Ark: Survival Evolved – the action-adventure survival video game in development by Studio Wildcard in collaboration with Instinct Games, Efecto Studios and Virtual basement – is scheduled to be released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux the coming month. The game revolves around players fighting to survive while being stranded on an island filled with roaming dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. From initial reports, it looked like Wildcard would wipe the servers ahead of the game launch. But now, Studio Wildcard has changed its decision.
Ark: Survival Evolved Servers won’t be wiped ahead of launch
For many months, the legacy servers have been facing a serious problem – players have figured out ways to exploit bugs to duplicate items. Item duplication was the main reason that prompted Studio Wildcard to wipe the servers. Skilled players have apparently been using aggressive hacking tactics for item duplication. And Studio Wildcard wanted to put an end to that by wiping the servers.
“There’s been a lot of item duplication issues in the last couple of months due to some aggressive hacking tactics that very skilled players have been using. We’ve been biding our time and monitoring how they’re achieving this, closing some loopholes. It’s a wide variety of techniques, but the bottom line is that we’ve got solutions for all of the problems. It’s not an easy thing to address what has already transpired and make it fair for the new players that are going to be coming in on the full release. We can’t get rid of all the Legacy items that people have created with those techniques”, Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz explains.
However, Studio Wildcard has now confirmed that it won’t be wiping out the servers. After discussion with the team, Stieglitz decided to not wipe the servers. Stieglitz believes that the problem with item duplication on the legacy servers will not be much of an issue in the days to come. He believes some of the crap that has happened will be eventually wiped out by players fighting it out.
“We at Wildcard had made a decision to wipe the PvP servers in order to clean up the ‘duped’ items which have been infesting ARK’s servers as of late. However, after further conferring with the various designers and community managers at Wildcard, and reviewing more pro-and-con debates among ARK players, and talking to the press more in detail about it, we’ve decided to stick to the original plan and NOT wipe: to reiterate, there will be NO mass server wipe for ARK”
The game is scheduled for release on August 8, 2017.