BranchNever

Hey, I've got an idea for addressing cheating in Ark Survival Ascended. I understand that tackling cheats will always be a constant battle between cheat developers and anti-cheat systems. However, some games and servers have found success by involving their players in reporting and moderating their own servers or lobbies. Games like Krunker, player-owned servers in Rust, and Ark have all utilized their player communities to combat cheaters who manage to evade traditional anti-cheat measures. The best part? These players do it voluntarily, out of their love for the game. Of course, I recognize that the Ark community has its share of trust issues. So, I've thought about how we can create a player moderation system that's less likely to be abused. Obviously, we can't just allow players to roam Official servers with god mode enabled to identify cheaters; that would be exploited in no time. Here's my proposal: create a dedicated website where players can submit video clips as evidence of cheating. These submissions would then be reviewed by individuals who have applied for and been accepted into this role by your current enforcement team. Now, I understand this might sound a bit sketchy, but let's not forget that reversing bans isn't the end of the world. It's relatively straightforward to ascertain whether someone was falsely banned, especially when you save the evidence in a database to facilitate a ban appeal process for those wrongly accused. To mitigate risks, we can set specific criteria for applicants, such as a deep understanding of the game and its typical hacking behaviors, active community participation, and a proven history of reporting cheaters, among other potential requirements. One crucial aspect of this website would be the requirement for the reporting player to provide clear proof of the cheater's identity in the video. Additionally, the moderator would only have the authority to ban the account of the player being investigated in the submitted clip through some private ban process conducted through the website and not in the game, making it easy to identify who banned who and for what evidence. To encourage player engagement, users could create accounts on this website to report cheaters. This would allow us to keep track of their reporting history, differentiating between true and false reports, and create a priority queue for reviewing reports based on each user's reliability. It could also serve as a baseline requirement for joining the enforcement program – for example, a minimum report score. I have some experience volunteering as an in-game moderator for servers run by a publisher, and this it's important to keep in mind is a rough idea that can certainly be refined and made viable. I would love to help refine this in the best way to implement this in Ark 1.5. For instance because I know you're all busy Initially, this could even be managed through a Discord server with bots to streamline the process. Even if this isnt a viable option for the game at this time consider adding information to the death screen such as the player who was riding the tame that killed you and their corresponding implant id making it easier to report. Currently its very difficult to provide information about a hacker in a report and probably only serves to make both sides of the report process harder having to properly identify the player. Would love to see people thoughts on this its just a rough concept im sure there some holes in it but I bet they can be worked out.