Keeping Your Minecraft Server Players Engaged and Alive
Keeping players engaged is key in building a Minecraft server community. Here are ways to retain players with updates and patterns!
In our past blog posts, we explored through the intricacies on building a game server community and moderating the community.
We're focusing on an important aspect of Minecraft community building: keeping your content fresh and your players eagerly waiting for what's next! To start, we need to take a step back and look at the very content that brought all these people together in the first place. Let's dive in!
The Early Days
During the initial stages of any server project, updates tend to be frequent and full of content. This is natural as most of your staff team involved are fully motivated by the freshness of the project. But it's important to channel that energy wisely.
In order to retain that motivation, focus on what the project really needs when creating an update. Instead of overwhelming your project with numerous new features, consider enhancing or expanding existing gameplay elements and loops. Creating more polish rather than bloat.
You'll thank yourself later, as you will only improve as a project owner as time goes on. Think of it like being an artist, who often look back on past works and refining your craft.
By focusing on quality over quantity early on, you can save yourself from creating more work for yourself in the future. You can also ensure that your project evolves in a way that excites and satisfies your community.
Community Engagement
The best of server or project owners plays or uses their own work without any kind of access or permissions that provide unfair advantages. This gives them a good perspective on what aspects of the project feel lacking or need improvement. By playing the game or being a user of the project, it's also easier to familiarize yourself with frequent players or users and learn what they enjoy.
Seeing what they enjoy, you can expand upon it or implement principles that bring them enjoyment into other aspects of the project. For a broader reach, it's sometimes a good idea to do community votes on features or creating a suggestions channel in your community's discord where members vote on and discuss suggestions.
When using voting for features, it's important to recognize that the less popular features are not always bad ideas. We recommended putting the runner up features into the next poll, or if they are obviously popular begin to implement them after the winner.
Update Patterns
The flow of ideas for updates will eventually begin to slow down, especially as the early days have come to an end. At this point, the updates may be too complex to implement or more difficult to plan.
If you try to update too frequently and set unreasonable expectations for yourself, everything will fall apart, and you either won’t end up updating at all or you will update slower than if you had just paced yourself properly. It can work wonders for a community to have updates on a guaranteed schedule, allowing hype to be built and fulfilled consistently.
In the context of a game server, you may have people playing in order to prepare for the update. They will be theorizing and discussing the best way to play it, gathering gear for it, or otherwise be focused on your project. This promotes engagement as well as provides time to the staff to continue updating. Sometimes, however, it is still possible to retain weekly updates or another increment shorter than a month(s) long span.
In these cases, it is recommended that you create some form of "Updates" or "Announcements" role within your community discord if you are doing pings. Otherwise, frequent pings may drive people away from your server out of annoyance.
Managing Updates
Whichever update model you choose, it's crucial to ensure that it's manageable for you and your team. Aiming for weekly updates? Be careful not to overburden yourselves. Working excessively hard to meet tight deadlines can lead to burnout and might eventually let down your community.
Whatever pattern you choose, be open and consistent with it, and only promise things once you know they are completed. Carefully document every minor change and update. This detailed record-keeping is key to crafting comprehensive patch notes that fully inform your community.
By transparently communicating every change, big or small, you demonstrate the depth of effort and care invested in your project. As you continue to improve and refine with each update, this progress is documented and shared, step by step, with your entire community.
Hope you had a fun time reading! If you're looking for a powerful and affordable Minecraft host that's ready to help your community grow, spin up a server at berrybyte.net/minecraft-- we love talking and sharing our insights with our users so swing by our Discord community for a chat.