What The Loka Community Wants
Recently I've been polling around and asking people what they would like to see on Loka. I did this to not only give myself an idea of what the community wants, but also @Magpieman, @Cryptite, and the community itself a more broad idea of what is needed on Loka right now. When polling everyone, I asked them the following question:
"I'm trying to gauge the community on what they want to see on Loka, so I've got some questions about what you'd like to see on Loka. What general area would you like to see improved, how, and why?"
Using the data I collected, I jotted down each category that a specific person mentioned. I kept the categories relatively broad so it is more clear on which general area to focus on. I tried to keep everything as unbiased as possible when doing this by asking players of all active alliances, but some people gave very little for me to chew on and others didn't respond. Hopefully this still has a good scope on what the community would like to see.
Categories
PvE Content
PvE Technology
Lore
Conquest Improvements
Town Progression
Improved Grinding
Improved Economy
Nomad Features
Aladra Revamp
End Revamp
PvP Server Revamp
Bug Fixes
Server Advertising
Community Events
Staff Improvements
Charts
Recently I've been polling around and asking people what they would like to see on Loka. I did this to not only give myself an idea of what the community wants, but also @Magpieman, @Cryptite, and the community itself a more broad idea of what is needed on Loka right now. When polling everyone, I asked them the following question:
"I'm trying to gauge the community on what they want to see on Loka, so I've got some questions about what you'd like to see on Loka. What general area would you like to see improved, how, and why?"
Using the data I collected, I jotted down each category that a specific person mentioned. I kept the categories relatively broad so it is more clear on which general area to focus on. I tried to keep everything as unbiased as possible when doing this by asking players of all active alliances, but some people gave very little for me to chew on and others didn't respond. Hopefully this still has a good scope on what the community would like to see.
Categories
PvE Content
PvE Technology
Lore
Conquest Improvements
Town Progression
Improved Grinding
Improved Economy
Nomad Features
Aladra Revamp
End Revamp
PvP Server Revamp
Bug Fixes
Server Advertising
Community Events
Staff Improvements
Charts
Analysis
After seeing all this data, getting opinions, and discussing with the people polled I'd really like to thank everyone for what they said and voiced. I'm not going to discuss each idea given individually, but I will give summaries of what was said. If I do discuss a certain idea, that person's response will be kept anonymous.
PvE Content
By far, this was the largest thing that was requested. Many, many people want to see more PvE content on Loka and this should most certainly be the top priority. Major things that were mentioned included biome overhauls, quests, and boss fights. There is so much room to grow and tremendous room for improvement in the regard and as I have heard, the PvE Team is hard at work trying to implement these features. Hats off to anyone involved over there. Anyways, most of the discussion to be had in this category was speeding up the time that the Development Teams are taking to implement new PvE content. There was also another issue that seemed to get thrown around very commonly, which was that there isn't much for people who are bad at PvP to do within conquest. It might seem a bit ridiculous to suggest something PvE related for conquest, however I feel that it could be very possible for something of the like to be a possibility in the future. Quests are also most definitely something that I am very excited to see, along with everyone else polled. PvE doesn't all just have to be quests though, a lot of it is small things like the fishing tournament and features similar to the Resource Isles. Multiple people expressed that there is nothing to do except build and fight in conquest. I really hope to see PvE improve upon this greatly in the future.
PvE Technology
This is something more on the backend of Loka itself, but PvE technology is anything that could be done to further the depth of questmaking and PvE content that can be made on Loka. Some notable ideas included allowing for further CIT use, NPCs, bosses, armor stands, among many other things. This is most certainly an area that can develop and I hopefully will become much more feature-rich as the PvE team does more and more complex things and require more in-depth tools. Giving players the tools to do really cool stuff similar to what we saw in the Nether's Eve questline would be amazing, but quite difficult. I am excited to really see where this new tech does go in the future though.
Lore
Lore is an area that will no doubt develop as the PvE aspect of Loka does. Lore has been something that has only become more and more negelcted as Loka has shifted into conquest, however mostly stems from people doing PvP instead of doing things like writing lore and hosting events. Some ideas that were thrown around to help this were putting lore further out there visibly into the server. Some simple things would be new NPC attire, NPC dialogue, calling features/places by lore names, etc. It's quite a simple thing to do but would really improve quality of life for people who are into that kind of thing. Lore is no doubt something I would like to help lay the path for fixing in the rest of my LCR term and I would like to have discussions about.
Conquest Improvments
The classic "Conquest is broken" attitude is something thrown around quite a lot these days. However, that does not mean conquest isn't broken to an extent. Currently, we have the mega alliance of Wolf Force, The Covenant and then the shattered Regional Powers Coalition. Players from both sides shared their concerns with the system, with multiple people being very strong opinioned about it which I will touch on later. Before that, I would like to discuss the missed potential with conquest at the moment. Currently conquest has two main modes of play: regular conquest and Rivina blitz mode. People expressed that there could be a possible in-between or even more modes in conquest. Some ideas of which could be a mode where no durability damage is taken with 20v20 styles of play. I am uncertain how this might get implemented, but an interesting thing to look at is allowing people to choose when they place on people how they might fight for that particular fight, or randomly choosing people's territories for this feature- similar to bountifuls. As I said earlier, people expressed opinions about conquest itself being broken, which I have to agree with to an extent. Currently, conquest allows for the capitals who not only have the dominant position through being the more powerful force, to also have access to Balak buffs, which only allow them to win more. They also have access to more biome resources for modding materials, and have their capital policies to even further their advantage. This is what multiple people felt was broken about conquest, and I don't know how to fix it or even if it should be fixed. I'll leave that conversation up for another day.
Town Progression
A huge area that needs work is no doubt town progression, especially past level 25. Currently not only do multiple town levels give you deprecated perks, which clearly need to be replaced. Post-level 25 progression is another major issue plaguing towns which I can say is definitely something that there is discussion to be had about. A list needs to be compiled at some point of possible post-level 25 perks that could be considered for implementation. Some of what could be on that list is probably clogged back in the Suggestions forum right now. Something I spoke to multiple town owners about was their lack of things to do in their town, especially when they completed the builds in their town. These poor owners have nothing to do except for sit on a beautiful town and look at it, which I would consider to be another major problem. Town progression is certainly an area that needs tons of work, along with towns themselves, and hopefully discussion is to be had between the LCR team about this.
Improved Grinding
Something put perfectly in these few words: "I don't want to have to get straight F's in school to win on Loka Minecraft." No doubt that this is something difficult to tackle and I am unsure whether or not to consider this an issue in the first place. Many people complained about how Loka is such a grindy server and from what I can infer simply want to spend less time for more reward. I think it simply comes down to many people who love this server, but cannot grind 24/7. It's difficult to fix this other than to up orespawns and shrine drops, but I think there is some amount of work to be done to help this. I find myself at the Resource Isles for up to five hours per run, and it is quite tiresome to even go to one these days, let alone hitting all three. Something that could help to improve this would just be to simply add more ways to make money, which really loops back into PvE itself. I hope to have discussion about how to alleviate this issue and make the server less grindy.
Improved Economy
Loka's economy is no doubt inflated beyond belief which is a major problem that many people expressed conern on. I think the root of the issue was that many people don't have anything to spend their money on. I feel that this is certainly something that needs to be addressed on Loka, as the econcomy is heavily broken. I also think that the issue of grinding above directly leads into the economic problems that the server has as well, with many people spending lots of time to get resources while others aren't able to do so.
Nomad Features
Something that definitely needs to be focused on is how nomads play on Loka. I feel that the nomadic playstyle most definitely needs to be improved upon. This is also something that leads into the camps and new intro. I hope to see that both of these features become fully fleshed out and are used by the nomads of Loka. I want to see the nomadic lifestyle turn into something that people will be able to legitimately play on Loka.
Aladra Revamp
Something that really has a lot of potential for development is the spawn isle of Aladra itslef. Multiple people expressed the belief that there are a lot of different ways that Aladra can be improved, most notably including the gambling machine for spawn. There is also a lot of improvement to be had in the builds of spawn themselves, especially with the new blocks that have been added to Minecraft over the past four years. I hope to see the build team come out hard with what they could do with spawn.
End/Nether/Ocean Revamp
This is something that really falls under the PvE content category, however many feel that there really is a lot of potential in these areas. New features could include a revamped end, with some type of Dreadfort-style building, Ocean dungeons, and more. This could most certainly be something with some great improvement to be had no matter what the PvE team decides to do. Overall I am very excited to see what the development teams are able to do with these areas.
PvP Server Revamp
Something that many people expressed concern on is the potential for the PvP server on Loka. The potential in both new gamemodes, updates to the current ones, and more is endless. Loka could very well become a PvP training server along with the conquest server we all know and love. There is tons of potential in fun gamemodes that could be added to the PvP server.
Bug Fixes
This is really simple. Get those 1400 open reports resolved.
Server Advertising
A lot of people expressed concern with the growth of Loka, and I think it is quite important for Loka to grow. People also expressed concerns with the toxicity of Loka, which adverstising could potentially alleviate. Getting new people on Loka is no doubt something that I would like to see in the future.
Community Events
Something that a lot of people love on Loka are the amazing community events. People spend so much time and effort in making amazing community events and lots of people really wanted to see more of these. Once the technology gets in place for ease of making these events easier to run. I really cannot wait to see what people do with events in the future!
Staff Improvements
This is most definitely a controversial one, however people did complain about the staffing on Loka. I heard concerns about the processes that go into banning, and the overall quality of staff. I fear that this is something for internal server discussion overall, however it is still something to take into account. Loka no-doubt has some of the best staff I've seen in a Minecraft server, however I feel that this concern should still be heard.
Summary
In summary, I feel as though there are lots of different ways that Loka can be improved. There is great potential on Loka for what the server could become in the future and I am very excited. I hope that both the other LCRs and Elders can take this feedback and work to improve Loka. Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey, I had about 36 people respond to me, some staying silent, others expressing their opinions with a lot of passion.