Do we have a plan to regain our lost players?

I know for sure it's the reason I stopped playing, or at least didnt give the server a second chance. I know 4 people that quit for this reason or because they were permabanned for mild toxicity. If the only 4 people I know from meepcraft quit for this reason, I think it's a reasonable assumption that it was a major turning point for a lot of people.

 

"I recently went on the server and found it to be boring, admin fix it." Did you consider that perhaps it isn't Meepcraft that's changed, but you? Most of us have been here five or more years now. Most of us joined as annoying, obnoxious kids or teenagers.

The server doesn't cater to you, it caters to who you were five years ago. And that age group, those who are currently 10-14, are in 99/100 cases not going to join an aged server with an average of 2 players online. It's that simple. Every server of every game has a turnover of people, Meepcraft didn't fail because a rule was too strict, but because the server failed to attract a new audience as the old one gradually outgrew it.

There's no point in taking shots at a single admin or a single rule. Nothing lasts forever. Look back on your time here fondly, because if you care enough to still be here arguing, you obviously had a good time.

And shed a tear for the thousands of hours poured into the server and thousands of messages contributed to the forums when both eventually go down. F.

 

It's their responsibility to continue to engage that audience. I hate you to ruin your sentiments but if you take a look at recent Pixar movies like Incredibles 2 or Monsters Uni, you can see how they are catering to the people who first watched their movies when they were kids. Any successful marketing strategy will continue to accommodate to those who began their success whilst still creating variety for new audiences. Meepcraft did neither.

 

But you can't cater in every way to new groups. Pixar made movies which cater to the old audience, but they aren't likely to make them r-rated because that would alienate the new audience.

 

Thanks for rewriting what I said.

 

I did not rewrite your post. I agreed with your post, but then stated that not all accomodations for the old audience are available without alienating the younger audience. Yes, Pixar creating sequels to older movies mostly caters to the older audience, but these sequels don't alienate the younger audience either. My post must not have been clear: catering to the old audience must be done with care to not alienate the new audience. The proposed suggestion (which should go in suggestions) I believe alienates new players. I'm not against the server reducing restrictions on the chat, but I want there to be care for the new audience who want at least some of those restrictions.

You're right, there are people hurt by the change. I still stand that the family-friendly direction of the server isn't the main problem Meepcraft faces, but I made it to cause no problems when that obviously is incorrect. I was wrong, thank you for helping me realize.

My point is that nothing happens by having the conversation on random forum pages. Those pages are never used, so we don't know that nothing will be done. If nothing does happen there, if there's no solid justification or apology, that's when the forums and possibly even the game chat become valid options. I don't know for certain if "report staff" is going to result in the correct action, I just know we should give it a chance because it very well might, and if it does, it will do a much better job than complaining anywhere else.

@AdrianIsEpic , thank you for having a very constructive post.

 

Anyone that knows me even 10% knows I would. However the server is not mine and we have to respect Fuzzlrs decisions. If he says its alright. Absoutely.

Do i think it will help? Not at all. We added a way for you all to use foul language and not be punished for it, and so far party chat is one of the most abused things. People saying “oops wrong chat”, or people saying things in party chat, then others spilling what was said in PC, therefore bringing it OUT of party chat.

I could be wrong but, most of Meeps players have shown time and time again theyre not mature enough for any type of PG-13 freedom.

 

Problem is, kiddies love to gain attention through this way. Daddy didn't seem to give them enough for them to seek attention through this method.

 

As devastating as legend's final post is on this thread I'd like to bump it to propose a solution.

I've came back, I have the summer off of work and i'm going to have a light amount of school, so I decided to play again. I played Meepcraft off and on since 2014 and have been playing Minecraft in general every year since 2014. As it stands Minecraft is in a small renaissance of sorts. Where interest has came back. I've missed a lot of the server's cultural shifts between 2017 and 2018. The core mechanics of the server are as solid as ever. I love them a lot.

Things that are great:
The quest plugin is really neat with a lot of potential.
The jobs system feels fairly quality, I've always seen it as a passive income and not as a get rich quick tool.
I made about 80k doing all the stuff that's available to new players and playing a lot in the wilds. I spent about 30k to get kitted out with gear since I'm lazy and on towny taxes.
The arena is a lot of fun with other players, and provides a great challenge for just playing alone.
Spawn is really nice looking and has a lot of things to do without like going to another world like spleef, and mob arena.

The things that I feel just aren't fun are due to a low player count which is something that's difficult to fix:
KitPvP is refined and feels fairly balanced from the little I have played of it when people were online, again, no players and it's no fun.
The /shop lacks decent competition due to low player count
There isn't a lot of competition in the economy causing sell prices to plummet in physical shops, but skyrocket on /shop
Lack of diversity in money making schemes due to low player counts again


Because I accidentally posted this i'm going to rush through my final remarks:
In conclusion, the major problems I have observed from coming back with a fresh start would be remedied by a higher player count. The issue is keeping players around and threads like these with the heated toxicity really won't help. Most if not all people are very friendly in game and are quick to welcome a new player to the server and help them out. So it's a matter of spreading the word around, and making it as easy as possible for new players to acclimate when they do stumble upon the server.

 

I went in game just the other day actually to /seen all the staff to see who had been on. KyloMeep and Clueless were the only two staff who had been on that day (they're the ones I've regularly seen in game when I've been on tbh). The next most active staff was probably 2 days prior to that, then from there on most staff hadn't been seen for 7+ days some 34 days+. just because there's no players on meep which means no modreqs doesn't mean y'all have to ditch. aren't there any plugins to test or things to build up for the server? if you're doing work behind the scenes, which I know admins can do, can't you tell us? some of us can't be bothered checking trello. or you know just be honest and say you're not working on anything for meep lol.
I know you guys have a life, we all do. but there's still a thing called supporting the community you love. and if you don't love meep then idk why you applied.


I don't want meep to die. I mean maybe it kinda is right now, and I'm just not wanting to face the fact that it is. Because I really, and truly do love meep. It was the building blocks of my childhood and I don't want those blocks to fall down and break a part of me. it honestly can't be the fact that minecraft is dying, there's 100s and 1000s of players on other servers, how do you answer that? Our players are out there, somewhere. meep just needs to step the heck up. I'd like to say a shoutout to ck too because I feel he's done so much as an admin in the past few months actually, and looks to me as the only staff actually trying. so maybe if all staff were like ck that would be great hehehe.

also this is super sad. I remember seeing so many people online at that time so many of my friends would be playing and I'd never be bored on meep until about 5pm my time which is about maybe late at night there.


Like honestly. 4 years ago, I was still at school. I was super excited to head off to uni 4 years later so I could actually play meep 24/7 not being caught by my parents. lol. and I was so excited to go to uni so I could also talk on teamspeak (or now discord) to my best pals on meep. but wow, it's funny to think I actually thought Meep was still going to be the 100+ player base in 4 years time. If only I had known.
now I'm at uni, playing on meep, being the only person online.....



ALSO WHERE THE HECK IS MEEPTIMES?????? y'all making me a sad, soaking sponge. wring me out people.

 

For good reason, it's full of ads now and is a pain in the rear.

Also, TeamSpeak is the real OG here.

 

Ive used TS for years. Always have, always will. lol

 

TS had businesses more in mind than people playing games, as with Discord. SunLife Financial had a server for meetings or something in my old town (no idea why) that I raided until they locked it. Fond memories.

 

In this case you don't deserve the hate/blame you've gotten on this topic and I do see where you're coming from. While I can't say I totally agree with the strictness to which you enforce the rule, you're ultimately not to blame for the rule's existence and there's only so much blame anyone can give you for simply doing your job.

Anyway, to some extent I do agree with everyone that has said that the PG rules have negatively affected the server. I won't make any claims about how much damage this actually did, as I have no real evidence that this had any major impact on the overall player count, but I will say that it became the least appealing thing about the server to me. I'm fine with strict eco rules, but chat-wise I prefer a pretty libertarian approach.

That being said, I'm not sure to what extent we can realistically blame the server's decline on this single issue. Even if the PG movement did a significant amount of harm (which is possible), I'm doubtful that it was the sole cause of the dwindling playerbase. It seems that the server's popularity was largely due to its community, in which case it's very possible that the decline was simply due to the core playerbase growing up and losing interest and/or getting busy with other aspects of life. While I can't speak for others, I know that even if the server had no unappealing rules or anything, I still wouldn't be active on it like I used to be. There might be periods of time where I'd play a bit again, but nowadays I'm far too busy and preoccupied with other interests to spend hours online everyday like I did before. To be fair, however, there are servers that succeed in constantly getting new players and/or maintaining old players better than Meep, so it might also be unreasonable to blame the decline on the aging playerbase. It's possible that the strong community aspect here made the aging playerbase affect the server more than others, but other things (such as the PG rule) could have been factors as well, or even the main cause. Ultimately I'm skeptical of anyone pinning the decline clearly on any single factor, but it's possible that either of these two things could have been the main issue, or at least a large part of the problem.

 

One time years ago there was a big thing where staff said no more saying the word.... Donkey. Yeah.

This was in effect I want to say a month or so. This led to attempts to 'not' say donkey by saying things like d0nk3y instead. Of course it didn't work but it happened.

Then staff basically said "No we actually don't care if you say Donkey."
This led to literally everyone saying Donkey for a week or two, with only excessive users getting a kick or something similar to spam more than anything, and then it basically died back to a pretty normal use of the word donkey before it was prohibited again.

I do the the minute staff say 'yeah go nuts' will be a solid month where staff will wanna kill themselves.

Buuuut I also think that we should get that month out of the way while we have a super low count if the goal is to get a higher count.

"But Im a parent or a young child and I dont want my kid/me to see that!"
Cool. I get it. It makes sense. Totally understandable.
Thats why we should have workarounds
/gtoggle, /ttoggle, /wtoggle, will mute those chat rooms.

/mute or /block or something will mute that one guy that wont shut up about donkeys for you alone and you can turn it on and off whenever. You cannot mute staff, but you have no limit on how many players you can mute [bc why would you? If you wanna mute everyone, have at it]

Maybe a /filter that will turn on a profanity filter? Like you know how if you say donkey in chat now it wont send the message. Maybe instead, it sends the message to global normally.
Now, the filter will be 'on' by default. So your little timmy is a little bit safer from the donkeys, at least directly. No one will have a reason to skirt the filter by saying d0nk3y anymore. The command wont be heavily advertised, but itll be known through the player base pretty quickly that it exists.

You can also simply turn off chat in the minecraft client.

Advertising to turn /filter off to lure unknowns unto seeing donkeys will be met with a kick (simply answering a question "how do you turn off the filter" wont).
That helps a little.

Then theres just the fact that youre living in a world where like everyone curses on the internet
"But smart people dont have to curse to hold a conversation!" A. I know I dont have to and B I wouldn't consider myself smart anyway lol.

Your kid is not likely to see anything they wont see at school or on other servers or at their friends house or googling donkeys out of pure childs curiousity.

Of course staff will moderate an excessive use of these words [still no sex refs, drug refs] but Id personally let the lighter or more subtle ones slide because there are a lot of teens and adults that play and dude theyre the ones that are going to give the server money.

Regardless of what happens, I dont think chat will improve without more staff interaction. Ive already written my thoughts on that but short version is staff used to seem to play the server. Not a lot of staff do anymore. Talk to your people more.

Donkey.

 

It’s possible that players are trying to break the rule in order to ‘rebel,’ which is something I can see myself having done back when I was younger. If this is the case, removing the rule might actually make people calm down.

Of course, it’s also possible (as you mentioned) that removing the rule would just give people free reign to say whatever they want. But even if this is true, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that Klutch is right about removing the rule not helping. Personally, ‘toxicity’ doesn’t bother me and I don’t really understand a lot of people’s outrage at it. I’d personally prefer playing in a ‘toxic’ environment to one with strict rules. That’s just me though, it is *possible* that most people wouldn’t prefer such an environment.

 

I love when people bring up this quote because some of the most intelligent minds of our time (and even of history) are well known for their potty mouth.

 

Yeah, I mean, I can understand why other people wouldn’t want to be playing in a ‘toxic’ environment and constantly seeing a chat filled with drama and such. What I meant in saying I don’t understand it was mainly that I don’t relate, but I can understand it from an outsider’s perspective and I can see the point being made that this server isn’t necessarily the best place for such an environment. Ultimately, I think it’s fair to say most of us play games like this to have fun. While a fun environment to me might be one where I feel free of the ‘constraint’ of unnecessary rules and have the entertainment of a chaotic/unfiltered player chat, I do realize that not everyone shares this preference.