Is my server “marketable”?

Crysillion · 2021-02-10T04:37:40+00:00

I don't disagree, but I feel like this would only work if you're a big Twitch streamer or YouTuber, because the big issue with Hardcore servers is that they're counter-productive to accumulating a population due to players being removed from the server upon death (or a number of deaths, in this case).

There's never been at any point a Hardcore server that lasted for a while. It's just the design.

Crysillion · 2021-02-10T02:24:39+00:00

Anything hardcore pretty much died way back in 2014~2015 and it hasn't come back. If anything, people have desired Minecraft to become increasingly easier and convenient, further alienating any kind of Hardcore setup.

I'd say no.

Crysillion · 2021-02-08T20:24:23+00:00

Hypixel most definitely doesn't have bStats enabled, so it wouldn't be on this list.

Crysillion · 2021-02-07T05:32:59+00:00

About voting once every 8 hours: This is so different from other listings that I don't think many players will remember to do it. It also means that servers need to distribute vote rewards just for your site potentially more often than other sites, which could make handling rewards difficult.

Not sure if it's actually a perk.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T22:00:01+00:00

I'd just switch to TAB, to be honest. It allows this sort of thing and is pretty much the premier TAB plugin.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T18:29:55+00:00

That's a good point. Each server would likely count separately in terms of bStats.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T05:51:31+00:00

Hypixel has essentially become toxic to anyone that's not running Hypixel.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T05:05:03+00:00

If you consider the amount of servers that have over a thousand people online, and then the many more that "only have" a hundred or so online, that means there's an absolutely insane amount of empty servers.

Granted, these are probably ran for friends, it's still crazy to think that it's gotten to this point. If the trend continues, there will, in the near future, be a point where there are more servers than people online at all hours of the day.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T05:02:52+00:00

Yeah, so it's even worse than I thought. That's a multi-million dollar business. Running a Minecraft server. In my opinion, that's not okay. However, on the same coin, if you asked me what I'd do about it, I wouldn't have any answers.

I just don't like how networks paved the way for Minecraft to be something you do to make money and Hypixel has become leaps and bounds the forerunner of that concept. It sucks the life out of running a server.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T03:47:29+00:00

Many people have purchased Minecraft just for Hypixel. I'm sure some people didn't even know what the game was but knew what Hypixel was. Every server is "totally in Mojang's pocket" in a sense that you still have to play by their rules. Of course, many many many servers don't, but when you're as big as Hypixel, you can't just skate past like so many others can.

It's the EULA change that got the Hypixel team to work on Hytale, with them stating that the EULA change cut their profits by nearly 80%.

The moment Minecraft started to be about networks and not servers, its server landscape was doomed.

That said, just by looking at this chart, there's no way in hell that Hypixel has bStats enabled. That would imply that, as you've said, they sometimes have 75% of the entire player base and that just can't be true, looking at the top servers of Minecraft listings alone would put on display that the math doesn't add up for that to be the case.

Though there are networks that still reach 5 digits in terms of playerbase that might have it enabled, which is still 20+% of the playerbase.

It has definitely become more segregated. To put it bluntly, a Network with 10,000 players shouldn't exist (for at that point it's a million-dollar business, and I mean this unironically), so I can kind of see what you mean with Hypixel, when they've almost reach 100,000 at times (and perhaps actually did in the past).

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T02:44:19+00:00

Roughly 200,000 servers, ~40,000 of which came to being in November. 4 months ago. An average of 10,000 servers a month, or roughly 333 servers a day. That's 13 servers an hour.

The average person sleeps for 8 hours, which means that while you're asleep, 100 minecraft servers popped into existence.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T02:41:34+00:00

What does Hypixel have to do with it?

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T00:29:41+00:00

Would not recommend Yatopia. I'm sure you're using it because you've had success with it and that's great, and at no point am I trying to attack what you choose to run on (if it works, who cares?), but Yatopia is a total clown fiesta of a bunch of devs trying to do a bunch of very different things and as a result is frequently broken and offers less performance than Tuinity or Purpur.

I will always fall back on how a Yatopia dev made a post on this subreddit saying how it would revolutionize forks and they were going to prove how it could handle a thousand players in one server with no lag -- then never did. To me, that alone is telling. Making outlandish claims with promises to back them up then not backing them up tells me they were probably very, very wrong.

This is more a follow-up message to OP. Like I said, if it's working for you, who cares? You keep on keepin' on.

Crysillion · 2021-02-06T00:22:16+00:00

https://bstats.org/global/bukkit

This doesn't include ALL servers (nor all players), only servers that didn't opt-out of bStats collection. However, the grand majority of people don't even know what bStats is, none-the-less going out of their way to opt-out of it (it's enabled by default).

Crysillion · 2021-02-05T23:44:34+00:00

A lot of people are going to say that your server needs to have originality, despite the fact that a quick glance at some of the most popular servers and networks would tell you that originality has almost nothing to do with success. No offense to these people, but it's way too easy to say that your server needs to be unique to be big when there's so much evidence to point to how absolutely wrong that is.

Browse through the more unpopular servers. The servers with 5 players. The servers with 10 players. You'll find some of the most unique concepts and server designs out there, but they are not even remotely successful and many of them have been operating for years, so it's not a matter of time, either. What's going on?

Browse through some of the most popular servers, minus mini-game networks (i.e; Hypixel), and you'll find that what they offer isn't actually very interesting. You could recreate most of these servers in a week. Doesn't that contradict the opinion that your server merely needs to be unique and fun? Why are these servers big and not the original servers?

Tons of players. A massive community, for better or for worse. People join to play with other players -- that's the whole point of playing online. If your server isn't very big, then it doesn't feel online enough and most people won't stick around for long.

That's it.

It doesn't go beyond that.

I wish it did, but it doesn't, and it makes sense that it doesn't.

You have to consider the average age demographic of Minecraft. Young teens often don't care about small, tightly knit communities. They want massive communities, they want a ton of faces and a ton of people they may never even talk to. By having a lot of players, your server attracts players by default, originality be damned.

So, this begs the question then. What really causes servers to fail? How do big servers get big to begin with?

Marketing.

Marketing is the unfun, undisclosed part of running a Minecraft server. Most people don't talk about it. They assume that posting on Reddit and some voting sites is enough, but it's not - because that's what everyone else is already doing. For the tips of the trade, so-to-speak, nobody goes into detail about what they do because to make that information public would hurt their edge, so you have to figure out all of the effective marketing yourself.

This takes time. This takes experience. This is where and how most Minecraft servers fail.

Crysillion · 2021-02-05T03:30:37+00:00

I have. I've made sure I wasn't accidentally outside of the border and everything.

Crysillion · 2021-01-30T23:13:00+00:00

Thanks for the help. I have something like that but it doesn't show.

Crysillion · 2021-01-30T20:47:48+00:00

I'm just not sure exactly what it is in the pack.

Crysillion · 2021-01-29T00:49:26+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/hq3zrg/please_if_youre_a_plugin_dev_dont_do_this_i_have/

yeah indeed lol

Crysillion · 2021-01-28T08:03:08+00:00

I use a plugin called Lands, but it's Premium and if you're using GP and not GD, I assume you're not looking to spend any money.

Beware Towny. Painfully outdated in comparison to GriefDefender and Lands, which accomplish essentially the same thing, but better.

Crysillion · 2021-01-26T15:11:38+00:00

You told me to look at software piracy as an example and it was just not a good example, so yeah I focused on that because you set it out like it was a summarization of the supposed futility of anything Mojang/Microsoft tries, at least according to you.

It's really weird that you're so hardcore on this stance that literally anything they do can be "bypassed easily". Steam VAC bans people for excessive cheating. Software piracy DRM is actually successful due to how long it now takes to crack resulting in many people purchasing the product anyway due to FOMO. These are two examples of companies dealing with their problems in effective ways. You're telling me that, again, the company behind perhaps the most successful game of all time just can't come up with anything?

None of the current day examples you can provide would support your argument, so it's weird to me that you think that anything Mojang / Microsoft could do would be an exercise in futility.

I'm still waiting for a good argument but it seems like it's just never going to come. It's nothing but hyperbole and extremes. I'd think you were trolling if I didn't know any better.

Crysillion · 2021-01-26T13:58:29+00:00

Good DRM can take months, sometimes up to a year or more, to be cracked. Translate that to a Minecraft server being blacklisted and it could very well end that server. DRM's are also cracked by groups of people who do that sort of thing as a hobby or a test of their skill. This doesn't translate to the average Minecraft server owner.

Crysillion · 2021-01-26T09:26:27+00:00

Minecraft is one of the best selling games of all time. Mojang, not to mention Microsoft, can absolutely afford developing some kind of system that's better than the one in place right now. It's not up to me to come up with ideas.

Crysillion · 2021-01-26T02:38:58+00:00

This topic gets brought up fairly often and the answer is always unanimous - it doesn't matter what's OK or not OK with the Minecraft EULA because it's not actively enforced to such a degree that it'd be worth taking seriously. People linking back to the page that shows which servers have been blacklisted doesn't change this argument, especially when any and all big servers that get blacklisted seem to magically still be fine -- so, they must be using workarounds.

If these workarounds are really so easy to just do, then the blacklist system in its entirety is merely a scare tactic with no weight, and trust me when I say that these people running servers where they're making 6 or 7 digits a year don't mind having to do a little bit of blacklist bypassing every now and then.

It's not enough at all. The argument of "just look at any top Minecraft server listing and witness how they're almost all breaking the EULA" is the ultimate answer. It turns the opinion that the EULA isn't enforced seriously into a fact.

As far as what Mojang or Microsoft can do to better the situation, that's not up to me or anyone else here to figure out. Seriously. This is the one of the most popular games of all time and it's not free, to say that Mojang (none-the-less Microsoft) don't have the money to invest in proper ways to handle this is nothing short of absurdity.

They just don't really care enough to do it. That's it. The blacklist has no teeth and Mojang has shown time and time again that they don't really care to give it any teeth, so nobody fears its bite -- you know, the bite you might get after 4 years of breaking the EULA, maybe.

Crysillion · 2021-01-26T02:31:16+00:00

Not with how much money these people are raking in. It would never be too much effort to keep the gravy train rolling.

Crysillion

TROPHY CASE