If I did away with voting sites, I wouldn't really need to bribe players to go vote with incentives like flydiscs and ingame money.
However it poses other problems ....
Such as voting points add up, they become a form of currency and evaluation of a players loyalty to the server, which is a good measure for rewards. Such as higher ranks and perks.
Without a voting points system from votes, what else is there that can be automated? (ie voting 20 times, the /rankup) thats nicely automated where it doesn't require any staff+ involvement in checking and setting a new rank for player who takes the time out to go vote.
I can't stand voting sites anymore personaly, they don't really attract new players to the server, its really just a loyalty rewarding program where voting websites and servers that are geared towards vote bribery benefit the most.
You need lots of voters per month for your server listing to be within the first couple of server rank pages to even have a chance of being seen by potential new players who might join.
Kraftzone at its highest in popularity was only ever on the 3rd page of Planetminecraft top servers (and as a cracked server that is an achievement) Kraftzone was never allowed to be a featured server because it allowed cracked players, it would have most definitely been higher otherwise.
On minestatus kraftzone's highest page rank was only 6th page, how many players you think check past the 6th page for a new server to try out? not many i'd imagine.
To me server listing sites aren't that much of a benefit to kraftzone, in the coming months I will be looking at otherways to move away from voting sites (surprising that I just made the vote reminder plugin to try motivate players to vote more but its a fruitless effort overall) as voting has been dropping by ~200 votes every month for for past couple of months.
So I would like to find other ways of rewarding players loyalty and using other ways of bringing in new players....
...Such as points for advertising kraftzone via youtube videos, posts on other gamings forums etc, using kraftzone image banners in your signature on other sites, referrals from other people you have invited etc.. these all require setting up and automating in a system that can completely replace a voting point, and is dynamic enough to provide ways for all players to gain points. So its not easy to make the switch from using voting sites.
In the meantime ./flight is available to members as the plugin that handles flydiscs is somewhat broken.
And the guns plugin was only put on the server to be used within the new survival games plugin, however I've just learned today that the plugin that was the best replacement for the old survivalgames plugin has been abandoned:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/survival-games-guns/ or the developer has been paid off to make it exclusive to some other server, which is another common thing happening now to plugins being put on bukkit.
Will have to see if its possible to have gun shop, but otherwise they are only being given out to donators and some regular players with high votes.
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