Agreed. The absence of World Edit, as well as the overly complicated chat system, was the biggest turn-off for me. World Edit has become a necessity for every reputable Creative Server, so it was no short of self-destructive for it to not have been included.
Sadly, I also agree. I understand not mining when you've already struck oil, but the whole 'islands in the sky' concept has gotten stale, at least for me. Perhaps the 'islands in the sky' "oil well" is beginning to deplete, I don't know. Now, not only did the entire server feel isolated due to a complete void of surroundings, but because of the way that the islands had been built, you couldn't go more than say ten blocks deeper than the surface. This was also a big turn-off for me, who enjoys making atmospheric underground cities.
A "few" extra thoughts that I have on why Creative mode failed:
Perhaps the server would not have been as big of a disappointment, had the developers not been as pressurised to release it. This argument can be made from pretty much anybody's perspective, given how heavily Freebuild was demanded, and for over a year straight. I also understand the thought behind the islands in the sky, since it would've made Cubecraft's Creative Mode unique had it been pulled off correctly. However, I don't feel that Creative Mode was
supposed to cater towards pulling new players in, because of how much competition there is in this field. It should've recaptured what made Creative as popular as it was back in 2014; the community. Because donators were the only members with World Edit, players were
forced to communicate with one another. Also, because World Edit was a thing, players were not limited to building either a wooden shack or a poor excuse for "parkour"; they could build cities, lake sides, valleys, villages, etc. in only a couple of hours. This meant that role-playing was more prevalent, which is also what helped build the community back in the day.
At this point, Creative mode is beyond salvation. You cannot wipe the server and start again, else you'll be met with a storm of discontent from players who had built half-decent plots. I feel there was a large miscommunication between the playerbase and the developers as well. For instance, one of the most suggested features was for players to be able to enlarge their plots, and while this feature was implemented, it was shut away behind a payment wall that meant winning hundreds of repetitive games to be able to unlock. Keep in mind that this is to extend only one plot, and that Minecraft's main demographic is children who aren't able to win every single Skywars game that they play, and you begin to see how big of a problem this is, especially when the default plot size was as small as it was. however, you cannot lower the prices at this point without dissatisfying the current community of Creative fans.
The Diamonds feature, while the concept
sounded great on paper, is evidently causing more problems than it's worth. While I haven't used Creative since the day of release, this isn't the first thread that I have seen address the spam of players promoting their plots. This also becomes a problem, when the chat covers a large portion of the screen and is distracting you when you're trying to build. In fact, I believe this is why
Roleplaying was banned back in the day, unless it was kept out of the public chat.
If by any chance the developers decide to retry Freebuild Mode, I would suggest keeping it as simplistic as possible. The Creative Mode interfaces really confused me, especially when it used to be as simple as typing /p home, a command that is universal across all Creative servers. World Edit
has to be a staple, otherwise there is
no reason for players to use Cubecraft's Freebuild instead of literally every other server out there. Lastly, the islands either need to be much closer together so you don't feel quite as isolated, or we need to go back to the Super-Flat overworld. I know it's far less original, but most players do not care about originality; they care about enjoyment.
Personally, I no longer see the point in investing resources into Freebuild. It'd likely be too much work for such little payoff, especially when those resources could be directed into improving the replayability of already popular gamemodes.
