Great idea here, organisation is definitely a key issue we need to address. I guess my caution would be that until we have development resource available to commit to do suggested updates then what we may end up with is very highly voted suggestions which then don't get done... I think that could make the feeling worse!
This doesn't work, Other games, such as Overwatch, make use of this exact system (probably where you got the idea from). The results are 1. People bypassing it (you even noted that yourself, there is no difference between "noob" and "noop" , "shit" and "sh*t" or "ez" and "izi". But also, within minutes of playtime everyone in the community will know your "nice sentences" by heart, resulting in them knowing what your actual message said anyways. This then gets exploited, said "nice messages" become toxic ones. Don't believe me? Play 1 game of Overwatch with a toxic kid and you will for sure see a premade sentence come up in chat.
Epic, and you're right, cube is understaffed. One thingy tho, your graph doesn't really prove much as the average player count has also plummeted. In data like this you want to show the ammount of staff relative to the playerbase.
For the four years I've been on this forums, people have always questioned the server why certain communitymembers won't become a staffmember. The answer is always the same: They.Dont.Fit . Either because they're better off as a highly appreciated communitymember, or simply because they won't fit as a good staffmember. If they were to fit in the staffteam they'd be given staff when they applied. Yet they haven't, therefore they simply werent good enough, this doesn't mean they aren't good communitymembers, for example because they vocal and have widely shared opinions, they weren't accepted exactly the way you stated: "For unknown reasons" note that even when they're unknown, the reasons are still there.
Mostly agreed
There is so much to talk about here and I would love to dive into in-depth discussions about the why and how of this, and the changes you have noticed aren't all cubecrafts fault like some people may seem to think but are reflections of minecrafts success as a whole.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.
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.
* Another thing worth noting is that, like I said before, haven't counted developing managers meaning that the 'scores' could even have been worse.
- 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.
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:
And yes, everyone could think of possible bypasses, but a positive message is better than a censored message.
- 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.
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 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.
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!"
- 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.
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
