How we could possibly boost the playerbase

Plugins:  We have to acknowledge server stability. How stable are these plugins and will adding them cause harm to the server.

C&D:  I think hosting giveaways is a great idea but do we have enough money to do so? Should we be spending the bit of money we have right now on advertising the server or should we be giving it back the community?

EDM:  How should we approach this? When I think of engagement the first thing that comes to mind is hosting C&D. What else should we do to engage the community?

I think there is a law against hosting giveaways for minors w/o parental consent which would be quite unethical for us to do given our server has a majority of minors esp. on the server. 

those 656 members have been spread out throughout 4 years and thus there will be the majority of the people not active. Poking sticks at them won't help the player count as you don't need to be playing on the server or even own minecraft to be on the discord. The people who are active on the discord are usually on the server and asking people politely will do nothing.

If a YouTuber says 'join this server it's really fun' only a few would join, if a Youtuber said 'for the giveaway go on totalfreedom and link your account to your discord to enter' then some people would do that.

so instead of wanting people who would be active in our community, you want an influx in uninterested players?
building competitions can and has been happenning without proper prizes however expecting it solely to increase our players would be dumb.

1) Those who build, redstone, develop etc
2) Those who PVP, make special potions, clans etc
3) Those who suck up to admins

we can't fix people who suck up to admins.

- DangerousCaves*, DangerousNether*
- Two plugins which make caves and nether dangerous, thus making it a little adventurous too.

why do we need dangerous caves/nether if this is a creative, freeop server? especially how i think they're bringing back the old overworld/nether worlds.

Oh god, here we go, lets run down this point by point:
Intro:
1) while the server may be boring to you (even tho ur permabanned) it's still fun for a lot of people who play on the server.
2) total freedom is much more diverse then you are making it out to be, and I know for a fact that what you said was VERY generalized

Your Suggestion:


let's go through your plugins first :
1) Movecraft is not even close to being supported to 1.16, and the devs of the plugin have no intention to update it to newer minecraft versions. we tried to figure out a way to fix it but couldn't

2) Bending has been suggestion numerous times however the main issue with it is that it does not log any changes to blocks in coreprotect, and earth bending or whatever does indeed break blocks, and while there is a config flag to make it rollback the blocks destroyed by earth bending, this is not 100% reliable and if the server lags or crashes the blocks that haven't already been rolled back will not be logged into coreprotect

3) the lucky block plugin a) has no real purpose on the server, there is absolutely 0 need for it at all. and b) it hasn't been updated in over a year and the developer has abandoned it

4) now theres a lot of minigames plugins that i know of, but as with all the rest of these im assuming you mean the first one on the list so im gonna assume that you are talking about www.spigotmc.org/resources/minigames.19687/, now, while this plugin could technically be added to the server, it is currently being worked on to get updated to 1.16, i still don't think that this is a good plugin to have it does not fit with the current stuff on the server, this plugin is designed for actual minigame servers, which we are not, it does a minigame by making regions and then stuff can trigger based on what happens in that region, someone with op can bypass these regions, and there are many other smaller details that just wouldn't work with the server. not to mention setting up an actual minigame thing would take hours of navigating an in-game gui.

5) ok, these plugins are just.... What?

these are plugins that are designed for like a survival server, with the caves one it would also just cause pointless lag because it is constantly updating to make a more "lifelike caving adventure" or whatever, not to mention there is literally no reason for this to be on a server where anyone has op and can just go into creative, overall this one has no place on the server at all.
the nether one is basically the same except that 1.16 already revamps the nether, so why would we need something to just like add stronger mobs in the nether???

6) while for the most part viaversion and stuff works well, its not perfect, and i see no reason why we should purposfully reduce server stability just to make a plugin from like 2015 work.


Competitions and Giveaways

ok hold on, i'm not the one who manages donators or anything like that but i do know that:

1) the donations go to help the server as in it goes to pay for running the server and it goes to paying the bills for it

2) we don't get that many donations, it's not like we have people giving us hundreds of dollars a day. we would end up losing money from this

3) While sure, giveaways may be a good way to get players easily, you have to also think about the long term. if a person was watching a youtube video and it talked about a giveaway on our server, sure, quite a few people would join, but after the giveaway ends, most of them will end up leaving. giveaways are a good way to get a quick jump in players, but the retention of those players would be almost nothing if they only came here for the giveaway. by not advertising giveaways we don't have to worry as much about player retention, the players who would come here would be here for the sake of actually finding the idea of the server interesting (also in my opinion lots of giveaways seem pretty fishy, and are kinda a grey area i don't want to ever have to deal with)

4) while yes building competitions (the spawn of the month suggestion also basically applies to this, but i'm personally not a fan of the idea) is a great idea, offering real money for it is not. for one, as i said before we aren't getting thousands of donations, and wouldn't have the funds do do something like that, how we could instead do is give away in game coins that can be used to by shop items, which i think is a much more renewable and a much better solution

5) yes, TF can be supported by seths money, but that doesn't mean that he is made of money. this server runs in germany. why? because it is a lot less expensive than him making his own physical server. sure we get donations, but that doesn't mean we have unlimited funds to do all of this

Engaging Discord Members


Ok, so i understand that sure, we have a lot of people on the discord, but most of them are inactive, have us muted, or something like that, it is not a requirement to be active on discord, or even to be on the discord at all, also, just so you know, i fact checked and went through the logs of that day and at least 10 if not more joined. the people on the discord don't have to come on the server, and don't have to listen to the announcements.

I can't agree at all with events that involve giving money away, Nitro, or perks like that. I don't see the issue with adding new features other than we've done a piss poor job at maintaining a stable server, and until that can be addressed (which it has never been) there's going to be opposition to adding pretty much anything because of people that falsely believe that it's somehow technologically impossible for this server to have features without crashing every 2 seconds.

Stop allowing this

alright well no one told me that, also there are other plugins for planes and stuff we can use.



ok



it does have a purpose though, it gives you a random block to build with thus giving you a surprise.




but how does it reduce server stability? and if it does, we can find ways to patch that. i know nothing about development tho