I think it would be incredibly foolish to arrange a tour now. A video with a big youtuber is guaranteed to bring a lot of people in and if you want a sudden peak in population that's a good way to do it, but they need a reason to come back tomorrow if you want a rise in population. There's no big event right now to build hype, Gondor is mostly done, it's just little bits that most people aren't going to be interested in. You need to time this well, there will be sweet spot between Gondor and Mordor when there's hype for completion of Gondor and hype to get involved in building Mordor (and Moria I suppose), that's when you want the video to go out. MCME's population has declined since the golden days I suspect largely due to moving away from literally everything being done by hand (there are no people sculpting cliffs, grassing huge swathes of land in Rohan, or sloping hills in the Shire anymore), if you want to keep people involved you've got to do things like build competitions (The Meduseld build competition was very exciting back in the day) and texture competitions and try to get some hand terrain work going on (are river digs still a thing?). If you're not going to do that you need to find some other activity for people, pvp is always good, as are the races that take place in the events, and of course the tours which were once a staple of entertaining on mcme (congratulations to @Glinting on getting promoted to the best rank). You could think about reintroducing NPC's, I don't remember why they were removed but we had them back in 2011 and they're always nice to have, you can give NPC's messages so perhaps set up another scavenger hunt or some kind of mystery and instead of having clues with the signs make people go find Faramir in Henneth Annun and ask him, or Barliman Butterbur in the Prancing Pony. Make it a challenge and you'll keep people on the server and exploring looking for NPC's to talk to.

If you rush a youtuber in now and the people come in and don't stay, you're buggered, that ship has sailed. Wait a bit longer and do the tour when you've got incentive to stick around and you'll be better off in the long run.

JordD04 said:

I think it would be incredibly foolish to arrange a tour now. A video with a big youtuber is guaranteed to bring a lot of people in and if you want a sudden peak in population that's a good way to do it, but they need a reason to come back tomorrow if you want a rise in population. There's no big event right now to build hype, Gondor is mostly done, it's just little bits that most people aren't going to be interested in. You need to time this well, there will be sweet spot between Gondor and Mordor when there's hype for completion of Gondor and hype to get involved in building Mordor (and Moria I suppose), that's when you want the video to go out. MCME's population has declined since the golden days I suspect largely due to moving away from literally everything being done by hand (there are no people sculpting cliffs, grassing huge swathes of land in Rohan, or sloping hills in the Shire anymore), if you want to keep people involved you've got to do things like build competitions (The Meduseld build competition was very exciting back in the day) and texture competitions and try to get some hand terrain work going on (are river digs still a thing?). If you're not going to do that you need to find some other activity for people, pvp is always good, as are the races that take place in the events, and of course the tours which were once a staple of entertaining on mcme (congratulations to @Glinting on getting promoted to the best rank). You could think about reintroducing NPC's, I don't remember why they were removed but we had them back in 2011 and they're always nice to have, you can give NPC's messages so perhaps set up another scavenger hunt or some kind of mystery and instead of having clues with the signs make people go find Faramir in Henneth Annun and ask him, or Barliman Butterbur in the Prancing Pony. Make it a challenge and you'll keep people on the server and exploring looking for NPC's to talk to.

If you rush a youtuber in now and the people come in and don't stay, you're buggered, that ship has sailed. Wait a bit longer and do the tour when you've got incentive to stick around and you'll be better off in the long run.

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I dont agree here, we got 2 Major Projects starting and running currently. That being Dol Amroth and ofc Moria. There are Build Days and Events planned for both of these, and with the new Plot Build Plugin its easier then ever before to get People engaged. Also, Competitions are nowhere near as Popular as they used to be, and new Players wouldnt take part in these anyway.

I only see positiv Results from this, as having new Players would give the Guides something to do. They also have the tools, as the Mini Game Plugin to interact with them more socialy.
So PR is always good, and its not like we only have one youtube to ask, there are tons of them!

Also the Reason why the generall Population of the Server has nothing to do with the Movement away from doing everything by hand. I guess its mostly due to the Hobbit Movies no longer being talked about or relevant.

_Luk said:

I dont agree here, we got 2 Major Projects starting and running currently. That being Dol Amroth and ofc Moria. There are Build Days and Events planned for both of these, and with the new Plot Build Plugin its easier then ever before to get People engaged. Also, Competitions are nowhere near as Popular as they used to be, and new Players wouldnt take part in these anyway.

I only see positiv Results from this, as having new Players would give the Guides something to do. They also have the tools, as the Mini Game Plugin to interact with them more socialy.
So PR is always good, and its not like we only have one youtube to ask, there are tons of them!

Also the Reason why the generall Population of the Server has nothing to do with the Movement away from doing everything by hand. I guess its mostly due to the Hobbit Movies no longer being talked about or relevant.

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I at no point stated that getting a youtuber in was a bad idea I just stated that it may not be the best use of resources to bring them in now. Think of it like releasing a game or a movie, you've got to time it right to maximise the effect. Sure you can invite Keralis is now and then get someone else in later when maybe the effect is higher, but will that person want to come now that someone else just did a video, who wants to do a video touring a server that other big youtubers are also touring, they're going to want unique content and you have to consider the possibility of audience overlap. I can't speak much about Dol Armoth but when I looked a few months ago it looked pretty close to finish. And I don't agree that new players wouldn't want to take part in competitions, competitions are a great way to show off for people who want ranks (and there are always noobs who want ranks).

It's difficult to debate over what caused the reduced population, it's likely a combination of the two, a decline in number of projects available to the general public will cause active players to become less active whilst a loss of interest in The Hobbit will reduce the rate at which people join. That's why you need to focus the recruiting effort. People catalyse other people, servers with large populations tend to hemorrhage players less quickly, if you just have a trickle coming in people realise there's no one around and leave.

JordD04 said:

It's difficult to debate over what caused the reduced population, it's likely a combination of the two, a decline in number of projects available to the general public will cause active players to become less active whilst a loss of interest in The Hobbit will reduce the rate at which people join. That's why you need to focus the recruiting effort. People catalyse other people, servers with large populations tend to hemorrhage players less quickly, if you just have a trickle coming in people realise there's no one around and leave.

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The population on the server was highest 2011-2012, from what I know, which correlates with the release of videos by JesseCox. To me this would indicate that purely biggest gains of popularity for the server are videos from large youtubers. I can point to a couple of reasons as to why population would reduce. One being the older (in server time) players get bored and move on, perfectly understandable on a project like this where years go by doing the same projects. These players leaving are often staff members who are just burned out, and would be solved if they did not have to spend so long on terrain and could focus on more interesting things such as settlements.

Decline in general adventurers could probably be pointed at the lack of "jobs" for them to do. Some people do not have the ambition to help in a massive part by doing themebuilds and becoming artist but it is not as much effort and requires far less thought to do something as simple as digging a river, which in those days would have up to 25 people digging at once to accomplish a goal. This shows that it was good for community and comradery to physically be working towards something together in a viewable way. It's just how the human mind works.

Now these two points contradict each other, do terrain beforehand or allow adventurers to help, but this is the choice that collectively has to be made. Would you rather be a smaller server with higher quality builds and fewer people, or have a larger population by retaining the adventurers and having rivers dug by hand. I can't really decide that point but it is something that has to be considered.

A rule I think that can drive some older but perhaps not as sensitive players to want to leave the server. There are many rules in place about not having discussions revolving around religion, politics, not having any swearing in chat etc etc. Now this is admirable if you want to enable the area to be a place that the youngest of players can join without being exposed to internet arguments and rude language, but that also brings the trade off that older people (age wise) may not necessarily want to stick around, as they are forced to change how they behave to cater for those who you could argue bring little to the building table, even if they do bring something to the community table.

I tried to write all of this in as neutral tone as possible, so if something looks like I'm criticising the way things are don't take it that way, as I did try to devil's advocate all the points I made.

Terrain work is MCME's Pandoras's box... Once you've opened the box with Voxel, WorldPainter and WorldMachine in it, you can not go back to manual work. Designers (who are usually working or studying IRL and thus have only so much time) would be annoyed that it all goes so slowly, and Advnturers are not motivated as they'll soon realise it could as well be done within a fraction of the time. Although as of lately, Eriol, Emil and other Designers have again started to manually finetune terrain, and Eag & Co. have now come up with a new and better forest concept that is also very labour-intensive.

Adventurer-involvement has been a big topic for years. Plotbuild and Job plugin have been created solely to satisfy that need. The main problem currently is not having enough workpower on the leaderside, most Designers are too busy being able to lead many jobs. The rebirth of Foremen we're currently considering might better this to some extent.

I agree with that nothing can go wrong with asking Youtubers whether they're interested to have a peek. As of now I simply have too many open projects that I want to bring ahead to also pick up this here.

Was around for a few of the Jessie Cox videos. Remember you really need to limit the random bs that can occur. Some is ok it adds excitement, but balance is important.

JordD04 said:

I at no point stated that getting a youtuber in was a bad idea I just stated that it may not be the best use of resources to bring them in now.

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And seeing how many possibly MCME-Changing discussions get started lately (e.g. Role of Guides/Realism vs Look/Quality of Terrain vs Partizipation/32vs16 Textures/...) i think we should first establish a new coherence on what we wanna be. As Jord said, if we have this flood of members now that we are kind of "unstable" ourselfs we could give away the chance of using the tour really effective.

I'm down to help the tour, just make sure @q220 and @DynoDaring give us the all-clear first

But maybe if we give a tour, only show the places from the movie, and also in the order the movie shows them. This prevents getting the tour too messy. and tell people that if they want to see more, they shud check it out theirselfs. Because this server is just way to big to show off everything, and only areas from the movie seems like a good collection of things to show.

If you need my help with the tours just ask.

I am TI's manager where he goes i go so i'm in

RubenPieterMark said:

Hm I think the time is coming sooner and sooner to invite him. The CoL is (almost) completed now. So I thought, maybe we could invite Keralis friend Andyisyoda first. He always is his companion on his Inspiration Series and he does a lot of other stuff with him as well. He has his own small YouTube channel as well, with a little more than a 100K subscribers: andyisyoda . This would probably pump Keralis up very much. Otherwise we could invite Keralis and Andy at the same tour idk. Finrod, when do you think you will have time for the tour project? When the custom inventory plugin is installed? Well, Smaug and me have brainstormed a bit for the tours a while ago:

Spoiler: Our plan

Episode 1: The Fellowship of the Ring
Bagend
Weathertop
Rivendell
Moria 2.0
Lothlórien

Episode 2: The Two Towers
Argonath
Edoras
Helm's Deep
Aldburg
Paths of the Dead
Isengard

Episode 3: Gondor
Osgiliath
Pelargir
Henneth Annun (the Forbidden Pool)
(Maybe show some of the massive fiefs or Calembel for example?)
The -then hopefully started- Dol Amroth to show our new blocks and models
Minas Tirith

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I think your strategy is unwise tbh. Firstly, youtubers don't like to copy other youtubers, particularly those who they make content with a lot (because they tend to share a viewer base) and people don't want to watch the same content twice. If you're gunna get andyisyoda in then you should do them together.

And I think your movie locations idea isn't a good idea either. If you show exclusively movie locations it looks like all there is is movie locations. You want to show off some of the movie locations and some locations people don't know. My person recommendation based on my experience doing tours:

I agree with @RubenPieterMark we should try to get PR as soon as possible since MC is dying and the server is loosing population I know for a fact when WatchMoJo.com did that video on MCME it brought players (I only found out about the server from that video) I dont love Keralis, Granted he is a high subscribed youtuber and we could use the extra PR

RubenPieterMark said:

Can we please do this? Dol Amroth is halfway done and there's a great deal to show in Moria. We can always get him on later to show off completed Dol Amroth and WIP Mordor or something. I feel we shouldn't wait any longer on this, because minecraft is dying slowly and so is our population. Guides, Finrod? @mandolore100

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I agry, we need to do this,
But:

- a schedule should be made for designers and foremen who have to provide LOT'S of jobs in the 2 weeks after the vid comes out.

- the upcoming christmass events should be well planned out and should be mentionned, so that the new players have somethin to get hype about.

If these 2 things are done well, then this will have a great positive impact.

Ps: I will return to being active after ma exams are done. (19/12) with lots of energy to help with building and explaining terrain smoothing and stuff...

I personally believe that when a problem is noticed by a fair majority of a community, the time has come to fix it. As quite a few people have commented MCME's population seems to be dwindling. I'd say the server is in dire need of this extra push. Evidence from the Welsknight tour shows that with these tours the population brings in lots of new players and with that many staff members have more things to do and could possibly motivate us all to do more around the server. Also let's not forget that Keralis is a larger YouTuber and could provide even more new players than Welsknight did. Hopefully my "words of wisdom" can help with the decision making.

I think videos of a big youtuber would help repopulate the server, which now is loosing population mainly because there isn't anything to do for adventurers that want to help and build on the main map and because there isn't any big project running, i think. So a server tour of a big youtuber would be really good for MCME.

I love the idea!
The population is to low I think, what is now a big issue!