I feel like Alice has lost a lot of it's players. And as players stop coming to the server, it gets boring, ususally when I'm online, there are 0-4 people beside me. I just don't feel like playing, the game is fun when there is multiplayer, the idea of multiplayer is to play with other people, and no people are present to play with most of the time.
Well, people will accomplish their goals, such as making ichor items, quantum, whatever, and once they do that, they'll progressively get bored, and quit. Once the map restarts, and new stuff is added, and old stuff is removed, they get new goals and play again. This is how, I feel, Alice works.
This is the cycle of SKCraft, it happens every update. The update happens and BAM tons and tons of people, then people get bored and go do other things, and it trickles down to to good ole regulars. Another update happens and BAM, the process repeats.
I agree, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a constant flow of new players. And IMO, there isn't one. Sure, people come with the small number of 1-2 per week and that's it...
That.... is the normal rate of new players. SKCraft is not an incredibly popular server, and is not ran like other servers. It is not advertised on any list, it is not ran for profit, they are not trying to maintain some rank on some site and it is not meant to attract that many players. We don't mind not having droves of players all the time, in fact the good ole regulars rely on it. When updates happen the TPS is usually very low and after a month or two it dies down and the TPS picks up and the server generally runs better. This isn't your normal minecraft server, please don't apply normal minecraft server logic to it. SKCraft is not dying, it is just going through it's normal cycle that has happened many times before and will happen many times again.
There WERE a lot of players. Coming in and leaving. That was back in the day tho... I remember playing with at least 12-15 people always online. And no, it's not that it's going through its usual cycle. Well, it is, but I feel like the overall player count that go through this process has been reduced by quite a bit.
A few regulars have stopped playing (alice broke last time I tried to come on, shall try again now) but I agree it's part of the cycle. Although, it does seem to have died slightly more this time
Remember that we've been running this server since 2010, which is back when Minecraft was in Alpha and there was no Nether and not even player health/damage yet (on multiplayer, at least). We go through cycles, and I personally get bored of Minecraft every few months. The server only gets reset/major update every 6-12 months. Towards the end, there are less people. If we changed things up more frequently, many people would get annoyed. Sometimes the wait is really long, like between Alice 1.2.5 and 1.4 because we skipped 1.3 entirely (1.3 was a lost version... lots of mods did not become available). Towards the end of 1.2.5, it got pretty quiet, but when we launched 1.4, we had to bump the number of slots to 80 and the server was running at less than 1 tick per second on the first day (we were expecting a more modest 30-40 people online). There are some things different about this particular situation: We had a reset after one month of running 1.6. This was highly unusual, but they were growing pains as a result of making a team the maintainer of the modpack rather than myself. Some people left. This modpack has a lot less tedium and unfortunately, tedium has a lot better player retention. We dropped mods like GregTech (which to be fair, has gone off the deep end) and replaced them with RotaryCraft and such (which turned out to be very buggy). A lot of people left because they enjoyed the tedium. While we don't have GregTech anymore, we also don't have anything like what GregTech was on 1.4 (more of a compromise). IC2, usually one of our most solid mods, has become utterly useless. Unfortunately, moving beyond Alice 1.6 (to 1.7 or something) has proven to be difficult: Many mods still have not been updated to MC 1.7. There still isn't anything like MC 1.4 GregTech, which isn't too insane but gives people something to do. A lot of unconventional mods like RotaryCraft and ChocolateQuest are.... extremely unstable. Trying to use them on Alice has been a solid adventure. There frankly aren't a lot of new 'different' mods, probably because interest in Minecraft is likely waning. Even if a mod is 'different', most would keep your attention for a few hours at most. So we're kind of stuck in this limbo where 1.6 isn't great as Alice 1.4 but there isn't anything substantially better with 1.7. Perhaps Alice 1.4 may always be my favorite modded server, and Alice 1.2.5 the most fun I've ever had in Minecraft.
I am fairly new to the server. (only been on 1.6) but i also see a decrease in players. I being fairly new to all the mods continue playing but i notice others leave. what i think should really happen is we all search for mods to add hopefully some good one will come I will look for some. I found one called witchery that seems cool but would have some things that would probably be banned on the server (Voodoo dolls special potions etc) but i would really like to see a pvp aspect in the server and will look for soem good mods
In essence after the reset you removed alot of the stuff that kept people coming back, including myself. While every single decision in itself makes sense, the overall sense makes this server rather short lived. I think a few people (maybe more then a few) have seen themselfes alienated from the high concept skcraft used to be, with Freedom to do stuff and minimal restrictions. That beeing said, thats a design decision, and it was made long ago. Maybe when 1.7 hits player count will go up again, eh ?
To be honest, I really don't know what I want, basically it's a lose lose situation. If Alice loses its players, it gets boring. If more players, a lot of players come, tps get super low, it's nearly unplayable, which by itself, leads to again, less players...
I think that was uncalled for. At no point did dubplay complain about the changes done to Alice or the modpack team. He just lamented the lack of players. Please be civil.
I would like to make one mitigating comment; players used to idle to keep their base running, to mine while they were AFK. With auto-mining gone, that means there are far fewer idlers. This does account for part of the perception that fewer people play. I recall (anecdotal) seeing 20 players on, with 6 active. Now, I see 8 players on with 6 active. It doesn't feel that different.
It is less short-lived than the original 1.6 modpack. At least by dumping our usual mods, everyone got the chance to try something different. I think, as usual, you forget that every decision alienates somebody. We like to choose different people to alienate each time. It keeps things interesting. It's not like we're stupid. The fundamental problem here is that there are few groundbreaking mods anymore and of the new ones that come out, none of them are end-game. A lot of the new industrial mods are like "IC2/BuildCraft but with lasers instead of wires!" or something lame like that.
