Before we start, this thread is not to negatively criticize the server. This thread is made as a means to help benefit the server. I hope that this will be thoroughly read, I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors. Building competitions – Building competitions in which players build a certain thing requested by staff. This could be related to an upcoming holiday, a mob arena, a parkour, etc. These builds could be used for the server, and the best builder could be rewarded. This reward should be announced beforehand. Potential rewards could be a BuyCraft certificate, special prefix, etc. Something worth more than the equivalent of $2 of donations. Plugins that expand player activities – This has been suggested to death but plugins like McMMO. I know many don’t care for McMMO, but ultimately it does not change the game for people that do not care for it. This adds more aspects to grinding on the server. It does not have to be McMMO, just plugins that expand what the player can do. These plugins could also provide donation incentives, such as McMMO credits, multipliers, etc. Open builder applications – There are many players that could certainly help build, while not getting any extra permissions or advantage in the Skyworld. They should only have access to special permissions within the build world (which I believe is already setup anyway). If they go inactive, demote them. Make inventories between the build world and Skyworld separate. The last builder appears to have been on “Error: Player not found.” days ago. Allow staff to use World Guard permissions – At first this may not make much sense, but it does give players more things to do. Let’s give an example: A player wants to build a PVP arena on their island, so they do it. Then they can ask a staff member “Can you enable PVP in this area?” This was a large part of .co, and maybe players had popular PVP arenas. It’s not hard to learn or teach basic WorldGuard functions, so this should be implemented. Learn from other servers’ success – There’s no shame in taking ideas from other servers and potentially making them better. If players say, “X is a good idea, we should have it here,” there should at least be a conversation about it. Fortunately, with the new staff team, this is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Give players more of a say – Allow players to vote on different ideas. Allow the players to have more of a part in the server (obviously not to the fullest extent), and they will be more likely to stick around for a while. Make staff all follow on ruleset – To have a consistent chat experience, all staff need to have rules fully explained to them. They need more of an idea of what is bypassing and what isn’t. What is right to say, and what isn’t. Saying “fudge” is not bypassing, it’s an alternative to a curse word, similar to “heck.” Preventing the inevitable broken economy – We need to implement things that take money out of the economy. We need to think “what’s being sold the most,” “are players make to much from X item,” etc. I believe to help slow the inevitable broken economy, we need to charge for /fix, charge for max enchants (for example: Efficiency 5 is the same price as Efficiency 1). Potentially nerf kits, while adding commands to donation ranks. Diamonds should be worth more than $10 each. “Tax” the lottery. I’m not quite sure how the lottery works now, but during the last several resets, money is added to the pot for no reason. The lottery should be “taxed” as a way to take money out of the economy. This would ideally decrease the actual pot payout by about 10% or so. Quality of life plugins – This could include a Timber Mod type plugin, or even something as great as Vein Miner. GUIShop is also a possibility (suggested by Dave). This would allow players to easily access the shop while on their island. It’s just a simple Quality of Life plugin that makes things easier for players, also you would have to add all items within the GUIShop, just commonly purchased items. Also, give all players a kit called “lava.” This kit should give the player a lava bucket with a cooldown similar to kit sap. “This also eliminates the need for ‘It's not a good idea to replace your lava’” – Dave Reworking the challenges (recommended by Dave): I agree with this suggestion. The challenges just are not worth doing. Some challenges are ridiculously hard, and only give the player minimal rewards. An example would be the Great Pyramid challenge. This challenge requires more than 14 stacks of sandstone to complete and rewards the player with 3 end-portal frames and 3 diamonds. Let’s compare this to the cost. This would require $56,375 worth of materials. This would pay the player back with $1,850 worth of currency and items (going by shop prices). Not to mention, the red sand that is only available in the donor shop needed to complete the challenge as well (not calculated within the material cost). A lot of other challenges also follow this formula, and they should either reduce material cost or increase the player reward. Keep Inventory – This suggestion is just a single permission that should be given to the Overlord rank. Overlord is not worth it, at double the price of God. You get colored chat, and you can change it from day to night. This is a ridiculous price for a small number of perks. Overlord donators should be given the permission that allows them to keep everything in their inventory upon death. This is a great perk, for a rank that is extremely underwhelming. Shop and Donor Shop changes – Make most items in the donor shop available in the normal shop. Members should be able to buy beacons, red sand, and spawn eggs. They should not have to rely on the RNG aspect of the vote crates. Incentivize players to join the forums – Old skyblock.co set up a system where when a player registered on the forums, they received money for registering. This is a good idea to get a more active community on the forums. This will make players more aware of changes, allow them to be a bigger part of the discussion, etc. Increase Voting Rewards – As it is now, voting rewards are pointless unless you are COMPLETELY new to the server. Crates: Item rewards need to be increased, and low-end ranks and commands should be added. Let’s say a player joins, votes, and then receives VIP or Elite from the crate (obviously make it relatively rare). This player is much more likely to stay on the server, rather than never coming back after logging on for the first time. Over time, the player is more likely to donate for a higher rank (such as one with /fly). This will potentially decrease short-term revenue, but it will certainly increase long term revenue per player. Voting Itself: Add more possible rewards when voting. Maybe a 3%-5% chance of getting a golden key would be a good start. Complete Rare and Golden key crate overhaul – These haven’t been touched for two+ years. This results in things such as having multiple different types of spawners, that are available with /espawner. I would also suggest adding the chance to get an Iron Golem spawner from the Golden key crates (0.5% chance). Also get rid of the potential to get eggs from these crates. Ultimately, these crates are gambling, and while that’s obviously looked down upon, I do understand that you must have bad stuff within the crates. Overall, just don’t have unnecessary stuff in the crates. Reward player recruitment – Get a referral plugin that rewards the player for bringing friends over. Obviously only allow a certain number of referrals under a certain IP address (possibly with a cooldown), but do not make this reward too over powered. This will reward players for bringing friends to the server and will likely increase the number of new players that join. Mob Arena rewards – This is something that needs to be done if we even want players to use the mob arena. Getting to rank 25 in a difficult Mob Arena awarded me with 8 gold and 10 iron (plus bones, feathers, etc.). These are very bad rewards, that will ultimately just make players disinterested in the server, because they cannot branch out and do tasks other than making farms. Sieanx suggested that we add crate keys as potential rewards, and I think that is a good idea. Free rank – This is a rank that will be awarded to players for a specific reason. A good reason could be completing Master challenges (enough to unlock Skylord challenges). This is a good middle ground, because it’s certainly not quick and easy to do these challenges. This rank could provide the player with specific commands, such as one or two warp sets, an extra home or two, and /nick without color or other formatting changes. Allow players to prove that they have completed these challenges by using either an automated method, or by allowing them to prove their progress within a specific Discord channel. This is all I have for now, but I will provide updates on new ideas as they come to me. If you have any suggestions of your own, be sure to post them down below. I appreciate any constructive criticism, if I’ve made any mistakes, be sure to point them out. Also remember, just because another server does it, does not mean it is not a good idea. We can learn from other servers' successes.
Thanks for making the suggestion post, Borked, honestly don't know why I wasn't excepting this post to be as long as it is... I'll give you my opinions on the ideas suggested here, and I suppose other staff/players will do as well. If I like the suggestion, this doesn't mean it'll be implemented, it just means I like it. With that let's dig in: Build Contests: We're already doing those for builds that we need, the Mob Arenas were made in a building competition for example. However I do definitely agree the rewards should be buffed up, give people more of a reason to get involved with them. McMMO: I don't really have much of an opinion on this, I don't see any reason why we need it, but I don't see any reason why we can't have it. So I'ma just have to go neutral on this one. Builders: We don't need any specific Builders as Staff are able to build stuff we need, and if we want the community to make it, we'd host a competition for it. Giving staff W/G: I honestly don't see a problem in this, we'd just have to make rules on what staff can and cannot do in terms of flags for the region. We would also probably make it a paid for thing, kinda like how enchantments are, "we'll make this region, but for $money." Learn from other servers: We can do that. In-fact, I'd rather we do that. I have no problem with ideas that other servers are doing, however we don't need their IP being announced to the whole server. Topics like this could be better discussed on Discord PMs with staff. Give players more of a say: I already planned on that, just not much has come up that we need a lot of votes on. Making staff all follow one rule set: That's already kinda being done in the sense of, we're all following the same rules. The problem lies in our interpretations of said rules. Some staff don't like "fuk" being used and call it bypassing, whereas others don't. It's all in personal preference, and it says so in the rules, "Chat Violations are in the discretion of all Staff Ranks," this means not every staff will agree on what words are bypassing and what words aren't. We do try however to keep it fair. (I say that but tbh, idk if we do. That's for the whole community to discuss.) The Economy: This is an issue that we do really need to address. I agree we need ways to get money out of the economy, stuff like /fix, /smelt, and the enchantments do really need prices set on them. Warps are planned to have prices set soon as well. The issue is, what price should be set on what? What's a fair price to set? Another problem is, I'm not sure if we can actually do certain prices on certain levels of enchantments. We can set a price on the entire command, but not so much the individual enchant themselves. It's easy for me to make a custom plugin to do that if we really need it. I'd rather we look more into this and see if Essentials has such an option. Quality of life plugins: These would be nice, but not really needed. The GUIShop idea... that I like. It is kinda an inconvenience to have to /warp shop every time you want to buy/sell something. And regarding that ‘It's not a good idea to replace your lava’ thing, that should be been fix a little while ago as I'm pretty sure I fixed it last week or so. Reworking the challenges: That's not something I am willing to do. The challenges file itself is not the most stable of files. It broke the plugin and forced us to restart the server multiple times when editing the file to fix a problem. So reworking the challenges would be time consuming, annoying, and something I'm just not willing to do. Keep Inventory: I don't see a big problem with that, except some would see it was being 'OP' because death no longer has any consequence. This could be fixed if we made it where it took say, XP away on death, or have it where when you die, you only lose some stuff? This idea only suffers from the "death having no consequence" part, if we can solve that issue, I don't see why this couldn't be implemented. Shop and Donor Shop: We could easily move stuff around where normal stuff that's not normally achievable in Skyblock is moved to the normal shop for all players, but donating should have a perk of certain blocks that are normally really annoying to craft, are easily accessible. Besides, if a normal player wants something from the donor shop, they can just ask a donor to get it for them, I've done that for people before, no reason why people can't just do that as well. Incentivize players to join the forums: Glitch that's all you, buddy. I don't see why this couldn't be added. Increase Voting Rewards: Honestly, I don't have an opinion on this. So I'ma just be neutral on this as well. And there's already a "lucky" event that can happen with voting where you get way more money and a Rare Key. Complete Rare and Golden key crate overhaul: Crates do need to be fixed up. Not only the Rare and Golden ones, rather all of them need to be redone. If people can throw ideas of exactly what items, their chance, and the amount, of the new crates, that'd be a massive help and it would also get the community involved in such an important topic as it does affect the entire community as a whole. Reward player recruitment: I see this as a slippery slope. It might bring in more players, but I personally don't like the thought of someone going to another server, advertising this one just to steal traffic from another server. It's not the most likely thing to happen, but I would rather never see it happen. I can't really put forth a good opinion on this, so I'ma just go with neutral for yet another idea. Mob Arena rewards: That's not my department. So, uhh... someone else handle this, thanks. Free rank: I'd rather just have ranks be in a crate with a rare chance, or give it to those who have made the biggest impacts on the community. Ranks are bought as donations for the reason of supporting the server, so giving out free ranks to everyone is a no-go. However, if we keep the amount of people who get said ranks limited, the problem won't be as bad. I suggest we make the rank for those who make the biggest (good) impact on the server and maybe even make it where people nominate people they think has had the biggest impact, and make it a community thing. It's a rank for the community, by the community.
Yeah same foreword as Kaka here. My opinion is not influenced on Kakas because everyone knows I already forgot what his opinion was. Build Contests: We're trying to do this already but the only problem is we barely get any people to actually participate. Same thing would probably happen with your graphic design contest thingy you suggested a few days ago. McMMO: Well I've talked to multiple people, no not only former staff, and I don't think it's a good idea. We'll give reasoning if it's really needed. Builders: We currently have no builders, which means they can't be inactive either. At this moment we can build as a staff team and with the build competitions. Giving staff W/G: I like the idea of having those playermade mob arenas but I don't think it's necessary we give the perms to helpers. Players can always mail an admin and ask if it's possible to use their build as a PvP arena. Learn from other servers: We can surely do that but people prefer a unique server over some copy cat that just goes with the flow. We're always open for suggestions in the Discord suggestion channel or here on the forums. Give players more of a say: As I said in the paragraph above, we're always open to suggestions. Making staff all follow one rule set: This one is pretty hard, people will always find creative ways to 'bypass' by using a different word but actually the same one. We try to keep the rules the same for everyone but, looks like I actually remember something, as Kaka said We try to be reasonable and that's all we can do. The Economy: We already were planning to start charging for commands like /setwarp and /fix etc. We changed Trivia to only work when 4+ people online, lottery only works when atleast 2 people enter. All these little things will help. We might be able to edit the shop prices along the way to not have 1 certain item everyone makes profit of. Quality of life plugins: Timber, yeah people asked me about this a few times before. I always reply the same way, I personally think it's a plugin just to be lazy. It's not that much effort to mine a tree. Vein miner, new people joining OSB are happy we have an original skyblock without any of this weird modern stuff so, it's a no for me. GUIShop, that's worth thinking about. My opinion is still that it's made for lazy people but here I see your point. Kit lava might be possible too. Reworking the challenges: I personally never did any challenges other than the island level ones. We'll give that a look. Keep Inventory: This would make dying completely meaningless since they don't lose their experience points either. It still is skyblock and dying should be something to be scared of. Shop and Donor Shop: If we moved most items over to the regular shop people would complain their ranks won't be worth it anymore. cough We'll have a look at it if we maybe can transfer a few items over but I can't promise anything. Incentivize players to join the forums: Let's be honest, even rewarding players for registering wouldn't be enough to force them to use it. I'm sure most of them would just register and never look back. If people want to read the latest news I'm sure they would, they know where to find it. Increase Voting Rewards: We could add the possibility to win some more items like gold keys. For the rest I think those rewards are fine. Next paragraph continues Complete Rare and Golden key crate overhaul: First of all I can tell you it has been less than 2 years since they've been changed because I haven't even been here for that long and have known them change. We were planning to look at the all the crates and change them but never actually had the time to sit down. So this will probably be happening in the future. Reward player recruitment: Refferal plugins, I think this just screams "Abuse me". There are way too many ways you could bypass any limitation you have on this plugin. I don't think it's necessary and would just be a pain. Mob Arena rewards: Same reason as the crates. Didn't find the time to sit down and look at the rewards, people were asking to open the mob arenas so we did. They're mostly open for fun at the moment, rewards will be changed in the future. Free rank: Not sure what we could do with this but I like the idea of a free achievable rank. No more laziness and big wallets. Just pure work and effort to earn what you want. We'll surely talk about this. "In the future" might sound vague but that's because it is. I currently am pretty busy with college and usually sit on OSB while doing college work. As soon as I find time to do things I'll certainly do them. (I know how lame this sounds but it's true)
I would like the reasoning for McMMO. Everyone I've talked to about it would indeed want it, or they were indifferent about it. It doesn't negatively affect players that don't want it. It just adds more stuff to do on here to people aren't bored next month, it add donation revenue @captianbob, and it overall just adds to the experience.
MCMMO (I don't wanna reply to everything) Theres immediately a lot to reply to on this post its so big, MCMMO does catch the eye as a plugin you do want, my issue as some who also runs a place using MCMMO is that causes a lot of reliability on it, people usually focus solely on it, the game essentially tends to be all about grinding those levels alone, and when you do of course you get the perks ect, they can make farming a little problematic ie Tree cutting, fishing is another issue I find as you can get substantial amounts of rare materials as has been seen with just the raw plugin installed. (no adjustments) Excavation and mining seem a little useless on a Skyblock, yes I understand there might be particular uses for it with cobble gens, and moving parts of island or placing them, but thats not exactly mining, in itself the plugin doesn't really serve much use on a Skyblock server in my opinion, if it was to be installed, it would need resetting frequently every year and even then it'd need adjustments to absolutely everything, from perks to general rewards, I can't see a need for it personally, some people of course will like the plugin and thats fine with me, but I must say its one of those that causes serious economy inflation in my opinion. Crate changes isn't a bad idea at all, I was looking forward to something new, gives reason to buy golden keys overall. Free rank, extreme seems to be the most popular rank being free with top voter and thats a good incentive, no free ranks with challenges otherwise the server will suffer financially. I don't know how I feel about /enchant being free, as a rank that uses it, I would like it free, but I see why its to be charged for. It seems small I know but I think it ensures people with less money or lower ranks work a bit more on stuff, plus I imagine rank spam for "Enchant my full set of diamond Armour" my increase, I do understand we have a right to say "NO I'M BUSY" but I think it wouldn't help in my mind. Incentive to join forums? Enjin didn't need it, most people prefer using the Discord, because its better on apps, and it runs smooth, players shouldn't be incentive to use a website or forum really, I mean it is important and most people know that, I guess it really doesn't matter, its not totally a bad idea, but I don't think its necessary in particular as players usually join forums anyway it seems natural to do that when you like a server, you want to see what drama is being posted. Mob Arena, another plugin my own place uses, I built one of the arenas here too, I would like to see new rewards definitely, I just want to wait til staff are ready and done with other stuff first, I had an idea for a separate crate for maze/spleef and mob arena rewards but I think vote keys would be added? even then its dodgey being a farmable key possibly? I don't know its a welcome idea though having rewards though, definitely not a bad idea. Build Applications, I do believe I've seen builders on the last couple of resets, I don't think they're constantly required though, maybe like seasonal builders is an idea, but thats it really, they should be compensated perhaps, but keeping [Builder] rank might be a little redundant most of the time when they may pay for ranks/prefixes. (Call them back for each resets spawn/donorzone/holiday event) if however they applied and kept their ranks but staff knew to keep them on during white list for building, then yes I can see it being handy. I've seen regular Twitter competitions, building contests are a good idea but mainly for the new Creative server that was referred to in the News post, here though maybe on holiday events, but for the most part it seems out of place. I could reply to literally everything, positive and with feedback, but I definitely won't I just wanted to discuss things of concern to me or of some interest, I do like renewed crates but I definitely don't agree on rank rewards. but fortunately its what the suggestion forum is, we can talk about these things, I like many of the ideas, but this really is all I have time for today. Please don't contact me on Discord directly regarding this post. Lovely talking to you Borked lad. x
First of all, Kudos to Borked for taking the time to contribute information and ideas that may bring new players or keep old players interested in staying with the server. I only want to comment on some of the things listed. (Just my input or past experience as a regular player). Building Competitions--- Reward the winner with a custom prefix for one month (like Top Builder), plus some in game cash for 1st, 2nd, 3rd places (25k, 15k, 10k). MCMMO--- I like using mcmmo, however I don't think it is necessary in this particular server. Also, someone above mentioned the grinding of those levels takes away from players actual building an island. I completely agree with that statement. I think that tree feller, for example, could be really abused because logs sell to shop for a decent price. GUI Shop--- I agree with staff that this might be too OP for some players (keeps them lazy). Maybe an alternative would be to add /sell command but keep it a limited number of items. For example, only add actual farm crop items in this command. But things like cobble, logs, gems, etc. players would still have to warp. Donor Shop--- The donor shop is a perk for players who spend real money to support the server, so there should be some items that they only have access to obtain. Mentioned specifically was beacon and members can purchase a nether star (I believe) and craft their beacon or pay a donor the money to get them one. There is also a small chance of getting a beacon in one of the crates (I got one before the reset, so I know it works). Voting Rewards--- I think the rewards are more than fair. $200 a vote X 6 votes a day X 30 days a month = 36K a month for 5 minutes a day effort. Plus all the loot from the crates really adds up. Crates--- I do think some of the loot in crates needs changing. I really get annoyed when I get the trails or /sit command for the 20th time. I would recommend removing them and adding in some useful items like 1 piston or 1 hopper. As for the golden crate, maybe add something like a one time use of /fix or /repair (it only works one time on one item of choice) and would be an extremely small percent chance of getting. Ranks--- I used to play a server where members had a chance of obtaining the lowest rank by using in game money. Some players aren't allowed to spend money online, or don't have access to paypal accounts etc. So the owner made an exception by adding this one rank buyable with in game money. It was normally a $5.00 rank but could be purchased with 100k coins. This made those players work hard and appreciate the rank when they earned it, plus they felt more like part of the community with the ranked prefix next to their name in chat. Ruleset--- I think staff does a pretty good job with keeping the troublemakers in check. My only complaint is when it comes to scamming/griefing. One of the higher ranks has /spawn mob. They can warp to any open island and spawn whatever. I personally think this is griefing and the punishment should be harsh for this offense. There aren't too many of these high ranked players, so it shouldn't be difficult for staff to go back through chat logs and find the offender (assuming offense is reported within 24 hrs.) If the player offended was online at the time, they should get a screenshot if possible to prove in a forum report. Thanks again Borked! Good information and great ideas.
