My thoughts

[xChaosx (Jack)]

[BCOLOR=transparent]I’ve been observing this community for a long time now wondering whether or not I should join it. I’ve been on the minecraft servers, teamspeak, and the forums for over a year now without posting anything.[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]I’ve seen how some threads go when posted here so please do your best to keep this as serious as possible.[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]To be blunt: What are you all still doing here?[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]I started playing seriously in this community when JtE started, and every smp since then has been poorly made. It’s as if they were created while already set on fire. There’s nothing that’s been done to change how you all are going about minecraft servers and I don’t understand why. The other issue is that no one seems to think that minecraft is the wrong way to go, which while I love the game too, it might be time to focus on bigger and better projects. If you all find a way to make a server as entertaining as they were back before JtE then you’ve found the million dollar solution. Until then, it seems as though more and more players are leaving us.[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]Thankfully, the event servers are getting relatively decent players which is great. I don’t have terraria but my friend told me that it was pretty fun to play with everyone in a game other than minecraft. Gmod (TTT specifically) was great the first time around! My friend told me someone was hosting one for the teamspeak server and I played on it a ton. I think one was created later that was not as well maintained; someone was talking on the server about the developers being inactive. That doesn’t seem to be happening with the new event servers which is really promising![/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]My biggest issue is that nothing’s getting better. It’s great that we’re getting activity on event servers but no one’s finding any solutions. I’ve seen post after post after post about the community’s direction get thrown into a pit because even the slightest disagreement sends everyone’s emotions overboard. The hatred towards those with different gaming affinities are so off putting to me that it’s kept me from joining. I played minecraft on the side for fun; most of my attention when I’m gaming now is towards Smite, a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game. My worry is that even if we have a lot of people playing this game everyone will still try to defend minecraft, and I think I’m the only person that even plays it here. Another MOBA game, League of Legends, seems to be popular on the teamspeak server. I frequently see users who post in the league of legends section try to push the community away from minecraft with very poor decisions. You have to come together as a group to push the community towards bigger and better things, not two groups against each other. I don’t know why more isn’t being done to turn this ‘minecraft’ community towards a ‘gaming’ community. It’s clear that many members feel as though minecraft is declining and we need to spread out. From my perspective, it seems like when someone says to branch out from minecraft, the serious minecraft players take it personally and act as though they’re asking to delete all of the minecraft servers. While this may be true, you need to put yourself in their shoes and see why they might think branching out is successful.[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]The only other thing I’ve noticed is how empty the servers have been recently. Between the silly posts on the forums and clearly disruptive banter between players of different games on the forums, combined with a declining staff team, school starting, and a lack of advertisement, this isn’t surprising. I don’t think either of these 3 problems are the root of the issue though; if the people in your community don’t want to be here, nothing will get better. This brings me back to my original question: What are you all still doing here? Nothing seems to get better for anyone who doesn’t play minecraft, the staff team is declining, there are more and more communities starting up that have a strong, passionate team of staff members and developers cultivating their servers into a community. I don’t think I’ll ever seriously make myself a member of this community because of the situation it’s in, but I wanted to offer you all my two cents to see if maybe EscapeRestart would be worth joining at a later date.[/BCOLOR]

[BCOLOR=transparent]I wish you all the best of luck, hopefully when I check back here it will be a community that’s alive and growing once more.[/BCOLOR]
[BCOLOR=transparent]-Chaos (Jack)[/BCOLOR]

 

[Notme]

Well I'm kinda tied here.
I came here in June 2011 - we had like 90 people on 3 classic servers (30 per server) here on peaks (classic was THAT popular was then with 200 or so other servers on official classic list) and around 30 - 50 people on good old SMP and CMP. (I don't remember excatly how many here, but Primordia, server that had SMP and creative mode in one had 70 at peaks, so it seems like had right number)
There was a lot of fun and nice people. They had cookies. So I joined them.

Well Primordia lasted only 4 months and exploded - staff was overambitious, there were too many plugin conflicts and there was MC update, that changed map generation slightly - they added jungle and cats. - 2011/ early 2012.

Weird curse fallen on Classic - at first it seemed like our premium servers are sucking them away, but then it got hacked, and mojang wasn't supporting it at all - it removed link temporarily at first, but in late 2012 they removed it permanently.
Classic died year later, and we shut down it.
It was during 2012 and Classic shutdown was in April 2013.
My personal opinion is that overhaul should been done in 2012. We are stalling for too long.

There were 5 more SMPs after that, every one losing popularity after few months....
Also there were many launches and shutdowns of premium minigame servers.

Hopefully tnmjimbob and digitalmez will manage to escape death and restart this community.

 

[Malcovent]

Putting personal opinion of the community and the direction it should take aside (I don't think It would be appropriate for me to comment on either), I find myself a little bewildered at the intention of this post.

It did a fantastic job at highlighting some subjective stances on community problems, but stopped short of actually suggesting any tangible solutions. Take the following,

If you all find a way to make a server as entertaining as they were back before JtE then you’ve found the million dollar solution

I don’t know why more isn’t being done to turn this ‘minecraft’ community towards a ‘gaming’ community

Great but, how? You have to understand that posting an opinion that's been repeated several times by different people over the past two years without providing any actual steps to achieving that isn't the most useful contribution. Start up what gaming servers? Are we aiming for popularity or just to have fun? With what staff? How do we advertise it? How do we stand out? Who will set it up and will they have time to? How do we wave our magic wand and make servers as 'entertaining as they were before JtE'?

I'm sure everyone can agree that a post that can essentially be summarized as 'be more friendly, make the servers fun, stop being assholes league' isn't really the way to address the issues. In fact it many ways it feels counter productive, especially when the personal trying to voice their opinion seems to be neither an established player, nor willing to stick around to help address their opinions.

There are correct ways to address this issue, and this is not one of them. But nor am I going to sit here and lecture people on how they should handle their community when I'm no longer an established member.

 

[Hockeyfan1852]

If you compare our last smp (Kami's Realm) with JtE there are many differences that should be noted. Kami's Realm was a disaster from the start we had poor planning having new players choose a clan and walk 3k blocks with no items to make it to their capital where they really didn't know where to begin. The rest of the map was unused there was no intensive to go anywhere even though there was supposed to be dungeons and quests around the map. Now we look at JtE which had 4-5 players managing a section of the server. We had a emerald trading system with quests that let you explore the entire map. We had towns apply for a higher status on the forums which made most towns have something to strive for. The lore for the server was great we had great storylines for the players to get into. The premade towns were amazing and had lots of time spent on them. Server quality for smp's will greatly impact the life of the server. No one is going to want to play an smp that is thrown together. However most staff think that an smp now is a waste of time which it is if we don't spend time making it great before hand before releasing it. I think the best route is the staff supporting it open up applications for staff and have the team work on the server for several months. Work until it is flawless and there is a good system in place then release it don't feel rushed into a release date.

As for league I have a valid opinion due to my 4,000 ranked games played since the beginning of season four. League is not going to make the community that much bigger. People are going to 5 queue with their friends in normals. DuoQ with someone who is close in elo and try to climb their way up. The only events we could host as a community for league would be making a ranked 5's team wouldn't really work well with the varying elo within the community. Host a 1v1 tourney on aram map maybe make it like all stars first to 1 kill, 100 cs or first tower. Again there is an elo issue however that might be a valid event only if the league players back it. Tourney's advertised on rito's forums or other places might bring in more league people to the community but only if we make a serious effort to create a tourney like this.

The servers are mainly empty because of the lack of content the only server I have seen actively trying to run events is BuildBox which I applause for trying to create intensive for players to come onto the server and build with a purpose in mind. Getting people to play is not just setting up votes or advertising and expecting people to join. We need something worthwhile to attract players in. If we put in the effort they will come and some will join into our community which can build up again the more high quality events we are running.

 

[ChocoFox]

I’ve seen how some threads go when posted here so please do your best to keep this as serious as possible.

Every now and again a couple of threads like this pop out. It's always the same. Honestly, everyone gets it already, that's why they're not taking it seriously.

a lack of advertisement

The community admins have already gotten a bunch of advertisers to get the name of EscapeRestart out as much as possible. Recently we also have encouraged voting on Minecraft Forums to grab as much attention and traffic to EscapeRestart's Minecraft servers.

EscapeRestart Unofficial Video Archive (ERUVA) is one of the interventions I believe made by the advertisers made as well.

Honestly, even from my point of view I can see clearly that the staff are trying their best to make this a better community and push our name out there.

 

[Hockeyfan1852]

Every now and again a couple of threads like this pop out. It's always the same. Honestly, everyone gets it already, that's why they're not taking it seriously.


The community admins have already gotten a bunch of advertisers to get the name of EscapeRestart out as much as possible. Recently we also have encouraged voting on Minecraft Forums to grab as much attention and traffic to EscapeRestart's Minecraft servers.

EscapeRestart Unofficial Video Archive (ERUVA) is one of the interventions I believe made by the advertisers made as well.

Honestly, even from my point of view I can see clearly that the staff are trying their best to make this a better community and push our name out there.

"The servers are mainly empty because of the lack of content the only server I have seen actively trying to run events is BuildBox which I applause for trying to create intensive for players to come onto the server and build with a purpose in mind. Getting people to play is not just setting up votes or advertising and expecting people to join. We need something worthwhile to attract players in. If we put in the effort they will come and some will join into our community which can build up again the more high quality events we are running. "

 

[ChocoFox]

"The servers are mainly empty because of the lack of content the only server I have seen actively trying to run events is BuildBox which I applause for trying to create intensive for players to come onto the server and build with a purpose in mind. Getting people to play is not just setting up votes or advertising and expecting people to join. We need something worthwhile to attract players in. If we put in the effort they will come and some will join into our community which can build up again the more high quality events we are running. "

Refuting the Original Post, not yours, can't even be bothered to refute your point.

 

[pilotranger]

(In my opinion) I feel like what contributes to this problem is that some players (such as me) take a 3-5 month break from Minecraft overall, and when we do, we log back on and everything has changed, ranks reset, plots cleared, so some feel like quitting due to them playing a SMP for a while and increasing in rank, only for them to earn it back again. Thats just what I think.

 

[digi]

This was brought to the staff's attention 2-3 months ago by a current member who decided to post this anonymously.
Most of this was discussed then with the 'anonymous' poster and various others and is still being discussed now.

EDIT: I was personally messaged by anonymous and apparently this was posted all for the sake of drama.

 

[Fragile]

I was personally messaged by anonymous and apparently this was posted all for the sake of drama.

Right... Let's not post threads just to get a dramatic response. I'll lock the thread for now. If there's an actual reason for this thread to exist besides drama, shoot me a private message and I'll unlock it if there's a good reason.