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Official PvE Duping is still a huge problem


Rio4201

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Official PvE Duping is still a huge problem

I've been gaming since the early 80s, and in that rather lengthy span I've seen just about every exploit, glitch or bug there is being abused in video games. In Ark particularly, it's rampant and not even being kept hidden. The unscrupulous players that do it often times get over looked and continue to ruin the game play of the legitimate players who want nothing but to play the game as intended.  Server performance in most cases is completely dismal resulting in lost characters, duped characters, crashing and timeouts which do nothing in helping with player retention.  The overall goal is to keep players playing your game, and to offer them an entertaining experience but the balance between frustration and entertainment radically shifts back and forth and more and more players seems to be leaving the game over the issues. The only real reason the duping is  happening so severely is because there are certain countries who are being given a very unfair advantage of hiding behind the anonymity that government firewalls offer.  I think it's unfair that they are being allowed to continue to exploit the game against the Terms of Service because of geographical location and political red tape while the rest of us have to sit by and watch them take advantage and profit from those who are too lazy to put in the time to gain their resources and dinos. Several companies over the last few years have made great strides in combating the problem, maybe it's time Studio Wildcard did the same? Blizzard for instance, put in micro transaction shop for tokens which could then be used for purchasing gold, and it has severely reduced the sheer amount of online gold sellers which used to plague the servers with spam.

 

The easiest way is to put asset/item authentication in, have a multi-layer system, one for the old cryo'ed dinos and items, and introduce a new layer that authenticates the dino ID and cross references that ID in a central database to make sure no other version of it exists, if it does, report the findings back to the powers that be and delete the new dino immediately.   I mean there are many more less effective ways to handle it, but for the most part, it's still a major issue that isn't being handled fully.

 

In any case, of all the issues that are on my mind, the server performance due to the duping is at the very top. Hope someday they get this under control, because it sucks when you can't do missions or lag so bad you end up in a bad situation that you didn't even know you were in.

 

 

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I've not played on Genesis Official servers for a few months because the lag was so bad. Game breaking bad. No one left their bases and just bred stuff. Is it still this bad? I recall someone on my server saying that duping was the cause then but, I'm not code savvy so couldn't see why this was the case. Have WC ever said "We are looking in to the lag"? I filed daily server reports and didn't see any response.

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1 minute ago, TonyTempah said:

I've not played on Genesis Official servers for a few months because the lag was so bad. Game breaking bad. No one left their bases and just bred stuff. Is it still this bad? I recall someone on my server saying that duping was the cause then but, I'm not code savvy so couldn't see why this was the case. Have WC ever said "We are looking in to the lag"? I filed daily server reports and didn't see any response.

It's still really bad, it's actually gotten worse since Crystal Isles has come out.  Both the Genesis servers I play on are being lagged to the point of disconnecting players every hour or so, as for Wildcard, I'm sure they are aware of the situation but as of yet, they haven't seem to come up with any viable way of preventing it.  The most we can do is spitball solutions in this virtual think tank called the forums.  Honestly tho, no matter what they do, there will be lag involved. Just a general query to check all the necessary dino IDs would be at least a minute or two of lag, but i'd much rather have a slighly longer lag time on a server save interval and see the duped stuff vanish, than to have continual lag throughout the cycle. 

 

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That is disappointing to say the least. I worry that the structure of WC may be falling apart which is a real shame because, after the founding staff moved on to Atlas, things seemed to improved. I see Cedric putting a positive spin on things but, these efforts are losing their credibility/value. I've been impressed with Dollie's approach and communication. Unfortunately it feels like something is wrong and the good efforts are being swamped by the bad.

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I feel that, Cedric is a good guy, he tries to remain upbeat in the face of some pretty harsh criticism, I think all the Devs do actually, Dollie has been super impressive and open communication is not only much appreciated but just plain and simply the right way to go.  Ultimately, I'm sure they are working on it, but as with most titles, unless you are sitting in the morning developer pow wows, you aren't gonna get a good idea of whats being done.  I just hope people realize and can accept that due to the pandemic, don't expect to see Genesis Part 2 on time lol. 

 

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32 minutes ago, Rio4201 said:

Official PvE Duping is still a huge problem

I've been gaming since the early 80s, and in that rather lengthy span I've seen just about every exploit, glitch or bug there is being abused in video games. In Ark particularly, it's rampant and not even being kept hidden. The unscrupulous players that do it often times get over looked and continue to ruin the game play of the legitimate players who want nothing but to play the game as intended.  Server performance in most cases is completely dismal resulting in lost characters, duped characters, crashing and timeouts which do nothing in helping with player retention.  The overall goal is to keep players playing your game, and to offer them an entertaining experience but the balance between frustration and entertainment radically shifts back and forth and more and more players seems to be leaving the game over the issues. The only real reason the duping is  happening so severely is because there are certain countries who are being given a very unfair advantage of hiding behind the anonymity that government firewalls offer.  I think it's unfair that they are being allowed to continue to exploit the game against the Terms of Service because of geographical location and political red tape while the rest of us have to sit by and watch them take advantage and profit from those who are too lazy to put in the time to gain their resources and dinos. Several companies over the last few years have made great strides in combating the problem, maybe it's time Studio Wildcard did the same? Blizzard for instance, put in micro transaction shop for tokens which could then be used for purchasing gold, and it has severely reduced the sheer amount of online gold sellers which used to plague the servers with spam.

 

The easiest way is to put asset/item authentication in, have a multi-layer system, one for the old cryo'ed dinos and items, and introduce a new layer that authenticates the dino ID and cross references that ID in a central database to make sure no other version of it exists, if it does, report the findings back to the powers that be and delete the new dino immediately.   I mean there are many more less effective ways to handle it, but for the most part, it's still a major issue that isn't being handled fully.

 

In any case, of all the issues that are on my mind, the server performance due to the duping is at the very top. Hope someday they get this under control, because it sucks when you can't do missions or lag so bad you end up in a bad situation that you didn't even know you were in.

 

 

Do you actually think duping is related to nationalities because of anonimity. Duping is not punishable by law why would it matter. 

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4 minutes ago, Dodofeast said:

Do you actually think duping is related to nationalities because of anonimity. Duping is not punishable by law why would it matter. 

Well here's the deal;

The duping is happening mostly by the different countries who are able to veil their players from being identified, China (and no I'm not blaming just them) for instance, firewalls their citizens like this.  When you can basically log into the server and dupe without fear of being singled out, that makes it much easier to do what you want and get away with it.  If someone in Canada, the U.S, the UK, tried that same approach, they'd be identified, and the ToS/CoC enforcement would ban them.   Which is partially why I attributed the last post to that.  In the bigger picture, these countries that hide behind those firewalls are able to build virtual economies for real financial gain, thus why you see places like India, China, and Middle Eastern countries putting up call centers with people dedicate to these online treasure troves.  If you google for online ark dino sales, you'll see dozens of sites that sell them for real world revenue. 

 

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I think it goes without saying though, that if we could make a real world profit off of playing our favorite games online, most of us would be millionaires by now,  just in this game alone I'd have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the time I've been playing, so I can see the allure. However if you aren't gonna enforce the rules globally, it shouldn't be fair that only certain countries get to do it. lol

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1 minute ago, TonyTempah said:

Is there a way to identify who might be duping in game? Could I witness someone doing it and report them?

Yes, you can report em, you get their coords by hitting 

ccc

in the console, then put in a ticket, make sure to get plenty of screenshots.  The easiest way to find em is to look for dinos with the exact same levels and colors in mass, for instance, if you see a base with 60 astrocetus all sitting there 9 times out of 10 they are dupers.  Meks are also generally heavily duped so if you see a few dozens of those, you can almost always assume thats the case. 

 

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3 hours ago, Rio4201 said:

Yes, you can report em, you get their coords by hitting 

ccc

in the console, then put in a ticket, make sure to get plenty of screenshots.  The easiest way to find em is to look for dinos with the exact same levels and colors in mass, for instance, if you see a base with 60 astrocetus all sitting there 9 times out of 10 they are dupers.  Meks are also generally heavily duped so if you see a few dozens of those, you can almost always assume thats the case. 

 

Im not sure that this qualifies as evidence.  I have hundreds of spinos,  hundreds of ankys,  78 rexes, all matching in stats and colors and I bred almost every one of them besides the events I have cloned.   
 

duped meks can’t exist on the same server together,  your argument fails on that note as well.  If one copy of a mek is out on a server,  another copy will fail to deploy from a pod.    
of course,  I do agree the duped meks are out on every server just about as they have been passed around by segments of the community and are pretty much everywhere.   But there is no server with 2 copies of the same mek out,  WC already addressed that.

 

also finding matching event Astrocetus wouldn’t be that hard to come by,  I’ve seen people tame all the same color combos on crystal wyvernS this event on different servers.   There is very few truly unique tames out there.

 

lag on servers can be attributed to huge bases and thousands of tames on a server.   We are experiencing the lag out connections just like on extinction because of all the building up on the server.  Pillars are one thing but people using 15k structure pieces to build a “perfect” castle on an official server  is going to tank performance on every server.

 

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3 minutes ago, GrumpyBear said:

Im not sure that this qualifies as evidence.  I have hundreds of spinos app matching in stats and colors and I bred almost every one of them besides the events I have cloned.   
 

duped meks can’t exist on the same server together,  your argument fails on that note as well.  If one copy of a mek is out on a server,  another copy will fail to deploy from a pod.    
of course,  I do agree the duped meks are out on every server just about as they have been passed around by segments of the community and are pretty much everywhere.   But there is no server with 2 copies of the same mek out,  WC already addressed that.

And that goes for everything or ???

My Char already got duped like 4 times, normal mine inventory is duped to.

But when i tried to use, anything, from inventory its just disapeared. 

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6 minutes ago, GrumpyBear said:

Im not sure that this qualifies as evidence.  I have hundreds of spinos,  hundreds of ankys,  78 rexes, all matching in stats and colors and I bred almost every one of them besides the events I have cloned.   
 

duped meks can’t exist on the same server together,  your argument fails on that note as well.  If one copy of a mek is out on a server,  another copy will fail to deploy from a pod.    
of course,  I do agree the duped meks are out on every server just about as they have been passed around by segments of the community and are pretty much everywhere.   But there is no server with 2 copies of the same mek out,  WC already addressed that.

 

also finding matching event Astrocetus wouldn’t be that hard to come by,  I’ve seen people tame all the same color combos on crystal wyvernS this event on different servers.   There is very few truly unique tames out there.

We watched a box tribe on 601 mass produce over 60 Astrocetus in the matter of a half hour near the Volcano, all the same levels and colors, not clones. We've also seen them do the same with Meks, I'd bet as long as they don't cryo them back up and throw them back out there's a work around. In truth, i know every little about how duping is accomplished, i have never cared to know as it offers too much tempation, who wouldn't like a few mill in Element on C.I lol. But true, it's not always obvious it's duping, but its still happening in spades. 

 

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2 hours ago, hud said:

And that goes for everything or ???

My Char already got duped like 4 times, normal mine inventory is duped to.

But when i tried to use, anything, from inventory its just disapeared. 

when your character dupes, the system is better at keeping track of your items now.  I've had duped chars, but never has the inventory duped w/ it.  It maybe moves to the next server w/out my character, but never have I had the same inventory show up on a duplicate copy of my character.

 

Duping used to involve setting up structures in such a way as to force the game to crash.  Not long ago dupers used an old everquest trick to eploit the timing of a dropped connection by pulling the plug on their ethernet cables at just the right time to copy it.  IF they can still use that technique i don't really know, that was just what i heard some time ago.  How you can prove that's what's going on would be a logistical nightmare, but I woudlnt' say it's entirely impossible to document.  What I would say is if you see them in the act of making copies of astrocetus from thin are, please take a video of the whole thing and report them.  The only way we'll get them out is if we do the legwork, WC doesn't have the man power to really go in and dig deep to figure out every bad actor out there.   It's our game too, so it would help if we put the effort in too and help get rid of these yahoos.  The community would be better for it if they are removed.  But posting the names and faces of people on the forums to name and shame will not work , reporting them appropriately will do the most good.  Naming and shaming in the forums will get you kicked and possibly banned, so don't do it.

If you suspect a tribe is duping inside a base to hide their activity, you can look through their walls w/ a railgun.  Then take a video of them in the act.  Spying on other players in game isn't illegal, it's only an issue if you are doing so as part of an act of harassment.   Investigating other players activity on the server isn't harassment.

 

We, as a player community, have plenty of old alliances on the servers who could put a little less effort into breeding 2000%melee rexes and put a little more into making the server a better place to play.  It doesn't have to be done by one person, if we all share a little in the effort, we can make progress on getting the bad actors removed.

 

@Kentmcg- you need to click on support, go to help or report pc abuse.  on that page, if you look in the upper right corner, it will say log in next to a button for submit.  First you log in, then click submit, u can fill out the report and include files and links with all your supporting info.  

 

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On 7/16/2020 at 5:19 PM, Rio4201 said:

Classic example was these guys, they got shutdown by WC shortly after the pictures from half the people on the server came over and saw it: 

 

gigadupers.jpg

Couldnt even tell you how many bases ive seen like this and alot worst [insert dino] of choice which its been done to, honestly untill they start using the globally ban option nothing will get done. We've gotten tired of summitting tickets yeah dinos get deleted but are back in a day or two by the same process so your right back to where you started but you have the added joy of dealing with the dupping process all over again which was the whole purpose of sending in the ticket in the first place, same thing can be said for the offline protected spike walls on extinction send in report spike walls get deleted next day they are right back where they were. And even then if they did the globally bans it would only marginally reduce said players as they could buy a copy of the game every time they got banned because they make more $$$ in a day then the game costs.  

Thought that SS was from our server at 1st same location, colors on the giga's but that building is different and its missing about another 1500+ giga's, yeah i know tribe limit is 500 so it was multiple tribes and or accounts but they had easy 2,500+ giga's out at one base.  Sent in a ticket dinos deleted, they had their dinos back in a day from dupping again and spread them around the map.

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