Why P2W restrictions [leading up to U2] are a bad idea:

for context on why I’m speaking on this, I have 3.7k hours (yikes.) on 3.0 and have hosted a few servers between 2016 and 2020, and also have been a typical player on other servers for a lot of time.

Also for context, I hate P2W servers and content just as much as the other guy. I still play on P2W servers sometimes though cause it’s basically free gear when I frag timothy with mommy’s mastercard and get some easy gear. yes, the karma comes back when timothy with mommy’s mastercard comes back with enough raiding gear to destabilize entire countries but it goes both ways.

but I’ll present every issue I believe will affect 3.0, and also Unturned 2 (since I presume the P2W restrictions will also be in U2) with P2W restrictions.

however, before I do, let me point out the flaw within restricting P2W content. it assumes all server owners have the intent to take hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars out of their own pocket with zero ability to profit of it all. Yes, you can say “well people can still donate.” but in a prepubescent-majority community of kids buying shit that isn’t even with their own money? I’d be shocked if server franchise owners in U2 could even break even on rent costs, owning a VPS, potentially modded content, etc.

anyways, I’ll point out the actual issues that I’d see would occur in the future for Unturned:


  1. Servers will begin charging for slots

a common practice in almost any other game that has P2W restrictions. Server owners need to make money somehow to pay the bills and they’ll do anything that isn’t listed in the EULAs or rules. Charging for slots is one. this happens in Arma servers, CS:GO servers, etc, where the popular servers will make a significant amount of the player slots, “VIP only”. on Arma I’m aware of a server that has 150 player slots, but (as of 2019 cause I stopped playing on it lol) had only 75 of those slots for free players. The other 75 were VIP only. doesn’t sound bad? once there’s more than 75 VIPs on at once (which is a common occurrence, especially weekends) it’ll begin kicking F2P players out to make room for VIPs.

similar on CSGO. if anyone is aware with a certain warmup server (not saying name cause it’d be advertising, but if you play CS you prolly know), prolly the biggest server franchise when it comes to community CSGO, gives VIPs the ability to kick out F2P players whenever the server is full and VIPs want to play. I play on these servers daily and it is annoyingly common that I get kicked out for a VIP that wants to play, especially on weekends. many other servers on CSGO do the same cliche of letting VIPs kick out F2P users whenever they want.

I’d imagine if P2W restrictions exist into U2, we’d see this exact issue in non-official servers where VIPs can force themselves into a server at the cost of a F2P player whenever they want.


  1. technically not P2W perms, yeouch.

there’s nothing P2W about a role that can, idk, use the /say command for example?

no matter what P2W restrictions exist, VIP/donator roles would still exist. what perms they’d give is still in the air. now since they wouldn’t be able to do the cliche /kit bonuses or whatever, custom non-game related perms can still be given.

I’m aware of CS servers that allow for VIPs to call vote kicks on players, global mutes, map changes, etc.

I’d be confident in Unturned 2, servers would give VIPs commands like /day, /weather, /night, or even /kick and /mute. It’s not really “P2W” which is why it’d “cheat” the restrictions.

I’d rather deal with timothy raiding me back with his mommy’s mastercard than timothy kicking me cause I killed him. cause at least I have a chance with the former.


  1. the good shit: imperialplugins, modded/commissioned mods and plugins

unturned 3 stayed active, alive and popular for so long BECAUSE of it’s P2W servers.

P2W servers funded catchy and trendy game modes that were heavily powered by high quality plugins from imperialplugins and high detail commissioned Workshop mods.

if it wasn’t for P2W servers, there would be no imperialplugins. because who would buy the plugins if their servers wouldn’t profit? there wouldn’t be such a good workshop, because who would pay to commission them all if they couldn’t profit in the end?

there would’ve been no escape from unturnov. and don’t get me wrong I hated those servers, they were bland and dry af. but they had a crazy amount of players so I can’t disrespect it. there would’ve been none of those RP servers that had a ton of mods and plugins and admins and shit, cause who’s gonna pay for all of that if there is a very very high risk that they’d be unable to break even with donations?

i can confidently tell you, if it wasn’t for imperialplugins and paid content, unturned would’ve heavily declined and died after 2018.

why else do you think vanilla unturned is so dead? not because all the other servers took its players, but nobody wants to play vanilla unturned forever. if unturned 3.0 had always been vanilla only, it would’ve died a long long time ago.

i’d bet money U2 will have a significantly weaker plugin market and potentially even workshop catalog if P2W is banned. this will be fine for a bit, as vanilla and/or official servers will carry the majority of unturned 2’s playerbase for awhile, but when people get bored of vanilla? we won’t have even nearly the same flexibility and versatility that U3 servers had.


  1. "brooooo unturned hosting isnt even expensive for me so it shouldn’t be expensive for you either!!"

this is such a weak strawman argument, why it’s so relevant to this day is beyond me.

one server alone at lyhme is $12 a month, for 24 slots. lol.

“just use a spare PC” ah yes because people are gonna have a decent enough PC that is powerful enough to host, or a run down computer connected to some residential internet plan so the ping is gonna be atrocious, the server will be slow, it’ll have to wipe often, etc. and that’s supposed to be a better option than lyhme? lol.

if you have at least 4-5 servers, that server rent is gonna stack up. good luck making server franchises. $48+ a month, only the most popular unturned servers would make enough in donations for them to break even at minimum.


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I’m assuming that this sentence is referring to Unturned’s recent changes to server rules, and not a hypothetical about Unturned II. Servers can still do this in Unturned, even after the rule changes.

I know people have referred to the rules as “banning P2W server transactions” and in some cases they will affect pay-to-win transactions. However – the regulations primarily target predatory transactions. Not necessarily pay-to-win transactions.

It is not a blanket ban on pay-to-win transactions. It is a blanket ban on repeatable purchases.

2 Likes

no evidence to suggest a correlation between P2W and popularity.

Unturned was at its most popular when it wasn’t even possible to have P2W servers. lol.

No, original networks find or create a new gamemode, they do the heavy work into making a project or server idea that gets popular, and when P2W scum network owners realize that this new gamemode or idea is out and popular, that is profitable, they move in to leech off of it.

Similarly to how most innovation happens in real life, it is not because of the private sector.
The private sector comes afterwards to profit off of it.

good

As I already explained before, these servers that make thousands of dollars a month only support Imperial Plugin’s monopoly rules. Plugin developers have no incentive to lower their prices because they know competition isn’t allowed on IP.

They most definitely have no incentive to lower their prices because these servers make thousands of dollars, and have well more than enough to buy their ridiculously overpriced plugin 10 times over, while original and fair server owners can not afford those plugins.

So your claim is actually the opposite. When there isn’t huge networks built on making a bunch of money off of children, the plugin market would meet the supply and demand by lowering their prices so a typical server owner can afford them. Innovation is beautiful. Guess those plugin developers should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and make a fair market.

The concept is incredibly easy to implement in every sense of the idea. You can quite literally setup such a server with free plugins. uconomy, warps, kits, a few traders on some custom map you whip up, and you’re ready to go. Simple as that. It did not require a thousand dollar investment from some holy benevolent server owning god - it was already there.

Why do people make out owners to be the creators of the community, when their only contribution is exploiting profit off of something other people would simply do for free for the benefit of the community?

As I did the math already, an anonymous RP server makes 1,800$ a month. The plugins, at best, would have only costed something over $100, a one-time purchase.

There is no risk to move into a market that they already understand is incredibly profitable. Children are profitable. Roleplay is profitable. There is no risk involved, ever since RP servers have been a thing.

no evidence to suggest a correlation between P2W and popularity.

I have already explained before why there is no incentive to run fair original servers.

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.
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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.

It is cheap for everyone who choose to home-host like a normal person.

Yes, renting servers is more expensive than home-hosting because of course, the people who are renting the server to you are in it to make a profit. If they rented it to you for the same price as the upkeep, there would be no profit made.

Because Unturned servers are definitely resource intensive.

You’re the one making the claim Consumer internet!=bad ping so you should be the one to provide evidence. If you live anywhere where people rent servers out, the internet should be fine. If you live anywhere where people are, odds are, your internet will be fine.

Structures, barricades, and player information does not contribute to server lag in any meaningful way, especially when you have decay set to default. I have no idea why server owners are so obsessed with wiping for lag reasons. For gameplay reasons, it makes sense.

For 1.6$ a month versus paying 12$ for the same exact thing? sure, thats almost 10x cheaper. Thats a no-brainer.

I agree! So those people better have chosen the option that is 10x cheaper, or else they’ll have to fork some fat cash. There is no reason for them to ruin the entire gameplay of the server by introducing P2W because they chose to rent, when there are hundreds of people willing to host for free with no P2W in a similar volume of 4-5 servers.

Hell, I upgraded my machine last week.

I could theoretically run around about… ~20 servers now with zero problems. Or if I just use my old machine, that would be ~10 servers for a one-time purchase of about 450$. 10 servers, for a one-time purchases of 450$, when it costs 1.6$ a month to run, versus 12$ a month for renting, if I do the math you would easily benefit economically in

450+1.6(10 servers)x=12(10 servers)x
450+16x=120x

x=5 months

5m 530$ vs 600$
1y 642$ vs 1,440$

In 5 months you would make a return on your “investment”. And of course, if you were in the community to host servers legit for fun and fairness and quality gameplay, then it would make sense that you would buy your own dedicated machine, so that those servers 100% stick around for a long time and build up a big loving community.

Also the 1.6$ a month average comes from an assumption you are running 8 servers. If you were running 10, the average electricity cost would go down even more to something like 1.2 or 1.3$ a month per server.

Cool thats great, crazy. I’d prefer servers give a premium extra slots above the 24 slot threshold over literally selling game-breaking kits. Of course, charging for slots is still an advantage, but I’m conceding to make my point.

I paid more money on Razorblades than I did the upkeep for 10 servers in a month. Calm down.

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My overall conclusion:

I don’t see why you simp for the very tiny elite minority of server owners who are in the game just to milk money out of the community. It is abundantly clear that people do infact run servers without a profit motive.

If servers that had P2W were banned, new servers, higher in quality (due to lack of unfair advantages), would take their place.

There is not a single valid argument for keeping P2W servers. They are not necessary.

  • Non-P2W servers already exist and upkeep themselves without making profit off of P2W purchases
  • There are hundreds of potential server hosters who are more than happy to run servers without P2W purchases
  • Non-P2W servers already innovate and create new original content
  • Plugins will still be made because there will always be a market for them whether or not there are huge unfair server franchises, they will simply have to adapt to the new market and stop being monopolistic
  • Mods will still be created for the game and ‘commissioned’ by server owners for the same reason those server owners run their servers without P2W - because they enjoy the community and game

My favorite Unturned experience in my entire 6,600 hours, was a creative medieval RP server made by an owner that did not offer P2W purchases, did not have to buy any plugins, and was built up and contributed to by the community it created. It was fascinating to play and build with fancy things, fight with medieval weapons like an Arbalest or a Musket - it made combat far different from Vanilla.

It was all for the betterment of the community. I have never seen a server do this gamemode/concept before. The owner made the map himself, the admins worked for free, the owner was serious about admin abuse, with no profit involved.

The server was a wild success - it was incredibly popular while it was around. Of course, to a P2W server owner, it would have been a major failure, since it made no profit whatsoever.



If I were to run a server again, I would recreate this concept but a little better.

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except the serverlist

no reason not to run a p2w server if people are willing to buy and play. business isnt immoral nor illegal.

2 Likes

I never argued P2W caused the game to be at it’s best phase popularity wise. idk where you got that term from to begin with. i never argued that P2W = caused more popularity, rather it kept the game alive with unique plugins and content that we wouldn’t get in a anti-P2W enviourment

aka. paying a developer, prolly on ImperialPlugins, to make a few plugins for such gamemode, and maybe additionally some commissioned workshop mods. the original network you speak of is completely capable of being the P2W scum network as well. infact they’re more capable of it - they have all the money in the world to fund any gamemode they want as opposed to some random guy hosting off a optiplex in his basement

and you’ve shown that you have absolutely no idea how ImperialPlugins work.

ImperialPlugins isn’t some private entity of circlejerk developers that control supply and demand for plugins - especially since it’s public seeing as any capable developer can sell their content on IP just like amazon. developers can literally contest each other in terms of plugin value. go on their website rn, you can see some developers have higher prices which other developers provide really cheap plugins.

a lot of developers that I was familiar with in my time were university students that used their talent to literally survive. if that’s immoral to you and you suggest banishing the windows they used to make money, then maybe you’re the immoral one

also arguing IP has high prices? those prices are genuinely well priced, i’m familiar with the IP devs, some of those plugins take months to make and test and can be as low as $10 or $15 for a permanent copy that comes with free updates and support.

the uPhone plugin, which has a UI ingame, uses an mySQL table, etc, is $20 and if I had to put a finger on it I’d say it prolly took 2-3 months to make and test, additionally to update it frequently for the sake of compatibility

the commisioned workshop mods were free too? lol

and I’m not sure what the issue is? “that’s a lot of money so it’s wrong” is that what you’re saying?

also an RP server, plugins only, that makes 1.8k a month, must have plugins wayyy over the $100 budget. if not i’d laugh at anyone who paid for VIP on that server cuz I know RP servers that have over $500 on plugins alone that dont make half of that a month.

what makes you think there will be an incentive in a P2W restrictive enviourment? spending money on hosting every month, workshop mod commissions, even plugin commissions, only to not get rewarded for the time and money put into it,

again, yes, people will still “donate” but as you said, unturned is a game with a young community and it’ll remain like that for U2. the majority of these kids are using their parents money. i wouldn’t put chances on hoping that you can break even at minimum from just donations.

don’t get it twisted now – you can still host a non-P2W server and get popularity. my RP server was a #1 indie server in winter/fall 2019. i paid around $250 for plugins for it and $16 a month on rent. i initially didn’t want to monetize my server as i did it for fun and the server was popular before there was any form of donating, then i just couldn’t find paying for it equitable as I wasn’t really having fun myself and I didnt wanna constantly pay for something I didn’t play so i started monetizing it, so i didnt have to shut it down.

you don’t need big ■■■■ P2W VIP roles to make a popular server. you just need money. and you know, the easiest way to get that money for a lot of hosters is big ■■■■ P2W VIP roles. or just be me and have money cause I worked for it irl.

Again, because everyone just has a high quality hosting PC with high upload speeds and in popular areas in the world (LA, london, new york, etc) for maximum performance.

which obviously won’t be the case - the significant majority of home hosters use older generation hardware, on residental internet speeds that can barely provide acceptable upload speeds for hosting.

if your vision of U2 anti-P2W at the cost of heavily weaker community server quality is fine to you, then idk what to really say lol. community servers will be dead if they’re all 150 ping whereas official servers would be the move. only for official servers to die after 1-2 years when everyone is bored playing vanilla.

oh they are bro. just depends what you’re hosting.

they can go from only needing ~500 MB RAM (vanilla, no plugins) to nearly 5 GB on a populated RP server (aka mine, had to upgrade my system from 3 to 5 GB cause it was crashing lol)

the average residential internet plan in the US provides at best 5-10 upload speeds, as upload speed is hard af to provide to non-urban areas.

to optimally host a demanding server, that’s not gonna slide.

lol, you know im not gonna even bother disputing this one. if you want to know what wrong with it, repeat what you just said 3 times to yourself

dawg… where did you get $1.60 from? http://mzunguhosting.ml/ type beat

dude you’d rather be literally unable to play a server as opposed to playing on a server that offers a kit of some lame gear you can farm easily? hear urself out on that one, or go play the servers that charge per slot in other games and enjoy being kicked lol.

what type of razorblade do you use if they’re more expensive than your hosting machine? surely you factored in the several hundred, nearly a thousand dollars, of a hosting PC that can compete with what third party hosts provide, additionally the electricity plan and the internet package that also competes with third party hosts

or perhaps they don’t compete. but you know what rain? i’ve never seen you ever host a somewhat popular server that was ever able to compete with third party hosts, matter of fact. so it’d be realll corny if you compared your hosting machine to servers on third party hosts.

and i dont even intend on dissing what your servers provide. but i’m willing to bet money the ping sucks, the performance isn’t an optimal level and the server list ping time isn’t good (the thing that affects how quickly a server will pop up on someone’s server list when they queue a search, my home hosted servers would take half a minute to show up on them lol.)


My overall conclusion:

I want you to hear out every point you provided with yourself. your vision of a P2W-free U2 came at the costs you admitted, of lower quality hosting, less plugins, less workshop mods, etc.

you pretend that being so anti-P2W, you do it for the betterment of the game, but you’re moreso so anti-P2W because it opposes your politically fueled beliefs, and at the betterment of the game you’re willing to sacrifice literally everything that kept U3 alive for so long, just so people can’t make some lame bread over it

seeing people invest money and time to receive money back disappoints you for some reason. you should try it rain.

2 Likes

@ForeverBlue As someone who’s actually bought priority on EarthMC when it was $10 (this happened when FuzeIII was on the server), I can attest to your point on player slots. For context, I played on EMC between January 2019 and September 2020 before quitting if I want to be honest it wasn’t worth even $10 if I want to be honest because the server owner just kept adding more and more rules and it made the server less fun.

I get more enjoyment from the various 4chan run minecraft servers if I want to be honest. Surprisingly enough, these servers are unironically less toxic than EMC. Because at the end of the day despite all the verbal radiation that’s slung around, it’s all just jokes & bants that we laugh about.

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