The Apology
I want to start this post off with the apology. After my post yesterday a lot of people have been angry, upset or proud of me, and having had a further 24 hours to reflect on a lot of the comments that have come out of it, and the communities position, it's ultimately made me realise that I did a totally crap job of explaining what the post actually meant, and what was actually a very unexpected response from the community given the approach I had tried to take.
I am truly sorry for the way that I acted in the thread, and a lot of the challenges I was given. To be honest after that post and the volume of pings I was getting calling me out for being a shitty human being, I was overwhelmed and that was pretty much non-stop for the best part of 6 hours, so as that time went on, my willing to explain exponentially reduced to the point of giving up and fucking off to bed.
To clear some things up generally, the thread was not the result of a single action, though the action around some members of this community harassing me triggered a reevaluation of the server, it's progress and it's future in my head, and being 100% honest with you, 28 hours ago I couldn't see a path forward that wasn't going to end in the burn out of TF as not just a Minecraft server, but as a community generally. My first priority to TF as the owner of not just a Minecraft server, but as the custodian of the community is as I've always seen it, to ensure that the community itself can survive, or at the very least to ensure that we can look back on TF in 5, 10, 20 or more years time and have something to go "Oh I remember that thing".
I am sorry that I wasn't able to make my intentions in that thread fully clear, and while this was made worse through people not reading the full thread, or just spreading mis-information generally I should have done more to make that clear.
The Plea for help...
In the last 28 or so hours, a lot of folks that haven't been active or responsive have appeared out of the wood work to "Save TF", and it's been honestly heart warming to see. It's a shame that a major incident / event is what it takes to bring folks back to TF's attention, however I hope that with an increased number of people actively invested again in TF's future, there's a chance the MC Server will be able to be moved from an "Unsustainable" approach, to "Sustainable".
There were 5 "Main" issues for me which resulted in the conclusion I made to ramp down and close down the Minecraft servers. I want to talk about them here and explain what needs to be done to mitigate and get to the stage where we can move past these.
1 - The "Community" is primarily made up of individuals that only login to the Minecraft server when there is significant drama to be had
The point behind this was the reluctance from the community to allow change to be made, despite it being something I've made clear time and time again that needs to happen. Now I don't expect 100% of you to agree with 100% of my decisions, while nice, it's unrealistic of me to ask that of people... What I do need people to do is to be respectful in their discussions, and to understand that sometimes the changes I and the executives make are ultimately stepping stones... I do my best to be transparent, and I do my best not to make 'Big Bang' changes to our game modes because it tends to throw people.
2 - We realistically at this point have no way to keep the server up to date
This was and still is realistically my major concern with the Minecraft server... Unfortunately our current development team has been swamped and generally inactive, there's little I can do to complain about that because they're doing all of this out of the goodness of their hearts, but when we aren't able to keep anywhere close to up to date when it comes to the updates, it's of major concern to me for a number of reasons.
The main issue is without active developers, we can't add the new functionality we have been asked to add by the community, we can't make the significant improvements and optimisations to the way that the game modes run, and we can't work on the custom game modes that we have had in the pipeline. There's a really cool gamemode that would be ideal for a large amount of our current TF player base, and has never been done anywhere else on Minecraft before, but it needs a lot of dev effort to make a reality and that's just been a huge struggle.
Work is ongoing with this to try to reduce the ongoing developer effort to sustain our game modes, to get there requires a lot of developer work and community support, this is one of the areas I need your help!
We urgently need to find some folks with some programming experience, ideally in Java who can help us progress with the development of TFM and the Freedom Gamemode. I'm going to be making the changes outlined in this thread, because while it's not ideal in the way that I wanted to be able to use the agile tooling, at this stage it probably makes the most sense for TF...
3 - Lack of player retention
This is still a major issue, and again, something we really need the community's assistance with
There are a lot of folks here with ideas on how to improve retention, and where those idea's don't require developer effort, I'm generally going to always be supportive. We really need to see an increase in the in-game players, we've got 600+ people on the Discord, and we have hours at a time where the MC server has 0 or 1 online players on the entire network... I need everyone to help with promoting TF and trying to help keep folks playing, those of you running guilds, engage with new players and try to engage them with the guild community as well as the wider TF communities.
4 - The bullying and targeted harassment at me and other executives
This one is very upsetting, because it's just not needed. I'm also going to clarify, respectfully disagreeing with someone, is not the issue here. Going out of your way to actively abuse, bully and harass some of us. The bottom line is there's not a lot I can do to change peoples behaviour, I ask that folks try to be respectful but if people won't be, they won't be.
I will however be changing my stance on the matter, I've tried for a long time to give people a wide birth and tolerate far more abuse than I probably deserve, in hindsight that's done a lot more damage to me and the community than just removing those individuals would have. I don't like removing individuals from the community, but those that partake in this sort of behaviour will be removed in the future.
What does this all mean?
Right now, today I'm going to put a pause on the close down activities for the Minecraft server, and give the community a chance to step up and help keep TF running in the medium to longer term. I really do need people to step up and help out here though, else we'll just end up back here in a few months again.
I will also be looking to make some more significant changes to the way TF runs, things like simplifying our rules and conduct policies, and unifying them across the platforms where it's practical to do so, so our new joiners don't have to read war and peace just to know what they can do. I'll be empowering some individuals with more responsibility and privilege across the network.
I am also going to take a few weeks to fully disconnect and step back, I've got a few personal bits going on at the moment and various expos and events that I plan to attend, and it's become very clear that I need to be able to take a proper break. I'll announce more on this in a separate thread, along with all of the changes which will happen.
I also want to be transparent here... This very much is a pause, not a stop. I intend to review the situation around Christmas time, and if things haven't improved in the key areas I need the community to help with, then we will be back here looking to close down the Minecraft game modes potentially. I really hope it will not come to that, but my priority is to ensure the community itself remains intact, the Minecraft server is simply one of a few ways we achieve that.
There will be plenty of other updates to come out in the coming weeks, and I ask you to read this post in full, it's intentionally detailed in an effort to answer as many questions as I could.
Thanks all.