EMC Final Election Debate 2019

Thank you for clarifying. My follow-up to this: do you feel that player focus on past issues is helpful or harmful to EMC's future, and why?

There are some players who would disagree and would state that you complete tasks solely for the good of your own SSRC corporation. Your interest in the EMC shop for one. Please remind the community your reasoning for why the EMC shop should return in an economy currently ruled and governed by the community solely. Why rely on staff to moderate this instance, but push for community-driven everything else?

Staff-held events are held to a different and much higher standard than player-hosted events. If a server is advertising something, it's required to be of a certain quality in order to ensure players are happy. The staff are trained on handling and diffusing situations that may arise, in order to keep everything going smoothly. Official server adverts are used because it is the server hosting the event.
Staff who host personal events do NOT use the advertising system and simply server-hop to get their message out, just as all players do. Why is 'server-hopping' advertisement not sufficient for players hosting events?

It's developmentally possible, but as an entire system together, not haphazard teleport signs. The stream base is less than a stone's throw away from the outpost and is merely a convenience for a server advertisement. What you are suggesting is a teleport to the wild in a currently survival world that relies on players risking items in order to adventure, as a survival server should. It is true that with Empires, this will be changed slightly, but there will be a balance system in place for it. Why is playing survival on a survival server so difficult?

Minecraft, including EMC, is a game which requires a certain amount of effort to complete a task. In the past, I sat at a computer for hours (as many other players did) to dig out my residence with iron shovels because I wanted the bottom empty for a project of mine. While digging, myself and other members had fun and laughed.
'Oh, back at it again?'
'Yeah, gotta get it done so I can start building'
'Need to buy any more iron shovels?'
'Nah, got a stash of a dc left, lol'
Conversations like above were commonplace. Players, including myself, PLAYED the game. We didn't expect some magic wand to do it all for them. When the magic wand option came into play, the cost was intended to equal the convenience of not having to do it yourself on a survival server.

I respectfully have to ask the question of 'isn't the point of Minecraft to PLAY the game?'

And therein you use the term that causes the most problems: legitimacy.

Staff do attend player events on a frequent basis, but we do not want to upstage the hosts so we try to respectfully tell people it's not our event the whole time. The colored messages are used because the server is hosting the event and there is a required legitimacy in order to attain that color. Imagine being a new player and seeing this official looking announcement about an event going across the screen. You go to the event, but it's actually kind of a dud due to disorganization or a host who is overwhelmed. You then believe that all events on EMC are duds and you quit because you thought it was 'lame'. Players associate colored messages with official server items and official legitimate quality as a general rule on ALL game servers, sort of ingrained in the gamer mindset. We have a certain bar we have to meet because every event is being judged and graded by the community.

How do you prevent the issues with legitimacy if you have player events running on the same system?

Your suggestion was to lower the price of a service which the player could simply do through manual labor. You then argued that the problem is people don't have the time. My argument was that the cost is defined by effort and is not as arbitrary as you make it out to be. Effort = playtime.

I have joined and laughed with only 5 players online at 2 am in the morning. Consolidating everyone to a few select smps is not encouraging community growth of the smps left behind. Instead, encouraging players to communicate and make friends with new players and across the smps is my rebuttal. If you think that some smps are quiet, then get off your home smp and go visit other smps and talk to people outside of your comfort zone.

So my question to you: What else could be done to encourage player-to-player interaction, apart from just putting people on active servers? Specific examples please.

I was using a hypothetical, and one I've seen firsthand. Not all player events are great, though most try and succeed at doing so.

With this compromise, should there be limits? Standardized message formats? Etc?

If everyone moves to stronger and vibrant communities (smps), what becomes of the smps that aren't so vibrant?