RFC: Banning Purchase of Individual In-Game Items

[RainOfPain125]

@kaguya

receipts/proof?

RFC: Banning Purchase of Individual In-Game Items

I’m making this a separate post because its just, really big. to be frank nobody asked you modern mo. Your input as one of the unfair server hosters isn’t productive or useful or representative of the general community, or even, the hosting community. I will read it anyway and of course debunk what I feel like is easy dunking. To be very, very, very, very, very kind about this, I will do some math. I ran 8 Unturned servers, a Minecraft server, and a MySQL server, on the same machine that I …

@Edbtvplays

Yeah, strange I would defend something I partially made.

It isn’t strange that you would defend business interests at the detriment of the community. However, I could care less about the renting subject, as it is irrelevent and it was a one-time poke at you. I am interested in P2W.

@Edbtvplays

No hosting company uses VPSes. and the use of VPSes or multiple services on the same IP address has nothing to do with the value of that VPS or that they resell at a higher price

this has nothing to do with my solution to P2W servers. irrelevant and off-topic.

@Edbtvplays

Again you are also just looking at the price of a machine like a company has no other costs, no staff to pay, no licenses to own.

I ran my franchise without paying for staff, or getting any “licenses” because I am not a business, I am a benefit to the Unturned community and I am apart of it - I was a server hoster. Not something to profit off of it.

@Edbtvplays

You fail to look at the bigger picture.

sure. irony.

@Edbtvplays

It is never the hosting companies responsibility to enforce Unturned Terms of Service

Well then it will be the hosting companies problem to deal with, when their IP gets blacklisted. good job!

Or, they could take responsbility and moderate their clients.

OR, as I elaborately suggested, the win-win compromise is that “hosting companies” are given UUID’s that they assign to each client server, thus the responsibility falls back into SDG staff’s hands without the collateral damage of blacklisting your entire “hosting company” from the master serverlist.

@DeusExMachina

Glass house with a giant bag of stones.

no comment

@Rain

It isnt “political” if it is “mainstream” amirite. haha lol, politics bad I would never engage in pooooolitics.

@Rain

So what other companies do with their “free trial, you can upgrade however” business model is scummy?

If it were my decision, Unturned as a product is not something that people can take and turn into a “free trial” at the expense of the developer - or atleast, it shouldn’t be.

@Rain

Modern already gives the players he has a lot, so its necessary to have a paywall.

Just because a server provides lots of content, doesn’t mean that it has to paywall future or existing content. You just makes claims IE “so its necessary” without explaining what makes it necessary.

I added lots of content to my servers and my roleplays endlessly, without donations, without P2W, without paywalls. There was no “necessity to have a paywall” as you claim. I am walking talking counter-evidence to your claim.

@Rain

People who buy ranks, do it because they enjoy the server.

Can you prove this?

Or do people do it to get an unfair advantage?

It doesn’t quite matter what server people are getting a paid unfair advantage on, or what their reason behind it is, the point is that they are getting a paid unfair advantage. You’re trying to skirt around the problem by bringing up irrelevant GOTCHA points that do not contribute to the problem at hand.

People can buy a rank that does not put them at a competitive advantage, because they enjoy the server and want to support it monetarily. But you claim that people buy unfair advantages because they enjoy the server. Your logic does not hold.

If people wanted to support the server no matter if they will, or will not, get an unfair advantage, then you’re essentially arguing that if we removed P2W from servers, players would donate their money at the same rate as if it were a P2W purchase.

In that case, P2W server franchises should have no problem supporting these simple ideas!

@Malviyn

implementing such a drastic change right now really does not make much sense.

It makes sense to make the game fun and fair for everyone. Its an open world survival game, not a marketplace for children to pay their way to the top.

If you can not understand why removing paid competitive advantages from the game makes sense, then what are you thinking?

@DerEnte

I think it’s ok to have a way to support a server.

I agree! Players can support their favorite servers monetarily without getting paid competitive advantages in return!

@DerEnte

but small perks like 20% cheaper prices at vendors

This implies that, people who pay, will essentially get 20% more money to spend on in-game items, which, is indirectly just paying for in-game currency, which can be used to buy an unfair advantage.

@DerEnte

slightly larger vault spaces are ok.

This is a compromise I can suffice. Its unfair, but its something I personally do not care about.

@danaby2

this is a good idea

Based!

///////////////////////////////////////////////

The one-hour timer between posts is annoying, so let me recap everything that has been said, @danaby2

TL;DR

• Nelson supports blacklisting servers that sell one-time one-item things. Like buying an APC one time for 1$
• Everyone agrees with this, but a majority of the Unturned community thinks it is lackluster, and insufficient to fixing the overall problem of pay to win servers.
• Countless people are flooding the SDG forums with new accounts they’ve made just so they can announce their support for ending pay to win servers. Something I have never ever seen before on another other post, for any other cause.
• The only people in this thread seriously defending pay to win practices are some folks from Modern Roleplay, and a lot of their points were easily debunked (such as the myth that hosting servers costs gazillions of dollars)

[Pelks]

you right good idea but lots of new people are coming in just to talk about it which I guess is good?

[Rain]

@RainOfPain125

Can you prove this?

Or do people do it to get an unfair advantage?

It doesn’t quite matter what server people are getting a paid unfair advantage on, or what their reason behind it is , the point is that they are getting a paid unfair advantage. You’re trying to skirt around the problem by bringing up irrelevant GOTCHA points that do not contribute to the problem at hand.

People can buy a rank that does not put them at a competitive advantage, because they enjoy the server and want to support it monetarily . But you claim that people buy unfair advantages because they enjoy the server . Your logic does not hold.

If people wanted to support the server no matter if they will, or will not, get an unfair advantage, then you’re essentially arguing that if we removed P2W from servers, players would donate their money at the same rate as if it were a P2W purchase.

In that case, P2W server franchises should have no problem supporting these simple ideas!

Can I prove this? I mean I don’t think you understand but, there’s no winners in creative roleplay. People who donated do have only a slight advantage. Again, none of this fits into Nelsons RFC. He isn’t doing anything wrong. So I don’t see why you have to argue in a RFC about something thats completely unrelated to the issue at hand. We are going off topic.
I think P2W servers that give heavily unfair advantages are bad. However, Moderns server does not do this. It provides a small marginal advantage.

[Edbtvplays]

@RainOfPain125

@Edbtvplays

Yeah, strange I would defend something I partially made.

It isn’t strange that you would defend business interests at the detriment of the community. However, I could care less about the renting subject, as it is irrelevent and it was a one-time poke at you. I am interested in P2W.

You say that it’s irrelevant but still poked at it all along, you brought the subject up. I am simply defending my hard work. I have spent hundreds of hours building the company, developing, supporting servers owners. How dare you say that my business practices undermined and detriment the community. You have an extreme lack of perspective and a lack of acceptance of others viewpoints especially from people who are as or more experienced as you. Just because it isn’t your opinion doesn’t mean its wrong.

You can’t win.

@RainOfPain125

@Edbtvplays

Again you are also just looking at the price of a machine like a company has no other costs, no staff to pay, no licenses to own.

I ran my franchise without paying for staff, or getting any “licenses” because I am not a business, I am a benefit to the Unturned community and I am apart of it - I was a server hoster. Not something to profit off of it.

Do you think I live for free? This is my job I use the small profit I benefit from the company to pay for the train ticket to get to my college amongst other things? We do have costs. Machines are not free, we pay for our hosting license for WHMCS, Development etc… Modern Hosting also does benefit the community in many ways. Modern constantly helps people in the Unturned Official Discord, we write our documentation agnostic to the host. We sponsor community events, small youtubers. Please don’t ignore that we try our best to be helpful while still remaining a business we are not in it for the money.

I am going to end the hosting topic here. You continue to be completely disrespectful to my work. What you said was completely out of pocket. There is no need for that behaviour in here or anywhere.

@RainOfPain125

@Edbtvplays

It is never the hosting companies responsibility to enforce Unturned Terms of Service

Well then it will be the hosting companies problem to deal with, when their IP gets blacklisted. good job!

Or, they could take responsbility and moderate their clients.

OR, as I elaborately suggested, the win-win compromise is that “hosting companies” are given UUID’s that they assign to each client server, thus the responsibility falls back into SDG staff’s hands without the collateral damage of blacklisting your entire “hosting company” from the master serverlist.

Legally, it’s not our terms of service to enforce. If we get a message or DMCA request from the game to take down the server that’s different but by default, we are not expected to uphold the terms of service which we have no control over. Just our own.
I agree with you that a UUID or some sort of system to be able to properly blacklist servers would be needed, rather than removing them off the server list via their IP or via their name, as both can be easily changed. Or masked.

[_UWU_Lexy]

No matter how well constructed your post is, Nelson is being drifted by individuals, who has 0 good or honest intentions for community, but just wants to release their anger towards others.

[Johnson]

I do not condone p2w practices that impacts the performance, and competitive-fun factor of the game. microtransactions in general are fine if they are single player experience games. But the moment you introduce microtransactions that gives p2w advantages into a multiplayer game it automatically ruins the credibility of competition.

You can argue that some cash cow games like maplestory, or genshin impact are doing well. sure I would believe you for those niches. but the majority of games that have been tainted by some sort of loot box for advantage or microtransactions for advantaged games ruined their rep for competitive play and fairness. Halo, call of duties, runescape, a lot of EA games…, plants vs zombies.

That’s a whole thing in itself… but the fact these guys have to milk the player base to be able to run a dedicated server, or their own server. Is a setup that promotes, and encourages more predatory behaviors to the poor bastards that want a good experience in the server. That fact doesn’t jive well with me. I tried running a server myself and found that my server ended up being a fish in a wide ocean of p2w crap, and I just ended up shutting it down because there was no point in running a server when all these other flashy but really shtty servers overshadow what you have, or your attempts to make a experience good for people.

[ClintonJay]

Hello there, Mr. Nelson of the sex, I like your fantastic idea and take big action furthermore I’ll like to take a quote from the bible. “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”

If you don’t agree with Nelson of the sex you are going against the mighty God himself

[RainOfPain125]

@Rain

I don’t think you understand but, there’s no winners in creative roleplay.

pay to win doesn’t literally mean paying to win the game. There is no “winning” the game to begin with. You can’t “win” survival. I’m not sure how you could go out of your way to misinterpret the point that paid advantages are a bad thing.

@Rain

People who donated do have only a slight advantage.

If you’re still on about ModernRP, I don’t care. I’m talking about all pay to win servers in general. Every server fanboy is going to make up excuses on how “well its not THAT big of an advantage” but at the end of the day, if it wasn’t a good advantage, then kids wouldn’t be fronting the money.

You also missed my point as well. I’ll re-write it a little, maybe you will get it better.

@Rain

People who buy ranks, do it because they enjoy the server.

@RainOfPain125

People can buy a rank that does not put them at a competitive advantage, because they enjoy the server and want to support it monetarily

But you claim that people buy unfair advantages because they enjoy the server.

Your logic does not hold.

If people wanted to support the server whether or not they get an unfair advantage, then you’re arguing that if we removed P2W from servers, players would donate their money at the same rate as if it were a P2W purchase that involved buying an unfair advantage.

@Rain

I think P2W servers that give heavily unfair advantages are bad.

Then you should agree that servers that give any unfair advantages are bad - because of course, there is no objective “measure” of what is “too unfair”. Its all or nothing, and everyone here would much rather prefer the all option.

@Edbtvplays

You can’t win.

anyway

@Edbtvplays

Do you think I live for free?

No, but other people live for not-free and still host servers without profit incentive!

@Edbtvplays

Modern Hosting also does benefit the community in many ways.

again, irrelevant. I’m done going on about your renting service. its irrelevant to the topic, I could keep bashing and shitting on it all day, rightfully so, but I’m not interested in derailing the thread for my own amusement.

@Edbtvplays

You continue to be completely disrespectful to my work. What you said was completely out of pocket

@Edbtvplays

There is no need for that behaviour in here or anywhere.

@Edbtvplays

I agree with you that a UUID or some sort of system to be able to properly blacklist servers would be needed, rather than removing them off the server list via their IP or via their name, as both can be easily changed. Or masked.

sure, we agree on the solution on “how to enforce anti-P2W” now we just have to get anti-P2W rules to begin with

And if you and everyone else keeps gloating about how MRP isn’t P2W, then I’m sure you have no reason to oppose these ideas.

@_UWU_Lexy

Nelson is being drifted by individuals, who has 0 good or honest intentions for community

what…?

er, yes! I agree! People who are in the community to make profit do not have good intentions for the community. If they put community over profit, they will make less profit.

@Johnson

But the moment you introduce microtransactions that gives p2w advantages into a multiplayer game it automatically ruins the credibility of competition.

based! Well put, Johnson.

@Johnson

but the fact these guys have to milk the player base to be able to run a dedicated server, or their own server.

Exactly! People who unfair servers under the excuse of “WELL ITS SO EXPENSIVE”, milking the playerbase and exploiting them, when there are hundreds of people willing to host quality servers for free - its been too long. A long time coming. And if Nelson keeps his current conditions for the ban, it will be far too little, already far too late.

@Johnson

Is a setup that promotes, and encourages more predatory behaviors to the poor bastards that want a good experience in the server.

yes!

@Johnson

I tried running a server myself and found that my server ended up being a fish in a wide ocean of p2w crap, and I just ended up shutting it down because there was no point in running a server when all these other flashy but really shtty servers overshadow what you have, or your attempts to make a experience good for people.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHY UNFAIR SERVERS NEED TO BE STOPPED.

The common phrase is “WELL IF YOU DONT LIKE IT, LEAVE!”

Leave WHERE? Nobody feels incentivized to run honest good servers, if for-profit greedy exploitative servers are going to buy out youtubers, advertise everywhere, clickbait everywhere, lure kids into their servers, and devoid the honest and quality servers of players that would have otherwise been on them.
////
If you run your server for profit, of course you want to “steal” players into your server from honest community servers, or even, other P2W servers! If you didn’t, then your server wouldn’t be as profitable!

Of course you want to buy out YouTubers, if you didn’t, then your server wouldn’t be as profitable!

Of course you want flashy gimmicky ranks and kits to sell that ruins the overall game experience for everyone else, or else there wouldn’t be nearly as much profit to be made!

Of course plugin developers would want to monopolize the plugin market and forbid competition to keep prices higher, because that is profitable behavior!

Of course servers buy into these ridiculously high plugin prices anyways, because they need those plugins to stay flashy and relevant to kids, and they already have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from their unfair trickery, thus giving those unnecessarily high-cost plugins a demand, and thus keeping the cost of good plugins too high for average server owners!

Of course the serverlist is full of P2W garbage, because at every single step in the process, it pushes out, and de-incentivizes, real community servers!

This isn’t rocket science. P2W is a cancer. The only solution is for Nelson to intervene. Unlike Mojang’s decision to forbid P2W because they did not want people to “profit” off of their game, SDG’s decision to forbid P2W would be for the betterment of the community overall, with healthier gameplay and the removal of the incentive to predatory behavior.

@ClintonJay

If you don’t agree with Nelson of the sex you are going against the mighty God himself

no comment.

[RainOfPain125]

To shit on people further, I’ve decided to go out of my way to pick a popular unfair, P2W server, and literally calculate how much money it has made since the first waves of donations came in.

I will try my best to keep the server anonymous so I don’t get hit with that “harassment, deleted” stuff with SDG mods.
//////////////////////////
Here is the servers best rank you can purchase for $42, and everything you get with your purchase.
(it should be $105, but it is on a permanent “60% off sale” to attract more kids into buying it)

“kit VIP”

“kit MVP”

“kit GOD”

“kit LEGEND”

“kit MEGA”

now lets do the math on how much money they make from this.

Lucky for us, their website has a very convenient widget that shows off every single donation, and how much the donation was. Very handy for this analysis.

I could be lazy, and add all of the totals on that page for an average of one page, and then times it by 99 pages of donations - but I want to be precise and accurate. I have gone through 99 pages of donations, 15 donations on each page, for a total of almost ~1,500 donations.

The first page alone, is 232.5 pounds (324.91 USD)

The first five pages, is 1,229.25 pounds (1,717.82 USD)

The first ten pages, is 3,918.62 pounds (5,476.08 USD)

All 99 pages, is 390,662.25 pounds, or,

$545,930 fucking dollars
over the course of 2 and a half years, they have made
$545,930 fucking dollars
that is roughly $18,200 dollars per month in profit

stop crying that servers, that cost ~2.5$ a month to run, are so expensive that server owners need $18,200 a month in profit to make up for their losses.

this is literally just a single server. There are tons of server franchises consisting of tens of servers.

[SDGNelson]

Edit: if the first ten pages is 3,900 are you sure 100 pages is 390,000? Or is it actually 39,000? That seems more reasonable.

[RainOfPain125]

@SDGNelson

Holy hell.

Funnily enough this cough anonymous cough server privately contacted me complaining about the proposal.

Money speaks for money.

It’s up to you, Nelson. These practices are, without a doubt, a net negative for the Unturned community as a whole, that is why I have been consistently adamant about you taking action. They as so occupied with profit that they came to you as soon as they saw the post, to ‘privately contact’ (beg) you not to introduce your suggestion.

I can see why you want to ban one-time purchases. That server makes a lot of money off of one-time uconomy purchases, which can cost upwards of ~$100 for a one-time payment of money.

But I still do not believe that is enough to fix the general problem of these practices.

(oh, you edited it. oops!)

@SDGNelson

if the first ten pages is 3,900 are you sure 100 pages is 390,000? Or is it actually 39,000? That seems more reasonable.

Yes I see I did an error where I made the numbers an order of magnitude larger (10x larger).

$54,593 total
$1,820 a month

I tried to edit my post, I don’t know why it wont let me. I’ve waited like 2 hours, so I’m making this comment instead.

[dutchguy]

i would love to see this getting banned and even more because some server s have even overpowered ranks that give you for example item commands. and in some servers even custom kits you can buy. those things together could you get a whole arsenal of guns and is unfair. but the money buying thing is als annoying because if people work hard to buy something ingame some dick buys it with real money i hope pay to win get banned entirely

[SDGNelson]

Sorry, I reacted too quickly before further investigating. I should not have said what I said there.

[Pablo824]

@Schneider

it seems like Rain is so fixated with proving people wrong that he’s willing to falsely calculate and exaggerate people’s income just to prove that he’s right.

I really don’t think that’s the case here. He did admit of his mistake after all.

Anyway, I was kind of shocked when I saw that they made half a million dollars, but even $54,000 is insanely high for just 2 years.
The things they are doing in order to get people to buy these kits and from what I see, you can always upgrade it to a better, more expensive kit. I can agree actions should be taken on those servers.

[Malviyn]

But still, that’s a lot of money that could probably cover the costs of the server a thousand fold, people need to stop feeling bad for any punishment or regulations coming for these servers.

Also the fact that they’ve contacted you privately about this speaks for itself.

[DeusExMachina]

@Malviyn

Also the fact that they’ve contacted you privately about this speaks for itself.

I can see why they would but those server owners “contacting” you privately just seems incredibly shady. This is a public thread for a reason. If you have good arguments, this would be the place to present them. Otherwise it is time for you to accept that fact that you are just in it for the money (which is morally wrong but you still have every right to) and admit as much.
Fingers crossed Nelson does not indulge them and just points them towards this thread.

They pull a huge part of the the current player count but that should not be mistaken for leverage in this sort of discussion. Their player can (and need) to speak for themselves, this isn’t an issue people can represent others on imho.

[hiilikewiki56]

Votes aren’t the best way to determine a server’s popularity. The reason why these servers have so many votes is because they provide rewards for voting. Pandahut and Empire have been some of the most consistent servers out there, yet they appear nowhere on there because they did not offer vote rewards.

[Fristy]

Hey Nelson, a friend of mine has a question about your proposal / is asking for clarification. He is wondering if allowing consumables/repeatable purchase items only effects P2W items or if it includes non-gameplay effecting items too such as custom made skins. Currently he plans to sell a “paint bucket” item which can be used to craft skinned versions of other items. This obviously has no effect on any gameplay element and provides no advantage to the costumer. The owner himself is very much against selling anything P2W and wishes to stay clear of that controversy, instead he will be selling skins exclusively as part of a onetime purchase deal that will be permanent which looks to be completely under regulation. With the exception of this repeatable skin crafting item.

[Elliot]

I think donate kits are problem too, but idk how to fix this. So I’ll just describe some things in my head here - about pay-to-win on PvP and on RP.
On PvP servers, the advantages are in better weapons, armor and equipment. Many people say that all of these items can be obtained from killing donators, but this doesn’t deny the clear fact of advantage. Yes, your opponent with a kit can be a complete noob or lowskill, but he also can be tryhard. Finally, a situation may occur when your enemy’s weapon will do much more damage than yours, but he will kill you anyways because of higher damage of his purchased gun, despite your aiming skill (or luck?).
Or when you don’t have enough rounds in your mag to pierce this guy thick armor. The donator will reveive his kit until the next wipe once the time to get again will pass, and he didn’t put any impact and effort to get it honestly, on the server - by killing a player, killing mega, looting military base or a deadzone - because this is a purchase made on a donate shop and it was bought for real money.
On the other hand, the pay-to-win aspect on RP servers with purchasing shops reduces the grind, since it is possible to go out of ‘rags to riches’ without any effort in the game, focusing only on role-playing. But the reality is quite the opposite.
The grind is making RP servers unique. You need to interact with other players to get more money in process.
P2W on such servers, the players and the administration turns the game into a something like a ‘sandbox’ for admins and donators. Ordinary players will have to grind and exist in a boring and toxic atmosphere, while donators bring absolutely nothing interesting to the game. They have no role, hence their acting is incredibly boring. RP should not be for money, as it turns into non-RP. The point of RP servers is to role play and do it better than other players, improving your skills every day of the game. The point of PvP is to be better every day of the game in the same way, but on skill of killing players with your mepelstriki. But Pay-to-Win corrupt both the atmosphere of the RP project and the fair competitive (or luck) aspect of PvP servers.

(sorry for my english if it’s not ok)

[RainOfPain125]

reject paid advantages

embrace fair quality gameplay