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I've been thinking about what to post about the SGC situation for a while now, but it's a tricky situation all around.
First of all, it's important to remember what the Administrative perspective for SGC's introduction was. MCSG has always been the largest and most important gametype in the community, but SGC was something that a vocal group within the community clamored for. They wanted old-style SG, and we wanted to give it to them. But remember that MCSG V1's code was old and broken, and we did not have the time, resources, patience, or demand for a full rewrite for a dedicated mainstream version of SGC. In order to maximize our utility with MCSG V1, we reached a compromise where SGC would be created by updating MCSG V1's code to working order. No full scale rewrite was done because it wasn't deemed necessary nor useful given the niche appeal of SGC. Not only did having that old code add a lot of nice little nods to the old ways, it also saved out Developers a lot of time and effort that they could have used with other projects.
So SGC is basically old code that has been restored to working order and up to date... in 2013. If you're wondering why things are breaking now, it's most likely because Minecraft has changed a lot more than SGC has (late 1.7 and 1.8 anyone?). SGC was a fun throw-back to MCSG V1, meant for niche appeal for a small amount of players who appreciated how things were. However, once SGC was released, we moved on to other projects and higher priorities.
And that runs us to the crux of the issue here: Developer attention is limited and scarce, so we must think economically. That always means forgoing some options in order to obtain others that are more important.
The Developers are a highly competent bunch, and anyone who thinks that they're "a bad dev team" or that they're "not doing work" is woefully misinformed and has no idea of what is going on. But they cannot do everything all the time always, and so they must be delegated tasks depending on how important it is to the community. MCSG is a gametype that is our bread and butter, so it is deemed a high priority; the AVN acquisition and merge was planned to expand our gametype repertoire, widen our appeal to players who are looking for some non-competitive mini-games, and solidify the future of the community, so it was deemed a high priority; the MCGamer V2 Update was a highly complicated infrastructure redesign that made our server infrastructure perhaps the most advanced one in all of Minecraft, and thus pave the way for future developments for the network, so it was deemed a high priority. All of these things were decided to be important enough for the well being of the network as a whole that it was worthwhile to focus on them, and consequently ignore everything else. As unfortunate as SGC's decline may be, it was understandable and justified in that economic sense, especially since it would likely require a more in-depth rewrite to update than before. We may not be able to please the few players who play SGC, but we did manage to content the many more players elsewhere around the network.
So what happens now? SGC might make a comeback, but there are still many priorities that need to be seen to first. I think a Developer would be needed for further elaboration. But I thought I would leave my two cents from the Administrator's perspective on the matter.
