Hello,
You've probably noticed that ever since we updated to 1.7 back in late October/early November, people have been experiencing a lot more network instability, including random disconnections, timeouts, lag, and a plethora of other issues. We've been looking into these issues over the past nearly 2 months since 1.7 has come out. However, it appears a lot of the issues are actually caused by the dual 1.6/1.7 version support.
Some statistics:
- 96.8% of MCSG players now use Minecraft 1.7
- 3.2% of MCSG players still use Minecraft 1.6
Over the past week, we've also been alerted to the fact that there is a memory leak in the dual protocol version of BungeeCord that we use, which has the potential to cause a lot of this network instability (and lag!); however, we have not, as of yet, been able to identify the root cause.
Because of this, we have decided that the best course of action is to drop Minecraft 1.6 support and return to a stable version of BungeeCord sooner than we really wanted to. Ideally, we were going to wait until OptiFine was released for Minecraft 1.7; nonetheless, as Minecraft 1.7 has been out for 58 days now and we have not seen a release, our choices are either to continue waiting for OptiFine and risk the stability and playability of our network and gametypes, or drop 1.6 support and hopefully return to stability as soon as possible.
Here's only a few of our primary reasons for dropping 1.6 support:
- We can update NoCheatPlus to a supported 1.7 version, reducing the rubber band effect for people using 1.7's new sprint mechanism.
- We can update our core network backbone to 1.7, allowing us to fully utilize 1.7's new features (such as the new biomes for use in maps, new chat features, etc.) and fixes.
- Our hub will be able to "talk to" 1.7 servers, meaning when Survival is ready (soon! Antster360), we can add it to the hub.
- We can work on a more stable version of BungeeCord, as the dual protocol version we (and many other major networks) use isn't exactly the most stable version to use - meaning that the random disconnections, timeouts, and lag can likely be fixed
Minecraft 1.7 was not an easy update for any servers to handle, as evidenced by the fact that a supported CraftBukkit version was not released for over a month after 1.7's release. A large portion of the game's code changed
drastically, making it difficult for server modifications to update, and even harder for client modifications to update. Within the next few days, we will post a maintenance notice with more information on when we are updating to drop 1.6 support.
In the meantime, you may want to upgrade to Minecraft 1.7.4 now if you are still on 1.6.2/1.6.4.
Regarding the Catching Fire map/plugin, development has been a bit slow over the past week or two. Most of our developers (myself included) had final exams to deal with, and over the past few days we've been focusing our attention on fixing the network instability issues. We'd rather have our network stable and playable before we release new features. We will hopefully have more details regarding VIP test games (and teasers!) within the next week once we drop 1.6 support.
We're aiming for a release of the AS/CA hubs around the same time we update the rest of our network to be 1.7 only.
TL;DR: We're dropping 1.6 support soon and going 1.7 only, so updating now is the best idea if you're still on 1.6. More Catching Fire updates coming once we go 1.7 only. AS/CA hubs coming around the same time we go 1.7 only.
