Ark and the CCP
2022-09-18
I’ve retold this story a few times, and figured it was better to write it here and link people.
Around ~2017 I tried playing Ark. It was early into EA, and wasn’t particularly polished or, well, good. But I had a unique experience that has stuck with me (far more than the gameplay itself), and is worth retelling.
Official Server 741
note, i don’t actually remember the number of the official server, but it was just a bog-standard numbered official server
I joined the server, found a nice corner that nobody else was in, and started making "friends" and neighbors. Ark is a grief game, meaning that people will inevitably conflict over resources and land, but there wasn’t really any of that in this server.
As i interacted more, i found out that there was a hierarchy to the server. A Chinese guild were the top dogs, more than a dozen of them ran a stronghold and various fortresses around the map. They were unchallenged, easily the strongest group in the server. But instead of fighting with everyone else, they had imposed a sort of hegemonic order to things.
If you put a red flag outside your house, you were agreeing to the terms and conditions of the Chinese (i forget their actual guild name). It meant that you agreed to caps on how many dinosaurs (and how high-level they could be) you could have, how many rare materials you could own, and how much weaponry you could have. Outside of your house you were to leave a combo-locked chest (with the combo given to you by the Chinese), in which you had to maintain a certain amount of resources. The guild would periodically come by and "tax" the chest, taking what they needed for whatever they were working on.
The red flag also guaranteed that you didn’t fight anyone who flew the same flag - you wouldn’t destroy your neighbor. If anyone with a red flag was on the butt end of a raid, the guild would exact revenge for them. That was the law - loyalists wouldn’t fight, and wouldn’t be fought. That said, anyone not flying the flag was open season - anyone could fight them and do anything they wanted.
Of course, the guild didn’t speak any English. But there were a couple "interpreters" or liasons that could write both pinyin and English, and had an exalted position in the server. Nobody was allowed to fuck with the interpreters, doing so was a permanent death sentence. Nobody, flag or not, wanted to mess with the interpreters, because that was the way you communicated with the guild. They also got some sort of benefits or easing of restrictions, though I don’t know what exactly it was.
The Rebels
No empire is complete without a resistance. I’d spawned on the beach (southeast, if i recall) which was a bit of a blind spot on the map. It had few resources worth grabbing, and it was one of those places that newbies spawned and made trouble in. So the only long-term residents were a handful of scrappy dudes in a ramshackle building behind some cliffs, near the water. It was a clever spot that was difficult to see from anywhere but one angle.
Naturally, they didn’t want to leave all their eggs in one basket, and they didn’t want to be seen running across the map regularly, so they would make friends with newbies (like me), show us their cool hideout and flying dinosaurs, give us some light armor, and ask us to collect some resource from the heart of the island. The guy i met went with me, showing me what to get and the safest route to it. But i wouldn’t take the resources to the base, instead i would leave them at a dead drop in between some rocks (or under water, i can’t remember) at the beach. This way, even if the guild decided this lair was illegal, a raid wouldn’t totally deprive the rebels of all their resources. Looking back, this was sort of an unintentional mirror of the guild tribute chests outside loyalist houses - both groups would farm these dead-drops for resources when they needed it.
I can’t say they were really rebels, they weren’t going to bomb the guild or anything. They just were defiantly not aligned with the guild, and went to lengths to protect themselves in the event of a conflict.
It wasn’t a clean division of factions. Some loyalists with red flags would quietly help the rebels, some unaffiliated people wanted nothing to do with anyone, just grief as much as they could (the guild generally took care of this), and some people with red flags were caught with illegal dinosaurs, which (in the only case i witnessed) led to a fairly impressive house turning into a scorched cinder overnight (when the guild was on).
The end?
I’d like to say that this bizarre setup had some kind of epic conclusion, and maybe it did. But i stopped playing after only a couple weeks. It was a unique experience, but i wasn’t really interested in involving myself with ingame politics and intrigue. I tore down my house, donated most of the materials to the rebels (and some to a friendly loyalist neighbor i had), and quit.
There is probably some kind of lesson in politics or human organization, some parallel or mirror to be drawn with real life. But even without that, it was the first (and only) time i’ve ever seen such a thing in a game. The closest that anyone has probably heard of is EVE, which prides itself on exactly these kinds of stories. But this was so totally regimented and structured, without any encouragement to do so from the devs, that it stuck out to me.
