MeatShield

I think it's more than just paint, I was trying to draw an example. It will likely be more than that like meshes and textures, my point was this sort of thing has already existed. You do raise good points. To be displayed on your screen the assets need to be on your computer in some capacity and that could bump into local laws. I saw my fair share of distasteful sprays in counter strike back in the day... There really needs to be a way for individuals to disable this, and for dedicated servers to turn it off.

It sounds like how spray tags worked in half-life. You make an image on your computer and spray paint it on the walls and everyone gets to see it... except it's for making cosmetics for characters and bases. So yes, other players will have to download it, no, it won't be full of viruses - that's not how computers work, but it will likely have some phallic tendencies.

Nope, I self host. Server's in my garage.

I have it running just fine under QEMU on Proxmox. I doubt they singled out some VM software and not others.

--https://server.nitrado.net/en-GB/news/ark-survival-ascended-server-hosting-exclusivity-news Just leave a bad review and get a refund.

If that's the hardware you have, you should be fine. Worst case you can turn maps on and off as needed. However if you haven't bought it yet, why go with a 10+ year old CPU? You can get something much more powerful for pretty cheap.