Ava
Administrator
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2013
- Messages
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Hello Tributes,
MCSG V2, the Minecraft 1.7 update, MCGamer V2: all large updates that moved our network forward. But unfortunately, these large updates also inadvertently caused big problems as well. But guess what? We fixed them in a few days, and everything was smooth sailing afterwards.
The exact same thing is happening now with the Minecraft 1.8 update: large update comes, large updates cause temporary problems, devs fix the problems, everyone enjoys the update afterwards.
But Why All the Bugs? You should test these updates before releasing them!
The claim that “we don’t care enough to test our updates” is a gross misconception (and rather insulting): we DO test these things, quite thoroughly in fact. If we really did not test our updates, we would have pushed the update 5 days ago as we originally planned to. But we didn’t, and instead devoted those days to ensuring that things were running as smoothly as we thought they would. And we pushed the update after our tests on the dev network showed the update to be flawless.
But here’s the crux of the issue: network upscaling. Things run fine in a test environment (like our dev network) because there is less the test environment has to account for: less players, less servers, etc. But our production network is massive, and the likelihood of problems occurring thus increases exponentially. Problems like the ones we’re experiencing now were definitely not experienced during our initial tests, and thus they are simply a consequence of how large our network is.
That is why AAA video games - with their multi-million dollar budgets, years-long development cycles, and top-tier programming teams - sometimes still require Day 1 patches; we are no different. It’s unfortunate and inconvenient, but it’s a reality of development.
A Note on Abusing Glitches:
We understand that the update has caused some unintentional changes in functionality ingame. It’s okay to accidentally experience a glitch, but it is not okay to purposely exploit one.
If a staff member sees you with a glitch, they will give you a notice and ask that you leave the server. However, if you continue to use the glitch to win games unfairly, you will be punished.
To everyone saying, “Just return to 1.7!”
First of all: we have no reason to believe that 1.8 is the culprit behind the most common issues described below. Many of the glitches that have appeared were caused by the update, but do not appear to be directly influenced by 1.8; the fact that they appeared during the update that mandates 1.8 seems to be an unfortunate coincidence. And as such, those glitches should be relatively easy to fix.
Honestly, as bad as people claim 1.8 is, moving back to 1.7 would be a real mistake.
Remember that nearly all of the current bugs, glitches, and problems that everyone is upset about are temporary (and likely not even related to 1.8). Yes, it’s upsetting that things seem broken now, but all of those things will be fixed within a few days. But what we do not want to do is let all of the hard work that has gone into the update go to waste for the temporary comfort of a soon-to-be-outdated system. Things will improve with 1.8, but reverting back to 1.7 is a step in the wrong direction.
Mojang is not making their update release schedule easy on anyone, but their updates are mandatory and unavoidable. We are one of the first large networks to transfer fully to 1.8, but other networks are going to make the transfer too, and they will likely experience much the same problems as we did. No matter what, there will be growing pains. But we chose to adopt 1.8 early in order to get the growing pains over, and thus allow us to reap the full benefits of a stable 1.8 sooner rather than later.
Remember what I said earlier: large update comes, large updates cause temporary problems, devs fix the problems, everyone enjoys the update afterwards.
Most Common Complaints Addressed:
Invisible Players (Status: Resolved, to our knowledge)
Invisible Players is an Bukkit bug that is not caused by the 1.8 update, but has been made a lot more prevalent suddenly. There were rare reports of invisible players back in 1.7, but they were uncommon enough that it was not well known. Funny enough, the 1.8 update was actually supposed to totally fix the invisible players issue by offering a dedicated invisible function thanks to 1.8’s spectator function. But unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case right now.
To our knowledge, this issue has been resolved. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
/disguise Not Working (Status: Resolved)
/disguise no longer brings up the disguised username, and some users are reporting that doing /d will cause you to become invisible to some players (and some players to become invisible to you). The 1.8 change is not believed to be the culprit, and /d should work regardless of the Minecraft version after the fix.
Again, to our knowledge, this issue has been resolved by a recent plugin push. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
Tier 2 Chests not working (Status: Resolved)
Chests appeared and were tiered properly before the update, and nothing was changed regarding chests or tiering in the update, so why they stopped working properly is quite odd.
Regardless, the issue has been addressed and fixed. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
Increased Ping/Crazy Ping/Ping 9001 (Status: Known and Researching)
First of all: no, you do not actually have a ping of 956395. And no, the update did not change the connection between your computer and the network. Your connectivity and pings should be unchanged from what they were before the update. We believe that the issue is the /ping function submitting erroneous values to certain players, and is not influenced by 1.8 at all.
We are currently looking into what the issue may be. In order to prevent misinformation and/or freak-outs, we’re temporarily disabling the /ping command until we find the issue.
Changes in PvP (Status: Inherent to 1.8, no changes necessary)
There is a back and forth between players whether 1.7 PvP is “better” than 1.8 PvP, or if they’re that significantly different at all. People are quite polarized on either side, which makes the debate rather intense.
But from a developer standpoint, the changes to PvP are inherent to 1.8, and as such there’s nothing that can really be “fixed” to make 1.8 PvP “better”. Whether you believe the 1.8 PvP is better or worse, it’s something that everyone will have to adjust to.
Potential Performance Issues (Status: Inherent to 1.8, but planned to address in the future)
Some players report performance issues with 1.8, others claim that there is no performance hit. These changes seem to be purely subjective and may be wholly dependent upon the user’s computer. As such, from a server-side development perspective, there is nothing we can do to change 1.8’s inherent performance.
That being said, a lot of effort has been made about improving peoples’ experience using 1.8 on our network, including network reliability improvements. In addition, we do plan on making a post at a later date regarding the best way to optimise your Minecraft settings for 1.8 usage. Stay posted to the forums for such a response in the future.
A tip to help with performance now: Under “Video Settings”, enable “Use VBOs”. If supported by your graphics card, this will likely result in an insane FPS boost. If not supported by your graphics card, it’ll likely cause some visual glitches, which can be resolved by turning the option off again.
Leaderboards Update: Where Is It?
While there is still quite a bit of chaos going on right now, there is a silver lining for those of you interested in the Leaderboards Update.
While the rest of the development team was working on the 1.8 update, subv3rsion continued his work preparing our physical servers for the update. It was discovered that our current Stats Databases may not be able to handle the sheer amount of data that the update would track. As such, subv3rsion is currently upgrading our Stats Databases, literally tearing out the old hardware and putting new, faster, shinier parts into it. After the upgrades are complete and the databases are able to handle the load of data, we will resume testing and development.
We hope to hit our next milestone shortly after that (leaderboards and forum integration), and we will be working as quickly as we can to finally release it to the public.
Once again, we thank you all for your patience.
MCSG V2, the Minecraft 1.7 update, MCGamer V2: all large updates that moved our network forward. But unfortunately, these large updates also inadvertently caused big problems as well. But guess what? We fixed them in a few days, and everything was smooth sailing afterwards.
The exact same thing is happening now with the Minecraft 1.8 update: large update comes, large updates cause temporary problems, devs fix the problems, everyone enjoys the update afterwards.
But Why All the Bugs? You should test these updates before releasing them!
The claim that “we don’t care enough to test our updates” is a gross misconception (and rather insulting): we DO test these things, quite thoroughly in fact. If we really did not test our updates, we would have pushed the update 5 days ago as we originally planned to. But we didn’t, and instead devoted those days to ensuring that things were running as smoothly as we thought they would. And we pushed the update after our tests on the dev network showed the update to be flawless.
But here’s the crux of the issue: network upscaling. Things run fine in a test environment (like our dev network) because there is less the test environment has to account for: less players, less servers, etc. But our production network is massive, and the likelihood of problems occurring thus increases exponentially. Problems like the ones we’re experiencing now were definitely not experienced during our initial tests, and thus they are simply a consequence of how large our network is.
That is why AAA video games - with their multi-million dollar budgets, years-long development cycles, and top-tier programming teams - sometimes still require Day 1 patches; we are no different. It’s unfortunate and inconvenient, but it’s a reality of development.
A Note on Abusing Glitches:
We understand that the update has caused some unintentional changes in functionality ingame. It’s okay to accidentally experience a glitch, but it is not okay to purposely exploit one.
If a staff member sees you with a glitch, they will give you a notice and ask that you leave the server. However, if you continue to use the glitch to win games unfairly, you will be punished.
To everyone saying, “Just return to 1.7!”
First of all: we have no reason to believe that 1.8 is the culprit behind the most common issues described below. Many of the glitches that have appeared were caused by the update, but do not appear to be directly influenced by 1.8; the fact that they appeared during the update that mandates 1.8 seems to be an unfortunate coincidence. And as such, those glitches should be relatively easy to fix.
Honestly, as bad as people claim 1.8 is, moving back to 1.7 would be a real mistake.
Remember that nearly all of the current bugs, glitches, and problems that everyone is upset about are temporary (and likely not even related to 1.8). Yes, it’s upsetting that things seem broken now, but all of those things will be fixed within a few days. But what we do not want to do is let all of the hard work that has gone into the update go to waste for the temporary comfort of a soon-to-be-outdated system. Things will improve with 1.8, but reverting back to 1.7 is a step in the wrong direction.
Mojang is not making their update release schedule easy on anyone, but their updates are mandatory and unavoidable. We are one of the first large networks to transfer fully to 1.8, but other networks are going to make the transfer too, and they will likely experience much the same problems as we did. No matter what, there will be growing pains. But we chose to adopt 1.8 early in order to get the growing pains over, and thus allow us to reap the full benefits of a stable 1.8 sooner rather than later.
Remember what I said earlier: large update comes, large updates cause temporary problems, devs fix the problems, everyone enjoys the update afterwards.
Most Common Complaints Addressed:
Invisible Players (Status: Resolved, to our knowledge)
Invisible Players is an Bukkit bug that is not caused by the 1.8 update, but has been made a lot more prevalent suddenly. There were rare reports of invisible players back in 1.7, but they were uncommon enough that it was not well known. Funny enough, the 1.8 update was actually supposed to totally fix the invisible players issue by offering a dedicated invisible function thanks to 1.8’s spectator function. But unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case right now.
To our knowledge, this issue has been resolved. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
/disguise Not Working (Status: Resolved)
/disguise no longer brings up the disguised username, and some users are reporting that doing /d will cause you to become invisible to some players (and some players to become invisible to you). The 1.8 change is not believed to be the culprit, and /d should work regardless of the Minecraft version after the fix.
Again, to our knowledge, this issue has been resolved by a recent plugin push. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
Tier 2 Chests not working (Status: Resolved)
Chests appeared and were tiered properly before the update, and nothing was changed regarding chests or tiering in the update, so why they stopped working properly is quite odd.
Regardless, the issue has been addressed and fixed. However, if you still see issues after our servers complete their update cycle (around 5:30 PM CST), please post them on our bug tracker at https://github.com/MCGamerNetwork/Issues.
Increased Ping/Crazy Ping/Ping 9001 (Status: Known and Researching)
First of all: no, you do not actually have a ping of 956395. And no, the update did not change the connection between your computer and the network. Your connectivity and pings should be unchanged from what they were before the update. We believe that the issue is the /ping function submitting erroneous values to certain players, and is not influenced by 1.8 at all.
We are currently looking into what the issue may be. In order to prevent misinformation and/or freak-outs, we’re temporarily disabling the /ping command until we find the issue.
Changes in PvP (Status: Inherent to 1.8, no changes necessary)
There is a back and forth between players whether 1.7 PvP is “better” than 1.8 PvP, or if they’re that significantly different at all. People are quite polarized on either side, which makes the debate rather intense.
But from a developer standpoint, the changes to PvP are inherent to 1.8, and as such there’s nothing that can really be “fixed” to make 1.8 PvP “better”. Whether you believe the 1.8 PvP is better or worse, it’s something that everyone will have to adjust to.
Potential Performance Issues (Status: Inherent to 1.8, but planned to address in the future)
Some players report performance issues with 1.8, others claim that there is no performance hit. These changes seem to be purely subjective and may be wholly dependent upon the user’s computer. As such, from a server-side development perspective, there is nothing we can do to change 1.8’s inherent performance.
That being said, a lot of effort has been made about improving peoples’ experience using 1.8 on our network, including network reliability improvements. In addition, we do plan on making a post at a later date regarding the best way to optimise your Minecraft settings for 1.8 usage. Stay posted to the forums for such a response in the future.
A tip to help with performance now: Under “Video Settings”, enable “Use VBOs”. If supported by your graphics card, this will likely result in an insane FPS boost. If not supported by your graphics card, it’ll likely cause some visual glitches, which can be resolved by turning the option off again.
Leaderboards Update: Where Is It?
While there is still quite a bit of chaos going on right now, there is a silver lining for those of you interested in the Leaderboards Update.
While the rest of the development team was working on the 1.8 update, subv3rsion continued his work preparing our physical servers for the update. It was discovered that our current Stats Databases may not be able to handle the sheer amount of data that the update would track. As such, subv3rsion is currently upgrading our Stats Databases, literally tearing out the old hardware and putting new, faster, shinier parts into it. After the upgrades are complete and the databases are able to handle the load of data, we will resume testing and development.
We hope to hit our next milestone shortly after that (leaderboards and forum integration), and we will be working as quickly as we can to finally release it to the public.
Once again, we thank you all for your patience.
