HalfSquirrel
Diamond
- Joined
- May 4, 2012
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As you can tell by the title of this thread, here I want to discuss community involvement. This thread was inspired by a post by ManOfTheBread in the thread WHY did Team Elite revamp the lobby?
Minecraft is a game completely run by the community. Sure, the development team programs the game and pushes out the updates and fixes everything, but without it’s community, where would it be? There are thousands of youtubers with channels dedicated to Minecraft videos, thousands of modifications for this sandbox game and thousands of servers for everyone to play on.
MCSG is the same. The Minecraft Survival Games is a Minecraft gamemode, so maybe it’s not it’s own special, unique game, but it still has over a million people trying to play this different gametype with it’s own unique set of rules and settings.
As of late, MCSG has made a lot of decisions without the consent of the community, and most things that did go to the community were not explained well enough to be community decided.
The biggest of these decisions is definitely the MCSG hub. Sure, many people had suggested it on the forums. But an equal amount hated the idea and wanted to stand out. Sure, it lets us get all of our gamemodes in one place. But at the cost of being the same as everyone else using a server joining method that’s a lot harder.
Here I’ll expand a bit on why the hub is awful (in my opinion), though I may not do it for the other things. First of all, it completely eliminates any possibility to join using the server list. There will always be hundreds of people joining the server from the hub, and they can join a lot faster because they can simply hold the right click button to easily get in whereas people joining using the server list have to time a click perfectly or they stand no chance.
Second of all, it’s way too crowded! You can either hang out there and attempt to talk to people while there are hundreds of random people sending messages at the same time completely drowning out what you tried to say and also not be able to join a server with hundreds of people standing in front of you, or you can try to join a server with everyone disappeared and not be able to talk to people whatsoever. I guess it’s not a big problem, because you can either hang out or play, but I think it could still be annoying.
Another problem is that when you fail at joining through the server list, you get redirected to the hub. If you are joining through the server list, that obviously means you don’t want to be in the hub!
Then there is the revamping of the original lobby. I understand changing the blocks to make it seem more modern, adding a bit here and there to make it more acceptable in the current state of the MCSG community, but not removing all the interesting things about the lobby. I know that you didn’t have a map file that had the party holes, or with the other interesting things that were there, but you could have replicated it based off pictures of the old lobby or from memory or just from a basic understanding of the old lobby. It didn’t have to be exact, it was obviously revamped and that can account for the edits.
There are also some other things missing from the revamped lobby, such as being able to jump from one side of the training ladders to the other, and then pushing people around up top. Now, it’s really hard to jump from one ladder to the other, and you can’t have fun pushing friends around. The pushing part isn’t that big of a deal, and it might have been something Mojang changed in a previous update, but it was still fun.
And then there is jumping from tree to tree. You used to be able to climb onto a tree, and then jump to the other ones and keep going in a circle. I found that to be quite fun. There was also an extremely hard to reach place where you could climb up some vines and be right under the ceiling! The ceiling was higher then I guess, and now the ceiling or the arches from pillar to pillar will get in your way and hit you in the head if you try to jump.
The other thing was king of the fountain. This is another of those things where you would need to be pushing people around, but it was really fun to get to the top and try to keep your position among the other tributes trying to get to the top.
Of course, there are some good things in the new lobby, such as the training area and the parkour (which I definitely can’t argue about) but it was also nice to be able to get shot and be teleported somewhere. I understand that teleporting people out of the map will cause server lag, but why not have it so that it teleports you back to the spawn? I think that could be fun. It would also work for the spectators blocking arrows, I assume that’s where the issue comes from, because they could simply get teleported to the middle of corn.
Another thing that was changed is the view distance. They first changed it to a lower amount so that people couldn't see through the unloaded chunks, but the community wanted it to be kept at it's normal amount. So they changed it back, but now it's back to it's reduced state again contrary to popular demand.
Here is one thing that has always been a problem: adding maps to the servers. The current system that adds maps to the servers involves the Sr. Staff finding the map and looking through it to see if it’s MCSG quality. But what if it turns out to be some awful map that nobody likes? Just because it might have been made well doesn’t mean it’s a good map. This is something that the community can help decide. Many members of the community download the maps and sometimes even try to play the map with friends to test the gameplay. They know if the map is good or bad, and they know how fun it will be to play on the servers.
The one thing all of these problems have in common is that the community had very little to no say in their arrival. Like ManOfTheBread said in the post that inspired this thread, we have a poll feature for a reason. Add some polls, but also explain what is being voted on so people don’t vote for the option they wouldn’t have wanted to vote for knowing all the necessary background information, such as turning off sound to reduce lag in Demon’s Breeze or around lava anywhere.
Always make sure it’s a feature that would be fun for everyone before adding it and make sure that there won’t be tons of people complaining about it to the point where it would have to be removed if it is implemented. That’s just a lot of hard work by the developers rendered useless.
And to all you staff members that are simply going to shrug it off, defending yourselves uselessly and generating disrespect from me and I’m sure many others, try to improve. Like this post explains, the community does know a lot about what’s good and bad.
Minecraft is a game completely run by the community. Sure, the development team programs the game and pushes out the updates and fixes everything, but without it’s community, where would it be? There are thousands of youtubers with channels dedicated to Minecraft videos, thousands of modifications for this sandbox game and thousands of servers for everyone to play on.
MCSG is the same. The Minecraft Survival Games is a Minecraft gamemode, so maybe it’s not it’s own special, unique game, but it still has over a million people trying to play this different gametype with it’s own unique set of rules and settings.
As of late, MCSG has made a lot of decisions without the consent of the community, and most things that did go to the community were not explained well enough to be community decided.
The biggest of these decisions is definitely the MCSG hub. Sure, many people had suggested it on the forums. But an equal amount hated the idea and wanted to stand out. Sure, it lets us get all of our gamemodes in one place. But at the cost of being the same as everyone else using a server joining method that’s a lot harder.
Here I’ll expand a bit on why the hub is awful (in my opinion), though I may not do it for the other things. First of all, it completely eliminates any possibility to join using the server list. There will always be hundreds of people joining the server from the hub, and they can join a lot faster because they can simply hold the right click button to easily get in whereas people joining using the server list have to time a click perfectly or they stand no chance.
Second of all, it’s way too crowded! You can either hang out there and attempt to talk to people while there are hundreds of random people sending messages at the same time completely drowning out what you tried to say and also not be able to join a server with hundreds of people standing in front of you, or you can try to join a server with everyone disappeared and not be able to talk to people whatsoever. I guess it’s not a big problem, because you can either hang out or play, but I think it could still be annoying.
Another problem is that when you fail at joining through the server list, you get redirected to the hub. If you are joining through the server list, that obviously means you don’t want to be in the hub!
Then there is the revamping of the original lobby. I understand changing the blocks to make it seem more modern, adding a bit here and there to make it more acceptable in the current state of the MCSG community, but not removing all the interesting things about the lobby. I know that you didn’t have a map file that had the party holes, or with the other interesting things that were there, but you could have replicated it based off pictures of the old lobby or from memory or just from a basic understanding of the old lobby. It didn’t have to be exact, it was obviously revamped and that can account for the edits.
There are also some other things missing from the revamped lobby, such as being able to jump from one side of the training ladders to the other, and then pushing people around up top. Now, it’s really hard to jump from one ladder to the other, and you can’t have fun pushing friends around. The pushing part isn’t that big of a deal, and it might have been something Mojang changed in a previous update, but it was still fun.
And then there is jumping from tree to tree. You used to be able to climb onto a tree, and then jump to the other ones and keep going in a circle. I found that to be quite fun. There was also an extremely hard to reach place where you could climb up some vines and be right under the ceiling! The ceiling was higher then I guess, and now the ceiling or the arches from pillar to pillar will get in your way and hit you in the head if you try to jump.
The other thing was king of the fountain. This is another of those things where you would need to be pushing people around, but it was really fun to get to the top and try to keep your position among the other tributes trying to get to the top.
Of course, there are some good things in the new lobby, such as the training area and the parkour (which I definitely can’t argue about) but it was also nice to be able to get shot and be teleported somewhere. I understand that teleporting people out of the map will cause server lag, but why not have it so that it teleports you back to the spawn? I think that could be fun. It would also work for the spectators blocking arrows, I assume that’s where the issue comes from, because they could simply get teleported to the middle of corn.
Another thing that was changed is the view distance. They first changed it to a lower amount so that people couldn't see through the unloaded chunks, but the community wanted it to be kept at it's normal amount. So they changed it back, but now it's back to it's reduced state again contrary to popular demand.
Here is one thing that has always been a problem: adding maps to the servers. The current system that adds maps to the servers involves the Sr. Staff finding the map and looking through it to see if it’s MCSG quality. But what if it turns out to be some awful map that nobody likes? Just because it might have been made well doesn’t mean it’s a good map. This is something that the community can help decide. Many members of the community download the maps and sometimes even try to play the map with friends to test the gameplay. They know if the map is good or bad, and they know how fun it will be to play on the servers.
The one thing all of these problems have in common is that the community had very little to no say in their arrival. Like ManOfTheBread said in the post that inspired this thread, we have a poll feature for a reason. Add some polls, but also explain what is being voted on so people don’t vote for the option they wouldn’t have wanted to vote for knowing all the necessary background information, such as turning off sound to reduce lag in Demon’s Breeze or around lava anywhere.
Always make sure it’s a feature that would be fun for everyone before adding it and make sure that there won’t be tons of people complaining about it to the point where it would have to be removed if it is implemented. That’s just a lot of hard work by the developers rendered useless.
And to all you staff members that are simply going to shrug it off, defending yourselves uselessly and generating disrespect from me and I’m sure many others, try to improve. Like this post explains, the community does know a lot about what’s good and bad.
