Java A bit of a Rant about BlockWars and the Changes Made to it Since the Chunk

[AnUglyTurtle]

Ever since my friend found that BlockWars was still around on Cubecraft we felt the need to rejoin and see what it's like. We've come to the conclusion that the game is not nearly as good as it used to be two or three years ago. We've found some new maps are annoying and some changes to old maps are extremely disappointing. Changes to gamemodes have made it difficult to fully enjoy what once was what we considered the best gamemode we've ever found. It's a real shame.

To start, the new maps. I think Pirates is a very good map (apart from the places you get stuck in). It's probably one of my favorite BlockWars maps that still exist. That's about all I got for compliments on the new maps/map changes. When it comes to Nuclear and Snowy, I find it oddly boring. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it's not nearly as creative as other maps. Maybe it's because I've yet to play an actual game with more than 3-4 players, but it just isn't interesting. As for Games. I hate Games. It is such a bad map. I like the design, but that just doesn't matter when it ruins every game that gets played on it. This map is way too small. This map is way too linear. I see this map way too often. It's a serious factor as to why BlockWars has become so boring to play. When I get stuck in 1v3s, which seem to happen way too often, I could die on the opponent's side of the map and by the time I respawn they're already half way back to their base with my flag. For the period of time where Ninja's invisibility lasted for 30 seconds, I'd be able to go invis, take their flag, run all the way back to our base, and still be invis for about 3-4 seconds after capturing. This should be a clear sign that the map is far too small and should be reworked. The same could be said for a Chunk map, but I have only gotten that map once and I don't know the names of them anymore. It's the semicircle map with the small path directly next to the flags. The map changes from old Chunk maps are disgusting and ruin what they're meant to be. Why would you remove the house in Western and put the flag outside in the open, and still have the nerve to leave the flag size larger than any other map? Why would you move the flag in the End from below the spawn and put it right in front of it, causing 1/3 of the map to go completely unused and take away any interesting defense strategies? Why the completely unnecessary revamp of Mushroom? These maps were all perfectly fine and what we considered some of the best Chunk maps in the game. Especially End. They did not need any changes, unless the Cubecraft player base couldn't figure out how to locate the flags. And if that were the case, I would have assumed The Bridge wouldn't have been brought over, but here it is, being one of the largest maps with many, many paths to reach the flag. Speaking of maps being carried over, you left out some of the most memorable, enjoyable maps the Chunk had to offer. Hell, the Mineshaft, and many others were far more memorable and loved than maps like Paint, Castle Wars, Retro 99, Green Zone or Forest Fight. These maps should've at least been brought over instead of making these other low quality, poorly designed newer maps.

Next is the gamemodes. Again it feels like the Cubecraft playerbase has a very short attention span when I look at the changes made to gamemodes. Removing Jail, for example. Jail was heavily based on having the patience to either rely on your team to break you out or to wait for your whole team to die. I personally really enjoyed this gamemode and I know many others did too. The change made to Core is a very odd one to me. I don't know why there are now more lives to the core. It now forces every game into overtime, which I've seen people state as the reason the CTF change was made. I miss when Core games were actually suspenseful for the majority of the match, not just at overtime when it's lowered to the number it should really start at. The CTF change is probably the most annoying to me. The games are far too short because of the 3 captures at most. They rarely ever hit overtime because of an interesting match, but rather because some people don't know what they're doing and the ones that do can't be bothered breaking into the flag because they're more often than not, using ninja and would much rather farm kills until overtime. I've had maybe 2 suspenseful games of CTF in the 3-4 months I've been playing it. Both were because we waited until overtime and then killed the opponent at the last possible second. It was forced suspense because we wanted some sort of challenge. An easy fix to the Core problem is lowering the lives of a core and leaving overtime to if they're within 3 lives of each other (if you stick to a high number of lives), and dropping it to around 1-3 lives once it starts. To fix CTF, just remove capture limits. Let us play the game out like you force with Core. Maybe add back Jail for the sake of more variety.

Now kits. I enjoy some of the changes to certain kits, like Tank getting sharpness on their pickaxe, Archer having rechargeable arrows, and Warrior getting pants instead of boots. But again, that's where the compliments end. Despite these changes, Archer is very situational and Tank, Medic, Jumper, Summoner, and Viper are all still useless. It's especially bad with Jumper, because some idiot thought that kit was too op and needed its pickaxe removed, while also thinking Ninja wasn't good and needed a serious buff. Seriously. What moron decided Ninja was in need of a buff. I understand maybe wanting to fix nametags so those are hidden, but now the weapon, particles, sound effects, nametags, name on tab, and THE FLAG are all invisible to the opponents. There is no way of knowing when a ninja is around unless you get extremely lucky and hit one with an arrow. That's the only time you get some sort of sign that a ninja is there. Even then, you don't see a floating arrow in their body. If you go invisible and take the flag, the flag is also invisible, and it was possible to get extremely far with the flag while the opponents had no way of stopping you. The way of nerfing this insanely op kit? It can't use a bow while invisible, and the arrow will instead damage you. I also noticed recently that they shortened the invis time from 30 seconds to 15 seconds, and the cooldown from 60 seconds to 45. These nerfs would be so unnecessary if you just made it possible to see the Ninja in some way. At the very least show its particles and flag. Both sprinting and potion particles. Another kit that I feel has been harmed is the good ol' Ice ball kit. This kit was replaced by Medic, and used to have leather armor, a wooden sword, a pickaxe, and three snowballs that would do knockback and give the opponent slowness 1. This kit saw a lot more use than kits like Medic, Jumper, Summoner, Poisoner/Viper, and Tank back on the Chunk. It was a kit designed to county kits like Runner and made the game a lot more fun, despite how annoying it felt to be hit by one in the moment. A return of this kit would at least add variety to the game instead of seeing the same 3 kits every single game. Also bring back the Alarm trap while you're at it. It was one of two traps that actually have any use.

As for the playerbase, it feels odd to see "100 people playing" and then seeing one active game and one lobby with one person sitting there. From what I've been told, the players are split between 1.8 pvp and 1.12 pvp. This seems to result in little to no players in 1.8 for most of day, leaving very little time to actually enjoy the game. I've played maybe 3 full games and they often end with 5 players left. I understand there are people who enjoy 1.12 pvp, but if this is going to be a limited time game, it might be a bit more beneficial to combine the two versions and just use 1.8 pvp.

Achievements. They're pretty good. Except one of them is unobtainable, and progressive achievements are unrealistic. The "I am Strong" achievement is impossible to get it seems. Me and my friend have done this achievement many times and we've yet to obtain it. As for progressive achievements, literally no one has obtained 10,000 wins since the statistics started tracking them, the highest being 9,546. And as for the Flag capture progressive achievement, seeing as you're limited to 3 captures per game, and getting games in 1.8 can take more than 30 minutes sometimes, I don't see any of these being all that reasonable for a limited time game. I'd say it's a good idea to lower requirements for progressive achievements, and fix "I am Strong".

Lastly, possibly the most important complaint I have about CubeCraft's BlockWars. The team balance. It sucks. I don't know what you guys did to it between now and the Chunk days, but I've never seen such an awful system. First of all, why disallow players from joining mid match? This makes crashing much more annoying and prevents more games from being full and eventful. Why prevent team balance mid game as well? Sure it may be upsetting being moved off your team, but it sucks even more to be in a 3v6. The Team Balance at the start of the game doesn't seem to do anything half the time. I'm sure everyone's aware of this, but fix the damn team balance. It's seriously one of the most annoying things to deal with in this game.

That's just about all the complaints I've gathered about BlockWars in the 3-4 months of playing it on this server. It's a real shame this game is getting neglected more than Double Trouble was post-1.7 on the Chunk.These aren't even the only complaints I have about Chunk games on Cubecraft either. The direction Tower Defense went is a real disappointment and I feel that should also be looked into, but I think I've gone on long enough. Thanks for reading my college essay I'll be taking criticism now.

 

[Smoothlyy]

TL;DR section pls

 

[AnUglyTurtle]

Basically, Games sucks, End and Western map changes suck, gamemodes need to return to their Chunk state, kits need to be reworked, playerbase shouldn't be divided into 1.8 and 1.12 pvp, achievements are unreasonable and broken, and the damn team balance is a mistake.

 

[Dudu]

it might be a bit more beneficial to combine the two versions and just use 1.8 pvp

Uh no. The reason 80% of the java playerbase is on cube is because of 1.9 pvp. If they wanted 1.8 they would just join the game on that version or go to any other server with old pvp. If you combined the two versions under 1.8 pvp, you would make almost everyone unhappy, and you were to combine under 1.9 pvp, there would be some people that would be mad too. It's just better to have the versions split

 

[Oreo♥️]

To start, the new maps. I think Pirates is a very good map (apart from the places you get stuck in). It's probably one of my favorite BlockWars maps that still exist. That's about all I got for compliments on the new maps/map changes.

Besides the fact that Pirates is way too large and has a rather design perfect to camp on the flag, it's your opinion so I'll respect it.

When it comes to Nuclear and Snowy, I find it oddly boring. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it's not nearly as creative as other maps. Maybe it's because I've yet to play an actual game with more than 3-4 players, but it just isn't interesting.

The main issue with Nuclear is it's size, it's massively big and has a boring design, where the most creative thing you can find there is someone using jumper/builder to get through the walls of the enemie's flag while they can't reach them. As for snowy, I find it a pretty ok now (although I also hate it for some personal reasons), it's got a great design that is enjoyable, different ways to defend and different ways to attack the enemie's flag, a fun parkour and a lot of void, which I find a essential part of Blockwars.

As for Games. I hate Games. It is such a bad map. I like the design, but that just doesn't matter when it ruins every game that gets played on it. This map is way too small. This map is way too linear. I see this map way too often. It's a serious factor as to why BlockWars has become so boring to play. When I get stuck in 1v3s, which seem to happen way too often, I could die on the opponent's side of the map and by the time I respawn they're already half way back to their base with my flag.

I recall you saying that newer players aren't used to long games, well, seems like you, a old player as you state, can't handle short games yourself. As for the map, I consider it a map where every (decent) kit is able to be used and get good results for using them.

For the period of time where Ninja's invisibility lasted for 30 seconds, I'd be able to go invis, take their flag, run all the way back to our base, and still be invis for about 3-4 seconds after capturing. This should be a clear sign that the map is far too small and should be reworked.

Even if I dislike the glowing effect a lot, this is where it becomes relevant; in the 1.9+ versions whenever you get the flag, no matter what kit, you'll receive a glowing effect, making it easy for your team to spot you stole their flag and make them target you. However, in the 1.8 version I don't think it's posible to fix. It's not about a map design, it's more about Blockwars's evolved in a way that adapted to 1.9+ versions, nothing that people can do to fix it. (Without changing the whole structure of the game, making it better for 1.8 versions and worse for 1.9 versions, however, this would make the community upset, since as you mentioned before, the 1.8 community is rather small)

The same could be said for a Chunk map, but I have only gotten that map once and I don't know the names of them anymore. It's the semicircle map with the small path directly next to the flags.

Palette?

The map changes from old Chunk maps are disgusting and ruin what they're meant to be.

So, in your opinion, what were they meant to be? Were you a staff member in the chunk that used to know the meanings of the maps and whether would ruin them or not? Don't think so.

Why would you remove the house in Western and put the flag outside in the open, and still have the nerve to leave the flag size larger than any other map?

As for the flag size, I don't know about it. Why would they remove the house tho, it's cause of the campers. Having a rather small place for a flag where you can build a lot of defense and is near the spawn is rather dumb and makes the games last very long, watch Icy Peaks for example. Closed area, spawn next to it, rather campy makes a map barely unplayable and boring for everyone.

Why would you move the flag in the End from below the spawn and put it right in front of it, causing 1/3 of the map to go completely unused and take away any interesting defense strategies? Why the completely unnecessary revamp of Mushroom? These maps were all perfectly fine and what we considered some of the best Chunk maps in the game. Especially End. They did not need any changes, unless the Cubecraft player base couldn't figure out how to locate the flags. And if that were the case, I would have assumed The Bridge wouldn't have been brought over, but here it is, being one of the largest maps with many, many paths to reach the flag.

In my opinion, moving the flag in front of the spawn was the right decision, however, they did it in a terrible way and were too lazy to even remove the unnecesary paths to where the old flag was. Although it could seem more interesting to have the flag down the spawn, it would cause enemies to be able to jump from their spawn to the flag area, and to develop rather boring strats where someone would get jumper and fall to the enemie's flag without taking fall damage, and if the enemie had left an opening to capture, to get a rather easy flag to capture.

Next is the gamemodes. Again it feels like the Cubecraft playerbase has a very short attention span when I look at the changes made to gamemodes. Removing Jail, for example. Jail was heavily based on having the patience to either rely on your team to break you out or to wait for your whole team to die. I personally really enjoyed this gamemode and I know many others did too.

Haven't played the game, but just reading that you'd need your team to do the work for you to get you out of the jail, or wait till they died kind of sounds boring.

The CTF change is probably the most annoying to me. The games are far too short because of the 3 captures at most. They rarely ever hit overtime because of an interesting match, but rather because some people don't know what they're doing and the ones that do can't be bothered breaking into the flag because they're more often than not, using ninja and would much rather farm kills until overtime. I've had maybe 2 suspenseful games of CTF in the 3-4 months I've been playing it. Both were because we waited until overtime and then killed the opponent at the last possible second. It was forced suspense because we wanted some sort of challenge.

I kind of agree with you on this one, having no cap limit would of helped me a looot when I was grinding for the leaderboard. However, having no cap limit made the games last always at least 7:30 mins (counting overtime) making them stupidly long, and it might be me the one that doesn't have patience to play 7 minute long games, but as far of now, there are not too many people who can oppose you a big diffuculty on winning, and having to be beating them up while your teammates are capturing or yourself is, sounds oddly boring and would be a big disappointment to go back on this times.

Gonna skip the kits cause I find quoting all of that is too excesive and can't be bothered to do it, doesn't mean I agree with you tho, might quote them later on.

As for the playerbase, it feels odd to see "100 people playing" and then seeing one active game and one lobby with one person sitting there. From what I've been told, the players are split between 1.8 pvp and 1.12 pvp. This seems to result in little to no players in 1.8 for most of day, leaving very little time to actually enjoy the game. I've played maybe 3 full games and they often end with 5 players left. I understand there are people who enjoy 1.12 pvp, but if this is going to be a limited time game, it might be a bit more beneficial to combine the two versions and just use 1.8 pvp.

So basically, you realize that most of the people are playing 1.9+ but instead of suggesting making it a only 1.9+ game you suggest to make it a 1.8 game, that would probably kill the community. Kind of dumb to be honest.

Achievements. They're pretty good. Except one of them is unobtainable, and progressive achievements are unrealistic. The "I am Strong" achievement is impossible to get it seems. Me and my friend have done this achievement many times and we've yet to obtain it.

As for progressive achievements, literally no one has obtained 10,000 wins since the statistics started tracking them, the highest being 9,546.

Progressive achievements are supposed to have an increasing difficulty, with 10.000 being the hardest. Indeed no one has obtained it yet but as you stated, it's only 400ish wins left for someone to obtain it.

And as for the Flag capture progressive achievement, seeing as you're limited to 3 captures per game, and getting games in 1.8 can take more than 30 minutes sometimes, I don't see any of these being all that reasonable for a limited time game.

I have rougly around 8'7k flags captured, and started playing around one month before the cap limit was added. It's hard, yes, not imposible tho, it'll take time but you'll eventually get there.

Lastly, possibly the most important complaint I have about CubeCraft's BlockWars. The team balance. It sucks. I don't know what you guys did to it between now and the Chunk days, but I've never seen such an awful system. First of all, why disallow players from joining mid match? This makes crashing much more annoying and prevents more games from being full and eventful. Why prevent team balance mid game as well? Sure it may be upsetting being moved off your team, but it sucks even more to be in a 3v6. The Team Balance at the start of the game doesn't seem to do anything half the time. I'm sure everyone's aware of this, but fix the damn team balance. It's seriously one of the most annoying things to deal with in this game.

The reason why the team balance is like this is because the old was broken, stupid and unfair.


As for what I can understand of this thread, you're a old chunk player who used to play Blockwars with it's friends, and went on CubeCraft to play the old game you beloved, but found out it had changed and as someone blinded for nostalgia you can't grow to enjoy the new form of the game and decides to complain about it.
Ain't gonna question if it's a great solution to your problem, but maybe if you tried to be a little less narrow minded about the new playstyles you could start enjoying Blockwars again.

 

[Andyyy]

It's really refreshing to see a new perspective on here about Blockwars and I'm glad you have taken the time to write about it. I feel that Oreoino hit the nail on the hammer for a lot of these but I'll talk about what the community consensus is and my personal opinions on it.

Starting off with the maps: It's generally agreed upon that nuclear is the worst map in the game due to massive size and boring colour palette. There have been attempts to rework it by community members but due to the theme of the map, neither of these things work out very well and the map has consistently been requested for removal for the last multiple years. This and IcyPeaks are the two main /hub maps for most players. The latter due to the boxed in flag and the spawnpoint being too close to flag for far too easy defending, which you bring up in the opposite form on Games.

I can see what your frustrations with Games are. What you were saying about barely being able to respawn is due to the distance from flag to spawn relative to the overall map length being very high which could be changed easily. I personally don't like games that much and this is a factor to it. However, I wouldn't consider this the largest issue and other maps mentioned before need much more work. Avoiding Xv1s is much more of a player skill issue most of the time. It's about finding the ideal spot to fight someone and to pick your battles wisely; this is why runner is considered the 2nd best kit, because you can pick that battles where you have the advantage.

I'd also agree that snowy does look very dull and should be made to look much better. About Western, I haven't played it myself (in it's old form) but I've seen what it looked like. Basically, it runs the same line as IcyPeaks does; a house just confines play and makes camping much easier with the bottlenecks and such. It was changed with good reason.

For the map End, the problem with it was that it was far too easy to defend. The defending team could use spawn protection to jump down on top of their flag in no time at all. This meant that an attacker would have to kill a defender 3 maybe even 4 times before they could take a flag, so when this came to some extremely good players, games went into overtime a lot.

In the gamemode department: Once again I never played the Jail gamemode but I want to point out some flaws that make the game inaccessible. The concept of jail relies on your teammates having some idea about how to play the game. Right now, there is a divide between veterans of the game and newer players. I think I'd find that I wouldn't be able to rely on random players to get me out of jail. You call it patience but it's really just punishing the player and decreasing the amount of active time in the game. To have fun in this mode you would have to play it with friends because you know you can rely on them. I've heard the complaint many times about Blockwars that you can't have fun playing it alone and I think this mode would be a worse offender.

About core mode. You are thinking what everyone else is thinking, it's too long and there's no suspense. I've personally made suggestions before about the big changes to core with no response. Core needs serious fixing. CTF, however doesn't need any changes to how it functions. I didn't like the 3 capture flag system myself for a while but I've come to appreciate it now that the waiting times on 1.9 are fixed after a suggestion of mine. I've played 1000's of games before and after it and the new one is better. I think the reason for this is that games where one team is far superior to the others change from a waiting game to a race. Like before it was fun to see how many captures you could get in a game before time is up, that got boring after a while and the faster games meant you just spent more time playing rather than just waiting for it to end. Those on the weaker team also had the advantage of not having to get pummelled for 5 minutes with no chances of victory. This is a major issue is core due to the capture limit and most games finish with one to two players left on the weaker team out of 8. Your complaints about winning too fast are a result of the veterans vs newer players again, there aren't that many middle of the road players that aren't literal gods. If you make it hard to capture when you are dominant, you make it near impossible to capture when teams are close. It's one extreme or the other and with the large skill gap that can't be resolved.

I'm not going to say much about kits because this has a big difference between 1.8 and 1.9. I'm a 1.9 player and I presume you play 1.8. Kit balancing is ideally very different in the two modes but as Cube keeps them nigh identical for simplicities sake, the game is designed for 1.9 and you are playing it with a completely different combat so there are bound to be issues. I'll go through the main suggestions for kid changes that are brought up.

Ninja - big nerf (sounds like it's really bugged in 1.8 but no sure)
Archer - buff / reworking (less arrow cap and more arrows overtime)
Warrior, Medic - slight buff
Tank, Viper, Summoner - buff

There's more kits but that's what you mentioned.

Achievements are fine. Wouldn't call them unrealistic by any means. I'm really close to the final progressive one and I'd like to some insane difficulty achievements for a challenge. For "I am strong", that sounds like a nightmare in 1.8 but in 1.9 it's much easier so have a go. I've got about 12k captures so I don't think 1k is impossible. These achievements aren't meant to gotten 100% with ease. There always being more to play for is a positive part about the achievement system.

Your sentiment about Blockwars being neglected is true. We have been throwing out suggestions for years and very rarely do we get any official response let alone the thought of a change. I think the cause of this is because the cubecraft staff here now are not the ones that worked to make the game, or many of the maps. As Blockwars is the 2nd oldest game on the server after minerware. Those who were passionate about it are long gone and those here now are clueless about all the small Blockwars mechanics that make a difference. Many of them have said it themselves that they just don't know enough about the game to participate in these conversations. The Blockwars community is known for creating blocks of paragraphs so even asking them to read it is a hassle. The best way of suggesting things is in a clear, good looking way with logical explanations in a concise form.

There's little hope for Blockwars on Cubecraft. For it to really reach it's potential it has to be remade by someone who's an expert on the game that has the knowhow to create new and interesting mechanics. I've personally thought about doing this but I do not have the knowhow in Java to do it yet, I'd really love to see someone have a try. I really love this game and it's heart-breaking to see it fade into obscurity.

 

[AnUglyTurtle]

As for what I can understand of this thread, you're a old chunk player who used to play Blockwars with it's friends, and went on CubeCraft to play the old game you beloved, but found out it had changed and as someone blinded for nostalgia you can't grow to enjoy the new form of the game and decides to complain about it.

To make things clear, I never said I don't enjoy BlockWars anymore. I absolutely do. I do, however, see that there are many issues with the newer version that makes it far less enjoyable than it used to be and it has nothing to do with my nostalgia. I had my own issues with the Chunk's interpretation of the game and often criticized it harder than I have Cubecraft's. I disliked many of their later maps, they had a serious crossteaming issue, there was insane targeting problems, and game throwing. While 1.8 modern BlockWars may not have crossteaming and targeting, it still has awful maps and game throwing. On top of all new problems that were very scarce on the Chunk, with many hackers (At least one a day) and everything else I mentioned in this thread. There's no nostalgia that's keeping me from enjoying this game today. There's Cubecraft-made problems that have hindered my enjoyment of this game.

Besides the fact that Pirates is way too large and has a rather design perfect to camp on the flag, it's your opinion so I'll respect it.

Personally I've never had any trouble on Pirates with camping, though that may be because there's never more than 8 players on it. Aside from that it's generally one of the more enjoyable maps.

Avoiding Xv1s is much more of a player skill issue most of the time.

Just to make it clear, when I say "Xv1s", I mean unbalanced teams, not the fights I pick. I'm well aware of how to pvp.

I recall you saying that newer players aren't used to long games, well, seems like you, a old player as you state, can't handle short games yourself. As for the map, I consider it a map where every (decent) kit is able to be used and get good results for using them.

The issue is that this map prevents any good games. I'm not saying because the game is short, it's bad. I'm saying it's far too easy to win because of the map size. There's no fun to be had playing this map because you could be killed on one side of the map and all of a sudden you're down a point due to a long respawn and a runner.

Even if I dislike the glowing effect a lot, this is where it becomes relevant; in the 1.9+ versions whenever you get the flag, no matter what kit, you'll receive a glowing effect, making it easy for your team to spot you stole their flag and make them target you. However, in the 1.8 version I don't think it's posible to fix. It's not about a map design, it's more about Blockwars's evolved in a way that adapted to 1.9+ versions, nothing that people can do to fix it. (Without changing the whole structure of the game, making it better for 1.8 versions and worse for 1.9 versions, however, this would make the community upset, since as you mentioned before, the 1.8 community is rather small)

Whatever it is you're talking about here does not exist for 1.8. This starts a whole new problem because putting the glowing effect on the person with the flag is a lot more lame than giving them a banner hat or a wool hat, which is a good enough sign of where they are. You don't need to make their location known through blocks. To me, that ruins the game even more. And just because they've updated it for 1.9+, doesn't mean the should abandon 1.8. While the playerbase is smaller, it may be larger if they just fixed some stuff.

Palette?

Yes. I tried editing the post multiple times but it marked it as spam. I couldn't find the map name in the list of maps when selecting in game, or in the BlockWars guide here on the forums.

So, in your opinion, what were they meant to be? Were you a staff member in the chunk that used to know the meanings of the maps and whether would ruin them or not? Don't think so.

This is a stupid argument. I believe the old maps were fine as they were. I may not be an old staff member, but you don't have to be to know the meanings and purpose of the maps. Thinking that's the case would be stupid. Hell, I was around The Chunk longer than the majority of its staff members. I was there since month 1 of the Chunk and stuck with it its whole 3 years. Any real Chunk player can understand what the maps were and why they were the way there were. And we all could recognize how making half of 2 maps completely useless would ruin them. Anyone could see it.

As for the flag size, I don't know about it. Why would they remove the house tho, it's cause of the campers. Having a rather small place for a flag where you can build a lot of defense and is near the spawn is rather dumb and makes the games last very long, watch Icy Peaks for example. Closed area, spawn next to it, rather campy makes a map barely unplayable and boring for everyone.

About Western, I haven't played it myself (in it's old form) but I've seen what it looked like. Basically, it runs the same line as IcyPeaks does; a house just confines play and makes camping much easier with the bottlenecks and such. It was changed with good reason.

Then why is The Bridge still a thing? It's a very similar map but in a sense larger.

In my opinion, moving the flag in front of the spawn was the right decision, however, they did it in a terrible way and were too lazy to even remove the unnecesary paths to where the old flag was. Although it could seem more interesting to have the flag down the spawn, it would cause enemies to be able to jump from their spawn to the flag area, and to develop rather boring strats where someone would get jumper and fall to the enemie's flag without taking fall damage, and if the enemie had left an opening to capture, to get a rather easy flag to capture.

For the map End, the problem with it was that it was far too easy to defend. The defending team could use spawn protection to jump down on top of their flag in no time at all. This meant that an attacker would have to kill a defender 3 maybe even 4 times before they could take a flag, so when this came to some extremely good players, games went into overtime a lot.

I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but moving the flag directly in front of the spawn is in no way better than having it be below you. At the same time, I do believe having your spawn protection to jump down there was a bad idea. Also the extended spawn protection was a bad idea and I forgot to mention this in the original post. On the Chunk, spawn protection was about 2-3 seconds. You were not immune to fall damage during that time, making End a very good map that did not allow you to jump down and kill for free. You had to play smart on this map. Now you just run through the middle, or the two side paths, much like Snowy and Positive, and break into the flag. It's lame and an awful decision that even the map creator had agreed on.

Haven't played the game, but just reading that you'd need your team to do the work for you to get you out of the jail, or wait till they died kind of sounds boring.

Once again I never played the Jail gamemode but I want to point out some flaws that make the game inaccessible. The concept of jail relies on your teammates having some idea about how to play the game. Right now, there is a divide between veterans of the game and newer players. I think I'd find that I wouldn't be able to rely on random players to get me out of jail. You call it patience but it's really just punishing the player and decreasing the amount of active time in the game. To have fun in this mode you would have to play it with friends because you know you can rely on them. I've heard the complaint many times about Blockwars that you can't have fun playing it alone and I think this mode would be a worse offender.

These are understandable and I never expect Jail to be added back despite being, in my opinion, better than Core. It was such a fun gamemode for those who understood how to read the rules are the start of the game.

I kind of agree with you on this one, having no cap limit would of helped me a looot when I was grinding for the leaderboard. However, having no cap limit made the games last always at least 7:30 mins (counting overtime) making them stupidly long, and it might be me the one that doesn't have patience to play 7 minute long games, but as far of now, there are not too many people who can oppose you a big diffuculty on winning, and having to be beating them up while your teammates are capturing or yourself is, sounds oddly boring and would be a big disappointment to go back on this times.

Games would only go into overtime if the teams had the same score, which from my experience back on the Chunk, rarely ever happened.

CTF, however doesn't need any changes to how it functions. I didn't like the 3 capture flag system myself for a while but I've come to appreciate it now that the waiting times on 1.9 are fixed after a suggestion of mine. I've played 1000's of games before and after it and the new one is better. I think the reason for this is that games where one team is far superior to the others change from a waiting game to a race. Like before it was fun to see how many captures you could get in a game before time is up, that got boring after a while and the faster games meant you just spent more time playing rather than just waiting for it to end. Those on the weaker team also had the advantage of not having to get pummelled for 5 minutes with no chances of victory

I guess me and my friends enjoy straight pvp and wouldn't get bored of being able to capture and kill opponents for 5 minutes each match. We find it much more boring to wait 10-15 minutes for a game to start then end after 2. Having a forced 5 minutes would at least make the waiting feel much more worth it.

So basically, you realize that most of the people are playing 1.9+ but instead of suggesting making it a only 1.9+ game you suggest to make it a 1.8 game, that would probably kill the community. Kind of dumb to be honest.

Ok so maybe not merge the two if it truly would upset a ton of people. But maybe make 1.8 not so broken so people who prefer 1.8 pvp over 1.9+ but prefer the less broken factor of 1.8 could move to 1.8 and not leave us with the same few players.

I'm not going to say much about kits because this has a big difference between 1.8 and 1.9. I'm a 1.9 player and I presume you play 1.8. Kit balancing is ideally very different in the two modes but as Cube keeps them nigh identical for simplicities sake, the game is designed for 1.9 and you are playing it with a completely different combat so there are bound to be issues. I'll go through the main suggestions for kid changes that are brought up.

My main point with the kits is that Medic sees 0 use, and the Snowman/Ice Ball kit was one of the most used kits, up there with Runner and Ninja. Removing this kit prevents some skillful play we used to see back on the Chunk. This along side the insanely broken Ninja kit which I guess is only broken in 1.8?

Me and my friend have completed this achievement at least 30 times between the two of us and neither of us have obtained it. I assume you play 1.9+ so that would lead me to believe it's only broken for 1.8, making only more of a case to fix their damn game.

Progressive achievements are supposed to have an increasing difficulty, with 10.000 being the hardest. Indeed no one has obtained it yet but as you stated, it's only 400ish wins left for someone to obtain it.

Achievements are fine. Wouldn't call them unrealistic by any means. I'm really close to the final progressive one and I'd like to some insane difficulty achievements for a challenge.

My point is it's a limited game, limited to 3 captures, where games can take anywhere between 5 and 45 minutes to start. I understand if you believe captures of fine, I don't but I guess that's just me. My real issue is with the Wins. I assume these achievements include stats from before they were added, so this has been tracking since the day the Chunk merged. 3 years ago. The fact that nobody has hit 10,000 wins in 3 years, even with it being a permanent game and even with it having the boosted playerbase from the Chunk for a short period, nobody has been able to reach 10,000 yet. This leads me to fairly come to the conclusion that no one who's started within the past year will be able to hit 10,000 any time soon. Even veterans who know how to play and are good at the game.

The reason why the team balance is like this is because the old was broken, stupid and unfair.

It wasn't broken, it was perfectly fine and designed to let people join mid game, something that should have stuck. It was not stupid, the fact that you think it was stupid shows me you haven't seen what kind of autobalance there is now and haven't been into forced 7v3s. It was in no way unfair when the alternative was 7v3s. It may have been annoying, I will admit that, but was in no way worse than what we have now. It was in every way functional, fair, and in the opinion of every old Chunk member I've spoken to, much smarter of Macreddin and his gang than whatever Cubecraft staff came up with... adding extra time to CLAIM there's an autobalance and not actually do anything.

There's little hope for Blockwars on Cubecraft. For it to really reach it's potential it has to be remade by someone who's an expert on the game that has the knowhow to create new and interesting mechanics. I've personally thought about doing this but I do not have the knowhow in Java to do it yet, I'd really love to see someone have a try. I really love this game and it's heart-breaking to see it fade into obscurity.

Macreddin did just this back in 2017/2018. He started a small server that had the original BlockWars, a beloved Chunk games called Thimble, and many other of the man's fairly unique gamemodes. Sadly there wasn't much of a Chunk playerbase left, and the only ones to show up were two groups that seriously hated each other back in the Chunk days and we struggled to get along enough to actually play a lot of BlockWars. But it was essentially what we had in the past, with the same magnificent maps, the same skillful players, and a generally amazing game that really should be what CubeCraft's BlockWars is. Should've been there, it was real fun.

 

[comfyyy]

My man just wrote a book holy crap. You know this ain't your English class right, post don't have to be in essay form. Yikes :confused1:

 

[Andyyy]

I feel like a lot of your gripes are basically because of the long waiting times. I do remember the struggle of long waiting times and actually came to the same conclusion then that the short games harm the playtime you get. Maybe an exception should be made for 1.8 but maybe It's a better idea to increase the game lengths by balancing it out more. I've suggested before that there should be a reward for staying in the game until the end and not leaving straight away, which would only be a couple exp but enough. Simply, unlike all other gamemodes in cube, you don't just move onto a new game when you die so when you feel weaker you just leave and go into a new game so you can win a lot of the time.

There's also the fact that 1.8 blockwars was only reintroduced recently, so the only people playing it aren't people that have been playing for years, they are people who are just trying it. These people have a lower tolerance of waiting times and if they have to wait too long they leave and don't come back. The positive feedback cycle of it is a big factor to why they take so long to fill. Maybe that capture limit should be removed in 1.8 and I might suggest that in the future.

Then why is The Bridge still a thing? It's a very similar map but in a sense larger.

Bridge is complained about too but the fact that it is larger does help. There is not so much of a bottleneck on bridge because in the flag room there's two ways in and 3 ways out so you can escape which lessens the effect of it.

I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but moving the flag directly in front of the spawn is in no way better than having it be below you. At the same time, I do believe having your spawn protection to jump down there was a bad idea. Also the extended spawn protection was a bad idea and I forgot to mention this in the original post.

I see how it wouldn't be so bad in the chunk but in the system that now exists made it a bad experience. I don't like how long the spawn protection is now and I think it should be 1-2 seconds shorter. It's kind of hard to explain how it works but. How end was below the spawn meant it was effectively behind enemy lines. If you killed a player and ran down the stairs you would just about almost take the flag when they jump down on you. In that case you would have to either run or fight. If you chose to run, the first problem was that the stairs slowed you down a lot so the person chasing you could get significant damage on you or even kill you. If you then chose to fight, the player would respawn and be only a few blocks behind you when they took the top route and you went up the slow stairs. And when you get slowness with the flag, that makes it even harder. If want to be able to kill someone 3 times in a row without dying you would probably need a stronger kit like ninja which would make you even slower compared to a runner.

Now when it's in front you only have to fight them once or twice which is much better. End should really be redesigned. I would say to put the flag back where it was before but move the spawnpoint back like 15 blocks which would help. I did like the depth of the map because it added to the game with ideas for funky strategies but poor design.

Games would only go into overtime if the teams had the same score, which from my experience back on the Chunk, rarely ever happened.

In 1.9 overtime happened about 30% of the time in CTF and like 80% on the time in Core.
Now it happens like 10% of the time in CTF which yes you could argue is too low now.

Me and my friend have completed this achievement at least 30 times between the two of us and neither of us have obtained it. I assume you play 1.9+ so that would lead me to believe it's only broken for 1.8, making only more of a case to fix their damn game.

Yea make a bug report if you want. Bug reports suck to make because you need "evidence" like do they want a video of me doing it or something which is stupid when it always happens no matter what.

Ok so maybe not merge the two if it truly would upset a ton of people. But maybe make 1.8 not so broken so people who prefer 1.8 pvp over 1.9+ but prefer the less broken factor of 1.8 could move to 1.8 and not leave us with the same few players.

Fixing Blockwars in general would be great.

The fact that nobody has hit 10,000 wins in 3 years, even with it being a permanent game and even with it having the boosted playerbase from the Chunk for a short period, nobody has been able to reach 10,000 yet. This leads me to fairly come to the conclusion that no one who's started within the past year will be able to hit 10,000 any time soon. Even veterans who know how to play and are good at the game.

I'm #1 on the leaderboard with all those wins and there's a few reasons why no one has 10000. Firstly, you can count off the last year because you can never play the thing so call it 2 years. Secondly, for like 6 months there were stat issues where wins weren't even counted properly half the time so call it 1 1/2 years. But of course no one who has started recently is gonna get 10k because it's featured instead of perm and when every single voting period when it's voted as the next featured game, staff try and get it in there less. The other day when it was featured just before it was going to be in for the vote, they quickly changed it to wing rush with about 7 players in because it being featured for 4 days is not enough. And again on the last vote it was featured for 3 days instead of 4 for 'reasons'. I'm not salty. Also if they added even the easy suggestions it would be so much better.

It wasn't broken, it was perfectly fine and designed to let people join mid game, something that should have stuck. It was not stupid, the fact that you think it was stupid shows me you haven't seen what kind of autobalance there is now and haven't been into forced 7v3s. It was in no way unfair when the alternative was 7v3s. It may have been annoying, I will admit that, but was in no way worse than what we have now. It was in every way functional, fair, and in the opinion of every old Chunk member I've spoken to, much smarter of Macreddin and his gang than whatever Cubecraft staff came up with... adding extra time to CLAIM there's an autobalance and not actually do anything.

I think we are talking about different autobalance systems because there are many that have tried and failed over the years. The auto balance that Oreo is talking about literally swapped players teams midgame which was a damn nightmare. It didn't even work because it swapped the last person that died so on average all the bad players got swapped to the other team and had no better chances of winning anyway. Basically joining midgame was removed because cube doesn't have the infrastructure for it or something. I don't really like it tho because you don't get the same feeling of winning when you joined midgame when your team is already a capture ahead because it wasn't you who helped your team win, you just happened to be there. I think other measures would be better.

Macreddin did just this back in 2017/2018. He started a small server that had the original BlockWars, a beloved Chunk games called Thimble, and many other of the man's fairly unique gamemodes. Sadly there wasn't much of a Chunk playerbase left, and the only ones to show up were two groups that seriously hated each other back in the Chunk days and we struggled to get along enough to actually play a lot of BlockWars. But it was essentially what we had in the past, with the same magnificent maps, the same skillful players, and a generally amazing game that really should be what CubeCraft's BlockWars is. Should've been there, it was real fun.

It's a shame I didn't get to see that. Rebuilding Blockwars is one of my big goals when I get the programming skills I will get from A levels and above. Make Blockwars great again!!

 

[Andyyy]

My man just wrote a book holy crap. You know this ain't your English class right, post don't have to be in essay form. Yikes :confused1:

It comes from a place of passion dude.

 

[AnUglyTurtle]

Bridge is complained about too but the fact that it is larger does help. There is not so much of a bottleneck on bridge because in the flag room there's two ways in and 3 ways out so you can escape which lessens the effect of it.

I guess it could be that for maps, it is nostalgia blocking me from seeing the problems with Western, though I still believe it was better before, because while it may have had one obvious entrance to the houses, I remember it having at least 2 open to everyone, and one more for jumpers. Similar to how Western has the paths underground below the rails now, the original also had that path, but it was a bit more hidden off behind the building, making it a bit more interesting of a path than what we have now.

I see how it wouldn't be so bad in the chunk but in the system that now exists made it a bad experience. I don't like how long the spawn protection is now and I think it should be 1-2 seconds shorter. It's kind of hard to explain how it works but. How end was below the spawn meant it was effectively behind enemy lines. If you killed a player and ran down the stairs you would just about almost take the flag when they jump down on you. In that case you would have to either run or fight. If you chose to run, the first problem was that the stairs slowed you down a lot so the person chasing you could get significant damage on you or even kill you. If you then chose to fight, the player would respawn and be only a few blocks behind you when they took the top route and you went up the slow stairs. And when you get slowness with the flag, that makes it even harder. If want to be able to kill someone 3 times in a row without dying you would probably need a stronger kit like ninja which would make you even slower compared to a runner.

I still strongly disagree with this. The same logic could then be used for Forest Fight, where the spawn is put right next to 2 of the 3 entrances, and one entrance is difficult to leave from if you're standing on the ground. If it's really an issue that people would respawn and jump down immediately without issue, a simple solution is to shorten immunity, and remove fall damage immunity. It's a very simple change that would immediately fix that issue. This was never a problem on The Chunk and I don't know why Cubecraft felt the need to ruin it. And while it may seem difficult to get away from the flag, I typically found it possible to hide behind corners in the middle path or hug walls on the left or right paths to avoid immediate conflict and get away. I understand how this strategy would be ruined with the glowing effect in 1.9 though. Which only leads me to believe that addition is pointless and makes the game a lot less interesting, promoting running instead of thinking.

But of course no one who has started recently is gonna get 10k because it's featured instead of perm and when every single voting period when it's voted as the next featured game, staff try and get it in there less. The other day when it was featured just before it was going to be in for the vote, they quickly changed it to wing rush with about 7 players in because it being featured for 4 days is not enough. And again on the last vote it was featured for 3 days instead of 4 for 'reasons'. I'm not salty. Also if they added even the easy suggestions it would be so much better.

This is exactly my point. It is unreasonable to think this is a possibility for players these days who didn't experience the head start by sticking around for that year and a half of this game being functional. Also I feel if you're actively trying to make this game show up as a featured game less, because of how frequently it gets chosen, then they should start taking that as a sign of it needing to be a permanent game.

I think we are talking about different autobalance systems because there are many that have tried and failed over the years. The auto balance that Oreo is talking about literally swapped players teams midgame which was a damn nightmare. It didn't even work because it swapped the last person that died so on average all the bad players got swapped to the other team and had no better chances of winning anyway. Basically joining midgame was removed because cube doesn't have the infrastructure for it or something. I don't really like it tho because you don't get the same feeling of winning when you joined midgame when your team is already a capture ahead because it wasn't you who helped your team win, you just happened to be there. I think other measures would be better.

If this is the case, then they tried fixing something that was not broken. I understand the frustration of getting moved from one team to another while you're winning, but frankly I feel this is a necessary sacrifice for games to be fun for the majority of the people. It's never fun to be stuck in a 1v4 because the game is incapable of balancing teams. What we had when this game first migrated, and back on The Chunk, was if the teams become unbalanced by 2 or more, it would start a 10 second countdown, and after those 10 seconds it chooses a player at random from the larger team, and moves them to the smaller team to prevent an unfair match. This was fully functioning and never caused any serious anger among Chunk players. I also understand the disappointment of joining a game that's ending and feeling you did not contribute, but that shouldn't matter too much because more often than not, you'll be joining a game early enough to actually play and participate, even if it's only for 2 minutes. Also, I don't see how CubeCraft can't handle players joining mid game when that was something nearly every Chunk game allowed. There were maybe 2 games that didn't allow joining in the middle, being Tower Defense and maybe Ender (Both feel like they got killed by Cubecraft as well but I'm not passionate enough about either to explain why in detail).

 

[Marieke2001]

This is exactly my point. It is unreasonable to think this is a possibility for players these days who didn't experience the head start by sticking around for that year and a half of this game being functional. Also I feel if you're actively trying to make this game show up as a featured game less, because of how frequently it gets chosen, then they should start taking that as a sign of it needing to be a permanent game.

So that’s where it all goes wrong. Everyone wants Blockwars to be a permanent game, but from what i’ve heard (the big change was during my network ban) BW was almost completely dead. It got more players because it’s featured every once in a while. Making it permanent would probably kill it once again.

Also, I don't see how CubeCraft can't handle players joining mid game when that was something nearly every Chunk game allowed. There were maybe 2 games that didn't allow joining in the middle, being Tower Defense and maybe Ender (Both feel like they got killed by Cubecraft as well but I'm not passionate enough about either to explain why in detail).

I think that this is more of a coding problem. Staff members can join mid-game in spectator mode. If they had to add members to survival, I think it probably would get a lot more complicated to make it really function. Not sure though.

If this is the case, then they tried fixing something that was not broken. I understand the frustration of getting moved from one team to another while you're winning, but frankly I feel this is a necessary sacrifice for games to be fun for the majority of the people. It's never fun to be stuck in a 1v4 because the game is incapable of balancing teams. What we had when this game first migrated, and back on The Chunk, was if the teams become unbalanced by 2 or more, it would start a 10 second countdown, and after those 10 seconds it chooses a player at random from the larger team, and moves them to the smaller team to prevent an unfair match. This was fully functioning and never caused any serious anger among Chunk players.

I’ve experienced team balancing both BW and TD. Sometimes the problem is that one team is so bad at the game that everyone within that team leaves. I end up at that team, with the only bad player left. My old team is crushing us and it’s no more fun for me. I also leave. In my opinion we’re better off without team balancing, at least after start. It’ll only cause people to dislike the games.

 

[AnUglyTurtle]

I think that this is more of a coding problem. Staff members can join mid-game in spectator mode. If they had to add members to survival, I think it probably would get a lot more complicated to make it really function. Not sure though.

This was something the Chunk had and it worked flawlessly. If Cubecraft struggles with something like this, then they should have made more use of what the Chunk offered.

I’ve experienced team balancing both BW and TD. Sometimes the problem is that one team is so bad at the game that everyone within that team leaves. I end up at that team, with the only bad player left. My old team is crushing us and it’s no more fun for me. I also leave. In my opinion we’re better off without team balancing, at least after start. It’ll only cause people to dislike the games.

I also experienced team balance in BlockWars, not so much Tower Defense because CubeCraft's Tower Defense has changed a lot since the Chunk. This still was never a problem on the Chunk. I guess the CubeCarft playerbase is just really bad at committing to their game. I don't think leaving unbalanced teams is a better option though. That leads to all players of the opposite team leaving and the game ending sooner, meaning you'd have to wait another 10-15 minutes to get back into a game that ends in less than 3. I understand there may be frustration with being moved off the better team, but that doesn't mean you should just quit.

 

[Marieke2001]

This was something the Chunk had and it worked flawlessly. If Cubecraft struggles with something like this, then they should have made more use of what the Chunk offered.


I also experienced team balance in BlockWars, not so much Tower Defense because CubeCraft's Tower Defense has changed a lot since the Chunk. This still was never a problem on the Chunk. I guess the CubeCarft playerbase is just really bad at committing to their game. I don't think leaving unbalanced teams is a better option though. That leads to all players of the opposite team leaving and the game ending sooner, meaning you'd have to wait another 10-15 minutes to get back into a game that ends in less than 3. I understand there may be frustration with being moved off the better team, but that doesn't mean you should just quit.

But that’s what most people do. I would probably also do it as it’s just no more fun if you’re winning and suddenly you’re the losing team with really no chance of winning.

 

[Eli]

I hadn’t replied to this because it’s so awfully long and tedious to read. But here I go I guess.

About the maps, I don’t know how much the essence of BlockWars has changed since it was merged from the chunk. But there is one change that has been made very noticeable, BlockWars became a fast paced game. People nowadays don’t enjoy long tedious games, what people want is this phenomenon called “instant satisfaction” and with changes like adding a capture limit, they’ve made the game progress. If you ask me, neither Nuclear, or Pirates are good maps. Why? Simply because they’re too big and the difference in map sizes seems absolutely incoherent. Every map should have a similar distance from flag to flag. That’s the reason why everyone hates Nuclear for example, it’s enormous. And it makes the games take way too long. Now about other maps, like snowy and icypeaks. They’re just built in a way that makes games take longer than usual. Icypeaks has only two paths to get from flag to flag, none of them “safe” the main path that connects both teams is easily blocked, and it most games it turns utterly dark. Ice parkour in most of the cases means death and flags are inside a small house, making them very easy to camp on.

As I stated before, the changes to CTF seemed necessary, to keep the game dynamic. About Core, I absolutely agree, games are horribly boring and take way too long. It honestly only consists on spawn killing and breaking a wool block twenty five times, not fun, not exciting, no nothing. I never played the jail gamemode, it would be interesting if it came back though, perhaps it’ll be fun!

The iceball kit and the alarm trap blocks seem like great additions. I will have to agree with you about the kits, most kits are not used once in game because people like to stick to the most evidently powerful ones (warrior, runner, ninja, archer and bomber) I completely agree that ninja needs a nerf and all those unused kits need a severe buff. My ideal BlockWars would be playing against as many different kits as possible, diversity is the most fun. BlockWars is so repetitive and monotonous and needs serious changes.

About the player base, big no. 1.9 PvP is the most popular PvP in the cubecraft server, so if we were to merge both versions, 1.8 would have to somehow acquire the 1.9 mechanics. (If that’s even possible, if not, then it should just be left as it is. Most people prefer 1.9 PvP here)

Achievements aren’t hard to get, I Am Strong is a pretty simple achievement if you ask me. I have all of the achievements except for 10k wins. But it’s necessary for it to be there, when Andy gets to 10k he deserves the reward (even if it’s absurdly small, if you ask me).

About joining mid game, this has been suggested before not only for BlockWars but for most game modes in the server. And their response is it would take them a lot of effort as they would have to change the entire games and matchmaking system. This, to me isn’t an excuse. Being able to rejoin a game is absolutely necessary. The team balancer has been a complicated issue to deal with, but how I see it and how most people see it, the current system is way better than the old one. It’s very annoying to be switched to the enemy team, especially when you’ve done a lot for your own team. That system is only discouraging. The current system gives players resistance, and it has its pros and its cons. If the players aren’t that great at PvP, they get somehow of a chance to defend themselves, but it still doesn’t fill the gap of a missing teammate. If the players are decent at PvP, they become almost invisible, encouraging them to camp and make the game take much longer than what it should.

To conclude, yes some maps are a problem. Yes most kits are useless. Yes the team rebalanced should be tweaked. I invite you to look at this thread which proposed drastic changes to all kits in game. https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/blockwars-kit-revamp.220074
But honestly don’t expect much from CubeCraft, they don’t really care about Java that much anymore, as their Bedrock server is 2 and 3x bigger. All of BlockWars’ past updates haven’t added any depth to the game, in the last one they just added to useless kits (medic and viper) to say oh yay we added a new kit! That no one ever used. BlockWars has been very badly taken care of. And unfortunately I don’t think it’ll ever receive the attention.

 

[Andyyy]

So that’s where it all goes wrong. Everyone wants Blockwars to be a permanent game, but from what i’ve heard (the big change was during my network ban) BW was almost completely dead. It got more players because it’s featured every once in a while. Making it permanent would probably kill it once again.

I played it just before the big change a lot and it was not dead. I was easily able to get into games and there seemed to even an upturn in players at that time