change

[Byte]

I'll address this.

the server rankings have been the lowest they’ve been in a long time

Yes. This isn't too crazy though. Typically these months (mid year around June/July) numbers go down.
Factor in recent server performance issues which likely caused us failing to hit donation goal in last 2 months.
People are also playing different games (Fortnite), CSGO popularity is down in general.

Having new players doesn’t mean shit, MAINTAINING new players is what really counts. Have admins encourage new players to join the community, help them as much as they need to be helped.

Admins (or just players in general) can influence who becomes more involved with the community but there is not much you can do besides that.

Also why is it a reoccurring theme that not only players, but admins are now saying that their own community is dead, or not going to survive through 2018? Is this a game of who can have the less confidence in their own community, which they spent time and put a lot of effort into?

This bothers me too. Its a bit of a meme but some don't really respect the community and actually trash talk it while being a member/admin etc.

On the topic of admins, why are inactive admins being kept? An admin review should be conducted, I recommended this ages ago, start of this year i’m pretty sure. In substitution for the demoted admins a ‘looking for admins’ announcement should be made, the one like the Trident piss gaming admin crisis.

Admin reviews are done, there was a set of admin changes ~1 month ago.
Demotions for inactive admins aren't done for many reasons, one being strict activity isn't required.
We can't just demote admins left and right, we have a tough admin application process compared to other servers.

More staff are needed, like i said in shout box the most active head admins should be promoted - Magikarp & @"Lil Bro", in my opinion. We need more decision makers, more people who do applications and advanced forum monitoring.

Why exactly are more Staff needed? Surely not for the sake of a title but rather to actually utilise the specific staff perms to actually work on something for the community?
# of staff members is a useless metric.

People like a fast forum, not a slow one, people like exciting announcements, events, interactive games (forum games need to be changed more often). 

Exciting announcements about what? Events take time/effort to setup. Interactive games (like treasure hunt) also take up a lot of time effort to setup.
Basic forum games can be changes pretty easily.

Invite people that are on your friends list to join the server at random! Have credit events! Anything that’ll make people want to join, everybody loves rewards/gifts, right?

Could be seen as spam, may actually defer people. Credits are inflated as is in general, the economy isn't exactly what it used to be.
Everyone loves rewards/gifts but we aren't in a position to regularly hand those out.

As for punishments, the Ban Guidelines have been a big leap for Invex and removes the argument of admins being bias. nice!
P.s. people seriously needs to stop crying about the amount of kids, they help the community believe it or not.

I agree, I don't like people that bully people because they're 2 years younger than they are.

Everybody thinks too big, everybody wants a new server, they think that’ll revive the community. No. highly doubt Byte has the time to even start thinking about a new server, not while the Surf server is still running at least. It’s simple things like the above that can make Invex what it once was, the Surf that was populated, the Jailbreak server that was in the top #200 in the world, the Aim that was full every afternoon.

It all boils down to this, time. At the end of the day, I'm the developer/organiser for everything Invex related. This includes server plugin updates/maintenance, new plugins/features, bug fixes (forums/server), organising forum games including time consuming ones like treasure hunt, organising community events, producing YT/misc content etc.

My time is very limited, moreso than ever. After all my other commitments I'm barely left with any hours which I can spend on Invex which I have to take out of my personal time. Even a small bug may take hours to fix and issues popup every now and again that I have to address (2 recent issues is fastdl link + fastdl auto sync). That means if I have 3 hours of free time in a given day, I have to decide if I actually want to spend it doing something I want to (i.e. actually playing a game) or spending it fixing Invex bugs/etc. When I do work on something like that its generally because I feel like it or am the mood to do it. 

Its not very fun to be responsible for basically everything and having people complain to you all the time about 'Invex is dying' and 'you should do X Y Z to make Invex good again' when those people would struggle to spend 5 minutes on the community. Even if there was a lot of extra help, it would only be for certain things (abuse reports, forum games, organising community events) are some examples. I'm still very thankful the majority of the abuse reports are taken care of by the Head Admins so I can focus on dev related things when I get the chance.

I mean there is a long list of suggestions and bug reports that if addressed would make Invex much better but there is no time to address them all as 1 person as most as development related. The only recent good feature was JBTB which I sacrificed and entire weekend to bust out. Invex isn't my job, its a hobby. And to be honest its taking up too much my time as is. I still try to work on various things within reason, setup community events etc as I know a lot of people enjoy them and I enjoy them too.

So to summarise. Invex is probably not dying, at least not for the next ~12 months. We can maintain the current state most likely indefinitely. Adding servers = Byte time so it won't happen. Major features = Byte time so it probably also won't happen. Small bug fixes/changes will happen. Community Events will also still happen. Forum games will also still happen. Beyond that, I'd encourage the community to contribute in any way they see fit. There is a lot of input you can have, just because you aren't a dev doesn't mean you can't do something like revamp the rules for a server, collect feedback, create content, plan or run community events (i.e. PoosKi RL event).

I have been toying with the idea of turning Invex into a serverless community. I'm not sure what people think of that but it would involve us shutting down all CSGO servers and simply running our forums/Discord and regular forum games/community events for various games. The idea being that the community would just regularly play any games together and then team up for community events. Given that surf numbers are low, 1v1 players basically have 0% interaction with the community, only JB is really keeping us from doing this. Our current community would stay but I don't know how feasible getting new members will be. Its no secret that Invex run community events very well compared to others and this way there is basically nothing to maintain/work on.