Hello all. As you can tell by the wall of text, I made a very thorough list of reasons minecraft servers can fail. It features lots of tongue and cheek humor to keep things interesting so please do not get offended by it. It really can help so take it seriously without taking it too seriously if that makes sense. It functions as a general guide for server owners, but I believe a lot of average players will enjoy reading it being able to relate to past experience.
Top 10 reasons your server is failing: *Mostly applies to struggling non-vanilla survival servers but a lot of it is true for minigames or creative type servers and hubs.
10. Your advertising sucks.
You don't have people playing because no one knows you exist. Get your name out there. Post on 3-5 different server lists. Having more than that makes it harder to keep track of and you end up posting advertisements that get outdated and inaccurate as you make changes. Make high-quality, professional ads to reel people in and entice them to join. Play fair. No flashy seizure causing banners. No bikini models on your ad either. Ew. Tell people what your server is about, and convince them that you're worth the 2 minutes it takes to open minecraft, log in, paste the ip, and join. Getting them to join is half the battle. If you're having problems with people jumping ship with the first hour then maybe you're not that bad at advertising after all. But you still suck (keep reading).
09. Your map sucks.
You've let everywhere look like nowhere anyone wants to be. You've let griefers, creepers, endermen, whatever else mojang gloriously decided to let grief things, grief things. This is especially true if you run a survival-type server. I don't care if you think just because its factions you can let people do their thing and throw money at you while playing on that hideous swiss cheese looking world of yours. Floating trees, nazi signs, genitals, random 1x1 towers, and a landscape that generally looks like your pimple-laden pubescent face is not the scenic view people want to walk out of their house to. If you choose to allow griefing on your server, keep it between people's buildings. People who join your server will be looking for trees and a nice pristine place to make ugly so you can have lots of little islands of ugly in an ocean of beautiful terrain generation. Sounds a lot better than having an empty mess of ugly everywhere at least. Maybe you don't run a survival server and instead you have a lobby/creative/minigame server. Well shame on you. You and your team of builders did a horrible job constructing that mob arena, or that creative portal gate thing, or whatever it is. Point is, if you've built something to serve a purpose for regular players, you better make it pretty. Just as nobody wants to live in a town where the city hall looks like a landfill, nobody wants to play on a server where the paintball arena looks like your uncle's garage.
08. Your spawn sucks.
You built this glorious huge spawn, or rather you downloaded one from planetminecraft, removed the "built by ..." sign and claimed it as your own. Don't make your server out to be something it's not. You have 20 slots but between you and me, we both know you can only hold 14 people before bad things. Why does your spawn need to accommodate 100 people at a time? Perhaps this is not the case. You've build an appropriately sized spawn yourself and you feel like it's pretty enough. But the problem is you have a 20 question mandatory quiz following a 10 stories of tutorial signage that nobody in their right mind would read. Half of the people walked past all those signs and the other half quit after seeing them. Fix it. Okay, so you've trimmed your spawn to where it doesn't take 20 minutes to escape and doesn't look an abandoned mega server spawn. Yay. No. You forgot it takes another 20 minutes of walking away from spawn for people to find a place to start. Perhaps you have portals or a command that takes players straight to the wild? When was the last time this 'wild' was moved? For survival servers, a good rule of thumb is 1 minute active 2 minutes inactive. That is, from the moment a player joins they have 1 minute of reading signs, looking at your glorious statues, and testing if your spawn is protected before they get bored. If they're not out of there after 1 minute chances are they're back at the homescreen. The other 2 minutes of inactivity is them running around looking for a place to make their bed, if they can't find a decent empty and unprotected patch of land with trees on it then you've failed.
07. Your execution sucks.
You got the wonderful idea while playing hide 'n seek on hypixel's server that you should 'borrow' your mom's credit card and create your own server and reel in the dough. No. Stop it. You're supposed to be providing an enjoyable experience for others. Servers...serve...a service...whoa call the grammar nazi's I just alliterated horribly. Stop harking your players at every turn to donate. It's not even donating, they're buying a rank. What rank are you giving them? You're not giving them admin are you? Oh just item spawning and flying? Okay that's marginally less suck-ish. But still. Stop it. Make things enjoyable and expect nothing in return. Avoid unbalanced ranks, improperly configured plugins, unsquished bugs on dev builds for plugins/bukkit and other derps. Make sure your server runs exactly how you imagined it would run without compromise.
06. Your server sucks.
You got a really sucky server. Well, obviously, but I mean your actual server sucks. It's weak, underpowered, and laggy. If you're running your server at home instead of renting one at a commercial data center I don't care how many gigs of ram or how many fps you get while running skyrim, call of duty, and minecraft simultaneously on your god given pc that can hack the nsa. Your residential internet connection just isn't up to par with the fiber optic speed of commercial data centers. Most home hosted servers can only handle 5-10 players before things start choking up. Consider renting a server from a reputable server host, smaller servers will want to rent up to 4 gigs of ram on a shared hosting package. Larger servers should consider VPS or dedicated services, but then again if you really are a larger server why are you reading this? Oh, and if you're looking for advice on hamachi servers, here is the single greatest piece of advice you can ever get for running a hamachi server: Don't run a hamachi server.
05. Your staff sucks.
You gave your friends op admin powerz. Maybe you let every reviewer from planetminecraft have op. Maybe all it takes is a pout face and an innocent "can i has adminz pl0x?" Bad. Take some time to scout out good candidates and have an organized well thought out application, spend a good amount of time transferring your delicious knowledge to them through training and properly discipline bad staff members. Also, for god's sake don't let brand new staff be able to ban, rollback, and use worldedit; if you do, and I know you do because I know everything about you, don't let them get away with misusing their power.
04. Your players suck.
You got a pretty sucky community there don't ya? They're always fighting, bickering, begging, whining, and being mean to each other. Ban disrespectful and rude players, they'll only encourag more bad behavior. If you let them get away with it people will think its okay to be rude to people on your server and then it'll multiply until everyone hates each other because of that one time they did that one thing to that one person. Get rid of the bad apples, if you let them sit on your field too long they'll turn into bad apple producing trees. Encourage good behavior by rewarding those that greet new players and help them learn the ropes. Joining a new server can be discouraging because you feel alone and don't know anybody. It's more comfortable for everybody involved if they have someone to hang around with the first time.
03. Your skillset sucks.
You don't know what in the world a .yml file is. You can't for the life of you figure out what's wrong with your permissions file. You don't even know how to upload your own map. Stop. No literally, /stop your server before you mess everything up. Take some time to learn why tab is a bad word to the native yaml peoples. I got my server owner degree at Google University, I highly recommend this school. Get some basic server owning knowledge before you attempt to run a server to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of strangers when things don't work. Know stuff about java, minecraft, bukkit, every plugin you run, computer hardware, etc. That way when the feces hits the wind generator you're prepared to clean it up asap.
02. Your concept sucks.
You lack originality. Does any of the following describe your server: hardcore, pvp, griefing, factions, towny, hunger games, prison, and/or creative? Well congrats because you fit in with the other 99% of servers. Because so many people fantasize about owning their own server, most server genres are completely saturated. This is basic supply and demand, there are more servers supplying a particular type of gameplay than there are players looking for it. There is no reason for someone to drop their current factions/towny/hunger games/etc server and join yours. It's too inconvenient, they'd have to lose all their progress and start over new on your server. You're basically fighting hundreds or even thousands of other servers for the very few players that are looking for a new server because their old one got shut down, they got banned, or their brand new. And do you really want former minecraft criminals and noobies reppin your server? If you provide a novel idea, or reinvent an old one, you're much more likely to attract players because you're filling a niche that their current server does not.
01. You suck.
You are 12 years of age or maybe you just act like it. You spel liek dis and has grammar none. Your server website looks like stock free enjin template. If you even have a banner it’s just the multicraft status banner or some generic looking thing you stole from someone else. Perceived professionalism is the greatest asset a server admin can have. Act professional, create custom artwork, code your own plugins, and people might actually think you have the slightest inkling as to what you're doing. People will not feel comfortable playing on a server unless they are sure it will be there tomorrow. Be calm, collective, and respectful at all times. Speak in a fashion that implies you are an educated individual by chucking unnecessary and cumbersome adjectives into a cauldron of metaphors to prove even the simplest point. Just kidding don't do that. That's silly. But don't talk like Dr. Suess either. Silly is he. Silly am I. Am I silly? Sally says so.
Enjoy this guide? Check out my other guide about things to consider before starting a public server here. It's written in the same thorough, yet comedic fashion as this one.
A lot of that is raging and bashing people lol. More like a rant.
You know what REALLY bothers me? People who think that spawns "make or break" the server. If it is some ugly structure you spawn in, that's extremely random and yes that does suck. If it is some elaborate world-edited structure, that also sucks because you can't find out way out and it is fake as heck.
For my server, I move the spawn from time to time but it usually is in the largest city or the most convenient area to be spawned in. From my point of view, servers that have good intentions don't "fail"... My server is basically for my friends and a few other people. It doesn't make sense to me why people beg for donations... I pay $5 per month for a place I can hang out with my friends from here and abroad and build better relationships through teamwork.
If I was a dictator and constantly controlled people by putting them into survival when they were flying or something, that would be a good reason for my server to fail. I don't do that, so all it can do is succeed for as long as the people that play are still Minecraft players.
A lot of that is raging and bashing people lol. More like a rant.
You know what REALLY bothers me? People who think that spawns "make or break" the server. If it is some ugly structure you spawn in, that's extremely random and yes that does suck. If it is some elaborate world-edited structure, that also sucks because you can't find out way out and it is fake as heck.
For my server, I move the spawn from time to time but it usually is in the largest city or the most convenient area to be spawned in. From my point of view, servers that have good intentions don't "fail"... My server is basically for my friends and a few other people. It doesn't make sense to me why people beg for donations... I pay $5 per month for a place I can hang out with my friends from here and abroad and build better relationships through teamwork.
If I was a dictator and constantly controlled people by putting them into survival when they were flying or something, that would be a good reason for my server to fail. I don't do that, so all it can do is succeed for as long as the people that play are still Minecraft players.
Like I said, it's all just tongue and cheek humor to keep things interesting.
There was some truth in there, but most of it was just bashing a certain type of people. Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely loved reading all that.
Very good guide (I have seen so many servers fail because of all the 10 reason). Just one thing I suggest taking the age labeling out of your post sure some 12 year olds are annoying but some are not. Heck 20 year olds can be annoying as hell. But that is all my opinion any ways great guide and keep up the good work.
Also props to you for the players suck reason it is very true. I have left many servers because I get spawn camped (I know I know my own noobishness) and players start ing at me for my skin and other crap.
Why did you blindly assume a server's gonna fail if somebody's 12 years old? Who said that servers hosted by 25 year olds didn't?
I said "You are 12 years old or maybe you just act like it" This means it doesn't matter if you are 9 years old, 30 years old, or anythin in between. If you act immature you're pushing people away.
I said "You are 12 years old or maybe you just act like it" This means it doesn't matter if you are 9 years old, 30 years old, or anythin in between. If you act immature you're pushing people away.
"You are 12 years old" gives it away. Without the "maybe you just act like it," that's pretty much saying that it doesn't matter if they're mature, but if they're 12 they're gonna fail immediately.
You should write a book. You know, one of those self-help crap they sell with grinning people on the cover: "How to become rich like me", "the secret of my success", "how you can improve your life like I did"... all written by complete unknowns. And make sure to put a bio in the first pages and back cover, letting everyone know how awesome you are and how you could have been the only person that could write a book on how to make a successful minecraft server, because you know the answers to it all.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I was trying to think of a signature and this is what came up.
And servers are ruined because of 12-year olds? I don't think so...There's an owner of a server who is 12 that get 30+ people on his server per day. Plus, he knows his grammar. And might want to minimize the word suck on the titles. It's making me feel that you're just insulting everyone.
Personally I don't care if someone stereotypes 12 year olds as immature, 99.9% of them are. In fact I've found very few who are (besides myself of course).
Unfortunately, nowadays, most children swear all the time, and couldn't care less if they got a detention. Although there are some who aren't like that, I have to say today's 12 year olds unfortunately live up to the stereotypes (going by my school alone).
Well, they probably didn't think very much, and they probably follow the said stereotypes because maybe it reflects OUR OWN behavior.
Also just wanna say, don't always bash on people simply because of their age, just because a couple of children in every community acts like total d-bags, swears, brag about how engorged their genitals are, yells how many times they've had intercourse with your mom, talks about smoking weed, does not mean EVERY 12 year old is like that, they are simply the ones who receive the most attention from society because of their pompous behavior, and because those 12 year olds receive the most attention from people, everyone thinks those are the ONLY 12 year olds out there.
Top 10 reasons your server is failing:
*Mostly applies to struggling non-vanilla survival servers but a lot of it is true for minigames or creative type servers and hubs.
10. Your advertising sucks.
You don't have people playing because no one knows you exist. Get your name out there. Post on 3-5 different server lists. Having more than that makes it harder to keep track of and you end up posting advertisements that get outdated and inaccurate as you make changes. Make high-quality, professional ads to reel people in and entice them to join. Play fair. No flashy seizure causing banners. No bikini models on your ad either. Ew. Tell people what your server is about, and convince them that you're worth the 2 minutes it takes to open minecraft, log in, paste the ip, and join. Getting them to join is half the battle. If you're having problems with people jumping ship with the first hour then maybe you're not that bad at advertising after all. But you still suck (keep reading).
09. Your map sucks.
You've let everywhere look like nowhere anyone wants to be. You've let griefers, creepers, endermen, whatever else mojang gloriously decided to let grief things, grief things. This is especially true if you run a survival-type server. I don't care if you think just because its factions you can let people do their thing and throw money at you while playing on that hideous swiss cheese looking world of yours. Floating trees, nazi signs, genitals, random 1x1 towers, and a landscape that generally looks like your pimple-laden pubescent face is not the scenic view people want to walk out of their house to. If you choose to allow griefing on your server, keep it between people's buildings. People who join your server will be looking for trees and a nice pristine place to make ugly so you can have lots of little islands of ugly in an ocean of beautiful terrain generation. Sounds a lot better than having an empty mess of ugly everywhere at least. Maybe you don't run a survival server and instead you have a lobby/creative/minigame server. Well shame on you. You and your team of builders did a horrible job constructing that mob arena, or that creative portal gate thing, or whatever it is. Point is, if you've built something to serve a purpose for regular players, you better make it pretty. Just as nobody wants to live in a town where the city hall looks like a landfill, nobody wants to play on a server where the paintball arena looks like your uncle's garage.
08. Your spawn sucks.
You built this glorious huge spawn, or rather you downloaded one from planetminecraft, removed the "built by ..." sign and claimed it as your own. Don't make your server out to be something it's not. You have 20 slots but between you and me, we both know you can only hold 14 people before bad things. Why does your spawn need to accommodate 100 people at a time? Perhaps this is not the case. You've build an appropriately sized spawn yourself and you feel like it's pretty enough. But the problem is you have a 20 question mandatory quiz following a 10 stories of tutorial signage that nobody in their right mind would read. Half of the people walked past all those signs and the other half quit after seeing them. Fix it. Okay, so you've trimmed your spawn to where it doesn't take 20 minutes to escape and doesn't look an abandoned mega server spawn. Yay. No. You forgot it takes another 20 minutes of walking away from spawn for people to find a place to start. Perhaps you have portals or a command that takes players straight to the wild? When was the last time this 'wild' was moved? For survival servers, a good rule of thumb is 1 minute active 2 minutes inactive. That is, from the moment a player joins they have 1 minute of reading signs, looking at your glorious statues, and testing if your spawn is protected before they get bored. If they're not out of there after 1 minute chances are they're back at the homescreen. The other 2 minutes of inactivity is them running around looking for a place to make their bed, if they can't find a decent empty and unprotected patch of land with trees on it then you've failed.
07. Your execution sucks.
You got the wonderful idea while playing hide 'n seek on hypixel's server that you should 'borrow' your mom's credit card and create your own server and reel in the dough. No. Stop it. You're supposed to be providing an enjoyable experience for others. Servers...serve...a service...whoa call the grammar nazi's I just alliterated horribly. Stop harking your players at every turn to donate. It's not even donating, they're buying a rank. What rank are you giving them? You're not giving them admin are you? Oh just item spawning and flying? Okay that's marginally less suck-ish. But still. Stop it. Make things enjoyable and expect nothing in return. Avoid unbalanced ranks, improperly configured plugins, unsquished bugs on dev builds for plugins/bukkit and other derps. Make sure your server runs exactly how you imagined it would run without compromise.
06. Your server sucks.
You got a really sucky server. Well, obviously, but I mean your actual server sucks. It's weak, underpowered, and laggy. If you're running your server at home instead of renting one at a commercial data center I don't care how many gigs of ram or how many fps you get while running skyrim, call of duty, and minecraft simultaneously on your god given pc that can hack the nsa. Your residential internet connection just isn't up to par with the fiber optic speed of commercial data centers. Most home hosted servers can only handle 5-10 players before things start choking up. Consider renting a server from a reputable server host, smaller servers will want to rent up to 4 gigs of ram on a shared hosting package. Larger servers should consider VPS or dedicated services, but then again if you really are a larger server why are you reading this? Oh, and if you're looking for advice on hamachi servers, here is the single greatest piece of advice you can ever get for running a hamachi server: Don't run a hamachi server.
05. Your staff sucks.
You gave your friends op admin powerz. Maybe you let every reviewer from planetminecraft have op. Maybe all it takes is a pout face and an innocent "can i has adminz pl0x?" Bad. Take some time to scout out good candidates and have an organized well thought out application, spend a good amount of time transferring your delicious knowledge to them through training and properly discipline bad staff members. Also, for god's sake don't let brand new staff be able to ban, rollback, and use worldedit; if you do, and I know you do because I know everything about you, don't let them get away with misusing their power.
04. Your players suck.
You got a pretty sucky community there don't ya? They're always fighting, bickering, begging, whining, and being mean to each other. Ban disrespectful and rude players, they'll only encourag more bad behavior. If you let them get away with it people will think its okay to be rude to people on your server and then it'll multiply until everyone hates each other because of that one time they did that one thing to that one person. Get rid of the bad apples, if you let them sit on your field too long they'll turn into bad apple producing trees. Encourage good behavior by rewarding those that greet new players and help them learn the ropes. Joining a new server can be discouraging because you feel alone and don't know anybody. It's more comfortable for everybody involved if they have someone to hang around with the first time.
03. Your skillset sucks.
You don't know what in the world a .yml file is. You can't for the life of you figure out what's wrong with your permissions file. You don't even know how to upload your own map. Stop. No literally, /stop your server before you mess everything up. Take some time to learn why tab is a bad word to the native yaml peoples. I got my server owner degree at Google University, I highly recommend this school. Get some basic server owning knowledge before you attempt to run a server to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of strangers when things don't work. Know stuff about java, minecraft, bukkit, every plugin you run, computer hardware, etc. That way when the feces hits the wind generator you're prepared to clean it up asap.
02. Your concept sucks.
You lack originality. Does any of the following describe your server: hardcore, pvp, griefing, factions, towny, hunger games, prison, and/or creative? Well congrats because you fit in with the other 99% of servers. Because so many people fantasize about owning their own server, most server genres are completely saturated. This is basic supply and demand, there are more servers supplying a particular type of gameplay than there are players looking for it. There is no reason for someone to drop their current factions/towny/hunger games/etc server and join yours. It's too inconvenient, they'd have to lose all their progress and start over new on your server. You're basically fighting hundreds or even thousands of other servers for the very few players that are looking for a new server because their old one got shut down, they got banned, or their brand new. And do you really want former minecraft criminals and noobies reppin your server? If you provide a novel idea, or reinvent an old one, you're much more likely to attract players because you're filling a niche that their current server does not.
01. You suck.
You are 12 years of age or maybe you just act like it. You spel liek dis and has grammar none. Your server website looks like stock free enjin template. If you even have a banner it’s just the multicraft status banner or some generic looking thing you stole from someone else. Perceived professionalism is the greatest asset a server admin can have. Act professional, create custom artwork, code your own plugins, and people might actually think you have the slightest inkling as to what you're doing. People will not feel comfortable playing on a server unless they are sure it will be there tomorrow. Be calm, collective, and respectful at all times. Speak in a fashion that implies you are an educated individual by chucking unnecessary and cumbersome adjectives into a cauldron of metaphors to prove even the simplest point. Just kidding don't do that. That's silly. But don't talk like Dr. Suess either. Silly is he. Silly am I. Am I silly? Sally says so.
Enjoy this guide? Check out my other guide about things to consider before starting a public server here. It's written in the same thorough, yet comedic fashion as this one.
A lot of that is raging and bashing people lol. More like a rant.
You know what REALLY bothers me? People who think that spawns "make or break" the server. If it is some ugly structure you spawn in, that's extremely random and yes that does suck. If it is some elaborate world-edited structure, that also sucks because you can't find out way out and it is fake as heck.
For my server, I move the spawn from time to time but it usually is in the largest city or the most convenient area to be spawned in. From my point of view, servers that have good intentions don't "fail"... My server is basically for my friends and a few other people. It doesn't make sense to me why people beg for donations... I pay $5 per month for a place I can hang out with my friends from here and abroad and build better relationships through teamwork.
If I was a dictator and constantly controlled people by putting them into survival when they were flying or something, that would be a good reason for my server to fail. I don't do that, so all it can do is succeed for as long as the people that play are still Minecraft players.
Like I said, it's all just tongue and cheek humor to keep things interesting.
Also props to you for the players suck reason it is very true. I have left many servers because I get spawn camped (I know I know my own noobishness) and players start ing at me for my skin and other crap.
Is shrek really love and life? I need love and a life. =D
My fan fiction of the game: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1957118-programmer-my-first-fan-fiction/#entry24096758
I said "You are 12 years old or maybe you just act like it" This means it doesn't matter if you are 9 years old, 30 years old, or anythin in between. If you act immature you're pushing people away.
"You are 12 years old" gives it away. Without the "maybe you just act like it," that's pretty much saying that it doesn't matter if they're mature, but if they're 12 they're gonna fail immediately.
My fan fiction of the game: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1957118-programmer-my-first-fan-fiction/#entry24096758
Summed everything up that you posted on this thread.
And servers are ruined because of 12-year olds? I don't think so...There's an owner of a server who is 12 that get 30+ people on his server per day. Plus, he knows his grammar. And might want to minimize the word suck on the titles. It's making me feel that you're just insulting everyone.
Well, they probably didn't think very much, and they probably follow the said stereotypes because maybe it reflects OUR OWN behavior.
My fan fiction of the game: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1957118-programmer-my-first-fan-fiction/#entry24096758
Your age has nothing to do with running a server, it's your mentality.
Whenever I go on a server that sucks I should just start shoving the link to this topic into the owners face.