Lets be real.

Minecraft isn't dying, it just is to the generation of kids that grew out of it which was a majority of this community including myself.
Not that there is anything wrong with it. Minecraft always had a market for young - high school age kids. (ofc older people still play.)

Servers across the board are at all time lows, the youtube community which was an essential part in spreading minecraft in the first place, is bringing in less then 10% of the views they used to in most cases, and the number of daily sales and active players at any given time has decreased significantly. Maybe minecraft is still doing ok, but it is with a demographic of 12 and under, and I would guess a shift away from PC and towards other platforms.

I know personally, my minecraft experience consisted 95%(at least) of multiplayer and youtube. Both of those platforms are undeniably dying(ok, you guys hate that word, so then "declining in average user rate and a quick pace and to a significant degree"), and so my minecraft experience and way of enjoying the game is dying too. And I would guess that is the same for most of the other "veteran" players of the game, unless you are a builder.

If there is a big area of the game that most of us play that isn't on the decline, please tell me, because I personally don't see much of a future for the aspects of the game that I played for.

It's interesting, Badlion has adapted to the decline of Minecraft by developing their own version of the Minecraft client, full of bug fixes, code optimizations, and a client sided anticheat that prevents cheating on Badlion's servers. They've also partnered with ESL, and are accumulating connections outside of Minecraft in the broader gaming world to keep themselves alive. Hypixel is expanding and using their massive money reserves and developer team to develop a game entirely separate from Minecraft.

It feels like smart servers who made money and assembled developer power are using it to get away from reliance on Mojang and "mainstream Minecraft" as much as possible.

But as for MCBall ever making a comeback, well, a server is doomed as soon as its owner loses interest and buys CS:GO cases with donation money instead of investing further into the server. It's a testament to the ability of people like jackster (and even knack) that the server has managed to struggle along for such a long time.

I don't agree with the fact that "mcball can't recover." But I do think that the community, the people in it, are the reason why we stick around. I think I've said this a couple times, but MCBall is so unique and I doubt you can find any other server like it in terms of the actual server itself, (Paintball,) and the people, the community. Everybody is so nice, and most people, unfortunately some have left, have stuck around for a very long time. We are all really good friends that enjoy common interests which, in my opinion, is VERY rare to happen, especially on a small Minecraft Paintball Server.

And what you said about the Youtubing thing I agree slightly. There were several Youtubers that recorded Minecraft that I used to watch. A lot of their subscriber counts have slowed dramatically or stopped in terms or rising, as well as their view counts. Minecraft isn't necessarily dying, and I don't want to say it's past its prime, but in the first years of its release (2012, 2013, 2014) it was definitely much more popular. Ofc this is debatable because, like GreekGoddess said, Minecraft has a much larger kid base, so at least for me, and other people, we are "growing out of it." I think I got Minecraft when I was 10, so a lot of time has passed. So another generation of kids may be starting to play Minecraft, but as different sources have shown, it's not nearly as big as the ones who started playing it when it first came out.

My point is that a lot of the MCBallers who used to come on have moved on, just like all of us eventually. So nothing is dying yet, but things have for sure changed.

I've seen that before in the past... Quick note though, you shouldn't just say "staff". MoDs and ChatMods can't do anything but moderate. Sadly, they can't really help much on their own. :/

As MoD+, I can do a bit more, like organize events and view applications. Not a lot, but I could help a bit.

I love this server so much! There's no other game like it, and I've made some amazing friends here... We've got to get things going again!

The problem with all of this, is that we need waffle to put in the time to get new staff, and start up voting, etc. Except, people don't have much connections with him, and even if you do have any kind of contact with him, he probably won't put the time into getting new staff. What we need, is someone who actually WANTS to help out the server. Waffle lost his motivation and he grew up. We need him to just sit his butt down for a few hours at a time, and try to rebuild the server again.

Mining_Shark for another mcball party