Suggestion Short Term Mass Playercount style SMP events

Would you like there to be a meeting about these suggestions and the future of ER SMPs on discord?


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Iggish

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Now this is just an idea I was musing with and so I haven't really refined it yet or anything, just hear me out.
First of all I want to say that I don't want to be that one guys who shits from on high on every smp and attempt at an smp this community tries, I really appreciate the hard work the staff and people put in to make people enjoy themselves.
However, the facts are that smps are getting less and less popular and the population of this community is similarly getting fewer.
(Small rant incoming) The demise of LoP was really hard to stomach for me. I put so many hours into building and grinding and looking back on it, what was it for? The core aspect of a game is to have fun so I don't really know why people had to grind for so long. The imbalance of kits and classes was infuriating in some cases and this alongside people with various levels of combat made for completely pointless and gruelling pvp. I don't know why so much effort was put into the pvp system if pvp was so discouraged. The massive walls, lock systems and elytra laws basically made raiding impossible. And once again I want to say that I get it, not everyone likes raiding etc, people like building.
Despite the stereotype that goes with playing aod and raiding, I also like(d) to build on SMPs, to make a big base. However it is painful to consider how much effort you put into something just for it to be removed six months later. For me, Smps are most enjoyable at the start, people have small settlements and raiding is possible.

So what I'm suggesting are SMPs that don't drag on for ages with a gradually dwindling player count, that don't suck hours of your time away to make a base that is pretty pointless looking back at it.
SMPs that have at most a lifetime that lasts a week. Some could even last a few hours
There are so many possibilites. Just a few are:
-A Siege SMP, where people have some time to build a base before other people attack them, with a goal to win i.e. destroy a bed or lifeforce.
-A Small SMP set in the skies with islands linking them up etc
-A Rush inspired SMP but on a much larger scale. Teams have to gather materials from scratch and invade the other team's island using original techniques like netherportalling or moving airships (using redstone etc)
-A Vanilla SMP with a very small map. Would keep it exciting although it's only vanilla.
-CtF style smp. The coding must still be there from the end of LoP so it would be (relatively) easy to make a server. Pre-built castles with a flag. People take however long they want to get gear and then try and attack.

Feel free to suggest changes and ideas to these suggestions.

there are so many other ideas that hopefully some of y'all can come up with below. I don't think there should be SMPs with no end goal that just die. Week long servers should have a massive event at the end, something to work towards. I think the community has reached the stage where long term smps are no longer feasible with the playercount and need which we have.
I still think the SMP that is being worked on should still go ahead as so much work has been done on it and I can safely say that people will enjoy it. However, I think short term, mass playercount event style smps are the way to go.

Also sorry if I have offended or triggered anyone with this post, it's just a suggestion. I don't think I have but I don't want to shit on staff and long term smp people or builders or anything.
This kind of turned into a rant / ramble but I think the point is still valid. Please discuss and give me feedback.
 

Danni122112

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I have no issues with releasing small SMPs like suggested above, and we could maybe make a poll (pls dont hurt me) ,or something after we have fleshed the ideas out a bit more.

The issues you have adressed in your first point is something I can relate to and agree on, and we are aiming to have several features to try to avoid this when the server do get released. No SMPs are permanent however, and while I think this one should have a long and healthy lifespawn, you sadly cant make a SMP last forever.

Some of the suggestions are something we intend to add on the SMP server as features or as events, so good to see that they are wanted.


I would love to see some more discussion and suggestion on the types of SMP events we could possibly make in this thread =)
 

Catcocomics

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I think the community has reached the stage where long term smps are no longer feasible with the playercount and need which we have.
I think we could stand a chance at a long term smp if we put more into getting builder players and fighter players cooperating as opposed to builders quitting because some fighters bulldozed them and took 3 hours worth of loot off them out of the blue, and fighters quitting because "faq, I can't find the damn entrance to this place, where the hell is it?!"

Perhaps this would be easier done if we actually did and smp with a more cooperative focus (like I've been asking for for 3 years now), probably with a story and active plot line that actually makes a presence to most of the active players (as opposed to, like, the abandoned spawn town getting blown up in the middle of the night).

Also, balanced dungeons that scale in difficulty to party size (and clearly state the intended level of progress in terms of equipment, such as stone, diamond, enchanted...), and making dungeons have plot significance and also findable (like, in KR I only ever saw one dungeon, and I couldn't even approach it during the one time I saw it because too many skeletons that take 5 hits to die but still 3-shot me).

I'd also appreciate dungeons with a greater puzzle focus (the one dungeon in DoD that I actually went in was just straight running through halls of constantly spawning zombies and skeletons and a boss at the end). I'll be plenty happy to help with making dungeons that actually have puzzles in them.
 

Iggish

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Actually, thinking on it, forum discussion is very good for in-depth answers but many people might not respond at all and the interval times with time zones might make for poor debate.
I think a discord meeting as a result of what is discussed on here would be a good idea. Then the ideas and suggestions posted here could be fleshed out more. Also people would respond more and it would be an instantaneous debate, no response times etc. A good time to have a meeting would be at the normal meeting time this saturday, as there is no normal community meeting on (was one a week ago). My suggestion(s) along with other people's about smp could be answered etc. To some extent, it could become a debate about the future of smps in general.

This is all ofcourse, if people would like a meeting on discord. So I'm going to add a poll to this thread and we'll see then.
 
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Danni122112

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Can we do something that isn't Minecraft P L E A S E.

I would rather play 40 person monopoly than play that vile mess of pixels.
https://escaperestart.com/forum/threads/proposal-community-driven-events-servers.20864/#post-401597

Nothings stopping you.

The only type of server I will make, know how to make, and got any interest in, is minecraft. If people dont want to play it that is fine, but some people do, and its certainly better than nothing.

I will also be looking into more small events, but not anyting too big when its not related to minecraft (think movie night, cards evening, stuff with meeting etc).


While it a topic for discussion if we should do less minecraft, this thread is not the place, and it is derailing the thead of the topic of discussion that was brought up.
 

Danni122112

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I think we could stand a chance at a long term smp if we put more into getting builder players and fighter players cooperating as opposed to builders quitting because some fighters bulldozed them and took 3 hours worth of loot off them out of the blue, and fighters quitting because "faq, I can't find the damn entrance to this place, where the hell is it?!"

Perhaps this would be easier done if we actually did and smp with a more cooperative focus (like I've been asking for for 3 years now), probably with a story and active plot line that actually makes a presence to most of the active players (as opposed to, like, the abandoned spawn town getting blown up in the middle of the night).

Also, balanced dungeons that scale in difficulty to party size (and clearly state the intended level of progress in terms of equipment, such as stone, diamond, enchanted...), and making dungeons have plot significance and also findable (like, in KR I only ever saw one dungeon, and I couldn't even approach it during the one time I saw it because too many skeletons that take 5 hits to die but still 3-shot me).

I'd also appreciate dungeons with a greater puzzle focus (the one dungeon in DoD that I actually went in was just straight running through halls of constantly spawning zombies and skeletons and a boss at the end). I'll be plenty happy to help with making dungeons that actually have puzzles in them.
90% of this stuff is already planned for smp (especially the puzzle dungeons), and we are trying to handle the issue brought up in the first pharagraph in a satisfying manner.
 
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Rune

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Can we please do something like the DoD end event or even something like Dwarfs vs Zombies? That would be amazing to play again and DvZ is really fun too
 
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Catcocomics

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As an apparently rusty DoD Director, what was the end event you are referring to?
The way the DoD end event specifically went, we spent about a week (maybe two) preparing a fort (that I assume the staff had chosen) to defend against wave after wave of invading mobs.
Occasionally, some "weak" scouts would come and try to harry use during preparations, though they were far from enough to defeat us.
During the actual event (which I believe lasted no less than three hours, if not more), everyone, regardless of town, grouped up and valiantly defended the fort.
There were many casualties.

I remember this particular event because it was a very glorious way to end off what was probably my best SMP experience yet with this community (quite unfortunately).
My contributions included:
-a potion shop, which probably got recycled or otherwise taken down during prep.
-myself and my hard-earned equipment
-about 3 or so cakes of hope (if anyone remembers me making cakes during the event/event prep).

We ended up winning about one or two seconds before the portal would have been destroyed, so it was really a close battle (and very fun and memorable).


DvZ (Dwarfs vs Zombies) is a Minecraft role-play game created by Robert Moran (aka Brucewillakers) where a civilization of dwarves are making their last stand against an endless army of monsters (funny enough, I was very into it back when DoD was seeing its final event, hence the cakes).
However, unlike the DoD event, DvZ uses players for both the monsters and the dwarfs (when a dwarf dies, they become a monster until the game ends), although some adaptations (including the latest) do use AI zombies.

However, we have a little ways to go before we can actually support DvZ on the proper DvZ scale (the rounds usually have at least a hundred players or more), though we can very well do something very similar to it in AoD zombie.
 

Danni122112

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Now that you guys know a bit more about the server, feel free to make some more suggestions if you got any ideas you want to see.

I am a bit reluctant to do events, as it takes me and other SMP staff away from working on the SMP server, but feel free to suggest anything there too, and I can take a look on if its anything we can do there.
 
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Notme

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What about 100% vanilla SMP event?
1.13 snapshots, no plugins, only community wide rules and community admins as mods, so all SMP staff will do is quickly get up server and forget about it.
That is launch and forget 1.13 snapshot server.
 

Sam_Winchester

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May I suggest a Skyblock, small mapped, SMP temp server?

Some Ideas:
  • Small map
  • 1 small island where everyone must cooperate and build together instead of fighting in order to survive (at first at least, later on people may branch off and start getting salty. Maybe announce when the period of grace is over?)
  • several small resource islands not too far away from the spawn/build island
  • nether disabled/end disabled or maybe also enclose very small maps for each world? idk how but it could probably be done just making sure both the nether and end temples are accesible
  • Simple economy implemented? Just get one of those skyblock pluggins to count island levels and etc, idk how plugins works, pls excuse me lmao