–Intro–
Hello everyone! I’m the owner of RAID-CITY Network, and as many other network owners have been wondering recently, where are all the players?
There are 40–60k players on Steam, but only 5–9k on servers at a given time.
This means some (or the majority) of players play unturned in single-player or actively avoid multiplayer for reasons unknown.
Clearly, there is something going on recently with player trends, and we network owners are blind to those trends because we can only judge or ask the people who actually play multiplayer.
I’ve noticed a positive correlation between players on Steam and lessening players on servers.
More players on Steam means fewer players on servers.
–What can we do–
I think multiplayer should be featured more prominently in this game, and for this to happen, I think we need to collect some data from all players.
I propose a public poll that would be put in the main menu for all players to share their preferences regarding the game as a whole and multiplayer
This data would be useful for us network owners to improve player experience and for Nelson because, aside from Twitter polls, I don’t think this was ever done on a wider scale.
In this thread, I propose we discuss poll questions and the topic.
multiplayer is dead due to several reasons (most of which nelson probably working on)
Bad UI (server list is terrible)
no official vanilla survival servers’ (no vanilla servers basically) and yes the survival player base used to be big and is what kept the game going for a long time
gameplay is flawed crafting/skills/progression very confusing for new players not rewarding i can go on and on about gameplay it needs a separate thread
lack of content lately maybe also causing this due to nelson focusing on very important but less
exciting stuff
the unturned 2 fiasco where alot of players that i know personally just completely quit thinking the game is abandoned (3.0) i cant blame them because the game had a lot of room for improvment back then and 4.0 was like the hope for fixing everything
Nah, I don’t think the community is as toxic as people make it out to be.
If you put yourself in toxic spaces in the community your perspective of that community is going to be toxic, The Unturned official Discord server and Pandahut servers are notoriously grubby places. Personally after playing the game recently I’ve realized that it’s heavily dependent on what server networks and regions you join rather than a widespread playerbase issue.
The reason multiplayer is not as popular as it used to be is purely based on accessibility, the matchmaking and lobby systems are completely useless and the server browser is hard to decipher as a new player. New players who use the matchmaking system are thrown onto servers where they probably shouldn’t be and have a bad experience which causes them to stop playing.
What Unturned needs are official vanilla servers, they can be hosted by nelson or hosted by trusted server providers, this way new players can experience the game as intended. A new server browser would also be a very welcome change.
this this this this. from someone who’s made a maps or two i’d love to see how many people are actually playing them on singleplayer, and multiplayer statistics over time. like it’d be so useful to have some sort of official built-in way to track what difficulity players prefer, playtime, zombie kills, items looted, anything to figure out what players actually like (instead of the posts claiming yukon is the greatest map of all time while the most populated server is currently sitting at 3 players).
It might be worth adding a server rating within the game, like in Garry’s Mod. So that players can rate the server using a five-point system. And the user interface as a whole is far from ideal. Well, it would be great to be able to edit the interface on server using plugins.
I think this system would be to easily abused tbh, could easily say "hey members, 1 star all networks and 5 star ours or other silly problematic things.
They would just reward players with loot if they are voting positively. Same thing is done to community-made server browsers. (servers usually give you a kit if you do /vote command and vote on the site with your steam account)
Servers currently advertise their features via Desc_Server_List and no wonder this is confusing for new players Maybe new filter system that advertises features like loot multiplier, kits, tpa, vaults, home could be added to Config.json
Just like with curated maps maybe curated server system could be put in place for players to have consistent experience as opposed to “official servers” that would require considerable work and cost from SDG
If you want to see the estimated online of our game, go to MMOStats, the infographics there quite coincide with the significant events in the game - the release of the Polaris map and interest in adding content related to the month of pride. The statistics are realistic, although not very reassuring.
