Sustaining village activity

Suppose you've created/took ownership of a village/town and invited a few players to build stuff in there.
However, a few days, weeks, months pass by, and more often than not, those members aren't active as you are — this guide will address that issue.

Causes

Boredom.
This is one of the most common ones (and can apply to other spaces, such as hobbies), and arises from a lack of clear goals, burnout, etc.

Other reasons include:

• Staff-issued punishments (extreme cases)
• External and internal conflicts between town members, assistants and owners.
• Occupations (education, work, etc.), health problems and whatnot.

Solutions

Boredom

• Have some sort of differentiating factor for your town (an underground cave system that's been converted into a city, for example).
• Set clear goals for your town members to reach.
• Host events (Build competitions and such).

Occupations

• If possible, split multiple parts of a project(s) in your town into small, managable parts.
• Please do not promise the moon (promise something that you cannot do) to your members.

Recruiting members

• You can advertise your town in #retromc-forum.
• Offer tours of your town for people who ask for them or are curious.
• Offer items for new members.

Miscellaneous stuff

Permissions

Before doing anything to the build, please make a ticket to obtain permission from staff (and, if possible, the original builder'(s) permission) & make sure that whatever you're doing is in line with village ownership rules, on a case-by-case basis. Once you get permission, you can move incomplete builds to another area, modify, or outright remove them, depending on the build & builder.

Cleanup

• Try to have semi-sytematic lighting, roads, etc.
• Demote assistants who are blatantly inactive.

The hard truth

As much as it pains us to say this, people will eventually move on due to the aforementioned factors. Projects that get stuck in development hell may never escape it and may be abandoned. Such is the nature of life.
What we can say is this: have fun — we're a Minecraft server running on a legacy version after all, not a business. We do this for fun, not profit.
Keeping that in mind, you shouldn't promise stuff you can't do to your members from the get-go and instead, keep reasonable and feasible goals.

Remember to have fun throughout your experience on RetroMC, and life in general.
—  Noggisoggi, 8 March 2025