What makes minetest servers popular?

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errant
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What makes minetest servers popular?

by errant » Post

I play on a public, low population with friends. It is modded survival mode, but "creative" with material constraints. We've built a little society and village and have been hoping to meet new players and neighbors, to see to see buildings from other players created around the world. But the server sparingly has activity and at most has a handful of concurrent players. Definitely, some server tourists visit the server for 20-30 minutes then leave, but I'm wondering what gives players from the public server list incentives to stay.

Spawn point design?
Player-built points of interest?
More shelter and provisions at spawn for new players because nssm adds many murderous mobs?
Internet notoriety and fame (outside of the game)?

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Mantar
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Re: What makes minetest servers popular?

by Mantar » Post

20-30 minutes? Luxury! Most tourists that visit the main Exile server are out in under 5 minutes! #can'tpunchatree
Lead dev of Exile, git repo: https://codeberg.org/Mantar/Exile

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Blockhead
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Re: What makes minetest servers popular?

by Blockhead » Post

I think I identified a lot of the main factors in my earlier thread How people might choose servers and the market for servers, which is an interesting read if you have time I think.

The main factors that contribute to lacklustre player numbers though I think are:
  1. Server saturation of a tiny market share game. Minetest is tiny in relation to Minecraft and other block/voxel-based games. Minetest also makes it too easy to make a server, so the playerbase ends up kind of spread, but people also naturally concentrate at the top population servers too, exacerbating it.
  2. A lot of servers offer nothing unique apart from their exact mod set. If you log into a server and you feel like there's nothing unique about it, why not hop to the next one? This is why having something unique like Inside the Box or CTF can be huge.
  3. Lack of out-of-game market penetration. For instance, just for one website: The Minetest YouTube space is tiny, and this also therefore means the out of game reach of most servers is near non-existent.
  4. Poor new player experience design. I know Minetest is a sandbox game, but the situation on too many servers is still "Where's the free land?" "How do I get started? Food? Mining?" and so on, at least for something that's had a lot of player-hours already (players * hours, either a lot of players playing small hours or a few players playing loads of hours can lead to a lot of player-hours).
So if we spin that around you need:
  1. Uniqueness or doing what exists really well. Minetest has a lot of breadth for this because you're not really limited to Minecraft-like games.
  2. Out of game marketing. Stream or record some let's plays, and a server trailer.
  3. Good new player experience. Really design a spawn point that's great for new players to learn and start their adventure really easily. Try to do this with the assumption players know nothing about your server, and only a little about Minetest or block games in general.
/˳˳_˳˳]_[˳˳_˳˳]_[˳˳_˳˳\ Advtrains enthusiast | My map: Noah's Railyard | My Content on ContentDB ✝️♂

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duckgo
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Re: What makes minetest servers popular?

by duckgo » Post

I will share my opinion as a player...
I think most servers are pretty similar, and that must be the fact that we don't have as many options to vary and make them a little more different.

1 - I think the first thing should be, what I want my server to be, choose a theme, even who knows, get a good minecraft server and use it as a reference (there are many videos for that)..

2- Which mods fit what I want to do, helps not to clog your server with a bunch of mods that don't make any sense..

3 - Level of game I also think is important, an easier server, or more difficult..

4 - As our friend Blockhead said, a good spawn, with good information for newbies..

6 - Publicize your server, maybe you have an official channel, with trailer, tutorials on how to play on your server, where to build, how to protect your area, how to use mods..

7 - Stream, or find channels willing to create content for your server, with nametags, maybe some privilege to fly for example..

8-News and Events, keep the server moving, most are stopped, and are sad...

9 - Moderators, I think this is something for when your server is bigger, but it's always good to have one or more moderators to help.

10 - A group for players to share their experiences, "Screenshots, Videos, Ideas", and report problems, this is very good, make them feel part of your world :)

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MCL
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Re: What makes minetest servers popular?

by MCL » Post

#1 reason: whether the server is operated by MultiCraft / some other iOS port
2014-02-14 - 2024-02-14 TEN YEARS OF MCL

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