This is going to be a wall of text but please bare with me!
Dear community,
For a long period of time now the Unturned server has been very inactive and hasn't seen much player growth at all with the exception of the occasional player popping on and off every so often. We did have a short lived success awhile back where players were playing on the server on a daily basis and maintaining a somewhat steady player base playing on the server and there was hopes of it continuing to grow, with myself considering expanding the server to 24 slots instead of 12 because it was full a number of times. However, as time past players left the game/server for a variety of reasons. Some just popped back on for a short time to check the new recent Russia update and got bored, some left due to their bases being raided/pvp, some went to other more largely established servers with teleport features and weapon spawning, which I am strongly against as I have always believed that such features are against the essence of the game itself being "Survival".
I myself have personally lost interest in the game. It's not simply that I have grown bored of it or that I don't like it but instead there is just so many other games which draw my interest more which I would rather dedicate my time to. There is also a number of more technical sided issues. One of these is that Unturned is a game that is currently "early-access" meaning that updates are released on a weekly basis. Whilst the advantage of this is that players are constantly getting new stuff to play around with on a weekly basis from a server management side it has its flaws. One of these is that the server uses a number of plugins for additional features in the game. Each update that comes out has a chance at breaking one of these plugins meaning that on a weekly basis plugins must be checked to make sure that none have broken and if so we must wait for the author of said plugin to update the plugin for use again. Over a long period of time this can become very tedious and an annoyance. Moreover, is that some plugins authors have gone inactive and are not present to update the said plugin that has just broken.
Secondly, another problem presented with these weekly updates is due to the overhauled XP system which I have tried to implement to make the server stand out. In short the idea was to decrease the amount of XP gain through activities so that players could not max out skills in every character speciality and would be forced to go down a more specific speciality over a period of time depending on how long they played. Though with the recent addition of quests/missions being added to the game by the developer the XP gain from these quests cannot be set by the server owner and are hard coded.
In regards to events which there should have been much more of these could have helped attract a number of players to the server but I hesitated trying to plan these events for 3 main reasons. One of these is time, events require planning in advance as they must be advertised in order to gather a group of players to an event where there isn't much a playerbase to begin with, however, in my life I usually can't predict if I will be available or not on that date the event takes place. This leads to the second reason which is that admins could monitor the event and make sure everything goes smoothly. However, we didn't really have much admins either. Myself, Blewert, EnzoMortelli and Bhai were the only admins. Each of us left for different reasons apart from Enzo who I believe still plays from time to time. It also didn't help that Bhai was caught redhanded by myself having hacks installed on his game. Finally, the last reason is that since Unturned is a free to play game there are many players who hack on this game and face little to no repercussions for doing so. The game is VAC protected but what does that matter when the game is free to play and a person can just register another steam account and rejoin. So... having a prize that is of value and advertising outside the server in the general community I thought would perhaps just attract hackers to the server to ruin the fun of the potential of an event to attract nice players to our community.
The last issue is simply monetary. The server was being hosted by VRocker (
http://vrocker-hosting.co.uk/) who has provided an outstanding reliable hosting service from start to end. However, services like these require to be paid for on a monthly basis obviously. I can't justify paying out of my own pocket to maintain a server for a game which I have both lost interest in and is not being utilised enough to justify reoccuring payments. The monthly amount itself isn't really much however upon looking at it over the period of 1 year it does all add up to something.
As a final part of my message I would like to thank all of the players who came to our server and tried it out and for all those who tried to keep the server alive and revive it through their ideas etc. If anyone would ever wish to maintain the server themselves (without my involvement) I would be more than happy to provide you with the current server files which includes the map data, bases, vehicles, inventorys of each players and last used plugins aswell as all the other miscellaneous config file stuff. If anyone wishes to do so with serious intentions feel free to directly PM me to discuss more.
I had alot of fun in this game playing with you all!
Thank you,
- Hanney
