!

We are very excited to announce our first pass of creature breeding and baby dinosaurs being pushed to the live game! Survivors will be given the opportunity to pair two members of the same species together, even across Tribes if you’ve got a particularly well endowed creature, and the resulting offspring will have random selection of traits from both parents, along with a degree of arbitrary mutation! Your new tiny friends will grow dynamically in real time and will need to be cared for to reach their ultimate potential.

You’ll be able to selectively breed for your desired qualities and we hope to see some hardcore survivors progressively raising generations of Dinosaurs that have more refined collections of high-end traits than that which could ever be found in the wild - though be warned survivors, as this rewarding process cannot be accomplished with minimal effort. With the dangers that exist in the ARK, incubating an egg and then raising a small helpless baby Dino in real-time from hatchling to adult is no tiny task! Good luck Survivors ;)!




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qukgMJDCCI

The Terror of the Deep, also known as the Mosasaurus Suspirita makes it’s way to the ARK! Contrary to popular opinion, the Mosasaurus, not the Ultramegalodon, is the largest creature that lives within the ARK’s vast ocean.

It is an enormous deep-sea marine lizard that grows over 50 feet long, spending most of it’s time below, only surfacing to breath or chase prey with an engulfing chomp. Due to it’s large size, tribes often opt to build mobile aquatic bases upon it’s back and it’s strength ensures that the Mosasaurus is the most powerful and ideal oceanic escort!

A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite distinctly versatile herbivore, the Iguanodon!


Hey Survivors!

It’s been another interesting day, full of hot dino action and also some technical glitches! Thank you once again for being so patient and understanding about the challenges that arose during the 2nd day of Pre Championships.

Unfortunately our host machine had suffered an outage during the game and we had lost connection to the game for approximately 15 minutes. In this time the game was still running, however in that 15 minute period - players had been killed and the direction of the game had changed. Due to this, we had decided to restart the match completely, as the time it would take to collect those who had survived and those who hadn’t would have delayed the match continuing for a several hours -- affecting a significant amount of players who were unable to play later on. We also understood that many players had practiced for a 5-hour game, and switching to a 3-hour game may throw off strategies, and finally there was a possibility for end-user mistake when going through the logs manually collecting who had died prior to the outage specifically, which is why we felt the best decision to make would be to restart the game. The second game went much smoother, with a few hiccups which we are currently looking into and will have resolved for the next set of games.

We’d like to extend many thanks to Bikeman for shoutcasting the entire day, without a break! Truly a soldier and to both TangentGaming and typeForced for their co-casting throughout the day.


The following players along with their respective Tribe have qualified thus far for the Grand Finale to take place on Saturday the 24th of October:

Grand Finale Qualified Players Day Two

Teams are not locked for the Finale -- during the Finale pre-match in-game, these players may opt to swap or combine Tribes with others who are also playing in the Finale.


As earlier announced, due to the recent issues that arose in today’s game and Sunday’s game, we have decided that, tomorrow; anyone who has not yet qualified for the grand finale or participated in a Pre Championship round will be able to play during the Pre Championship games. That means everyone who qualified in the Preliminaries but has not yet placed for the Championship will be allowed to play in the last Pre-Championship matches and whitelisted. Due to the large number of people that have been whitelisted for this particular day, we will be running two servers that will be launched simultaneously. Players will be able to decide which server they would like to play on and we will be pulling the remaining qualified slots off of both of these servers evenly, so we advise that players join whatever the lower-population server is at the time to attempt to keep them even, which will help your odds. We expect these sessions to be around 200 players each.

The final number of qualified survivors we plan to push onto the Grand Finale is approximately 160 players, this means we’re looking to pull in the top 30-tribe players from each session tomorrow.

These games will both open for lobby pre-match at 1PM EST and they will launch at 2PM EST. In that one hour window, you will be able to organize your tribes and plan your pre-game strategies, as with the other SoTF Pre Championships that have been played!

Good luck to everyone tomorrow, and see you all then!


Those who watched the stream noticed we had a mid-game disqualification during the Pre-Championship match. The tribe Bumbi was accused of ESP use, and removed from the game pending investigation.

We want to address this publicly, because it’s important to us that people know what went down.

During any tournament game, especially these pre-championships, we have staff members monitor the game for suspicious behavior. Several people alerted us to the Megapithecus Rampage, and we already had a number of people spectating it, along with BikeMan’s and our own coverage. It was deemed in the moment to be sufficiently concerning that in the interest of protecting the integrity of the tournament pre-finals, and not potentially jeopardizing all of the other players who were participating, we disqualified them and removed them from the game.

To get an idea of what we were seeing, you can check BikeMan’s VOD at 3:08:40:

http://www.twitch.tv/bikeman/v/21308038

We put this here just so that people understand what it was that we were looking at, and why we took what actions we did during the live session where we had to make a real-time decision based on what we were witnessing combined with historical monitoring.

Upon further review of the evidence, including alternate vantage points, and several conversations with the members of the team, we are sufficiently convinced that their actions in this instance were more likely the use of extremely low draw distances, not ESP or any kind of third party program. We want to officially clear them of any suspicion in this regard, and apologize for any misunderstanding.

We will be resolving the draw distance issues as of the next tournament match, so that this will no longer be an issue. Draw Distances will be automatically enforced in the application to a standard minimum-distance when playing SotF.

Additionally, we will be qualifying Bumbi for the Finale which will be monitored from all vantage points, and will be expanding the Finale player pool by six players, so that no potential qualifying slots are taken up by their inclusion. We believe that their gameplay during the match and their incredibly strong position in the game at the time of disqualification warrants this.

Keep in mind that we are always watching. Use of exploits in game mechanics or settings are taken just as seriously as hacks or 3rd party programs, and we will not hesitate to disqualify people that use these. We review every case very seriously, and very closely.

Hey, it wouldn’t be a proper sport without a little referee-controversy, right? In all seriousness though, we appreciate everyone’s understanding that we’re still growing our experience with competitive gaming through Survival of the Fittest!