Minecraft Forums

Quote from ian_mcianface»

The actual game is a secondary focus point to social media Meat Golems, validations and superficial friendships... Now it's commonplace to see 10 people chatting on Discord, 0 people playing the Game.

From my experience this is because some people move on from playing the same game over and over again, however some do stay, like the owner often stays online pretty often/daily because they are financially supporting it and cannot just "move on" because either some player will get mad that the world is no longer active or they have a sentiment to the world themselves.

I also agree with the above comment that states that builds in Minecraft need a purpose.

Also, games need direction to be a game, there must be a goal if the game is a game, if there is no goal, then the specified "game" is a toy, but some gamers like toy "games" as well. (no negative connotation intended, I don't think theres any problems with playing Minecraft or similar)

gpu increases avg fps

ram & cpu decrease lag spikes
Your build may be limited by motherboard throughput as well, so first step is to find whats at 100%

Quote from StarlightGlimmer»

I use Windows 11. Hopefully will be using Mac OS X at some point in the future.

Dont ever use mac

worst os 100%
except for chromeos which will always be ****

1. No break from telemetry

2. Mac can’t run exe files so 90% of all apps are off limits

3. Costs a whole lot more

4. Performance not found in any mac. Expect a potato-mid tier computer.

Quote from Nebgama»

and where is your source exactly? because i have only seen a whole bunch of hype train speculation with no actual official source, they know that if the ruin or remove Java version then they are shooting themself in the foot.

We have certain mechanics generally redstonecentric in Java that you cannot get in bedrock. Java is also the most popular version of the two because of modding.'

imo they never should of made bedrock its a subpar version and waste of time.

Bedrock is like a microsoftized version of the game. Also java/bedrock parity is coming and non-parity is already a valid bug report. Java edition is played less due to having lower amounts of platforms. (OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE PLAY MORE ON PHONES THAN PCs due to accessibility)

The reason people don't like bedrock edition also has nothing to do with any marketplace or subpar modding and is more about the fact that bedrock edition has a lot of bugs. The main difference is that one copy is using LWJGL as a game engine, which is a very solid game engine with few bugs and the other has a "special" one made custom from microsoft with TONS of love and definitely not any exploits and bugs (/s).

Quote from Capiosus»

Forum is probably just not likeable because of UI. A UI overhaul would make people use it more without changing a whole lot. Maximizing the view of the forum rather than stone texture black bars would look nice, as well as curved buttons and dark mode. See the attached images.

I like having some negative space. DOOMWORLD.com uses the full-length posts and it looks weirdly crowded despite having little content. And you don't even get more words in for shorter posts since it's only expanding horizontal space.

Quote from Capiosus»

For those that still remain forum style users (those that prefer long slow messages over a fast paced conversation), Reddit has blown up due to its ability to centralize notifications and kinda killed most forums just because everything can be on one platform instead of 8 different websites.

Reddit is having some changes that are about to cause an exodus from the platform a la tumblr.

Upcoming Reddit changes may end free third-party apps (9to5google.com)

This is a far broader and probably difficult thing to answer than it might seem.

Discord is likely far from the key reason these forums aren't as active. Rather, it's a symptom of a broader cause, but not the cause itself.

Some history rambling for some context:

I was around on the web pretty actively in the 2000s, probably when forums where at their height. That was the age of Windows XP, Myspace, forums, and messenger clients (and maybe the final days of stuff like geocities and "personal websites"). Youtube was still a mere concept, and video streaming for movies and shows was a decade off or more. Anyone else who around on the internet back then will be able to attest that both tech and the web was different. Forums were one of the best ways to centralize back then (and even going back further, they were with "BBS"). "Social media" as we know it today wasn't yet in place. You didn't make Discord servers back then. You went to Invisionfree or phpBB, or maybe later MyBB, or something like that and made your own free forum. Or you searched the web for one on a subject you liked and joined one of those communities (maybe it was art and it had a whole website like in the case of devaiantart, or maybe it was a forum and you joined that). And then you loaded up your messenger client of choice and it ran in your tray/as a sidebar and you chatted with people on your friend list. AOL, Yahoo, or MSN/Windows Messenger. But for centralizing on a larger scale, forums were the big way to go. Like most things, that didn't last forever. I noticed even by the late 2000s or early 2010s (well before this forum or even Minecraft existed), that many forums (some of them large ones, even) were losing their steam, but through the 2010s it really became apparent.

There's a few key things that happened in this time. The web population blew up (no longer was it only well off middle class in first world nations or better that had PCs and internet access, as the barrier of entry became lower), and importantly with that, a shift occurred where the majority of it was trending towards mobile users, not PC users (which similarly had trended away from desktop users and more towards laptop users). Back in the early/mid 2000s, you'd most likely get online at a stationary desktop using dial up, or early cable/DSL if you were lucky. Now a mobile computer and the web was in the palm of your hand with wireless access and could be taken with you with ease. I hope I don't have to explain the obvious here, but the way people compute and use the web differs greatly in those two scenarios.

I cannot overstate that last point; the mobile shift was a major thing that had huge impacts on how the web changed, and how people used it. Now, people would check the web maybe more frequently, but in shorter, less concentrated sessions. Typing up lengthy posts on a forum you needed yet another unique account for wasn't an attractive idea for most of these mobile users (things like "sign in with your Google/Facebook/other account" grew big in this time). Starting to see why Discord rose, even though it's basically just just the chat rooms of old with new features? It works perfect for a large part of the modern web population. It wasn't Discord ITSELF that did anything. It was a larger cause (that cause being the tech/mobile/web shift), and Discord was a symptom OF that larger cause rather.

Forums still have a place, but they're not the big thing they used to be.

Let's keep in mind, Minecraft is also a bit over a decade old (I presume the forums are too), and not all things grow continually. Games that get updated that long, and other "live service" games are still (relatively) new, at least outside the MMO sphere. Another very big game in this space in coincidentally the same time span as Minecraft, League of Legends, closed its old forums, and then it's "new forums" (the boards) as well, many years ago now. It puts into perspective both how "well" these forums have done, but also how much it takes to keep a forum active in the modern web age. It wasn't going to grow forever. In strict terms, something is either growing, or dying. There's these harsh reality things in life called "saturation points" and these forums probably long ago reached theirs. Obviously, Minecraft sales have continued well, but those long ago shifted towards console, mobile, and bedrock versions, not the original Java version. And while this is only speculation, I'd make a wager that the majority of the community these days is more casual and less willing to interact at a high level on a forum in 2023, versus the more "hardcore" or "dedicated" or "PC enthused" or whatever you'd call it community from back then. What spurred the forums back then was the dedicated part of it during its huge blow up phase. That sort of projection was NEVER going to last indefinitely.

It's probably not helping that the old official Mojang and/or Minecraft website used to have a link here (I think?), as did the game client I believe, and that's not the case anymore as far as I'm aware. I've administered a forum that had a link to it from the website main page, and when it lost that, it was rather disastrous for new member growth.

As for why there's a lot of new users registered, but not much activity? Honestly, that part would stump me. I can only speculate, but I have very little in the way of guesses. A lot of the traffic is likely web crawlers (search engine bots), spam bots, or people finding a result through a general web search. I imagine fewer people probably come here from the onset with the intention of looking to engage with a Minecraft community, but rather are looking something up related to Minecraft, and since there's a decade and more of archives to pull from, this place will come up for a lot of them. There's the whole "1%" rule or whatever it's called, where like 99% of your users will be lurkers and 1% will be content creators (it might even be 99% lurk, 1% joins, and 1% of THAT 1% [so .0001% overall] are active content generators, I forget which).

These are just some speculative considerations on my part. I certainly don't know the history of these particular forums too well, but I am more than aware of the changes in the area of tech/devices/web in the last decade or two, and I can tell you it's not even a question that forums as a whole have just been long displaced in the limelight, so it's probably not one major thing this forum did (or didn't do), nor one particular other website or application, that led to it's loss of activity.