[diamond_boss]

I'm going to crawl out of the woodwork to say three main things.

1.) Yes, actually. Yes, BUT
2.) You uh, might want to leave Lights banned. That said,

3.) the villains on the server gave people a common enemy. Brought a sense of thrill to things. Food for thought.

Clearly this idea is absolutely insane, but it has merit. Unbanning EVERYONE though? Have you ever seen that list? Some graves are best left undisturbed.

This is probably the best critical response to the suggestion i've seen so far. A lot of people don't realize that yes, I did take into account the fact that Rokkr and Intelli run the server etc, etc... and yes, I'm also aware of why many players were banned and that there are very strong reasons why they should stay banned... but I counted that all in before making this suggestion.
First off, in response to gallinka, the reasons for player's bans and so on aren't really relevant when it comes to cleaning the slate. Keyword: cleaning... you don't leave certain spots dirty because they're worse than others. The point of this suggestion wasn't to be critical and pick and choose which people to unban, the point was to increase server population/activity by allowing restricted regulars back on. Like I said, the temporary players who got banned by coming on once and being stupid won't be coming back anyways. I honestly doubt they even care, therefore I also doubt that trouble on the server will really be as bad as some people seem to think.
Now, in réponse to Dj, I get why some people should be left banned. If it comes to that being the deciding factor to whether or not this goes through, then yes, I think it would be good if some players are left out. And yeah, the point you made about having villains around was another thing I wanted to address. Let's all be honest. Nobody really cares about whether or not notorious people play on our server, except maybe a few people. I mean, when Lightbulbs came onto the forums and made all those joke threads for attention, very few people were genuinely upset. In fact, i'd say that a lot of people liked having him around for the fact that, well... he's lightbulbs and either people wanted his attention, or they thought his threads were funny and wanted to amuse the situation.

Finally I just want to say that I was bold enough to make this suggestion because quite honestly, I don't take this server seriously anymore. No offence, I love most of you, but I've been too deep in the amazing reality of my life to care about who plays on here and I'm sure quite a few others share that feeling. It's just a game, and when I am enjoying it, I would at least like to know that the experience is still good (people playing, activity, etc). Hence, I'm playing with fire because i'd rather watch the house quickly burn down than slowly crumble into dust.

[Heatinq]

No for 2 reasons:

#1: In case you haven't forgotten, Intelli OWNs and runs the server (with help from rokkr and all of staff). It is a dictatorship. There is NO democracy as far as these decisions go. Intelli is human and I am sure willing to admit when he is wrong (is he ever wrong though?). I know he is open to suggestions too, BUT his word is final and both him, rokkr and staff make the decision to permaban a player.

#2: The rules on this server are really not that hard to follow. In the case of a ban where an argument was made that the rules were not clear (and I can count on one hand where this has happened) either there extenuating circumstances (the player had multiple bans, etc) and a ban appeal was not accepted, or the ban appeal was accepted after a short punishment period. Permabanned players, on the other hand, where proven to either not be willing to follow the rules or just unable to follow them NOT ONCE BUT MULTIPLE TIMES! This happened to the point were it became a pattern. A simple ban was not enough and thus they were permabanned.

Are there players who could come back after a permaban and follow the rules and make a positive contribution to the community? Probably, but which ones. How do we pick and choose. If we make the wrong call or let everyone back in it WILL have a negative affect on the community and that is unacceptable.

Well It wasn't havoc when MineRealm had 120+ people and there probably was cheaters which staff dealt with.Second, most permabanned people are banned for pvp issues/ xraying or griefing. These are usually easy to deal with, catching xrayed, pvp hackers, etc. I don't know much, but if MineRealm is a privately owned server Intelli can simply reban players that are the worst of the worst cheaters/ rule breakers. This can be an opportunity to revive the server since people say its dead.

[eah]

Are we even sure those banned players would join? A huge portion of the banned veterans haven't posted on the forums in a long time. They gave up, forgot about minerealm, or are just busy with other things - just like everyone who is not banned.

If it's trolls and griefers you want, it would be much more efficient to do paid advertising. Better yet, get someone to do a youtube series on minerealm griefing. That always brings in the baddies.

[dlgn]

3.) the villains on the server gave people a common enemy. Brought a sense of thrill to things. Food for thought.

I think this is actually quite important. Too much drama ruins a server, but a community with no drama is a community with no excitement. Back when MineRealm was at its peak, there were constant disagreements, from one-time things to relatively constant rivalries to outright campaigns of war. And you know what? That was great. Despite all the work it caused for the poor beleaguered staff, it meant that people were invested. It's important to have conflict to keep the community alive, and having a large but familiar community that cares about you, whether they love or hate you, has always been one of MineRealms best features.

Think of a forest. Many of you probably know that completely preventing wildfires is generally a bad idea. Why? After all, you don't want trees to burn down and animals to die. The answer is that it makes way for new life and allows diversity. Furthermore, if you don't allow any wildfires, the forest will often become choked with invasive species and actually be severely damaged when the inevitable fire occurs.

What does this long-winded metaphor mean for MineRealm? Conflict is like a wildfire. While it may cause some damage short-term, it opens up new possibilities, revitalizes the server, and allows excitement and tension to be present without blowing up into conflicts that are too big to be contained.

Conflict drives development and projects; rivalry and necessity are both excellent motivators for new ideas. After all, it's more satisfying to race through the Nether, defeat your opponents, and lay down railroads to your new and improved grinder (now 10% better than x's!), then celebrate with your friends than it is to simply walk through and place tracks to a grinder that's as good as it needs to be and no better.

I think this is especially important to a server like MineRealm. With giant builds everywhere and end-game reached, it's essential that the playerbase has a motivation to continue, and for me and many others, that seems to be gone. We have everything we could really want or need just to survive. We can build just as well in SSP as on MineRealm, and it's no fun working on MineRealm without chatting with friends, or showing off your new building/grinder/music disk collection/noob armor/etc..

Now, to be honest, I'm not sure that unbanning everyone is such a good idea. I think it has the potential to cause much more trouble than it's worth. But what else do we have? The Wilderness didn't work; while it isn't completely abandoned, I (and probably many others) don't find it fun to simply dump everything and start over in a harder environment, especially when I could get stuff far more easily somewhere else. The Mist was more effective in gaining user attention, but while it's fun, it doesn't bring players together for more than a few minutes, nor does it motivate us to make grand campaigns for (forgive my idealism) blood, love, and glory the way we often did in the past. The new map might have some effect, but I don't know if we have enough forward momentum, as a society, to take advantage of such an opportunity—not to mention that I feel very uneasy about making an entire new start, even if the old map is still there. Part of the reason I play MineRealm is because of its sense of continuity, and I'm worried that a new map might break that, both physically and culturally. We could advertise, but I'm worried that if we brought in hundreds or thousands of new players without a reasonably large collection of regular players to anchor MineRealm's culture, the server could change to the point where it's no longer the MineRealm I know and love.

So, what do I say? Well, I'm currently undecided. I see the problem quite clearly, but I don't know if this is the solution. Certainly, we'd be bringing back dedicated and driven people who are invested in MineRealm (because how else would they find out about their unbanning, and why else would they return?). But most (or at least many) of them have no interest in the server's community as a whole, and would quite happily exploit those of us who remain without contributing to the community. After all, there's a difference between "I'm going to expand into contested territory, win over other guilds' members, engage in high-stakes guild politics, pour value into the market by stimulating competitive trade, and engage in passionate, even angry debate on the forums" and "I'm going to grief MineRealm to hell, tear apart all the guilds by making their members hate each other or leave due to harassment, take advantage of the desperation of those who remain, exploit the market's flaws to annoy people and get whatever I want, and troll and harass people".

Socrates used to say that he was the gadfly stinging the "horse" of Athens, agitating them out of their complacency. Of course, Socrates was a mischievous but righteous philosopher, not a driven and competitive gamer, but his point is still meaningful: without conflict and argument, there's nothing for us to do but fall into meaningless complacency. So the question is this: how can we shake MineRealm out of its oversatisfied complacency and rot without destroying the core of what makes in fun in the first place?

~dlgn

p.s. This isn't to say I have no hope. I may not know for certain what we should do, but I'm looking forward to seeing the ideas we come up with. It looks pretty dark from here, but we got through the Great Purges, ☺, and more. I have faith that we can pull ourselves together and do whatever we have to do to revitalize our favorite server.

[diamond_boss]

Don't wanna go off topic on my own thread, but I completely agree with dl on what he said about the drama/competitiveness stuff. Maybe Minerealm just needs a new system or some sort of big new change? I'm sticking with my idea bit please don't think it's the only way. I jut thought that someone has to put up an insanely radical idea and it might ass well be me.

[Seratias]

So, hey guys. It's been a while.

I used to play on MineRealm quite a bit (days, weeks have been blissfully spent here). During my time here, I tried to keep myself alive, keep those around me alive, and do minecraft things, building and battling. For me, MineRealm was never just a place I went for trading and farming; It was a place I went to talk. I would bring chat up when I noticed nobody was talking, and try to run a conversation, even if it was with just 2 or 3 other people. But I knew that it helped, that it was fun, that it was vital.

Then, about a year ago, I started tapering off. My friends didn't like the hard rules that currently existed, which made them pretty much completely reliant on me for diamonds and land. My best friend, the guy who got me into minecraft, was banned (tenshimori/Algeon), probably you guys never knew him, he was a bit more quiet than I. Maca930 was banned and then delared abstinence from minecraft, as he had grown bored of it. I was alone, still too young to interact well with the grown-ups around me.

So one day, I decided a clean slate was what I needed. I sold everything I had, gave away a realm around 225,-225, sold another two for 80k in a bundle, and set out anew with a bit over 100k in my pocket and an uncertain future dangling around me.

What happened? I played, and I played alot, all over again, like in the beginning. The world was mine to survive and shape once again, and I could interact with so many people, though I noticed the community had definitely smallened. Instead of 80 people, there was 40 at peak times, and sometimes I'd think about thi, but then I'd ignore it, I had plenty of people to talk to anyway.

I played, I met some great friends, we built more than ever before together. But then we all tapered off. With school came responsibilities, we wouldn't see one another on, and again I drew disconnected from the community as it shrinked. I joined less and less, and with everything achieved but without the guts to leave it all behind, the world around me fell into disrepair. The builds around me stalled and stopped. The community grew smaller and smaller, and soon there was never enough people on to talk to, just afkers sitting at their farms reaping in meaningless benefits in a world that, once so vibrant and people-filled, had decayed to a husk where money was useless and gold was owned for the only sake of selling it to those who couldn't or wouldn't farm and exploit the code by all means necessary.

So I've been here a long time. I've watched the community at its peak, played with friends at home, and friends on separate continents. I grew careful, tenuous friendships, and watched them wither with neglect like plants, dragged out painfully, slowly dying. I stood at the helm of a glorious build, stars in my eyes, and then let the golden sands of opportunity and joy slip between my fingers. Heck, I don't even know if my realms have disbanded or if I've joined in the last months just to hold on to something I can't even define, something I don't even care about anymore.

But this all comes back to a point: Community. It was never the trading mechanics or the trees and the builds. It was the fact that while trading, I could thank someone, and they would thank me back. That I could show my builds to the people around me, and they'd say "great" or "it's ugly" and I'd respond with a smile or a frown in emoticon form. It was that when bored while mining I could press 'T' and escape my loneliness and interact with jokers jostlers and gods (looking at Intelli), and they'd reply to my smiles with smiles, and we'd share laughs about references or guild chat.

So I say we need to start over, like I did a year ago. We need to unban everyone, advertise and tell everyone, sell votes and donorship for small things (not money, maybe materials like coal or special tags?), clear the map, clean the slate, recruit new admins.

And while I can't guarantee that the stale taste of Minecraft to me will become fresh as spring again (1000+ hours gives you a lot of time to do things), I can assure you that it will be a step forward. If an wizened old boy like me can be persuaded to pick up those wasdies again, then many more will eagerly step forward and run ahead toward MineRealm.

Still, hey, it isn't up to me. It isn't up to anyone else than Intelli. But it is up to me to say how this server shaped me and matured me, taught me to think about the people behind the masks and usernames, to resolve things with nothing but pixels and characters. I know that years in the future, I'll look back on this moment, and all the moments before it leading up to this, and know that community and society can shape. I'll remember that the integrity of a community refusing to conform to the world around it can count for something, but it is the actions of its leaders that will decide whether it ultimately will.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll start a new MineRealm, once this day is gone and done, and I'll build upon the principles I found on these bytes and bits of an adventure.

This was my two cents, and that might be the last two cents I'll ever give. But know that I kept all the cents you guys ever gave me, and that one day I'll pull out all these shiny pennies, rub them, and smile.

Thanks for reading,
Seratias

[Gnotoca]

Needed to think a bit on this one. But in the end NO.

I do not want 5 billion one-block dirt towers and max destruction in public areas ...

[Rick]

Mass destruction and dirt towers gave people reasons to talk and work though.

[Bu1ld0g]

Needed to think a bit on this one. But in the end NO.

I do not want 5 billion one-block dirt towers and max destruction in public areas ...

Have you looked at the map recently?
There are still plenty of nub spires to go round.
Loggers that protected griefed builds due to inactivity and the map wipe are much worse imo.
Takes seconds to remove a 1*1 compared to fixing a whole plot.

[Eetrab]

Those who are banned (especially those permabanned) are usually banned for a very good reason. yes, letting them come back might increase activity on the server, but it would also potentially cause complete and utter chaos, making the game worse for everyone else.

Personally, I would seriously consider leaving for good if everyone was unbanned. Plus, how many do you think would be re-banned almost immediately , or at least within a month? You'd be back to square one.