So I haven't really responded much over the months to people requesting me to come back -- What I personally have to say might not appear popular to others. I'm just going to throw it out there, though.
Theoretically, if I were tasked with leading this community, I'd start at the core foundation of the staff team. I'd absolutely revitalize the staff team, change many mechanics and workings of the staff team, and build an extremely solid administration. I'm talking a staff team made out of steel - one that I'm proud to both lead and stand behind.
Again, I must warn you: Some of these things might sound crazy...but here goes:
Every new person hired, at every level, gets to talk to me. I don't mean that in a scary way - no, talking to me (or whoever is the leader) shouldn't be a scary thing. Anyhow, they'd personally be screened by me. Yes, I'm a firm believer in handpicking the cream of the crop hirees. I don't usually like to settle for less, so I'm aiming to have the type of staff team that other communities look up to. "Wow, look at so-and-so making a new server. I really hope their staff team is as top-notch as MCSG".
I'm absolutely serious. Top notch-staff team, handpicked. Should the need arise, trusted, competent administrators would also be granted the ability to screen hirees.
Communication and integration is next. If a staff member needs to talk to a dev, admin, or owner, then it should be possible. Absolutely. From what I've heard, it’s often hard for staff members to talk to admins/owner currently, and perhaps that's because the upper level staff don't want to constantly be bothered by useless messages. When you have a top-notch staff team like mentioned above, that sort of thing doesn't happen anyways. So again -- easy and efficient/hassle-free communicative abilities from lower level-staff to even the highest levels.
Key point: QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. I'd much rather have 50 fantastic moderators than 200 pure moderators. If a large portion of those 200 moderators don't do their duty well, and fail to work efficiently...what's the point of having them. 50 top-notch moderators will get the job done, and please the community while doing so.
I've heard from current staff that meetings are still somewhat dreadful - They take a while and there are STILL issues with timing. That needs to change. Meetings need to be 30 mins tops. That's it. Unless there is some monumental situation at hand, (leafygreentea came back and killed the entire sr. staff team) then really, 30 mins tops.
There's plenty more I've thought about regarding the staff, but those are just some more immediate and frontal thoughts/changes.
Moving On.
So this is a tricky subject, and potentially could get some people mad at me. But hey, that's going to happen when you're promoting some amount of change to the status quo. Anyhow, the development team would need to get revamped.
Like I said, this is tricky. Here's why: I don't have a full, working knowledge of the current financial operation of the server. (I have a rough idea, but its outdated and was at best a superficial understanding) I don't know exactly how money flows in and out, and what is allocated to what. Also, this is in no way bashing the current development team.
So, here's a couple things: Get a few, STRONG developers. Ava is a pretty cool gal. I've known her for a bit, met her IRL a couple times - she's a smart person who's off to do great things after college. That's for sure. But she's also not able to handle development single-handedly. Think of it like this: Let's say you have a soldier in your army. He's the best soldier you've ever trained. He's amazing. That doesn't mean you can send him out on his own to take out entire squadrons of the other army. It just doesn't work like that.
Same idea here - Ava can't just do everything. There needs to be, in my opinion, three developers that can get the job done, fully. This might be the most difficult task.
Somewhat related to development -- I'm going to perhaps be "politically incorrect" as this may appear as pure bashing of the sever (it's not, I'm purely giving my thoughts on things for the better of the server). The gamemodes. All of this stuff that came with the AntVenom merge. Stop. There are so many gamemodes that have extremely small, sometimes zero playerbase. Zero. That's not acceptable. Gamemodes shouldn't always be released just because someone else has it. There are exceptions to this - Having a creative and survival server are fine. Even other popular things are fine. It's more of "When has the last time anyone can remember playing something like Survival Bingo to the degree and extent that SG has been played"? I'm checking right now, and there's actually zero people on both the US and EU network. If I wanted to, I literally could play multiple gamemodes because no one else is playing them. Perfect what already is popular, then draft ideas for new gamemodes. The thing is, when a new gamemode is going to be released, it needs to be great from the beginning. A top-notch product needs to be made. SG was hands-down the single greatest gamemode innovation in Minecraft, and UHC is a close second now. Other communities made pretty good SG servers, and have hundreds of people playing on them. There must be a reason why very little play the UHC here.
Badlion has UHC. They just do. Everyone knows it - Mineplex staff know it, Hive staff know it. It's just a matter of fact. Don't attempt to outdo them in UHC...it just wont happen. Instead, let's get started in innovating the next big gamemode. That's what needs to happen.
That largely ties in with forging a stronger dev team, however part of this is also a shot called, or at least should be called in my opinion, by the administrative staff.
I recently heard AU was shut down. There is only one reason for this: The AU servers were simply not profitable. That shouldn't be the case -- the system should work that it's proportional to the AU playerbase. Again, I don't know the absolute specifics like numbers, and I understand AU hosting is much more expensive, but still, it was a thing many years ago, and shouldn't be going away. That's backwards progress. Not good. Should be forward progress.
I briefly read the announcement regarding AU server shutdown. I'm not at all denying that the quality to value ratio was off, but it was more often that not like that in the history of MCSG. For as long as I can remember as staff, AU has always been spotty compared to US and EU in terms of quality to value ratio. Other servers have AU, let's have AU too. Even if it's a much smaller amount of server hosting compared to US or EU, there still needs to be AU if there already was multiple years ago.
More serverwide community events. I'm talking livestreams, I'm talking tournaments. That sort of thing. Chad used to livestream back in 2012. It was awesome. Everyone in the TS back then would always get so excited when a Chad stream was coming up. It was great fun, and something everyone could enjoy. I'd certainly want to have fun livestreaming with the community.
But why stop there. Let's get some real YouTubers and Twitch streamers to realize this is the place to be when it comes to playing SG. Why not?
Anyhow, I'd probably look into reworking the donation system and introduce different in-game properties that would encourage donating. Not pay-to-win or something like that. That's lame. I'm a competitive gamer, so I know these things first hand just like everyone else.
Look at CS:GO. It's not pay-to-win, yet valve rakes in so much profit off of skins and cases. Players love the skin system. Even the operation system too. Let's look at those sorts of avenues for the server, to ensure the server is getting the money it needs to maintain AND grow.
I'd also promote the push for more competitive, organized play. Again, tournaments. Not just any tournament - Tournaments with prizes to be desired. Livestream the tournaments. Get thousands of people watching on twitch. Do it.
Full communication needs to be made between staff and players. Introducing the Dev Changelog was a great idea. Continue on that sort of path.
There are plenty of decisions made that never made sense to me. Some may disagree with me on this, but for the longest time I've always wanted to push harder bans. I wanted to do away with all of the 1 day for this, 3 day for this, 5 day for this, 7 day for this, permaban for this nonsense. You hack once, now it's time for a break. Second time, you're gone. That's it.
There's often too many uproars over bans either being unjust/unfair, or invalid.
This goes back to top-notch staff team. The staff that deal with ban disputes need to be the best hacker-spotters ever. I can look at a player, and just tell be the way he moves if he's likely a hacker. Once I actually see the portion of the video where he/she is supposedly hacking, its either they were or they weren't. I've played this game too long to not be able to spot hacks. Aeruner was an old admin, and he and I used to be some of the only sr staff that could actually reliably spot better sprint mod when that used to be banned.
Speaking of catching hackers, let’s get work started on making an absolutely phenomenal anti-cheat system. Strong, full-fledged devteam = better work production towards great anti-cheat. Remember, anti-cheat systems don’t care who they ban. They won’t hesitate to ban someone that is their friend, because they don’t have friends. They don’t ban out of anger or spite. They ban because they are programmed to under a specific, hardened set of parameters.
The forums are flooded with posts about “this server is dying” or “what happened to mcsg???”.
Honestly, yes some of this posts are not very helpful and are just angry people sharing their anger. But there is a reason why we see so many of these posts. A reason exists.
There are several other significant changes that I would bring about, but many of them escape my train of thought for now. I often put on the “I’m SixZoSeven, so let me just post witty or neat things that gets lots of likes from people.” Seriously, when I was staff I would very rarely directly speak out against other staff members. If someone said something I completely disagreed with in a meeting, I would often just stay out of the conversation or vaguely respond taking a neutral stance. That was my fault – I shouldn’t have been so afraid. As everyone can see by this post, I’m very clearly not afraid of people I used to work with disagreeing with me. It’s a good thing to have them disagree – at least it means they’re reading what I’m typing.
If I was older and wiser back when I was staff, I’d have done everything in my power to make MCSG the best server it could be.
Again, could write about more things…but many other ideas escape my current train of thought.
I completely understand how arrogant this sounds...but take a look at what I have in my signature. There's a reason I have those awards, voted by the community. And to think that was back when I was younger and didn't actually fully incorporate my personal potential for this community.
He was a good admin!
