The thing is is that there's like a thousand other towny servers that don't have a bunch of development issues. I think Meep has hit its high point and unless Fuzzlr and devs want to devote like a solid year to fixing stuff and adding unique new features (custom items, meeble paid ranks, new paid perks), we aren't going to hit that again. So dropping the two towns worlds won't help anything, and you say that they are splitting the population and that is just not true. There is typically 3-5 people in both townsA and townsB and the other 30 are in townsG. If that's splitting to you then you may want to consider taking a 3rd grade maths class.
Edit: I say a year because that's what a lot of other servers did but they still only peak at like 200 players at most! So yea MC servers are a pretty bad investment right now. I like the idea of a non profit server but it just doesn't seem realistic unless it'll be like a hub like Hypixel or something.
~ @junelawnchaired
Those other towny servers tend to generally use plug and play plugins and do very little dev work past that point. Most major hub servers that have a towny do this as well. But yes, when you have people split over numerous servers, then that is indeed splitting up your population and a low population is inherently damaging to a towny gamemode. Do all thirty of you have a town by themselves? Do a few of you have one or two residents? Towny thrives when there is an abundance of players and logic would dictate that should be the first order of business, getting players into towny to improve the gameplay for everybody involved.
The dev itself is not an issue when scaled to the server size, the dev work you guys seem to want is great if this was a server hitting 500+ people with the resources to dev, but MeepCraft is not currently this and I would certainly bet the server couldn't pay for a real tech if it wanted, relying on volunteers to do things in their free time - Which leads to much longer dev time.
The point I was trying to make about a "non-profit" server is not that this server should be one - But that once profit of any kind is out of the picture it opens up a server to try many different things; such as allowing people to donate whatever they want in order to keep the server running. $1 here, $1 there adds up fairly quickly and no doubt MeepCraft would benefit from that. This is not saying "For Profit" is inherently bad, but it seems like the market conditions on this type of server are not the greatest.
Last night ingame people were complaining about perks and I replied that people should just donate regardless of perks if they are truly vested in this server staying afloat - Surprisingly not many people budged on this idea, which shows me the playerbase for the most part cares very little about the welfare of the server and more keen on demanding new things, new perks, staff's time, etc. So perhaps this server's time is over from both the player's perspective and administration's perspective.
Looking back on the past couple years since the server began catering to a younger and younger audience it seems fairly clear this was a bad move, it was not wise to replace the older group of kids with the younger as it's lead to a sharp decrease in quality in almost all aspects of the server. This has lead to a situation where people constantly tattle, insult or bicker with eachother, fail to post anything original or creative to the forums and turns global chat into more or less mindless dribble. There is very little that engages you in regards to other players anymore and I think that is doing the most damage to the server. The age group this server caters to has little to no disposable income, and no reasonable parent is going to drop $160 on a game they already bought, for the most part.
For the most part, the administration (staff) is doing well - albeit suffering from a bit of being lost on where to go from the EULA crackdown, for which I personally think that means going into a completely different direction. Perhaps going back to the roots of simply being a great towny server would be the boon the server needs and bringing the population into a single server - Which inherently enhances towny gameplay.
Maybe you players should start utilizing social media and accessing the millions of MC players out there to bring up your population, the best part of this is it costs $0, unlike advertisements. Then when they join actually be friendly and not bickering in chat about pointless things so it drives those players off.
