For myself its the general attitude and behavior of the members and staff. I have no issues joining a server that has been around for years and has a butt load of stuff, or its been around for a few months and is barebones. But its the atmosphere of the community that I look for. When I join, do people acknowledge me with Hello's and Welcomes? Do people offer me assistance in the rules, tutorial, finding a nice place to settle down in? Those are things I look for. Are the staff members balanced, sane and fair? Are bans handed out for clear cut rule violations?

Things that turn me away

- Join a server with 50 or so people, nobody says hello
- Join a server and the chat is lit up with orientation, gender, race slurs and profanity
- Join a server where the staff are ban happy and banning for every little thing. I was once on a server with over 100 people and people were being banned left and right, and the ban messages were like "banned for asking too many questions" "banned for being nosy" "banned for digging too much" "banned for ugly building technique"

my ping

The stability of the server is very important. I remember that I bought my own server, but because of server technology failure, it caused a large area of downtime. The loss is quite huge. A lot of data has been lost. It's terrible without backing up your data.
.

Depends on the type of server. I find myself gravitating toward roleplay servers, and if I log in an immediately see vulgar language in the chat, or immature language in the chat, I will never come back.
I will also leave if the server purpose on the posting doesn't match the actual activity on the server. If it's listed as a survival server, and everyone is flying around or murdering every person they see, I'll leave and won't come back. If it's a roleplay server, but no one is roleplaying and people are treating it as a factions server, I won't come back. Basically, if it's supposed to be a cooperative server, and no one is acting like it, I won't come back.
I also won't return to a server that shows obvious preferential treatment to a certain subset of people. In example, a server owner who oped their friend, and their friends gets to break all the rules and berate people, but the moment someone speaks out against the friend, they get punished. Things like that.

Agree with what most other people have mentioned here. I'd also say one of the reasons I would instantly leave a server is if it only has one or two players online and they are AFK.

The whole point of playing on a server is to play and interact with other people. If your server has a near zero population, then I'm sorry but I would rather invest my time elsewhere or play single-player for my Minecraft fix.

Stupid people, immature language, or just a bad spawn area.

Getting banned

dumb people

Impossible lag and in my preference, too many people.

This seems similar to another recent thread cf. https://www.planetminecraft.com/forums/pmc/discussion/biggest-server-turnoff-588516//comment/3350303/#reply_3350303

Focusing on the "join, look around, and leave" and ignoring the "instantly" ie there is no immediately apparent 'Outta Here!', but one still ends up leaving (and not returning):
[These are in addition to the causes listed there, any of which may also take a while to become evident.]

Server theme differs from that expected. (Most likely if the server does not have a forum/site/blog as ad/blurbs can often be ambiguous. [Probably even more true for those of us out of touch with current pop culture. ])

Server dead/no one on. SSP over a net connection offers no advantage and many disadvantages [For this one, one would hope a person checked back at various times, as primetime in one part of the world may be anything but in another. Again, if the server doesn't have a site, one might – for instance – more easily mistake a European or US time based server for an Australian one.]

Server 'mined out' (including fully 'claimed'). Unless this is advertised or otherwise part of the theme, in which case one would want to know 'going in'. [At least one long running server treates the margin of devestation around world spawn as a feature.]

Confusing entry point/rules with no clear way to get timely explanations. Too much time trying to determine where one can harvest, where one can build, etc can be very off-putting. (Obvious exception for some forms of puzzle server, but the fact that it is a puzzle server should be known beforehand.)


Running through most of these is the idea that a good server will let people know what to expect and make basic information easy to find.

[deleted]

two things:
favoritism, and elitist attitudes.

Lack of people. This is why i hate minecade at 6am.

Apparent lack of effort or the feeling that the server's a cashgrab. Sometimes how laggy it is and if I'm rubber banding or I'm watching people glitch/teleport around due to the lag. Things like that.
Dumb rules too.
I was on a Creative server once that used to allow Roleplaying (so long as it was family friendly, they usually were.) I come on the next day after being on there for months, Roleplays banned and mods are banning or muting people who's roleplaying. Server didn't have a 'local/public' chat plugin where you talk in local and people in a certain radius see or public where you talk to the whole server, so it wasn't a case of public chat spam.
Came to the same server a few months ago. Chat was moving at a million miles per hour and the lag was really, really bad. I mean like place a house, be proud, get kicked, sign back on...its all gone because of the lag type lag. Or constant rubber banding. Never went back lol.

My biggest pet Peeve is unfriendly staff, there have been so many servers I've given a chance, then I ask a question about an odd plugin they use, and get laughed at or even more annoying no answer at all. I'll immediately leave a place like that, your problems would never get solved in a place like that.

The other thing that would make me leave is players that get too many chances, I recently joined a pixelmon server and this person was griefing immediately which was against the rules on this particular server, and he was given upwards of five chances, and all the damage he did could have been avoided if they stuck to their policy of no toleration.