Archived Faction Member Cap Removal

This suggestion has been archived / closed and can no longer be voted on.
Wooperr

Wooperr

Joined
Jul 23, 2017
Messages
20
Reaction score
62
Points
0
The cap on total members in a faction, currently set at 50, should be removed. This will increase the scale that individual factions are allowed to exist on, which can lead to the following benefits.


1. Larger cities with more creative layouts as well as more complex architecture, themes and lore, improving the atmosphere and immersion for many players and expanding the boundaries they can explore in, especially those new to the server.
2. Increased survival world player retention by making use of existing active factions, whose online players can encourage newcomers to participate and gain experience. With the cap in place, large factions face pressure to save their member slots for players who already have experience, rather than giving the slots to fresh new players, who may not be able to benefit the faction as much. Players unable to find an active faction to start in who resort to creating their own factions are destined to struggle in MassiveCraft's unique custom world and plugin arsenal.
3. Increased factions competition by allowing factions to compete for greater dominance, putting the spotlight on the power that larger numbers of players in a faction can have on the faction's ability to achieve its economic, warfare or influencing goals. Small factions will face pressure to gather new recruits, allowing them to rise against larger foes, while larger factions will be able to take projects and wars to levels never seen anywhere else by playing their cards well.


Removing the cap on faction members will undoubtedly cause some interesting dynamics in survival, or at the very least allow factions to progress far beyond what they were capable of before. Giving the opportunity to as many players as possible to gain experiences in the diversity of faction scales, activities and hierarchies will definitely enrich the server, perhaps even in ways we can't know yet.

Discuss your thoughts by replying below, and please leave your official feedback by voting in the poll.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
This suggestion has been closed. Votes are no longer accepted.
Has there been factions to reach the cap yet?
 
Pretty sure the cap was put in place so the reset wasn't just players funneling into 1 big faction. We're far into the reset now
 
A month or so after the cap was instituted I was an officer in a faction that recruited and trained new players and I would recruit until 45 and stop because there was no point going past that point. I would just ignore the requests for a faction in recruitment chat after that. So yea, I think there were and there have been factions effected by this. If memory serves, when the cap was instated there were 3 factions that were over this amount.
 
I wasn't trying to make a point, just curious to see if a faction hit the cap yet.
 
Wooperr said:
The cap on total members in a faction, currently set at 50, should be removed. This will increase the scale that individual factions are allowed to exist on, which can lead to the following benefits.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think it's a good idea to remove a cap or at least raise the cap.

1. Larger cities with more creative layouts as well as more complex architecture, themes and lore, improving the atmosphere and immersion for many players and expanding the boundaries they can explore in, especially those new to the server.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I would agree. Limiting the number of members to 50 puts an arbitary limit on what factions can do in terms of building and factions lore.

2. Increased survival world player retention by making use of existing active factions, whose online players can encourage newcomers to participate and gain experience. With the cap in place, large factions face pressure to save their member slots for players who already have experience, rather than giving the slots to fresh new players, who may not be able to benefit the faction as much. Players unable to find an active faction to start in who resort to creating their own factions are destined to struggle in MassiveCraft's unique custom world and plugin arsenal.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

One of the things our server does well but could always do better is welcoming new players. I've seen new people join, ask for a faction and get no response and go offline. I would like to see it change so that people welcome new players and for there to be a bit of competition among factions when it comes to recruitment. With no limits factions might have to give new players more reason to choose them. I would love to see a bit more lore based role-playing in Ess as well as Regalia and I think we would get more of that if factions could grow and build empires, kingdoms, nation states, etc.
 
I'm going to play the ignorant devil's advocate, but in these large factions, how many of these players actually are active?

Another question: alt-ran sister factions can be set up to function like an extension of the main faction. Have there been any attempts at doing this, and has there been any success?
 
FireFan96 said:
I'm going to play the ignorant devil's advocate, but in these large factions, how many of these players actually are active?

Another question: alt-ran sister factions can be set up to function like an extension of the main faction. Have there been any attempts at doing this, and has there been any success?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Many factions create jobs for the new players and it goes with success cause the player has something to do. A daily miner quota for example they have to mine 2 of each ore a day and if they keep it up for a while they get perks, ect. New players now are stuck wondering how factions work, how regals work and all of our in house plugin and most of the time they just log out.
 
I feel a need to respond here because I was actually the one that made the final push for a cap. I thought it was a good idea at the time, and I still do. However, it probably can/should be raised. The benefits for the cap mostly revolve around the idea that at some point, a faction hits a peak and can't really progress/expand much and benefit from it. Once a faction does that, members just join, potentially get god gear, then leave the server or roleplay. Anyways, here they are.

1. Active members are more spread out. In my years leading a faction (and no, I wasn't salty about the cap. My faction has been up to 50 members and down to just 2 a couple of times now in the past 5 years) I noticed that having active people made the faction as a whole more active. However, if those active members left and/or I personally became less active, the activity of the faction as a whole plummeted until everyone just quit massive. Trust me, the activity of one person has a HUGE effect on the rest of a faction. There's no two recruits more valuable than two that want to and can play together, for this exact reason.

2. Factions prioritize slots. This means that, if a faction is getting too big, it can kick/remove alts or inactive members. This means that membership in a good faction is more valued, and big factions can then pick and choose who they want to be in their faction. Big factions that want to keep expanding or grow more powerful would be selective in their members and grow that way instead.

3. Factions are more competitive. When factions grow less active in general while one or two grow more powerful, this means that the small factions are increasingly less able to stand up against the one or two big factions, both in advertising in recruitment and in battles/wars. Therefore, eventually they just don't.

4. Faction chat is trash if there's just a ton of noobs on. Chat is a big part of engagement and activity. If you can't read chat you can't become involved with your faction properly. This isn't really a problem a lot of the time, but I've heard of it happening once or twice.

5. Factions stop recruiting so much and start doing actually neat things with their time.

Now two things to point out:
Sub factions used to be a thing and still CAN be a thing. Alt-account led factions (I think) are allowed now, so bypassing the cap isn't impossible assuming your members are decently active.
I've seen an improvement, since the reset, in these exact areas. I see more large factions, more competition, and more engaged and active factions. The player count has taken a hit, but I'm relatively sure that's due to school starting. Anyways, thanks for reading. If you want my advice, just keep the cap but raise it to 60 or 70 and see what happens. My other question would be @onearmsquid how many of those 47-player factions have alts in them, and how many alts? Alrighty, thanks again.
 
Ethibas T said:
I think it's a good idea to remove a cap or at least raise the cap.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Agreed

Ethibas T said:
I would agree. Limiting the number of members to 50 puts an arbitary limit on what factions can do in terms of building and factions lore.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I disagree. 50 active players can make a very large city indeed. I haven't actually seen a large city be made that had a player for every house since factions regularly had 100 players online. Barring Asteria and factions like it: Those cities are mostly ugly though.
Ethibas T said:
One of the things our server does well but could always do better is welcoming new players. I've seen new people join, ask for a faction and get no response and go offline. I would like to see it change so that people welcome new players and for there to be a bit of competition among factions when it comes to recruitment. With no limits factions might have to give new players more reason to choose them. I would love to see a bit more lore based role-playing in Ess as well as Regalia and I think we would get more of that if factions could grow and build empires, kingdoms, nation states, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Both before and after the change, I've noticed that many players in recruitment chat don't need to or get a chance to ask twice. I'm not sure about the night-hours where there are only a few players on in factions anyways, but changing the player cap doesn't make a difference anyways if there's nobody online. More often I see players join a faction, get the tour, THEN go offline forever, and its happened more often in my faction the bigger I got. Again, I haven's seen what you've apparently seen, so one of us is probably wrong.
 
This has been discussed within Game Staff recently, so this input is really interesting and good for us. I hope you don't mind me putting in my 2 cents, though.

Wooperr said:
Larger cities with more creative layouts
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

By all means, nothing is stopping you from making large cities or even creating proper and creative lore for your faction. If you hit the cap, and everyone had max power, your power would be upwards to 1,500. That's a lot of land to claim and build on, and depending on the build style you can build a whole capital no problem. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that some people want to build bigger and better, and just more in general, but with the cap, what we have now I believe that people can accomplish a lot and make it just as interesting and creative as they would if they had the land claim of 200 members. It all depends on the people running the faction to build on that or not, I don't believe it's a true cap issue.

Wooperr said:
With the cap in place, large factions face pressure to save their member slots for players who already have experience, rather than giving the slots to fresh new players, who may not be able to benefit the faction as much.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I have never held a faction that has had more than 20 people in it, but I can definitely see where this might be a struggle for people so I can only sympathize. But, this is where this comment does have a good point:
FireFan96 said:
alt-ran sister factions can be set up to function like an extension of the main faction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Daughter factions are allowed and should be utilized. Keeping new player, or players that may want a "reserved" spot in the main faction, in a daughter faction is a good idea. You keep them under the same umbrella (so to say) and can provide the same experience/ function as you do with the main faction. It all depends on what the Leader wants to do. Filtering out people who aren't as active and putting in new players could be easily managed, especially if you're all in a centralized place like a personal faction Discord.
Factions that have hit the cap should look into investing into a daughter faction so that they aren't excluding potential new recruits or limiting the faction's population if they truly feel this is an issue.

An issue that I've seen in large factions, and I'm not saying every large faction was like this, but when a large faction reached a certain number in population, they could no longer cater or give personalized experiences to those people. I'm not saying that the leader or officers should have given them every minute of the day, but when you have a large number of people, others are going to go ahead and feel left out and then soon log off (especially if it came to new players) when there is another 50+ to be taken care of.
In the extreme cases, when a faction had upwards to 200+ people, how would anyone know what to do with that number of people? What jobs (or similar) tasks could you give them, to keep all 200+ of those people occupied. Eventually, the forgotten players would log off and not come back because they had nothing to do or offer to the faction, that the first 20 so people were already providing. People would recruit, give them a home, and then walk away from the person and possibly never speak to them after one or two days, and it was mainly because the new person would be left confused or bored to even continue to explore past the faction.

50 players is a lot, but it's also a comfortable number that someone could manage and organize. If done properly, then those 50 people could have a task or job (or similar), and if they needed to, then they could expand into a daughter faction. If we see this to be a reoccurring issue, that daughter factions have to be made in order to accommodate for an influx of people (in multiple factions, mind you) or if there are factions consistently (not declining and gaining again) that sit on the cap, then I have no doubt we would also consider a cap increase/removal.

Right now, leaders/officers should try to cater and help who they have now, and get them more involved in their faction, and show us that they can expand and that the cap is hindering them, then it'll be an easy question to answer.
 
MokeDuck said:
I disagree. 50 active players can make a very large city indeed. I haven't actually seen a large city be made that had a player for every house since factions regularly had 100 players online. Barring Asteria and factions like it: Those cities are mostly ugly though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I understand what you are saying and for the most part agree. I wasn't saying that factions of less than 50 can't make a large city or build. Even a single person faction could conceivably do that. I just think 50 is a bit arbitrary of a number and by that I don't mean a cap is a bad idea entirely instead what I'm trying to say is that adjustments should be made to the cap to advance the purpose for it in the first place or it should be eliminated. I agree with almost every thing you have said. It just seems to me that if a certain number of factions near 50 and are either creating alt-factions or keeping their size around 45 to 47 to have room to add recruits if needed then the cap should be lifted.

Both before and after the change, I've noticed that many players in recruitment chat don't need to or get a chance to ask twice. I'm not sure about the night-hours where there are only a few players on in factions anyways, but changing the player cap doesn't make a difference anyways if there's nobody online. More often I see players join a faction, get the tour, THEN go offline forever, and its happened more often in my faction the bigger I got. Again, I haven's seen what you've apparently seen, so one of us is probably wrong.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I suspect I may be wrong in this case if what you say about people getting a tour and then leaving is right on the money because that is probably what im seeing when new players ask for a faction and then shortly after go offline. They are probably the ones you see who are joining factions and leaving. I've never taken time to see if they actually were added to factions. I simply see them ask and leave so here we probably are observing the same thing. They are probably pm'ed, join, get the tour and the go offline just like you say happens. From my view of not seeing the pm's that may happen it looks like they just left. So I don't doubt I'm wrong on this.
 
@MokeDuck

Removing the member cap stops the server from deciding when a faction has reached a peak, and puts that power in the hands of the players. If reaching a peak reduces engagement in a faction, then that's the very driving factor that encourages players decide what to do next, whether join a different faction, create their own, or do something else entirely like roleplay.

MokeDuck said:
1. Active members are more spread out.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If only a handful of players are interested and active out of the many that enter the survival world in the long run, then their freedom to choose which factions they want to join should always be the priority over restricting them from joining larger factions because they reached a certain number of members already. A good way to make active players inactive is by preventing them from playing with the faction and players they want to.

MokeDuck said:
2. Factions prioritize slots.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Why should players in every faction have to worry about holding a slot there? I'm certain all of us except the young kids here have real life responsibilities. Not all of us can play every day, and some of us can't even play once a week. Factions shouldn't have to kick members for not being active enough if we want to maximize player population in the survival world. Besides, without the cap, factions can still just as easily pick and choose which people they want, and membership in already active factions is still valued.

MokeDuck said:
3. Factions are more competitive.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Removing the cap gives motivated players the power to help their factions grow without an upward limit. This keeps already large factions motivated too. But that doesn't mean players MUST compete against the big ones. Factions should be allowed to be any size their leaders want. Some factions can be small with tight-knit communities while others can grow large to share the experience with many players at once. Also, as you already said, large factions DO have peaks. Just like any organization in real life doesn't last forever, no faction stays large and dominant forever. The big don't always stay big. The small don't always stay small.

MokeDuck said:
4. Faction chat is trash if there's just a ton of noobs on.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If a faction's chat becomes a problem that reduces engagement for its members, then doesn't that also play into the peak argument you just made?

MokeDuck said:
5. Factions stop recruiting
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
How does not recruiting help new players get involved in survival? A faction doesn't HAVE to recruit all the time, but why do factions that WANT to need to be stopped because they reached a certain number of people with that question in mind.

MokeDuck said:
bypassing the cap isn't impossible assuming your members are decently active.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Why should players who want to be in a faction have to move to a sister faction because the first reached an arbitrary number of people? Being in the sister faction means you can't use faction chat to talk to the rest of your members, and alliance chat gets diluted by other factions. Members of the sister faction can't have the same permissions as the main faction, and can't build on the main faction's territory unless they're manually added with /f access, or set as an ally, which carries the risk of unwanted factions building there too. These are unnecessary inconveniences that can easily be avoided by removing the cap.

I don't think it's right for the server to decide how big a faction can be or how active players should be "distributed" among them. Players should always be allowed to choose how they want to play, whether with a small, big, or giant faction. Leaders should always be allowed to choose the size they want their faction to be, and given every opportunity to reach that number without barriers.
 
The member cap was added so factions like Insani wouldn't just mass recruit and make new players leave. It's made to increase player interaction if you have 200 playersa in your faction you can't interact with them all
 
@MadamAries

MadamAries said:
By all means, nothing is stopping you from making large cities or even creating proper and creative lore for your faction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It is true that people can achieve decently sized and creatively built cities and roleplay environments. The argument for removing the cap is to expand the potential leaders have to do this for larger numbers of players to experience, and to remove any walls in the way of them doing so. Even if no faction reached beyond 50 members or claimed in excess of 1500 chunks in the absence of the cap, I don't see this as a good reason why the cap should remain regardless. Leaders should have the opportunity to reach whatever height or scale they want to.

MadamAries said:
You keep them under the same umbrella (so to say) and can provide the same experience/ function as you do with the main faction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
As I explained to MokeDuck, having daughter factions doesn't translate to a comparable experience as being in the main faction.

1. Without faction chat available across both factions, it's harder for the members of the main faction to communicate with the daughter faction, and vice versa. Alliance chat can only take the place of faction chat if the daughter faction doesn't choose to ally any other factions, since otherwise information private to a faction can't be as easily shared without a third-party platform like Discord, and chat can be diluted by other factions in general. Not having any allies in a daughter faction removes the entire faction relations dynamic from the player experience. I think this is an unnecessary inconvenience.

2. Daughter factions don't share permissions with the main faction. As an ally, a daughter faction has ally permissions set by the main faction, which may have set them particularly to manage non-daughter-faction allies. Adjusting these permissions to accommodate their daughter factions shouldn't be something players have to juggle. Daughter factions also can't share build permissions on the main faction's land unless either build permissions are turned on for allied factions, or unless the faction is manually added to land with /f access. These extra steps are unnecessary and can be avoided by simply removing the cap and allowing factions to accommodate more players.

MadamAries said:
when a faction had upwards to 200+ people, how would anyone know what to do with that number of people?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Keeping a large number of players occupied is a task shared by faction leaders and server staff. The argument could be compared to this one: "How can any one server keep hundreds of players occupied? Eventually, the forgotten players would log off and never come back, since they don't understand the plugins the server uses, didn't receive any helping hands from the more experienced players, and couldn't easily adapt to the custom world or mechanics." Player retention across the server is a problem due to these factors and others, and it's one of the most difficult issues to solve. However, removing the member cap will allow factions to boost the number of players who at least TRY survival for any extended period of time by providing them with a team they can rely on and play with. Whether they stay or go is entirely up to each, and whether factions choose to recruit is entirely up to each of them. But removing the cap makes it easier for all factions to recruit new members, or focus on who they have when they want to. We don't know the stories of each individual player. Who are we to say that they chose to do something else with their time than stay in any one faction or play survival as a whole because of the performance of any particular faction? We can't read minds, and we can't easily predict choices. Lastly, the leader of a faction with a large number of members doesn't have to manage their engagement entirely on their own. Factions has an officer rank, which the leader can use to delegate powers and tasks, spreading the responsibility to many instead of one. Server staff work as a team to address server problems. Faction officers work as a team to address faction problems.

MadamAries said:
Right now, leaders/officers should try to cater and help who they have now
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Whether factions reach the cap or not should not warrant blocking the factions that want to advance beyond it. Whether there's a cap or not, factions can still choose to focus on the engagement of their existing members, and will certainly do so if they believe this is the proper focus for their factions. Removing the cap allows factions who have no engagement issue to bring new members in to share in the experience.
 
Wooperr said:
@MokeDuck

Removing the member cap stops the server from deciding when a faction has reached a peak, and puts that power in the hands of the players. If reaching a peak reduces engagement in a faction, then that's the very driving factor that encourages players decide what to do next, whether join a different faction, create their own, or do something else entirely like roleplay.


If only a handful of players are interested and active out of the many that enter the survival world in the long run, then their freedom to choose which factions they want to join should always be the priority over restricting them from joining larger factions because they reached a certain number of members already. A good way to make active players inactive is by preventing them from playing with the faction and players they want to.


Why should players in every faction have to worry about holding a slot there? I'm certain all of us except the young kids here have real life responsibilities. Not all of us can play every day, and some of us can't even play once a week. Factions shouldn't have to kick members for not being active enough if we want to maximize player population in the survival world. Besides, without the cap, factions can still just as easily pick and choose which people they want, and membership in already active factions is still valued.


Removing the cap gives motivated players the power to help their factions grow without an upward limit. This keeps already large factions motivated too. But that doesn't mean players MUST compete against the big ones. Factions should be allowed to be any size their leaders want. Some factions can be small with tight-knit communities while others can grow large to share the experience with many players at once. Also, as you already said, large factions DO have peaks. Just like any organization in real life doesn't last forever, no faction stays large and dominant forever. The big don't always stay big. The small don't always stay small.


If a faction's chat becomes a problem that reduces engagement for its members, then doesn't that also play into the peak argument you just made?


How does not recruiting help new players get involved in survival? A faction doesn't HAVE to recruit all the time, but why do factions that WANT to need to be stopped because they reached a certain number of people with that question in mind.


Why should players who want to be in a faction have to move to a sister faction because the first reached an arbitrary number of people? Being in the sister faction means you can't use faction chat to talk to the rest of your members, and alliance chat gets diluted by other factions. Members of the sister faction can't have the same permissions as the main faction, and can't build on the main faction's territory unless they're manually added with /f access, or set as an ally, which carries the risk of unwanted factions building there too. These are unnecessary inconveniences that can easily be avoided by removing the cap.

I don't think it's right for the server to decide how big a faction can be or how active players should be "distributed" among them. Players should always be allowed to choose how they want to play, whether with a small, big, or giant faction. Leaders should always be allowed to choose the size they want their faction to be, and given every opportunity to reach that number without barriers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I agree with all this. You misunderstood the reasoning about "factions stop recruiting.": factions stop recruiting when big factions have so many players and a tenth of those players do nothing but recruit. The main issue that I saw is that factions prioritized recruiting, while neglecting all other aspects like building, PvP, etc. In terms of the chat, I was saying that when factions DID get to have a lot of members that were active, their chat would often be filled with a lot of players talking over eachother, so it would be better if they split up into a faction and a subfaction. Other than that, those are valid points and were the objections raised when I brought this idea up the first time.

I'm, like firefan, kinda playing the devil's advocate here. I think maybe raising the cap would get us the best of both worlds, if we don't already have it with a 50 player cap. I'm not entirely opposed to removing the cap: we now have data and experience about how this change works and we know it doesn't negatively impact the quality of factions and I don't think it negatively impacts the playercount. Not to get flame-y here, though, but your arguments start to resemble "why should the server tell us what we can and can't do" or "why should the server restrict freedom"
 
I'd like to get @Nano_Kay and @Jalapeno690 and maybe @Winterless 's take on this. They have the factions that have been at the top of the cap, and winterless has been pretty high for a while now. Has the player cap helped or hindered your factions and ability to recruit? Do you think that being forced to stop recruiting makes massive more fun for you? Would you rather be able to keep recruiting, keeping in mind other large factions can also recruit more?

Also, in my mind, the question I think we should ask is, do we have enough new players coming into the server and looking for factions for everyone? Because in my experience players that weren't engaged didn't "just find a new faction" as some people are suggesting, but instead weren't engaged enough to even log on.
 
Last edited:
Nano_Kay said:
No factions have reached the cap except for Osmaniyye and uh- if you have 50 active members, why recruit more? Obviously, 50 members all active never happens. So, kick inactive and then recruit active people.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
dont forget the factions that decide to leave a 3-5 gap so they can welcome people and kick players that havent played in 1 week.
 
If a faction is good at recruiting members, teaching them the server, and retaining them on the server, it makes sense you would want as many new players to experience this faction as possible. In this hypothetical situation, let's assume there are multiple factions that fit the criteria of being a "good" faction above. In each of these factions, there's obviously going to be the members that want to stay in the faction no matter what, and the members that at some point will want to branch out and do their own thing, aka creating a faction.

If a goal of the cap is to have smaller factions with better levels of interaction and activity, but we also want players that have been taught about the server and retained to eventually branch out on their own and create a faction, aka spreading the wealth around in the hopes that a knowledgeable and retained player will be able to teach and retain new players in their new faction -

Are the good factions at the 50 member cap going to have to thanos snap their faction because it's in the best interest of the server?

With the cap removed, good factions that teach new players and retain them on the server don't have to make a decision about forcing out players, and new players can constantly join the faction and experience it. There will always be the players that want to make their own faction after they've been in a faction and learned how the server works. This is a given, and we see it time and time again. The simple fact that there is more than one faction on the server reinforces this.
 
Alj23 said:
If a faction is good at recruiting members, teaching them the server, and retaining them on the server, it makes sense you would want as many new players to experience this faction as possible. In this hypothetical situation, let's assume there are multiple factions that fit the criteria of being a "good" faction above. In each of these factions, there's obviously going to be the members that want to stay in the faction no matter what, and the members that at some point will want to branch out and do their own thing, aka creating a faction.

If a goal of the cap is to have smaller factions with better levels of interaction and activity, but we also want players that have been taught about the server and retained to eventually branch out on their own and create a faction, aka spreading the wealth around in the hopes that a knowledgeable and retained player will be able to teach and retain new players in their new faction -

Are the good factions at the 50 member cap going to have to thanos snap their faction because it's in the best interest of the server?

With the cap removed, good factions that teach new players and retain them on the server don't have to make a decision about forcing out players, and new players can constantly join the faction and experience it. There will always be the players that want to make their own faction after they've been in a faction and learned how the server works. This is a given, and we see it time and time again. The simple fact that there is more than one faction on the server reinforces this.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The problem that you run into is that big factions aren't good at recruiting and teaching new players: medium sized factions are. The best part about our current situation is also that we started with the 50 player cap, so factions don't even need to thanos snap their faction. Factions kicking half their members doesn't benefit the server OR themselves, which means that its probably not gonna happen. Again, realistically if you don't have enough members at 50 players to get A B or C done, then most of your players are presumably inactive. The goal of the cap, overall, was to make massive less of a towny who-can-recruit-more game and more of a game the focuses on other aspects, because you don't have to worry about bigger factions eclipsing you. The secondary goal was to increase player retention after realizing that 100+ player factions, realistically, don't teach the basics to new members any better than a 50-player faction.
 
MokeDuck said:
The problem that you run into is that big factions aren't good at recruiting and teaching new players: medium sized factions are.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

There isn't a correlation between the size of a faction and its skill in introducing new players to the server or retaining them. A small faction with good leadership and organization can just as easily retain 10 new people as a large faction with good leadership and organization. That's not even the point. Removing the cap allows factions of any size to recruit as much as they want to, and stop when they want to focus on other things as well. This leads to the most opportunities for any faction with good leadership and organization to make an impact on the players, and add to the survival experience as a whole.
 
MokeDuck said:
The problem that you run into is that big factions aren't good at recruiting and teaching new players: medium sized factions are.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
MassiveCraft has had a lot of small, medium, and large factions over the years, and the issue of inactive factions has always been present at all three levels. I'm going to need you to cite some facts that back up your charge that medium sized factions are the best at recruiting and retaining members.

MokeDuck said:
The best part about our current situation is also that we started with the 50 player cap, so factions don't even need to thanos snap their faction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not even sure what you're trying to say here. Reword it.

MokeDuck said:
Factions kicking half their members doesn't benefit the server OR themselves, which means that its probably not gonna happen.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I admit, my "thanos snap" example was slightly extreme. My overall point was that it is kind of obvious that if the member cap was implemented with the truest and nobliest of intentions, then a goal of the cap would be at some point to encourage well retained and knowledgeable players to strike out on their own and create a faction so they could spread their knowledge around and repeat the retaining and training cycle that was present in their last faction. A player that knows about the server and can teach people about it and retain them would contribute to greater overall server health, but we're not seeing this in the levels some expected the cap would create.

MokeDuck said:
Again, realistically if you don't have enough members at 50 players to get A B or C done, then most of your players are presumably inactive.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not true. Different players have different strengths. If in 50 members a faction has recruited people that enjoy farming and mining, but not a single builder, it would make sense that if A and B are farming and mining, but C is building a nice city, then A and B will get done and C won't, yet the faction is still active. It doesn't make sense that we would put a limit on a faction recruiting to try and find a player that enjoys building.

MokeDuck said:
The goal of the cap, overall, was to make massive less of a towny who-can-recruit-more game and more of a game the focuses on other aspects, because you don't have to worry about bigger factions eclipsing you. The secondary goal was to increase player retention after realizing that 100+ player factions, realistically, don't teach the basics to new members any better than a 50-player faction.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't think so, for the most part. I think the cap was an ill conceived way of /possibly/ seeing some different structure in the way people run their factions. Overall I think it just discourages people from expanding beyond 40ish members, because they known when they hit 50 they're going to be some hard decisions to make.

If a faction is at 50 members, and new players are joining the server, the faction leader has to look at their situation and realize that there is the possibility of the new players joining the server being more active than the people currently in their faction. So they have a decision to make. Do they just stick with what they have? Or do they take a risk and define some internal metric for activity and then start booting all the people that measure in on the bottom of that metric? Do they kick someone who hasn't logged in since last week? Two weeks ago? End of the last month? Sure, the idea that a faction leader wants active faction members isn't far fetched, but this a game at the end of the day. Before the cap we had a perfectly balanced solution of allowing factions to cater to all levels of activity. The system worked itself out, which was a separate system from the issue of player retention.

As a side note - there's probably a good chance that a player who joins a 200 person faction and stops playing would probably have stopped playing just the same in a 50 man faction. This is because some built in obstacles to retention exist on Massivecraft, and combating them is not something any faction has ever done great. MassiveCraft at its core demands a lot of upfront investment to begin enjoying the server, a lot more than your traditional minigame server that a lot of people like. The sheer scale of MassiveCraft and what's possible in the faction world might overwhelm new players, and in lieu of thinking on a grander scale, a lot of new players settle for your traditional faction miner/farmer/fisherman roles, which can tend to bore a lot of new players because they just don't understand what's possible on Massive. Massive is not like any other server, and the uniqueness makes us not the tea of choice for a lot of new players. Just the way Massive is. So new players deciding to stop playing is something widely experienced regardless of the faction they end up in.
 
I think there is consensus that the cap should be raised. Those who support a cap have expressed some inclination to raise the cap and those who don't want one at all would support raising it so I think what may help the discussion is for those who want a cap and those who don't to discuss what to raise it by if their preferred choice isn't chosen.

Having an agree on figure would allow the staff to look at it as a choice between maintaining the 50 member cap, raising it by the amount which seems to be the consensus or to eliminate it. I think helping to provide this third option would be good for both sides of the discussion since it would increase the chance of them getting a somewhat desirable outcome should staff lean the other way.

If i had to pick a number over eliminating it I would say 70 to 75. The reason for that is that I suspect anything closer to 100 would be uncomfortable for those who want a cap and anything close to 50 would be problematic for those who want to eliminate it.
 
I agree with the cap being removed.

This is probably already been mentioned, but it's very possible that the cap is actually hurting new players. with people being extremely selective about who to include in their faction, it's very unlikely a brand new person that just joined would make the cut. now I know that isn't every faction, and there are some that are more than happy to welcome brand new people, but at the same time I know there are a lot that aren't that way. at the end of the day, you are spending a lot of time to build your city and gather resources, if you're only able to share that with so many people, it's harder to just go with a new person.

I know that only a couple of factions have actually reached the cap, but you might be surprised to find that more factions will surpass 50 if the cap is removed.
 
MokeDuck said:
@Zacatero Only three factions are potentially being selective. Maybe 4.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
there was Asteria, Ossmayiethiny, Celetil, Insani, Novorra and Bridgeport. those 5 alone are near/have reached 50 member but were blocked to recruit and introduce new players due to the cap. most of the small factions(20 players ish) are close friends, usualy rpers or pvpers. Medium size factions (30-40) are decent. they are a close group of friends as leader and officers and have a few members/recruits. but bigger factions (75-100+) are usualy built for mass recruiting. they are set up in ways that the new player learns alot fast, and (usually in the f home) can always go back to read to better understand or ask a player online, because there will be a higher chance that there is someone online in a faction of 100. I've personally been in insani, asteria, tyberia, enigma and novorra and they were all above 50 members, they made it easy for new players to get started. by introducing the member cap at a low number of 50 without an Empire Plugin(that has been a WIP for like 4 years now) those huge factions were now forcebly removed and now massive is facing the consequences, a reallllllly low player retention and low survival activity.

With nearly no noobs staying on the server, who are raiders gonna attack? Themselves? it gets boring after a week. pvp is currently on an unstable rollercoaster, it dies, then it comes back slightly, then it dies. By removing the cap those big factions now take in noobs and introduce them, they get raided and die. Teaching them about /dynmap and other important survival tip, like /bp and how you dont lose armour on death. and if you attack a faction with lots of noobs, an will respond and bam, more pvp.

Removing the cap can both help the server grow back at a better rate and some with PVP.
 
MadamAries said:
Daughter factions are allowed and should be utilized.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That requires people to have purchased a second account.. not saying that some people don't have that, but it's fair to say most do not. So your argument against removing the rule is essentially "MassiveCraft would rather you pay Microsoft more money to get around the rule"
 
I think raising the cap would be a proof of concept that can still be removed at a later time if the problem persists.
 
Sir_Daragon said:
as much as i like the idea, in the past suggestion whenever we recommand to staff "give it a try and if it fails turn it back" they decline the option
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh I wouldn't turn it back. It raises the bar, so the cap remains and still functions as it used to. Meanwhile, the factions that want the cap removed have some breathing room to prove that they are optimizing the player spots to help players.

Ideally, the 70 man factions succeed in retaining players who are invested in a faction, and staff can think about removing the cap. Worst case scenario, the cap is now set to 70 instead of 50.

There's something to gain, nothing to lose. It's a good deal and should be considered by the game staff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

MokeDuck
  • Suggestion Suggestion
Archived "hardcore" Factions World
Replies
4
Views
3K
Suggestion Archive
VenerableCount
VenerableCount
IGutTheMidasTuch
Played Character Venokh || Balance Warden
Replies
0
Views
75
Character Sheets
IGutTheMidasTuch
IGutTheMidasTuch
H
Played Character Accursed Amorronokh
Replies
0
Views
91
Character Sheets
HoLee_Of_Ducks
H
Scribbe
Played Character Adanna
Replies
0
Views
91
Character Sheets
Scribbe
Scribbe
Gambit_Games_
Played Character Elowen Helfae Valhelsia
Replies
0
Views
79
Character Sheets
Gambit_Games_
Gambit_Games_
Top Bottom