I wanted to make a place where I could vent all my frustrations and problems with parkour in one place in the hope that they might be acted upon if structured in a sensible way. I'm going to talk about the rankup system, reasons behind player burnout and quitting and a couple of things about the network as a whole. Each of these topics will be in separate spoiler tabs so that they are organised and structured.
Is that too much to ask or am I being impatient and greedy?
The current ranking up system is just not working. Period. Ok yeah, the ranks kinda reflect skill before the first prestige, but not really. Ideally they would show skill level, but they don't because there are so many easy ways to get mana that don't show genuine skill. For example, coinflips, buying and selling cubits and other store items, trading with friends and grinding (I'm leaving out spawn parkour and scramblers because the mana rewards from them is relatively small, unless you are Koala). As a result of this, people can get from noob to champion by just grinding the same maps repeatedly. Yes, there is the score barrier for higher ranks, but those ranks are more or less obsolete because they don't unlock anything useful. What's the point in grinding maps for 50k, or even 20k, score when everything you need is unlocked at skilled rank, something pretty much everyone who joins the server does. Therefore currently, ranks are only cosmetics, and are used as such by many members of the playerbase. They give too much credit to players who have done little and not enough to players who are genuinely really good at parkour.
Firstly, give score greater use. Once you pass the 50k mark, then it is the most meaningless number; even more meaningless than jumps and hours. Perhaps say you need to have a score of 100k to prestige once, and then 150k a second time, and so on. Many suggestions for what to do with score where made in a thread here. Secondly, try to remove or nerf some of the ways in which people obtain crazy amounts of mana, like coinflips, and, brace yourself, selling cosmetics from the store. This second point is harder to implement, I grant you, but it is the main reason why some people have quite literally millions of mana and dozens of prestiges. (If you want me to explain why it is different from other gamemodes like islands where it's fine to buy and sell cosmetics for in-game currency, then I will, but in the comments.)
Another way you could make the rankup system better is to have some kind of gauntlet or challenge once you have enough mana to 'prove you are worthy' in a sense. This would then make prestiging the ultimate challenge, and great praise and reward to those people that achieve it. Beating long maps is the premise to almost all parkour rankup servers, and while I completely understand Dacon's reluctance to be seen to be copying ideas from other servers, he should try to learn from them the premise and then adapt it to make it his own unique take on the genre. Manacube is (probably, I think) the largest parkour specific server in Minecraft, and so it should capitalise on that and make it a place for player of ALL skill levels rather than the mess it is right now.
Another way you could make the rankup system better is to have some kind of gauntlet or challenge once you have enough mana to 'prove you are worthy' in a sense. This would then make prestiging the ultimate challenge, and great praise and reward to those people that achieve it. Beating long maps is the premise to almost all parkour rankup servers, and while I completely understand Dacon's reluctance to be seen to be copying ideas from other servers, he should try to learn from them the premise and then adapt it to make it his own unique take on the genre. Manacube is (probably, I think) the largest parkour specific server in Minecraft, and so it should capitalise on that and make it a place for player of ALL skill levels rather than the mess it is right now.
This is something that I wanted to talk about because it's something that higher ups on the staff team don't really think about and don't take into account when planning updates. It's also something that particularly pains me and pains a lot of other people as well because we've all had friends who have quit and disappeared from the internet, and it's a problem that, for the most part, could easily be resolved.
People tend to quit because they are bored. That's one of many reasons, but it is the largest. Why do people get bored? Mainly because there is a general lack of things to do when you beat every map and get the ever-cherished checkmark. You can build or you can get world records, and that's about it. Since a lot of people either have built many maps or don't want to and aren't good enough to compete with the world record titans at the top, they tend to migrate to other servers and take up other things. Admittedly, this only affects a small group of people: 1562 maps is a daunting task as a new player, but remember what I said about Manacube Parkour being for everyone? The server needs its Xniper03's and it's Synnlex's and it's Caseyclosed's just as needs all the new players at noob rank who have never played parkour before.
Allow people to create harder and harder maps. The limitations on what insane mapmakers are allowed to build kill creativity and motivation. Maybe don't lump these ultra-hard courses in with the rest of the insanes, but rather a different category entirely. That way a person can still get checkmark by beating all 1562 maps or however many there are at that point while leaving out the really hard stuff. To keep a thriving playerbase, there need to be fairly constant updates and additions to prevent boredom. For a different example, look at 2b2t: people come and go on that server all the time because the last update to version 1.12.2 was a good few years ago now. The lack of any update and clarity on how long it's going to take for the next one makes people want to go and play something else.
Ok this one is just me ranting really, rather like a lot of players have been doing on the forums lately, albeit for slightly different reasons. It is plain as day that the admin/developer team only care about money really. Whether that's the issue of one owner deciding on their priorities or all of them being greedy, I don't know, but something needs to change. The greed becomes apparent when you look at the #updates channel on the discord. Notice how almost all of the updates are for gamemodes that have a large number of patrons? Notice that the gamemodes that don't make a lot of money, like parkour, factions, infinity and creative, are the ones that get very few updates? Yeah, I don't think that that is a coincidence. (For those of you who don't play parkour, new maps have nothing to do with admins, it's all down to the work put in by Shinxray. Manacube does not deserve him.) You may say that priority is focussed on those other gamemodes because they have large playerbases too (*cough*nowhere near as large as parkour*cough*), they need attention, and the plugins used for them are far more complex and so have more bugs to fix. This may be, and probably is, true, but keep in mind that the last large parkour update was last November, and it didn't even add anything large to the general gameplay: just a new lobby, daily challenges and some QOL updates, whereas all other gamemodes have dominated #updates and #announcements all year. People are getting bored and the lack of updates and clarity about when the updates will happen are frustrating more and more people to a higher and higher degree. I've heard that a parkour update is in the works, but that was months ago and we've heard nothing about it since.
So yeah, less P2W, more content besides the current system and some proper rankups.
So yeah, less P2W, more content besides the current system and some proper rankups.
One last thing I wanted to mention is the chat. Chat on parkour has always been know as horrendous and some people find it really distracting when trying to play. I'm not going to rehash all of the suggestions that have been made about it here, I'll just give a link to where people have discussed it in more detail.