As some of you may know, Minecraft Forum used to have it's own server list. This was like other sites in that you could post your server on it, and get votes to have your server rated higher. It also did have an auction system that let you bid to get your server to show up below posts to increase visibility. This list didn't last too long, and so was shut down some time ago.
I have been currently pondering the resurrection of this list, but would like you, the community, to give your feedback into such a list.
I am already well aware of the issues that the current forum has with regards to advertising servers (with the mess of how the rules work and how to promote your server without breaking them) and that it's hard to work within the rules to have your server seem active.
I am here to gather your thoughts and input into what you'd like to see in a new server list. I'd hope to see answers from both servers owners who'd use such a list (both small and large servers) and what you as players look for in such a list.
This does not mean it will come back, or that it'd have everything. I am currently weighing the options for it and if it would be worth the time and effort to see if it could be brought back.
I left it as an open question so that you can give your feedback without thinking that it has to be related.
If you didn't know the old system, it did offer the following:
- A dedicated page for your server, where you could post comments and reply to them.
- A status and player count, showing if your server was up and how many players were on it (this was cached, so it would be updated every X minutes)
- An activity chart, showing how active your server was in terms of players
- Voting, where you were able to vote and get rewards on the server if they configured it
- Ranking, where the more players that voted for it, the higher it was on the list.
My own input was that such a system is flawed from the start, where it benefits the large servers. This currently also exists in the current forum, where threads of certain nature are always more active than others. I envision a system which would be able to work with both small and large servers, attempting to treat them more fairly, while also offering a way for servers that use things such as a whitelist or graylist to function.
Top Tier idea! Any new server list coming from an existing community (that doesn't display paid adds for the first 1/3 of the page, and donation boosted servers for the following 3 pages) is a huge win for any server hoping to prove itself with its content, community and ideas. And as an owner, of course I'd approve of a new place to advertise lol.
There are only a couple alternative websites enabling servers to be able to stand out against the legitimate full blown successful companies with large wallets and a significant advertising budget / famous youtuber servers... like PMC and.... idk what else.
Of course these same servers already have plenty of players to vote the second you enable server lists again, ready to immediately shoot and stay at the very top of the list forever, which is why i like Headless' idea about the different lists based on server size! Heck make it default show a medium sized server list.
Or even better make a "Hot" or "Growing" tab displaying "servers that are growing fast proportionally to the population/votes they've had in previous (enter timeframe)", maybe giving a balanced advantage to larger servers, or needing a minimum votes/playercount, because a significant change in their population/votes percentage wise is more impressive.
This would allow servers that are putting in the effort to grow, to continue to succeed instead of it just being a purely numbers game benefiting those holding all the cards (players) already.
Or even better make a "Hot" or "Growing" tab displaying "servers that are growing fast proportionally to the population/votes they've had in previous (enter timeframe)", maybe giving a balanced advantage to larger servers, or needing a minimum votes/playercount, because a significant change in their population/votes percentage wise is more impressive.
Unfortunately this will not work because the server can report whatever it wants as its player count.
I think @HeadlessCowboy's Idea would probably work better. MCF users who have more reputation (calculated by post count & years/months active on the site?) would boost servers more per vote. This may also have a side effect of increasing forum activity, which is something we want.
This is a much simpler way of doing it, however, with some bigger servers there may be a bigger portion of players that don't vote for them compared to small servers making the smaller server have more power than larger servers that some are looking for off the bat.
A larger server would only have lesser vote participation if they felt they weren't required to suggest and reward voting to their players as much, maybe because they have already passed that window of growth... but agreeing with Metamorpic, that its easy to put fake players on the server, so voting will probably be the method used and effect large servers in that same exact way... im just suggesting a good way to setup a "Hot" server list to give servers who are actively doing something new or doing it well some exposure...
Server lists like PMC and potentially This one aren't for really big servers anyway,hence their vote participation you may have noticed. At least it isnt their target method of exposure, as they have other avenues available to spending their time/money/population, they dont have to spend nearly as much time on these boards... thats not to say large servers arent on the top of PMC (and the forums here) as well, they are, and thats normal.
There are people that just don't feel like voting since it takes up too much time and not enough reward for the vote. Servers don't want to have to break everything their server it is about just to get votes. IE, "I will vote for your server if you give me op."
Thats exactly what im saying, if a player isnt voting its cause the server doesn't care to reward it enough... its the server that could be doing more. And there are SO many far extremes from "vote and i give op" lmao... that would only work once per player anyway, ridiculous scenario. i get many monthly votes, because i reward fairly.
Not all servers want rewards to be too great for voting since that would ruin their server. There are many different server types out there that voting wouldn't make sense for the server vision; to have rewards good enough to vote for at the moment.
That is still absolutely the servers fault... Voting is important on every single server list in existence... this one will be no different...
Balancing vote rewards with your server vision is an important part of server ownership... You don't want to give too many or your economy will go bust and your players will feel over pressured, you don't want too few or your players wont feel the 30 seconds it takes is worth it....
Ultimately a player going out of their way to vote is something they are doing nice for you as an owner, because all votes are is exposure. If u don't want to reward that in one way, you need to find another... or people (duh) wont do it... Your rewards could be vote ranks, cosmetic perks, discord perks, things that don't have to effect game-play in any way (if you're so worried about asking for votes as a type of progression) ...
That's up for you to decide and figure out, you have to as an owner.... If you choose to ignore it out of principal, its on you if you don't do well on server lists.... I'm not saying its easy to balance it in every server type, but its still something you HAVE to do.... If this means spending more time on cosmetics, or out of game perks, do so.
its not a perfect system, but it works well enough that every other server list in all of time (and any game) uses votes as their metric... If this website wont use votes, and we agree players can EASILY be spoofed (there are MANY alts and MANY programs to help with this), then what else would it possibly use?
If you wanna grow USING server lists, you gotta play this game man, we all do it.
I mean heck, even if your server is some sort of communism-craft, and you don't want ANY player to have ANY type of advantage despite them showing support for your sever, even simple cosmetic/discord ones...
You can have a system where TOTAL votes of all players reward EVERYONE equally.... you gotta figure out your own system dude.
This seems like a good idea. I propose the order of the server list is shuffled daily, randomly, but, that to be part of the shuffle. The owner of each server needs to click a confirmation daily/weekly, to show the server is active, and that the owner still wants new players. This would be the only way to benefit everyone without bias in my opinion.
The only thing i'd like to add, is that rule breaking servers, ie: Eula breaking, multiple listings for the same server, etc. should be banned from the list.
Thanks for the thoughts!
You see the problem, don't you? Servers rewarding players for voting no matter how good or bad the server. Even rating systems are bad for servers too while voting because they never get the right answer. I know this may sound tedious, but maybe they should have to write in why they like the server every time they vote and it gives feedback to the server owner so they can improve or know what they are doing right. The server owner could have things on their server as prompts already in the text field [ie what their server is about] but the voter must write at least 25-50 characters to vote.
Players wont blindly vote on a bad server, just like they wont play on one...
With so many options out there, players don't stick around and keep voting for no good reason.... what reality are you constructing?
Sure some servers have advertising/budget issues and don't have the number of players they deserve compared to how "Good" they are, but that's not because of voting as a metric.... its cause of how competitive server hosting can be... you have to put just as much effort if not more into getting visibility as "being a good server".
Being required to write an essay on why you like a server is ridiculous... whos gonna be monitoring those 25 characters so that they aren't all "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..." or some other nonsense? MCForums? That's a ludicrous amount of moderating you'd be demanding of them. (Every single player vote, every single day (You cant just have that happen once either, or else votes are meaningless and don't represent the ACTIVE players and most people aren't looking for a dead server))
Vote systems aren't always perfect, but the worst things about vote systems is when sites let servers pay for votes or offer no method for new or growing/improving servers to get visibility..... hence again.... my idea for a "Hot/Growing" tab.
Some players do indeed vote for bad servers, such as it is their friend's server or someone they know. It wouldn't be the largest problem unless the person hosting the server is college+ where they have met more people in their life span.
This is such a small deal issue... heck staff can vote for their own server, whats the problem in that? Ive seen owners who try and require that (i don't cause I'm not so desperate/greedy, but im not gonna recommend tearing down the whole system to stop it, with no real idea for a replacement)... What really matters is OVERALL you have a lot of players voting... and the PERCENTAGE of them voting compared to other servers... which again, is under the servers control to properly incentivize it...
You think college aged and up ask their friends to vote on a mc sever they dont like every single day? And that their servers do better because they "have met more people" ?? Lol those ppl are at college or working all the time... they aren't gonna take time out of their busy week to remember to vote every day on a "bad" server... at least not for any real bit of time... This is getting wild...
If cosmetics are so useless, give them a use... I programmed custom plugin to make pets (normally just cosmetic) give effects and have skills.... this is all just coming across as a bunch of excuses..
It isn't an essay mate, and if players do spam letters they could be auto-banned from the system. If it is good feedback, the server will slightly improve over time.
You may not think of this but, voting rewards are paying for votes, just in a different way [In game]. So what makes a server different than a website?
It would take a series of advanced AI to automatically detect if something is truly a review and not "spam" If its not "AAAAAAAAAAAA" Its just some other random text like "Voting, just give me my vote lololol, haha this cant be detected as spam or a poor review without a massive army of MCFORUMS ppl trollololo"
And ban a user from voting entirely cause they didnt want to take the time to write out something every time? why?...
Other forums/server lists already allow for users to post comments on servers, and users only rarely do, because its tedious and pointless to them... and if you think you have problems incentivizing votes now, imaging trying to convince players to write that every day.... Your idea would just require servers to incentivize voting EVEN MORE to make it worth it to those players willing to play in that new weird system, going against a main reason of yours for its existing....
The big issue with votes imo is a big server will get more votes and a small server trying to start out and be seen will have only a few if any and thus the old problem of big servers are on top, small ones hidden away at the bottom.
One possible way could be to have different tables of servers that vary on the player count, though not sure how that would be verified (there will be server owners who lie to get top of a list)
or a new and upcoming list that allows the new servers to be visible along side the big ones.
Absolutely agree, big servers run the show. Even on the forums here which aren't vote-centric; Big servers get away with doing constant bumps that would be removed for being a "pointless bump" from any smaller server/thread, because their posts are just so flooded with garbage like telling their staff/players to constantly post their applications/reviews there. Pages and pages of player applications (sometimes from the same several ppl strangely enough) and the owner/runner of the thread (and other presumably staff members) replying "thanks!" then later "application accepted/regected" then later "bump!" (all responding to the same post) No one in their right mind would have any interest in reading this trash, including moderators... once you're big enough your page just gets ignored by mods it seems.
That's another reason why a review system doesn't work... its even harder to keep honest than votes, where u can justify some more structure without coming across as "insulting muh free speech" or moderating with so much bias.
or no votes and have the list sort by something like name (though that would have server owners calling themselves silly things to just be at the top, looks at all the discord names with ! so they show first)
or just a standard list, and then random bunch(5) of servers are auto picked each week to get a special listing above all others, a server can't be picked again for say 3 weeks, that way anyone can be visible to all no matter the size or age of the server
Yeah server owners do frigging SHADY things. They do things like purposefully seek out thriving discords, to only fill them with bots that spam hundreds of your users their discord/server ip... Its happened to me, more than once. If a system can be abused, they WILL abuse it...
But giving small servers a chance with the big servers "Randomly" only does a disservice to the smaller servers who are "good" and doing new and exciting things (or doing old things well)... You'll be mixing those cool but small servers with the low-effort servers like the 1000th new skyblock server made with apex's autoconfig system, (that never has any players because its no different from other skyblocks)... I guarantee you'll have constant dead/empty servers filling those slots as soon as weeks after the new server list is implemented, when they would better go to growing servers whos staff and community put in the daily effort and deserve to grow...
If you used a "hot" system that takes into account what i described (the number of votes/reveiws/page hits or whatever mix of metrics you want to use, VS the number of those metrics they had a days - a week ago, representing a direct growth in both participation and excitement about that server percentage wise) then it would give servers a fighting chance to prove themselves....
if you do go the "Random" route there needs to be more scrutiny than truly random... maybe "random from the hot/growing list" or "2 random servers from each tier of player/vote amounts" to give an even spread of server sizes & types.... just know whatever system you try and use people will be trying to game/abuse it immediately... its surprisingly viciously competitive out there.
Yeah, I do agree. My previous post wasn't necessarily to disagree with you, but rather to show the other side so people can grasp some the other side(s) arguments.
Maybe have something like this as a formula for hot servers:
= ( [votes of the previous day] / [player previous day peak average + 1] ) / ( .985 * [votes of the previous previous day] / [player previous previous day peak average + 1])
Definitely didn't come into this thread expecting to get so heated either, haha! Been owning / deving for servers on and off for years with one I think is kinda decent now so i got a lot of opinions on the matter XD
And yeah, that would be that starting point of the formula, if you want to try and rectify a votes vs player number system, that is... which i'm still not sure can work... (I promise ya, hackers join servers attempting to crash them with 100s of alts pretty regularly, most growing servers have to have defenses against that type of attack, and owners can use the same exact methods to boost their own servers to hundreds of players, CHEAPLY) Other metrics can be added too if you WANT there to be a system where each individual user that comments on a server boosts that server on the lists some too.
The system does still need the weights for larger servers, as a small change in votes for a small server is a MASSIVE change in percentage, when large servers doing something new that incurs a noticeable change in activity percentage (which may be hundreds of players difference vs a small server's 3 player difference) is likely MORE impressive, and deserves more rewarding.
Also I think 1 day is too short a TimeFrame to compare... server owners would try and game the system by having specific days where they put a bunch of bots / Tell / pay people to vote (By rewarding 2-3x as much on those days or whatever) At the same time a week/month could definitely be too long, things happen fast for small servers... A proper formula would probably take into account daily, weekly, and monthly comparisons.
If MCF is lookin for someone to develop a fair formula who has proficiency programming several languages AND knowledge of the mc server space, HMU lol.
Whatever MCF decide, the inter-workings of the "popular/hot/growing" system, if you decide to add one, should probably be kept secret or the scum will abuse it.
Why not use a system similar to the one that r/mcservers uses? There you are allowed to repost an advertisement once per week. If you don't get a lot of activity on your post, it at least gives you some visibility once a week. This way, even small servers are able to grow. The current system on Minecraft Forums is all but useless to small servers as it now stands. If you make a thread and it becomes inactive, you're not allowed another thread. So your choices are to 1: Break the rules and repost or bump, 2: Leave Minecraft Forums and advertise somewhere with a set of rules that allows small servers to advertise successfully, or 3: Make a new server and cross your fingers that it becomes successful. It seems like the idea of restructuring has good intentions, but it doesn't need to be as complicated as some people are trying to make it. I hope that mods are able to figure it out, because I would like to be able to use this site to advertise my small server again.
I think it would be cool to sort the servers by average player counts, this way someone looking for a small server can filter easily, then from there filter by type wether survival or creative, modded etc, then they are filtered by activity and voting
There are already several server lists, so any new one would need to offer functionality not found on the others.
In my opinion, minecraft-mp.com is currently the best list available. Why? Filtering. There are so many servers out there, that just presenting a list sorted by some sort of scoring system, or players online, etc, only helps you find the popular servers, not the ones suited to your play style.
However while minecraft-mp.com is currently the best, and definitely in the right direction, I think it's missing major functionality to address the goal of finding servers. Thus my suggestion would be to follow their example, but take it further.
Some of the things I think minecraft-mp is missing:
Ability to get more than 1 page of search results.
Ability to search servers *without* specified tags.
Many servers show a player cap of "1", yet more players than this online, making searching by max players significantly broken.
Search/filter/sort by uptime.
It would be nice if players could influence tags present on a server as well. This is probably a difficult feature to get right, but I find many servers with tags they don't deserve, or without tags they should have. For example, I've run across so many "vanilla" servers that aren't anywhere close to vanilla, it's to the point where the tag is worthless. So maybe if a tag is contested, still show it, but color it or give some other indicator of such. I've seen some sites (not minecraft sites, but other sites with tagging systems) where tags are entirely user driven, where the top user submitted tags show up.
lastly, some sort of comment system for the server, where people can post feedback/reviews. This should probably be sorted by some sort of "useful"/"not useful" flagging system, rather than just putting new comments at the top. And server owners should not be able to remove comments. For filtering spam, it should probably be such that anything with a high amount of "not useful" flags gets automatically removed.
Since the proposed comment and tagging system have user-driven functionality, it would probably be good to integrate them with the voting system. For example when a player votes, they have to pick one or two tags. Maybe if they leave a review, the server is notified as part of the callback, and they can dish out additional rewards. And a callback notifying of the "useful" flags, so servers can reward players who submit useful reviews, encouraging quality content.
The idea is to give control of the rating system to the users. Make it harder for server owners to be dishonest, and make it easier to keep the server profiles up to date by distributing the burden of profile maintenance. This crowd-sourcing approach has been shown to work really well in places like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and others.
I think the servers should also expire so that owners have to re-enable it to be listed. I used to see a lot of dead servers on the list before so maybe they would need to log in and hit confirm to have it be shown without losing comments etc
Greeting!
As some of you may know, Minecraft Forum used to have it's own server list. This was like other sites in that you could post your server on it, and get votes to have your server rated higher. It also did have an auction system that let you bid to get your server to show up below posts to increase visibility. This list didn't last too long, and so was shut down some time ago.
I have been currently pondering the resurrection of this list, but would like you, the community, to give your feedback into such a list.
I am already well aware of the issues that the current forum has with regards to advertising servers (with the mess of how the rules work and how to promote your server without breaking them) and that it's hard to work within the rules to have your server seem active.
I am here to gather your thoughts and input into what you'd like to see in a new server list. I'd hope to see answers from both servers owners who'd use such a list (both small and large servers) and what you as players look for in such a list.
This does not mean it will come back, or that it'd have everything. I am currently weighing the options for it and if it would be worth the time and effort to see if it could be brought back.
I left it as an open question so that you can give your feedback without thinking that it has to be related.
If you didn't know the old system, it did offer the following:
- A dedicated page for your server, where you could post comments and reply to them.
- A status and player count, showing if your server was up and how many players were on it (this was cached, so it would be updated every X minutes)
- An activity chart, showing how active your server was in terms of players
- Voting, where you were able to vote and get rewards on the server if they configured it
- Ranking, where the more players that voted for it, the higher it was on the list.
My own input was that such a system is flawed from the start, where it benefits the large servers. This currently also exists in the current forum, where threads of certain nature are always more active than others. I envision a system which would be able to work with both small and large servers, attempting to treat them more fairly, while also offering a way for servers that use things such as a whitelist or graylist to function.
Top Tier idea! Any new server list coming from an existing community (that doesn't display paid adds for the first 1/3 of the page, and donation boosted servers for the following 3 pages) is a huge win for any server hoping to prove itself with its content, community and ideas. And as an owner, of course I'd approve of a new place to advertise lol.
There are only a couple alternative websites enabling servers to be able to stand out against the legitimate full blown successful companies with large wallets and a significant advertising budget / famous youtuber servers... like PMC and.... idk what else.
Of course these same servers already have plenty of players to vote the second you enable server lists again, ready to immediately shoot and stay at the very top of the list forever, which is why i like Headless' idea about the different lists based on server size! Heck make it default show a medium sized server list.
Or even better make a "Hot" or "Growing" tab displaying "servers that are growing fast proportionally to the population/votes they've had in previous (enter timeframe)", maybe giving a balanced advantage to larger servers, or needing a minimum votes/playercount, because a significant change in their population/votes percentage wise is more impressive.
This would allow servers that are putting in the effort to grow, to continue to succeed instead of it just being a purely numbers game benefiting those holding all the cards (players) already.
Just my 100 cents lol.
Unfortunately this will not work because the server can report whatever it wants as its player count.
I think @HeadlessCowboy's Idea would probably work better. MCF users who have more reputation (calculated by post count & years/months active on the site?) would boost servers more per vote. This may also have a side effect of increasing forum activity, which is something we want.
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Then use the same math and concept for votes, as i said "population/votes"
A larger server would only have lesser vote participation if they felt they weren't required to suggest and reward voting to their players as much, maybe because they have already passed that window of growth... but agreeing with Metamorpic, that its easy to put fake players on the server, so voting will probably be the method used and effect large servers in that same exact way... im just suggesting a good way to setup a "Hot" server list to give servers who are actively doing something new or doing it well some exposure...
Server lists like PMC and potentially This one aren't for really big servers anyway,hence their vote participation you may have noticed. At least it isnt their target method of exposure, as they have other avenues available to spending their time/money/population, they dont have to spend nearly as much time on these boards... thats not to say large servers arent on the top of PMC (and the forums here) as well, they are, and thats normal.
Thats exactly what im saying, if a player isnt voting its cause the server doesn't care to reward it enough... its the server that could be doing more. And there are SO many far extremes from "vote and i give op" lmao... that would only work once per player anyway, ridiculous scenario. i get many monthly votes, because i reward fairly.
That is still absolutely the servers fault... Voting is important on every single server list in existence... this one will be no different...
Balancing vote rewards with your server vision is an important part of server ownership... You don't want to give too many or your economy will go bust and your players will feel over pressured, you don't want too few or your players wont feel the 30 seconds it takes is worth it....
Ultimately a player going out of their way to vote is something they are doing nice for you as an owner, because all votes are is exposure. If u don't want to reward that in one way, you need to find another... or people (duh) wont do it... Your rewards could be vote ranks, cosmetic perks, discord perks, things that don't have to effect game-play in any way (if you're so worried about asking for votes as a type of progression) ...
That's up for you to decide and figure out, you have to as an owner.... If you choose to ignore it out of principal, its on you if you don't do well on server lists.... I'm not saying its easy to balance it in every server type, but its still something you HAVE to do.... If this means spending more time on cosmetics, or out of game perks, do so.
its not a perfect system, but it works well enough that every other server list in all of time (and any game) uses votes as their metric... If this website wont use votes, and we agree players can EASILY be spoofed (there are MANY alts and MANY programs to help with this), then what else would it possibly use?
If you wanna grow USING server lists, you gotta play this game man, we all do it.
I mean heck, even if your server is some sort of communism-craft, and you don't want ANY player to have ANY type of advantage despite them showing support for your sever, even simple cosmetic/discord ones...
You can have a system where TOTAL votes of all players reward EVERYONE equally.... you gotta figure out your own system dude.
This seems like a good idea. I propose the order of the server list is shuffled daily, randomly, but, that to be part of the shuffle. The owner of each server needs to click a confirmation daily/weekly, to show the server is active, and that the owner still wants new players. This would be the only way to benefit everyone without bias in my opinion.
The only thing i'd like to add, is that rule breaking servers, ie: Eula breaking, multiple listings for the same server, etc. should be banned from the list.
Thanks for the thoughts!
Players wont blindly vote on a bad server, just like they wont play on one...
With so many options out there, players don't stick around and keep voting for no good reason.... what reality are you constructing?
Sure some servers have advertising/budget issues and don't have the number of players they deserve compared to how "Good" they are, but that's not because of voting as a metric.... its cause of how competitive server hosting can be... you have to put just as much effort if not more into getting visibility as "being a good server".
Being required to write an essay on why you like a server is ridiculous... whos gonna be monitoring those 25 characters so that they aren't all "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..." or some other nonsense? MCForums? That's a ludicrous amount of moderating you'd be demanding of them. (Every single player vote, every single day (You cant just have that happen once either, or else votes are meaningless and don't represent the ACTIVE players and most people aren't looking for a dead server))
Vote systems aren't always perfect, but the worst things about vote systems is when sites let servers pay for votes or offer no method for new or growing/improving servers to get visibility..... hence again.... my idea for a "Hot/Growing" tab.
This is such a small deal issue... heck staff can vote for their own server, whats the problem in that? Ive seen owners who try and require that (i don't cause I'm not so desperate/greedy, but im not gonna recommend tearing down the whole system to stop it, with no real idea for a replacement)... What really matters is OVERALL you have a lot of players voting... and the PERCENTAGE of them voting compared to other servers... which again, is under the servers control to properly incentivize it...
You think college aged and up ask their friends to vote on a mc sever they dont like every single day? And that their servers do better because they "have met more people" ?? Lol those ppl are at college or working all the time... they aren't gonna take time out of their busy week to remember to vote every day on a "bad" server... at least not for any real bit of time... This is getting wild...
If cosmetics are so useless, give them a use... I programmed custom plugin to make pets (normally just cosmetic) give effects and have skills.... this is all just coming across as a bunch of excuses..
It would take a series of advanced AI to automatically detect if something is truly a review and not "spam" If its not "AAAAAAAAAAAA" Its just some other random text like "Voting, just give me my vote lololol, haha this cant be detected as spam or a poor review without a massive army of MCFORUMS ppl trollololo"
And ban a user from voting entirely cause they didnt want to take the time to write out something every time? why?...
Other forums/server lists already allow for users to post comments on servers, and users only rarely do, because its tedious and pointless to them... and if you think you have problems incentivizing votes now, imaging trying to convince players to write that every day.... Your idea would just require servers to incentivize voting EVEN MORE to make it worth it to those players willing to play in that new weird system, going against a main reason of yours for its existing....
Absolutely agree, big servers run the show. Even on the forums here which aren't vote-centric; Big servers get away with doing constant bumps that would be removed for being a "pointless bump" from any smaller server/thread, because their posts are just so flooded with garbage like telling their staff/players to constantly post their applications/reviews there. Pages and pages of player applications (sometimes from the same several ppl strangely enough) and the owner/runner of the thread (and other presumably staff members) replying "thanks!" then later "application accepted/regected" then later "bump!" (all responding to the same post) No one in their right mind would have any interest in reading this trash, including moderators... once you're big enough your page just gets ignored by mods it seems.
That's another reason why a review system doesn't work... its even harder to keep honest than votes, where u can justify some more structure without coming across as "insulting muh free speech" or moderating with so much bias.
Yeah server owners do frigging SHADY things. They do things like purposefully seek out thriving discords, to only fill them with bots that spam hundreds of your users their discord/server ip... Its happened to me, more than once. If a system can be abused, they WILL abuse it...
But giving small servers a chance with the big servers "Randomly" only does a disservice to the smaller servers who are "good" and doing new and exciting things (or doing old things well)... You'll be mixing those cool but small servers with the low-effort servers like the 1000th new skyblock server made with apex's autoconfig system, (that never has any players because its no different from other skyblocks)... I guarantee you'll have constant dead/empty servers filling those slots as soon as weeks after the new server list is implemented, when they would better go to growing servers whos staff and community put in the daily effort and deserve to grow...
If you used a "hot" system that takes into account what i described (the number of votes/reveiws/page hits or whatever mix of metrics you want to use, VS the number of those metrics they had a days - a week ago, representing a direct growth in both participation and excitement about that server percentage wise) then it would give servers a fighting chance to prove themselves....
if you do go the "Random" route there needs to be more scrutiny than truly random... maybe "random from the hot/growing list" or "2 random servers from each tier of player/vote amounts" to give an even spread of server sizes & types.... just know whatever system you try and use people will be trying to game/abuse it immediately... its surprisingly viciously competitive out there.
Definitely didn't come into this thread expecting to get so heated either, haha! Been owning / deving for servers on and off for years with one I think is kinda decent now so i got a lot of opinions on the matter XD
And yeah, that would be that starting point of the formula, if you want to try and rectify a votes vs player number system, that is... which i'm still not sure can work... (I promise ya, hackers join servers attempting to crash them with 100s of alts pretty regularly, most growing servers have to have defenses against that type of attack, and owners can use the same exact methods to boost their own servers to hundreds of players, CHEAPLY) Other metrics can be added too if you WANT there to be a system where each individual user that comments on a server boosts that server on the lists some too.
The system does still need the weights for larger servers, as a small change in votes for a small server is a MASSIVE change in percentage, when large servers doing something new that incurs a noticeable change in activity percentage (which may be hundreds of players difference vs a small server's 3 player difference) is likely MORE impressive, and deserves more rewarding.
Also I think 1 day is too short a TimeFrame to compare... server owners would try and game the system by having specific days where they put a bunch of bots / Tell / pay people to vote (By rewarding 2-3x as much on those days or whatever) At the same time a week/month could definitely be too long, things happen fast for small servers... A proper formula would probably take into account daily, weekly, and monthly comparisons.
If MCF is lookin for someone to develop a fair formula who has proficiency programming several languages AND knowledge of the mc server space, HMU lol.
Whatever MCF decide, the inter-workings of the "popular/hot/growing" system, if you decide to add one, should probably be kept secret or the scum will abuse it.
yeah like what
Why not use a system similar to the one that r/mcservers uses? There you are allowed to repost an advertisement once per week. If you don't get a lot of activity on your post, it at least gives you some visibility once a week. This way, even small servers are able to grow. The current system on Minecraft Forums is all but useless to small servers as it now stands. If you make a thread and it becomes inactive, you're not allowed another thread. So your choices are to 1: Break the rules and repost or bump, 2: Leave Minecraft Forums and advertise somewhere with a set of rules that allows small servers to advertise successfully, or 3: Make a new server and cross your fingers that it becomes successful. It seems like the idea of restructuring has good intentions, but it doesn't need to be as complicated as some people are trying to make it. I hope that mods are able to figure it out, because I would like to be able to use this site to advertise my small server again.
I think it would be cool to sort the servers by average player counts, this way someone looking for a small server can filter easily, then from there filter by type wether survival or creative, modded etc, then they are filtered by activity and voting
There are already several server lists, so any new one would need to offer functionality not found on the others.
In my opinion, minecraft-mp.com is currently the best list available. Why? Filtering. There are so many servers out there, that just presenting a list sorted by some sort of scoring system, or players online, etc, only helps you find the popular servers, not the ones suited to your play style.
However while minecraft-mp.com is currently the best, and definitely in the right direction, I think it's missing major functionality to address the goal of finding servers. Thus my suggestion would be to follow their example, but take it further.
Some of the things I think minecraft-mp is missing:
It would be nice if players could influence tags present on a server as well. This is probably a difficult feature to get right, but I find many servers with tags they don't deserve, or without tags they should have. For example, I've run across so many "vanilla" servers that aren't anywhere close to vanilla, it's to the point where the tag is worthless. So maybe if a tag is contested, still show it, but color it or give some other indicator of such. I've seen some sites (not minecraft sites, but other sites with tagging systems) where tags are entirely user driven, where the top user submitted tags show up.
lastly, some sort of comment system for the server, where people can post feedback/reviews. This should probably be sorted by some sort of "useful"/"not useful" flagging system, rather than just putting new comments at the top. And server owners should not be able to remove comments. For filtering spam, it should probably be such that anything with a high amount of "not useful" flags gets automatically removed.
Since the proposed comment and tagging system have user-driven functionality, it would probably be good to integrate them with the voting system. For example when a player votes, they have to pick one or two tags. Maybe if they leave a review, the server is notified as part of the callback, and they can dish out additional rewards. And a callback notifying of the "useful" flags, so servers can reward players who submit useful reviews, encouraging quality content.
The idea is to give control of the rating system to the users. Make it harder for server owners to be dishonest, and make it easier to keep the server profiles up to date by distributing the burden of profile maintenance. This crowd-sourcing approach has been shown to work really well in places like Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and others.
I think the servers should also expire so that owners have to re-enable it to be listed. I used to see a lot of dead servers on the list before so maybe they would need to log in and hit confirm to have it be shown without losing comments etc