EULA stands for End User License Agreement, just to clarify.
It’s basically just a document saying “hey, you cant do this with our game” and Minecraft has one. If you’re not familiar, the EULA in Minecraft states that servers can not profit off of their own game. This protects Minecrafts own interests, as they don’t want unfair servers with pay to win (p2w for short) ranks (ie, you pay the server 40$ and get a god kit with armor and commands other people who dont pay dont have) to ruin the experience of their game.
Why should Nelson care to add one? With an EULA all server hosters would have to agree to it, and if it were similar to Minecrafts EULA you wouldn’t be able to create or run a server without agreeing to it (when you try to run an MC server for the first time a .txt pops up with EULA=false in it, and you have to change it to EULA=true)
Once you agree to it, it would be your own fault if you choose to violate the EULA and make your server P2W. From there Nelson could choose to “blacklist” big P2W server networks off the master serverlist (the serverlist everyone uses in Unturned) effectively ruining a servers populaton - and therefore the server will loose profits and etc - which in turn would force the server to make their ranks non-p2w or die off as a network
And guess what happened in Minecrafts scenario? Mojang threatened to make most of the biggest server networks cease and desist “If we do not hear from you within 7 days of this email, we will have to write to you more formally and that may lead to more formal measures.” effectively making all of the extremely popular servers step down, and replace their P2W ranks with cosmetic perks and things that don’t give you game advantages.
What is minecrafts criteria for a p2w server? Some of them goes as follows -
- Some rank perks affects gameplay.
- Some items in the store affects gameplay.
- In-game currency is available for purchase.
Why would this be a good thing to do in Unturned? P2W servers are running rampid in Unturned. I have an entire webpage dedicated to showcasing P2W Unturned servers and it takes me a good 5 or so seconds to load because of how many servers there truely is. Removing P2W servers would make the overall experience better for all the players of Unturned and reduce the amount of server hosters that come to Unturned simply to turn a profit - very much how Bitcoin Miners move to towns with low electricity costs and provide very little back to the community.
Plus Nelson doesn’t want P2W. If he wanted P2W then why wouldn’t he want to add it to the core game? He could’ve added P2W things to the game, such as the ability to spawn in servers with a specific kit of sorts, and he would benefit / make money off of this. But he has not done such a thing. Why wouldn’t he do this?
So to recap
1 - Assuming Nelson doesn’t want P2W in Unturned
2 - P2W ruins the player experience
3 - All of this is perfectly possible to execute, it just needs Nelson to take action and actually do it
4 - P2W servers do not make up a lot of the serverlist. So servers that refuse to comply would be forgotten as there would be tons of other servers to choose from that are fair and non-p2w.
5 - Even if a server chooses to continue being p2w then thats fine. You may still connect to such servers through IP and Port if you really wanted to. You just wouldn’t be able to find them on the master serverlist.
The goal here is to make all servers more fair by force, as server owners will not willingly make their servers fair for all players. And bear in mind Unturned is a free, blocky game. It attracts a lot of kids that have no idea what p2w is or why it’s bad. Which is why Unturned is such an easy cash-grab for server hosters to get into. It’s incredibly easy to make and host a server in Unturned compared to other games (ex Minecraft takes around 4GB’s to run a decent 24 slot server, while Unturned would only take around .5GB to 1.2GB’s of RAM)
This post was made a while ago on the steam forums. A lot of people on there said things about Nelson couldn’t do such a thing. But in recent months when Nelson introduced the server browsers little image system people created a bunch of fake servers with lewd imagery on them. Nelson then added a black-listing system to the master serverlist and can now effectively blacklist servers from appearing on the serverlist. So yes, Nelson could do this if he wanted to in 4.x