(Suggestion) Server Reset

Community Suggestions
1

Hello everyone,

I am once again asking for everyone to consider a server reset.

Here are various threads throughout the years to read that sum up the issues I have noted for some time now,

To summarize previous reset suggestions, the map is far too large and there are far too many cities. This leads to, in turn, low player interaction and poor economic performance. Active investment is spread out across various areas of the server that rarely see foot travel, leading to poor returns and revenue for businesses. Also, what online community do we have without players interacting with each other in game and collaborating? Isn’t the whole point to be playing together?

Most private cities, including some that are included in the airport warps, are completely inactive. Most government city areas lay completely inactive as well (I can exemplify this by going though zone by zone and identifying “dead zones,” but I feel this is a waste of time since most players understand what I am speaking about). Most of our spikes in activity occur in times during the summer ironball tournament. Many projects, including our spawn, lay incomplete simply due to lack of time available for our staff members to attend to these “smaller,” yet noticeable issues. To any new player, one thing is clear: the server is completely dead. Who wants to take part in a server with three people online and half of river city torn up and a front row plot owned by someone that hasn’t logged on in nearly three years? Countless players have warned everyone of this “doomsday” event happening based on server quality and trends in data, but most players decided to remain ignorant.

Another conclusion can also be drawn: the staff team is overworked with the endless issues the archaic server presents on a daily basis. An overworked staff team has caused many problems, such as an immense amount of incomplete gameplay projects, and I can hardly blame them. The job is unpaid and is simply a passion project. We need to take the stress off of our staff members and modernize our server via a reset before the map comes to its known fate in the first place. I may not be a technician or have knowledge in code, but what I can say is that the work it takes to open a smaller server with a new map and modern mechanics. The way I see it, we are treating the server like a vehicle from the 90’s and plugging in new parts to keep the thing running for another six months. Eventually, it’s just going to cost too much money and time to keep up with and it would be much better to get a new car.

Further, our ceiling of players online has shrunken even more over the last few years (Statistics for HelloMiners , how many players, how many votes and more stats for HelloMiners) and our average players online has now dropped to four (Full Statistics | HelloMiners | Minecraft Server List | Best Minecraft Servers). This should suggest radical changes are required to perform CPR-esque revival of the server. Instead, the status quo has remained unfaltering. Stop making this job harder than it has to be on yourselves, staff. There are many active players that would appreciate a functional server in an image we all can work towards. It’s time to put the past behind us. Let’s try to consider that to preserve this community, it’s not the map that makes it special, it’s the people. Creating a more functional server can aid in the preservation of our community from dying out.

Please consider this another time. Thank you for reading.

Do you support this suggestion? (Please only answer if you are active)
  • Yes, I support a server reset
  • No, I do not support a server reset and we should stay on this map
0 voters
2 Likes
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Yall do know there are other servers right?

I know that these are issues that have been plaguing the server for a while now but we’ve been gradually fixing a lot of the issues that have come up over the last couple years.

Truth be told I honestly don’t think there’s a point to resetting everything. Once you do that you lose the community we have and were basically just a new server but more jaded.

The community we have likes playing the server for several reasons, the history, their long term projects, and the community we’ve built in order to overcome the issues like a oversized map and undersized player base.

I’m not saying we don’t have some issues we need to work on (the size of the server map being one), but again, a server reset isn’t gonna make it so that we magically have no more problems, it’s just gonna make different ones.

If you want a small and new map with people playing economy survival minecraft, congrats, there are over a dozen out there who are desperate for you to play them in hopes of building a mere fraction of what this server has built across its decade of history and hundreds of thousands of players. But I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that we are not interested in becoming one of those servers after everything this community has gone through and built.

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I couldn’t have said it better!

At some point I had the same opinion about resetting the map and was really in favour, but at this point it doesn’t make sense. From one person who is not nearly as active online everyday as our core community to another @Dylad, this is not at all what’s best for the server or community right now.

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It would make more sense I think to add another server world within HM and is completely separate like an SMP instead of just wiping the current world

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I respect your reply, but I will note that this server is not a history museum. It’s supposed to be enjoyable, playable, and interactive. This history comes with a massive cost of bludgeoning our admins and technicians with constant issues that wouldn’t exist if we were on a map that wasn’t over a decade old. Imagine how much more time would be freed up after reopening on a new map and spawn and starting to build from the ground up. We are essentially taking a multi-year plan in order to complete a borderline patch up.

You argue that a reset wouldn’t fix our issues and would only create new ones. That is true, but these issues will likely be far easier to attend to than those we are having now.

Also, you mention how the server would become more jaded. I disagree. I don’t understand what the point of logging in every day is when you already have everything. Some people need to realize how awesome of an opportunity it would be to help shape the next decade on a new map.

We can keep our history project open possibly in place of a build server to spectate, but for gameplay purposes, we aren’t retaining anybody new for a reason…

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I’ve been torn on a server reset because people who play Hellominers do so for the history, we have played on the same map for over ten years now. I think most of us realize the server has changed a lot over those ten plus years and the server dynamic is completely different now even compared to two years ago. This post is not going to lead to a server reset because the active players now are too invested in the current map, however, I hope this post leads to some changes. Dylad is right, ever since Tedde cut off advertising funds sometime in 2017 the server has failed to attract and keep players, most especially now. For the past three years, we have tried to advertise HM but I think we have to reflect that advertising is not issue, its the culture and the toxic server dynamic evident in HM now that keeps player retention at almost zero. We have the most amazing, diverse, loyal players that I have seen out of almost any community but the server is the issue. Everytime I see a post like this, people say we don’t need to reset, we need to fix a variety of things, and I agree. I am not disregarding the efforts staff have made, but in my opinion they have been eating at the sides and not tackling the core of the problem (the culture and toxic server dynamic). HM has almost zero server retention for new players and thats down to many many reasons but what staff need to do is bring the server dynamic to late 2016 & early 2017 (sk era and time with highest player retention). That brings us to the issues I believe stop us from having the HM server reaching the dynamic of 2016-17.

  • The Economy: We do need an economy reset, because there is absolutely no other way to fix this. If Hellominer’s hired someone who specializes in currency and economy im pretty sure they would have an absolute melt down. We need to stop pumping money into the economy (never do that again) through stupid plugins such as the one that rewards people for killing mobs and mining ores and remove keep it very minimal. (the idea is to keep inflation at 3% annualy not fuckin 40%) Staff really should only let new money enter the economy through new players joining because that was the biggest incentive to keep them on the server (so they would buy stuff). Also remove GTC because that caused more problems than it was fixing.

  • Private Cities: I don’t think dead cities are an issue, its great to remove them but they don’t pose much of a problem. I’d honestly keep the whole system the same except change the airport because its aweful (why did we ever change the airport design). We need to start charging a decent amount of money to take the airport to a private city because free teleportation is stupid when your trying incentivise currency circulation. (Like 1k a ticket in the economy now)

  • Tutorial: I remember JC made a tutorial and then last I heard Ultra was making one, I don’t know if he finished or what but why do we need to have an elaborate tutorial. The best part about when I joined was being thrown into the server with barely the basics and figuring everything out. JC’s tutorial was pretty bad and what we need is a quick basic tutorial that kicks you the main server as quick as possible beacuse the longer players are in there the higher chance they quit.

  • Warps: Bring back warps, but only to like 2 government cities. Main reason why warps slowly failed is because we ended up having like 10 of them and it completly diluted their value. Private cities were always supposed to be second in line so why are we prioritizing them now. Bringing warps back will improve the economy because property value will go up tremendously where they are brought back (generating more currency transactions) and mega stores will actually be able to exist again. Stores suck now because unlike GNR or Owl_Talon they don’t have a warp to attract traffic anymore, and also because the economy sucks.

  • End Dimension: I understand the world download was stolen by Magnus and Boots, however why was another one never made. I know we have a resouce world, but it has not ever been reset in 3 years. Can we actually have a end where we can have private farms.

  • Resouce Worlds: Remove them. Part of having an economy is scarcisty of an items and no one uses them except the end dimension to farm endermen and to make nubville.

  • Rares: Making useful rares again would be amazing. For a long time during 2018-2021 the rare market was one of the only functioning economies on the server and then it got nuked buy the plugin that made all rares have vanilla enchants. I understand the reason for that, however, we need to bring back unique rares because new rares today are the same as a boring vanilla item except with a cool name and maybe 25% faster attack speed. Rares were the best incentive for playing in events, except today events are practically boring because what I am getting some useless money for participating and a rare I already have. Ultra is truely the master at creating events, I just wish his events would have cool rewards too like they used to. Events/Rares are a huge end game part of this server and nuking them was a huge mistake, it kept a lot of veterans active.

  • Casino: I love the idea (take money out of the economy), however, I hate how it promotes gambling on the server, addiction is a real issue. This is more a personal issue of mine, however, id just like to state it here.

These are just a few of the issues I’ve thought about in an hour, Im sure I could come up with more. The issue with HM is not the players, community, but the server dynamic and we need to change that to something similar to 2016-17 when the server had the highest player retention rate and these are some issues that if we fixed would help us get there.

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I typed that in like an hour and am not double checking my grammer. So sorry if it is hard to read sometimes.

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Its not a history museum, its a constantly evolving world. Cities are revitalized or given new identities and some stay the same. The map has changed so much in the last couple years and its because of our constantly shifting community.

Our admins and technicians aren’t facing issues relating to the map or its size. That really isn’t true. Most of their time is spent on adjusting things like plugins as they update and most of all, creating new interactive systems for the community. Most technical investments of the last 2 years have gone into things like the event hub, making things like jobs and activities for players new and old. This is something we have needed to have overhauled for years but has only gotten attention recently due to the changes in staff and lack of availability from some of our team members. This would be an issue if we were in the current map or a reset one. If anything, starting over would mean that we would be putting even MORE work on the admins and technicians while also throwing away a lot of the work that’s already been done. Not to mention the enormous amount of man power that would have to be invested by our moderator team in regioning and managing this new server, which we simply do not have.

I really don’t see a point in resetting everything. You talk about how people could shape the next decade on a new map but they could get the same thing from playing literally any other survival economy server that’s just starting out and still be able to play HM. You can quite literally have both. I’d be jaded if you took away one of my options.

There have been a couple different attempts at soft resets for the HM community spanning from other servers, to private realms, to radical changes to gameplay. The only consistent factor across the board is that people lost interest in them. Yet here we still are playing HM.

Our main reason that we are at an all time low for player count is that the main generation that made up our player base has grown up and has less time to play games. That combined with our lack of advertising in a radically different market in regards to what people like to do in minecraft has made it nearly impossible to get new players to join in general.

Those of us who actively play HM and want to see it thrive have invested a lot of time and effort into making it possible for new players to get started. We’ve made new warps, new cities, new jobs, and new opportunities that players a decade ago would be losing their minds over. But the tastes of the minecraft community have changed and with so little investment in our advertising, that small proportion of players who want what we have don’t know we exist.

Again, resetting this WILL NOT FIX THAT. People still wont know we exist and people still wont want what we have just because its new. Anyone who has played a significant amount of time on HM over the last couple years will tell you we don’t have a ton of players joining then leaving, we don’t have many players joining to begin with.

Most of the biggest issues we have right now can be fixed, the main reason they aren’t is because we don’t have anyone to work on them. We don’t have an economy because there is no one around to buy things and no one needs apartments to rent. We don’t have basic workers to make building and resource collection efficient.

We need PEOPLE to fix these issues because at the end of the day they are fixable. If you really want to try starting from scratch go try out another server. Hundreds have come and gone since HM started and yet we’re still here, making progress.

We’ve discussed this idea a dozen times and it never gets passed this discussion because it doesn’t fix HM’s problems. So either go and play a new server and shape whatever kind of culture your looking for, or stay and help fix problems where you can.

HM is not a museum, nor is it a lost cause. It is an ever changing community that we need to invest in collectively if we want to see it thrive again.

2 Likes
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I do appreciate some of these points and will bring all of them to admins attention to discuss

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I would have given a more substantial reply as a staffer but given that I’ve already done so the countless of other times you’ve come with this idea that the majority of the community rightfully keeps shooting down. (Thanks Nar for putting it so wonderfully this time) I’ll just post this meme because I’m getting tired of replying to this suggestion

ZomboMeme 8657
ZomboMeme 8657633Ă—867 148 KB

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I think that we can tackle a lot of these issues without needing to do any resets, we just need to add to what we already have.

  • The economy wont be improved by a reset. We have so few players that there is no point. In a world where you can farm nearly any resource and anyone can be a pro at any trade minecrat has, our economic needs come from a lack of time. We pay people for blocks and jobs because we don’t have the time to do it. We are all fully capable of looking up tutorials for item farms and other ways of getting what we want. As soon as we reset the economy people will just invest into those same things that made it so that they didn’t have to pay others for their goods and services in the first place.
    There is a discussion to be had about the ever growing inflation problem, but that is a separate issue entirely from an economy reset.

  • I think the roles of warps and private cities need to be greatly reconsidered because they have both become nearly irrelevant with people investing more into private bases.

  • The tutorial and other resources for new players have been in the works and I think were finally gonna see them become useful with new players,

  • End Dimension and rares becoming more relevant again… yeah no I completely agree on this one, why is this not talked about more?

  • I think resource needs to be nerfed a little but not removed. Maybe make it a no keep inventory world or limit it in a way once you’re no longer new to HM because we still need a constant source of easy to collect early resources for newbies. IDK we can find a balance.

  • Addiction aside, casino is fine as far as a concept, but I do think we need to look at the input output ratio. Just seems like an easy system to abuse once you understand it.

Honestly these are all really good points I feel like we need to talk about more on a case by case basis because some of these are super easy to fix and some could benefit from more proactive discussions.

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We voted on this a couple years ago, if the vote went through we would have reset. The vote did not go through so there are currently no plans on resetting.

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Regarding the economy (this was going to be a separate post but it isn’t now, oh well):

A big problem with HM (and frankly Minecraft economies in general) is that there’s a hard cap on how productive you can be in a certain amount of time. While that may sound dumb, it’s quite important: in the real world everyone gets better off (in general, over recent times you may not believe me and you’d be justified, but that’s an unrelated issue) over time, and a big part of this is improved productivity making goods and services cheaper to create, which allows wages to generally outpace price rises (laughs in UK housing market).

However we’ve long since hit the point where the only way to be more productive is to put more time into the game, simply because minecraft doesn’t really allow for massive productivity improvements through automation or similar. This is a bit of a problem as the optimal way to play the game is, as it turns out, both incredibly boring and doesn’t exactly promote interaction or co-operation with other players. While I can’t 100% prove this, I suspect a significant portion of our classic “new player retention” problem has been down to this and the point I will make in the next paragraph.

The other point is that, as you’ll all know, economics isn’t fair. Some people become fabulously wealthy, others launguish in poverty. However in real life, if you’re poor you kinda have to stick it out: you can’t just quit and go do something else (well you can, but let’s not go there). Here though, you can just say “well fuck this, I’m going to go play Bloons TD5” and leave forever. To combat this (I know things like community can help here tbf), we need to make sure everyone is able to keep the hope of someday being richer alive and well, which is difficult when we have a mostly zero-sum economy (i.e. every forsal you gain, someone else has to lose one), and the one exception being incredibly monotonous grinding (see previous point).

How do we fix this? I genuinely have no idea at all. Even in a server concept I’ve been workshopping in my head (a prison server in the slightly more literal sense, with falliable guards, allowing tunnels and smuggling and gangs etc) which has way more economic levers to pull, I still can’t really figure out how to make the optimal way to play be a fun and engaging gameplay loop. Here, I have no ideas at all. Even if I had a perfect solution, it’d still require at the very least an economy reset (since things would break if some people started this new economy with a few million).

I hope that made some sense, as previously mentioned this was going to be a new topic but it works here too.

Sidenote: anyone who says the casino is a god source of money should probably double check that
- The person who calculated the odds at the casino

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I don’t think the current economy can be improved, we have been way beyond that point, however, we do need a currency that is valuable on HM. Reseting the currency is probably the best way to fix that, because right now the only thing the Forsal is good for is buying land. No one wants to sell valuable items, realestate, or their services (such as building) for money. If we remove GTC too, my idea is that the currency will be less dependent on items and grinding and more dependant on other interactions such as apartments, player to player jobs, private city plots, and rares. Once renting out apartments to new players became unprofitable I view that the crux of when the economy started to fail. For reseting the economy, I’d remove RP jobs and just keep the only new money being generated from new players joining. My theory is if we base the new economy around the player then it will encourage infrastructure in cities, creating more jobs to build buildings, encouraging the player to live in a private city instead of branching out and building a wild base, which leads to shops in said private cities, and etc. Just a start to what a reset economy could accomplish under the right implementation.

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Here we go again…

A reset means killing the current community, which means killing the server. A reset won’t help getting new players at all.

I’ll save myself from explaining and just agree with what Nar said above.

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It’s the oldest city server for a reason. There are many things that can be done to improve the server by strengthening player led gov depts. Resetting will only create the same problem in another 5, 10 years and serve no benefit when we have resource world.

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idk how to quite directly but,

I totally agree that new players should be via new players.

removing gtc is something I really wanted, and got an even better replacement for it. Player driven GTC economy. Honestly, I’ve got no idea how to explain/title it, but imagine an /ah where only x items are, like cobble, diamonds, netherrack is. At that place, the price can be placed like stocks, for buy and sell orders for those items.

I wanted to remove resource worlds completely, by bringing rare items (rare items as that do not exist in the main world) via events that are constantly/rotating.

For rare markets, as I know there is no track of what items exist already, so a spreadsheet should have been made by players now (lets say we ask everyone to put them at x spot somewhere in their base so we can ourself check) and seeing what exists in what amount for future use of new items.

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image

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Funny how 50% of the players that voted for a reset, dont even play on the server :rofl:

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That’s really not surprising given that they most likely don’t play for a reason.

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