Love Evolved (formerly known as Valentines Day) is returning next week! Love Evolved will be active on Tuesday, February 11 18:00 UTC and will run through Tuesday, February 18 18:00 UTC.

While ARK is under Cupid's spell, you can expect to find past event items and brand new skins! See the full event details below:

Dates
2/11 - 2/18 18:00 UTC

Activities
For the duration of the event, Coelacanth will be fishing for some love. Reel in these amorous fish and be showered in candies, some chocolates, and even chibi pets!

Rates

• Increased breeding rates to 3x
  
• Increased player XP rates to 2x
  
• Increased harvesting rates to 2x

New Emotes

• Flirt Emote

New Items

• "Cupid Couture Bottom" (Pants Skin)
  
• "Cupid Couture Top" (Shirt Skin)
  
• "Halo Headband" (Hat Skin)
  
• "Teddy Bear Grenades" (Grenade Skin)
  
• "Bow & Eros" (Bow skin)
  
• "Love Shackles" (Handcuffs Skin)
  
• 6 New Chibi Pets

Wild Event Creature Colors

• Red
  
• Magenta
  
• Light Red
  
• White

Past Event Items

• Valentine Chocolates - Chocolates can be used to heal your tames or provide a big boost in acquiring new tames!
  
• Valentine Candies - Candies can be used to give a tamed dinosaur a random coloring!

Anti-Mesh System
The results from the implementation of the anti-mesh system has had a positive effect on the overall health of the game. We ask for your patience as we continue to improve the false positives you are seeing. Every report you submit brings us closer to an exploit-free environment. Thank you for your patience as we realize this is a inconvenience for those who encounter these problematic areas. We are working diligently to correct any false positives that currently remain. When making your reports, please list the map you had the encounter on.

Mod Sponsorship Applications
A friendly reminder that the mod sponsorship application process closes on the 2/5.

Apply for Sponsorship




Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 7th of Feb at 1 PM EST until Monday the 10th of Feb 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

Until next time!

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Last week we deployed upgrades to the anti-mesh system that significantly reduced the amount of meshing that is occurring on the Official Network. It’s been instrumental in creating a fair playing experience and decreasing the amount of meshing, as we are seeing an overall 90% reduction. We truly believe, with your help, we’ll be able to move the needle to 99%!



The first iteration of the anti-mesh system only included detection which enabled us to collect critical data needed to upgrade the system to take action on those who were identified to be meshing. The wide-scale deployment of the second iteration last week allowed us to reduce the edge cases and false-positives that resulted from upgrading the system to take action. We’re now introducing an upgrade to the action-taking capabilities of the anti-mesh system that is much more aggressive than the prior version we introduced last week. Instances in which you may have been teleported before will be less forgiving now. This upgrade has been tested on multiple maps and across a large number of servers. After fixing the few edge cases that resulted from the upgrade, we are now confident in widening the scope of servers to ensure the system is ready for the larger network.

It is possible that you may find yourself in situations where the system has not accounted for and we're asking for your assistance in reporting them. Your tribe log will contain important information about any actions taken by the anti-mesh system. That information is useful in determining if it was a legitimate action and will be utilized to make further improvements to the detection logic. We've created a thread for you to file your reports.

We will be vigilant in reviewing your feedback and responding to cases in which the anti-mesh system acts incorrectly. With your help and cooperation we believe we can eliminate meshing, an exploit that ruins the gaming experiences for many survivors across Official and Unofficial Networks.



Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 31st of Jan at 1 PM EST until Monday the 3rd of Feb 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

Until next time!

Twitter: http://twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: http://facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: http://instagram.com/survivetheark
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Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110
Youtube: http://youtube.com/survivetheark

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


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:


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.


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Love is in the air! We know you love events and we love providing new experiences for ARK survivors. For Valentines Day 5, we'll be introducing new content similar to Winter Wonderland where we saw the introduction of Chibi's.

In addition to existing content you'd expect from past Valentine's Day events, we'll be introducing new content to collect. Our pint-sized chibi friends were such a welcome addition we've decided to reintroduce them for this event! You'll be able to collect the 54 chibi's from the past event, in addition to 5 new chibi pets.

We know you're probably fishing 🐟 for more information on how to get your hands on the new chibi pets, emotes and skins. We'll hook 🎣 you up with the details in due time Similar to the last event, we added new functionality that modders will be able to take advantage of in the future. This advancement expands our item skin functionality to allow support for items like the bow that support multiple ammo types. Simply put: We're able to add skins to more item types now!



We're thrilled to share new emotes, skins, and chibi's with the ARK community for Valentines Day 5 and we'll be sure to post more details as we near closer!

Head over to SurviveTheArk for the full community post including information on the upcoming Legacy PvP closure!

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 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:



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.



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.





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.



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.





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.




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

Winter Wonderland will be returning for the fourth time on Tuesday with all new presents for ARK survivors. The winter-themed holiday event begins tomorrow at 10am PST for PC, XBOX, and PS4 and will last until Tuesday, January 7th. All maps will receive Winter Wonderland and all its content including RaptorClaus and GachaClaus, however, only The Island will have a visual winter theme.

One of our most notable helpers, RaptorClaus, will be back to drop off holiday gifts filled with loot, event items, mistletoe, and lumps of coal for all those naughty survivors. You'll be able to catch RaptorClaus flying across the skies at midnight (game time) on all maps.

GachaClaus is also returning to help RaptorClaus spread the holiday cheer! GachaClaus will be roaming all maps in holiday garb and sporting holiday-themed colors. He will be accepting your coal and in exchange will gift you holiday-themed items, or you can trade-in your mistletoe and coal for a chance at event items. weapons, armor and a brand new event item, Chibis!

While Winter Wonderland is active, you'll have a chance to collect over 50 ARK chibi pets. ARK chibi pets are cute miniaturized versions of the creatures you have become familiar with in your travels across the ARK universe. Chibi's pets can be leveled up by killing specific alpha creatures and in return, you'll be granted additional player levels . Some chibi pets may be harder to find so you'll have to visit GachaClaus and RaptorClaus to find all the chibi pets! Can you collect them all?

Check out the full event details on SurviveTheArk

Please head over to SurviveTheArk for the latest community post!

Please head over to SurviveTheArk for the latest community post!