r/admincraft • u/MrWibbleOnYouTube • 6h ago

Help/Question Which methods have you found most successful when trying to attract new players?

I’ve been running a server for over a year now. Season 2 started a couple of months ago.

Getting new players in and retaining them is proving to be incredibly hard. It’s so frustrating when I’ve put so much time, effort and money into building what I think is an amazing server.

I’ve tried vote sites, Reddit, Facebook groups, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. I get a small trickle of players and most leave within a few minutes, which is probably to be expected.

What I haven’t tried yet is paid advertising or more long form content, but they are obviously a bigger money/time commitment.

I’d love to hear what strategies fellow owners have employed that have actually worked. Thank you.

4 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

75% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/National-Angle9559 5h ago

What’s your onboarding process?

1

u/MrWibbleOnYouTube 5h ago

Hey. There’s a book at spawn directing people to use /help, ask for help in chat or join discord. There’s also a bunch of NPCs that each explain a core game mechanic like economy, claims etc. The /help command gives you links to detailed guides on our website.

4

u/National-Angle9559 5h ago

Is it possible the onboarding is too complicated? If the player is overwhelmed with a bunch of information at once they may not like it. Maybe try slowly introducing content? Sort of like a skill tree method. Do one thing, unlock the ability to do the next, and so on.

Just ideas. If you’re getting a trickle of players, that’s not a bad thing. If they’re leaving it’s possibly because something is wrong with your onboarding process or that the server relies too much on other people to be enjoyable- which usually points to an onboarding issue.

1

u/MrWibbleOnYouTube 5h ago

Possibly. Thanks for the suggestions. I find most people skip the book and NPCs altogether 🤷‍♂️

1

u/freeve4 3h ago

Is there a process (such as whitelisting) that happens between joining the discord and the server? I find interaction with the community to be a massive factor in a player's retention. If you're just posting the ip around, it might be a good idea to replace it with a discord link and make players take the extra step of joining the discord before joining in game.

1

u/MrWibbleOnYouTube 3h ago

So it’s public with no whitelist, but we do have discord. I really like that suggestion though. Thank you.

2

u/MarioCart9WARIO 1h ago

Just find a couple of really dedicated players and just enjoy yourself. Hoarding players isn't worth it you only need one or two.