Making a Minecraft Server feel like home
Making a Minecraft Server feel like home
Minecraft servers are a big deal on the Internet. Gamers, forums, and demo servers alike have dedicated their lives to building awesome structures, fighting epic boss battles, and roleplaying as their favorite characters. One of the coolest things about a Minecraft server is its community, however the people who make up that community might not always be the nicest. It’s important to remember that not everyone who plays on a Minecraft server is there to have a good time, but to abuse the server, which means players may find themselves in situations where they are forced into PvP, aggressive griefing, or intense combat.
The Minecraft Server Community
Social Sites
Discord
A little while back Minecraft and Discord joined forces to make the world's most popular online construction game even better. Minecraft players can now easily create, share, and connect to Discord communities from within Minecraft, making it easier for Minecraft players to voice chat and work together without leaving the game. The channels can be quite elaborate in what they offer. Even a ticket system to report issues you may have. Discord is by far the most popular platform for people to communicate with in the Minecraft worlds.
Minecraft servers are quite common and many actively seek people to play on the server. There are quite a few servers, both free and paid but they do not actively use Facebook. This is dispite alot of the users who do. So at this stage it is not a popular platform to communication to their players.
Twitter was created in 2006 and started out as a way for people to share short bits of text. In 2006, most people used Twitter for things as simple as telling someone they saw them on the street or sharing what they had for dinner. However, over the years, Twitter has evolved from a simple messaging tool to a social network. Twitter has become one of the biggest social networks in the world—in fact, it has more monthly active users than Facebook and LinkedIn combined. In addition, Twitter is used by over 1 billion monthly users, who collectively send over 500 million tweets a day.
Even with such an active amount of traffic, Minecraft Server owners have not really embraced the use of twitter or see how they can benifit from using it.
Websites
Shops and Forums make up most of the reason to have a Minecraft Server websites. Some offer vote links to make it easy for players to receive rewards if the server owners have setup votifier. This is not used for any form of quick communication so again most server owners stick to Discord.
Whilst it is still a work in progress, the Koi Network's website design is one of the best looking. It is asthetically pleasing with subtle interactions that stand out. Everything is done so smoothly and beautifully. The Koi Network's website really deserves the Best of Minecraft website award.
Minecraft Servers
Minecraft servers have a reputation for having very low player counts, and there’s good reason for it. Minecraft servers can be made in a variety of different ways, and if yours is too similar to another server, players will leave for a different one. Yes you can add plugiins to make it a little more interesting, but there are literally 10s of thousands of servers out there. They are many ways to make your server unique with the bigger server owners doing custom modifications to put a slant on the play.
Some of the reasons to keep a player engauged are in fact the other players or server owners. Interaction that is freindly and fun with constant access to Staff or Admins to help keep things in check.
As a checklist of things your server could have:
- A Lag free experience - no one likes lag
- Some sort of Quirky games
- Hidden gems or exploits which will try to bring players back to try and work out just how to get to them.
- Different levels of playability to help beginners to advanced if you are running games
- fake money with some sort of economy (it makes the world go round)
- Leader boards to highlight do-gooders and time spent
- Have great Admins and support staff who are always available.
Conclusion
People like different things so there is not a clear easy answer on what makes a server great. But f your wanting get some ideas, try to hop online to some of the more popular servers to work out what you do and don't like. Nothing helps like a bit of window shoping to get the inspirational jucies flowing.
Just be sure to have fun!
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