Let's Talk Unintended Build Areas/Mesh Holes and Level Design

[Dollie]

Okay team,

Much of our work against meshing this year has involved our Anti-meshing Detection System and we’re continuing to see a marked decline in incidents. Countering meshing is not over and, whilst cases remain low and will continue to decrease, we incorporate other methods in the battle including: Fixing mesh method exploits (the ways in which players get in), utilising Level Design to fill in holes or unintended building locations and, enforcement against offending players.

We’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about Mesh Detection, fixing exploits, and enforcement this year, so let’s spend some time talking about the level design aspect. 

By Level Design, what we’re literally referring to in the case of meshing is holes & unintended playable areas. Once a map/game has been shipped, holes and missed locations (along with bugs/exploits) are going to be found by the sheer number of players that are now playing. It’s the nature of the beast, in our game, and others. Ideally, all of these locations would be found during our QA process but it wasn’t the case, so we circle back, and have our Level Designers iterate on them aka fill them in via our live game updates.

Our approach to fixing holes/unintended playable areas is simply to fix them as quickly as possible. This is because we have concerns about players seeking an advantage over others by exploiting these locations and using them to detrimentally affect another player’s experience through illegitimate gameplay (i.e meshing/unraidable bases). We understand that due to the pace of our method some well-meaning players may be unintentionally affected due to not knowing that the spot was illegitimate but our focus is to prevent malicious players from gaining an unfair advantage by using these locations. 

During the development of The Island, and possibly some other maps, we have given visual indicators indicating that these parts of the map were going to change. The reason behind the differences in the processes was due to the fact we were continuing to develop and design those maps. Entire regions or biomes were being changed, and these changes were going to have a large impact on the majority of players on those maps, which is very different from filling holes and preventing unintended playable areas from being accessed.

Whilst we’re sympathetic to players who felt they may be in a legit spot because, say, X dino could fly inside it, the damage players could do to other tribes with public notification, shared locations, and, warning of an incoming fix to an unintended and, frankly, OP location would impact more players negatively than those impacted by building in one of these locations.

 

[wizard03]

Have to say, the cliffs on the ocean over by the skylord artifact on the island is very buggy.....the ground looks like you can walk here and there, but then you will clip through the ground and interact with a misplaced clipping.....Been more times than not, Id go to farm the metal nodes to the south of the supply drop spawn and then just magically fall right through the textures. One time it caused my anky to fall through to the water underneath where it proceeded to drown. =/

If players could get familiar with it, they could essential hide all sorts of stuff through the map and it wouldn't be discovered unless someone seen him clipping through the textures or if they somehow cheated.

[acat]

Cave bases are still the meta in ark. There are really not many normal above ground spots that are viable for building. And the few that exist mostly only work for big tribes. The so called ratholes are what guarantees small tribes a somewhat safe space to live, because open spots are no option and the bigger caves are too hard to fortify and hold with few ppl. The ratholes are usually super small and can only fit a few vaults, not even a real crafting area. I think those spots should stay IF they are not behind closed mesh and have entrances big enough to fit through with small tames, so it stays fair and is not unraidable. They are the small mans caves so to say, and caves are without alternative sadly. I know that some spots are far from fair, and im fine with removing/balancing those, but it is a critical topic and could quickly remove the base of existance for small tribes.

[TiTmellais666]

I agree with smaller caves for small tribes as indeed it's very hard to progress at start especially if u new to ark and big alpha spots are for tribes who are online 24/7 and not everyone can do that...

IMO need to create maybe small or medium size genuine caves... i know it will be hard to do that but at least it would give players time to progress and move on instead of being beach bob and wiped on first night as logged off

[acat]

i want to add that pearl cave on center and hard ice cave on island are harder to raid than most ratholes, because you cant fit any soakers through the entrances. And they have huge spaces behind, that allow for defenses at turret cap and big dinos to defend, plus space to set up a decent breeding programm. Ratholes sometimes have entrances that are equally small, but they also just have space for a dozen turrets and no dinos to defend.