Supreme Ark PVP Server Changes and Wipe

BEFORE YOU READ: If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please keep the discussion within this post on these forums. It facilitates information archiving and indexing pertaining to this announcement.

The Why

The last PVP server wipe occurred on December 12, 2017 with the release of the Aberration DLC. March marks the third month since the last wipe and while it may be somewhat premature relative to all our other wipe intervals, which often span ~6 months, we are compelled to go through with another server wipe for several reasons relating to server sustainability. Allow us to point out some of the key "features" of our PVP servers and transition into the new plans.

1. Players that have been with us for a long time know that we advertise as an infrequent wipe server or on an absolute need-to basis. Our wipe schedule was focused around allowing players to make significant progress where they would otherwise not be allowed to on servers with frequent wipe intervals.
2. On the Aberration DLC release, our servers received ~100 concurrent players during peak hours. There was a lot of player turnover as people checked out the new offering but of those several players stayed and eventually migrated to Ragnarok or The Island along with the occasional players that make it back to our servers. This, combined with our traditional 25x rates, made it so we had a lot of clutter around the map which affected server performance, and to this day we feel those effects.
3. For a long time we have carried the 25xALL rate label and is arguably one of the biggest reasons why players join our servers. However, we've come to realize that our rate multiplier is not compatible with our wipe schedule given the healthy population we strive to achieve. In other words, and strictly from a performance point of view, what we have going on at the moment is not sustainable.

The combined effects of infrequent wipe intervals, moderately high rates, and highly variable population swings has put our servers in a situation where:

• The game servers experience unexpected server crashes which inevitably lead to rollbacks. As anybody who's experienced even a few of those, it's very discouraging having accomplished something only to be reset by an unexpected server crash. Consistent and repeated events lead to players deciding to stop playing altogether.
• Heavy lag in cluttered maps like Ragnarok
• Players build up incredibly fast even within the week, new players are easily discouraged by behemoth bases with every last surface area unit packed with turrets.

Coupled with other factors including:

• Our mod collection, which originally was meant to supply players with mild QoL (quality of life) enhancements, has really gotten out of hand and we now have an automated enhancement for several aspects of progression (S+ and Automated Ark bloat) which ties back to the previous points above.
• Rules, oversight, and monitoring of large organized tribes that bend the rules in their favor and eventually force many players off the servers.
• Limited advertisement for all the aforementioned reasons. In order to resume advertisement efforts, we require a stable working base.

All of these factors paved the way for quick bursts of action followed by rapid stagnation. As loyal as you, the players, may be we understand that a low-population server is not exactly exciting and forces many to seek that enjoyment elsewhere until the time is right once again. In light of this, Supreme Ark PVP will be taking on some radical changes, taking a step back towards a more bare bones experience. Some of you will not be content with the changes that follow and for that we sincerely apologize. However, we feel strongly that these changes are required to foster a sustainable experience for everyone that chooses to follow Supreme Ark in this next phase.

Rates and Settings

SupremeArk PVP will be going from 25xALL to 5xALL. Yes, you read that correctly, 5xALL. Our new settings will be 5x XP, gather, taming, breeding, etc.

Reasons why this will be beneficial:

• Slower gameplay. While it is a dramatic drop, it is still a faster pace than vanilla rates.
• Bloat potential will be lower given players will have to dedicate more time to reach the same levels at 25x rates, and even then may not reach it. The lag period between early-game and end-game will be significantly longer, allowing potentially smaller structures, and less density given the amount of work required.
• It will make achievements and progress more meaningful.
• Trading will be a thing. At 25x rates, it doesn't make sense to trade much of anything given you can go out and gather it yourself in a few minutes. At lower rates, it makes sense to trade with people who specialize in a specific resource or material. Dinos will also become more valuable given the time required to breed them.
• Breeding bonanza and other weekend boosts will be more meaningful. We plan to introduce xp, gathering, and taming boosts as determined by the community in semi-weekly polls.
• More tightly knit community due to the increased time players will be exposed to each other.

Additionally we will be rolling back to more vanilla settings across the board:

• Max player level of 100 + ascension (vanilla)
• Max wild dino level of 150 (vanilla)
• Max tamed levels of 71 (vanilla)
• Vanilla player stats (except for weight @ 2.5x). This also means no more movement speed per stat point nerf!
• Vanilla tamed dino stats (except for weight @ 2.5x). No more super OP melee damage. Bosses will return to be more of a challenge.
• Keeping custom drops but nerfing overall quality and quantities to be more in-line with 5x rates

Mods

Our current mod collection consists of 19 items with some relatively bloated and deeply integrated mods such as S+ and Automated Ark. What should have been simple QoL additions turned into a mess of automated tools which remove a lot of the purpose of playing the game. All of the automated collection and processing utilities rely on active server checks which place unreasonable stress on the servers especially in period of high population. Our new mod collection will be smaller, less bloated, and balanced:

• Protected Passives
  • Required companion for the passive pens
• Supreme Ark Donor Mod
  • Required mod to reward donors
• Supreme Ark Terminal
  • Highly convenient utility
• Swim Clear Goggles
  • Clear underwater vision
• Ultra Stacks
  • Required stack mod
• Balanced S+
  • Removing a lot of the automated and OP utilities such as gardener, sheep herder, hatchery, nanny, farmer, etc.
• Utilities+
  • Reusable bola, flare, grappling hook, parachute, etc
• Shield4Noob
  • ORP2 replacement. ORP2 was simply placed a high load on servers with its active checks
• Pet Finder
  • Finds your lost dinos
• Death Helper
  • Suicide potion and pulls your cache if under the mesh
• Currency Mod
  • Common trading unit
  • Provides another collection goal. People like to have money
  • Will also include kibble table which will remove the necessity to have large egg farms

That's a total of 11 mods (mostly small) which should improve loading times, save that precious SSD space, and reduce client and server crashes due to mod conflicts all while providing a more bare bones experience, as Ark is meant to be played.

Rule Changes

There will be some amendments made to the current rules. The core will remain the same but rephrasing and restructuring of our rule system will allow us to more proactively address rule-related issues. Of meaningful mention:

Passive Pen: Players will be responsible for placing their dinos on passive and inventories emptied so that the protected passives mod will protect them from any damage. Any dinos not protected by the mod are the sole responsibility of the owners given all server-side enforcing is available. This however does not give raiders a free pass to wipe a passive pen. If ill-intent is determined, punishments will apply. The full spec will still be required to formally label a structure as a passive pen however the main purpose will be to ensure that your passive dinos retain protection in case your nearby structure count drops due to destruction. Protected Passives relies on the ratio of enemy vs. friendly structures to determine whether or not dinos should be protected.

Building on Restricted Areas: We will be designating starting/trading zones for new players. This is to prevent the whole issue of new players not allowed to progress by third-parties. New players will be entitled to a maximum amount of time in a designated safe zone, after which all structures belonging to that player/tribe must be removed or face admin deletion without prior notice and be issued a penalty. All resource rich areas will also be protected. We will have a new mechanism which will take care of active server-side enforcement, meaning this will not rely on players following the honor code. In safe zones, players will not take damage and in restricted zones, players will not be allowed to build. Maps with legends will be posted on the website outlining these zones for each map.

Don't be a Jerk: This rule will be renamed to "No Harassment." The reason for this is the definition of a "jerk" is broad and varies from person to person. Harassment has a much more precise definition and examples include but are not limited to: spawn camping and repeated attacks. This rule will also be extended to monitoring and limiting large organized tribes should it become necessary.

ORP: Tribes will be allowed a single impenetrable ORP shield that will cover a 10x10 area. Anything outside of this area will rely on good base defense.

The full version of the rules will be posted once the servers are wiped. Please be sure to become familiar with the modified rule set when it becomes available.

Server Plugins

Plugins allow us to extend and implement additional server functionality without the need of mods. Plugins we will carry include:

• Points/Kits/Shop
  • Gain points for playing or donating and trade those for cool and convenience rewards. Allows loyalty/donation point trading between players
• Teleport
  • Allows person to person teleport. Handy for getting out of sticky situations. A 60 minute cool down between teleports will be implemented
• Learn All Engrams
  • For donors with a minimum cumulative contribution of $15, you will be able to learn all engrams with a simple chat command. Useful for learning engrams after mindwiping.
• Cross Server Chat
  • Will allow players to talk to each other between maps in the same cluster. Will help unite the community scattered across maps.
• Safe Zones
  • This plugin will allow us to set admin-defined safe (start areas) and restricted (resource-rich areas) zones. Will remove the need for an admin to manually enforce rules in these areas.

Map Layout

Supreme Ark PVP will still carry 3 maps, however we are changing things up in our permanent offerings:

• Ragnarok (permanent)
  • Due to the sheer popularity of this map, we will keep this a safe permanent map.
• The Center (permanent)
  • This will replace The Island. Safe and permanent until the next wipe if community decides on anything other than The Center.
• Wildcard Map (rotating)
  • This will be a 2-3 week rotating map decided by the community. The point of this map is to offer ascension and resources only obtainable from other maps, such as The Island and Aberration. Transfers will be open from the get-go to allow players to easily gather dinos and resources in the limited time frame.

Turret Limit

We have neglected the need to establish a proper turret limit due to lots of testing and time required for balancing and improperly working settings. Ideally we'd like to have no turret limit but even with the fact that our servers run on top-notch dedicated hardware, massive turret walls do impact our server performance and it is because of this that we need to establish a fixed but reasonable turret limit that allows players and tribes to defend their hard work.

The core issue stems from the fact that in Ark, the only way to defend your base is with a high turret density. A dense enough turret network and a base can come close to being undecidable but it comes at the expense of the server and degraded performance for everyone else. Wildcard believes that 100 turrets within a 10,000 unreal unit radius. Let's break that down and do some simple math:

300 unreal units = 1 Ark foundation length

10,000 unreal units = 33.33 Ark foundation lengths

That means 100 turrets in a radius of 33.33 foundations. It's clear that whoever came up with those numbers is not exactly the sharpest crayon in the tool shed. What makes this issue so exceedingly difficult for us is the fact that we have to try and balance around non-vanilla rates. However, given the fact that our drop table quality will be reduced, players and dinos will follow the vanilla leveling ramp, it simplifies the problem. Laboratory testing with controlled bases hardly illustrate the real in-game scenarios and due to testing taking many hours to complete we will be starting off with what should be a comfortable starting point of 100 turrets in a radius of 24 foundations. This should result in a ~2x density allowance. We will monitor how PVP plays out with these settings and incrementally modify the density allowance should it become necessary. It's easier to allow more turrets in a given radius than it is to restrict the density which would cripple many bases at or near the turret count limit.

When

All current Supreme Ark PVP servers will wipe and inherit the outlined changes on Friday, March 23, 2018 around 7-10PM CST.

These are dramatic changes we are introducing to PVP and we hope you can understand and sympathize as to why we have to. The one thing we are known for is for sticking around and it is evident with the number of players that leave and eventually find their way back to this community.

Supreme Ark is not going anywhere as long as we have the support of the community and we would be thrilled to have you join us in this next phase.

Sincerely,

The Supreme Ark Admin Team

FAQ's

What about the points I have earned or donated for?

To keep everyone in a competitive and fair playing field, stashed points will be withheld for a full 7 days. Everyone will start at 0 points and will be able to earn points based on their playtime during those 7 days. After the 7 days, any points you had before the server wipe will be added to your new balance.

I donated recently and didn't get to fully enjoy my points. Am I SOL?

No. Players who have donated within the last 30 days will receive an additional boost equivalent to their total contribution within the 30 days whether or not you exhausted your points before the wipe. For example:

• You started with 0 points
• You donated 10 days ago and received 1,250 points.
• You used 700 points up until the wipe. You had a remainder of 550 points.
• The 550 points will be withheld for the first 7 days.
• You earn 325 points just from your hourly reward within the point withholding period (Day 1 to day 7).
• After the 7-day period, your 550 withheld points will be added to your newly earned 325 points, PLUS your original donation amount within the last 30 days, in this case 1,250 points.
• After all is said and done, you have 2,125 points.

@whatzitooya

Respectfully. The change to the rates will result in almost no PvP. The grind of ARK does not "make achievements more meaningful" it simply creates a barrier to play with the time we have available. Low rates promotes inequality which supports larger tribes and overall far less content being produced by players. With less bases on the map to raid, and more of a grind to repair and PvP, only the largest tribes want to PvP. But they have no content because all the small and medium guys can't invest the time to build up.

I've played thousands of hours on officials and hundreds more on varying rate unofficial. 25 times is the best by for mature players who also have a life outside of Ark. Reducing the rates just means more grind without improving fun meaningful play.

Further, your reasons of limiting bloat don't make much sense because raid content is what keeps servers alive. Decay eliminates worthless bloat and also changing the structure limit, #of ORPs etc. Using rates to do this is like trying to swat a fly with a wrecking ball. You'll cause a lot of damage to PvP and probably only increase bloat as bored players from large tribes build meaningless random structures.

Lets look at your reasons

Slower gameplay. While it is a dramatic drop, it is still a faster pace than vanilla rates.

• Slower gameplay means more grind in Ark. More Grind means less PvP, that's an Ark basic rule. Officials have 0 large scale PvP except mega wars.

Bloat potential will be lower given players will have to dedicate more time to reach the same levels at 25x rates, and even then may not reach it. The lag period between early-game and end-game will be significantly longer, allowing potentially smaller structures, and less density given the amount of work required.

• If this were true, Officials would be bastions of small scale PvP. They are in reality the furthest from it. What this really will mean is a larger gap of equality between large tribes and small tribes. This is the very thing you want to minimize to promote PvP!! The meta for base design doesn't change based on rates. Bases on Officials look the same as bases on 25x servers. You're only changing the amount of grind needed to get there which directly benefits large tribes over small tribes. To promote PvP, you want as many players to be on as even a footing as possible. What you are expecting to happen from reduced rates won't happen. There simply won't be any smaller structures and small tribes. Look at officials, if your logic made worked, then officials would have many smaller tribes, it doesn't, it has 1 evil empire.

It will make achievements and progress more meaningful.

• Sorry but no, it just makes loss more painful.

Trading will be a thing. At 25x rates, it doesn't make sense to trade much of anything given you can go out and gather it yourself in a few minutes. At lower rates, it makes sense to trade with people who specialize in a specific resource or material. Dinos will also become more valuable given the time required to breed them.

• Again I don't get the logic. If that were true then trading would be a big thing on officials. but it's not. Still the only thing people want to trade is genetics and good Bps. You're just massively restricting access to trade goods to the largest tribes and taking that content out of reach for smaller ones, which just reduces the amount of different players that can be traded with and will result in less trading not more. If you want to encourage trading then you have to make good genetics and good bps within reach of more players. i.e. give smaller tribes more time to go get them with higher rates. Also, making Dino's "more valuable" just makes losses from PvP suck more. There is no benefit. On top of reducing PvP, you also promote a salt mine as fights actually cost player time.

This is just bad guys. I know the feeling of lookign at low server pops and trying to figure out what to do, and most of your changes are great (adding center, mod changes). But the rate reduction is bad bad bad.

Please reconsider this.

-Hoi

@Hoi

I'm not the best with words, but let me try and explain this as elegantly as possible. What we have tried to work with in the past has been based around three core principles:

• No frequent wipes
• Moderate population with high variability
• High rates

What I have observed is that trying to satisfy all three components puts us in the situation we are in right now in terms of sluggish PVP and server instability.

What makes more sense is following a pick-2 system where for example:

• Host a moderate to high active population with high rates but at the cost of frequent server wipes (2-4 week intervals).
• Host a low population with high rates at the cost of highly infrequent wipes (4+ months)
• Host a moderate to high active population with infrequent server wipes (4+ months) at the cost of low rates

You don't have to look to deep into other servers to know that the vast majority of servers employ one of these themes. Provided that we have the potential for high population swings, we have to plan around maximum player retention while consistently ensuring proper server performance, else anybody that lands here will leave. We have lost a lot of players recently due to the server crashes and that's not something we want to keep dealing with. It's frustrating for you the players and it's frustrating for us because it makes it an uphill battle.

I've played thousands of hours on officials and hundreds more on varying rate unofficial. 25 times is the best by for mature players who also have a life outside of Ark. Reducing the rates just means more grind without improving fun meaningful play.

Admittedly the only experience I have in officials is probably a maximum of 15 minutes worth. However, I do employ the experience and knowledge of those who do have that experience to shape some of our changes.

There is also a reason why I don't currently play on the servers: I simply become bored at 25x rates far too easily. I've managed these servers for a long time and seldom do I get to enjoy them as a player. For the sake of transparency, I will admit that there is a heavy bias towards a game style that I would like to participate in. The idea of dropping the rates birthed shortly after the last wipe when for whatever reason the multipliers were set to 12.5 instead of 25, yet no one seemed to have a problem with it until someone made a mention of false advertisement. It was an unintentional change, but everyone was on near 50% of the advertised rates for a week or so and things seemed to work fairly smoothly.

The grind of ARK does not "make achievements more meaningful" it simply creates a barrier to play with the time we have available.

I believe it does make achievements more meaningful. It's the same reason why in life you value more what cost you your time and work as opposed to something gifted, if that makes sense.

You make a lot of examples relating to Official including:

• A scene where only megatribes rule and unfair advantages
• A scene were trade doesn't happen
• A scene with no PVP

I will admin that we have fallen short on enforcing the very rules we strive to enforce but there is one major difference between Official and unofficial servers like Supreme Ark. Support. The process for getting any sort of support in official servers is laughable. The only rules in official servers are the unwritten ones enforced by those who aren't best suited to enforce them, enforcing based on their moods and biases.

On our servers, any issue you have we are just a few clicks away. We have rules that aim to skew PVP in a more fair and competitive manner, banning many of the cheap tactics that are widely exploited on officials.

Lastly, our goal from these new changes are focused on more refined and rich PVP as opposed to balls-to-the wall mind-numbing tactics.

What,
I was actually just looking at the server in my fav list and was honestly gonna ask about a possible wipe. My group was on your server for the last wipe and we had alot of fun. The idea of a 25x was fun, exciting, well for the first bit, then it just seemed to easy, I for one am glad to see it drop relatively to something more challenging yet not vanilla rates. Makes it more of a challenge to get the base you want, and not some mega base we could build in a day. The server had a great population and am willing to bet it will again. Looking forward to coming back and having a blast again this go around

@whatzitooya Thank you for your well articulated and thought out response. Your efforts to create a fun playing environment coupled with your neutrality and also the team moderating this server will always distance yourself from other unofficials and officials. You do us players a great service and I am grateful for it. You try to balance this game which, though a great environment created by WC is a mess on balance leaving it up to individual servers to try and create a game out of WCs sandbox.

I'm not trying to complain but I experienced ARK from a lot of different angles and I have seen what does work and what doesn't, the consequences of certain direction choices, intended and not. I can only offer this experience to you and of course you make the choice that you see best.

As I see it, the biggest single item that you're changing is a level playing field between tribes of different sizes. And this is one of the most important factors in creating a good PvP environment.

Low rates creates inequality and this inequality is the enemy of creating a good PvP environment. You want people battling at roughly the same tier and the best way to do that is high rates.

The most fun fights always had 2 main conditions:

1. Losing (or even winning) didn't have enormous costs

2. The fight had dynamics that weren't just max tier meta

I know from a server administration perspective, server performance seems critical, especially when players complain about it. But it's the game that really matters, not the server. The sluggish PvP is not related to server performance, it's related to people not having incentive or resources to PvP.

I'm just suggesting that if you give people those two factors, you'll have a far more sustainable player base than one with immaculate server performance. Low rates destroys the resources people have to PvP with and unique PvP encounters normally happen not at max tier.

If you are decided on the rates for Rag and Center, then maybe consider your rotating server which I assume will be wiped frequently to have high rates. This would both give incentive for people to play on it and create fighting that doesn't come with huge loss. Have transfers one-way.

One of the most fun PvP nights I had in ARK was fighting for a scorched earth official on rexes. We were Alpha with 2 turrets, a Paracer and flame arrows. Nooblets caught this one on his stream when we raided him here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPEWKRFfXpc

This type of fight only happens after a wipe so if you want PvP that utilizes all tiers, the only way I've seen it happen is with frequent wipes.

In the end there is one rule that is basic to Ark, the lower the rates the less PvP there is. Even on these servers, which you consider stagnant, I had some PvP encounters. I shot at people and got raided 4 times. At 5x I would have been completely sick of rebuilding. Also, I was talking to a tribe just last night about setting up a base to be raided at a pre-scheduled time. I had bred a bunch of pteradons with high melee and was going to build a base that would have let them out of the cage to help with raid defense when needed. It was a cool base design and would have been a really fun raid for whoever participated. This type of player generated content is the best kind on Ark and is impossible with low rates.

@hoi the difference between this x5 rate server and official servers is the fact that there is a tribe limit of 10... how are u comparing this to official server where we have about 80ish people in our tribe and allied with 10 other tribes

the only thing that makes official server so unbalanced is the tribe limit and the alliance limit. There is none.

so x25 or x5, this server will never ever be like official server. And x 5 only makes it most stable and viable for a long term wipe

I want to put in my thoughts on this before it was to late. I took last night and this morning to think about the settings for the new PvP vision.
Lower Player lvl, awesome, all for it.
Lower Dino wild lvl, all for it, will make getting dinos for an Alpha fight more then go out and tame enough for the fight.
Lower Dino tame lvls, again, all for it.
Lower resource gathering, wanted it lowered, but feel like 5 is low, however I can live with it but think anywhere between 8-15 is the sweet spot.
Lower Anything related to the Dino tame/breed/mature, Please for the love of all that is holy and sacred, pump that number to 15 to 20. Taming a max lvl Ptera (150) on 5x w/ mutton would be 15 minutes, 10x 7 minutes, 15x 5 minutes and 20x 5 minutes. Even if we keep resources low, I think moving the tame/breed mature dino stuff up would not hurt anything and bring positive attitude, seeing how you are taking the other things that makes breeding/taming dinos super easy out like AA and Nanny. I put in the times for a basic tame like Pteras to give a good example.

As for the Mods, all for going lower and changing a few. Except CF. With the lower Dino level and lower points to put in, no one is going to have a super fast super hard hitting super health dino. Feel like the lower lvl and points makes it so one Dino does not rule them all. This still gives the chance for player to make flyers for more of a PvE role where they are trying to gather stuff or just travel around the map. I have played a server without CF, and could not personally do it. I urge you to rethink about adding CF into center/Rag maps. With current dino lvl and points settings I do not see it becoming an issue.

To sum it up, I am looking forward to a change, but would like to see, in order of importance to myself, CF remain, dino tame/mature/breed moved to 15x to 20x, and resources bumped between 8x to 15x. I will gladly discuss any one of my concerns later tonight.

Edit** put in wrong max dino lvl

Any chance for Tame/breed/mature could be upped?

The other rates I can handle no problem.