Board Thread:Modded Servers/@comment-32315314-20190416144427

Hi, my name is Rob and I run a server which uses the LOTR Mod.

On 7th February this year, a Discord user of the name AlteOgre joined my server Discord and reached out to me in direct messaging. He said this:



After responding and questioning him on what exactly he meant, he gave me the results of the staff's "clear and unanimous" decision that my page was being removed. Following this he left my Discord server so that I was unable to contact him on Discord and say anything else. I checked the wiki and sure enough, my server page was gone. It also came to my realisation that the staff had just edited the server guidelines on the wiki, adding a rule banning micro-transactions.

I offer online store items which are very nicely balanced and do not offer game-changingly unfair benefits. I understand that for someone who had never played on my server, they may look pay to win, but this simply is not true.

Being able to raise funds for the server lets us benefit all players, not just the donators. Because of our donators' goodwill, we are able to run a high-end dedicated server, costing around £90 per month. This would simply be impossible without the donation store, and you seem to ignore the fact that our donations benefit everybody with a fast and smooth, lag-free experience.

We do our best to compete with the multitude of other servers available, including the official server which of course exerts a large monopoly over the multiplayer community. If players dislike the "pay to win" aspects of the server, they are free to leave and choose from the great variety of servers available. It's as simple as that. Therefore I have an incentive to ensure all donator items are well-balanced, so as to not put off the server's vast non-donator playerbase, and argue that I am achieving this due to the fact that our active playerbase is majority non-donator. This is a self-sustaining economy; if the store is too pay to win, players will be put off and will leave, causing a downwards spiral in the server's health (in terms of playerbase and donations).

Your intervention does not help anyone. At all.

Keep in mind that the purpose of intervention is to help rather than hinder.

Before AlteOgre terminated our primary source of new players, the server had experienced two months of unrivalled activity, regularly hitting a full server of 20+ players. Since the unfortunate event, there was of course a time lag until the noticeable dips in server activity. At present our primary source of new players is our Technic modpack, which is unsustainable for various reasons.

I know this sounds like a rant, which in many senses it is. However all I wish to do is raise this problem with the community and hopefully convince the staff that their intervention was unnecessary.

Regards, Rob. 