How do I get more players on my Minecraft server?
I generally agree with other answers - some reasonable and consistent ruleset + community + advertising is the way. I tried to play it for couple of minutes and I have these notes:- Abundance of messages, I really hate it and it distract from playing- Information usually does not make much sense. For example rules say what is wrong, but not what is right. There is the RPG plugins available, so maybe you want the RPG fans, but there is no info about that. Or maybe you hate them, but why the plugin then. - Inconsistency. There are the simple shops, but random wild teleportation points, but no monsters (easy/peaceful game mode?). So it's not clear if you want newbies or experienced players or which other kind of players. My advice:Think about the server concept. For example I like the survival part the most, but I miss monsters. I like the random wild locations, but it's not clear how can I interact with other players. Also, there is no residence plugin (or I could not find it) and it's not clear how you defend against griefers. I don't mind to mine for resources, but when the diamonds can be bought in a shop, then what is the whole point? With affordable admin shop you attract the lovers of easy game play, is it what you want? Tune down the self promo thing. If I play, I want to enjoy it. I will vote for you if I like the server. I don't care about some stupid reward thing. I also don't understand the command cool down timer. Last command I did was /spawn and there I had to wait two minutes (not 2 seconds as for teleport) for no reason on an empty server. You treat me as a bad person from the very beginning and I don't like it. I expect you to protect my gameplay not to protect the gameplay against me. About advertising and community - paid advertising is not wrong, but it's not the only way. Maybe start to invite people you know and tell them why they should join. Make the server working for them first. They can invite more people.
What are the costs of running a server for an MMO?
It can vary by a lot, mostly by 1. how many concurrent players you plan to serve and 2. how good your custom server tech is.Say you want to serve 1,000,000 concurrent players at peak times. You will probably use multi-shard server tech that combines a set of server machines into a shard (minimum, atomic game server fit for say, 20k players) and multiple shards per game server location, with the ability to add and drop shards as player numbers and *locations in the game world change. Typical examples might use 9 uber machines in a shard with game servers that could use up to 36 shards, so up to 324 racked hardware servers per game server, per region. As the world turns, player numbers rise and fall per region, of course, peaking at local 6pm - 1am. You don't want to disadvantage a player in one time zone by forcing them onto a distant server. There are whole classes of bugs for high ping players.Once you get the base multiplayer game going, you can start getting your data sent per frame as low as possible, for player locs, movement, actions, etc so you can squeeze more player on a server. More players on fewer servers is your main tool to limit costs and improve revenue. (also base server specs - what level of box is good enough)Maybe you need a more humble system to only serve 50k concurrent players and your tech is good enough to serve 10k people per box (that would be pretty elite). You end up with a one box shard and a game server that can expand to 5 shards, on demand.So, if you use machines that normally go for $100 per month and get a bulk discount of even 50% , that would still be 5 x $50 servers or $250 per location with maybe 5 in the US and one in Europe at $1500 per month, for this example.BTW, as a total SWAG, to have 50k peak concurrent players, that means you maybe sold 2,000,000 units of client software and 150k are still subscribing. At $5 a month per, your cash flow is $750k / month. Good F2P MMO's might make a similar amount but in either case, you would be paying down the more than $100M it cost to make the game and will have a content team pumping out new material at a burn rate of about $1.5M/mo. You see the problem with this kind of math.*Oh, and if you have an event in the game, like a holiday event, that attracts everyone to one place on the map, at one time, your shard system will need to be pretty clever.Good luck.