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Jiro_89
4th November 2018, 23:55
This is essentially what the outcome will be if I go through and remove every conceivable exploit from our servers. For years we've used a common sense rule and haven't needed to change our main rules at all for Ark. Now I've got people complaining that the rules aren't clear, that they're not concise enough, that there are loopholes, etc.

In order to address these problems I made some more in depth rules. In order to comply with them I had to start making some drastic changes to how things work in the server, most notably Structures plus. I immediately received push back, and people were unhappy with how it would negatively affect their already made structures. Hardly anyone was immune to the changes as they've been apart of our servers since we started them.

Here is the real truth in the matter of defined rules:

If I make the servers as exploit free as I possibly can, you WILL NOT have Structures Plus, you WILL NOT have Protected Passives, you WILL NOT have Ultra Stacks, and you WILL NOT have a good portion of the plugins. Is this what the Ark community wants? It's an honest question, because I don't have many options here. I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't lately.

I rolled back the servers to a few hours prior to this post to reverse the cube removal change while we hash out how we're going to move forward here.

dentodili
5th November 2018, 01:02
This is essentially what the outcome will be if I go through and remove every conceivable exploit from our servers. For years we've used a common sense rule and haven't needed to change our main rules at all for Ark. Now I've got people complaining that the rules aren't clear, that they're not concise enough, that there are loopholes, etc.

In order to address these problems I made some more in depth rules. In order to comply with them I had to start making some drastic changes to how things work in the server, most notably Structures plus. I immediately received push back, and people were unhappy with how it would negatively affect their already made structures. Hardly anyone was immune to the changes as they've been apart of our servers since we started them.

Here is the real truth in the matter of defined rules:

If I make the servers as exploit free as I possibly can, you WILL NOT have Structures Plus, you WILL NOT have Protected Passives, you WILL NOT have Ultra Stacks, and you WILL NOT have a good portion of the plugins. Is this what the Ark community wants? It's an honest question, because I don't have many options here. I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't lately.

I rolled back the servers to a few hours prior to this post to reverse the cube removal change while we hash out how we're going to move forward here.


I'd like to suggest a transition grace period, for people to adjust and get accustomed and maybe demolish and salvage stuff. I fully agree rules are to be followed not abused, but i guess everyone's got their interests. Unfortunately , in a buggy, glitchy game such as Ark making fully proofed rules is no easy task, but i'd like to request that no matter how this is resolved, meshing, hacking etc should be considered a serious offense. It is when you have to deal with meshing that this game becomes unbearable.

Jiro_89
5th November 2018, 02:14
I'd like to suggest a transition grace period, for people to adjust and get accustomed and maybe demolish and salvage stuff. I fully agree rules are to be followed not abused, but i guess everyone's got their interests. Unfortunately , in a buggy, glitchy game such as Ark making fully proofed rules is no easy task, but i'd like to request that no matter how this is resolved, meshing, hacking etc should be considered a serious offense. It is when you have to deal with meshing that this game becomes unbearable.

This thread is an open question from an administration standpoint to the players on Ark. Are you all comfortable with the status quo or are there actually serious issues people have with the rules. If so, serious changes that will affect your gameplay will need to happen. My experience with Ark in the last few years is that it's difficult to draw that line of what is okay and what isn't.

Skybases are a prime example of this (I'm not selecting anyone in particular, it's just a good example). In order to make a sky base you have to use exploits in some fashion. Anyone building a skybase knows that floating foundations were never added as an intended mechanic. But if the sky base is still raid-able under conventional Ark warfare then is that okay?

The most recent change made is another good example of potential for abuse affecting quality of life to everyone else. S+ ladders have a warp option to save a lot of time climbing up and down. But they can be used to shoot under the mesh so players can play and build safely underground. I could count the number of times the abuse of this mechanic has happened in the last year and a half on one hand, but if I'm making standards of rules that people can't try and 'loophole' then the 99% of other players will suffer the consequences.

Prior to these new rule additions, I've gone with the idea that as long as the player/tribe doesn't have an unfair advantage (like duplication, invincible bases under mesh, etc), then it's not that big of a deal.

InsaneJ
5th November 2018, 09:03
I haven't read into the issues. Nor am I able to quote the rules from memory. From what I know a lot of the rules are common sense like you said. Here's the kicker. If people need to be told that whining and bitching on the server after being asked not to means disrespecting the staff and other players, then those players need to go. Same goes for other common sense rules. It's unfortunate that a lot of players, about 1/3rd, choose to ignore the rules and behave like dirt bags. With Minecraft we have things like MCBans to keep known idiots out, but with ARK we have to take the brunt of the brain cell killing onslaught ourselves.

The problem with elaborate rules is that you will never be able to cover all situations. And, as you already discovered, having strict rules punishes the good players more than it does the bad players.

So my advice would be: keep the common sense rules. Maybe add a few examples. And people who need to be told to use common sense get banned if they can't figure it out quickly enough.

InsaneJ
5th November 2018, 09:28
One more thought.

This is a PvP server. This means you can go at it with all the tools at your disposal. No use complaining about players that aren't using exploits, bugs or cheats to their advantage.

dentodili
5th November 2018, 10:12
The problem with elaborate rules is that you will never be able to cover all situations. And, as you already discovered, having strict rules punishes the good players more than it does the bad players.

So my advice would be: keep the common sense rules. Maybe add a few examples. And people who need to be told to use common sense get banned if they can't figure it out quickly enough.


I second this, the current rules are good, the passive dino thing with ghost mode is also good, i've never seen a sky base, but long term that will go south really fast, same with bases under the mesh etc. One thing i need to stress out is that a strong stance on griefing and meshing would at least limit the warfare to conventional means and not turn us into the clusterfuck that the officials are. I'd hate to see square miles of gates around every base, lowered bottom floors and underground turrets.

Heilaard
5th November 2018, 11:50
Hello,

Since I feel like I'm the probably the guy that caused all this fuss I feel like I need to say my opinion. I never wanted to anger or annoy anyone with this whole matter, I was merely just trying to help to prevent disagreements about rules and what is and what is not allowed. I think my biggest mistake was to just ramble about it in game instead of making a thread about it on the forums, suggestions whatnot, my apologies for that.

Anyway clear rules are just important to me where you can find all the important stuff because before you know it you've done something wrong and you didn't know it wasn't allowed since it was nowhere defined even slightly. I'm happy you added some important mechanics to those!

Let's take the example of the floating base, which meta and myself made. At the point we were going to make it we asked ourselves too if it would be ok to build something like that, since technically it shouldn't be possible but s+ made it possible. So we checked around and saw that we were not the only ones with a floating foundations. We didn't ask if it would be allowed since we wanted a secret and safe base so we would not have to worry about getting raided that much. And so we proceeded with the build. I have no idea that the s+ mod was not intended to make floating foundations possible, I'm guessing if the modmaker didn't want that that he would made sure it wasn't possible.

Meta is a creative guy as you probably have noticed already with his builds in ark and maybe tfc (no idea what he build there), but so skybase was one of those ideas as it was interesting to build and have. Keeping the game interesting for us. Sometimes raiding a base requires creativity too to get in and in our case it is certainly possible with the right tools.

I'll keep it with this for now, I hope meta isn't going to be angry at me with what I said :P.

P.S: The huge rollback seems to have deleted alot of our gear, uploaded dinos, etc... We did bosses on the island yesterday so every dino who was still in the cloud and gear is gone and we didn't kill the bosses anymore :s. Also when I logged in I had to respawn and didn't have any of my gear anymore. Wondering if it's possible we could get stuff back somehow or if it's gone for good?

dentodili
5th November 2018, 13:07
Hello,

P.S: The huge rollback seems to have deleted alot of our gear, uploaded dinos, etc... We did bosses on the island yesterday so every dino who was still in the cloud and gear is gone and we didn't kill the bosses anymore :s. Also when I logged in I had to respawn and didn't have any of my gear anymore. Wondering if it's possible we could get stuff back somehow or if it's gone for good?

I had joined them at the end of that boss run and i can confirm they really did kill stuff and reuploaded their dinos at the green obelisk on the island if that helps - CRIMSON

Epimetheus
5th November 2018, 17:34
I agree with J: Common sense easily prevents atleast 75% of the exploits, i would rather say 90%. The people should just think once about the things they do: Is it ok to undermesh on unofficial if its not allowed on official (you get a ban if you are discovered and cant play ark anymore), is it ok to use mechanics that enables incredible unlogical things when there is no higher power behind it (building floating bases without use of alien technology (tek).

I would make the same suggestion as dentodili: give people x amount of time to adjust their bases (may depend on base size, you can give huge bases 1-2 days/weeks more). After that its not allowed anymore and will get removed without warning.

Asnira
5th November 2018, 18:01
Hi,
I just wanted to say that I think the current rules are good. Coming from Official servers, I now can sleep more relaxed since I joined Happy Diggers, I dont have much time to play so I just want to login every now and then, do some stuff and relax, And Happy Diggers has just gave me that. I want to Thank you all Happy Diggers for that, community and staff.

PS: I agree with dentodili about griefing and meshing.

Dourne
5th November 2018, 18:21
OK wow...what i miss??

uh where to start.

IMO removal of any of our current mods (S+ mainly) = wipe, no question. 99% of all our bases are S+. ***This is a bit extreme in my view though. easier to change rules.
Exploits/skybases/undermesh - caught once banned (nice rule change), not to mention i dont even know how since i just play the game as intended anyway.
current offenders of above exploits need to change their stuff immediately. say a week....get moving.


I agree with InsaneJ - this post was written based on this comment.

"In my opinion, those players can shove off. Loophole arguments are typically made by players who know exactly what they are doing. If someone needs to be told not to act like a jerk and does so anyway, then that person is not welcome. "

PoSack
6th November 2018, 18:18
Not really up to date on what has been happening but after reading through this thread I think I kinda get whats happening. Getting rid of S+ and all the other mods I don't think would be a good solution. That is literally why I started playing here, cause it just made the game better. If people abuse things like going under the mesh just ban them. I don't know, I just feel like there is a better option. Any way you could track this sort of stuff? Also has the S+ developers brought this up at all? Maybe they have a solution to preventing this. Try to find different angles at the problem then just deleting S+ cause that is a lot of annoyance for players just to prevent the 2 people or whoever on the server from putting stuff under the world.

Metamorfos
6th November 2018, 18:28
I agree that common sense covers most, but some rules will be interpreted differently because of how people view/experience things. It's easy to draw a line on duplication, building underground bases or having dinos or structures with inventory under the mesh and I'm glad you updated the rules with that.
I hope people know the definition of undermeshing though, esp. young non-native English speakers.

But stuff like no player harassment on a PvP server will depend on how the targeted person experiences it. Imagine jailing someone. One person might view an hour of inability to play as harassment, while another person only feels that way after half a day of inability to play. I remember discussing this with "dark lords of the dodo" and they did not even view jailing someone for an extended period of time as player harassment. Do they lack common sense? I don't know, maybe only when it comes down to those things or because common sense is not applicable to everything or because common sense is not that common afterall (cultural differences and whatnot).

Other things that come to mind is repeated killing of naked players after you raided them, repeatedly raiding someone, killing passive dinos, wiping outposts etc. PvP server and playing nice is a difficult equilibrium to keep. Where do/can you draw the line on those things.

I honestly don't know how you would fit those things into rules, cause they are affected wildly by people's emotions, time they can spend in the game or their persona. Maybe it could be refined, so people atleast know when they cross a line or when the recipient of "PvP" actions has been unfairly treated. Either way, it's quite a challenge to come up with a solution to this.

Luckily, in my time playing here, I haven't come across a scenario where people enter grey area regarding player harassment yet. Maybe no refinement is needed now, but you never know what the future holds. Or like people say in my language: "Goede afspraken maken goede vrienden."

Or turn all servers into PvE! :D

Mr.Fred
9th November 2018, 08:21
I agree with dentodili (https://happydiggers.net/member.php?2187-dentodili) :)