How to get more players

The surge was mostly because of something new to Brawl. The average Brawl player went on, used their compass and saw a new gamemode, and decided to check it out. The reason why the player count is slowly decreasing (and will continue to decrease) is because it is not noob-friendly, due to a mixture of a few things:

• Ambiguity Towards Gameplay Features

What's a feast? What does one of the 116 kits do? Why did I just get teleported into a room made of ender portals that I couldn't escape? If someone's new, they won't know the answers to these.

HG right now is too hard to understand - explaining the feast more like saying "Come to the feast for game-changing goods!" when it is first broadcasted would help a lot. Removing some of the useless and less-used kits, for example Acrobat, would help too. Traps that are too complicated such as the one I mentioned should be fixed, as getting stuck in an unescapable trap is no fun.

• Long Wait Times

Of course new players aren't going to do well on their first go, and so it should be. However, if the new player can just hop straight back into a game and wait under a minute to play again, they're more likely to play again. Each time, they'll get better and better with practise and eventually they'll have hundreds of wins.

This is not the case, currently. New players can't just hop back on into a new game when they die, which was something that was awesome about HG back in 2012. Now, new players need to wait sometimes 10 minutes or more in order to play a new game, which is not appealing to someone who just died to something they don't understand in it.

• Lack of People to Help

Mineplex has Trainees, and Hypixel have Helpers - these are the people who I asked questions to when I first played these servers. Brawl had JMods, but not as many as we need. JMod has hardly any room to abuse, so Brawl can spare to have more. If Brawl treat JMod as a Helper rank (which to be honest, it is but isn't thought of as), it'd mean a lot more new players would have someone to ask questions too.

In fact, a Helper-like system could be implemented so that everyone could help (if there weren't trolls, but there are ways around this). If a staff member sees a player helping people a lot or just generally acting mature, they could give the player a Helper rank. This rank wouldn't necessarily be a member of staff - they'd have just 1 permission more than the average player, the ability to read (and answer) questions that could be asked via /help.

If a player is new, a message saying that they can do /help then put a question would be broadcasted every 20 seconds or so. When it is used, a Helper can read what they say and help their question, no matter where they'd be on the server. Then, the answer would be sent back to the new player. If the player's offline when a Helper answers their question, it'd be posted when they log back in.

It'd hardly be able to be abused, and if it is then there's hardly any harm done.

In CTF, CTF teams introduce a competitive environment that brings the community a lot closer, and create some awesome matches that are fun to play in and fun to watch. In HG, HG teams would do the same (and did, in the short time it was around on McPvP). It could be free to host as long as CTF gets a team server - HG matches could always be hosted there. It can easily be organised by the community, and CTF matches are (they only need 1 staff member, and honestly they could add a referee rank to CTF quite easily). It'd take very little moderation and not a lot of effort from staff members, so they can focus on other projects.

Also, they're very popular. On a poll I had on the forums, at one point 18 people voted that they'd like to see it return, but no-one voted that they'd not like to see it return.

One of the biggest ways popular YouTubers find out about servers to record on is by one of their friends, presumably another YouTuber, telling them. Advertising it to smaller YouTubers who are more likely to play it would mean that slightly bigger YouTubers, or even really big YouTubers would see it. Providing HG is changed to make it entertaining for new players and entertaining for people watching new players, bigger YouTubers would see it until ASFJerome and BajanCanadian are playing a HG on Brawl every day.

However, spamming the IP is definitely a bad thing. When you're playing a server and someone posts "Join averycrappyserver.com for HG, CTF and more!!", what do you think of the server immediately? Not that its good, and mostly that its a server you're not going to enjoy. Its a good way to give Brawl a bad reputation, not a good way to give Brawl more YouTuber attention.

Honestly, its advertised enough. Its available on the compass and is seen as soon as you log on. However, this is only in Brawl. I think advertising it elsewhere would be a good idea too, which is something Brawl already does but could do better.

I personally don't find tokens very useful, and they're the kind of thing I throw away in the jackpot in Slack against @Nytron. Giving a better reward would mean more people would vote, which'd definitely help Brawl.

 

They actually need to revert the changes. HG was in a perfect in all the ways McPvP tried to change.