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Dear DiversitySMP staff and players, Recently, with the current state of the server and the issues we face while playing, I, along with some others, have been brainstorming some ways that this could possibly be fixed. We all found Diversity and decided to play for similar reasons. A friendly, community based server that doesn’t reset? Sounds amazing. However, it’s been over 7 years since the server started. As time has gone on, Div has changed a lot from what it used to be. The fact that everybody is already established and the common goal of “beating minecraft” is gone, it’s extremely hard to feel as though there is any sort of community on the server. I know for a fact many newer players feel discouraged to play on SMP because of this. Afterall, it’s hard to play on a server where many have spent years gathering what they have and you’re just barely starting out. This is why I think it would be a really good idea to start possibly considering a reset of the SMP world. As someone who has played since 2015 and has made a lot of progress on the server over the past 6 years, I know it’s gonna be hard for many older players to be comfortable with the idea of resetting, but it genuinely needs to happen eventually. This idea has been brought up multiple times and each time it’s been shut down because of the fact that Diversity prides itself on being a server that doesn’t reset, and quite frankly, they fear that many players would leave if it were to reset. That’s understandable, DiversitySMP’s player count has definitely gone down over the years, but that’s because hardly any of the new players that join are actually staying. Which, once again, is because of the major divide between new and old players, and the lack of a common goal. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As much as many of us don’t want to admit it, there are multiple ways in which resetting the server would actually do a lot more good than harm. The server costs would decrease massively. The current cost of the server is approximately $300 a month, which Div used to be able to handle before the donations slowly started to diminish. Currently, the cost of the server is basically being covered by Zore alone, which has to be pretty hard. The lag would also decrease massively. Having less chunks that are loaded/explored will help the performance of the server drastically. This kinda also raises the question of the world border and whether or not it’s too big. Honestly, everybody I have spoken to has agreed that the world border is a bit big and could easily be lowered to 100k. That way there aren’t as many chunks being loaded at once and the lag really wouldn’t be that bad. The server would actually be able to update to 1.17. The massive changes to the generation of chunks that come with 1.17 is going to quite literally break the server. As excited as everyone is to update, there’s no way that SMP could handle it without a complete reset. With that being said, while resetting the server right away would be nice, there’s no actual reason to do it until we plan on updating to 1.17. I think that giving players a heads-up a few months before resetting would be a really good idea. Lastly, what do we do with everyone’s hard work? Does it just disappear? Absolutely not! Nobody should have to lose all of their hard work. This is why DiversitySMP should let people get copies of their work in its current state before the reset, that way everyone still has access to it and can continue their projects. In conclusion, I would really appreciate it if the DiversitySMP staff would consider this request, even if it’s not approved, it would still be nice to get your feedback. Any players who have any ideas or input, please feel free to respond to this post. I’d love to hear everyone’s opinions.

Some great points on the benefits of resetting the world. Personally, I have played on many servers that felt like they had a strong sense of community with smaller map-sizes within walking distance of other players, and community-built towns and projects, but they all seem to go through a peak where they are popular with lots of new people joining and playing, then over time only a few regulars remain before eventually dying off completely. One of the issues seems to be when people of similar age (in elementary or high school, with lots of free time to play Minecraft) begin to grow up, graduate, get full times jobs or start pursuing post-secondary education. There just isn’t enough free time for playing Minecraft at that stage in life and I fear that as most of our regular players are reaching this point, the server may die off regardless of whether we reset the map for new players or not. The current difficulty rating of the server may also be an issue. Most new players seem to play for a bit then are discouraged as soon as night hits with the swarms of mobs, particularly the zombie gangs. I tried to get my young niece to play (She was 11 when I got her to join the server) and she immediately no longer wanted to play after night hit, and she died (I offered to help her get established but she wasn’t really interested and went back to her Skyblock server lol). Everyone has a play-style that they prefer and since we have multiple server worlds, they may be coming to play Creative or Skyblock, then see it is level restricted with a requirement to play SMP first, and then leave. Another issue I have seen is that the word “Diversity” is highly associated with the Complete the Monument (CTM) adventure map in Minecraft. While it is sometimes funny that a lot of new players ask, “Where’s the parkour?”, or “How do I get to the puzzle map?”, it really hurts to see players join and leave so quickly as they came with the sole goal of playing the CTM. I wonder if we should also consider a name-change so people searching online don’t associate our server with the CTM, or perhaps add another word so that we are unique from the map: “<Blank> Diversity” or “Diversity <Blank>”. That way we could keep our current logo without too many changes and still have the original roots and ideologies of the server. This also brings up another issue of getting the server’s name out there. Voting is one of the only ways I know of for advertising since most servers have rules about not advertising other servers and none of us have large social media followings such as YouTube or Twitch to reach a larger audience of new players. I try to make sure to vote once every day to get the server higher up on the lists but my measly 20-25 votes a month cannot compete with the hundreds of votes very popular servers get. It also certainly is not fair to Zore to be paying for the upkeep of the server from his own pocket though I, and I’m sure many of us, greatly appreciate and cannot thank Zore enough for keeping the server up when he could have just dropped us all in order to pocket that money or spend it on other things (Thank you so much, Zore! We all love you and appreciate all the hard work you have done to keep the server up for us to have somewhere safe and friendly to spend our free time and escape from reality for a while, especially during the pandemic). The current map world in its entirety is too large to be downloaded for individuals to use, though I do agree with the number of large world generation changes being made in the next update, this would be a great time to start a fresh world as much as it would pain me and many of our other long time players. I would certainly be open to the idea of resetting if there’s a way to get a copy of my build to use in single player. I am very slow creatively and enjoy taking my time with building. The fact that we haven’t reset has allowed me to slowly build something much larger than I normally would have without being un-motivated by an imminent world reset. I hope we are able to come up with some solutions in the future, and hope to continue to play with you all for many years to come! Thanks for reading my thoughts.

1) What's your current in-game name? Tyler420 2) What do you think you were banned for? If you are unsure, our rules can be found at diversitymc.net/rules I was permabanned for being at Livid_Wizard’s town in vanilla and not leaving right away when he asked me to. The exact ban message from Austin is “You have been banned from this server for ‘Fucking with me on purpose. trespassing’”. 3) Why should you be unbanned? I believe that I should be unbanned because I was not trying to be malicious or cause any actual problems. I was visiting Livid_Wizard’s town in vanilla with other people because we thought it would be funny to surprise him. I admit, we should have left when he first asked, but I was having a hard time looking for an exit. At some point, Livid was trying to help me, but I lost him, and that’s around the time that Austin came in. Austin said that if I didn’t leave, I would be kicked or banned and I was unaware that the situation had escalated to the point that it did, as I was still looking for an exit during this conversation. I jokingly said “ban me” in chat, which I assume Austin took as me doubting his authority, so he actually did. I was expecting the situation to deescalate shortly, which is why I made the joke, but I understand the confusion. With that being said, I do not agree with a permanent ban in this situation. Had I just been teleported out, or directed to the portal, I would have been able to leave Livid’s area and stop “trespassing”. It was genuinely not my intention to cause such turmoil and I am sorry to those who have to be subjected to this. If you have already appealed and been denied in the past, you must wait 6 months before you can appeal again.