Best Posts in Thread: Retaining players!

I would think that retaining players should be a high priority for meepers. The last two times I seen someone request a town was pretty disturbing. The first time someone asked to join a town all they got in chat was a bunch of no, no, no. That person left the server. I was just on and someone asked to join a town and was told that there was a town open and that was followed by "don't join that town". That person also left. Now I know meep is a tight community and that is what keeps players here but the player base is dying, there are 23 people on, on a Friday night. If you don't start welcoming new players and helping them like people used to do there will be no meep. So for crying out loud invite new players to your towns, get them started, help them and maybe more would stay.

 

Nah, she wasn't. She made a perfectly valid point.

What she was saying, nicely, is you players are really dumb for wanting a better experience yet not taking any action to achieve that. Players directly contribute to the enjoyment of this server and you have to recruit and teach newbies in order to get them to stay. Otherwise they leave and ya'll still got no players which means nobody can really build a town (maybe a 3 person village) which defeats the entire point of the gamemode.

Staff could make a town to retain new players but that is added workload. You need someone like me, who made a massive town via spawning crap in and being online most every day, keeping it nice, pretty and fun and then you recruit and talk to anyone you can, then they stay. Then playercount rises, then towny is fun because people are in, you know, towns.

Also she points out that the playerbase kinda sucks, being as young as they are, where they mostly pick on eachother and spam useless things and ultimately turn off a lot of players.

Obviously I'm paraphrasing and more blunt, but that was the jist of her message.

Craps not gonna improve unless everyone does their part. Players have to welcome players and mayors have to teach the new generation of MeepCraft how things work.

 

Being the mayor of one of a large town, I can tell you it's a lot more than 50%. A significant amount of players that join Meep doesn't get to towny, and I know this because I welcome every single person by name, and typing it out already leaves an imprint. I don't see quite a few of the people that I welcomed in tab. Of those that do join towny and do join a town, most stay for a few days - maximum - and then leave. Very few people actually stay for longer. Knowing this, I try hard to get new people involved into ways of getting money and into the community. For a person to stay, they need to be, as Jess emphasized, welcomed and taken seriously, not globally denied by happy pranksters.

 

I mean, one doesn't need forum posts to see the server is on life support, nor have I made any argument it does harm. The worse case scenario is that it does nothing, it's neutral, at that point it is worth the post because I'm positive at least one person read it and took it to heart.

If you are a new player this forum isn't going to turn you off because no new player is going to scour it for an opinion before joining. People log in the server first, and will get turned off by the idiots who like to spam useless crap like "tendies" or you will join in on the idiocy. The forums are a second step when people join, but Jess pointed out that the strongest asset this server had, the community, can and should do more to grow the community. With exception, the community has turned into turd thus it no longer provides attraction to new players.

You are absolutely right many factors are involved with driving the player base down, but Jess is right when when she says the community has the power and ability to grow itself.

I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

 

The biggest issue that has to be solved is gaining a playerbase and the current playerbase is the perfect tool to achieve this. It's really that simple, what Jess said is exactly the issue/solution. Of course this single thread won't magically solve anything but if nobody posts anything then we're in the same boat. My suggestion is if you are tired of seeing the same thread then stop reading them and move on your day but until the playerbase issue and the blacklist issue is solved then MeepCraft is on a path to being shut down because there is a self-constructed ceiling to any success.

Personally, if I were admin, I'd just ban the people who are hampering the effort to retain players and move on my day so it seems some people are lucky. But either way it's an issue that has to be solved because not only does it prevent playerbase retention it had served to drive away more mature players who aren't willing to deal with the ignorance and immaturity of the cited group within the playerbase.

That 95% doesn't matter because the 5% left is still enough people to max the server to capacity multiple times over. Look at the popular hub servers with crap off the website towny with hundreds of players. Those hundreds of players are ripe to be poached by a better towny and decent playerbase.

You're absolutely right that her post will likely change nothing because, as I stated before kids suck, but at the same time there is nothing wrong with what she posted. If you don't like it - Don't read it.

 

Because of personal likes and dislikes, people are always going to judge towns, which are basically forms of similar people grouping together. For example, when I served as a mayor in Delta, many people, including those that are in this thread, have repeatedly insulted our town in global. Of course, I'm sure that most of it was really meant to be directed to buttfly's immature behaviors, but it was really hard for us to get back our good reputation.
Most of the times, town mayors are trying to improve their towns to the maximum possible and to retain larger number of players in their towns. (Unless the town is private for a friend group) I hate to see discouragement resulting from competition. Competition can be used to improve environments, yet on Meepcraft it tends to lead towards personal criticism.
If you have not been staff in a public town, you most likely have no idea whatsoever how it is like to be running a town. How much commitment is needed to taking care of it. Owning a town right now I believe does not make huge profits either. For this, I respect the public town staff greatly for giving up their personal time where they could have made extra meebles to help others be introduced to the community.
Since I am inactive in game, I did not know that things were getting this worse, but hopefully the new tutorial (mentioned in Meep Times) will help us retain more players.

If you think it is funny to say "No" to new players just because, then you are seriously doing harm to the community, more harm than when you spam global. I hope everyone takes this seriously.

 

99% sure that was me that said the last part.

 

A lot of people find towny too complicated a system to figure out; a few get frustrated by the feeling that there's almost no way to get money (should they investigate further they would discover tons of options, but a lot of people don't), and there are probably those discouraged by seeing so little people on, when in comparison with other servers. New people need to know ways to get money, at least to get their balance started up. Meepers need to be kinder, and show that both the system isn't too hard to learn and the community, though small, is definitely worth it.

[edited to clarify]

 

Nice to see that the server is still here, sad to hear that it's declining. I logged in the other day to check things out and see if anyone I knew was still playing, but didn't see anyone on. This is a nice server, and the Towny/economic features made it fun. Hopefully the current player base will rally and grow it back to what it used to be. I'll check in again in a few months and see.