Grapeshot Games, an offshoot of Ark developer Studio Wildcard, has been forced to takes its pirate MMO Atlas offline for a second time in less than a week, following yet more shenanigans from cheaters - who this time spawned in drakes and hijacked official in-game server messages.
Late last week, Grapeshot elected to shut down its Atlas servers and instigate a rollback of more than five hours after cheaters, believed to belong to player group Black Butterfly, caused havoc by spawning the likes of tanks, giant whales, and airplanes into the pirate game. The studio later claimed the incident was a result of an admin's Steam account being "compromised", and that it had "taken the appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen again."
Unfortunately, while Atlas' downtime and server rollback initially appeared to resolve cheating issues, it wasn't long before more antics ensued.
Pirates have once again proven themselves incapable of civil behaviour, as salty early access survival sandbox Atlas has been hit by ne’er-do-wells dropping terrible whales and other oddities all over the world – for the second time in a week. While Thursday’s whale of a time was down to a “compromised” admin account, according to developers Grapeshot Games, Sunday’s cetacearama was down to “a technical exploit” they say they’ve now closed. Once again, Grapeshot took all the official servers temporarily offline and rolled back the North American PvP servers to an earlier backup. Naughty pirates.
Grapeshot Games, an offshoot of Ark developer Studio Wildcard, has been forced to takes its pirate MMO Atlas offline and rollback servers after cheaters began spawning giant whales, tanks, and even aeroplanes into the game.
The incident began yesterday evening when a group of players were streaming their armada's attempt to bring down an enemy galleon on Twitch. In the stream, hosted by a dashingly outfitted BurkeBlack, the armada's carefully laid plans are thrown into disarray as giant whales suddenly began spawning in unnaturally large numbers around the enemy's vessel.
As the stream went on, events took an even more bizarre turn, with BurkeBlack's ship suddenly dive-bombed by an aircraft - not, usually, the sort of vehicle players would expect to encounter (particularly in a high-speed free-fall) during Grapeshot's pirate game.
Atlas, the pirate-themed MMO from Ark: Survival Evolved, can't seem to catch a break. Yesterday, someone managed to gain access to an admin's Steam account and wreak havoc across the Official NA PvP network.
Using the admin accounts' special debug commands, the interloper bombarded players with warplanes falling from the skies, a number of World War 2 tanks, and an ocean full of whales. Atlas streamer BurkeBlack just so happened to be recording the whole thing, and you can see the chaos in action below.
Here's that same streamer being almost struck by a falling plane:
And here's another streamer being assaulted with tanks:
The damage was so bad that Atlas developers Grapeshot Games had to roll back the servers by five hours, undoing any lasting effects from the impromptu summonings. They were also quick to point out, in an official statement, that the incident was not caused by a hack, third-party program, or exploit and have taken "the appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen again."
Over on the Atlas subreddit, players are understandably upset by the events. The prevailing theory is that those involved with this incident were a part of a company called Black Butterfly which, according to multiple Reddit threads, haven't been banned. Many players are demanding more clarification on what went wrong and why the alleged perpetrators are still playing.
While this latest incident was clearly not a bug, it's unfortunate considering all the issues that have plagued Atlas since launch. After several delays last month, the game finally launched onto Steam Early Access but still suffers from performance and stability issues and a variety of bugs that included accidentally giving NPC ships machine-gun-cannons that destroyed players within seconds—you do have to wonder what other surprises the MMO will offer up.
Thanks, RPS!
Some scurrilous hornswaggler yesterday gained access to an Atlas admin account with dominion over the piratical survival sandbox’s North American PvP servers and used it to, in the words of developers Grapeshot Games, “cause some devastation.” This appears to have included summoning a great many sea beasties as well as, ah, driving around in World War 2 tanks and raining warplanes from the skies. To undo the devastation, Atlas rolled those servers back to a backup from some five-and-a-half-hours earlier. Skulduggery may be supported in Atlas, even encouraged, but only approved skulduggery: no ducking, no bombing, no heavy petting, no tanks.
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