Admins could be hired to do 8 hour shifts on each official server. This is something that seems to be needed quite badly. The playerbase of official servers is low due to undermesh and other exploits. If there were an admin logged on from say 9-5 every day who could go and check right away when an undermesh base is reported, this could smooth things out quite a lot.
so you are willing to pay a monthly fee for the official server?
currently the official are a free service. no costs, but then also no special service
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Funcom made enough money off of Conan Exiles to pull themselves out of bankruptcy and hire additional (expensive) staff. Admins wouldn’t be nearly as expensive as developers to hire. The role could be filled by minimum wage employees for a cumulative cost of much less than it costs to hire a single programmer.
Edit: Extra costs to the players would be unnecessary. If nothing else, I would be fine with spending an extra couple dollars on the subsequent dlc packs.
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Not an MMO (and even in in MMO’s you don’t have instant service that you think should be filled with poverty wage working hours). No.
Bonus: I would quit modding if Funcom put investments into hundreds of employees to stare at a computer screen doing nothing on lightly used FREE official servers, then investing into actually improving the game (as you specifically propose).
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You make a fair point, but I think I have a counterpoint to that as well. You don’t need to hire anyone with a high level of developer skill or knowledge to serve as an admin. Sure, maybe 8 hours is a bit much. Maybe 2 hours per day is more reasonable. The main point would be that there is an admin on each official server and reachable with a reliable schedule every day. You could even just hire one employee for each region who has a schedule where they hop from server to server in that region and handles exploiters.
Example: "I as admin will be on official servers in this schedule, EST time zone.
#1 from 1:00pm-1:30pm
#2 from 1:30pm-2:00pm
During this time, I will be reachable to immediately investigate instances of exploiting or cheating. If you have something to report outside of these times, please use the forums at (link) with evidence and it will be investigated within 24 hours."
additional staff is to be hired. this changes the previous business plan. so the question remains whether you are willing to pay a monthly fee for the use of the official servers? you want more service, so are you willing to pay for it on a monthly basis?
i don’t see any reason why an additional service that involves additional financial effort for funcom should be free for the player. after all, funcom already pays for the hosting of the official servers at g-portal without charging the player in any way. g-portal doesn’t run the servers for free.
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Seeing as how you pay for the game itself and the game is designed primarily with official server play in mind, I would say that everyone who paid for the game already did pay a fee. As well as all of the additional DLC content being sold. If the game were free to play, I would say yes absolutely.
As it stands now, it would be completely unnecessary for players to pay a fee to have admins in the official servers. Funcom is not going bankrupt right now. They can afford to pay a few admin staff without any major loss in revenue.
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and the official servers are designed with no admins in mind and therefore you now want more service so you have to pay more, right?
That is a ridiculous claim. There is literally an admin role in the game, with the devs taking time to create an entire admin power system complete with menus and in-game server settings.
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The only thing missing is an actual person on a reliable schedule. That is not a lot to ask of a company that hosts official servers.
and none of the functions in this admin panel is designed for server admin task like blacklist players.
it’s an additional service, on top of the currently monthly costs for server hosting, and all I want to know is: are you willing to pay for such an additional service?
And I’ve answered that twice.
If it was free to play, yes. Otherwise, it is unnecessary. Funcom has enough money to pay a dude minimum wage for every region to be on for a few hours. There is zero reason to need to charge the players for this.
and it’s still not the answer to my question: are you willing to pay for an additional service? you pay the game, the price is calculated with official servers in mind, the price is calculated without any admin service for the official servers and now you want more, more than the calculated price includes.
Hell I would even apply for that job myself. Jump on every official NA Official server for a half hour each every day to ban exploiters? Sign me up. I’d gladly take that, even as a volunteer. The problem is that for legal reasons, they likely couldn’t take volunteers for that.
so you would work for free? nice
I guarantee that there are plenty of other players that would volunteer for admin duty if it were offered to them. It’s not a difficult job to do. All you need is the time to be able to fit it into your day and the ability to be punctual.
volunteer admins is not an option and would only shift the costs from the admin to someone who is needed to manage and control the volunteer admins.
the complaints about admin abuse alone would require x employees in such a scenario.
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I’m aware of that. That is why I said they likely couldn’t do that for legal reasons. It would probably also cost more overall than just hiring admins straight up.
My point is that making players pay a fee to have admins is unnecessary and would ultimately cost funcom more money than it would save them due to most players being unwilling to pay to play a game that they already paid money to own.
Either the game is paid for via upfront purchase or it is paid for via subscription. Doing both is not feasible. You could offer a “gold membership” momthly subscription, but you would need to offer a lot more than just “our servers will have admins” for a monthly subscription in a $40 game.
so wow is not feasible? every addon is with a $40 price tag and you need a monthly subscription to play the game, and this without any admins on the servers. all they have is a game master team for ticket processing. after bigger patches you can wait weeks for your ticket.
it’s a new calculation and therefore not unnecessary. the current game price includes not the monthly costs for hardware and admin service. so they can increase the base game price (will not compensate the already sold copies and is hard to calculate) or restrict all official server access to players with a monthly subscription (not really a good idea) or setup new official server with admins available only for paying players (new hardware costs + admin stuff costs) or offer the same service (official servers for free, no admins) for the same base game price without any extra costs.
every scenario with admins, costs additional money on a monthly base which is not included in the one time purchase of the game. included in the game price is the monthly hardware costs of the official servers. a company can’t endlessly churn out monthly costs to run a game without any compensation.
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