To mark the beginnings of my blog, I have quite the long post to share with you all. Let’s go over our three M’s for today. [[Minecraft]], [[Motivation]], and [[Modifications]].

Minecraft

It’s been coined by people somewhat recently; a strange phenomenon shared by many where you get that “[[itch]]” to play Minecraft, leading you to [[gather your friends]], [[choose your mods]] and [[start a new world]], in no particular order. For the first few nights, everyone is online, gathering materials, building bases and upgrading their gear. But at some point, usually after everyone has maxed out gear, or the ender dragon is defeated, the itch is scratched and the player count dwindles. Everyone loses interest, yet left unsatisfied with what they hadn’t accomplished. At the start, you made plans for [[mega bases]], [[extensive farms]], or a [[widely connected system of minecarts between everyone’s bases]], but at the end you end up with a few houses and an iron farm.

About how long do these servers last? As you could guess, I’m referring to the “Two Week Minecraft Phase”. It’s such a common issue among players that you’ve probably seen plenty of videos surrounding the topic.

Hundreds of thousands, millions of players experience this with their groups of friends, and take to YouTube to find what other people have done. So what causes this?

[[We’ve tried a lot.]] Pure vanilla worlds or modded worlds with quest-based progression, and everything in-between. We’ve spread out and explored the world, connected our bases on the nether roof, and also stayed close by and worked on one large base for everyone.

It was apparent at first that the reason people were quitting was because they had made small goals and reached them quickly, such as getting maxed out gear, elytras, or even a basic house. We’ve banned the nether, or the end, or otherwise limited progression to force people to think a little bigger or work as a team.

But the small goals or spreading out of players alone weren’t the issue, they were just symptoms of something broader.

Motivation

Everyone has a different experience with motivation, whether it’s general motivation for life, a higher purpose or calling, or in the little things where you don’t need to have a purpose, you just want to enjoy something to it’s fullest.

Let’s assume that everyone involved at least has the initial motivation to join a Minecraft server. Everyone at least kind of feels like playing Minecraft, in some capacity (that “[[itch]]”). If you don’t feel this way, then don’t start a Minecraft server.

What’s important is finding ways to keep that fire going, not necessarily in the individual, but in the server. The players come together to light the initial flame, and someone needs to keep it stoked. In a Minecraft server, you’re often going to have a few people running the actual server, so they’re usually the people in charge of this.

There’s endless ways to keep a server going. But let’s start here first, do you want to keep the server going? You have to understand your players, and work with them [[always]]. Even fundamental questions like these need to be asked at some point, as a server that lasts for years might not be the right fit for your group.

If you want your server to last as long as possible, then keep in mind that there’s going to be a lot of downtime. You’re responsible for the server’s fire, not the players’ motivation. The server can still be alive with a sparse amount of players online, it’s just how you look at it.

But maybe you don’t need to keep your server alive forever. Currently, our server is running with a timer counting down to it’s explosive destruction and as of writing this, we’re still quite motivated to play.

Modifications

The Minecraft [[itch]] has been cursed upon our group as of recently, so we got together and threw some ideas at each other to see what might extend our playthrough, or otherwise make it a more satisfying experience. Now, we have a few different types of players in our group, so anything we come up with has to either suit everyone uniquely or be broad enough to not limit anyone’s experience, preferably the latter.

Each player is different in terms of how much social interaction they want out of a video game. On one end you have players that are satisfied to play for years on a singleplayer world alone, and maybe get a little kick out of sharing it with the others. On the other end, you have people who utilize the game solely as a medium to hang out with people, and as soon as everyone else is off the server, they’re off too.

As you could guess, the majority of us don’t keep up with singleplayer worlds, so “It’s more fun when you’re near other players” was behind most of our gameplay suggestions. We’ve played a lot of different video games, and even the bad ones are fun for a minute if they give way to funny moments with friends.

But Minecraft isn’t just any game. There’s a reason we don’t pick it up only once and discard it after two hours like a cheap indie horror game. Jumping around your base while chatting on Discord all night long is fine, but we want to get more out of the game.

Minecraft is different because each new world is a fresh opportunity to dream as big as you want, in any way you want. For us at least, being near each other while playing is important, but not everything.

In the past, our group’s servers have lasted anywhere from a few days to a few months. In most cases, around 50% of the initial players are still playing after a week, and after another week there’s usually only one or two people still on regularly, focusing on their own builds. So for us, [[two weeks]] is actually about average for losing player retention, and with what I’ve seen and the other servers I’ve participated in, it’s a consistent trend.

Naturally, our first idea was to [[limit how long the server is online]]. To have a timer count down until the end of the server, maybe around two weeks or a month. The intentionality of it might give some players a purpose, to do the most they can within the allotted time. But for most it would seem meaningless to work on anything that’ll be gone soon, even if the server was very probably going to die around that time. Any amount of time can create this worry, from a week to a year.

I also thought of making the timer only begin once players hit a certain progression, like defeating the ender dragon, but that would just arbitrarily limit players and cause anxiety. Or worse, somebody goes off and does it alone then gets blamed for the death of the server.

So what did we do?

We had a few good ideas, but for this server these are the ones that stuck. I named them “[[Oversocialized]]” and “[[TWMPT]]” (Two Week Minecraft Phase Timer).

[[Oversocialized]] is a Minecraft datapack I created to apply permanent attributes to players depending on the player count. This will hopefully discourage playing by yourself, and encourage players to invite their friends to get back on with them. I’ve already noticed with the little we’ve used this, that the negative attributes applied when there’s few people online are quite annoying. In my more detailed blog post (Link here once it’s created), I’ve attached both datapacks at the end for negative and positive attributes applied, and just positive.

[[The Two-Week Minecraft Phase Timer (TWMPT)]] was planned to be a datapack, but with conflicting text placement and just a variety of issues, it became a website instead. The concept is this: a timer is set at the beginning of the server (14 days for our case), and it ticks down until it reaches zero, in which case the server ends. But the rate at which the timer ticks depends on the online player count, so active servers will last much longer, and inactive servers will run their course.

Making the website was a lot easier now that I have some HTML/CSS/JS under my belt with this website. Though, the actual timer element still took a few tries to get right as I had initially just copied a tutorial for it, but then I realized it was only client side, and I ended up making a free Railway server just for the timer… Either way, it works now. Probably.

Yes, that’s our group’s name, don’t ask. The rate we settled on was a very simple 0.5 per player, so it starts at 1x speed with 0 players online, 1 player online means 0.5x speed, 4 players means -1x speed, etc. Negative speeds mean the timer runs backwards, so long play sessions with big groups will run it back quite quickly.

As of writing this, our server started about two days ago yet the timer hasn’t gone down 12 hours. Of course the first few nights are going to be the most active, but in any case our server is going quite well.

I’ll be writing another update post once the server is finished, or if something else weird happens. Look forward to it!