DST playing style, public servers experience and Reputation system

[Sapientis]

I would be surprised if those questions haven't been answered, but I felt like creating a poll, so I did. Also there are some of my loose thoughts regarding public servers.

I myself mostly play alone, would say 70% of the time. 25% would probably be spent playing with close friends, family and other people I quite trust and can rely on. The rest are public servers visits, which last a while, but each time after spending a good amount of time building the base, cooperating with other people I find myself joining the server just to find out all my time was for nothing, base is gone in flames, destroyed or scavenged, or even worse, server has been completely regenerated. I quickly lose interest in wasting my time on pubs and go back to wasting it on playing alone (at least I won't get disrupted).

Although my experience overall on pubs is somewhat good, I don't like the Schrödinger state of all my effort there. This is not even about griefers, pubs are full of ignorant people joining mid Summer, finding your base, triggering Wildfires and dying/logging out. There's not much you can do about it.

Forumites argue whether Iridescent Gem being an ingredient of one of Wickerbottom's books in upcoming character refresh is a good idea, I personally consider it awesome for both solo playing and playing with a group of trusted people, but it has been pointed out, that this recipe is horribly unhealthy for most public servers scenarios, which I agree with. Pubs already struggle with griefers acting out of malice or ill-understood fun as well as just inexperienced players. Adding such valuable Gem as part of quite powerful character item adds another risk of griefing out of ignorance (and I'm afraid many pubs will suffer after Wickerbottom update goes live, probably most will forget about her few weeks after, but the problem will remain).

Then I found myself wondering "how many public servers ever get its visitors on the game's main questline - Celestial Champion", because to me it seems like a waste of time (I won't do it in one game session and I want to know I'll have my server how I left it), I will do it on a trusted server but not on a public one, thanks.

I feel like this game is too "uncompromising" to be enjoyed to its fullest on public servers, especially having high expectations like willing to defeat all bosses, build a neat and functional base and just have a good time playing with strangers.
Would a mechanic like Player Reputation help? Maybe it would prevent some griefers from spoiling other's experience, but there's no mechanic which would prevent players from being ignorant, just like all of us have been at the beginning. Every new player needs time and needs to make mistakes to improve, public servers are just too prone to them for me to enjoy.

This meme (not my creation) is just one shade of public servers :v

[Maxposting]

what is this, minecraft?

[Iino]

Shounic from the Tf2 community recently made a phenomenal video amid the #savetf2 protest regarding the different tactics and solutions one could possibly implement against cheaters and bots, one of which being a reputation system (also known as trust factor). The problem with such a system is that it takes an enormous amount of time and resources to be fully developed, so much so that even a giant like Valve took around 5 years to put out a system for just one of their games. KLei simply does not have the necessary resources to perfect such a system; how do you train an algorithm to tell the difference between burning trees for charcoal Vs. Griefing? Even then, Valve's system's competency is inconclusive in the long run, hop on a game of CS:GO and soon enough you'll spot someone that manages to deceive the system.

Honestly, the rollback feature is enough, it might be a jaded point of view, but if someone wants to cause chaos on the internet, they will always find a way to do so.

[Duck986]

1 hour ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

what is this, minecraft?

no, it does not have player report system yet.

[Sweaper]

Public servers are fun if you are able to embrace both the chaos and its short life.. And as you said, leave the extremely late game content for private servers or endless public servers. You can also host your own public server and add Klei IDs to the servers' blacklist and overtime the amount of griefers joining it will dwindle or find a public server that already is doing this

[Cheggf]

Griefers are such a problem that we should give them more tools to cause even more problems. 

[Gashzer]

If anything we should lean into the griefing on klei public servers instead of all these extremely high resource cost measures people suggest on the forums which griefers might be able to abuse anyway!

Disable vote kick and vote rollback, turn world to wilderness mode so you can respawn randomly anywhere in the world when you join or die, then slap on pvp, also make klei servers reset when they become empty or when they hit day 1000, boom all griefing problems fixed on klei pubs.

No need to thank me all at once guys 

[nimzowitsch10]

I think your idea a good try to solve the griefing problem but it really won't put a dent on anything. The things the public server needs the most are community appointed moderators and logs that keep track of someone burning/hammering structure/unrenewable that people can see. These two things will shut down all the major griefers that are causing trouble right now.

 

As for actually moderating griefers, I think some of the notorious ones should be gone for good. Most people that play on the klei US east know about most of the major griefers. When the griefer enters and starts burning stuff, everyone kicks on sight, and that person will wait the 5 minute cooldown to come on the server and get kicked again and again. Sometimes the griefer changes their alias so people don't know it's them. This happened yesterday where we were playing with a griefer that has been targetting the servers all day. He kept joining and would inch closer and closer to base to burn it. This went on for at least 3 hours and we all eventually went to bed. He got on later that night and burned everything then reset the server with his buds. This was a day 130 world where we did all the questlines and were building bases with everyone on the server. This griefer has consistently burned bases on the US east for years and the pub servers would be a legitimately better place without someone like him. And if he makes a new account to play pubs again, that's good for klei, $$$.

 

Klei has maintained a hands off attitude on pubs because they believe people entering on day 1 and burning people's hard work that played for 100 days is an actual playstyle (chaotic playstyle as JoeW has said). I think I speak for 99.9% of pub players when I say, get rid of griefers.

[Sweaper]

7 minutes ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

The things the public server needs the most are community appointed moderators and logs that keep track of someone burning/hammering structure/unrenewable that people can see.

 

There are mods already in the workshop to keep log of those actions and who did it so you can ban them without the need to be in the game at all if you're running the server or the people ingame get the message of these actions and can decide to start a vote to ban the griefer

[MondayNight]

Pubs akin KLei official servers are fun for short-to-midterm punctual runs (Ruins rushes, Bosses take-downs, etc) and random "d|kking around". Can encounter like-minded individuals via said public servers with whom to have fun and befriend. Can also function as a teaching material for newbies, albeit not a reliable method. And that's about it for such environment. I doubt situation can be improved via some Reputation System - am sure there will be people to abuse it, either up-voting their friends or down-voting with friends help certain players they dislike for various reasons. By now, after way-too-many public servers hours, I reckon KLei's intention with pubs is solely introductory, & not in a serious, long-term play capacity - and are fine for such a purpose. Else, if one still desires random encounters yet in a more safe-&-friendly circumstance, can go for DST community servers that are actively moderated. Better have KLei investing in more game-play content as opposed to rather superfluous auto-moderation.

[Evelo]

I know the game is called Don't Starve Together but I rarely see people play with a large group of people. Maybe they play solo or with 1 to 3 other people. Balancing around the chaos that is random individuals in a "wild west" seems like a bad idea. Just my opinion though... as a 95% solo player with 5% with 1 friend.

[oregu]

it'd be near impossible to implement it well, but i see this more useful in the way that i kind of just want this more so people trust me with assigning tasks to them because i have 7k hrs by now but it'd be hard to tell how experienced any player is off the bat, especially if you're newer.

[Chubbylicious]

22 hours ago, Sapientis said:

 

I don't think this would be healthy, exactly because of the minecraft situation. Our playerbase is very small, most of us know one or another youtuber... so it would be very easy to spam report or spam ban someone. Also, a lot of new players would suffer with the reputation system, since most experienced players don't bother to teach and help them.

I'm a very experienced player myself and already saw server were "picking the same character was trolling" or servers that you're kicked immediately even when it's public. It's not fair to have your reputation decreased because someone didn't bother to put on a passwork or write in the description that different characters are preferable.

About the public server experience... Most public servers have a auto-reset configuration, so players will always log in (we know how the population decreases when winter comes). I, as a player, LOVE the setup and base-building part of the game, so this situation is ideal for my play style. If all server were now resettable, I wouldn't find a server to play. But megabases servers DO exist and you can find them, at least here on Brazil.

I apologize for my english mistakes, if you find any syntax errors, please feel free to correct me!blockquote widgetblockquote widget

[Cheggf]

3 hours ago, Chubbylicious said:

Our playerbase is very small

Look at steam charts, this game is big (just not something like Fortnite big). It's a bad idea because you can easily abuse it, but it isn't because the game is small. For example, one time I was on a server where for 6 hours a group of 5 different griefers kept trying to come back over and over again. If they're that dedicated and in real time groups that large then it would be easy for them to gather a larger group to just report somebody whenever. And can you family share this game? That'd open more opportunities for abuse if so.