Sporadic

Sup LotC,

Good job assholes you've started another World War. From the tech side of things this is a big challenge and reflects a lot of the stuff we've been working on for months. All the removed commands, log pits, wool pits, animals glitching out, angry pings from Pun, Admins wtf'ing and "communication issues" have all been endured to get us ready for those legendary Big Events that make LotC so epic.

Fingers Crossed?

Our modest goal is to keep TPS at or above 10.0, aka the "barely playable" level. But even this might be hard. Minecraft was never meant for big players counts clustering together as happens during wars. In technical terms our bottleneck is incoming position packets which scales in O(n^2) for players grouped. In normal language: The more concentrated the players, the worse the tps (props to Aethgorond for not concentrating any players inside their nation it really helped). We really hope the lag spikes can be kept at minimum. We will work on monitoring the server throughout the battle events and see if we can achieve this goal. So here's hoping for a war that lasts a long time.

Gross Hack Incorporated:
Our last "optimization" drops non-essential incoming movement and look packets when TPS drops below 15. In normal language, movement becomes more granular. Now for your own toon you won't notice this but you WILL notice this on other people's movement.
Because this only kicks in at the feature will be indistinguishable from "normal" lag (which will causes movement to be jittery anyway). Mainly it prevents 10 TPS from turning into 5 TPS. However, there's some annoying side-effects I've tried to, but may not have managed to, iron out. For example jumping causes random damage (now fixed... hopefully). If you notice anything unusual about movement of yourself or others that has only started happening recently, please fill out a bug report.
But hey good news: Animals can now keep their AI until the player count reaches 160 150 (rip). Let's hope we can make that change lasting. No promises.

Status of 1.14:
Mojang has recently released 1.14.1 but is already committed to also releasing a 1.14.2. We will not update any sooner than 4 weeks after Spigot and Paper released their 1.14.2 versions and declared these to be stable releases (current recommendations are strongly against updating).
Luckily Kowaman/Llir has volunteered to take charge on updating plugins on our side of things. It seems it's going to be A LOT easier than updating 1.13 (that was not a good time pls PM Tofuus your thanks) so I think he will be able to wrap it up very quickly. Becuase the 1.14 API is already out, there is nothing preventing anybody from starting the update process. Unfortunately, the 3rd party plugins we use may or may not update within a reasonable timespan, as many plugin authors may have gone inactive in the past year.
Estimated Timescale: Fuck if I know.

How to contact the Techs:
/treq will be disabled soon. Other teams find it a reliable way to quickly handle tickets but those teams consist of way more players. We have only 4 of which 2 are encased in permafrost. It's way too few people to make the ticketing system work as a reliable communication channel with our team. Please perform all support queries through the Forum.

Also: If the Mod team says they can't do something we won't do it for you either. Permissions are granted in such a way that mods can handle all acceptable player requests that aren't the direct result of bugs/glitches. Techs are not Mod++.
 

Recent Crashes and Rollbacks:
The server has crashed twice in the last week. Once was due to our chat plugin going belly-up (Luckily we're well aware of the unstable disaster our chat plugin has become so we've already set steps to fix it up real good. Please read below. It's very important.) The other was due to a faulty worldedit command by an Apologetic Mod whose privacy I will protect. When Tofuus comes back he's going to give the mods a firm tongue-lashing about responsible WorldEdit usage but he's Taiwanese and weighs like 110lbs which won't frighten anybody.

These crashes caused rollbacks which caused people's personas to copy over. If you have any RP items lost due to either rollback, please reply to this thread. Provide the numerical ID of BOTH the personas involved (the overriding one and the overridden one), the date it happened and what identifiable items you have lost. If the rollback caused you to GAIN items... you probably aren't going to tell me, so whatever.

Auth Issues:
If you still have an unrecognized /auth on your account it'd be great if you could reply to this thread with your Minecraft Name and proof of ownership. Auth can be reset by any Admin. If weeks later you still haven't contacted us about getting your auth fixed we will assume you to be a hacker trying to steal the account.

Chat System Upgrade:

NOT IMPLEMENTED YET. FOR FEEDBACK PURPOSES ONLY
This is the most important update note so please READ and READ THOROUGHLY. It's become necessary for us to hack into RPEngine in order to increase its resilience and accommodate our growing server load, opening up the possibility for greater cross-server integration. In normal language: The code sucks and needs replacing. The result is sweeping changes to the RPEngine functionality you're all used to. In some aspects, the transition will be seamless, but in others there will be growing pains to inconvenience ya'll.

Now this won't roll out before the weekend, which is unfortunate because I know of at least 1 chat exploit that can crash the server at a crucial time. So if it goes down at a crucial time there's probably a banned alt being a cunt. But the replacement has been scheduled for somewhere in the next two weeks. The most important things to keep in mind are:

• There will likely be a lot of bugs on release. It's a big system and with big changes come big issues.
• The channel referencing system has been changed from commands to hashtag. You will no longer be able to use /ooc and /ooc [message]. Instead, use #ooc and #ooc [message]. Ditto for other channels.
• Most of the previous chat-related commands have been consolidated into the /chat command. Please look there before reporting and "missing" functionality. Also read onward to find explanations on anything that has been removed.
• Always report any missing (talk) permissions in chat with your MCName and what channel you were using, and what error message you are getting

Functionality removed:

• The [Trade] channel has been removed due to the excess of OOC and low-effort trade being conducted.
• Stop Move Ping (left click player to ping them) was removed due to an excess of abuse opportunities.
• Continuity will no longer work on commands such as /edit info. Instead, use /edit moreinfo to add description to an item that already has SOME lore. It will allow up to 1000 characters in length now.
• PMs have been offloaded to the proxy node. Cross-server PMing is possible but PMs do not respect focus mode (/chat focus) filtering, and no filter exists for it. Also, focusing on a PM channel is not possible as before, but you must use /t and /r each time. Sorry.
• Your buddylist has been cleared. If this annoys you just do what I did and not have any friends.
• You should be able to use the OOC channels from the Lobby servers and hear people on other servers.
• You can no longer uniformize emote colours. Get used to me *smirking defiantly* in hot pink.

Additions:

• Party chat is back but has also been delegated to proxy so we can have cross-server messaging and I don't waste any time. As a result /party status won't function. Please become familiar with the new party chat system before making reports (NB: to start a party you must join a party with yourself as the target player).
• /countdown and /emote were rewritten by Textarea (our new coder) and are now part of the lEver command suite. Functionality might change slightly. Report any bugs you encounter.
• - You can now mention teams in-game with the use of @mod @dev @story @community. Mentions will affect everyone that joined the corresponding staff channel for the team type. I always have my mentions off though so don't even bother.
• - Friends can now be contacted throughout our entire "network" (basically just main and the lobby). Great for pming people that got AFK kicked. Use /friend to navigate your way through the new system.
• - Text formatting for ^bold^ and /italic/ in-game chat is now available to all players. Use it wisely. Emote colours are still a VIP-only feature.
• - You can now focus chat to only show messages that Mention you or a team you're in.

NOTE THAT THE NOTES ON THE CHAT PLUGIN IS JUST A HEADSUP. IT DISCUSSES A CHANGELOG THAT HAS NOT BEEN IMPLEMENTED INTO THE GAME YET.
It's not only there for your information but also for you to give feedback and ask questions. If there's anything you are worried or concerned about, you can reply here. If you have questions about feature parity or feature loss, post them here. If you are interested in testing and writing a guide on the new system, post here. We want to provide the best chat experience possible.

That was my presentation thanks for listening