Follow-up: I made a video about why Space Engineers multiplayer servers die

A couple weeks ago I made a post here asking:

“Why do you think Space Engineers multiplayer servers die?”

I honestly wasn’t expecting the response it got. There were 80+ comments from players, server owners, admins, and people who have been around Space Engineers multiplayer for years.

There were a lot of different opinions, but a few themes kept showing up over and over again:

• Space is so massive that even populated servers can feel empty.
• Space Engineers is great at answering “What can I build?”, but not always “Why should I build it?”
• Performance gets worse at exactly the moment multiplayer gets interesting — when lots of players and ships are actually together.
• Servers need events, objectives, active development, and reasons for players to keep coming back.
• Once population starts dropping, it can create a snowball effect where fewer players causes even fewer people to join.

I ended up turning the discussion into a video and highlighting some of the comments that I thought explained the problem particularly well.

Video:
https://youtu.be/llaR9uhh2TE

Thanks again to everyone who responded to the original post. A lot of the points people made genuinely changed the way I look at Space Engineers multiplayer.

I’m still curious about one thing though:

For those of you who have played on a server that actually stayed populated for a long time, what do you think that server did differently?

I feel like figuring out why the successful ones survive might be even more interesting than figuring out why the others die.