To start things off I'm going to go back to the roots of what our goal is as a server. We want to provide a safe, happy and enjoyable environment for everyone who decides to play on OGCraft no matter your age or background. To do this we have a wonderful staff team who volunteer their free time to bring you the server and all the changes we make along the way. The internet is a scary place and if we can be that light that helps guide people the correct way then we've achieved what we set out to do.

That being said, the other key aspect of the server is you, the players. You playing on the server and voting for the server keeps our numbers up and therefore more people will find the server and play on it. More people means more votes, and more votes means more people. It's just one big snowball effect.

However, to do both of the above we need donations to keep the server up. None of us (including myself) take any profit from the server as 100% of donations go back into server related things. The main three things are hosting the server, bringing more players and player retention, and if one of these three fail then the server stops growing and we will eventually close and there won't be an OGCraft to play on, which for obvious reasons we don't want to happen.

The three main things we've had feedback on recently are the fact mending has been removed from crate items, netherite has been removed from all kits and people not wanting to vote. 

The reason we removed mending from crate items is because when we originally did the items, they were a one time purchase and therefore if you had one there was no reason for people to keep donation, meaning we were struggling to host the server

When people tell me or other staff members they don't want to vote, to us that's your way of saying you don't support the server and without that support, we cant bring more players. Voting is a direct way to help support the server for completely free.

The reason we removed netherite was because if you want netherite tools, it's going to give the server more player interaction with you seeking out the ancient debris and going through the grind than you just popping it straight out from your kit to your tools. Without that player interaction, we have little to no player retention.

We understand your frustrations, we really do. It was actually the reasoning behind me wanting to add spawner keys to ./shop along with creating the enchanting machine, so players had access to premium features without having to pay a premium for them. However we also had to think about keeping the in game prices high enough so the donation items were not flooded throughout the server. It meant we wouldn't have the above issue of no donations. It's been a fine line we've been trying to find over the last 2.5 years and we believe we are close to finding it. The admin team have collectively put in thousands of hours into bringing the server to life and all of it was purely because we wanted to. We wanted to bring you a server where you could be yourselves, be happy playing with a community that grows together and most importantly be safe. Most, if not all, of the limitations we implement are because it impacts the server in one of the three main areas mentioned above. We don't change things because we want to be mean, we do it so in the long run you guys still have a server to play on.

Between the Admins, we are all either in full time education (Roman, Annei, Derryl) or work full time jobs (myself, Nix, Swanky) so any changes done to the server are done whenever we have free time. This is why sometimes it can take a day or two to implement a fix for a bug or something along that type of thing. I know personally I didnt actually start "playing" the current map until 2 days after it's official release because I was fixing things that needed sorting at that moment.

In the past we've attempted different things to bring in more players, for example we've promoted ourselves on server listings, opened a tiktok account, partnered with streamers and even tried advertising. However all of these cost money so if we funnel too much money into that, we have none to keep the server going and therefore we would have no server. The more people we bring in, the more features we can bring to the server. Donations and voting are the two biggest ways we can do that, the latter being the free version for everyone along with helping with achieving vote parties for everyone.

That being said, I want to thank every single supporter, both past and recent, because without you we wouldn't be where we are today. Without you we wouldn't have OGCraft. I also want to say thank you to superminiminer who not only became the first "Supporter", but went straight for Supporter III. Monthly donations are by far the best way to help support us which is why we also added Carpenter to the monthly rank crew.

I know there's a lot of information but we just wanted to be honest with you guys what we do as an admin team and why things change over time.

Thank you for reading

 - OGCraft Admin Team