Hey xHappyMood! Thanks for this thread - I do hear your concerns regarding this, and I'll be happy to answer all of what has been written here. As a note; if something doesn't make sense or needs further clarification, be sure to ask! I may not able to give a lot of detail but I'll definitely try.
What do I mean by transparency and clarity?
I mean how CubeCraft keeps everything strictly confidential until it’s released. The only thing they sometimes give is one unclear screenshot so that we know a game is going to come in the next few days. But that’s not what we’re interested in. We want to know what CubeCraft’s priorities are in the long term. If it is new games, fixing bugs or something still completely different.
As others have mentioned in the responses to this thread - we can't be entirely precise with what we're working on. CubeCraft is currently in a massive expansion and growth phase, and with this, there are immense amounts of growing pains with it. This means a lot of development time is being put on that isn't necessarily seen by the public - these changes aren't something we can neglect, it is something that is a necessity to be worked on.
What’s wrong with the transparency and clarity?
Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is kept strictly confidential. If you leak one little thing you’re fired as a staff member. It feels as if you’ve tried to keep a little confidentiality, which I understand, and which is completely fine. But the problem is that you’ve driven it too far. You’ve made everything confidential, which is too much. Staff members have told me that it’s hard for them to get what they need being a staff member because everything is so confidential.
As someone who's been part of the staff team & community for a while, I can assure you that leniency regarding leaking has definitely increased. The mere mentioning of an update
potentially being in the works would have gotten you kicked off of the team and network banned. (
@Marieke2001 
)
We've clarified this with our staff team that we'd
love to be open with them regarding what we're working on, but we need to ensure that this information isn't leaked as:
and
Of course CubeCraft keeps updates private, because of competition with other minecraft servers. For example CubeCraft released a time ago Among Slimes, which resulted in a growing player-base. If CubeCraft told they were working on implementing Among Slimes, there would have been a chance that other minecraft servers would do the same.
We simply cannot afford massive things to be leaked. We know that sometimes this is a bit of a grey area, hence why we're more lenient with our staff members now instead of jumping the gun, network banning someone for leaking, burying the evidence and pretending like it doesn't exist. As it is with any of our rules, both for staff and players, any clarification can simply be asked.
I've noticed a bit of confusion regarding our development team, as seen by this quote:
If you’d know something like “We’re going to add a game, then fix some major bugs, then start working on another game again.”, the feedback threads could be a lot more specific. We could tell you guys what WE want you to focus on, in relation to what you’ve told us you’re planning to do.
So let me quickly clarify what our development team currently consists of.
We have multiple different departments in our development team, ranging from content developers who bring you new loot and cosmetics, to game developers who bring you game updates, to anticheat developers who are constantly working on Sentinel, to our infrastructure team who ensures that we have enough resources to support all of these players on our server, to our protocol team who work on general problems on our server such as lag and gameplay bugs, to library developers who helps with the general development of the server. Lots of departments, lots of specialities.
Though I feel like our development team can do everything if they wanted to (cc. Among Slimes being developed with the entire team in 10 days, tested, marketed & shipped), logistically speaking, we wouldn't want 10 developers working on a single bug. In a typical day, you'd see all of these people working simultaneously, likely all on different projects.
Proof of this is just having a scroll through our announcements & changelog channel on Discord. At most, major bug fixes would involve 3-4 people, but we still have a development team of ~20 people that haven't been accounted for - all of which are on their respective projects.
I hope, and really think, that what the community wants is still the most important to you, even though it sometimes seems to us as if you ignore us.
Absolutely I agree with the first part - this is why we're hosting things like community talks. These are massively helpful to us, hence why we're trying to make them more frequent. I know you mentioned this in the thread, just wanted to parrot it.
In regards to ignoring the community, this is the opposite to what we want to do, and we're sorry if we've come across that way in the past. However, as you've mentioned quite well:
There’s no harm in admitting that you’re wrong. It makes you seem grownup and mature enough to admit that you make mistakes.
We've made mistakes before - this is why we turn to things like the forums and community talks so that we can gauge if the changes we want to make will either be positive or negative, instead of crossing our fingers and potentially wasting resources.
In retrospect, making these mistakes are the exact reason why we've adopted these practices (cc. the Beta EggWars merge). Without these mistakes and being called out on it, we probably would be keeping things even more secret. Your feedback is highly appreciated!
I got this idea from @KitsuneToru. It is to let CubeCraft do an update on what their priorities are, and what they will be doing in the coming months every few months. 3 or 4 times a year would be great, just to keep the community informed a little bit about what’s happening behind the scenes and to show that you haven’t forgotten about us. We can either see that you start focussing on what we want you to focus on, or we can see that you don’t, and write detailed and specific feedback about that.
Again, this already takes the form of the community talks we're holding now. Though this only tends towards our game development team, that's essentially the department that matters the most on an outsiders perspective. We're looking for other ways to improve our communication with the community, so if you have any other suggestions (that isn't community talk-based, such as more Behind the Cube posts), let us know!
With updating you all on results from community talks, I admit, I have been a bit poor with it. I'll be spending the next couple of days updating you all on progress with the Tower Defence community talk, as development for this update has begun, and go into detail with the SkyWars community talk.
I believe I've covered most things. If there is anything that you'd need clarification on or anything you'd want to be expanded upon, then let me know.
