The Great Migration & Xbox UWP

As we have previously mentioned in July, today marks the beginning of the process of removing our lower population ARK servers on PC, Xbox, and PS4. Here is a quick breakdown on how this process will work.

Taking Down Low Pop Servers
These lower population servers make up about 33% of the existing online servers, with calculations based on sustained player-count as well as popularity of game mode. These servers will be taken offline and be re-purposed for new, fresh servers that will be put up on launch day. Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down will become a Legacy server. 

Legacy servers will remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers.

Servers Up for Deletion
Below is a complete list of the servers that will be deleted come August 29th. You have from now until 12:00am EST on the 29th to move your belongings onto a server not present on this list. Please click one of the links below. They are separated by platform (PC, Xbox, and PS4).

How To Move Servers
If you are unfamiliar with the process, you are able to upload your items, creatures, and player through the Obelisk terminal, supply drops, as well as the Tek Transmitter. Survivors are advised to use Cross-ARK immediately to relocate their belongings onto a server that is not included in our take-down list above.

Server-wide Blackout
Our Official Server Network will be taken down at 12:00AM ET on August 29th and will remain down for approximately 8 hours, with our official servers coming back online at 8am ET. During this time we will be going through the process of removing all servers outlined in this post and re-purposing them into a new cluster, completely separate from all Legacy servers. The Legacy servers and all the new servers will come back online after that time.

Important Customer Support Legacy Information
When the current servers become Legacy servers on the 29th, we will no longer offer Customer Support to these Legacy servers. All outstanding tickets to our Customer Support team will be wiped clean on launch day, and no future tickets submitted by those playing on Legacy servers will be accepted. Going forward our Customer Support team will be focused on assisting those present on the new cluster, which will not be plagued by many of the issues that occurred during the Early Access process. Unfortunately it is beyond the scope of our operation to continue to offer support on Legacy servers at this time.

Do note that this is for Customer Support only, which is the process of submitting a ticket through our support system. Legacy clusters for PS4 and for Xbox will still be receiving Ragnarok servers. Legacy servers will also receive all of the same fixes and content that the new cluster will.

Allocation of New Servers
We know you are all very curious about this, but we don’t have this information ready to share quite yet. What I can tell you is that we plan to continue to support all current existing game modes in some capacity, so you won’t lose access to your favourite way to play the game. In the beginning we will be mainly focusing our efforts on strictly PVP and PVE servers on all maps, but will allocate servers to the other game modes based on their popularity.

Server Saves of Deleted Servers
We will make the save files available as soon as we can, which will likely be sometime before Saturday. We will host these files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available. 

To those affected by the move, we apologize greatly. This moving process will not be easy, but it is a necessary step towards our official launch. We have learned a lot throughout our Early Access adventures. Throughout our ups and downs, you’ve stood by our side and continued to support us during our growing pains and mess ups which is why we wanted our players to have the ability to keep as much progress as they can while still moving forward with a plan that will improve the game overall. We are committed to monitoring the health of this new cluster with our new ddos mitigation and changes to the transfer system (both of which will also be present on the Legacy servers), which will no doubt improve the official online playing environment.

We look forward to fostering a fair and fun community with the beginning of our brand new ARK cluster on launch day. We very much appreciate your support of ARK through its Early Access process. 

Xbox UWP, Rentable Servers, Crossbuy, & Crossplay!

While I have you here, I have some Xbox news to share as well!

Originally our plan was to go out with Play Anywhere on our launch day but unfortunately that has now been pushed back until mid-September. However I do have some exciting news to share: with the use of Xbox and Windows 10 PC Crossplay (UWP) you can host your own server without needing an extra copy of the game or a second console to do it! (Though it is important to note that you will still be able to host a Player Dedicated server this way.) If you own ARK digitally on Xbox, you get the Windows 10 PC version as well as the Xbox One X version for free and you can play with all your Xbox friends from your PC or either console. 

In addition, we'll be introducing rentable servers for our Xbox Survivors at that time! We'll be sure to let you all know when these additions are ready to go out to Xbox users.

Our release date is rapidly approaching and we're very excited for what is about to come. We hope you are too!

All the best,

Studio Wildcard