Oh boy, well since we made a thread lemme word vomit all over it. Keep in mind all of these ideas are just baby ideas. Thoughts in my head, I don't know the true basics of the technical mumbo jumbo but...ideas....I have plenty of them.:
1) Redoing spawn completely, bring the players back in for the builds. Even if its just taking it down a small chunk at a time and redoing one of the four inner sectors in the first ring of it. Make the buildings player built, hold a monthly, quarterly, whatever event where we say "this competition will be for the Minetown Bank" (just an example). Then players would be given a build area on event/creative/where ever we hold building events of this size to team up(or work solo if they prefer) and execute an idea for That build. The winner of the competition would have their build featured at our spawn indefinitely, or until we decide spawn needs changed again (hopefully never). There would still be builds done by the staff/build team but it would help bring back that "Player based" Feel everyone loved about classic.
2) MAKING SPAWN FUN! I can't stress this enough, Spawn is basically a museum of the possibilities of building in creative with world edit, most of it is flat, it lacks any major landscaping and while it is beautiful, no one visits it. My idea is (since this is a vanilla feature we have disabled) Making single spawner areas within spawn that players have to find...search out and locate. The easier ones (perhaps like, pigs chickens or cows) could be less effective grinders, like a one spawner bbq. The rarer/harder to get to ones could be more worthwile (Squid, creepers, what have you) It would be like making each spawner, in its own, a little mini game. This is something we could build/do in complete survival mode, it wouldn't need creative, or fly or jump. You could easily turn one of the hostile mob spawners into some sort of arena/make it harder to stay there and farm the items to help keep the market in balance. You could easily flag just that area for pvp and players could massacre eachother while worrying about the mobs spawning as well.
3) I've said this before....WAY back in the day to staff that aren't staff currently (YFM for one *sniff*) Adding the possibility of lore/adventure to survival. Not necessarily a full out Roleplaying element but something that a player CAN do if they want to. Give Shamballah a story, make it interesting, put little lore areas where players can pick up a book and read about the many adventures of Sawine through the creation of Shamballah, or whatever main hero decides to build this wonderful city. Hide places throughout the map, little builds that are somewhat hard to find. (a good example is the underwater kraken we currently have on the map) I understand the world map will make this easier, but its the thought that counts. Have a sign that gives a book that tells a small story. Once the players have collected certain groups of books/a certain number of books they can turn them into staff for an item (nothing huge, but key items that are typically harder to farm.) This is a bit more difficult technically wise because we would need a way to make sure players can only get one book from the sign and a method to track which players have turned in what books. Again, I don't speak technical mumbo jumbo, this is just an idea. This would get players out and about on our map, pull them away from the warps and give them something to get armored up and adventure out to. We can make it semi dangerous to get to the area (No like, swimming through a lava river type scenario where an average player can't make it out alive)
4) Adding Daily/weekly/monthly quests. This is something that is just an idea. The server would host a sort of quest. It could vary from day/week/month. Something like "We're building the Bank of Minetown this month (coinciding with the player event or not) and we're low on stone brick. Bring me 64 stone brick and I'll give you one gold ingot." the pay would not be grand, you would not get MTC from it (that would just flood the market) and you could only complete it so many times a month/day/whatever. It gives new players a chance to get on their feet and I would hope bring players out towards getting more. There could be easy ones (as mentioned above) or harder ones (Like, find me an ender egg and I'll give you (something worth less than buying an ender egg at the Admin Shop but still viable)
5) This idea is a bit less....executable but its an idea, I think its a decent one so I'm going to post it. Since it is a vanilla feature to be able to change the type of spawner using a spawn egg (keep in mind we currently have this disabled) we could start allowing well established towns/players to purchase spawn eggs and change their spawner. Perhaps we only allow a player one spawner change, perhaps we limit it to towns and only allow them One spawner change. This idea is a baby that needs lots of love and nurturing but seeing as I think its an idea that will get shot down quite a bit I haven't really nurtured it. Staff would have to change the spawners, players would not have the ability but it would bring players a reason to save up and buy spawn eggs, while giving them the ability to make more efficient spawners if they so choose (Say they have a spider/skelli/zombie spawner grinder and want to make it a skelli/zombie/zombie spawner, by buying a zombie egg and using one (or their only) spawner switch they could do that.