Official Statement Regarding H.O.D Gaming and Game Exploits

As for this thread being full of freshly joined accounts, this is something to also consider because those who are joining up now, are totally questionable as to why and who they are...

They could potentially be sock-puppet accounts.

Hell, HOD isn't even going to be doing anything in ARK... More of this forcing the devs hands to make an outcome that they want. This is so not the way to get anything done as now, anything that Wildcard do, will be mired by this BS, and forcing them to do what they want will be the new narrative.

Seriously, he could've posted the video private, he could've reported it to Wildcard, and if he was keen on fixing this, he'd remove his videos showing the exploit... But noooooooo.... Too many hits for that to be an option...

This, is where current development of games is heading, and people are just going to throw out this, every, time, that, anything, doesn't, go, their, way.... User/Threat driven development is a stupid thing, as the focus isn't on bettering the game, it's about forcing the devs to do something, for which the PLAYERS have no idea if it can be fixed or not, and how long that others who don't know about the exploits, are going to be vulnerable to their reckless releasing of exploits.

Honestly, this is why I'm really tired of players throwing out exploits into the wild... THINK ABOUT THOSE WHO _DON'T_ EXPLOIT, DON'T SCAN VIDEOS THAT EXPLOIT AND ARE AT MORE RISK THANKS TO YOUR SELFISH BEHAVIOR BY JUST THROWING OUT MORE INFO THAT PEOPLE WILL USE TO CAUSE TROUBLE....

No doubt because this video is trending, people are looking at the other videos, and going "Oh, so THAT'S how you do it..."

@BubbaCrawfish

I freshly created this because i've finally had enough. Make no mistake though - i've been playing this game and witnessing the rampant cheating for a year before you ever signed up.

And no, the video needed to be public - because as stated....they straight ignore other personal methods.

4 minutes ago, bob2002 said:

@BubbaCrawfish

I freshly created this because i've finally had enough. Make no mistake though - i've been playing this game and witnessing the rampant cheating for a year before you ever signed up.

And no, the video needed to be public - because as stated....they straight ignore other personal methods.

No, the video didn't NEED to be public... They could've raised awareness without showing every joe bloggs and his mangy dog how to do what he does. A post on the forums to raise enthusiasm and urge the devs to really do something, is something simple.

You're also not the only fresh account I've been seeing in here.

1 hour ago, BubbaCrawfish said:

And yes, I watched the video, but demanding that something be added immediately, is how you end up with bugs as people don't think about how it can be exploited, compared to fixing the issue that is plaguing them. By the knee-jerk implementation, often things get broken, REAL fast.

Pretty sure they have been asking for years, hence the reason they are saying immediately as of now

@BubbaCrawfish

Did you join forums and never play the game? You seem new or something. Cause you're completely clueless about how many times people have told WC about these exploits and posted MILLIONS of tickets....and nothing gets done. I don't think you actually even play. Or you're some try hard angling for forum mod or something dumb.

10 minutes ago, bob2002 said:

@BubbaCrawfish

Did you join forums and never play the game? You seem new or something. Cause you're completely clueless about how many times people have told WC about these exploits and posted MILLIONS of tickets....and nothing gets done. I don't think you actually even play. Or you're some try hard angling for forum mod or something dumb.

Along with if you check my posts, you'll find I try to get peoples installs and problems fixed by asking the simple questions, and giving out valid information.

Hey look they are promising stuff and ban you if you disagree. 

Honestly know needs your little complaining a#$@ if you don’t like the game just stop f’n playing and stop and accusing wildcard I’m sure you can’t do better a lot people like

the game if you don’t the game there plenty of games to play a few half a$s games but there are plenty

Why do you guys even have an account to fricken complain every cant be perfect you guys that think you can do better than wildcard

You need a month or more to respond on this tickets. And when u respond u be like:  ''Nothing can be done'' . I personally  send tickets for alot of stuff like when all my cryo dinos vanished  because of your bugs  u did nothing ,  i report meshing nothing happen i  lost 2 bases . Yesterday i reported  base that is  in the mesh so maybe 1 month later i will see a respond haha.

10 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

That's not a fix, that's just kicking the can down the road and opening up other problems. Years ago, people were using dino/behemoth gates to mesh into the terrain. I don't think anyone here would want any gates gone. This also just highlights how exploits evolve, which is what Ced said in the post.

Its a temporary fix !!! the current state is unacceptable. you can get the items out of the game for now and start to fix it and bring them later back... and a behemoth and a fcing chair that has no use in the game except meshing are totally different things... 

Please remove it for NOW until its fixed. i have like 5k ingame hours and 70% of my bases got meshed sooner or later. its just frustrating to loose hours and hours of work because an exploit.

like 7k players want the items out of the game for now. https://www.change.org/p/wildcard-fix-meshing-on-ark-pvp-servers?recruiter=903055967&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition&utm_term=share_petition

that should be almost every official player. so why you refuse to do it !? do u want to loose your whole playerbase ? And like i said, that fix should be just temporary until you have a better fix !

1. You say you take making the game fair and fun very seriously. That a clear lie. If you took it seriously you would have faster response times, take more actions against cheaters and exploiters and you would fire most of your enforcement team. 

2. When some one is spreading information about exploits, your first instinct should not be to take action, it should be to take in the information and fix the underlying problems so that information becomes invalid.

3.You want us to use your appeal process. What a joke. You take months to reply to appeals, clearly you don't care enough about your community.

4. You say the meshing techniques are continuously evolving. They are not, you just keep adding new ways to mesh. The chair has always been a problem. Then you added the climbing picks and the karkinos. Dont try and tell us you are improving your game but its too difficult. Grow up.

5. Filing a report. Pfft. We all know this does nothing.

6. Your enforcement team has not improved the quality of playing the game for anyone, so don't kid yourselves and try to fool us by saying that you have noticed a considerable improvement since their introduction. If anything things have been getting worse and worse, and lets not even begin to talk about preferential treatment and corruption within that team.

To sum it up, I uninstalled Ark the day you banned HOD Gaming because that was when you showed your true colours. You're more concerned about people exposing you than you are about fixing your game. Furthermore this response from Wildcard was pathetic and was made by someone who does not play on official servers or does not put the time into the game that the rest of us put in. Studio Wildcard, you are pathetic.

Dear Studio Wildcard, do not get me wrong, but as far as I am aware, those exploits are virtually unfixed for years.

In Security Business, you notify the vendor and after a grace period that material gets published. A common process which should make a better experience for all parties involved. Looking at ARK there are many smaller servers which you do not have an eye on to ban players who do cheat. In fact, it may be hard for admins to check it all without breaking the privacy of users.

Those publications may put a bit of pressure onto you to actually looking into the problem. I agree with you, this is not what you want to have. On the other hand I see more than 30000 players (source: https://steamcharts.com/app/346110) suffering from those exploits.

In Security we sometimes have "Security by obscurity", which is remaining silent about those flaws (see wikipedia quote in case you are not familiar with that term). For a game is like trying to disarm a bomb by praying instead of actually taking security measures.
 

Quote

In security engineering, security through obscurity (or security by obscurity) is the reliance on the secrecy of the design or implementation as the main method of providing security for a system or component of a system. A system or component relying on obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that if the flaws are not known, that will be sufficient to prevent a successful attack. Security experts have rejected this view as far back as 1851, and advise that obscurity should never be the only security mechanism.

Besides that I had filed 3 bug reports in the forum for various stuff which hasn't had any reply - so I see the frustration of users as they feel ignored. The result is their way of trying to apply a lever where they can. Publishing information is the only one they can make themselves heard as proven.

CoC you say ?

i really dare you and your WC friends to try to play pvp without spawning in any items and capture it all

not live coz meshers won't come

lets see you try to do something 

DEAD BROKEN GAME, just DONT BUY ANY WILDCARD / SNAILGAME BROKEN poop... you guys are just making them rich while they just waste your time, they lie and bend the rules like they want to. i mean they know how much time you need to invest to play this unhealthy poop game. and they are playing with peoples health to make money!!!! what do you expect from such a company?

those bugs are known since ark exists, instead of fixing them, they release dlc after dlc to make more money of you fools! "NO you can keep all your stuff, which you have farmed over a year and we wont wipe the servers on release"  then on release they throw out new servers so the old ones will die out, in my opinion this equals a lie and this from a developer team?! then this atlas piece of garbage which was just some kind of sea expansion of ark just to make even more money of you  

you all complain but i bet you would buy another dlc regardless

Hey if your so frickin perfect why don’t you try making a game to match ark .your sad about your useless life that you have to go around blaming other people for misery

That has to be the worst statement ever. You have to own up to your mistakes. How can you call someone talking about a mesh in a video and explaining it in single player a "gray" zone ? So now we cant even talk about meshing ? Do you want to silence potential discussions because you cant fix the issue ? Or do you just not want to look like the bad guys ? Well you are the bad guys, you fully baned someone, you have to be responsible for this, you can't just call it a "gray" zone. And even if it was in a "gray" zone which it 100% isn't, you didn't contact H.O.D. to potentially remove the video, you didn't give a warning, you straight up globally baned him and fail to ban others who are 100% in the black zone with plenty evidence to support it, this response is worse than Logan Pauls apology for the suicide forest video, seriously.

11 hours ago, Jordanp1177 said:

This is full of crap. Just a textbook copypaste mindless corporate response to try to avoid having to actually do anything or own up to your mistakes. Nobody will accept this response and you are digging yourselves into your own graves. So many people have quit because of this whole fiasco, people who have been playing for thousands of hours and have been bringing new players to the game no longer recommend it, and your player base is dropping. I mean even on unofficial people mesh and cheat, they are just more likely to be caught. People are even quitting even though they love the game, they are just quitting and no longer supporting you just based on how badly you guys have been preforming as developers. Guess you guys dont care though do you? I mean youre owned by snailgames now, one of the most money hungry cash grabbing developers to ever exist, most of the crap theyve developed and released ended up being nothing more than a cash grab they abandoned. As long as the meshers keep buying new accounts youre all good to go financially. RIP Ark.

Where does it say that they are owned by Snailgames ? I only see spin off ARK titles on the Snail Games website

28 minutes ago, Rocketraptor said:

Hey if your so frickin perfect why don’t you try making a game to match ark .your sad about your useless life that you have to go around blaming other people for misery

But we already made suggestions to fix the problem... Very simple ones at that, ones that I myself could do if I was a high working staff at Wild Card... We are also blaming the people responsible for flaws so that they fix them, not for misery

Suggestion how to FIX meshing:

The last couple hours i thought about how i would try to fix the mesh problem. here is my suggestion:

1. i would try to solve that issue with raycasts. everytime the client is loading in enemy structures like "turrets" or "generators" a process should be triggered.

2. aslong the enemy strucutres is loaded the process should be repeated every 20 seconds.

3. the process should be randomly triggered every 5 mins or so to prevent player building inside the mesh.

Process: 

1. Shoot raycast in every direction from the current origin player position.

2. Every raycast should be shoot like 20 meters or until it hits a normal from the mesh.

3. After its hits or hits not save the length of the raycast.

4. Now shoot a raycast back to the player from the postiton there the first raycast stopped.

5. If it hits NOT the origin position of the player or have a different length, then the raycast hits normal of the mesh.

6. That means that the player was INSIDE a mesh. because raycast (like turret shoots) goes throw the mesh, but not BACK in.

"Several changes each patch are aimed at fixing exploits but the methods that are used are continually evolving; as such, we are always trying to improve our procedures when it comes to situations that affect the player-base.  We use these situations to take a look at our internal process and identify areas where we can do better or provide more clarification."

Yes, these problems are continuing to evolve, but only because they keep getting ignored. And when those in fear of being meshed use methods to keep their hard work from getting destroyed by these Mesh Monkeys, you ask them to remove those defenses that they placed there to keep from getting meshed. But surprise surprise, once those defensive measures get removed *BAM!* Their whole base gets destroyed by a mesh monkey. And when these MMs get reported, it takes upwards of 3 months for your team to respond. And when you do promptly respond, it is not to ban them, but to warn them. Many of us can think of other dev teams with similar games (RUST, being a huge example here) that take AT MOST 6hrs to respond to such cheating.

I get it. You might not have a big enough QA team to assure that these things are handled promptly, but the fact that the QA people that you DO have is that incompetant, that one can safely compare them to a woman whom you had just handed your newborn baby to, and when that baby cries that same woman just drops the baby onto the ground to stop the baby from crying. That is not fixing the game. That is not the way to handle a game that is so beloved by many people, a game that has redefined the survival genre, a game that was YOUR DEV TEAM'S IDEA BABY and that you fought so freaking hard to keep. The Isle, Beasts of Bermuda, heck even Path of Titans... those are all survival games that don't have anywhere near as much content as you put into the game, nor do they have any defined stories (yet), and yet those games recieve a lot more love, affection, and most importantly SECURITY than what you have put into the game.

Take a look into the review of the game, not just the good ones. Then take a look into your team. Someone within is lazy and irresponsible. It is your personal duty as Devs to make sure that the game IS fair, through and through, and this incompetance should not be tollerated. You need to find out who it is, what they have done, how long they have responded, and whether or not they have biases, and replace them with people who are far more competant than this. Dondi and his team, the creators of The Isle, might not be the best of people, but they fired one of their best programmers because he was being a jerkwad in general. And now look at where The Isle is today: far more complete and more loved.

#FreeHOD , Wildcard, you started a fire that will burn you to ash, POWER TO THE PEOPLE

13 hours ago, pedobear1717 said:

''As always, we value community feedback and encourage you to share it with us.'' But if we don't agree with you YOU GET BANNED BOI

Yeah, don't call them out for not updating the release notes in a timely fashion or you get bitch slapped with a warning you must acknowledge before you can post again. SO MUCH FOR VALUING FEEDBACK FROM YOUR COMMUNITY. It was nice that the reinstated him BUT THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE BANNED HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!! He wasn't benefiting from the exploit...he was a victim BECAUSE WILDCARD CANNOT FIX THEIR OWN GAME AFTER TWO YEARS OF MESHING!!!! 

R.I.P. ARK....can't say the same for WILDCARD....D.I.A.F.

11 hours ago, Ownz1nR34LT1M3 said:

This, as well as many other reasons, is why I humbly live out my days on a Nitrado hosted ps4 Ark server.  It sucks that we lost the survival side of Pvp, but me and my buddies can still fight each other if we arrange something. 

As for what some of you are suggesting, and this statement by Wild Card, there should be a much longer process of "Think" before the part where you "Speak"  Asking people to spread the word about how horrible the Ark is will do nothing but reduce the likelihood that you will see this universe known as the Ark expanded.  Private servers, or other similar arrangements, is still a great way to play this game.

Did you guys ever consider the fact that all of your desires to raid and kill each other with no remorse for how much of someones hard work you are destroying, no efforts to make a world full of peace, and no Code of Honor between you and your enemies would create an Ark as toxic as the wastelands?

I am not here to insult everyone who is commenting here or Wild Card.  I am a huge fan of this game and would like to see it grow in a good direction.  I just can't sit by and watch as everyone throws the blame on Wild Card but you all seem to forget the golden rule of Pvp servers.  DONT GET TOO ATTACHED TO ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU WILL NOT HAVE IT FOREVER.

RIP Server 3.  The Law will never die.

What a waste of the English language. Your post makes no sense unless you support cheaters. I guess your screenname "1337sp34|<" says enough....

Ark is already dead....they had no plans on "expanding" it...unless you consider AtlASS an "expansion"....what a joke!

14 hours ago, Cedric said:

Providing a fair, fun, and safe environment for everyone is something we take very seriously here at Wildcard.  Building an enforcement team was the first step to making sure that people can enjoy ARK without fear of cheating.  Since the introduction of the enforcement team, we've noticed a considerable improvement in the overall quality of life of those playing on our official servers. In severe situations, like someone meshing or duping or spreading information related to such, our first instinct is to try and take action with the intention of preserving the integrity of our official server network.  

When someone is banned as a result of our Code of Conduct, there is an appeal process that allows for a fair review of the situation. There are always two sides to every story and we want to remain impartial and hear both. Any issue that violates our Code of Conduct is subject to a fair appeal process. When things land in the gray area, our first instinct is to do whatever is in our power to prevent abuse. Upon further review of the situation involving H.O.D Gaming, we felt that it was not deserving of a permanent ban. Videos showing exploit techniques are admittedly a gray area when it comes to enforcement, which is just one of the reasons why the appeal process exists for bans.

Several changes each patch are aimed at fixing exploits but the methods that are used are continually evolving; as such, we are always trying to improve our procedures when it comes to situations that affect the player-base.  We use these situations to take a look at our internal process and identify areas where we can do better or provide more clarification.

There are established methods for escalating exploits to the development team that exist to prevent the spread of information to the general public.  The more widely known an exploit is, the more likely it is to be exploited. In these instances you should file your report on the SurviveTheARK website.  You can find the link to report abuse or bugs under the support header.

We want to make sure that everyone can enjoy their experience on our official network and will continue to take exploit matters seriously.  As always, we value community feedback and encourage you to share it with us. Thanks for your continued support and passion for the game!

 

Team Wildcard

 

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WC addresses some guy getting himself banned, but what about the actual issue of meshing? What steps are being taken to fix that? An “enforcement” team only goes so far and only does so much. What else is WC doing to prevent meshing PROACTIVELY as opposed to just reacting (occasionally) to reports of abuse in problem areas?