We have had an amazing year in terms of server development. Look at how much has changed on HM lately, with the new event hub, rules on staff inactivity, 1.19.2, roleplay jobs and more. Theres still a lot that needs to be done to get the server back to its golden era.
I understand that a solid, and very in depth new player tutorial is top of mind for me, however I never wanted to do this because we didnt really have enough content on the server to warrant a huge tutorial overhaul.
Event Hub has brought a lot of new ways of regular income for the middle class miners on the server, which was its intention from the start - but now we need to focus on the lower class in terms of new players.
We need to physically go into ideas on what will help keep new players around. The biggest selling point about HelloMiners is its cities. However the issue with this, is nobody who builds a city actually sticks around to build capital or improve it. Cities like Archendale were once massive pillars of capitalism, however now cities have very little value. When I started Solaris in 2016, I was selling plots for 3500 every day. Now city owners are lucky to sell plots weekly.
If we want to continue to be a city server, we need to put the value back into cities. We need a city reform update. Yes the wild land price increase actually did work with our economy. But we need to take things a bit further to improve the server.
A massive new tutorial needs to be made, and we need to move the capital to Crystal Bay. (this will be 3 months of work for me.)
Government plots need value. In the past ANY gov city plot went for big money.
Helloclan needs to be renovated and have beauty picked over history.
Player cities need to be competitive. We need to digitalize city tiers to be similar to how the companies plugin manages things. Cities that dont accommodate for new players need to be on page 2 for the airport.
Warps are gone but nothings came back to fill its place. We need a faster transport system for new players, and discuss how we want to manage this.
Suburbs overhaul must continue. We need to continue to put value into rentals. Part of the reason cities lost their plot value, was that rentals became unprofitable.
Love all the points made, but really, what we need is just more players. Advertising the server should be top priority.
My opinion on your topics by order:
Yeah, a new tutorial would be great. Changing the capital could be good too, but you should expect HCitizens to be butt hurt over it.
What we need is actually less gov cities. CB came already in the transition from a good to a bad time. When it started being built, we had a decent playerbase to fill plots in all gov cities. When it was finished, part of the playerbase was already gone and things went sour. If you expect private cities to be competitive & gov city plots to have value, reduce the number of gov plots so the price goes up and private cities turn into a cheaper alternative.
Tbh just delete HC at this point. It does need a renovation, and I love that you pointed out picking beauty over history. People here tend to have attachment issues with old stuff, but imo we should keep what is worth to keep. Lots of gov projects in the past had to bend around to include old shitty looking structures, just for the sakes of ‘‘it old muh history’’.
Thats true. City tier updating sounds refreshing, just hope it gives decent perks for once. Being a nation owner myself, i only see the highest tier as a glorified title. International airports should be only allowed for nations (you know… inter… national… between nations… anyways.)ATM we have a thin spread playerbase that doesnt need eachother for anything other than shops i guess (wich Ara and some others carry alone).
For the love of God, just remove warps for everything other than events. Add subways, buses, trains, whatever. It makes no sense for private cities to have flights to HMIA if they can just /warp and go. Make people walk for once.
Suburbs do compete with private cities for newbies, but unlike in private cities, they cant find anything else other than houses at warp s. This lowkey sucks, cuz people tend to rent a random suburb plot, ask for a job, get ignored and quit (been there, done that in 2014).
Its on my list, i feel like keeping CB up to standard would be a good start, and at least selling up the plots.
I sorta agree, but on that point we also need less private cities. Which is why we should yeet cities from the first page of the airport if they dont have plots for sale.
HC should stay, its just its not my forte, we need someone to do a gov contract to just block it up, if we keep it and we should, we need massive demolition contracts and then more parks designed.
City tier upgrade refresh would be very time consuming and kinda bad because we would need a second quests plugin in a way, but we might be able to just make a dupe of the plugin jar and alter it a bot.
I like subways. New players do not.
Suburbs will have an automatic find-a-home button that people can click to tp them to a house, this is in the works with ARM.
Warps are gone but nothings came back to fill its place. We need a faster transport system for new players, and discuss how we want to manage this.
As former Lead Railway Technician, we were planning on creating a new fast-travel system based around teleporting along stations on lines and ‘hubs’. You could travel both by minecart and by this airport-like system. This would’ve used both new government lines and old private lines. As I’m trying to get back active again, I’d love to continue this project!
lowkey just make airports at HMIA tier 5-6 only, and tiers can be adjusted if cities are advancing too quick so that there’s always around 5-8 cities at airport no matter the time. i think we should be concentrating activity into more packed areas if we want activity (or an illusion of it), private city investment, each city can have its own little thing like monbay being good for houses, PH being good for shops, etc.
this would be a change that requires no player input and only staff input also, bc we know for a fact everyone with their tier 2-4 cities will get mad at this lool
The problem with the subway in cb is it has so many options yet it’s quicker to just fly to the areas via elytra. Also, I tend to only need to go to areas in the EH so there isn’t a need for it.
The main question here is about successfully maintaining a decent level of new players to sustain those that don’t stick around. The context being to ensure this is a successful city server.
There are a number of factors to think about:
Competition:
There are a number of city servers already. Some allow players to really get involved in the running of the server and there are those that are half-baked attempts at a city server or just run as one big city. The great thing about HelloMiners is that whilst a lot of smaller community cities have disappeared over the years, there are lots of different cities and we’re starting to see more and more develop their own themes rather than be run of the mill mini-plot sky scrapers usually made of wool. So what are we offering that’s different but also expected as a city server? What are we missing? Why would a player play on HelloMiners rather than a SMP or a mini-games server? If most players are playing minehut and hypixel, what can we do to bring them here?
Value:
A core part of offering value on a Minecraft server is what can you offer players? Do you gamify elements of the server to make people compete and engage with it? Think about the core of what HelloMiners is essentially - make a city, build a plot, build a shop… then what - grind money? What are we then offering gamers that will keep them around once they’ve done all that? One thing that keeps being brought up time and time again, which is hardly supported on the server, is roleplay. The nearest we have to this from a plugin sense is quests. What aspects of the game have been lost? Why do players leave?
Service:
Another factor is providing good timely service. I won’t bang on about this but all I can say is we’ve gone from being a server where mods feel like they’re the only ones holding the server together to a fairly well supported server at different levels. Whilst we have a strong moderator team, other levels need to be supported as well as sometimes things can rest on very few shoulders and more support might be needed there. This may be due to skill sets but we can at least see the level of dedication and effort, which may not have been apparent in the past.
Atmosphere:
There is a lot to be said about atmosphere, whether its quantity or quality. Whilst it lacks in quantity at present, the quality has certainly approved. There might still be a few screws loose here and there, but nothing that is causing the house to fall down just yet. One thing that does need to be improved, aside from roleplay, is having more social events. I feel this works really well when players focus on this. It would also be great to get some organised sports events re-established as well. There’s a brilliant golf course around for those that just want to quietly practice.
Advertising:
There has been some great work with insta lately and we need to keep this up, focusing on getting people to play. We also need more youtube videos showing off some of the extraordinary original designs that have popped up. Everyone also needs to vote to get players. Invite your friends, advertise in your schools. Unless we have a great social media presence, the only way we’re going to get around this is paid advertising which costs a lot.
TLDR
Just some questions to think about. We really need to address the core issues the server has and what it can offer that will make players want to stay. Whilst we can attack various aspects of the game and say oh maybe it’s this or that lets remove it, it isn’t going to get around the problems the server has. I think the Event Hub is a really good step. Maybe there’s a way we can support cities more with server plugins, remove PVP toggle and push cities to have arenas, mini-games, more interaction, social events etc.
So far I liked pretty much everything I’ve seen written here. Here are my two cents.
From the beginning I’ve been vocal about removing all warps apart from the event one and I think it’s a bullet we have to bite through. As a server that hyper focuses on realism with cities and companies warps just aren’t really realistic but just convenient.
However, removing all warps apart from event hub will likely just result in our current playerbase setting home at former warp airport and newbies who have no clue about how the server works getting confused. That’s just the reality, especially since the server still lacks a lot of Infrastructure, which I think is necessary before we take any more drastic steps in that area.
So I’d like to suggest that the government funds more infrastructure projects. Many infrastructure projects right now are entirely funded by private cities as a passion project. We should have the option for those projects to be funded by the government instead. (Read: not force people to turn over all infrastructure projects to the government, just have it as an option).
Another thing is that I believe is that we should get rid of the elytra as well. They’ve gotten rather scarce recently anyway, they’re not realistic and they make the map feel so much smaller than it actually is. Because with an elytra you can fly from one side of the map to another in a matter of minutes. Is it convenient? For sure, but on the otherside we have people complain about how there is not much of a challenge on HM, so why pamper players with warps and elytras?
Why not make infrastructure actually useful rather than a fancy not necessary passion project. We have roads, horses, cars, planes, railways, let’s actually have a fucking use for them.
As a final note I agree that international airports should be limited to tier 5-6 cities. Turning large cities into connection hubs, allowing for more connectivity and collaboration.
I also think it helps with the gradual discovery of the server rather than having a huge choice of cities, of which the majority is dead anyway. It would also make cities compete with each other to stay on the frontpage of the airport menu.