This forum is inactive because no ideas are being added

No. The community has asked for changes for a while, some of them that would improve the quality of the game mode. The lack of these changes occurring has driven the active players again from the day-in-day-out continuous harvest process fight die. The content of the game has become stale.

 

The main reason we haven't added any ideas recently is because we have limited dev time and other servers (i.e War 2.0 and a "secret"[ish] update) are a higher priority.

 

A daylight cycle (quoting someone else) is not that hard to add. Neither is canceling a called horse.

 

But it's also not as important as War 2.0 updates or the secret project.

 

But it’s also been waiting three times as long as War 2.0 or some secret project the community really doesn’t care about?

 

Also at what point does one server become “more important" than another? When said server gets less playercounts than other servers? Who’s fault is that? Not the community who still plays, so why shunt then to the side?

 

When it has more potential to grow and get more players.

People ask us to update old gamemodes which have little to no potential to grow, but they also expect us to be getting 3,000 players at 3am on a Monday. It's impossible to please everybody, but as we want the server to grow, we focus on the gamemodes which have more potential. This is the much better option if you look at how other servers have gone about doing things.

The only reason Hypixel was able to beat Mineplex and McPvP is because Hypixel moved on from their old gamemodes and made new ones. Just look at the obvious facts:

• Most popular Hypixel gamemodes: Skywars (released 2016), Bed Wars (released summer 2017), Murder Mystery (released autumn 2017)
• Most popular Mineplex gamemodes: Arcade (released some time in 2013), Bridges (released late 2012-early 2013) Cake Wars* (released summer 2017)
• Most popular McPvP gamemodes (before it died): HG (released in 2011), CTF (released in 2011)
• Most popular Wynncraft gamemode: Wynncraft, its only gamemode (released in 2011-2012)
• Most popular ArkhamNetwork gamemode: Prison (released 2012)

Every single one of these networks used to be really popular at some point in time, however only one network is large compared to all the others: Hypixel. Notice how Hypixel's most popular gamemodes are the only gamemodes released since 2014 on this list. In fact, if these Hypixel gamemodes were never released, and all the players were still playing Mineplex, it would still be the most popular server right now.

The only anomaly here is Cake Wars, which is currently twice as popular as every other gamemode other than Arcade (which is technically about 15 gamemodes in one, but I'll admit, that gamemode is a classic). That's not too bad for a garbage rip-off from it's more popular counterpart.

In fact, other than Hypixel's gamemodes and Cake Wars, every single gamemode on that list used to get at list 10 times as many players than it does now - in some cases, such as CTF or Arcade, they used to get 100 times as many players. That's one hell of a difference. The only exception to this is Wynncraft - I could go on for hours about how Wynncraft is still somewhat successful but I'll do it briefly. Wynncraft has released a ton of unique new content to it's gamemode, rather than solely focusing on updating the old content. Wynncraft has about 8 times as much content than it did when I first started playing it, and as such, almost every single old community member on Wynncraft is still active to this day, myself included. Wynncraft is about as third as popular as it used to be, but this is because it's been receiving considerably less YouTuber support - large names such as Yogscast used to play Wynncraft and they don't any more, so the large amount of new, short-term players have quit. The fact that they still have a third the amount of players is impressive.

Noticed any trends here? The most popular gamemodes in Minecraft currently are new gamemodes, made by the only financially stable server that is interested in innovating and releasing new gamemodes. Hypixel is not only the most popular server but it's also now releasing a stand-alone video game, gaining the attention of large-scale competitors in the gaming industry. There's a good chance you'll see Hypixel up there with Bethesda or Nintendo or Ubisoft, simply because they're interested in releasing new, innovative games.

You can even look at the gaming industry as a whole and see what they're doing: is Nintendo still stuck in the past, releasing the 17th update to Super Mario 64, or have they released new, innovative ideas and games such as Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey? Then compare it to companies like Bohemia Interactive, the devs behind DayZ, who are still focused in making their older games good instead of making newer, better ones. Bet you haven't heard of "DayZ" in a while, have you?

I'll also touch on Battle Royale briefly: yes, it is a new gamemode and yes, it's made HG's popularity look like Pokemon Go last year, but I wouldn't really call this innovative. First of all, it was based off PUBG and Fortnite, whereas the other popular gamemodes in Minecraft are completely unique. Secondly, it was essentially fpsHG, which the community didn't seem to care about anymore (even though they told us they did). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I don't think this gamemode was designed appropriately. Instead of making the game design scalable to however many players are in the game, the gamemode was designed for over 50 players, which we weren't able to get. Innovative, fresh ideas are important, but you also need these ideas to be pulled off correctly for them to work.


Now then, to apply all this to what Brawl should (and partly, is) doing. Keep in mind I don't fully agree with the direction Brawl is heading and, if I were in charge, I'd be doing things quite a lot differently. We're currently working on 2 things:

1. War 2.0 - Yes, this is a very old gamemode, but we're essentially required to work on War 2.0 because Chap decided to promise it all those years ago. Let's be honest, if we came out and said "Alright guys, we're not gonna bother with War 2.0 anymore" when Putty took over, the community would leave in boatloads and, quite obviously, that would be bad. However, even then, we've tried to revamp the gamemode into something quite different: by completely changing all the guns, completely recoding all the mechanics, and adding more focus to the objectives of each game type so they're not all played as if they were TDM, the gamemode plays quite a lot different than what it used to.
2. That "super secret" project. Lemme talk about this one.

Now, I'm not entirely sure if I'm allowed to tell people what it is yet, so I'll link to a thread where someone else did: https://www.brawl.com/threads/70225/ Jokes aside, I think that considering the developer of the gamemode confirmed a leak instead of removing it immediately, it's a reasonable assumption to make that I'm allowed to say what it is as well. Please don't demote me :'v

Party, in my opinion, has a lot of untapped potential. In a world where every pre-teen's attention span is the length of a John Lewis Christmas advert, gamemodes would be better off being short. And that's evident in every gamemode which still get's more than 1,000 players (Skywars, Bedwars, Murder Mystery) - other than Wynncraft, but again, the community is quite different and the average age of players seems to be 16-18.

Party is the absolute epitome of this - games quite literally last shorter than a dog bouncing on a trampoline, and once it's over, there's a completely new game to catch any 12 year old's attention again. By the time they're repeating the same gamemode, they've played enough fresh content in between to not get bored.

This is exactly why Party is arguably our most popular gamemode right now. It's not because of YouTubers playing it, as YouTubers bring in short-term players (all of whom are now watching Zoella or something). It's because Party absolutely nails appealing to the average player - and I've thought that ever since Minefinity was going to be a thing, 3 years ago, which featured the exact same concept as Party's. The only reason Minefinity isn't a big name right now is because the EULA makes it impossible for new start-ups to stand a chance, and WiKi_KiKi kinda just gave up trying to fix a bug and followed his life-long dream of becoming a truck driver.

Back to Wild West: if we're ever going to touch Wild West again, we should focus on revamping the gamemode and turning it into something innovative and new, rather than introducing riveting new features such as a daylight cycle or combining diamond armour. Sure, the last two ideas will make the gamemode slightly better for the community than it was before, but it also means dev time couldn't be spent making the new big thing.

Oh, I should also mention that this is exactly what we're planning on doing with Wild West, eventually.

Yes, this isn't ideal for the community. I get that, I'm part of it. I quit Wild West because I got bored, and I'd love to see a new update to make the gamemode fresh. However, I think the best way to end this monster of a response is to quote Putty, because he put this exactly right:

This might seem to be quite bad for the community, but it really isn't. Here's what Putty promised when he became owner of Brawl:

We need your patience because we do want to keep the community happy, but we can't do it if our revenue is dwindling and we're unable to grow. We are going to revamp gamemodes if Brawl is able to last long enough for us to do so, but the only way we'll last long enough for us to do so is if the community is patient, let's us try new things even though they might not be interested, so we can grow our playerbase and revenue, hire more devs, and update some of our older gamemodes.

And I'm not lying. Look at some of the stuff we're planning on doing, and have already done, since Putty took over:

• War 2.0 - complete revamp of an old gamemode
• Battle Royale - complete revamp of an old gamemode (fpsHG)
• Party 2.0 - complete revamp of an old gamemode
• WarZ 2.0 - complete revamp of an old gamemode (which seems like it's taking forever to do, but trust me, the map is quite possibly larger than this post)

This might be contrary to everything I've said before in that we should be innovating rather than sticking with old gamemodes, but here's the thing: to try and please our growth and our community, we're trying to do a bit of both. We're trying to innovate by revamping old gamemodes into something new, so we have a chance of making the "next big thing", but also are appealing to old players who want updates. As a result, we're not going to implement changes like a daylight cycle because, even though they would take very little dev time to implement, this dev time wouldn't be going towards the ultimate goal of revamping gamemodes into new things.

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Anyways. I said I was going to end this post about 5 paragraphs ago and I will end this post #soon v). But first, sorry for the long post, but I think it's kinda necessary here because the community (especially the Wild West community) has became more and more pessimistic. Understandable, as transparency on Brawl right now is poor to say the least, but I implore you to understand that Brawl has an unpaid owner, 3 unpaid admins. 3 underpaid developers and about 60 unpaid SMods, Mods, JMods and Build Team members who aren't doing all this for their own personal gain, but because we truly do want Brawl to get better.

Oh god not another paragraph And if this post doesn't work and doesn't clear up at least a fraction of the pessimism going on right now, then I'd at least like this to be known: pessimism is nothing but detrimental to Brawl and, as a result, the people who want our gamemodes to be revived (also known as: you).

*drops mic* I'm now gonna have beer and contemplate my usage of the last 90 minutes writing this post, so yeah. Thanks for reading all this if you did, and shoot me up with a PM on the forums or Discord if you want to chat about it more, cus I'll do anything within reason at this point to make members of the community a little more happy and optimistic about the future of Brawl.

Spoiler

Not too shabby.

 

Props for the essay but TL;DR so I’ll focus on a few key points.

Community Morale -

You can’t aim to please everybody when you focus on WarZ, War, Party, and BR when CTF (No one can read Nom’s code) Wild West, Raid, and KitPvP get little to no attention. Eventually those communities start to feel left out and ignored, their gameplay becomes stale for months while other content is developed. Or a massive change in the game occurs that makes the game unplayable to previously developed playstyles and unappealing to previous players (i.e. Wild West Economy changes back in 2016. Many players took a look at the implemented “fixes” and said, “DEUCES!” And bounced to other servers/communities.

Wild West Community Pessimism -

Work done by staff team has not been seen. Not necessarily saying nothing has been done, but the community feels better about it when some of the changes they want to see or changes that they have been told are coming are not being implemented. It seems like the managers of each game mode are hitting the same brick wall previous managers have run into, and their ideas/requests are being shot down by the anti-idea artillery labeled the Brawl Upper-Staff Team. You would probably get pessimistic too.


Wild West Revamp Planned -

Not even going to delve into this. A Wild West rework that I was demoted for had the entire skeleton of the gamemode coded & implemented into a server in the space of a few weeks. All that was required was a bigger map & more buildings which would have taken another week or two. This same rework was handed to Brawl on a silver platter, refined by randomcitizen1, then, shot dead in its tracks by the upper staff team. Brawl is doing work that doesn’t have to be done by making another rework.