Many games in the genre offer public servers however none of their server offerings are successful without a highly active admin team. It's a bit naive to think that all you need to do is implement in game player protection when most of the problems on public servers come from people accessing the admin command system and essentially bypassing any in game protection.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, people will complain there are no public servers until there are and then they will complain about how crap those servers are and how the hackers are ruining them.

You just need 1 guy to log in once and flatten your base in 5 minutes and then you won't ask about public servers again.