Creative revival Ideas

posting this here to make it easier to refer to and make this a base of creative revival suggestions/ideas. please help us come up with ideas


Creative Revival:

• Remove the Terrain world. In doing this we have only plots for people to build on each rank. However, a terrain world that would have no effect on rank, so you can't rank up with builds in this world, would be made available to everyone BI and up. This basically would be a freebuild area.
  
  
• New PMC thread for Creative. This would be something new that we could update ourselves and start fresh. It would sort of be a "Grand Re-Opening".
  
  
• Fix the names of the Ranks. So, the names would change to: Guest, Builder, (Name), Apprentice, Architect, Creator. The name for the new BII rank is undecided but suggestions are welcome. Additionally, if anyone can think of a good theme for the ranks other than the builder theme that would be awesome too.
  
  
• Make Ranking Harder. A decent terrain will now be expected from new incoming builders, also premade plots will never be an option.
  
  
• New Spawn?
  
  
• Build Points. This is our form of in-game currency. Players will be awarded for ranking up, and voting. Ideas for how much could be allocated are: Guest -> Builder = 30 points, Builder -> (Name) = 50 Points, etc. voting = 1 point.
  • Buyable things with build points.
    • Nicknames (within reason)
      
      
    • extra plots
      
      
    • particle effects
      
      
    • pets (EchoPet)
      
      
    • Hats
      
      
    • access to /tp
      
      
    • disguise
      
      
    • Prefixes/Suffixes (Again, within reason)
• Donators. Donators will be able to access anything you could purchase with Build Points
  
  
• Plots
  • Guest: 33 x 33
    
    
  • Builder 65 x 65
    
    
  • Apprentice: 151 x 151
    
    
  • Architect: 251 x 251

Any and all suggestions are welcome as this is only a rough draft. any liked ideas posted here can be added to this document.


Post by:

SimplyGreen03

bobbylou4

qb10panther

Navarog

 

Having the ability to build with other people, less experienced people has been one of the problems I have observed. Although their skills may lack, their ideas can accumulate and help the cooperative build between the people. Not having a world where players could easily build together discourages many of the new players from returning. I fully support the BI's having accessibility to a cooperative terrain world.

Also, another idea I have been pondering is a small building academy on the creative server. It would be held weekly/bi-weekly and would include more experienced people pairing up with less experienced individuals, or one helping to teach a group by providing demonstrations on how building elements come together, and then let the others experiment, helping the weaker of the group. I believe this would help bring the builds above average, improve relations between people on the server, making people want to be active, and would be rewarding to some of our more experienced individuals who would receive recognition from their lesser peers (as a reward for learning)

Honestly I believe that there is a few more ranks than needed. Although the ranks make people want to get better and get to the highest rank, but what happens when they reach that rank? Most people will head on to staff or become inactive. I believe the original purpose of creative was to build, and getting better would just happen over time. Honestly only 3 ranks are needed in my perfect world.
A newcommer rank, Guest: To moderate newcommers
A common rank, Builder:Rank given to active community members
An elite rank, Archetect: Rank given to the best of the best.
For those people that need that encouragement, we could revamp the contests once we get enough people. That would most likely encourage them to be better than their peers, thus making them improve and desire to be part of the community.

 

Going with your idea for the new plot setup, why not keep using the current plot worlds (cleaning up and changing things where necessary), and use the terrain world for the public b1+ terrain world? This avoids any need to reset worlds.

 

We would like different plot sizes

 

The building academy thing would become tedious after a while if it's just more experienced people teaching other people. 9 times out of 10, when people ask me how to improve their build I just reply "Your walls are still a bit flat, and you need to work on finer detailing it" and they accept that and go, this is even before I see their build.

To alter the idea somewhat. When I was still a B1, I remember Si WE'ing a smallish island in the sea, and basically everyone online at the time went on and made a house there. It was good fun.

So here is what I propose then. Either weekly or bi weekly, there is an island-type thing made in the free build world. Everyone can go there and build a house alongside others, who can then give them critique and advice on how to improve, and in the end there's a small group-build, which we can then date and have a sorta scrapbook after a while.

This idea allows others to see the creative process others go through, ask questions, and receive direct feedback on their builds in a casual setting.


As for Tech's comment. Trust me mate, this amount of ranks is fine, maybe only get rid of B2, as it feels like an inbetween rank atm. As soon as you hit the top, then you just flatten out and lose motivation. You'll notice very few Architects remain on the server after a while. Actually, I think I'm the oldest who isn't staff.

 

You used to be staff.

Maybe BII could be called Trusted, and keep a Terrain world.
I'd also like to come back, I happen to be staff on a server with about 10-30 players on during the day at a time, although in the morning (Europe time, GMT to GMT+3), the numbers get lower, and I could get a few tips from them for you guys.

 

http://www.spigotmc.org/resources/plotsquared.1177/ THIS. YOU GUYS NEED THIS.

 

At the moment, I think one of Creative's most prominent issues is that its target demographic is wholly undefined. We want talented builders, but the ease with which ranks are obtained is (apparently) not appealing to talented builders, who want to build around other talented builders. The server is too mature (and hostile towards) younger people to attract them. We don't have RPing for that crowd (thankfully) and getting BI is just annoying enough for lazy people and those who just want to builds with their friends to abandon the server before even attempting to rank up. We aren't a minigames server either, and without progression, players won't stay..

The only solutions I can think of that could fix this issue are either making ranking up much, much harder, or completely gamifying the server . We have sort of tried to make the server harder (a while ago, albeit, but it happened) so I think if we're going to revamp the server completely, we should just completely gamify it. I don't think this would alienate any talented players, but as I am decidedly untalented, the opinion of someone who has actual building ability on this matter would be nice.

To completely gamify ranking up and playing on the server, we should use a points based system to award players for building well. If we do institute such a system, we should have a strict and well documented point-award system, as well (i.e. [very roughly] a build of at least 40x40x40 gets 2 points; with level 3 (out of 5) of depth gets 3 points; with a color choice of 4 (out of 5) gets 4 points; with 5 interior rooms of quality 3 (out of 5); etc.). With a certain amount of points, one gets a rank. The ranks could be placed further away from eachother for this, I think, which could make getting architect take much more time, which would keep more players for longer.

Of course, the idea is full of issues (balance will be a huge pain in the ass), and I have no idea if it would actually work, but it is a radical idea that would change things dramatically.


Less radically, I agree with some kind of other points which could be used to buy things like nicknames, extra plots, particle effects, etc. I think they should be awarded for only voting (and maybe donating? I have no idea what is going on with the EULA stuff but CyberVic could confirm whether or not this would be legal) to force players who want cool stuff to vote. All of them should be time limited, as well.]

Having fewer ranks would cause more of an issue with progression which seems like (and, shown by Aenimalistic 's post in the other thread) the biggest issue the server has is progression. We've tried for a long time to have a server that is just building and it periodically dies and then again rises, which is fairly annoying and kind of saddening but inevitable with a pure building server when most people only play on servers which have players online.

If we're making things more gamified, then we could maybe have more comedic names for ranks.

"Trusted" implies that the lower ranks are untrusted also, which sounds kinda bad.

I absolutely love Legend9468 's idea of creating a building island periodically for anyone to build on.

 

Hows about having the first 2 ranks designed around the more casual basis, and then the next 2 or 3 ranks being based around the more skilled builder ranks. The casual ranks would be for people who just like to chill, and just to prove that they know how to build. The next builder ranks will be much harder to get, and represent the types of builds that we want to populate the server with.

It's a compromise, I know, but if we can define them into 2 separate categories, then we can possibly appeal to both sorts of players.

So the gap from Casual I to Builder I (Not as in the current B1 rank, just a name to give you the idea), would be akin to the jump between the current Builder I to Apprentice

 

The only issue I see in having a gap is that I'm not sure how many untalented builders will want to stay if they have little to work towards. Also there should be another chat unlocked for higher ranks if we are going to have both casual and more serious ranks, to keep the (usually) more mature hardcore players from the (usually) less mature casual players.

 

I kinda wanted this "new" server to have a closer community, I liked the idea of having build teams and regular competitions. I feel like having two different categories of builders with their own chats would kind of divide the community. However, I do like the idea of having to different categories in themselves, perhaps the "casual" builders could earn ranks by means like doing team builds and less impressive creative builds.They could be judged on things like creativity and originality more rather than aesthetics.

Perhaps doing something like [CI] for a rank, and so forth, similar to the builder ranks.

While on the top of ranks, I think it would be cool to have some special tasks for player to achieve certain ranks along, perhaps like a team build, or a terrain specific build.

I really like this idea, I also think it would be neat if instead of building your own city you could work with others to gain style specific ranks, of course it would depend on what the individual did to help on the build, so I suppose monitoring to see what builders did what would be a good way to figure out who did what. as far as incentive for achieving "mastery" in a style we could add a special perk only the "skill/style masters" could obtain, maybe some thing that could help them in their style. If we can't find a cape plugin it could just be something to a similar affect.We could just do custom particle effects


EDIT:

 

Capes would be amazing

 

I think there should be a separate world that is utterly free-reign - "beginner world" (or something to that effect).
That way all new players, no matter how quality they are, will be able to play freely and choose to stick around.

There's a lot of new players who have come over the last year, see the applications and hoops to jump through just to play creative, and they quickly give up and leave.
Yes it weeds out some of the shitty people but I think it's a contributing factor to why the server has become dormant.
If we allowed new players to have their own world to build in we could retain more players, which in turn will boost our profile and attract more new players.

Some of them will be contempt with this, others will want to rank up and have access to better worlds. At this point, using plot world to gain access to the higher ranked worlds will then become a secondary and voluntary process (heck we could just judge them based on their work in the "beginner world").

Ideally this would cause a higher number of active players without taking away from the quality of any of our currently established worlds.

 

Against the EULA :/

 

Not if people aren't paying for them. The suggestion is using them as a rank marker of sorts in a particular area. No different from the ones in chat.

 

I just realised something that would be negative if we raised the standard of builders.

How are people going to be impressed with my average builds if everyone else is also a good builder?!

 

We had a free reign area for a long time but it got griefed so much that no one wanted to build in it and admins were spending most of their time just cleaning up grief.

 

Suggestion then.

Free reign world with some sort of world guard system where you can claim "plots" of land using votepoints. Limits the amount that people can claim, and helps to boost voting. You can still build there without it, this is just a claiming system.

 

Also, for the love of god don't let this thread stall. Even if it's just to voice your opinion on suggestions, post it. More people means more representation of the community in these changes.

More people, more momentum, more* server.

*As in improved server, but I had a thing going. #MoreServer2k15

 

As I said, if I can return to Creative, I could get some tips from a popular creative server which ranks by builds