Not Planned Minecraft - Suggestions for 1.17

[nonya]

Introduction
As 1.17 has arrived upon us, so has the anticipation for the new map for the 1.17 server. As this time approaches us I would like to introduce several suggestions that I believe would have a positive impact on the server. Please note that these are mostly based off of my opinion and it's incredibly likely what I’m saying is absolutely crazy.

The New Player Experience
Firstly, I would like to address what I call “The New Player Experience”. This is in reference to how new players interact with the server upon their first time joining. Speaking with many others that span from multiple divisions, I have found that this issue is a common occurrence among new players. The primary reason for the poor new player experience in my eyes is the starting spawn. A spawn should be designed as a hub for people to interact with others and gain information about the server they are playing on. From what I can see, this is none existent. There are no rules for players to read upon joining, no information about events that happen on the server, and no information regarding useful commands that players should know. The rules not being presented to a new player is problematic because it does not properly inform them of the expectations they might have for the server.. I believe that when attempting to nurture a community, setting the tone for the expectations for how things run is very important in that regard. Next, the lack of information on helpful commands for the server I believe makes getting new players incredibly difficult. This is due to the way spawn is set up. For example if a player is unaware of the /rtp command, it makes it nearly impossible for the player to escape spawn and its massive land claim. Other commands such as /pw would help navigate the player around the world. These are just a few of the commands that I think would help provide new players with the steady introduction to the server. I say this because even as I joined as an eG I found it very confusing and unwelcoming to a server of which I couldn’t access shops and couldn’t get out of spawn to start actually playing.

The Economy
I believe that the current way the economy is setup makes it so that the benefits are seen in the short term but the cons are only seen later. This is due to the economy largely being based on luck. Players having the capability to win tens of millions of dollars from a single key may seem like an amazing thing at first, but ultimately leads to a less interesting economy. This is due to the fact that giving access to all of this money based completely on luck effectively removes the entire point of having a player run economy. I can speak from experience that being given everything without doing any of the work required makes the game more cheap and less rewarding to play. A player could be active for one hour and with one lucky spin, could have a larger bank account then the majority of the server. Instead of building your house out of diamonds and feeling as if you accomplished this based off of the hard work put into mining or gaining those diamonds, you just end up being thankful you got lucky with those keys you received from that event. All in all I think there is little to no long term benefits to making the economy solely based on how lucky a player is and severely cheapens the process of gaining money through player shops and resource gathering.

Player v Player combat
I’m not really sure why PvP is disabled on the server and I’m just there are good reasons as to why this is the way it is so I am going to keep this short. But from my eyes removing PvP from a server is removing one of Minecrafts core features. Removing this not only makes player interaction much more dull, but also leaks into what events are beeing hosted on the server. While the current set of events are enjoyable, the amount of events that could be hosted with PvP enabled would greatly improve the event attendance and player engagement. Unfortunately, with PvP being off, the general idea of having it in events becomes almost unrealistic. I think that most players that are interested in PvP aren't expecting to have an all out PvP server where everyone is fighting with each other, but just having an additional feature that would greatly enhance the experience. Things such as keeping inventory and providing the option for land claims to have PvP disabled would make everyone happy.

Conclusion
All in all, this is obviously coming from someone who is not familiar with what happens behind the scenes, but what I have described to you is based on my experience and what I find would lead to improved player recruitment, player retention, and overall higher quality server for outsiders and insiders of eGO. This is just my way of trying to make the server a more enjoyable place (which I understand is incredibly objective).

Additional Notes
Some additional notes is I'm very excited to see what happens with @Goosesk suggestion for a build team. Also as I discussed earlier I believe that encouraging players to explore spawn by making mazes, different courses (basically activities that do not require ECs), and making it so the /warp ec is somewhere that can be accessed in spawn would also be a positive improvement IMO.

 

[GrumpyCatJen]

Hi Nonya, We really appreciate your detailed suggestions. I can assure you that most of your ideas or concerns are in development, though I cannot say which ones because that might reveal too much about some exciting plans we have for future servers. I am going to tag our Senior Managers, and we will review to see if we can incorporate additional ideas. Tea BUTTERLOVER7683

 

[BUTTERLOVER7683]

Hey, nonya!

It's difficult to give you a team statement without actually having a full-on discussion with the rest of the team, but I can offer you my tentative personal opinions on everything you mentioned. To make it easy, I'll just go down the list.

The New Player Experience
100% agree the new player onboarding is pretty bad, but this has more to do with us having to adapt to a new technical system at the time making this process more difficult. In the previous map to this one, the spawn had the list of rules in big images and /help would provide you with a nice comprehensive guide on what you could do on the server. We can and will do better with this going forward.

The Economy
I don't want to say too much here since this is definitely Tea 's wheelhouse, but I'd have to agree that the economy definitely feels centered around crates. We've got player shops and shops run by Tea (APPS and such), but for perspective, I pretty much never used those shops and just by using keys, I was at one time the richest person on the server. Granted, other people were actually spending their money, but I think the point still stands. I think going forward, we can put more emphasis on the "hunter-gatherer" economy rather than the "gambler's" economy. We will likely still keep crates in some capacity to keep voting rewards spicy, but you won't just get 10 mythical keys for a well-timed sneeze. (We'd actually love to hear some suggestions on how to make voting rewards super enticing without maybe breaking the economy. It's a question we've been thinking about for a while!)

Player v Player combat
This one's a toughy. I don't ever remember a time PvP was enabled on the server. This is largely because we advertise ourselves as a server that offers a cooperative, non-competitive (in the traditional sense) experience. From the best I could tell, even having PvP on in the wilderness in the Survival server may put off some players. But don't worry, some more PvP oriented gameplay may reveal itself in the future. Referring to PvP events, just because it's off pretty much everywhere on the server doesn't mean we can't turn it on in other places. Last map, actually, there was a small arena built by APPS that had PvP on if I remember correctly. PvP events certainly aren't out of the question.

We strive to make the server as good as we can, but given the nature of just how difficult it can be to [1] develop the server itself (it's not always easy to get stuff to place nice with each other) and [2] appease everyone, we can only do so well at that job. I'm interested to hear what you think about all of this.

Stay sane and wash your hands,
Butter

 

[Tea]

First off...let me say Thank you for this post +1

The New Player Experience
In 1.15 I had made a rule board and we had holographs everywhere letting people know the basics...we will deff be trying that again.

The Economy
People in the top 10 on baltop did not get their money risking their keys, it's actually from /warp apps and trading their keys for guaranteed money. You will make okay money on the crates...but it won't be able to compete with players who are grinding.

This was the first time I used vote keys/rare keys etc and I wasn't really pleased with doing just money, so I'm very open to suggestions in terms of items!

Last map I made adminshops so there was wiggle room for players to price their items. I had many people come to me and said they wanted a player run economy this map. So all prices made for apps and ec are averaged player prices. I will try to make some adminshops next map to try to make both parties happy.

PVP
I promise to have some area for people to pvp next map....
Our active player base has never been fond of pvp. In the past when pvp has been a thing, it only caused people to come in and use it to annoy or grief others and nothing beneficial (which has been so hard to admin) leading to the death of many servers...
We used to have a plugin to enable it on claims, that lead to a lot of problems as well. It's been very hard to find a nice balance.

When we release other game-modes pvp will have a main part, but as for survival it will have to be in specific areas/events only till we can find that sweet spot.