As we come to the end of what's been a rather challenging year for us all, both within this community and for many of us in our personal, social and other circles, I wanted to start to outline some of the plans and priorities that I've got in mind for the first half of 2022.
Over the course of this year we've faced some fairly significant challenges in terms of our player base and any form of retention and growth, I'm thankful to those of you that make up our core player base, and genuinely appreciate your continued support. My hope is that over the course of 2022 we can start to stabilise and grow properly, and these priorities will reflect making the server more sustainable to operate from a capacity and development perspective, but also critically will reflect the significant quality of life improvements for all members of the community.
The following list is in a rough priority order, but some activities may be completed in parallel or by different individuals.
Plots Server Launch
A lot of work has already been done as 2021 has been concluding to make the Plots world a reality, unfortunately it hasn't quite made it to launch for the end of this year. As it currently stands we have some additional permissions configuration that needs to be finished off, along with a lot of builds that the MB Team have been tasked with.
As soon as both of these activities are done, we will look to start a limited beta-trial on the server, before rolling it out to the entire community. The current hope is this will go live between February and March of 2022, but this will be sooner if we can make it happen!
Freedom Game-Mode Flatlands World Clean-Up
This is a critical activity to help ensure the server is sustainable to run, back-up and maintain. With the work @"StevenNL2000"#2 has already done to get the world sizes down it's enabled us to re-start some of the back-up processes that were previously crashing and disrupting our hosts environment. The Flatlands clean-up is the last activity that needs to be completed to enable us to re-baseline the servers requirements, and move to upgraded infrastructure and enrol the server into the panel.
Skyblock Reset & Network Integration
Since we merged the Skyblock server into the network, we've had a lot of problems finishing the full integration and getting it into the bungee, this has been due to the server historically being an offline mode server, and the migration to online mode being exceptionally challenging.
Speaking to @"Hooke_"#417 we have agreed that we will look to perform a full re-set of the Skyblock server and at the same time switch it to being part of the core bungee network. This will mean that players will be able to connect to the Skyblock from the hub server and without the need to re-connect on a different IP. As part of this it will mean Skyblock will cease to run as an offline mode server.
Flarum Upgrades & Re-Platform
The Flarum instance we run here is in need of some maintenance in the new year, part of that will involve re-platforming it onto a new VPS with an improved configuration in line with some of the lessons we've learnt from running Flarum so far.
This work should help ensure we're on infrastructure which is no longer grandfathered and helps align with the direction all of TF's infrastructure services are moving.
The 1.18.x Upgrade
A major priority for all of the game-modes will be to get to stable 1.18.x support ASAP, our various game-modes currently all support different versions of the game and have various compatibility rules to offer the appearance of a consistent base version to which the servers run on.
I am expecting this will be the largest challenge in the Freedom game-mode as evidenced by the fact we're still not actually running 1.17 on there, but this will be the highest development priority at least from the network perspective going into next year.
Panel Migration
Thanks to some excellent work from @"[deleted]"#15 earlier this year we now have a working setup of AMP which is currently the panel we're adopting for all servers across the TF Network, during the first half of 2022 we need to get everything moved to be ultimately managed by AMP which will likely be a reasonably significant amount of work, and cause some disruption. Some servers have already been moved across, but quite a few still need to be, mainly the hub, Bungee and Freedom game-mode.
Website Re-Design
One area that has come up a few times now is that the temporary landing page on our website isn't great, and that having a proper permanent website would look a lot better and be far more useful for the community.
During next year I'll be working with the ECD Team and the Development team to start working on bringing a new updated website to TF that showcases the various game-modes we will have running, information about our history and our community, and having some of the static content we currently host on the forums (Like our community guidelines) moved on to the website.
Player Retention & Growth
This is somewhat of a catch-all style point, but a key area we need to address is the actual retention of players throughout the network, starting with working on the existing advertising and promotion on the Freedom Server, and transitioning to a retention focused approach.
We will also need to look at ways to promote and retain players on our Skyblock and Plots servers, exactly how this is going to work in the longer term is to be addressed, but it's on my radar as activities we need to handle.
World Download Tool Improvements
There are quite a few improvements that I'm hoping to make to the world download tool to streamline the process of getting new files introduced to the tool, and ultimately there's a lot of stuff I have archived that needs to be published. Over the first half of the year I'm hoping to at the very least get all the files that should be available made available, and then in slower time also overhaul a lot of how it works under the hood to streamline and improve this process.
Designing New Game-Modes
During the first half of 2022 we're also going to be looking to gather and understand ideas around additional game-modes we might want to introduce in the future. Given the huge amount of work we already have on our plate, I can't imagine that we will have any launch right now in the first half of next year, but we certainly want to be actively developing ideas so that should development or general capacity be available to work on them, we will.
I'm also aware that there are going to be some activities we will likely start during the first half of 2022, but that are somewhat unlikely to be actually complete during this time. This section will outline some of these activities.
Migration Off Of Flarum
This was an activity that I had started working on some time ago, and after substantial backlash on how things were being ran, decided to de-scope. My intention at the moment is to look to re-start this work during 2022 and by the end of the year my aspiration is to have moved away from Flarum fully.
Migrate various aspect of the Freedom Game-Mode to Network Manager
This is another activity I had hoped to do this year, but to help strip functionality from TFM, I'm keen to move some of the basic functionality TFM does to be managed into the NetworkManager plugin, including rank management, punishments, sanctions, chat and all these sorts of things. This will help get TFM into a better position to eventually be moved over to being stripped back more and we switch to permissions, or ultimately for whatever the longer term plans @"StevenNL2000"#2 has for the Freedom server by reducing the ongoing development overhead of the Freedom game-mode and trying to standardise into common practices where we can.