I feel like Nelson giving up on his monetization rules has led to the revival of predatory design.
Today, GameGhost sells kits containing different items.
Brad RP’s casinos, which were built with the intention of flushing people towards their fast-tracks for income, through “donating” (purchasing) ranks that provided in-game money, continue to lure young children into the mental tricks that incite this desire, without any checks for whether or not someone is an adult, not even a tickbox, not even removing players who make these purchases but openly say they are under 18.
Nelson could hypothetically say that even though these are not at all needed for the maintenance of a server, which is far cheaper than defenders of child predation for miniscule monetary gain would have you believe, he cannot hbadnle every case equally for every server, so it may be better to be laissez-faire.
To that argument, I’d like to point to the drastically diminishing player counts for Unturned, which often linger around 2000. This lends credence to the fact that the load Nelson would have to bear in handling reports, or reading donation pages, has probably decreased. It’d also be worth mentioning how Unturned only really has, as a rough estimate, 150 servers that are ever touched often, and most only by a few people, with the top 25 servers being the ones with the most impact. What I’m getting at is Nelson’s workload isn’t too high, and he would likely be able to moderate these servers to a decent degree, especially if he only touches the English side, lowering his workload even further.
It would be important to acknowledge the ethical concerns in letting your game play host to all these things. It’s one thing when the game in question is Garry’s Mod, something that cost’s money, and skews slightly older in audience, even if it’s very problematic. It’s another thing entirely when you are a free to play game marketing towards kids. Let’s drop the BS. The game plays, aesthetically looks, and through promotional material, appears like an E for everyone game, which usually skews towards kids, the group that rating opens the gates for.
In my eyes, the thing that puts the nail in the coffin is how some of these predatory practices affect his game. Monopolization, particularly the ‘acquisition’ of developers in larpy attempts at corporate politicking, and mimicry, is a sickness that plagues the already fragile Unturned modding scene. A certain abuser with a large server acquiring other user’s plugins, mods, et cetera, in order to preserve his server’s playercount through new content, is terrible. The founding of a certain major RP server, through developers nuking another now dead, once massive RP server’s plugin access, is a bad practice. The act of ‘buying’ multiple servers is bad. The act of “hiring” developers by sealing off some of the biggest plugin creators, and modders, just a few years ago, in order to profiteer, directly harms others abilities to access new plugins, access older plugins that may lack maintenance, or commission creations.
The current state of the major RP server players is extremely toxic. It boxes in developers under promises of lucrative ventures. It destroys the spirit of modding, and whatever creative culture it ever had. It does so at a time when community content is desperately needed for the game, following other modder’s controversial exodus from the community. In doing so, these measures put down other servers who’d like to start up, and produce content, while also keeping them from ever competing. It becomes a way to monopolize a space, by seizing all means of production in the form of developer expertise. This in turn damages diversity, and makes the Unturned multiplayer scene more brittle, susceptible to the drops in players caused by any single negative action, or miscalculation, undertaken by a third party to Nelson. This also just causes less players to play these spaces, and if anyone is banned, discouraged, or just simply gets bullied from said spaces, these players are then devoid of any path to recourse that allows them to get that similar experience, which may cause them to quit.
In less words; it hurts Nelson’s business to allow these servers to operate as they are currently operating.
Together, we can resist the negative influences, and I hope you do too. It’s for the best that you tackle things head on.
Thank you