I said this in the other thread Wielder made about the topic of P2W servers.
I donât agree with the practices, but at the end of the day the players who play there can spend their money as stupidly as they want. Its like people buying NFTs, there wouldnât be a market for it if people didnât buy it and if theyâre that foolish let them waste the money.
Iâve played on a few servers and have seen a few start off âlegitâ and then slowly start with simple donation tiers. Stuff like discord titles and whatnot. Then little things in games, usually the pippi stuff like wallpapers and flaggis. Then you get little starter bundles to build bases easier after a wipe and whatever.
In every case, it wasnât the owners that initiated it. It was someone in the community asking to donate and making a suggestion and many agreeing. Donât get me wrong, the owners will exploit it. But the players themselves start it and keep it going. It is a two-way street.
Not saying its right, just that it happens. Current server I play on allows donations but gives nothing for it. Its not even done through a paypal account, its done through a feature offered by the server provider so the money goes directly to them, not the server renter themselves.
Running a Conan Server can otherwise generate a ton of revenue for an owner. One server that I saw have some stuff to it (and I wonât name it here), was generating something like $2400 a month. Thatâs not a bad bit of cash since a 70/70 server can be rented for like around $24 (according to Host Havoc, not sure of the quality there, $45-60 is from providers I know like Server Blend and GTX Gaming).
Renting a dedicated box can be anywhere from $300-800, so even still⊠the revenue generated from donation packages can be quite lucrative. So there is a big incentive to do it. Especially when the community is duped into thinking the costs are more than they are. Usually with stuff like, âwe buy the best processors, and keep everything top of the line so we donât have lagâŠâ and all that.
By the way, its not just PVP servers that do this. In my experience PVE do it just as much.
@Wielder Donât take this as a criticism of your opinion or stance. But what you have been describing has been apart of Conan Exiles since 2017. Its always been tough to grow a new server. And apparently successful servers have always had âcash shopâ like mechanisms. Not all Conan servers do this. But its always been present and has been as popular as it seems from the get go.
Its not going to harm the game (though I would say it doesnât help it, and it definitely irks modders whoâs work is sold). Nor affect its population. The population has been pretty stable over the years, with far more than we had on average in 2018.
While I wish it would go away. Iâm just going to say that a fool and their money are soon parted. And this is more or less an individuals choice.
Now for you growing your server. People are going to go on about trust and this and that. Whatever. Of course they are going to say that. Theyâre happily on a server, they arenât going to move, and theyâre going to give some rationale.
That all goes out the window when the server they are on disappears or some other issue crops up.
The real way of generating a population is timing. Is your server up, available, and catching peoples attention when they are looking for a server? This happened one time when I was helping admin a server. Without advertising, the population just grew on its own. It wasnât a God damned thing that I did, Iâll tell you that. And the owner during the population spike was in the hospital during the time frame. Just numbers bred numbers.
Essentially luck. But it doesnât appear to be like a far fetched luck, you just have to keep at it. But it does help if you have a core membership since especially with PVP, no one likes to play on empty servers. If you can maintain around 10-15 during primetime for your serverâs region, then it will grow.
If its just you by yourself, well I donât know what to tell you. Need to get down and have a dialogue with peeps to get them to play there. But once you have the numbers, more will come.