Escalated CubeCraft Problems v3

[remio]

Hi all, I know @ELI⠀has already made A CubeCraft Critique last week and I'd like to congratulate him on making such a well-structured thread in which he really gave his opinion on the server. However, I felt like some points were missing, so here is CubeCraft Problems v3. There are some general problems I'd like to discuss here, starting off with the lack of updates.

Spoiler: Lack of updates

This is actually quite a serious one to start with, as updates are one of the basics of a succesful server. Without a good update once in a while, the community of the server will get less hyped about the server meaning that they will start looking for other servers that actually do release updates. I will now make a comparison of CubeCraft's 2019 compared to other years, using bar charts that will give you an insight into the amount of big updates they've made. And by 'big' I mean actual updates and not another silly map or seasonal update, because I've got a feeling like the management is trying to hide their lack of updates from the community by releasing a seasonal update every now and then, while not changing anything except for some loot.

* Please note that the relevance of the updates are based on my opinion

You can see that in 2015, things were starting to get settled. In 2016, the developers were tryharding and released a great number of 29(!) updates in 1 year. In 2017, things started to go a bit downhill, but 23 major updates is still a lot. In 2018, the update count was 15, which was a pretty big decline compared to the 2 previous years. And then we get to 2019. Who could tell me what happened here? 23 updates in total with only 6 being major updates?! However, it's not fair to compare these years as there might have been more developers in the other years, so I checked out @Story's staff history&status thread. There's been a total of 18 developers on the network, not taking into account that @rubik_cube_man, @GingerGeek and some others do also code things for the network. (Neither do I take into account that some developers might do other things than just coding updates.)

• In 2015, there was a total of 6 developers on the network (excluding rubik, ginger and the others that were mentioned in a different way on the staff thread), meaning that the average updates 1 developer released in 2015 was 12/6=2 updates.

• In 2016, there were 11 developers. Some of them didn't stay for the whole year, but making things a little easier for me I will just say that every one of them stayed for the entire year, because no developer resigned at the start of the year. This means that every developer had released 29/11=around 2,5 updates in that year.

• In 2017, there had been a total of 17 developers on the network and the major update count for that year was 23. 23/17=around 1,4 major updates per developer. This is more than 1,1 less updates than the previous year.

• In 2018, 12 developers had worked on the server (not counting 101_son as he left quite close to the start of the new year) and 15 major updates were released. 15/12=about 1,3 major updates per developer.

• In 2019, a total of 8 developers have worked on updates (not counting Qatell as he left pretty soon after 2019 started.) and 6 major updates were released. Warning, we're now at a point where we're really going downhill! 6/8=0,75=0,8 updates per developer, meaning that the average lies below 1! Counting from 2015, this had never happened before and the same applies to the amount of major updates. 6 is the lowest amount of updates EVER since 2015. Conclusion: Not sure if I'm in the right position to say this (or ever know enough about it all) but I believe that the workload of the developers could be a lot higher, looking at the past. Although it might require a lot of work, 6 is a pathetic number. I hope this will change in 2020, otherwise I'm not sure how many players the server has in 2021.

* Another thing worth noting is that, like I said before, haven't counted developing managers meaning that the 'scores' could even have been worse.

Spoiler: The toxic community

The toxic community is one of the biggest reasons why I pretty much stopped play CubeCraft. Every time I play SkyWars, PvP, or actually any game at all, there are those toxic tryhards who call you out for names every time you beat them, which makes me angry and a little toxic too. Toxicity is basically a chain reaction, once someone had started being toxic there's actually no way to stop it-
Wait, there actually is? Yes! And it has been suggested a couple of times before before! And before you say something like "there already is a chat filter!", this is not the way. You basically just delete the full message from the chat instead of removing/replacing just a part of it. And here I give away the perfect solution to this problem, which even is funny! I kind of 'stole' the solution from @Spuuuni's thread about preventing toxicity (took me 30 mins to find this lol) and I think the second solution is the best. Just replace the toxic words by nice words! Sentences such as "I hate you noob" would be replaced by something like "You look like the most lovely flower on earth <3".

Pros:

• If you randomize the sentences, it will look like the person who sent the toxic message actually meant to be nice to the other person.
• Messages that were meant to be an example (messages like "he said 'noob' to me") won't be deleted anymore because the words would be replaced. Instead of feeling like you're being ignored by the person, you'll understand the context.
• The community would generally seem less toxic because of the flood of nice messages.
• Tryhards become less toxic because they know their messages would turn positive anyways.

And yes, everyone could think of possible bypasses, but a positive message is better than a censored message.

Spoiler: Bad treatment of suggestions

This point is related to the lack of updates, because the good suggestions don't get added in game. And I know this problem is also in the previous 2 CubeCraft problems threads, but this thing needs to be in this thread because it is still relevant as the management still doesn't do anything with the suggestions.

First of all: Why actually is the suggestions subforum still a thing? In the past, the suggestions subforum was the most lively thing on the forums because everybody here wanted to contribute a little to the forums. But right now, the suggestions subforum is a boring place because only once in a while a good thread is made. Why? The lack of activity by the management of the server in the suggestions subforum discourages everyone from posting suggestions. Why would you suggest things if you know that the management isn't going to do something with it anyways?
Now let's take a look at the tags.

There's a total of 10 pages of escalated threads and 1 page can list 20 threads. The 10th page contains only 1 thread so 10*20-9=a total of 191(!) escalated threads the managers could choose from. The last time the management actually implemented a real suggestion was in August 2019. That's almost 6 months ago! The amount of individual suggestions (not invididual threads) that actually needed effort to add (so I'm not talking about suggestions like 'change the colour' or something) implemented in 2019 was 3. You had 365 days and the amount of actual suggestions implemented was 3. No wonder why these forums are dying, people just get discouraged by the lack of interest in good suggestions! The "escalated" tags are worthless right now as they are just some kind of fake rewards for your efforts. I see absolutely no reason why managers can't even take 20 minutes to go through the page of escalated tags and read through suggestions. If you'd give actual feedback, or say something like "Hey, I'm sorry but we don't think this is relevant enough to be added" I wouldn't be writing this. But at this point suggestions just get escalated, sometimes a staff member give a reply (which is appreciated), but where's the reply of the management? For countless of times I see real great suggestions that shouldn't even take too much time to be implemented, but no reply from any manager at all. You must understand that people get a feeling that their threads get ignored. Open your eyes and look at the great suggestion threads out there. You could say that they are not ignoring the threads, but it certainly looks like ignoring if you give no replies at all.

* Before you're gonna say something like "but you don't even know how much time an update costs to develop!!1" I'd like to refer to the part where I compare the developers' effort of 2019 to other years. And after all, I'm not talking about entire updates, I'm talking about suggestions that should be added and not be ignored.

Spoiler: CubeCraft is understaffed

This server is understaffed. You just can't deny it. Once again looking at Story's thread about the staff status&history, you can see that there are 12 moderators+helpers. 6 of them are, in my opinion, pretty inactive, meaning that there are 6 staff members to handle 100.000s of individual players every day. Now let's make a comparison to the staff team and its members in previous years, again starting with 2015 and ending in 2019.

* Could be possible that I made mistakes in counting, sorry for that.

• In 2015, there was a total of 42 moderators+helpers. This was a nice amount compared to the player counts back then.
• In 2016, there had been 56 moderators+helpers on the network, which I believe is the highest ever on CubeCraft. They definitely needed that because back then the player counts used to be way higher than now.
• In 2017, there had been 48 moderators+helpers on the network. This was a good amount for the playercount back then.
• In 2018, you can see a big decline of staff members. This decline came with a huge decline of players, meaning that the server became a lot smaller compared to the other years. Forgot to mention, but this started in 2017.
• What can I say... A total of 17 helpers/moderators in 2019.. Pathetic.

And now you are probably about to say that you can't make good applicants out of thin air, but this is not true! I know Animal has had some issues with her health (and still has them) but there's more staff members in the recruitment team than just Animal, right? Anyways, there definitely are a few good people you should check out! People like Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu all have applied but weren't accepted for to me unknown reasons. And then we have 2 people who are slightly too young to be on the team but would still make good staff members: Elivat and Dutudy, both having different qualities that would definitely be able to make a difference on the team. And now comes the question: Why aren't some of these guys not in the staff team yet? I personally have absolutely no clue. At least, no clue about 3 of them, as Elivat and Dutudy are still too youn- wait, what? So they would already make a good staff member but get denied because of their age? Isn't that ridiculous? "But if you are older you'll be better at handling stress!"
Excuse me, but what exactly is so stressful about being on the staff team? After all, there are, as far as I know, no deadlines for certain projects like builds. I could understand that it's stressful to receive messages of people swearing or threatening at you, but I think that's another kind of stress. Especially now that the server has become smaller. And on top of that, I think that if you are as mature as Elivat and Dutudy, you should be able to handle that kind of stress perfectly.

So basically: Accept Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu and put less stress on the age requirement. After all, the helper stage is a mod trial and if a person doesn't fit in the team, you can kick that person anyways.

Give people a chance for your own sake, you need more staff.

That's it, hope you'll do something with my points.
Thanks for reading,
~ Sheep

 

[Ducky]

Hi all, I know @Eli has already made A CubeCraft Critique last week and I'd like to congratulate him on making such a well-structured thread in which he really gave his opinion on the server. However, I felt like some points were missing, so here is CubeCraft Problems v3. There are some general problems I'd like to discuss here, starting off with the lack of updates.

Spoiler: Lack of updates

This is actually quite a serious one to start with, as updates are one of the basics of a succesful server. Without a good update once in a while, the community of the server will get less hyped about the server meaning that they will start looking for other servers that actually do release updates. I will now make a comparison of CubeCraft's 2019 compared to other years, using bar charts that will give you an insight into the amount of big updates they've made. And by 'big' I mean actual updates and not another silly map or seasonal update, because I've got a feeling like the management is trying to hide their lack of updates from the community by releasing a seasonal update every now and then, while not changing anything except for some loot.

* Please note that the relevance of the updates are based on my opinion

You can see that in 2015, things were starting to get settled. In 2016, the developers were tryharding and released a great number of 29(!) updates in 1 year. In 2017, things started to go a bit downhill, but 23 major updates is still a lot. In 2018, the update count was 15, which was a pretty big decline compared to the 2 previous years. And then we get to 2019. Who could tell me what happened here? 23 updates in total with only 6 being major updates?! However, it's not fair to compare these years as there might have been more developers in the other years, so I checked out @Story's staff history&status thread. There's been a total of 18 developers on the network, not taking into account that @rubik_cube_man, @GingerGeek and some others do also code things for the network. (Neither do I take into account that some developers might do other things than just coding updates.)

• In 2015, there was a total of 6 developers on the network (excluding rubik, ginger and the others that were mentioned in a different way on the staff thread), meaning that the average updates 1 developer released in 2015 was 12/6=2 updates.

• In 2016, there were 11 developers. Some of them didn't stay for the whole year, but making things a little easier for me I will just say that every one of them stayed for the entire year, because no developer resigned at the start of the year. This means that every developer had released 29/11=around 2,5 updates in that year.

• In 2017, there had been a total of 17 developers on the network and the major update count for that year was 23. 23/17=around 1,4 major updates per developer. This is more than 1,1 less updates than the previous year.

• In 2018, 12 developers had worked on the server (not counting 101_son as he left quite close to the start of the new year) and 15 major updates were released. 15/12=about 1,3 major updates per developer.

• In 2019, a total of 8 developers have worked on updates (not counting Qatell as he left pretty soon after 2019 started.) and 6 major updates were released. Warning, we're now at a point where we're really going downhill! 6/8=0,75=0,8 updates per developer, meaning that the average lies below 1! Counting from 2015, this had never happened before and the same applies to the amount of major updates. 6 is the lowest amount of updates EVER since 2015. Conclusion: Not sure if I'm in the right position to say this (or ever know enough about it all) but I believe that the workload of the developers could be a lot higher, looking at the past. Although it might require a lot of work, 6 is a pathetic number. I hope this will change in 2020, otherwise I'm not sure how many players the server has in 2021.

* Another thing worth noting is that, like I said before, haven't counted developing managers meaning that the 'scores' could even have been worse.

Yeah this is indeed a big thing. I was always hyped for Eggwars and Skywars updates (big updates), but since the last one was I don't know how long ago, I kinda stopped waiting and since then there has been no update for my favourite games. I really hope there are new updates coming on Cube because I really like the server, but some games really need updates.

Spoiler: The toxic community

The toxic community is one of the biggest reasons why I pretty much stopped play CubeCraft. Every time I play SkyWars, PvP, or actually any game at all, there are those toxic tryhards who call you out for names every time you beat them, which makes me angry and a little toxic too. Toxicity is basically a chain reaction, once someone had started being toxic there's actually no way to stop it-
Wait, there actually is? Yes! And it has been suggested a couple of times before before! And before you say something like "there already is a chat filter!", this is not the way. You basically just delete the full message from the chat instead of removing/replacing just a part of it. And here I give away the perfect solution to this problem, which even is funny! I kind of 'stole' the solution from @Spuuuni's thread about preventing toxicity (took me 30 mins to find this lol) and I think the second solution is the best. Just replace the toxic words by nice words! Sentences such as "I hate you noob" would be replaced by something like "You look like the most lovely flower on earth <3".

Pros:

• If you randomize the sentences, it will look like the person who sent the toxic message actually meant to be nice to the other person.
• Messages that were meant to be an example (messages like "he said 'noob' to me") won't be deleted anymore because the words would be replaced. Instead of feeling like you're being ignored by the person, you'll understand the context.
• The community would generally seem less toxic because of the flood of nice messages.
• Tryhards become less toxic because they know their messages would turn positive anyways.

And yes, everyone could think of possible bypasses, but a positive message is better than a censored message.

Okay, when I read ''You look like the most lovely flower on earth <3'' I had to laugh really hard because it'd be so funny to see that from a tryharder in chat. Ahum, sorry. Yes, the community is very toxic, unfortunately. I have the same as you; whenever I play Skywars of Eggwars and I get killed by a tryharder or I kill a tryharder, there is always a message from that person like ''hah ez u noob'' or ''come 1v1 me nub, u were so lucky with that extra hit''. You know what I mean.

I get why you don't think the chat filter would be a good idea, at least I think why you think that; if the word gets cencored, you can still guess the cencored word 99% of the time which makes the sentence toxic again. The idea of completely replacing the toxic sentence for something like you mentioned (the flower thing) would be funny, but also kinda better (really not completely though). Since you don't see any toxicity in the chat, but instead you see a lovely flower. Though, that idea has to be worked out since you can't repeat that sentence 5 times in a row, that would look unprofessional.

Spoiler: Bad treatment of suggestions

This point is related to the lack of updates, because the good suggestions don't get added in game. And I know this problem is also in the previous 2 CubeCraft problems threads, but this thing needs to be in this thread because it is still relevant as the management still doesn't do anything with the suggestions.

First of all: Why actually is the suggestions subforum still a thing? In the past, the suggestions subforum was the most lively thing on the forums because everybody here wanted to contribute a little to the forums. But right now, the suggestions subforum is a boring place because only once in a while a good thread is made. Why? The lack of activity by the management of the server in the suggestions subforum discourages everyone from posting suggestions. Why would you suggest things if you know that the management isn't going to do something with it anyways?
Now let's take a look at the tags.

There's a total of 10 pages of escalated threads and 1 page can list 20 threads. The 10th page contains only 1 thread so 10*20-9=a total of 191(!) escalated threads the managers could choose from. The last time the management actually implemented a real suggestion was in August 2019. That's almost 6 months ago! The amount of individual suggestions (not invididual threads) that actually needed effort to add (so I'm not talking about suggestions like 'change the colour' or something) implemented in 2019 was 3. You had 365 days and the amount of actual suggestions implemented was 3. No wonder why these forums are dying, people just get discouraged by the lack of interest in good suggestions! The "escalated" tags are worthless right now as they are just some kind of fake rewards for your efforts. I see absolutely no reason why managers can't even take 20 minutes to go through the page of escalated tags and read through suggestions. If you'd give actual feedback, or say something like "Hey, I'm sorry but we don't think this is relevant enough to be added" I wouldn't be writing this. But at this point suggestions just get escalated, sometimes a staff member give a reply (which is appreciated), but where's the reply of the management? For countless of times I see real great suggestions that shouldn't even take too much time to be implemented, but no reply from any manager at all. You must understand that people get a feeling that their threads get ignored. Open your eyes and look at the great suggestion threads out there. You could say that they are not ignoring the threads, but it certainly looks like ignoring if you give no replies at all.

* Before you're gonna say something like "but you don't even know how much time an update costs to develop!!1" I'd like to refer to the part where I compare the developers' effort of 2019 to other years. And after all, I'm not talking about entire updates, I'm talking about suggestions that should be added and not be ignored.

Yup. This is a huge thing as well. Look, I don't suggest something that often (most of the times it's not even really needed or necessary what I suggest but okay), but when I see a good suggestion, I want to give my opinion. Though, I see way too often that those threads don't get escalated or implemented (if it's good enough). I think, there are plenty of escalated threads that could benefit Cube very good because they're detailed and worked out very well. Though, no attention is given to them (not that I see).

I have seen like some threads been given an answer to by a Management staff member with an opinion or statement, but that's far from all the escalated threads. I really agree with the fact that there should be given more opinions on those threads by higher staff members so normal members don't feel ignored or even worse, they wouldn't take the effort to create another (maybe great) suggestion because they already know no-one's gonna take a look at it.

Spoiler: CubeCraft is understaffed

This server is understaffed. You just can't deny it. Once again looking at Story's thread about the staff status&history, you can see that there are 12 moderators+helpers. 6 of them are, in my opinion, pretty inactive, meaning that there are 6 staff members to handle 100.000s of individual players every day. Now let's make a comparison to the staff team and its members in previous years, again starting with 2015 and ending in 2019.

* Could be possible that I made mistakes in counting, sorry for that.

• In 2015, there was a total of 42 moderators+helpers. This was a nice amount compared to the player counts back then.
• In 2016, there had been 56 moderators+helpers on the network, which I believe is the highest ever on CubeCraft. They definitely needed that because back then the player counts used to be way higher than now.
• In 2017, there had been 48 moderators+helpers on the network. This was a good amount for the playercount back then.
• In 2018, you can see a big decline of staff members. This decline came with a huge decline of players, meaning that the server became a lot smaller compared to the other years. Forgot to mention, but this started in 2017.
• What can I say... A total of 17 helpers/moderators in 2019.. Pathetic.

And now you are probably about to say that you can't make good applicants out of thin air, but this is not true! I know Animal has had some issues with her health (and still has them) but there's more staff members in the recruitment team than just Animal, right? Anyways, there definitely are a few good people you should check out! People like Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu all have applied but weren't accepted for to me unknown reasons. And then we have 2 people who are slightly too young to be on the team but would still make good staff members: Elivat and Dutudy, both having different qualities that would definitely be able to make a difference on the team. And now comes the question: Why aren't some of these guys not in the staff team yet? I personally have absolutely no clue. At least, no clue about 3 of them, as Elivat and Dutudy are still too youn- wait, what? So they would already make a staff member but get denied because of their age? Isn't that ridiculous? "But if you are older you'll be better at handling stress!"
Excuse me, but what exactly is so stressful about being on the staff team? After all, there are, as far as I know, no deadlines for certain projects like builds. I could understand that it's stressful to receive messages of people swearing or threatening at you, but I think that's another kind of stress. Especially now that the server has become smaller. And on top of that, I think that if you are as mature as Elivat and Dutudy, you should be able to handle that kind of stress perfectly.

So basically: Accept Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu and put less stress on the age requirement. After all, the helper stage is a mod trial and if a person doesn't fit in the team, you can kick that person anyways.

Give people a chance for your own sake, you need more staff.

First of all, yes. Cube is understaffed and needs more staff, really. 12 staff members for this server (6 inactive in your opinion, sure but I'm just counting them in for now) is just not enough at all. We got lots of player reports everyday, questions in #staff-help on the Discord server and in-game questions and other stuff from players (in-game is maybe not that important because that's a moment and you can't know what's gonna happen when you go online on the server).

Second of all, thank you for the compliment. I'll just say that I have applied something like 5 to 6 times since my first apply. I did 3 to 4 before my break and since I'm back I have applied once. I never got feedback and I honestly was too scared to ask for feedback because I always thought that'd lower my chances. To be clear, that's not true.

In the past, the applications age always was 13, I don't know the reason why it's been increased to 15 but I can assure that Elivat and Dutudy both have their amazing qualities since I talk regularly with them. It is indeed understandable that you should be able to handle such threats and messages, but when it comes to dealing with such situations, I am sure everyone's had such times at school (at least I've had a lot), I just always ignored those people and continued with my life and school stuff. Yes, school and being a staff member on a Minecraft server are 2 completely different things, but if you can handle such situations in general, then you most likely have those good qualities to deal with those situations.

Remi, thanks for the detailed thread. In my opinion there are a few things that should and can be improved on Cube. That's of course also why I gave my opinions.

 

[Story]

And here I give away the perfect solution to this problem, which even is funny! I kind of 'stole' the solution from @Spuuuni's thread about preventing toxicity (took me 30 mins to find this lol) and I think the second solution is the best. Just replace the toxic words by nice words! Sentences such as "I hate you noob" would be replaced by something like "You look like the most lovely flower on earth <3".
~ Sheep

Overwatch has this and it's still miles ahead of Minecraft in terms of toxicity, by far the worst toxicity I've ever seen in a game. Your 'solution' is not a solution, its a dampening measure, it doesnt solve the problem, it just makes it 5% better.

The problem is that in Overwatch, when you say "ez" or "you suck" something of that nature, it will convert it to numerous possible phrases, my favourite being "my mommy tucks me in at night", but this is so commonly known in the game now that at the end of a game when you see that phrase in the chat, you know contextually that its either "you suck" or "you're easy" and it has the exact same negative impact, you know exactly what it was meant to say, and they dont care what it was converted to.

So I dont think it would work at all.

 

[Finixly]

Well, I came here to become a staffmember (idk why lol), but yes, I'm also too young and I don't really think I'll be a good staff member due my inactivity on my pc (for reports) and lack of English grammar. Beyond that, over a year, when I turned 15, I could try.

 

[Drakie❤]

I feel like replacing toxicity with happy phrases, wouldn't discourage or stop toxicity, ever heard the phrase "its the thought that counts."? If this feature was implemented, people would eventually realise that people aren't actually being nice, there messages are being replaced, and these messages will become sort a taboo(I think this is the right word), where everyone will recognize these nice messages as actually someone saying, "ez" or "L" in the chat.

 

[Dohaa]

I agree with everything you said but you missed something very important, the anticheat, you can try to convince all you want that "they constantly work on it" all you want, but you know it isn't true. Cubecraft's anticheat has gotten worse and worse every year. Yes when it came it was good but that was years ago. The fact a large server still has fly hackers is pathetic. I'm not asking for a Badlion style anticheat, but at least try to improve it. It hasn't gotten any clear updates, it is very outdated. I know that players on this server get extremely offended when you talk about the anticheat, but it's the truth you can't ignore it.

 

[Aosm]

You’re right with everything you said, cubecraft need staff, updates, etc. Please @owners read this. +1

 

[Andyyy]

Overwatch has this and it's still miles ahead of Minecraft in terms of toxicity, by far the worst toxicity I've ever seen in a game. Your 'solution' is not a solution, its a dampening measure, it doesnt solve the problem, it just makes it 5% better.

The problem is that in Overwatch, when you say "ez" or "you suck" something of that nature, it will convert it to numerous possible phrases, my favourite being "my mommy tucks me in at night", but this is so commonly known in the game now that at the end of a game when you see that phrase in the chat, you know contextually that its either "you suck" or "you're easy" and it has the exact same negative impact, you know exactly what it was meant to say, and they dont care what it was converted to.

So I dont think it would work at all.

I'd prefer the more creative insult over the simple spammy ones. Its much easier to see it light heartedly. Removing the spammy insults has worked wonders on Hypixel with the ez thing and i think it adds more fun to chat. People will also be less likely to take the effort to type some creative insult out so i think it has more impact than it seems.

 

[Deleted member 294498]

I think it's good to show the people what's actually going on!

Overwatch has this and it's still miles ahead of Minecraft in terms of toxicity, by far the worst toxicity I've ever seen in a game. Your 'solution' is not a solution, its a dampening measure, it doesnt solve the problem, it just makes it 5% better.

The problem is that in Overwatch, when you say "ez" or "you suck" something of that nature, it will convert it to numerous possible phrases, my favourite being "my mommy tucks me in at night", but this is so commonly known in the game now that at the end of a game when you see that phrase in the chat, you know contextually that its either "you suck" or "you're easy" and it has the exact same negative impact, you know exactly what it was meant to say, and they dont care what it was converted to.

So I dont think it would work at all.

I think it really should work. Look at hypixel!
I never saw someone saying those words because it's just not fun after some weeks.
And the amount of words like; ez/noob/tryhard etc. will increase

Altough, what's wrong with making it 5% better?
Everything helps making a better community/server!

 

[Story]

I think it's good to show the people what's actually going on!



I think it really should work. Look at hypixel!
I never saw someone saying those words because it's just not fun after some weeks.
And the amount of words like; ez/noob/tryhard etc. will increase

Altough, what's wrong with making it 5% better?
Everything helps making a better community/server!

I didnt say we shouldnt do it, was explaining why it wasnt a solution as Remi said.

 

[Deleted member 59979]

Spoiler: Lack of updates

This is actually quite a serious one to start with, as updates are one of the basics of a succesful server. Without a good update once in a while, the community of the server will get less hyped about the server meaning that they will start looking for other servers that actually do release updates. I will now make a comparison of CubeCraft's 2019 compared to other years, using bar charts that will give you an insight into the amount of big updates they've made. And by 'big' I mean actual updates and not another silly map or seasonal update, because I've got a feeling like the management is trying to hide their lack of updates from the community by releasing a seasonal update every now and then, while not changing anything except for some loot.

* Please note that the relevance of the updates are based on my opinion

You can see that in 2015, things were starting to get settled. In 2016, the developers were tryharding and released a great number of 29(!) updates in 1 year. In 2017, things started to go a bit downhill, but 23 major updates is still a lot. In 2018, the update count was 15, which was a pretty big decline compared to the 2 previous years. And then we get to 2019. Who could tell me what happened here? 23 updates in total with only 6 being major updates?! However, it's not fair to compare these years as there might have been more developers in the other years, so I checked out @Story's staff history&status thread. There's been a total of 18 developers on the network, not taking into account that @rubik_cube_man, @GingerGeek and some others do also code things for the network. (Neither do I take into account that some developers might do other things than just coding updates.)

• In 2015, there was a total of 6 developers on the network (excluding rubik, ginger and the others that were mentioned in a different way on the staff thread), meaning that the average updates 1 developer released in 2015 was 12/6=2 updates.

• In 2016, there were 11 developers. Some of them didn't stay for the whole year, but making things a little easier for me I will just say that every one of them stayed for the entire year, because no developer resigned at the start of the year. This means that every developer had released 29/11=around 2,5 updates in that year.

• In 2017, there had been a total of 17 developers on the network and the major update count for that year was 23. 23/17=around 1,4 major updates per developer. This is more than 1,1 less updates than the previous year.

• In 2018, 12 developers had worked on the server (not counting 101_son as he left quite close to the start of the new year) and 15 major updates were released. 15/12=about 1,3 major updates per developer.

• In 2019, a total of 8 developers have worked on updates (not counting Qatell as he left pretty soon after 2019 started.) and 6 major updates were released. Warning, we're now at a point where we're really going downhill! 6/8=0,75=0,8 updates per developer, meaning that the average lies below 1! Counting from 2015, this had never happened before and the same applies to the amount of major updates. 6 is the lowest amount of updates EVER since 2015. Conclusion: Not sure if I'm in the right position to say this (or ever know enough about it all) but I believe that the workload of the developers could be a lot higher, looking at the past. Although it might require a lot of work, 6 is a pathetic number. I hope this will change in 2020, otherwise I'm not sure how many players the server has in 2021.

* Another thing worth noting is that, like I said before, haven't counted developing managers meaning that the 'scores' could even have been worse.

This is something I've only recently started to notice but I have to agree it's a huge problem. There are plenty of devs, I don't see why they release so little updates. There are so so many good suggestions and it's not like they're unrealistic suggestions that would take too long. If they want ideas, they can just head onto the forums and look at the suggestions sub forum. They have plenty of time, there are over 8 people working on developing new stuff and they don't even put out one update per developer in an entire year? That's just stupid.

Spoiler: The toxic community

The toxic community is one of the biggest reasons why I pretty much stopped play CubeCraft. Every time I play SkyWars, PvP, or actually any game at all, there are those toxic tryhards who call you out for names every time you beat them, which makes me angry and a little toxic too. Toxicity is basically a chain reaction, once someone had started being toxic there's actually no way to stop it-
Wait, there actually is? Yes! And it has been suggested a couple of times before before! And before you say something like "there already is a chat filter!", this is not the way. You basically just delete the full message from the chat instead of removing/replacing just a part of it. And here I give away the perfect solution to this problem, which even is funny! I kind of 'stole' the solution from @Spuuuni's thread about preventing toxicity (took me 30 mins to find this lol) and I think the second solution is the best. Just replace the toxic words by nice words! Sentences such as "I hate you noob" would be replaced by something like "You look like the most lovely flower on earth <3".

Pros:

• If you randomize the sentences, it will look like the person who sent the toxic message actually meant to be nice to the other person.
• Messages that were meant to be an example (messages like "he said 'noob' to me") won't be deleted anymore because the words would be replaced. Instead of feeling like you're being ignored by the person, you'll understand the context.
• The community would generally seem less toxic because of the flood of nice messages.
• Tryhards become less toxic because they know their messages would turn positive anyways.

And yes, everyone could think of possible bypasses, but a positive message is better than a censored message.

As Story already said, if you change the message to something nice it'll eventually lose its impact and the meaning will still be the same so it'll just be pointless. It's a good measure although honestly they just need to put something more harsh in because people won't get the message unless you actually put the foot down. Something that actually puts them off from doing it completely is what we need, I've been thinking passively about solutions for a while now but really it just boils down to people feeling like it is normal and okay to be a horrible person and we just need to get the message across that it's not somehow, I'm not familiar with all the suggestions but I imagine there is at least a couple out there with some great ideas.

Spoiler: Bad treatment of suggestions

This point is related to the lack of updates, because the good suggestions don't get added in game. And I know this problem is also in the previous 2 CubeCraft problems threads, but this thing needs to be in this thread because it is still relevant as the management still doesn't do anything with the suggestions.

First of all: Why actually is the suggestions subforum still a thing? In the past, the suggestions subforum was the most lively thing on the forums because everybody here wanted to contribute a little to the forums. But right now, the suggestions subforum is a boring place because only once in a while a good thread is made. Why? The lack of activity by the management of the server in the suggestions subforum discourages everyone from posting suggestions. Why would you suggest things if you know that the management isn't going to do something with it anyways?
Now let's take a look at the tags.

There's a total of 10 pages of escalated threads and 1 page can list 20 threads. The 10th page contains only 1 thread so 10*20-9=a total of 191(!) escalated threads the managers could choose from. The last time the management actually implemented a real suggestion was in August 2019. That's almost 6 months ago! The amount of individual suggestions (not invididual threads) that actually needed effort to add (so I'm not talking about suggestions like 'change the colour' or something) implemented in 2019 was 3. You had 365 days and the amount of actual suggestions implemented was 3. No wonder why these forums are dying, people just get discouraged by the lack of interest in good suggestions! The "escalated" tags are worthless right now as they are just some kind of fake rewards for your efforts. I see absolutely no reason why managers can't even take 20 minutes to go through the page of escalated tags and read through suggestions. If you'd give actual feedback, or say something like "Hey, I'm sorry but we don't think this is relevant enough to be added" I wouldn't be writing this. But at this point suggestions just get escalated, sometimes a staff member give a reply (which is appreciated), but where's the reply of the management? For countless of times I see real great suggestions that shouldn't even take too much time to be implemented, but no reply from any manager at all. You must understand that people get a feeling that their threads get ignored. Open your eyes and look at the great suggestion threads out there. You could say that they are not ignoring the threads, but it certainly looks like ignoring if you give no replies at all.

* Before you're gonna say something like "but you don't even know how much time an update costs to develop!!1" I'd like to refer to the part where I compare the developers' effort of 2019 to other years. And after all, I'm not talking about entire updates, I'm talking about suggestions that should be added and not be ignored.

This has been an issue for who knows how long. Management purely don't care. For so long I've tried to defend them on this saying things like "it could take time to develop" and "they have other more important suggestions" but honestly I'm not gonna lie anymore. Management don't care about their community whatsoever, they put so little effort in to actually read and implement suggestions and it's blatantly obvious. The entire suggestion subforum is essentially pointless and unless there is a visible improvement in management's implementation of suggestions they should straight up remove the entire section as it serves no purpose.

Spoiler: CubeCraft is understaffed

This server is understaffed. You just can't deny it. Once again looking at Story's thread about the staff status&history, you can see that there are 12 moderators+helpers. 6 of them are, in my opinion, pretty inactive, meaning that there are 6 staff members to handle 100.000s of individual players every day. Now let's make a comparison to the staff team and its members in previous years, again starting with 2015 and ending in 2019.

* Could be possible that I made mistakes in counting, sorry for that.

• In 2015, there was a total of 42 moderators+helpers. This was a nice amount compared to the player counts back then.
• In 2016, there had been 56 moderators+helpers on the network, which I believe is the highest ever on CubeCraft. They definitely needed that because back then the player counts used to be way higher than now.
• In 2017, there had been 48 moderators+helpers on the network. This was a good amount for the playercount back then.
• In 2018, you can see a big decline of staff members. This decline came with a huge decline of players, meaning that the server became a lot smaller compared to the other years. Forgot to mention, but this started in 2017.
• What can I say... A total of 17 helpers/moderators in 2019.. Pathetic.

And now you are probably about to say that you can't make good applicants out of thin air, but this is not true! I know Animal has had some issues with her health (and still has them) but there's more staff members in the recruitment team than just Animal, right? Anyways, there definitely are a few good people you should check out! People like Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu all have applied but weren't accepted for to me unknown reasons. And then we have 2 people who are slightly too young to be on the team but would still make good staff members: Elivat and Dutudy, both having different qualities that would definitely be able to make a difference on the team. And now comes the question: Why aren't some of these guys not in the staff team yet? I personally have absolutely no clue. At least, no clue about 3 of them, as Elivat and Dutudy are still too youn- wait, what? So they would already make a good staff member but get denied because of their age? Isn't that ridiculous? "But if you are older you'll be better at handling stress!"
Excuse me, but what exactly is so stressful about being on the staff team? After all, there are, as far as I know, no deadlines for certain projects like builds. I could understand that it's stressful to receive messages of people swearing or threatening at you, but I think that's another kind of stress. Especially now that the server has become smaller. And on top of that, I think that if you are as mature as Elivat and Dutudy, you should be able to handle that kind of stress perfectly.

So basically: Accept Ducky, Kozimobo and Keanu and put less stress on the age requirement. After all, the helper stage is a mod trial and if a person doesn't fit in the team, you can kick that person anyways.

Give people a chance for your own sake, you need more staff.

I can see the reason for an age limit, sure there are some exceptions who are perfectly mature and capable of dealing with stuff but I feel like if there are any especially good applications which are only slightly under or any good candidates who haven't applied because they're underage they should reach out and try and get them onboard anyway. Putting the limit as 15 is a good move as it probably has stopped a good amount of annoying 13 year old toxic tryhards etc.
In general though, you're definitely right in saying they need to sort it out. It isn't an issue with there "not being enough good applicants" or anything, it is purely the system being broken. Marieke made an excellent thread about it (although I can't find it anymore) but the entire system needs a complete revamp.

To summarize:
- Management need to sort their act out
- Management need to sort their act out
- Management need to sort their act out
- There are a lot of problems that need fixing and management don't care
@Camezonda @Efcluke94 @johncoles @GingerGeek @marcoslater @rubik_cube_man I know not all of you will know all of will have the answers or will be the best to say anything but can we actually get a comment to this and Elivat's thread, it has been far too long without answers and we actually need a comment more than just the regular stupid stuff. Actually tell us what the hell is going on, admit that you've messed up or show some hidden explanation. You need to actually say something. Your entire business will not fail if you admit that you were wrong and change your way. Actually give us an explanation, don't just ignore this and pretend that you're doing a fab job. I think I can speak for everyone, pull your act together because you're doing an awful job.

 

[Finixly]

Perhaps the thing I'll say now is very useless.
Not sure if I was the only one, but I saw GingerGeek watching this thread, maybe they'll do something with it, or he just ignores it? But yeah, atleast they saw it!

 

[remio]

Perhaps the thing I'll say now is very useless.
Not sure if I was the only one, but I saw GingerGeek watching this thread, maybe they'll do something with it, or he just ignores it? But yeah, atleast they saw it!

Hope dies at last lmao

 

[Drakie❤]

Hope dies at last lmao

wat

 

[Deleted member 294498]

So I dont think it would work at all.

hmm...
I think this is a no?
Or am I wrong?
If not, then why wouldn't it work at all?

 

[Story]

hmm...
I think this is a no?
Or am I wrong?
If not, then why wouldn't it work at all?

I write "at all" at the end of most of my sentences for no reason, dont take it to heart, if it makes you feel better I clearly wrote this:

Your 'solution' is not a solution, its a dampening measure, it doesnt solve the problem, it just makes it 5% better.

 

[Zed]

Hope dies at last lmao

If you turn around three times shouting ginger, I shall always appear in a thread ;) * subject to availability

I've just replied to another similar thread. I'm going to use parts of that response in this one so apologies for those who are reading both thread!

Want to kick of with saying thank you for taking the time to give your feedback. We really do appreciate that these threads come out of a care for the server that we all share and we as a team are trying to do the best for the server and it's community.

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.

Community Spirit
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 but 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.

Repairing the relationships with some members of the community is likely impossible but with the vast majority we feel like we can do better and please understand that we do want to fix it.

Community management is a task which no game studio has effectively solved, let alone a Minecraft server. There will always be toxicity and trolls and finding the line of what’s an “edgy” joke and what’s inappropriate content for our platforms is an ever evolving problem space. We are continuing to learn here and try out new things.

We’re wanting to foster the amazing parts of our community - the creativity, the (appropriate) memes, the initiative shown with the translations and try to get back to our roots of having the entire CubeCraft team as part of the community.

At the heart of any good community is a great team who makes it all happen, organising events, keeping chat safe and friendly and helping those who need - our volunteer staff team are often underappreciated but they keep the cogs moving within the server!

Staff Team
It seems great minds think alike! This is a new item which we've just started tackling internally. For a bit of context, at the back end of last year myself and Luke N spent several months reworking how the marketplace team worked. We're taking a lot of these lessons and are looking at applying them to the staff team. This is still in very early stages and our first revision of thoughts only went out to staff today. We will share the new structure with the community as and when it's decided and finalised but this will take a few weeks to nail down.
As part of this we will be reviewing stuff like application requirements etc so please hang tight for details!

Lack of Updates
Beyond the issue of us focussing on Java I'd like to give some more insight into the lack of updates:

We learnt that hard way that new content + lots of update != automatic success; when we were releasing lots of new content like Island Games, Arcade, Freebuild etc we did a few things: a) focussed two hard on shipping to a timeline - we had so much content planned and in progress that we were shipping stuff too quickly and not concentrating on building hype, working with content creators and promotion of the content b) didn't provide enough aftercare to the games in terms of follow up patch releases and
A combination of the both meant we ended up with a lot of games and not a lot of players playing most of them. This problem of games not starting caused our player count to spiral downwards rapidly and was only curtailed by the introduction of "The Big Change" which almost immediately halted the reduction in player count.

With regards to number of devs, your numbers are somewhat flawed. In 2018 we drastically reduced the amount of work we were assigning to developers. We had quite a few stay on part time doing small bug fixes here and there but most moved on to other servers or got full time jobs in the real world(TM). Even to this day we have a few developers who still have the rank but only contribute very rarely (e.g they may get asked to do a small loot update etc etc). This wasn't effectively communicated at the time (again not exactly great news to share with the community) but I hope that explains the disparity between the number of developers and the amount of content shipping - a lot had the tag but weren't active.

If you want an accurate number of active devs: We have rubik (also runs development the team), driima and the four new devs: Mats, Palombo, ItsRotem and Pico. Six in total.

Suggestion handling
Ugh - the current suggestion system just isn't really fit for purpose, sorry. For it to be effective we need someone to go through and actually triage into priorities and for that work to eventually get assigned to a dev. This doesn't happen so most suggestions are sat idle. This is a process failure on our part but there is no short term solution for it.
To be frank, even if they were triaged - anything but the most technically trivial changes we haven't really had the resource to give to it in the past year. As explained our focus has been on other projects and keeping the base level of network service running.

I'm not sure how to fix this going forward. I'm hoping with the new staff structure we might be able to keep on top of it better. I don't want to overpromise though. We may have hired four new devs but only two of them are focussing on game and content related items, we have three networks to support so we are still limited on resource.

Ambition
Management aren't sat in a room twiddling our thumbs! It's true that our focus hasn't been solely on the Java network recently as we've branched out as a company to remain sustainable and it's regretful we have not been able to give Java as much attention as we would want to - but we still care about the server and have been trying to do what we can where possible!

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.
As mentioned 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 but over 2020 we’re wanting to refresh a lot of our content including our major games across all networks.

Thanks for all the feedback and let's hope 2020 is a great year for CubeCraft :cool:

 

[Marieke2001]

Suggestion handling
Ugh - the current suggestion system just isn't really fit for purpose, sorry. For it to be effective we need someone to go through and actually triage into priorities and for that work to eventually get assigned to a dev. This doesn't happen so most suggestions are sat idle. This is a process failure on our part but there is no short term solution for it.
To be frank, even if they were triaged - anything but the most technically trivial changes we haven't really had the resource to give to it in the past year. As explained our focus has been on other projects and keeping the base level of network service running.

I'm not sure how to fix this going forward. I'm hoping with the new staff structure we might be able to keep on top of it better. I don't want to overpromise though. We may have hired four new devs but only two of them are focussing on game and content related items, we have three networks to support so we are still limited on resource.

May I suggest something? Skifby used to have a monthly recap. In this thread the best suggestions from the past month were being brought up (based of most like or votes). We were able to vote for the best suggestions out of 4(?). What if something like this gets added again, but now officially trough staff. This means both more community interaction thus narrowing down the favorite suggestions from a period of time. Might make a google forums where people can vote for the thread that should be in the monthly recap, then add the most voted 4 or 5 to the thread and have a new voting. But this might take some time to organize.

EDIT: an example https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/recap-september-edition.198452/

 

[remio]

May I suggest something? Skifby used to have a monthly recap. In this thread the best suggestions from the past month were being brought up (based of most like or votes). We were able to vote for the best suggestions out of 4(?). What if something like this gets added again, but now officially trough staff. This means both more community interaction thus narrowing down the favorite suggestions from a period of time. Might make a google forums where people can vote vote for the thread that should be in the monthly recap, than add the most voted 4 or 5 to the thread and have a new voting. But this might take some time or organize.

There already is something like that as Cynamooo makes monthly recaps. But you are right about the voting thing. I think that would give more recognition to the members who spent a lot of time on threads.

 

[Marieke2001]

There already is something like that as Cynamooo makes monthly recaps. But you are right about the voting thing. I think that would give more recognition to the members who spent a lot of time on threads.

I think @Cynamooo continued with the work of skifby, reviving it after a year or more, or at least, that was the idea