Should Klei shut down the Klei Official Servers?

[Seero]

8 minutes 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".

why are you deciding whats fun for me

it's fun for me (when there is multiple people and they are all trying to kill each other)

[MondayNight]

21 hours ago, Seero said:

why are you deciding whats fun for me

it's fun for me (when there is multiple people and they are all trying to kill each other)

We're writing here about general consensus, not your personal preference. And, by the number of PVP servers in existence at the moment, consensus seems to be they aren't fun. I've provided you with arguments of why is the case: lack of balance and a target audience.

[Duck986]

14 minutes ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

I've provided you with arguments of why is the case: lack of balance and a target audience.

ok and? they're still fun for some players tho.

u like pvp? fine. you don't? fine.

[Mike23Ua]

Personally I don’t think it’s anyone’s business but Klei’s to decide what is and isn’t a good investment for them- if they feel something is worthwhile they will do it and if they don’t, they drop it.

Like I said Xbox never had these servers and I like to think that in some weird way by Xbox never having them they were somehow saving money.

If killing these servers means more time can go into content updates & character reworks then.. R.I.P Servers  

[Sweaper]

1 hour ago, MikoFanboy said:

I will never understand how people can enjoy public server since your work can be destroy in a blink of an eye

Live in the moment because nothing is forever

[JeezSorry]

I feel like this thread is gonna get shut down sooner or later so here's my stance as a member of the community!

 

It's just gonna get shut down sooner or later regardless, I assume at least

 

so no need to cry everyone! Just have fun, and remember....

Don't cry Starve Alone!!!!!!!!

[blizstorm]

3 hours ago, sudoku said:

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. 

How do you kicked a team of 4 griefers who is burning your base on klei servers?

There is a griefer group who coordinate, log onto the world at the same time. with 4 of them around, no votekick or rollback vote will pass, so all you can do is to watch the base burn.

 

I mentioned the reluctance to combat griefing, and by that, I was referring to cheaper method than active moderation. There are things like regeneration of reeds which is simply a line of code

[Capybara007]

1 hour ago, JeezSorry said:

I feel like this thread is gonna get shut down sooner or later so here's my stance as a member of the community!

 

It's just gonna get shut down sooner or later regardless, I assume at least

 

so no need to cry everyone! Just have fun, and remember....

Don't cry Starve Alone!!!!!!!!

Why do you act like klei is a super gatekeeping team and will say "**** you get muted", they wont do that.

[Gi-Go]

3 minutes ago, blizstorm said:

How do you kicked a team of 4 griefers who is burning your base on klei servers?

There is a griefer group who coordinate, log onto the world at the same time. with 4 of them around, no votekick or rollback vote will pass, so all you can do is to watch the base burn.

You need 3 friends to defeat 4 griefers. Then it will be 4 vs 3, since person who is being vote kicked cannot use his vote for either yes or no. 

[. . .]

yes

[JeezSorry]

17 hours ago, Capybara007 said:

Why do you act like klei is a super gatekeeping team and will say "**** you get muted", they wont do that.

remember, I said, "I feel like this thread is gonna get shut down sooner or later"

doesn't mean it will, reason I believe that is due to well

mass hate on this topic.

A controversial topic itself.

And arguments which have already arisen.

Just my thoughts, no need to fight! 

[Well-met]

as bad as public DST is, this thread is silly.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Why people have that hard time understanding versus? He is just saying that oficial pvp servers arent worth for klei

About the topic, why closing official servers would fix anything? At most klei will decide to close them to save resources and money but asking klei to close them doesnt have much sense. I dont use them (i think i have played 3 times in pubs) but it doesnt hurt anybody.  Is a great help for people that are alone or have potato computers

 

[sudoku]

18 hours ago, blizstorm said:

How do you kicked a team of 4 griefers who is burning your base on klei servers?

There is a griefer group who coordinate, log onto the world at the same time. with 4 of them around, no votekick or rollback vote will pass, so all you can do is to watch the base burn.

 

I mentioned the reluctance to combat griefing, and by that, I was referring to cheaper method than active moderation. There are things like regeneration of reeds which is simply a line of code

Id say the chance of you consistently running into a situation like this is quite low. Yes it sucks, yes these people suck and most likely should find another game to play if constantly griefing is how they derive entertainment from DST, but public servers are chaotic. You throw the dice each time you join and sometimes the play session doesnt always go the way you want it to, whether its running into griefers or getting players with less than ideal experience.

Its how you overcome the obstacles that makes playing on a public server fun especially for someone like me with close to 4000 hrs played and the typical session playthrough has become stale. If you have a zero tolerance towards griefing then its best you just host your own world where you have absolute power to ban griefers.

[GenomeSquirrel]

40 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

Why people have that hard time understanding versus? He is just saying that oficial pvp servers arent worth for klei

About the topic, why closing official servers would fix anything? At most klei will decide to close them to save resources and money but asking klei to close them doesnt have much sense. I dont use them (i think i have played 3 times in pubs) but it doesnt hurt anybody.  Is a great help for people that are alone or have potato computers

 

They have been in a relatively low quality for a while now; I went in one server, enter first cave and crash, go to next server, next cave and crash again, third server, third cave, yet another crash. Sometimes the host will turn red and we'll be caught in a mini groundhog day loops. Often times there will be too many spiders on the screen, and the game will not detect your inputs well enough to survive.

I could see the argument that it is both a waste of resources, and giving a faulty impression of the game. If I purchased the game in this state I would have refunded it.

[CaRat]

I think the klei servers are only down so far because of the beta.(idk why but alot of em shut down with the beta underway) I still have tons of fun on servers of the klei hosted ones because no one can just boot someone for not liking someone. Instead you have to vote to boot and vote to roll.  Plus the communication thing is just wrong. They mentioned every update both here and when you just look at recent updates on steam. The only thing I think they should add is the option to rollback 2 or 3 days just incase the griefer is smart and griefs before a save. 

[Mike23Ua]

So apparently they’re now down on PlayStation too- YAY!! Now no platform has Klei official servers wooo 

(I’m excited because Xbox never had them, and with them down hopefully that means Klei is saving money for.. uhh something else.)

[JoeW]

The OP is a bit aggressive, but I am going to reply so everybody knows where we stand at the moment. This is going to get long, but I am trying to keep it brief. By no means am I going over all the details right now - because there is a lot to this. 

First, we don't lock or hide posts for any reason other than if they aren't hosting constructive and meaningful conversation. Regardless of how critical it may be. Unless of course, there are a bunch of threads about the same topic, but that's normal forum moderation. 

Next - the current state of the public servers, hell the existence of the public servers all together can be blamed almost entirely on me. It was my initial push to open public servers and it's been at my insistence that we haven't made any drastic decisions with these servers as well. We do everything together at Klei, so we rarely use "me" when talking about what was done - but I do want this to be clear, because we have internally debated and discussed this situation for a long, long time now. We're all in agreement that we have a situation that needs to be resolved, and we are absolutely actively working toward a solution. And at this time we have settled on a path forward that we are currently working toward.

The purpose of the public servers was to provide good, powerful servers to people that might not be able to play on their own dedicated servers otherwise. This was an early decision and we stand by their purpose, but I think if we had to do it over again we would have made different decisions. 

We have had a ton of discussions. From shutting them down entirely, or internal moderation and even community moderation. But we have never been entirely satisfied with an answer that didn't ultimately feel like it would only bring about new problems. And we're not super keen to waste resources on something that doesn't have a lasting positive impact to the game. 

There are a lot of challenges to moderating a game like Don't Starve Together that I feel are unique to the DST experience. Not everybody thinks that accidentally burning down everything is a "bad" thing. Not everybody agrees on what should and shouldn't be done in the game at any given time. There isn't really any right or wrong way to play the game. Some people feel you must min/max to play correctly, some enjoy the chaos from trying to help people figure things out. Some of you absolutely love the chaos other people bring, some people like 100% cooperation at all times. 

Most of the forum can't even agree on how to play the game at any given time. 

We have no interest in enforcing how you or your friends play the game. I have supported something like a dozen online games with millions of players, and it takes a lot - A LOT of resources to maintain even basic game moderation. 

Combing through server logs, is especially interesting in trying to decipher what a persons original intention was when they burned the base down. 

It's one thing on your servers that you own, and you make the decisions. It's another thing as a company trying to do what is best for customers that purchased your game. I am not comfortable banning people unless I am absolutely certain what they did was bad. And as much as you might not like hearing it, screenshots don't cut it. 

Naively I guess. The idea was that those servers would be chaos, and if people didn't like it, they wouldn't play there. I don't think this is incorrect now, but I also see that there is a place for open public servers like DST has without the chaos. 

Now - I am aware that there are situations where people have flat out said they were griefing. But I am also aware of many of these situations that I have investigated (quietly) also had another side of the story where they were also harassed. And I am very, very resistant to banning people, unless there is no other choice. 

This landed us where we are now. We are currently working toward better tools for server administration. Substantially better logging and moderation capabilities as well as encouraging, providing and highlighting more player hosted dedicated servers as well.

We've been quiet because we haven't had an adequate solution, but we're well on our way on this. This will come little by little, and some of this is already starting (Steam chat filters are in the test build right now) and more that I can't talk about yet, more details will come out for this when I have more information. But for now, I wanted you to know where we're at. 

[Owlrust]

23 minutes ago, JoeW said:

Most of the forum can't even agree on how to play the game at any given time.

I know this is a serious post and all, but I chuckled at this bit.

Primarily because it is completely true.

[Falkenpelz]

It is really nice to know, that Klei is looking for appropriate solutions to reported issues and I think NOT providing official servers at all in a game that is explicitly multiplayer-based would still be the bigger problem (I for example can't host a server with more players than myself, lol).

I also find it kinda sad to see posts that just generally assume, Klei 'doesn't care', maybe it's just my personal, overall positive experience, but heck guys, give them a chance to answer..

[Mantispidae]

I don't think the concept of public servers need to be done away with and as highlight above- you can't always tell when and where developers are or aren't working on something- not everything goes public! Not everything that's been in one state for a long time has been forgotten either, nor can solutions get worked on the second they get proposed, even when a whole team is on board. Stuff is complex on the developer side.

What I was gonna say is that the public servers might need some customized tools and boundaries that player servers don't. As-is they operate (on a technical side, anyway) basically the same as any unmodded player servers, which is probably at their detriment when they have the 'official' title. Whereas in my experience (which admittedly is limited) these things general have some sort of unique mechanics to them in order smooth out the experience and prevent messy, chaotic operations being associated with the devs- something probably lacking here because the idea of public servers launched real early and you really can't predict these things. 

I don't think anyone would complain if the servers got rehauled entirely to better cover their weakness, or even had some features implemented for world management exclusive to them (Although i have no clue how complicated something like that might be). Little by little adjustments, like Joe noted at above, are also great for when you know some things you can fix up but don't have a solid idea on what to do about the whole. It's a lot to fix but a lot to fix doesn't mean you have to throw the whole thing out.

 Also do think it's unfair to pretend as if the devs couldn't give a damn or are actively hostile to the idea of change when sometimes they just can't speak on the details of anything and everything they do or discuss. 

[Cheggf]

On 10/12/2021 at 7:06 AM, CaRat said:

I think the klei servers are only down so far because of the beta.(idk why but alot of em shut down with the beta underway)

The servers have been constantly crashing & losing caves ever since the Waterlogged update, apparently. I wasn't playing at that time but I have been playing since the Webber update and the servers have always been having issues. I'm not sure what the issues are, but I've heard rumors that there's easy ways to crash servers and every time my friend sees this one group of people on a server the next time we check that server it's no longer up. Could just be a coincidence.

[blizstorm]

On 10/12/2021 at 2:16 AM, Gi-Go said:

You need 3 friends to defeat 4 griefers. Then it will be 4 vs 3, since person who is being vote kicked cannot use his vote for either yes or no. 

4 Yes 4 No is a failed vote. Nobody will be kicked and no rollback will be done. With 4 griefers in the world, they are body-blocking the rest from entering the world, so they pretty much checkmated the world

On 10/12/2021 at 8:14 PM, sudoku said:

Id say the chance of you consistently running into a situation like this is quite low. Yes it sucks, yes these people suck and most likely should find another game to play if constantly griefing is how they derive entertainment from DST, but public servers are chaotic. You throw the dice each time you join and sometimes the play session doesnt always go the way you want it to, whether its running into griefers or getting players with less than ideal experience.

Its how you overcome the obstacles that makes playing on a public server fun especially for someone like me with close to 4000 hrs played and the typical session playthrough has become stale. If you have a zero tolerance towards griefing then its best you just host your own world where you have absolute power to ban griefers.

4 griefer ending the world is different from a griefer burning the base, or a bad roll, like maxwell being one shot by a depth worm. One griefer, is just a rollback away whereas for the maxwell, if you take proper precaution, is at most just 1 life amulet away. The former, is pretty much an ultimate unblockable server killing move. What is lost, for a 100 days server, would be 100 hours of cumulative play by all players; and for a 1000 days server, would be 1000 hours of cumulative play by all players. The incident happening is not even a bad roll by a computer, but done by malicious stalkers outside the server, just deciding when they want to kill the server.

I look forward to you playing long enough on Klei servers to provide some solutions to overcome the above mentioned obstacle.

7 hours ago, JoeW said:

This landed us where we are now. We are currently working toward better tools for server administration. Substantially better logging and moderation capabilities as well as encouraging, providing and highlighting more player hosted dedicated servers as well.

These measures would be useful in a moderated servers, but what about unmoderated servers like Klei servers? There can be improvements for unmoderated servers like voting reform and additional items regeneration to target anti griefing? These are solutions that are likely to provide a lasting longer positive impact.

Voting system was created 4 years ago, when most players would vote independently, and the majority of voters would aim to do good. However, recently, griefers have learnt to group up, to bodyblock and do vote stuffing, breaking the premise when voting was created.

Sophisticated griefers like to target unrenewable, like reeds and fossil. By erasing these things, the griefers effectively handicap the unmoderated world.

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The servers have been constantly crashing & losing caves

Having a dedicated venue to report Klei server malfunction would be useful, along with a responsive team to restart and troubleshoot

[Gi-Go]

5 hours ago, blizstorm said:

4 Yes 4 No is a failed vote. Nobody will be kicked and no rollback will be done. With 4 griefers in the world, they are body-blocking the rest from entering the world, so they pretty much checkmated the world.

 

The person that is being vote kicked cannot vote, nor will be counted as an automatic "no". Its 4 yes and 3 no. After that you can rollback. 

[Seero]

On 10/11/2021 at 10:34 AM, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

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.

ok an actual serious response

they should work on pvp, and since dst has a pvp option, that alone should make klei have a server for pvp