How Chinese 1% kids are ruining Ark: Survival Evolved
Summary
Ark: Survival Evolved, a unique open world player vs player (PVP) first person shooter game is being ruined. Its developer, Studio Wildcard is being prevented from banning cheaters who have a personal, perhaps family connection to Wildcard's corporate owner, Snail Games.
What is Ark:Survival Evolved?
Ark: Survival Evolved is a persistent-world 24x7 online massively multiplayer first person survival shooter game. The Official PVP servers number in the hundreds, split between five different maps and with a couple of thousand daily players. Imagine a few hundred miniature parallel worlds connected together through teleporting. North American, European and Oceanian servers are managed by Wildcard gamemasters(GM), the Asian ones by Snail GM's. This detail is important.
The worlds have different biomes, ~170 unique animal species, mostly dinosaurs but also mammals, reptiles and a few fantasy creatures such as wyverns or rock golems. The hostility of environment ranges from nil- that is, tranquil beaches that'd make an ideal vacation spot except for the giant sharks off-shore, through risky & exciting ones such as redwoods filled with terror birds and giant marsupial cats that can jump at you from 50 meters up; lakes brimming with piranhas, giant crabs, electric eels and jellyfish who all seem to love each other and hate you and up to irradiated, toxic environment filled with living land mines, armor-melting centipedes, invisible giant killer gliding lizards and subterranean xenomorph-like giant monsters that make T-rexes look harmless.
In those cases, you either have to use lots of explosives, which are time-consuming to produce, or bring the biggest, baddest monster you've tamed. Such as predatory squids the size of whales.
Sadly, ecosystems are not a feature of the game.
Game world in A State of nature
Anyone can travel to any server and fight players who live there, attempt to kill them and steal all their possessions. It's all so very Hobbesian, which forces players to band together in order to avoid becoming just another victim.
Very few of the items used in game were looted from supply crates that periodically respawn at various places of the maps. 99.9% of what is used, needs to be crafted from raw materials harvested from the game environment. Or stolen from other players who are insufficiently paranoid.
Naturally, this sort of huge game-world coupled with the necessity of having and defending both a production base for in-game items and also territory to harvest raw materials from has led to the game being dominated by a few huge alliances that 'own' the majority of official servers.
The game as it is played on the official PVP servers is quite complex and demanding. Ark on official PVP servers is many games at once, there's the first person shooter level, complicated by the ability to build your own bases, lay traps and so on. There's the real-time strategy game element, where leaders direct action.
There's the logistical level, which requires having people grinding items and breeding creatures to support their warriors. This grinding is however, not entirely brainless, the one who comes up with the most efficient harvesting & crafting methods can gain a significant advantage.
There's the building game, that requires careful design of bases, a keen eye for flaws and all that. And last but not least, the social level.
Resources in the game are scarce, especially if you're new and inexperienced. The game makes it really easy to steal from your team, and there are few good ways of preventing theft. Teams in this game are implemented through tribes, which are groups of player characters with tribe owner being paramount (he can remove anyone, & he cannot be removed if he doesn't want to). A single sticky-fingered individual can destroy a tribe, if he's not dealt with.
The Darwinian nature of the game on official PvP cluster has led to its PvP population mainly being comprised of highly dedicated, largely mature players led by intelligent, socially adept leaders.
Bad leaders can't motivate people, keep order, thus they are weeded out. Immature people like teens are a pain to deal with, so they either mature quickly, or are cast out.
Because Ark is many games, and there are strong incentives to get along with others, the player base is very diverse. My own tribe has people such as a retired German naval officer, an Australian housewife, a nail stylist, a group of hard-working Portugese, working class Slavs who just love to blow up stuff, a lawyer, an Airforce cybercommand grunt, a carpenter who was an infantry NCO in the 2nd Iraq war, a semi-ironic male gold-digger and so on.
Getting to know foreign people with interesting life experiences is just one of many charms of this game.
The Chinese
Chinese teams are pretty good at this game, as they seem to be much more naturally keen on large-scale cooperation than Westerners. They're also difficult to communicate with, as the Chinese who play Ark mostly can't speak English. Those who can are likely busy trying to achieve success in the real world, not a virtual one. Google translate works, but isn't used that often, and it has to be done on both sides- due to font issues, Chinese and Cyrilic characters are only shown as squares on Western localisations.
Chinese also have a different view of the game. They fight less often, but when they fight they go all out and use surprise, massive numbers and material superiority to win quickly. If that fails, cheating happens.
Less often now, as developers are now quite keen to wipe players who have been caught cheating on video by their enemies or accidentally incriminated themselves on stream.
Meanwhile, players not from Eastern Asia are much more fractious, naturally form smaller tribes and seem to seek out fighting for its own sake.
Chinese Streamers
However, there is a problem: Streaming Ark in China is a business model, and given the bigger population, a more lucrative one than elsewhere. Chinese apparently like watching these streams, and are generous with donations to see Chinese tribes fighting foreigners.
A mandarin-speaking friend of mine told me that even if they spend say, $40 per a cheating account and cheats just for a couple of hours, it's still worth it, financially. That is why GM's typically wipe entire tribes when it can be shown somebody with aimbot was helping them.
Studio Wildcard has been globally banning and dev-wiping tribes that get frequently reported and are deemed to be using aimbots, other hacks or severe exploits. Note that people who merely played with cheaters and benefited from the cheating also get banned, even if they're unaware of rule-breaking.
Several big ban waves after release of legacy servers have made the game ..somewhat more clean. Before release, practically the entire PvP player base was duplicating items through the server transfer system — they'd upload the item to another server, and crash their own, which would then revert to a saved state in which the item hasn't been transferred out yet.
The most recent big banwave.
Led to global bans for around a hundred players, and wiped major tribes on around thirty, which means perhaps a thousand people lost everything due to being in the same tribes as cheaters or exploiters.
Reasons for the wipes have not been forthcoming so far, though people in the know believe they are probably justified. Real money trading did happen, sometimes with consent of tribe leadership and sometimes without. The top tribes had a few people who were using cheats, but it was not blatant as it's been several ban-waves before.
The use of denial-of-service attacks to crash servers and keep them offline has been a staple of high-level Ark:Survival Official PvP for more than a year now. It's very hard to establish who is the guilty party, which makes enforcement very difficult.
My own tribe has lost two assaults against one Chinese tribe for this very reason, and we feel pretty good that said Chinese tribe was partially wiped in the recent wave, though probably for a different reason.
The most prominent tribes like A-Team, BLDX, YSS, etc were almost completely erased. Less high profile ones escaped the ban wave.
Tens of thousands of hours of grinding and building were erased in a day. We still don't know why exactly, though few believe the wipes were completely unjustified. The tribes that were wiped have many players in them who are 'reformed' cheaters and exploiters. One can hazard to guess that some of them weren't completely reformed. Hopefully, Wildcard will provide some explanation at some point.
The Problem with TEA
TEA tribe is a unique Ark tribe. You'll have to take my word for it, or you can read the semi-official Ark subreddit.
TEA apparently have a lot of money.
They’re known for bragging about it.
They’ve been buying in-game items for it. If you can offer $10k for ownership of somebody else's group, you can afford a few dollars to purchase a creature.
This in itself is a bannable offence for which people have been erased by developers.
They've also been trying to buy entire tribes. That is, purchase owner status in them.
There is probably more evidence against TEA for cheating than against any other tribe. That they haven't been wiped, globally banned is outrageous and inexplicable. TEA's claim of 'having money' is nonsensical, as they'd have to pay literally millions and millions to make a company behave so unfairly and ruin its own reputation.
The following video contains evidence strongly suggesting someone with admin access to the servers is spawning in Element ( a substance that cannot be transferred across servers and on that server is only obtainable through boss-fights). One of their bases requires ~500 element each day just to keep being powered, this would be, in my estimate, 2 good players working 8 hours each and every day on nothing but farming items required to trigger a boss-fight and then several more hours actually fighting these bosses.
TEA however, doesn't have good players.
Their bases are badly designed — as shown in the above video. Those shimmering blue spheres are generators that provide wireless power to defence turrets. No one else ever puts such generators to power just a few turrets, because it is extremely expensive and wasteful.
Those big, shimmering walls are actually very expensive gates that other tribes don't use in place of walls.
According to what I've heard, their core groups is barely 20 people.
What is worse, they've had GMs wipe bases of other players on their servers.
You can hear the disbelief in their voices. They weren't doing anything shady, merely constructing an new base. Official servers were widely seen as fair and without the abuse of admin access that is quite common on unofficial servers.
TEA's utter lack of shame
I believe A-Team, BLDX wipes were probably justified. Maybe overly broad, but they both were very likely doing something shady. DDos at the very least. However, A-Team, BLDX and most of the other banned tribes were generally impressive tribes that were organized and did not need to use cheats to win. They could win without cheats, just not as often.
“Tea is legit” is well, a meme. People write that as a joke, and no one involved believes that to be the case. TEA crowing victoriously about how they 'won' is well more salt in the wound.
Community Response
People involved are irate and angry. The Salt is truly flowing.
It looks like traditional enmities have been put on hold, and TEA servers have been under constant attack since the ban-wave. Several have already been wiped (conquered and completely destroyed) by players within 48 hours. One of them has been rolled-back by a GM during that time, then conquered again.
It seems allies of TEA proved to be somewhat mercenary as they had very few people defending.
Semi-official Ark subreddit has been completely flooded with memes and art about this latest outrage.
TEA has been found to have a base “under the mesh” that is, in a part of the map that's not supposed to be accessed (offence usually punished by a wipe). TEA has been seen aimbotting on live-stream, and recorded aimbotting many times over.
Official forums are almost completely dead, well, tranquil, as the stringent Code of Conduct, makes them completely unattractive to Ark Official PVP players.
The unforgiving, brutal nature of the free-for-all player-vs-player environment is such that nice people burn out on it very rapidly, unless they have a trust of a larger group. Usually burn out too fast to earn that trust, so the game is very much played by people who hold 'survival values' dear.
You don't have to be a slightly psychopathic obsessive no-lifer to play Ark Official PvP, but it sure helps.
Future of Ark
Is to be decided. The game has an amazing amount of content, great art, a very dubious code-base yet it is unique and rewarding. Perhaps too rewarding is a good description.
If Snail & Wildcard do the right thing and dumps TEA into the sewers where they belong, perhaps there'll be Ark Survival Evolved 2, with better code, less lag and more intriguing & biologically accurate PvE content.