Let's say you are a new player. Oh hey, skyblock this looks fun. So you get to your new island, $0 in the bank and some stuff in the chest. First thing you do is build a cobblestone generator, expand your island, blah blah blah. Eventually you want to make a farm, because you'd like to purchase some items from /shop. Great. Let's make a tree farm.. You dig out some dirt from your island and place it on the cobblestone platform, losing $5000 worth of dirt to the void, and $1200 worth to Clearlag plugin which annoyingly spams chat every 10 minutes.. You start axing down your trees as they grow, very slowly growing your wood collection. You type /kit bone and receive a measly 5 bones to help speed up growth. An hour passes by, you decide you want to expand your tree farm. Great, i'll just buy some dirt from /shop. Uh oh, you discovered a problem. Dirt is $600 a piece! How will you ever afford that! You do the math. Okay, $600 for one piece of dirt. That's only 1.3 full inventories of wood, as wood sells for 15 - 20 cents a piece! You come to a conclusion that wood sells for barely anything, so decide to find something better to farm. You then realise that in order to farm anything else, you need dirt. But dirt is expensive. You ask the playerbase for some dirt, because everybody online is friendly, right? Yes, you're right actually. Only problem is nobody wants to get banned because trading dirt is against the rules, just like sand and lava. You wonder what to do next. Hmm, let's contact a staff member! You live in Australia so there are 0 staff online to help with your problems. Just by chance, a moderator from the US logs in at 3am his time. You ask for help, but he can't do anything to help you because he knows absolutely nothing about Skyblock. You've had enough. You leave the server. For those wondering, this is an accurate depiction of 90% of the new players who join Skyblock. Don't believe me? Join for a day and watch the amount of people who get welcomed by the server, start an island and leave after 10 minutes. You may argue, oh, but it's like every other server. It may be, but why would you want to be like other servers? Stand out. Make skyblock fun not just a huge grind for new players. Voting for the server should also NOT be necessary to greatly increase progression in game. It only brings more players who will leave very quickly. I already know there are going to be people who disagree with me, so if you do PLEASE state your reasoning below, I'd love to hear it.
10000000000000% support also slime farms are broken the slimes barely spawn this was said perfectly man, so many ppl leave and its such a grind to get a farm done on skyblock that it might as well be a full time job if you're taking it seriously
This sounds more like a discussion rather than a suggestion right? Sure you're suggesting change but you don't have a lot of suggestions going on to say what should be changed. That's what crew would find helpful if he does consider change from suggestions (at least it's more helpful for him in the long run). Are you suggesting changes to items in the shop like dirt to lower prices? There are reasons behind why this is high as it leads to farms such as pumpkins which lag the server intensively. That's why those pumpkin prices were reduced to attempt players not to make such huge farms with redstone that lag the server so badly. Or are you suggesting that the server just entirely gets a redesign so we look like those huge custom skyblock servers with npcs and gui menus at every turn? This isn't really crew's style of server (at least at the moment if it does go in that direction). I assume what you're asking for is easier ways to make a profit, but while you can describe how hard it is you also need to give a way to possibly improve or give new ways that could make money. Voting is one way that gives you like $500 per vote I believe which you seem to dislike but it is a money method at the very least, without it you'd be even more in trouble
Thanks for your response Swift. Yes, I do believe prices in the shop should not be as expensive as they are, or alternatively, increased sell prices which will inflate the economy. I don't entirely agree with the lowering of pumpkin sell prices, doing that isn't going to fix the server lag that is already present. Maybe a better option would be to increase sell prices for other types of farms, cactus for example, a farm with little redstone. Only problem is, sand is $800 a piece, cactus gives you 17 cents a piece when selling, so why would anyone go for that type of farm. I think the buy/sell prices in the shops need to be carefully reviewed and altered, considering all types of players, to give us a better variety at make good money. I also believe there should be more ways to help new players get started. At the moment, there's two kits default players can use, sapling and bone, both of which aren't very useful. What about a kit daily, weekly and/or monthly, which gives players some decent items such as dirt, sand, lava, food and minerals. These items are very useful to new players, and still useful to richer players, who are using the dirt, sand and other items to build farms. There's definitely more ways to improve, but we have to start with the basics. Thank you!
I see what you're saying to increase the farmable prices in the shop but as you said besides cactus every other farmable item requires you to use some method of redstone to gain those items if you didn't want to do it manually which most players don't which is why they create these automatic farms to do it for them and then afk at them making it keep the chunk loaded which causes overall lag. If all farmable items were increased in sell price then wouldn't it just increase the type of farms people could make which can increase the lag? Pumpkin, sugar cane, melon.. it doesn't really matter the crop the way to retrieve the crop that isn't manual is all the same, requires either water or pistons depending the block type. If it requires water that means you have to replant it yourself which is probably going to eliminate it from the options if all you need is a piston that breaks the crop and then regrows without you having to do anything. I do believe crew has tried to alter prices for items in the shop many times before and every time he does so not everyone is happy with those changes but he has his reasons for doing so. Donor kits do give out grass and sand, I believe there's likely a logical reason to why defaults don't have such kits as people could just get on a ton of spam accounts and give all of those kits for free and get a ton of free dirt and sand that way compared to it being only for donators. I know moderators could track when people island farm for such materials but it's not the same for items gained from kits that I know of (and if it is it would require an admin to get such logs). Also to go back to your first paragraph I don't believe sand is illegal to trade (while it says it is when you try to drop it) from what I have been told it isn't actually illegal to trade it like dirt or lava buckets are. If I am wrong then blame sando from like a year ago :p.
I had my own suggestion thread on this issue. I definitely agree with this that skyblock need to change and it doesn't draw any new players. Noobcrew has responded to my thread a few weeks back but has yet to put enough effort to address the suggestions made to solve this problem
:L Oh noes. Can it be developed in-house? Or maybe an alternative plugin that is continuously updated would be better. This Skyblock plugin is compatible with 1.16 and is open source. https://github.com/IridiumLLC/IridiumSkyblock https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/iridium-skyblock-1-8-1-16.62480/
ahhh good luck with such a task, skyblock's plugin is custom coded (by our friendly neighborhood matt) that is mainly used on skyblock.net (ours on mv sb may be even more outdated as it's not as updated as .net's is that I remember). i would never diss matt's work of course he's amazing Though I don't disagree that updating would be a great idea for skyblock as the main issue for not updating past 1.8 is the pvp but skyblock is not dependent on combat so it would be fine i don't see 1.16 happening before .net gets it probably.