My Proposal To Improve Survival Mode and Add Greater Challenges

Hey guys. So, I've been around on Mineplex for a few years now and I have spent at least half of my time here playing in Survival Mode. I've been playing Survival Mode since it first launched on Mineplex, so I've seen a fair amount. From the days where the servers were always crowded, chat dialogue covering half the screen with so many people talking and trading, TPing to different survival servers would often dump you (and other players) in a random location between TPs, which served as an impromptu meeting ground with a lot of foot traffic, people spawning in god weapons that would overload and lag the game with how much loot they could produce and trying to build anything was a constant battle between attempting to work and trying not to be one shot by a god bow and lose your entire inventory of build materials.

There were clearly a lot of things that were bad about previous iterations of Survival Mode and the improvements they have made have started to move things in a nice direction but there were also some good things that had come from all the glitches and hacks and I don't believe those aspects have been addressed as adequately. As many know, since there were no other way to obtain them, blocks that could only be found in the Nether and End had to be spawned in. As awful as it was to die so easily with one hit from an arrow, the fight offered some aspect of challenge to an otherwise relatively mild survival experience. When those challenges and items were taken away, a lot of Survival players left the game. Even now, we can barter and trade with hackers in an attempt to get the foreign items that we need, but using such non-legitimate tactics cheapens the game for many of us and for those who enjoy the grind, make earning your items boring and dull.

I have come up with a couple of suggestions for solutions to some of these problems. While I am in no way a game developer, I believe these suggestions could be achieved fairly easily.

1. Allow Access to Mini-Nether and Mini-Ender Dragon Fights/End Cities: This is an idea to allow players to access the Nether and End, without having to deal with the complications of having both those biomes available in-full on a large multiplayer server with claimable chunks in the overworld.

How this will work:

(The Nether Portion) A player builds a Nether portal in the overworld. When the player tries to enter the portal, it will bring them into an exclusive, mini-version of the Nether that is just for them. I have no particular suggestion for how many chunks there should be, but as a player could continuously leave and return to a new nether, I don't think the size has to be too big. No one else will be able to enter into the Nether with them, as this will generate a small one time Nether map and returning to the Nether again through the same portal will never generate the same exact Nether that you have already cleared of resources.

(The End Portion) A player accesses the Nether as described in the paragraph above. There is a small percentage of chance that the player may enter into a Nether section that also contains an End Portal. I think the end portal should be buried by other blocks every time that it spawns, so the player has to dig around in hopes of finding one and cannot easily jump in and out of portals back to back in an attempt to find the End more easily. When the player enters through the End Portal, they will have an opportunity to fight the Dragon.

To ensure the player is ready for the dragon fight, either give them an option to save the fight for later when they enter the End portal, so they can clear their inventory and armor up OR the game temporarily gives them a set of decent armor, tools and blocks to help defeat the Ender dragon. Dying in this fight will respawn you in the End and let you fight the dragon anew (with the dragon fully healed, of course) or give you an option to return to survival.

Upon beating the dragon, the player is then given an elytra, a stack of rockets (provided they get rockets working in survival) and access to a mini-version of the end, with random chances for End Cities and various loot. As long as the rest of the end has shulkers, chests and crafting tables, players should be able to create shulker boxes when they find End cities and carry back a fair bit of loot. Leaving the End would return the player to the Overworld, outside of the original Nether portal.

Wither Boss: While I don't have a specific suggestion for the Wither Boss fight currently, I think a similar system could be worked out to allow for people to fight the Wither (without destroying the overworld) and gain access to nether stars and beacons that way.

2. Intentionally recreate a TP pass through hub or congregation zones of some sort.

How players get there: Players access a non-deletable "Home" that is found in a list in the Command Block similar to the Homes list, but for Hubs.

What the hub is: The hub is just a place for players who are bored or lonely to TP into. It should be a somewhat small circle of area that may even have non-killable villagers to trade with for special items/blocks or to sell things. The area outside the hub can be wandered and explored through. Perhaps having one hub centered in each survival realm would be nice. With multiple hubs like this, players will be able to travel more easily through all survival servers and have more opportunities to interact with other players.

3. Upgrade Mineplex Survival to the latest version of Mineplex available (1.16)

Why mineplex should do this: I NEED ALL DA NEW BLOCKS

I have been under the assumption for a long time now that it must be a very difficult process or some other preventative reason that has kept Mineplex from updating versions, but I will suggest it none the less, as I still have no official answer on the possibilities of such an upgrade.

Please let me know what you think or any suggestions to improve upon these ideas!

 

Hallo! I saw your suggestions and I have one suggestion to add: Bring back elytra
and spawn eggs! I've been using elytra in Mineplex Survival before it was removed. Really helpful when building sky bases. And the reason why I wanted spawn eggs to be back? Well, maybe some but some of us built some buildings where they use mobs as props(such as a zombie as a prisoner in a jail built by someone) and one thing that we could use this in a PVP like a player verses 12 zombies and 13 skeletons and something like that. I've used villager spawn eggs because I have a fond for villagers. If spawn eggs ever came back, Ill take at least 4 villager spawn eggs and give them an underground village(hopefully it won't be griefed due to underground raiding and griefing rising ;-;) Anyway, thats my suggestion to add and you may add yours to make survival better:)

Edit: Also, if possible, can you limit the spawn eggs like removing the ghast spawn eggs bc other spawn eggs can annoy players alot. Just don remove the villager spawn egg, they aren't quite annoying or doesn't deal damage to players.

I also need the new blocks and updates, they may improve my building style and be helpful to redstone and other things too:)

 

I didn’t read this that throughly but a few things the sorta popped out on me.
Bows don’t one hit you anymore. They only give flame and you can easily beat that just by eating some gaps. For the 1.16 I don’t think they are giving us the new blocks soon. Mainly due to lag.
The mini nether things are a good idea but that requires more servers which requires more money which I don’t know if Mineplex would be in favor of that. Still good idea tho.
For the hub thing once again a pretty good idea but it’s gonna be griefed into oblivion the first week. The not really sad truth.
But thanks for making these suggestions and trying to make survival a better game.

 

Oh, I was referring to the very early days of Survival on Mineplex when PVP with a bow wasn't yet disabled and people had God/OP bows with Power 32000 and Knockback 32000 and other OP enchantments that would let them take you out instantly.

I agree that the added server thing would probably be an issue. It might cause more lag, too but I'm not sure how bad it would be.

And the hub areas would have to be areas players couldn't alter, like how they cannot alter the Mineplex lobby without using hacks. Not saying it wouldn't still get griefed at times, but I imagine resetting just those chunks that the hub is in might not be too difficult if that happens.

Sadly, while I like the idea of being able to have villagers in builds as props, spawn eggs aren't even legit to vanilla Minecraft unless you're in creative, so I doubt they would add them in to Survival Mode on Mineplex.

 

I like a lot of these ideas, but there are a few that I think will take Mineplex Survival out of the direction the developers want to go. For example, having villagers in the hub dedicated for trading with, even though I love the idea, takes survival in a different direction than I think they want to go with it. It just doesn't feel like something Mineplex would do. Also I believe someone has brought up bringing Mineplex into 1.16 and the answer that was provided was something like "If we where to update the game, people in older versions of Minecraft couldn't play" Now I also think that the nether and end ideas are cool ideas, although the ender dragon fight idea needs a little work. But the getting the other deminsions to be specific to players might take a minute to develop I think it could be done. And finally the hub idea is really cool, I personally loved being dropped off in a random location for the players I would meet. But I can also see this being denied for the simple fact that theres already a hub, but pvp games also have a second hub so there's no way to tell which way the developers would go with this. But all in all there are some really good suggestions in this post and I love seeing the community bringing more attention to survival. Keep it up!

 

You need to look at this like a business. Adding nether or end doubles or triples current server resources. Will adding these also double or triple current profits from running the server?

Imagine if they decided to say “hey you get 6 plots of claims for free” and anything outside of that 6 you need rank or extra purchase to own

 

Some of this sounds decent enough though returning the server to how it was also fixed these issues also 32k arrows could only damage players by the flame and it was very little damage plus everyone has gapples to be immune anyways so that wasn’t an issue there also used to be mobs to fight especially the wither for players to actually have things to fight I have a game clip of me killing an actual flying ender dragon as well not just one that flaps above a spawner as for lag only noobs used tools with looting and fortune most long time players had 32ks that excluded those enchants or had them at much lower levels so lag wasn’t a problem, if they reset the game all of the valuable items will be gone and there will be nothing to work toward and no economy they’ve already ruined the game so much and made it almost unplayable plus empty of players where if they just undid everything they changed it could be the best survival server on any platform again like it was before