- Joined
- Nov 19, 2018
- Posts
- 3,043
- Ratings
Hello! Some of you may know me as I used to be a member of staff for quite some time. I joined the network in 2018 and became hooked on Olympus and Creative immediately. During my time on ManaCube, I fell in love with the forums and often spent most of my time when I was on the staff team helping with appeals and support tickets, as well as replying to and getting involved with posts all across the site as I thought it was a great way to bond with players and meet new people from other gamemodes. As an avid forums user, I have noticed a decline in the utility and activity of the forums amongst the community. I am saddened by this as I understand not everyone who plays on the server has access to Discord for numerous reasons, all of which are understandable.
That being said, I would like to suggest some possible incentives and ideas that could possibly be considered to improve the experience - and I’d like to urge any other members of the community to suggest any ideas they may have, or give feedback on the ones I have suggested! I would also like to preface this by saying I wholeheartedly understand that the staff and development team have been working on ways to get more use out of the forums for the players (i.e; giveaways, creations, events, /cow, etc.) these are just some additional ways I think could (hopefully) help liven up the forums:
~ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ ~
Forum Status / Tag Colour
• Currently, the colour of your name on the forums is determined by your donator rank or Patron status. In-Game and on Discord, if you have Patron+ you can customise the colour of your role/prefix, so I think it would be cool to add that option to the forums also.
• Alternatively, similar to the "Active" "Well-Known" and "Popular" roles in the discord server, there could be coloured tags determined by your forum status (for example, mine is "Forum God" based on the number of posts I have, and there are several others such as "Forum Master" "Forum Legend", etc).
Trophy Points
• There are currently 10 trophies you can unlock on your profile (Max 118 points), it could be fun to add more "achievements" such as reaching 1k likes, 2k posts, etc. This alone may not encourage people to use the forums more, but if there were more uses for the points or there was more of a point to them other than just achievement hunting it could make the points a bit less... pointless.
• OFFICIAL: Sync your Minecraft account to the forums
• CHECK ME OUT: Have someone follow you
• LENDING A HELPING HAND: Make a support ticket
• WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?: Post a status update
(rough ideas for extra achievements)
Stats Page
• The "stats" page has been under development for a little while and still isn't entirely accurate. I understand this is not a primary concern for the development team to work on and that game-breaking/affecting bugs take precedence 100% of the time, so my solution would be to change it from a stats page to an updated Patron/Patron+ list OR it could be changed to a list of Champions based on Season and Server (similar to the new Museum, but you can navigate it through the website instead).
In-Game Alerts
• Thanks to Discord bots and some extremely smart players, there are ways to connect the in-game events such as LPS, Minesweeper and Manaponds to give alerts when they are about to start. I think it would be nice to have this option made available to players through the forums also as you can select whether or not you wish to receive email notifications from the forums when you sign up, and you can toggle what you want to receive notifications for. It could be displayed similarly to the "Server Reset Countdown" tab which is occasionally added to the home page (at the time of writing this it's Earth Season 3). But additionally, it could be nice to include King Benny alerts to this, as well as possibly an individual reminder for the daily cashcow rewards in the event players are trying to maintain a streak with claiming the rewards, or even just so they know when the countdown is over and they are able to claim rewards.
• Leading off of this point also, another idea would be to add /cow streaks to players' forum profiles as it may encourage healthy competition for players to log on every day to claim their rewards. Possibly at the end of every month, the player(s) with the highest count could receive cubits or a mention in the monthly update post (similar to how it used to work with voting where the players who voted the most per month were given recognition for their support).
Events
• I know firsthand that the Events team work extremely hard creating, updating and hosting events for the community to enjoy so I know it can be quite exhausting and takes a lot of time and effort between each event to set up new ideas. I personally think the implementation of the "Karaoke" event on Discord is a great way to allow the team extra time to work on the in-game events as well as still host a fun contest for the playerbase. That being said, I think there could be plenty of ways to utilise the forums for events.
• Occasionally on Valentine's Day there is an event called "Love Letters" where players used to write letters to Dacon to propose in-game marriage to him and the winner got to marry him on the events server (Purpz can correct me if I'm wrong with that hahaha). Similarly to that, I think it could be fun to have other forum events such as seasonal creative writing events (horror stories, puns and jokes, poems, favourite manacube/event memory, etc). Winners could also receive tags in-game, something similar to the "Featured" tag, but possibly with "Creative" or something along those lines.
Exclusive Patron Sub-Forum
• ELITE-ranked players have their own sub-forum where they can discuss all the ELITE-Y things that they do and vote for the monthly ELITE title (Spilling all the secrets, mwhaha). I think it would be nice to have something similar for Patrons as we have one in the community discord so it could be used as a way for Patrons to receive exclusive updates or information on potential BETA testing (where possible as I know not every BETA release is exclusive to Patron/ELITE players and 99% are just tested by staff, especially in the early days of the testing).
• Alternatively, it could be used for Patrons to receive priority support for issues with purchases or issues in-game. I'd take this suggestion with a grain of salt as I understand it could come across as "pay to win" and would potentially come across as though the more money you spend on the server the more important your issue is to a player who maybe hasn't spent money, which is absolutely not the case (Ping does an amazing job with tickets!).
Player Influence
• I think it would be nice to have the community's voice have more impact when it comes to selecting the monthly "Creation" winner(s). Rather than having just staff vote based on the entries, I think it could be worthwhile having players vote for their favourites since it directly impacts them. But that being said, I can understand the concern of bias and it being harder to maintain the polls every month.
~ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ ~
Thank you for having a read through my suggestions! I'm curious to see what other people think of them and if anyone has any extras. I have played devil's advocate for every one of the ideas I've submitted here and I know some of them do have more downsides than upsides, but I figured if I posted them here it may encourage others to suggest ways they could be expanded on.
That being said, I would like to suggest some possible incentives and ideas that could possibly be considered to improve the experience - and I’d like to urge any other members of the community to suggest any ideas they may have, or give feedback on the ones I have suggested! I would also like to preface this by saying I wholeheartedly understand that the staff and development team have been working on ways to get more use out of the forums for the players (i.e; giveaways, creations, events, /cow, etc.) these are just some additional ways I think could (hopefully) help liven up the forums:
~ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ ~
Forum Status / Tag Colour
• Currently, the colour of your name on the forums is determined by your donator rank or Patron status. In-Game and on Discord, if you have Patron+ you can customise the colour of your role/prefix, so I think it would be cool to add that option to the forums also.
• Alternatively, similar to the "Active" "Well-Known" and "Popular" roles in the discord server, there could be coloured tags determined by your forum status (for example, mine is "Forum God" based on the number of posts I have, and there are several others such as "Forum Master" "Forum Legend", etc).
Trophy Points
• There are currently 10 trophies you can unlock on your profile (Max 118 points), it could be fun to add more "achievements" such as reaching 1k likes, 2k posts, etc. This alone may not encourage people to use the forums more, but if there were more uses for the points or there was more of a point to them other than just achievement hunting it could make the points a bit less... pointless.
• OFFICIAL: Sync your Minecraft account to the forums
• CHECK ME OUT: Have someone follow you
• LENDING A HELPING HAND: Make a support ticket
• WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?: Post a status update
(rough ideas for extra achievements)
Stats Page
• The "stats" page has been under development for a little while and still isn't entirely accurate. I understand this is not a primary concern for the development team to work on and that game-breaking/affecting bugs take precedence 100% of the time, so my solution would be to change it from a stats page to an updated Patron/Patron+ list OR it could be changed to a list of Champions based on Season and Server (similar to the new Museum, but you can navigate it through the website instead).
In-Game Alerts
• Thanks to Discord bots and some extremely smart players, there are ways to connect the in-game events such as LPS, Minesweeper and Manaponds to give alerts when they are about to start. I think it would be nice to have this option made available to players through the forums also as you can select whether or not you wish to receive email notifications from the forums when you sign up, and you can toggle what you want to receive notifications for. It could be displayed similarly to the "Server Reset Countdown" tab which is occasionally added to the home page (at the time of writing this it's Earth Season 3). But additionally, it could be nice to include King Benny alerts to this, as well as possibly an individual reminder for the daily cashcow rewards in the event players are trying to maintain a streak with claiming the rewards, or even just so they know when the countdown is over and they are able to claim rewards.
• Leading off of this point also, another idea would be to add /cow streaks to players' forum profiles as it may encourage healthy competition for players to log on every day to claim their rewards. Possibly at the end of every month, the player(s) with the highest count could receive cubits or a mention in the monthly update post (similar to how it used to work with voting where the players who voted the most per month were given recognition for their support).
Events
• I know firsthand that the Events team work extremely hard creating, updating and hosting events for the community to enjoy so I know it can be quite exhausting and takes a lot of time and effort between each event to set up new ideas. I personally think the implementation of the "Karaoke" event on Discord is a great way to allow the team extra time to work on the in-game events as well as still host a fun contest for the playerbase. That being said, I think there could be plenty of ways to utilise the forums for events.
• Occasionally on Valentine's Day there is an event called "Love Letters" where players used to write letters to Dacon to propose in-game marriage to him and the winner got to marry him on the events server (Purpz can correct me if I'm wrong with that hahaha). Similarly to that, I think it could be fun to have other forum events such as seasonal creative writing events (horror stories, puns and jokes, poems, favourite manacube/event memory, etc). Winners could also receive tags in-game, something similar to the "Featured" tag, but possibly with "Creative" or something along those lines.
Exclusive Patron Sub-Forum
• ELITE-ranked players have their own sub-forum where they can discuss all the ELITE-Y things that they do and vote for the monthly ELITE title (Spilling all the secrets, mwhaha). I think it would be nice to have something similar for Patrons as we have one in the community discord so it could be used as a way for Patrons to receive exclusive updates or information on potential BETA testing (where possible as I know not every BETA release is exclusive to Patron/ELITE players and 99% are just tested by staff, especially in the early days of the testing).
• Alternatively, it could be used for Patrons to receive priority support for issues with purchases or issues in-game. I'd take this suggestion with a grain of salt as I understand it could come across as "pay to win" and would potentially come across as though the more money you spend on the server the more important your issue is to a player who maybe hasn't spent money, which is absolutely not the case (Ping does an amazing job with tickets!).
Player Influence
• I think it would be nice to have the community's voice have more impact when it comes to selecting the monthly "Creation" winner(s). Rather than having just staff vote based on the entries, I think it could be worthwhile having players vote for their favourites since it directly impacts them. But that being said, I can understand the concern of bias and it being harder to maintain the polls every month.
~ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ ~
Thank you for having a read through my suggestions! I'm curious to see what other people think of them and if anyone has any extras. I have played devil's advocate for every one of the ideas I've submitted here and I know some of them do have more downsides than upsides, but I figured if I posted them here it may encourage others to suggest ways they could be expanded on.
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