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[Xavi | Goofy]

Heya! I’ve read through all this texts and damn it’s a lot haha
Some points I wish to ask about/give my opinion about.
Ps. Rereading this I might come off as wanting to shut down the whole idea, they are just questions I’m truly interested in so don’t hate me.

Community suggestions,
I remember a while back that there was a community suggestion task force. This was shut down as focus shifted onto larger projects and not new. This was already ran by volunteers with less admin involvement. How do you see one assigned admin working instead of the mentioned project?

Community manager role,
Another topic I’m more interested in is what the role “community manager” actually entails in the proposed suggestion. Would this simply be someone that looks over suggestions and provides an answer? Or is actually involved in discord conversations etc. I feel like I’ve become quite distant myself from the latter, however it’s not as easy to pick this back up. I feel like the same could apply to current admins.

Eli moms quote,

in a house where two can eat, three can eat as well.

Although true if there are no leftovers usually this would mean the other two would need to give theirs. Again, the position would be great but hiring another employee to keep in contact with people is another. As I see it is that if any role would need to be removed this one will be first to pop as much as it saddens me to say this.

The time spent,
I’m not sure how many suggestions are actually made each week as I simply pop in once and a while but most are “bring back x” or very bare bone. These will most likely never be implemented. I’m curious how many are left afterwards. If anything the 25 agrees threshold can be brought back. Which would leave only one or two a week which 2h would be fine for in my opinion.

 

[Matriox]

Community suggestions,
I remember a while back that there was a community suggestion task force. This was shut down as focus shifted onto larger projects and not new. This was already ran by volunteers with less admin involvement. How do you see one assigned admin working instead of the mentioned project?

I'm not suggesting an admin needs to reply to all suggestions. I am suggesting that the product team listens to what a majority of the community is saying. The examples I gave in the thread have next to unanimous agreement. These suggestions with such a high degree of support should be replied to by the product team:
- Add planned tags again, to all Eggwars suggestions for example that are very popular (leather armour etc)
- Add back 5v5 Blockwars, it's clearly much more popular
- Whatever suggestions with a high degree of support should be getting replied to and planned or denied
It's as simple as that, nothing drastic really.

What also needs to happen is @Camezonda needs to clean up the feedback and suggestions subforum at some point. There are 75 planned suggestions at the moment, take a planned tag off of anything that's not likely to happen so we know what to expect into the future

Having two different places for feedback and suggestions is also not efficient. Remove the discord community-corner, it's clear it's not being looked at. Keeping all feedback on the forums will mean we can all vote and it'll be easy for Camezonda to see suggestions. Also could make the forums more popular, which is well needed. Especially needed if we add back the agree threshold for forwarding suggestions. However, most people don't even vote anymore as they know it's useless, so 25 agrees won't work with the system in its current state in my opinion.

Community manager role,
Another topic I’m more interested in is what the role “community manager” actually entails in the proposed suggestion. Would this simply be someone that looks over suggestions and provides an answer? Or is actually involved in discord conversations etc. I feel like I’ve become quite distant myself from the latter, however it’s not as easy to pick this back up. I feel like the same could apply to current admins.

Whatever Youn did, he did it right

I haven't directly suggested adding a community manager back in the thread, as I know it just might not be viable for Cubecraft right now. But a rejig of responsibilities internally could mean that someone could take on the role of community manager, or simply, the project manager of any specific update could interact with the community for that update.

One thing Youn did while he was community manager was managing community-driven updates, for example the Tower Defence update. This is where community members acted as beta testers and were able to suggest implementations and changes to the game update before the update was released to the real server. This is the way to go with all game updates in the future (@Camezonda). So a repeat of Blockwars or Eggwars, or any other update that most people didn't like, doesn't happen again.

Sometimes Cube forgets that you don't need to release endless updates to a game to make it attractive. People fell in love with Eggwars and Blockwars for what they were, and changing them so much was not needed at all. So involving the community would have prevented all the backlash, which for both cube and the community, it is mutually beneficial to keep backlash about an update to a minimum.

Story tried to revive community-driven updates, but it was scrapped, this shouldn't have happened. It doesn't need to be anything as formal as "focus groups", as he called it. But simply just getting a discord together of known active community members of a game to give suggestions and test the game before releasing it to the server would be beneficial for both parties.

Again, this is so MUTUALLY BEFICIAL that I have no idea why it wouldn't be implemented for any update to a current game on the network.

Spoiler: Random things Youn would have asked us for inspiration

 

[Eli]

I remember a while back that there was a community suggestion task force. This was shut down as focus shifted onto larger projects and not new. This was already ran by volunteers with less admin involvement. How do you see one assigned admin working instead of the mentioned project?

I am mostly unaware of how that task force operated and what the initial vision was, because I notice some discrepancies between Hoshi’s initial announcement and Efcluke’s message announcing they were going to shut down the team:

• Hoshi’s announcement made it seem like they were creating a team that would look at ALL suggestions of all kinds and provide the admin team with a healthy influx of ideas regardless of the scope.
• EfcLuke’s message made it seem like the team was more so directed toward small QoL changes, which confused me granted that the whole feedback team thing was broadcasted as a “Community Update” and I don’t see why the “Community” should only stick to QoL feedback.

Perhaps you are right however to the extent that CubeCraft seems to be operating under the assumption that their development plans for new ideas do not involve the community, and that the community simply has the role of massively play testing their new games to iron out a wrinkle or two after release.

And that just confuses me even more because why have a Public Notion Board with the intention of being transparent and involving the community if you’re not gonna hear them out on ideas of a larger scope.

With much love for this network I must say I don’t understand why CubeCraft recently thinks that running a 100% consumer oriented service is incompatible with listening to consumer feedback and recommendations.

And hey, maybe they wanna have full creative control because they think they’re far more experienced and capable at designing games as the average Joe who plays cubecraft, and they’re most likely right, but they shouldn’t really make that opinion so overtly evident.

Although true if there are no leftovers usually this would mean the other two would need to give theirs. Again, the position would be great but hiring another employee to keep in contact with people is another. As I see it is that if any role would need to be removed this one will be first to pop. ‘Wasting’ the initial costs that come with it.

Continuing with my line of thought in the previous paragraphs, it’s unbelievable to me that the role of a community manager could ever be thought of as dispensable and unnecessary. ESPECIALLY in a gaming community.

It’s important to understand that hiring a community manager does not have to interfere with the way cubecraft excercises creative control over its projects. In fact, it can 100% be an aid to maintain the status quo, with the benefit of slowly but surely gaining more community approval.

And if you’re thinking of the possibility of CubeCraft doing bad economically in the future, the last person I’d fire is the person whose literal job is up-keeping public image and convincing everyone that everything is under control. I don’t know why they would prefer going silent over actively working to maintain the community by their side.

 

[Xavi | Goofy]

Hey @Matriox thanks for clearing up seems like I got a bit sidetracked by the comments and potentially even filled certain parts in myself such as community manager as I read all the comments and the thread in parts. My apologies. For starters I agree for 99% You did bring me back down to memory lane. I wasn’t to familiar with what Youn did exactly but I do believe ‘focus groups’ where a smallish part of a community is brought together is/was a great idea. With which I totally agree this should be brought back to a certain degree.

i also agree that a cleanup should be done. The 2 threads mentioned were given an answer as to why they won’t be implemented. Leather armor can be found in a thread on discord and 5v5 as well I believe or even here on the forums. (I feel like I’d have difficulty finding this though, which is another issue )
Centralizing feedback would be a good starting point however. Yes, feedback should be made more accessible however I feel like not much good has come out of those on discord. This should manny be used for update feedback.


As for @Eli, that makes two of us. I believe the team had a look at all feedback being made but it was rather difficult to turn tides in larger updates as the team was quite small? This is just my own speculation however. For example, you can’t have such a team which would only include 3 well versed skywars players help direct a skywars update. It could probably affect updates to some extend by taking literal suggestions but there’s always a lot more details to iron out, example would be the pictures provided by Matriox above. I guess it just never got to that. I’m just rambling though.

I’m in no way trying to say that the community manager role is dispensable and unnecessary. It’s just that if you had to pick between an admin who keeps the network working and one that upkeeps public relations the network would come first.

 

[Cube Nerd]

Cubecraft treats it's cummunity HORRIBLY, lets look at some past updates:
1. updates to 1.20
minerwar- rebalanced to have more single plyer games
lucky blocks- this was the most updated game, one largely played by mobile players
eggwars- completely rebalanced
lobby and pvp- pvp KB was changed, the the lobby's new color scheme feels more childish
2. CTF update
changed to 10v10, which made it much harder to have an impact on the game, and gutted the cummunity
3. bedwars and pillars of fortune
bedwars in a very popular minigame, the only reason they added it was because it was an easy way to get attention
pillars of fortune, another trending game


What does all this mean? It means that cubecn't don't care about it's dedicated player base they they have chaced of minerwar players, eggwars fans, and CTF scrimmers all in the name of makeing more child friendly. The final nail in the coffin is after many many requests to add minerwar back to java edition (and refusal because of the lack of players) they plan to add bedwars to java, which is very pointless of everyone goes to hypixel to play it, not cubecraft

 

[Matriox]

eggwars- completely rebalanced
pvp- pvp KB was changed
Blockwars - changed to 10v10, which made it much harder to have an impact on the game, and gutted the cummunity

If Cubecraft utilised the community for these updates the community would be happy with the update and Cubecraft would be happy with the content they're releasing, while also not receiving any backlash for it. I see no reason why they don't go back to having feedback servers for game updates which contain members of the community of the relevant game

 

[Cube Nerd]

If Cubecraft utilised the community for these updates the community would be happy with the update and Cubecraft would be happy with the content they're releasing, while also not receiving any backlash for it. I see no reason why they don't go back to having feedback servers for game updates which contain members of the community of the relevant game

The reason why they don't folllow feedback is because they don't care, they only care about makeing it more kid friendly, and attracting new players, which really sucks. There is no other reason to add bedwars.

 

[Matriox]

There is no other reason to add bedwars.

Disagree all you want... it's probably the most successful game launch ever

 

[Matriox]

To add to my responsibilities suggestion: there is a lot of great content creators who would love to join the program, but there seems to be no admin available to go through the applications.

Sr mods could filter the applications and forward only the ones they think would be beneficial for Cubecraft

Content creators massively increases popularity of a server, having a content creator role will increase the amount of content that goes out about Cubecraft which would be great.

 

[Cube Nerd]

Disagree all you want... it's probably the most successful game launch ever

name 1 person who thinks that cc bedwars is a good update, also, it will get less players as time goes on

 

[Nightmare]

name 1 person who thinks that cc bedwars is a good update, also, it will get less players as time goes on

Probably all the people that play it a lot think its a good update, otherwise they wouldnt play it