Post by Zowja on Apr 21, 2016 21:53:48 GMT -5
The momentum going into NFC 1.8.4 has been terribly small. We have nearly 300 subscribers and the server has only seen 10 people join so far in its first five days. Why is this? The reason behind this and the channel's current state are rather interesting.
When we began our channel, we were all about Alpha and the vanilla experience of Alpha (and eventually Beta). When we started our server, and first started to become noticed, it didn't take long for us to catch speed, stabilize, and grow. This is because there was an active and growing community of people looking for old Minecraft stuff. Not only that, but Alpha was familiar and people loved to play it, so even when no one was online, people would play on a server a fair amount on their own and usually giving a much higher chance of being on while another person joined, then they'd do stuff together on the server. This was great for stabilization. None of this is going for NFC. There is no community actively looking for something like NFC. NFC is new and unfamiliar, its only server having a currently fairly empty community. That community looking for old Minecraft stuff is dying nonetheless. I am happy I was able to experience that rebirth of interest in old Minecraft stuff in 2013-2014, but it's dying now, hard. I remember last year (2015) searching for beta 1.7.3 servers once it became 2015 to see my competition when I was hosting those servers, becuas everyone updated their vids to say 2015 instead of 2014 if their servers were still up. The average video advertising servers had views in the thousands. If you do the same today, it's 4 months into 2016 and the average video's views are in the hundreds. You can see in the comments of almost all of those videos that the servers struggle with stability; people being on often. The community has shrank by a factor of, or over, 10; and that sounds about right to me. This has come from multiple reasons, but I can name a couple big reasons: Hackers. The beta code is easily warped to be able to do great amount of destruction, mostly with no authentication (since people don't use Secure...), and even Authme can be bypassed with the right code. I don't understand them, but there are still quite a few that can just trash old servers because they think it's funny or something, putting huge dents into server's communities and experiences. Big servers going down. Either because of hackers, or community fading away, or whatever reason, many of the big servers, including my own for Beta, were shutdown. This caused large losses in worlds people built up in these Alpha/Beta servers, so when you lose that it's pretty repulsive. And finally, it was people's big goodbye. Many came back to the old days seeking to re-experience that old feeling, and found it just unreachable in some way, like me, and the return ended up being a goodbye to Beta and Minecraft as they knew it.
So that external community has faded. What about the Quistones internally? What about those nearly 300 subscribers you still have? In some way, shape, or form, we have lost 75% of our sub's attention. A lot are just inactive, some just for a random reason, but a lot do have some certain reasons. I know a fair amount of the people I was attracting to my servers didn't have a youtube account or hadn't used it in forever, and reactivated it just for subbing to the channel. Those people are totally gone to inactivity. Many had an active YT account, but ended up sorta leaving it behind in the dust after the rebirth phase because job/college/etc. At one point these subs were all active. In fact, there was a time when nearly 100% of our subs were active. That was the short lived golden days of the Quistones Vanilla Beta 1.7.3 server with the old world. In that time we were growing much faster outside of our channel: on our server. In terms of a beta server, at the peak of our growth it was completely insane for a beta server. It was, be ready, about 100 new people joined every three-four days. Of course not all stayed for a while. Our system for growing economically was rather rough, but outside of that it was user friend and easy to start, and people were inviting their friends to see this new big beta server, like the community was alive again. And those friends invited their friends and those friends invited their friends and... and... It was crazy. But we ended up being hacked and totally destroyed around spawn, and knocking our server out. This was the first huge blow to our community. We eventually came back, but it was a much smaller number. Then difficulties in the friendship of me and my best friend whom I recorded with was another blow and weakened our channel for a while. The next time I started to first a public beta server up again, again we caught a lot of speed initially and at that peak we were growing at about half the rate we were before. That ended up getting hacked again, but much more intensely, breaking Authme and many other plugins I thought were invincible. That was another big blow to a community smaller than what we had on the previous beta server. The only thing I was able to flee to at the time was a very early NFC, being apart of the blow because now people have to use a mod, which I was horrible at coding at the time and had terrible setups, to connect to the server. The hacker couldn't penetrate this, but it absolutely nuked the community. It was nice to relax in what seemed like a safe haven with a small community for a while though. Eventually I was getting better with NFC, and it started to grow quite a bit. The public NFC server actually was growing decently, but still much smaller than the previous two beta servers, and with that small community we got hacked again. Seriously, my own beta Minecraft mod got hacked. Why people. Why. I had nowhere to go, and our world was trashed yet again. This guy was relentless and that community ended up dying and going inactive for a while as I dealt with this man. This man proved to be rather interesting as he gave me security to better the security of my mod through real Mojang authentication which would eventually lead me to having the same abilities with Secure. At that point our community was inactive and dead. NFC was struggling with gameplay and community even after buffed security. Secure was created and fired up - quite literally - as it quickly caught speed, but quickly burned out, leaving us inactive again. As to why I'm not entirely sure still, I think it was because the over all rebirth was dying and interesting in vanilla beta/alpha was falling hard as the version doesn't change and can only hold your attention so long... I was hoping to really launch NFC off this - it's a new version of Beta! It updates! It's still old MC, but with something new! But NFC never caught speed again because it had serious issues with gameplay and ore progression, which lead to the terrible year-long development of 1.8.4.
So that's where we are at now. NFC 1.8.4, community ready and fit for a foundation for growth, has emerged into a world where the community internally and externally is toast and interest is low. This is a rough start for 1.8.4. I'm not entirely sure where to spread this either - YT vids? That's sorta becoming toast, maybe having Joey will lighten things up again though. PMC is not a very big hub for this stuff. Reddit maybe? Spreading via YT comments? MC forums? They're sorta hostile to old versions. The community in all areas is fading.
I'm probably going to have to build an entire new community from scratch. Perhaps that starts here - at the NFC forums, a connection the NFC community would revolve around.
When we began our channel, we were all about Alpha and the vanilla experience of Alpha (and eventually Beta). When we started our server, and first started to become noticed, it didn't take long for us to catch speed, stabilize, and grow. This is because there was an active and growing community of people looking for old Minecraft stuff. Not only that, but Alpha was familiar and people loved to play it, so even when no one was online, people would play on a server a fair amount on their own and usually giving a much higher chance of being on while another person joined, then they'd do stuff together on the server. This was great for stabilization. None of this is going for NFC. There is no community actively looking for something like NFC. NFC is new and unfamiliar, its only server having a currently fairly empty community. That community looking for old Minecraft stuff is dying nonetheless. I am happy I was able to experience that rebirth of interest in old Minecraft stuff in 2013-2014, but it's dying now, hard. I remember last year (2015) searching for beta 1.7.3 servers once it became 2015 to see my competition when I was hosting those servers, becuas everyone updated their vids to say 2015 instead of 2014 if their servers were still up. The average video advertising servers had views in the thousands. If you do the same today, it's 4 months into 2016 and the average video's views are in the hundreds. You can see in the comments of almost all of those videos that the servers struggle with stability; people being on often. The community has shrank by a factor of, or over, 10; and that sounds about right to me. This has come from multiple reasons, but I can name a couple big reasons: Hackers. The beta code is easily warped to be able to do great amount of destruction, mostly with no authentication (since people don't use Secure...), and even Authme can be bypassed with the right code. I don't understand them, but there are still quite a few that can just trash old servers because they think it's funny or something, putting huge dents into server's communities and experiences. Big servers going down. Either because of hackers, or community fading away, or whatever reason, many of the big servers, including my own for Beta, were shutdown. This caused large losses in worlds people built up in these Alpha/Beta servers, so when you lose that it's pretty repulsive. And finally, it was people's big goodbye. Many came back to the old days seeking to re-experience that old feeling, and found it just unreachable in some way, like me, and the return ended up being a goodbye to Beta and Minecraft as they knew it.
So that external community has faded. What about the Quistones internally? What about those nearly 300 subscribers you still have? In some way, shape, or form, we have lost 75% of our sub's attention. A lot are just inactive, some just for a random reason, but a lot do have some certain reasons. I know a fair amount of the people I was attracting to my servers didn't have a youtube account or hadn't used it in forever, and reactivated it just for subbing to the channel. Those people are totally gone to inactivity. Many had an active YT account, but ended up sorta leaving it behind in the dust after the rebirth phase because job/college/etc. At one point these subs were all active. In fact, there was a time when nearly 100% of our subs were active. That was the short lived golden days of the Quistones Vanilla Beta 1.7.3 server with the old world. In that time we were growing much faster outside of our channel: on our server. In terms of a beta server, at the peak of our growth it was completely insane for a beta server. It was, be ready, about 100 new people joined every three-four days. Of course not all stayed for a while. Our system for growing economically was rather rough, but outside of that it was user friend and easy to start, and people were inviting their friends to see this new big beta server, like the community was alive again. And those friends invited their friends and those friends invited their friends and... and... It was crazy. But we ended up being hacked and totally destroyed around spawn, and knocking our server out. This was the first huge blow to our community. We eventually came back, but it was a much smaller number. Then difficulties in the friendship of me and my best friend whom I recorded with was another blow and weakened our channel for a while. The next time I started to first a public beta server up again, again we caught a lot of speed initially and at that peak we were growing at about half the rate we were before. That ended up getting hacked again, but much more intensely, breaking Authme and many other plugins I thought were invincible. That was another big blow to a community smaller than what we had on the previous beta server. The only thing I was able to flee to at the time was a very early NFC, being apart of the blow because now people have to use a mod, which I was horrible at coding at the time and had terrible setups, to connect to the server. The hacker couldn't penetrate this, but it absolutely nuked the community. It was nice to relax in what seemed like a safe haven with a small community for a while though. Eventually I was getting better with NFC, and it started to grow quite a bit. The public NFC server actually was growing decently, but still much smaller than the previous two beta servers, and with that small community we got hacked again. Seriously, my own beta Minecraft mod got hacked. Why people. Why. I had nowhere to go, and our world was trashed yet again. This guy was relentless and that community ended up dying and going inactive for a while as I dealt with this man. This man proved to be rather interesting as he gave me security to better the security of my mod through real Mojang authentication which would eventually lead me to having the same abilities with Secure. At that point our community was inactive and dead. NFC was struggling with gameplay and community even after buffed security. Secure was created and fired up - quite literally - as it quickly caught speed, but quickly burned out, leaving us inactive again. As to why I'm not entirely sure still, I think it was because the over all rebirth was dying and interesting in vanilla beta/alpha was falling hard as the version doesn't change and can only hold your attention so long... I was hoping to really launch NFC off this - it's a new version of Beta! It updates! It's still old MC, but with something new! But NFC never caught speed again because it had serious issues with gameplay and ore progression, which lead to the terrible year-long development of 1.8.4.
So that's where we are at now. NFC 1.8.4, community ready and fit for a foundation for growth, has emerged into a world where the community internally and externally is toast and interest is low. This is a rough start for 1.8.4. I'm not entirely sure where to spread this either - YT vids? That's sorta becoming toast, maybe having Joey will lighten things up again though. PMC is not a very big hub for this stuff. Reddit maybe? Spreading via YT comments? MC forums? They're sorta hostile to old versions. The community in all areas is fading.
I'm probably going to have to build an entire new community from scratch. Perhaps that starts here - at the NFC forums, a connection the NFC community would revolve around.