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Alexp192

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I think that was the best post I've seen in a long time.
But, lets talk about sentinel, the most controversial thing Cubecraft has ever had.
As you know I am a 1.8 player and I have seen thousands of hackers in cubecraft during the 5 years I have been playing on the server. I'd like to see the owners (Camezonda or Rubik) play for 20 minutes skywars on 1.8 to see what they think about the state of the anticheat/hackers why this is TIRED.
The truth is, it's so hard to fix this?

Awesome post Eli! ;)
 
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BringMeTheHorizon ♠

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having certain bots will just be abused to hell.
Mind explaining what will get abused and how? It's quite easy to stop any kind of abuse that would lead to major damage. Ban command? If you code the bot correctly, which isn't even hard to do at all - you can only allow people that have the ban perms on Discord, to be able to use the ban command. Similarly for the kick command, nicknaming command, so on and so forth. Also has an option to purge messages if necessary, an anti-spam function (Dyno is an example of a bot that has that function), a chat filter. Having a bot would make moderation so much easier, I don't see why you never had one. Even official Discord servers use them. They gave you an API for a reason - use it! You can even log every single deleted and edited message, in case something happens. Audit logs don't have that.
 

Eli

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That's unfortunately how we need to deal with hackers. With CubeCraft being a large server, a cult following of hackers is also with us. People dedicate a lot of their time to creating a client which bypasses Sentinel, so there will be consistent influxes of hackers that will come up in your games. So, the best thing for people to do is to report them - it ensures that we can deal with them and any alternate accounts, but also allows us to find any trends with certain hack types to forward on. Any anti-cheat system is going to have flaws, but we can all work together to polish those flaws accordingly. c:

I get that Sentinel "updates" should be secret that's the whole point since you don't want hacked client developers to work around it. Thing is, it's been some time since these Sentinel rants have happened and there's been barely to no communication from Management toward the community regarding the Sentinel situation. I'm not asking for them to say "oh hey we did this and patched this!" No I think most people wouldn't really care, what we want to know is what is currently happening with Sentinel. Is it being worked on? Only for Bedrock? Only for Java? Or does the dev mainly focus on appeals and reading the Sentinel logs? Why don't they consider using parts of different anticheats that could be more effective? Is it impossible? Are these claims from these hackers real? Is it true that some checks are currently disabled? Is it true that some bypasses have been functional for more than a year? At least tell us something about Sentinel, because as Simon Bolivar once said "An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction".

Thanks Alex and Horizon for bringing the thread back on topic, I don't want this to end up like all those other threads. Hope everyone understands.

I think that was the best post I've seen in a long time.
But, lets talk about sentinel, the most controversial thing Cubecraft has ever had.
As you know I am a 1.8 player and I have seen thousands of hackers in cubecraft during the 5 years I have been playing on the server. I'd like to see the owners (Camezonda or Rubik) play for 20 minutes skywars on 1.8 to see what they think about the state of the anticheat/hackers why this is TIRED.
The truth is, it's so hard to fix this?

Having played 1.8 SkyWars with you is what made me realize how insane the hacker situation is. Very true, I don't think that the people who say Sentinel is somewhat decent have played on that version.
 

Baba Yaga

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Congratulations, this is the first real suggestion thread that forces me to type regularly. This pretty much summarizes everything that keeps CubeCraft from gaining players in 2020 and I think that this thread should be taken very seriously.

Sentinel and /report
Back in 2015 there was a report system where you were able to type /report <IGN> <reason> and that was how you reported your hackers at the time. As you probably know the server was incredibly popular and there were so many (fake) reports that forced CubeCraft to remove it completely and move to the report website. The obvious issues with the website are that it takes a long time to even get a respond to your report, not everyone has a PC capable of recording their gameplay properly and nobody simply wants to put effort into reporting hackers because of the first reason.

And as @Story mentioned, the bypasses that are being used are up to 2 years old which absolutely ridiculous. No anti cheat will ever be perfect but this can be prevented and it should. Sentinel should be the number one priority of the server right now simply because we would rather play hacker-less games than have new ones with hackers in them. I noticed that ranked players are now able to use /report, and although I see what they tried to do I find that absolute madness. Apparently you'd have to spend money on a server to report hackers because your accusations have a higher priority based on a rank? Now, I know that this isn't the mentality behind this system and I appreciate the effort, but this should not be permanent. This is a brilliant temporary solution, but I do hope that in the time this system has been published you have been working on some actual sentinel improvements.

The decaying of the forums
This is actually my favorite part of your thread. I think you've described this extremely well and I hope they'll actually do something with this. Whether you like it or not, a community can collapse quite easily after the disappearance of several big community members that are known for writing extraordinary rants and suggestions. A community is far more fragile than they want you to believe, but it is the unfortunate truth. A lot of big community members have left the forums since '18-'20 and that had an enormous impact on the forums. Not to mention that several big community members have been (network) banned as well. Now the reason why that's very relevant to the current state of the forums is obvious. If this many community members left or got banned you will experience a suggestion section with suggestions that are so minor that nobody even takes a look at them anymore. And I can't blame staff members for that at all but either everybody magically starts to make quality suggestion threads like 2 years ago or this forum will decay.

This can be fixed though, but this one doesn't take a bunch of extra coding nor does it require skilled builders. It's literally up to everyone reading this. Every single one of you reading this can make the difference here. How? By suggesting things that will actually have a great impact on the server, that will actually change CubeCraft in a positive way and that will create discussions on the forums. We need creative people who think out of the box and use that to try to make this forums a better place, and the server for that matter. That's how you will improve your server, forums and your entire network.

Featuring system
I haven't been a big fan of this system although I do recognize its usefulness. The reason for disliking it isn't really the system itself but rather the cost create it. That includes removing the arcade, my favorite place to play on. Despite that this was my favorite place, it still deserves its own spot on CubeCraft because the arcade can be whatever you want it to be. It is its own universe with a lot of minigames and that's what CubeCraft is and has been known for. Enjoyable minigames that are simply fun to play. The featuring system would be great for let's say older dead games. CubeCraft once had "BuildWars" which is exactly what you think it is. It was bugged, not played that much but could be a featured game if this won't cause copyright issues with you all know what server. And so there was control point, Hour Glass, Money Walls and many more games that weren't so popular back in the day but would be excellent featured games material. And how about adding old arcade games again? Hide&Seek as the best version of the game I've ever played on CubeCraft, Quake was extremely fun as well, Super Craft Bross was amazing and TNT Run as well. It would be such a big step towards the right direction. (Just a side note, I absolutely hate the fact that there is just one lobby, every lobby had its own community and I feel like that's been absolutely ruined).
 

Younisco

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I'm not asking for them to say "oh hey we did this and patched this!" No I think most people wouldn't really care, what we want to know is what is currently happening with Sentinel. Is it being worked on? Only for Bedrock? Only for Java
Sentinel is always being worked on, there's no doubt about this. ;P

Why don't they consider using parts of different anticheats that could be more effective?
Most effective anticheats are made in-house, such as Watchdog and Sentinel. But using opensource anticheats would be bad considering there are more clients that can bypass it, and we would need to wait for an update by them. However:
hing is, it's been some time since these Sentinel rants have happened and there's been barely to no communication from Management toward the community regarding the Sentinel situation.
I can understand this concern though. I can also understand why Management may not want to communicate a lot about certain checks being disabled (if they are, I don't know ;P ), so client developers can't abuse it.

Mind explaining what will get abused and how? It's quite easy to stop any kind of abuse that would lead to major damage. Ban command? If you code the bot correctly, which isn't even hard to do at all - you can only allow people that have the ban perms on Discord, to be able to use the ban command. Similarly for the kick command, nicknaming command, so on and so forth. Also has an option to purge messages if necessary, an anti-spam function (Dyno is an example of a bot that has that function), a chat filter. Having a bot would make moderation so much easier, I don't see why you never had one. Even official Discord servers use them. They gave you an API for a reason - use it! You can even log every single deleted and edited message, in case something happens. Audit logs don't have that.
I'm not saying abuse in moderation permissions, but rather random annoying commands. But you make a very valid point about it helping with moderation. Perhaps there could be one room where the bot can work in, and nowhere else so it's not abused in other rooms? I don't know how it'd work. :P
 
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saztper9

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I can understand this concern though. I can also understand why Management may not want to communicate a lot about certain checks being disabled (if they are, I don't know ;P ), so client developers can't abuse it.
Alot of hackers already know how sentinel works, and what checks are disabled and enabled, so its doesnt really matter if management does or does not provide info about sentinel
But using opensource anticheats would be bad considering there are more clients that can bypass it, and we would need to wait for an update by them
Then how come NCP is open source and its fly and nofall check hasnt been bypassed yet?
Sentinel is always being worked on, there's no doubt about this. ;P
yea sure u guys are...
 
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BringMeTheHorizon ♠

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Perhaps there could be one room where the bot can work in, and nowhere else so it's not abused in other rooms? I don't know how it'd work. :p
Yeah, it's possible to make a "#bot-commands" channel, and then code the bot to only respond there.

An example would be, if a user doesn't have ban perms/kick perms or whichever other permission that a member doesn't have, but every staff role has, and if the channel isn't #bot-commands, then the bot will not respond to a command in any other channel. If I still have recollection over basic JS, I could give you an example in code. Quite simple, really.

And, if a user is a member of staff, then they could use the bot in other channels, especially moderation commands.

Again, if you want a basic example in code I could give you one on Discord. I could also make a bot with the specific things I mentioned, for you to test.
 
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GalacticAC

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The biggest reason why i stopped posting here is that your effort put into the thread wont really make the thread gain the attention it dserved to me, so I (and maybe other people) went to place like [DATA EXPUNGED] where ideas gets actually good reflection
 
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LordSidi0us

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I suggest harder punishments and stronger staff/community wall.
The idea is-People are going to follow the rules strictly and think more before breaking them.
Staff should receive a little bit more respect.Everyday random people blame them for their own faults but at the end of the day, they are here to help and to make the server better place, not to take undeserved criticism.
 
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6Sence

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I suggest harder punishments and stronger staff/community wall.
The idea is-People are going to follow the rules strictly and think more before breaking them.
Staff should receive a little bit more respect.Everyday random people blame them for their own faults but at the end of the day, they are here to help and to make the server better place, not to take undeserved criticism.
Making harder punishments won't help the cheater problem, hackers will go on alts either way.
 
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6Sence

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They won’t return on the same accounts over and over again
Very little hackers cheat on the same account, we literally have practically infinite accounts, there is no need to use the same one. Cubecraft should just use NCP. Anyone who says to use some smaller not very well known anticheat like verus does not know what there talking about, just look at what happened to OmegaCraft.
 
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I'm just going to reply on the "Sentinel and /report" part.
That's unfortunately how we need to deal with hackers. With CubeCraft being a large server, a cult following of hackers is also with us. People dedicate a lot of their time to creating a client which bypasses Sentinel, so there will be consistent influxes of hackers that will come up in your games. So, the best thing for people to do is to report them - it ensures that we can deal with them and any alternate accounts, but also allows us to find any trends with certain hack types to forward on. Any anti-cheat system is going to have flaws, but we can all work together to polish those flaws accordingly. c:
You're basically telling players to use the report system because Sentinel is unable to keep up with the amount of bypasses. It literally shows how bad the current state of the anticheat is.

You can no longer 'vanish' the problems by saying things like "people dedicate a lot of their time to creating a client which bypasses Sentinel, so there will be consistent influxes of hackers that will come up in your games" or "sentinel is always being worked on" - the anticheat has too many flaws and is unable to patch the vast majority of the bypasses that currently exist. I don't know how Sentinel works and what sort of detection methods it uses but it clearly isn't doing what it's supposed to do. To me, it looks like the focus is on patching individual modules instead of a complete movement check that is able to detect every movement related cheat. And yes, it is possible to detect every movement related 'cheat' as it directly modifies gameplay (in terms of movement speed / direction).

Most effective anticheats are made in-house, such as Watchdog and Sentinel.
Sentinel is far from an effective anticheat in its current state.

--
The current cheating problem on CubeCraft is something that shouldn't be ignored by the management - you cannot play games without encountering a cheater. This ruins the overall playing experience. I barely play CubeCraft anymore because I know that if I play it, the game I join is ruined by cheaters. We should get an official statement by the management about Sentinel's current state. Something like the "Sentinel Update" thread by CrazymanJR.
 
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Zed

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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.
 
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Story

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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.
This is the most beautiful Management reply there has ever been on the forums. The honesty is great.
 

Eli

Forum Veteran
Dec 25, 2017
1,279
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408
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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.
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 ^-^
 
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