Reason Why Blocktopia Lost Players?

[captain_pikmin]

I have never asked this question before but I saw someone say, "people just come and go with their lives and leaving Blocktopia behind." But I have one explanation that might not be true for why Blocktopia lost some players. Back when 1.6.4 was released, a plugin, Bukkit, or something hasn't been updated so the server had to stay in the previous version before we could update. During that time, which was like 6 months I think, I assume people just found 1.6.4 servers and went on from there. This entire thing might be untrue and it might be because of a different reason. But I want to see some answers.

 

[Notme]

Well our popularity was based on Classic flow, we lost classic, so we lost popularity.

If we started advertising our Premium servers heavily in 2012 and later then we wouldn't lose THAT many players.

 

[Notme]

Essentially this. If I recall correctly, our decline began with that classic fiasco where some dude was maliciously mass-creating servers to overwhelm Minecraft.net/Mojang and crash everyone. This hurt classic traffic considerably. Sometime following that mess, Mojang wanted to start phasing out classic and removed its link, just to make it harder to access, which crippled traffic even further. They then eventually and finally removed classic altogether.

A good chunk of players, including myself, *mostly* played on the classic servers. Once the classic servers went (especially the zombie server), quite a few of those players simply lost interest and either became less active or left entirely. There's also the inevitable element of life happening and people acquiring new responsibilities, hobbies, relationships, what have you...which combined with not really having a reason to stay made it easy for people to move on. It was just a matter of unfortunately losing an anchor in our community and people drifting away as a result.

And don't forget Java - Classic couldn't run anything never than Java 6.
Java 7 was out already in 2011, but its ever-increasing popularity didn't help Classic.

There were internal factors too:
Addicting factor and short life of some premium servers like Primordia or Adventure&Tournamets weren't healthy for our Classic servers popularity too - people who moved into short lived addicting servers and got really dedicated usually lost interest in MC, when their favorite servers shut down.
Tl'dr: Java and Premium stealing players wasn't too good for classic too.

Hopefully people got better grades in school after this mess of 2012.
Or at least other games got these refugees from collapsing Classic.

So yeah there was perfect storm starting with Primordia (this server managed to peak 70 players or even more at European evenings, it was easy to get on Classic even on busiest time, when LoP was a thing) and was getting stronger every month (external factors were damaging classic popularity too), until Classic was nothing but post apocalyptic wasteland.

 

[VegnaTurtle]

Maybe mc got old while everyone else did too.

 

[Notme]

Maybe mc got old while everyone else did too.

Someone doesn't remember shitstorm, that happened in 2012 to Classic.
Look at biggest Minecraft communities - they have tons of players.
We had free popularity from Classic, while big communities are advertising heavily - they are feeding on Youtube and other websites.
It was easy to get new person on classic - all you had to do was making an account.
In premium MC you have to pay $20, if you want game, and new players usually go to biggest communities.

We can advertise towards players, that are tired of pay to play/win and general soullessness of big communities.

Yes, people get old too, but on heavily advertised/with heavy influx of players it doesn't matter, if A, B, C and D doesn't play anymore and we have E, F, G and H instead of A, B, C and D.
This is something like Theseus ship paradox.

 

[755someone755]

This is something like Theseus ship paradox.

Getting philosophical up in this bitch. I think the right thing to do in this situation is to pull the lever, and just learn Chinese.

Honestly I don't get why people always start this debate; We always end up with the same stale points, and debating now is useless. We know what mistakes were made and how the community as a whole could have reacted better (and I, as somebody who only rarely visits anymore, do believe that these mistakes have been a lesson to us all), and it's pointless to argue about what we should have done and what evils Oracle and Mojang bestowed upon us.
The fact that we're debating this at all (and that at least 48 people have read this thread) is a sign that the community is still very much alive and willing to at least skim over these overused sentences. Like Raxo said, we didn't lose players, we just lost the ones you and I know -- maybe you and I are the problem, because we're the ones who have grown up and now refuse to accept new people to "replace" old, gone friends. I barely know anyone anymore (coming from back when I knew almost the entirety of CZS players), but that doesn't mean there isn't anyone for me to meet. I don't go to my local drug store and say it's abandoned just because two of the three pharmacists that I used to know there got retired and replaced, and they hired a security guard. (The guard here representing the extensions of our community into GMod etc.)

Just enjoy what's before you, reminisce old memories you got from here, and continue to meet new people just like you did when you first came here.

 

[Notme]

Getting philosophical up in this bitch. I think the right thing to do in this situation is to pull the lever, and just learn Chinese.

Honestly I don't get why people always start this debate; We always end up with the same stale points, and debating now is useless. We know what mistakes were made and how the community as a whole could have reacted better (and I, as somebody who only rarely visits anymore, do believe that these mistakes have been a lesson to us all), and it's pointless to argue about what we should have done and what evils Oracle and Mojang bestowed upon us.
The fact that we're debating this at all (and that at least 48 people have read this thread) is a sign that the community is still very much alive and willing to at least skim over these overused sentences. Like Raxo said, we didn't lose players, we just lost the ones you and I know -- maybe you and I are the problem, because we're the ones who have grown up and now refuse to accept new people to "replace" old, gone friends. I barely know anyone anymore (coming from back when I knew almost the entirety of CZS players), but that doesn't mean there isn't anyone for me to meet. I don't go to my local drug store and say it's abandoned just because two of the three pharmacists that I used to know there got retired and replaced, and they hired a security guard. (The guard here representing the extensions of our community into GMod etc.)

Just enjoy what's before you, reminisce old memories you got from here, and continue to meet new people just like you did when you first came here.

Yeah I bet staff/people rotation was very high in TO times:
I bet when TheOnes became Blocktopia, then majority chunk of staff got replaced, just like when Classic shutdown.

Heres tracker, may not be that accurate before August 2011, as we don't have complete archives and there was trouble with keeping quantum foam named Trusted from that time.
This tracker contains most volatile of staff too - Trusted on trial.

 

[les_morts_vivants]

everything went downhill when they banned aotsftw

 

[Jayfeather]

Someone doesn't remember shitstorm, that happened in 2012 to Classic.
Look at biggest Minecraft communities - they have tons of players.
We had free popularity from Classic, while big communities are advertising heavily - they are feeding on Youtube and other websites.
It was easy to get new person on classic - all you had to do was making an account.
In premium MC you have to pay $20, if you want game, and new players usually go to biggest communities.

We can advertise towards players, that are tired of pay to play/win and general soullessness of big communities.

Yes, people get old too, but on heavily advertised/with heavy influx of players it doesn't matter, if A, B, C and D doesn't play anymore and we have E, F, G and H instead of A, B, C and D.
This is something like Theseus ship paradox.

The common argument was "it's impossible to advertise" which probably led to a decline

 

[Notme]

The common argument was "it's impossible to advertise" which probably led to a decline

I think you kinda got it backwards.
Decline was caused by Mojang's negligence of Classic.
Advertising could prevent decline, or at least make it weaker.

 

[Vatumok]

I think you kinda got it backwards.
Decline was caused by Mojang's negligence of Classic.
Advertising could prevent decline, or at least make it weaker.

You could better say, the destruction of classic by Mojang. But yeah, losing players has never been the problems, getting new players has been. With classic we were big and could easily get more players with the server list. Now we're at a pretty low players count plus it's hard to get our name out which makes it hard to attract new players. We had the chance after classic to build something new with the large playerbase we had, but we didn't get our shit together in time. Minecraft dying isn't the problem either, it remains one of the best sandbox games and top servers still get tens of thousands of players, our name just isn't very big in MC anymore.

 

[Hex]

You could better say, the destruction of classic by Mojang. But yeah, losing players has never been the problems, getting new players has been. With classic we were big and could easily get more players with the server list. Now we're at a pretty low players count plus it's hard to get our name out which makes it hard to attract new players. We had the chance after classic to build something new with the large playerbase we had, but we didn't get our shit together in time. Minecraft dying isn't the problem either, it remains one of the best sandbox games and top servers still get tens of thousands of players, our name just isn't very big in MC anymore.

10/10 response. Minecraft isn't dead, Hypixel, LemonCraft, Minecraft Central, Etc. get 500+ players a day. We failed to advertise at our high points so now we are working with low points, still possible to use though!

 

[MetalGearSolis]

Maybe it was the community restart ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Friendy]

10/10 response. Minecraft isn't dead, Hypixel, LemonCraft, Minecraft Central, Etc. get 500+ players a day. We failed to advertise at our high points so now we are working with low points, still possible to use though!

Hypixel brings in 10k+ a day!

 

[Poe]

See How the majority of people come on when something new rolls out so what if we planned regular events?