RFC: Banning Purchase of Individual In-Game Items

[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.

@anon37323693

You can’t win.

anyway

@anon37323693

Do you think I live for free?

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

@anon37323693

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.

@anon37323693

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

@anon37323693

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

@anon37323693

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

[Elliot]

Thought of my friend, nodus:
“Pay-to-win must be estimated not by the type of purchase, roughly speaking, but by what is in it”.
P2W kits and admin powers in donate needs to be discussed too.
And also: what about non-english P2W servers? Like spanish, german, french, portguese, polish, russian, turkish etc. servers? Who will check and verify the reports? Will authorised members of these communities be involved? I am interested in this cause I am russian myself.

[RainOfPain125]

@Elliot

And also: what about non-english P2W servers? Like spanish, german, french, portguese, polish, russian, turkish etc. servers? Who will check and verify the reports? Will authorised members of these communities be involved? I am interested in this cause I am russian myself.

This is an interesting problem. Personally, despite the language barrier, it is kinda easy to recognize if an Unturned server site has a shop. Chrome comes with extensions that auto translate a page but sure, that’s a good idea. However, to prevent abuse, there should be atleast two folks in the same language checking the same server, so one can’t just claim it’s P2W without anyone being able to check it.

[_UWU_Lexy]

Kindergarten level discussion here. One says it is ok, another says it is not. No temporary ranks, temporary ranks are ok. Obviously, everyone is representing their servers or beliefs. There shouldnt be any double standards. Do you think donations for perks/kits etc is bad for community? If so - remove it completely. Let to sell name colors and skins or option to use skin. If you decide to remove certain items like consumables but let keep selling ranks (temporary or not), what difference does it make? Ranks can have multiple items, special commands etc. So, in the end, we created chaos with no actual result. Also, talking about those temporary/permanent ranks. How you decide it is pay2win or not? Will you play on a server for a week or so to understand what actual advantage it gives, because same item on one server may be valuable or total garbage on another. What prevents from creating multiple ranks with those same “consumable” items and players buying those permanent ranks over and over? Who prevents admin buddies with dummy accounts to sell their items to other players “black market”, how you will proof that admin is not giving items to those dummy accounts, maybe those dummies will say they looted it on server? There are tons of ways to abuse it, not even considering that keeping option to sell ranks change nothing. So ban every way of donation, except skins, name colors, discord tags etc - which doesnt affect gameplay at all or keep it as it is. And finally, how you are planning to deal with false reports, because from reading this discussion i already see those coming, like game of thrones just instead of fighting with swords and dragons, community will fight with reports.

[RainOfPain125]

@_UWU_Lexy

How you decide it is pay2win or not?

@_UWU_Lexy

Will you play on a server for a week or so to understand what actual advantage it gives

a maplestrike on a survival server is the same as getting a maplestrike on a 10x loot survival server

sure, it might be “”“worth less”“” because its more common. but that doesn’t nullify the fact that it is a paid advantage.

To the most extreme example, selling a kit with a cooldown of 365 days, that only gives one canned beans, is pay to win. you are paying for an advantage. eating beans to stay alive is a paid advantage. It doesn’t matter how much you fanboy a server and try to downplay how “effective” the paid advantages on it are, the point is that it is a paid advantage.

@_UWU_Lexy

Who prevents admin buddies with dummy accounts to sell their items to other players “black market”, how you will proof that admin is not giving items to those dummy accounts, maybe those dummies will say they looted it on server?

Look if the admins are going out of their way to abuse and spawn in items on their server to indirectly profit off of the items they’re spawning in, not only is that going to be incredibly slow profit, its just not realistic. That dives into server admins abusing, not the systematic function of a donation shop.

@_UWU_Lexy

So ban every way of donation, except skins, name colors, discord tags etc - which doesnt affect gameplay at all or keep it as it is.

yes! I know you agree with my on the same outcome (ban paid advantages) but I wanted to properly answer your rhetorical questions for viewers.

[dragon_beast]

if i were to find a server that breaks the rules, where can i report them?

[_UWU_Lexy]

Im not supporting anyone, nor trying to fight over comments or opinions. Lets just talk facts. There shouldnt be any compromises. Compromise means non of the sides are fully satisfied, it is loss on both sides. There shouldnt be grey area on this question - just black or white. Everyone on this topic pretends to be guru of all kinds of things, but most likely are just emotion driven people. Look at popular games like Dayz or Rust. Dayz forces 0 p2w donations (just cosmetics, game tags or que priority). Rust - lets to sell whatever private server owner decides (kits, ranks, items, resources etc). There is no grey area at those games. Both ways are totally different, yet both have their own advantages, disadvantages. It is up to game developer to decide what path he wants to choose, not in some forum topic where everyone is fighting like cats and dogs. So, question is one and only: 0 p2w donation or your server, your decision how to run it. There CANT be like “something in the middle” - it will only create lots of misunderstandings, interpretations, uncertainty and chaos. Nelson, please, sort out this thing asap and give us UNTURNED 2 or show some progress that everyone is waiting.

[RainOfPain125]

@dragon_beast

if i were to find a server that breaks the rules, where can i report them?

If I had to elaborate on how this would all work out:

• User finds a server that offers paid advantages
• User makes SDG account
• User goes to a certain subforum and writes about the server (hopefully in some kind of template)
• If the User does not provide sufficient information in the original post, the SDG moderators (or whoever handles blacklisting the servers) will ask the person more information (or more likely, go out of their way to find the server and check it out for themselves)
• Confirm it has paid unfair advantages then blacklist it