Having been on and off this game several times over the past year or so, I find it frustrating not being able to save anything in perpetuity. I tend to take long breaks from the game and the world gets cleared if I don’t visit regularly and/or keep paying for premium when I’m not using it.
Ideally I’d like to see a system similar to Minecraft, where you can pay for a server that your friends can log into any time, or play locally and invite your friends to your game. I don’t know what the performance impact of running a server on my phone would be like, but it wouldn’t cost me anything to run it on my desktop.
Obviously self hosting carries the potential to cannibalize revenue from premium servers. Perhaps a one-time fee to get the ability to register a locally hosted server with the game? You could make it completely off menu with a web portal for payment and setup instructions and everything.
No. We do not have that. The way private servers work right now, you are paying for server time in a datacenter. Self hosting is running the server on your device or local network. Try turning off data/wifi and boot up your private server and tell me how that works out for you.
Okay, so I’m talking out my butt apparently. I don’t generally play on my own server, I have a couple of times, and I just checked and there is still all my progress as far as I can tell. My main complaint was really borne out of the fact that I can’t boot up my friend’s servers after their subscription runs out. I was overreaching the false conclusion because in the server settings, unvisited areas of the map are cleaned at minimum monthly.
I still want to be able to self-host a server regardless.