Eetrab wrote:Over the year and a bit (I joined the forums long after I joined the game), I noticed that slowly, less people were on minerealm. More vets were leaving, especially now, and more problems are arising. Minerealm is a great server but recently, it has become rather...stale. There is nothing new, nothing exiting or pleasing. The biggest events now are the complete dissolving of NTC, the formation and fusion of factions and the occasional banning festival. Minerealm needs something more exiting, like server-wide battles, epic builds and even greater deconstructions (like the great spawn/trade deconstruction) I believe that was the last true great event.
An interesting idea. Earlier this week, I was actually trying to think of "big projects" (similar in scope to the subway) that could create a new activity for people to participate in, and leave the survival map changed in a big way once it's done. The best I could think of would be an above-ground road system spanning the entire server, and that's not even my idea originally (someone else, I forget who, brought it up in a different thread a while back). That would be pretty tough to pull off, though, since lots of private realm owners might want to keep an above-ground system out of their realms even if they're ok with a below-ground subway.
Eetrab wrote:Maybe even start over. Create a second survival server.
Sorry, but that would be counterproductive--if one of the problems MR currently has is a declining number of players, the problem would only get worse if the player base were suddenly divided between two different survival maps. And starting over within the current survival server is (thankfully!) off the table, per Intelli's post a while back about not wiping again.
Eetrab wrote:Many changes are needed though, including a better economic system, and server-wide events.
I don't have a problem with the current economy system, though some additional bells and whistles (e.g. automated player-owned shops) would be nice. If you've got some specific ideas, it would be great to hear them--even if you're not sure about some of the details, a little brainstorming wouldn't hurt. As for server-wide events, that capability already exists, but it hasn't gotten much use. I think the Christmas snowball fight might've been the last time the system was used! If Intelli would open it up to being used for more events (including events run by players, to reduce the extent to which he would have to run things himself), that could also be good.
Eetrab wrote:And everyone who snatched up locations near spawn, STOP TERRAFORMING!!!! Really, the area around spawn is flat. You might as well just start off with a super flat map. Build with the land, make it more natural and in the process, more pleasing ascetically.
Making things visually pleasing is a subjective criterion. Personally, I do like the uniformity of a flat area of land with buildings on it, but Spawn City does take it to a bit of an extreme, with hardly any change in ground level for hundreds of blocks in any direction. The difficulty with this proposal, though, is that it's more difficult to change a terraforming project that's already been completed than to refrain from terraforming in the first place. At this point, to introduce variability into the landscape, it would basically have to be individual players who decide to destroy the current buildings on their Spawn City realms, and artificially create a hill or valley that extends through only a small number of realms.
Eetrab wrote:Change creative. It is a bit of a slump, with endless half-hearted creations (a few are quite impressive, so no offence to them), pixel art and signs declaring their creators name to the world.
It really is. Pixel art may or may not be considered to look nice (personally, I hate it, but there are those who love it), but the signs listing peoples' names in the sky just look really tacky. A few players have tried to address this problem by making their own creative lands (the ones that can be created by donors and veterans) more exclusive to certain good builders and imposing additional restrictions on the quality of builds there. I think those kinds of semi-private creative maps (owned by one individual player, who decides to make it usable to a group of builders) are probably the best bet for making creative better.
Eetrab wrote:But the real problem is, again, the lack of people. There is one easy solution to this: Google "best minecraft server" and the first result is "Minerealm, best overall server". Advertise everywhere!
I don't think that's feasible... due to certain servers that exploit advertisements and realm ranking sites. I've left more than one server in disgust after realizing that they pay their members a diamond a day (spawned out of nowhere, of course) to upvote the server on ranking sites. At this point, the top page on many such sites simply consists of those servers that offer the most in-game perks for help with advertising. As a server dedicated to being legit, MR will never be able to compete with the hundreds of upvotes those servers get each day.
Eetrab wrote:Then again, I could be all wrong. There could be a phenomenon, and thousands of newbies join in a matter of days, factions join together to create the tight-knitted community that I was introduced to (this is much better), and everyone makes a conscious effort to fix Intelli's 'new seed' wipe disaster (sorry, but the effects are still lingering in my home town, Abyssus). So really, everyone, not just the admins, please make Minerealm a more exiting place.
Check back in a month. I first joined MR part way through the summer last year, so I wasn't here last May-June... but I have a hunch that we'll be seeing at least a small bump in the population as primary schools end for the summer and players suddenly have more time for Minecraft. How many of those players would remain even slightly active in September is anyone's guess, though.
Eetrab wrote:I agree. Yes, people should be banned for hacking, but griefing is a different matter. The realm system is supposed to stop griefing, and I believe that if you build a house in a public realm, and it gets raided or something, then it's your bad luck. Admins, of you are reading this, stop being so strict about griefing. 99% the time, it is the recipients fault for being griefed.
How exactly do you plan on making the server better via griefing...?
The Greymarch has ended.