Vanilla minecraft offers players infinite respawns, which makes the cost of life basically non-existent. This is bad on servers with unrestricted PVP, since it allows brute-force pvp tactics. On modern SMPs, this issue is tackled in various ways. Maybe we can adopt some of the concepts that are already used in other SMPs.

Here are the ones I have an issue with:

• Dream SMP has a system of "canon lives". This system is too punishing for the kind of server we have. We want to maximize player happiness, and there's nothing more frustrating than not being able to play the server due to skill issues, or, even worse, an oversight in server rules or balance
• Lifesteal SMP has a system where you lose a heart if you die and you gain a heart if you kill someone in combat. If you have 0 hearts left, you are banned. I feel like there shouldn't be situations where one player gains an advantage in combat over another, just because one of them died before. And as with Dream SMP's "canon lives", you shouldn't be banned from a server due to skill issues. And it's even worse here because of the snowball effect

I'm thinking of temporary bans that gradually get longer. Kinda like the smartphone lock delay for incorrect passwords.

Any other ideas?

Since the world has a fixed border, it may, however unlikely it may seem, run out of resources. The mitigations listed for that problem rely on statistical unlikeliness, which is not ideal. The problem needs to addressed with a sound solution.

Whitelisting the server prevents players from joining without a tedious verification process. It is, however, needed for solving multiple other problems. If we can address these issues, then we can safely unwhitelist the server.

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Minecraft has a problem with bots mass joining and/or ddosing public servers, rendering the experience unplayable. We currently solve this problem by having the server whitelisted and safe from bad actors joining, but this is more of a band-aid, rather than a permanent solution.

In an ideal scenario, any given player should only have one account they play on. This is currently enforced by manual verification and a whitelist, but if we want to make this server operate without a whitelist, then we'll have to find a way to tackle this issue. It's not easy due to VPNs being a thing. Even manual moderation might not help.