BEFORE YOU READ: If you have any questions, comments, or concerns make your posts on the #pvp-wipe-discussion Discord channel.

The Why

The last PVP server server wipe occurred in March of 2018. As many of our long-time and new players can attest, Supreme Ark PVP has suffered from a critical existence failure in the intervening time. The last wipe failed for a variety of reasons:

  1. The general lowering of rates, while initially a boost to server population, resulted in pushing away some of our less “hardcore” members.
  2. We drifted away from our old motto of “All the fun with none of the grind!”
  3. We suffered several game breaking mod catastrophes, each time lowering our population.
  4. Finally, we “abandoned” the PVP side of things when it was clear population wasn’t returning for a while. The Ragnarok PVP map literally broke sometime this summer, which prompted our PVP revival after much interest from you, the community.

Rates and Settings

Supreme Ark will be returning to our traditional rates of 25x ALL. You heard right: 25x ALL. XP, gather, taming, breeding, etc. It has been made very clear to us that a lot of people preferred this rate setup. This rate setup was very well received for nearly two years, and hopefully will see us through for the immediate future.

  • 25x rates leads to a more laid back atmosphere in terms of PVP, while at the same time allowing people to rebuild extraordinarily quickly in the event they are raided.
  • People really liked our unique drop table for PVP back in the day, so that's also coming back.
  • Player and Dino level are returning to their classic values (350 max player, 240 max wild, etc.)
  • We’re lowering the mutator cost from 200 element, which previously made it practically impossible, to 40 element. This is higher than the default 10 element per pulse. It will still be possible to super-breed your dinos with a bit of elbow grease.
  • There will be no ORP (offline raiding protection) mod, nor a vanilla ORP implementation. We have had some major issues with ORP mods in the past from rendering structures invulnerable to flat out not working. On top of this, the best ORP mods often came with a heavy performance tax which is not ideal on top of the major strain that PVP combat has on server instances. With this PVP iteration comes a much more relaxed turret limit, and so your base is only as safe as you can make it. Be smart!
  • 100 turrets within a radius of 10 foundations. In terms of allowable density, this is as dense as you can place turrets. We need to leave some limit simply because of heavy turrets. In practical terms, this means about 1 turret per single wall on a turret wall (Heavy turrets make this like 4 normal turrets per wall on a turret wall).

Mods

The full list of mods can be found here.

Rule Changes

A large portion of our core rule set will transition over. The main changes, in a nutshell, will be:

Passive Pens

No more passive pen rules. This means that any all dinos on the PVP maps are fair game. It clear that the passive pen rules that we had in the past, while they mostly worked, created a lot of confusion among players when it came down to the structure spec and players taking it into their own matters when a passive pen was slightly out of spec. In addition, the rules only ever worked on players that followed them. At the end of the day, any player with ill-intent was able to wipe out passive pens at the expense of their immediate termination from the servers. For some, having the responsible player banned was often not enough justice after the damage had been done.

While the passive pens as you know them will no longer be a facility players have to worry about, we do understand people do not want to see all of their hard-earned dino breed lines vanish in a single PVP event. We want to give players the ability to spring back up as quickly as possible after a devastating battle in order to keep PVP interesting. In place of our traditional passive pen rules, we will instead be providing an totally optional facility: the Parking Map. This consists of a single flat PGArk (procedural generated ark) map in which you will be able to store a limited number of dinos. Item transfers will be disabled, meaning the only thing you will be able to transfer will be your naked character and dinos to prevent players from abusing the purpose of the facility to stash blueprints and other valuable resources. This single map will be set to PVE to mechanically prohibit players from killing each others' "protected" dinos. Furthermore, the dino metabolism and breeding settings on this map will be set as low as allowable by the server to prevent them from dying and automatically breeding. As mentioned before, this facility will be entirely optional but it makes sense to take advantage of it.

Tiered PVP

Protections for the underdeveloped against developed players or tribes will be implemented. Our "No Harassment" and "Don't be Jerk" rules are very broad and subjective when it comes to PVP. These will be a set of rules specifying a bracket of players you and your tribe will be allowed to attack. There is absolutely no reason why a fully developed metal tribe with good dino breeds needs to ago around raiding stone bases or worse, beach Bobs.

This is a very broad overview of changes to our rules and we strongly encourage PVP players to read and understand the detailed rules here.

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
  • 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 mind wiping.
  • 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

This PVP iteration will carry 3 maps:

  • Ragnarok
    • It's by far the most popular map.
  • Center
    • This will provide the Broodmother and Megapithecus Boss fights.
  • Passive Parking Map
    • This will be a “storage” map, replacing our old system of passive dino protections, albeit mechanically enforced. This is strictly for storing dinos, not breeding.

Other Odds and Ends

In previous PVP iterations, we've gone a highly infrequent wipe interval and while many members agreed with it, as time went on, there was a lot of uncertainty as to when the next wipe would be due to a very loose wipe schedule defined by unclear criteria. Going forward, we will still strive for a fairly infrequent wipe interval however the expectation of it will be more predictable as we follow 4 month re-evaluation periods. At these points in time, we will evaluate the health of PVP and community desires and make changes as necessary. If nothing needs changed and the PVP servers are healthy all around (performance, player numbers, etc), then we will simply roll onto the next evaluation period. The one exception will be irrecoverable map corruption on any one live PVP map, which will require the wiping of all maps and initiate a new PVP season.

When

All current Supreme Ark PVP servers will wipe and inherit the outlined changes on Friday, September 14, 2018 at approximately 6PM EST.