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Should players have anti mesh defenses?


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Should players have anti mesh defenses?

I think we can all agree meshing is annoying for those who have well established tribes. It's been an issue for a long time and unfortunately reporting it while meshing is in progress doesn't stop it from happening immediately nor does reporting always result in action.

So I was wondering. Should players just simply have their own means to defend against meshing? One example that crossed my mind would be to add a expensive tek structure that could interact with tek turrets to enable tek turrets to fire projectiles through terrain. Basically, if something is expensive enough it typically wont be used to FOB on someone elses base and used primarily as defense. Yes, this might make attacking bases more difficult even for a legitimate raid but I believe the benefits outweigh the detriments.

I completely understand that we as players shouldn't be the ones to defend against meshing and it should just be fixed but regardless the reality is that the way things should be is not always the way things are. Regardless of the fact that we should not be the ones to defend our bases against these types of assaults they still occur and the ark community needs their own tools to deal with this issue beyond player reporting until ark development finds more permanent solutions.

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15 minutes ago, Noric said:

How about instead of making Tek turrets able to fire through the terrain as well as firing normally, they make a kind of turret that only shoots through the mesh.

I thought about that myself but it would lead to a whole new form of griefing players, imagine people placing turrets up on a cliffside that you can see, but are getting killed from as you walk down the beach because they can fire though the mesh. or as you enter a cave the person who placed tek turrets up on his base above the cave on the land end up killing you?  Its actually more problematic then a solution.  

Need a working defense rather then a offense to them.

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29 minutes ago, johnm81 said:

The solution in my opinion is not with anything but hiring gms that actively sit on a discord alert channel that respond to sos calls in the time it takes to log in and warp to a x y z coordinates. This can be found by typing ccc in the console 

Who's paying these extra GMs?  Quick math shows that adding just 20 full-time staff members at a conservative pay rate would cost Wildcard over a half-million dollars per year.  Fixing meshing will not increase revenue anywhere near enough to justify that kind of expense.

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46 minutes ago, SMP said:

Who's paying these extra GMs?  Quick math shows that adding just 20 full-time staff members at a conservative pay rate would cost Wildcard over a half-million dollars per year.  Fixing meshing will not increase revenue anywhere near enough to justify that kind of expense.

You'd had to know who would return and buy the new maps to say that with certainty. 

Ark was and by play rate, still is a very popular game despite many people leaving due to meshing and other bugs. 

If they fixed those, there is a real chance you'd get return customers as well as the new people they still get. At $35 a season pass that's only 15,000 players between 3 playforms. More than achievable.

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I don't think players should have to build something to defend against those kinds of exploits, let alone such a structure locked behind tek tier. Maybe just make it so foundations attached to land generate a field of death under them (tweaked so putting a thatch foundation on a steep slope doesn't make walking up that slope a kill zone, and so that building over a cave doesn't kill every player that enters it).  Maybe structures could just ignore (and reflect) damage for impacts to certain regions of their collision boxes. Should you really legitimately ever be able to hit the underside of a foundation (not hanging from a raft), fridge, smithy, etc....?

...and AoE weapons like rockets should be able to detect if they are hitting the underside of a mesh before detonating.

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1 hour ago, yekrucifixion187 said:

You'd had to know who would return and buy the new maps to say that with certainty. 

Ark was and by play rate, still is a very popular game despite many people leaving due to meshing and other bugs. 

If they fixed those, there is a real chance you'd get return customers as well as the new people they still get. At $35 a season pass that's only 15,000 players between 3 playforms. More than achievable.

My estimate was based solely on a single platform.  Moderating all of the official servers across multiple platforms would easily increase that estimate to over a million dollars annually.  Even if everyone who threatened to quit due to meshing bought another $35 season pass, it wouldn't begin to cover the costs. Also, those additional sales would drop to near-zero the following year, then what?  Lay off all those new GMs and start listening to the outrage from entitled customers?

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8 hours ago, SMP said:

Who's paying these extra GMs?  Quick math shows that adding just 20 full-time staff members at a conservative pay rate would cost Wildcard over a half-million dollars per year.  Fixing meshing will not increase revenue anywhere near enough to justify that kind of expense.

If you are paying someone to sit at a computer and do nothing but kick players you could get away with minimum wage. Colleges do worse with paying their computer lab TAs. Now for the economics, the question is a complex one. If you did this and made meshing a near 0 occurrence event how many people would not leave the game? How many would return?Times that against the cost of the next DLC and then you would see if it is a viable long term result. 

Truth of the matter is that no one knows if the increase in player base times dlc price could justify an expansion in work force. I don't know and neither do you. They would have to hire temp workers and then watch their player counts with no other confounding variables for a legit analysis.

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7 hours ago, Uueerdo said:

I don't think players should have to build something to defend against those kinds of exploits, let alone such a structure locked behind tek tier. Maybe just make it so foundations attached to land generate a field of death under them (tweaked so putting a thatch foundation on a steep slope doesn't make walking up that slope a kill zone, and so that building over a cave doesn't kill every player that enters it).  Maybe structures could just ignore (and reflect) damage for impacts to certain regions of their collision boxes. Should you really legitimately ever be able to hit the underside of a foundation (not hanging from a raft), fridge, smithy, etc....?

...and AoE weapons like rockets should be able to detect if they are hitting the underside of a mesh before detonating.

I agree that players shouldn't have to build things to protect against it, but finding a solution that will work till it is fixed with whatever method they are using, is better then nothing I think far as the tek forcefield goes, if the cost to run was a lot cheaper, it would be well worth the effort, not only protection against those who like to mesh but those who like to pull currupted ontop of peoples bases on extinction.  

I can see problems happening with the kill player bit,  but the no damage to bottom side is creative, problem is sometimes more then just the bottom of the foundation is underground as well, like 80% of the foundation being underground, which then just negates that being a fix, as they'd just start shooting the side of the foundation instead of the bottom.

 

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6 hours ago, johnm81 said:

If you are paying someone to sit at a computer and do nothing but kick players you could get away with minimum wage. Colleges do worse with paying their computer lab TAs. Now for the economics, the question is a complex one. If you did this and made meshing a near 0 occurrence event how many people would not leave the game? How many would return?Times that against the cost of the next DLC and then you would see if it is a viable long term result. 

Truth of the matter is that no one knows if the increase in player base times dlc price could justify an expansion in work force. I don't know and neither do you. They would have to hire temp workers and then watch their player counts with no other confounding variables for a legit analysis.

My math is based on a number pretty close to the average national minimum.  Even that is a bad idea, as giving kick/ban rights to someone barely qualified to flip a burger will lead to a whole slew of new problems.

I'll agree that WC doesn't know if it would result in a profit, and therein lies the problem.  Corporations don't typically spend large sums of money without a significant amount of confidence in the potential ROI.

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No this a terrible idea. You don't solve cheating by allowing others to counter it with cheating of their own. All this idea would do is punish legit players (who btw are still the majority of players in this game) when they attack bases. As others have correctly pointed out, this kind of thing will lead to an entirely new range of issues. There will be bases that will become virtually untouchable, where attackers will be magically shot through the ground, from below, from above and through rocks.

Also merely "making it expensive" will be no impediment to those that wish to abuse and spam such a feature. Metal structures and TEK were meant to be "expensive" and costly to make but in reality that is absolutely not the case. Cost has never been much of an impediment in this game, only time.

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Having tackled map developement in the devkit, I'd say a viable, yet lengthy solution would be to implement kill zones.

Said kill zones could be addded via the "biome zone volume" system of the devkit, which in turn allows for extended customization. I'd go further and suggest that if a player enters such a zone too often, his account ID should be saved in server logs, then a notification could be sent to WC GM staff for further investigation.

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51 minutes ago, Darkholis said:

Having tackled map developement in the devkit, I'd say a viable, yet lengthy solution would be to implement kill zones.

Said kill zones could be addded via the "biome zone volume" system of the devkit, which in turn allows for extended customization. I'd go further and suggest that if a player enters such a zone too often, his account ID should be saved in server logs, then a notification could be sent to WC GM staff for further investigation.

I don't think that would work either, if you've played with the character in the devkit, the default location of the character is direct center of the body mass, this is why people sometimes find themselves spawned half way into a foundation, as the correction for placement of the character doesn't always kicks in right off the bat, I've even had my character spawn 1/2 way into the ground when respawning then have to jump a couple times to get unstuck.   So there would be a lot of false positives in that aspect.

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3 hours ago, SMP said:

My math is based on a number pretty close to the average national minimum.  Even that is a bad idea, as giving kick/ban rights to someone barely qualified to flip a burger will lead to a whole slew of new problems.

I'll agree that WC doesn't know if it would result in a profit, and therein lies the problem.  Corporations don't typically spend large sums of money without a significant amount of confidence in the potential ROI.

An easy enough solution to that would be that these new group of 'gms' could simply be spotters for devs. Deploy these guys for rapid response and in turn if they see something a dev can show up quickly as they are screening out false positives. So then we have no issue with them having power but provide a call screening service of sorts.

Companies do typically spend large sums on expansion in stages so if actual ROI doesn't match projected ROI they can stop and reconsider with minimal losses. Case and point Walgreens and their Power system back in the 2000s. They rolled it out in a state by state basis and when found it wasn't yielding the cost savings it projected they stopped. WC/Snail Games could do the same here.

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54 minutes ago, caleb68 said:

I don't think that would work either, if you've played with the character in the devkit, the default location of the character is direct center of the body mass, this is why people sometimes find themselves spawned half way into a foundation, as the correction for placement of the character doesn't always kicks in right off the bat, I've even had my character spawn 1/2 way into the ground when respawning then have to jump a couple times to get unstuck.   So there would be a lot of false positives in that aspect.

I knew that. What I had in mind was kill zones losely modeled after the landscape. A 1-2 character wide gap if just fine imho, the main purpose is to prevent bases and large scale deployments under the mesh.

As for false positive, yes some could also occur when your character falls through the floor, hence why I mentionned "too often". For example, if you go through the mesh 10 times per 24 hours period, that's suspicious....

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8 minutes ago, Darkholis said:

I knew that. What I had in mind was kill zones losely modeled after the landscape. A 1-2 character wide gap if just fine imho, the main purpose is to prevent bases and large scale deployments under the mesh.

As for false positive, yes some could also occur when your character falls through the floor, hence why I mentionned "too often". For example, if you go through the mesh 10 times per 24 hours period, that's suspicious....

10's an overly generous amount.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've accidentally been in the mesh 1 or 2 character lengths in a 3 year period. 2 of them came from the teleporter. 

 

If they could get that depth right, I'd say 3 times in any day or 8 times in a week should be red flagged. That still feels too high and I can just imagine the mesh schedule these losers would draw up but if it was insta kill at that depth, it wouldn't matter. 

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34 minutes ago, yekrucifixion187 said:

10's an overly generous amount.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've accidentally been in the mesh 1 or 2 character lengths in a 3 year period. 2 of them came from the teleporter. 

 

If they could get that depth right, I'd say 3 times in any day or 8 times in a week should be red flagged. That still feels too high and I can just imagine the mesh schedule these losers would draw up but if it was insta kill at that depth, it wouldn't matter. 

10 was a random number. I never faced the issue personally, but a friend of mine has the issue happening to him 1-2 times per month, especially on Ab.

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