Forum Closed

[firebird1170]

Big picture seems like GED wanted something grandiose out of MCC that the community didn't really want, nor could deliver even of they did want it. Implementing MCC as desired, probably would have been an enormous development. Hundreds of man-months sustained effort. Part time and transient volunteers - never have cut it. Especially when most didn't believe in that grand a vision. Mostly they just wanted to play the game.

There's nothing wrong with the vision, nor with what the players wanted. There's just a mismatch. GED primarily wanted website clicks and posts, the community primarily wanted to play. Mistakes and miscommunication on all sides yes. But this is normal for any human activity frankly. It only gets worse when there's a mismatch of expectations. I didn't know that there was a difference before, but reading this thread, it becomes clear.

Bottom line, what the community implemented was not what GED wanted. So he can pull the plug, its his choice. Likewise we move on and go our own way now too.

The timing is just sad though. At the moment GED pulled the plug, the community had found a way to move forward positively by returning to TWC. Nobody was doing anything inherently wrong, nor having nefarious motives. There was no discord or drama, and the player base was growing. People were happy to be active, felt good about TWC, and frankly had no animosity towards GED that I could see. Play was also fair across the board - even from those granted amnesty from past misdeeds.

But whatever, thanks GED for the support you did extend the past few years. Too bad we couldn't be what you wanted.

Firebird

[GrnEyedDvl]

Well, it was a PvP server. Creative, Collaborative and Tekkit servers were all attempted several times and never kept activity beyond the initial "oooh new map/playstyle" period. The existing playerbase had no appetite for anything else and launching a server with no one to play on it was proven to be impossible several times.

I disagree.

The Tekkit server was a novelty and mostly a test platform. The Creative server became a waste as people were just testing redstone devices or any number of other things they can just as easily do on single player.

But the Collab server had a few (granted very few) dedicated players but was taken down after only a couple of months for absolutely no reason at all. It was never given a chance to grow, and it wasn't hurting anything sitting there running even if nobody was on it. Nobody ever tried to promote it at all, and at the very least if it had been left up there would have been something for people to do when the PvP server was taken down and then took forever to get back up.



[quote]Little wonder former admins were upset with the described state of affairs.[quote]
But they fail to realize that they contributed to the state of affairs.

Though the lack of forum use was because the forum failed to attract the modding scene it was opened for:

That's one reason, but hardly the only reason. There are TONS of other things that can be done on a forum, as you know full well since we do them on TWC.

Setting up the Faction Leaders as a Curial type body is a no brainer. Why the hell would you not tap the inherent leadership of a faction leader and use it for something like this? All the award stuff I mentioned earlier could be voted on here, any other changes that affect the site as a whole could be voted on here. There are a LOT of things a body like this could do, if it was even half assed organized.

No picture/screenshot of the week contest? No Seed of the Week/Month contest? No building contests? No factions posting pics of their builds?

1. It's not being used on TWC either. Chess and the Clans are only currently using it now because I went and asked them to start using it.

But there is no structure in place (yet) for how its going to be run. Soon there will be a director in charge of running the tournies and working with Content to announce tournies and winners, handing out prizes and promoting other stuff. You cant just turn it loose to the general public and give them no incentive to get involved.

2, 4, 5, 6, 7. When everything on the forum died except the PvP server, it made no further sense to maintain the rest. One of the decisions the Admins after me took that I largely agreed with was stopping any effort to keep everything else on life support. Remlap moved PvP to the top of the list and let everything else fall by the wayside, which was the right decision.

No, it was completely the wrong decision.

I specifically complained to you about the farce that was the amnesty, and you didn't do anything about it.

Actually I did do something about it, but what I couldn't do was reban people after another admin granted them amnesty. That just wouldn't be fair to those granted amnesty and sure as hell wouldn't be fair to the admins to cut their legs out from under them like that. So I made a very specific rule announcement that it would never happen again and that cheating would never be tolerated on MCC. And I caught hell for that announcement.

But now you are willing to play with these people that you agree should never had been let back?

Are we starting afresh?

I honestly haven't decided. What I did do is buy another motherboard for the server having problems. No matter what I do with those two servers they still have to function properly so I had to do that anyways, or throw the box in the trash.

But to be honest I do not have the time to dedicate to running it like I think it needs to be run. So I have to decide if I want to spend a few months putting a structure in place that should have been done over the course of the last 2 years and then risk having other people not follow up and maintain it so things fall apart again, or cut my losses now and do something else with the servers.

Keep the old threads. There's a lot of cool stuff there.

I will keep the database, but only visible to me on a local copy at my house. If I start fresh that means totally fresh.

GED primarily wanted website clicks and posts, the community primarily wanted to play. Mistakes and miscommunication on all sides yes. But this is normal for any human activity frankly. It only gets worse when there's a mismatch of expectations. I didn't know that there was a difference before, but reading this thread, it becomes clear.

No, that's not what I wanted. I wanted to give people something fun to do, and MC can be fun.

But we do have to face reality here. Setting this stuff up isn't free, so I set an initial goal of the site generating enough traffic to cover operating expenses and I would eat the initial server purchase cost. The original date for reaching that goal was Dec 31st, 2014 (two years after launch), which Poach and all the other admins knew about. This is why the decision to focus only on the PvP aspects of MCC was completely wrong. Because when there are problems with PvP there is no other traffic at all. Zero.

This is why it was wrong to take down the Collab server and close other parts of the site. That at least keeps players around and if you have forum traffic based on that player traffic (contests, awards, etc) then you can keep things going. But if the only discussion on the site revolves around PvP in-game play then you are setting up to fail. I mentioned the server admin section of the forum earlier, what I didn't tell you was that I had about 50 old PMs with people asking questions on that. Questions that should have been posted in a forum (and shame on me for leaving PMs on when I was absent) so that anyone with any knowledge at all could respond to them. Likewise with other sections of the forum, closing them means you get 0 traffic. Leaving them open hurts nothing and just might attract someone who runs across it on Google or whatever.

The complete focus on only the in-game aspects of PvP was a dismal failure and anyone that thinks about it for 10 seconds can easily see that. Sadly, nobody thought about it.

You cannot have a community with no communication, and you cannot have communication without a method to communicate (the forum) but there was no real communication going on. If the only communication is going to be about PvP rules then having the forum is a complete waste.

So shame on me for leaving for more than a year and not following up on things, but if one person can make or break a community then shame on the community for not caring about anything other than playing.

The timing is just sad though.

The timing was a server failure. I should have moved the site database to another machine as I knew the one it was on was having issues. I patched it together for now but I wouldn't trust it in a production environment. But things were limping along badly anyways even before that. In retrospect I should have shut everything down in August last year and rebooted the entire thing.

[Poach]

I disagree.

The Tekkit server was a novelty and mostly a test platform. The Creative server became a waste as people were just testing redstone devices or any number of other things they can just as easily do on single player.

But the Collab server had a few (granted very few) dedicated players but was taken down after only a couple of months for absolutely no reason at all. It was never given a chance to grow, and it wasn't hurting anything sitting there running even if nobody was on it. Nobody ever tried to promote it at all, and at the very least if it had been left up there would have been something for people to do when the PvP server was taken down and then took forever to get back up.

Having a server that has 1 or 2 players that log on every so often next to a server with 30-50 people on at any one time doesn't make it a 2 server website. The Collab had no community at all after the first couple of weeks. Leaving it up to be empty was a waste of time, they invariably crashed for something or other after being empty for a month and simply weren't restored.

We also did promote them: every MCC advert we put out included reference to every server we had going at the time of the advert. PvP, Creative, Collab, all of it. Creative even had its own dedicated staff. Everyone that came did so for PvP. The other servers all failed regardless of what we did, and we know because we tried more than once.

But they fail to realize that they contributed to the state of affairs.

You're damn right we did and I stand by every word I typed on MCC or spoke on Teamspeak. You demanded Rickie and I toe the party line simply because you decided we should and a whole lot of good that did the site: our "private channels" for airing grievances outside the public eye only worked for as long as you personally supervised them and even then both Rickie and I generally felt we were treated as nuisances to be heard then forgotten about. There was no cooperation, no accepting of criticism, no compromise, nothing. Every disagreement was 'settled' by letting the Admins do what they were trying to do anyway. I kept posting in public because posting in private, be it PM, Steam or TWC Hex, resulted in all happening.

And what ultimately happened? The server launched with intensive life support from you failed shortly after your attention was called to other matters and the Staff you left behind vanished into thin air at the first sign of difficulty.

That's one reason, but hardly the only reason. There are TONS of other things that can be done on a forum, as you know full well since we do them on TWC.

Setting up the Faction Leaders as a Curial type body is a no brainer. Why the hell would you not tap the inherent leadership of a faction leader and use it for something like this? All the award stuff I mentioned earlier could be voted on here, any other changes that affect the site as a whole could be voted on here. There are a LOT of things a body like this could do, if it was even half assed organized.

No picture/screenshot of the week contest? No Seed of the Week/Month contest? No building contests? No factions posting pics of their builds?

Have you still got the MCC forum contents? Go look at all the "X of the week" contests we tried to do and which failed. Go look at the Content department that turned over active staff with amazing rapidity because no one read what they did or contributed to what they tried to do.

The site failed. Only the PvP server worked. You showing up to firefight at the end of a long decline doesn't give you the understanding to hand-wave it all away as "you guys just didn't try". We very much did and it very much fell apart through lack of interest in anything that wasn't the PvP discussion forum.

But there is no structure in place (yet) for how its going to be run. Soon there will be a director in charge of running the tournies and working with Content to announce tournies and winners, handing out prizes and promoting other stuff. You cant just turn it loose to the general public and give them no incentive to get involved.

I haven't been an admin there for 18 months, but I was the admin that was going to try to turn MCC around before you elected to side with the sham election that gave you the final admin team the site had. I'm also the (ex-) admin here that started using the Tournament plugin and created the Olympics contests. Finally, I was the admin that tried to rescue the community by bringing them back here, where all that good stuff was happening.

The person that stopped that stuff taking off one month ago was you. The community were on the verge of making a major turnaround after 2 years of poor administration where the server that Rickie and I left running was the last server to run before the one that Hawk & Co very briefly ran under your heavy supervision.

If you'd let me do what I wanted to do on MCC, or given me the benefit of the doubt with the TWC move, all this stuff you wanted would be gearing up right now. I was going to give them the Tournament plugin (as I had with Chess and Wargame), and I was going to put them in the Olympics, and I was going to go cap in hand to Content to ask for anything they'd give me.

An opportunity lost.

No, it was completely the wrong decision.

MCC failed. Magefsx attracted a grand total of zero mod teams to the site and everything that wasn't the PvP server limped on for a few weeks before dying. "Everything else" became nothing but clutter. Moving it back here would've been the best thing to do if you wanted to try to nurse any sort of community larger than a single server, but you vetoed that.

Actually I did do something about it, but what I couldn't do was reban people after another admin granted them amnesty. That just wouldn't be fair to those granted amnesty and sure as hell wouldn't be fair to the admins to cut their legs out from under them like that. So I made a very specific rule announcement that it would never happen again and that cheating would never be tolerated on MCC. And I caught hell for that announcement.

My point was that you come in here talking down to us about an amnesty that had widespread and vocal opposition among the community you're villifying for the very acts we wanted nothing to do with, and that I personally came to you begging for an intervention in.

But now you are willing to play with these people that you agree should never had been let back?

I'd have happily re-banned them all if you'd let me do what I said I was going to do rather than leave Hawk in charge. I want nothing to do with them.

* * *

I get that you got pissed at the PvP community based on watching them for a few days on server launch and on watching them get rightly upset when you showed up at the end of Remlap's tenure to leave unpopular and unprepared people in charge.

The community existed for around 3 years officially with great success and enjoyment. What you witnessed was a very small and very selective sample of behaviour and even at that you're twisting it to your own opinions: don't people (including me) have a right to be very, very upset at what happened with the final server? Was your own son not pretty happy being a Dwarf? Was he not contributing to their wars and projects?

You based your entire ingame behaviour conclusions based on watching a single faction that opted to build their base right next to other people's bases, on a server where the whole point of playing was to control territory. The server was not a "buddy buddy" PvP server, it was competitive. It always was, even when you played on your alt account on the very first official server. That aspect was the same then as it is now and as it was when you decided the whole community was "toxic".

If you're even remotely open to trying this again I strongly urge that you do, because fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the community. They got upset over some terrible admin choices and they attacked some newbies that picked the wrong place to settle down on a server with a "control land" playstyle. Neither of those behaviours are even remotely toxic.

The past 18 months have seen two failed servers and have been all-round a dark time for MCC. Don't judge 3 excellent, long-lived servers on the failings and accompanying unrest of 2 bad very ones.

[firebird1170]

Regarding amnesty - Practically speaking, giving someone a second chance is fairly self-regulating. Those who reform, play normally and become a positive asset. Those who don't, end up getting themselves banned again.

Regarding what type of servers succeed - What I've seen the successful ones which have players are PvP/Factions. Haven't seen examples of creative/collab servers which have any significant populations. Not to say one couldn't make one successful, just that what MCC ran into seemed pretty normal for Minecraft.

The servers with enormous populations, are those who go crazy with enchants, allow buying of privileges, unlimited griefing, few ban reasons and no permanent ones, and its pretty much ape behavior instead of building anything lasting. I don't like that style, but seeing what servers are successful, apparently most MC players like all the monkey crap throwing.

Not recommending you go that direction GED, but its one reason why Collab/Creative failed on MCC, and why the MCC-style PvP community was pretty small.

Our experience with KaW also repeated this. 80% of new visitors were little kid trolls, or griefers we were constantly busy weeding out. Of the rest, some rage quit when we tried restrictions such as a greylist, removing /spawn, etc. Others rage quit if we didn't add their pet feature or plug in like brewery. In the end, the number of people who wanted to play in the MCC/CaW style, and stick with it long-term, was fairly limited.

At any rate, I personally think a Factions server should want to keep around collab-minded builders as well as PvPers. If they all stay on the server and be encouraged to do their various tastes of play, it would seem to give the most broad appeal without becoming a total ape server. Just my opinion though.

Firebird

[Nerva]

Every one of those problems has a root in the community, that's where the admins came from. And while admins made the decisions, I did not ever notice anyone (including you) getting involved in trying to improve the site. Where was the "community" when it came to ideas about that? Everyone was so focused on PvP they didn't give a crap about the site that supported it. If you want a very recent example of what I am talking about, then consider Ferrets hitting his 10 year anniversary on TWC and mentioning a medal. Now we have a new award coming and an art contest to decide what that medal will look like.

Not one of you so-called community players suggested something like that even one single time. Not one of you ever considered changing the rep icons to a MC themed icon. Not one of you suggested medals on the site for the Hunger Games competitions. Not one of you noticed the Tournaments section was not being used and suggested a use for it. Not one of you typed up a list of sayings to go with rep levels. Not one of you ever posted a new thread outside of Q & S or PvP. Not one of you noticed the 3000+ spam pages on the wiki and reported them, or even edited them out which everyone had the right to do.

All of these things and more are suggested on TWC every single day. Some things we implement, some things we do not. But admins cannot have every single idea. They can implement the ideas they have (which as I already stated did not always happen) but the admins on MCC got absolutely 0 in the way of support for anything outside of PvP on the site. That is not their fault, its yours. There is a fair amount of blame for everyone to shoulder here.

Maybe we were all happy in TWC, where we felt part of something bigger and could dedicate to minecraft PvP which was our common interest...
So many ifs, we'll never know what could have been.

[Poach]

Also if "controlling land" as a playstyle isn't working for what you want TWC to represent I propose you move back to the Map 1 style where there's a gigantic map (36k diameter, was it?) and everyone can buy publicly-accessible portals.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Use the original threads, GED. This is an old community now and there's value in having my original intro threads and the screenshot threads.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Use the original threads, GED. This is an old community now and there's value in having my original intro threads and the screenshot threads.

Original thread for what? This is the original thread for why I did what I did and the issues I have with what went on at MCC.

[Benz282]

Seeing as there's been a total of 7 posts on the new forum in the past week, it doesn't seem like TWC has missed out on much due to GED's decision to shut down the subforum.

There's a whole host of reasons for why this has happened, but the simple fact of the matter is: this community is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

[removeduser_487563287433]

Seeing as there's been a total of 7 posts on the new forum in the past week, it doesn't seem like TWC has missed out on much due to GED's decision to shut down the subforum.

There's a whole host of reasons for why this has happened, but the simple fact of the matter is: this community is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Um... but didn't it get moved off-site? It would take some time to reform but you're fatalism is misplaced.

[Mike92574]

Seeing as there's been a total of 7 posts on the new forum in the past week, it doesn't seem like TWC has missed out on much due to GED's decision to shut down the subforum.

There's a whole host of reasons for why this has happened, but the simple fact of the matter is: this community is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

I'd hardly say the community's dead. The reason for lack of activity is the time of the year, most people are in college/school. This has happened every time holidays end.

[Diglytron]

Seeing as there's been a total of 7 posts on the new forum in the past week, it doesn't seem like TWC has missed out on much due to GED's decision to shut down the subforum.

There's a whole host of reasons for why this has happened, but the simple fact of the matter is: this community is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Makes me wonder if you just see what you want to see.

[Nerva]

Seeing as there's been a total of 7 posts on the new forum in the past week, it doesn't seem like TWC has missed out on much due to GED's decision to shut down the subforum.

There's a whole host of reasons for why this has happened, but the simple fact of the matter is: this community is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Just like you are now dead to me...

[firebird1170]

Reflecting with the benefit of time passing, and reading over GED's comments again, I understand and have to agree with what he did and why. There comes a time when one has to step back and think clearly if things are going well under the current approach, and if they are likely to get any better. If no to both, then make changes. True in life, not just games. Life is short, we all have to put our time and energies into what we think is most productive and worthwhile. Thanks to all. Firebird

[Buddydog]

I also think I misjudged GED. Orginally, I thought GED was being selfish for not being able to control the community server and that the system was responsible for the toxicity. Unfortunately, the toxicity just got worse without GED. If a community is not capable no matter what of controlling their attitudes, I can understand why one would want to shut off its support.

[gollumking]

I would also like to let GED know that i am deeply sorry. Like Buddy, at first i blaimed GED for the hostility of the server, but now on CAW, that hostility has turned into as firebird says a "monkey throwing fest server". As a fellow x-serverowner, i can understand to some degree the stress that you have felt, but with the attidudes of these players, it cant be anywere near what i experienced. Overall, i am deeply sorry GED.

[Enros]

Is this gone for good, or will you be attempting to start a new, friendlier minecraft server with more popular features?

[Sanny]

Is this gone for good, or will you be attempting to start a new, friendlier minecraft server with more popular features?

That's up to GED, but by no means it's gone for good. MCC could always come back around with a new community who show interest.