What I'm stating here is not meant to be an insult or misinformation about anyone, any person or any object/entity, it is plainly my opinion.
Minecraft, I don't believe is entirely a declining community - Microsoft wouldn't have bought something to let it die in their hands, will they? For 2.5 billion dollars, I don't think so. Obviously Microsoft would have many plans for Minecraft, many people are already predicting that. But the current trend of thought is that they are improving Minecraft Realms. Ever since the death of Bukkit, many players have reverted back to other more servers that could provide a better Minecraft gaming community and would be always reliable - if 1.9 comes out, within hours their developers would be slaving away to make their own server API for 1.9 and it would be out in a few days. Although Minecraft's growth has slowed, it is still considered superior to a certain extent.
Blocktopia took quite some time to update, but being a small server, although reliable, was not known much by people playing Minecraft, other than the regulars and rarely some new players. I've seen some players on Create before, new ones especially, who join in, and say a casual 'hi' in chat, before being abruptly replied by a simple 'hi' by the regulars online (I'm guilty of this). Usually these regulars are busy doing their own stuff, trying to build stuff so that they could be ranked up, or just busily working on their own things and are not in the mood to entertain the new players.
When I new player joins, I occasionally get tp requests from them asking to see what redstone insanity I'm building, fairly annoyed, I would decline and ignore their tp requests - look at it this way, I've got my own life here and I prefer solitude. I've once upon accepted these requests, and these newbies would survey my build a bit, become uninterested, and then move on to another.
'What is this?', is my most feared question. I would have to break away from my work and go to them and answer their never ending questions. Most of the time I would lose my train of thoughts and become fairly annoyed. I'm not an entertainer nor a server promoter, you know.
After I'm done patiently explaining what they're looking at, these players would stay around for a bit, and they would appear on the servers for at most another 30 minutes before vanishing off the blocky faces of Create, and I would feel mad as I wasted my time at nothing.
So when I deny and ignore their requests, another regular online would entertain them, and take over my job, or, if the server is quiet, the newbie would just leave to RoF to take a look or something and then vanish.
I think this is one reason why BlockTopia's growth of players is dropping and is now almost plateaued, obviously I'm not pinpointing anyone, but the truth is, we are all annoyed at teaching players new stuff and how things work on certain servers - it's not an easy job, and the reward of the player staying on and playing with everyone else is very rare. One opinion I would suggest is to make things not as complicated, to make simplicity rule the servers, generally, make it more playable and new-player friendly.
I used to run a server last year (it's dead now), and it had a lot of guns, all those fancy-complex stuff. Some players whom I don't know did join and become regulars, but most of them just joined, saw the guns and left - the only person online when they joined was the idiot owner(me) trying to add more and more and more and more guns all the time and making the server increasingly difficult to understand - with blackmarkets and jetpacks, too many mobarenas and all kinds of crap, the players become irritated at this server and did not have the initiative to learn how the economy system worked, how the guns work as frankly - they have nobody to shoot.
Something that would make a server prosper, I remember reading it from somewhere, is to start small, build up a consistent playerbase, and then advertise the server gradually, and bit by bit increase the playerbase. If there are players on a server having fun, they would indirectly lure newbies and chain them to the playerbase, and new ones would even advertise the server to others. "It's like starting an engine", I remember from one post that I read, once it's started, it would run smoothly. However, the starting part is difficult, as you need a new enthusiastic playerbase to begin with.
My suggestion for this part of the 'enthusiastic' playerbase would be this: we only keep the servers that are prospering and not come out with new ones. Kami's Realms is currently the server with the highest consistent playerbase - even at off peak hours at weekdays, it would have 1 or 2 players playing it, or so if I noticed from /glist (I'm banned from Kami, let me be transparent here for the sake of this explanation). So, I suggest we temporarily reduce the servers which aren't active. It's a very painful decision, I know, but change is good sometimes. After all, isn't Change the only thing that dosen't change? Keep Kami's Realm only (I'm only talking about Blocktopia Minecraft servers, no comment on other Blocktopia game servers), and put the other servers into sleep mode (A lot of people's gonna criticize me over this, but hey, you wanted opinions, so here's mine). Afterwards, the community can start doing some advertising over Kami at many websites such as PlantetMinecraft, MinecraftForums and start a voting system. Vote for rewards, I think that is a pretty neat idea.
Going back to my own (dead) server, I used to have this voting attachment I call 'Jackpotter'. It acts like a form of gambling via votes on the server. Every time a player votes, my voting plugin would activate Jackpotter. Basically, Jackpotter is a mini-invention I made to encourage voting and make voters to be seen as 'heroes'. Jackpotter is a completely random commandblock contraption I had made - it randomly picks a number and displays it from ascending order, creating tension within the players whenever it's active. If the number it strikes is 10, all the players online are rewarded greatly monetarily - about 4500 in game currency for them to buy whatever they like. Top voters for a month also get a gift.
For survival servers this kind of 'vote4rewards' treatment may be good - a lot of newbies joined that came from these voting sites (although a lot left as well because of the lack of playerbase, I said that before), and I think Kami could have a good introduction to this kind of thing. Once again, I would like to restate that this is only my opinion, and I don't expect it to be carried out anyways.
I say, we should:
1. Start small again, simplify things, put inactive servers into sleep mode
2. Get a small playerbase
3. Set-up a voting system, but don't launch it yet, get all the players to know the rewards for voting and give them a specified date when this voting starts.
4. On the date of the start of voting, launch the advertisements on the voting sites (PMC, MinecraftForums, all have forums for this kind of thing for free) and announce publicly that the voting has begun.
5. Hopefully the players jam up the voting system and bring the server up to the top.
6. Get a bigger playerbase, and slowly but not too quickly chip in things Kami originally had, like quests, etc.
7. Increase the rewards over time - from one diamond sword to an enchanted diamond pickaxe to special gambling currencies for voters.
8. Initiate parties for events - events in which players get new stuff, and the voter gambling system is activated a few times in succession without players actually voting.
9. When the playerbase is high, ask the players for opinions and start a vote, also, restate the old servers and let them see if they would like to wake up any of them.
This is obviously my own personal opinion, and I expect there would be many people who would yell and scream at this stupid idea - but do reconsider the option to make Blocktopia a better place for everyone.
