Posts by wild1145

↩  Telesphoreo Then why the hell do we keep running a modified version..? That seems absolute madness.

↩  Tizz Yeah I'm keen to move away from "Automated Removals" except where they player has clearly gone totally inactive, I want the activity checks to form 1 part of a number of tools the EAO Team can have at their disposal to help better manage our admin team and make sure we're all doing our best for the community.

↩  characterslimits CoreProtect until the latest release was the big recent one that comes to mind. Nearly every other plugin does exactly the same behaviour, which is why we have to modify them. NetworkManager and Plan also do exactly the same, as does Essentials.

↩  characterslimits Because the vast majority of plugins will ignore permission nodes when a player is OP. Which is what causes us 90% of our problems with perms.

↩  characterslimits Because I wanted an experienced Java developer who also had experience running development teams.

Video as I think he's confessed himself is not all that experienced as a Java developer, And Elmon is not a Java developer at all. We have no other developers left at this point. Though that is not the reason for appointing Paldiu.

Paldiu is an experienced Java developer, and I've seen run other development teams in the past... I have confidence that he can run the team going forward, and that he can juggle the various priorities I'm going to push on him, and that he can delegate that down to the team, while also trying to bring in new developers to the team to help pick up the slack.

Paldiu gave a very lengthy and well written application when I chose my last ELD so I took that into consideration, it was exceptionally close between Fleek and Paldiu when I appointed Fleek previously, which is why when Paldiu made me aware that he would still be open to the position, I took some time to consider it, and felt that overall he is the best candidate for the role.

↩  fionn There's a lot of unknown right now around what will merge and how merged it will become, the "End goal" is it will be just another gamemode on the network, but we're taking the transition steady because there's no real rush, and I'd like to get it right.

↩  fionn My point was the TF dev team had to put 0 effort in, that was my point.

Also, we don't have a "Full developer team", we currently have 1 Java dev... Who also has a life.

You really cannot compare the work Seth did to other developers, Seth also owned the server, and I suspect had a significant amount more time free. I am relying on people who are willing to give me their time for free to contribute to the server, which is a tough ask because I'm certainly not skilled enough to do the work myself...

As for your other points around the hub and such, again that's already been addressed here, it will in the future be linked in, for now it's running isolated while we slowly merge things together in a sensible way.

↩  fionn The question has been asked and answered here... If you read through the comments you'll find it.

The TLDR (Because I'm fed up of saying the same thing over and over again) is we are actively working to improve the Freedom gamemode, but it requires significant amounts of development effort, which we just don't have. The Skyblock gamemode we absorbed into the network required 0 developer effort, and minimal effort from our existing staff team, meaning it was a low effort & low risk, with the chance of being somewhat rewarding... This won't take time or effort away from the Freedom gamemode, but does give us a low maintenance gamemode that players can enjoy.

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↩  fionn Nobodies asking you to stick with the regular 7 player freedom server but if the server is averaging 7 players maybe that's something you should work on, and not by thinning out our player base to other servers, either. People only join servers where there is at least some bit of a player base, especially in this stage in totalfreedom where it's basically a roleplaying server, realistically nobody is going to have fun on a server where nobody is on it because you and Ryan decided it would be best for the community to have people playing skyblock for a week and then it ends up just being a waste of resources

I would encourage you to read the rest of this thread. This point has been discussed and already addressed.

Regarding the paid ranks - I didn't know they were a thing, and they weren't setup by me. There has been a long standing discussion around how we can accept peoples money where they want to contribute towards the server, but at the heart of that ask, whatever the solution is will need to satisfy the following:

1. It's Legal - Ie it's all able to be tracked / taxed / invoiced appropriately.
2. It at no point detriments or impacts the actual game play for any of the game modes - TF has never been "Pay to win" I have no plans to change that.
3. It needs to be transparent in what you're paying for / donating towards, and we need to have safeguards in place to prevent fraud / similar.

I had no personal knowledge Skyblock had paid ranks, and while I fully intend to honour any ranks previously bought, I have asked that the online store be pulled until we can work through what the model could look like if we wanted to facilitate donations, which is a general pattern we need to work through.

And to cover off the other comments around TF never accepting donations, under Mark and Windows that was the case, under Seth donations were accepted and often encouraged. While donations are certainly not required / needed I appreciate some folks have previously expressed an interest in contributing to the server financially and would like to eventually find a good way to allow that.

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↩  Luke this is a common thing with yall, especially ryan in which criticism nowadays is met with exactly this which is kinda counterintuitive and is the digital equivalent of sticking fingers in your ear and going 'lalala'

I will admit I use the line more often than I probably should. But equally there comes a point at least in my position where you know you can't please everyone, and people either need to get with the program or find somewhere else.

I don't think anyone is saying criticism is bad, I think my point has always been there is a line to be drawn and at least for me as the owner of the server and network, it's my line to draw because it's going to be my problem whatever happens.

I will also remind people that the rules enforced on the server may carry sanction on the wider network. Part of the change to Steven's job role was to manage bans across the network. Staff or players that go out of their way to "Break" the server may find themselves indef suspended and/or indef banned on the Freedom servers or wider TF Network...

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↩  Luke 8 players. They could potentially all leave by the end of this week. If they're a close group all it takes is 1 to leave for all of them to leave.

In which case we got 8 players for "Free" for a week, and we have a fully functional gamemode that took none of our existing dev's effort to setup and maintain... Either way we've got something for "Nothing" which is far easier to maintain than our Freedom gamemode...

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↩  Luke Based on general management experience, people merge because their shit is failing. Based on the fact that their playerbase was literally 8 people, I can safely say this is why.

It's certainly possible, it's hard to grow servers in general. I'd rather give this a go and get it wrong than not try it...

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↩  Luke Disagree. Based on history it'll just fizzle out at the same rate, only difference being people play skyblock for a few weeks before getting bored.

Maybe so, but I'm going to do what I can to try to keep players on our gamemodes in general...

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↩  Luke I say charming for lack of a better word. By this I mean we lose what it was originally created for, which is an all inclusive freeop instead of a generic network.

And I have no intention of it becoming "Just a generic network", the challenge is balancing the huge amounts of dev effort required to make the custom gamemodes we have lined up, and the maintainability. The Freedom gamemode as is requires a huge amount of dev effort to maintain, so I am reluctant to put too much effort into trying to get new gamemodes out there because it'll take time and effort away from our ability to do dev on the Freedom gamemodes. It's a balance, and I'm trying to get it right, but I might not get it right first time...

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↩  Luke nobody is saying it was. people are saying it won't work.. because it won't

On the grounds that it already had an active player base, it can't do any worse than things like SMP... At least there is already some level of community established, not the largest, but it's better than fuck all...

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↩  Luke Don't you think there's a reason that the network you've absorbed had to be absorbed? Can you tell me what the playercount on there is like?

I wasn't involved in agreeing them merging into us, I simply approved the end result.

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↩  Luke And it's not by introducing Skyblock?

It gives us a better chance at surviving than doing nothing, which was my point.

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↩  Luke The issue is that nobody is going to play it not just some folks. It's skyblock. It's been here for years. What's unique? Crates?

Who's actually gonna play it, Ryan? The 'preexisting 8 players'?

I'll take those 8 existing players over 0 players at all...

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↩  Luke ..but it does. Patterns form. Clearly new gamemodes (or at the very least basic overdone gamemodes) don't work for TF. Instead of generic gamemode #2, go for something lesser seen that'd be more fun. Why not do minigames? I'm sure that'd fit in amazingly with Lyicx's job? I'd love to see paintball, spleef, etc.

This was a gamemode that required such little effort from anyone on the existing TF Team, it made it very easy and a very appealing deal. There's no custom dev involved, and everything is already configured and proven and good to go... We have had a cool gamemode which hasn't been done in Minecraft before written up and designed, and I'm really hoping we can actually develop and launch it soon, and we've got some other interesting gamemodes that are fairly un-common from what I've seen that we're looking to add. And I agree, I've considered options to be able to quickly turn the events server into various mini-games, or just flat out work out the best way to stand them up on demand anyway, and I hope that will all be to come in the future, but these things as always take time.

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↩  Luke And what will we be going for? 'ATLAS Network'? Because seriously if we keep doing this shite we are literally going to just be another bland as shit network that nobody actually stays on because they could go somewhere like Hypixel or elsewhere. There's modernising TF to ensure survival and then there's making it into your own network that is completely lost what originally made it charming.

I think there's an aspect of rose tinted glasses there, I can't say as I ever recall TF being "Charming", but for the record, the intent is to long term just refer to the network as "The TF Network" or something like that, few people actually call TF "TotalFreedom" anyway, the branding and such would all remain mostly the same (Or at least it wouldn't have to change) and the narrative for playing on the server would likely change with it.

Ultimately I want to be able to offer an experience which people actually enjoy, and while SkyBlock is not the silver bullet to solve all the problems, I see it as a baby step in the right direction and to ensure that TF doesn't just end up as an archived forum that we all look back on every 1 or 2 years like so many other communities that came before us.

↩  Luke As I've said before, long term we will be moving away from "TotalFreedom" as a key brand name, because frankly that's not even representative of the current Freedom gamemode. As has been said before, TF is a community and I don't see why it should be limited to a single gamemode, which frankly is struggling to get people interested in it...

Let me clarify something, because clearly it's not super obvious...

This wasn't a "We'd like to do this, what do y'all think", this is a "We're going down this direction because we feel it's in the best interests of the TF Network, tada".

We've absorbed an established server into the network, and while right now today it is not fully integrated into the network, it is an established server, that requires no additional effort from our limited development team, and in the longer term will allow folks a totally different experience compared to what they've had to date.

TF in it's current format is going to continue to fizzle out until there's nothing more than a discord and a forum where everyone moans at each other, our current Freedom Gamemode is of limited interest, because if you wanted to go fuck around, you'd just go spin up your own server or use one of those free server hosts, something that was much harder when the server first came to be.

This is the first of a number of additional game modes we are looking to introduce into the network, and in this case happened to be an established server so required very little time on our part to integrate it as far as we have.

I appreciate some folks won't like it, won't agree with it and won't play it, that's all fine. The Freedom gamemode will continue to be maintained until there is literally nobody playing on it, and we will continue as we have capacity to expand into new gamemodes, in an effort to keep TF frankly relevant in the Minecraft community.

Just because other gamemodes have failed in the past, does not mean they always will in the future. Give it a chance to thrive before throwing your toys out the pram, especially when a lot of folks don't actually know much about it, much less have bothered to even join the server...

↩  RedEastWood My view is that it adds unnecessary complexity to the server, is dev effort for something that I don't think we personally need, and will almost certainly lead to confusion eventually.

I've never seen a server allow people to change rank colours, and given we're changing how the ranks are working soon to be part of Network Manager, this won't even be technically possible at that point, because the plugin is closed source for one, and there's no way in fuck that we're trying to modify it...

On the grounds nobody has been able to give a good reason to do this beyond nostalgia or personal preference I am going to decline this suggestion.

If we have grounds to change the colours in the future (Ie new ranks / less ranks) we can re-visit, but otherwise the current colours are just fine.

↩  RedEastWood I disagree. A handful of people want to change the colours, but have never been able to agree on what, and given they have changed multiple times for no good reason, it just makes it even harder to quickly identify the rank of someone at a glance... The colours are there for a reason, and as I've said, need to be consistent.