ARK: Survival Evolved - Community Crunch 255: Behind the LiveOps Curtain and More!

Community Crunch 255: Behind the LiveOps Curtain and More!

Posted: 19 Feb 2021 07:23 PM PST

Behind The LiveOps Curtain

Hey Survivors, we thought it might be a good time for a little Live Operations Dev Blog of sorts. We've been very busy behind the scenes and sometimes during that hive of activity, we may forget that our players enjoy details outside of "We're busy with X, more info soon" etc. So let's give you more of a glimpse behind the LiveOps curtain.

LiveOps

LiveOps has been er...hectic of late. Let's get straight to it.

Transfer Issues: We encountered some serious problems on our networking side that led to some players losing items and/or characters. We initially implemented a quick fix in order to address it as quickly as possible, then pivoted to working on a more long-term upgrade to make our system more robust.

We don't find what occurred acceptable in the slightest and have some of our engineers focused on working alongside our host to upgrade the system and prevent these issues from occurring in the future. These specific problems were something we hadn't encountered with the system in the past (even though the symptoms may appear similar to some of our players).

Anything resulting in data loss for our players is of critical importance to us and we apologise to those affected.

Meshing: Meshing is still a focus for the team - we're constantly working on patching out methods and holes as we learn of them. We saw an uptick in meshing incidents on Playstation recently. In general, we've made significant strides in reducing meshing and, overall, incidents are way down in comparison to a year ago. That said, in a sandbox game, people always find new methods.

Some of our solutions to further counter meshing include:

Zipline patch. Players can no longer jump on a zipline to get through a small hole.
Implemented an automated system that will now try to detect projectiles, so when players are firing rockets, ziplines etc inside the mesh they will get destroyed before they're able to make an impact. Unfortunately this system can't hit every location but we're happy to have made some impact in this regard.
World Borders: Soon, we will be updating world barriers on all maps so that anything outside of a world border will be destroyed. Boom. This is live on The Island on PC and there were some edge-case issues with it being oversensitive but that's now been fixed and we'll be rolling out to other platforms soon.

We consider our continued approach to meshing to be three pronged:

Better detection to prevent it in the first place
Destroying what has slipped through the cracks
Identifying specific areas that can be exploited and patching them.

We'll share more on the world border changes when that goes live.

Enforcement

Some of you don't feel your reports lead to action so we want to share more info about the action taken against players who cheat or otherwise break our Code Of Conduct. We are working on some solutions for better visibility for those affected by cheaters into punishments and actions taken against players that are consistently ruining the game via third party software etc. We hope to roll those out in the near future.

Performance and Stability

Client and server performance was a focus through 2020.

That said, over the years, we've learned to stop counting dodos before they hatch in regards to how noticeable performance improvements are. But now that we can see the combined impact of a year's changes, we can confirm some tangible improvements when comparing performance at the start of 2020 to performance today.

Servers

Transfer system:

We completely moved to an in-network solution
Now have more control over what can go in and out of the system on a network level
This system is faster, more reliable, and more cost effective
(though it still needs some work to get it where it needs to be! ;))

DDoS protection:

We added additional hardware and software solutions to our already existent DDoS solution through Nitrado
Incoming traffic can be more finely tuned on the packet level rather than at a higher more general level than prior

Performance in-game

Structure placing and demolition performance update.

The most significant boost to performance in-game that we implemented on our Official Network last November is the structure placing/demo update.

Eliminated server calculation in relation to placing structures:
Previously the server had to do some massive calculations involving checking all snapped structures to the structure being replaced to verify structural integrity. That calculation has now been eliminated as it is a replacement rather than the placement of a new structure in a new area. This is most noticeable on busy servers with large save files.

Optimised server calculation for demolishing structures:
The demolish change was a reduction on how much is actually being calculated. It's less complex in the way in which the server checks these things now so demolishing things will be less intensive aka "cheaper"on the server's performance thereby reducing lag, stalls and/or server frame drops when demolishing.

We're not taking these gains as cause to stop iterating, though. There's still room to improve, so we'll keep pushing those out throughout 2021 too.

Community feedback/connection

In some ways, when we update the game, we're really updating something that's no longer ours. It's yours; it's a creature, mechanic or DLC that millions of players may have grown to love, and we want to make sure we do good by you all first and foremost.

This is a reason why we released an Official Discord, so we can get more feedback from players on the direction we're headed. Thanks to a breadth of functionality, lots of our players have embraced the ARK Discord as a semi-public community platform. We find observing our player's thoughts and chatter, along with sometimes interacting with you in a "live" medium useful and enjoyable. This along with the more traditional forums and various feedback channels helps us to stay connected to the community.

If you've made it this far, thank you for sticking your head behind the curtain with us. Do let us know if you find write ups like this interesting.

Studio Wildcard

EVO Event

Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk! It will be active until Thursday the 25th of February. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: