Concerning Totalfreedom's excessive admin count

What do you think we should add? The smp is going to be bungeed so that will give the ops something to do but I think we could add more. The problem is, because Total freedom is a freeop server it's hard to implement anything else to it.

it’s not a personal problem. this is a problem that the server needs to fix, that it’s boring. you even said so yourself that there should be plugins added to make it more fun.

I agree with Waspter. Just a quick look at the server shows that people don't really stay here for server gameplay, but rather for the community surrounding the server. When actually considering what people do ingame on TotalFreedom, most people are talking rather than doing something actually related to gameplay like building. In the context of there being too many admins, we need to ask ourselves why so many people are trying to become an admin. Once someone becomes an admin, they gain access to a number of exclusive features, like an exclusive chat, private forum boards, and other perks that are honestly more cosmetic than necessary, such as custom login messages and access to private worlds. When you think about it, isn't the idea of gaining access to a "buffoonery" board where admins post about people acting like morons, getting a fancy new login message, and getting access to a permanent world full of private builds tempting? I'm not trying to say admin features don't have necessary use cases, but I do think that some of the cosmetic features need to be removed.

Still, the biggest problem in my opinion is the fact that operators can't really communicate and interact with other admins the same way that the admins can. On a server that bases its activity on conversations with other players, this is especially important. Being an operator on the server rather than an admin can cut you out of the conversation, and that's why it gets to be so boring. If we want to combat TotalFreedom's excessive admin count, we need to make sure that it isn't necessary to be an admin to have fun on the server.

As a currently very active builder OP (with the MB title which never really made me different) and a relatively new one at that, I feel like I have some 3rd party insight that is much needed.

Just as a little experiment to convince myself, I got on the server today (as I usually do for my time) and began looking at the tab list hourly.


It may be a little bit biased and anecdotal, but I would say that is pretty common for my experience on the server, and there is no point in capturing any more shots because that would overlap with Burger's time and would be redundant evidence to a claim that almost everyone agrees with.
I wish not to downplay the argument that there exist horrible Admin:OP ratio on the server, but I would like to state that it is not constantly in this state.
There have been many times where I would log on and no admins are present - not online and not in Discord chat.

I've said this before in another post, but I would like to put forward that having this ratio in game is not as bad as an issue as one might think.
There will usually be active administrators who enforce rules, friendly admins who interact with the community - a lot who actually balances both and handles it well.

This may not be the common case but it is in TF - Admins are not 100% purely rule enforcers, they interact with players on the server much like how a normal OP would.
I know a lot of admins that would consider me/other active ops as a "friend" - even more being acquaintances with each other.
I hope I'm not making a strawman, but I don't see much of you here actually consider admins - moreso yourself - as a part of the actual community. That kinda says something.

---

How do we deal with this, then?

I think all the things I wanted to say about "cutting down the admin count" has already been said in the thread, so I'm not gonna discuss it further.

Admin influx controlling would definitely be something that we should be doing right now - whether it'll be closing down applications for having enough active admins or toning down the "incentives" for being admin (looking at you, wildcard/bossbar/title).

What I really want to talk about is player retention.

I think we've made it really clear that our server isn't the most stable.
As an active player, I can pretty much confirm this. (The screenshots I took within 5 hours was met with at least 2 crashes IIRC)
I don't think we will progress spinning in a circle talking about how bad the server is at keeping up.
It is either that my skimming is very bad, or that nobody in this thread is talking about why the server is unstable.
From my experience, there could be 10 OPs who I've never seen before online and there would be nothing happening - yet the server decides to freak out when there's 3 people I know that would never intentionally crash the server.
Do we know why is the server behaving this way? Are we going to have more detailed server activity monitoring to help this? I have seen little regarding actually solving the problem.

This might be a hot garbage take, but I'm willing to say what I want: TF's edge has dulled against time.
I may not be the most well-versed in TF history, but I'm pretty sure that most of us agrees that "Relative to other 2013 Minecraft servers, TF offers a bit more commands and rights".
This is because TF never had to deal with the popularity of Minigame servers or professional Creative building servers or whatever the average playerbase does these days.
TF offered an edge back then - because it gave you what you wanted in other servers. Now, TF has dulled - there are other servers giving more than what TF gives.
I'm sorry but as much as I am impressed with TFM, this is a sign of lack of development and actual awareness.
We "can't give OPs brushes" because "it's untraceable", we "can't have Bending" because "it's unstable", FAWE never got on the server because "it's a shitty plugin" despite the massive amounts of utility it provides over vanilla W/E, Voxel got taken off because "we couldn't make it proper"... The list just goes on.
I wonder how many of those in there is actually physically impossible to implement due to some java black witchery and how many is simply because "it's gonna be very hard".
I couldn't comment on how SMP will be because at the time of writing it simply is not released yet - but by the looks of things it already sounds more interesting than Free-OP. Guess what the difference is.

If you thought that was absolute horseshit of a take, I can't care less and I am going forward with a shittier one anyway:
As a long-term feature, we should develop Free-OP style minigames.
This is irrelevant to the actual original post, however, so I will simply say the concept that this came with. If anyone wants to make this an actual suggestion, feel free.
Basically, this is the same premise that I think why TF was popular but isn't now - TF isn't a Freedom server now relative to other servers.
We had advantage because we gave more to what others were willing to give - then why not do the same now?
This could very much be a unique selling point of the server - OP styled games. Spawn in insta-kill potions on skywars, get TNT on a spleef, get efficiency 3 million pickaxes to decimate the bridges others made in bedwars - if we were to make this a reality I could totally see how people would want to play it.
This is TotalFreedom, not Random Creative Server #48125. We don't have to make our own unique niche functions - we just have to do what they didn't do.

However, we all know that this isn't something that can exist overnight.
You know what exists right now though? The entire community.
As far as actual server functionality goes, there is absolutely nothing keeping me here other than going on Creative Server #69420.
It cannot be further from the truth when talking about the actual community.
I've built many friendships on the server with various different people that is willing to interact with each other in a way that didn't involve anything else - ironic that it is actually based on the boring-ness of the server itself that we had formed closer bonds than "how many games did you win last night".
Then, you may ask, "Why is the retention still ass if it's so attractive?"
The reason is that it's not properly embraced.
Maybe it's due to timezones, but I personally have not seen an actual event in game since Cavecity.
What we did are Jackbox Party games, Cards against humanity - games that extended out of the Minecraft platform.
I am pretty sure that Build Battles have been suggested since forever - you can't blame the ECDs for this one.
There has just been nothing that actively requires players to devote themselves and therefore gets feedback - we had to make things to do ourselves.
It is certainly a harder aspect of the server to advertise or to solidly build on, but it's definitely one of the big reasons why a lot of people stays here.

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to contribute more coming by as an actual normal active OP who never got admin and does not plan to apply.
Feel free to critize and comment on my thoughts though, this has been a discussion that the server has needed.