Should Klei shut down the Klei Official Servers?

[Burgers]

Just to clarify, I’m not trying to troll here. :)) I genuinely want to bring up an important issue with this game. Before you rush to defend Klei, please remember you have to respect yourself as a customer. Don’t Starve Together costs €15 and even has cosmetic microtransactions. Klei does release “free updates every month” but you are still the customer and still have rights.

Now, to the topic at hand… Should Klei shut down Klei Official Servers?

There are less and less available Klei Official Servers on the browser list every passing day for the last couple of months. From personal experience, I haven’t seen Ireland 1 and Germany 1 on the server list for months. I’ve never seen all 3 EU Klei Ooficial Survival Servers (Hounds Huggles, Slime, Spiders and Such) active at the same time. Right now, there are only 2 servers available that are barely alive. It’s clear that Klei has a problem with maintaining their servers. And even worse, these servers are prone to regular crashes. Nearly every day.

Without even taking these at hand, there are several other problems with these servers. 

The player limit is only 8 people. When there are plenty of servers available somehow, people will disperse between all these servers and they will be very empty. When most servers are down, there aren’t enough slots for people who want to play. 

People are complaining that public servers are too easy or too hard. On private servers you can adjust the difficulty of the game through mods or world settings, but this is not possible on official servers. They could make a feature where players are allowed to vote to change certain world settings but that doesn’t exist to my knowledge. 

And of course griefing… private servers can easily combat griefing, not only because the host has a lot more power (can bring back resources through console or easily ban griefers) but there are mods that can help combat griefing. Klei already wasted an entire update on trying to mitigate some griefing methods but with little effect (spawn protection still doesn’t work against Bearger, Deerclops, Meteors etc. and is not applied on Cave Entrance/Exits and Wormholes). Not to mention that the recent updates have added new exploits that buff griefing even more (permanently delete Pig King, Bee Queen etc.). Both public and private servers are performing a lot worse with these last updates (see bug tracker reports during Celestial Champion and Moon Grotto release for example).

Klei has really bad communication with players right now. They will push hidden changes (flingomatic changes, patching Loot Stash rollback, stunlocking changes), you can agree or disagree with these changes but Klei still did not communicate them with the player. They push really questionable changes (Cookbook crafting recipe consisting of random food items and no papyrus/reeds) and won’t even explain their reasoning behind these changes despite several people complaining about them. I would love to hear their reasoning behind changes on the patchnotes. :)) All communication you really get is through patchnotes and the roadmap. In the last one, they said that 2020 was their strongest year, yet this is nowhere reflected by the state of their official servers. I can’t help but feel that Klei is even lying from time to time. Just look at the Moslings exploit and how they said they were considering a Rain Flute of sorts to accommodate for patching this exploit. This was said over a year ago. Klei responded to this issue when someone complained about it on the forums several months ago and they said they were still considering it.

As a customer, I think the one thing that every customer has a right to is transparency. If Klei has issues with maintaining servers, they should just communicate that with the player base instead of keeping quiet. This issue will only get worse as more and more players realize the horrible state that these servers are in and start complaining.

I would rather see Klei donate money to a cause more worth fighting for like against climate change rather than wasting money maintaining barely functioning servers. It has been more than a year to my knowledge since Klei donated any money to any sort of cause anyway. And maintaining these servers should, even though to a lesser extent than other things, still cause a small impact on the environment.

I want to see a change on how Klei is communicating by finally addressing the issue with their official servers. If they can’t handle maintaining them, at least give them to someone who can do that themselves or shut them down completely and let people move on to other dedicated servers.

Hopefully Klei doesn’t close this post, it will only further prove that they would rather just keep quiet than addressing issues with the game.

TLDR: Read the post and don't be lazy!

[Mooagain]

No, public servers are fun

[Hornete]

This post is a bit confusing, you mention exploits, lag, bad communication in content changes. All fine things to complain about. But uh, what does that have to do with the main topic of the Klei servers specifically?

 

17 minutes ago, Burgers said:

Not to mention that the recent updates have added new exploits that buff griefing even more (permanently delete Pig King, Bee Queen etc.).

I'd be interested in some clarification here on this exploit and how it works. I've never seen or heard of such an issue and I browse the bug tracker quite frequently and never seen this reported there, so it's likely the Klei devs simply have never heard of these exploits.

[Mike23Ua]

Xbox One,Xbox Series X/S do not, and to the best of my knowledge NEVER had Klei official or dedicated Servers- this is pretty much why Xbox players NEVER GOT TO PLAY FORGE, proof of that is in our Compendium history of Travels, it only shows Gorge and NO Forge or Forge Season 2.

Since I’m on a console that does not have them- I can say with absolute certainty you all can live without them.

And more importantly: You will be joining other players worlds who play the game beyond just “Default” which: Again as I’ve said is an EVERYDAY thing for Xbox One/Series X/S players- It’s not going to kill you, and in fact it will open you up to varying playstyles and world preferences beyond what your used to.

On the Business side of things: By NOT having these servers Klei can hopefully save Money for something else…

For all we know- They could be pulling these Servers down to replace them with a Return of Gorge/Forge Mode servers sometime in 2022/2023..

Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S are locked at a hard cap of 6 maximum players, so if you lose anything at all by not having Klei officials- it’s having lower player count.

[Maxposting]

im kinda stupid i thought this was about the discord server

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

1 hour ago, Burgers said:

And even worse, these servers are prone to regular crashes. Nearly every day.

1 hour ago, Burgers said:

I would rather see Klei donate money to a cause more worth fighting for like against climate change rather than wasting money maintaining barely functioning servers.

It crashes for me as often as any other good dedicated server. But generally lags less than other dedicated servers.

If you want to fight climate change, donate to projects, vote politicians and change your lifestyle. Maybe there are some problems with those servers and some reason there is less of them, but I have never felt like they were "barely functioning".

Please don't remove Klei official servers. They, on avarage, last longer than any other public dedicated server, because they are more visible and well "official" and thus are visited by more players.

57 minutes ago, Burgers said:

Hopefully Klei doesn’t close this post, it will only further prove that they would rather just keep quiet than addressing issues with the game.

C'mon, Klei is pretty consistent with locking the threads and have good reasons for it every time.

58 minutes ago, Burgers said:

TLDR: Read the post and don't be lazy!

Calling someone lazy, because they prefer to use their time in a different way than reading a long post about a game is just stupid.

[Captain_Rage]

On the one hand, the official servers may be a good place for the devs to gain some insight about the aforementioned exploits and similar detrimental things that might have slipped under the radar. The only victim might be the occasional new player, but this is about as likely to happen on any server. The official servers are hopefully helping the developers in one way or another, even though they don't seem to get much attention.

[landromat]

1 hour ago, Burgers said:

TLDR: Read the post and don't be lazy!

no

[Capybara007]

I dont think the only reason why klei officials are dissapearing is because klei is short on money. There could be other factors.

[HansimUnglueck]

I very much enjoyed playing on official servers for several reasons: 

Official servers give parameters on how to play DST to a certain degree because of administrational limits. You‘re very much not allowed to change world settings — your only chance of variation is limited to World Regeneration. 

Servers only have 8 slots for players to join and play at the same time. Once you log out or lose connection, your slot will most likely be filled by another player waiting to join, do you‘re always competing for these very limited slots. That said you‘re rather forced to play for extended periods of time to actually accomplish bigger events like Celestial Champion and Fuel Weaver on official servers. Extended periods of time aka 6-8 hours or even longer. One could argue about casualness. But by definition the game doesn‘t dictate any event to complete or participation of any kind other than to survive and even that is kind of negated by a total reset aka World Regeneration. 

Limitation of events plus limitation of slots combined had beneficial effects on cooperating with kindred souls that had the same objectives thus giving birth to online friendships that — to this day — last beyond playing DST.

For that I am thankful. 
This topic is directed at these conditions/disturbances. With said limitations the options are scarce. 

Server condition — for a fact — is vital to even being able to play DST thus servers not working, not being listed, being extremely bugged, lagging hard or crashing after certain events are being triggered, are a death sentence, not less.

Non-transparency on a communicational level really doesn’t help the struggle players (costumers) are going trough which do invest a lot of time and energy into playing and accomplishing goals. On an emotional level these non-actions cause frustration and anger.

An answer by the management and/or devs would be really appreciated to understand the reasoning behind these server conditions.

[Gi-Go]

Wait, what? How do you delete pig king and bee queen? 

[Mike23Ua]

4 hours ago, Gi-Go said:

Wait, what? How do you delete pig king and bee queen? 

Well if your on PC or PS4/5 I don’t have an image for that, but if your on Xbox it’s usually a Button that looks like This:

[Gi-Go]

23 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Well if your on PC or PS4/5 I don’t have an image for that, but if your on Xbox it’s usually a Button that looks like This:

Thanks, I understood everything perfectly and am no longer confused. 

[NightfallsCurse]

19 minutes ago, Gi-Go said:

Thanks, I understood everything perfectly and am no longer confused. 

I like your sarcasm :D

Welllllll, it sounds like sarcasm at least

[blizstorm]

I would agree with your conclusion that Klei server should be shutdown, but some of the premises are invalid. Klei reluctance to combat griefing and Klei inability to keep the servers are some valid reasons. Some other dedicated public servers are doing a decent job at these.

If the server is occasionally having too few or too many players, means that the servers have just the right number of server slots.

If the server is too easy or too hard, means that the servers have just the right difficulty

Hidden or unfavourable changes are not a valid reason to shutdown Klei servers.

[MondayNight]

I don't think we're "there yet", aka at a point where community dedicated servers can offer a comparable experience to KLei's official pubs. Vast majority of dedi-servers employ various mods, and that alone & from get-go skews the supposed "default" side of game, or how theoretically KLei envisioned DST's "default" style when new to the game. In past KLei pubs not only had best ping and stability among all existing servers, but also high number of people joining all time, as OP stated, making it easy to socialize and curdle friendships with like-minded individuals with whom one could team up in future private and public DST sessions. But from some time now, and through very-faulty updates (Waterlogged in particular, it brought swarm-mobs-causing-massive-lag bug, Caves shard disconnecting from Forest, the "???" ping estimation error [actually this one is older, yet piles up on top of the rest] and much-much more), KLei official servers began being quite sub-par to even run-of-the-mill community ones, being updated with significant delays, having Cave crashing with annoying recurrence, going into the "red host" lag territory on daily basis. Not to mention many past KLei pubs simply... disappeared from server populace for good. All-in-all looks like KLei is neglecting their own pubs in blatant manner. I wouldn't want said servers be forked even if I seldom play them now, however something needs to be done about them from devs' side. Is a pity the "first and default, arguably best DST experience" plus a great social cohesion element in game context for new, casual, and even some advanced players alike reached such a low atm.

PS: griefing and/or the lack of active moderation on KLei pubs shouldn't weight in regarding their very existence.

[sudoku]

As someone who only plays on public servers, the extent and potential of griefing is vastly exaggerated on these forums. Does it happen, yes, but not so much that it would require klei to completely remove public servers. Even when griefing does occur, if you are freindly and playing as a team player, most people have no trouble following your lead to votekick a greifer if you witness them and rollbacking. 

If you do not enjoy public servers and the social challenges it requires to navigate the server then you already have the option to host your own world, but removing public servers entirely for people who do enjoy playing on them isnt fair to them.

(I havent played the newest update yet so i cant comment on server stability but if it is a problem then that is unfortunate)

[Seero]

no we're in desperate need of pubs and public pvp servers

(maybe youd have fun in pvp if you stopped complaining about it)

on that note maybe klei should make a pvp server

 

[Mx-Pain]

Public servers are the best things EVAAAA !!!

[MondayNight]

3 minutes ago, Seero said:

no we're in desperate need of pubs and public pvp servers

(maybe youd have fun in pvp if you stopped complaining about it)

on that note maybe klei should make a pvp server

 

The handful of PVP servers existing out there are almost all-time empty. No one plays them, and when someone does, usually will camp spawn after getting certain battle gear (Pan Flute included), killing players right out-of-gate after their "griefing protection" expires (if it's even "On"). DST wasn't from start oriented towards PVP and consequently attracted people not into such aspect. Plus default PVP is very imbalanced. Would be a bad investment for KLei, more-so when they are ignoring a lot their current existing pubs.

[Seero]

1 minute ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

DST wasn't from start oriented towards PVP and consequently attracted people not into such aspect. Plus default PVP is very imbalanced. Would be a bad investment for KLei, more-so when they are ignoring a lot their current existing pubs.

dont care

it's fun

[MikoFanboy]

I will never understand how people can enjoy public server since your work can be destroy in a blink of an eye and some people despite of dislike other for playing and enjoying character that different than them (cough cough ~every demand for balancing character in a non competitive game~ cough) yet still decide to play on public server rather than playing with their own server and their friend that has a common mindset

-----------

anyway, I do think Klei should shut down the Klei Official Servers, I don't think it do any good for the game itself tbh

1) availability 

although everyone, in everwhere can find and join the server, but in the most part of the world, you will get extremely high ping, because Klei server doesn't being host worldwide unlike Forge and Gorge 

so if a new player decide to play on THE OFFICIAL KLEI SERVER, their first impression has already being ruined 

2) the cost

eventhough it doesn't cost as much as the Forge and Gorge server, it still cost something to host a dedicated 24/7 server.

Shuting it down can be beneficial for the game 

3) standard 

it's one thing too have a bad dedicated server with griefers and toxic player, but it's an other thing to have AN OFFICIAL server that has those thing.

Since Klei couldn't monitor those server 24/7 or do anything to those griefers and toxic player in their own official server, they are slowing killing their own image to new player, which will hurt their business in the long run

 

[MondayNight]

6 minutes ago, Seero said:

dont care

it's fun

Again, judging from the mentioned empty PVP pubs out there atm, I beg to differ. Still a KLei bad investment for an abysmally small crowd "enjoying" a very unbalanced feature on "default".

[Capybara007]

1 minute ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

Again, judging from the mentioned empty PVP pubs out there atm, I beg to differ. Still a KLei bad investment for an abysmally small crowd "enjoying" a very unbalanced feature on "default".

Is not abysmally small, and overall there will be more people complaining than people thanking them for shutting down the servers.

[MondayNight]

19 minutes ago, Capybara007 said:

Is not abysmally small, and overall there will be more people complaining than people thanking them for shutting down the servers.

It is. Check yourself DST servers list by marking the "PVP enabled/On" filter (an example from my end in spoiler below). Plus my reply is by no means in favor of KLei shutting down their current existing servers, au contraire. Only regarding a supposed "PVP Official server" being superfluous in context of current dev neglect of KLei pubs.
 

Spoiler

93 PVP servers from a 7532 total atm of this post - aka ~1,234%, what you'd call "abysmally small":

Of notice: majority of those servers are personal and with mods, not dedicated vanilla pubs.