Wildcard community manager encourages Exploiting against their CoC

[Cedric]

Just now, GP said:

It won't, pure and simple. There have been mesh and dupe fixes, and guess what... players find new ways to mesh and dupe. There are thousands of players that have time and interest to experiment in this game, and that will always put developers one step behind. This is nothing unique to Wildcard, all game developers are one step behind those that wish to exploit video games, just like any company.

Asking that type of question is like asking when crime is going to be stopped forever, or even asking when DDoS will be stopped forever, even though major companies get DDoS every year people think that Wildcard can stop it. The server providers could put in extra mitigation, but DDoS will never be stopped ever, period.

So asking questions like that is pointless because there is no answer because things like that cannot be eradicated 100% because there will always be humans that push the boundaries.

I couldn't have put this any better.  Thanks GP

[vibeman117]

13 minutes ago, PertySlick said:

Cheats and exploits have always been a part of multiplayer gaming.  That's why I play private servers with people I know or trust.  All the "fixes" being implemented to fix one groups issues are increasingly eroding the experience for others. 

Your comment proves what most of us thought when Cedric tried to minimize the legitimate concerns of a large part of the community. 

Cedric came out and said "Cant let social media fool you into thinking "fix your game incompetent devs" is the voice of everyone" - all because one guy said  told him " I love that game man! Me and all my buddies have a private server"

I just love that you have a private server Specifically because the incompetence of the dev teams ability to fix game breaking issues have pushed you to play private servers in order to try to minimize the effect of you being negatively impacted by the very issues legitimate people raise alarm to that the community manager is in denial of acknowledging. 

Its even more Juicy that Cedric liked your post because he loves Confirmation bias, and absolutely hates dissenting views. 

 

 

[Leebum]

3 minutes ago, vibeman117 said:

Your comment proves what most of us thought when Cedric tried to minimize the legitimate concerns of a large part of the community. 

Cedric came out and said "Cant let social media fool you into thinking "fix your game incompetent devs" is the voice of everyone" - all because one guy said  told him " I love that game man! Me and all my buddies have a private server"

I just love that you have a private server Specifically because the incompetence of the dev teams ability to fix game breaking issues have pushed you to play private servers in order to try to minimize the effect of you being negatively impacted by the very issues legitimate people raise alarm to that the community manager is in denial of acknowledging. 

Its even more Juicy that Cedric liked your post because he loves Confirmation bias, and absolutely hates dissenting views. 

 

 

This guys makes LOADs of assumptions. Assuming why someone plays official and what Cedrics motive was. Wow. I started playing unofficial myself because of the players not the duping or meshing. and that was 3 years ago

 

[Cedric]

2 minutes ago, vibeman117 said:

Your comment proves what most of us thought when Cedric tried to minimize the legitimate concerns of a large part of the community. 

Cedric came out and said "Cant let social media fool you into thinking "fix your game incompetent devs" is the voice of everyone" - all because one guy said  told him " I love that game man! Me and all my buddies have a private server"

I just love that you have a private server Specifically because the incompetence of the dev teams ability to fix game breaking issues have pushed you to play private servers in order to try to minimize the effect of you being negatively impacted by the very issues legitimate people raise alarm to that the community manager is in denial of acknowledging. 

Its even more Juicy that Cedric liked your post because he loves Confirmation bias, and absolutely hates dissenting views. 

 

 

If you look at the rest of that thread it specifically says why that post is important.  Working in this job you get a lot of negativity - especially being the only one that communicates with the player base.  It's very easy to get depressed or down or in a really bad mental place.  So that is to remind ME that not everyone hates the game because that is the truth.  That "all because one guy said  told him" is actually a lot of people I've met in real life.  

If you really believe I hate dissenting views, you haven't really kept up with my Twitter.  I'll concede good points and will openly admit the issues in the game.  I do it almost daily.  Not sure what grand concept I'm avoiding.  But you're welcome to believe what you will.  More important fish to fry at the moment.

[Demerus]

9 minutes ago, Cedric said:

If you look at the rest of that thread it specifically says why that post is important.  Working in this job you get a lot of negativity - especially being the only one that communicates with the player base.  It's very easy to get depressed or down or in a really bad mental place.  So that is to remind ME that not everyone hates the game because that is the truth.  That "all because one guy said  told him" is actually a lot of people I've met in real life.  

If you really believe I hate dissenting views, you haven't really kept up with my Twitter.  I'll concede good points and will openly admit the issues in the game.  I do it almost daily.  Not sure what grand concept I'm avoiding.  But you're welcome to believe what you will.  More important fish to fry at the moment.

Ced,

This is an appropriate time to say this so Im going to be 100% honest.

You are a huge improvement over your predecessors and the community thanks you for the work you do. 

As a community manager, you are doing what you can with the info and tools you have.

ignore the naysayers and block out the salt because at the end of the day, you are just the bridge between WC and the player base.

its just unfortunate people forget that fact and want to always shoot the messenger.

Like you said, there are still players in the community who appreciate the work you and the other teams are doing.

As players, we try our best to take the good with the bad when it comes.

 

 

[deedoubleu]

13 hours ago, Grekern said:

Well except for the crazy "Dev team is in on it", he got a point.

Devs are probably too busy for this, GMs on the other hand...

Is it possible at all to prove they are not? Sometimes they will enforce stuff that is not strictly written in CoC, other times shrug it off with "atm it is not enforced, we will notify everyone if this will change, read CoC meanwhile to make sure you are up to date".

GMs are people too and some of them probably have friends ? would not be surprising if those friends get a free pass or a slap on the wrist when other folks would have their structs or dinos wiped.

[Grekern]

6 hours ago, Torchupmaryj said:

There are new slot cap duping methods out there, there are bases meshed everyday. Also there are people selling duped loot all day everyday. People raise tickets that get resolved without a legitimate resolution. These are legitimate concerns. Implicating the devs working with mega tribes to turn a profit, may be false may be true, Its my right as a player in the community to raise my opinion, regardless how radical it may seem. It sure is suspect that new exploit methods are always built into the games logic, after old methods are "fixed". They dont exactly promote confidence in their ability to correct major issues, when issues that are "being looked into" are still around years later and this is a consistent pattern we have seen historically. Cedric would rather people with dissenting views shut up and be more like the people on private servers he was bragging about who never complain about the game. (Except they play on private servers to get away from the very issues people still bring up today.)

I am 100% sure Devs ARE NOT part of cheating, of course they dont want this stuff ingame.

What is weird is that everyone is openly duping and have bases full of duped stuff, they get reported "This tribe on this server have 15000 replicators"

And they dont even go in and ban and remove them, this tells everyone that you can do what you want and if you play the game fair you will be wiped by dupers.

If they go in and just remove poop like that when it is reported then maaaaaaybe next time there is a new method out there, people will think twice before using it because they would know they get banned and removed.

Saying that there is no point banning dupers because it will always be new methods out there sends the wrong message and telling us that cheating is accepted and will always be accepted.

Everyone see what is wrong here but nothing is being done with it, just check the bases and start banning, it will stop alot cheating in future, I cant even belive you dont see this

 

[Erinn]

You always hear only the whiners, reading tons of posts like "I lost this and that, fix this bug, incompetent monkeys" bla bla bla. I'm surprised Cedric isn't like a grumpy old harpy by now.

I have more than 8000 hours on official legacy PVE and I never had a major issue. One time our server was broken and the battleye was kicking everyone after 2 minutes. Filled a server outage - fixed in 30 minutes. I have never lost a character, I simply make a new one for each map and enjoy the new DLC without my overpowered stuff (until transfers open). If someone is duping, I simply don't care, it doesn't affect me on PVE anyway (RIP PvP players, my "thoughs and prayers" are with you). I don't transfer dinos RIGHT AFTER update because I know there might be issues the dev team didn't know about. I never lost any babies because I simply cryo them, or work on my building projects around the base and regularly check on them, not trying to exploit the stasis thing and then cry when they starve.

Ofc I lost few manas together with my ascendant or tek armor/weapons because of the island glitch, but don't tell me someone with 8k hours doesn't have some spare ones. I was raided once too on exti. The manticore never bugged for me and I did the fight for all my characters and random people who asked me for help. The "bad things" simply happen, but I encounter something like this once in 1-2 months. Seriously I have no idea what half of the posts are about.

And there is a lot of people like me, we are just not that noisy as the other part of player base. With this, I would like to say I still enjoy the game even after thousands of hours, I loved the autumn trees and now I'm in love with the snowy ones too. I like the latest changes and I like the ideas from QoL list, can't wait for them to be implemented slowly to the official game.

Keep up the good work and enjoy the holidays. I surely will.

TL;DR: stop crying and use your brain while playing, it will make your game more enjoyable.

[Grekern]

5 hours ago, Erinn said:

You always hear only the whiners, reading tons of posts like "I lost this and that, fix this bug, incompetent monkeys" bla bla bla. I'm surprised Cedric isn't like a grumpy old harpy by now.

I have more than 8000 hours on official legacy PVE and I never had a major issue. One time our server was broken and the battleye was kicking everyone after 2 minutes. Filled a server outage - fixed in 30 minutes. I have never lost a character, I simply make a new one for each map and enjoy the new DLC without my overpowered stuff (until transfers open). If someone is duping, I simply don't care, it doesn't affect me on PVE anyway (RIP PvP players, my "thoughs and prayers" are with you). I don't transfer dinos RIGHT AFTER update because I know there might be issues the dev team didn't know about. I never lost any babies because I simply cryo them, or work on my building projects around the base and regularly check on them, not trying to exploit the stasis thing and then cry when they starve.

Ofc I lost few manas together with my ascendant or tek armor/weapons because of the island glitch, but don't tell me someone with 8k hours doesn't have some spare ones. I was raided once too on exti. The manticore never bugged for me and I did the fight for all my characters and random people who asked me for help. The "bad things" simply happen, but I encounter something like this once in 1-2 months. Seriously I have no idea what half of the posts are about.

And there is a lot of people like me, we are just not that noisy as the other part of player base. With this, I would like to say I still enjoy the game even after thousands of hours, I loved the autumn trees and now I'm in love with the snowy ones too. I like the latest changes and I like the ideas from QoL list, can't wait for them to be implemented slowly to the official game.

Keep up the good work and enjoy the holidays. I surely will.

TL;DR: stop crying and use your brain while playing, it will make your game more enjoyable.

It is not about crying, it is about the losing bases to people that been cheating in front of everyone eyes.

I have many more hours than you so yeah I still enjoy the game, but I think many are angry because they losing thousands of hours to cheating players in pvp.

And many question why dont Devs just go into these tribes and look in their vaults and just remove them.

BTW I know of course no DEV's are in on this or any stupid poop like that. Just wish they did something, it's right in front of them

[PertySlick]

6 hours ago, Erinn said:

You always hear only the whiners, reading tons of posts like "I lost this and that, fix this bug, incompetent monkeys" bla bla bla. I'm surprised Cedric isn't like a grumpy old harpy by now.

I have more than 8000 hours on official legacy PVE and I never had a major issue. One time our server was broken and the battleye was kicking everyone after 2 minutes. Filled a server outage - fixed in 30 minutes. I have never lost a character, I simply make a new one for each map and enjoy the new DLC without my overpowered stuff (until transfers open). If someone is duping, I simply don't care, it doesn't affect me on PVE anyway (RIP PvP players, my "thoughs and prayers" are with you). I don't transfer dinos RIGHT AFTER update because I know there might be issues the dev team didn't know about. I never lost any babies because I simply cryo them, or work on my building projects around the base and regularly check on them, not trying to exploit the stasis thing and then cry when they starve.

Ofc I lost few manas together with my ascendant or tek armor/weapons because of the island glitch, but don't tell me someone with 8k hours doesn't have some spare ones. I was raided once too on exti. The manticore never bugged for me and I did the fight for all my characters and random people who asked me for help. The "bad things" simply happen, but I encounter something like this once in 1-2 months. Seriously I have no idea what half of the posts are about.

And there is a lot of people like me, we are just not that noisy as the other part of player base. With this, I would like to say I still enjoy the game even after thousands of hours, I loved the autumn trees and now I'm in love with the snowy ones too. I like the latest changes and I like the ideas from QoL list, can't wait for them to be implemented slowly to the official game.

Keep up the good work and enjoy the holidays. I surely will.

TL;DR: stop crying and use your brain while playing, it will make your game more enjoyable.

There are plenty of things worthwhile to complain about.  Telling people to "stop crying and use your brain" is ignorant and belittling the fact that the game and dev actions do have some legitimate problems.  I'm happy that you have been so fortunate to not experience any major issues.  That is quite impressive considering I just went through a 7 day period where I was only able to play for two days due to downtimes brought on by updates.  This game is way too high maintenance for that kind of downtime brought on by (assumed) bad update scheduling and updates that break server connectivity or take down servers all together.  Whenever patches are announced I now "batten down the hatches" in preparation.  But sometimes I don't even get enough notice to do so.  And should players fear patches in this way?  Patches should be tested, and tested again, and then deployed all together at once.  No, I don't expect them to be able to test every little thing with every patch.  But some recent patches seem to be completely untested.  Currently my player has a constant whistling happening whenever I play preventing me from whistling any commands myself.  An issue that apparently already occurred two years ago.  Sure, I can work around this to maintain my game but I can't go do anything too dangerous without the ability to whistle my tames.  But the worst part is I still haven't seen any acknowledgment of the issue or whether a fix will be in the next patch.  The lack of communication is the hardest pill to swallow.  I don't mind working around glitches and bugs as they happen and are a part of gaming.  Especially in a game as complex as Ark.  But the constant downtimes and issues caused by updates should be preventable and are worth complaining about.

[Erinn]

@PertySlick I didn't mean to belittle anything, and as I wrote I encountered some of the game-breaking bugs too. The fact that I play on PvE is protecting me from 100 duped MEKs wiping my base and all the meshing that's happening on PvP. Duping is on PvE too, but I don't really care if my neighbour has 50 or 100 MEKs. I consider PvP much more punishing than rewarding and I avoid it since the day one.

I was talking about hundreds of posts that pop up everytime after a patch saying "so I logged in after patch and transfered my character and now it's lost" or "I didn't cryo my 2% matured babies and now they are gone" or "I just went right into bossfight and the server wasn't stable yet and I lost my stuff". Just why? Why everyone feels the need to rush everything in a game that takes almost 2 weeks to raise a dino? Flooding the game with hundreds of tickets like this and then wondering why it takes 5 days for GM to help you with your issue. I just craft/breed what I lost back and don't bother (and I can't really complain since I'm on legacy anyway). I agree if someone is playing solo and loosing a 150 tamed dino he worked hard for, he is right to ask for replacement. But when someone is outraged because he lost one of his 128 manas in a bug, it's nonsense.

But you are right, more straightforward communication would be a big improvement. Also the testing, as you said with the whistling - if the patch was tested, I bet something like this would be noticed for sure. But it's not happening on PC and we don't know if they tested it on one platform or none (probably more likely). From what I see the other platforms are neglected much more than pc.

What I ment was - play safe and always protect yourself, try to minimalize the risk of losing stuff. It's kinda sad we have to play this way. Even the moderators here say they upload event items so they don't loose them.

[PandaOP]

On 12/17/2019 at 11:56 PM, Torchupmaryj said:

Wildcard community managers encourage Exploiting against their CoC

When the Community Manager encourages people to clean their bases and "hide their dupes" This is not them promoting confidence in their ability to fix the issues so many people have raised alarm to. This is Wildcard saying we know you dupe, and that's ok if you keep it on the down low. Imagine all the people who lost out big time because exploiters duped a bunch of stuff like meks, or element dust, or cluster bombs, or rockets, or c4, or tek structures... then unfairly fobbed up and attacked you with nothing but duped loot. Wildcard doesn't care about you. In fact they want those exploiters to stay hidden and not caught, because they dont want to enforce exploitation's like that. 

They will just resolve your helpdesk ticket without resolving the issue.

Its simple really, When a base gets wiped, and all the dinos are killed or stolen, wildcard is betting on you sinking more time into their game to build back up. The exploiters have a symbiotic relationship with the dev team, the exploiters wipe bases with ease and they love it for the EZ loot, and the people who got wiped complain to all their friends " which is free advertisement for ARK" then build back up " which is another time investment"  or they quit, which ARK already got your money so they dont care. 

Also, its pretty suspect that these mega tribes can make thousands of dollars monthly selling duped loot. The Dev team actually has room to exploit the system for side cash. Imagine how valuable an exploitation method is for a mega tribe, do you honestly believe the developers have ZERO ties to any mega tribe members willing to pay great money for a new exploitation method?

You know the saying gotta spend money to make money, Exploiters would pay top dollar to a dev for an exploitation method that makes them money.. Or pay to have someone overlook their bad behavior.. Food for thought

Damn dude,whatever you have been smoking.............dont be shy,pass that along!

[Grekern]

19 hours ago, PertySlick said:

There are plenty of things worthwhile to complain about.  Telling people to "stop crying and use your brain" is ignorant and belittling the fact that the game and dev actions do have some legitimate problems.  I'm happy that you have been so fortunate to not experience any major issues.  That is quite impressive considering I just went through a 7 day period where I was only able to play for two days due to downtimes brought on by updates.  This game is way too high maintenance for that kind of downtime brought on by (assumed) bad update scheduling and updates that break server connectivity or take down servers all together.  Whenever patches are announced I now "batten down the hatches" in preparation.  But sometimes I don't even get enough notice to do so.  And should players fear patches in this way?  Patches should be tested, and tested again, and then deployed all together at once.  No, I don't expect them to be able to test every little thing with every patch.  But some recent patches seem to be completely untested.  Currently my player has a constant whistling happening whenever I play preventing me from whistling any commands myself.  An issue that apparently already occurred two years ago.  Sure, I can work around this to maintain my game but I can't go do anything too dangerous without the ability to whistle my tames.  But the worst part is I still haven't seen any acknowledgment of the issue or whether a fix will be in the next patch.  The lack of communication is the hardest pill to swallow.  I don't mind working around glitches and bugs as they happen and are a part of gaming.  Especially in a game as complex as Ark.  But the constant downtimes and issues caused by updates should be preventable and are worth complaining about.

Have the constant whistling too, I dont even see they are working on it, I cant do poop like wistle other things or use whips

It is actually starting to piss my whole tribe off

[Zedakk]

So you're constantly bringing out mesh and dupe fixes but people keep finding new ways of doing it. Pretty sad there are still that many ways people can do either. How broken was this when you released it originally?? You know the things people are fed up with especially from a PvP perspective it's been the same things since legacy. Fix duping and meshing (if you can't fix it you know there are programs people have made that work perfectly well in "mesh detection".) Haven't even mentioned the DDOS which I could live with if you get rid of meshing and duping. Another thing I've never understood, you have so many issues already with your game why do you keep releasing more DLC's and creating more issues for yourself? Is funding that bad you need to bring out rushed DLC's every year to boost it back up? Maybe you should of structured how your skins etc are rewarded to you or allow them to be unlocked through doing things in the game or make them purchasable? (You missed out big time on this you would of make heaps of money in my opinion.) Then that would of given you the funding to fix the issues sooner and upgrade the outdated pos servers your still using and have more funding to actually make the game good.

[DeHammer]

All I want to say is that I was gifted this game by my brother who loved it so much, he wanted to share it with me. I've now spent several thousand hrs in the game over the course of the last year, and I'm probably going to be playing it for quite some time to come. Once I'm finally done, i's a game experience I'm going to remember for a very very long time to come; lots of great enjoyable & fun memories. I can't think of a single other PC game that I have ever got so much from, with so little, beyond my time, invested. 

It's not a perfect game or perfect dev team. There are no perfect games or dev teams. But it's as damn close as you can get for the price of admission. They could charge a lot more for this game and it would still be worth every penny. 

So for the critics out there... get your heads on straight. No one wants to read whiny rants from people who can't properly manage their own expectations. 

[DeHammer]

1 hour ago, Zedakk said:

Haven't even mentioned the DDOS which I could live with....

...and have more funding to actually make the game good.

1) DDOS isn't something you can fix in a game. The root cause of DDOS is players being idiots.

2) The game doesn't need to be good... it's already great. 

[Zedakk]

9 minutes ago, DeHammer said:

1) DDOS isn't something you can fix in a game. The root cause of DDOS is players being idiots.

2) The game doesn't need to be good... it's already great. 

1) I know DDOS isn't an in game issue it's a server security issue. As I said if they structured their poop right they could of made much more money off this game and been able to use much better servers with much better security aka no more DDOS.

2) The game CAN be good at times. However the amount of bugs, glitches, exploits whatever you want to call them far out weigh the good right now. As I said I can deal with the DDOS but the duping and meshing needed to stop a long time ago. PvE will always continue cause you don't have the toxicity of PvP but if the bugs weren't there the toxic people wouldn't be able to abuse them

[DeHammer]

48 minutes ago, Zedakk said:

1) I know DDOS isn't an in game issue it's a server security issue. As I said if they structured their poop right they could of made much more money off this game and been able to use much better servers with much better security aka no more DDOS.

2) The game CAN be good at times. However the amount of bugs, glitches, exploits whatever you want to call them far out weigh the good right now. As I said I can deal with the DDOS but the duping and meshing needed to stop a long time ago. PvE will always continue cause you don't have the toxicity of PvP but if the bugs weren't there the toxic people wouldn't be able to abuse them

I work in Enterprise IT. You clearly have no clue of the challenges involved.

1) More easily said than done. You can't actually prevent DDOS attacks, you can only minimize the impact of them, which requires an expensive infrastructure and enormous bandwidth. Which wouldn't be a realistic expectation for game servers. 

2) More easily said than done. Getting rid of bugs is an impossible challenge. It's a constant battle. Getting rid of exploits can be even more difficult. It would be easier to literally track down the offenders, visit each of them at their home, and give them a reason not to be idiots. None of which is a realistic expectation. 

[TheDonn]

On 12/18/2019 at 3:39 PM, Cedric said:

If you look at the rest of that thread it specifically says why that post is important.  Working in this job you get a lot of negativity - especially being the only one that communicates with the player base.  It's very easy to get depressed or down or in a really bad mental place.  So that is to remind ME that not everyone hates the game because that is the truth.  That "all because one guy said  told him" is actually a lot of people I've met in real life.  

If you really believe I hate dissenting views, you haven't really kept up with my Twitter.  I'll concede good points and will openly admit the issues in the game.  I do it almost daily.  Not sure what grand concept I'm avoiding.  But you're welcome to believe what you will.  More important fish to fry at the moment.

I am honestly floored you responded this many times to people in this thread.

[Joebl0w13]

This thread has long run it's course. The complaints that brought it back up belong in more recent and more relevant threads.