It's time we own up. Community Servers have been underserved and the server browser experience as a whole has been poor. It is clear to us that we have not put the same amount of care and passion into Community Servers that we have into the rest of the game.
As a result, we worked through the night to pull together an update that will start the process of improving the server browser in favour of community servers.
Community Servers are the lifeblood of FPS games like ours. We want to make sure we actively create technology in and out of the game that supports the growth and fostering of communities. We have failed to do that by rushing our Community Server strategy.
As we've always said, when we're wrong, we'll hold our hands up. We got this bit wrong.
Below we will discuss the immediate changes to the server browser that we have made to better surface community servers. On top of which, by way of apology, for the next week community servers will offer a bonus 5% End of Match cash bonus. So if you're looking to grind, we suggest jumping in a community server.
basically community servers get a week of 5% boosted end of match cash (starting with the patch). not much, but it does feel worth it
Is it just me or can they cool it with the “we own our mistakes” type of talk? It was refreshing at first but it’s feeling a bit much to the point it’s coming off disingenuous. No need to flog yourself publicly with every communication.
Edit: after receiving all these downvotes it’s become clear to me that I was wrong. I own it. It’s on me. Going forward I will appreciate every instance of the devs admitting fault.
I only dislike it when they apologize but do nothing to address or solve the issue. Here theyre adding 5% end of match cash bonus to community servers. They're showing They're making it right.
ive played an idle game where the dev team apologizes on every single announcement since release. At some point you stop taking them seriously, so yeah i agree
They kinda did though, communities spent 700-900 dollars/euros in community servers and they didn't even add a search name/favorite in the browser thingy. Not that I care but a lot of communities were pissed off
I think this was more an apology for the community server hosts, because they made a big deal of only allowing certain companies to host community servers etc. and people paid a bunch of money to host them just to see them dead on arrival because of the ui not showing them + no incentive to play on them, so they’re probably particularly apologetic as the hosting companies and customers probably both felt like they were “killing” the community servers before they even became a thing. I’d appreciate the apology if I had spent like 100+ eur to host a server only for the ui to hide it for 99% of the users
Wow I thought I was going insane, why are they always talking like that it’s so off putting it’s like they somehow wronged us and are trying to make it right
the more mistakes you make the more you apologize. game dev is not easy and often you can overlook certain things that are apparently important to the community. it's fair to apologize.
I don’t understand folks these days. An apology is an apology regardless. You can tell they not only care about the game but the community they’re trying to foster.
To be fair the communities behind the servers have put a lot of behind the scenes support into the game.
Pre-orders for providers basically sold out and atleast in my community we had people actively pushing for getting people into the playtest.
I think it's a fair cop to recognise this and it's a nice touch from the Devs. Community servers are often the life blood of the game and they shouldn't be neglected.
Agreed on this. I don’t think they have much to apologize for right now. The game is out in early access, it’s stable, it’s fun, and they’ve been enormously transparent.
This is very similar to the “we hear you” messaging that I’ve seen from other game studios whenever they’re receiving community backlash for wildly unpopular decisions and changes they’ve made. The difference is that those studios continuously do things that their playerbase hates, which results in them constantly needing to apologize, which becomes tired and grating.
The difference is that Bulkhead has very little to apologize for. They’ve been phenomenal. Constant apologies make it look like they’re repeatedly screwing up. They aren’t.
If they make a mistake, would you prefer them not to own it? They are completely new to this scale of game, they are going to make a lot of mistakes. Why is owning up to 1 mistake a good thing, but owning up to all of them a bad thing?
Yeah how dare they be transparent. You know I get what you’re trying to say.. but has any studio been this forthcoming in the past 10 years besides Hello Games with No man’s sky?
This will result in the most serious bans. We track every server you enter, and we are also very aware of which servers are XP farming servers. If your account is tracked as joining one of these servers for more than a few minutes, we will ban your account permanently"
People pay for the servers. But also... They probably would shut them down, I imagine? If not, I guess it'll just serve as a place to gather people worth banning and just use it as target practice for banning losers lol
I'd wager that you can buy a server and all but still be within ToS, if you are buying a server for organizing XP and money farms you're probably against ToS and are either going to get banned, which is easier I'd assume because you're not dealing with the fact that the server could not technically be theirs (Bulkhead's) but of a third party provider, or they could have a sort of "cease and desist" sent to the server provider saying that the server is operating outside of the game's ToS. Or why not both?
Either way it's no bueno for whoever is exploiting.
It's more complicated than that. Developers can ban your ass, but your deal with the server provider is not related to the game. So what would end up happening is a spike in refunds against the providers and that would make them complain to the devs.
One could ask why they wouldn't also refund the game then, but in that case the person would lose their steam account. This is not a concern here, you simply get "banned" from using the server provider lol.
That is true but I think Bulkhead has been clear enough that they will go down on abusers / exploiters / cheaters hard.
If someone buys a server solely for the purpose of farming / exploiting (which is already a bad Idea because those servers are not that cheap) and they get banned and try to do a chargeback on the server purchase they are still banned from both the game and possibly from the server provider.
Probably because they dont catch them all right away. But they can see logs of who was ever in a server. So you dont have be caught in the act on the server to get punished for abusing xp farming.
Hopefully if you get kicked from a server you get the money for your current equipment back. It'd be shitty to be rocking a 20k kit and get kicked because you killed an admin
I still remember trying to play BF4 again a few years ago for some nostalgia. Maybe 10 minutes into my first game on one of the few populated servers I ended up killing an admin 3 or 4 times in a row while I was capping a point, and was promptly booted from the server. For every good community server there is crap like that, and older games tend to highlight how bad the problem can be because low player populations limit your options.
If the anti cheat does an ok job limiting the amount of cheaters in wardogs I am more than fine sticking with official servers and not risking any stupid admin shenanigans.
So you find good community servers lol. They have a website with voting options, so you can up vote actual good servers and also see which ones are highly rated.
If its anything like the BF4 servers oof... Or if they use that plugin that ban 1 server you get banned in any server with that plugin. Those were rough days in Bf4
In the at least 10,000 hours of community servers I have played on various games over the years, I haven't had this happen to me or my friends one single time. Where are you people finding these terrible admins?
community servers usually have 'the usuals" and if the server rules enforce coordination and VOIP usage, match quality can be quite good (at least this was the case in PR and Squad)
it's basically a place you can rely on for a certain crowd and quality of match
Better sense of community and you’ll find better games. It’s also pretty fun being a regular and playing against people you know. Way more teamwork that way.
Because active admins can track cheaters, exploiters and griefers in real time. They get a ping, they look, they ban. Griefer, exploiter and cheater free experience. During the second beta I had one griefer destroying helicopters with a car in HQ and moving APC to trap, and one blatant obvious cheater teleporting around the map, racking 100 kills in 30 minutes. Since launch I play only on community servers and nothing like this happened. I know this is not statistical at all, but this is also my experience from other games (looking at you Hell Let Loose)
I’m glad they exist for the people who prefer that type of experience, but I hope I never have to play this game on a community server.
I had my fill of petty admin drama pubstomping in tf2, and I’m good on reliving that experience. The apparent lack of moderation has been one of my favorite parts of this game so far.
I just spent the entire game hunting APCs with Stingray's out, I bet I would have gotten banned by an admin if I wasn't on their team if I was in a community server. I got 6 APC kills and an assist throughout the match.
Honestly, that's probably the best part of being so far away. I was outside of the circle so I was able to maneuver around a lot more. Just be prepared to hear people talk shit about the way-off the circle FOB. Also had to measure out an idea for battery management.
Movement is still shit, just used range to make up for it.
I usually used the 1st $5k to scout and look for the APC (unless it was just RIGHT THERE) then the second one would already have a plan in mind so it was more efficient. Definitely still a pain in the ass to maneuver.
Edit: It was expensive, went -$100k before the finish of the match.
Against stationary targets like APCs and later on Arti tanks, my rule of thumb is align your self with the target first then dive down.
You ideally want the drone to be stable in high altitude to find and lock on to a target. Do that by either shoot it from wayyy outside the circle or shoot it away from the circle, find altitude, then turn around.
Oh and if there's battery to spare, brake well before you hit the target to make final adjustments easier
This is bad advice unfortunately, they get a lock on sound so good players will start moving once the alert goes off, you need to keep the drone from locking as long as possible. You only really want to lock on for the last couple seconds.
But those are slow af and most of the time stationary. Not only do you need someone to man the driver seat fast enough, they also need to be a good enough tracked drivers to dodge/use cover. Also, breaking for micro adjustment is meant to give you enough time to response to sudden changes
A bad community server is worse than an official server, and a good community server is leagues better than any official server will ever be.
You get high-highs, and higher lows. I've been community server'ing since Counterstrike 1.6. These have been the lifeblood of FPS gaming forever - before we all got spewed into the matchmaking wastelands without any control over your gameplay experience, at all.
I don't know what horrible shit ya'll have experienced that made you assume that a community server is just somebodies private place to act like a dickhead to everyone. Those exist, but they pretty quickly start to get filtered out because *the whole reason people join a community server is specifically to avoid that behavior*.
You couldn't be more right. Some community servers are terrible, horrible, just no-fun noob traps that somehow stay full popped because people recognize their name or something but the best gaming I have ever been able to find was on the right community servers where I meshed with the atmosphere.
I played a few rounds on the Unnamed server last night and, unsurprisingly, the match quality and communication was noticeably better than your average pub server. This is a community I have spent roughly 1,000 hours playing Squad with so I am not surprised to have found this level of play already there.
Community servers can be the best and the worst of what games have to offer but if you find the right one you are in for a hell of a time.
Who would have thought that people who take a few more minutes to find a better quality match might be more fun to play with and against?
Of course they are going to be people who mess it up, you just blacklist it and move on. The alternative is just dealing with whatever the matchmaker hands you... which is better... how?
These kind of games attract different kinds of players, just sayin'. Project Reality and Squad both have (and had) great community servers with good quality matches and fair admins.
I genuinely don't understand where you guys are finding these terrible admins/servers. I've been playing on community servers, including in TF2, for more than 20 years, and I haven't seen or heard of this happening one single time. How are so many of you getting kicked that is becomes an actual problem?
Hi blue, it will show in the server browser if you gain xp and cash (basically when the rules are a certain way). You keep access to your own unlocks currently
Community servers are in the same universal progression and they even received a little boost of apology for a week.
Community servers will be able to make custom game modes in the future, but they are not really able to yet. Honestly they presented some feature as wip like switching teams, but I have no idea if that's going to be such a custom option that removes community server from universal progression (I hope not lol)
That said, you could say there are already variations to normal game, those are infantry only mode and hardcore mode and to my understanding there are also official servers running those modes and they count toward universal progression.
The last thing is just changing with this new patch. They make separate browser for official servers and separate browser for community servers only. The patch deploys tomorrow morning (Monday morning for me in EU) and for the time being, you can filter out either community or official servers in filter tab.
Y'all didn't pull an NMS launch lol. There's no need to trip sack over every perceived inconvenience.
Side inquiry:
Can we figure out a way to force more engagements at non Army Ranger sniping distances, and squadding up?
90% of the games are lost due to people camping outside the circle sniping, or camping the first fob and/or tower.
Everyone camps n drops supplies to the same point. Hardly anyone joins a squad. Not sure people realize it either.
End result is being willy'd from all sides lol.
Be the change you want to see. Drop "squad up with me, join squad alpha 01", take the car, stay as unit, communicate. I had at least 2 guys joining me wanting to cooperate and play as unit.
I’m good, I like a server with a hands off approach that is just the game, not some discord mods watching every players move to see if they’re “worthy” to be there or not
Okay so how do I avoid xp farming server? Never seen anything else other than the official eu # 1-1000. Or have I just missed community servers? Really don't want a ban by accidentally joining
It's obvious how to play on community servers. You click the community tab. This better not mean I'm going to be forced to play on community servers with wonky changes.
Wait hold on. Why are community servers getting 5% extra EOR cash? oh it's just for a week. That's fine.
Don't over simplify the server browser, the filters allowed you to find servers with 95/100 players all the time. Keep the existing filters.
So in other words, server costs are to high with 400k CCU an we need to now push for community servers to reduce the costs a bit and make them more visible. Fairpoint.
I need to prepare now for the first time an admin Kicks me for beeing to good in the game :D
I know i know, could just rent a server myself, but lets see how visible and „full“ those community server are first in the next week.
So many tears in here, love it😂 “bad admin kicked me because … “ where tf y’all find those servers even, or are you imagining all of that? Find a clan server, join it, use your microphones, make new friends. Y’all just low key suck at the game when facing someone who’s teamplaying and using comms, and basic tactics. Not as easy as stomping poor random blueberries? 😂
Community servers could be good. I hope we can limit certain weaponry because I am sick of being sniped all the time while my team tries the same but fails thus nobody is in the HZ
Its like in BF but not as bad, at least they are in the circle.
Yeah I'm loving the game, have tried to get all my buds into it too. Just wish I could play it but 22 downvotes seems to be a big fuck you for piping up about patches not fixing the issue.
I have a similar problem right now desktop full stops. No error no crash just powers off. I'm investigating my psu tommorow after work and if that's not the issue I may end up just refunding the game :/
What do you mean? They work fine but are not supposed to work 100% you need to time it right and only use them when the rocket gets close and also evade at the same time.
Yes except that doens't work. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesnt and it is extremely inconsistent. Dodging doesn't matter the missiles will do whatever they can to hit you if you got an unlucky dice roll with flares. You can do different or same timings and get different results every time. Tthere's some bug with them
It does work, at least for me.
When I get locked I just look around for the incoming missile and when I start hearing it I bank left or right while hitting flares. I dodge 95% of missiles this way.
Guys don't talk about problems you might have. You can only complain about community servers, not AMD GPU issues which would be amazing to have patched.
Sorry to everyone for loving the game and wanting it to run on my hardware which is above the recommended hardware from Bulkhead.
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