i believe voltz as a modpack has been mishandled to a degree by all servers that have run it to date - VoidFlame included -. following are a list of justifications and ideas to remedy this, and possibly bring new popularity to the pack, should they be followed.

Voltz originally was marketed towards PVP and Raiding, as anyone with working eyes knows. for this reason, factions servers seem perfect to capitalize on this. however, it's been demonstrated over many fallen, shut down, or otherwise dead voltz servers that just opening a factions server isn't exactly viable.

by "isn't exactly viable" i mean that player retention is unjustifiably low; especially for a specialized server. when a player joins voidflame voltz, they didn't just find it on some random list site. they purposefully looked for and found it, either by looking for modded factions, or voltz directly. just a week after server reset, player counts dropped from 100 at peak hours to 20 on a good day. that's 80% retention loss, and given that the server resets annually, 1/12 months are populated to any reasonable level.

because population is so low for so long, raiding is extremely rare, when you don't count lategamers stomping the occasional 20 hour freshspawn noob. (that's it's own problem, but that's not the intent of this post). when raiding is left to being such a rarity, the retained players turn to more of a builder's mindset, focusing on bolstering their bases from nonexistent threat, while casually chatting in globalchat. while this is quite cozy, this is not exactly the majority of what voltz advertises to be.

Many player who joined within the first week of reset likely joined thinking to themselves: "oh man, I can't wait to launch missiles/sneak into/play under a faction!"... and through that week, impatiently expecting to encounter someone, to get that rush of defending a raid or executing one themselves, and it never coming. this leaves players disappointed, disillusioned and uninterested with continuing their tenure within the server. this longwinded explanation for the drop in player retention can be summarized with:

TL;DR kiddies want boom, dont get boom, go away

With all this said, it would be complaining and whining if i did not offer a solution. i believe that in order to bring the lost players back, and more reliably hold onto new players is to launch a new subserver, perhaps called 'war', or similar. the difference between RAID and this proposed 'war' server, follows.

1) bi/tri-monthly resets. this is to more often level the field for new players. instead of leaving the server for a large majority of the year due to server dominance (I.E. Lategame players), they would be emboldened to keep trying, as the majority of the server will be on par with them, or they would leave for a much more reasonable time, at most a few weeks.

2) random spawns. This is an easy one, this just allows players to spread out, and not get spawnfucked.

3) much smaller world border. a smaller world border would greatly help players find bases naturally. (i would personally say 5kx5k?)

4) war-specific member kit. would include advanced powercube, some solars, barebones MFFS setup. ME system with 64k drive. this would get players a reasonable chance to start, and the MFFS would stop any simple missile rushes, as well as teach players that important mod.

5) no faction claiming at all. faction power would make underdog punch-up raids impossible, and push large groups onto players.

6) less restrictions on items like trackers. with the larger focus on raiding and the strides taken towards players finding bases naturally, the tracker would be important to find hidden bases underground.

7) less dimensions. certain dimensions (mars, other far planets, deep dark) aren't in the scope of this server. i would leave it at OW, Moon, Nether, End.

8) heavier anti-cheat. obvious reasoning. however i don't know if this is reasonably doable, as I don't know the current anticheat.


Leaderboard for unique players killed and base blocks destroyed