Minecraft PC IP: play.cubecraft.net

Zed

Zedmin / Managing Director
Team CubeCraft
💙 Admin Team
Jul 11, 2015
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Honestly this is the exact kind of response I was looking for when I made this thread, I'm extremely grateful for all the honesty you've put into this response. As I stated at the end of the thread, I'm still hopeful for the future of the network, and good luck to the management team with this upcoming year. Please never forget that us (the community) are a very valuable tool for you (management) to continue to improve and preserve the server. I'm also really glad to see you're reconsidering certain things like the staff structure, which by now has been pointed out by many as insufficient. And about the anticheat, it's understandable, just know that perhaps the way to prevent people from thinking Sentinel is inexistent is by doing stuff like this, giving honest and truthful answers to the community, we're only looking for a better communication ^-^
<3
 

Marieke2001

Forum Professional
Jul 2, 2015
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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.
So i've been here for almost five years. This reply has been the best i've seen from management thus far and this is the reply people have been wanting for some time now. Yes, I know some of the management members put their effort and time into the forums, but members can barely see it. This is actually one of the few times i've seen a thread getting a full and honest explanation These kind of replies do let people know that you care for the forums and put time and effort in it. I really appreciate this kind of a response, so eh, thanks :).

Edit: I've barely or haven't spoken to you when I was a staff member, but I like this side we see from you in this thread :)
 

Nikoshka

Dedicated Member
Jan 10, 2018
281
1,609
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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.

The response here is brilliant. I'm 100% sure the community appreciates this.

Problem is, I'm not quite sure I can truly believe that a change is going to be made.

To me, this just seems too familiar to the time when Mac left, the admin team was restructured (with the inclusion of a management rank), and then the server became significantly worse, with the sense of community completely gone.

Forum members have been complained one way or another since 2016, and despite this, the server has only gotten worse. I feel greatly that the members of the community have been seen as merely pawns against a massive corporate entity.

What are you going to do differently this time?
 
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Zed

Zedmin / Managing Director
Team CubeCraft
💙 Admin Team
Jul 11, 2015
248
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268
Radcliffe, Manchester
twitter.com
The response here is brilliant. I'm 100% sure the community appreciates this.

Problem is, I'm not quite sure I can truly believe that a change is going to be made.

To me, this just seems too familiar to the time when Mac left, the admin team was restructured (with the inclusion of a management rank), and then the server became significantly worse, with the sense of community completely gone.

Forum members have been complained one way or another since 2016, and despite this, the server has only gotten worse. I feel greatly that the members of the community have been seen as merely pawns against a massive corporate entity.

What are you going to do differently this time?

So this is a perfectly valid question.

Firstly, just want to address the whole corporate thing -- we're not some massive corporate, at best we are small to medium sized company. For us to act against our players would be to shoot ourselves in the foot. Yes we have servers and staff to pay but they are both fairly useless unless there are players! It's in all of our interests to provide the best experience for players and to grow where we can. If you feel we have deviated from this objective then these are genuine mistakes (we are far from perfect!) and not some large corporate conspiracy. Google already has all your data anyway.

When I think back to the previous times we've restructured how we run this has mainly been due to unexpected changes in staff. As such we've never had the time to proprely sit down and plan what we wanted to do - they have been "reactive" changes rather than "proactive". I think I mentioned in my post that from about October last year I spent some time looking at how we run things there and introduced a new way of that team working. Since around November I've been having a few chats internally about how both the staff team operates and as a follow on how we engage with the community as a whole. These are not plans which we've rushed together.

My focus over the next few weeks is going to be on the staff team. I believe that a great core of volunteers is key to any good online community and revamping the staff team will help foster positive community growth, so I'll give a few of my thoughts for this area:

A consequence of previous attempts is that they've resulted in a patchwork of policy and process - as evident from how stuff can fall through gaps (e.g. appeals not answered promptly, this suggestions forums, etc). This is the first time we've done a such a drastic rethink of how we to collaborate with both our staff team and our wider community (i.e. you folks!)

When me and (efc)Luke first sat down to reflect on the current state of the staff team we tried to trace back where all the components of process, rules and structure originated from within the staff team. Luke was actually one of the first staff manager back in 2014. Since then we’ve had five staff managers come and put their stamp on how the team operates: changing, adding and removing bits and bobs of stuff they did and didn’t like it.

Ultimately, it’s our belief that it’s time for a ground up rethink of how we operates. Internally we have some interal goals and strategy of what we are wanting to achieve but our thoughts on all the details are still in development. As I said we've only just started openly consulting about all this internally within the staff team and we will try and share as much as we can with the wider community when the time is right.

Change is always hard. Even with the best of plans stuff will go wrong. We fully expect these changes to cause some issues along the way - however with all your support I think we will come through this as a better server, ready and able to fully support our amazing community across our platform!

Hope that's answered your question?
 

PerryJ

Forum Expert
Aug 28, 2016
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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.
You sir have my respect to post such a great and well made answer about the 2 critique threads. The fact that you answered means that management still cares about the server. I'm still a bit sceptical, but I'm looking forward what 2020 will bring for Bedrock but also for Java. Good luck with that. You've restored my faith for a little bit. Props to you.
 

Fiefens

Novice Member
Jul 23, 2019
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  • Hello everyone! I have been wanting to do this thread for a while and I finally brought myself to sit down and write it. So here are my thoughts and criticism on CubeCraft since the Big Change. I do this for multiple reasons, mainly because these topics I will be talking about on the thread are of my interest, and I believe they deserve to be discussed properly. Secondly, the forums has been lacking real discussion and debate lately, and hopefully this thread can give us all something to talk about for some time. I encourage you, since you’re already reading this to leave your little grain of sand on this discussion, don’t think your opinion is not worth sharing, all perspectives are welcome and very much appreciated, doesn’t matter if someone already said it, it’s your individual opinion that matters. I’m most certainly expecting someone to contradict what I’m saying, that’s sort of the point.
Firstly I would like to explain the structure of the thread, there will be an amount of specific subtopics I want to give my opinion on. These subtopics will be organized in spoilers, to give the thread a sense of organization, and because I don’t want to demotivate whoever is reading this with a wall of text.


The first, and I’d say the currently most relevant topic I want to talk about is the situation around Sentinel and /report, but it’s mostly about cheaters in general.

For context, many of you may have noticed that it’s been an increasing trend to write rants/complaints about Sentinel. A “nice” example of these complaint threads is this one: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/sentinel-no-vale-para-nada.224704/. In this particular example, the thread owner was complaining about Sentinel being ineffective. He says he’s tired about finding 2 to 3 hackers every game he plays in, and proceeded to share a video of two hackers fighting each other in a SkyWars match. First of all I’d like to say that I chose this example because the Thread Owner was particularly nice and diplomatic about his complaint, getting his point across without using swear words or insulting anyone. And the first reply to this thread is in Spanish, but I’ll summarize it quickly. The thread owner was basically told that while Sentinel isn’t the perfect anticheat, if he reported them himself, he’d eventually end up seeing less hackers. And it’s here where you can find the problem.

Every single Sentinel rant is replied to with the same old line, “Sentinel is constantly being improved” and “Please report them on the report site”. Which is, the way I see it, the most conformist and hypocritical position that can be adopted. I myself have been one of these people, yes I’m calling myself a hypocrite but I’m endorsing it and write this expecting to see a change beginning with myself and any other people who might agree with me.

I’ll say it, all those self-proclaimed hackers that have made Sentinel rants and have criticized the anticheat are right. They’re all right and it’s about time we stop ignoring the real issue, it’s been enough of blaming them as the problem. Since they insult, harass, hack and whatnot their arguments aren’t valid? No, they’re right to dislike Sentinel, they’re right to complain about it. (I’m not justifying their troublesome behaviour. I in no way agree with presenting their ideas the ways they did, doesn’t mean I didn’t agree with the essence of their complaints. Which is why I’ve written this, to prove it is possible to talk about the same problem, in the same position, without sounding disrespectful and ridiculous) Sentinel is not working how it should, it is highly ineffective, it doesn’t deal with hackers in time, and it’s getting the community upset. Because outside of the ecosystem of the forums, players do like to speak with the truth when it comes to Sentinel. Sentinel is inefficient and requires a lot of attention. The player cannot be blamed over not liking to have to waste their time reporting hackers, since the only thing that a player might want to do, as their name states, is playing.

I’m not an anticheat developer, I barely know how to tell Python to print something. I have never used hacks in my life, but it is far beyond any technicism to see that Sentinel is not working how it should be. I invite you to try to play a game of SkyWars in the 1.8 version of the server. Chances are, you’ll find a hacker every 2 to 3 rounds. Two to three rounds. That’s an insane amount of cheaters! And do you think people will want to stick around because they’re loyal to the server? Well no. Players will eventually get tired of being chased by a bhopper every 10 minutes. Do you think it’s fun to have to waste 3 minutes of your life every time you record and report a hacker? Do you think that having so many cheaters is contributing to the gameplay experience of CubeCraft? No, it’s corrupting it, it’s killing it. It’s making CubeCraft seem a great place to hack on for hackers, and a horrible place to play on for legitimate players.

The situation is in no way eased with /report either. It already didn’t work when it was limited to plus rank players, now that the reporting perk has been given to all paid ranks, you will most probably only ever have your report attended in 1 of every 14 cases. Although I would not associate the staff team with it being ineffective, since they do the best they can, they just have very few people to be checking reports constantly. But that cannot dismiss CubeCraft of giving us a solution, because currently it’s all schemed up like this:
  • Sentinel has its flaws yes, but you can report hackers on the web! You only gotta record the player, upload it to youtube, and file the report. Pretty easy right? It most definitely doesn’t interrupt your gameplay at all.
  • Reporting on the website is too tedious? We got you covered! You can report hackers in-game, although it probably will never be attended. If you wanna make sure they end up being punished, record and report! Your round of EggWars is guaranteed to be ruined regardless!​

I mean, I can sort of understand that CubeCraft’s interest as a company may have migrated from the Java edition to the Bedrock edition, since it’s seemingly five times bigger in playerbase. And that’s understandable, but at least invest something on your anticheat? Or are you already doing something for the anticheat? Please tell us about it at least, otherwise people will continue to complain and the community will continue to believe Sentinel is simply not worked on. It’s all about establishing proper communication and providing concise results. I cannot say “oh you need to fix this specific check” or “maybe try this code!” Because I know nothing about it, but I can in my position as community member be the one to enforce pressure on the topic, demanding results and improvement. Because I don’t need to be an engineer to ask the electronics store to fix my newly bought, already broken PC right?​
Don't mind the double spoiler, I was messing with the format and it glitched for some reason, can't fix it.



The second thing I want to talk about, is the current situation of CubeCraft’s forums. And this topic comes together with a suggestion. Because currently, it seems like the only people keeping the forums alive are a few dedicated community member that are very loyal to the server and like hanging out on the forums. Together with the occasional suggestion, most threads seems to be more forums community related than server related.

One could attribute the deterioration of these forums due to CubeCraft’s player base having seen a reduction. But that’s not true at all, didn’t Bedrock have more than 10,000 players this summer? Why aren’t they flooding the forums? Maybe because most of them probably don’t even know it exists.

While this may be a very personal interpretation of the situation, and there might be multiple other reasons to blame. I’ve come to the conclusion that the forums has lost its purpose. Forums are supposed to be a place to exchange ideas, to discuss, more concisely, to debate isn’t it? And debate has two very particular elements, an issue to debate on and a result prior to the discussion. In the case of CubeCraft, two sides should be the one providing results, from one end, the community with suggestions. And from the other, Management with updates that take into consideration such suggestions. If there’s no results then there’s no point for debate, and if there’s no point for debate then people don’t have the initiative to participate. And if people don’t have the initiative to participate they don’t provide suggestions from their role as community members.

I can imagine someone saying that the past year hasn’t had good suggestions, while it most certainly has (Examples: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/suggestions-about-experience.216149/, https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/minerware-microgames-ideas.220914/, https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/blockwars-kit-revamp.220074/). Not many since there's not much to even talk about, but there have been a few quality suggestions put out there since the Big Change. And most haven’t made it, since Java is not important anymore, so are suggestions apparently. Discussions are very few, and the few there are, are rapidly extinguished by the staff team and later on ignored by the community, respecting the staff’s authority. So what is the point of continuing to make suggestions for CubeCraft? Since you’ve been given the impression it as a whole doesn’t really matter, because your input will most probably never be the reason for change in the actual server. Sure you might get a few internet points in the process of talking to yourself on a really long thread only a few will read, but fact remains most people will desist if they realize they’re not even being heard. Because the basic stage of the exchange of ideas isn’t being fulfilled.

So since Management’s interest has migrated over to Bedrock, and we could expect to see a greater abundance of updates for Bedrock rather than for Java. Then bring the Bedrock players over to the forums. Since they do have a reason to comment and share their ideas, because chances are Management would be more open about ideas for Bedrock. Hence I think the forums should be further advertised in the Bedrock network of the server, in an attempt of reviving the forums. This can be done in the shape of Server-wise messages and other in-game references to the forums.
Now as for some good things I would like to congratulate CubeCraft on.

The Featuring System was a genius idea, and the person who came up with it deserves the biggest congratulation and recognition. At first I didn’t really understand the dynamics of this system but now that we’ve got more than a year to get to know it, I must say I am extremely happy with how it turned out.

The Featuring System was proven to be very effective when it comes to giving previously dead games a player base. It brought life back to many game modes that had been struggling before. Which most importantly includes, BlockWars, Survival Games and Slime Survival, amongst others. It’s given me, and many other players a reason to look forward to something CubeCraft related. Because I’ve personally enjoyed BlockWars more than what I used to now that it’s only available for limited periods of time.

At first I was completely opposed to the idea of making BlockWars a featured game. In fact, I made a thread about it, this thread: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/bring-block-wars-back.212629/. Fun fact, that thread is the current 18th most liked thread in the suggestion sub forum, amongst 16k other threads. And it received a huge amount of support with 68 votes in favour, and while Management was very much aware of the success of this thread, they decided to not implement it. And well at first I didn’t understand this position, I was told I wasn’t giving real reasons, only saying “bring it back because I like it and these other 67 people like it too” wasn’t enough. And I understand this now, I’m glad I’m able to say this on my own thread. I accept that the idea of the featuring system was a great one, and it sure was very successful and I would like to congratulate CubeCraft about it.

The translation Team has acquired most of its importance and impact on the server during the past year, and it has brought a lot of translations for multiple languages. The most important part about the translation team is that it has made the CubeCraft experience accessible for many more people, regardless of the language they speak. It not only is a very important project in my eyes, it has also become a very special place for loyal community members to bring their efforts together into doing something good for the server. The Translation Team is one of the things that has helped me keep faith on the future of CubeCraft. And hopefully CubeCraft will continue to appeal to multiple communities around the world. There’s some other steps I consider CubeCraft should take toward this goal of becoming fully international, and there’s more detail about it in this thread: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/international-growth.219703/

Establishing that team, was a very big step in the right direction, and deserves another congratulation.

In conclusion, this past year since the Big Change leaves me thinking Java has become mostly unimportant. It leaves me expecting nothing for the future updates but Skin Packs for the Marketplace. But with a sense of hope, since I am confident the server can still take the right steps into preserving this amazing community I so love and appreciate. Because CubeCraft’s content has an amazing potential, its games are very high quality, and the server in general has a very distinctive feel, of wanting to bring new experiences to an otherwise stereotypical market of Minecraft servers. But it’s a few things like the Anticheat that are affecting CubeCraft’s success.

Thanks for reading this! In this particular thread, I’m expecting that since you’ve finished reading, you’ll go ahead and leave a reply. Your input is highly important!

Geez... sentinel is being worked on, its not like it can be perfect...
 

Nikoshka

Dedicated Member
Jan 10, 2018
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So this is a perfectly valid question.

Firstly, just want to address the whole corporate thing -- we're not some massive corporate, at best we are small to medium sized company. For us to act against our players would be to shoot ourselves in the foot. Yes we have servers and staff to pay but they are both fairly useless unless there are players! It's in all of our interests to provide the best experience for players and to grow where we can. If you feel we have deviated from this objective then these are genuine mistakes (we are far from perfect!) and not some large corporate conspiracy. Google already has all your data anyway.

When I think back to the previous times we've restructured how we run this has mainly been due to unexpected changes in staff. As such we've never had the time to proprely sit down and plan what we wanted to do - they have been "reactive" changes rather than "proactive". I think I mentioned in my post that from about October last year I spent some time looking at how we run things there and introduced a new way of that team working. Since around November I've been having a few chats internally about how both the staff team operates and as a follow on how we engage with the community as a whole. These are not plans which we've rushed together.

My focus over the next few weeks is going to be on the staff team. I believe that a great core of volunteers is key to any good online community and revamping the staff team will help foster positive community growth, so I'll give a few of my thoughts for this area:

A consequence of previous attempts is that they've resulted in a patchwork of policy and process - as evident from how stuff can fall through gaps (e.g. appeals not answered promptly, this suggestions forums, etc). This is the first time we've done a such a drastic rethink of how we to collaborate with both our staff team and our wider community (i.e. you folks!)

When me and (efc)Luke first sat down to reflect on the current state of the staff team we tried to trace back where all the components of process, rules and structure originated from within the staff team. Luke was actually one of the first staff manager back in 2014. Since then we’ve had five staff managers come and put their stamp on how the team operates: changing, adding and removing bits and bobs of stuff they did and didn’t like it.

Ultimately, it’s our belief that it’s time for a ground up rethink of how we operates. Internally we have some interal goals and strategy of what we are wanting to achieve but our thoughts on all the details are still in development. As I said we've only just started openly consulting about all this internally within the staff team and we will try and share as much as we can with the wider community when the time is right.

Change is always hard. Even with the best of plans stuff will go wrong. We fully expect these changes to cause some issues along the way - however with all your support I think we will come through this as a better server, ready and able to fully support our amazing community across our platform!

Hope that's answered your question?

I appreciate it. :)
Whilst I'm still not fully convinced (and I don't think I'll ever be fully convinced until I see change) I like where this is going.

When I said the 'massive corporate entity' phrase, it was more of a metaphor as to how disconnected the management team felt from us.
I really hope the entire management can begin to see the errors in their ways and start integrating back into the community again
 

RPoule

Dedicated Member
Jan 13, 2016
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That is due to our loss of @CommunistCactus @iLoveYouu @Sophie @ISTY. @Nikoshka and many many more. We had some outstanding good debaters on this forum. But due to lack of interest from management they all left or got banned. They were more annoying than rewarded for their constructive criticism. I’ve already said this before, but there are nearly not enough escalated threads getting implemented. There is also just a lack of result after many of the same complaints.
yuppp cubecraft cringe, remember that one resigned staffmember a couple of years ago (can't seem to remember her name) who joined on under a fake name heavily critisizing cubecraft while trolling the entire forums? She was IP-banned within 2 weeks or something lmfao.

Sentinel has its flaws
I've been falsely banned by sentinel 3 times now, one of which was quite recent.
I honestly believe the reason we see less hacking than before is because there are simply less kids trying to do so. Yes Sentinel has improved and yes I finally feel like my personal feedback on it (which I've had the opportunity to give a couple of times now) is actually being listened to, yet still I find non-lagging players who are obvioiusly reaching further than 6 blocks. To me, Sentinel was as a meme when she launched and to this day I find it hard to justify calling her anything else.
 
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Natxo

Well-Known Member
Jun 27, 2016
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Solo puedo decir una cosa: ¡Gracias, gracias y gracias! Para prestarme atención, para ver que realmente no estoy equivocado. Creo que deberíamos unirnos para pedir soluciones o explicaciones porque somos los jugadores que hacen que Cubecraft siga vivo. Creo que puede ser mucho mejor de lo que es y la gente no iría a otros servidores si funcionara como debería.



I can only say one thing: Thank you, thank you and thank you! To pay attention to me, to see that I'm really not wrong. I think we should join together to ask for solutions or explanations because we are the players that make Cubecraft still alive. I think it can be much better than it is and people would not go to other servers if it worked as it should.
 
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