Here a quick statistic about server votes:
In the last 12 months, we got 783 referrals from minecraft-server-list.com where we used to have a very prominent 2nd place in the “whitelisted” category.That is 65 per month, 16 per week. In the last 2 weeks however, we got only 7. That’s one quarter of what we were used to. Why? There are more and more larger servers pushing into this space, and we are now ranked 5.
We currently have in average 40 unique players per day. If everyone of them voted, we could have had 440 votes on that list, which would rank us #3.
So one thought to fix it is to give higher incentives to vote a specific server list where we think that the impact is highest. We could introduce to not being able to do certain things on the server if you have not voted for that one list in the last 48 hours, for example usage of the deposit, shop or other things. Being able to be ranked up for example.
I am not 100% certain about this, but it’s a very tempting proposition.
Opinions?
Seems like something that could go wrong. What if a site is offline or their vote page is just plain broken? Would this mandatory vote only matter on the minecraft-server-list.com?
Instead of (or along with) such restrictions, there could be:
A raffle for those who vote the most. Say, a free (or heavily discounted) deposit box or home – or even a pot of uncs made by all those votes.
That would make everybody vote a heck of a lot more.
Yeah it would only apply to one of the voting lists.
Sure, if something broke we would have to switch it off. IT would likely have to work on an average over a longer time.
What I am doing right now is making a per-user stats on how often they voted compared to on how many days they logged in during the last 30 days. Then we get a better picture.
Expanding on alley’s idea – a monthly raffle with entry requirement of x votes over the month? So you don’t have to compete with the people who can vote every day, and gives recognition for a solid minimum contribution to voting. Still not sure about Uncs being a sure-fire motivator though.
I’m game for the idea, however sometimes my IP gets blacklisted for some time for being on a university system. The only other thing I can think of is the incentive types, forcing people to vote for certain “abilities” I think is breaking some of the rules on some server lists. I just don’t want that to hurt our visibility.
Who ever gets the longest continual voting streak gets 50,000 uncs..
good idea :)
What we could do is incremental voting rewards with a ceiling. So for every day you are online and vote, you get +x% rewards. For every day that you are not online and still vote, you get even more.
Perhaps reduce the number of valid voting sites – take off a couple that produce little traffic. The high number can make it feel like votes matter less.
While Uncs are a good incentive and there are new non-market ways to spend them, the value of a currency is tied to the purchasing power it gives, and every now and then the market is pretty bare. I don’t have any great ideas but I would suggest making it not Uncs based, and its benefit being in value added gameplay. A lot of established players and voters will not be significantly motivated by currency or anything already tied to it (homes, deposit slots).
Thats quite a good suggestion actually. I will see the 2-3 largest contributors and will limit it to those.
Something else that I will start working on will be mc-like achievements where people get rewards for doing something for the first time, such as voting. Like this we can introduce new users to server features and voting as well.
The second half of my comment makes no sense. I meant any extra rewards, like a weekly or monthly prize or cumulative benefit, on top of voting Uncs, should be a gameplay based buff.
I’m a fan of K.I.S.S. That being said, would moving that server to the top of the list of links make a difference? I do not know the stats behind how many people are voting for each one, but if it is weighted to the first few then that may help with that single instance.
On another note, Planet Minecraft does not accept a username to get the normal incentives and therefore I, personally, have not voted on that site in over a year. Unless it is driving users to the server then I would remove that one as an option.
From my numbers here we can get hundreds of people per month at least come to our site and take a look at it if we are on the top of this list. We used to be on top 2-3 years ago already and it was a major fall-off when we went to number 2.
Hi all, here’s a couple of comments on the post and the various comments about (12 of them as I write):
– I’m all in for a higher incentive to vote regularly and on the most interesting server (although Alley has pointed out that this needs to be watched.. but I guess we’re all here to ring the bell if something goes wrong).
– There are proposals to give more stuff/things, others to quit (most on Unc’s part ;p), I think the most acceptable way would be to have a mix of both that would kind of equilibrate. Since passing from 6 voting site to 3 would cut the daily voting loot in 2, there should be a compensatory incentive for regularity (instead of quitting more rights/functions to the irregulars). I’m talking here about general user acceptability, as for myself I wouldn’t care too much, when I’m active I vote, and when I’m not active I don’t care about not being able to do this or that.
– I agree with Chenoa’s idea to link the incentive to a mid-term horizon (one month) and a high but not elitist objective (for example, 20 votes per months, or 60 if you want to cumulate on the 3 sites). I can see why Riedi liked the idea of 50kuncs for the top voter but I really don’t think that this kind of “winner takes it all” thing is what we want ;o). We want everyone to be motivated to do something that seems achievable and will be useful.
– The incrementing vote reward is another good idea, but you may also want to applying a progressive cool-down, so that all the benefit is not lost on the first streak breaker.