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Beware, Weaponised reporting is apparently a thing now


Azmeaiel

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Beware, Weaponised reporting is apparently a thing now

An interesting one but apparently a neighbour of mine is being targetted multiple times by a certain group of tribes on the server who reportedly sell land for irl money on dubious websites. This neighbour has had reports constantly filed against them for building near other tribes bases, although the only structures they have outside immediate vacinity of their base are in range of neighbours and allies who have agreed on the buildings and also use them, and only in regions where it is agreed on and shared use. This is the same with the use of their pillaring of the land. In one area walls were removed from the area around base and the acess to and from the base and immediate vacinity of base was pillared, another base on a small plateu was likewise pillared around the wall and in the compound of the base well within render range and not more than 1 pillar deep on outside to prevent griefing. Several times now this tribe has had reports files against them for excessive pillaring even though they are not near others bases, and are only protecting immediate vacinity of bases and their acess points. During this latest report the wall immediatly around the tribes base was removed along with tek behemoths, tek boxes , all this in direct vicinity of bases. When pillars were removed huge areas were pillared by the tribe putting in false reports , committing exactly same apparent violation (even they do not have base on server just pillars and land claims with beds) . and also directly pushed against structures. Destroying peoples work immediatly around an active base to give obvious land-grab tribes acess seens incredibly hypocritical.

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17 minutes ago, R0b1983 said:

I do but it only takes 22 hours then they disappear without reason. 

not if there are ladders or fence foundations used. Tribe that put in the report immediatly put up their own spam pushed into the base they had just ticketed and its surroundings., and this is directly against an active base that had pillaring to protects its acess and walls from just this kind of griefing.

 

It is a big concern as this opens up false ticketing to get land immediatly in vacinity of an active base as has happened here, and because they ticketed first you have no kind of recourse against this abuse of enforecement, although when it is as close to base as it was with the tribe having been there for over a year and the ticketer being on the server only a day it should have been obvious.

 

 

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personally experienced this too. when I noticed our base is surrounded by pillars from other tribes

 

read code of conduct twice, submitted a report to ask for explanation. then, as far as I understood, report was ignored.

final decision is to abandon server and seek new location for base

 

in my perspective, code of conduct is ambiguous. no quantifiable guidelines for most items listed. to play ark in official is to balance between the fear that one day everything of you will get deleted and the fear that someone may simply pillar around your base. unofficial servers, on the other hand, tends to lose player pretty quickly and does not seem to support long term game. ark is a great game,  but sometimes it gets me upset for reasons outside of the game itself

 

I don't know if there is anything I could do in my power, but I hope one day I can worry about how to tame a dino, fight a boss, or build a base, as opposed to worrying about  how not to get insided, glitched, or framed

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5 hours ago, Azmeaiel said:

not if there are ladders or fence foundations used. Tribe that put in the report immediatly put up their own spam pushed into the base they had just ticketed and its surroundings., and this is directly against an active base that had pillaring to protects its acess and walls from just this kind of griefing.

 

It is a big concern as this opens up false ticketing to get land immediatly in vacinity of an active base as has happened here, and because they ticketed first you have no kind of recourse against this abuse of enforecement, although when it is as close to base as it was with the tribe having been there for over a year and the ticketer being on the server only a day it should have been obvious.

 

 

That makes it look like GM receives a cut from land selling.

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Yup all you have to do is make a small base in a claimed area or probably not even that and attempt to place a tek gen or expand. Can't place anything because of pillar spam? Report it and get a few friends to do it too. Within a week the pillars will likely all be gone now. Now you and your pals can take that land and do the exact same thing. It's already been a conversation point on most of the servers I am on. Hopefully there are some new requirements to take action as opposed to what seems like quantity of reports. 

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The only thing I have pillared are the beaver dam spawns on Ragna but I learned from Aberration where I pillared the queen pathways in the red zone and a GM removed them all.

Soon after during the next event you had traps and 1 time use traps which were closed off in the middle of the pathways which prevented anyone from luring queens to their traps.

If someone one day reports my beaver pillaring and a GM removes them I wouldn't even be surprised. Resource spawns like that should be by default no build areas but people can build on or near them and disable the spawn.

GM's should take such things into consideration because ''no building'' zones are very, very rare in this game and servers have to help themselves. 

I know pillaring is a big problem (1 tribe on valg pillared a whole square on the map 10/10 to 20/20) but some pillares have meanings behind them.

Before taking such actions it could help to contact the accused tribe.

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59 minutes ago, Fukushu said:

The only thing I have pillared are the beaver dam spawns on Ragna but I learned from Aberration where I pillared the queen pathways in the red zone and a GM removed them all.

Soon after during the next event you had traps and 1 time use traps which were closed off in the middle of the pathways which prevented anyone from luring queens to their traps.

If someone one day reports my beaver pillaring and a GM removes them I wouldn't even be surprised. Resource spawns like that should be by default no build areas but people can build on or near them and disable the spawn.

GM's should take such things into consideration because ''no building'' zones are very, very rare in this game and servers have to help themselves. 

I know pillaring is a big problem (1 tribe on valg pillared a whole square on the map 10/10 to 20/20) but some pillares have meanings behind them.

Before taking such actions it could help to contact the accused tribe.

This reason exactly, we have had gms come onto other servers and say acess points such as obelisks important for end game content , direct acess to bases and keeping these open was fine , the land in question is a very narrow strip of land near red obelisk on ragnarok. The tribe, instead of fencing their front yard area to store dinos got rid of fences and left the area open so passage of rexes, gigas and other land based dinos could get too and from the obelisk and also acess desert and beach in both directions, this normally fenced in area was instead prevented from being blocked by pillars and all within render of the base itself and where a wall would normally be. A command was used that seemed to remove up to 5 structures instead of a few offending pillars, removing tek storage and everything in it, tek behemoth gates, the entire wall around a base on a small plateau , tree platforms, cliff platforms and basically anything else smaller than a 1x1 box, massive damage to base and materials lost and at the end of the day the reporter pillared the entire area deleted himself, including a much wider area of cliff, surrounding hills and said offending acess to the beach which was deemed excessive pillaring by a gm and removed only hours before under that same guys ticket.  And because this person ticketed first, no tickets could be made in defence by the accused tribe. I Understand when this system is used against huge tribes pillaring and selling land for real money on black market, or when another player is directly structure griefing another but when its neither of these and a player loses a massive ammount of work for simply keeping acess to their base clear and the reporter is the one benefitting, it seems dubious at best.

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After some thought, I believe it is probably not as much as real money dealing as that your position simply put you at a obvious disadvantage

 

1. admins are humans too

admins are probably to busy to play ark thoroughly (who would want to spend all their free time at the workplace?). as a result they can not fully understand the value of the resource spawns, at least not in official pve
now imagine you are a super busy admin and suddenly your received a dozen report about some pillars, and you found that the pillars are indeed there. of course you will want to remove them and finish your job as soon as possible according to the "pillar is bad" principle and make the reports stop. i think normal people tends not to be too painstakingly careful with their jobs.

 

2. it is less profitable to help you

there are 2 ways to access ark: season pass or permanent access. as someone who managed to occupy strategic resources (like... the beaver area), you probably came very early.

so what does this mean? it means 1, you probably bought permanent access and all dlcs , and thus will not pay more for this game; 2, you have too much investment in the official servers to quit even if you have the season pass; and 3. you cant ask for a refund.

admins are probably hired by the developers, and reasonably they want the developers to get more money from this game. if they had to choose between favoring you and a player who may not buy the next season pass, who is thinking about whether to buy another dlc, or who may ask for a refund for the game, who do you think they will favor?

 

3. you cant do anything to them

you cant hurt them back when they hurt you, and obviously you cant help them back when they help you. this is enough reason for them to act without considering your feelings

 

I experienced the same thing as you, and was upset for quite a while. But finally I figured its pointless to be upset unless we can have a solution, and of course, the capability of enforcing this solution too (which is currently hopeless). I hope someday someone could be smart enough to bring justice and promise into this game, but that person is not going to be me.

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@Azmeaiel they don't even care about real money sellings. I have reported a guy selling his base for real money before and got told that they won't do anything because he was not selling it ingame. 

It got sold on a different platform and the GM told me that they only care if it's ingame over the ARK client.

They have no intentions of stopping such things happening, it would be so easy to verify the owner of the tribe after the selling. Some guy even told me that he makes banks building bases for people.

A report for real money selling in ARK does nothing because they only act if it's over the client but who would post over Global that he is selling his base for cash...


Also, just as a reminder ARK is owned by the Chinese Snail Games and ARK in China is free to play with P2W. Maybe we will also get some P2W one day to counter the IRL sellers like World of Warcraft now sells ingame gold for money.

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15 minutes ago, Fukushu said:

@Azmeaiel they don't even care about real money sellings. I have reported a guy selling his base for real money before and got told that they won't do anything because he was not selling it ingame. 

It got sold on a different platform and the GM told me that they only care if it's ingame over the ARK client.

They have no intentions of stopping such things happening, it would be so easy to verify the owner of the tribe after the selling. Some guy even told me that he makes banks building bases for people.

A report for real money selling in ARK does nothing because they only act if it's over the client but who would post over Global that he is selling his base for cash...


Also, just as a reminder ARK is owned by the Chinese Snail Games and ARK in China is free to play with P2W. Maybe we will also get some P2W one day to counter the IRL sellers like World of Warcraft now sells ingame gold for money.

It is kinda irony that you complain about them not taking action solely based on reports in a thread that accuse them to do exactly that. This is just logical that they won't take action unless they can prove the claim from data that cannot be manipulated by other players. Pretty much the same as this thread:

Now suppose they would take actions just because someone made a report regarding RMT how people would just go on other sites, fake a profile claiming they are someone else, file a report using that as a proof and just like that an innocent was banned.

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@invincibleqc that's why I gave them so much evidence. They could have just waited one week and seen that the tribe owner (different steam account) has changed to someone that has never had anything to do with the tribe or even the server in general. 

I don't think it would be unreasonable to check such things. I'm not saying to ban someone because of some pictures and I have stated before that they should check the tribe owner change.

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2 hours ago, Fukushu said:

@invincibleqc that's why I gave them so much evidence. They could have just waited one week and seen that the tribe owner (different steam account) has changed to someone that has never had anything to do with the tribe or even the server in general. 

I don't think it would be unreasonable to check such things. I'm not saying to ban someone because of some pictures and I have stated before that they should check the tribe owner change.

Ownership transfers are not uncommon, and are unfortunately not sufficient to prove without the slightest doubt it was the result of RMT. Your report might be useful, as it will put these players on their radar, but banning a player solely based on evidences provided by another would result into a lot of abuse and innocents being punished for nothing (just like this thread accuse them to do). In other words; your reports only point them in the right direction, but are not enough to take action without them being able to validate your claims from source players cannot manipulate.

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what if we saw someone attempting RMT on external websites? (discord, ebay, taobao...…..)

 

the only solution to get proof seems to be pretending that you wanted to trade with them, but will that count as performing RMT as well?

 

also, most RMT I heard of is in Russia and china, if we manage to get proof, will the admins be able to understand their language or interfere with them at all?

 

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5 hours ago, nameless said:

After some thought, I believe it is probably not as much as real money dealing as that your position simply put you at a obvious disadvantage

 

1. admins are humans too

admins are probably to busy to play ark thoroughly (who would want to spend all their free time at the workplace?). as a result they can not fully understand the value of the resource spawns, at least not in official pve
now imagine you are a super busy admin and suddenly your received a dozen report about some pillars, and you found that the pillars are indeed there. of course you will want to remove them and finish your job as soon as possible according to the "pillar is bad" principle and make the reports stop. i think normal people tends not to be too painstakingly careful with their jobs.

 

2. it is less profitable to help you

there are 2 ways to access ark: season pass or permanent access. as someone who managed to occupy strategic resources (like... the beaver area), you probably came very early.

so what does this mean? it means 1, you probably bought permanent access and all dlcs , and thus will not pay more for this game; 2, you have too much investment in the official servers to quit even if you have the season pass; and 3. you cant ask for a refund.

admins are probably hired by the developers, and reasonably they want the developers to get more money from this game. if they had to choose between favoring you and a player who may not buy the next season pass, who is thinking about whether to buy another dlc, or who may ask for a refund for the game, who do you think they will favor?

 

3. you cant do anything to them

you cant hurt them back when they hurt you, and obviously you cant help them back when they help you. this is enough reason for them to act without considering your feelings

 

I experienced the same thing as you, and was upset for quite a while. But finally I figured its pointless to be upset unless we can have a solution, and of course, the capability of enforcing this solution too (which is currently hopeless). I hope someday someone could be smart enough to bring justice and promise into this game, but that person is not going to be me.

I agree with your on 2 and 3.

 

Have an issue with #1 a bit - but I agree that everyone is human.

I've done development, community management, and customer service irl before. Currently work in development but I do help customer service when my attention is required - I also provide information to customer service to better help them do their jobs (which in turn helps me do my job when they provide feedback/issues from customers). It was the job to know the product. I understand that maybe their support may be outsourced? That would make sense with lack of knowledge or care for the game. If the customer service is an in house position I expected them to understand basic mechanics and ideas. I expect the people who created the game and conditions to foresee possible outcomes and I expect management to raise the bar or set goals each year. I am human and I work for very chill companies but I'm still held to a standard to understand my product(s). The type of support we receive I expect that everyone is outsourced and has no legitimate interest in the game from beginning to end. But if you're working in the studio on a game that will likely be re-skinned (Atlas basically Ark 2.0) then maybe there should be more consideration in this part. That or drop support for official servers entirely? Let unofficials take over. It'd be cheaper I'm sure and they'd have less of a headache. Playerbase basically moderates and fixes their own issues. Single player environments would be the main concern.

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10 hours ago, Azmeaiel said:

This reason exactly, we have had gms come onto other servers and say acess points such as obelisks important for end game content , direct acess to bases and keeping these open was fine , the land in question is a very narrow strip of land near red obelisk on ragnarok. The tribe, instead of fencing their front yard area to store dinos got rid of fences and left the area open so passage of rexes, gigas and other land based dinos could get too and from the obelisk and also acess desert and beach in both directions, this normally fenced in area was instead prevented from being blocked by pillars and all within render of the base itself and where a wall would normally be. A command was used that seemed to remove up to 5 structures instead of a few offending pillars, removing tek storage and everything in it, tek behemoth gates, the entire wall around a base on a small plateau , tree platforms, cliff platforms and basically anything else smaller than a 1x1 box, massive damage to base and materials lost and at the end of the day the reporter pillared the entire area deleted himself, including a much wider area of cliff, surrounding hills and said offending acess to the beach which was deemed excessive pillaring by a gm and removed only hours before under that same guys ticket.  And because this person ticketed first, no tickets could be made in defence by the accused tribe. I Understand when this system is used against huge tribes pillaring and selling land for real money on black market, or when another player is directly structure griefing another but when its neither of these and a player loses a massive ammount of work for simply keeping acess to their base clear and the reporter is the one benefitting, it seems dubious at best.

And if you get blocked by pilalrs now then you make a report and the pilalrs will be gone most likely soon after

 

thats just how it is on PvE since no one seems to understand not to pillar or claim land that is far away from their base.

 

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@slapdashgamer unofficial has their own big problems: Admin abuse, p2w mechanics, server stability and some others.

I like the mods and reasonably increased rates on unofficial servers but even if I have to deal with a lot of garbage on official, it's not comparable to having an admin who freely reigns over his domain without having to fear any repercussions. (other than players leaving)

I have experienced it in other games what admin abuse does to a server and I'll gladly deal with the hot mess officials are.

Alone the possibility to come here and talk smack about ARK without instantly getting banned from the game is more than many people on unofficial have.


There are probably tons of good servers out there with great admins but from my experience such things can turn around very quickly if one of them comes up with a ''great idea'' (p2w mechanics to carry server costs etc.) and the community is not happy about it.

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11 hours ago, nameless said:

After some thought, I believe it is probably not as much as real money dealing as that your position simply put you at a obvious disadvantage

 

1. admins are humans too

admins are probably to busy to play ark thoroughly (who would want to spend all their free time at the workplace?). as a result they can not fully understand the value of the resource spawns, at least not in official pve
now imagine you are a super busy admin and suddenly your received a dozen report about some pillars, and you found that the pillars are indeed there. of course you will want to remove them and finish your job as soon as possible according to the "pillar is bad" principle and make the reports stop. i think normal people tends not to be too painstakingly careful with their jobs.

 

2. it is less profitable to help you

there are 2 ways to access ark: season pass or permanent access. as someone who managed to occupy strategic resources (like... the beaver area), you probably came very early.

so what does this mean? it means 1, you probably bought permanent access and all dlcs , and thus will not pay more for this game; 2, you have too much investment in the official servers to quit even if you have the season pass; and 3. you cant ask for a refund.

admins are probably hired by the developers, and reasonably they want the developers to get more money from this game. if they had to choose between favoring you and a player who may not buy the next season pass, who is thinking about whether to buy another dlc, or who may ask for a refund for the game, who do you think they will favor?

 

3. you cant do anything to them

you cant hurt them back when they hurt you, and obviously you cant help them back when they help you. this is enough reason for them to act without considering your feelings

 

I experienced the same thing as you, and was upset for quite a while. But finally I figured its pointless to be upset unless we can have a solution, and of course, the capability of enforcing this solution too (which is currently hopeless). I hope someday someone could be smart enough to bring justice and promise into this game, but that person is not going to be me.

Mostly I have had very good experience with the admins in this game and they have been very knowledgable about what they are doing. The thread is not about me but a player that has been targetted several times near a popular area. His base and the offending pillars do not affect any of the people in tribes who surround him, we all work together, do boss runs together and are frequently on same discord if not in direct alliances with each other. The offending pillars were on narrow peace of beach keeping it open so we could all acess a transmitter near his base to do boss runs and this has been fine for a year, in fact most of the nearby tribes also have pillars protecting their direct acess done in exactly same fashion. All these pillars are also within render range of the players base. Simply put , when this happened we all knew it was none of the people the pillars directly affected putting in the report, we are all fine with them or allied.  The area was instantly pillared by a new tribe though once removed by a gm, and this player instantly spammed the entire area, including pushing into our group of buildings and the base of player they reported spamming hills, cliffs and entire area with more pillars than the 'offending' ones removed by gm. My issue is that the the offending pillars were in render of the guys base and not pushed up against any structures and were clearly protecting a small acess for everyone with bases there, this guy suffered massive damage to base and was stripped of huge ammounts of materials and structures from tek storage simply because some player wanted to do a land grab and had completley gotten away with it scot free. Because the land grabber put in ticket first the other player now is considered an offender and has no way of defending themself to gms. Its abuse of ticketing system pure and simple.

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5 hours ago, genie45 said:

And if you get blocked by pilalrs now then you make a report and the pilalrs will be gone most likely soon after

 

thats just how it is on PvE since no one seems to understand not to pillar or claim land that is far away from their base.

 

That's partially to blame on the devs not configuring the maps to turn off building in resource rich areas for PvE

Someone doesn't build near the metal spawn so that it doesn't inhibit the metal spawn but if it's not pillared some troll will place foundations on an alt account and ORP them for fun. 

Then what is the rest of the server to do for metal, obsidian, crystal, paste, etc?

It's a sandbox survival game. Protecting your servers resources for your growth and survival should be part of that right? (I'm not talking about the over pillaring land grabbers but this example relates to your comment of "pillar or claim land that is far away from their base.")

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