Posts by Feueristic

These are all changes that are internally discussed for quite a while with very well-rounded reasoning behind them, and I can personally attest to them. All in all, these changes are intended to improve the general experience and make sure what happened before wouldn't happen exactly the same way again, and we get to steer the community in a better direction than before. But for that to actually take place, I ask all of you for your patience in inspecting these changes taking place, and reflect thoroughly on everything and everyone before jumping to comment.

As a part of the community management team, and a person that cares about this place, I am willing to facilitate respectful and detailed conversations about potential criticisms that you may have regarding the changes that we will push into place, and make sure your voice is heard loud and clear. While we will hold players accountable for harassment and disrespect, we will also hold the same if not a higher standard against staff members for their responsibilities. You may approach me individually to do so if you have comments regarding such, and I am sure everyone will appreciate a bit of respect in speaking about those criticisms as well. Nothing gets done if you just keep making snarky remarks and being negative, yes?

We all can do better, so let's do it!

While this is a sad announcement to hear, as one of the newer members in the executive team, I believe that we can prove ourselves to be better. It remains true that a lot of things said before in the previous times that Ryan has wanted to shut down the server almost remains identical, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Out of the bottom of my heart, I do believe that the vast majority of everyone that has been on the server for longer than an hour has good intentions of the server. Whether or not if that is genuinely expressed, or if it is replaced with a vocal minority is something that we can discussed later, but what we can do now is think of how we treat each other as a community, how we treat other as people, and how have we treated ourselves.

I know that a lot of people still want the place to flourish, and it's about time that you finally have a word in about how we can work together to actually make things happen.

If you do believe your actions in the past weeks has had a negative impact on the server, however small, and you do feel guilty about it, I urge you to put it out here so we can solve it alongside everyone else. This is not the time to be pushing blames on each other, but to for once see the good inside others and put differences aside.

If you genuinely do believe that someone's actions has had negative impacts on the server, also however small, I do still recommend you at least try to approach those people first and see if there exist misunderstandings that can be so simply resolved with a short conversation about what actually happened. There is still good in a lot of us, so let's make it show.

I believe in all of you. So please, let's try.

How we can all improve TF
Help Build a Better Community

To add on to Video's comment, as a member of the community management team, I do apologize on behalf of the tenseness of the server as of late and how the situation was handled overall. In any case, the server was indeed unstable, and a lot of things and emotions culminated into what happened today. I hope that everyone can understand our situation here from the staff members team, as well as the general playerbase.

I would like to urge players to not blame each other, but to understand the different perspectives of the situation. We can try to work better as a whole to repair the damage or the panic caused by the situation and prevent this from happening in the future if we can cooperate as a community.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this thread or approach us. If you have broader comments on how we can do better, check out the following threads:

How can we all improve TF

Help Build a Better Community

As one of the members in the community managment team, as well as a community member myself, I would like to try and steer everyone away from the development doubts and questions as we've had plenty of time discussing it, and mainly use this thread as a place to discuss community matters, like transparency, interactions, stereotypes, goals and anything that revolves around such.

We would love to hear from you all, and let's do our best in helping each other, shall we?

Going through the individual items listed from the example file, assuming that no other players has additional information in the file:

1. lastlocation and logoutlocation is the easiest to eliminate. Due to the complete world(s) reset there is little to no point to keep specific coordinates intact. There is no use for specific homes set for interesting terrain in the Overworld as well, since that will not exist (or may be generated under a different seed).
2. Timestamps are useless - the only interesting fact is that it remembers last time you used a specific Essentials' kit, which, we quite obviously don't use.
3. AFK status is temporary.
4. godmode and teleportenabled can be changed with one command.
5. money holds no value, and can be changed with one command as well.
6. I don't think nicknames would be too hard to recreate either, given the amount of tools discovered by other players (FZMM, birdflop), or just the tools we have provided (nickgradient, nickrainbow).
7. There's no specific reason why we have to store IP addresses and username histories with Essentials, and I don't think our current operations relies on this. If anyone on the development side has something to say about this though, I'm sure the rest of us would love to hear it.

Hence I see nothing of note that requires us to retain this specific file. As usual, though, I'm open to discussion if any of you feels like I brushed over something or a specific entry is quite useful for your own purposes, and if that's the case, I hope you can let all of us know.

perhaps AI isnt ready to replace humanity yet afterall

The problem

As of this thread detailing how Senior Admin positions are to be applied, applicants are expected to follow the application calendar, specifying the application, public and private voting periods that takes place in an application. This additional thread specifies the actual calendar itself, which is reposted as below:

As one can see, the calendar ends at March (which was 4 months ago), and therefore there are no dates to follow as to currently existing Admins if they wanted to apply for the position. Therefore, admins are, in a sense, soft-locked in their position, where they may never be promoted to be a Senior Admin. (This fact is courtesy of isaac.)

In addition to the previously described problem, these application periods only occur every three months, meaning that even if an admin has had more than sufficient experience (like after spending 2 years on the server), they will still be required to wait out the periods if they were to "miss the train". This, in addition to the other requirements, is not really necessary for the position and does not further prove the applicant's ability to be a suitable candidate as a Senior. Personally, I also do not really see a reason as to why these applications as to be "batch performed" and there are no real improvements to efficiency even if they were in cohorts because of the small amount of applications (and applicants, for that matter).

The Suggestion

The suggestion is split into two parts:

1. Re-open the Senior applications in general, and make a new calendar that continues the traditions set before.
   • This will re-enable the influx of Seniors to our servers, and re-enable promotion of our admins. They will undergo the same processes that many other Seniors has gone through as a previous applicant themselves.
2. Completely open up senior applications such that they can be submitted at any time, following the voting processes already in place.
   • This removes the other barrier-of-entry previously mentioned that applicants must align their applications with the 3-month application window.
   • It is to be noted that this suggestion is not to remove the voting period processes (2 weeks public voting + 1 week Senior voting), and only serves to eliminate the 3-month window.

Potential Problems

As with the previous suggestion thread, some has raised the concern of there being too many Seniors existing amongst the staff ranks:

Quote from videogamesm12

We don't need more Senior Admins right now. We already have an imbalance of Senior Admins to regular Admins, and opening the floodgates honestly would make things worse.

To provide detail to this, as of current, there exist 6 regular admins (3 having the required total service time to apply) and 11 seniors admins (6 of which are Executives, with Video being the current game-mode Owner). (Source: The maintained staff+MB list at AdminWorld).

If there are any other potential problems with re-opening the senior applications, as well as potential issues with changing the application format to a more continous form, please discuss them in this thread.

Personal Opinion

I do not really see how having more Senior Admins necessarily make things "worse", as they are simply admins with more verified experience and has gone through strict voting processes. There would have to be an argument where having more seniors would obstruct the other, regular admins taking care of their own administrative duties, or some other form of damage to the staff structure as it exist right now. If such argument exist, I am open to discussion.

Another fact remains that the Senior Admin application process itself is already convoluted enough that the 3-month application window does not really make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. From what I can see, it is an unecessary system that does not give significant additional benefits other than us appearing more professional. Having it remain will not make much of a difference, but having it removed would not change much as well, and thusly I recommend reducing complexity. If there are other potential benefits that I have missed with the window that I did not realize with writing this thread, please remind me so in a reply to the thread.

In any case, I hope that the suggestion can induce some interesting conversations about what it means to be a "Senior Admin" and how the two staff ranks relate to one another. Even if the suggestion does not go through, I am sure that there will be useful discussions that can be referenced in the future. I look forward to your votes!

Vouch.

This vouch is on the basis of my personal belief that the applicant has served the punishment long enough specifically under the given ban reason "Joining with fake and offensive hostnames". This is, also, the only specified reason on the list of banned players.

I will respect Luke's authority on his own opinion about how to handle uvb's ban on Discord.

To the rest of the people commenting on applicant's (and their friends') behaviour outside of the provided ban reason, if you have evidence that this user (and their group) is engaging/planning to engage malicious behaviour on the server, I would like to ask for the presentation of it. Otherwise, I would hope that we can not make passive-aggressive judgements just because "they know each other".

Neutral (leaning slightly Object).

I would like to remind everyone that the applicant has made edits on the build submitted after the application. While they are not complete transformations by any means, they do add detail and change it a bunch.

To clarify, though I'm not the builder, I do believe that the three builds that the applicant has submitted is of the following:

This hits a gray line since all three of these individual units are kind of linked together into one bigger build, I do believe these can be somewhat seperated into its own unique build themselves and therefore can be treated as such.

To start off, the general creative aspects of your build has to be commended. Perhaps not implemented in the best ways, I still do see a lot of interesting ideas shown in the build and an attempt to integrate them, like a small tree on the beach build as well as the swimming pool on the ship. Technique can always be refined, but creativity cannot be replaced. For this, I do believe you have potential.

However, simply having the ideas is not enough, as you have to present them properly in a structured way. Your builds, however, looks quite "scrambled" if I had to put it in words. While each detail and each unit almost kind of work on their own, they never really work together as one build. Like the mini-hut within the first glass-roofed structure in build 2, or the tree surrounded by a stream of water in build 3 - They are all individual ideas that seem nice, but when in context seem pretty out of place. The hut is not centered within the larger structure, the front pillars having different pillar bases than the back ones; Or the tree being seemingly randomly placed within the beach area with no justification. I recommend you try making a plan first, or imagine in your head how the build should look. Before integrating a new part into the build, it is important to realize its effects on the rest of the structure as well as the purpose of that new part.

Additionally, the builds themselves are very rough. A few signs of this is that you used a lot of quartz blocks without justifying it with structural patterns or seperating it with other blocks; Often fences are placed as an attempt to add detail but they seem to not be attached to much of anything and only made the build noisy; The shapes that the build uses is quite rudimentary (a lot of diagonal or orthogonal straight lines, roof shapes are very straight-forward) - These facts all add up to leave the build looking relatively unsatisfactory. I encourage you to give another look-through to these builds and try to either polish them (reduce random clutter, make curves, add structural complexity, etc.), or you may attempt to reconsider how they are formulated in the first place.

To reiterate, I think there are certainly ideas worth being explored implemented into the builds that you've submitted - however, the general size for each build is relatively small but despite being in those spaces they don't seem too organized and the style is a bit harsh to the eyes. I encourage you to try more, either with new, larger and more streamlined builds that has a well-defined style, or going back and trying to rework your existing build and see how things can fit better together.

Hope to see an update from you soon!

Quote from videogamesm12

We don't need more Senior Admins right now. We already have an imbalance of Senior Admins to regular Admins, and opening the floodgates honestly would make things worse.

Quote from Alco_Rs11

This. There are more Seniors than regular admins.

I'm quite interested in this specific opinion - I don't really care about the post itself and I don't think I care enough to vote, but what would be the ideal Senior-to-Normal ratio? I personally haven't really heard of anything of "too many seniors compared to regular admins" before now. Also, I would like to ask for clarification on how having more seniors is "worse"?

Object.

Quack has laid most of the valid reasoning above, but I'll throw in a few words to nudge you in a better direction:

For what it's worth, repetition is not always a bad thing. However, the way that you executed it in your build is definitely extremely obvious, and the original pattern being boring itself definitely did not help. Compared to the size of your build, one unit of your pattern is quite small, making the repetition even more tedious than it already is - not to mention the fact that the pattern itself looks repetitive (stairs are stacked very similarly). These are factors that makes the pattern very unsatisfying to look at

I urge you to consider more techniques that make the original pattern less boring (less "stair-spam"? more structural ideas? add other forms of detail? etc.), and to add more patterns so you can break up the monotony, as well as playing with the size of the build itself to lower the repetition count. You can also try with placing a different pattern every 2 other patterns which should help a little bit.

To help with the entrance being off-center, one must realize that asymmetry is quite a powerful tool to introduce new and interesting ideas as well as cool shapes and concepts that would otherwise be tedious or impossible to show with full symmetry. It does come with a catch that you should make it obvious that the build is intended to be made asymmetrical, or it would be treated as a fault rather than a feature. In your case, where all the walls repeat themselves and the rest of the build is entirely symmetrical, it looks very odd that you have a non-centered entrance, where no additional features are added to justify that off-centered entrance.

To aid with this, you may alter the shape of the build itself such that it holds it's own asymmetry, or to add features where it justifies the existence of that entrance's location (a hut of sorts? some ceiling? some additiona detail?), or simply center the entrance.

The bigger picture of the structure being boring would be the fact that it is entirely rectangular - this does not need to be the case.

While it would be difficult to incorporate complex shapes and ideas like circular towers/gazebos or slanted shapes, you can start by considering unions of simple rectangular shapes (L, T, H, U being common examples). These introduces new complexities into the build to make it look more interesting to the viewer. In addition, for higher floors, you may consider not straight stacking up the floors and rather make a balcony of sorts and create interesting features on a 3D level, which would make the build much more sophisticated.

All in all, I am glad that you found motivation to learn building via asking one of our current masterbuilders - that is a step that few take and I applaud you for your curiosity! But it is a skill, and like any other skill it requires time and patience to get good at. I hope my advice has been helpful and I wish you a great journey in learning to build. Hope to see a successful application from you!

P.S. If you're looking for more building-related resources, perhaps this thread can help you!

Quote from CoolestGuy94

Privacy Policy for a minecraft server... Pretty cool.

I don't think anyone is seriously mentioning instating an entire policy dedicated to privacy? Either way, this thread only serves to provide a place of discussion of matters regarding privacy. Whether or not a policy is needed will be up to the general community.

If you do have differing opinions on whether or not such privacy should even exist in the first place on our community, I welcome you to raise your argument.

Quote from Alco_Rs11

You really shouldn't expect privacy regarding items, etc. on a place like TF and it's next to impossible to stop people from using item loggers which quietly log items for retrieving later. If you don't want your shit potentially stolen, keep it in your toolbars and don't bring it to TF.

I agree with this statement, but only to a degree.

I understand that tracking specific items is essentially impossible - if not downright impossible. As long as the items exist(ed) on the server, there will probably be a way to acquire them without explicit permission from their owners. This is a point that I am willing to acknowledge, and where players can have reasonable expectations and responsibilities about their own items.

However, in extreme cases where some form of item piracy is obviously happening (exactly same NBT with original credits still attached, with the original owner specifying that the item is not to be distributed, yet it is distributed anyway), if admins were to see that, is it not fair for the offended player (the one that made the private items) to expect some form of punishment towards someone who clearly violated someone else's privacy?

In turn, while players can be punished for obvious cases of intruding on another's private builds, you can still "spy" the same if you were to use, say, a completely clientsided alternative (e.g. free-cam), or go into another player's private territory with some alt account, or some other way that is not inherently obvious at first sight. Should we, then, because of this fact, completely give up sanctioning players of intrusion?

The idea is, while there are acts of invasions of privacy where it is unreasonable to expect them to be regulated, I think there are other acts of invasion of privacy, on the other end of the spectrum, that we can do something about.

These are all similar points that I have raised in the Discord discussion thread.

Quote from Gommeh

As admins, I think we have an obligation to uphold that as best as we can, unless it interferes with our ability to administrate and enforce the rules.

This should fall in reasonable expectations of a player that expects both privacy and safety via admin monitoring players.

On one end, players having complete privacy where admins cannot see what people are doing leads to significant security and stability risks for other members and the server in general - on the other end, admins having complete control over every player's every activity with item creation or building sounds like literally 1984. With many things in life, the dose is the poison and a balance is the antidote - I personally believe that it is reasonable to administrate given a valid suspicion (lag machine built on private grounds, potentially exploitative item being used), but to respect privacy in other cases.

The bottom line is, having an environment where players can feel safe and respected should be a goal for every member in the community, be they the normal players trying to build a community with others, or staff members with enforcing rules that upholds such. Having privacy is one of the bigger points that we have regarding this, yet it is strange that I believe that we have rarely explored and developed the idea much, and mostly left this as an excercise to admins to have a feel for themselves. This post is here for a place of discussion before another fight breaks out in server chat due to "i should not have been banned with this" or "why isnt anyone doing anything to this obviously annoying guy". Afterall, as much as it is important to have a good standard between admins, the more important fact is to communicate this standard to other members and make aware of each other's expectations towards one another.

Recently there was some Discord discussion surrounding the topic of the existence of private items and what it means to the server - to players and to staff. (You may find the Discord thread in #freedom-01-server-chat "Discussion regarding proprietary items".) While I do feel confident about a satisfactory conclusion being reached specifically on the topic of private items itself, I am creating this thread to push forward the discussion of player privacy in general, what it means, and how we enforce rules regarding such or otherwise uphold and respect it.

For what we're currently doing, we may refer to the community guidelines:

Quote from wild1145

1) Respect & remain mindful of other members of the community.

TF at it's core is it's community, we want everyone to feel like TF is a welcoming and we expect anyone within our platforms to respect other members of the community and remember that everyone is unique, and everyone will have different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. Discrimination, Attacks, Scams, Bullying or any other form of abuse of any kind towards other members of the communities will not be tolerated and will be subject to staff intervention.

To get the obvious out of the way, I personally believe that the act of upholding privacy by punishing offending players is to remove those that disrespects other members of the community, which we obviously value. It should be noted that the final goal is to make players feel respected, and in this specific topic, feels safe with their privacy - And this is how it ties in with the mentioned community guideline.

While this is a good summary, I think we can do a little bit of reflection on:

1. What we define as a player's privacy
   • How we define it in spirit - What does something being "private" really mean in its purest conceptual form
   • How we define it in action - What constitutes as a player's "privacy"
   • How that interacts with the world - What violates it, and what may respect it
2. What players should reasonably expect from administrating staff members (and by extension, the limit of our abilities)
   • What we are able to - To prevent violations, to punish offenses, and to respect boundaries set by players
   • What we are not able to - Unrealistic expectations and what our limits are to "respecting privacy"
3. What we are already doing to respect such
   
   • Specific cases where we can expect administrative control to offending players
   • Prevention of actions one can take that may violate privacy
4. How we may improve upon what we already do

I hope that with this discussion we may elucidate a few myths flying around, form a stronger consensus and hopefully improve privacy on TF.

The spawn is finished! Thank you everyone who participated in this project! It was a lot of fun!

Prize is as follows:

Rewards are already given to everyone. Well done to everyone!

This community project was a lot of fun for me to plan and take in action. I hope to be able to see more faces for upcoming other events!

Video games has evolved a very long way since they became a thing, and Minecraft also along with it. What is once a survival sandbox can now be used as a medium or a platform for anyone to express whatever they want, be it visually stunning pieces, story-telling experiences or just technical demonstrations of Minecraft's limits. This kind of freedom breeds creativity, and thus in my opinion what we can refer to as "art".

Outside of this though, people have been debating about the definition of art for as long as the concept existed. No answer of this can be wrong, but none of them are correct either. Ultimately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and one's standards of such depends on their own interpretation of life itself. Afterall, art is not just about the artist but also the audience, even when sometimes they are of the same person.

While it is nice to be able to categorize things into words as we speak, sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth to try and define the meaning of everything. Perhaps that's a good sign to simply sit back and appreciate something that you found enjoyable, be it a really well-built Minecraft giraffe, or just a banana and some duct tape. Life's too short for anyone to be hung up on semantics.

Submissions are now closed. Thanks for the few participants on this event!

A further update will be posted following in the thread when the summer spawn goes live on the Freedom server. Stay tuned!

Just a bit before submissions closes!

Don't miss this chance to be a part of the community summer spawn!

Amazing submissions everyone! Glad to see the community being creative. We'll be sure to try to include these in our final build.

lyicx :Here's a support hotline. Please reach out for help because you obviously need it.

A reminder to the rest of the forum lurkers - submissions are not limited to actual build submissions! You are free to drop in conceptual build ideas or sketches of what we, at the MB team, can make happen for you. Let your thoughts fly! _{(or swim in this case)}

Quote from ClayCoconut

Hello there Feu! Thats a very cute drawing tutorial. I assume we can submit our own drawings here?

Yes! Thank you for reminding the teacher to give the class homework. I somehow completely forgot to attach that part.

If you want to make your own tizz Penguins with my guide you are free to do so in this thread! I would love any art.*

_{*please do not draw akefu penguins i swear to fucking god}

Hello TotalFreedom!

We at the creative team is proud to announce our upcoming project: The TotalFreedom 2023 Summer Spawn!

The spawn, of course, will be themed around summer, and all the joyous things that comes along with summer. The ocean breeze, the warm sunshine, and all the pretty things! But it's unfair to only let us Master Builders have the fun, no? That's why we're introducing this community contribution event as a part of this summer spawn project!

The spirit of the event is to encourage builders and creative minds around the server to contribute whatever they can and whatever they want to add to the spawn. Whether that is ideas that we can make happen for you, or the builds themselves that you want to be included, we would love nothing more than your contribution to make this spawn truly TotalFreedom!

To spice things up, we will be handing out rewards based on your contributions - if you got to take part on the project, not only will you have the fun of creativity, you'll also get our rewards! So what's not to love about this?

The details of the event are as follows:

• Submissions can be made from the time that this thread is made until June 24th 23:59 GMT+0.
• Each player can contribute one item: a conceptual idea or a build schematic.
• Submissions can be made here on the thread or via DMs to me or ClayCoconut on Discord (Feueristic#7035 / ClayCoconut#2860), as well as in-game mail (/mail) to me (Feueristic).
• Conceptual ideas have no limit, as long as they revolve around the theme of summer and suits the general build picture well.
• Build schematics dimensions must be under the size of 15*25*15 (x*y*z), and the submitter must label clearly the name that the schematic is saved under. (If you are not sure about how to work with schematics, you may ask other players/admins to help you.)
• Screenshots of your build should be attached to the submission, though it is not required.
• Build submissions will be prioritized over idea submissions.
• In case you made two or more submissions, we will approach you to choose your entry, and if you cannot choose we will pick for you.
• The creative team reserves the right to choose final entries to include and no guarentees are to be made that every submission can be included in the final build. (But we'll try our best!! )

A rough sketch of what the spawn will look like:

This is a stylized draft of what our plan for the spawn look like. Please keep in mind the underwater theme to your contributions! Unused empty space is where builds can populate the project. You may approach me if you have uncertainty about this!

The rewards of the event are as follows:

Now, what are you waiting for? Get building!