Most servers don't have the time or staff that is trained to "teach" children.
Instead most servers have a no tolerance policy.
I for one don't have the time to teach kids right from wrong.
Especially when their homes and schools should be doing that in the first place.
I've noticed this dilemma also. I used to run a 250 slot pay2win childrens server which made a lot of money, was in the top 10 of a few voting websites and grew extremely fast. Everyone loved the rules, the trained staff, and the community I setup for everyone. Eventually I got so drained from dealing with shit head kids almost every hour of every day I started distancing myself from the server and working towards expanding and evolving to a "cloud" server like most other popular servers were doing to keep the player base happy with different gameplay.
Eventually I got fed up with dealing with all the kids that I resigned and decided I wanted to create a solid, non-pay2win, mature, no bullshit, community that is extremely professional and is fun for me as it is fun for other fellow players that want the same thing.
My issues with the first server that's still running but slowly turning into a ghost town with the kids that are left running around with no rules getting enforced (the kid I left it to is in-active).
- chargebacks on paypal
- Hackers
- Close friends hacking
- kids that create a youtube channel and record the server but use the subscriber base against the staff/server
- constant spam on the forums
- ddos attacks
- hard to find staff that could do a good job
- rarely anyone 18 or older
- no one under the age of 16 that were respectable or trustworthy
- constant rule breaking
- not much respect given by players
My new server and community hasn't grown as fast as my old pay2win server that started over a year ago. Player retention is harder than it used to be. It's hard to find mature players. I don't get as many people from my bumps. And the biggest complaint is "low number of players". Granted I've only had it running for 5 months but it took me 6 months to get 90-120 people on my old young crowd driven pay2win server.
It's almost like the community is filling up with younger and younger kids that are attracted to shiny things. No one notices hard work, good policies, and a active mature staff. Players these days notice these things... shiny, sparkly, flames, bright flashy colors, player activity, and the chance to screw over someone else. Players don't worry about messy websites, messy spawns that don't make sense, hard to navigate websites or servers, and a 15 year old running the server.
My old server never had a complaint about "low population" when it was first growing. People would come on, run from spawn, go on their own, or team up with strangers, or bring a friend onto the server to help them. They wouldn't mind not having many people on and they would spend hours in solitude building up a faction home.
It's the weirdest thing to see these days barely 10 people come on from a bump and five minutes later only 1 stays for a half hour. Where did everyone go? My banner isn't deceiving, my server page isn't deceiving, they clicked on my server because.. they wanted what it was advertising correct? Factions, mcmmo, no lag, professional looking everything? Welp all I'm getting are people asking for op, hacking, rule breaking, trolls. But no solid player base that wanna stick around. We even enjoy feedback and people could tell us why they're leaving and we'd attempt to change it. But the average complaint is "low number of players to interact with".
Conclusion is, over a year ago players were willing to stick around and wait for more people to get on and didn't care if there were hackers, spammers, caps, and other stuff. Now the older crowd is harder to find and the younger crowd is overtaking the scene and being animals about things.
