What's the matter developers?

[MoLoToV]

The point in the original post was that get more/better developers and lower the standards as Badlion has better plugins and I would suppose lower standards.

The plugin was created by the owners I believe, so the standard had nothing to do with it. Also, I don't believe there are hundreds of applications on developers unlike for the moderators.

 

[Ceroria]

I'm a rather frequent visitor to Badlion, and let me tell you, they do not "stop" KillAura. It is just as effective as it would be on MCG. Plus, I know badlion actually has a major problem with players using autoclickers that even extends to their staff team. I myself haven't noticed any decline in our anti-cheat but I don't speak for everyone, so..

Regarding the "devs aren't doing anything," that isn't true. First off, they are working their butts off to fix all of the bugs with our whole entire network so that the new leaderboard update will work smoothly and track all of the specific statistics that we are adding, some of which require serious effort due to the fact that these are some things that have rarely been attempted to be tracked in Minecraft before.

Yes, we may benefit from adding more developers, but it isn't that simple. Making sure somebody is qualified and trustworthy enough to hold such a rank is more than just looking at a couple of feats a certain person had done.

 

[Pixelatorx2]

First post in a while

I'm a developer, and trust me, it is ridiculously difficult to create anti-cheat plugin. I'm going to quote something from Harry Potter, which I think is a pretty good relation to this

“The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible. Your defenses, must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo." - S. Snape

Imagine he is talking about a hacked client. What is the point of hacks? To get past the defences and, well, hack. They are constantly changing and its really difficult to block everything. There is no sure-fire way to stop hacking. Its not as simple as "oh make something to look at their screen and check if they are hacking". Not possible.

Also, I don't believe there are hundreds of applications on developers unlike for the moderators.

This is true. Good developers enough to work for, as you stated above, one of the largest minecraft networks around are VERY difficult to find. They aren't gonna hire your run-of-the mill person who knows a little about it. Go big or go home. Also, if they were going to hire someone to create an anti-cheat plugin they have to be extremely good at what they do. It has to be as close as possible to perfection, otherwise we have picky people complaining.

 

[Col_StaR]

As the Admin who is perhaps most embedded with the Developers, I can assure you that their chats are basically nonstop with Dev work. And based on what Chad tells me about their current projects, the Developers are probably the most busy they have been since before the V2 update.

I'm going to be blunt here:
Just because the Developers aren't doing what you want, does not mean that they are not working/short staffed/bad.
We have to assign priorities to everything, and what is high on the community-want list may not be high on the priority list.

A lot of people may want a more advanced anti-cheat system and complain when they don't get it, but you know what would be even worse to have? Nonfunctioning servers. Wasted investments. Bugs, glitches, and general lack of functionality in games. These are the things that the players don't see or think about, but the Devs do nearly every day.

For the record, that is what the entire Dev team is working to address. Reliability issues post-V2 update have been addressed for the last few weeks, and that includes a lot of intensive research into, "why does this not work?". People noticing a lot of crashing and servers being down? That issue, which should obviously take a higher priority than an anti-cheat program- should be addressed soon.

I have a friend who is willing to join the dev team, it's just that he doesn't get payed, but he is a good developer, coded a whole server for the clan I'm in.

Edit: The point I was trying to make is how Badlion's devs can code better anticheats than one of the biggest communities on Minecraft, and that we need to get better/more devs. Don't go around telling me to code better, the point wasn't to get me in the developer team with this thread.

You can't deny this either, look at the amount of people agreeing.

If your friend is willing to join the Dev team, I encourage him to apply. The more Devs the better, something I don't think anyone will disagree with. However, he still needs to meet our requirements and standards, as those are just not negotiable.

In regards to the Badlion situation, I've stated this before and I will say this again: it is a lot easier for smaller communities to make changes than larger communities. Badlion is 1/5th the size of our community based on current player counts (and approximately 1/20th of our total population size), is only hosted in one location, and hosts only two or three gametypes. Their network is much simpler than ours, and the the advantage of a smaller community is a greater focus and flexibility. They don't have to worry about server failures on four regions around the world, often for four different reasons. They don't have to worry about data transfer issues across continents for a centralized region. They don't have to set up a bunch of new gametypes across multiple regions, taking into account the regional differences in ISPs and architecture. And things don't break as often as they do when you only have a handful of servers, not 200+ at any point in time around the world.

Boy, I would love to have the advantages of a small community for Development. But the reality is that we are not a small community, so we have a different set of advantages and disadvantages. We have to work with what we can do, not what we wish we had.

Honestly, I think the people who get the short end of the stick here are the Devs. They're putting in a ton of work to keep the place running on a technical level, doing difficult work that only they are skilled enough to understand and fix, and they get bashed on by people who are ignorant of what they do. But frankly, regardless of what people say or believe about them or their current work, I will stand by them.
Because without them, we would be one network crash away from not existing anymore.

 

[Ceroria]

To add on to my previous comment, you mentioned how the Hive had plenty of better gamemodes and was better in that sense, however you conveniently left out the fact that the Hive's Anti-Cheat from what I've experienced is nowhere near competitive to ours, or Badlions for that matter. I've played a lot of Splegg in my day and flyhackers are somewhat frequent however I've rarely encountered a flyhacker being kicked by the Hive Anti-Cheat. Also, for PvP's sake they lack some features/abilities to make the PvP game run as smoothly as it does on many other servers.

Not necessarily bashing the Hive, I fact I find it very enjoyable to play on, but on the basis of Anti-Cheat I believe we won the upper hand. We also have a larger and seemingly more dedicated Dev team.

 

[Ava]

I had a response prepared for this, but Col_StaR's post nailed what I was going to say perfectly. Well played.

 

[Col_StaR]

I had a response prepared for this, but Col_StaR's post nailed what I was going to say perfectly. Well played.

You have your job, I have mine.

Now, back to work!

 

[Electrix]

Thanks for adressing this post!

 

[XxBenchWarmerxX]

Why should I? I have no problem with the current NCP.

then why should you have a problem with people complaining about the anti cheat

???

 

[Sarchikani]

I wonder what the devs have been doing? Maybe working on the leaderboard reset promised a month ago. Or maybe they are making something brand new, another gamemode without fixing the problems that already exist on the servers. I really do wonder what these "dedicated" developers do each day when it comes to these servers.

 

[Trilexium]

I find that a majority of people who complain about the work that the development team do are ignorant of what they do in the first place, and adopt a rather pessimistic view on the issue; instead of taking into account the positives (eg, this network being up in the first place) they choose to focus only on the negatives.
As a *somewhat* experienced Java developer myself, I know the struggle that developers face when trying to make something like an anti-cheat plugin. Due to the myriad of available clients which more often than not use different ways of performing different *illegitimate* actions and the fact that they are constantly being updated with workarounds to anti-cheat configurations makes producing a perfect anti-cheat impossible. You also need to make sure that the system doesn't produce false positives- incorrectly punishing players who are not using hacked clients/unfair modifications. Then you need to make sure it'll be compatible with any custom plugins.. the list goes on.

You also need to keep in mind that the anti-cheat is not that major of an issue compared to other things, like making sure the servers don't crash or encounter errors. V2 has had its nightmares from the development team's point of view, and what we're experiencing now is the calm after the storm. Also, making threads and posts like this that don't really suggest or identify anything that the developers can improve on doesn't really help here- it's the equivalent of flailing your arms about in the middle of a cyclone (a rather random example, but you get the idea; you're not contributing anything to resolving the issue).

I wonder what the devs have been doing? Maybe working on the leaderboard reset promised a month ago. Or maybe they are making something brand new, another gamemode without fixing the problems that already exist on the servers. I really do wonder what these "dedicated" developers do each day when it comes to these servers.

Refer to Col's post, a few comments up from this one.

 

[Wyz]

As the Admin who is perhaps most embedded with the Developers, I can assure you that their chats are basically nonstop with Dev work. And based on what Chad tells me about their current projects, the Developers are probably the most busy they have been since before the V2 update.

I'm going to be blunt here:
Just because the Developers aren't doing what you want, does not mean that they are not working/short staffed/bad.
We have to assign priorities to everything, and what is high on the community-want list may not be high on the priority list.

A lot of people may want a more advanced anti-cheat system and complain when they don't get it, but you know what would be even worse to have? Nonfunctioning servers. Wasted investments. Bugs, glitches, and general lack of functionality in games. These are the things that the players don't see or think about, but the Devs do nearly every day.

For the record, that is what the entire Dev team is working to address. Reliability issues post-V2 update have been addressed for the last few weeks, and that includes a lot of intensive research into, "why does this not work?". People noticing a lot of crashing and servers being down? That issue, which should obviously take a higher priority than an anti-cheat program- should be addressed soon.


If your friend is willing to join the Dev team, I encourage him to apply. The more Devs the better, something I don't think anyone will disagree with. However, he still needs to meet our requirements and standards, as those are just not negotiable.

In regards to the Badlion situation, I've stated this before and I will say this again: it is a lot easier for smaller communities to make changes than larger communities. Badlion is 1/5th the size of our community based on current player counts (and approximately 1/20th of our total population size), is only hosted in one location, and hosts only two or three gametypes. Their network is much simpler than ours, and the the advantage of a smaller community is a greater focus and flexibility. They don't have to worry about server failures on four regions around the world, often for four different reasons. They don't have to worry about data transfer issues across continents for a centralized region. They don't have to set up a bunch of new gametypes across multiple regions, taking into account the regional differences in ISPs and architecture. And things don't break as often as they do when you only have a handful of servers, not 200+ at any point in time around the world.

Boy, I would love to have the advantages of a small community for Development. But the reality is that we are not a small community, so we have a different set of advantages and disadvantages. We have to work with what we can do, not what we wish we had.

Honestly, I think the people who get the short end of the stick here are the Devs. They're putting in a ton of work to keep the place running on a technical level, doing difficult work that only they are skilled enough to understand and fix, and they get bashed on by people who are ignorant of what they do. But frankly, regardless of what people say or believe about them or their current work, I will stand by them.
Because without them, we would be one network crash away from not existing anymore.

Thanks for clearing this up, you don't know how frustrating it is to play daily trying to rack up some wins, while there are fly- and speed hackers catching up to you or even jumping from 10 blocks on you :/ I think only the people who play this game competitively understand my frustration and where I'm coming from (see the first page replies)

I thought the XAC anticheat would've been better than the old one, but I can't run away from hackers if they run faster than me.

Is the plugin unfinished, and if it is, how long do we have to wait for it to be fully finished?
I do get though, good developers are hard to find, and if they're not applying, makes it even harder. But maybe you should go on servers looking for good developers and hiring them? Maybe giving them a better deal than the server they're working for?

I don' know but the anticheat needs to be fixed ASAP