As the Admin who is perhaps most embedded with the Developers, I can assure you that their chats are basically nonstop with Dev work. And based on what Chad tells me about their current projects, the Developers are probably the most busy they have been since before the V2 update.
I'm going to be blunt here:
Just because the Developers aren't doing what you want, does not mean that they are not working/short staffed/bad.
We have to assign priorities to everything, and what is high on the community-want list may not be high on the priority list.
A lot of people may want a more advanced anti-cheat system and complain when they don't get it, but you know what would be even worse to have? Nonfunctioning servers. Wasted investments. Bugs, glitches, and general lack of functionality in games. These are the things that the players don't see or think about, but the Devs do nearly every day.
For the record, that is what the entire Dev team is working to address. Reliability issues post-V2 update have been addressed for the last few weeks, and that includes a lot of intensive research into, "why does this not work?". People noticing a lot of crashing and servers being down? That issue, which should obviously take a higher priority than an anti-cheat program- should be addressed soon.
I have a friend who is willing to join the dev team, it's just that he doesn't get payed, but he is a good developer, coded a whole server for the clan I'm in.
Edit: The point I was trying to make is how Badlion's devs can code better anticheats than one of the biggest communities on Minecraft, and that we need to get better/more devs. Don't go around telling me to code better, the point wasn't to get me in the developer team with this thread.
You can't deny this either, look at the amount of people agreeing.
If your friend is willing to join the Dev team, I encourage him to apply. The more Devs the better, something I don't think anyone will disagree with. However, he still needs to meet our requirements and standards, as those are just not negotiable.
In regards to the Badlion situation, I've stated this before and I will say this again: it is a lot easier for smaller communities to make changes than larger communities. Badlion is 1/5th the size of our community based on current player counts (and approximately 1/20th of our total population size), is only hosted in one location, and hosts only two or three gametypes. Their network is much simpler than ours, and the the advantage of a smaller community is a greater focus and flexibility. They don't have to worry about server failures on four regions around the world, often for four different reasons. They don't have to worry about data transfer issues across continents for a centralized region. They don't have to set up a bunch of new gametypes across multiple regions, taking into account the regional differences in ISPs and architecture. And things don't break as often as they do when you only have a handful of servers, not 200+ at any point in time around the world.
Boy, I would love to have the advantages of a small community for Development. But the reality is that we are not a small community, so we have a different set of advantages and disadvantages. We have to work with what we can do, not what we wish we had.
Honestly, I think the people who get the short end of the stick here are the Devs. They're putting in a ton of work to keep the place running on a technical level, doing difficult work that only they are skilled enough to understand and fix, and they get bashed on by people who are ignorant of what they do. But frankly, regardless of what people say or believe about them or their current work, I will stand by them.
Because without them, we would be one network crash away from not existing anymore.