Currently, controlling our games servers is too hard. If an update is pushed, shutting down servers can cause data loss and loss of server progress. Especially in games such as my own where players will be playing for upwards of 2 hours at a time, shutting down servers can cause issues with people having wasted their time grinding towards something and not getting it due to a server shutdown.
I am proposing the idea of being able to “kill” or lock servers. This will prevent any new players from joining these servers and instead only let them join new / updated servers. This will prevent data loss from shutdowns and stop bad player expierence from older builds of the game.
In my game I had a full server that had been running for 84 hours, and I didn’t want to forcefully shut it down as people could have lost serveral hours of progress.
Allowing us to set servers as “dead” will prevent old servers from going on for this long.
However, another alternative to this is to allow us to create “Public Reserved Servers”. This will allow us to teleport our players to a new server at the end of a round (or something similar) instead of teleporting them to a reserved server then teleporting them back to a normal server, or letting the server just continue in an old build.