(inspired by dough) So the topic of this thread is the decline of Mineverse, or rather the entire Skyblock network as a whole. Skyblock.net around 2014 used to be filled to capacity, with people buying donor just to get in. Today the server struggles to attain 120 and maintain no less than 50. Skyblock.org, the less popular alternative, still netted around 150 players in 2014. Today its a ghost town, with only 8 players around at any given moment. Our own Mineverse, one of the biggest fish out there in 2014 which netted around 1000 to sometimes even 2000 players, has dramatically fallen below 400 at peak hours. Hellblock is dead. So are most of the minigames (sole exception is bedwars). What I wish to accomplish in this thread is to have an open discussion about how to fix things around here. It's no longer a story of having the server reset, because every time a server has reset it usually results in failure, as issues that caused the server to need a reset still lingered after the reset (ie. Duping in survival and factions, broken tiers and ranks in infection, etc.). Now it is a discussion about how to stop losing players. In my opinion, our main issue is the out of date server. The server still runs on 1.8. 1.10 has been out for 5 months, and 1.9 has been out for a year. No one wants to play on old settings, they want something fresh and new. Why are the servers so behind, you may ask? I believe it is our lack of administration. Crew and Cypriot as a two man crew, with tanner, simply cannot maintain a server of this size on their own. It's impossible. There is no way two men can run Minetime, Mineverse, and both skyblock networks, not to mention skywars.com and their own personal servers, without any issues. They'd have to work around the clock to keep things smooth. Servers our size have administration teams of up to 10. Not trying to throw shade or bash the two owners, I have deep respect for both of them, but it just cannot work like that in a business. I'd like to hear some of everyone else's opinions on how to get this server back up and going again. We need to have a discussion that involves everyone; the staff, the owners, and the community. If this cannot happen, the server will inevitably die. There isn't any sugarcoating it.
It's not just Mineverse that's dying a slow death. Minecraft multiplayer itself has been in decline for the past year. Ever since EULA was put into place, it seems many servers have seen a steady decline. On top of this; Mineverse can never grow back to what it once was. It has grown stale, and the owners themselves don't seem to really care of this fact. The community, since 2014, has grown toxic and hostile. More hostile than a Tumblr page full of edgy transgender weebs on their periods. No matter how many suggestions, rants, and posts there are of this topic - it won't matter. Nothing will change.
Trust issues in my opinion are the main problem. As you states, there is no way 2 men can run 3 servers at one time. If our administration team would put trust in other people to administrate, then Cyp and Crew could focus on other huge problems, for example, how Prison is nearing the grim fate of Hellblock. The lack of trust is slowly going to come back to bite Cyp and Crew, as they realize the server will eventually reach the point when the max number of players for Mineverse is 200, and we all remember when Mineverse was in it's golden days. The Mini-Games were a huge flop for two reasons. For one thing, Mineverse isn't known as a Mini-game server, and because of that there isn't a whole lot of attention towards the Mini-Games. Number two, is that the games themselves aren't original, and are only fun to play for short periods of time. There are certain servers that I'm not allowed to name that do an excellent job with Mini-Games, because when they release them, they are polished and fun to play. but what do i know
Alright, so I'm going to try and be nice and talk fairly about everyone here on my comment so that people understand the issues at hand and not hate on me that I picked on a particular individual or group. To begin, I agree; the server has multiple issues besides a reset. If anything, a reset of all servers should be the last issue to fix. Mainly because, if you reset a server before fixing it, you never solved the problem! The problems are still there even if you reset it! The duping, the disabled hoppers due to duping, the missing chunks at times with new servers (Towny for example), ranks, etc. Fix the issues on the server before you reset. Also, with reset on your mind while reading this, a reset wouldn't be bad for the server. Yeah, it sucks, your prized possession a wooden house that took you 8 hours to build in all is gone. Well, its like a goldfish, it grows old and dies. And just like Mineverse is growing old, its dying as well. With peak hours reaching 200-400 (rounded), the server is in dire need of something or else it might fall like so many beloved servers that fell on the same path we are in. The community as a whole has fallen it seems. The players that once put in so many hours into the server, contributing donations instead of using cheap ways to get Titan, are now gone. The last of us old players int he community are hanging on by a thread of hope for the server, hoping that the server revives itself. Sadly, it may not live another year if the server keeps going like this. Something needs to change before its too late. That being said, a few changes are in desperate need of attention. First off, the staff needs to be increased. No, "Moderators" do not count as staff in this context. I'm speaking of qualified, active, kind staff. I mean no offense, to anyone of the higher staff ranks here and please don't be offended when I say this. But, our top ranked staff aren't capable of handling the amount of work by six men. We got two co-owners, and four builders last time I checked, that's not enough to run Skyblock (both .org and .net), Hellblock, Mineverse, and Minetime. That's not sufficient to run five servers with six men. With that in mind, the work they do is very rushed because of some updates they constantly have to do to keep the servers active and responsive. We demand new updates, new maps, new stuff, but the staff that is capable of producing such requests are few and far between. Now the solution to the problem of the shortage of staff is fairly simple. Look at our suggestions and see how many qualified builders we have. Many of the skilled players we have within out own community could be Builders for the server. Open up public applications and let the community and the staff decide on players that want to be part of the team for non-profit. We know the builders we have now are paid (evidence by a thread made by a builder that left quite some time ago) to build the server, yet they can't do it all in a short amount of time. Look at our community builders that suggest infection maps. They do such a fantastic job and at times make perfect maps that are accepted and implemented into the game mode. They spend hours and hours on these maps, and some of them may be gifted to make maps even faster than most. They do it for no rewards cash wise, yeah there's a rank reward, but the point it is, they spend so much time and effort that they get no reward that matches the amount of time they devoted to these maps. They should be considered for hire to a nonprofit group of builders that have a mission to work together on maps and updates and could even be taught by our hired builders to code and design plugins and game-mode for the server. Heck, the community players could even chip in on suggestions for these game-modes that could spice up the server a bit and make it fresh and original. Not to say the server takes other community's game-modes, but it would be nice to not follow the meta of, "Kitpvp," "OPPvP" "Survival" or even "Towny." To try and not follow the meta and make servers that may be similar to those ideas, but also make their twists and turns to the game-modes and make em original. Original Maps for general game modes are a problem for our server. Now, I know Kitpvp just got a unique map introduced which the community is half and a half on whether they hate it or not, but many other game-modes do need updating. Our beloved OpPvP with a multitude of the population on peak hours is a generic map that is not original. No offense, but I've seen YouTube'rs that play ridiculous videos on the map on OpPvP (In fact I watch SSundee play that map on his personal server in one of his lucky block challenges). Now not to say there is anything wrong with the map we have, in fact, it's rather nice to have a map that largest and that detailed. But, to get people to join and stay on our server, we need uniqueness, not meta. We can't be following the same ideas, same maps, same game modes that other servers make and assume people will come to our server and not the most popular servers in Minecraft. The website. Now, let me get this clear and straight first. The website is beautiful. It's in fact better than MP in PC quality (Meaning, the comment ability on forum posts is easier than MP). But, the detailing of the server and the simplification of the website is rather old. The new generation rather goes towards website that have, 1. Responsiveness (Meaning, they can look at the website on all platforms) 2. Detail (check MP website or even Microsoft for crying out loud for example) 3. Simplification and mobility (Making it easy for the user to access every page very fast and smooth) If a website lacks on all three or one of those qualities of good websites, the website will not get as many people online, viewing, and even making posts as much as the owners want. For example, as a Moderator of Mineverse back in January, I had quite some time of difficulty explaining to new members about how to report a player or ask for help on forums. I had to spend about 10 minutes going through the steps on how to report a player (around ten steps, in which halfway through they got confused on which post to click and copy). That said, not every case was that, but the most simple users don't usually understand how the website works due to it being complicated and multiple folders to click to get to where they want to go finally. In a simpler website, you only have to click maybe three things to get to where you want to go (whether it be forums, reports, news, etc.). As a beginner website designer and my father being one as well (with his many friends being designers too), I know a few things from the people I know about websites. Of course, not all websites are perfect, but I can tell this website could be better and could attract more people to the server if it took a rather opposite direction of the look of the website. I believe that is all I need to speak about the server. The server is failing, we must all acknowledge that even the owner must. If we don't acknowledge the fall of the Skyblock Network, we could never unite as one community and one staff group and the server might as well be doomed. We need to stop pointing fingers at each other and saying "Oh that idea sucks my thoughts is better" or "No, the server isn't failing its just people don't wanna get on" and start working together rather than arguing. That is all for now; I will make a second more detailed post about them. Thanks for reading.
Mineverse perspective - (Not taking into account other servers) Basically about the issues that still linger after resets like duping in Survival, I think that there really needs to be better anti cheats, and other plugins, etc., that reduces chances of duping going to happen. It's not a solution if we reset Survival every time there's a duping case. And the issue is right now it isn't even going to get reset probably... Players from all gamemodes are calling out for resets, but where are they? It's not just resets that need to happen, it's FIXING the problem so that they don't happen again after their respective resets.
This is why I think MV is falling-ish. People are getting bored of it, just because they are Errors/glitches/bugs in popular gamemodes, which have caused people leaving Lag. Just, lag. People are raging because of the hackers. @Auzzi started fishing :t:
I'm confused.... What do you think builders are? You make it sound like builders are the ones who build and develop servers, wrong. There is a sole Mineverse build team, they build spawns, maps, etc. Take it from me, I was on it. You may have worded something wrong but the way it sounds is incorrect. Anyways, builders can get paid but they don't have a specific biweekly check. They get paid per project (meaning spawn, map, etc). Depending on the size of the map, they can earn different amounts of money based on the Owners' judgement. It's not much, by the way. I will not disclose numbers.
Yeah, I kinda wrote that suggestion wrong. Basically what I meant was that the builders we have now, who are 4 at the moment, cannot build what we demand. We want new maps, new spawns, new etc. yet the amount of builders we have cannot build in time what we want. Yes, they can push through and rush a new map within the timeline they may have, but in reality, we can accomplish a lot of what we want for the server, we just need more people to do so. From what I understand our developers are here to develop the server in whatever ways they can. Meaning, they are responsible for game mode design, plugin design, server design, etc. We only got 2 developers as well, which isn't enough to launch the updates we want. It took the developers, builders, co-owners 1 year to build towny the way it is and the server still needs bug fixing. If only we had more skilled builders, developers and may i say co-owners to help move along progress, we could've had towny launched last year within 6 months instead of maybe 6 more months after a year of building.
