I haven’t played public pvp servers in a long time, only private pve with friends, but after reading 200+ comments I would definetly agree on blacklisting current p2w servers and dividing existing ones that have it or not.
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Why is the government interfering with our free-market server economy? Unturned should stay out of the interests of the server networks and not impose restrictions on servers that could hurt them. Multiplayer servers entertain the majority of players, so the people that run these servers should see their rights as a private entity protected and not be restricted from doing certain things. This is clearly a violation of my civil liberties as a business owner!
Seeing some comments, couldn’t keep myself from writing one too.
So first one is about price to keep the server running. Most of the comments (well, there is mostly one individual keep posting here and trying to make others think the way he thinks/understands it) telling that server hosting costs are low, server owners hyperbolizing prices, I can host a server on my PC and I just need to pay electricity/internet bills etc. So, there are few things to know for inexperienced “server owners”:
- Every server is different, different resources amount is needed to run those servers. For example, vanilla server might use around 500Mb of RAM, server with lots of mods might need 3Gb or even more. Then, there is CPU. With each additional plugin, CPU usage jumps up so hosting on some entry level VPS with trashy CPU might be an option for vanilla servers when its no-go for modded server with plenty of plugins/mods.
- There is this thing called DDoS. Sure, host on your home PC. Its cheap and all. But wait until someone launches DDoS on your server. And, yeah, this type of attacks is still widely spread among unturned server owners.
- Then we have logevity/uptime of the server. I don’t know about other, but personally, I wouldn’t keep my PC running 24/7 in my bedroom.
Sum things up. If you have a somewhat popular server with mods and plugins and you have experienced DDoS - you will probably go to OVH or something similar. You might also need windows OS (not talking about owners who are used to linux). Suitable (for really lightly modded server) VPS prices start from 11$/mo (without windows license ofc), decent dedicated server prices start from 60$/mo~ (again, without windows license). Yes yes, you can host more than one server on a dedicated instance, doubt if VPS with shared memory/cores would be well for more than 1 though.
Another thing - workshop mods and plugins. Yep, these are the only things that keep community. Lets be honest, unturned didn’t have new official content for ages. And players got bored of the same repetitive stuff. So majority of community moved to those “evil” modded servers. While there are plenty of servers (dead ones) using X years old mods (which, at this point, is most likely looking as outdated vanilla content), there are lots of servers who are investing in new mods creation. And believe me, its not an easy task (if possible at all) to find a good experienced mod maker who would gladly make free mods for your server. So what server owners do - they are hiring modders. And prices for those mods might vary from few bucks to 50$+++ per single mod. Then there are plugins too. Some server owners are not enough of same templatish plugins they can find in plugin markets. They want to engage their community with a nice content - they pay developers to create those plugins. I won’t talk about price here, just a note: single plugin can cost a 3 digit figure. To conclude, don’t expect modders or plugin developers to work for free. They might have some free plugins/mods shared with community - yet, its mostly templatish things and are basically used for advertising their services. And thats completely understandable, since they spend their time to make them, they spend time on learning. And they probably spend even more time on it than someone spends commenting on this topic. So, with these restrictions, dropped amount of orders in a long-run, developers/modders will say “f*** it, I am moving to another game”. This wouldn’t be so big deal if unturned is being updated with fresh content as much as, for example, Rust.
Finally, those “evil” owners of the server spends their time too to manage their servers. And some of them spends more than 8 hours/day (having in mind that unturned might go breaky-breaky with each update). So thats kinda a full time job. And why is it bad that owner gets paid for their work? Even if its more than 1k bucks/month - its a relatively small salary in most parts of the world.
In the end, developers of mods and plugins are happy to have new orders, players are happy to have fresh, engaging content, owner is happy to have a big community and be paid for his work on the server, Nelson is happy that someone plays his game. So why bring this chaos to the community at this point? Ohh, right. Because someone is unhappy that his “mega-interesting no P2W” server cant gather few players? Well, its definitely not about “saving kids”. Parents have this option called “chargebacks” in case their kid really takes their card without their knowledge (if they don’t notice that someone is purchasing something - then maybe they don’t give a s*** about couple bucks?). And if the kid have his own credit card then maybe parents trust him enough?
Btw, why the hell everyone is taking minecraft as an example? I can take Rust, which is by all means more similar to unturned (except graphics).
Perhaps if you had any idea how competitive markets work, you would know Im correct. Your server failed because you weren’t delivering a desirable product. Perhaps nobody wanted to host for you because you mishandle equipment that doesnt belong to you?
Not only is this entirely an opinion, it literally goes against tangible evidence that people prefer the p2w servers. These servers are literally popular because they have these options. Is it so hard to understand?
Its a serious commentary about you, not a rumor. If I wanted to slander you Id talk about you spamming my discord with furry pornography.
If people didnt like these servers, they wouldnt play on them. They wouldnt make the purchases. But they do. These servers are not popular because they make profit, they are profitable because they are popular. There are non p2w servers out there, and running a server yourself isnt hard either. This isnt comparable to feudalism, where it was “work for me or Im going to kill you” its literally just “hey go find a server you like.” This is a competitive market. There are options. Popularity is exactly proportionate to demand. If somebody buys a product, then there is demand for said product. If there was truly no demand for p2w servers, they wouldnt have any sales.
To say a business failed is not a personal attack. Come on Rain, this is a serious commentary and is in no way slander, or an attack, or a call to harass. This is me pointing out that your servers were not popular. They failed. You werent even hosting using your own equipment.
I know some people in that discord and they beg to differ. Directly opposes tangible evidence. You imagine there are “ten thousand” players who will magically appear if p2w servers are banned. There arent. The alternatives are already out there that such a demographic could take. If there was true demand for this then the market would reflect it. It doesnt. Your entire opinion predicates on a hypothetical demand for non p2w servers despite there being no evidence for it.
Entirely your opinion and completely unproductive forum behavior. Stop presenting opinions as fact.
People support removing predatory purchases. This has been agreed upon and Nelsons decided to do it. It had nothing to do with servers being “P2W” and was entirely a moral and consumer protective choice. If the community really wanted P2W servers banned then they would be banned. They didnt go that route. And apparently 6 people joining the forums is a big deal guys! Nevermind the fact there were plenty of accounts created to speak against it as well- its not like this is a controversial discussion or anything, right?
No. They are not popular because they are profitable. They are profitable because they are popular. Nobody buys an optional product that they dont want.
Nelson himself wont provide free dedicated servers. You have no legs to stand on if even your host wont provide free servers. Its not immoral for a server to seek profit. Its not immoral to offer these products. Stop speaking as though you are some paragon hero of the community when everything you say goes against what players are actually doing. Even Nelson has gone against your radical ideas.
Apparently replying to people and giving a radical opinion is debunking now. Lmao? “P2W is bad”. “paid advantages are bad” is entirely an opinion Rain, it will never be a fact and it will never be a real argument.
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Informed users make the best decisions. 
We’re glad you came back from two years of silence to support removing P2W!
yes! we want to “hurt” unfair servers because we don’t want to see them anymore.
and it’s Nelson’s game, his choice to protect his game from people who shamelessly profit off of it, and ruin the gameplay experience in the process! based rights!
it’s also not like the rules are some dystopian 1984 situation where Nelson literally shuts down servers. They’re just being removed from Nelson’s master serverlist. what an exaggeration on rights and nonsense alike.
There are server owners of non-profit fair servers that also manage their servers. Seems like we could replace one for the other!
Yes! With servers that are focused on making profit, they are incentivized into committing malicious and illegal DDoS attacks against competitors so that the players of those servers join their own server and buy their own ranks! Thankyou for proving my point on the predatory malicious behavior of profit driven servers.
To contrast, it costs no money to wait out a DDoS attack, while it costs money to attack someone. In a server community without paid advantages (and thus ability to profit off of kids) the incentive to DDoS is minimized, and the money to dish out a DDoS attack is less. Win-Win!
Guess who is running their machine 24/7/365? People who host fair quality community servers.
Please, for the love of god, show me these “fair quality” server you are talking about all the time. I would love to see how active owners/admins are on them 
About that DDoS, from my personal experience, DDoS attacks usually come right after some player is banned. Coincidence? It could be. Anyways, let me know when you finally succeed with this “fair quality mega super no P2W” server.
I don’t really get why you said this to Effectism and his comment when I gave you a very clear and what I believe is a solid reason for P2W servers having a high popularity.
This I feel just invalidates what you said because I can’t be the only person who has the mindset on P2W servers running successfully due to them appealing to players.
This quote along with you not even bothering to respond to the rest of my post/your severe word choice on other comments to describe P2W servers has me convinced that you think P2W servers even existing is a detriment to the server pool, even if some people prefer to play on them. Almost like you are just so clouded and focused on the owners being money hungry manipulative people who don’t care and are bringing nothing but harm to the community, that you would rather have them be gone completely, even if they are constantly full of players on a daily basis bringing attention to the game.
I know that when I join a server with P2W features I immediately think to myself if it’s even worth starting to build a base and get situated. I go in with the mindset that if I’m willing to be at a disadvantage against those who have money to spend on some steam game, I can’t get mad when they start using those advantages on me.
Which is why I firmly believe that completely separating P2W and non-P2W servers in the server browser would be the best option in keeping both parties happy. Those “money hungry owners” can only “extract” so much from players until the player decides it’s too much. Ultimately forcing the player to decide if they would rather be at a disadvantage and possibly play less and less on the server, or to keep up with those who have free cash and spend more.
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8,682 unique players joined my single server Eaglefire 3. That is just one, in an entire franchise I ran.
There are admins on IBC, a fair franchise, all the time. There were admins on my servers, a fair franchise, all the time. I would love to see how active owners/admins are on P2W servers if they don’t have an incentive to do their duties if they still make the same amount of profit either way.
There are quite a few no P2W servers. They’re buried under the massive piles of clickbait predatory garbage of P2W server franchises.
If this was the case, then why is the ratio of non-donators to donators on P2W servers always a super high ratio? Remember how earlier I debunked how much money a certain anonymous P2W server franchise made a month?
Well they had ~100 pages of donations, each with 15 donations. I will be extremely generous and assume that each donation is from a different and unique person (someone could have bought a rank, then money, then more money, totalling 3 donations for one unique person).
As I already said, my single server, Eaglefire 3, had 8,682 unique players join. If we assume every donation on the anonymous server was by different unique people, that would be 1,500 donations.
thats roughly a 1:6 ratio of donators to non-donators.
This is extremely generous because those 1,500 purchases definitely wasn’t from 1,500 different people. And also, their server is always full, so they probably have had way more unique players join, and thus the ratio would be much higher (1:20 or 1:40)
If your point were true at all, that people play on P2W servers so that they can have P2W ranks with kits and money, then why aren’t they out there buying those ranks? What you claim is very different from the reality of things.
yes! They are a cancer to the serverlist! Their existence as inevitable predatory clickbait shitholes is always going to negatively affect the serverlist.
yes! If your server wasn’t occupied with caring about profit, paying youtubers to expand their serverbase, paying for ridiculously expensive plugins that keep the monopolized plugin market alive, it would be outcompeted by another for-profit P2W server that does those things.
Sure you can try to be a “benevolent” server owner and not participate in literally fucking DDoSing the competition, like the bare minimum standards, but that doesn’t stop the fact that adding unfair advantages to the game is at the detriment of everyone else’s gameplay experience. They don’t have to be competitive nor money-grubbing to ruin the gameplay by adding paid advantages. Whether they are either of those is irrelevant to the point.
And most kids do not understand this, or most teenagers and adults don’t want to join servers that have P2W, but it is incredibly hard for non-P2W servers to exist for the reasons already given to you earlier that you have ignored.
If peasants didn’t like Feudalism, they wouldn’t have participated in it.
If peasants didn’t like Feudalism, they wouldn’t have bought things made under Feudalism.
I wonder why the peasants participated in such a shitty system ‘voluntarily’.
They are popular because they pay to be popular.
So yes! You only further prove my point!
Why run a server that is actually fair or hosted on a good machine with good ping with good latency with good admins, when you can just market an empty soul-less uncreative unoriginal server with enough YouTuber advertisements.
Profit =/= Good product. Something doesn’t have to be good to be profitable. If it is more profitable to just waste money on advertising rather than improving your “product” (server) then they will of course choose to do just that.
Meanwhile, honest fair servers that do not buy out YouTubers and do their own wholesome things are of course, at the disadvantage since the large majority of the playerbase, being children, are swayed by kid-friendly content creators to go onto other servers.
Not going to name names, but one YouTuber is incredibly, blatantly, a sell-out that visits any Roleplay that pays him to advertise it. I knew someone named Aethon who used to administrate a Roleplay server that was borderline dead. The owner paid this YouTuber a one-time sum of $200 to make a cheesy quick Roleplay video on it. Aethon said the server was full, 24/24, for the next two months, and the server owner made ten fold what he paid the YouTuber.
I never said they were not popular. And that is beside the point - that paid advantages ruin the gameplay experience. Your efforts to de-rail the conversation with slander and made up garbage is ineffective.
step 1 of shit debate discourse, make up what you think your opponent imagines in their head.
I don’t see the past 100 years of “market demand” stopping the climate collapse of our generation. Surely if we wanted businesses to be environmentally sustainable (or even better, environmentally beneficial) they would have done so already. The market would have met the demand, and yet they have not.
Perhaps your very narrowminded view on how economics works, is bad. Very bad. Servers are in the business of making profit, not providing a good product. It is profitable to convince or manipulate the community in such a way that players looking for servers will filter into P2W servers. And of course the more players playing P2W servers, the more potential profit there is to be made.
Then the logical conclusion is to ban P2W. If there is a profit incentivize to fuck players over, ruin the gameplay experience, DDoS the competition, clickbait children, shamelessly advertise, and buy out Youtubers, then perhaps the solution is to remove the inherent incentive that drives these things!
Just a thought.
If peasants really wanted Feudalism to be overthrown, then they would have overthrown it. Except Feudalism lasted for over 1,000 years. hmm.
“if they really wanted it”
as if they do not really want it.
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u knwo wat would fix everything
a 2.2.5 server !! (pls someone with the resources i will love u so much if u set up a 2.2.5 server)
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Why is the government interfering with our free-market server economy?
Unturned is not a government. Unturned / SDG is a company. And companies can make of their product whatever the fuck they want. And Nelson wants to protect his own interests, public image, and interests of his game’s community from predatory servers and their equally predatory P2W transactions.
I ran a 5GB, fully modded RP server, with no P2W transactions of the such. It all costed me barely 20$ a month. There are ranks on servers which can cost twice that. This is unjustifiable.
Most third party hosts such as the one I used have it integrated within your purchase, so there’s no extra costs.
That’s why you get a third party to host the server on their own machine lmao.
Absolute BS, most good third party hosts will sell you a decent server at 18$ a month.
That I know of, only the following 3 (big) servers have ever commissioned any mods:
Nylex with his Bundle and extra Content mods
Gameghost with some clothes and vehicles
EDGP? I think that was the name - with a gunpack and vehiclepack for their bootleg server
The thing is, since all of the big P2W servers are racking in such huge profits, then why can’t each and every single one of them get commissioned mods, too?
They don’t, because they don’t want to. It costs money. The owners do not care for the experience they provide and want to minimize costs and maximise profits, even if it comes at the expenses of the playerbase and player enjoyment.
Depends from modder to modder, when I made commissions the price was usually around 7 bucks for each gun, or 2 / 3 for each piece of clothing. Which, again, would be very negligeable amounts for big P2W servers.
Maybe a huge plugin would, but the vast majority of plugin commissions I have seen + the plugins which I myself have commissioned did not go over the 30 dollar margin.
Yeah, when you give them a commission, obviously they’d want payment. Thing is, most servers, including the big names, run on PUBLIC mods, which were made by Modders on their own accord, as passion projects. Like Bandit’s Arsenal, Jpepe’s Vehicles, Tanama’s Automobiles… I can go on for hours.
Not really, most of them give their highest ranking staff members console access and / or, when they don’t… it’s not really that hard to see.
If owners really were that dedicated, and responded to each call for help about their server, then why is in-game moderation on these servers more often than not, piss poor? Let me give you an example, on Brad’s RP, the owner did not respond to his own staff for weeks, when the server added a mod which included RPGs, Brad forgot to blacklist them, and though he was getting spammed by people to do so, he wasn’t there to read the messages, and people turned the server into anarchy and kossed each other with said RPGs until it was eventually fixed.
That’s not the point. Nelson wants to ban repeatable purchases because they are the most predatory ones, traps into which Unturned’s audiance, mostly made out of gulliable children, can easily fall into.
It’s not chaos? People have argued about this in interviews and it is clear what the community wants.
It also clear what a handful of big server owners want, too, but Nelson’s made his mind already.
Many servers don’t give refunds.
You wanna give fucking credit cards to children now? The age demographic well-known for not being able to make good financial decisions?
P2W servers are the only ones around / dominate the charts simply because they have much more publicity than smaller, possibly non P2W servers.
There are many reasons why servers fail that have nothing to do with P2W or Non-P2W aspects. Many smaller servers simply die out because they don’t have either as much publicity as the already established ones, or die to internal issues, like the owner getting bored, the project being abandoned, or the staff team or the playerbase becoming disinterested. I personally ran a decently popular Non-P2W server for 3 years and a half, and can tell you, that it is absolutely possible to gain notoriety without needing to make little kids pay 40 dollars to buy a million dollars worth of in game-currency, which, by the way, is one of the examples that was brought forward during both interviews with Nelson, and something which very often can cause entire server economies to collapse, not that their owners care all that much about it, as long as it’s still profitable for them.
Most of these server owners, do not care about player enjoyment, and only want to see profits. See previous points for more info.
By doing this, they are making the server experience both less fun for themselves, as getting the best gear should be a process you have to go through to work your way to the top, and also hindering the experience for others or making it less fun, because what’s the fucking point of playing on a server and actually doing what you’re meant to do, when the guy in front of you just paid 20$ and got all that in a second?
Perhaps if you finally stop using this incredibly disingenous argument you’d understand the point. THIS. IS NOT A MARKET. THIS. IS A VIDEOGAME. The audiance is not grown adults, it is CHILDREN. Children more often than not CANNOT make good financial decisions. This is why Nelson wants to protect his players from people running P2W servers. Most of them are predatory in nature.
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This I feel you’re doing the math for incorrectly.
Something like that I would say you have to calculate month to month and only accounting for the players of that specific month. Some months would obviously have a higher ratio of players not willing to spend money than those who do. While there would be months where players had just a bit more money to blow thus skewing the ratio in favor of the P2W players. Grouping the total player history from when the server was first started is I think a very obvious mistake for trying to calculate the ratio of players who paid for an advantage. You would have to refine the search more than by just total number of unique players due to all the variables that exist from just the base number (maybe someone clicked the server to play and then realized they did not want to anymore 5 seconds in, but still adding a point for the non-P2W players of the server). Instead refining by how many of those unique players played on the server repeatedly in order to see if the player was a one time joiner of the server or not I think would yield better results in determining the P2W to non-P2W players of that specific servers entire history.
This I feel is not coming from someone who would want to spend money on a game that could not even matter in a couple years. I myself have no problem paying for items here and there as I work 12 hours of the day and don’t always get to grind for everything I need in the server. Or just don’t want to bother grinding for something that could very easily be stolen when I log in the next day after work. Which is why I will specifically seek out P2W servers because they let me play with a playstyle that allows me to enjoy the game while still managing real life.
This one made me laugh because of the example I gave with War Thunder and my friends calling me P2W throughout the night of us playing.
Do I think paying for items when there is those who might not be able to or willing is fair?
Absolutely not, but I feel its very clearly a given that you’ll be at a disadvantage for trying to play like you would on a normal server.
Would I want to cancel P2W servers completely as they ruin the gameplay for everyone who plays on them?
No, because some players prefer the P2W aspects over a server where you grind for everything on your own and I wouldn’t want to ruin how they enjoy the game.
I myself enjoy regular non advantageous servers as they are fun when I have tons of downtime but am also a fan of P2W servers for when I don’t, which is why I believe just completely separating the two is what’s best for everyone.
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I also play war thunder lol, I bought the super hellcat and the german tech tree version of the IL-2.
But the reason why I did this is important: because I found that the game was very boring and stale while playing with no premium vehicles. If you wanna have fun in war thunder, or, at least, not be as frustrated, you gotta donate. The same is true for Unturned servers. On RP, they wall off some of the most fun jobs (like, for example, Hitman), or premium salaries, vehicles, etc, for anyone but for those who donate, making the experience very boring for your average non-premium player. They sometimes give donators the fucking /give and /vehicle commands too, which just blatantly screams “I don’t care for my server’s economy, all I want is your money”.
The thing is, for you it’s purely subjectional + you’re an adult with a job, but the vast majority of players are children who rely on their mum’s credit card, and for a child to see something like this is either one of three things:
-
Very frustrating, if he meant to play the server seriously, according to the gamemode and concept on which the server is based on, so they leave because they now know that the server itself is not as serious as was made out to be. (which, by the way, is the case on many big P2W Roleplay servers; as I’ve said, most players play for one day and then never come back because the experience is just so bad / not original enough / is hindered by certain… people)
-
Doesn’t really care, because they’re there to have fun with their friends for a day and then never come back.
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Indirect advertisement for the server, because a child seeing something that someone has that gives an advantage is a way of inderectly conditioning him to donate. Like when a kid sees another child’s toy and demands it for himself.
Finally, I have played on many of the big RP servers and though I cannot give you the exact numbers, both because I don’t want to be quoted on this nor have the time to do the math like Rain, I can without a doubt say that there is definetely a clear unbalance between the population of players who don’t donate and never play on the server again after a day, those who still don’t donate but stay, and those who donate and, sometimes, also stay.
Thing is there are very few “Normal servers” with no P2W, because pretty much all Unturned server owners who aren’t in it for the actual experience, (or because it’s not a passion project for them) realize how easy it’d be to make a boatload off of the kids who play the game.
But you are for everyone else who plays on these servers, even if it’s indirectly.
Yes. Yes it is.
But to limit how predatory servers can be, with a ban on bepeatable purchases, is also a great idea indeed. And I am thankful Nelson has decided to go through with it.
Also, and this is more of a message to the mods in this thread: is it just me or is it taking more than one hour to make another comment? Feels like 1 and a half.
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this! It is Nelson’s decision.
I ran 10 servers on a machine with 2x8GB 2400MHz RAM, and it was the same machine I used to play games and do my work. Never hit RAM limit. No mods, just plugins, but yeah, it’s easy to run servers. Introducing mods just means the server will eat more RAM keeping those mods loaded, that’s all. You trade being able to run more servers, in return for one heavily modded server.
yes! If people can’t be as based as me abd run servers at home then go ahead and rent. It’s just gonna costs 6x more per server.
I agree! Why spend money on new mods if you can either keep that money, or make more profit by spending it on server advertisements.
A single server made $1,800 a month. So yes, it would seem like a negligible amount.
Because the plugin market is monopolized, and why should they stop selling them for over a hundred dollars if these servers that make nearly 2,000$ a month can afford them?
Pushes out fair quality servers, enables predatory unfair servers.
yep. Not chaos, Order.
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-lol-
If you expect that Unturned Server hosting is a substitute for a full-time job you’re setting yourself up for failure.
This policy change pretty much just makes it so you can’t sell, say, a maplestrike to some gullible kid for $1. You can still make money off of selling stuff on a server (ex. ranks.)
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How many players did you have on these servers, 1.6gb seems a bit low for even vanilla, the best I could get away with was 4 perhaps pushing at 5 with the same amount of ram
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TLDR: Does nelson want to ban P2W or does he want to ban user exploitation? P2W is extremely hard to terminate, and there will be ways to “bypass”/“go around” it, eg: A website that has its own system, currencies, etc. and operates on its own, but then a server (unturned, rust, anything) can connect to a shared database, read something, and give advantages to the player that just joined the server… Is restricting how a website operates going to be banned now? or would custom plugin restrictions need to be in place? and if custom plugin restrictions are in place, how would they be restricted? What about server termination? how will that be handled? how will servers be uniquely recognized? This entire thing needs more details and to have an outline of how terminations are going to be handled.
So, my thoughts on this…
It needs to be clear what exactly nelson is targetting. Is he mostly concerned of P2W? or is he more concerned on exploitation of people’s income? (see the interview video, as it seems there that he’s more concerned on the exploitation rather than on P2W).
The next step from that is to figure out what he intends to do, and how much it will affect other things.
Lets say he wants to 100% remove exploitation of people’s wallets… In this case, the server could be forced to do the following:
- Add an icon and text to the server on the server list, its details page, and the loading screen, that said server includes micro-transactions
- Be transparent with each transaction made. When it was done, how much was paid, what they got in return, if it was refunded, etc.
Those would be minimally impactful and very passive. It wouldn’t damage legit servers, and it would force predatory servers to say that they get money from players. Plus you can see how much they are getting and for what.
Rules then on top of this could be implemented and expanded, say a server had someone spend 8 grand in one go and all they get is a potato rank that gives them a single maplestrike thats fully equipped… said server could then be warned/removed from the server list due to exploitation of the users.
(Note that “exploitation” would have to be clearly defined. What makes exploitation? what is exploitation? how do we determine that someone was exploited? and other questions about the subject need to be answered. The example above is an exageration, but we all know servers, specially exploiting ones will try to get as close to the grey line of “acceptable” as possible, so a clear distinction between good and bad that everyone can agree would have to be made)
Alternatively, lets consider he wants to get rid of P2W.
Problem with this, is there’s no real way to get rid of it other than force servers to remove all forms of purchase that get rewarded with anything other than cosmetics (chat colors included as cosmetics).
Problem with this… there’s always an alternative.
Lets say a full P2W blanket ban like described above is performed. A server could then just handle any purchases through a website, say they get “200 websitecoins”, and through the website they can buy custom things, like a website item or a website rank, or a network-wide rank, etc. and that purchase then gets synced to a database.
Said website isn’t interacting with unturned or the game, or any other game in any way directly, but then the game can interact with the database…
Should the rules then be expanded and have a website banned simply for selling website-items that are fetched and given in-game by a custom plugin? Should that ban then affect also other games, or only unturned? Should custom plugin restrictions need to be in place? and if so, how would they be restricted? how would they be moderated, validated, added, etc? How would it be detected that a plugin was made in order to provide a paid advantage rather than to provide a new system that works better than the old one, or a system that syncs everything in a database so multiple servers accross the world can have the same ranks?
The simple change to this entire thing is to not attempt to abolish P2W entirely (good luck) and to instead reduce its repetitiveness that allows it to be extremely profitable.
Just like nelson said on the original modified post: “Repeatable purchase $X for Y Z = BAD”.
This would reduce the volumes of sales of repeatable purchases, but would allow one-time purchases to still thrive and for server owners to still get enough cash to keep the server running, and for the milliard of issues with trying to abolish P2W to just not be dealt with.
Finally… The ban implementation.
A unique way of identifying a server, its owner, and its actions should be made. This means that if I buy a server from X host, and I do something bad, then only I get banned, not every single other person using X host. This means that IP + Port banning is not a solution, nor is server names, or anything thats easily changeable. A new uniquely identifying method would have to be added where someone cannot easily change their unique identity. This could be with legal documents and human verification, or something else, but this gets hard and quick.
On top of this, reports need to be handled as well… in which case should there be a new forum section for reports where people just say “X server bad bua” with no other info? or should there be an in-game way to report one? or should there be a more complicated way where a server can officially link their website with the game and then that way the game can easily tell which website its using, but then an owner can spoof that and then a report for that would have to be made…
Simply put… Yes, bans can be put in place. Yes warnings can be given. Yes things can be shadow banned. But a lot more of human moderation and actions are going to be needed for all of this.
In conclusion, do I think this is bad? Not at all. This is a good thing, but it needs more thought put into every single aspect, and all of it needs to be written as clear as possible so people don’t try to interpret specific things in their own way.
3 Likes
Don’t care didn’t ask plus you own a P2W server network. Be thankful Nolson isn’t imposing a total ban on P2W like Minecraft did.
Guys, remember, servers with non-P2W donate can be profitable and there is so many ways to make shop purchases not P2W.
Why is the moderation team interfering with my fun experience on your server?
2 Likes
some servers were full, and some were ran on intentionally unpopular maps like Monolith just so anyone who wanted to play that can do so.
also, to clarify, 8 Unturned servers, 1 Minecraft server, and one MySQL server. Assuming 8GB was reserved for Minecraft, OS, and anything I was doing, the remaining 8GB was for the 8 servers to share, which, given no mods, some servers running small maps, and some servers expected to be unpopular, was enough collevtive memory to run efficiently.
the gooberment is so bad!!! regulation bad!!! doing things for community well being is communism!!!
I’ll get back to you eta an hour
1 Like