Best Posts in Thread: If there is ever a time to lay all the cards down on the table, it is now.

Edit: This post is now 64 days old and I am so depressed at how prophetic it was. In retrospect, why do I perceive so much “virtue signaling” in the replies? Is it just me?

TL ; DR - I am sad.

Given how many times I have seen posts like these I am very tempted to just delete this and give up like I did in the past. If you have something to add, please do so, trolling or not. The opinions of those who read this are the most important for THEY are the veterans and the loyalists.


The rhetoric discussing the current state of this server should be addressed sooner rather than later. The current trajectory is bleak and it needs to change. Someone needs to step forward and show leadership by providing us a vision for Meepcrafts’ future while at the same time actually acknowledging mistakes made in the past to foster trust with what is left of the community.

Stop deleting opinions you dislike on discord and address them instead. If you can’t develop a reasonable response that others will blatantly agree with, perhaps the person talking is onto a subject that actually merits time and thought. If they are a moron, the response should be a no-brainer, supposing it even needs a response.

Deleting messages on the other hand undermines staff as a whole as it serves to validate claims of bias, favoritism, and hypocritical censorship. That whole deletion of “trailing dislikes” a few weeks back is a great example. It can also be taken as evidence that some are well aware of the reality, are upset by it, but then decide to pretend it isn’t an issue, fabricate another reality, and feed it to us as the truth. It is unfair to the hardworking staff that actually put in the effort to operate appropriately and according to the actual stated rules. People notice, it affects the community negatively, you should do better.

It is quite unsettling to see assumptions, affirmations, and lazy excuses nonchalantly handed down and parroted as facts. A great example being “it’s finals week” in response to the player count hovering in single digits.

Why not survey the community? Topics like: their feelings about staff, why they quit, or what needs to change. Simply asking seems to be a logical thing to do when addressing the exodus of the community…
Also when I say "the community" I don't mean a town hall meeting on discord, that is a very specific subset of players that in no way accurately represents the community as a whole. Too much damage may have been done to accomplish this now but trying is certainly the better option.

So far we've got a single survey about the tutorial that didn’t even have proper words in the available responses. Invaluable or Valuable? Who honestly expected to get meaningful feedback from that survey? So many new players who have a bad experience will never fill it out because they are either gone or will never make a forum account. You are sitting on a data set made up of veteran players’ opinions about the “new” player experience… TF? I couldn't even fill out that survey, not just because of the grammar issues but because I don't remember what issues I had "starting off" seven years ago...

Saying “it will be better soon” without providing concrete details is no better than an airline pilot telling you to use the oxygen mask as you fall like a brick into the mountainside. We have windows.

This isn’t a multi-million dollar game company, there need not be secret projects, it might sound awesome to those working on them but to me it is just more of the same rhetoric with a bit of staff elitism thrown in.

The projects are for the community yet you leave them in the dark until the very last moment and rarely consult them about said projects? Seems a bit backwards to be honest. Had people known that hundreds of hours of work would go into extreme only for it to be left to decay three months later with no acknowledgement of the mistakes made, I am sure they would have voted the effort to go elsewhere.

I imagine the reason so many “projects” are kept secret is because the administrators don’t wish to be hassled about timelines and held accountable for broken promises. I submit that that is the problem in itself. Those making the decisions need to take accountability for their actions and mistakes. They also need to be transparent about them. It would be a lot healthier to tell the community why something is behind or shelved than to leave them in the dark for months while leading them with a carrot on a stick.

Players need to know the server is on a path and what the path looks like. That means solid information and timetables. If this isn’t provided then players and the community become hopeless. Sound familiar?

The lack of players isn’t a result of skyblock spawners existing or not existing nor is it based on the quality of the jobs plugin. “Revamping” the tutorial or adding a parkour map won’t do anything to retain players either. If you honestly think that player count is tied to such specific aspects of the server than you have your head deep in the sand.

Long term, players log on because they look forward to playing with friends and participating in what they perceive to be a great community. That community needs to be nurtured, cared for, and respected. Players need to feel that the people making decisions value the community and the prosperity of the server more than personal image and pride. I hate how much this mirrors American politics at the moment, it is sad that the two are comparable.

The player count had grown during the launch of extreme because people either heard or got a glimpse of the community starting to blossom again and they wanted to join in. After all, nearly all of us do want to see it blossom again, very much so.

Unfortunately, this time around the blossom was watered with Brawndo.

As has happened in the past, pride, bias, lies, special treatment, vague rules, and inconsistent management/moderation lead to large core chunks of the community leaving, which in turn discouraged others from logging on for any sustained period of time.

Only a select few people enjoy playing Meepcraft alone and if at all possible they should not be tasked with solely deciding its future as their perspective is typically incompatible with the idea “community focused”.

I implore you(administrators) to take a step back and rethink several things and try to extract some wisdom from the Extreme launch, KitPvP and the subsequent events before you just drop more things into Meepcraft. Simply adding skyblock won’t do anything if you don’t address the systemic issues at the top first. It will only result in another few years of the staff team wasting their real lives putting bandaids over broken legs.

It really won’t make a difference how much effort the staff team puts into specific projects if leadership continues the pattern of ignoring, silencing, mistreating, lying, disrespecting, misinforming, and failing to care for the single most important aspect of the server: the community.

 

Of course I have not truly played MeepCraft in quite some time so I don't understand all of the internal issues involving staff going on.
However, I put extensive hours into the server through 2015-2017 so I am definitely aware of the old state of things. I also believe there is another barrier that stops new people from joining such a small server (small now, years ago when we had 100-200 it was what I consider large for such a tight knit community).

That barrier is that the server is simply too overwhelming for such a small player count. I made a new minecraft account a few weeks ago and joined the server (my old one was hacked) and played the tutorial and went to spawn, I adventured around to look at all the new things and was extremely overwhelmed. Within 10-20 minutes, I logged off. I wasn't unmotivated or looking to chase nostalgia, I had actually been waiting eagerly all day to log on in the first time in forever.

If I was a new player walking into the server for the first time I would leave in the first 5 minutes because the server environment doesn't match the player count (i hope that makes sense). What I mean by this is that the spawn is gigantic (it looks amazing) but it is extremely vast and unpopulated by players. Massive spawns work for servers with large player counts but when I log into MeepCraft it makes the server look even more dead.

This second part is perhaps more of a theory and might sound like I don't understand the server anymore but I believe it plays a key role in the lack of new players. There are just too many options and main activities for such a low player count. I'm not talking about kitpvp or boomo or the things like that. I'm talking about all the different towny worlds. In theory, it sounds like it divides the already small community and greatly overwhelms and divides new players.

Conclusion / downsizing / fix
I think the two most necessary things to ensure new players stay on longer than 10 minutes is to make the spawn much smaller than it currently is. Secondly I think meepcraft should remove all but one of the towny worlds to ensure current players are all focusing on one thing at a time. Maybe that means resetting everything? Creating an entirely new server all together? Having an insane overhaul? The way I see it is that the server is built for a massive player base when I rarely see it above 15 players. New players can't use half of the current features because they require others to play with, so why even have them in the first place? And I know countless hours have gone into all the big features that exist and it would feel like a waste to temporarily disable them but why spend time on big projects and features for no one to play them at all. If / when the server gets up to a much higher count (100-150 players) then we can re enable all the features that boost the server. But as of now these big features seem to hurt the servers growth.

------
Maybe this all sounds moronic and illogical to people who still play, but as a current outsider who frequented the server many years ago this is what I've thought about meepcraft for years. Please feel free to correct me or tell me why this wouldn't work. I know I can't grasp the full current state of the server.

--- Double Post Merged, Jun 28, 2020, Original Post Date: Jun 28, 2020 ---

Additional
If the server was restarted with a smaller spawn / not as many features, a good way to claw back players who were once here and have quit would be to schedule the 're release' of meepcraft. This schedule serves to make people aware and write down the date while also helping to reintegrate old players. These old players who have taken time off the server might feel like they are no longer apart of the newer community, this chance for everyone to start at the same time could help them to meet all the newer players. If they no longer feel outside of the loop they are much more likely to log back on.

 

Honestly feel like you hit the nail on the head here. Before revamp, we were such a small and tight-knit community that it was both shocking and kinda hurtful that revamp was being done with basically no input from the most active, dedicated, and knowledgeable members on the server. Look, I get that just because you play a lot and are "good" at the game, doesn't mean you deserve input. That's absolutely true. What's also true is that if we were told more details about Extreme before it came out, we all would have said it wouldn't work.

The player base wasn't competitive and large enough to support it, so the goal of revamp was to attract all the older players to return, and retain new ones. All done at the expense of those of us playing right before revamp. And that's a major problem. For example, myself and a small group of people were online every single day, were all crushing it on baltop, had massive builds and projects, and knew almost every player-side command. We were probably the most knowledgeable non-staff members of the server in its current state. I, personally, also knew just about every active member at that time. So one would think when a massive, server-changing update was planned, that could be the difference between the end and the revival of said server, we would have been consulted maybe a little bit. Instead, all decisions seemed to stay within the staff team, and only said staff team were involved in it. I know several people who were ex-staff and quit the server months before revamp came out who knew more about the update than me, a player who had played pretty seriously for a good while. Maybe I sound a little self-entitled here, but I truly feel like my input and other players' inputs should have been valued much higher and actually just taken into consideration at all. So many ideas that were implemented and failed could have easily been either fixed or voided altogether if they had just asked people other than staff. Newsflash, just because you're a staff member, doesn't mean you know what's best for the server. Staff members are chosen for their kindness, helpfulness, activity. Yea, server knowledge is considered, but I've seen plenty of people become staff with just a few months of experience. Compare that against the 6 years I have, plus the even longer many other players have played for, and you see that being staff doesn't make you an expert. This isn't an insult to staff, it's just a fact.

It feels as though this revamp was done under the pretense that staff knew what they were doing and that player input wasn't needed. And I absolutely have no idea why this was a thing. And after high staff realized player input could actually help, it was too late. Players were asked of their opinions only after the problems arose, instead of before, when they could have outright prevented it. Town halls are useless if people feel like their opinions aren't valid.

And to mention the "staff elitism," it sounds dumb but it's actually so prevalent. As I mentioned above, being staff does not make you any better a player or person. Take me for example. I feel like I am pretty qualified to be a staff member, but I don't have the personality for it. I'm not as cheerful and helpful as them, mostly because I just don't find that fulfilling. So I don't strive to be one, because I don't want to be one. Does that mean other players who do strive to be staff are better than me? Does that mean that they deserve to have more knowledge about upcoming server updates when they play less than half as much? No - it doesn't. All it means is that they want to help other people. So why is it that many of them feel like they are above me, or have to act like they hold some big secret that I can't know until its public? It's very annoying to play a server when someone who is staff is constantly bragging about how much more they know than you because high staff decided they get information.

All players want is clarity. That's all we've ever wanted. But it seems like this is never learned. After every big fiasco that could have been prevented by simply consulting players, said players are never consulted. Just ask for our opinions, and actually take them to heart. No, not everyone's opinion will be what's best for the server. But I think the server's small enough now where high staff know who's opinions would be valid and who actually could help. Ignore the random whiners and consult the actual players. For a community-based server, there seems to be little respect for the community.

 

I’d like to thank you all for taking your time to properly write out the ideas and concerns expressed here. Sometimes we hit the nail on the head, sometimes we don’t. I fully admit I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I am fully willing to accept responsibility for those and work to do better. A common misconception I see is the idea the staff team as a whole simply ignores our own mistakes and criticism thrown our way. The simple fact is there is usually very little benefit in making some big announcement that “this was a disaster,” but instead is often acknowledged much more if you would simply approach Lord, qaz, or myself directly. We’re not aliens and we’re not blind, so if there’s an obvious issue, chances are we’ve already seen it and are fully willing to hear you out.

In terms of deletion, 90% of the time messages are deleted it is the same exact content that has been posted as spam which no message, no conversation, no reasoning, no amount of work will ever change their mind. Instead we’ve found constantly being beaten over the head with negative messaging which discourages people from playing. In the case of something like “it’s finals week,” this was completely true in the fact around half our staff team was inactive for that period of time purely because of finals. However we acknowledge this was used for far too long and merely served as a temporary excuse. As a team we have already begun deploying surveys out to collect more community feedback. The one for the tutorial is our first attempt at that and I’m sure we will be able to use your perspective on that to better tailor the questions and responses of future surveys.

We do not publish timetables or expected dates simply because the fact is we are an all volunteer staff team. As you said yourself, we are not a multi-million dollar development studio. We are all very busy both in and outside of Minecraft and putting things on a schedule creates an unrealistic demand on our staff members and the time they should be required to put in. The majority of us are university students and/or already have careers or other employment of some kind, so while I’m perfectly willing to say some of the things I am currently working on, I do not like stating when things will be done because I would rather let things release when they’re ready than to try and push a deadline. We found this out with the revamp as it was originally set for January however college classes took over my entire life and prevented it from being finished. This created an unrealistic expectation on everyone to get it out as soon as possible and the bugs and lack of polish the first season of Extreme released as was the result.

As sort of the main person behind Extreme, I completely admit a majority of the issues were my own fault and we have already implemented a number of changes to do better. I knew going in this wasn’t going to be a gamemode for everyone and I even warned people of such. I considered it highly experimental to begin with due to how different it was from the traditional towny setup we have had. I’ve been able to listen to a lot of the feedback on the first season and have enormous plans to polish and refine the ideas further and I will definitely be collecting a lot more community feedback prior to launch as well as deploying a beta version where nothing is saved for anyone to try out. One of the first changes we’ve made internally as a staff team going forward is subjecting all upcoming releases to a change control system to allow for proper testing and review before official releases.

So the biggest question going forward is, what next? Right now it will be much smaller scale updates which focus on building a core foundation of available gameplay to fall back on for players to have at their disposal while the large scale projects such as Extreme Season 2 are being worked on. The core focus on gameplay for now is intended as a way to create a solid base for players to enjoy doing things either alone or with their friends. This allows us to have said content already available when the next large scale update is ready to deploy which normally brings people back. One of the major decisions we made that is currently being worked on is the update to Minecraft 1.16. As of right now, we are still playing in Minecraft 1.12.2, using a server four major versions behind the latest severely limits us in terms of gameplay and features. Surveys as well as open betas/test worlds are going to be used far more prevalently going forward to garner feedback and make the necessary changes to gamemodes and features.

So I would very kindly ask that everyone be patient and be open on what you think of specific things. Just last week we met with @Viperfan and @Katronica to discuss their own concerns with the server as a high staff team and I would hope they have their own input on this as well. As many of you already know, I am consistently present in-game, on forums, and on Discord to respond to things as soon as I possibly can, and that applies to the other high staff as well. In closing, I would like to promise that we are working on listening, we are changing, and we are already working as hard as we possibly can to make things right.

 

What’s up everyone. Haven’t posted in a while but this caught my eye. A lot of the posts I see in this thread are basically the same posts in older threads and discussions from months earlier. Once you see through all the platitudes and well-versed (more likely insincere) responses to criticism you can kinda tell that nothing is going to change, the player count will continue to dwindle and that nostalgia you’re grasping at by enabling a broken server by continuing to play on it will disappear.

I had so much fun with everyone in Exegol when we started playing again for that first month. The server was popping, everyone was promised towny war and a lot of content that will allow the players to interact with eachother. Something different from what Meep has been for a while. But a bunch of events that were already discussed a lot before prompted myself and others to voice our concerns to the staff. Quarantine was giving Meep a unique opportunity to be exposed to a bunch of people that had nothing better to do, so they’d better capitalize on that or else the player count would drop back to a woeful single digits once people got back out of the house.

Anyway, fast forward and a culmination of blunders caused the server to flop. And unsurprisingly, people are still having the same conversation and debates. What’s best for the server to survive? How do we increase the player count? What game modes and things should we add? Those things have been debated on for literally years. This is a Minecraft server, why the hell is there so much stupid politics? Cut the bullshit. When things like this happen in the real world, the leaders responsible who don’t do a good enough job get fired and replaced. Or they resign. With extreme, maybe the people in charge just weren’t cut out for it. Don’t make promises you can’t fulfill, and then you won’t get shat on. If Fuzzlr was serious about moving the server forward, it wouldn’t be using an outdated version of Minecraft. Fuzzlr is a big boy now and his time is better spent on other things. The only reason why the current people are in charge of things on this server is because Fuzzlr doesn’t care enough about Meep to replace them. And that lack of drive trickles down to the players, because they see it too.

 

Well written, all of you. I definitely would love to see meepcraft be the community it used to be, that's the best part. I applaud the work of the staff who are genuine and put work into this server just for the love of it. I hope things work out for the best here.

 

So uh as one of maybe two only players from Exegol besides pmx who still even goes on these forums I just wanna chime in from what I saw.

Before the revamp I would log on occasionally essentially to what felt like was a dead server.

Which is true in a sense. There was a small dedicated "community" if you wish to call it that. I prefer to call it what it was in reality, a friend group. A group of friends keeping alive a minecraft server. People like myself would filter in and out but by in large the vast majority of the 10-20 players online were in fact just a friend group. Just look at almost any staff application filed in that time, besides Nuker it's hard to find someone who wasn't bombarded with +1's from their friends.

In my opinion, the failure of the revamp can be broken down into 2 main points: gameplay and moderation.

To begin, let's start with the gameplay. As mentioned in the reveal post...

That sounds absolutely awesome, so much so that many old players came back in anticipation for this. Like viperfan said I saw names that I haven't seen since 2012 logging on the server. Old friends and new friends coming together for this. Logging on I met up with some old friends we ran quickly (as best as we could considering the servers crashing, but to no fault of anyone lol) to a remote location to set up our town. We made it underground and tried our best to hide it because of the inevitable pvp and war that was coming. However soon many baffling decisions were made including...

• Enabling a Dynmap for a war based mode with player locations
• Having /tfly in towns where pvp was supposed to take place
• Turning pvp off in towns

And that's just with pvp itself. That doesn't include other dumb gameplay decisions like

• Having custom terrain that was an absolute joke
• Having custom terrain that had godawful ore generation (which led to many people downloading hacked clients, myself included

Essentially what the gamemode turned into was going to dungeons and trying to build a town up for this long rumored pvp battle that never was going to happen.

That being said, dungeons were an absolute joke. What a complete waste of time for something that absolutely didn't mattered. Instead of pouring all this time flexing worldedit abilities and your sick nasty ability to write code, why not focus on refining gameplay elements like towny war? Not only that, but "advanced crafting" was a waste of time that nobody needed, nobody wanted and only crashed the server.

Speaking of towny war, this was supposed to be the bread and butter of extreme. This is what we were all here for. I couldn't wait to flex my sickhunt pvp ability on these legion hoes with my friends... tnt cannons and all. So why in the hell did you guys make it so only nations could declare war? On top of that, why was it that in a world nations could only declare war were nations absolutely to the tits expensive? Especially in a world where getting money was very difficult to do?

Essentially you could sum up the gameplay failures to: having dumb small decisions, focusing development time and energy in a complete waste of time and completely ignoring and making the main focus of the world totally inaccessible.

"Not everybody was in the world for towny war" That's sick bro, go to normal towny where there isn't towny war.

Okay next up we have moderation.
Remember this quote?

And remember how they were all friends? What moderation do you have to do on a close-tight knit server? Almost little to none. So much so that the vast majority of staff who got promoted would 100% not be in a moderation position in a more popular iteration of the server. But they were, and the revamp dropped.

From the beginning it felt like the staff catered to a specific group of players. Many of the rule changes in extreme (no pvp in towns, no building offensive structures outside of towns) were based off Legion in specific. For a lot of us it felt like our input was being straight up ignored but those guys had a fast track to staff's ear, and that's where we get to the first major breaking point for us as players.

When Legendcaleb and VKL got banned for something completely the server's fault, it was like a big slap in the face. I was very frustrated at this and wrote this post. The culmination of the bans and the bias of the staff led my town to write this open letter to the staff. Just a back story, the letter written was co-signed by former admins, moderators and long-time players of meepcraft back when this server was hitting literally 100x the current player base. It's not like we didn't know what it took to run a successful server.

Things simmered down for a while but there always seemed to be that edge. That coupled with the cactus incident led to many discord calls with fuzzlr about specific staff members from our end.

I want to make this bold because it is important. If a number of players have an issue with certain staff members, maybe ask yourself why the players have issues with that staff member instead of consistently just shutting them down. That goes for multiple staff btw.

I think the biggest slap in the face for us was the council of warlords thread. Essentially after being kicked and banned for petty offenses by this "biased" staff, it was announced that if you did have any infractions you would be ineligible for this "council". What an absolute joke.

To sum it up, basically inexperienced staff coupled with new players = favoritism and frustration for a vast majority of players. The others in the thread nailed it perfectly, especially Jwarian.

Peero keeps talking about how this server used to be a small tight-knit community. For the entire time it felt like the vast majority of staff and Legion wanted it to go back to that community. And guess what? It did, with the breaking of trust of a large number of the playerbase towards the staff and the server.

If that's all we are to you guys, then I think we aren't coming back.

 

These problems were so prevalent in extreme. Now, I was probably not the best person to have been giving feedback at the time, as half of what I say is really stupid. However, I was trying to give genuine feedback at the start of extreme's launch. I had heard about extreme and so was playing meepcraft a few days before the revamp was launched. Immediately I disliked the revamp. I made this incredibly clear, and probably way too clear. I participated in plenty of conversations with other players who had the same views I did in the global chat, but these things never really had any effect. Every time a new dungeon was launched I complained about the new dungeon - to me they just weren't interesting. At all. It was draining resources. I made a pathetic attempt at trying to communicate my feelings by making suggestions here on forums. What I thought we really needed was a non-extreme reset. That would have been more enjoyable in my opinion. However, probably because of the stupidity of my suggestion (it was probably like 3 sentences, tops), this was denied. I would have appreciated if someone would have reached out to me, but I also acknowledge that I REALLY should have communicated my thoughts better.

I think my views on extreme represented a large portion of the community who had logged back on. I think the only reason it lasted so long was the enjoyable experiences people had linking up with past friends and teammates. No real large tasks were performed, towny war never came to fruition, and the extreme playerbase fell apart. Even after it fell apart, it probably could have been maintained in the normal world, but I got bored quickly. Probably because Peero was so so so far ahead of everyone else (no hate to him), and in an economy server, you need to have more room than that. Once you've exhausted the enjoyment from just playing minecraft, an economy allows you to have another goal to strive for.

This is just my personal feelings, but I think that staff knew, to some extent, what they were getting into. That extreme was a partial attempt at reviving the server - one last hurrah, if you will. I've managed to maintain some of the feeling of starting out, playing with a lot of my friends from meepcraft - just us having fun playing minecraft again. I know that if staff did reach out, I would provide feedback the best I can, although it would be incredibly blunt, I feel the staff need that every now and again. My guess is that the staff team is just too supportive, I didn't see any people in the staff team that disagreed with how extreme was turning out, surely there had to be a few that had their opinions, just didn't want to voice them. Oh well, I don't have any insider knowledge.

Yeah, I agree with you guys. I dont know if its too far gone. People said years ago meep was on "its last legs" and it made it through. I would like to push for just a general reset. Nothing "extreme" (although extreme hardly held up to its name). Thanks for reading my incoherent thoughts on the situation.

 

I appreciate you taking the time to deliver your initial thoughts on this.

I will say that matters pertaining to bias, favoritism, vague rules, special treatment, elitism, and a general lack of transparency do deserve recognition at some point down the road. @_Peero_ made some great observations about some aspects of the favoritism, elitism, and lack of transparency. I understand why you left the subject alone, as the issues are not simple to address and require a thorough examination of the server policies, the accompanying enforcement as well as the general behavior and culture of those who are chosen to represent the server. I would not have interpreted an immediate reply on this subject as proper acknowledgment anyhow rather I would have seen it as a damage control response.

Needless to say there are a lot of players scorn and I do think the current moderation format is in disarray making it difficult for lower level volunteers to do their job. Sometimes leading to inaction either for fear of retaliation or due to a general lack of clear standards. An example being the failure to define and enforce PG-13 chat fairly.

There was an excellent point made by @cooey about volunteers being “too supportive.” I would submit the idea that the current culture might be discouraging volunteers from speaking out about said issues perhaps for fear of not being promoted, being excluded from projects, not wanting to draw attention, “make waves”, or as a result of general character traits inherent to the “volunteer personality”. The latter cases requiring tactful leadership to encourage people to offer their true opinions because they are valuable.

Most of these issues can be found by simply reading through previous discord and forum complaints and I won’t bother pointing out specific incidents because as you stated, you aren’t blind. More could be gleaned from a survey as you referenced anyhow.

I do think it may be beneficial if your vision and long term goals for this server were shared in a more detailed and structured form. Perhaps something that can be posted to the front page of the website and pushed to the inactive people via the gigantic email list. It may also be an effective way to drive substantial traffic to a newly crafted survey so you can gather the information necessary to properly allocate your limited volunteer resources going forward as you prepare for the attempted “revival” that should accompany 1.16.

I will say that you have generally given me a prompt ear, and it does not go unnoticed but I did not craft this thread specifically looking for a reply, I did so in hopes of catalyzing change.

 

ok imma keep it real with u and hopefully short but to put it blunt the server is fucking dog shit rn. staff basically disregarded anyones opinions during extreme UNLESS they were in legion and that obviously pissed us off, so of course we would wanna bring it up, but all we got were mutes and "dont be toxic". why would anyone wanna play a server where if u have an opinion that does not conform to the "clueless clique" you are dumpstered and maybe banned. lag is a massive issue and i think the server just needs to be fully reset, towny, extreme, everything. get rid of halo, sorry if you guys like it but who in the actual fuck comes on to meepcraft and says "oh boy lets play fucking halo".

another large issue is that the teams are working on TOO MANY DIFFERENT PROJECTS at the same time. focus on one, role out whatever it is and then go to the next issue. dont do more than you guys can handle. i dont wanna read from the staff team that they are working on 20 half assed projects, i wanna see one project done R I G H T.

in regards to the staff team, please actually listen to us and our input and dont do that warlords shit where you guys say fuck u if u have been banned or whatever ur toxic so ur opinion doesnt matter. if u want a community ur gonna have toxic people regardless, and perhaps one of the reasons theyre toxic is because of the direction the server has taken to the point where you are practically no longer a valid member of the community because the clueless clique has decided they dont like u.

and pls go back to 2013 spawn it may not look pretty but at least it isnt a clusterfuck like the spawn we have now that is so difficult to navigate.

(i was drunk when i wrote this so sorry if its not coherent)

 

Pretty sure 80% of the people that joined back in that time and people who played at the time said it wouldn't work. Your group defended the idea of it becoming great actually telling people it's gonna be good and should give it a try. What's more surprising is that we were actually told what was coming in the extreme and it was even hyped so much that most of the things that were promised to be on day 1 weren't there. Although we were told that it will have a series of updates but correct me if I'm wrong, that was about the following updates for other aspects of the server.

I'm actually surprise to see this line from you honestly.

Sadly this is quite true tbh. This is also exactly the reason why the bias in most of staff members are so hard that they make terrible judgement. I mean, you see people get away with the most awful things said on chat but as soon as someone else tried to have a quick fun with another player, literally having a completely different intent, for some reason they would assume something else and enforce the "rules". It's really dumb and you could really tell from that alone that SOME are focusing on the wrong things. People would probably come at me saying "It's your fault!" No I'm not just referring to what happened with that discord mute, this actually happened to multiple people. It's so anti fun and it causes players to just quit altogether.

Anyhow, let me gives you guys a little insight on what a new player thought of the server.

My girlfriend also had a shitty experience here as a new player. Also she really doesn't like to play MC because she thought block games were "stupid" but she gave it a try because she wanted to play with me. Surprisingly she enjoyed playing in extreme as she was able to fly and build things. I let her build on my town so she could have a grasp of the block game experience and help me along the way. Couple of days later, she asked me if she could do more so I offered her a town in front of the Crypt dungeon. She was so excited to work on this town but a few days after I told her this, the town was destroyed because it was under my alt. She was greatly upset and didn't bother to log back in again. Staff didn't even bother to contact me about what's going to be done with these kinds of towns. She had plan in that town and that was taken away from her.

She quit as a new player and she told me that "they are stupid and make idiotic decisions".
Quite a few people in staff team knew that account of mine was being used by her and could verify this through IP checks and log checks. Even discord verification could work but they chose to listen to "these" people that loved sucking up to them lol.

I understand that a rule was put in place weeks after I had this alt town hence why I made the decision to give it to her as well. However, looking at Minecraft Dynamic Map I could definitely still see an alt town that has existed since Day 2 of Extreme and still is probably off the "radar" heh.

On the other hand,

I saw this and I thought they announced something regarding SB. No offence to Clue but claiming that SB died off because of spawners was a bit silly. It was just one of the long list of problems that turned people away from that game mode. I don't mean to brag but I want to give my entire island in SB and it's members a big THANKS for keeping that community alive back in 2017-2018 and helped brought in donations for the server despite receiving shit and non stop trashing from these so called "great players".

What I find funny with all these is that these so called "great players" pretty sure you were already called an "idiot" for having an alt that has a rank. These people are so narrow minded that they don't even realize that you actually brought in donation for the server that THEY play on. Then they continue to have a go at you because you use these "alts" on the server. While they also use their alts to play??? Just really hypocritical honestly. What's even more funny is that if that player is friends with a heavily biased staff, you'd get branded as "toxec" simply because you are educating them lol.

I could literally go on and on about the problems here but it gets so tiring really.
Toxic people being under staff wing, false promises, fractured community, not having a clear path
These are just a small list of problems that turns people away from the server and sadly, these aren't being addressed at all lol.

 

I just wanted to thank everyone who has commented on this post so far, I really do respect what the community has to say and reach out as much as i can. I try to take point on aspects regarding the community and their feedback. I am going to respond to aspects of this which i feel like i have the knowledge to do so.

Firstly, in regards to this, over the past 4+ years i have been staff, the one thing which i actively have advocated for was better communication, this is both inside the staff team and to the broader community. This is why myself and a fellow staff member decided to work on methods which we can get the feedback we greatly need from the community. Our first method is through the use of the Google forms/surveys. This method is new and we are still learning. As lead on this aspect, i can admit that the communication between the community and decisions regarding the server have been lacking, and something which i am actively working on is improving this. If you have any suggestions and questions regarding this, please contact me.

Projects are not always kept a secret and it is not always the admins which make these decisions. We have various teams and the majority of these are lead by other members of the team. It is up to them what they want to disclose, and YES most of the time, we dont want to share something we are working on and get the communities feedback on it and then it never happens.

As mentioned, this is something which i am working on. Being staff as long as i have, i have noticed a lot internally and externally through talking to many people and all of which i am taking into account with my approach on gaining feedback and making the communication and decision making process clearer with the community.

Yes, some aspects which we keep secret are done so for a reason, there have been many occurrences that i have witnessed where ideas have been hatched and then it came to development but when it came to it actually working, it didn't. What would have happened if we told the community about this idea? People would have gotten their hopes up and then we would have been the "bad guys" because we couldn't actually provide this great idea.
HOWEVER, i do recognize that once an idea has been approved for development and we know it will work, that we should then reach out to the community and get feedback.

Okay, we had this meeting a few days ago and as mentioned in this meeting, we cannot just pull stuff out our butts instantly, things take a while to develop and implement. You were also asked in the meeting if you had any other issues and that you could contact anyone in regards to it.

I have always worked with the community, as much as i could.

I hope this helps to clear up some confusion regarding the community feedback and communication aspects of the staff teams decision making processes. If anyone has any questions regarding this, please let me know

 

This is the best line out of this entire thing. Bravo

 

The server has a community that wants it to succeed. But the server is not able to be ran with the care necessary for it to be entertaining and worthwhile of people spending their time on it.

I have cared about the server for years (even times I’m not playing. I still check forums daily), and have tried my hand at staff twice. While I have my own personal strengths and weaknesses that made my staff experience interesting, I truly wanted to help the server.

I recognized a bunch of these issues so long ago and was so disheartened by the lack of free time and effort of staff at the time. Until eventually I was using my role as staff as the only reason to keep me logging on. When I realized I was wasting my time (because even as staff, I held no true power) I resigned.

I still care about the server. Hell, if I was asked to help I still would.

The issue isn’t the lack of people that care. I’m 100% sure there are numerous members of the community like me that want the server to succeed because of the positive impact it’s had on our lives. But at the end of the day, we will not be able to do anything more than type these posts on forums.

Upper staff are volunteers that have priorities unrelated to meepcraft. This isn’t saying they aren’t trying to help. But for the server to truly improve you need to 1. Be equipped / able to truly help the server. 2. Have the time to create stuff behind the scenes. And 3. Be trusted enough to actually be able to go and work on the server.

Attaining all 3 is only possible by Smod/Admin, and more specifically, Owner/Admin/Tech.

Do any of our volunteer staff team of the Smod+ fit all 3 criteria?

they are staff, so I do not doubt they want to help the server. Some don’t have #1. I was in this scenario as well.

How do you help the server without having the technical skills to develop updates? Work with the community!

Post the MeepTimes, be active on slack, actively be asking people that have the means to update for progress updates, trying to motivate them so that the server can benefit.

love me or hate me (staff that knew me when I was staff), but I worked my ass off to try to improve the server when I didn’t have #1 or #3. In a time where Clue wasn’t admin. Fuzzlr didn’t play (wow, this never seems to change). Lordinateur was inactive. What was there to do?

It is truly difficult to continue to continue hoping when you are helpless watching something you love depreciate time and time again.

I still have ideas that I believe would help the server, and would gladly defend them if someone actually cares to hear.

But truly, there is still a glaring problem that no one wants to address. The one person that should be personally invested in the success of the server, it’s owner, does not participate with the community. Does not set the tone of the staff team. Does not actively show he cares about the server. Does not try to manage or operate the server (despite there being chance of financial gain before he quit).

You can say he works behind the scenes. But in all honesty, the server would be better off with just about anybody owning the server that had all 3 criteria to be able to help.

Is it disrespectful to say this? Yeah, sure.

But it’s also disrespectful and stupid to neglect your duties as owner while a community wastes thousands of hours trying to keep a server alive when they do not have the means available to them.

 

It's late so maybe I'll write something more in depth later but I just wanted to reiterate what everyone's saying about the lack of transparency. Everything is a "you'll see" or a "just wait ". It's almost infuriating. Yeah, some things are better as surprises but let us know where you guys are headed. We're always left in the dark and that's why people leave. Staff and players need to be more on par with each other and staff need to involve the community more in what's going on. If not, it's two communities and that's on the staff team.

 

We all appreciate what staff are doing and we know you all want the best for the server but I feel like you missed a major part of the response. Part of having community feedback is also letting us in on updates more. For example, with the jobs update, the most information we have is that there will be a new jobs slot and some of the formulas will be redone. New jobs slot is exciting for maybe two of us players, being that it'll be presumably harder to get. This makes the new jobs update uninteresting for most players. If we had more info about it maybe more people would be inclined to try it out. Furthermore, you keep mentioning changes to Extreme and stuff, but give no ideas or plans. This is the real source of the problem. Asking for input is fine and dandy but at the end of the day staff take the input and put their own spin on it, as opposed to community ideas. Suggestions are good but wouldn't it be better for everyone if things were added that were good to begin with? For me personally, I'd like to know what is coming in advanced. Think about it like minecraft snapshots: We get the updates before they are actually released, so players can bug test and give their opinions. You mentioned actual beta testing, and while I don't think this is absolutely necessary, being informed of changes prior to their implementation gets people excited and lets them actually know what to expect. That's what I envision. This way if an idea that everyone hates is being considered, it can be stopped before much development is done on it. I think what Jwar is getting at is that since Meep's not a corporation or big gaming company being transparent with updates is actually possible and more beneficial. That's how I see it anyway.

If I'm being totally honest, I don't see why you guys want the server to go back to how it was. It's different now, and most of you can't seem to accept that. Yes, it is a friend group. Yes, that's what happens when a server grows to less than 20 active players. But, instead of rolling with the tide most of you are trying to get back the old Meep. The old Meep is dead and if we keep going at it like this the new one will be too.

As I've mentioned countless times, those of us who never quit went to Legion because it seemed like fun. Yes, we were probably biased towards because to be completely honest we were far better for the server. We weren't toxic, we weren't annoying, we listened to staff, we knew the rules and what happened when you didn't follow them. So if the staff team seemed to be leaning in our favor, it was for good reason. You can't expect to join back on a server, act polar opposite to its current state, then get all pissy when the staff team doesn't like you. Maybe mature and realize acting like an ass on a minecraft server that a lot of people hold dear to their heart, that raised most of the people on it, that I'm sure even you, yourself, have a sort of bond to, is gonna hurt it. The server was more community-oriented than ever before, so when you come and disrupt it, staff members aren't going to sit there and let it happen.

Don't come back if you're gonna act that way, cause I would much rather see the server die to a lack of players than killed by people who used to love it and log on everyday just like us.