Hey hey hey party people.

Been sat on this for a few years now, but ever since the Birdfrock 'incident' a few days ago its become clear to me that apparently one person bringing forward their grievances with the server to the staff can actually have an effect, and while I may not agree with Birdfrock, his reasonings and the staff's response to it , I am very pleased to see the server at least trying to move in a better direction.

While I've decided to not go on a long winded rant about every little thing I deem to be out of place regarding the server, as it is not mine, and my way of doing things is not necessarily the best, I've thought about this particular point enough to think that someone should really say something.

If you're on the forums reading this, I imagine that I would not be wrong to assume that you play the server enough to notice the one of the largest, if not the largest issue with CraftyMynes. The playercount.

As I am writing this, there are currently 2 players on CraftyMynes, not including myself. While CraftyMynes is a rather unique experience in that we have a much deeper community than most, meaning that I can't foresee Crafty going entirely dead anytime soon, a near entire lack of player influx will only continue to starve the server of it's lifeblood.

So, what to do about it?

There is a multitude of things which can be done in order to get the playercount up, but as I said at the start of this ramble, I will be focusing on the one I deem most damning, and it can be quite neatly summed up one sentence.
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CraftyMynes is NOT a vanilla server experience.
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While in the past I have been of the opinion that adding plugins would solve all the servers issues, I am no longer of that opinion. While yes, it would likely solve the lag issues and allow for a higher playercount, I think adding plugins would simply drive away the community that Crafty already has, and throw the server into an even worse state.

The system we currently have with the command blocks (while I can't pretend I properly understand it) I find to be incredibly charming, and 100% makes the server stand out from the crowd in a sea of plugin-riddled survival servers. And besides, after all these years, it would be a shame to start now and cast aside Crafty's unique command-block legacy.

So instead, I will present you with a hypothetical scenario;
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You've decided to go out for the day. It's been a few hours and you've been enjoying yourself, and you notice you're starting to get a bit hungry. You think for a moment, and decide that you're going to treat yourself to your favourite, a nice steak. You wander about for a little bit, looking at different restaurants until just out the corner of your eye you spot a place you haven't seen before. "Crafty's Steaks".

"Perfect" you think to yourself as you go in and take a seat, looking through the menu, settling on the 12oz flat iron. Your waiter comes up and takes your order, and while the place isn't packed, you're loving the ambiance and décor. After a little bit, you see your waiter approaching your table with a plate, and you sit up, looking forward to your food as it is set down in front of you.

But... this isn't what you ordered. Your potato wedges look fantastic, the side salad looks fresh and crisp, but instead of your steak, there's a large slab of cauliflower instead. Just catching the waiter before he heads off, you let him know about the mistake, you ordered the steak, not this!

You prepare for the apology, and to wait a little longer for your actual dish to be prepared, but it doesn't come. Instead, you see a smug grin cross the waiter's face as he pushes his glasses up his nose. "Umm, actually..." He lets out, "I think you'll find that while the word Steak typically means beef, it can also mean just a thick-cut piece of any animal or even vegetable."

You of course are disappointed. You guess he's technically not wrong, but this isn't what you wanted. "But shouldn't you make it clearer? At other places steak just means beef steak, like you'd expect?"

At this, the waiter changes. You can see his teeth grinding, his eyes nearly bulging out his head as he begins frothing at the mouth. You cry out as the waiter punches you in the nose before ripping you from your seat and throwing you out the front door, slamming it behind you, screaming something about not mentioning other restaurants.
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While far from a perfect analogy, I believe it gets my point across. Yes, technically CraftyMynes is a vanilla server, but just because you haven't edited the .jar file does not mean it belongs in the vanilla server list. Commands like .home, .trade and .tp are not vanilla.

I believe that if CraftyMynes was to be advertised on the Semi-Vanilla server-list, it would have a HUGE impact on player retention. Rather than new players joining, looking around at a hub world before pressing tab and seeing all the ranks, both of which famously do not exist in vanilla, and immediately leaving forever because as far as they're concerned you lied to them in order to trick them into playing, instead they would join, see exactly what they wanted to see and begin their adventure in a new server, before later learning that it is 100% command block, and actually get a chance to appreciate how cool that is.
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Anyway, if you've read this far you obviously care for the server, so should you see any gaps in my reasoning kindly tell me why below, and with any luck your solution will be better than mine. Despite it's issues, I am very fond of this server, and this post is my attempt to try and give it a new lease at life, and should someone else have a better idea I would very much like to hear it.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

-BingusIncorporated

Alright alright alright. Must say, threw me for a real loop with the restrictions in place. But I've given this quite a bit of thought and I'd like to believe that I've thought of something which may help out with player numbers.

Votes are important for player numbers. I can't say I know just how important, but I get the general impression that it's very. As such, we need more votes, yes?

I propose an addition to the voting rewards. Firstly there's the Magic Meat and XP, and I say don't touch it. That in my opinion is more or less perfect the way it is, and any changes to that could just be a bit of extra work for no real reason.

However, there is a secondary reward currently in place. I believe after 30ish days of daily voting, you get a reward (I want to say an Elytra + something?). I'm much less focused on that prize, and significantly more interested in the infrastructure surrounding it. It tells me that there is already a system built into CraftMynes that can count how many days in a row you have voted, which is the crux of what I am going to propose next.

I would like to suggest a voter rank, and give it access to the third .sethome that VIPs and above get access to. I suggest that after 10, 15, 20, whatever days of daily voting, this rank is given to the player. HOWEVER, unlike VIP and all of the current ranks, as soon as the daily voting discontinues, the rank is removed and to regain access to the 3rd home the player has to once again vote daily until they reached the required vote streak to regain the rank.

This would do very little to interfere with the current playerbase, and it allows a path to get a third home for players who are not able/willing to put money into the server. It gives a much stronger reason for people to vote while offline, which, all in all should hopefully lead to a sharp increase in votes.

I did my best to work around

@CraftyMyner The systems behind the scenes are so complex that even when I the creator go to change one thing I break 5 others.

That funky little sentence, and this is my best shot to think of something which could be implemented without too many changes to the current system.

Thoughts?

Your beautiful bubbly bouncy baby boy <3

-BingusIncorperated

When the trail chamber update comes definitely wipe. Use that wipe as a big way to get new players hooked with some of these changes

Update the discord, if you want new players to stay discord is pretty much the best way going forward for making them feel welcomed and in a community cause rn that shit is uninviting fr
Add channels in there that players can promote themselves for making team, the more teams the better for building communities, plus there's more big bases to raid
Make channels there too that have bots that post the forum links and a preview image of the post so people can click if they're interested
Hire some fiverr minions too to help out with updating the forums and adding those bots trust

Bring the book back, that shit was so much easier to know the commands, also gives player a immediate way of knowing that theres tp and set thome. Don't do the book tp system tho that shit was tragic keep the one on now

Someone said something about the voting rank and that's a good idea, do it so that its not a one time you get it kind of thing and instead make it so you have to consistently vote and if you miss more than like 3 days in a row you loose the rank and the extra set home displays as "locked" until you get the rank back. This would be like a way to farm votes from the players who arent willing to buy vip but are invested enough to want to keep their rank, plus a 30 day bonus item would be good too.

Do something like the VIP+ lootcrates but a less good version as a reward for voting a week in a row too and promote it all with a big sign that says "Crates" in spawn and a area under it so players can see what they can get making them want to vote for it, trust

Show off the command blocks visually in spawn (or make a fake display) to show how the server works would be good too.

Unban old players from minimum like 2-3 years and back, trust. My main account been banned since I was a middle schooler and I'm sure hella people back then would wanna play again if they saw something like "Unbanned old players" in the forums or on the main server list in Minecraft next to "Just wiped".

Out of all these ideas though, 100% consider the updated discord, it's the biggest thing imo for keeping new players