How Can We as Players Help Mineplex?

I suggest fully utilizing the Ideas Discussion section of the forums. As a member of ideas team, I assure you we go through every idea that is proposed! Tons of awesome ideas come from community members, and a really awesome idea could really gain traction and attract more players.

Following and interacting with our social media pages is also always helpful, as that increases reach. The more players we reach through social media, the more likely they are to log on!

 

The only way to get Mineplex to grow again is to get large content creators to play the server. It's how Mineplex became #1 and how it fell. If they manage to get decent publicity and release one or two hit new games, the player count will start rising again. Sadly, on our side there's not much we can do.

 

Hello! This is a very hard question to answer. However, I am glad that this question was asked. The biggest and most obvious thing that players can do is abide by the rules. Of course, this is easier said than done, nonetheless, the Staff Team would really appreciate it. We all know that sometimes people slip or make a mistake, but that is why we have appeals :D

Furthermore, actively participating on the forums also really helps. As Emiliee said, being active on the Ideas Discussion section would greatly help the server's development. Also, reporting bugs, keeping discussions going, and simply asking great questions like these will help keep the server going. In all, keep the server alive! Try to prevent posts from becoming so old that people would be necro-posting, engage with other players, and simply having a great time!

 

As community members, we can always strive to contribute to the ideas discussion on the forums, join community subteams and support our conent creators, even streamers/youtubers who aren't official content creators for the network. That and to keep on playing Mineplex is the most anyone can do at the moment. For the most part, we're a very tight knit community and all get along well and know each other, but it would be nice to open our doors and try to bring new players in.

I agree that Mineplex should use some of their immortal earnings towards hiring more popular content creators as it proved to have worked in the past. Seeing as with approximately 3,396 people subscribed (give or take a few— this information was taken from how many people are in the Immortal community in-game), Java is making approximately $23,738.04 a month. Keep in mind, this is Immortal alone and doesn't include ranks, chests, cosmetics, amplifiers, or clans. Furthermore, I'm sure that Bedrock is also making a decent amount of money through marketplace, though I wouldn't know so please don't fully take my word for it. I think that the resources in order to be prosperous are definitely there, but what a lot of people don't understand that it's not in the hands of the staff team, including our admins, devs and leaders. At the end of the day it's ultimately all up to the founders, Strutt20 and defek7.

I think a big flaw is when people compare Hypixel to Mineplex. They are obviously more equipped in terms of everything regarding resources, and there is a huge gap in between the two servers. Yes, Mineplex was once at the top, but that was also when Minecraft was still relatively new and developing and coding for servers wasn't as advanced as it is now. From what I know, Mineplex is constantly looking for developers, but they're not going to bring in applicants onto the team just because they applied. They want candidates that match the skill set they're looking for, whether it be for GWEN or backend, so it's not that Mineplex doesn't have the capability or resources to hire new developers, it's rather the availability of them. Also, in response to you saying that content creators don't care about Mineplex, that's why they would be hired. It's a common marketing strategy in order to promote the server. There are people like Graser10 (and his friends KiingTong, etc.) that make one video every few months, but having a (semi)popular content creator that would constantly record or stream on Mineplex would help the server go a long way.

The truth is, people still definitely know about the server since whenever Hypixel goes down, our player count increases drastically. Additionally, as @kubernetes stated, as can be seen from yesterday's numbers, having content creators will definitely give us the push that we need as Tubbo's stream boosted the player count to 4.4k rather than our average of ~2.1k.

There is also definitely more that could be done from everyone, community and staff members alike, like having devs updating old (SSM, CW, SW, SG, NANO) and creating new games (like Alex's "secret project" he mentioned back in 2020), having staff do as much as they can with our hacker "pandemic" until we're able to find a GWEN developer, and community members doing what I stated in the beginning of this post- strive to contribute to the ideas discussion on the forums, join community subteams and support our conent creators. Seeing the big decline of Mineplex (Java) over the years is upsetting, but the fact that we're still holding over 2k players daily just shows that we definitely have the potential to improve from here.

 

Wanted to sort of slip in an opinion here. Players attention shifts, arguably, Mineplex's decisions over the few years have indirectly lead to this shift (not bad ideas, just ones the community didn't follow). I'll list a few of the things I think are primary in the playerbase shift.

DISCLAIMER:

• Most of the times I mention PVP in this, I'm talking about player vs player direct combat with swords and abilities, not things like spleef.
• By 'you' I am referring to the person reading this post, not the OP.

1. The difference between Mineplex and Hypixel
I wanted to bring this up first because I've been seeing a lot of people trying to compare Mineplex to Hypixel. You cannot compare the 2 networks. Their entire community, style, and methods are very different. Mineplex has always been a server focused on the custom-PVP aspect of the game, a forced PVP style that's always been meant to be easy for children. Whilst Mineplex has periodically released non-combat related minigames, they've never really become too large because the ethos of Mineplex has forced the community to 'PVP or don't play'. Hypixel on the other hand has always been about PVE games, more adventure and more activity based, take the old adventure lobby for example back in 2015. Hypixel has only recently gone large with PVP, but this was after their large scale minigames became popular so they were accommodating for Mineplex's community (theoretically this is why Mineplex lost it's final quintuple digit in consistent players), this moves me to my next point.

1.1 Severe employee level closures
Hypixel is a multi-million US dollar company (recently quoted at $45m) and they had much higher investments at the start than Mineplex did which allowed them to push for larger content releases. With the upcoming Hytale and Hypixel Studios launch, their income and investments have been booming which allow them to hire hundreds of developers which can work on their dozens of games simultaneously. Mineplex on the other hand was quoted at almost 4.5x less than that ($10m at most, this is not a reliable statistic). Mineplex has had lots of issues over the years with rogue developers, company merges, lots of community side issues (rogue staff and the Rebel_Guy incident) which influenced the then immature minds of people who didn't fully understand the situation and moved from Mineplex (I give you the start of cancel-culture lol).

Mineplex arguably no longer has the capacity to make developmental/update decisions that include as many people as it once did in the balances. What I mean by this is that there were many more leaders back in 2016 than there are now for example which took most of the main front end positions where Mineplex could now be improved. There were about 9-10 at a time which all had a specific role in the servers development. Obviously now there aren't people do to the job which is probably the primary reason they were removed.

These were some of the Leader groups that there were back in 2016 which no longer exist:

• Game Director (Known holders of this role Sigils) - Lead integration of ideas into updates behind the scenes and some large scale events stuff (Like Minecon/Minefaire)

• Project Manager (Originally held by and dissolved after the departures of kennethbgoodin, sjsampson and syclonejs) - Managed the creation of games and updates
• CEO (Now an ownership role held by Defek7, previously b2_mp) - Responsible for all managerial decisions under the owners
• Customer Relations (Previously held by Strutt20 as a Leader) - Managed the Customer Support group of staff
• Development Leader (Originally held and changed after the departures of Chiss, Brvtvs and Phinary) - Lead both sides of Bedrock and Java development prior to the split
• Business Manager (Originally held and dissolved after the departures of b2_mp and AppleG before he became an owner) - Lead the decision making before the CEO role became a Leader possibility
• Bedrock Content Lead (Originally held and dissolved after the departure of t3hero, it is now an Admin team) - Lead the content pushed to the Bedrock Marketplace
• Official Content Creator (Dissolved shortly after introduction of the YouTube rank, originally held by CaptainSparklez and Parker_Games) - Official YouTube channels that were directly endorsed by Mineplex

Below are the list of leader roles in 2021:

• Head of Staff
• Java Development Leader
• Bedrock Development Leader

I guess the only way you could really help in this respect is applying for the developer position if you know how to code which can be done here.

1.1.2 The effect of the closures
As you can see, it's a very large change. These 3 people are expected to do the job of what once was 12 even before Mineplex started gaining popularity. As far as I know, the way development used to work is that a project manager would take up a responsibility over a sector, such as a large scale game update (affecting most games on the network), dedicate developers to specific parts of it, issue schedules, and it would be produced on-time and efficiently. Now, it's completely at the discretion of the lead developer to the respective Java/Bedrock side. Any suggestions that you make, send on the forums, CoM or the Ideas Team interact with are all ideas for the owners/leaders which they may reject at any time for any reason and then quickly change their mind (such as the assurance of 'no new rank', and then Immortal appears).

So it's not that sometimes it feels like they don't care about your idea, it's just they don't have the capacity to accommodate it in their schedules to try and keep a demanding community happy. It's still a really good idea to suggest ideas to the server, even if it feels as if they've gotten lost in the abyss. You can do that here!

1.2 Volunteer staffing
You probably saw this coming, but applying for the Trainee position is also a great idea for helping the network which can be applied for here! There's lots of opportunities for you to help the network at higher levels of your choosing such as banning hackers, helping the community with questions and concerns, joining subteams, representing the server, and gaining the experience of being someone that people look up to.

To become a staff member though, you need to be socially fluid. You need to know the boundaries of social speak or you'll be seen as 'robotic' and the community won't acknowledge you. It's not about how high respect your name demands when someone utters it, its the respect that the community give you because they know that you're a friendly face and they can talk to you if they have issues. That's what makes you a good staff member, although there are lots of issues surrounding how the community treats the volunteer staff members which severely affects the numbers that get accepted. Sometimes a simple 'hello' or 'how is your day going' can do massive amounts for someone's mental health.

Because of this, whilst the recruitment criteria since 2016 hasn't changed much, Mineplex has slowly declined in volunteer staff which has lead to rises in cheaters and issues in the community on the network that the team doesn't have the capacity to deal with 24/7 as it once did.

2. Mineplex's social media
Mineplex used to be booming with popularity on it's social media. Here's another little list of Mineplex's social media platforms.

• -unapproved link- (Verified) - Active and the main source of advertising
• -unapproved link- (Verified) - Abandoned, last post 4th October 2017
• Mineplex Facebook - Abandoned, last post 1st March 2019, Facebook reward is also offline
• Mineplex Twitch (Verified) - Abandoned, last post pre-2017
• MineplexGames YouTube (Verified)- Abandoned, last post 16th January 2019
• Minecon/Minefaire Panels - No longer possible

One of Mineplex's best ways of gaining its previous popularity was through it's YouTube channel and Facebook reward system where subscribers and viewers would push the pages in the algorithms which would present them at the front of the best audiences, which in turn would bring players to the network. Since all of the primary accounts have gone offline, it's not possible to use that same tactic.

This is somewhere where the community could help, it's possible that Mineplex's intention with removing most of its social media was to give the YouTubers of Mineplex a chance (mainly the YT's) so maybe that's something you could go for, you just need to learn how to actively engage a community who are both interested in your content and come to the network to play, increasing the player count.

2.1 Mineplex's response to criticism
This is a big one. The leadership of the server has said this for years, and that is their refusal to respond to criticism (such as "expose" videos) made against them even if they're massively dragging the community in a way that negatively effects the network. This makes sense in a way, because if they respond to the criticism, it gives the person in question more of a spotlight which could cause more players to fall to their side of normally half truths. Bold examples of these are the Rebel_Guy incident, most of the negative "Mineplex exposed" staff resignation documents and the "Mineplex is dying" YouTube videos. In actual fact, not many people who make these are either giving full truths, or have enough knowledge of what they're talking about to properly form an opinion on the state of the network.

We all need to remember that Mineplex won't respond to negative criticism to defend its dignity which like aforementioned, is a good idea. Giving the negative players trying to drag the network attention is the opposite of helping the network. It's always best to focus on the positives Mineplex has to offer like its unique games and the memories you've made on the network!

3. The community
Without the community, Mineplex wouldn't exist. Everybody has their own way of treating others, whilst it sometimes isn't arguably acceptable, we need to accommodate everyone's feelings and make sure everybody is nice to each other otherwise you have a toxic community on your hands. Obviously, this has already happened with certain areas of the CakeWars and Clans community which some could say is irreversible at its current state. I don't like when 'irreversible' is applied to a social situation, everything is reversible with a little bit of positive interaction and giving the community reasons to interact with each other.

The community gives multiple arguments of "Mineplex don't care", "they won't ban this cheater", (insert any message sent in StaffRequest) etc. There are multiple reasons for every single one of these common reasons so I'll have to break some of the more popular ones down.

3.1 "Mineplex don't care"
This is a vague statement which normally applies to how Mineplex collects feedback. Mineplex do care, the staff care, they try all that they possibly can to ensure that you have a good time on Mineplex but because of the technical and physical limitations of the job, it isn't possible. It isn't easy as "oh I like this idea, it'll be implemented next week", it has to come in a larger update, and even before that be accepted by the owners who have the final say before it even sees a response. When I was a staff member, I tried everything I could to get the community to interact with each other, I made massive strides in the Clans community to bring the community and staff team together which allowed contact between the 2 communities which hadn't been seen in years. I did lots with certain higher levelled players which allowed me to see their frustrations and see what I could do to amend them. I wasn't alone in that, every moderator strives for you to have a good experience, but it's really difficult to do it ourselves with their currently extremely limited numbers.

3.2 "too many hackers" or "ban him for reach"
Mineplex staff agree that hackers are a massive problem, but currently there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. There are no IP bans which arguably would be incredibly helpful at this point, there are no support mechanisms to accurately view all account connections to quickly dispose of compromised accounts, and mainly, there are just too many compromised accounts.

On any normal day, back as a moderator, I would've banned about 300 bunny hop hackers in CakeWars alone if I was really going for it the full day. Even then, I would have hardly made a dent in the influx of cheaters coming into the network. GWEN has had most of the the movement blocks turned off due to version specific issues which of course leads bunny hop to become a massive issue. Even if a moderator bans a player, they can come back almost instantly on a pre-loaded account that most cheat clients now support and there's no change in the problem. They are eagerly awaiting the new 2FA system on Mojang accounts because of this issue, it'd make game-changing alting almost impossible.

Believe it or not, the large scale cheaters do get network banned for throwing hundreds of accounts into cheating, although it doesn't deter anyone which wasn't a result leadership were hoping for. Sure it's a ban that's very difficult to appeal, but not impossible, and the player just loads alts on a VPN or dynamic router. This poses another problem with network bans becoming irrelevant. Network bans used to be given to severe cases of community disruption and other major infractions that involved legal actions, in 2015-2018 there were probably a max of 15-20 network bans? 2019-2020 there's definitely been over 50.

3.3 StaffRequest
I moaned about this on a previous document on my wall, but the argument still stands. A lot of players in StaffRequest become entitled to have their queries dealt with immediately even if nobody is online and start bashing the volunteer staff team if they don't get a response within 3 microseconds. The community was set up for the community to ask questions to staff who weren't in their lobby and now it's the largest community on the network that all need staff members constantly.

I get it that you're losing games because there's a cheater, but that doesn't mean that the staff members are invalid or useless just because they can't be with you at that moment in time. I know it's pathetic, but you need to record and report it because if no staff member is available, there is nothing you can do. No, that doesn't mean bullying people who say "coming to record" in the com.

End
So obviously this is a bit of a big post, I'm open to feedback on it. It's not meant to bash the network, community or anyone else who feels offended by it. If anyone is then please DM me and I'll alter it. Thanks!

 

It'd be a good idea if there were enough players to accommodate it.