I bet half of you are going to read this and the other half are still staring at the strange blue text in Discord wondering why it’s that color.
I’m going to speak in the third person for this because it’s easier to set context.
Oceania Gamers was originally created as a one-stop for all Australian gamers. We were originally a small competitive Counter Strike community that moved into more valorant content when it launched. The same core community dabbled with a few games, such as Among Us, and we had a bit of a fun community going for a while.
Asharn introduced Kprotato to Ark. Kpro thought “I could run servers better than this”. And things just spiraled from there.
The servers were originally offered up as a place for others to play because that’s where kpro played. The Oceania Gamers branding was slapped on it, but the original “OG OG” was not supposed to become an Ark community.
In fact, the original Oceania Gamers Ark cluster was a modded PVE and only had three maps; with Valguero being the constant ‘home base’ map, and the other two changing for access to bosses. This was eventually changed to unmodded PVE, then unmodded PVP, then modded PVP, then the player base couldn’t play due to them being EPIC players, then back to unmodded PVP.
Once the addiction fully set in, I used a tax return to fund an old HP DL360 and we ran the full cluster on that ever since.
Sometime during or after COVID, the Ark community pop just blew up with people abusing some PvE mechanics left on a PvP server. There were a lot of bobs enjoying a quiet place to play, but there was also a growing competitive player base itching for some good PvP.
The increase in players showed some flaws in the originally PVE-focussed configuration and the idea of ‘seasons’ was introduced. “Season One” - ie, the original saves from that dedicated server - came to an end and “Season Two” was coined as “the long season”.
OG was technically a no-wipe cluster however it was never actually advertised as such. The “seasons” thing was a tongue-in-cheek joke from watching too much Game of Thrones.
Season Two brought some major rebalances to BPs primarily. It also provided a fresh start for everyone to play it all again. Player pop had been decimated by an eight-man tribe just ripping through every structure they found, and the late-game was just too tedious when you’re dealing 1 HP damage per bite from a Shadowmane. Rebalancing this was a big change and the cluster started doing really well.
While there were a few veteran tribes playing, people were still largely just enjoying the rather low pop server. The original conglomeration of tribes all trickled away, with Bravo20 leaving the reigns to his own empire to Ziracon. When Bravo20 went permanently AFK, Zira took over full control of all tribes across all maps and reognized the group.
The foothold gave him a good start and lead to him controlling pretty much all maps; at times, single handedly.
Around this time, we did have some long-term tribes move on from the title. Things quietened down, I stopped paying too much attention, and the community built itself without much oversight.
This is the part where recently memory comes in. People banded together to take down Ziracon, some dirty games were played, and PTO was consumed on all-night raids.
The community has grown beyond what we expected and we’ve had a complete spectrum of people be apart of it. It really challenged the model that I had for OG in my head; not as an Ark community but as a general community that all roads came from.
This, sadly, meant that I was making decisions that were best for a community no longer related to that model.
OG was meant to be an inclusive place; so moderation needs to be extremely light. This is extremely counter-intuitive to a gaming community that requires constant, active moderation.
This is where the split comes in.
With the Ark community split from OG, I can take some more risks and take a moment to sit back and learn some lessons from the past. I can also make decisions that are best for the Ark community, and focus more on cleaning up OG into a more family-friendly Discord.
That said, we have three major changes happening to our Ark community:
With this split I will also be giving everyone a second chance. “Chinese hackers” (who were literally Chinese hackers) will remain on the ban list, but everyone else is being removed. We’ll also be changing the way that we address punishments for rule breaking to be a little less permanent.
I’ve been polling the community hard, both inside and out of OG, and the general consensus is that people liked the old rates, but also want to see newer players catered for a little bit.
The only way to handle this is to incorporate ORP into the meta.
Vanilla Offline Raid Protection disables bases after a tribe logs out. Structures cannot be damaged however turrets will also not shoot.It remains in this state until the tribe logs back in.
We’re also adding a decay timer. If a tribe doesn’t log into a map for a week then their structures will decay and disappear.
This means that base defenses only need to last longer than two hours. For a comparison, tribes were building for eight hours (of sleep) previously.
The negative side to this is that offline players cannot be raided; if a player leaves without donating gear then that gear is permanently lost. The positive is that you don’t have to live to play Ark with this kind of configuration.
This is not going to be a popular decision. I only ask that you try it out before leaving because you can’t offline raid bobs for prim bps.
All rates will be the same as I originally wanted.
The harvest rates were popular in the past; not too much, not too little. It’s a little painful when you’re getting started but is slightly too much when you get your Stryder.
The XP gain in the past was 1x. This was extremely unpopular for players over level 100. 1-80 takes about a night on 1x, so increasing it isn’t that big of a rebalance. The main benefit is lessening the dedication required to hit max level; it’s now slightly brutal instead of next to impossible.
The breeding rate was selected because it’s the best compromise between dedicating a week to breeding one dino, and building a massive mutated army super quick. You’re looking at a rex ever 19 hours and a giga ever 24.
I’ve based taming on what is reasonable. It’s not too long that you need to build a base around a tame in-progress, but it’s not too short that you’re rapid firing tames out. Making food drain 5x but taming speed 1x keeps the meat required high, but keeps the time short.
This balance should be good enough for the game to not progress so fast that it’s unenjoyable, but not so slow that you have to take PTO for a tame.
A few QoL adjustments are being made.
This should address some concerns about BP quality getting to high again. Stack sizes will give a modded server feel and let you carry more, but items that need to occupy multiple slots will be configured to smaller stacks for faster crafting.
As mentioned by Nianyu, increasing upload slots and timers will let new comers keep valuables safe in upload for longer and give them more of a safety net as they get started. It will also allow players to keep highly valuable items protected for as long as the decay timer.
Cave building will be allowed, but I’ll make a note to disable building in mission areas.
Players will no longer be able to take non-abberation tames to abberation or flyers to Genesis 1.
We’ll be monitoring for bad-faith actors early, so there will not be any surprises after a few months of game play.
This will help us stay ontop of names that break our rules. You won’t receive any warning; your profiles will just disappear and you’ll have to start from scratch.
In addition to a crack down on racist and sexist behaviors, we’ll also be introducing a tribe limit of ten people.
Ideally, tribes will just be you and friends. Our hope for the limit is to make tribes a little more special. It’s an experiment that we’re willing to work with the community on.
As always, people who join and mesh their way to glory will be swiftly banned permanently.
We had a lot of questionable things happening in OG. All of those involved will be given a second chance with the understanding that this is their last chance under a CCP-level of monitoring.
Poor behavior will no longer be a death sentence though; we’ll opt to remove player progression over out-right bans. This will also affect tribe mates, so we strong suggest keeping one another honest.
No punishments will be subject to discussion. We’ll always have good, documented proof prior to enacting punishments. These proofs are available amongst the admin team to avoid people lying their way out of things.
If anyone struggles with the concept of second chances, and can’t keep themselves from exploiting their way through the game, then we’ll just permanently ban you from the Discord and the servers so that we don’t have to interact with you anymore.
Anything else will be largely kept the same. Things like admin logging will remain to keep us honest.
If you have any specific queries please contact the admins in Discord. We won’t be maintaining open, public configurations any more.
Blog posts aren’t considered rules. They’re just a place to chronicle our communities on-going history. Please check the servers page for accurate, up-to-date rules for our clusters.
These changes are the result of five years of refinement, coming directly from the community.
The rules, the configuration and even the admins are all derived from the Oceania Gamers community. We’ll continue to keep this spirit alive in FARKT, but we’ll also be keeping a closer eye on people getting a bit cheeky with our rules. That said; one of our primary goals is to keep that community spirit alive, and to provide an experience to cater for as many Australian Ark players as we can.
That being said; you’re still not paying to play on the servers. Players should continue to expect a best-effort approach to administration, and FARKT will continue to forego any warranty or guarantee on your progression or in-game assets.