I just do not understand why the forum is overrun with complaints and vitriol against Funcom, for the state of official servers.
Co-op with friends exist, private servers with much more directly moderation exist. About the only reasoning I hear for not playing on Private is ‘Server owners cheat’, which I’ve not found to be the case for the most part myself.
I also do not understand, why try to do a main for long term play on officials? With their server wipes, it just seems pointless to invest in long term play on them.
Anyone have a good pro list of why to play on an Official over finding a Private server whose community, and administration, you gel with?
The best time I’ve had on this game was on private servers, particularly when your admin(s) are mostly active, responsive, diplomatically neutral, and regularly create interesting server events to mix things up.
I ended up becoming an admin myself on some of these server and very much enjoyed my time doing so… it’s disappointing though that admin abuse is definitely a thing and can tarnish/destroy an otherwise great and thriving active server and ruin things for everybody and unfortunately I’ve seen co-admins and server owners be guilty of it multiple times, giving certain clans advantages over other clans and not staying completely neutral as they should be; I ended up not wanting to admin on those servers anymore and left.
The reason I play on officials these days is because there is zero chance of admin abuse occurring, everybody is on a level playing field, nobody has any kind of sneaky advantage over anyone else, also nothing is boosted so the grind is a bit more intense and you’re not being ridiculously out-grinded on boosted servers by people who are on all day/everyday for whatever reason.
Dunno if this is a “pro” list but this is why I think so:
Same reason people use software with default settings when taking the time to set it up to their specific needs and style would improve their productivity by orders of magnitude.
Why does anyone want to be at the mercy of people they don’t know? Funcom is a known quantity.
A lot, perhaps even most private servers have really goofy settings set. Almost none of them have the settings I would want. Officials too but at least I know what they are before I create my character or do a server transfer. This reason by itself expands into 20 other different reasons.
Most private servers are fairly cliquish - fine if you’re in the clique (maybe) but if not it can be a little cold. And the Admin is usually part of the clique.
Anonymity. You can join a private and play without others critiquing or judging your style or habits - or often really even knowing you’re there. On privates it’s generally common to talk about the new guy.
Some private servers request or demand that members join their discord or other.
You can get away with more sh*t on Officials than you can on Privates. Even if players may not do sneaky things, the freedom to do them (typically) without consequence, is appealing to most people. Do you want to be in an environment where you know someone is looking over your shoulder too often, or do you like freedom.
Uptime / Downtime. Private servers especially new ones, take down the server “to do stuff” - thus more often (than Officials) the server won’t be available or it will just suddenly dump you.
Stability. Many, probably most private servers are running mods of some sort. A lot of people view this as just another point of failure - not to mention change the game… especially when many of those changes are so significant it’s hard to tell if you’re playing something even close to the intended experience.
Longevity. How many private servers that were there last year are still there today? Probably less than or about 25%.
Admin personality. I suppose this is related to a few of the others above but there are no “personalities” directly associated with the admin on Officials while on Privates that’s rarely the case. Players may know the admin from other venues and not join for those reasons. For example there are a few people in these forums running private servers I would never what to have to deal with - on any level.
I could go on… but 11 is probably enough.
On the other hand I could just as easily compose a list from a different perspective where some of those pros and cons are inversed and other pros for privates are listed. Anyway, those are some of the reasons I think people either prefer Officials or actively avoid Privates.
Is it? Official servers have these building limits, and according to many, many complaints, they’re not clearly defined, and people are getting their bases blown up because someone reported them for overbuilding; whereas the clan next door gets to keep their big base.
Private server admins can be a known quantity, as long as you know the person and trust their judgement. But unless you’re getting into a private server whose owner you know already, you’re taking a leap of faith into the unknown. And if you are the owner, it becomes a matter of attracting the right sort of players into your server. This works best with already established groups - which you can get to know and love (or at least mostly tolerate) on official servers.
In other words - official servers are the matchmaking party. Private servers are the people you take home from the party.
Chosed officials because private servers come and go easyly and get wiped offten, i dont like to start over and over. Dont want to join discord or other plataforms in order to play, just want to sit on my chair and play.
Because of all the concern with ToS and even before that, searched within the community a vanilla pve-c server to join in my region and find none. All them had some messed up configs.
All I can say here is this.
Pve official only.
2 main reasons.
There is no admin to give advantage to no one, or anything back.
Vanilla parameters are mandatory on pve, you enjoy the real deal and you use everything the game provides. I hate changes on pve, it makes the existence of some things pointless in the game.
For every other aspect of the game privates, especially when we speak about RP. The existence of spawn kill and raid off on officials is enough to destroy the gaming experience and create toxicity. So no thanks I play to have fun.
@DethosThePict, you are about to fix an RP private server. I will advise you just one thing, leave the parameters vanilla, touch nothing, nothing at all and give nothing back to the one who lost. In fact create a password and toss it to the toilet. You will be the servant and not the admin otherwise, mark my words.
And for this reason alone I won’t play on Privates. When I rented servers, players can attest that I would not, and will not participate in my own server except as Admin. Admin must not play.
Second reason vs Privates: my very first server closed within a week of my joining. The second one rolled back twice within a month of my joining. There has been no Official wipe since May of 2018, when the game rolled out to “new” servers.
Yeah thats a big one, no one wants their progress wiped. When I see people asking for official server wipes I feel like they are just trolls trying to get funcom to grief others. For me its i dont know of any good Private servers and those that are advertised on PC is always PvP based and PvP servers are a no go for me.
Please don’t think I’m trolling. I have asked for Official wipes, quite recently in fact. As one of the quite rare survivors of an actual Official wipe, I can attest it wasn’t great, but it sure did fix the imbalance. Right now, there are two or three clans Hoovering up the goodies, from west to east, server to server. Over the weekend, two players from servers I abandoned desperately called for me to come back and see. To document. Why? We all know what’s cookin’.
There is one great fight I ever had. One. And it was in the opening weeks on a fresh, but already-dominated server. I don’t want to sound like a chaos agent, but wipes can be good for a jaded playerbase.
Simply put. New players don’t go to privates first but officials. How many immediately get turned off and leave the game when confronted with the toxicity?
I love analogies so let’s view CE as a city.
IMHO privates are the gated suburban communities of CE with all the HOA junk attached with it. Yeah everyone is fine driving their Subaru horses or Tesla rhino or what have you. Living in their 3000 sf base with 2.5 thralls…but that comes at a costs of limited play and admins that can be Karen’s.
If you truly want to make change, you gotta get dirty in the inner city…and that means officials. As much as a complain about the players on official servers, it’s what the noobs deal with so it’s what I will as well.
Huh, if it hasn’t happened to me before with this one clan just having overwhelmingly huge bases across the map and taking up a lot of great area’s which they did on multiple servers I wouldn’t believe it… but I guess you’re right it would be a deterrent for people mass building.
Having run several private servers over time, I am rather surprised that it is so often the case that someone is paying money, and just ruins any chance of server community, by showing favoritism and cheating.
Can you all share some more specific incidents you have had with this, where you joined a private and the server owner admin ruined it?
Also, aren’t wipes ever okay? Say every three months? Maybe six? I enjoy the ‘climb’ up portion with friends in CE. Also can see it as a way to do long term server events, that start with everyone on equal footing at a known time.
Personally, I enjoy playing on the Official server(s) is to do things in vanilla play (no mods), no worries of being an admin, chat with other players. Many of my builds tend to originate from the official server. Plus, oddly enough, I did more of the content on the official servers than I do on my private servers.
Granted, I do not play that much on the official servers.
I’d like a mod on pve servers that would allow me to hide helmet, as well as give my thrall crafters a specific voice line. Goes up to Blacksmith Thrall Looking to protect yourself or deal some damage? inserts other voice lines for other thralls from skyrim
All I can add is my experience with private servers.
You see I quite like mods, but I only like a few small mods.
So over the past 5 years that I’ve been playing, I have occasionally dipped a toe into the muddy waters that are private servers.
My first outing was after an official wipe in early access, before the actual release of the game.
I was invited to a private server being run by someone who had been on the same official I had been,
with promises of longevity for the server, it shut down in less than a month.
My next outing was with promises that the server was prepaid for two years. A month and a half later it was converted into an Ark server because the Admin’s wife decided she preferred that game over CE.
I could go on, but I’ll end with this, I had decided I wanted to try and build like I’ve seen in PVE.
So I asked if I could play on a PVE private server hosted by someone here on the forum.
I tried to log in, and the server was gone, they had converted it to Savage Wilds.
Apparently a vote was held on discord I was unaware of, I dislike discord.
So from that time to today I only play Official, or my personal private server I run on a spare older computer I keep running for testing purposes.
The second Private was owned by a Steam friend. He was over the game and was not actively playing.
This was an RP server. As such, I had developed my own language, style, and simply refused to speak via Global. This made one player very uncomfortable, so he took it upon himself to raid my little insulated tower.
Apparently, overcome with guilt and shame when he realized his mistake (and no goodies), he appealed to the server owner, who rolled back his raid. I mean seriously? Own your damage, buster.
He had the audacity to call me out on it afterward too. “ALL players use Global, but hey, you do you.” That was the first time I’d ever heard that slyly derisive cut.
Just one example of many…
2+ years ago, back then it was called les Spartiates.
Server rules with capitals…
NO GOD’S ALLOWED.
When the admin couldn’t win the raid he was summoning a God…
He was raiding in god mode…
He was flying away the fights…
You need more?
Beware, not all the privates were this way…
In some privates I participated admins were my teachers…
In some privates I participated admins were heroes…
In some privates I participated this game was in a level you just cannot imagine…
But in some, not all.
And like the taxi drivers my friend, because all the taxis are the same color, the ones mistake affects all the drivers, if you understand what I mean here.
