My rant

I've been Meepcraft-ing for quite a while now. I've met a countless number of people, met and been staff, learned about things I probably shouldn't have, and done a few things I shouldn't have. I haven't played in quite a while, but recently, I came back to see how things were doing. I came back to a mess.

The community is still going strong with many avid fans of the server still playing both to play, but mostly just to play with their friends. The game itself isn't as popular. With an owner that is busy with life, a lot of things just aren't getting through. Klutch and the other admins are working hard to get things through, but in the end, EULA and other features really destroyed a large portion of the server. With so few people on the server, it's not as fun to play for the game because there is less people to trade/sell/buy to/with. I understand that the server just released a new towns world recently, but people have school to attend to and jobs to fulfill.

In addition to this, I see a bunch of ideas on "pending," yet all ideas that go through are unfinished/bugged out.

My solution: Devote people to doing specific tasks. I understand Meep wants to be a jack-of-all-trades server with mini-games and stuff like that, but we're The Number 1 Eco Server Ever, or so I thought? Fuzzlr needs to appoint someone with as much power as he does, the admins just don't have enough. People are still donating, yet where are the funds going to? Staff should be a little more transparent about where things are going in my opinion.

We're a community. We're not some upper/lower class in society. We're a large family and we deserve to know what's going on.

 

Right now the goal is to get new jobs up.
After that, no idea. But I'm going to assume, and hope, that stuff is going to start getting fixed and worked on.
I believe boosters would be next.

 

I think that's important that one job be done at a time, and that one job should be maintained until the end. No sense in adding things that people don't want, just to have them get used to it and having it die 4 months later (Infected, CTF, other mini-games)

 

if you want to see a better list of planned additions and fixes, you can look on our trello - Trello
It's also organized, sorta, with high and low priority tags (red = high, blue = low)
Almost everything is put there, the only things that aren't are stuff that players could exploit... for obvious reasons.

 

We are with out a doubt the most transparent minecraft server around. We cant be any more transparent than we already are. Its literally impossible. We dont get the funding to pay techs full time so we are making do with what we have. Boosters should be #1 priority at this moment. Jobs is almost complete but is being held back by me to get the final values right.

 

it's kinda hard to give your mods/supermods perms or access to all these things since how much can you honestly trust these people over the internet

this is a profitable business for fuzzlr and giving out perms willy-nilly is going to going do to the opposite of helping the server grow

i believe there is a lot of stuff admins cant even access and i dont know how one goes about fixing this

i believe the reality is that the "donations" are just barely covering the upkeep of the server machines, but again this is just an external view on this whole issue

 

A lot of this could honestly be done by random players with nothing better to do (namely, me). I know a lot of past staff did this, where they had volunteers help out. If staff needs help, I'll be available until late Jan

 

the main hold up is with actually implementing things which requires a dev who needs to be 1) good at coding 2) trusted enough to not steal everything and start a different server or something. the ideas are there tho

 

Why would one even bother with any development at this point and time? It's nearly 4PM EST and there is less than 30 people on - It seems that should be the main focus, bringing in new players, even if that is cause to stopping any and all development. Additionally you're trying to split those 30 people inbetween 3 town game-modes, and a handful of mini-games.

The front page of discussions is literally like 10 threads of the same exact thing, all pointless, and there is nearly no real discussion on anything contained on the forums. That is because the server traded populations when they began cartering to the lowest common denominator, young children, who add very little to the entirety and are restricted in both playtime and money and in the pursuit of doing this driven off most young-adult players with free-time and generally disposable cash.

Perhaps what the answer is, is to drop all the pointless gamemodes and 2 extra townies and try to focus on 1 thing and become successful in this rather than try to do everything and fail.

Looking from the outside the answer seems simple to me: Drop the mini-games that offer no real new players and bring in almost no donation money. Drop the 2 useless towns that split your population and begin focusing almost solely on towny, the one game-mode PROVEN to make the server successful. Doing otherwise is being just as dumb as Trump.

Don't blame the staff though, they have almost nothing to work with at this point, anything they do sits in the balance of "wait and see" at this point and that doesn't change very quickly. If I were a betting man, I'd say the days of huge minecraft servers are nearly over.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 12, 2016, Original Post Date: Dec 12, 2016 ---

EDIT: FOR PROFIT LARGE MINECRAFT SERVERS are almost over. I suspect a non-profit orientated group of people could easily make a big server, relying on only player donations to only keep it up.

(The Ark server I'm on accepts donations of $$, $$ to charity, or time volunteered to charity. In the month I've been there, has done more good than any MC server I've seen in the couple years I've been around)

 

I Agree, but a lot needs to be fixed. A simpler tutorial, for example, is something a volunteer could do that would help new players.

 

This is already something several players are doing already, myself included.

 

This. Golden. Af. Make a suggestion and change trump to Hillary

 

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.

 

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.

 

I fully understand your reasoning, but I just don't think that will work. The issue is not that new players don't join, it's that they don't stay. We have to continue development, because otherwise we're left with absolutely everything being broken, and current players get bored. We cannot possibly hope to gain players if we can't keep the ones we have. Jobs and bug fixes need to be #1 priority, because new players join, and see people talking about things being broken. Why should they stay if they feel like the content of the server isn't going to get better? Fixing things keeps current players happy, and creates the foundation for new players to join in.

I agree. At this point, it's really up to players to help the server. If you really like it here, tell friends, tell family! The game is much more fun with people you know, and I quite honestly think referral is the best way we've gained players. Advertisements have only brought players in for a short time, then they all leave when the ads end.

 

When you realize bickering about this in some kids thread won't change anything still lol >>>>>>

actions speak louder than words y'all. don't act like you don't have the hundreds of suggestions that can turn this server around

 

Of course there needs to be some development. The issue I think is the want to be development X number of projects, leading to nothing being done. For example: Jobs, is there not a already developed plugin that exists? What is the advantage of having a custom jobs that does not work compared to an already existing and tested plugin? There is no point in reinventing the wheel, one should not be custom to merely be custom, one should get the best solution for a problem. A free existing plugin is just that.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 13, 2016, Original Post Date: Dec 13, 2016 ---

Except there are already hundreds of suggestions pending to be done, right? The issue is this is not a server with 700 people anymore, it's a server with 10 people on currently. You don't need suggestions, you need bodies.

 

I mean, when I started we didn't have all sorts of cool stuff. We have a towny gamemode with a ton of players - it was very fun.

Minecraft on reddit • /r/Minecraft
450,000 users currently, 900 of them online currently.

Making it so towns can have residents = cool things.

I get your point and agree with it, but dev can be done really cheap and quick if you just take existing solutions and apply them - Not try to create your own which inevitable requires massive upkeep, leading to long periods of it just not working.

If I had $1 for everytime I've ever had to say "<plugin> is currently broken" I could buy this server.

 

no one is gonna stay without suggestions ya goof