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

inb4 boats man
also its super easy to install something like fabric and then all of the mods specifically to optimize server performance, like lithium for mob ai, starlight for lighting engine, etc with ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGE to existing functionality. there is literally no reason to continue using mojank shitty jar. fabric modders have painstakingly taken the effort to always preserve vanilla code when optimizing this shit game. meanwhile mojang cant even optimize their game for minecraft realms

I agree Crafty Mynes should be advertised as "Semi-Vanilla" since it does have .home and tp commands, which are not pure vanilla.

But i dont agree/think this is the main reason for the player drop.
When we were #1 on most advertising sites, i'v never seen someone log on and be like "oh this isnt actually vanilla, im leaving". on the contrary, i'v seen more players go "hmmm i think i like this better".
Still, i agree, this is lowkey false advertising.

I think player numbers have gone down simply because we are not as well advertised as we were before.
For that we need to encourage more player votes and, i think, someone would need to make a checkup/update on the sites where we are listed, and maybe also geting listed elsewhere.

As for server issues, I would vote for switching to a moded server, to better deal with performance issues, and use these plugins to make our .homes and .tp work, but no more commands than what we alredy have.
This way, we would have better performance, no more command block issues in special areas, and everything else would stay relatively the same.
pretty sure this would help keep players too.

for as long as i can remember, cm prided itself on having the number 1 rated server in the vanilla tab on most server voting sites (mainly mcsl), which probably would have been close to impossible on semi-vanilla. the criteria for being on the vanilla tab was having an unmodified server jar file. seeing as how being #1 in vanilla doesn't seem to be making people flock to the server like it once did, i think improvements to the player experience (i.e. less lag, more player leeway) would be the next choice to bring people in.

Part of the problem is server list sites have allowed modded servers to call themselves vanilla and use that tag in searches, simply because they have a vanilla like survival mode. Doesn't matter that the server itself is heavily altered. And they get hundreds of people voting for them, which shoves us into obscurity. Not really fair, kind of like a superstore smothering out a mom and pop shop by advertising as a local business along side them.

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@CraftyMyner If we go semi-vanilla, it's hard to go back. Do we try to switch categories for a week or month and then make a decision if we see more players?

I think this would be wise. My hypothesis is that we will not see an increase.

P.S: I know I could have just pm'd you my opinion but I figure others might agree.

@CraftyMyner I tried to do something good for the community, it was probably short sighted, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I didn't foresee what was going to come next. It felt like I just said a racial slur on twitter, pretty much everything I did was contested. People, including me, were made fun of in the forums. I don't believe in myself anymore. I do not understand the community or the game well enough to make correct decisions. I tried to take advice from staff and other players but I am still lost.

Just a pre-lude to your questions, don't be too upset, and don't worry. In regards to all the recent kerfuffle I know that for me, and I am going to assume others, it was all a case of timing. I know you were only doing what you believed to be best for the community. But from the point of view of the player I saw basically no changes for literally years, despite raised concerns, and then suddenly one person starts to complain about an issue which next to no people have actually had, and within hours the owner, almost always silent, makes huge changes to the server. For me at least it very much came across as a slap in the face to anyone else who's ever suggested any changes to the server. I think J_a_r_d said something similar in the (now deleted) chat under BirdFrocks post.

Now I've had a bit to calm down I think the changes that were made were actually pretty sensible, just implemented in a rather rushed way. And even then, as I said at the start, It's really nice to see actually changes for the better, even if the first few steps were a little wobbly.

@CraftyMyner If we switch to semi vanilla, all the work I did could be replaced with a few plugins that take seconds to install. That emotionally hurts. It's like entering into a car show where everyone has a sports car and I have a go-kart that was built in the backyard with my dad when I was a kid. It feels out of place. I know I can keep what we have but it's going to feel a bit jank when compared to the offerings available with plugins.

Personally, (judging from other replies my opinion is far from unanimous) I would like to keep the command blocks, as I put originally,

@BingusInc 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.

I very much like the analogy you used with the Sports cars and the Go-Kart, I think it almost perfectly sums up the server, and if it's any consolation, I find that the heart of the server really shines through, and I thinks that's why CraftyMynes has the deep, long lasting community that it has. I find at least that keeping it command block helps to retain that nostalgia I have for Minecraft throughout the years.
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Now then, this is going to be a little difficult now, as I won't lie, I simply hadn't considered

@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. As such I'm not really sure what to suggest, because as you say, not everything actually can be implemented properly without issue, and lacking your unique knowledge on the server's inner workings I simply do not know what is a simple request and what is not.

Instead, I suggest that you begin with something that can be changed a lot easier (at least as far as I am aware) the Forums.

People have been very good about sharing thoughts in these comments so far, so I hope that sentiment remains. If a voting mechanic/section could be introduced to the forums any ideas that you see which you think may have some merit behind them could be put to the face of public decision, which and much less likely to go down poorly, and it also lets you see which decisions are controversial ahead of time, saving a situation like last time.

@CraftyMyner I guess the few questions I have are:

Is the lag really that bad, do we even have enough players right now to cause lag?
Is there something we are missing that would make a much bigger difference than semi-vanilla in terms of player retention?
If we go semi-vanilla, it's hard to go back. Do we try to switch categories for a week or month and then make a decision if we see more players?

1) Honestly? Not really. At peak times I can see some strain, but you're right, we rarely have enough players for it to be an issue, however if we can get an player influx again it will become one.

2) Not as far as I am aware. Not to say that there isn't one, I am simply not able to spot it myself, hopefully other answers will prove more fruitful.

3) I think that's an excellent idea, it would be very useful to test if it actually makes a difference.
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To finalise, much like yourself, when I first started playing I was a mid-teen, and now as an adult with a career and other responsibilities, it's harder and harder to truly unwind and find time for the things which bring me so much enjoyment. It's because of that I've been going on these tirades, because I truly believe that CraftyMynes is something special, and I think it's worth my time to attempt to stop it from fading into obscurity.
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Forever your's Crafty <3

BingusIncorporated

I’ve always liked CraftyMynes because it is vanilla. I think if you decide to take it semi-vanilla it’s going to be a slippery slope with people wanting ever more and more plug-ins.
If you want to boost membership I would recommend boosting motivation to vote. I remember for example when we used to be able to purchase elytra by spending vote credits.
In the same vein but a slight tangent, have you ever considered ban forgiveness? I love that cheaters get banned so reliably (as least from my perspective) but I also believe that many of the offenders could be reformed if given a chance. What do you think about a year long ban vice life?

I'm with Timmy on this, I like that CraftyMynes is genuinely vanilla. Most of the core players like that it uses the genuine mojang jar.

We went round this loop maybe 4 years ago. We had a vote and semi vanilla was seriously considered but I think you would lose as many players as you gain.

There is confusion out there as to what is vanilla. Vanilla is in a way what you make it. Teleports and homes don't make it not vanilla and let's be honest we enjoy those facilities.

As for why numbers have dropped, its a combination of things. They always do after a few months of a new map, as core bases are built and boredom sets in. This new map we had a massive no of past players return and it was great, but its September now and schools and university term is starting. I also know we lost some players to Baldurs Gate! Mainly though the recent exodus I'm sure is due to the amount of griefing. I remember myself leaving for a month before i could face starting again after my base was griefed, it is hard to get motivated to start again.

Getting new people to join is mainly down to three things - votes, critical mass and welcoming. People come on the server because of the first two. They stay when they feel welcome and make friends.

So how
to get more votes. Personally, I would love to get rid of phantoms for votes! Rewarding top voters?

Critical mass - players don't join if they see 0 players on the server. They may as well play sp. They start to join if they see 3 or 4. Maybe some of the staff and loyal players can watch for the numbers being low and join even if they are mainly afk or just for a few minutes.

Welcome. Making sure to say hello and help new players. Taking time to chat to people. Everyone can help with this. You can also invite your friends.

Crafty is very kind in keeping this server going. I am sure he subsidizes it hugely. And whilst he may not be obviously visible to you all I can assure you he is available when needed and does take everyone's suggestions seriously.

@TimmyBoyT I’ve always liked CraftyMynes because it is vanilla. I think if you decide to take it semi-vanilla it’s going to be a slippery slope with people wanting ever more and more plug-ins.
If you want to boost membership I would recommend boosting motivation to vote. I remember for example when we used to be able to purchase elytra by spending vote credits.
In the same vein but a slight tangent, have you ever considered ban forgiveness? I love that cheaters get banned so reliably (as least from my perspective) but I also believe that many of the offenders could be reformed if given a chance. What do you think about a year long ban vice life?

I wholeheartedly disagree with your hypothesis that it would become a slippery slope, as the main reason to become semi-vanilla in the first place is to deal with the inadequacies of the vanilla server jar in terms of performance. The server would, and should, stay essentially a survival server. I don't think anyone would even suggest plug-ins on the server, not that they'd ever even be considered.

How would motivation to vote increase membership? Cm is already #1 in the vanilla category on mcsl, so this does nothing

I do think that the ban forgiveness is an interesting idea. I've always found it funny that cheaters were allowed to come back on alts and never the originally banned account. Sort of a "if you have money and/or you're not a kid with no job you get to come back" situation.

@Tez1010 I'm with Timmy on this, I like that CraftyMynes is genuinely vanilla. Most of the core players like that it uses the genuine mojang jar.

We went round this loop maybe 4 years ago. We had a vote and semi vanilla was seriously considered but I think you would lose as many players as you gain.

There is confusion out there as to what is vanilla. Vanilla is in a way what you make it. Teleports and homes don't make it not vanilla and let's be honest we enjoy those facilities.

Getting new people to join is mainly down to three things - votes, critical mass and welcoming. People come on the server because of the first two. They stay when they feel welcome and make friends.

So how
to get more votes. Personally, I would love to get rid of phantoms for votes! Rewarding top voters?

Critical mass - players don't join if they see 0 players on the server. They may as well play sp. They start to join if they see 3 or 4. Maybe some of the staff and loyal players can watch for the numbers being low and join even if they are mainly afk or just for a few minutes.

Welcome. Making sure to say hello and help new players. Taking time to chat to people. Everyone can help with this. You can also invite your friends.

The jar being vanilla is essentially just aesthetic for you then, and even if it improved performance you would be against it?

Vanilla is, technically, an unmodified server jar. If you asked a player though, they would just say "no commands, sethome, or things like that," so someone wanting a vanilla server would not make a scene because the server jar is modified.

2 of the 3 things you suggested to increase player count are responsibilities of the players, which in my mind, makes no sense. It's up to the people that run the server to attract and maintain a player base. The players that are on the server now are the product of that effort. The third thing you mentioned, votes, I already explained above.

Votes would matter more though if the server was semi-vanilla, as it would be in a newer, more competitive category. So I would say if the server was to be changed to semi-vanilla, increase voting rewards.

@Tez1010 Getting new people to join is mainly down to three things - votes, *critical mass*

Critical mass - players don't join if they see 0 players on the server. They may as well play sp. They start to join if they see 3 or 4. Maybe some of the staff and loyal players can watch for the numbers being low and join even if they are mainly afk or just for a few minutes.

I agree with critical mass being a factor (in fact I would argue it's the most important factor), however the threshold is empirically not 3-4 players. We should otherwise be seeing brand new players join literally all the time because the server always has 3-4 players online on average, and a handful of those should be sticking around. But they aren't and the server hardly ever reaches above 10 players, I was surprised when I saw it reached 14 at one time but I haven't seen that number since. In my opinion that threshold is around 15-20 regular players.

Regardless of where that threshold is, there's a major antagonistic force against player retention and growth that prevents the server from going above 10 players, which you might have already guessed is the Mojang server jar. It's designed for Minecraft Realms numbers of players which is 11 max; Mojang is financially incentivized to optimize for this target since Realms is their first party paid hosting service.

We have seen it, time and time again, over and over again, that when the server has 15 players all operating in independent base chunks we start seeing extreme server lag. Every time there's a map reset the server lags to hell and back because there's like 30 people all loading independent chunks.

Critically is good and all, but when there's an opposing force conveniently above the criticality threshold that makes new players quit because they don't want to play on a "laggy, crappy server," suddenly criticality, player retention, and welcoming means squat. There's even a thread here that specifically petitions to switch to semi-vanilla to fix "extreme server lag" as one of the reasons.

I agreed with the past two posts, made by Shlocked and jard.

I’d like to add one thing though, more on the “vanilla” gameplay aspect of things. Which I’d argue is more important than being vanilla in definition. There’s a feature on the server that is in place because thunder cannot be enabled due to an exploit. Thunderstorms. It’s a very important part of the game and makes things like certain Trident enchants and Lightning rods useless. Also because of this, it cuts out a feature in the game which allows you to make multiple unique mobs. The most important being charged creepers. This is because they have a special ability to drop another mobs head when they explode said mob.

“But Crafty already has a solution to this”

Yes, and to be brutally honest. A bad one. I can confidently say throughout hundreds of hours of gameplay over the past year or two I’ve never seen a single charged creeper. It’s all luck based. The only way I’ve found to get these heads is getting a rank which is placed behind a paywall. Which is a bit unfair

And again, I know crafty mynes isn’t really “vanilla” when it comes to a gameplay’s perspective, but if you are even going to use the word vanilla and can’t come up for a better solution for disabling things. Just call yourself semi vanilla and just enable the thunderstorms.

@JackyBoy__ I agreed with the past two posts, made by Shlocked and jard.

I’d like to add one thing though, more on the “vanilla” gameplay aspect of things. Which I’d argue is more important than being vanilla in definition. There’s a feature on the server that is in place because thunder cannot be enabled due to an exploit. Thunderstorms. It’s a very important part of the game and makes things like certain Trident enchants and Lightning rods useless. Also because of this, it cuts out a feature in the game which allows you to make multiple unique mobs. The most important being charged creepers. This is because they have a special ability to drop another mobs head when they explode said mob.

“But Crafty already has a solution to this”

Yes, and to be brutally honest. A bad one. I can confidently say throughout hundreds of hours of gameplay over the past year or two I’ve never seen a single charged creeper. It’s all luck based. The only way I’ve found to get these heads is getting a rank which is placed behind a paywall. Which is a bit unfair

And again, I know crafty mynes isn’t really “vanilla” when it comes to a gameplay’s perspective, but if you are even going to use the word vanilla and can’t come up for a better solution for disabling things. Just call yourself semi vanilla and just enable the thunderstorms.

This still wouldn't solve the issue of the exploit itself so i'm not sure where you were planning to go with this. I've found several charged creepers, generally in highly populated areas like spawn city and whatnot. Although I have a suspicion that the charged creeper spawns can be taken up by the multiple GP farms on the server, as i've seen several in falling GP farms that survive because of their greater health. Something that'll be looked into. At the end of the day as a vanilla server we're more at the whims of mojang than some.

Sadly it isn't true that there are 3-4 players on all the time, it is often zero apart from evenings in the US.

And yes whilst my suggestions do need players to help, I would expect that to be mainly staff.

As far as vanilla is concerned, it isn't an aesthetic thing, it's a geek thing! Some of us just have that mind set. It also means you can update the day the new version comes out and are not dependent on others. We do get players come on and go oh no homes or tps that's not vanilla and just log straight off. Each to their own.

Would going semi vanilla help. Well it would probably improve performance and some cheats would be prevented. But there are options out there - semi vanilla and more 'vanilla gameplay' . The semi vanilla I think is most comparable with CM and has been going a similar time has 3 players on at the moment, the same as us and generally has similar nos. As far as I know that has stayed with homes, tps and not much else.

On charged creepers, we get loads in our mob farm. Simply build a general mob farm and a way to separate out the charged creeper and its target.

CraftyMynes is Crafty's Mynes and comes with all Crafty's geeky facilities. As for ranks, it costs a fortune to run this server every month and people need the incentive to chip in, the most effective one being extra homes, I don't know a busy server that doesn't have homes and tps apart from no grief, where you can have a smaller map.

Pardonning cheats is an interesting one. I have often wondered about a 2 year amnesty. Mainly because most cheats are very young and a couple of years makes a big difference. Allowing people back on alts has pros and cons. And yes I agree it favours older/wealthier players. I doubt pardonning historic cheats would bring players back and more likely would upset those that don't cheat.

@CommanderCat_ This still wouldn't solve the issue of the exploit itself so i'm not sure where you were planning to go with this. I've found several charged creepers, generally in highly populated areas like spawn city and whatnot. Although I have a suspicion that the charged creeper spawns can be taken up by the multiple GP farms on the server, as i've seen several in falling GP farms that survive because of their greater health. Something that'll be looked into. At the end of the day as a vanilla server we're more at the whims of mojang than some.

Sorry for the slow reply. It was meant to demonstrate a small but important detail of the game that is no longer vanilla because of being more vanilla in definition.

From a pragmatic standpoint I believe the server's current playstyle/experience skews things far more in the semi-vanilla direction than plugins and mods which fix the game's issues ever will.

Ordinary players aren't going to care about things like thunder hack being patched with a plugin (because they're typically not cheaters), insta-kill bow hacks being patched with a plugin (because they're typically not cheaters), or server lag being optimized (because less or even no lag benefits the vanilla experience).

Things like ranks, homes, .commands, custom spawn, monthly CraftyCrate giveaways, server jails, minigames, etc, even if they are *technically* implemented with command blocks, third party software running in the background, and external web APIs, are far more likely to be noticed and singled out by players as being "semi-vanilla" like. The standard Minecraft/Minecraft Realms experience simply doesn't provide any of these features.

To rephrase things in a more conclusive way, I think it's okay to be semi-vanilla with plugins and lie about it. The server lists don't care anymore as Dennari alleged in this very thread, so that diplomatic excuse is gone. And it would be a white lie anyways, because regardless of semi-vanilla status the server still wouldn't go out of its way to create an experience far removed from vanilla that it would scare off players looking for a SMP experience.

As long as the semi-vanilla things work invisibly in the background to benefit the vanilla experience of the player base, this single aspect doesn't detract from being "vanilla" at all, and nobody should really care about it unless they're just dogmatically opposed to it.