Jan 22, 2020

ARK: Survival Evolved - ARK: Survival Evolved

Hello Survivors,

Jesse and Jeremy here! We know things have been a bit quiet on Genesis news for the past few weeks, even though there is much more to show you, we’ve been deeply immersed in the pre-release development process. That being said, we’re writing today to tell you that the final release date for Genesis Part 1 is now February 25th, 2020 simultaneously on all platforms.

This additional delay will no doubt come as a disappointment to everyone who is eagerly awaiting Genesis. We’re extremely sorry to push it back an extra month, but as we have been heads-down with the rest of the team polishing, balancing and putting the final pieces together, we really felt that the extra wait will be worth it both for the quality of the base game and the ambitious new expansion.

The live ops team is taking advantage of the scheduling change by making sure we have a really fun Valentine’s event in store for you (something we originally planned to skip because it followed so closely behind the launch of the new expansion). Plus, we’ve just deployed an initial anti-meshing patch, and next week we will be rolling out a definitive anti-meshing logic overhaul that should fundamentally address those long-standing issues. As we look forward to a successful cross-platform launch of Genesis, all of this will make ARK substantially better for everyone who plays PvP and PvE.

On behalf of the broader Wildcard team, we thank you so much for your passion, creativity, feedback, and support. We are extremely thrilled to bring ARK’s next chapter to you, and are looking forward to a hugely exciting 2020! Meanwhile, here are some tasty new screenshots from ARK: Genesis Part 1!

Jesse and Jeremy
Studio Wildcard

Anti-Meshing Efforts

Hey everybody! I’m WC_jellyknee, the lead Live Ops Engineer on the ARK team.

I wanted to tell you about our efforts to prevent cheating in ARK in general, and our continuing efforts to defeat undermeshing specifically. We're excited to get this post out in order to address the issue of meshing with the community and, also, to share news on how we will be countering meshing more aggressively moving forward via technical solutions. I'm going to start off by quoting from a previous developer diary:

Undermeshing refers to the ability to get to where you aren't supposed to by moving outside of the playable space. Almost every game is susceptible to undermeshing in some form. Most speed runs rely on undermeshing, for example. It's effectively impossible to solve completely, at least automatically. The approaches taken to prevent it are usually a tradeoff between how much freedom you want the player to have, how complex your world is, and how much processing time you can afford to spend on physics. Generally, when there's an instance of meshing, it's caused by bad collision setup, improper level geometry (holes), or a problem with the algorithm used to move the character through the world. In some instances, you place kill volumes in locations that you want to guarantee that the player doesn't end up, but that isn’t a global solution. When we lay out our levels - we construct them in the way that is interesting and optimize them for efficiency so that we can maximize quality and quantity. What that means is generally the world outside of the space you're meant to play in is empty - we spend our resources on the spaces where players are at. In addition - we reuse assets many, many times - rotating a rock different ways to make it look different before shoving it into the terrain at various depths to mask the reuse and keep it visually pleasing. Technically, the physics for these objects overlaps, and if you get past the surface of one, you'll stand on the next one down. While that sounds like it would help, it’s actually the meat of the problem. Adding more meshes doesn’t help, because once you can get past one, you can get past the next one. That said, there have been many instances where we’ve flagged the collision on an object incorrectly, or left a minute hole that we can and do address through Level Design.

You can read the rest of the developer diary here:

Undermeshing has been a thorn in the side of both players as well as the enforcement team, and a serious concern for the development team. To help mitigate this, we have further upgraded our anti-undermeshing system in order to help the enforcement team track down problematic map areas, as well as tracking down people who are breaking the ARK Code of Conduct.

This underlying system has been in place for a while now, gathering useful data, and we have been testing it to make sure that it works reliably. We wanted to make sure that it minimizes the amount of false positives - we don't want it to flag locations where players can get to during normal play

Now that this system has been proven to be effective, we've now built another layer on top of it to take advantage of this data. I don't want to give specific numbers here because it can only help bad actors try to find new exploits, but I'll explain how this system works:

1) If we detect a player undermeshing for a certain amount of time, it will teleport them to a valid position that they were previously at. It will then monitor that player for an amount of time.
2) If the system finds that player undermeshing again within that time, or if it's not able to teleport the player to a previous position, then the player's character will die. Any items being carried will remain at that location.
3) The system is aware of what the character is doing, and will take certain actions into account to help prevent player frustration.

The system, whilst in a state we’re confident will have an impact on limiting meshing, is in a state of ongoing development. We will continually make improvements and updates, along with rolling out more definitive undermeshing-resolving changes in the next week.

While we continue to introduce new content and experiences to fans of ARK we will remain focused on ensuring that everyone has a fair playing experience on the Official Network.

By default, the anti meshing system will be on for the Official Network For Unofficials, these launch parameters can be used: -noundermeshchecking // Will turn it off the anti meshing system entirely -noundermeshkilling // Will turn it off the anti meshing player kills (but still allow teleporting)

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Jan 14, 2020

Community Crunch 213

ARK: Survival Evolved - complexminded

Patch Notes Round-Up

As we near the launch of Genesis and a new year of ARK content, the current state of the game and the topics that are trending in the community remain essential to us. While we are excited to introduce new content and experiences to ARK survivors, it's important to take a brief moment and recap some significant updates that have made an impact on the current state of the game.

Developers that are working on Live Ops updates have a different priority and focus than that of those working on new content. The main focus of these updates is to ensure that you have an enjoyable and fair playing experience with current game content. As you might imagine, it is a constant process of observing, investigating, adjusting, interacting, updating, reporting, resolving, and repeating the cycle.

Performance, Bugs, Balance, Quality of Life and fixing Exploits are important to us and we know they hold a high priority for you folks too. These updates may not be new news for the well-informed survivor but they may provide insight into the thought process behind the changes. Without further ado, let’s get stuck into what we’ve been up to with recent live game patches:

Performance

Performance is an intrinsic cornerstone of a player's experience. Improving performance is an ongoing process for us that we’ll continue to seek to optimize. Here’s what we’ve worked on in regards to performance recently:

- Changed droppeditem physics to improve server performance. - Added animation staggering system by default to reduce CPU overhead - Applied a one time disabling of replication on all sleeping players on all Official PvE servers. - Fixed a client-side crash related to rendering 3D text - Vastly improved server stability, with various Network Channel threading crashes fixed

Unintended Mechanics / Exploits

Addressing exploits and unintended game mechanics in a meaningful way is crucial to the health of the game on our Official servers. Recently, the team has focused quite heavily on eliminating various methods of exploiting and we’ll continue to hit them as hard and as often as we can!

Many of our recent exploit fixes targeted meshing methods and dupes but there was also some focus on unintended mechanics like MEKs becoming invulnerable and the pretty damn rude Ice Titan breath going through the mesh much to the dismay of its targets, amongst others.

Addressing exploits is an ongoing commitment and we look forward to rolling out more fixes in the near future.

- Unattach all grapple hooks when sitting on a chair. - Disabled climbing pick from attaching to gateframes, charge lanterns, ladders, fence foundations, and railings - Fixed 2 mesh exploits related to creatures. - Fixed 2 mesh exploits related to structures. - Fixed ice titan breath going through the mesh. - Fixed some cases where building structures did not use a bidrectional trace check (allowing certain structures to be placed deep into the mesh). - Fixed a case where a collision check on players wasn't correctly applying thereby allowing them to go enter some meshes. - Fixed an incorrect collision profile which allowed MEKs to collide into and stack on top of one another. - Enforcer can no longer blink onto/or very very near creatures - Pipes can no longer be placed on enemy structures - Fixed an exploit with the snow owl that allowed it to infinitely freeze players - Added additional server-side protection to Explorer Notes to prevent cheaters from acquiring them with hacks - Passengers on creatures will now be ejected if the creature is picked up - Fixed an exploit related to turret damage - Fixed various duping methods

Bugs

What is there to say about bugs? We don’t like them, players don’t like them and they need to be squashed. Along with what we’d consider more run of the mill bug fixes, we’ve addressed some bugs with far reaching implications in regards to MEKS, Managarmrs and Velonasaurs, among other issues. Our players are adept at rooting out bugs and we’ll continue to iterate on your bug reports moving forward.

- Reloading bows from prone TPV no longer gets them stuck - Firing bows while in orbit camera no longer gets them stuck - Firing bows while running no longer gets them stuck - Pipes can no longer be placed on enemy structures - Fixed the enemy build radius check for the fence support - Fixed the whip to properly pickup items that are flat on the ground (previously would miss such items) - Fixed a bug which prevented players entering 'K' cam a second time if they had a weapon/tool in their hand. - Fixed a bug which allowed Velonasaurs to shoot endlessly in turret mode without draining stam - Fixed a collision issue with Velonasaurs - Fixed a network desync related to Velonasaurs - Fixed a client crash related to Velonasaurs - Fixed a client FPS bug related to Velonasaurs - Fixed a bug which allowed MEKs to be invulnerable to various types of damage - Fixed a bug which allowed Managarmrs to use their ice breath underwater/whilst swimming - Fixed a bug which allowed Velonasaurs to shoot endlessly in turret mode without draining stam - Fixed two damage miscalculation bugs with the Managarmr pounce and Velonasaur AOE Needle Spin - Fixed a bug with the Velonasaur's attacks causing it to incorrectly attack the wrong collision group on Paracers, Diplodocus, Brontos, and more creatures. - Items placed on top of water pipes will now respect enemy foundations. - Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause the atmospheric fog to break - Fixed a bug which would cause the Snow owl heat vision to cause other clients FPS to drop when around large bases or a lot of creatures

Quality of Life

As many players will have noticed, we’ve rolled out a significant number of QoL updates recently. The time you spend in-game is valuable to you and is most rewarding when it's not filled with tedium. We prefer your time be spent on the things you enjoy. This is where Quality of Life comes in! These updates have incorporated changes to stack sizes, inventory slots and other miscellaneous tweaks to help make your time on the ARK feel engaging and rewarding. Please continue to let us know the types of QoL changes you’d like to see as we work together to identify what’s important to players. We understand that the ARK Community is diverse with each group holding a different perspective and all of your feedback is valuable to us.

- Dedicated Storage weight reduced from 50 to 20 - Decreased cook time on the industrial grill by 50% - Shortened aberration earthquake duration by ~10% - Shortened Scorched Earth sandstorm duration by ~15% - Lowered gasoline consumption rate by 50% on the following structures: Chemistry Bench Electrical Generator Fabricator Industrial Cooker Industrial Forge Industrial Grill Industrial Grinder. - Modified the stack size on various items: Veggie Cake 5 -> 10 Raw Meat 20 -> 40 Cooked Meat 30 -> 50 Sap 20 -> 30 Fiber 200 -> 300 Thatch 100 -> 200 Organic Polymer 10 -> 20 Vacuum Compartment 100 -> 5 Vacuum Compartment Moonpool 100 -> 5 - Modified the inventory slot size of various items: Industrial forge 60 -> 100 Chemistry Bench 60 -> 100 Fridge 48 -> 80 Industrial Cooker 48 -> 80 Preserving Bin 24 -> 48 Mortar and Pestle 12 -> 24 Refining Forge 8 -> 24 - Made it easier to look at items to pick them up - Improved dropped item placement when dropping items from structures to reduce the chance of them getting stuck - Added “F” alternate activate option on items to pickup all items in a nearby range - Improved third person view offset so that it now positions at the average head height rather than the center of the character’s capsule to improve how it feels when the camera is brushed up against a collision in the world

Game Balance

Balance is an ongoing process and we’ll continue to monitor our servers to see how players are using creatures and items as we consider making balance changes. Healthy balance is achieved by a constant process of small nudges, changes, and tweaks in order to improve the entire ecosystem as it is maintained and honed in response to the needs of the player-base.

It’s no secret the Managarmr and Velonasaur have held the top position in the food chain to dominate the meta since the launch of Extinction.

The Managarmr intrinsically holds loads of utility and that has made it challenging to balance whilst retaining that utility that helps make it the popular dino it is. Our intention was never to make Manas capable of remaining constantly airborne. Granted, its place as the top player killer was partially due to some bugs/unintended mechanics which we also addressed.

Velonasaurs were outputting extremely high DPS. Similar to the Managarmr, bugs are responsible in part for this (we see you, no stamina drain in turret mode and an unexpected scaling to the right click +c attack!). Velos are primarily intended to help in base defenses but they were far stronger in the meta than intended.

That said, our statistics show they’re still two of the most popular creatures which is interesting!

Other balance changes include some steps towards addressing the cliff platform meta, giving Brontos some love, smacking Plant Z a little and tweaking enforcers up after some functional changes we made in order to mitigate a meshing exploit left them looking a little sad.

- Enforcer blink recharge cooldown reduced from 20 seconds to 7 seconds - Enforcer blink range extended from 4000 units to 5000 units - Enforcer can no longer blink onto/or very near creatures - Velonasaurs will now consume stamina whilst in AI-turret mode - Reduced Velonasaur recovery time from 4 seconds to 1 second - Managarmr limited to 3 jumps, 6 strafes, and 1 dash before it has to land - Reduced Managarmr ice-breath exponential damage scaling by approximately 20% - Reduced stun duration on Jellyfish and Eels by 20% Wild eels 7 -> 5.6 Tamed eels 1.5 -> 1.2 Cnidaria 4 -> 3.2 - Reduced Plant Z flash range by 50% - Plant Z Grenades weight reduced from 10 to 5 - Metal Cliff Platforms no longer take 50% less damage from explosive damage - Bronto should no longer be affected by knockback - MEK pistol Damage reduced by 10% - Fixed the enemy build radius check for the fence support

Content

The whole team has a lot of fun conceptualizing and implementing events and event-related content for our community to enjoy. The end of 2019 saw a return of our Turkey Trial Event and 365,085 player deaths from a well-known culprit. Shortly after, we released Winter Wonderland and introduced the adorably dorky chibi pets. Last year you indicated that events were important and listed several things you’d like to see. Because of this, we took some time to invest in events and make them more memorable for you. We get a kick out of the pics and art you folks share of your events skins and chibi collections, thank you for including us in your holiday adventures!

As always, keep your feedback coming, whether we are interacting directly or reading and observing, we pay attention to, and value, your communication with us.

EVO Event

Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 17th of Jan at 1 PM EST until Monday the 20th of Jan at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes:

2x Harvesting Rates
2x Taming Rates
2x EXP Rates

That wraps up this Community Crunch, our roundup of what we’ve been up to lately and a little insight into our process. For a more in-depth look at all of our recent patches, you can view full notes in our forums