Yes, I was thinking
@Watermelon_01 meant player population, player community, perhaps player numbers, that sort of thing.
I'd like to see a more vibrant involved community, yes.
Perception is everything, so for the most part it's not just about players having fun, but about players BEING SEEN having fun, being challenged, getting involved, interacting with other players etc.
So I'm thinking about things like:
- more players contributing to forums threads
- a wider range of players chatting in the public ingame chats
- a greater investment in recruiting players into towns
- strategies for getting players trading goods and services with each other
- a greater sense of pride about building.
Some ideas:
1. Townships (beyond a certain size) being required to have a town thread at forums (even if recruiting is closed), as per
@Dwarfers thread
2. More excitement for "pve" players by doing away with the illusion/assumption of safety, and making it clear that their towns can be raided, can have war declared on them etc - hopefully this will get more players talking in the public chats, engaged with their towns - and balancing this by ensuring the war/siege system doesn't leave players at risk of having all their efforts obliterated if they don't pay attention for a couple of days - and indeed, perhaps even setting it up so that it's isn't always the biggest bully that wins every time...
3. Getting the region limitations in Townships 3.0 working properly, such that certain regions really are limited to certain professions and/or biomes, requiring towns to trade for goods or acquire the services of professionals to a greater extent than at present
4. Strengthening the professions, the challenge and uniqueness of professions and the potential for interacting with other players, via custom crafting perhaps
@Jonsoon @devotedworker
5. Finding ways to get new players immediately engaged in connecting with the server - this was the greatest strength of the whitelisting system - not just the ban checking, but getting prospective players to actually cogitate and verbalize why they wanted to join the server - potentially via the Tutorial design as discussed in
Eligof's thread. [Please may I be involved in the planning of this,
@LightningCape @hilltim1 (That said, I'd love to see the /register command could do a quick check of ban history and send a "please apply personally for whitelisting" message when things turn up, lol.)
6. Absolutely anything that makes for less mindless griefing by 1-day players with no server loyalty - it's discouraging both for the players who get their builds/creations griefed and surely also for the mods and admins who have to deal with petition after petition. (I want to see our senior staff having more fun than that.)
7. Activities that encourage players to take pride in their builds - monthly build comps or similar, with categories for various size towns, various regions, terraforming etc - perhaps only one or two categories pre-announced for each comp date
8. Mob arenas - there seems to be a lot of player enthusiasm for these - and I'd be interested to see whether it's at all possible to repurpose a small number of existing Survival-server dungeons to give the mob arena feel.
Btw
@Watermelon_01 if you think of a thread title that better reflects what you'd like to see discussed here, you can ask for an Admin (or Mod?) to change it.