The thing with the DLC is mostly just what the public interpreted various terms as meaning "Early Access" meaning "Here you get to buy into an
incomplete version of a game while we work on making it complete", and DLC being "Here is an
extra addition to a game that is already complete", and so people felt they were being scammed because they felt that content had been ripped from the "official" development of the game (which they would have been entitled to per buying into the early access version) in order to be put into a separate DLC so that they could make more money off of those who had already bought the game. How much content actually
was supposed to go in the original version, I can't comment on... But that's the gist of why people got upset about that, and were therefore wary about any other attempts for them to increase or add on prices.
But as for
confirmed scummy stuff? I can honestly say I don't really feel liked devoting myself to digging through that many years of maybe-not-newsworthy content to determine what's trustworthy and what isn't right now (it is after all 9:30 PM, and I'm an old man who has to get up early tomorrow).
I only personally saw the fiasco of the Atlas release, which was done by the same people under a different name. For ARK, I was never really interested in the game, so I didn't delve too deep into the rumors surrounding it. Rumors such as devs favoring certain megatribes and tribe structures because of personal involvement, inconsistent administration (wiping entire clans of their player profiles for using exploits that had been publicly known about for months/years, while ignoring other tribes doing the same or even ignoring bug reports made about these exploits), flip-flopping on how to handle the servers when coming out of EA (supposedly they'd announced that they wouldn't be doing a content wipe on servers for release, then went back on that and stated that they would wipe content. There was an outcry, so they retracted the statement about wiping content. Then they announced that they'd split servers into legacy and fresh servers, with the legacy servers being untouched. Then after the split, they started wiping and repurposing legacy servers anyways), and probably a few other things I'm forgetting (again, never really followed ARK that much).
But
here's a dude who got globally banned without warning for exposing an exploit that had been known about (and reported on) for years. They unbanned him shortly after the outcry erupted at his banning though, so at least they're consistently inconsistent.
And
here is how they handled another long-running exploit (I believe this was one of the things they said they'd fix in Early Access? I dunno).
"8 new replies have been posted": Meh