Servers are dead. We need real content

[Dreamscape18459]

Thanks everyone for commenting. Its given me a lot to think about.

4 hours ago, lifetheuniverse said:

Make your own server with the mods you want? My setup can't run a DST world with linked caves even without mods, and server hosts have shoddy, hassle-ridden mod support at best. More commonly, terrible support or ridiculous prices. And there's still the issue of modded servers typically being ignored.
I'd wager that there are many in this position.
Not to mention those of us who can't really use the private server option on other people's servers because...well, Dreamscape put it best.

Yeah performance is a huge issue on servers, especially those that last for any significant amount of time. There are mods to help this but......as you said the server loses a lot of traffic by using them. I think performance issues effect client hosted servers more since the dedicated software (using Steam CMD at least) uses significantly less resources and users who benefit from client hosted worlds are probably less technology savvy and there is so much system hardware that Klei has to account for.

Of course the server traffic issue due to mod use is not an issue at all for private worlds with friends since the only traffic they receive are from a small knit group.

I totally understand why Klei doesn't add shipwrecked from a hardware perspective since many worlds can't even add the cave shard. Adding a third SW shard (and potentially a fourth Volcano Shard) would just make this situation even worse. (I can comfortably host overworld and caves but I don't know if I can handle more shards.) More shards also means more work setting them up (forwarding ports, etc) and network communication (now shards have multiple others to communicate with instead of one) which would make hosting a game even more complicated.

Out of every thing I would like to see Klei do in the future I think performance improvements oriented for servers/worlds that last a significant amount of time should be a priority since they effect any world that lasts a long period of time. Due to this its an issue that is likely to effect nearly every player (regardless of their preference of client hosted or dedicated servers) and while mods can address it I personally think this is something that players would benefit from Klei fixing than modders (since players have to go out of their way to browse the workshop for performance improvement mods).

2 hours ago, Lumina said:

(Also, i would like some public server hosted by Klei and using mods, it would be a good things to spice things a little and offers to some players the opportunity to discover some mods. But it's probably not easy to do...)

This is hard to do since Klei is ultimately responsible for maintenance of their servers. Adding an external mod author's code is hard since they are an external party and Klei can't touch their code if they need to fix issues the server is having. They are completely reliant on the mod author to maintain their mod.

This could also be seen by players as an official endorsement of sorts by Klei. While Klei has shown some mods on their Rhymes with Play stream's this is a one time relationship while an active server running mods is a longer term affair.

It could happen but I personally feel that community servers will always serve this market better.

2 hours ago, Lumina said:

 

I agree mods are good answers for a lot of things, but shouldn't be needed to play in decent conditions. They are here to add content (especially specific content) and some QoL that aren't mandatory or could even go against the design of the game, or to try differents things that could not work well in the base game, to test things that people could want into the base game and see how they works.

I agree with this but if a mod is really, really good it can be beneficial added to the game. (Age of Forgotten Empires is a great example and I think Minecraft's Piston's addition in Beta 1.7 way back in 2011 were originally a mod.) Having mods is a great source of feedback for Klei and can lead to new official features or incorporation into the main game.

There is a character named "Wulfe" on the Steam workshop which is extremely similar to Webber. However Wulfe was released months before Reign of Giants existed. I don't know if Klei used the mod as inspiration but the two character's have some extremely similar design.

21 hours ago, GenomeSquirrel said:

Griefers are rare, and I have a thousand hours in mostly public games behind that claim. The bigger problems, ignoring game design, are players that have no interest in cooperation and players that contribute nothing while consuming and misusing resources. That’s what makes me not play regularly, again ignoring game design.

Having been a server admin (and friends with some) for many years across a wide variety of games I have personally found griefers are pretty common, even inside entirely closed servers.

It is a little tough to define griefers since servers have different rules and thus definitions of griefing. On public servers I consider hammering pig/bunny huts that spawned at world gen and moving them to a base griefing but other players don't view it that way. However if I am playing a private world or a closed world with friends I don't view it as such. This is tough since rules change across servers and, if I am not mistaken. don't think Klei official servers have rules outside of the community guidelines.

[GenomeSquirrel]

2 hours ago, xxVERSUSxy said:

I don't know on what servers, at what hours or how much you play in pubs (just 1st autumn, till spring, 1 in-game year a.s.o.), but it appears we are in different ...dimensions. As a measure for the troll/toxic/griefer insanity in pubs I just cite the Vanilla (Diverse Survivors) group of servers that have almost daily griefers reported on Discord - don't believe me, go to their discord, they have a whole channel dedicated to griefers report. Or How To Survive!, DST Experienced Players etc - all have griefer-report sections with frequent reports.

Now imagine if some relatively small community servers have said problem at mentioned scale, what does this tells you purely at a theoretical level about official pubs?! (will not dwell more into empirical experiences - and sadly we don't have hard data; also what one considers griefing is a matter of debate, not limited to only setting things on fire, and/or hammering of stuff)

With how active this board is, how many regulars I’ve seen in pubs, and first hand experience; it doesn’t make sense that there are daily reports. 

 

That at said I have defriended someone who asked me too many times if I have discord, perhaps that community is more active despite not making sense for public lobbies ...

[Lumina]

1 hour ago, Dreamscape18459 said:

This is hard to do since Klei is ultimately responsible for maintenance of their servers. Adding an external mod author's code is hard since they are an external party and Klei can't touch their code if they need to fix issues the server is having. They are completely reliant on the mod author to maintain their mod.

This could also be seen by players as an official endorsement of sorts by Klei. While Klei has shown some mods on their Rhymes with Play stream's this is a one time relationship while an active server running mods is a longer term affair.

It could happen but I personally feel that community servers will always serve this market better.

Yes, it's the kind of things i have in mind, that could make it difficult to do. It's why i don't hope or expect too much on this matter, because it's a lot of work and potential trouble for Klei.

[MondayNight]

6 hours ago, GenomeSquirrel said:

With how active this board is, how many regulars I’ve seen in pubs, and first hand experience; it doesn’t make sense that there are daily reports.

These forums are visited by a rather small percentage of players, and an even smaller number actually comment - most just lurk (think at the 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality). Then there's that forum rule of "no name and shame" - personally I consider it bo||ocks: if victims/witnesses provide evidence beyond doubt (or as little doubt as possible) like print-screens AND chat-logs, that is a legitimate underlining of disruptive people, more so if said perpetrators do it recurrently like Clouds (for literally years, since DST beta).

 

Also bare in mind most commentators here, in these forums, have stated a lot they are playing mostly private servers with friends or alone (a lot of them say they play alone DST, the irony! But hey, their game and time!) - not even community ones.

 

But if we go back to empirical experience, I too have close to 2k hours of official Klei EU servers and stopped playing on them last December precisely because of griefers - even if you are playing in a nomad style (and I did so, mostly diverse thematic runs beyond boss speed-runs and Ruins rushes - e.g. making a certain number of kills till autumn's end or amassing a certain number of resources like silk - by the end of my time in pubs), knowing a proverbial poop-with-eyes can at any given moment destroy stuff on purpose "for $hits and giggles" is very off-putting.

[Dreamscape18459]

If we wanted to get some math for griefing joining pubs at random and seeing if there are any spider dens placed at spawn portal might provide some useful data.