Last updated 1 October 2026

Privacy Policy

What we collect, why we collect it, and how to get it removed. Plain words, no tricks.

MESA ARK (“MESA”, “we”) runs ARK: Survival Evolved PvP servers, this website (mesark.net), the leaderboards (leaderboards.mesark.net), the store (store.mesark.net) and the MESA Discord servers. This policy covers all of them. MESA is not affiliated with Studio Wildcard.

No accounts, no sign-up forms and no advertising or tracking cookies.
We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It does not use cookies; it records the page, referrer, country, browser and device type, and counts visitors without identifying them.
Our host (Vercel) keeps standard server logs, such as IP address and request time, to run and protect the site.
Pages embed YouTube videos. YouTube may set its own cookies when you play one; that is covered by Google's privacy policy.

When you play on a MESA server, the server and our admin tools record:

Your Steam ID, Steam name, character name and tribe.
Which server you joined and when, and in-game events such as kills, purchases with in-game points, and admin actions.
Your IP address and a hardware ID, used only to enforce bans and stop ban evasion, cheating and alt abuse.

We use this to run the servers, enforce the rules, investigate reports and build the public leaderboards. The leaderboards show character names, tribe names and in-game stats, never Steam IDs or IP addresses.

Our Discord bot answers questions and handles support tickets. It stores ticket transcripts and the questions you ask it.
It reads messages in our public community channels to spot common questions, measure how the community feels about updates and write weekly reports for staff. Messages are stored with your Discord user ID.
Message text is sent to Anthropic (the Claude AI model) to write answers and classify topics and sentiment. Anthropic processes it for us and does not use it to train its models.
If you link your Discord to your Steam ID, we keep that link so staff can help you faster.
The bot may send you a direct message, for example about a ticket or to welcome you back after time away.

Store payments are processed by Tip4Serv and its payment providers. We never see or store your card details. Tip4Serv shares the order with us (what you bought, the amount, the date and the Steam or in-game identifier needed to deliver it), and we keep those records for delivery, support, refunds, chargeback disputes and our accounts. The rules on purchases are in the Terms, linked in the footer of store.mesark.net.

We do not sell your data. We only share it with services that run MESA for us:

Vercel (website hosting and analytics).
Our game server and bot hosting providers.
Discord (the platform our community and bot run on).
Anthropic (AI processing for the support bot).
Tip4Serv and its payment providers (store purchases).

We may also share information when the law requires it, or to deal with fraud or chargebacks.

Ban and enforcement records are kept for as long as the ban applies.
Purchase records are kept as long as we need them for support, disputes and our accounts.
Bot and server databases are backed up daily; backups are kept for 30 days.
Everything else is kept only as long as it is useful for running MESA, and deleted on request where we can.

You can ask us what we hold about you, or ask us to correct or delete it, by opening a ticket in the MESA Support Discord. We may keep records we need for active bans, fraud prevention or the law. MESA is not meant for children under 13.

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of this page and post the change in our Discord.