[2019] What was the recent drag weight change for?

Wall`O`Text incoming. I got going and couldn't stop.

Most of this is based on my personal experience from when I was modding and shouldn't be taken as an official company stance.

We didn't say it couldn't be done, and we didn't say the plugin would have those problems. Cedric was giving fair warning that it could have problems like that. Trying to communicate these things in a tweet though is difficult because a larger conversation has to come in tiny pieces over a long thread which can be missed or we have to try and be reductive with what we are saying while also trying to get the core point across, we don't always succeed in the latter.

A few notes here though on some of these discussion points so far, and some things that haven't been as well:

1. You can't copyright a concept (thankfully, or else anytime somebody tried to make a new version of something they would get slapped with legal threats, mods would basically never exist), you copyright the specific expression of a concept. Can you imagine only one company being able to use the concept of "Experience" or "levels"? That would be awful.
2. When we incorporate mods into the core game we pay the mod authors for their projects, even though technically wildcard doesn't have to do that with any mods made through the devkit and published to steam (EULA agreement to prevent mods from boxing in content of the main game), it's one of the things that made me happy about wildcard when I was a modder because it felt like we were being acknowledged for our work and effort, as opposed to certain other companies which used it as a source of microtransaction content for players to pay for.
3. That plugin might work pretty well, but considering server owners are forced to pay for it (Basically the price of a full game, eek) I doubt it has had the mass testing to really be sure about false positives. I would certainly be concerned about issues like being "Partially in the ground when you log in" or any meshes where their collision is a little off.
4. That plugin wasn't made through the ARK Dev Kit. The ARK Server API plugins operate using a method of DLL injection, and while we aren't saying "No don't do that" for unofficial servers it should be noted that it carries risks and we don't provide any kind of support for that method of modding.
5. We don't have their code to see what their method of detection even is. Additionally, since it is currently a plugin that hijacks functionality to do its thing we would need to convert it into the core game source which may not be all that feasible in a 1:1 conversion depending on what they are doing.
6. We already had our own efforts in the works for trying to combat meshing. It's not a simple problem and there are a lot of outliers that, if not handled carefully, can result in massive issues. Suddenly forcing that on everyone with no way to back out if something goes wrong is not usually a good idea. This may be a bit of a "Working with the devil you know" kind of situation as I understand there is an opinion that the argument of "Doing something, even something semi-broken, would be better than nothing at all right now with these problems."
7. I hear a lot of people say things like "Other games don't have these issues" pretty frequently. And in some cases that is true, but almost exclusively with small maps and small room-based systems (Where you have to load from room to room). For games with large competitive multiplayer maps ever notice how the play area is usually a large simple landscape? The driving factor for why meshing is such a big deal in ARK as opposed to many other games of similar scale isn't that the other games aren't capable of being meshed, it's that there is usually no incentive or benefit to doing so. That incentive is driving people to find the weak points, weak points that are actually present in most games, and exploit them.

Yes, that was an unintended side-effect. Alternative solutions are being evaluated.