The Archives
Suggestion
Hello, I would like to preface this suggestion with a very simple explanation behind the intent.
Recently, there has been a lot of players complaining about the lack of world availability and missing their old builds. I fully understand not wanting to use the servers to host these worlds as they cost a significant amount in upkeep. This being said, I have formulated an idea that may help bring players nostalgia without making the worlds publicly downloadable nor hosting several servers that have no players for 90% of the day. I understand that there is a good chance that this will be denied either way, but would like to put the idea out there at the very least.
The idea, I've dubbed The Archives.
How would this work?
- Players join the hub, with a new icon labeled the Archives
- Players can click the icon, and it pulls up a list of classic servers, with a little blurb about them (IE: "SMP1 [2016-2020]", "SMP3 [2016-2018]", "Factions 2k18 [2018]")
- The server then checks if the requested archive is active or in a queue, if not, it adds it to the queue, and sets it so the player will autojoin when the server is up
These Archive servers would be run on an individual server, and would be zipped outside of the times they are running. To save on file size, only the world file will be on the server, removing any vulnerabilities and incompatibilities that older servers might have with the newest version.
These Archive servers would put players into Spectator mode, preventing editing the world, but allowing the players to revisit their nostalgia. Additionally, this would give extra metrics on which servers people would like to see most. For servers that have multiple worlds (IE: Mob Wars), the resource world would not be available, and each individual world would be separately selectable.
These servers could be set to autoshutdown if certain conditions are met:
- No players are online (after x mins graceperiod for join delay)
- Some period of time has passed (Arbitrarily, 1 hour) since the server was loaded
Some Advantages:
+ Reduced server load - Yes, it takes a server, but 1 server is better than having 3 unused servers. Plus, this server could be used for other things as well, as it isn't a specifically dedicated server.
+ Additional Metrics - A lot of players don't pay attention to the forums or the discord. This would bring in an additional metric, such as which past servers have the most traffic.
+ Nostalgia - Many of the players consistently ask about or wish to revisit some of the long dead servers. This could revive some degree of traffic from older players coming back to play. With the queue, they may join other servers while waiting for their requested server.
Downsides:
- Still Takes a Server - While it may not have to necessarily be a fully dedicated server, this would still require at very least a server to run on
- Storage - While zipped files can reduce size when not being used, unzipping may take too long, or lag too much. Either way, a lot of the worlds can have fairly large file size.
Thanks for hearing me out!
