Hello, I'm 501warhead; Then and Now.

[501warhead 1796]

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7 hours ago, Jaeden said:

I've a few questions! I don't mean them in a negative way, they're genuine.

- What are the things you wish to change or improve upon now that you've gained admin?

- For future map releases, will you be in support of a more community-based map development, rather than the old system of only select staff working on the map? It's a possible system that could potentially produce excellent results, if done correctly!

- Do you have plans to work extensively (in regards to both adminship and developer) with the Event Team so we can produce some more fluent systems? ;D.

 

 

1. Two points that I feel strongly about which people almost never consider;

- Staff Turnover rates are god awful. Admins and moderators leaving by the bucket load, why? We're rapidly draining dry of candidates because we eat though them all so fast, moderator burnout is a big problem. This is something on the forefront of my mind going into it as I think we've got some great members of staff and I don't want to see many of them feeling like they have to go.

 

- Staff perception of the community. While this isn't like a "staff don't care about people at all!" point, it's more along the lines of I feel like we tend to focus on just whoever is the loudest or largest when we make decisions, and that'd not right. We're all here to have fun together and play the server together and we should be actively striving towards making the server fun and enjoyable for every single player, at least as much as we can. We can't hold everyones hand, but we can actively make decisions that dont just benefit or target a singular group, regardless of merit or size.

 

2. The problem with this is, and I'll be open with this perspective, is that;

- In my personal experience there are only a select few people with the motivation and drive to complete a map. Often times builders either burn out, deal with life, or just can't figure out what to build.

 

- Maps are more than just a hodge podge of stuff here stuff there, map design is actually a complex thing and we've learned a lot over the years. Things which aren't obvious are like, player movement; How do we want players to move through the world? What do we want them to see as they do? What do we want to have as a well traveled location with settlements and friends and what should be a distant frontier? What should we hide away in the map, and of what nature?

 

We aren't perfect, and we do make mistakes - but I'd have to say I don't think (personally) that community driven map making will work, we're trying to make better maps each time!

 

3. As a dev, Absolutely! Have some plans that you already know about :P. As an Admin, also absolutely - but you may be hearing more of what I'm going to ask you to do rather than the reverse, I've got a few things on the noggin'. We'll hopefully work together to make the server a better place.

 

6 hours ago, Good Guy Shady said:

Will warclaims be made great again?

 

also welcome back.

 

The answer to this question is "Warclaims will be better when less people attend". I'd like to make warclaims better but figuring out how to optimize something that minecraft really doesn't like is difficult, at this point we're probably going to have to look into trying to hard edit some of the way minecraft sends packets or something, networking traffic when many players get close cause a good bulk of our lag. It's actually funny, while the lag in most warclaims go on you can hop into console and just type commands fine, no problem. If you check the performance (Ticks Per Second) it's even rather high - it's just that the server bogs down so much sending all this information so quickly to 200x players all in one area so you can basically almost never move. We're trying to find solutions, our problem is extremely niche.

[501warhead 1796]

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5 hours ago, The axeman51 said:

You were the one nibody like caused you were super biased to high elves right?

 

I only played a high elf for less than a week I think, I believe you (might) be considering SupremacyOps who stole has a similar name to my RP character, his name being Kalenz Uradir and my name being Kalen Forseth.

 

4 hours ago, Harold said:

Communication is good 501, but you have to keep it up. I fear when the controversy and "confusion" has been forgotten about, you will revert back to old tricks and inactivity on the community side. That's not a dig, its just what the community has seen from you and one of the reasons you should may not been accepted as an admin. Couple this with the controversy you created in and around the last war claim by removing the forts doors, not even a few week ago, and you begin to wonder whether this is a reward for a greater workload on plugins? Seeing as Developers own their plugins and only lease them to LoTC, and therefore we rely on you to maintain them? Maybe you'll take guidance for plugins from anyone other than yourself? 

 

I was never your greatest fan. If I remember correctly, when you left before, the other devs had to pickup the pieces. You've done some good work in the past, nothing the community has ever asked for or wanted however. Your community engagement track record is awful at best, damning at worst. You work to your own drum beat, there isn't much else to say that hasn't already been reiterated by the community. You are an odd choice for admin. 

 

I think you will fail, and fall into old habits. From the way you spoke to the community after the last server warclaim, I have no confidence in your ability to handle people or their problems. Coding is your speciality, and your damn good at it, you don't become an admin to code however. You are not a people person, as much as you try to make yourself out to be here; you sound pretentious. You are not someone I would trust in a customer facing role. The rest of the community has made that point very clear to you, very politely, over the past day. 

 

Time will only tell if you keep the promises you make now.

 

Alright, I'll do my best to respond to this! Thank you for your time writing this up, it does mean a lot to me to get feedback like this as it's hard to be 100% introspective on all of my actions.

 

1) "You'll fall back into inactivity towards the community"

 

While I do not hope this will be the case and have intention to be clear on my actions with the community, there is a chance some inactivity will occur but mainly due to life, school, and the nature of being a developer; we often work long nights, alone, quietly coding in the dark. I want to make promises to you guys and upkeep them, and it may mean "disappearing" to make those a reality. Note, This seems odd after all the things I've said but I'm just being honest about the situation; However, I am putting forward a ton of my effort to make sure that even with these lapses I will never fully disappear short of quitting, I'll probably be around here and there, a few announcements, some community meetings, a few plugins and some discussion.

 

2) The topic of doors in the SNElven Fort

 

I alone did not make this decision, and to reiterate what I have said before as to it (Even if I am not right, which is fine, I wish to clear up some of the rumors) The decision was made due to the massive excess of locked, wooden doors rittled through the fort. These should have been denied as soon as they were noticed as ww2buff said the fort was ready and it was a mistake on our part. In the moment of a warclaim however as we're moderating the whole thing and 20+ humans run up to each door every 5 blocks and /roll 5 times in a row we suddenly have to deal with an amazing amount of stress coupled with also trying to make sure the defenders aren't up to anything terrible. It was a decision which we spoke about for a good portion of time and came to the conclusion excessively locked doors through LWC weren't healthy for a warclaim, a few were fine, and that this was unmoderatable. Additionally, with the lag, neither side was really able to traverse doors making it almost needed for us to remove them for both sides of the battle to fight. If you think the actions of myself and the staff that day was wrong still, as stated, I do not blame you - I believe it was horrid miscommunication at the start of the battle and it is on us for that, but the door decision I will stand by.

 

3) When you left the devs had to pick up the pieces

 

Alright, a little bit of "real talk" here on this topic - this comes straight out of a 5 person chat which no one knew about. I didn't exactly "step down" out of free will, as a matter of fact the original idea was I was going to step down as lead dev and let someone else take my place but help out the development team greatly. This... didn't fly. Not a day into my declared reduced inactivity to prepare for this I opened up Skype to find that a discussion was taking place to "Remove me", I was scratching my head a little bit as I read through the chat then came to the realization that the Administration at that point actually wanted to make an example of "Devs who don't do what they want" and publically demote & denounce me as, and I still perceive it as such, a power play to enforce that the administration was the "good guys" here for the players. Yes, I wasn't the greatest individual but seeing this kind of boiled my blood and before I had a chance to step down to Dev I decided to just beat the administration to the punch at that time and simply leave. Completely, as I really wanted nothing to do with the server after that. It left the devs with no one to help but I wasn't really welcome to help at that time.

 

4) Way I spoke to the community after the last warclaim

 

I'm... confused by this point as well? I sat for several hours in GOOC answering any and all questions that came my way, I held no secrets, I spoke openly about why we made our decisions, spoke openly about why we did what we did. I really think that was the best thing I could have done, was drop all the secrecy and just openly talk to players - I believe strongly in being open with what we do so that players are informed when they base their opinions. If you still aren't happy with us that's fine! But I didn't want rumors flying around (as they seem to have done) based off of misinformation. I'll tell you what happened, how it happened, when it happened, and why it happened.

 

5) Only time will tell

 

Absolutely correct. I hope that, in time, you'll come to see me as an asset and not a detriment but I am happy that you have at least expressed that you will be patient to see what happens, and thank you for this.

 

3 hours ago, Destroyer_Bravo said:

legit question: is lotc's code bloated with overly long lines of code that can be summed up with module functions? feel like if that were the case big lag could occur from it.

 

I might rant a bit off on this because if I can help clear this up I will, but two major points on this;

 

1. "Bad code" doesn't directly affect performance unless it is truly out of this world, and it's really not on Lord of the Craft. Plugins, in a few tests we made, that were custom on lord of the craft made up for, like, 0.17% at most of our performance decrease. The % which our plugins eat of our performance is actually really low. What bad code does is it doesnt "decrease" performance, it creates bugs, makes adding new features difficult, it makes finding and fixing bugs difficult. But bad code does not equal bad performance, at least not one to one

 

2. Good code actually can effect performance more than bad code. This is the hardest thing to grapple with, actually. We try to write code in such a way that adding new features is as easy as possible, but in the process we sometimes make decisions that can effect performance negatively. Having spent such a long time digging through minecraft code (even de-obfuscated code through Minecraft Forge due to being curious) I can tell you that the Mojang developers are absolutely some of the best developers I've seen, they often do elegant solutions to problems and I enjoy it, but it doesn't come without a cost, and this little rant from the creator of optifine explains how new, common conventions which are accepted by many actually can be the bane of performance.

 

To answer your question; Yes, there is bad, old code (primarily in nexus) but it rarely lags the server badly, it just makes it an incredible pain to update and give new features.

1 hour ago, Gucko said:

How's Desires?

 

Good, thank you!

 

1 hour ago, nppeck said:

I remember you

 

I remember you too!

 

I'm not done quite yet guys, I wanted to give a full response to the comments which were hidden. They'll be in the next post.

[Cracker 4570]

Disappointed to hear you would like to continue keeping map design away from the community. Knowing that 5.0 would suffer due to issues between staff vision and player compatibility and yet being unable to do anything about it was one of the major reasons I burned out and left the team. I hope you deeply reconsider instead of perpetuating the same mistakes the administration has been making in regards to map design since 2014.

 

I cannot say I have much confidence in your position as an admin but I wish you all the best.

 

 

[bungo 3965]

Hello I just want to comment on the map part.  It may be rude and insensitive but it is the truth as I see it.  I will start off by saying this is the worst map we've ever had.  We have 3 maps and on one whole map there isn't a single person living there.  On another it's a relatively small playerbase that occupies an entire map.  The last map is where everyone lives and it's not very nice to look at.  I remember that during the development cycle we tried to get a good looking map to replace one of these maps and it was eventually denied for being too plain.  The build team wanted really cool biomes such as the awesome mesa biome or a cool moon rock biome which we have with whatever the big map is called.  No one goes there no one lives there no one wants to walk that far to even see it.

 

I've found that the best maps are those the staff doesn't touch or touches to a minimal extent.  Maps like 4.0 and 5.0 are what the staff team sees as an ideal map and they always add systems which always fail. (Nexus plots, the plot system we have now)  The map should be made at a medium size, divided up between various factions based on population and allow the leaders of those factions to determine the map they want to play on and roleplay on.  I don't have any faith in the staff team in terms of map design because every map the staff touches is just bad.

[501warhead 1796]

@kenring

 

Alright, I somewhat explained in the previous post the issues, but I will address your concerns about warclaims.

 

First and foremost, we're working continuously on improving warclaims. This is an ongoing struggle and, contrary to belief, our plugins actually, collectively, only lag the server as much as WorldGuard, which has on record been our most intensive plugin. Now, if we remove worldguard does it mean we can have warclaims? Not quite, both for being an integral part of our land protection systems and moderator tools the lag it actually produces is less than the number of chickens inside of tahn. Let me present to you a real number.

 

What I mouse over here is the server performance report of how much of the TPS is dedicated to chickens.

 

 

nms.EntityChicken is, as you can read, the entry for chickens. It is, at this time, taking up 1.82% of the total Ticks Per Second, which are what minecraft uses to move players and entities. Let's compare it directly with a bit of code for our LumberJack plugin!

 

 

This is the highest entry in the list for a plugin - this used 0.11% of the ticks per second at this time. This is 16.5x lower than our highest record plugin, which isn't even Nexus and, funny enough, it's actually seemingly caused by WorldGuard as well.

 

We actively record how much performance our plugins eat up and each time we see a similar trend; The plugins aren't the problem, it's Minecraft itself. That the engine has a really hard time sending all the information to every player on the server when they're all within a 200 block radius, and it's probably because each time it sends information it's sending player skins, player positions, what way their head is facing, if they're swinging or not, where they're swinging, if they're placing or breaking blocks, what armor they're wearing, if they're flying, all this informating being sent every 1/20th of a second to 200 players is 200*200 packets being sent every time. that's 40,000 packets every 1/20th of a second, not including the world, and 800,000 packets each second needing to go out to just those players for those players. Not including chunk data, tile entity data (banners, signs, flower pots), and not including non-player entity data. Over the course of a minute the server will have to have sent out at least 48,000,000 packets and if it slows down sending some then suddenly everyone is lagging, player aren't moving. Then, the server also has to interpret every single action you make at the same time, because every action sends a packet to the server. While code can operate fast, this gets really intense really quickly. If the server doesn't receive your data hits aren't registered, you can't move, you can't open doors, you can't eat. Sound familiar?

 

So no, the lag in warclaims is not even majority dictated by plugins as far as we can tell, but we're actively looking into the problem! 

[Aengoth 2890]

Ah **** he lives. Finally someone to help confront @Heero 阴's malaria going into overdrive.

[Wendigo 786]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.