[Poll] Blocktopia Overhaul

[superhalo6]

I have another point, this issue isn't as [BCOLOR=#000000] black and white [/BCOLOR][BCOLOR=#000000][BCOLOR=#ffffff] (spacing error here) we are displaying it as, there could be different opinions on each section, someone could disagree on the name change, support moving into different games but disagree with ending some of our Minecraft servers.[/BCOLOR][/BCOLOR]

 

[DieLorelei]

Spoiler: Opinions & Stuff

Even though the name Blocktopia has a legacy behind it, its really only relevant to Minecraft... (and other voxel games)
I think people are forgetting that this isn't Blocktopia's first name change, and when it became Blocktopia it didn't much effect the community or its popularity within Minecraft.

A transition to a multi-gaming community is probably for the better, because thats what most of us have done anyway - moved on to other games.
If you're going through with the overhaul, the name should represent the community as a whole. If a majority of the members want to keep it Blocktopia, that's fine. Though I strongly believe we should consider a new name, for a new beginning, and hopefully a bigger and better community.

Attracting more members into the community through various games may give the community means to host more servers through potentially larger donations, once the overhaul is established. Any lose to current servers could possibly be temporary if everyone works to create a friendly environment for all gaming groups and bring in those members to the new community - giving them something they would want to invest in.

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I've seen gaming communities that allow their members to appoint representatives for specific games. They aren't given any moderator powers, but they are given rights to lead an official guild under whatever name they'd like for the game they're elected for, and select their own hierarchy for managing it.
If we adopt a similar method, The minecraft servers could remain Blocktopia, each server could retain its staff, and new games such as Black Desert could have its own guild name - just as long as everything points back to the community.

 

[digi]

Will this change be happening at the beginning of next year?

 

[Hunter]

why not just make rof the lobby server and give it portals to the others
also make tnt and infection a&t gamemodes
lobby rof buildbox aod infection smp a&t tnt

four servers remain.
who's next?

 

[Naterger]

Put buildbox on a pedestal, let go of the others, at the very least (if buildbox gets removed) release all the maps to us, i for one have many unfinished projects scattered about the maps that i will one day finish~!

 

[Naoh]

I can't help but be old fashioned here. I like Blocktopia the way it is. The thought of leaving the old ideals scares me a bit. We've all seen how successful the G-Mod server was. It was fun at first, but ended up kinda dying within a month or two. I'd agree we need to rekindle the Blocktopia spirit, but I'm not sure that making different game servers is the way to do it.

I've always viewed the big four (Build server, Lava survival, PVP, SMP) as being rather necessary.

Here's my suggestion.

Stick with the big four, and bring back TNT. TNT was a huge people magnet. Every time I turn around, we have someone in the lobby asking "where am tnt server? i heard about tnt server and am interest". In addition to this, we should advertise, to bring in a fresh crowd. Now mind you, I know nothing about advertising, or if we in fact are advertising. Remember that the main time for crowds is summer. I don't believe that Blocktopia is dead. I don't think we need to pull something as drastic as to make an almost entirely new everything. Yet. Maybe my idea is just a bit optimistic, but it's just my opinion.

 

[Prizyms]

Regarding BuildBox, creative servers are the bread and butter of gaming communities with Minecraft support - given BuildBox's long history and consistent popularity, I'd like to think that a creative server of some sort will be making it over if the referendum is passed (which at this present moment, I see no reason for it not to). I can't make any promises for the future of BuildBox just yet but I will keep you all posted.

 

[Hunter]

quite honestly i would personally be content with TNT coming back as an a&t gamemode
the other servers can do whatever
Prizyms what exactly would change
everyone seems to want change in general but it seems as if a specific direction is in mind

 

[Willchill]

The community should go in a different direction. Minecraft obviously isn't doing much for us anymore.

 

[Hunter]

The community should go in a different direction. Minecraft obviously isn't doing much for us anymore.

this seems to be the general consensus.
but i have not seen an actual response to the question at hand.
WHICH DIRECTION SHOULD WE TAKE?

edit: apparently this is "confusing" so i'll explain this to you guys
everyone has been going blah blah we need CHANGE minecraft is BORING for the last few months.
this is a general opinion shared by many.
however, this never suggests an alternative.

it has been suggested that we do multiple games! wonderful.
still need to choose which games to focus on, guys.

 

[JayJay]

A&T, I only just joined the team of staff.

 

[BanSwift]

Do you know what kind of games we would be moving to?

Runescape. My childhood <3

 

[Prizyms]

Prizyms what exactly would change
everyone seems to want change in general but it seems as if a specific direction is in mind

In general or for BuildBox?

General TL;DR: Complete overhaul of the community, shifting our focus from solely Minecraft to being a general gaming community

BuildBox: It's all up in the air at the moment. I don't see a reason to change a creative server that much (what is there to change?)

 

[Hunter]

A&T, I only just joined the team of staff.

Then you will have just left the team of staff. :p
I suggested consolidating some of the servers into A&T as gamemodes.
TNT and Infection would work rather nicely.
Doing this would reduce the number of servers without doing away with them entirely.
It would also give the A&T server a reason to exist.

 

[DieLorelei]

this seems to be the general consensus.
but i have not seen an actual response to the question at hand.
WHICH DIRECTION SHOULD WE TAKE?

edit: apparently this is "confusing" so i'll explain this to you guys
everyone has been going blah blah we need CHANGE minecraft is BORING for the last few months.
this is a general opinion shared by many.
however, this never suggests an alternative.

The proposed change is opening the community up and making it a multi-gaming community. Thats there in the first post... That term is intentionally vague in order to appeal to the widest variety of games...

The only conflict I'm seeing in the discussion is which servers to cut. Except if people could donate the money to keep those servers running, then we could probably keep all of them in the transition... By the sound of it, if something isn't done, either HA's will be paying out of pocket, or Blocktopia as it is now is shutting down. Opening it to a multi-gaming community could get us more members , and thats more people who could potentially donate.

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Response to your edit:
Which games... I don't know, lets start with some popular ones? Minecraft, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Risk of Rain, Rust, ArcheAge, Black Desert, Team Fortress 2, Gary's Mod, Runescape, Final Fantasy, Plug.DJ could even have its own sub forum... Most of us are on Steam right? We could look at games most of us have... As we play those games, we can direct the people we meet over here to a subforum / thread for that game. Then of the more popular games, we could host servers as the option becomes viable.

 

[Hunter]

In general or for BuildBox?

General TL;DR: Complete overhaul of the community, shifting our focus from solely Minecraft to being a general gaming community

BuildBox: It's all up in the air at the moment. I don't see a reason to change a creative server that much (what is there to change?)

Mostly wondering whether the forums would be completely wiped.
Still hoping that was a joke.
Having some specifics as to what would be "overhauled" would be nice.

The proposed change is opening the community up and making it a multi-gaming community. Thats there in the first post... That term is intentionally vague in order to appeal to the widest variety of games..

So basically we're just upgrading the Gaming Corner from off-topic to a full-fledged forum and giving it a few more subforums.

If the idea is to have more Blocktopian servers for other games, then which games would they be?

 

[std1997]

I wish there had been more detail included with this but I can understand that you guys mainly just wanted to see what the general opinion was before you put a lot of thought into this but now that it's been proven that most people within the community are for the idea. I'm curious as to what games we plan on involving in our community, what servers we plan on keeping in Minecraft, who we plan on keeping within the staff structure, and who is going to be leading/working on this new overhaul? Those are my questions and I know they'll be answered soon enough.

I'm obviously completely in favor of the change and to be honest, I wouldn't mind if we had to completely remove all if not most of our Minecraft servers but I can understand that some people have some emotional/nostalgic memories or projects unfinished on some of the servers that they want to keep but I feel like that's the price of change. We have to be willing to make new memories with our friends here instead of clinging to something that's obviously failing in ways of improving our community.

That's just my 2 cents. I'm also incredibly sleep deprived so my 2 cents is probably more like 2 pesos

 

[BanSwift]

As long it doesn't go into mainly in League of Legends, I'll stay. If not, well, let's just see about that.​

Vote influence ban.

 

[DieLorelei]

So basically we're just upgrading the Gaming Corner from off-topic to a full-fledged forum and giving it a few more subforums.

If the idea is to have more Blocktopian servers for other games, then which games would they be?

From the sound of it, yeah. As far as which games, I edited the post you quoted to include some ideas, but there are tons of possibilities. I think the issue is more about the costs to maintain them though.

 

[Hunter]

Most of these games have threads in the Gaming Corner section already.
Most of these threads have gone inactive.
Most of these suggestions have not warranted a major forum overhaul to be implemented.

 

[DarkHender]

With all these name things. How about we cut out Block- I mean- I think we could come up with something better.

 

[superstein]

To those concerned about voting yet:
This is simply a vote to the community on whether they'd be interested in us looking into ways to overhaul the community. We've drawn up some initial plans but nothing is set in stone yet. We plan to be very flexible with options, considering now is the time we can change things around a bit. Because this change is FOR the community, we will ensure that we have the community's interests as our priority and will make sure every facet of this overhauled community will be agreed upon.

To those concerned about the forums:
Likely we will keep many of the active threads, and forum layout will be changed to give more room to "new" parts of the community. We will be fleshing out the "Gaming Corner" to expand to more games to give more organization capability and more infrastructure for them, and make the layout easier to navigate, remove some redundant subforums, etc. I wouldn't focus so much on that, nothing will vanish out of thin air, we promise.

We'll be sure to be completely transparent and open through this whole process. If this vote is to pass, we're always open to feedback or ideas, we'll consider almost anything.

 

[DieLorelei]

Most of these games have threads in the Gaming Corner section already.
Most of these threads have gone inactive.
Most of these suggestions have not warranted a major forum overhaul to be implemented.

Some games are better off with single threads while some could support an entire subforum. Just because a thread goes inactive doesn't mean people don't have things to say about them, but they might be afraid of necroposting, or posting another thread of the same topic in a general gaming board...
As far as the suggestions not warranting the proposed overhaul - I believe the complaints from the player base about the current state of the community warrants a major overhaul.

 

[Alisha]

Thanks for clarifying the forum games part Superstein.

I'll vote for overhauling Blocktopia, I understand that it's necessary. I don't want to see a place wither and die of course, which I'm betting no one else wants to either.

Since I mostly associate with the forum games part of Blocktopia I just want to be able to keep contributing to things people enjoy.

I only hope that communication is constant; this is a big switch and no one wants to be left in the dark about how the overhaul will go.

 

[JKangaroo]

With all these name things. How about we cut out Block- I mean- I think we could come up with something better.

Might as well have a thread later on where people can pitch ideas and decide from there (whittle the ideas down slowly to the most popular/well rounded one)
If we are going with the overhaul and taking on a new name, 'Block' should probably be removed. A new development should probably come with a new start. Blocktopia will still be apart of the history just as TheOne's is currently. But Blocktopia really doesn't feel right when Minecraft isn't the main focus anymore.

The overhaul however in general sounds like a good idea, and judging be what's been had so far, it seems many people agree to a relative degree.

Of course, everything at this moment in time is up for speculation by the community until the overhaul is decided upon or not where we'll get the rest of the news on what's going to happen.
I would think Buildbox would remain at least as one of the remaining Minecraft servers should any be shut down, seeing as it acts as a creative base for the community and also basically provides for nearly every other server we've had due to its ease of access. Anything else could possibly become a combination if that's possible.

And of course branching out to other games/genres is up in the air as well... And frankly I wouldn't know where we could even start with it. The possibilities with such an overhaul is endless just due to what could branch out from where we are... from MOBAs to MMO's to FPS's to many other genres.

We'll just have to wait and see for now, but so far it feels like a promising development. There's a lot of things to do along the way though and we'll just have to take it one step at a time.