I need to get this off my chest

Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by Caeyde, Apr 21, 2014.

  1. Before I start this (hopefully) short little thread
    The following things are my OPINION
    If you don't like what I say, then that is your OPINION
    I'm sorry if I offend you, but I can't and won't change my view on this
    If you can't deal with other people's opinions in a reasonable manner, I suggest not reading this

    Ok.....

    These things are in no particular order, just whatever order my mind wants to put them in

    I feel like Aikar is adding too many updates for new players and attracting new players, and doing less for the current players. Yes, I know we need it. We lost many many amazing people after...certain events... I'm not saying I don't like the updates for new players, and Im not saying that we shouldn't have new players, I'm just saying that I feel like less is being done for us, the current players, the current generation.

    I don't want to bring the demotions up again and I don't want to start a fight but I do want to tell you and show you what I think, what I see right now. I'm not going to try and describe what I think, I'll just throw you right into it

    Song is Castle of Glass if anyone is interested, but that's not the point.
    That's EMC, as I saw it a few days ago, when I drew it, a few days ago.
    I felt like EMC was just....dead...or dying....
    I've looked around and we seem to be pulling it back though... But, I don't know anymore, I'm not sure what's going to happen.
    The only thing I've liked about the whole demoting incident is putting Krysyy as Community Manager. I wasn't sure about it when it happened, but I'm sure about it now.


    Putting EMC in the spotlight, making it shine again. EMC deserves to shine, but we just haven't had anyone to push it along until now. Thanks Krystal, and congrats on the promotion.

    Now, relating less to the community and more about...the website
    Ohhh the lack of forum topics here kills me sometimes. I'm not ranting about this or begging for this at all but there are artists here, oh I see half this community as artists. There's "Share your EMC Creations!" but that's for buildings and things inside the EMC servers. There's no where for request forums, art shop forums, signature shops, avatar shops, stories, videos and youtube channels, there's nothing for creativity! I'm not asking for a new forum topic, I'm asking for somewhere for the community to show of their artwork, no matter what form it is.
    I mostly want this because every so often they'll be a thread saying "Looking for avatar" or "Looking for video intro" or anything like that and it'll just be lost in the Misc. section. Every so often I'll want to show off a picture or an animation and it'll be lost in the Misc. section. Even our "Official EMC Art thread" is in the Misc. section... And Max's "Give me your Art!" thread, if you put your art in there it's pretty much guaranteed to get on one of EMC's pages at some point. If we had an art section on the forums, if you want art to feature you could go and pick out a piece of impressive art and post it. It would be more of a surprise to the artist and make them seem like the staff...care about our creativity.

    -------------------------------------------------------

    Might as well throw my suggestions here instead of making a new thread for it all.... (Most, if not all, are art or creativity related):
    Featured art: A little box somewhere on the main page or something, where every week or month a piece or a few pieces of art is chosen, I mean, it doesn't have to be art, it could be a story or short piece of writing. Or instead of a small box on the main page, it could be like Aikar's "Misc Updates [date]" threads, posted weekly or monthly. If I was a new artist, someone who has never seen this server before and I saw "Featured Art" on the main page I would be suitably happy enough to join the server and share my art.

    Art Competitions again?: I didn't actually join in time for when the Wallpaper Contests were around, but I have heard of them and read up on them. But wow... Why did we stop these? o.o Really, I'd be interested in knowing! Must I say more?

    Might add more to this if I feel needed

    Again, I won't change my opinions on this. You can give me your opinions, but you can't change mine.
    Thanks for reading
  2. Thank you for sharing this with us Alice. I'll talk with the team and see the feasibility of some of these awesome suggestions. Please feel free to pm me any others you may have.

    I'll have to research more into the Wallpaper contests. Got a link for me?
  3. Thanks Krys
    For the wallpaper contests I can find this and this on them, there might be more that I can't find though, but I think those two are all of them
  4. Just to add to this, I'd love some more You Tube video contests. Maybe a bit more than just a simple promo video for EMC, something that really shows off the community.
    Mirr0rr, Silken_thread and AliceF3 like this.
  5. I feel like it would be good to have what I have seen on other forums a 'Creativity and Media' category in the forums for all the things you've listed above. I would very much like to see that here. :) 'Share your lets plays' could be a subforum in this forum.
  6. Great ideas guys. Alice, do you mind if I make another forum post for ideas so that we don't crowd yours?
  7. I don't mind at all, this was simply to get my point across so it can stop haunting me...
  8. Well thanks to you, my brain gears are turning. Look for new post shortly.
    607 and Silken_thread like this.
  9. Firstly great post Alice and I know what you mean when you say not much was done with EMC and how dead it got, like you I expressed myself to Icc some time back but little was done at the time but we don't always see what's going on in the background.

    Recent events brought out why that was, Aikar felt his work was in vain with Justin still the owner at the time (Justin for whatever reason did not have the time needed for EMC) and Aikar he did not want to lose his work or see it put into the hands of someone else, at least this is how I have read the situation.

    Only in the past few months has Aikar had ownership and since then there have been a lot of criticism at the way he has been running it. I think this is unfair as he has only really been in control a few months and can now finally put all that hard work into place.

    The difficulty is the time it takes to program all the new features and keep everyone happy at the same time. One of the best things Aikar has done and I will include Mararias here and other staff who may have had imput, is the increase of staff in general for the wiki, programming, new website for the future etc and the great job these are doing.

    You brought out some good points and Krysyy has acknowledged this these idea's are always welcome and there is no lack of support for good ideas either.

    If things seem slow at the moment it is only because there are not enough hours in the day to bring every thing together, but it will come in time.

    Aikar Hat's.

    As owner Aikar has several hats to were, Owner, business man, programmer, manager, operator. I am sure there are many many more that could be added to the list but as stated he is doing the right thing even if it seems he is not. EMC is a new company now looking to make things way better, it has an owner who has a vested interest in its success and is working hard to bring that success about.

    His brain must be fizzing by the end of the night, and he does all this after his normal Job.

    As hard as it is at times we just need to be a little more patient and all the great features we have been looking for will come. As for the art section to the website forum that sounds like a great idea, I am not much of an artist my self but I love to see what ppl produce.
  10. What silken said does summarize a good bit of the issue - simply not enough time.

    Even with the development help, it takes time to train them and get them up to speed too!

    As for new vs old player features, helping new players does help old at the same time.
    If there is no-one to play with on an SMP, then the older player will get lonely and quit too. So I've put a lot of effort back into growth to ensure people have people to play with. Our 10 server design hurts us a bit, and its too hard to merge them, so It's a battle of mixing both to ensure we don't cross too far down.

    But as we saw this weekend... Were finally crossing that line back into growth instead of decline.

    It's taken A LOT of work to get us here, but were all excited.

    Now that a lot of that work is out of the way, I can keep focusing on the other promised updates. Nearly finished difficulty setting last night, then Tokens will be next and it won't take much.

    I was planning to write a thread today before I even saw this, explaining why things never go to 'schedule', but the gist is: we have to find balance to keep us in the best position.

    If we go full fledge for dragon tombs and ignore EVERYTHING else, we will have people quitting due to bugs/dead servers/unresolved small issues etc.

    So I try to balance between everything I work on.

    Thankfully I am able to delegate a lot more now, max and krysyy are really owning all of the non technical things, and krysyy is even learning to help out with some of the marketing side of things too. That takes a good bit of work off my plate (though I still have to do the technical things of marketing until Hatori is able)

    For example over the weekend, I wanted be able to measure the new players coming in, so I had to upgrade our tracking technology to be more accurate, as before we were flying partially blind with analytics.

    Flying blind = wasting money.
    Then when the growth went crazy (did not expect that), I had to even make quick changes to implement auto rotation.

    Stuff like that happens all the time. Tasks come up that "needs to happen now", that delays others. And ignoring those would cause serious issues. If I didn't resolve the bungee issue, we would of lost every single new player on sunday, as Residences would of ran out.

    I'm trying my best to get everything done, just going to have to be patient.

    as for non technical things like the art suggestion, I see no problem with that new forum idea :)
  11. I understand that it all takes time, and I do appreciate everything you do and everything you program for us. Everything just seems a bit..messed up to me, a bit confused with all of the recent events, promotions and demotions. It always seems like we're aiming for something specific but I'm not sure anymore
  12. We are aiming for greatness :) I wish the demotions didn't have to happen, but I did what I felt was needed for the longer term health of the Empire. I have to know that my staff team has EMC's best interest in heart and that we have the best people on the team who are going to give EMC their best effort to help us make it even better.

    We may of lost a few old timers and active people, but those few are not the sole heart of EMC, we have thousands of lovely players who all make up EMC :)

    Things can only grow from here. Now that things have stabilized drama wise - I don't see reason for confusion.
    Goal is to continue to make the Empire better, delivering quality updates, growing back to our original numbers, and more events to participate in.

    Fun all around.
  13. That hurts, that hurts a lot....
    We're all part of a big EMC pizza, if you cut out a bit of that pizza then there's less to enjoy and less filling. Not whole anymore...

    I understand that and Im not against your opinions. I can tell that you're dedicated to the well-being of the Empire, I could tell ever since I joined, and I respect your choices.

    It can be fun all around if we all play our cards right, but we'll see
    Kromo30 and IcecreamCow like this.
  14. I agree with you on everything. I want to point a few things out about the new player vs current player issue, though. I had a rant a while ago about this, which can be found here.

    I think that the demotion of IcC was a situation where nobody really wins. From what I know, it was one of those decisions that just had to be done, and nobody would come out of the situation a winner. Older players have left for several reasons including the demotions. I think that the older members become attached to staff. IcC and Justin both worked hard to bring up the empire, and the older members who spent so much time knowing these two, were very sad to see them go. The demotion reasons were completely fair, but Justin and IcC were practically family to these people, and also role models. Even then, this made some members happy. I think that a good amount of people were happy with the demotions. I know a lot of people who feel EMC is more stable and more efficient now. In the longterm, the demotions will do good.

    Another reason is Mojang. Aikar has a blog at the website aikar.co, and a blog post on there is that Mojang is killing minecraft. They want to focus more on the single player aspect of MC, which is not really a good thing. Sandbox games should really be explored with people, not alone. People get border of MC or things like that all the time. I went through this phase for a while.

    The rant link has more points about new players, though.
    MrUnknownian likes this.
  15. I think you misunderstood me. My point was that your post made it sound like EMC was dead/dying just because of the recent event, and my point was that it's not.

    We lose people all the time, and I was just trying to say that the recent events was no different than the subset that left 6 months ago.

    I don't WANT to lose anyone, but its not the end of EMC because we lost people.
    mba2012, Parkerjv9, jkjkjk182 and 2 others like this.
  16. That's not what I'm saying either but I'm not going to argue with you because I'd end up feeling against you and I don't want to be against you, Aikar... I just feel like a chuck of the community is gone, but you're right, it's not the end
    Squizzel_Boy likes this.
  17. A chunk of the community is gone, but that's not always a bad thing. I have been a part of online communities for... well a really long time. People change. The communities change. They age, they grow, they morph. Ignoring those things and denying the growth, is a hindrance. No matter how many times I try to tell people, it seems the message is never delivered. So I will try again here...

    I was upset about what happened. I cant deny that. I love EMC, and I loved being a part of the bigger picture. But, there came a crossroads where some of us saw a different future. That does not mean that one has to be bad, or one has to be good, or right or wrong. What happened, needed to happen. Its crazy to even think I got to a level of acceptance on that. The thing is though, online communities are AMAZING, for one crazy reason. They are not limited. Where there would be walls and separation IRL, they disappear here.

    You know what makes a community? The way it holds itself through change. Every player here, can have one event they can all relate to. A global change that affected them in some way. This recent event, yeah.. sucked I had to be on the end of I did. BUT, the community, WILL make it through, and it will be stronger. I have seen EMC through a lot of community 'breakdowns'. Not because anyone did anything wrong or right, these things just happen.

    Alice this thread... is the most perfect thing that could happen for EMC. A player put everything out there to show they want to see something better. That they have a voice and they want it heard. That's important. A rally flag for the people who see the same things you see. A chunk is gone, but the prettiest fields are grown after the fire.


  18. Great job, smooch. I could not agree more.
    Kyzoy likes this.
  19. Sorry long post >.> I'm no good at condensing my posts.
    I very much agree with the above suggestion (obviously :p ). I remember this being suggested before but it wasn't implemented and the reply was 'the forums shouldn't get too cluttered with unnecessary different sections' ( something along those lines). But I think that it would be worth implementing a new section (or restructuring the sections), because like Alice points out, right now everything 'creative' related is scattered and lost across the forums. Skin and signature businesses go under "Products, Businesses, & Services", Let's Plays have their own section, art contests (e.g skin design) go under Public Member events (?) and everything else goes in the "Official EMC Art thread" and "Give me your Art!" threads. I very much enjoy the last two threads, but they've also become places that collect all sorts of art (different media, different topics). Not that that's bad, but a new section would give people more room to post minecraft/emc specific pics in their own threads, imagine something like a player's own gallery thread. I think that would be really awesome. The new section would also clearly show "We have a place where you can make and post creative stuff here. Look other people are doing it too.". I think that might encourage more players to post their creations, who right now might feel like there is no place to post it and that it would get lost between everything else anyways.

    I understand that such a section is not really essential for or necessary related to what's in game, but I think it would be a great opportunity for the community interact with each other on a different level. Everyone loves EMC so when you need a break from working on your res by yourself or chilling at your private wild base, you could continue to channel that EMC love into for example an EMC animation or promo vid that you work on with other people on the forums.
    Or an EMC background.
    Or a random drawing of your skin. :3
    Or reading staff stories other people wrote. :3
    See, wouldn't it be awesome if more people made art and posted it somewhere? :3
    ----------------

    I also think one thing that Alice was trying to say is that with some of the staff leaving, we also lost some diversity in the staff team. Every staff member has their own events/services for the community, like mob arena, fire floor, NZScruffy has his list of shops, his own shop and public utilities, AlexChance has his signature business and building service, etc. Every staff member does his/her own thing that interests them. But while there are in game events, I don't really see any events on the forums to stimulate the community to work together or compete outside of the game. Well, there is deathtomb's story contest (really excited about that btw), but ... he left. :/ Like Alice said, the wallpaper contests were really cool but that was a *long* time ago. The last similar contest I can remember was by Aikar to design a new animated ad for EMC to use in voting sites. I understand why he did that, but it required a specific skill which excluded a lot of people from entering and it wasn't really about a fun community thing, but crowdsourcing the community to make something useful for EMC.

    Other recent staff run 'contests' were to get accepted in the build team, contributor team etc. Again, they were useful, but they weren't about something short and fun to distract yourself from reality and to get to know the community better. It would be nice to see some new contests that aren't ultimately about getting something useful & profitable for EMC, but simply for fun and involving the community.

    Of course players can create these contests too, but it would be nice to see some staff run ones because they have more resources, powers, influence etc. :)
    Also, I think people would get tired if they see me post yet another drawing contest. >.<
  20. I wish someday I can meet someone like you IRL... Then I will be at peace with myself. ISMOOCH for Nobel Peace Prize.
    AliceF3 and Olaf_C like this.