I’m going to start with a disclaimer:
I am in no way affected by this as I currently don’t play on any official servers, nor have I done so in the past 2-3 years, last I played on officials was in 2017-2018. Why am I saying this? To point out that this is coming as completely impartial feedback, just based on what I noticed and I have no “horse in this game” to speak of.
Now that we got that out of the way… what’s this idea this time?
I have noticed an overwhelming amount of players who are getting wiped by funcom staff on official servers, be it for being falsely reported, be it justly for violation of ToS, in this topic that is not relevant so please don’t take it to that direction.
Some of the wiped players thou seem to have really elaborate bases that are outright “beautiful” for lack of a better word and it shows that they put months or even years of effort into creating them. I would even dare to call it “creative art” and you can notice attention to every small detail.
And while I can totally understand that official servers are meant to favor the multiplayer aspect of the game and as such, large buildings or even small ones with lots of placeables and lights can cripple other people’s gameplay on the same server, however I can not understand wiping obviously creative and art-like bases without offering any alternative.
I’m pretty sure there are even official server admins out there who feel outright ashamed for having to do their jobs and having to wipe certain very well built bases.
So here’s where my suggestion comes in, offer an alternative… Implement the possibility of exporting player-owned structures and objects from the server and facilitate a way for them to re-import that data into single-player.
Even if at first you just offer exports and the bare minimum, I’m sure the modding community will jump right in to help players reimport that data or you could supply a simple external tool that can be put together in 20 minutes, eventually though you could just put a “copy my data from this server to singleplayer” button that does it automatically (needs to have a cooldown to prevent DoS attacks)
So here’s what I’m suggesting for now as an initial step:
- A very simple webpage requiring funcom login that has a dropdown list with official servers that the player has a character on with an export button next to it that creates a database dump of the objects / stuff the player (or their clan) owns.
- A number of these database dumps would be exported and stored on the server with the oldest being overwritten to preserve space and a download button next to each (why store it? so that before admins wipe somebody, THEY can also create a restore point for the player to prevent destroying their work permanently - needs to be part of admin wiping procedure)
- A simple tool with 2 file browser boxes, you select the export dump file in one, the game.db of your single player in the other and finally an import button that reads the owner ID from the second game database, and inserts the data from the dump with the new owner.
This whole thing would require very minimal effort to implement and I’m sure a lot of players would be grateful for it.
Eventually with time this could be improved and maybe added as a functionality of the game so that no external stuff is required.
Oh and it might also open up an interesting aspect of the game, which would be more hands-on “sharing” of created bases for others to use in their single-player game, much like mods, but without anything special being required.
Downsides? I’m not sure how this would be viable for consoles, they might have to wait for it to be implemented into the game, or a special console app developed that can handle this.