Hackers are slowly ruining Ark, the survival game by Studio Wild Card. If you are not familiar with Ark, it is an adventure/survival game that allows you to build and tame dinosaurs. Players can mate and breed dinos to get the best stats in stamina, melee, and health. These stats help defeat bosses at the end of the expansions or maps.

Whenever a new map comes out, you often find servers full of players on the official servers. There are other servers, but they are your non-dedicated servers. That means they are run my people who rent servers from people like G-portal or other companies. Right now we are losing the battle on hacking. Hacking hasn’t been a big issue in the past. We’ve known about hackers or dupers for a while, but amount of duping wasn’t so horrible that it crippled game play for nearly the entire server, all the time. For some reason, the hackers are hacking overtime.

While, I could easily play on another server, I have found this server to have a great community. In the end, it’s about community. Some servers are really cool with awesome people. I’ve met friends who are from Sweden, Ireland, and other countries around the globe. During the lockdown, Ark was a really big help for many of the players in hard-hit areas. They tried to help ease real-life struggles by hosting in-game incentives so that people could focus on something rather than death. It was also a small token of how much they cared about their community.

Fast forward to today, and we are seeing some players ruin the game by constant hacking. The server I play on is constantly crashing, and it is happening so frequently that very little gets done. There are constant rollbacks which once again prevent people from getting things done. So, the enjoyment that once came with starting a new map and meeting new people is starting to dull. Sadly, these tribes did not start on the server day one. They came after people were already building their bases and blocked about three tribes from finishing their bases. It is aggressive gaming at best.

If Studio Wild Card doesn’t want to lose players, they will need to find a better or more efficient way of getting rid of hackers. Perhaps, looking into a mandatory downtime like WoW would be beneficial. There has to be something the company can do to make sure their players feel satisfied with the end product.