What Can We Do Better?

  • I realize a lot of people have made comments / concerns around how I have ran TF, and how things are progressing. So I'd like to invite folks to have a discussion here around what we can / should be doing better. It doesn't have to be fully formed idea's like we would normally want for suggestions, but I'd like to know what people think we could be doing that would make the player experience better within the network.

    This isn't just tied to the Freedom server, it can relate to Skyblock / Forums etc.

    I also can't guarantee we will do everything, and there's a good chance some of what will be suggested is already in the works, but I'm keen to make sure there aren't silly / obvious things we could be doing better and that would make the player experience better without being huge amounts of dev / similar effort which we don't tend to have.

    Also, please don't turn this into a flame thread, I'm asking for genuine constructive suggestions and feedback, anything that isn't I'll split off into other threads.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  • One thing I suggest is processing suggestions a bit faster. For example, I have a suggestion that's been out since September of 2021 for Freedom-01 and it has not received any attention/resolution (accepted/rejected) despite the problem it seeks to address continuing to happen.

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  •   Alco_Rs11 That's a good point. As part of handing the Freedom game-mode over to StevenNL2000 the plan is for him to pick up the processing of those suggestions. I think Steven has been pretty busy and I've not heard from him in a few days. I'll spend some time trying to catch-up on the really old ones, so if nothing else he has a chance and we can ticket up some of the much older stuff and focus then hopefully on the newer suggestions.

    I'll also catch-up with Steven when he's back online and make sure he's happy picking it up going forward as it's certainly something I'm hoping not to be doing longer term!

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  • To be honest, It kinda feels like the progress towards 1.18 and moving most of the important stuff off of TFM and to NM and whatever else has been kinda.. "opaque"?? Idk any good words to describe it, but it just feels kinda slow. I don't want to come off as unappreciative of any progress made tho, and I'm sorry if I do.

    ピバラ。

  •   Deauthorized I'm hoping Paldiu can provide an update. I'm not sure I have much more information beyond what has been shared in terms of how close we are to things.

    I've also asked the exec's to start posting some form of activity updates to try to encourage transparency or at the very least improve our ability to communicate with everyone. Good shout. Thank you.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  •   RedEastWood Unfortunately the vast majority of issues raised on that thread require significant development effort to fix. Most if not all have been raised as tickets, I'll give the thread a full re-read through to make sure we didn't miss anything, but I'm not sure there is much we can do beyond wait for the developers to implement a lot of those things. Which is why I asked folks to flag where there might be other things that have already been missed / we should just be doing better, we've already had two good points on here that weren't on that thread that have been things we can actually address and make a difference on.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  • @'anemone' TF has always depended on developers giving their time to the server to help improve things. Unfortunately for us to maintain the "No Donations" policy which is where I'd like us to ideally stay, it means we have no money to pay a developer an actual salary.

    It is something I've thought about a lot, and there are some solutions I've started to explore in the past but never actually managed to find something that is great. Part of the reason behind splitting Plots out for example into it's own server is to remove the need for dev effort to continue maintaining our custom plots plugin just to make it work in the Freedom server.

    I guess it's one of those where we're working to change the way the server fundamentally works (Seth when he owned the place was an experienced developer, and had time. I'm a professional sys admin, not developer unfortunately) so we need to shift in line with the skills we have at our disposal. We're trying, but it will be slow going…

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  • From a developer's point of view...

    • The Ticket System
      The reason I have been able to make such rapid changes to the TotalFreedomMod in my fork of the plugin is because I'm not held back by having to look for (or create) tickets for every single fucking thing. The ticket system may be better from an organizational point of view, but frankly I think it slows me down significantly as a developer.

    • The Shop
      To put it bluntly, the shop system is shit. It goes against the very foundation of the server. Kill it and make the shop items free.

    • NetworkManager integration should be optional
      I have always strongly disagreed with the motion to make TotalFreedomMod require NetworkManager to function properly. It should be considered optional in scenarios where somehow NM breaks. That way, we have a good failsafe system to use. It also means that anyone who wants to make a freedom server will be able to just download the plugin and put it in their plugins folder. No need to purchase a $20 plugin just to run an otherwise functional plugin.

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  • I'll reply about the other two points tomorrow but this one is an interesting one for now.

    Quote

      videogamesm12 The Shop
    To put it bluntly, the shop system is shit. It goes against the very foundation of the server. Kill it and make the shop items free.

    The shop is designed to encourage voting and the goal then being that we get more players. If we remove the shop, how are we suggesting we make use of Coins (If we don't just scrap it) and how do we plan then to give people a reason to vote? Also would like to hear Tizz 's thoughts on that matter.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  • Quote

      videogamesm12 To put it bluntly, the shop system is shit. It goes against the very foundation of the server. Kill it and make the shop items free.

    I agree with the other two but disagree with this. As Wild said, it's an incentive to vote. These aren't major features we're gatekeeping from OPs who don't want to vote. I know you want to debloat TFM, but this is not the way.

    The one thing I'd like to see gone is the severe efforts to organize development. It's never worked well for TF. I was able to push out updates to the main server fast and keep a separate tab running for major updates. I'd like to see a hands off approach once again and let there be small updates and bug fixes more regularly than waiting to do everything at once. I know that's not entirely how it works in the enterprise world, but that's not where TF is at.

  •   Alco_Rs11 Absolutely agree with this.

    Though I am not a developer and I am completely unsure of how much work it has to be put in with most things, sometimes suggestion implementation is just at a snail's pace. To the average player, all of the behind-the-scene important structural work seems like it's dragging all the changes that would at least be a bit more visible to the common player base.

    From what I've been just feeling as an on-and-off player, a lot of suggestions seems to be hanging upon a lot of the mentioned important maintenance work. As a 1/256th of a programmer, it sounds understandable and frankly is probably way better for the longevity of the server and the ease of maintenance and what not - but I just can't help but notice that the entire 6-7 months I was gone, excluding a handful of bug-fixes and some minute feature implementation, we have really only progressed from version to version.

    Fair enough that maybe we don't need 200 features per weekly patch, but can we at least finally allow /tpa to ignore /tptoggle so that we don't have to use /ride...?

    Seeing what other actual developers have already chimed in on this topic, I suppose a lot of the actual issues and solutions are suggested already. Just here to give my own 2 cents.

    C'est la vie

  • Quote

      videogamesm12 The Ticket System
    The reason I have been able to make such rapid changes to the TotalFreedomMod in my fork of the plugin is because I’m not held back by having to look for (or create) tickets for every single fucking thing. The ticket system may be better from an organizational point of view, but frankly I think it slows me down significantly as a developer.

    So we had a chat about this offline yesterday before I had to head off to bed. I think there has been some confusion about what has to (or should be) written as a ticket and what doesn't need to be.

    The ultimate goal of the tickets is to help us form our release notes for new version of our plugins, and to track the community's demands for things. It's also there to ensure we're prioritising the sort of things that will have a positive impact to the community, rather than whatever people think of on the spot.

    I probably need to have a conversation with Paldiu to make sure he understands what I've setup and how, and he can then make sure folks are up to date on that, but the entire goal was to make development easier by clearly stating what needed to be done and if appropriate, how it should be done. And it means we don't end up losing stuff on the forums like we have for years and years now. I don't expect people to raise tickets for minor code improvements / optimisations, but anything that we would want to feature in release notes should be ticketed ideally.

    This probably does lead into another topic which has caused pain (In my view) is folks ignoring the jira board (Which is where all the community suggestions that are approved go) and just implementing random stuff nobody wants. It just means the community gets pissed because they see dev time being "Wasted" on stuff nobody asked for, and causes extra agro for no benefit.

    Quote

      videogamesm12 NetworkManager integration should be optional
    I have always strongly disagreed with the motion to make TotalFreedomMod require NetworkManager to function properly. It should be considered optional in scenarios where somehow NM breaks. That way, we have a good failsafe system to use. It also means that anyone who wants to make a freedom server will be able to just download the plugin and put it in their plugins folder. No need to purchase a $20 plugin just to run an otherwise functional plugin.

    The long term goal is to fully remove TotalFreedomMod from the server, as well as as much custom code we possibly can. The bottom line is we don't have the number of developers that we used to, or as much of their time. Recent months have highlighted that for TF to stand any chance of longer term survival, we need to strip out the custom stuff we write that other plugins (Paid or free) have built in. If other servers want to use TFM, they're welcome to use older versions / add to it themselves, but right now I don't personally see a future for TFM or any similar plugin on the Freedom game-mode.

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      Telesphoreo The one thing I’d like to see gone is the severe efforts to organize development. It’s never worked well for TF. I was able to push out updates to the main server fast and keep a separate tab running for major updates. I’d like to see a hands off approach once again and let there be small updates and bug fixes more regularly than waiting to do everything at once. I know that’s not entirely how it works in the enterprise world, but that’s not where TF is at.

    There aren't any real serious efforts to organize development, because it's tried and failed. We now do the bare minimum to track community asks, and make it as easy as we can make it for it to be reviewed and approved. Formally tracking the suggestions in Jira and linking them to releases was designed to try to make it easier for us to track down where bugs / issues are introduced, and to ensure when we put stuff on Freedom-01 it's actually release quality, instead of patching of patching of patching, which has also historically called us issues.

    I'm open to ideas of how we find a sensible middle ground, because as I see it short of going "Do what the fuck you all like whenever and eh we can't approve / reject suggestions because dev's might never do it" I'm not sure how much less formal we can make it… Happy to take on thoughts though. Keen to get it better than it currently is…

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  •   Feueristic I think one consistent theme so far has been lack of actual transparency with the dev team side of things, and the struggles we're going through. Part of that's on me for not making it more clear when we've been struggling to get updates pushed out / progress made, and I'm hoping some of the points raised earlier in the thread will help address it (Activity updates / similar).

    I'm certainly open to ideas as well, if there are other things we can do to make the community aware of these struggles, and hopefully keep people informed, I'm all for it.

    I'm trying to be more clear on the longer term "Big Project" bits that I'm working on / are of importance to the network, that will likely end up linking back to the dev side of things.

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      toyota_snpra player count

    Any suggestions on how to improve it?

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

  •   RedEastWood What rules would you like to see removed specifically? Given we have 8 rules and most boil down to "Don't break the law" and "Don't make things un-playable for everyone else" I'd be keen to know how people would further remove / simplify things…?

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      MagAgentV3 Let me use the tag black mesa

    What error did you actually get? I can't think off the top of my head what would be blocking that…

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK