Hey. Sorry if I contradict anything the mods have said - I'll try not to. I want to give some background and response to the points raised here.
I've tried to address all your points but sorry if I missed something.
I'm also going to reply to another thread and will likely use parts of this repsonse in that one.. so for those reading both - sorry if you read the same sentence twice!
Firstly thank you for all your feedback which you’ve given and your continued support for the server.
Just to keep everyone up to date and as a quick preface, we’ve had a bit of a reshuffle internally and the main leadership of CubeCraft is Luke (efc), Rubik, Cam and Marco. John’s main focus is now on other projects within the company but they are still involved with the web stuff. For the past few months I’ve been busy with the boring side of running an organisation and looking at management structures working closely with all the management members in how we are running the team.
Luke looks after all things content: such as working with our amazing content creation team who are doing awesome work with the Minecraft Marketplace, and holding a strong creative vision for all things CubeCraft!
Marco looks after all things infrastructure and support: keeps the servers online and ensures that our customers aren’t having any purchasing issues etc.
Cam and Rubik look after all things product and development: updates, features and new stuff
A bumpy road
I'll start with some honesty:
2018 and 2019 were both super tough years for us, our player-base shrank and with it our team, resources and ability to deliver the things we wanted to.
This caused difficult decisions to be made in terms of priority - ultimately Bedrock had the most potential in terms of growth and so as an organisation we had to focus on that in 2019 to ensure we remained sustainable and to
build resilience against any future issues we may come across.
Our Java network is and remains the heart of the CubeCraft Games network and it’s unfortunate we have not been able to put as much effort into as we would have liked.
At one point during 2019 we
only had two active developers (rubik and reece(driima)) which was unmanageable as the sheer amount of background work which needs to happen to keep us up to date and compliant across the three networks we operate (1.8, Java and Bedrock).
Thanks to all the hard work in 2019 from across the entire CubeCraft team we’ve overcome the difficulties which we started facing in 2018 and we are starting 2020 in a good place and with big ambitions.
Anticheat for us is hard, like really hard
I'm fairly sure you've heard the overview of why anticheat development for us is more difficult than other networks:
- We support so many different versions: Sentinel runs across three networks: 1.8, 1.9+ and Bedrock. Each of these versions have their own set of behaviours and paramaters and their own "quirks". On 1.9 we are having to cross some fairly major mechanic switches especially with regards to swimming and flying as we support 1.9 through 1.15. This effectively triples how hard it is for us to get a really good anticheat across the network.
- There are cheat developers out there who focus on CubeCraft, it's a continuing and tiring game of cat and mouse. Ultimately constantly patching up bypasses as we see them out in the wild means we aren't spending time on more complex and complete detections and a balance has to be made
Ultimately we need more people working on Sentinel but the skill level required to be effective and the length of time before a developer fully understands the Sentinel codebase means that this is a costly process and one which we can't justify without a more solid strategy for anticheat.
I wish there was an easier answer here but I'm afraid I don't have one. Sentinel is a continuing topic of discussion within the management and moderation teams. For those keen eyes on our staff list you'll notice we have a new main developer for Sentinel come onboard recently (Mats). They've got some pretty cool stuff in prototype and hopefully we'll see a lot of that rolling across the network over the coming months.
I feel I should come to Sentinel's defense somewhat - It does catch and block a lot of cheaters (thousands every week) but I share your frustration that seemingly obvious cheats are obvious on the server and we don't do enough to show it's successes.
Communication and our relationship with the Communtiy
We’ve always been proud of our community (some exceptions do apply...) and we are upset at the increasing sense of discontent within some parts of it. A lot of this has been due to a perceived lack of communication - where we have definitely faulted - as explained above the past few years have been tough and there’s not been a lot of positive news to give out and so, perhaps mistakenly, we chose silence instead.
Community Staff
We are in the early stages of completely revamping our staff structure. I don't want to commit to anything publically at the moment as the staff only just got our first thoughts on how we can improve things today! Please know that we are actively engaging and trying to improve and grow the staff team!
Java
Myself and the rest of the team are really excited for 2020 we’ve got some big things in the works and are wanting to
refocus effort onto the Java network.
At the back end of 2019 we took on four new developers: Rotem, Colin, Mats and Pico. Effectively tripling the size of our development team is no easy feat and there are some inevitable growing pains as the team gets used to the server and everything we have going on. A lot of team are still onboarding right now but over 2020 we’re wanting to refresh a lot of our content including updating our major games and bring in new content.
Forums
You asked about Bedrock players and why they aren't on the forums. I've got a few thoughts here:
- We don't really push our forums on the Bedrock server at the moment. Our mobile experience isn't great at the moment and until we have that nailed I don't think there's much point pushing it ingame.
- Bedrock players play very differently -- generally much shorter play sessions than we see on Java
- Players tend to be more casual in who they play with across all the networks and less engaged on social media and other platforms
Thank you
Thanks for your kind comments regarding the Big Change. We know it was a shock for everyone to begin with but we agree that it's kept our catalogue of our games alive. And yes - the translation team is amazing and big props to
@Elenahh for organising all that by themselves.