Why hello there, fellow community member, or guest. Whoever you may be, feel free to put on your high socks, grab a pair of tight underwear, and fetch something to eat whilst you read.
So, here I am. And as you could probably tell, or you just have from the title, which is probably why you read this thread! The decline of this community. I dearly hope that I do not come off as a pessimist, and I don't necessarily have the knowledge or experience of this community to input too much of my opinion, but if you are one of those people that does have the experience, feel free to input. And even if you're not-- please so. I am merely making this thread to raise the awareness, or to generate ideas to help the community, which seems to be hanging from a bare string.
The decline of EscapeRestart. Many of us have already well enough realized it, and many of us also realize it, but can't let go. Whether or not you choose to believe it, it's the inevitable case that this community will fade away, with a wisp left of what used to be a prosperous gaming community, in the past of classic Minecraft, precisely. Lava, TNT, Zombie. All creative, extremely unique servers, with devoted staff, developers, and a "Hey, that was pretty fun! Let's go there again, and let's invite some our friends!" type of playerbase.
Go ahead and look at the Minecraft servers. I haven't been on there often enough to properly tell, but I don't quite need to to know that it doesn't have an extraordinary amount of a playerbase. So, what happens when people see a server with little to none players? They don't join, there's nothing to do, especially when most of our Minecraft servers are communication or faction based, other than Create. Eventually, it'll dwindle down. And further, and further
So, what does that leave us? Teamspeak, other gaming servers, and forums.
The other gaming servers, precisely Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: Jailbreak, Garry's Mod: TTT, and Starbound. CS:GO:Jailbreak, don't need to go too in-depth. Was hyped up, but was never released, hence still having the subsection. Garry's Mod: TTT, was relatively active at peaks in the first week or two, but now, remains at a near steady 0/32 (32, was it? Right.) With the small occasion of a tiny group of trolls, deathmatching each other. Both of these subsections on the forums are inactive. The thing with these two servers is, they require a medium to large amount of people to be fun, and without an actual planning, who's going to take the risk and join the server, making it 1/32, and hoping someone else will join? I wouldn't want to. Starbound-- too unofficial to remain active, and relatively expensive.
Forums and Teamspeak. These are the things, mainly the forums, letting the community hang on a single thread. The forums are filled with many dead, inactive subsections, useless, just sitting and longing to be used by the right set of people with the right purposes. The forum user count of members has dwindled to an average of 15-25 members. And looking at it, most of them are just previous staff members, current staff members, or old members sticking around to see how the community fairs, or just out of pure habit, which is my personal reason. Compared to circa 2012, which was around 50-60 members. That's a huge drop. Compared to circa 2012, we had several forum introductions a week. How many introductions have we had in the past three months? From the looks of it, the only ones actively making threads with the exception of the rare introducing new member, are staff. And of course, the royal, extravagant, League memers. To be honest, the League guys cast a large portion of the still relatively active community we have now, and I'm thankful. But for an informal game that the community doesn't even officially recognize as one of their main games, that's not going to cut it. The only steadily active subsection is the roleplaying.
The saddest part? That this was envisioned to be a thriving era of the community, after the overhaul, which was claimed to be smooth, which was, but inactiveness came up it and bit in the huge asscheeks.
In conclusion, the community has spread out too much with too many overhyped servers that, pardon my harsh language, failed, with generally unoriginal ideas. I mean, a SMP out of thousands? A build server out of thousands? A TTT server out of thousands? A Jailbreak server out of hundreds? Kind of unoriginal, and original used to be our complete forte previously. But not anymore.
How do we fix this? I'm not completely sure. Actually, I'm not sure at all. All I want to say, and know, is that the community is declining at a fast rate, and if we don't do something to bring it back, it'll be like that orange juice you forgot to drink in the morning. Old, sour, no. I know I'm not being the greatest of human beings to merely bring up this topic and not say too much on how to actually fix it, but I just wanted to raise the awareness and generate new ideas.
My personal three cents would to go back to what we used to be good at. Completely original servers, in a tight community where a lot of people knew each other, with devoted developers, eager to help out.
But y'know, that's just coming from a guy that joined the community at the age of 10 in 2012, so once again, I don't know how credible I am, but I'd like to hear the thoughts and idea of the community as a whole.
We're escaping the inevitable, but not restarting what could be.
Thanks, best regards, DynastyOfBlocks.
So, here I am. And as you could probably tell, or you just have from the title, which is probably why you read this thread! The decline of this community. I dearly hope that I do not come off as a pessimist, and I don't necessarily have the knowledge or experience of this community to input too much of my opinion, but if you are one of those people that does have the experience, feel free to input. And even if you're not-- please so. I am merely making this thread to raise the awareness, or to generate ideas to help the community, which seems to be hanging from a bare string.
The decline of EscapeRestart. Many of us have already well enough realized it, and many of us also realize it, but can't let go. Whether or not you choose to believe it, it's the inevitable case that this community will fade away, with a wisp left of what used to be a prosperous gaming community, in the past of classic Minecraft, precisely. Lava, TNT, Zombie. All creative, extremely unique servers, with devoted staff, developers, and a "Hey, that was pretty fun! Let's go there again, and let's invite some our friends!" type of playerbase.
Go ahead and look at the Minecraft servers. I haven't been on there often enough to properly tell, but I don't quite need to to know that it doesn't have an extraordinary amount of a playerbase. So, what happens when people see a server with little to none players? They don't join, there's nothing to do, especially when most of our Minecraft servers are communication or faction based, other than Create. Eventually, it'll dwindle down. And further, and further
So, what does that leave us? Teamspeak, other gaming servers, and forums.
The other gaming servers, precisely Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: Jailbreak, Garry's Mod: TTT, and Starbound. CS:GO:Jailbreak, don't need to go too in-depth. Was hyped up, but was never released, hence still having the subsection. Garry's Mod: TTT, was relatively active at peaks in the first week or two, but now, remains at a near steady 0/32 (32, was it? Right.) With the small occasion of a tiny group of trolls, deathmatching each other. Both of these subsections on the forums are inactive. The thing with these two servers is, they require a medium to large amount of people to be fun, and without an actual planning, who's going to take the risk and join the server, making it 1/32, and hoping someone else will join? I wouldn't want to. Starbound-- too unofficial to remain active, and relatively expensive.
Forums and Teamspeak. These are the things, mainly the forums, letting the community hang on a single thread. The forums are filled with many dead, inactive subsections, useless, just sitting and longing to be used by the right set of people with the right purposes. The forum user count of members has dwindled to an average of 15-25 members. And looking at it, most of them are just previous staff members, current staff members, or old members sticking around to see how the community fairs, or just out of pure habit, which is my personal reason. Compared to circa 2012, which was around 50-60 members. That's a huge drop. Compared to circa 2012, we had several forum introductions a week. How many introductions have we had in the past three months? From the looks of it, the only ones actively making threads with the exception of the rare introducing new member, are staff. And of course, the royal, extravagant, League memers. To be honest, the League guys cast a large portion of the still relatively active community we have now, and I'm thankful. But for an informal game that the community doesn't even officially recognize as one of their main games, that's not going to cut it. The only steadily active subsection is the roleplaying.
The saddest part? That this was envisioned to be a thriving era of the community, after the overhaul, which was claimed to be smooth, which was, but inactiveness came up it and bit in the huge asscheeks.
In conclusion, the community has spread out too much with too many overhyped servers that, pardon my harsh language, failed, with generally unoriginal ideas. I mean, a SMP out of thousands? A build server out of thousands? A TTT server out of thousands? A Jailbreak server out of hundreds? Kind of unoriginal, and original used to be our complete forte previously. But not anymore.
How do we fix this? I'm not completely sure. Actually, I'm not sure at all. All I want to say, and know, is that the community is declining at a fast rate, and if we don't do something to bring it back, it'll be like that orange juice you forgot to drink in the morning. Old, sour, no. I know I'm not being the greatest of human beings to merely bring up this topic and not say too much on how to actually fix it, but I just wanted to raise the awareness and generate new ideas.
My personal three cents would to go back to what we used to be good at. Completely original servers, in a tight community where a lot of people knew each other, with devoted developers, eager to help out.
But y'know, that's just coming from a guy that joined the community at the age of 10 in 2012, so once again, I don't know how credible I am, but I'd like to hear the thoughts and idea of the community as a whole.
We're escaping the inevitable, but not restarting what could be.
Thanks, best regards, DynastyOfBlocks.
