2018 Fundraiser Feedback

[defiex]

This year's fundraiser has come to a close, and we'd like to hear your feedback on it. What did you like? What did you not like? How was this compared to CTF and/or last year's Zombie/Carnival event? How can we improve things for next year? (You don't have to just answer these questions, you can give any feedback you want.)

Thank you in advance for all of your feedback, and thanks for a great fundraiser!

[fazaden]

As a guy who's not much into pvp, this was probably the first fundraiser ever where i did the main event, instead of just hanging out in the minigames zone the whole time. This style of event is awesome, and easily adaptable to other themes (like a space settlement, etc). The "go out into the wilderness to find _____" can easily substitute dungeons for mazes, obstacle courses, or other player-made builds.

The good:

1. You had a choice in how deadly the monsters were, based on where you camped out.

2. Working together to unlock new abilities (Haste, Regen,extra health) really scratched my Cookie Clicker itch.

3. There was pretty much always at least one admin on to upgrade buildings when they were completed.

4. There was incentive to mine out all ores, not just gold. (I got like 80+ nerdcoins from redstone alone)

 

The not-so-good:

1. Branch mining was pretty much the only option, actual cave systems were rare. (This might not be a bad thing for most people, but I'm a lazy caver through and through)

2. It took quite a long time to unlock the first few buildings, but this was mostly fixed when they adjusted the exchange rate for gold-to-nerdcoin.

 

 

Overall, I had a lot of fun, and would love to do an event like this in the future!
 

 

[Trooprm32]

The concept for this fundraiser was by far, for me, the most fun I've had during a fundraiser since I started on this server... I stayed on 'til the very end.

I'd like to see a "rebuild X" event or concept come to PvE some rev, in a similar fashion to the "Collect them all" event from a few revs ago, but is more collective as a server to work together to "build or repair" something, may it be spawn or something else.

[buzzie71]

It was a lot of fun restoring the town and running Jojamart out of it!

I enjoyed the community oriented premise of this fundraiser - the restoration mechanic is fun and presents a clearer community-oriented objective to fulfill.  The rewards (the ones I was aware of at least) felt like they were worth the effort - they gave a noticeable leg up in mob combat and made traversing the map easier to do.  The map fit the theme while showing off some interesting terrain.  The custom mobs gave a refreshing spin on mob combat (props on the Enderman work for mixing flushing-from-cover with attack power in particular) and the effort of coming up with combat strategies was reminiscent of the old days of trying to play Minecraft for the first time.  The dungeons (at least the ones I visited and not including the one I had submitted) were varied in gameplay as well as presentation.  I enjoyed the diversity of the dungeons and thought they were fun (though admittedly I got help in figuring some of them out).

The main thing I didn't like is that the mobs closest to the town still hit pretty hard.  While it was fun to deal with custom mobs with little equipment and have to resort to non-weapon countermeasures, I felt encounters with them were a bit on the punishing side for the easiest mobs (eg. dying in a few hits or fewer, baby zombies that run as fast as the player can sprint).  Keeping inventory on death felt at times essential to not having a hard time - while it was a useful reward to obtain, it felt a bit like a crutch.

Iron also felt difficult to acquire underground - not sure if I was just unlucky, but I've been having more luck on the current Chaos map finding iron ore than on the fundraiser map.

I also felt that the fundraiser gameplay was a bit too big in scope for the few days that it was up, given the speed at which buildings were restored (I felt that with the energy during the event, more could have been accomplished with a few extra days) and the variety and number of dungeons available.  Similar events could perhaps stand to run for longer, though as a fundraiser event, extending its duration past one weekend might be a harder case to make.  If there is ever a need for an interim event when all the servers are down but the plugins are updated enough to run this, this kind of map might be a good one.

Overall it was a great fundraiser premise, and I had fun with it.  At least the general store wasn't closed on Wednesdays :D

(I'm still fond of PvP and CTF, but given the community focused gameplay I think it makes sense that there was no PvP involved in this map.)