ECC: The number of online players seems to have decreased recently. You can really tell during the off-peak times. I blame this player slump on our community chat. This last month, there was persistent trolling. Our primary medium of communication and therefore, our community, has been undesirable. I think that it is clear that good community is very important to the success of any MC server. January set aside, I have been very happy with chat. People could chat, trade, ask for help, etc. without feeling like they would be attacked. Mocking is fine for fun, and I get that arguments play-out in global and that's fine too. This month however, there was constant, persistent trolling in chat. This caused there to be even more trolling and effectively, set our standard of communication to be "anything I can say in chat to get over on somebody else." No matter how great a server is otherwise, allowing this kind of chat environment to persist will be the reason it gets shut down. I recommend that trolls not be allowed to dominate chat in the way that they have this past month. Thanks. [Please lock this thread.]
The amount of players is as said, its off peak times. Some well known active members may have left, perhaps giving the allusion that there is less. I see that there are a lot more players daily, but due to either confusion or frustration half the builders/residents move on to become mayors+. I personally blame this on the fact that for someone to go from 15k needed to 85k is a massive difference for a new user. As trolling is, we have but a few >good< trolls that would make people "leave". Most people are either really bad or mean. The staff or normally on top of this. I feel like users can be really hypersensitive and over react to comments. That being said, I think the decline of users is either the challenge for new users or the lottery (which is self-explanatory). I see more people quitting from the lotto than from trolling. Not saying either ways are bad for the server, either.
Trolls and mean people are only a portion of why our user numbers are down. There is also the fact that voting is not interesting (horse eggs = lame now) and ECC is getting pretty low on the voting sites; lottery frustrating new users (people convince users who don't understand lottery to play it); survival games frustrating a ton of new users (blame kits and experienced users); many users joining thinking we are factions and/or skyblocks when we aren't (false advertising somewhere); all of the scamming; and lastly, I see several users leave because people ignore them and/or refuse to help them. This last one I notice a lot... I know I left many servers before I joined ECC because no one helped me. Although people in chat make ECC negative and sour to new - and old - users, that alone won't make a large amount of people leave. I see many give up on in-game chat and just use the forums for their socializing. Many do find a few friends, too, and just talk to them on Skype and such. The real issue is all of the issues I listed above... There's so many factors in play right now that make the community and ECC seem "less than nice and fun" lately. edit: To add, though, I have actually noticed a lot of bullying, harassment, and trolling go untouched by Staff moderating, simply because it "is not enough to warrant any warnings or punishment." I don't know what changed with Staff guidelines or Staff recently, but it is highly bugging me. :/ I see a lot of users going around constantly bullying people and nothing is being done - even when there are complaints made.
In the 7 months i've been here, there have been these familiar complaints with: lotto, sg, lack of help, economic difficulty, misconceptions about the server features/worlds, scamming, voting etc. None of these sources of discontent have emerged recently. The only new problem that i see is this last month of trolling, and how it has effected the social aspect of minecraft - a solitary game. I think that lack of a decent in-game chat is more of a problem than we have recognized.
