Omniverse Earth recently launched, and with it the same voting system that Horizons had.
I believe the rewards from voting in Omniverse Horizons were bad for the game's economy in the long run. Vanilla Minecraft for example has established obtainment methods for beacons, elytras, and dragon eggs. Getting them from voting, however, was both far easier and a lot faster, with items you rarely need more than 1-3 of total. Not only this, but in cases of things like huge bags of holding, voids, etc. you are hurting the viability of some jobs - for example, the void is the key craft of the inventor job. If you don't need an inventor to get voids, why do you need the inventor job at all? If you don't need an Artisan to get a good bag of holding, why do you need an artisan? These kinds of things hurt the balance of the game in my honest opinion, and were bad for the long term economy. Sure, with servers like this the economy will never last. But that is not a good reason to not try to make it last as long as possible.
Especially when you consider new players. New players that see other players getting beacons, elytras, etc. will get the first impression that the server hands everything to you for free, which is not the kind of server that will bring in nor retain very many players.
Of course, the server relies a lot on voting to stay visible, and the voting needs to be rewarding. However I have what I think would be a perfect solution.
Players have said that the pristine/flawless resources obtained by voting is needed to keep the town upgrades and other such things reasonable, because they are too rare otherwise.
So I think that voting could be balanced with the following changes:
1. Remove the super rare items like diamond boxes, huge bags of holding, beacons etc. from the voting loot pool
2. Increase the chance of getting pristine/flawless ores, tome fragments, and similar rarity items
3. Increase the voting points slightly
4. Guarantee an extra pristine/flawless item after completing all votes so that even unlucky players always get something out of it
This would make voting healthier for the economy in general, would make it more consistently rewarding, while not feeling OP, and would allow new players to see that "hey, there's some custom items here, I wonder what they are for". It would smooth progression, give all players high value resources to sell early in the game (unlike beacons and elytras that are not worth very much at all now) and would give new players a better impression when voting.
This isn't the only balancing the server needs by any means, but I think it's one of the more important ones. Many current players may not realize it, but Thonk rebooted the server for Omniverse Earth partially to bring in new players. He will not be adding anything like custom crops unless we get a lot of new players. Which isn't likely going to happen if the server doesn't get some changes. Thonk is working on the server alone, so it's understandable that we can't get anything huge. But I think balancing is just as important as anything else while being a lot more achievable than original plugin content.
I believe the rewards from voting in Omniverse Horizons were bad for the game's economy in the long run. Vanilla Minecraft for example has established obtainment methods for beacons, elytras, and dragon eggs. Getting them from voting, however, was both far easier and a lot faster, with items you rarely need more than 1-3 of total. Not only this, but in cases of things like huge bags of holding, voids, etc. you are hurting the viability of some jobs - for example, the void is the key craft of the inventor job. If you don't need an inventor to get voids, why do you need the inventor job at all? If you don't need an Artisan to get a good bag of holding, why do you need an artisan? These kinds of things hurt the balance of the game in my honest opinion, and were bad for the long term economy. Sure, with servers like this the economy will never last. But that is not a good reason to not try to make it last as long as possible.
Especially when you consider new players. New players that see other players getting beacons, elytras, etc. will get the first impression that the server hands everything to you for free, which is not the kind of server that will bring in nor retain very many players.
Of course, the server relies a lot on voting to stay visible, and the voting needs to be rewarding. However I have what I think would be a perfect solution.
Players have said that the pristine/flawless resources obtained by voting is needed to keep the town upgrades and other such things reasonable, because they are too rare otherwise.
So I think that voting could be balanced with the following changes:
1. Remove the super rare items like diamond boxes, huge bags of holding, beacons etc. from the voting loot pool
2. Increase the chance of getting pristine/flawless ores, tome fragments, and similar rarity items
3. Increase the voting points slightly
4. Guarantee an extra pristine/flawless item after completing all votes so that even unlucky players always get something out of it
This would make voting healthier for the economy in general, would make it more consistently rewarding, while not feeling OP, and would allow new players to see that "hey, there's some custom items here, I wonder what they are for". It would smooth progression, give all players high value resources to sell early in the game (unlike beacons and elytras that are not worth very much at all now) and would give new players a better impression when voting.
This isn't the only balancing the server needs by any means, but I think it's one of the more important ones. Many current players may not realize it, but Thonk rebooted the server for Omniverse Earth partially to bring in new players. He will not be adding anything like custom crops unless we get a lot of new players. Which isn't likely going to happen if the server doesn't get some changes. Thonk is working on the server alone, so it's understandable that we can't get anything huge. But I think balancing is just as important as anything else while being a lot more achievable than original plugin content.
