Ark: Survival Evolved maker Studio Wildcard has doubled the reward for its bounty program, and is now offering $200 to anyone who reports in-game hacks or exploits that fulfill certain criteria.

Over on the game's Steam forums this week, Wildcard announced the first recipient of the original bounty, which at the time offered $100. In that case, player ZeroDay(++) contacted the company about a "potential hack/exploit which could force servers to crash unexpectedly, as well as have other unintended side-effects." After sharing the steps for reproducing the issue, the studio was able to see the exploit for itself, and a few hours later, $100 had been sent through PayPal.

Since then, Wildcard has decided to double the bounty to $200. Keep in mind, there are limitations on what qualifies for this--Wildcard is looking for any kind of hack "that can have an impact on gameplay or server stability," but it must work on the official online servers. Single-player cheats or those that work on unofficial servers don't qualify, nor do things like aimbots or speedhacks.

Everything submitted to Wildcard (through the email address info@studiowildcard.com) will be evaluated, and you may still qualify for a bounty "if we determine that the issue falls outside the scope of 'hacks,' but still qualifies as an extremely critical bug (such as wide-scale easy duping, or methods of crashing the server, etc.)."

You won't necessarily receive a reply to your email, but Wildcard insists it's reading everything it receives. There are, however, a number of frequently reported hacks that it says it doesn't care about, so you should avoid emailing about those. According to a post on Steam, they include:

ArtificialAiming: These guys make ESP/Aimbots/Enhanced Perception mods. We don't want to hear about these, we know, and VAC will handle them.

MrAntiFun: This guy makes OFFLINE, SINGLE-PLAYER CHEATS ONLY. It says so on his website.

CheatHappens: These guys make OFFLINE, SINGLE-PLAYER CHEATS ONLY. It says so on their website.

GameCopy World: These guys provide OFFLINE, SINGLE-PLAYER CHEATS/TRAINERS ONLY.

ANY exploit that cannot be used online, on our official servers. This means things like making single-player characters which can be uploaded to non-official servers, or admins that are abusing their powers on non-official private servers.

Ark launched in Steam Early Access earlier this month and has already made more than $10 million. In addition to PC, the game is set to come to Xbox One and PS4.