Hey folks,
So I realised I've not really been doing a great job at keeping everyone up to date with the priorities as I see them, and that's my bad. I've had add-hoc conversations with a few people and on a few chats in Discord, but this feels like a good time to give you an up to date idea on my priorities following on from my original thread quite some time ago. This is sort of in priority order as I see it, but as this should be spanning the full breath of the executive team as well as other individuals, I expect much of this to run in parallel.
Dev Updates - Java 16 & Minecraft 1.17
The highest priority item for me at the moment across the network is to be in a position to bring Freedom-01 up to Java 16, which will enable us to start looking at performing the 1.17 update. At the time of writing this the development team and myself have done a significant amount of de-risking on the development server, and we're down to a single plugin which we must get updated to work properly on Java 16 before we can update the current servers java version. Everything else we believe should update fully and without issue.
Once we have the entire network running Java 16, the next priority will be getting the Freedom game mode uplifted to 1.17, and should the Skyblock server be integrated fully into the network before this, the Skyblock will also be uplifted in parallel (Though we don't expect this should require our developers time as there are no custom plugins we support at this time there). Once we're ready to do the uplift we'll drop 1.16.5 support throughout the network and jump up to 1.17.1 (Or the latest 1.17.x build depending on patches).
While there are folks that may not like 1.17, for us it's critical that we keep in step, we've noticed historically that most players will look to update to the latest version as it's released as they are using the default profile (or that's what I suspect anyway). We will however be giving plenty of notice before we jump to 1.17, and will look to open the development server for some testing before we roll the update out everywhere.
Hub Improvements
A clear need for better moderation abilities has been identified within our hub infrastructure, and while the hubs are unlikely to be heavily used at the moment we will be looking to bring on some staff to better manage the moderation in the hub server. Longer term we will re-review this and may merge the responsibilities of moderating the hub in with the Freedom or another game mode staff, but for now due to the way TFM perms work we aren't able to have cross-network Freedom staff.
In addition to this we will be looking to make some cosmetic improvements to the hub many of which I had hoped to be made some time ago. I will be looking to work with the MB Team to start making more seasonal updates to the hub and to ensure there is a growing number of things that can be done there as per the original intention of the hub. While it's not intended that players will spend extended amounts of time in there, as we grow there's a good chance people may be in the hub waiting for friends, or waiting for server re-starts / similar.
Plot World Improvements
This is something I'm very keen to start making significant progress on, as @"Miwojedk"#64 so elegantly put it, the current plot world is pretty crap for enabling our building community to effectively build, and I want to do what I can to make that a better and more useable experience for all involved. I am currently looking at creating a new server on the network to be dedicated to creative plots, and this is for a few reasons. The first being it gives us the chance to be free of any "Weird Shit" that TFM does, Plots were never designed to run on a TFM server, and it's clear it's been "Slotted in" and I think that has served us well, but with the move to running TF as a network and with a lot more resources to play with, having a dedicated server gives us a lot more flexibility. This will also allow us to try a few things out in a safer environment, the first is to move to a 100% permission based system, which I think for plots especially will prove to be invaluable, and will allow us to give players a lot more access to work with their plots, without risking them doing damage elsewhere like they could on Freedom-01.
The other key improvement I want to make with the plots server is to ensure we have as many good building plugins to aid our rather talented building community, there is already a thread asking for suggestions, and I really appreciate all the feedback so far! We will continue to work through the suggestions, and will hopefully find a configuration that the majority of folks finds works well.
Skyblock Integration
We still have some work to do in order to bring the sky block server into the full TF Network, and to bring it's community over with it. We're doing some work to improve the stability and performance of the server at the moment, and are looking at options to change it into online mode so that it can be properly integrated, so far this has proved to be a bit more complex than we had hoped, but we are optimistic that we can complete the integration and bring the Skyblock game mode into the TF Network.
MB Project Servers
To enable the MB Team to properly work on some of the work I have tasked them with (Updates and changes to the hub for example) we will be looking to stand up some MB Project servers on the network where the team can have additional permissions and access to make the required changes to the hub before they are then moved onto the live environment. This has been on my to-do list for quite some time, but has slipped for a number of reasons.
Freedom-01 World Optimisations
The Freedom-01 server is reaching disk sizes that are now impossible to properly back-up and restore. Despite making improvements elsewhere to TF's disk utilisation (Mostly in the area of CoreProtect data) we've not been able to shrink our file size footprint by a substantial enough amount to have a fully functional backup solution (Just due to how our hosts backup service runs).
There is also a significant "Cost" (All be it sponsored) to having as much disk space used. With thanks to @"Folfy_Blue"#356 we have a script we will be looking to test in the near future on the Freedom-01 Flatlands and over world to remove any chunks that have had no modifications made to it, or have never had anyone actually enter the chunk. Our hope is this will help combat the Columbus style damage where chunks are generated and written to disk, but never actually built in. Our hope is this may help shrink our server file sizes down anywhere from 30% to 75%.
Player Retention & Growth in General
We're starting to notice a somewhat scary downward trend on players, despite this last 3 months historically being when TF should see it's annual peak of players. I suspect this is the result of a number of factors including the fact a lot of the world is only recently able to travel for holidays and such, but it is still a significant concern. I've asked @"RedEastWood"#47 to take up the overarching role around player growth and retention with the hope of having a single person responsible and accountable for such a role, it will enable us to grow our network better, and our community can begin to grow as a whole.
Updates to Executive Roles (And non-executive roles)
Over the coming months there are some changes I will be looking to make to ensure our current executives are best suited for the role, and also to ensure we have people responsible for the roles that I feel the server needs to have covered, there are a number of tweaks and changes I will be looking to make tweaks to the roles and the overall structure of things to try to clear up some roles and responsibilities generally