Question About ARK Official Admin System

[AnnoyingGamer]

Hello everyone. I'm AG_SL. I study game development in SLIIT Sri Lanka. I recently started playing ARK on official servers. One of my friends lost his character while traveling to another server and he had to make an appointment with a ARK staff member to get the character back. So this got me thinking, Why did he have to make an appointment with a staff member? Can't official server admins access all the official server logs and see the player activities?

I asked from ARK Support about these and they suggest me to ask here. So it would be great if anyone can answer following questions. I love video games and I love studying different games and their structures. So please help me with this:

1. Can official admins access any official server details (like; player joining, leaving, ip address, animal details, tribe details, etc..) or each official server has their own admin who can only access that specific server?

Eg: 'Official Valguero Server 100' has its own admin who can only access 'Official Valguero Server 100' details
Or each ARK official staff can access 'Official Valguero Server 100', 'Official Valguero Server 101', 'Official Valguero Server 150' or any other server they want.

- So if they can access any server details including logs, Can't they just check if the player's character exist in another server or not. If the character is not in another server that means the character is lost for real and they can restore the character on the last server it existed. If that the case what is the point of the appointment?

2. Does each official server has different hosts or all the servers run on the same host (like in GTA 5)? Or does ARK has hosts for different regions like 1 host for Asian servers another host for Europe servers, etc..

- If the servers runs on different hosts, do they connected with each other somehow? Can they communicate with each other or all the servers are isolated from one another?

3. Does ARK save server data on our computer to save loading time?

4. Why does ark takes lots of time to load buildings, animals and other stuff made by other players?

It would be amazing if someone can answer these questions for me. I love the game and really curious to learn how the game works. Sorry for the bad English. It's not my first language. Thank You.

[Larkfields]

Players using official servers have to make an appointments because WildCard and Nitrado don't have enough staff to deal with all the player's questions and problems all of the time.  The official admins are staff who have to be paid, so official admins are an expensive resource.

1.  You need an official admin to properly answer this, but...

In theory, they could see people joining and leaving.  They could obtain IP addresses.  They could get dino and player and tribe information.  I get most of this information on my unofficial server, and I imagine that WildCard and Nitrado have better tools than I do.

2. A single PC server can manage several maps.  Players sometimes refer to a map as a server, so there can be some confusion about what exactly a "server" is.

You can sometimes see how many maps are operating from a single PC server by searching on BattleMatrics.
For example https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/search?q=elias&sort=score
You can sometimes see when several maps are running from the same PC server when they share the same IP address.
In practice, the shared IP addresses might be on a Virtual Machine, rather than a physical machine.
 

3.  Ark stores the maps on your local PC, but not the players or structures or their dinos.

4. Buildings are stored on the server, so all the information about buildings and inventories and tamed dinos have to be transferred over the network from the server to your PC when you travel through an area of a map.   Maps are transferred in chunks, so only the chunk you can see is transferred from the server.  This saves network traffic, and reduces the amount of RAM you need to store the map when playing the game.