Statement on Reddit

[rawsh]

first off the statement in its entirety, 

 

Quote

Our Customer Support team has and does answer tickets. The unfortunate thing was that as issues escalated during the process we were absorbed in finishing the game, the ticket count escalated with it. Waiting times increased. The team did and still do the best they can, but the fact is that the legacy servers were plagued by issues that were not fixed as quickly as we would have liked. Duping being the obvious, which was heavily abused on what I would wager was every official server. Extensive ddos has led to characters being lost in server transfers, and then characters needed to be replaced. I am sure I do not have to list every issue, those who use our official network are aware of them.

We have been working for weeks on solutions for both ddos mitigation and for duping prevention, and have made great progress. I have looked at and tested them myself. Ideally these will stop a massive amount of the issues with ddos and duping that are currently occurring when they are rolled out. They may not be foolproof, and if they aren't that is something that we will be looking to address as quickly as possible. But I believe the difference will certainly be substantial.

If we continue to address tickets currently in the system, those tickets could go unanswered for months meaning that any new issues that occur under our new system will be added to the end of that list. I understand the disappointment when I say that it is beneficial for us to approach ARK with a clean slate and address the issues that will be pertinent to our player population at the time of release, and not the issues that will be fixed but affected the community in the past. Our official servers have been a testing ground for new content and fixing bugs. You have been our testers. It has never been about not appreciating the support that our community has given us over the last 2 years. We are extremely grateful for that. But, as a game about to leave early access, which few early access games ever do, we have to make difficult decisions that few gaming studios have had to make before. We do not necessarily know what the best options are, all we can do is make the choices that we believe will be the best for ARK as a whole going forward.

"Our Customer Support team has and does answer tickets", mmmmh maybe some, mainly your customer support is waaay overworked and could have used a team at least twice its size, ever thought of that?,

 

"which was heavily abused on what I would wager was every official server.";  lady are you high? , leading with the unwarranted insult to the face, but ok shes been away from the servers for a loooong time obviously has no idea whats going on, for example that duping is rarely a problem on pve, 

 

"Extensive ddos has led to characters being lost in server transfers"; do you want to tell me that all those lost characters, one of the biggest problems arks transfersystems has to offer making traveling between arks a risk every time?, is entirely the fault of duping attempts?, jeah.... right... neat bow you tied around those two issues, too bad most people will recognize they got nothing to do with each other.

 

"I do not have to list every issue, those who use our official network are aware of them".;  we are painfully aware of unfixed issues some of which persist till today, and we have reported many of them , and many of those reports went unheard... 

 

The rest to me is asscovering, the whole thing feels like a "we have to write something" statement, 

what my cynical mind is telling me this statement means:" we dont wanna spend money or time on the player base that helped make our game", 

 

in the end there is at least a little bit of much needed reflection, : "We do not necessarily know what the best options are, all we can do is make the choices" ; no you dont and i woulndnt claim i do, but over the past months it has become painfully apparent, that not knowing whats going on in your game, or at least having played on one of your own servers will lead to horrible choices ruining a game that was pretty awesome at one point,  

[SmokeyB]

What I got from that is that duping isn't fixed,  it never will be they just will try and fix the current method used to dupe. Players will find a way and trolls will spread the way to do it on utube and bam were back to square one.

[CyanicEmber]

That can be solved by liberal and swift application of the ban hammer.

[PuffyPony]

What I just read is someone who does not understand the confines of working as a for-profit business while trying to make a quality product and is so angry about their experience that they're completely unwilling to consider that the dev might be giving an honest answer here.

[OnePotatoChip]

37 minutes ago, CyanicEmber said:

That can be solved by liberal and swift application of the ban hammer.

And, hopefully, now that they're not fixated on 'release rush', they'll actually be more active in hunting down the new methods of duping and the people behind them. 

[waterKeeper]

3 minutes ago, OnePotatoChip said:

And, hopefully, now that they're not fixated on 'release rush', they'll actually be more active in hunting down the new methods of duping and the people behind them. 

Yeah, this.

 

I think they were almost completely neglecting the state on officials there at the end. Idk what they'll do or if it will work, I think I have been more excited and curious about a fix for duping than the release or dlc. 

[NebraskARK]

Makes sense to me.

[Thul]

2 hours ago, SmokeyB said:

What I got from that is that duping isn't fixed,  it never will be they just will try and fix the current method used to dupe. Players will find a way and trolls will spread the way to do it on utube and bam were back to square one.

Correct duping is not fixed they lied about that also. WC is so full of poop.

[waterKeeper]

1 minute ago, Thul said:

Correct duping is not fixed they lied about that also. WC is so full of poop.

I don't think they said it was fixed, they used words like "mitigated."

[Thul]

6 minutes ago, waterKeeper said:

I don't think they said it was fixed, they used words like "mitigated."

Here’s the full statement from Stieglitz:

“Earlier today we at Wildcard had made a decision to wipe the PvP servers in order to clean up the “duped” items which have been infesting ARK’s servers as of late. However, after further conferring with the various designers and community managers at Wildcard, and reviewing more pro-and-con debates among ARK players, and talking to the press more in detail about it, we’ve decided to stick to the original plan and NOT wipe: to reiterate, there will be NO mass server wipe for ARK.

“Instead, we’ll be launching an ADDITIONAL new PvP Server cluster network at ARK’s retail release on August 8, while the legacy Early Access server cluster will stay online and intact. At that time we’ll be rolling out the new server code and infrastructure necessary to prevent these hacking issues from ever occurring again. We are sorry for the abrupt turn-around on this decision and any confusion that it may have caused, and we’re looking forward to a fun ARK launch with everyone in the weeks ahead!”

Let me help you with your foot!

[waterKeeper]

As it turns out, duping was a thing since the beginning, but most players were unaware of it. For me, the game was playable back then, I never encountered duping until the last month or two when blew up. If they can reduce its occurrence to before it was common, I think I'd be ok with that.

 

But pissed off players are going to really make them work so they better be prepared.

 

[waterKeeper]

6 minutes ago, Thul said:

Here’s the full statement from Stieglitz:

Yeah he's probably wrong there, but Jens statement is more recent and she specifically says the fixes aren't foolproof. And she makes it sound like when it does recur, they will keep trying to suppress it. That's the most I can hope for, that they dedicate themselves to containing it and ban everyone that does it.

 

It's been a waiting game at this point. I'm not playing at launch. I'm sitting back and watching. If anything I'll play some single player or couch co-op casually while I wait, or try some mods on pc. I'm enjoying the break.

[Insomniak]

@Jat you have answered me directly here before, so I'm going to throw this out there. Wouldn't a better support solution be to wipe the current query and start over, but only respond to issues like lost characters and lost tribes, someone who maybe can't login to their server.. things like that. 

I would imagine this you could support both clusters easy enough with such a strict criteria? This is and will be an ongoing major issue for players staying legacy, as well as a fear in our minds that one day, our characters will get deleted from a transfer or login error.

As you already know, when someone reads reviews they normally don't read into them deep enough and hearing about people losing thousands of hours of work without support may be something that sways them.

[Insomniak]

32 minutes ago, waterKeeper said:

As it turns out, duping was a thing since the beginning, but most players were unaware of it. For me, the game was playable back then, I never encountered duping until the last month or two when blew up. If they can reduce its occurrence to before it was common, I think I'd be ok with that.

 

But pissed off players are going to really make them work so they better be prepared.

 

It's been there from the get go, yes. It's hard to stop the effects of it but for dev effort on stopping it thus far..  that's a F all the way around. The bright side is going forward it can't get worse, so any effort is better than what we had. I would imagine a new Eula would help with discipline, which as you mentioned would help being a good chunk of that effort, just WC being proactive. There's a reason, after all, that people spank their kids lol 

[DeningWei]

3 hours ago, SmokeyB said:

What I got from that is that duping isn't fixed,  it never will be they just will try and fix the current method used to dupe. Players will find a way and trolls will spread the way to do it on utube and bam were back to square one.

Yep that's what I took out of it as well.

[DeningWei]

38 minutes ago, Insomniak said:

@Jat you have answered me directly here before, so I'm going to throw this out there. Wouldn't a better support solution be to wipe the current query and start over, but only respond to issues like lost characters and lost tribes, someone who maybe can't login to their server.. things like that. 

I would imagine this you could support both clusters easy enough with such a strict criteria? This is and will be an ongoing major issue for players staying legacy, as well as a fear in our minds that one day, our characters will get deleted from a transfer or login error.

As you already know, when someone reads reviews they normally don't read into them deep enough and hearing about people losing thousands of hours of work without support may be something that sways them.

Especially when the new servers come out WC will probably have even less total servers than before release.

[SmokeyB]

Just now, waterKeeper said:

As it turns out, duping was a thing since the beginning, but most players were unaware of it. For me, the game was playable back then, I never encountered duping until the last month or two when blew up. If they can reduce its occurrence to before it was common, I think I'd be ok with that.

 

But pissed off players are going to really make them work so they better be prepared.

 

Before tek there was no need to dupe,  limitless weight quetz was good for metal tier,  we could actually farm. Now flyers speed and stam is broke,  and even a high weight anky doesn't really get that much metal,  farmings broke but we need millions of mats to build tek structures. No one has time to farm element to make a full tek Base. 

The duping is the problem but tek tier and flyer nerf is the cause of it. Until them two things are fixed people pretty much have to dupe to have anything.

[YUSHOETMI]

Rockstar are a company with many AAA titles under their belt and a vast team to work on all aspects of the game. Duping and other glitches are still prevalent in their games, they always will be in ark. That statement makes sense, only logical to scrap all tickets from the past and focus on the new servers so any new problems aren't lumped to the back of the que. 

dont see how this is a kick to the community. 

[Insomniak]

16 minutes ago, YUSHOETMI said:

Rockstar are a company with many AAA titles under their belt and a vast team to work on all aspects of the game. Duping and other glitches are still prevalent in their games, they always will be in ark. That statement makes sense, only logical to scrap all tickets from the past and focus on the new servers so any new problems aren't lumped to the back of the que. 

dont see how this is a kick to the community. 

So, roundabout your saying there will probably always be duping and glitches in ark, which is the main reason they separated clusters, and the reason given for not supporting one of those clusters. Your logic, from here, should lead you to believe that eventually, giving official reasoning by wildcard, neither cluster will be supported for that same reason.. and you may just be right. See how that might be a kick in the face? 

[powerstuck]

You have your own website, your own platform and you decide to communicate with 5% of your community thru Reddit. 

That's like a company announcing its licensing 50% of its workforce...and announcing it on MSN messenger while they have an official communication platform for all of their employees but don't use it.

Wildcard logic...it's like Early Access, setting new grounds...not the best but still new.

[Chronosphere]

4 minutes ago, powerstuck said:

You have your own website, your own platform and you decide to communicate with 5% of your community thru Reddit. 

That's like a company announcing its licensing 50% of its workforce...and announcing it on MSN messenger while they have an official communication platform for all of their employees but don't use it.

Wildcard logic...it's like Early Access, setting new grounds...not the best but still new.

makes sense, scared devs afraid of making a move, rather they enjoy shooting themselfs in the foot.

[Jostabeere]

4 hours ago, CyanicEmber said:

That can be solved by liberal and swift application of the ban hammer.

Their support doesn't have the data to catch dupers like every other online game support does as they stated.

Heck I work for a horrible Asian mobile game company as a support monkey and if a player reports someone in one of crappy mobile games about cheating or harrassment, I can look at the logs, see everything this player did and said. I see everything about payments, actions, chatlogs. But WCs support seems not to know in the slightest what people do on their official servers.

[Chronosphere]

2 minutes ago, Jostabeere said:

Their support doesn't have the data to catch dupers like every other online game support does as they stated.

Heck I work for a horrible Asian mobile game company as a support monkey and if a player reports someone in one of crappy mobile games about cheating or harrassment, I can look at the logs, see everything this player did and said. I see everything about payments, actions, chatlogs. But WCs support seems not to know in the slightest what people do on their official servers.

do you even get paid? why would u work for a mobile game support .. seems not a bright future 

[Jostabeere]

4 minutes ago, Chronosphere said:

do you even get paid? why would u work for a mobile game support .. seems not a bright future 

I get paid pretty well for what I am doing. And what I meant is not that the company is horrible to their workers. They're horrible as a publisher by spamming out pay2win mobile games.

[Chronosphere]

1 minute ago, Jostabeere said:

I get paid pretty well for what I am doing. And what I meant is not that the company is horrible to their workers. They're horrible as a publisher by spamming out pay2win mobile games.

yeah i dont understand the sudden hype for mobile games beeing made, its so awkward if everyone does it nobody gaining any sales and the bunch of games point and clikc and clikc more isnt very fun of a game duno why anyone bother buying a clicker game.. just annoying everyone around them and not really brain workout either..i boycott all their sales with me A not working B not buying.

not blaming you or hate you for working for them if their pay u well.. take all their money and run fast af.