Some people say that my Minecraft server is dead. In a way, they are right. The people that say it often log on when there are 0 other players online. I understand their frustration.
It can be frustrating for me as well. The whole point of running a server is, at least in part, for it to be fun to play on for my community. Most of the fun of a server comes from interacting with other players.
Adding to my frustrating is how it can sometimes act as an inescapable black hole. Over the course of a week, 50 or more different players may have logged onto the server and immediately left due to seeing nobody else on. Had there been a crowd of people, they each may have kept playing and even came back the next day. It creates this interesting paradox where a community is unable to grow unless it already has a lot of people. This makes it impossible to grow from 0 unless you scrape together the few people who are happy with playing when there are few other players online. The low player counts lead to comments about the server being dead.
However, we are not dead. We are merely comatose. In the 10+ years I have run Minecraft servers, April and May have always been the least active months. Players have club activities, final exams, and final projects to work on. Things always rebound in the summer months. If some players give up in April and don’t bother coming back in June, then we will have new community members to keep this place lively and active anyway.
One thing I do is hold “Power Hours”. What is a Power Hour? Well, before, I explained how most people find it to be more fun to play with other players online. However, when everyone is logging in during different minutes of the day, they are usually seeing 0 players. Power Hours are just coordinated times where players try to all log in at the same time to ensure there are other people to play with and talk to. Theoretically, if 10 different people were all going to log in at different times over a 4-hour period, they can all log in at the same time and create a small-sized crowd. That’s the idea of a Power Hour.
One other thing I would like to address are the players who say they are bored of survival and would like it to be swapped out for a different game mode. Listen, I understand that everyone gets bored of survival at some point. However, there are still people that enjoy it, and there will continue to be new players that log on that don’t like it. It is okay that you don’t like it. If someone likes eating pretzels, and one day they get tired of it and want potato chips, they do not need to ask the pretzel-makers to sell chips, they can buy chips from the existing potato chip companies while the pretzel-makers continue to do what they know how to do best. (Also, I do like having second game modes on my server, but it is not wise for me to do this when the number of players is this small as it divides and splinters the player count even further.) In summary, if you do not like survival any more, then this server probably isn’t for you any more. We will miss having you play here, but we respect your decision to spend your free time on a hobby that you find more entertaining! Plus, you are still free to visit us any time you want and to continue chatting in our Discord server.
Anyway, that’s all I have for today. Feel free to leave me any comments on my Discord server if you would like to see me talk about any other topics related to my server.