EDIT: fuck the title was supposed to have only one "of" kms. pls forgive my mistakes.

This started out as a comment on bgbba's post but as it got longer and longer I felt it kind of warranted its own post. This is how I have been feeling for some time now, and I hope you all enjoy.

Let me begin with a story, my story on Civcraft. I joined 1.0 as a complete newfriend, joined some people called SCoM (Socialist Commune of Minecraft), they dipped after the base got raided and I went to Mt. Augusta, eventually after I saw a commie sounding username that I assumed would help me. Later I went to go form my own communist town, Communa (a laughably newfriendy looking town if you check it out on the 1.0 map). I moved over to 2.0 built a town called Proletarskaya, another communist town and quit around early to mid 2.0. I do distinctly remember llshadyguyll inviting me to Titan to show me the town and its defenses in its very infancy, which I was skeptical of and later I found out there was a whole war over it. Good job Titan dudes, you proved me wrong lol. When I came back for 3.0 I joined the USR another communist country.

When I came back I was quite sad to see that a lot of the hardcore political players had left, and there seemed to be a huge focus on the part of 2.0 that occurred after I left. I came back, thinking "wow this server has been overrun by newfriends" because back in my day you were a newfriend if you joined after the first HCF invasion. Aside from that there was certainly a different focus to the community. What mattered now was what happened after I left, and there was no real talk about what happened before that point. I came back feeling like a fucking newfriend listening to all these people talk about these wars that occurred and I felt as if I had missed out on a huge development. Then of course, 3.0 ended, not before a raider group basically destroyed the server... :thinking:

What it looks like to me, just based on the timeline, is that there was a turn-over in population with the old political players leaving around the time that shit was starting to kick off with these wars that I missed. In 3.0 a few of them did come back, but once the move to Devoted and Civclassic happened, I haven't seen them around all that much.

Just an observation of course.

Bgbba raises a very important question in his post:

So I guess I am making this to get this out in the open: what are your visions for how the Civ community survives? Java minecraft is, ultimately, doomed. The days of infinite growth and abundant interest in the game are over and they aren't coming back. Praxis isn't coming over the horizon to save us. And so we will have to save ourselves. So what do we do?

If the server wants to survive I think that it most certainly needs to innovate and the best way to do that is by balancing pvp and vaults as a play style. I think we're approaching a point where the number of vaults is going to skyrocket as individual players begin to amass wealth with the only remaining thing to do being building vaults. This is something that Devoted tried to combat with making vaults harder to make, and I appreciate that they tried but I think another less invasive solution is available. I have proposed a change a couple times in private that uses buffs that occur due to proximity, and I think that would do a few things:

1) Strengthen the community by encouraging groups. Grouping up is a good way to promote a feeling of civilization building. Larger, populated towns breed activity and activity breeds more activity. The biggest problem with my town in 2.0 was that we were secluded, the demographic we were targeting to come join us was too small and hyper-specific, and the town felt dead and empty. Inactivity breeds inactivity, and I've come to learn that players not being grouped up in a single city or area is more likely to breed inactivity on the whole.

2) Promote guerrilla advertising efforts like on 1.0/2.0 by members of the community to grow their own group, or form alliances. If their defense is reliant on numbers, then numbers will rule and they will do what they need to do to get more people.

3) Make wars a little more numbers-based with individual skill effectively acting as a modifier. In my head, I'm not thinking of this really affecting 1v1 or 2v1 combat, moreso encouraging larger and larger alliances for wars. This would make diplomacy and public opinion even more important as you would again, need numbers. If you are a shit, you aren't going to convince anyone to fight for you.

4) People who otherwise would not be useful in wars would be needed more. Having proximity-based buffing would encourage people to mobilize as many people as possible, even if they aren't considered useful in a traditional sense, so that they can get more of a buff. This requires more cooperation on the part of pvpers with non-pvpers, and actively discourages attacking civilians indiscriminately because you could lose a lot of rep with the community and they could actively turn on you and help the other side. This also theoretically makes civilians a larger target of raiders or sides in a war, as they could buff the strength of the opposing side. The downside of this is that there are too many civilians to pearl in my hypothetical situation and the cost of doing so would be too high. Again encouraging larger groups/alliances.

Now I am not sure about the exact specifics of all of this but I was thinking of it in terms of keeping a tankier kit, but the radius buffs would give you something like a 1% higher damage, and the more people with overlapping radii, the higher the damage. The admins could make this and tinker around with the specifics but I think something truly innovative has to happen in this area, or the server will essentially devolve and the spirit of Civcraft will be completely lost (if it isn't already).

The admins need to fix real problems that people are actually complaining about like exploits that still exist in the game despite modmailing, and non-exploitative issues like passive mobs despawning, or the hostile mob spawn rate being finicky (something I believe they are working on :thumbsup: to peter) instead of trying to fix non-issues like alting that I haven't heard anyone complaining about except for Teal. I hope Teal takes this criticism well and doesn't just write it off as "whining" and discard it. The word I am thinking of is priorities.

And again, I think that truly innovating the genre is key here, not "fixing" something that has been a part of the community for quite some time now. Refining what you have is good, but what we have is fundamentally broken in my opinion and has forced away a lot of the good players like the elf roleplayers bgbba mentioned. At the end of the day their play style does not matter, and has been on the periphery of the game for some time and the key to growing the community is bringing them back into the fold and empowering them with opportunities to make decisions that matter. If you don't feel like any decision in this game you make matters you're probably more likely to feel like you're wasting your time entirely and simply quit.

It isn't that I have a hard-on against pvpers either, I think they are certainly useful, but like in any game you need to balance all play-styles, otherwise it drives away everyone else as the game becomes something it wasn't intended to be. What I think Civcraft was intended to be was a civilization-building simulation of sorts, promoting its own growth and activity through trade and guerrilla advertising.

Now as for admin-side advertising, I think that is important as well. I think all sides should do their part, but I think that advertising will be a lot more effective in the long term if the players that come actually stay, and I think the players will stay if they feel they can make meaningful choices that have reverberations in the game as a whole. If the admins do want to advertise I think they should advertise on more political forums of discussion to get a smarter playerbase. If you just look at the subreddit, the collective IQ of the playerbase seems to have dropped in the order of double digits.

What I was getting at with "priorities", is that if you don't set the priority at innovating the game in a way that impacts the overall community positively and empowers the majority of people who would play the server, then everything else is kind of putting the cart before the horse.

Now on to some things said in the comments section which I want to respond to:

OrangeWizard made this comment which encapsulates a lot of proposals given over the years that come up time and time again but need to be put to rest:

ban alts

No. I think the alt policy right now is perfect and should stay as is. It is a pretty good balance and doesn't really need fixing. Teal has proposed changes due to the pay to win argument, which if you look back to my post made during beta Civclassics, I said was the worst argument of them all for a few reasons. For one, you can get alts cheaper. Secondly, there's much bigger "pay to win" aspects of gaming that can't be accounted for that matter a lot more. Thirdly, most people already have accounts, or have access to a friend's account. Fourth and finally, it isn't that much money to get a second account anyways and even though it gets progressively harder to get more accounts technically speaking, most people don't buy all their accounts in one batch. People have been amassing their accounts for some time I assume and all that money would be wasted with Teal's proposal. Not to mention the added side effect of people impersonating other accounts that haven't logged into the server like old raider alts... that won't end badly whatsoever.

buff bow damage, nerf accuracy

I don't think this is a necessarily bad option, but I think it is something that needs to be discussed once something truly innovative is proposed.

linearise armour scaling

3.0 tried this, you ran the armor through the factory. If done correctly maybe but I don't think that armor is really a problem at the moment.

remove most potions

What? I don't get this. Potions are part of what makes pvp a skill, knowing when to pot, knowing what duration your pots are running at and timing them. Managing your inventory etc.

limit cps

It already is. Do you want regular 1.10 style with like 1 cps? I personally don't.

goal is to nerf powerplayers and pvpers

No the goal should be to balance their playstyle. People hear the word "nerf" and feel they are under attack, but they don't see the game as broken. I don't think we should "nerf" anyone because everyone else is bad, I think we should fundamentally change the game so that they are balanced and forced to cooperate with players they otherwise wouldn't have to.

they contribute the least to civcraft as a genre

Not true. Powerplayers as far as I have seen have contributed a lot to the game, and they shouldn't be shunned away from the community, however their playstyle is at the moment overpowered and needs to be balanced to reflect an actual civilization building experience like what Civcraft was trying to get at.

...

then, incentivise trade and diplomacy

I believe my proposal would incentivise diplomacy. I'm not sure what can be done about trade with this map. My proposal for developing trade would be to have a single unitary map with a realistic biome distribution (ie ice on the north and south poles, growing more temperate and tropical towards the middle) but that would require a map reset, and basically at the end of the day trade really only exists because people are too lazy to get materials themselves. Perhaps with larger groups with the proposal I am suggesting, it might have an added effect of promoting more trade.

map should be smaller, right now land is the cheapest commodity that exists

I think the map is perfectly sized right now and if there were an influx of players there would be plenty of room for more development. Again, it gives players agency, makes them feel that they are affecting the world around them. That is what creates activity.

also reduce ore spawn rates, scarcity should be higher,

3.0 tried this and people did not feel the mining was rewarding. As someone who mines a lot on this server, I'd prefer mining to stay as is. It is fun and keeps me coming back.

homesteading should not be a viable playstyle

I don't think it should be as viable as playing in a group but I think it should still be a realistic choice you can make, with downsides and benefits.

alternatively make mining require more investment, have stone blocks naturally reinforced or affected by gravity mining in civclassics is far too profitable for individuals

Perhaps it is too profitable, but I am not sure what the balancing decision would be. Making mining cancerous is not the solution, I know that for sure.

travel should be made harder, not with stupid cliffs, but with mob spawns, which are higher in areas that players do not frequent

Regarding this and your last proposal, I have played a server like this before and it was very tedious and I did not want to keep playing it. Playing poor-man e-legos might be fun for some but I don't think this is something Civclassics is doing or should be doing. It isn't what is going to grow the community.

Maxopoly responded to OrangeWizard's comment with regards to nerfing powerplayers saying:

That's about as wrong as you can get. The turbo autists will always make up the core userbase of any game. Alienating them kills the game.

While I agree, you can't alienate them, you also can't alienate all the other people you want to get to play the game by making their choices feel meaningless and having diplomacy and real political debate be on the periphery of the meta politics of the server. I already said, nerfing is not the word balancing is, and something should fundamentally change.

There were a few comments talking about how there needs to be more diplomacy on this server and that is pretty true. I am not saying there's no diplomacy already, but there does need to be more of an emphasis on it. In 1.0 and early 2.0 there was a lot of discussion about what was right and wrong, especially with regards to PrisonPearl, and we're not seeing those discussions today. The reason we're not seeing those discussions isn't because they have already been had, it is more because the playerbase has devolved immensely due to an overemphasis on pvp. Now people just care about what they can get away with and how they can justify their actions. That isn't diplomacy, that is shit stirring and e-lawyering. If that is the game that people want to play then fine, but that used to be an aspect of play and isn't really "in the spirit of Civcraft" at least as I remember it. If the admins want to reflect that spirit, the game needs to change in a fundamental way for the community to grow and thrive.

TL;DR: Read the last paragraph if you want the basic gist of what I'm getting at