Not doing anything wrong is not enough. Actually, to miss to do the right moves, miss to adapt and develop is already enough of wrong. EMC keeps doing business as usual and misses to evolve - community-wise. Aikar is doing an amazing job with maintenance and development on the server side, this is the strong side of EMC. The sandbox EMC is here, it is working quite well. But the community side lacks development. That's the failing side. EMC staff missed to ride the big waves of activity in the past. It is true that Minecraft changed and the expectations changed, so the waves are smaller now. The question is how many active people on EMC desire a change and if there is enough motivation and enough momentum to connect, organize and initiate changes. Alternative is to just sit and wait for EMC staff to serve us just the right dishes. "Send PMs to the staff with your concerns and suggestions." But that would be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. A side note: boasting about few hundred thousands of "members" is backfiring, because those "members" are obviously not here. EMC has few thousands of more or less active members. That's a factor of 100! I suggest to drop that, to stop calling ghosts "members" as one small step away from being a graveyard. https://empireminecraft.com/posts/1271015
I understand what you mean, but I think EMC isn't dying, you just need to start talking if you want the chat to be active, ask what people are doing, and if they, for example are saing they are building, ask them where and go take a look. to then start talking about what they're builing. I don't know if it's just me, but it is really easy to start talking to someone, and to keep a conversation running. you just need to try... otherwise, the forums indeed aren't that active midweeks, but it can be quite active here in the weekends aswell
Actually I do come across skin competition ads from time to time, I even tend to (sometimes) sponsor them and well... I just got an idea But about the quiet chats... I think there's another possible reason for that: overzealous players who insist that the rules be followed to the letter. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes it does and that can also often result in quiet periods. Two examples... Two - three people on SMP2 were busy on their residence, talking about stuff. The conversation was good to follow (I thought it was fun!), also for an outsider and more important: /newplayers & /who showed me new players in the tutorial. Having an active chat is a much better atmosphere than everyone being quiet. In those cases the last thing on my mind is telling players about residence chat (but some will do that!). Last week, also SMP2, I was talking a newbie through a specific feature when someone else came up and hinted at res chat. Even though another player had also shown interest in this feature. In those cases I chose to ignore any hints almost entirely and responded in the likes of "I'll explain the chat channels to him at another time" and carried on. End of discussion more or less (I have to admit: in those cases it helps to be better known )). I'm pretty sure some would have gone quiet to comply with "them rules". These two examples could also have gone the other way around, ending up with a quiet chat because most players were busy with private chat. I think that's something to think about as well whenever you see a player cry out "spam" while there actually isn't much spam going about, or when they insist people use private chat which will only result in a more quiet (boring) town chat. And most of all: he who said the first word... If a chat is quiet you can do something about it. It doesn't always work, but I also had my shares where I simply threw fun anecdotes into the channel about things which happened to me in the waste. Simply because I could. For 5 minutes nothing happened, then all of a sudden a Quartz supporting friend came back from the waste and we had a good chat again. But... I know what I'm going to do today! (watch some Phineas & Ferb, the very first season. Been months, and some of those episodes really crack me up ). "See mom, there they are ON STAGE!!" <you only see a silhouette, curtains go open> "Let's hear it for Marty the rabbit (?) and his musical blender!" And of course the start of a classical tune playing If you'll excuse me...
I'm just going to comment on the "60 players" thing you said. Because, yeah, I personally recognise that too. I personally have had "issues" with getting to log in in the past.... when there were only two or three servers (excluding utopia). 3 servers vs 9. That's not a fair comparison, is it? And I personally find that on my home server we often have 20+ players online - even without events (there are only very rarely official staff hosted events on smp1). So I don't think smp1 is dying yet. Yes, in the off hours (I'm from Europe, most on EMC are from the US (6-10 hours earlier) it might be a little quiet sometimes, but that's understandable! Most of EMC will be in bed, or at school/work! So, yeah, like some others said, spend some more time on EMC, and you'll find that EMC is not dying any time soon!
