EggWars Ignoring the Competitive CubeCraft Community

[khaostica]

For those that are unaware, CubeCraft has two types of players, nons and sweats. Nons are the people who join the server for a fun time every now and again. They play for fun, and hope to get a few wins while playing. Sweats are those who devote quite a bit of time to the server. Sweats are also known as “Pros,” or maybe “Competitive Players.”
This where CubeCraft fails its community. The players who spend more time on the game are obviously going to be better than those who play casually. This skill gap tends to result in a lot of differing views and opinions overall.
Casual players won’t care about how well-optimized the server is, what bugs the server may have, or the content in gamemodes. They may still care, but it’s to a SIGNIFICANTLY lesser degree than the more serious players.
These competitive accounts have many different forms: Grinders, PvPers, and Scrimmers come to mind. This side of the community will notice the majority of the flaws in CubeCraft, partly due to more time spent on the server, as well as more experience with the game in general.
If there’s a bug where a UI refuses to open after a certain length of time spent online, they’re more likely to notice than the casual players.
PvPers want to see more game optimization, meaning better servers, especially for battle arena, less server freezing, and maps designed to be stable (not 1000 glass panes).
I’m not too sure what grinders want, but I imagine that more optimization of servers as well as some more map reworks (for gameplay) may be in there)
And that leaves scrimmers. I was a scrimmer, and I know this community very, VERY well.
They have some of the most unique ideas, but this different opinion is a stark contrast to what a casual player might want.
Due to the massive difference between scrimmers and casual players, their voice tends to go unheard or refused.
Birthday was a map perfect for competitive play, but casual players didn’t enjoy the time it consumed, so it was removed.
Private games would make the lives of scrimmers much easier, but this feature is yet to be added.
Nearly every detail of CubeCraft affects scrimmers, block registration, server optimization, map gameplay, region optimization, core gameplay mechanics, and more.
This intense connection means that a relatively small change to casual players could completely change the world of scrimming.
If shop prices are increased or decreased by a few iron, then scrimmers will have to spend months adapting to the new metas that would arise from these new prices, while casual players may not even notice.
But not only were a few iron changed in the 1.20 update, but the update completely killed the scrimming community.
There are so many unbelievably irritating changes with this new update that I barely know where to start.
Firstly, 1.18 support is completely gone, although this is mostly due to the actual game, Minecraft, dropping multiplayer support for this version. 1.18 was far more optimized than 1.19 or 1.20, and was the most competitively viable version.
However, the community wouldn’t completely die to version support, so what happened?
Eggwars Was Reworked!
Casual players were definitely the centre of attention for this new update, because not a single scrimmer was excited when they heard about this new eggwars.
Before the update came out, it felt like there was a ticking time bomb. Eggwars would be inaccessible to 1.18 mains, and it would change so much that it would barely be recognizable.
Scrimmers loved the way CubeCraft had eggwars set up. The abundance of blocks and long fights made for a very competitive environment that mostly removed the random aspect seen in other servers’ gamemodes.
Those that didn’t enjoy eggwars might’ve gotten frustrated with how unskilled it could get when CPS was introduced, but there was an easy work-around.
Scrimmers could simply force their community to use dc prevent, removing the unskilled nature from the game, but if removing dc prevent killed their comm, that meant most scrimmers liked how it was set up.
There was a controlled chaos to this system, and it made for a unique and fun environment.
The update stripped this unique gameplay and replaced it with something completely different.
In time, a scrimming community could develop around this new eggwars, but the server completely ended an entire community centred around it.
There’s a certain cruelty and injustice to that, and it’s not like there aren’t work-arounds. The server could add old eggwars as a separate gamemode, or maybe as an option for the eggwars rank selection at the start of the game.
And if you’re wondering why the update killed the scrimming community, there are two reasons.
Number One: DIFFERENT CORE GAMEPLAY. Eggwars gameplay was meant to be long. Overpowered mode meant that players could get stacks upon stacks of blocks, protection four armour, and gapples, resulting in long, skilled fights. Hive’s problem is that the first fights are mostly RNG. Four hit fights aren’t exactly skilled, whereas CubeCraft had those immediately long interactions. This made cps, PvP, gamesense, and many other characteristics essential to becoming a good player, so the harder you tried, the more you were rewarded. The update removed this, resulting in a completely different, and while still unique, not anywhere NEAR what CubeCraft scrimmers were accustomed to.
Number Two: OFFBRAND HIVE. I said it. CubeCraft eggwars was made to be a long, skilled process, and Hive Treasure Wars was the shorter, less skilled process. Hive is so optimized and perfected that no core gameplay from any other server should match it if they want any chance at surviving competitively. CubeCraft changing their core gameplay into the shorter, less skilled process was EXACTLY what they said they wanted to do. It makes the game more viable casually, but competitively, Hive became the better option. Removing the uniqueness of CubeCraft made it too similar to servers with better optimization and mechanics, so they competitive community has gone to those servers instead.

There have been many, many words said throughout this thread of mine, but I hope they don’t go to waste.
I have one suggestion for a simple fix to this ignored community: bring old eggwars back in literally any way.
Just by adding it, whether through its own gamemode, an option in the game, or anything similar, it will give the competitive community a GOOD REASON to play CubeCraft.
Thank you for reading this if you have, and just note that I do respect CubeCraft for bringing new content to the server, I just want to see the competitive community return to this formerly unique, and truly amazing server.

 

[adrian525pl]

Why is it, that most of the threads I recently find on the forums leave me asking "are even playing on the same server"?


You are claiming that eggwars NOW is adjusted to a shorter variant, with fast games? And that long games require more skill? The only thing that is "offbrand hive" about cubecraft is the knockback system, which seems almost random at times and once your are comboed you cannot counter, which makes it seem like they just copied and pasted the hives system.

To not say more than needs to be said: I do agree that the pvp system and the fights itself favor a shorter one where "fights" end after only a few quick hits and rely almost entirely on comboes in the air, knockback and suprise attacks rather than actual fighting.



As for everything else about eggwars, though?



Lets see: you can obtain relatively powerful gear fairly early, allowing you to survive longer. You can enchant your items, including armor, to be more resistant to damage. You can upgrade your gear to be unkillable or almost unkillable in some gamemodes. And you can buy hard to break materials to protect your egg without even leaving your base if you are lucky, making it necessary for players to buy stronger pickaxes, which has an impact on the games length.

Literally everything in this update made the game last longer and become harder if you want to win quickly while also allowing worse players to have a better chance to fight back. The old eggwars was about speed and short games, but "longer" fights. Now its about short fights but longer games.




As for longer games being more skillful or long fights being more skillful, as a long game enjoyer myself: hell no, those games entirely rely on your level of preparation, the amount of resources you can get and a bit of luck. Last time I checked, farming diamonds isn't exactly a skill, especially not on overpowered mode out of all gamemodes. 2 players in netherite armor with tridents and golden apples could spend literal hours fighting before anyone even gets close to being dead.

CPS, gamesense, movement, you name it. All skill matters less if your opponent has near-unpenetrable armor with reduced knockback and enough enchanted golden apples to end world hunger for the next 3 decades.

What matters once players got strong armor is how well prepared you are yourself. Some of my fights have been so long since the update that I experienced armor and weapons breaking due to their durability running out. Reminder: we are talking about netherite armor, the most durable armor obtainable in the game. It takes almost two minutes of uninterrupted hitting with a 9 damage trident for just a piece of it to break.

 

[khaostica]

Why is it, that most of the threads I recently find on the forums leave me asking "are even playing on the same server"?


You are claiming that eggwars NOW is adjusted to a shorter variant, with fast games? And that long games require more skill? The only thing that is "offbrand hive" about cubecraft is the knockback system, which seems almost random at times and once your are comboed you cannot counter, which makes it seem like they just copied and pasted the hives system.

To not say more than needs to be said: I do agree that the pvp system and the fights itself favor a shorter one where "fights" end after only a few quick hits and rely almost entirely on comboes in the air, knockback and suprise attacks rather than actual fighting.



As for everything else about eggwars, though?



Lets see: you can obtain relatively powerful gear fairly early, allowing you to survive longer. You can enchant your items, including armor, to be more resistant to damage. You can upgrade your gear to be unkillable or almost unkillable in some gamemodes. And you can buy hard to break materials to protect your egg without even leaving your base if you are lucky, making it necessary for players to buy stronger pickaxes, which has an impact on the games length.

Literally everything in this update made the game last longer and become harder if you want to win quickly while also allowing worse players to have a better chance to fight back. The old eggwars was about speed and short games, but "longer" fights. Now its about short fights but longer games.




As for longer games being more skillful or long fights being more skillful, as a long game enjoyer myself: hell no, those games entirely rely on your level of preparation, the amount of resources you can get and a bit of luck. Last time I checked, farming diamonds isn't exactly a skill, especially not on overpowered mode out of all gamemodes. 2 players in netherite armor with tridents and golden apples could spend literal hours fighting before anyone even gets close to being dead.

CPS, gamesense, movement, you name it. All skill matters less if your opponent has near-unpenetrable armor with reduced knockback and enough enchanted golden apples to end world hunger for the next 3 decades.

What matters once players got strong armor is how well prepared you are yourself. Some of my fights have been so long since the update that I experienced armor and weapons breaking due to their durability running out. Reminder: we are talking about netherite armor, the most durable armor obtainable in the game. It takes almost two minutes of uninterrupted hitting with a 9 damage trident for just a piece of it to break.

To be honest, I haven't played much of this new update, but when I was referring to long games, I meant scrims. My message was for the scrimming community, and how the new update affected them. I'm not as certain as to how the update affects casual players, but from the scrimming standpoint, we definitely would like to see a return of the old eggwars.
Long games may not seem skilled to casual playing, or maybe even to other communities, but long-term fights during scrims were by far one of the most strategic and complex parts of eggwars. I won't go into detail about how, but if you would like me to, just let me know.
Some people may like the new update, but if an entire community is instantly wiped off of cubecraft, then that's a problem. The fix is so simple that one sentence is more than enough to explain it: just add a method of playing the old eggwars to cubecraft.
Now to reply to the points you made, I'll try to be as honest as possible, and I apologize if I'm blunt.
"The only thing that is "offbrand hive" about cubecraft is the knockback system..." I do not agree with this whatsoever. Cubecraft KB is far more reliant and doubleclicking and stable connection that Hive, making it simply worse if your fighting in duels. HOWEVER, in eggwars or scrims, this KB makes clutching much harder, which is definitely a good thing when everyone clicks five digits of CPS.
"CPS, gamesense, movement, you name it. All skill matters less if your opponent has near-unpenetrable armor with reduced knockback and enough enchanted golden apples to end world hunger for the next 3 decades." My response to this is yes, but no. More CPS basically removes skill, which I agree with. If your opponent is virtually unkillable, and they won't die to the void because of extensions, then skill feels VERY irrelevant. Netherite armour is also just an added skill reduction. This will help close the skill gap, but only by decreasing how well you need to play. As for gamesense, this is the most important part of any scrim, but in casual eggwars games it barely matters. In scrims, it's all about team rotations and which fights to take and when to bank, whereas in casual games it's about sitting on gens. I don't see any way to bring movement into this. Movement helps in rotations, but only slightly. Movement just makes it easier to get from one place to another, and doesn't effect games as much as something like gamesense does.
"The old eggwars was about speed and short games, but "longer" fights. Now its about short fights but longer games." This is another yes but no statement. With how different scrims versus casual games are, I'll end up giving many of these two sided answers. Old eggwars, casually, had very long fights, which required skill and gamesense throughout the fight (banking gens while pvping, positioning far from the void, and more) where in scrims these fights were similar, but upscaled by a mile. PvPing players with less skill casually resulted in shorter fights, or one very clear winner throughout the fight. This was the skill gap. This gap is great to shrink for casual players, but in scrims it removes the unique skill required for long fights - EXSCLUIVE TO SCRIMS.
"Some of my fights have been so long since the update that I experienced armor and weapons breaking due to their durability running out." This is where the difference between casual eggwars and scrims REALLY shines through. Scrimmers have enough CPS to survive when they might get hit off, so fights almost always resulted in armour breaking (this was for leather, chain, iron, and diamond gear). Weapon breaking wasn't as common, mostly due to backup swords being cheaper than armour to obtain (if your diamond sword breaks, you're probably okay to grap a stone sword). Anyways, most fights in scrims were based off of how many hits and crits you got on your opponent, and waiting until their gear broke. Gapples were the main reason people didn't die during scrims.
Anyways, thank you for your reply, it was great to hear from someone with more experience in the new update, and I would like to mention one key thing:
My thread and this reply are geared towards scrims, NOT CASUAL GAMES. I'm sorry if I spoke on behalf of that community, as I wouldn't consider myself to be a casual player. Scrims are just so different, and I hope you understand that this difference is why the community died. Casual players needed a change to their games for the skill gap to shrink, whereas scrimmers found the old eggwars to be much better for SCRIMS.
Thank you for reading this, and let me know your thoughts.

 

[CrystalLegend01]

One question: what is scrimming and what does it involve, just curious

Aside from that, I think the makeup of EggWars players is slightly more complicated than casual players and sweats.
I am an iPad player that uses touchscreen controls. I don't focus on clicks (taps) per second and I'm sure most other mobile/iPad players don't either. I try my best, but rounds don’t go perfectly all the time. Honestly, I consider myself good at the game, despite the few device-related limits I have.
I consider myself casual but I’m still kind of competitive, so I guess I’m in between? Me being a casual player seems a little dependent on the device I play on. Also, I'm definitely not a grinder/speedrunner, total PvP fan, etc. so I am not in that category at all. On the other hand, I have over 300 wins on EggWars Teams of 4 and I play on Cubecraft somewhat often.

 

[khaostica]

Scrims are 4v4 games of eggwars. All of the players are KBM, and they’re the most competitive/skilled community around eggwars. The teams are in voice calls as well.
Anyways, here’s twenty minutes of a scrim I played in:

 

[ProfParzival]

For those that are unaware, CubeCraft has two types of players, nons and sweats. Nons are the people who join the server for a fun time every now and again. They play for fun, and hope to get a few wins while playing. Sweats are those who devote quite a bit of time to the server. Sweats are also known as “Pros,” or maybe “Competitive Players.”

*snipped for brevity*

One of the most well reasoned arguments I've seen made about how Cubecraft have always ignored and continue to ignore any competitive aspect of gaming on their servers.

I've never really seen any support for it apart from a couple of half hearted and short lived attempts. That's always puzzled me.. It seems like one of the easier marketing options they have available to them; but they've never really explored or supported it.

For example Circuit Season one was truly amazing as a scrimmer.. all the best players on the server battling it out against each other in really exciting matches and it was great to watch. It could have gone from strength to strength and become something bigger if Cubecraft had supported it.. or bare minimum not introduced updates that harmed it.

One of the admins tried to start a scrim competition and realised how painfully difficult it was to even get games started without a private games option. I honestly thought at that point that at least someone at cube might start to champion the competitive side and make it more attractive to scrimmers. Nope.

I agree with many of the points you made and also was really baffled why Cube had entirely changed eggwars (when they could have had "NEW" and "CLASSIC" modes or introduced ranked) but as someone who mostly grinds these days rather than scrims, I have to admit it's now somewhat more balanced than when they first introduced it and I'm starting to enjoy it a bit more.

From a scrimming PoV though.. yeah.. they just overnight totally changed what eggwars was to the community. I'm not saying that the community can't recover in time, but I just find it crazy that Cubecraft have had such a great marketing opportunity available to them yet they prefer to just ignore it at best and or go out of their way to kill it at worst.

I guess it's only ever been about following the money (the casual gamer). I hope I'm wrong.
What REALLY did speak volumes though was how very awkward it was to watch their introduction of season 2 where the owners / admins etc attempted to play Eggwars squads... it instantly became clear that none of them were actually eggwars players and that spoke volumes. They needed to have staff that ACTUALLY played it, championed it and supported the competitive aspects that were starting to flourish.

Why is it, that most of the threads I recently find on the forums leave me asking "are even playing on the same server"?


*snip tons of mostly irrelevant stuff*

One question.. have you ever played in a high level scrim against the best players?

I'm guessing not as your reply seems to be just about Eggwars games in general and nothing to do with scrimming and the competitive community. There is more than one way to make the server more popular than simply concentrating on a better experience for the casual players and at the behest of everyone else.

Adding ranked games, keeping an eggwars classic game mode or supporting private games a while ago when the community was blossoming were all things that could have been done.