Staff decisions about bans have been incredibly questionable, to be honest the fact that Phoenix's permaban was overturned because of a private email exchange between him and Crafty that nobody would ever be able to scrutinize was the seed that really planted my doubts in the longevity of CraftyMynes as a community. All of these haphazard changes to staff policy in a desperate bid to retain the existing playerbase just reinforce my doubts in the server.

It's hard to take CraftyMynes seriously anymore, whatnot with Crafty's inconsistent re-appearances and months-long hiatuses, the general lack of staff consistency (a mod bans for use of unauthorized mods, well established as a permanently bannable offense, then their decision gets overturned by an admin because of a secret "decision" between the admins). We can't level any constructive criticism in an effort to help improve the server because the head guy who has the power to do anything disappears for months at a time, and then writes some long windy response about how he has no time for the server anymore. But he rectifies a permaban almost immediately and very actively communicates in the discord all of a sudden -- yeah, I totally buy that.

Everyone who has participated in running any sizable community knows the key thing to moderation is consistency. Everyone know how they should act and treat others, because they've seen what the staff will otherwise do to rulebreakers, time and time again. The moment you introduce exceptions and favoritism, the whole thing falls apart and nobody wants to participate in the community anymore.

I have literally no idea what will get you banned on CraftyMynes anymore, I have no idea if some dude dicking around with client mods in spawn or Lunar client will get banned anymore. Maybe they will get banned because it's an unapproved mod, or maybe they won't because the staff have all of a sudden decided that unapproved mods aren't allowed except for the ones they like, or maybe it's because there's nepotism in the inner circle of admins because of some secret emails between that person and the owner that were sent. Do the other banned players who spam slurs and sexist shit on the server get a free pass for their behavior by emailing the owner some sob story? This is absolutely not a positive outlook for any new players looking for a stable community to join.

Oh, and before you guys try and go at us because we're Team Eye, at least we've followed the rules, and if we fuck that up we take full responsibility. ;)

lets make a new discord for a server that pulls in like 3 new players per month at most. that will definitely solve the problem guys.

its not that the entire vanilla community has moved on from vanilla smp and craftymynes has done nothing to keep itself relevant.

its not that the past community was alienated away because of issues like lag and game breaking bugs which could have been fixed with a well planned move away from mojang software designed for 11 players (minecraft realms) to competent server software that every other competing server benefited from.

it's not that staff presence has been nonexistent to where i'm willing to bet $1000 that random kiddos have been fly hacking and xraying everywhere on a 1-3 max player server, and that the staff members that still gave a damn before realized these types of communities and servers have lifespans, this one has run its course, and they need to move on.

yeah its the discord, its all the shitposting that happens in it because absolutely nothing else happens in the community. "discard" all of the old players currently in the discord and instead make a new discord so then 20 'people max can join it and it just turns into another ghost town. its not like the server has functioned perfectly well without a discord in the past and in fact was using teamspeak during the height of its popularity.

@Schlocked cm is doomed tbh

^^^

here is why cm is dead

1. horribly mismanaged, staff presence is nonexistent and do not engage with the community. the discord is less active than some 10 member private discord
2. horrible server software, switch to semi vanilla already. many incredibly game breaking things ruining the server experience in the past could've been resolved with a seamless switch to paper or something else actually competent, but there is this obnoxiously obsessive compulsion to stick with official mojang vanilla software. "blame it on mojang" doesnt work as an excuse anymore when there is an objectively better choice to make
3. vanilla minecraft is running out of steam, sorry, pack things up and move on

is there any fix to these problems? in principle, yep, but pragmatically, nope lol. i have exhaustively discussed these issues for the past 6 years or so, especially the semi vanilla change, and i'm always met with the same adamance over and over again. it is literally pointless to mentally invest any further in a server that refuses to change

Yes, because the actual, tangible benefits from using better software outweigh the cognitive dissonance from challenging dogmatic beliefs that otherwise just make us feel good inside.

Should I be blunt? "We are pure vanilla which is good" is textbook dogma that has plagued this server for years now. We keep seeing the negative effects of this belief over and over and over again, and yet we must continue to use Mojang's jar, because this is true and good and unquestionable. Like I said, textbook dogma.

Only like 5 or 6 remotely active players still care, and the player counts speak for itself. Keep in mind this server used to pull in 20-40 players regularly at its peak. The rest of the player base who value an actual better server experience quit years ago and will never voice their dissenting opinions here for that reason.

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.

@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.

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

@babybirdfrock wasn't cheating, big fcukgin diff bozo.

Rule 3

Minimaps are strictly forbidden on CM, cheaters are not tolerated!

is this report just going to be ignored despite the clear precedent that "accidentally logging in with minimap" is still a perma ban?

https://forum.craftymynes.com/8252-hecknup-s-ban-appeal
https://forum.craftymynes.com/6451-jsn-s-ban-appeal
https://forum.craftymynes.com/9811-pffffff
https://forum.craftymynes.com/6724-spiketickett-s-ban-appeal
https://forum.craftymynes.com/9402-lucidletters-ban-appeal