Suggestions in order to raise Kaisecraft's popularity

[Deimos]

Dear forum,

I have been playing on this server for a few months now and I think it's about time to give my personal opinion about it.

I think it's easy to agree on the fact that the popularity of a server is determined by the amount of players playing on it. I honestly believe that Kaisecraft has a lot of potential (otherwise I wouldn't have stayed here this long), but it is lacking behind since it's popularity isn't high enough.

There are a few things that attract new players, first of all, the amount of currently online players. At some times, the server has around 20 players online, simultaneously, which is great! Though at some times, the amount of people online is nearly 0, which is a very bad thing to have. Indeed, no players online equals no players wanting to join, which results in no rise in popularity and vice versa.

That's why I'm suggesting the following, in descending order of importance:

Make Kaisecraft more accesible. Everyone is free to join the creative world, but not the survival world. This immediately limits the amount of players wanting to join with the intention of playing survival games. Kaisecraft has a very good survival world in my opinion; old school survival, no help from the beginning, you start from scratch and that's what a lot of people like. Filling in an application on the forums is not that big of a job, I know that. But people who are just browsing for good survival games, aren't very likely to stay since they weren't able to get a taste of the survival world, because it's not accessible. Being the main reason not to even consider filling in an application on the forums. I'd strongly advise (and I'm sure this would rise the amount of players) to let EVERYONE who joins be able to play on the survival world.

I'm not sure why this isn't possible yet. Probably because people wanted to limit the amount of raiders, just stealing stuff and then never coming back. I don't see the problem there. This is survival for god's sake. If you don't want to be stolen from, hide your stuff better. The world is big enough to find yourself a nice and safe place to hide so there's absolutely no reason to be afraid of people like that. Another counterargument: we use the factions plugin, immediately allowing you to protect what's yours, in the unlikely event people find your well hidden base . I might overlooked something, so please let me know.

Secondly, people are also attracted by the number of players slots. Popular servers have plus minus 50 to 100 players online simultaneously. Therefor I'd advise to raise the amount of player slots to at least around 100. I know this is costly, and a counterargument would be the fact that we don't have that much players playing at the same time and it would therefor not be necessary to raise the amount of slots. Though, if I were a new player browsing for servers, I'd immediately check the amount of slots. Lots of player slots means a lot of potential players playing simultaneously, resulting in me wanting to join this server. I know this is costly, but I'd see it as an investment (more players = more potential donors), and it would certainly be interesting to consider this suggestion.

Lastly, I'd like to talk about the look of the creative world. I don't know what happened there, but the landscape is created in such a way, it's nearly impossible to just start building somewhere. It's way too rugged. I'd advise, in the future, to use the normal landscape generator (or how do I call it) so people are able to build on the ground, and are not forced to build ugly platforms hovering above the landscape. I think lots of people don't like the current look of the creative world, resulting in less players joining the server. (But I might be wrong on that one, I'm  nearly only playing survival)

I hope I made some good points here, and I'd like to hear feedback from anyone. Please feel free to counterargument my suggestions, not necessaraly all three, and let me know what you think about them.

Cheers!

Deimos

[Michael5017]

I do not agree, that guests can be in survival world, the most of them will grief or make the world really different and with that i mean like the old Mainworld. There wont be any place to build almost.

But, i do agree the about the look of the new world, its nice but... yeah what you said.

About 100 slots, 50 slots is just enough, because there arent much people online always. Maybe, 30 people but ive never seen 50 people on KCv2.

[Exi]

I agree on most of these points. We could get the player slots to 100 even though the numer of players is unlikely to raise over the current maximum of 50. Raising it to 100 will make people more interested in this server causing more people to join and to invite even more friends since they will all be able to join the server.
About the survival world, I like to have more activity on it and allowing guests to join in is a good way to do this, however I would only do it if there is a way to keep them away from the factions plugin. To basically make sure they can not join a faction or create one. This will take away the danger of griefing and will be another motivation for them to get citizen, making them longer-playing players on the server.


I'm not too fond of the main world myself because it looks ugly imo but it's a big change to get a new world again, I'm standing neutral towards this one.


I think what this server needs most of all is good advertising. Get it on those server collection sites, give players rewards for voting for kaisecraft, it's always a good thing to get some promotion for the server here and there.

[HanSolo]

Although I don't agree with some points (Survival free to everyone), it's explained very well and I support this

[Zlexy]

Survival is kept to citizens+ only because it gives them an incentive, and also it gives guests a reason to apply for citizen, I'm open to change though. I'm neutral on that.

The server won't be upped to 100 slots, 50 is fine and within our range.

Advertisement is hard to do, it's all about technique rather than the amount of money you spend.

I kind of agree on the main world thing.

[Deimos]

Hi forum, thanks for the responses!

Let me give a quick reaction to some of your replies:

I do not agree, that guests can be in survival world, the most of them will grief or make the world really different and with that i mean like the old Mainworld. There wont be any place to build almost.

In my return, I do not agree on this. First of all, the griefing: this is exactly what I explained in my first post. The world is gigantic. There's more than enough place to build a base, and never be found by anyone. If you're planning on not to get griefed, dig a hole in the ground, build a nice, cosy base far away from the spawn and no one will ever find you. So the anxiety for griefers is really for no reason at all. You're saying there won't be any place to build, that's clearly nonsense. There's still a massive amount of space that's unused, meaning a massive amount of space to build. Simply check out the world map, and you'll see.

Secondly, I assume you're saying that the world will be completely destroyed by griefers (here meaning the guests) using TNT for instance to blow up everything. This might be true. Yet up till now the survival world is forbidden for guests. And look at the landscape already. I mean, the big destruction around the spawn currently present happened by the hands of citizens, not guests! So if this really is a problem, it's especially the citizens that should take blame here. TNT is rather hard to obtain, so if guests would be able to join, they wouldn't be the ones to destroy everything since they wouldn't have had the time to obtain the necessary gunpowder. There might be a little more destruction if they were allowed to join, but that's not such a big problem, right? If it would get really nasty, admins could still be able to flatten out the terrain if necessary. Furthermore, walk 300 blocks away from the spawn, and the terrain is nice and flat again. So I think that's not an issue either. Please, if I'm telling lies, reply .

I agree on most of these points. We could get the player slots to 100 even though the numer of players is unlikely to raise over the current maximum of 50. Raising it to 100 will make people more interested in this server causing more people to join and to invite even more friends since they will all be able to join the server..

I agree on this one, exactly my opinion. Of course, it's not up to us to up the amount of player slots. I understand it fully if Zlexy or Kaise refuse to do this, it was only a suggestion open for debate.

I kind of agree on the main world thing.

I think lots of people do. Anyhow, as Exi said, it will probably be a nasty procedure to create a whole new world. Just something to bear in mind for the future. If a new world is started, let's just use the normal world  lay-out.

[dzoni01]

I have a simle solution to your ''main world look'' problem.
Just find a planes biome it isnt going to hurt you to go exploring the world a little you know.

[Deimos]

Anyone else willing to reply here? I'd like some more feedback .

[Kaise123]

Sorry, I haven't had internet access for a while so I haven't been able to reply to this.

I think it's easy to agree on the fact that the popularity of a server is determined by the amount of players playing on it. I honestly believe that Kaisecraft has a lot of potential (otherwise I wouldn't have stayed here this long), but it is lacking behind since it's popularity isn't high enough.

There are a few things that attract new players, first of all, the amount of currently online players. At some times, the server has around 20 players online, simultaneously, which is great! Though at some times, the amount of people online is nearly 0, which is a very bad thing to have. Indeed, no players online equals no players wanting to join, which results in no rise in popularity and vice versa.

While popularity isn't everything, I do agree with you here. KCv2 is not aimed at being a large server run like a business, more of a stable community that doesn't grow out of proportion. That said, if the server was more popular we could attract better players (Ones more suited to staff ranks or donating).

Make Kaisecraft more accesible. Everyone is free to join the creative world, but not the survival world. This immediately limits the amount of players wanting to join with the intention of playing survival games. Kaisecraft has a very good survival world in my opinion; old school survival, no help from the beginning, you start from scratch and that's what a lot of people like. Filling in an application on the forums is not that big of a job, I know that. But people who are just browsing for good survival games, aren't very likely to stay since they weren't able to get a taste of the survival world, because it's not accessible. Being the main reason not to even consider filling in an application on the forums. I'd strongly advise (and I'm sure this would rise the amount of players) to let EVERYONE who joins be able to play on the survival world.

I'm not sure why this isn't possible yet. Probably because people wanted to limit the amount of raiders, just stealing stuff and then never coming back. I don't see the problem there. This is survival for god's sake. If you don't want to be stolen from, hide your stuff better. The world is big enough to find yourself a nice and safe place to hide so there's absolutely no reason to be afraid of people like that. Another counterargument: we use the factions plugin, immediately allowing you to protect what's yours, in the unlikely event people find your well hidden base . I might overlooked something, so please let me know.

The reason for the Survival world being Citizens+ only was mainly to make it more competitive between factions, and at the time of release it was to prevent a huge number of players from being there, as it was a bit of an in-development feature. It also helps to combat people who come on just to troll others, among other small benefits. Another main reason is that it makes more people want to apply for Citizen, bringing more people on to the forums.

However, Since we've had the Survival World around for a while now and generally everything runs fairly smoothly, I'm willing to open it up to all ranks should it be generally supported. Generally we like to listen to what a majority of players on the server think before making a fairly important decision, So I'll start a poll on the forums about it.

Secondly, people are also attracted by the number of players slots. Popular servers have plus minus 50 to 100 players online simultaneously. Therefor I'd advise to raise the amount of player slots to at least around 100. I know this is costly, and a counterargument would be the fact that we don't have that much players playing at the same time and it would therefor not be necessary to raise the amount of slots. Though, if I were a new player browsing for servers, I'd immediately check the amount of slots. Lots of player slots means a lot of potential players playing simultaneously, resulting in me wanting to join this server. I know this is costly, but I'd see it as an investment (more players = more potential donors), and it would certainly be interesting to consider this suggestion.

I do actually agree with this point in principle. IE when looking for a server, people are more likely to join a server with more player slots, as it seems to be more 'secure' (Larger operation meaning that it will be around for longer, more established community, etc). However, This has never been the goal of KCv2. The idea is not to have the most number of players online. It's just for fun. However, I could raise the player slots to around 500 just to see what happens. It could be interesting to see how much it actually affects the community.

While the original idea of the server was to provide an easy-going community without too many players online, and to give as much as we can away while still allowing incentive for donations, I can see that sometimes things need to change in order for the server to progress. As I run the server via a VPS and can control all parts of the OS, It won't actually cost me any extra to up the player limit, It would only be more expensive should we actually need to upgrade the resources on the server to support more players.

Lastly, I'd like to talk about the look of the creative world. I don't know what happened there, but the landscape is created in such a way, it's nearly impossible to just start building somewhere. It's way too rugged. I'd advise, in the future, to use the normal landscape generator (or how do I call it) so people are able to build on the ground, and are not forced to build ugly platforms hovering above the landscape. I think lots of people don't like the current look of the creative world, resulting in less players joining the server. (But I might be wrong on that one, I'm  nearly only playing survival)

I can see your point here. The change in world generation was a bit of an experiment for me, and the main reason was to minimise the massive areas of ocean that always generated with MC's default terrain generation. I do think I got a bit carried away with it, although if you check out the DynMap there are some reasonably large flat biomes, but they are grouped together and are quickly swamped by builds.

The issue with the huge areas of water has been resolved in the 1.7 terrain generator (See This Mojang.com Post so the changes are no longer so necesary (Although I would like to add in some larger flat areas with some structures on them to break up the monontony. I'll work on that after 1.7's release), however I'm reluctant to change the world over now, Better wait until at least ~1.8 days. I think one of the reasons for many ugly looking floating builds is because they have been imported from the old world but poorly positioned.

One possible solution would be to get a team together and use WorldEdit or VoxelSniper to reshape some of the landscape to make it more builder-friendly. On the other hand, everyone has a different building style so I'm sure some people do enjoy the current landscape. By the looks of the DynMap, some areas of the world are yet to be explored.

If I was able to join the server at all, I would be able to work on some of these things myself. But as most people know, My internet does not allow me that luxuary.

I hope I made some good points here, and I'd like to hear feedback from anyone. Please feel free to counterargument my suggestions, not necessaraly all three, and let me know what you think about them.

Thanks, It's always good to hear some useful feedback from a 3rd party. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, nor in the detail that you have provided here. It's much appreciated!