I am a former server owner [host] and administrator. The reason I no longer host a server is because managing a server can be time consuming and irritating, and I really would rather play for fun. Although dealing with a lot of members may get annoying sometimes, I always tried to be fair. Here are my first impressions of your server and some suggestions as to how to possibly improve what you've got going for you. I thought I would write this to do you a favor and give anyone who may be interested a little feedback. I just registered to become a member about an hour ago, and the following are my initial impressions of your server.
Although I understand having a great deal of members is preferable to some hosts for a multitude of reasons, as an average player just looking for a nicely put together server to call home - I was bombarded by my chat window scrolling at one hundred lines per minute when I logged in. Thankfully I had the /deafen command, I think the server might look a lot better if you configured a simple chat-channel plugin. Also, this relieves some of the stress from your seemingly 'overworked' moderators, having a mod designated for a particular channel rather than a hundred players shouting [and needfully repeating their requests] over one another, and mods trying to reply to who they can.
After registration / reading the rules I went to East Town, where I found a great deal of grief scattered about. I walked outside the town for about five minutes in one direction, but did not reach beyond the area which the terrain was destroyed by grief. I decided East Town was not for me. The same thing happened in West Town, except I tried to go even further beyond the reach of town and still failed to find undamaged terrain.
I now regret voting for your server [on four sites] in advance. It took me ten minutes of privately messaging moderators to get any reply [which was just a hello, then they continued to overlook me.] I only wanted to ask about how leave to main chat, because the text constantly scrolling up my screen at such a fast pace made it unbearable to play the game. Finally, after literally spamming my question dozens of times [this is the only way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it, apparently] someone [a member, not gamestaff] told me to use /deafen. Thanks to this, playing on your server was almost tolerable, although I then am forced to read only irrelevant moderator replies streaming up my chat window, these are of course not filtered out with your current chat system. O.K. I thought, I can just ignore this drawback, if I can just find a nice spot.
I finally got a moderator to reply again, and explained my situation. The moderator told me [very rudely] that she was not a taxi service and that she had other things to do apart from help me. I told her that I understand she had a lot to do [your server is plagued with 12 year old kids, fussing and demanding help on all sorts of things they could figure out themselves.] but that I am a new member, and I thought she was being a bit rude. I asked the mod if she could help me find a remote area to start in away from the regions which have been destroyed. "Just teleport me like 20,000 blocks out." I said. This would have been accomplished by her typing one or two commands. Instead she took the time to explain to me exactly why she didn't have time to do that, and was pretty nasty about it.
I tried contacting other in game staff, but they were all to busy to ever respond. Instead they were all busy replying to mostly bad players, who spam chat and ruin the environment. I am the kind of player who re-plants trees, I fix water with a bucket if I see somebody messed it up, etc. I used to be a host, and so if terrain gets messed up, naturally I fix it. I am an experienced player and could be a very helpful guy to have on your server. Even when I was a busy admin, I could determine whether I was speaking to a legitimately decent player who was asking for a simple request or bit of information, or a fussy little kid who wouldn't do anything for them self. I could tell the difference, because I wanted to have a nice server! So therefor I valued decent players who contributed to a nice atmosphere and kept the place looking good and were helpful!
Anyway, I really doubt I could play on this server, unless maybe some game staff could assist me without being terribly rude, or some of my suggestions would be heard. Setting up a better chat system would, in my opinion, significantly improve your server. More serious players might be inclined to donate or actually play there if it wasn't so obvious that despite having in-game staff there is essentially no order at all. cheers
