Me and a few other people are divided. So lets debate it here
Just think about it for a second. Breathe it in. Could official vanilla servers in a way promote community servers to create unfair pay to win servers? Nelson has already confirmed all official servers will be completely vanilla, and official servers will be pay to play. I don’t see any reason for community servers to become not pay to win.
We’re not even trying to talk about if p2w is good or bad. We’re just wondering if official servers would promote p2w
I myself agree it would. Very much like 3.x I think big Unturned 2 franchises will provide more and more flashy plugins in an effort to attract more and more kids / noobs to their servers. And a mindset of “if you wanted the fair experience then you should’ve gone out and bought the pass to play the official servers” which seems a bit fucked up imo. At this point I’d prefer the game to cost money versus having official paid servers
@Wakko says that having the official servers sets a high standard / precedent for all vanilla servers to follow. I counter this by saying that people would have a bit less incentive to host purely vanilla servers if people could just go play official ones. I’m not trying to say they would completely die off, I just think it would become what the server browser is today, which vets are always complaining “vanilla is dead” or “theres no good vanilla servers anymore” and all of that jibber jabber
@Wakko also stated that people bothered by p2w could play the few vanilla servers or go buy the official pass like I said (which is the mindset)
Also another argument by me against official servers is that Unturned is so great because I run a clan and it is very easy to get people into the game and play with them because Unturned is free to play. Unturned 2’s current model would ruin this, because groups like mine seeking a fair, non-p2w server will buy the pass and then tons of members in the group who dont have the pass will be completely left out, effectively dividing / separating the group. I’d much rather prefer the game be paid for then that kind of nonsense
Theres plenty more opinions and topics and good points regarding this that I can’t think of, but lets talk about it a bit, and think for a bit before genuinely voting in this poll, please.
The incentive is to let people who dont have the pass play on your server. If 50% of the community doesn’t have it then you can “capitalize” (not literally) on that other 50% of free players as they can play on your server.
As long as the official servers exist I dont think they can really die off, what you could possibly see is that free vanilla servers would die off as free players find other modded servers they like more.
Assuming this is in some terrible future where free vanilla servers are all dead, I can see this as a bit of an issue, but honestly 5 dollars is just such a small amount (I do understand if someone is oversees and weirdness with currency makes this more money but still) that I dont really see this as that much of a problem. Also I dont really get why you would rather have the entire game be paywalled rather than official servers, because that would just divide your group even further imo.
This is a pretty interesting post though. Looking forward to others two cents.
Look at Rust. A large portion of the community already plays Modded servers or the Official servers. Vanilla servers in Rust are neglected are only fill a small niche of players that don’t actually want vanilla, they want to be protected by the admins (single, duo trio only group servers). The only reason players would play vanilla is because of the admin protection or because they don’t want to play on the massive official servers dominated by pro zerg clans.
Imagine that, except if you had to pay through another paywall in Rust to access those official servers? They would have even less players and even more would be playing on the modded, high loot, p2w servers
OK. For one, in Unturned 3.x it is already hard for me as the leader of a clan to find a good, reputable, non-laggy, non-p2w server that meets my vanilla standards. Why should it be any different in 4.x? Also, 5$ is a shiton to certain players. A ton (I’d say a large majority) of Unturned noobs are players with a free non-premium steam account, meaning they haven’t even bought anything on steam. There are the kinds of people that are either alts or never will buy anything online.
I would much rather have it paywalled because if we’re already gonna deal with paywall issues we might as well put it right then and there. A paywall on the game has it’s own perks such as anti-alt protection and help with detering hackers. Hackers have a much lower incentive to buy the game again just to troll and be an idiot than in free games. Dota made a report the other day saying cheaters on average made 5.2 alt accounts to circumvent bans - which is quite a lot. This would help server hosters who actively ban cheaters keeping them at bay.
Also the way I recruit people involves finding people that alread own the game. IE meeting them actually in-game or holding recruitment applications on the fourms. Very rarely do we have a problem where we recruit some random guy out of nowhere and he complains about not owning the same game we’re playing - because we just don’t recruit those people to begin with.
You cant really bring up modded servers as a negative to official servers, as they are mutually exclusive. If there are no official servers, modded servers would still exist, if there are, modded servers will still exist.
Official servers would not prevent nor cause modded servers to pop up, but it is fair to say that official servers would reduce free vanilla servers.
Cant really say much about this seeing as the game isnt out yet, but hey we can only pray. Sadly, I seriously doubt the playerbase will change, and demand will always bring supply, leading to a repeat of what is currently going on in 3.0.
Just get a job lol /s no but seriously I dont see how you can support paywalling a small portion of the game, compared to paywalling the entire game. Seems pretty contradictory, and making the game cost money would honestly kill any chance whatsoever of U2 making it as “big” as 3.0 or 2.0. The only reason I ever started playing it was because my normal pc broke so I couldnt play dayz with the boys, so we picked up the next best thing which was unturned 2.0. You would be cutting the playerbase so hard by making the game cost any money at all, as I doubt a one man dev team could make up for it. (Also nelson has said he wants it to be free many many times.) Yes it would combat cheaters, but I would rather play an active game than a dead one. Also the only reason you recruit people that already have it, is because the 3.0 playerbase has completely stagnated over the past year, with very few new players.
Rust is a rather poor example because, like Unturned, Rust has Rocket w/ plugins too.
(Remember, Rust is also a Unity game)
Zergs are an entirely different story as the gameplay of Rust itself strongly encourages working with large numbers of other players.
You have the power to host your own server. Which is what most people have been forced to do.
That said I really don’t think people with non-premium Steam accounts should be granted access to official servers regardless.
Seeing how Unturned II’s gameplay is already shaping up to be more engaging, and the vanilla game more fulfilling than the empty husk of 3.0’s vanilla “survival”, I’d expect there to still be a good chunk of free vanilla servers in the overall server distribution.
I also find it ironic that you complain about zergs while leading what is functionally a zerg equivalent in Unturned. I lead an even larger group than RA too, and if Unturned II went through with official passes, I’d honestly still have no problem with it. Most of my buds are authentic veterans that would gladly buy the official pass, and to imply that paywalling the game is a better alternative is frankly quite puzzling.
I do find that this perspective is a new one in the gist of the community, but as far as I’m concerned, the structure of Unturned II’s meta will really give P2W servers a run for their money. (Don’t play on them either!)
That’s because kids and noobs are their target group of people and I don’t think that these kids and noobs will start boycotting their business practices any time soon (that’s the reason why they are their target group). Even if They did, it won’t be related to the Unturned 2 release.
One thing that I can think of, and that could provide a necssary wakeup call for the community is running 1 or 2 free official servers with increased wipe rate (wipe every 2 or 3 days) to get these people into vanilla and non pay to win enviroment.
because the official servers will be wildly popular, there will probably be big rogue groups/clans and factions of screaming 8-year olds and the whole thing would inevitably turn into a mind-numbing clusterfuck
like sure, you can say that “kids won’t buy passes to get onto official servers” etc, but trust me. You’re wrong.
I’m trying to point out a problem. These kids are not playing on a non pay to win server because they most likely haven’t seen any due to the fact that vanilla server don’t have a lot of exposure. A single free official server will bring a lot of exposure to vanilla servers and let those kids realize how bad is pay to win.
I’m not saying that, Im trying to get these kids out of pay to win servers by showing them something better.
I have seen the pool but it’s unrelated to what I’m trying to say.
but the kids are what will make the servers shit, because they micspam and generally fuck up people’s lives. Which is why the official servers will be bad, because they will play on them, because they will be popular. for a proper survival experience, small dedicated survival servers with a nice and friendly community are the best.
By creating a paywall between something people want, they have to make a decision. Vanilla server owners can capitalize on this by providing a very similar experience to what Nelson will offer, but for free. Assuming there is a built in feature that can link players to a donation page, this would give servers an incentive to provide a good alternative to Official servers.
Right now our problem isn’t a shortage of servers, it’s a shortage of people interested in Vanilla. Most of which I assume are hunkered down waiting for II’s beta to be released. Here are some examples: Vanilla Server Populations - Album on Imgur
Emphasis on the free vanilla servers. I recon that there’ll be more than a few seeing as right now we’re already in excess. I imagine that a new beta for Unturned would peak a lot of server hosters’ interests.
You can remedy this through either one of two methods. I imagine that most of your recruits are newer players, typically the friendliest as they haven’t been introduced into the kill on sight meta too much yet. And since most new players don’t immediately buy stuff, they’d probably be on either the modded or vanilla servers rather than the official ones. So, in order to recruit more people, it seems logical that you would all play on community servers.
The second thing that you can do is simply reorganize the groups that y’all play in. Have a certain number of people group up into a vanilla server, and the others into an official server. From what you’ve told me, your people are already divided into small sub-groups for 3.0, all it takes is some reorganizing.
Well, no. Not necessarily. Official servers are essentially just vanilla servers in Unturned; not exactly Rust’s group protection servers as you describe. It doesn’t make sense that players would make the jump from, “Oh well I can’t play the official vanilla servers, I ought to play the modded ones instead,” rather than “I ought to play the free vanilla ones instead.” While I think more would be playing on p2w servers, I doubt that it would be to a significant degree. I predict that most players would simply opt for the free variants of the official servers instead (assuming that there’s a brief description of official, vanilla, and modded to inform players of the differences).
If you’re so worried that people won’t host servers that suit your clan’s tastes, why doesn’t your clan host its own servers?
I don’t see why Nelson should have to foot the bill for any servers, vanilla or otherwise.
I never really said anything about that, but yes, official servers would reduce free vanilla servers. And if theres still an equal amount of servers supplied and they aren’t free vanilla servers then they’re p2w vanilla or servers or some form of modded one.
Paywalling has so many benefits that the list could go on forever, but I’d rather not talk too much about it. Of course the player base would be cut, then again you’re already dividng the playerbase massively with this “paid pass” for the official servers.
And I would love to see 4.0 be something where it encourages working in bigger numbers of people while also favoring smaller groups if they’re skilled enough. Even if you don’t want that then it’s sort of undeniable that 4.x should have better net code and be far better in every way optimization wise and therefore more players could be fit onto bigger maps. So I wouldn’t be suprised if bigger clans did form due to the bigger free wiggle room.
First off, not everyone has the free power to host a server. I go around convincing those who would love to run a server to home-host theirs, and some of them do it and enjoy it very much. Others complaing about having literally crap for a computer or terrible internet - and renting is an extremely bad alternative to home hosting. While I think people hosting their own servers are great I think if the main goal was to get away from p2w servers (because idk, its that extreme) then it’d probably be private / friends-only and not dedicated.
With that said I agree non-premium steam accounts should be granted access to the official servers (I never said they should be granted?). A paywall would mean people would have to buy the game, and if they were a non-premium account before then as soon as they go to buy the game their account would be premium.
I heavily disagree. The battle between large server franchises will just lead to the Exact same things in 3.0, with franchises pushing more pvp-related plugins and gamemodes to fuel the 24/7 Doritos mountain dew quick scoping lust to attract as many players and new players as possible. Maybe it won’t be as bad, but you can’t deny that the big p2w franchises with thousands of dollars wouldn’t pay out some plugin dev to make creative, new gamemodes
(which would be in extreme demand from all of these big franchises and therefore the price would go up and therefore free servers that don’t want to be vanilla and want to be one of these cool custom gamemodes will not be able to afford them - exactly what seemingly has happened in 3.x especially with anti-competition measures by certain plugin websites fueling even higher costs)
I find it funny that you assumed the RA was a zerg . Frankly we often run in groups of 4, but at max we run in a group of 8 players on the same server. Hardly near the sizes of Rust zergs (20-80 players) and hardly having any of the characteristics of those zergs (unorganized, decentralized, improperly taught, extremely harsh unequal punishment, etc)
While thats cool and all, lets be realistic. My group is comprised of random gamers. They’re aren’t my “buds”. They aren’t on the same level of cash money as me or some other members, and frankly a lot of them are completely free-to-play steam players that, as I said, have never paid for anything on steam.
I can EXTREMELY back this up because a while ago steam added an update where I can no longer invite random, non-friended users to my steam group, forcing me to friend them. While on the other hand if you had a premium-steam account you could go to the group page and click the big “apply” button in the top right (which then I’d go to a special steam page and click the green check next to your name)
Sadly a crapton of people can’t click that conveinent little button, because they don’t have a premium account. I have to waste my time friending each one of them, then having my entire friends list be full until I clean out everyone.
TL;DR yes, theres tons of free-to-play Unturned players
Thats a toughie, because avoiding them won’t stop them or their affect on the serverlist, plugin developers, or even their affect on free fair servers.
Thats why my seemingly “radical idea” from another post is for someone smart, and high in power like a government (nelson) to step in and protect all of these noobs and kids (everyday consumers) from unfair services (p2w servers). Though that post is toast. It’s their target group of people because they’re the easiest to manipulate and the easiest to get their attention with their flashy plugins. We don’t want people installing the game, going on some 5x loot pvp cringe server and assuming that this is the fully fledged unturned experience like @ColonelCrossfire said he thinks would happen.
Wiping is completely unnecessary, especially if it’s going to be the same system as 3.x wiping. As soon as you get raided and stop playing then everything you’ve built disappears, no need to wipe the entire server. Of course official servers would provide a non-p2w environment but thats the messed up mindset I discussed and highlighted in my argument
“if you wanted the fair experience then you should’ve gone out and bought the pass to play the official servers”
The post specifically says to think about it. If you aren’t writing and discussing then you aren’t engaging and thinking critically about both sides of the argument. So I look at this poll with multiple grains of salt.
These kids and noobs don’t play free, fair servers because some of them don’t notice the difference. Some may not notice that the rich snobby kids that pay 50$ to dominate the server are dominating because of that rank, and if they do they’re probably manipulated by the server staff into thinking its “fair” or “necessary for the server to survive”. Which is funny, because theres tons of people out there willing to host completely fair servers for free because they enjoy the game or have other incentives besides profit. This post isn’t entirely regarding vanilla, but more so official servers promoting franchises to battle at providing more flashy stuff and plugins to attract more to their p2w servers.
Again, a lot of noobs don’t know what they’re doing and kids are just kids. Thats why I think someone needs to step in to protect them. I discussed that but again, it was locked because
Sure kids are annoying, but it’s the fact that kids are easily to manipulate and they have the money. They are the main driving force behind p2w servers and they are what fuel them. By nelson creating Official Servers instead of addressing the massive p2w problem he’s effectively ignoring it. IMO the official server pass will only divide the community further. Kids wouldn’t want to spend extra money to play on the official vanilla servers when they could play on the bright, flashy, attractive kits pvp full-time pvp experience of a modded server.
A big problem with Vanilla is that lack of moderation and high amounts of abuse due to a lack of permission groups being integrated into the game. For that you’d need Rocketmod (which then your server isn’t vanilla). So players on Vanilla either have no staff and are dominated by hackers that kill off the server, or theres admins running around with extremely abusive permissions. Either I’m suprised anyone would want to play vanilla because both of those outcomes are terrible.
Capitalize as in create p2w ranks? I’ve said it before, that there are tons of people willing to host completely free, fair servers because they want to give back to the communoty or they have other incentives besides profit.
I see it being very hard to find a free ‘vanilla’ server in 4.x very much how it’s hard to find a free ‘vanilla’ server in 3.x.
Which we can’t do, because, as said, it’s virtually impossible to find a good community server as it is now. I have to factor soooooooo many things
Location
Ping
Is there staff?
Staff are helpful?
Staff don’t abuse?
Lag spikes?
No P2W?
Non rented?
Dedicated owner / hoster?
Not 5x kit pvp garbage IE it’s vanilla?
No workshop mods or false advertising?
No wipes?
It’s quite hard to find a server with these kinds of filters. IE, a good community server. Not even a whole lot of p2w servers fall under all of those.
That would only divide my group further with players yearning to play with me or others on the Official servers but not being able to. Gotta think.
Thanks for the constructive well written response with reasons.
We do host over 10+ servers. Sadly I hate playing my own servers because of the chance I may abuse unintentionally or players in the community will speculate that I abuse, which is why I only play on other peoples servers. Frankly I’m good at PvP, so I get called out for supposed ‘abuse’ a lot.
Well if it wern’t for all the shitpost comments (actually just 3) then it’d be a bit quicker.
yes make many sense.
Also, we could all also think of the downsides of Official servers besides promoting p2w or dividing the community. A big argument I had against Official servers it that they face the same problem as every other server. They need staff. If they don’t have staff then hackers will run rampid. If they do have staff they were intentionally or unintentionally abuse, and even then if they didn’t people will speculate that they did - which would look terrible for Unturned’s reputation. Imagine people getting false bans or bad run-ins with staff fleeing to the Unturned reviews speaking about the official servers having abusive staff (official unturned discord )
. Frankly we often run in groups of 4, but at max we run in a group of 8 players on the same server. Hardly near the sizes of Rust zergs (20-80 players) and hardly having any of the characteristics of those zergs (unorganized, decentralized, improperly taught, extremely harsh unequal punishment, etc)
)