Help me make Survival relevant again

[Towelie]

Hi everyone,

This post is addressed to our Survival Playerbase (play.superfuntime.org).
What do you think we should do to spruce up / improve Survival and to make it relevant again (as in so it attracts more players).

What I won't do:
- A complete conversion to another game mode.
- Make Survival a great deal more challenging (as much as I wanted to go this route, the majority of the players showed us that they want a calm, relaxing experience.

What I am thinking of doing:
- Make the new temp world a world where pvp is enabled at all times and the difficulty is ramped up slightly (I can do that per world). Let me know what you think of this, would it work and how would you improve it.

Looking forward for your suggestions!

[_0i]

I think maybe having more player to player interactions would be cool, but I feel like a lot of it is just how many players there are and I think if we can get more, it would be super fun


Edit: Player to player interactions being like duels with wagers, little gui minigames with wagers, stuff like that just to make it more fun

[AtomicPulse]

I know I'm not a regular survival player but I have 100 hours so I at least know how it works.

My personal opinion and main reason for not playing more then I have is because of how unlike vanilla survival the server is. I know I'm a modpack player but plain vanilla survival is still really fun and when there's loads of additions it's not my favorite.

Obviously I'm not trying to start an argument or anything and I'm sure many will disagree, though I would prefer a plain vanilla experience over having loads of modifications

[stormshooter]

I think maybe having more player to player interactions would be cool, but I feel like a lot of it is just how many players there are and I think if we can get more, it would be super fun


Edit: Player to player interactions being like duels with wagers, little gui minigames with wagers, stuff like that just to make it more fun

Would be cool if you could put bounties on people in the pvp world, and maybe give some incentive to go there, like a larger amount of ores or something

[Towelie]

I think maybe having more player to player interactions would be cool, but I feel like a lot of it is just how many players there are and I think if we can get more, it would be super fun


Edit: Player to player interactions being like duels with wagers, little gui minigames with wagers, stuff like that just to make it more fun

Would be cool if you could put bounties on people in the pvp world, and maybe give some incentive to go there, like a larger amount of ores or something

I thought of having bounties multiple times, but it would simply not work with our current pvp system. We would have to have always on pvp. And it's not enough for pvp to always be on in a single word, because if someone wants to avoid a bounty, they will just go to a non pvp world

[Happysheep102]

I think maybe having more player to player interactions would be cool, but I feel like a lot of it is just how many players there are and I think if we can get more, it would be super fun


Edit: Player to player interactions being like duels with wagers, little gui minigames with wagers, stuff like that just to make it more fun

Would be cool if you could put bounties on people in the pvp world, and maybe give some incentive to go there, like a larger amount of ores or something

I thought of having bounties multiple times, but it would simply not work with our current pvp system. We would have to have always on pvp. And it's not enough for pvp to always be on in a single word, because if someone wants to avoid a bounty, they will just go to a non pvp world

This whole pvp situation with players interacting and making the server more challenging and engaging = A Factions Server.

[Happysheep102]

I can't actually suggest anything (helpful ik). But this is my view of survival.

You have a huge amount of new players joining the server daily. Your problem is not getting new players, its keeping them. New players join, build for a few hours and get bored. I myself and many long term players also feel the same. I'll give an example. I've spent the last few months building a huge auto shop and village. It kept me occupied and playing lots for ages. However now it is finished, I have nothing to do, nothing really that I want to build. Survival (as a concept) gets boring very quickly.

Survival has a purpose, you build, you survive, if I was you, leave it be. Have a different minecraft server to bring player interest such as Pixelmon, Prison, Factions.

Back when I used to play a lot more, it was a joy to rotate between the different SFT minecraft servers as they were all so different and kept players interested. I divided my time up between them all.

Don't break survival, its the lack of options that's the problem.

[_0i]

I can't actually suggest anything (helpful ik). But this is my view of survival.

You have a huge amount of new players joining the server daily. Your problem is not getting new players, its keeping them. New players join, build for a few hours and get bored. I myself and many long term players also feel the same. I'll give an example. I've spent the last few months building a huge auto shop and village. It kept me occupied and playing lots for ages. However now it is finished, I have nothing to do, nothing really that I want to build. Survival (as a concept) gets boring very quickly.

Survival has a purpose, you build, you survive, if I was you, leave it be. Have a different minecraft server to bring player interest such as Pixelmon, Prison, Factions.

Back when I used to play a lot more, it was a joy to rotate between the different SFT minecraft servers as they were all so different and kept players interested. I divided my time up between them all.

Don't break survival, its the lack of options that's the problem.

I really agree with this, survival gets boring for me a lot, and I eventually come back for a couple weeks, but I think adding more to survival won't fix this, adding more gamemodes would keep me interested for longer. I play some other servers because they have other modes SFT doesn't have, which I want to play.

Edit: TLDR: I think SFT adding a separate server for factions kitpvp stuff would be great.

[Lady_Carissa]

Disagree, the last Factions Community was super toxic. Overall, Factions Communities are toxic.
Yes, I know some of the players were banned, but a new Factions Server would just bring in more toxic members.

I would love to see a KitPvP server though, but Loot is bringing in a PvP World, so we'll see.

[Towelie]

I don't have the time or the desire to make a new Minecraft server.
Maintaining the Survival server is the best thing I can do right now.
I have a busy life and a job that requires a lot of my attention, so I simply could not have the time to do this.

That being said, if someone that I know I can depend on wants to make one, I would not object.
For the scope of this thread, please limit replies simply to improving Survival.

[Towelie]

I know I'm not a regular survival player but I have 100 hours so I at least know how it works.

My personal opinion and main reason for not playing more then I have is because of how unlike vanilla survival the server is. I know I'm a modpack player but plain vanilla survival is still really fun and when there's loads of additions it's not my favorite.

Obviously I'm not trying to start an argument or anything and I'm sure many will disagree, though I would prefer a plain vanilla experience over having loads of modifications

What is the biggest offended of that in your opinion? Slimefun? What else?

[T4Tom2]

I can't actually suggest anything (helpful ik). But this is my view of survival.

You have a huge amount of new players joining the server daily. Your problem is not getting new players, its keeping them. New players join, build for a few hours and get bored. I myself and many long term players also feel the same. I'll give an example. I've spent the last few months building a huge auto shop and village. It kept me occupied and playing lots for ages. However now it is finished, I have nothing to do, nothing really that I want to build. Survival (as a concept) gets boring very quickly.

Survival has a purpose, you build, you survive, if I was you, leave it be. Have a different minecraft server to bring player interest such as Pixelmon, Prison, Factions.

Back when I used to play a lot more, it was a joy to rotate between the different SFT minecraft servers as they were all so different and kept players interested. I divided my time up between them all.

Don't break survival, its the lack of options that's the problem.

Happy has summed it up well; but I think his conclusions can be added to. From where I'm standing, survival is boring people for two reasons; lack of mods (and I acknowledge that adding more mods moves away from the vanilla survival element) and a lack of difficulty - it has become too difficult for players that are actually established to die and have any regression whilst it is still too difficult for those new players to become stable to a point where they wont die and make any real progression.

There needs to be a midpoint that makes it easy enough for new players AND challenging enough for established players to make it challenging - potentially giving new players useful commands like /back (only a suggestion) to allow them to prevent regression, whilst also increasing the difficulty via increased mob difficulty and potentially stripping back on some mods, like pyromon for example (I don't really see many people use this) in favour of a supermob mod? and potentially the disease mod? or things to that effect. The one other suggestion of this type I have and its gonna get struck down and probably rightly so would be something like turning on creeper damage, so players have to play with some level of attentiveness

The other way to view it and this is quite a depressing way to look at it is that survival is just not what it used to be, and as Minecraft as a game moves on, survival is one of the server types that will be left behind.

[Autpek]

To piggy back off of T4's post, vanilla survival does get left in the dust, but that is why we play with mods.  I know some skyblock servers have a world players can go to for resource farming of all varieties that give you quests that you complete and can go though more worlds for more difficult quests and items.  In the mining worlds resources are in abundance but so are the mobs that you have to fight to be able to get to them.  Something like this would allow new players to die but not be so upset (until they lost their real good enchanted items) but allow more experienced players to dive deep and even complete raids.  I have only seen this type of game play on bigger servers and most likely require some pretty intensive mod packs so I don't know if this is of much help.

There was a post about having quests, and if that is setup properly I think that would be an equivalent solution to spruce up things.

What I do like about this server as of late is that you do a really good job at keeping it up to date.  Most servers have a hard cut off and are not even up to the aquatic update, and the fact that we are at a version that Optifine hasn't even released is pretty awesome in itself.

[Nono98ben]

Every once and awhile, I check in on Super Fun Time as it is the first public Minecraft server I ever played on. I saw this post and thought Id give my suggestions. In the 183 hours I've played on the server since 2011, its all been survival. I played actively for about 5-7 months until Minecraft 1.2 was released. I came back in 2014 and played for about a week. Since then, I check in every few months to see how the server is going.

I mainly quit playing because my friends build was taken down because of a town that was created next to them. My friends were there first then the town was created, their build was too close so it was removed. When I came back to play in 2014, my base was then taken down because I was inactive for three weeks. In my point of view, having builds taken down due to inactivity almost forces players to be active ultimately killing their experience. I can understand the reasons why this is put in place though. In 2011, it was almost impossible to build somewhere and see someone else's base nearby on this server. However, as a player, if I leave spawn and see no builds, the server looks like a ghost town and I don't feel inclined to come back because the server seems empty.

Personally, I would have began playing again if it wasn't for the building code violations. Out of the 5, the 4th one is the only one I completely agree with and the first one a little bit. If builds are protected with grief prevention, a stick can be used to figure out who owns the build/base. My first suggestion is to tame down the building code violations. Also, a lot of players enjoy redstone, so maybe remove the limit on pistons?? Its obvious why its in place, but the way the server is set up now with the low population, it is difficult to cause the sever harm with a few extra pistons. Maybe a plugin that detects the placement of pistons to alert mods incase someone is placing too many.

A few things I really liked back then when I played were the rank system with the playtime, the EMP, and the towny plugin. I dont know if the towny plugin is still used in the survival server today, but I know there is some sort of town plugin put in place. In fact, once I quit Super Fun Time, I moved to a strictly towny server and found that server was very challenging.

In order to make this towny sever more challenging, the owner allowed one set home that could be reset once per week where you could only /home once every 24 hours. There was no tp requests to other players and there was no /spawn. Thats harsh for any survival server, but the time restraints slowed down the process the game was played. The server had jobs to earn money as well as player shops and a really good shop at spawn (similar to the EMP) where it was worth the risk to travel there to sell stuff even if that meant death (there were no enderchests yet). Towns were ridiculously expensive and took a lot of grinding to afford one. Each player had three chest protects. Nations were even more expensive. It was similar to factions, but it was very challenging. PvP was always enabled but when you joined the server for the first time, you had a 4 hours grace period or something like that. There was raiding outside of the towns and inside the towns during wars, but griefing was still prohibited. The only griefing that happened anytime was when there was a war between nations. It was in a controlled setting though and supervised for good fun. A lot of the players took the towns so seriously, that they built castle walls around their towns and put glass over the top so absolutely no intruders could get in and kill players. If you want to make survival more challenging, those are some of my suggestions based on my past experiences. Im not saying that this is what survival should be, but it presents a new challenge to a lot of players.

These are a few things that I would suggest to make survival relevant again. I know that some may be impossible to reconstruct nowadays, but its a different point of view from someone who doesn't play multiplayer nearly as much as I used too. Enjoy