All Networks Java Bedrock What's the future of CubeCraft?

[xHappyMood]

Hoihoi,

The Feedback & Suggestions subforum is very much extremely dead and it's a shame.

Let's start with some numbers:

Since the 17th of March, 5 posts have been made by admins in the subforum (of which 1 was in a thread that should not even have been in that subforum, 1 was a thread posted by an admin, 1 was just saying it couldn't be done, and 1, 2 were saying it would be done and then saying it had been done). That means there have been 5 posts in the past 229 days, and 1 thread has seriously been answered in all that time.
While writing this I actually hoped it might be slightly off because Story had still made some posts being admin since then, but he left on the 17th of March, so that doesn't even make it any better...

Just to compare here, I, who am very inactive, have, on my own, made 7 posts in the Feedback & Suggestions subforum since the 17th of March, more than all admins combined. And a whole 615 threads have been posted since then.

The changes made to the suggestions system also didn't do any good. It has been 446 days since those changes, and in that time 1188 threads have been posted. In the first 446 days of the previous suggestions system a whole 3063 (!) threads were posted. That means a 61,21% decrease in suggestions...
I know this entire decrease can't be blamed on the change of suggestions system, because the playercount has (I think?) also gone down, but I'm pretty sure that it has not gone down by 61,21%. Therefore just by that it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for the amount of suggestions to drop that much, if the change in the system didn't play a part.

Okay time for some other things.

I do realise far from all of those suggestions since the 17th of March (very few, even) have been of high quality, and worthy of a detailed response, or really one at all. But there have been enough examples of high quality threads a lot of people agreed with, some even specifically directed at admins: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and there are more examples. All of these have been completely ignored, even if they were specifically directed at an admin.
That used to be very different, it used to be that if you put a lot of time into a suggestion, it would probably get an admin responding on it, ESPECIALLY if it was feedback specifically directed to a certain admin/department.
I'm not saying every single thread should be getting a response from the admin team, but this is just not even close to being anywhere near enough, it's terrible. If people spend their time and energy on making a thread, then I feel that should be acknowledged, instead of completely ignored. It is your server's interests they have at heart, after all.

I previously mentioned that one of the posts since the 17th of March was a thread posted by an admin. It was posted almost 2 months ago, and since then has completely been void of any admin response, even if it were only in the form of reactions to the posts in it. You can't just ask people what they think should happen, and then completely ignore the entire thread for 2 months. You have to be more responsive if you ask people for their opinions.

And then there's reactions... the , and were originally implemented as a way of determining whether a thread should be forwarded to the admins so it could get a response. After that wasn't the case for every thread anymore, they were still useful as an indicator for what percentage of people agreed with a suggestion, and usually threads with a higher amount of agree reactions, would be more prone to getting an answer from an admin. Lately, however, the reaction score of a thread hasn't made any difference whatsoever anymore. It has been completely useless to react to threads, and has no influence on their likeliness to get an admin-response.

I made another feedback thread a while ago, complaining about the way Story replied to suggestions people made, because it wasn't very constructive and supportive. I was then promised that such replies would not happen again. At this point, though, I'd much rather have an admin responding like that than what it is right now. Although I guess technically it's one way of making sure there are no such replies anymore...

Now that I'm in here making this thread anyway, and since I'm already talking about feedback and all that, where are community talks? Overtime I've seen multiple promises and plans for a new community talk, but the last one was in April 2021, over 2,5 years ago. Just goes to show how much you've been listening to and taking in community input...

I don't know if you've ever seen Hotel Hell, but if I were Gordon Ramsay and you all were the managers of a bad hotel, I'd probably be telling you "It seems like you've given up" or that "You've forgotten the players are the most important people for you" (but using more expletives, because I'd be Gordon Ramsay).

The lack of listening to feedback has been a recurring theme throughout CubeCraft's history, and I've complained about it several times in my time here. But in all this time I don't remember it being as bad as it is at the moment. I'm very sorry, but you cannot manage a server without listening to the people who keep it alive: the players. They are essential to you, and so is their experience. If they have something to say about that experience then you have to take it into account. And also SHOW that you are taking it into account. There needs to be a form of response from your side as well, encouraging people to share their opinions and experiences, knowing that you actually do something with it. I'm not saying that responding suggestions will suddenly triple playercount, nor am I saying that every single thread should get an admin response, but if people have actually invested their time and energy into making a thread, then I think it's the least you can do.

Oki that was it, I look forward to a response.

Yes, I could have made this a thread in that subforum, but it would have been ignored anyways, so I did it here

- me in admin team feedback a week ago

just wanna add that here since it's kind of related

for the rest like ppl said before if you are discussing things weekly or not able to implement suggestions at the moment then tell us that, we can't smell it. but if you're almost at a point now where you will be able to consider suggestions again then that's amazing, let's hope responsiveness increases.

 

[Redned]

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I appreciate you taking the time to write such a detailed post. I do have a few answers to some of the things you've listed here and some additional clarity. I know Laura has already answered a few things already, but a few additional details can never hurt

September 1st, 2022, The Future of CubeCraft Java is posted, detailing massive changes coming to the Java Network effective September 5th, including the deletion of multiple gamemodes and maps across the network. Along with it the conditions which had to be met for the Java Network to continue to exist:

An unexpected notice that surely took many players by surprise. This thread, alike the prior Big Changes (see what I did there?) to Java certainly gave birth to some controversy, and even saw feelings of anger, sadness and disappointment. However, not everything was lost, since the thread implied big plans were on their way, perhaps to delay the day CubeCraft's leadership had to sit down and take a decision on the matter.

However, as you go back and read the statement again you cannot help but wonder, well... September 1st, 2022 wasn't the day we were told Java is closing, but... when will THAT day come? will it come at all? or will we be stuck in a limbo for years on end concerned about the underlying threat of our beloved network's deletion?

We are at a point where trying to find the answers to these questions is extremely confusing, the Java network is certainly not hitting the 1k player benchmark that was told would be a necessity, yet it is STILL receiving consistent updates and content overhauls.​

I want to make this crystal clear: at this point in time, we have no plans to shut down the Java network. I think the main point made in the thread you're referencing is that if Java were to continue on it's decline, the costs to maintain the network would outweigh any benefits. This is not strictly from a monetary perspective, but more of a "if games cannot actively start, why should we continue running the server?", since after all, if there are no players to play the games, there is really no reason to keep the server online.

Now, while the benchmark in the thread was specifically set at 1,000 players, this was a benchmark set with the information we had in mind at the time. Over the last year, we've learned a lot and made major technical adaptations which make maintaining our Java network significantly easier and far more worthwhile for us to keep online.

As Laura mentioned, one of the key changes made on the technical side is that both our Java and Bedrock networks now run on a common codebase. The bulk of the code and our server platform that power our Bedrock network also powers our Java network. Both networks run side-by-side and use the same infrastructure. All the game updates you have seen over the last few months were written just once, and could run on both our Java and Bedrock servers.

In the past, running both networks had far more overhead as we had completely disjointed codebases on both sides. This is no longer the case fortunately, and has allowed us to deliver content at a rapid pace compared to what we could previously offer. Continuing to keep our Java server online has negligible overhead alongside keeping Bedrock online, so while we may have initially set a target for 1,000, it shouldn't be regarded as a hard requirement and we have no intention to shut down Java any time soon. We've definitely got some big ideas in the works

And to add even more factors into our soup of uncertainty, CubeCraft's community strategy seems to have shifted massively from what was established in THIS thread by @Zed from two years ago, where a solid Community & Volunteering Team was set in place, out of which, only 1 member remains. And not a single update thread regarding the big thing that matters the MOST, CubeCraft's relationship with the community, has been posted since, community talks seem to be a distant memory of the past, and responses from the admin team on threads has become a rare delicacy few are ever lucky enough to experience, and what once felt like a company who had finally understood the importance of community, seems to have once again drifted apart from it.​

I don't feel that this is a completely fair evaluation to make. I will agree that our communication during our 1.19 update certainly could have been better. There was very little content going out to the server during the time (it was also the largest update we worked on, ever), and while we could have been more communicative on status updates, delays, etc., hindsight is 20/20 and we've definitely learned from this experience. Laura discussed this a lot more and our capacity to incorporate ideas and suggestions during this time was very little to none. There are still things we are catching up on.

Coming out of the migration though, we've definitely had some community talk-like discussions. While we've not had a proper "Community Talk" in quite some time, we hosted multiple events during and after our migration that involved gathering feedback from the community, such as a live event on Discord where we showed off new 1.19 content and did a bit of a Q&A, and "CubeCraft Live" which was a live event we hosted in September playing games with the community, showing off more content, and hosting another Q&A. While this was not exclusively aimed towards gathering feedback, we were able to get a good sense of common questions, issues, ideas, etc. and incorporate them.

We've also used our socials as a way to gather feedback, recently doing an impromptu Q&A on Instagram answering questions from the community. We also recently hosted a poll on YouTube asking which winter games people wanted to see back on the server.

Additionally, we've also been looking to Discord to gather feedback and ideas. A good example of this is with our upcoming Battle Arena update. Prior to any work being started on it, we created a thread on Discord asking the community what they'd most like to see in an update. Much of what is planned to be released in this update was based on this feedback. We're also hosting a kit competition that will result in kits designed directly by the community being put into the game.

Another example of this is the Parkour Map Update released a couple weeks ago. This stemmed from a suggestion on Discord where a community member had pointed out that we'd not added a new impossible map to Parkour since the release of the game. We decided to add a new impossible map as a result of this along with some additional content.

Another thing I want to mention is that we do not exclusively rely on the forums for feedback and suggestions.

The forums are unfortunately not as popular of a destination across any Minecraft server as they were in times past (thanks Discord). In the past, we almost exclusively took suggestions from the forums, which worked when everyone used forums, but today we miss a lot of the big picture exclusively relying on the forums for general feedback and suggestions. We still read through suggestion posts and do often look at them for sources of inspiration and/or to gauge general feedback in conjunction with other forms of communication, but considering how few people use the forums these days, relying on it exclusively misses a lot (a good example of this is the what makes FFA fun thread, which only saw 10 replies in 2 months, whereas it's Discord counterpart has seen many hundreds of messages).

While it may appear that community engagement has dropped on the forums alone, we do strive to listen to feedback and suggestions where possible. I also understand that we are not perfect and there may be places we can improve; if there are gaps you're seeing and/or places you'd like for us to improve, I'd love to hear your ideas

Hopefully the above points I've discussed can paint a clearer picture and offer a bit of clarity to some of your questions and points you've raised.

 

[Reesle]

Another thing I want to mention is that we do not exclusively rely on the forums for feedback and suggestions.

The forums are unfortunately not as popular of a destination across any Minecraft server as they were in times past (thanks Discord). In the past, we almost exclusively took suggestions from the forums, which worked when everyone used forums, but today we miss a lot of the big picture exclusively relying on the forums for general feedback and suggestions. We still read through suggestion posts and do often look at them for sources of inspiration and/or to gauge general feedback in conjunction with other forms of communication, but considering how few people use the forums these days, relying on it exclusively misses a lot (a good example of this is the what makes FFA fun thread, which only saw 10 replies in 2 months, whereas it's Discord counterpart has seen many hundreds of messages).

While it may appear that community engagement has dropped on the forums alone, we do strive to listen to feedback and suggestions where possible.

The main reason I felt CC abandoned the forums community wasn’t necessarily because of forum suggestions not being implemented, but for me it was mostly the lack of replies. I’ve seen many good suggestions on the forums, and I wish they would’ve minimally gotten a reply from an admin or dev as to why they can or cannot implement it.

For example, in my opinion, these were good suggestions that got many , and it would’ve been nice to at least get a reply as to why they weren’t implemented or couldn’t implement them:
- https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/skyblock-generator-boosts-icon.350734/
- https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/make-more-bundles-giftable.334602/

 

[Eli]

I want to start off by saying I am really loving to see so many developers responding to this thread! I don't know if there's been some change internally, but it's really refreshing to see the people who quite literally put in the most important work also be at the forefront of it all!

Hey, thanks for the feedback! I appreciate you taking the time to write such a detailed post. I do have a few answers to some of the things you've listed here and some additional clarity. I know Laura has already answered a few things already, but a few additional details can never hurt


I want to make this crystal clear: at this point in time, we have no plans to shut down the Java network. I think the main point made in the thread you're referencing is that if Java were to continue on it's decline, the costs to maintain the network would outweigh any benefits. This is not strictly from a monetary perspective, but more of a "if games cannot actively start, why should we continue running the server?", since after all, if there are no players to play the games, there is really no reason to keep the server online.

Now, while the benchmark in the thread was specifically set at 1,000 players, this was a benchmark set with the information we had in mind at the time. Over the last year, we've learned a lot and made major technical adaptations which make maintaining our Java network significantly easier and far more worthwhile for us to keep online.

As Laura mentioned, one of the key changes made on the technical side is that both our Java and Bedrock networks now run on a common codebase. The bulk of the code and our server platform that power our Bedrock network also powers our Java network. Both networks run side-by-side and use the same infrastructure. All the game updates you have seen over the last few months were written just once, and could run on both our Java and Bedrock servers.

In the past, running both networks had far more overhead as we had completely disjointed codebases on both sides. This is no longer the case fortunately, and has allowed us to deliver content at a rapid pace compared to what we could previously offer. Continuing to keep our Java server online has negligible overhead alongside keeping Bedrock online, so while we may have initially set a target for 1,000, it shouldn't be regarded as a hard requirement and we have no intention to shut down Java any time soon. We've definitely got some big ideas in the works


I don't feel that this is a completely fair evaluation to make. I will agree that our communication during our 1.19 update certainly could have been better. There was very little content going out to the server during the time (it was also the largest update we worked on, ever), and while we could have been more communicative on status updates, delays, etc., hindsight is 20/20 and we've definitely learned from this experience. Laura discussed this a lot more and our capacity to incorporate ideas and suggestions during this time was very little to none. There are still things we are catching up on.

Coming out of the migration though, we've definitely had some community talk-like discussions. While we've not had a proper "Community Talk" in quite some time, we hosted multiple events during and after our migration that involved gathering feedback from the community, such as a live event on Discord where we showed off new 1.19 content and did a bit of a Q&A, and "CubeCraft Live" which was a live event we hosted in September playing games with the community, showing off more content, and hosting another Q&A. While this was not exclusively aimed towards gathering feedback, we were able to get a good sense of common questions, issues, ideas, etc. and incorporate them.

We've also used our socials as a way to gather feedback, recently doing an impromptu Q&A on Instagram answering questions from the community. We also recently hosted a poll on YouTube asking which winter games people wanted to see back on the server.

Additionally, we've also been looking to Discord to gather feedback and ideas. A good example of this is with our upcoming Battle Arena update. Prior to any work being started on it, we created a thread on Discord asking the community what they'd most like to see in an update. Much of what is planned to be released in this update was based on this feedback. We're also hosting a kit competition that will result in kits designed directly by the community being put into the game.

Another example of this is the Parkour Map Update released a couple weeks ago. This stemmed from a suggestion on Discord where a community member had pointed out that we'd not added a new impossible map to Parkour since the release of the game. We decided to add a new impossible map as a result of this along with some additional content.

Another thing I want to mention is that we do not exclusively rely on the forums for feedback and suggestions.

The forums are unfortunately not as popular of a destination across any Minecraft server as they were in times past (thanks Discord). In the past, we almost exclusively took suggestions from the forums, which worked when everyone used forums, but today we miss a lot of the big picture exclusively relying on the forums for general feedback and suggestions. We still read through suggestion posts and do often look at them for sources of inspiration and/or to gauge general feedback in conjunction with other forms of communication, but considering how few people use the forums these days, relying on it exclusively misses a lot (a good example of this is the what makes FFA fun thread, which only saw 10 replies in 2 months, whereas it's Discord counterpart has seen many hundreds of messages).

While it may appear that community engagement has dropped on the forums alone, we do strive to listen to feedback and suggestions where possible. I also understand that we are not perfect and there may be places we can improve; if there are gaps you're seeing and/or places you'd like for us to improve, I'd love to hear your ideas

Hopefully the above points I've discussed can paint a clearer picture and offer a bit of clarity to some of your questions and points you've raised.

My takeaways from your response are as follows, and thank you Redned and all the devs for your patience and careful responses:

• My way of percieving CubeCraft's community engagement might be a little... outdated, I always visualized the forums (and perhaps staff-help back when it was public) as the only important communication channel in the community, for that I apologize and commend Cube on their outreach in other socials!
• It's great to have final clarification on what is happening to Java, it's a breath of fresh air, but I do insist, I wish it were more common knowledge, only a handful of CubeCrafters will ever see this thread.
• The various efforts you mention to reach out to the community definitely exhibit an interest to remain connected, even when you are most busy, for which I am personally thankful, I insist the thread never intended to imply the team does not care, when it very clearly does.
• Even IF there's been impromptu Q&A events, instagram surveys, discord prompts, etc, none of these really constitute a thoroughly planned method/space of community interaction, and rather just seem like easy quick ways to gather some feedback. Which is great! But may still lead to situations like the posting of this thread and many others, which may or may not make fair assessments of the reality of things, but still amass some degree of support from people who are visibly unsatisfied.
• Part of me wants to believe that the forums still are significantly important than other communication channels granted that you may recieve a lot of complaints/suggestions from the average joe on instagram or discord, but the people who turn to this website to post an idea are going an extra mile because they believe in this place have a certain additional degree of passion for it, and that, I think is something that should be appreciated and respected with greater staff presence in the site.

Thank you once again to all the devs for their replies.

 

[Dualninja]

I want to make this crystal clear: at this point in time, we have no plans to shut down the Java network.

That is so good to hear, we were all really worried for Java and its future. However, as was said above, can you please say that you won't be shutting Java down on the Discord. Maybe make an announcement without using @ everyone.

We've also used our socials as a way to gather feedback, recently doing an impromptu Q&A on Instagram answering questions from the community. We also recently hosted a poll on YouTube asking which winter games people wanted to see back on the server.

Additionally, we've also been looking to Discord to gather feedback and ideas. A good example of this is with our upcoming Battle Arena update. Prior to any work being started on it, we created a thread on Discord asking the community what they'd most like to see in an update. Much of what is planned to be released in this update was based on this feedback. We're also hosting a kit competition that will result in kits designed directly by the community being put into the game.

As for the other socials, you're right. The Forums are not the largest of Cubecraft's socials, but it is the oldest. I do love seeing other methods of community interaction, such as the "Create a Kit" competition. But, it's hard to keep track of all of Cubecraft's socials, so it would be nice if it were a bit more centralized. Take for example, the Youtube poll, it would be really nice if we even got a link to that poll from other socials, such as putting a link to it on the Discord or the Forums. I still think community talks should make a return though, as they were really effective at gathering community feedback.