Originally posted by Cobretti:

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.

And all of that can be alleviated by intelligent coding. The hardest part of any of this would be to figure out a smart way to handle player building rights, and what an admin could do to allow a player more room if they wanted to expand.

When a 50x50 or larger (let's face it, we'd all need more room than 50x50) chunk of the world, from top to bottom, can only be built on by a certain player.. no one's coming in to smash your building. To add security to that, block destruction rights would also ignore any damage dealt to blocks except by:

* The player directly
* Weather conditions/actual monsters

To prevent monsters from being kited to bases, you'd have to create safe zones as well that would either entirely repel monsters, or kill them instantly. Could do this with higher-tier Wards that could be made in-game by the player, or via admins on the server. Either way is easily possible.

Point is: it could all be done flawlessly with some intelligent coding. However, you have to consider that Unity could be holding them back technically, and also that multiplayer and its perfection is probably the last thing on their list of to-dos currently. Without having someone willing to code all of this for them on the side or something, it won't be coming to fruition any time soon I'd say.