A path going forward?

" I think the core concept of player governed survival, player driven anarchy, but not as an uncontrolled toxic mess like 2b2t, rather a field for strategy and player interaction has a spot and you could make it find broad appeal. I believe in the concept. "

i think civ has a bit of an incoherent central premise; player-governance, sure, but what makes this different from exercising agency outside of a game? maybe it's just me but i don't think the concept behind civ is very substantial. it's unclear on whether it wants to be about power or about self-expression, and where it intersects, it doesn't necessarily do it any better than other games, or even rl pursuits.

i always thought a monthly subscription would be viable for a stable income stream

we have lots of people who'd happily pay $5-10 a month pretty much indefinitely as long as the server stays running, plus more casual players dropping in here and there

it does have some gameplay implications - raising the barrier to entry would cut out a portion of the casual playerbase and make it harder for older players to come back after leaving

not necessarily the best approach but might be worth considering

Perhaps add a spawn room/world with tutorial info or whatever. Could you imagine playing OSRS for the first time without tutorial island?

I remember first playing CC and playing by myself for a solid fortnight because I spawned in the middle of nowhere. Didn't even know how to chat in global. I'm sure this puts a lot of newcomers off - they want to be apart of a civilization/group/team/faction, and their first impression is the complete opposite of that

Something like this would help stimulate and accommodate what the server is trying to offer, instead of perpetuating the self-impression of some cruddy SMP

Maybe you could even charge players real money to have shops at spawn point

First impressions are important

Posting links to other subreddits i see...ban maxopoly

also, perhaps add monthly costs for using alts, like 4 free alts and every next one someone owns costs like 1$USD a month idk

I've tried very hard to write out a long independent response and separately a rebuke of u/AllenY99's post, but ultimately I am tired and I will cut to the point. Don't let Allen, who hasn't even been around for more than two years, fool you out of the treasure you've made for yourself. This is a cutting edge proof of concept for an MMORPG that can write itself cohesively, providing a stable and inviting story going on three years with good management, and encourages nearly the full spectrum of human expression and interaction from the smallest of gestures to the largest of political and economic systems. There are two kinds of problems going on in this community right now that affect our ability to grow:

• Problems caused by our "too open" licenses to use plugins that enable the community to create new competing servers using our shared code base. At the end of the day these servers are usually created by people with a grudge against another part of the player base (wee pee) or against a certain style of gameplay (bots) or are designed to solve a performance problem (TPS) with a sledgehammer (loading barriers) and are hell bent on causing a situation that creates extreme player turnover as people jump ships and player commitments get abandoned. This is not an argument against open-source software development itself, as I believe that is beneficial to the genre, but against the way we have made our software open source and at the same time freely available to use. It was reckless and should be stopped. Further development must keep in mind that benefits gained by adopting this policy are negated by design mistakes from now on, as lack of competition and alternatives will ultimately give players no where to go from this.

• Problems caused by our home game, Minecraft. We have an API, ABI, appearance, and EULA all forced on us and completely out of our control. We are at the point where the only way this genre is going to grow is if someone in the community rolls their own sandbox game engine or re-uses a preexisting one that can meet our requirements. There are a few sub-points under this that I would like to briefly touch on as I run out of effort to write this:

  • the EULA prevents us from doing all kinds of things like charging money, such a basic human thing

  • Mojang can make design decisions and these are forced on Spigot/Paper/Bukkit developers which then have spilled over into our community which has no say if a major subsystem has to be rewritten and made ridiculously complicated just so Minecraft in general can have new command block functions or something

  • the rules that Minecraft/Spigot/Paper/Bukkit/Forge code follows is always inconsistent and loosely enforced and therefore the functionality inside Citadel that literally holds the fabric of the server together by controlling all block changes is actually a ridiculous and mildly in flux patchwork of codebase that is hard to understand and oftentimes breaks between updates (as an example, this happens to all other plugins too!); if we had control over the entire stack we could make more stable, easier to modify and update code (that actually calls, for example, the same event handlers rather than having two three or four different ways of doing things that can all happen that make it hard for others to understand!)

  • we cannot add good looking new content or blocks as we have no deployment method for client-side code and no permission to add or roll one that is acceptable per all the licenses and EULAs involved; Mojang always says it is developing a way to do this and sure I've seen demonstrations of them but I am not convinced by how they work and they always seem to be afterthoughts or hacks rather than a core part of the architecture that will remain stable

There is a lot more to be said, but I'm tired.