Since I joined EMC, I have tried to be that friend to each new comer that completes the tutorial. I used to go see them at their res and throw them some saplings or jack-o-lanterns, just to tell them that they were welcome. Just like I felt so welcomed when I joined. Frankly, the quality of the new player went down. Griefers and stupid swaztica makers have worn me out. As well as the ones that try to get around the chat by cussing or being disgustingly profane and racist. Amazingly, each one of these young stupid-heads thinks that they are so unique and smart. Now completely burnt out, I will welcome them and answer questions that they have. If they stick around more than 10 minutes and act like they are gonna stay or come back, I will give them something to help get them going. But I am quite afraid that they will be the next one to cause chaos and public drama .... and not get banned for it even though they could be under rule #8, if for no other reason. I think the standards have been lowered because we 'need' all those new players. I would argue that we don't need them that bad - they aren't trustworthy with our pristine Frontier. (which is totally not and is a problem all on its own) But I am now due for my 1 year anniversary on EMC and having a hard time getting motivated to host anything. I mean..... why bother?
I agree with OP 100%. I started on marine4121, god knows what year. the accounts well over 2,000 days old now. i was young and it was my 3rd ever minecraft server i played on. i played on my previous 2 minecraft servers till they died (over 1 year on each respectfully. Probably no one remembers me on Marine4121 as i'm generally quite in game and just do my own thing and not really worry about what people talk about. still the same on Envine. I created Envine to put all the stupid stuff i have said & done, none of it bad or anything, and to play on a different server i use to build for without all this attention. Also just to create a new chapter i guess. anyway, i remember all smps being full of life, active and booming remember before the games server existed and events would fill a server right up? remember when your neighbours on surrounding plots weren't 100+ days derelict. staff were really active on all servers, dont see nearly as many on, i can understand why when thers nowhere near the players that use to be on. I left a day before that account turned 1,000 days old because i simply got bored of minecraft. It wasn't until 2 or so years later i remembered this server existed and i joined back and played minecraft again, expecting the community & server to be bigger and better than ever. wow. Every smp but 8 & 9 is more dead than a graveyard. servers barely reach 10 players after a restart. and even events barely pull numbers. When i first joined on Envine as a "New" player the server had a whopping 0 players online. My first thought was "How?". I kept at it getting marine4121 on and seeing if i had my old residence on smp2, nope, checked the enderchest for some goodies, full of junk and a builders wand that disappeared when i clicked it. I spent a solid few hours doing starter stuff, gathering materials, food, etc till nyhl joined first player i seen on this seemingly dead server. i called it a night and went to bed. got on the next day to 3 players. Over the weeks i quickly learnt the once active server with an amazing, helpful community was gone. chats would go hours without a word being spoken. my chat would only light up when me & cadgamer101 or 202 & nyhl would occasionally talk in private message. A dead smp4 with 4 active people didn't really fuss me. I built a mall in 1 week and spend all my time since farming custom mobs and even making some cheeky boss farms like the old momentus diamond farm if anyone remembers that. i was just recently looking through a very old photobucket account i have and found some really old pictures of the first fire floor, ice cream cow's (remember him?) head drop. i just cant remeber the password right now...
I agree with most of this... however, seeing a lot of old friends leave EMC for very similar reasons and only being heard by deafened ears, there's not a lot the community can do at this point other than just to accept the server the way it is. Its annoying to see once a giant magnificent server crumble to what it is now. Especially to have so many other friends press into other servers. Far well thee... hopefully you will return one day.
Sad to see you go cyberazaz101. I'm not going to go into great detail here on every point made, but I'll address a few major ones. Keep in mind that what I say is my opinion as a longtime player on EMC, as well as staff for appropriate sections. In summary, we had a plan in place, but when going into implementation we overreached and the delay coincided with the Mojang to Microsoft conversion, and subsequently faster and faster updates that put us further and further behind.. I was not a part of the decision process for the Dragon Tombs announcement, but I know from analysis of where we were at in the process that it was announced far too soon. There was this large push on the forums for complete transparency with plans on the server and Aikar wanted to honor that by revealing this large scale plan he had for the server to allow respawning of the dragon. However, it was all plans and not a lot coded yet. As the development team set out to code the requirements for the event, Microsoft started releasing updates faster and faster, including the update in which you could repawn the dragon. Welp, now EMC had to change plans to try to mkae it more than just spawning, because vanilla beat us to it. When the updates come faster, they are usually less stable as well. With each official update released and each EMC special feature that needed to be accounted for, the to-do list kept and continues to keep pushing back Dragon Tombs. Everyone's usual response is 'well, get more devs'. It's not that simple though. I've seen most applications that go through to Aikar for the development team. Not many are versed in the correct coding, so then Aikar ends up stopping progress in order to teach them, or fail to before they get burned out. I can't code so I don't know how difficult it is, but I know that working around already established code with every new update has TONS of bugs. If you haven't looked at track yet, you should. Experienced developers we could hire cost money. And unfortunately, EMC is not this large scale server that can afford that. Aikar and chickeneer (our main devs) still hold full-time jobs and have real life responsibilities to handle. Now as to the EMC Games, this is mostly my area, but when it went out of my purview is when things went wrong. We tried to make it too fancy and automated in order to increase usability and make it yearly without a problem. The build team did a great job and a few of the events work GREAT, but there's something in the arena area that crashes me when just visiting. To make this usable, we'd have to scrap all command blocks and run things old school. It's messy, and primitive, and is still in the plans. My health took a rough turn for a few weeks, but I've been working on pulling this all back together manually and removing the command blocks. Of course, by going back to the primitive build, it requires a lot more to fully set up use so that's where I've dedicated my time. Summary for this entire section is something that I've been fought on a LOT. In my opinion, Complexity results in problems. Yes, it's great and all to have automation, etc for items. Code makes things pretty, etc. But it also makes things more difficult to fix if something breaks. Complex systems are sometimes hard to understand for some of us. Example: Res flags are great and all, but it takes sooooo much more time to assign all of the flags than to just live with the limitations present. Command blocks broke on games and I don't have the knowledge to fix them. The staff that does has real life issues to attend to. We're just not a big enough server to expect that we can just hire someone to handle it. We need to get back to not expecting bigger and better, but instead just be happy when something works. Get back to the basics and next time, stop complaining that something isn't exactly perfect and just enjoy it. Creature Capture disappearance is the direct result of the aforementioned res flag complexity. Maybe I'll poke around and see if I can take that back to basics too... Sorry if that's a bit ranting, but I personally stay away from complex systems because every time that I've tried to embrace them fully, it bites me in the butt. New and shiny only lasts so long. We need tried and true and that's my focus for bringing back EMC Games. I can't do anything about Dragon Tombs unless you can force Microsoft to release only STABLE builds. I don't see that happening any time soon so we have to do the best we can with what we've got. I am not in control of Tokens so I can only give the information which I have been given, as well as a little background. Tokens were released early in order to make sure the community players could gather enough that they would not be immediately limited by the requirements of the next phase. We're talking hundreds of thousands of tokens required to be able to freely advance without limitation. Now with the updates mentioned above, the entirety of Dragon Tombs and the original plan had to be somewhat scrapped and taken back to the drawing board. This all being done in-between updates and bug fixes. This is why there is such a delay for true usage of these items. I agree that it's been far too long, but with such a lofty goal of Dragon Tombs in the first place, it was more complex than originally expected to simply code and go. Again, this is my personal opinion and I do commend the developers for their work thus far. We had a survey recently in which the community assisted in modifying how we handle things. There are players who want things stricter, and those that want things looser. We found a balance for this and have adjusted as needed. Schematic printer function is a creative-minded feature that does not belong on a survival server. Restricting use in very specific ways and needing to monitor everything more closely is what we are trying to avoid with our rules, per the players' preference. Global chat is on the way. It can't be dropped in overnight because there are various changes that have to be made based on previous chat code. We agree that we want to have the community more cohesive, and we're hoping this can help. As for physically compacting servers, that is a LOT of work. Standards have not been lowered with regards to anything other than what the community voted we should be more lenient on. The changes made were decided with the help of the community instead of unilaterally. There are players who wish we were extremely strict, but the majority wanted looser restrictions that mirrored a 'help them get better' attitude. Yes, all servers need players, but we don't need them badly enough to sacrifice the play experience for our other players. If you think staff is doing this, please PM me the staff's name. I can assure you that all threads like this that are made are read and mostly agreed upon. There are ears with hands tied, but never deafened.
I agree with everything you said with maybe the exception of mods upholding the rules. But, I think the age of these servers is approaching its end I'm afraid. Microsoft and Mojang are pumping out more and more updates and it is difficult for plugin developers and these servers to keep up. The updates are great, and I think they have caused some renewed enthusiasm for minecraft but the new players I know play realms or xbox live or local worlds and don't know or care these servers exist. EMC is not the only server that is stuck on 1.12 and that, I'm afraid, is the kiss of death. New players get on a server with empty oceans, no pandas, no bamboo, none of any of the new stuff? Not likely. 1.13 was released July 18, 2018, that's a long time ago.
I'll try not to repeat points already made by people, but in general most of your points are valid but highly expecting. By that I mean you have very high expectations for the server, which may come from the glory days of EMC when we were much larger and had a lot larger of a staff team. Also, inflation doesn't necessarily hurt the economy, since it means you get more from selling goods as well. Diamond are about 100r right now, and if you take that as 3x what they used to be, I'd say you can get far more than 3x the free rupees from stuff like voting than you used to. Stuff like tokens and lack of updates, well, it's a survival server run by a very small team, so you have to manage your expectations, EMC doesn't have the budget or staff of some of the larger minecraft servers like hypixel to push out content constantly while also managing the server. I do somewhat agree with you, on those points, because EMC's current process for finding developers makes it near impossible to join the team. Krysyy said: I don't know the case for other dev applicants, but when I applied, I was turned away on the grounds that I had to be a mod first. Aikar's exact words were: That's hard. I've applied several times throughout the years, and I guess never passed as I've never heard back. We get only a handful of new staff per year, and so the chance of a staff member also being a competent programmer as well is so slim. We only have 4 devs right now, and obviously need more. We always hear about how tough the workload is on the devs, and how many things have to be done (which I am sympathetic to, I've been in similar positions before in terms of unexpected workloads for projects), but yet we don't seem to see them actively looking for new developers. Obviously I have some personal bias on this point, being a competent (at least IMO) programmer who tried to help, was denied, and then has to listen to how much work the devs have in every other suggestion post. But anyway. As for your bit about the mods, I'm somewhat in the same boat, I think that EMC greatly stifles technical minecrafters with restrictions and hidden mechanics. I can see how aesthetic minecrafters might feel the same way about losing the ability to use certain features like that. The ability for people to use this mechanic to their advantage is relatively limited, since it's not practical to grief with and would be used for things like making builds for all to see. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what EMC considers "vanilla+" or not, and while they may consider unbreakable tools and armor, magic crafting tables, and the ability to bed warp between your outpost and spawn to be "Vanilla+", they may consider automatic building to be a little bit too much like a FTB style of mechanic. As a fellow 7+'er myself, it's sad to see you go, but it seems like you're just looking for a more intricate survival experience than EMC currently offers as a vanilla+ server. I hope maybe someday when we get these fancy features out that perhaps you will come back to check them out.
A little background info since there seems to have been a miscommunication on this: This comes down to trust and vision for the server. If you applied to be a dev, then were told to apply for staff, it's because Aikar and I need to know that you meet the requirements for trust and overall vision and attitude. Adding a dev who just wants to code big items and not focused on the same mindset as the admins is problematic and causes more issues than having the developer is worth. We've been there and dealt with the fallout. Having a dev who can't pass the qualifications for moderator leads to problems when players ask questions and I end up having to do damage control more on what was said or general customer service. Players will always turn to developers as staff, even when we say don't. If you were not added after a developer application, then your moderator application likely did not meet standards yet. It's difficult because sometimes you are close but there are reservations that nag in our gut as a 'red flag' of sorts. We've had quite a few red flag instances bite us in the butt, so we needed to stop ignoring the gut feeling that was telling us not to proceed yet. Us adding only a few staff per year is not due to need. It's due to quality.
You are not alone my man. I have a friend named Willies952002 who applied as a dev and was turned away. It's a shame though because he's quite a good programmer.. He even updated EmpireCraft for EMC to 1.14... ._. I may be biased, but that was nice of him.
I completely agree with everything you've said, and I think that being cautious like that is absolutely necessary for the health of the server. As someone's who probably holds the record for most bug reports to the devs, I know how important it can be to make sure you don't just focus on pushing out content and instead focus on optimizing and foolproofing it first. That being said, I think that considering how relatively few devs we currently have, and considering it's been almost two years since the last one joined the team, I think you should change the approach. Rather than looking for mods who happen to know how to program as well, you should look for the competent programmers and then try to turn them into good mods. Again, I have obvious bias here, but I feel like I see exiting players citing the lack of updates more and more often, as well as complains about it in general. As a very active and very old member of the server, it's frustrating to see this happening. This isn't commentary about me specifically, I'm sure emc has countless people who feel the same way and plenty of candidates who are overlooked. Edit: Well hell, there you go. Willies doing unrecognized work for EMC, and isn't on the team. I don't see his name anywhere except on the pull request on the github. Maybe it happened and I missed it, but I would think someone like that would be deserving of a thank you post on the front page or something, since he doesn't get the fancy blue name. Like I said, I wasn't just speaking for myself, there are lots of talented people out there I do apologize for derailing this thread, though.
The shrinking size of the developer team is actually starting to worry me, given the current situations that a good percentage of them are facing: Aikar - Busy with real-life chickeneer - School Teacher, also one of the only active developers. MrSocks75 - ??? WA9ACE - Busy with real-life This seems to be a trend that I also fall into. After careful observation, I've come to two conclusions... EMC's players haven't gotten any updates in over a year, leading to a decline in active players mainly due to things getting stale fairly fast. EMC is loosing out on new players - a fair percentage of the new players that I see join EMC are on newer versions of Minecraft (1.13-1.14.4). With this taken into consideration, there are those that complain as to why doors are broken, chests won't merge into double chests, and why they keep getting kicked when trying to type a command.. ultimately causing them to leave and not come back. Please excuse me for a moment... Runs and Hides
Anyways... It's sad to see another member of the community "leave".. hopefully you'll return some day when EMC is back to having a booming population I don't know who this "Willies" person you're talking about is, but he's not here
We tried that. Frankly, developers' mindset is very rarely able to turn to mod status. Developers tend to be more blunt and often short-tempered with players. The problematic customer service issues I usually deal with come from this. They don't hold their tongues with drama either... (again a generalization of self-driven work instead of a team mindset, based on patterns)...We're in discussion to allow something to allow some players who are good devs to help, but not be given the expectation we have in moderators with attitude. Trust, ALWAYS. But attitude we can be more lax when the dev doesn't have an active in-game title for example. Guinea pig of program mentioned above... Willies has been working quietly to help EMC without the title for a number of reasons. As for the thank you post, it would be with the actual update (and therefore hasn't happened yet), as all developer shout outs have been.
On the point of the broken client version- that's a big one for sure. People don't normally expect to have to use 1.12, so they assume the server is just garbage and broken. I've seen that happen more than once, and even when you explain to a player that it's because of the version, often time they just don't care enough to go switch and come back. On the point of the devs being busy, I think we both agree that it's understandable, obviously we can't expect people to be dropping real life jobs and school for EMC. For me, I always have to put college first, and as I'm typing this I have a school project running to process gigabytes of data for an extra fancy midterm project. However, you are absolutely correct. Shrinking dev team availability is still a big issue, and if they can't put the time in themselves, if they value the longevity of the server then they should be finding people who can. Even as a college student I could easily commit 20 hours a week some weeks to being a developer since I can justify it to myself as education-related Maybe if we keep this dev riot train going long enough, aikar will be forced to come out of hiding and scold us I might join you in the running and hiding.
I've seen a total of maybe 7 applications this year, only a few of which actually had any applicable coding experience and met our requirements. You have to be 18 and live in the USA, in addition to the requirements listed before, because of signing the NDA. Not everyone knows how to code, and from those that do, they don't know how to code in the way we are looking for, or they live outside of the USA. Willies is the only one that got through close enough to actually be helpful and not a setback at this time. Once again, shout out will be in the actual update post for the work that they've done.
It seems as if we get more devs. The updates will come out faster and then more people with stay Bc it’s up to date, at least that’s what I am gathering from all this.
Your thinking isn't wrong - more developers can roughly equate to more tasks be completed in parallel. However, that would be in a perfect world, where every task only required one developer to complete, but nothing is perfect, and knowledge isn't spread out evenly among a group of people. Here's an example... Survival Update v2. There was a lot of content released in that update, and it came out in a decent time-frame if I'm not mistaken.. but that's when we had 8/9 developers on the team, now we only have half as many. Also.. I feel that this conversation should be moved to it's own thread, instead of being on someone's "leaving" thread
