Basically, this is a post for what people have issues with for the new ranks, and how we would improve them. personally, I think all of the ranks should be able to vote for, or at least up the bonuses for the highest voting rank.

As a very long time Patron of wildercraft, as a player, as a financial backer, a fan, and a team member, I have to say that change is scary. Do I 100% agree qith all changes? Nope, do I think they are all gonna stay as is? Again nope. 

Am I going to stop and really think about the changes, you bet, and probably play under the new system to see how it works out. Then Im going to come back with real criticisms, suggestions and opinions based on what i feel and what i see other players feeling.

However, the current iteration of WC has been growing for 5 years under ideas from that time.  Ive seen several of the other servers i used to play in just straight up dissapear in that time.

Redbau and team didnt pull these changes outta of a hat on a tuesday standing on a street corner.  They debated them, drafted and proposed and changed and redrafted these changes around the needs of the server and players.

Take a moment! A real moment, knee jerk your anger over o  lounge or season 1 feedback for sure!  But then take another moment to really consider the changes and the health and well being of ther server that you live on here and come back with uour thoughts and share them here!

I can see two large issues with the ranks as-is:

Claiming Rights and Claim Blocks.

By claiming rights, I mean being able to claim in the Nether and End. By locking claiming rights behind paid-only ranks, this gives paid players the advantage to section off or claim large sections of areas. Non-paid players do not have this ability and do not have the ability to ideally indicate areas in which they intend to build. For example, let's say a free-to-play player wants to build on a certain area in the very near future. They go somewhere else to collect resources or prepare for the build. When they come back, a paid player has laid claim to the area. In this situation, the free-to-play player now cannot build in the area in which they intended. While this scenario may be rare, it is still a possibility. However, certain nether-based farms are location specific and would most likely happen here.

The second issue is claim blocks. Waiting until you have 100 votes until you have 1,000 claim blocks is quite steep. Assuming you can vote 3 times a day, you have to wait 34 days of striaght voting in order to recieve the increase. This can be highly detrimental to those who cannot play as often or may not play as much as some of the more hard core players.

This may try to incentivise people to play more often, however, this creates the additional issue of pistons. Pistons only work within claims. This can be a major issue to new and long time players alike. For example, if you build many redstone contraptions or farms that require pistons, you will need to create claims for each one. If the player runs out of claim blocks, they can now no longer use pistons, which are a vanilla mechanic of the game.

Please feel free to contact me for clarifications or concerns about my post.

Why do we need to improve the ranks?

If it isn't broke, don't fix it

Another concern would be, if you're going to overhaul the rank system once.. will it happen again when chapter 3 lands? will ranks just be bound by chapter now? is donating the only way that ranks will carry over?

I think it's important that staff take a look from the perspective of free to play players. And when I say free to play, I mean microtransaction players. Because a lot of people still spend a lot of money on the game, just not for ranks, for wildercoins, keys, etc.

What has this ranked system done for those players:
Pros:

Promise of maybe some sort of kind of reward for all of your votes?

Cons: 
* Reset votes means reset rank
* Players that were previously at the higher ranks not only have their ranks reset but can never return to that level because it's now behind a pay wall.
* Nether is now behind a huge paywall, even higher than it was when you could get there by playing as well.
* New things that everyone is hype about are behind huge paywalls as well.
* Even the highest rank unpaid rank is worse than the applicable rank before (Mythic, but with 5 shop chests)

You're throwing your FTP players in the trash with this announcement, and a lot of those players fund the microtransactions that are much more sustainable then these high cost buy ins.

My Ideas:
* Drop Nether down to a FTP rank. This just hurts. 
* More shop chests at top FTP rank. Again, this has been suggested and just seems obvious.
* Instead of making pets and hats exclusive to higher ranks make a few rank paywalled exclusive pets and hats, and then have the majority pets and hats able to be bought for a ton of wildercoins. That way you still get the money, probably even more so because comeone who doesn't want those, and yet you still keep exclusive things for the paid ranks. (Seriously, you could sell pets for $10 and people would buy them, and I guarentee you'd make more money from that then the few people willing to buy $70 rank to get one. This also gives you a win to bring to the FTP community that is much more palletable (micro transaction instead of paywall).
* Don't talk about potentially honoring those people who voted thousands of times until you actually have something concrete. You're just firing people up and making them more angry. Work on something for those players, hope they stick around until you can actually give it to them, and deliver. I know the reason you do it is because you do genuinley care, but talk isn't going to help when they feel that they've been lied to (ranks will always carry over etc etc). 
* I could say a lot more but not without seeing the actual percentage of money you make off of micro-transactions vs ranks. But do you guys really make that much more from ranks that you're willing to go all in on that? Micro-transactions seem a lot more effective over a longer term.

Sorry throwing in the trash is way too harsh a comment. I get you guys need to make money to keep the server running, and I think everyone on the team does genuinley care about the community, but this is a lot of paywall thrown in all at once.

In the end, (And I'll stop after this promise, cause I'm posting too much on this thread) regardless of whatever changes you make, you need to sell us on the "why". You're moving to a paywalled system, that's happening no matter what regardless of tweaks. Paywalling a lot of features the older players have come to appreciate every season. There's a reason for this change and I think it would help the community a lot to know what it is. 

You don't have to get into specific financials obviously, but you need to sell people on the future of this server. If this servers been barely running and it needs a system to be more stable, say that, if it's because you want to expand and create a better experience, say that, etc etc. You need to sell people on the vision of this server and the direction it's taking. Because right now, people think it's going the way that we've seen a lot of struggling games die. Pushing more and more stuff behind paywalls, alienating their playerbase, until people move on. And to be clear I don't think that's what you guys are doing or want to do. But you need an announcement explaining why a huge chunk of things that people enjoyed are going behind paywalls, probably an apology to the older players to go with it, and you need it from Red, not from the staff trying their best to do damage control on the discord. Just be genuine, the community WANTS to accept it because they love the server, you just need to give them a reason to.