Feedback What would you prefer?

Hello everyone!

As you all have seen by now our admin team has made the decision to shut down a few of our older servers permanently to give our equipment a bit more room to work more efficiently. Our admin team works very hard to keep over 30 servers running as smoothly as possible but we only have so many hours in the day! So this begs the question, what next? Well, we'd like to hear from you!

Would you guys like to see our admin team put their hard work into getting our existing servers more stable so hopefully less issues will arise from them?

OR...

Would you like them to put more of their time into getting new servers up and running?

Let us know!

~EL

 

Personally i think we should strive towards striking the iron while it's hot. Which means new servers quickly when they are released.

Shut down the following:

• Any server with only a few average daily players that don't bring any new players in either
  • At the moment we have 13 servers that average <3 players online daily, and out of those 7 of them have brought <10 new players in
    • Current server stats can be found here for anyone interested.
• Low population servers that are extremely similar to each other (Looking at you kitchen sinks, why do we need 5 packs that are almost the same thing, just a few mods difference)
• Or merge servers that have multiple low player count nodes, allowing inventory/claimblock/money transfer, like it was done with the E2E servers.

And then launch new servers quickly when popular packs gets released.

Waiting 2-5 months after a popular pack has come out does not help us attract new players to the network.

A new popular server like Po3K could have drawn in tons of new players if it was launched within 2 weeks of it's launch. Now, a lot of interest in it will be gone as players have gone elsewhere to play it.

Edit:

I'd forgotten that base downloads are a thing, so the below is kind of useless.

Another thing that i think could be improved is the server shutdown time.

Right now, servers are shut down 1 week after announcements, this is very abrupt and leaves players rather sad and or angry. Personally i experienced it just once, and it was not very fun.

I think the server shutdown time should be increased to 1 month. This will allow players time to finish up their packs if they are near endgame, and they will have plenty of advance warning.

It also gives the Admin team 1 month where they can work on getting new servers set up, knowing that there will be resources available for it at that time.

 

In my opinion quality is always over quantity, when I can cry i lost MANY hours of gameplay on closed server I understand thats for greater good, when new pack comes out its good to open server for it but remember some modpacks dont have many servers running them and some ppl wants to play some older packs than new ones that are much the same to each other like Will said and after hype train stop those new packs is left with bunch of players.

I think having fewer packs but provide them good support and no crashes is more important than having all the new packs. Also remind re-release of Regrowth - we had it shutdown but after it re-open we had much interest in it so why dont think about re-opening older serwer for a limited time or give us asked so many times vanilla server?(no mods or just few utility ones will not burden serve like new bulky 200+ mods modpack)

 

I just wanna say i agree with Willsharper on his points, other than i dont a reason to keep the servers open for a month after its gotten its death sentence. This is purely anecdotal but i would say when a server close down most people just move on to a new pack or download their base to singleplayer, no matter what its basically a empty server from then on.

And well, since the admins are the ones who open and close servers its not like 1 month shutdown announcement will give them more time to prepare

 

Well. What ya could do, is launch a new server ASAP, and then make sure it's stable before moving on, yes?

 

yeah, i was kinda hoping there was a both vote... XD

 

It doesn't matter how many players we attract to our server if they are unplayable. Those new players wouldn't stick around if we have stability issues.

Network should be adding new popular servers sooner to attract more people, but it also needs to be keeping up with stability, even if that includes shutting down other servers.

The biggest thing for the latter in my opinion is to make a schedule. For example, guarantee new servers will be up for at least 12 months or something, then after that it may be reclaimed at anytime (with a 3 month warning or something). Alternatively, have it set on 6 month evaluation period, that at the end of each 6 months, there's an announcement that the server will be going on for another 6 months or will be shutdown in 6 months. There are many ways to do this. The actual policy doesn't matter as the predictability, because players don't want to start a new server only to have it announced the next month that it's being shut down.

 

For some reason i had completely forgotten about the base download when i wrote this, so yeah, that does make my argument kind of fall on it's head haha.

Can we ignore the part of my message below the 'Edit:' line? I think my point still stands with with the above suggestions though!

 

The reason we shut down servers after only one week is as Aido said, because the second you announce it, no players stick around. They'd rather start a new adventure on a new modpack or continue on in single-player right away. We've seen it many times with server shutdowns (I think at one point we allowed 2 weeks and it ended up just becoming a ghost town after the first week was up.)

This also doesn't work like you would think. We can't just close 5 modpacks at once just because they are similar. I can tell you right now, there are kitchen sink packs I would not want to play, but others I really enjoyed playing and a lot of others probably feel the same way. Heck, Infinity Normal is a "Kitchen Sink" modpack, but it currently has the best player counts on our network. Does that mean we should close tekkit legends just because it has lower numbers and is similar (albeit it's numbers are still respectable)? No, simply because they attract different players and will not be comparable in the way that you wish here. As you can see, the servers we picked are all at the top of that list you sent.

Looking at it from an Admin's perspective, we cannot spit out new servers the second they launch without having lots of bugs and things that users will get mad at us for not having polished despite the pack just being launched. It happens on servers we play tested for months, so it only gets worse when you don't play test and just launch new servers willy nilly. We've also seen new servers get launched and die after a month of being online. When do we deem a new modpack as "dead"? Giving it time to launch in the community and mature means we have time to gauge whether it would be a good modpack to have or not. Heck RLCraft had so much hype on launch and now a lot of people hate that modpack on Reddit. Do you see my point? I'm not trying to say that your ideas are dumb, they're just not realistic for a team of 3 to accomplish given our current position (in my opinion)

 

I did specifically say 'Low population servers that are extremely similar to each other', and the servers that are currently being shut down, Crundee and Crackpack, fit rather spot on with that statement

Infinity and Tekkit legends both have great numbers, and bring in tons of new players, so they should obviously stay on the network.

I'm not saying 'Shut down all the kitchensink packs', but the low population ones that have been halfway dead for the past 3-6 months and barely bring in any new players. Same goes for all other packs really.

 

That's what were doing

 

Add some newer packs for fun

 

That's actually a good point. Didn't even pass my mind wow I'm very intelligent.

 

New servers are always good to keep everything fresh and interesting.
But if those server do not perform well then existing and new players are less likely to want to actually stay.
Take what you will from that but im gonna say a bit of both.
And as Willshaper said previously, if packs are not released to play (even if that comes with bugs initially as long as they are mitigable) then they will not bring in the new audience that will keep the community growing

But thats just me

 

We're always trying to balance adding the new with keeping the old working. While something is new and exciting when someone on Twitch or Youtube is playing a pack, these largely exist as single player experiences with an entertainer making them as exciting as possible.

As a network we have to then take that same pack, hope that actually has a multiplayer setup and then make it work. That's where there is a lot of time invested by the staff here. That's of course discounting the desire of enough staff to be interested in the pack to be able to effectively help players muddling through a pack. Then if you rush a pack out you might find out it doesn't work out well for multiplayer, or it is unstable, or filled with fun filled ways to cheat.