[Suggestion] New player city district

[Mous_E]

Disclaimer: I haven’t been active in the server community a whole lot, so please forgive me if a plan like this has been discussed already.

Hellominers is really bad at keeping new players. Many of them play briefly only to leave shortly after. I personally think that creating a new player district in an active city (or CB since there seems to be some development there) strictly for new players during their first few months of playing would be beneficial in teaching them how the server works as well as integrating them into the server community. Think of like a shopping district with affordable rent shops for new players to buy and sell from, and apartments and/or houses for new players to live in. New players would be supporting each other as well as getting familiar with the server and the community, which gives them more incentive to stay and stuff.

In General, I feel as though we need to put more effort into making the server more new player friendly. I know there has been lots of work put into improving the new player experience, but im not quite sure if its enough since it hasnt really been working as of lately.

[UltraPro]

I agree our player retention is garbage, we had like 65 players join last month and we retained 0 of them. I believe a lot of this is because of the FPS issues at spawn, people login, see the fps is 15 for them at hc spawn, they click the tutorial and then they quit.

I have been making huge progress into making the new player experience more friendly, if you go to /warp spawn, you will see I have built a brand new spawn building and im working on a helphub area there as well in CB, where the FPS is much higher. I intend to make a quicker tutorial with an option to skip it sometime soon but due to irl stuff I havent been able to complete it.

I think the issue isnt a new player district being needed, versus making all cities a priority. The airport is amazing how its setup, but there are so many dead cities that dont deserve to be on the first page of the airport GUI. We should re-orginize the cities based on activity, and have a second page of the GUI for the dead cities. Currently we sort cities by their tier, which is good, and we should still sort them by tier from left to right. However we need to have like “featured cities” at the top, which meet very simple requirements:

• must have plots for sale under F5000
• must have 3 stocked stores around the city
• must have no eyesores and many parks
• must have transportation system (subway, tp buttons etc)

Another barrier to most player owned cities, is transportation, we need like actual rail systems or encourage people to use vehicles more often, and maybe put vehicles into the tutorial to speed things up. Heck even give people a tutorial motorbike or tutorial car with really crappy fuel or speed. I think vehicle tickets how they are handled right now is poor.

Everything that I have done at the event hub actually isnt for new players, its for established players who have already been onboarded, its just we dont have an onboarding system to get people started, which is what the /findhome command will help solve. I will roll out findhome to certain apartment buildings in the future strictly in government cities.

Let me know what you think.

[Mous_E]

Sorry for delayed response,
I strongly believe that we have to really WOW new players to really hook them in, so yeah bad spawn FPS as well as a somewhat underwhelming spawn area doesnt necessarily help keep new players. We also average like single digit players on most days of the week which does not attract people.

The work done on the new spawn and new player experience has been really good so far, I’ve seen a little bit of it and I really like it. I personally still think having a designated new player area is still a good idea, but the private city priority is very much needed. Private cities have always been somewhat overshadowed by gov cities, even after the removal of warps.

I really like the idea of a railway/metro system. I wish that elytra weren’t added or were more restricted since railways would be so sick. I really like riding old rails to random places. Unfortunately, elytra pretty much erase the need for any other means of transport, especially the cars and planes and stuff. A stack of fireworks lasts so much longer and takes you so much further than fuel. Government funded highways and railways would encourage more highway and railway development, since a large reason for the lack of any highway system is the cost of the land and materials.

Going back to private cities, I absolutely agree that dead cities should be somewhat shoved to the side to make way for newer or more active cities. Right now there’s so many cities there isn’t much point in even starting a new one. I really like the idea of encouraging new player traffic to private cities, since it’s somewhat like the idea i proposed. People would be able to actually profit off of businesses in private cities. I feel like warp/gov cities should really just be shoved to the side with dead cites to really push people to invest in private.

Once the server is ready to handle an influx of new players, we really just need a vigorous advertising campaign. I’m pretty sure some guy made a comment on a semi-popular reddit post a year or so ago which led to a boatload of new players joining for the following few weeks.

Overall I strongly agree with your stance and I’m really happy that you’re still trying to revive the server. I grew up playing this server and I really want to see it thrive. If you ever need any help with anything lmk, I’m willing to do anything to keep the server alive.

[UltraPro]

I totally agree. I think people overlook that HM is a city themed server and nobody cares about cities anymore. I wish we had like an actual city featurette page on the website, like if we make cities THE core part of the server i think that would fix a lot of things.

We need to revise city tiers. I think the tier system as it is is good, and we need awards for land value and so on exactly how it is, we could even make a GUI in game for it.

What if cities were registered under two larger over-branching tiers.
Unregistered → Registered

Realistically if we want HM to be a frickin’ city server, we need to put a focus on cities and city owners. I think we should also look into a real-estate GUI which is just /rg list, but sorted into city plots, skyscrapers, homes etc, to allow people to have a clearer understanding of their real-estate portfollio. Real-estate should be the driving factor on the city, but because the map expanded so rapidly a lot of it has lost its value.

Regular un-registered cities are the exact same as right now. But registered cities are for like cities that want to be #1. We want to pump these cities and shill them to new players as hard as possible, but they sorta have to be a player run new-player environment. (shops, plots for sale, houses for rent or sale etc.) Nar suggested something similar to this to me.

We can get people to pay a large registration fee like 100k or something and then boom, with the amount of featured airport and new player exposure they get it’ll make the money back. (money just a placeholder for estimate) then we can do like annual licenses to be registered, that way we ensure that the cities are active.

Why is this a good idea? it pumps cities up, hordes all new players to any registered cities, eliminates 100k registration fee from the economy (inflation) and makes investing in cities worth-while.

And by pump cities, I mean like advertise them to new players. I also feel we can do in-game advertisements with map-arts. I found and bought a plugin which allows people to pay forsals to display any (approved by staff) png or jpg image on billboards across the ENTIRE SERVER, and it updates every like 10 seconds to a different image. We can sell these item-frames or advertising billboards and people can set them up on their own. I feel advertising is a core part of an economy server or city server and this just feels offputting that we dont have more giant yootay-cola billboards, its just part of the roleplay aspect, and HM seems to not care about roleplay, but you see, the 12 year olds joining, care about the coolness of having like in game companies and lore and so much more, but we need to make that a thing.

Remember ore-store? Remember Oburo? Why are these so iconic even though both have been abandoned for like 8 years? (IK ore store is still a thing but you get my point) Advertising, if we open that up to companies, cities and so on, and make it like a reasonable price per irl week of advertising in forsals, it gives people another avenue to spend money, and eliminates cash from the economy. (inflation)

[Mous_E]

Absolutely. Private cities are like the core of hellominers and they’re starting to become irrelevant. The registered cities idea sounds great. As much as many people hate to admit, we do somewhat need more roleplay elements on the server. Like you said, things like billboards and such. I think modernizing/reworking old elements of the server is essential since half of the server is really modern and half is stuck in 2017.

I really, really like the registered city idea, just like as you said it brings more people to the cities and pushes people to put more effort and passion into making cities. A big issue I find is that a lot of people, mostly veterans, stay out of cities and opt to focus mostly on farms and private bases and such.

The server absolutely needs more push towards a city server, since right now it’s more-so an enhanced survival server. There isnt really a player controlled economy since the gov trade center is still a thing (i think?), and cities are more of a side project/passion project than the primary attraction to the server. It’s more of a monopoly server than a city server, since most of the active players mostly play on their farms. This happened more as the server started to die and players were left with nothing to do but build farms and stuff.

Regardless, registered/unregistered cities are really good ideas. Same with billboards, sorted region lists, and other rp elements of the server. Companies, cities, and transportation to replace elytra are things I strongly believe will help the server move more towards a proper city experience.

[UltraPro]

The city tiers we have right now are fine, its just theres no relevancy or purpose. If we keep city tiers as they are, in all honesty i couldnt tell you the requirements, this is why we need like a city tier embassy area for city owners, like a little hub area for all the info you need about managing your city. I am willing to pay for a design in CB.

I will push a vote on the discord to see what people think about it in general.