Hi gang, Yes, it's a critical Shellvent. Some of you don't like those, so if you're one of those please stop reading now. But do be aware that this isn't just me being negative. I'm addressing issues, but I'm also coming up with suggestions how those could be fixed (this is a suggestion thread after all). "Don't you have better things to do?". No, for reasons I'm not allowed to share Aya insists on being on Games and honestly: I'm bored out of my mind. That can't be good I'm left a little under impressed, hence usage of the word "fix" in my subject. Not trying to be mean or overly critical but seriously: if the games server is totally empty most of the time then isn't that an indication that something doesn't work and players aren't really into it? So here's my take. Why can't I teleport to Aya? The games server is HUGE. We ran into multiple situations where one of us found something which appeared to be playable (getting into that) and then it's "Aya/Shell, come over here!". Yeah, but... where is "here"? Sure: sometimes you can press 't', then check your backlog, but even that is no guarantee you can explain where you are. And quite frankly, especially with the release of subzones, I don't get it anymore. If I can make a "no tp" area on my residence, then surely you guys should be more than capable to ensure that us players can teleport in the lobbies but cannot teleport into game areas? It makes no sense to me. This is a major downer for me, because... enter the next point: Why don't you tell us up front that something doesn't work? I can respect that one game doesn't work anymore due to a Minecraft update and you need a quick fix. So place some signs, all good. But seriously; this isn't one incident. It almost seems as if a majority of the games don't work anymore. Hide and seek (it makes no sense! (getting to that later)), creature capture, mine bomber... Only mentioned three, but three can be enough to demotivate, especially if you find these in sequence (guess what happened to us?). Why do you lock up players? If you don't play on other servers ("those places we do not speak off") and therefor aren't familiar with commands such as /hub and /spawn then you risk getting trapped. Or having to walk a LONG way back to spawn. Why do you guys assume that players know all these commands? Aya wandered off in funland, found a game and assumed I was going to play. She was selected for a team and had to wait for other players. Who didn't show up (sorry, sorry, sorry! ). Problem. Especially because even the /town command didn't work. You're lucky that MultiVerse doesn't remember the location you teleport from; so if you go to another server and back you're back on spawn. But the very moment this does gets changed (it is a requested feature) then you guys are in serious trouble. Well, us players are, but that will reflect back on the Empire. Why can't we 'do' things? Ok, this isn't fully fair but still... Having experienced subzones (and taken them to extremes) I se lots of unused potential. A whole drop party area.. why can't we use it? Do you guys have any idea how awesome it would be for a regular player to 'do' stuff on EMC ground? "Here I am, go to /games and we can DO stuff". Why not make this a SS event? Us players can buy into games.... for .. I dunno: 20k tokens or 100k rupees we get to use the games server. That also attracts more attention to /games, and if /games is appealing you'll get more players over time easily. uh, oh, getting ahead of myself! Suggestion No, this wasn't a list of whining but I did wanted to get my point across. Why not rely on the community to help you out here? With all due respect but what I see on the games server is a server build by staff (and possibly some helpers, but that's all done according to staff), yet without trying to stop and think how a regular player would experience all this. Note: this is only my impression. But I say that because I know how this usually works: when players don't like something they'll just stop playing. And considering the fact that Aya and me are on an empty server for the past 2 (!) hours. Three now This place could be so much more! Why not a fun community competition to build games for the games server? Especially now that us players have subzone access this should be more than doable. At the risk of sounding ungrateful... The games server looks awesome, it honestly does. I spend quite some time walking around buildings and looking while trying to find more things. It's basically a mini town / server. I recognize and definitely respect the work and effort that went into this. As a building project the games server is seriously awesome. No matter my criticism this honestly doesn't change: this is seriously impressive. I'm not trying to take away any of the glory here. Hell no. But the problem is that, as ungrateful as this may sound, in the end this is only eye candy. A good game isn't defined by its look but by gameplay. There are dozens of games out there which are horribly looking but oh so much fun to play (Tetris anyone?). Hmm, there's also this weird game of Minecraft. Looks horrible but people tend to like it for some reason... ok, ok, sorry And yes... Aya and me found some hidden stuff, which doesn't work right now (adding up to.. you know). My issue There are tons of seriously qualified players out on the Empire. But instead of asking them to help, staff prefers doing it all on their own. Basically all you want is players to ask you to allow them to let you help them. Ending up on stuff done in your way, or the highway. But sometimes the highway can be much more appealing (unless there's a traffic jam ). Food for thought? Sorry for the long rant, but when I see a whole server being empty most of the time (see: /who games) then my fingers start to itch. There's so much potential going to waste here I think
Quite a lot of stuff I agree with. One more thing that I believe: there are only a few singleplayer games, most are multiplayer. This means that if you don't have (many) friends (who are online), you can't do much apart fron those few games. Apart from PvP, I've never played a multiplayer game on the games server... They look cool, but I need company, which I rarely have. So I personally would like there to be a few more singleplayer games...
So your suggestion is to have players that are not staff be building and designing games. Done. (and has been done) The staff don't build the games server. The amazing and talented Build Team does. Yes, some of our staff are ON the build team, but they treat the roles separately. Only someone with OP on the server may edit a command block. That's the only limitation there. Before you make a suggestion in the future, I kindly advise that you ask who is actually involved. Now to address the actual issues that are a problem, such as tp, we are currently in discussion.
I agree with a lot of this. Had the games server leaked to me years ago from a former build team member and was immediately interested; upon its final release I was left a little bit unimpressed and the games I played were... honestly underwhelming. There's a whole lot of untapped potential with it, as well as an opportunity to get players from outside of the normal SMP target audience to play (potential for more sweet supportership money for Aikar). It's quite sad that nobody seems to even play on it.
Something tells me the build time can't, for example, place command blocks. They build the eye candy (as I called it), not the games. My suggestion is to give the community a chance to build games for the game server. Make it a competition: people go wild on Creative (single player), send it in (I can provide an anonymous FTP server though dropbox is probably better) and you guys can use the entries for the game server. I know you don't like long posts, but, before you comment it would help if you didn't gloss over my post before commenting. And with that I'm no longer pursuing this thread. I know I'm critical but in the end we have the same goal here. Sometimes that's easily forgotten if you're on the receiving end of criticism. Which is the main reason I write long posts, to ensure that my point gets across.
Making a game isn't just building an arena + adding obstacles. I'd say all physical structures is 15% of the actual progress. The programming and other technicalities are the other 85% since that's what took the longest to successfully finish for games. Mojang constantly changes the logic process for much of the games function infrastructure and things break and somethings are entirely scrapped until a solution is found. Games Server about 2 years ago had MANY more options but lots of the games were put aside due to Mojang's technical changes. Its not so much "there needs to be more builds", its more or less technicalities which takes time to figure out. Some of it sounds easy and some of it is. The more simplistic ideas I have found and witnessed were the most difficult to get working.
