501warhead

This charter application has been approved.

This is fine, I have editted the topic name to mark it clearly as OOC in the RP forum.

I think it's fixed? We're removing apps from the new topic feed

Heya! I'll be responding. So, first and foremost your frustration is completely understandable. However, I have some good news! This is our bad and we'll be allowing and putting you back into your role. So, we made a mistake - we had some of the picks brought to our attention that we sat down with Sky to discuss. You were among this list and we were under a false impression that you had previously (even multiple times) been removed from the team for PEX abuse. This was misinformation that we had no ability to verify because team removals are not recorded so it was purely word of mouth where we had no easy way to verify. So, this was our mistake and we are completely reverting our decision. As the reason behind this post has been addressed it's being locked. Feel free to PM any of us with concerns!

The Weeknd has been my jam but it's not on YT at all. and this new thing from deadmau5 good stuff Finally a damn classic. edit: spoilers

there is already the ability, as mentioned above, to remove the snow. There will hopefully be, sometime soon, the ability to just view lotc like normal w/o snow - it's a process tho, we're still working through it.

@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!

Page 3 Responses; 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. 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. 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. Good, thank 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.

Page 2 Responses; 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. 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.

I have not! Roles have not been discussed yet As stated before, it is certainly being worked on! The problem is that with the removal of swing timers (as an optional combat style) all of the weapon damage needs to change and weapon %s need to scale around, it's actually not just as simple as going to the player and saying "ok you hit like you're Sylvester Stallone, have fun" - we have to balance all of these so axes don't suddenly feel like someone picked up a truck and is swinging it like a stick.

Ya, pride and ego are the bane of progress (Although nostalgia is also up there with those two!) and I like progress! Well, as much as I would like to give you good news (I dont like just saying "No, won't happen") I'm afraid I cannot on this topic - We cannot, reasonably, downgrade at this point. To understand why (So you aren't just scratching your head) all of our plugins (~20 pieces of work) are 2 versions of MC ahead, we've rewritten a good bulk of our plugins to only be compatible on 1.10+, and all the blocks suddenly disappearing out of the world might give our server a heart attack and periodic seizures. While these wouldn't be impossible to deal with (we could do it, it would take a lot of time, months even, but it would be "possible", just as much as rewriting minecraft is "possible") the time we spent on it could just as easily be spent making 1.10+ better for you guys and making swing timers very much 1.8-like.

Lol, but you spawned us in warping doors all around anthos and spawned a few double chests of sand (you filthy corrupt gm)! I never did anything of the sort. Shows what you all know! And I worked hard around that time on the maps :( Good! I'm afraid another dev is working on it - stepping on toes leads to brawls! You can ruin a lot of peoples code if you try "fixing" their code and then they already had a fix, it makes everyones life hell. It'll get done, these things take time! Dev cycles aren't fast, and I know it can feel like forever but we are working on it, we're just a bunch of college students.

Greetings folks! So, a little nervous I saw that there was a lot of confusion thrown about at my recent (and somewhat unknown) promotion (you can read the post and comments here). I tried to answer the concerns directly there but I know a lot of folks won't view responses nearly as much as a whole thread, so I'll take this time to simply answer two questions; 1. Who am I? 2. Why me? Who am I? Then So, roughly... it's been a long time, it would be 2 years now? Late 2014 I was promoted to Moderator by Firespirit44, and before then I had been (Man, trying to think of myself pre-staff is so awkward, was I really that edgy?) relatively "unknown". I worked as an ET Builder (with literally 0 work ethic) and then got promoted to GM, where I... did... something. For a while. I think I made some event structures, some command block stuff, and a lot of voxel work - not a lot of modreqs, and kind of went inactive towards the end of my time as a moderator, preferring to remain off duty and roleplay rather than actually do work. The team lead at the time didn't seem to mind but it kind of bugged me, but - at the time - I really enjoyed the power trip of being a moderator and didn't want to give it up. I'll just be open and honest about that - no secrets here! At that time I was technically in my computer science degree but I had no drive or passion for it, floating through with literally 0 interest in the program and about to switch majors. I had never touched Java, had failed a semester of school, and decided - ah fuck it, what do I have to lose? I badgered Kowaman for a test plugin schematic so I could apply to Sporadic, who was always this cool developer who was always mysterious and non-chalant (it seemed) but did a ton of work - I was terrified to approach him, so I got the test plugin from Kowaman and coded it so that when I contacted Sporadic I'd be able to code something and join the team. When sporadic & Telanir left I was kind of worried and Kowaman kind of went on the fritz from having to do the 1.8 update all on how own (I did NOT and still do not envy him, it took Forge like a year to update - LotC was no small feat for one developer) I eventually got Kowaman to give me a full trial and add me as a coder. So what did I do as a coder? I did what all coders do! I code a magic plugin! I spent months on this "magic plugin", so eager to get it out (making staves with gems and staves, enchanting them with a rune forge! Making awesome magic spells to shoot and fling!). I had literally almost no idea what I was doing, I pretty much coded the most spaghetti code you could, and I kept adding more, and more, and more, and more features to it until eventually I, being the novice coder I was, buckled under the weight of it all and realized my dream required more time than I could put into it, and I got to a point that I hated every line I coded - I saw what I made that I had coded a month before and, now having learned more, realized that so much novice mistakes were made that fixing them would take just as much time as I put in. I gave up. And then, in a teamspeak channel as I was talking to Kowaman after the 1.8 update he dropped a bomb without any form of prelude: He had left. No, not was leaving. As in he suddenly after a long brief of silence said "Aaand enter. Alright Kalen, you're the dev team lead now." "...What?" "Ya, you're the dev team lead. I quit." "Kowaman no. Kowa no, you know I can't do this." "Too late!" I value Kowaman as a friend, but this obviously put me in a pretty shitty spot. This was around when Telanir came into the picture, and he came back at a little of mine, Kowaman, and Tythus' request when I was really needed some help - but it didn't change the position I was in, lead dev with little experience. The rest of the time really goes by in a flash, I spent pretty much months working through the smallest bugs which I didn't have the skill to understand, such as NPCs not turning their heads when they looked at you, that one alone took a few weeks of frustration. The stress rapidly built up under my own, personal expectations and pitched me rapidly into a place of being... well, an ass. Combined with my jaded personality from being a moderator (It really takes it all out of you) and the stress I became, inside of staff chats, an arrogant, power-demanding individual who often talked behind peoples backs. Man, what a way to open right? "Hey guys, I'm 501warhead and I'm a pretty bad dude!" - however, this is an introspective topic that I've had a few months to reflect on and decided I'd share that reflection with you. I'm happy to be open about these things as I feel like it will help understand me a bit better. So, around when 5.0 came out things weren't looking great. I was totally burnt out, Kowaman had come back and I had whipped him into helping me asked him to help me out as I was totally burned out. I didn't want to give up lead dev but decided to do the 1.9 update (the timelines are a little hazy, this happened sooner or later but im not sure if kowa was actually around for this). So, a little bit about me - I'm a bit of a "Minecraft Purist". That is to say, I love this game! I'm really passionate about minecraft, enjoy building, enjoy picking apart it's code, love playing both vanilla and mods. So when I saw the changes to combat, I was excited! I was really happy about the changes because I loved seeing new things from Mojang and as soon as I saw the community reaction... I got upset. I was mad at the community, mad at the players - why don't you enjoy minecraft? They're going to make it better probably, it's unreasonable to not update (and this is true, but my response was, as ill explain, uncalled for). So, in one of the worst decisions I've ever made - I decided, in my head, that I was right and everyone else was wrong. I brute forced the update, cranked it out under high stress, never wrote patchnotes because my blood pressure rose each time I opened the forums. LotC was not healthy for me. I had fought the community, fought the very players of the game we loved - I was wrong and deep inside I knew it, but I didn't want to admit it. Eventually however as 5.0 approached it became all too much - I stepped down from the position and apologized, even if it was semi-tongue and cheek riddled with sarcasm (can be found here) and went to focus on... well the rest of my life. I started my semester strong, started classes I was excited for, got a job, and still balanced fun (Played and still kind of do play the fuck out of World of Warcraft, no I will not link my battle.net because im afraid of you hardcore players but I think I did pretty well getting to ilvl 876 and clearing heroic) with life. Now As I progressed in my courses I got a burning desire to test out some of the advanced stuff I learned during my major, to stretch my legs a bit. I had been wanting to do a big overhaul on our back end data storage for sometime (it is a mess) to speed up searches and to make persona data more secure and I contacted Kowaman at the end of September to help out. Pretty much from the start I acknowledged I wasn't a great lead dev and made sure to stay away from balance related topics, while I had been against racial Player Vs Player benefits from being revoked and pro-1.9 PvP I stepped down and let the developers develop, I was perfectly alright and even supported their decisions - I had come to grips with an important concept which has driven me to applying and now obtaining the administrator rank; Put the community first, your own ideals come second. This isn't to say that I have literally no ideas which I won't compromise on, but the most important thing that I realized was best for the community was doing what was in the communities interest, not my own. That often times how the community perceives something is a big deal. (Puts me in a hard spot saying this! What if you guys don't want me? But... kind of almost breaking my own rule, I want to stick it out to let you guys decide if I work for you or not.) This realization kind of put me in a place that I felt good about my ideas, that the big picture was that everyone should be happy and we shouldn't shrug off opinions just because they might not agree with our own ideals. Anyway, I've been basically working in the background for several months working on a few large plugins and systems hopefully soon to be a reality and I hope you'll enjoy them, but I obviously come somewhat out of the blue. I'm very vocal inside of private chats but other than that I was relatively unknown that I was even around before the announcement (Even to the moderators, sorry guys :(. I'm bad at using Skype, <3 discord) but I'm upping the ante here soon with my communication and you should see me all over the place in the coming weeks, hopefully saying some things most of you are excited to hear! Why me? So, while I cannot speak for those who chose me I will try to explain a little bit about what was going on and what happened. So, while I had been back I was attending several meetings and focusing on a lot of points for the future - As we talked about our direction I spoke in length about the fact that what the community wants is important, spoke about the state of several failing systems on the server, and am advocating for clearer plugins and less silence. Outside of that I have been also pushing several large reforms which should be coming soon - often times even spending all nights arguing with the administration for a better server! Now, am I right? Are my ideals the correct ideals for the server? Only time, and you, will tell - but I hope after all of this you have a bit more of an idea about who I was and who I am. Ask me whatever you want! I'm an open book, it's late so I might have to answer some questions tomorrow but I'm sure there are many. I'll be as open as I can be without spoiling upcoming plans, I still do feel like surprises are better than spoilers!

Oh! I didn't code that, that's actually @Kowaman's work, and it was so buggy to hell - you could get stuck in the modes, items could be duped, you could just get stuck with perm slowness! A lot of really bad bugs in code which, and Kowaman will probably acknowledge, was pretty bad because he coded it early in his career for thee various antagonists. I honestly also just forgot about it! It's harrd keeping track of everything on the server, we have ~20 custom plugins and ~30 stock!

To the leaving post comment (I'd quote you but forums are acting funky!) Yes, I left mainly due to school and due to lack to being able to maintain lead developer due to my issues - I returned and put in work as a Dev without really announcing it, but i've been back for a little while I'm sorry you feel that way but it is warrented, I acknowledge. That's rather rude - I do not personally attack you even though we don't see eye to eye. As far as my work - I was an inactive moderator because I lost the motivation to continue, as most do. It has a way of bleeding you dry, and not everyone is the same - I found my calling was code, which I have been more productive on for longer. I would apologize for these - this does sound bad - but I am afraid I actually do not know what you refer to? I'm being open here, I hope, but I have never done the above to spite anyone. Plugins often just weren't finished, and perhaps you are talking about one of those? We throw small features on for testing but throwing them onto the live would likely cause horrendous crashes and would detract from the experience of playing on lotc as a whole. If you elaborated I would be happy to answer you! Perhaps I forgot my past antics, and I would be remiss if I could not answer for them. Thank you all for your feedback, negative or positive! I'm replying to the negative ones here so that I hope that I am not seeming like I am ignoring concerns, I'm here to be an open book and will happily answer what questions you have!

At the time I most certainly did not believe it to be a lie, but times and technology change and some people are simply more clever than I am. This was a mistake on my part and I dutifully apologize for the deception and have every intention to make certain such deception does not occur again. Thank you, and the "Why." name was from a period in time in my life where I blamed myself for a lot of problems and entered into a deep stupor that was hard to climb out of cynicism, it was a dark time and it has now passed - I do not feel comfortable using that handle any longer. You have very good points! In truth, I did not wish to try to take this position until recently. As far as merit goes - I have done virtually nothing in the public eye to relieve my stigma until this point and kept quiet about the entire ordeal, which as you've pointed out is rather negative of me. Between school, work, and life however I spent nearly all of my free time coding and developing on the back end - a lot of sleepless nights, but I enjoyed the work. This doesn't help with the public perception, but I'd argue that it's a little early to judge - I'd urge you to give me another chance if you can find it within you, and if not I absolutely acknowledge why you do not like me but hope that with time I can - as you stated - do real work for players and prove capable of the job.

We've had our differences in the past but things have changed a lot with me - I rubbed a lot of people the wrong way before but I would like to think I've grown a bit since then, but only time will prove if that is true! I hope you'll think so after a while.

I've actually been around for a few months now, I've mainly focused on the back-end stuff and working with staff - not talking much publically except lurking around in OOC, which if I'm on you're sure to find me in chatting it up!

I look forward to working with you all!