General Server Improvments & Suggestions

[xDrews]

Time for another Post, has been a while since the last one!

 

First of all, I want to thank the whole Network team for working on Assassins Craft! A lot of things have been fixed and a lot of new cool things like Glaskerville and Items got added, which i really appreciate.

 

Same as last time, this post should be meant as a positive critique and I'm writing it because I care about the server and don’t want it to die or decrease even more.

 

I will Cut this post into several parts, in which I talk about the server in general and then about some specific game modes.

Things affecting the server in General
 

1. Playercount

 

As we all know, since some years now the player count on network has decreased a lot, this perhaps affected by the popularity of Minecraft itself or also the server. There are number of possible ways with which we could try to bring back more players to the server, which i will list below:

 

• Advertising the server

 

You could advertise the server by maybe partnering up with for example a discord of some sort so you advertise their discord and they advertise Network.
Also you could try to bring content creators to the server, like it happened some years ago with Youtubers like Inachete and Hiipo, which got a lot of views and brought a part of their community onto the server.

Another way of advertising it is also social media platforms, for example on reddit or twitter where you can advertise the server and get new players interested in it.
 

• Downgrading to 1.8

 

1.8 is much more stable on both servers and computers and also has a better combat system than the current 1.15. A lot of players also still play on 1.8 for that reason and a lot of servers support that version too. The downgrade doesn’t need to be on the whole server, so modes like pure survival can keep getting updates like the new nether update. The server hub should be 1.8 to 1.16 and there you need to get either 1.8 for pvp modes or 1.16 for survival/creative gamemodes, as it was some time ago with 1.12/1.10/1.8.

 

2. Frequent events/updates

 

Instead of focusing on just one gamemode, make updates for the most played ones more often, they don't need to be big, it can be just small additions that will make players want to play and check out the update.

Also why not make community events, where players compete or have to do something for a small prize (like ingame money)?

 

3. Fixing bugs/plugins

 

There are still some bugs that make the game a bit annoying and that are quite easy to fix for someone with a bit of knowledge about the plugins. 

Also I made the suggestion for a Skin plugin for cracked accounts some time ago (its called SkinsRestorer i think), why not add this? It's updated to the newest version and would give players more personality unlike now where all cracked players have to use the default steve skin.

 

Things regarding Assassins Craft

 

1. Gameplay

 

Since the last post I’ve made a lot of bugs got fixed and some new stuff got added, but still there are some annoying things like bugs or unbalanced items, which can make the game a bit annoying or unfair.

 

Another thing is the skill gap between players that play actively and have good gear and newcomers that are not very familiar with the server and usually get killfarmed by better players. In my opinion it is too easy to farm gold and get to a high level in a short time.

To make that skill gap smaller following things could be done:
 

• Reset

 

Resetting the entire Assassins Craft mode for every player would bring all players down to the same level, so new players also have a chance to fight against these or to go loot chests without the fear of getting followed or directly killed off spawn

 

• Decrease Loot

 

To make better gear harder to get, chests should either have less gold / weapons in them or gear like armor or weapons should be more expensive in the shops.

Another idea is to make loot more random, so there isn’t a 100% chance for at least 3 gold to spawn in a specific dungeon but that there is also the chance to get none or just some iron. For players that know every dungeon it's easy to get around 64 gold in under an hour (assuming you have fly from sponsor rank, more later).

 

2. Unfair Items / Abilities

 

Some items and other things are really unbalanced, like playing against these in a fight is really annoying or unfair. To make them more balanced they should get made weaker, so you have more chance to fight against them but that they aren’t useless.

 

• Sniper Rifle / Musket

 

Both the Musket and Sniper can be found in some dungeons quite easily and they are really strong in ranged fights. The problem with them is that they are:

1. too common to find in dungeons

2. hitscan, so the bullet instantly hits there where you are aiming with the crosshair

3. ignoring enchantments on armor and do the same damage like they do on unenchanted armor

4. making too much damage in general, even the default sniper without any extra perks like + damage or poison can instantly kill a armored player with a headshot

 

To make them more balanced, you could

1. make them more rare in dungeons or take them out completely so they are only available in the market

2. give them bullet travel and dropoff, so the shot takes some time until it hits a ranged target

3. make them detect enchantments like protection or projectile protection and reduce damage depending on this

4. reduce base and headshot damage, so a full enchanted diamond player doesn’t die from 2 headshots

5. disable double rifle which can be used by having a rifle in each hand and swap to the other after shooting with the first one.

 

• Anti Knockback Shield

 

The shield does what a hacking client with andi Knockback and Blockhitting does for you, it blocks damage from incoming attacks and also makes you resistant to any knockback an enemy would give you normally. Just think about it for a second and imagine fighting against something like this as a normal player. Overpowered right?

The shields abilities could also be reduced and balanced by changing following things:

1. Reduce the anti knockback 10 enchantment to like 5, so it blocks 50% of the knockback but not all.

2. Give it a cooldown of some seconds until it can be used again after a certain amount of hits on it.

 

• /Fly for sponsors

 

Just think about making a game mode focused on parkour (at least a big part) and then give players the ability to fly through the parkour to the end and get the loot that is there. Sounds pretty boring because it requires absolutely no parkour skill and is unfair to players without the permissions at the same time. Makes it pretty much pay to win, as I said somewhere above with fly you can get a stack of gold in less than an hour, while free players need to do every parkour without fly and have a higher risk of dying by falling into a trap or lava and take much longer to get the same amount of gold.

Removing fly completely would be fair to every player that hasn’t paid 50€ just to upgrade their stuff faster. Also it would remove the ability to pvp while flying completely.

 

Things regarding other gamemodes

 

1. Pure Survival

 

• Creative Mode
  
  It’s a SURVIVAL server, so why is there a creative mode? There is also a Creative server meant for creative building, and I think having creative mode gives an unfair advantage, you don’t have any challenge achieving something compared to players that don’t have a sponsor rank and have to do all their things in normal survival. Also creative brings exploits like doing PVP with creative generated Items. Yes, its written in the rules that its not allowed, but not everyone doing it can get caught and not every player knows that their enemy is using generated items that took no effort to make.

 

• World Edit
  
  I think Worldedit is a great tool, but it should rather be something for the Creative since it also gives unfair advantages, bypasses claims, like you can delete someones house which is claimed and also blocks generated with World Edit don’t have a Creative tag, so you can mine them as a survival player and make whatever you want with them. This ruins the economy when someone can create stacks of diamond blocks and give them to others or sell them in the market. 

 

• Nether Update
  
  The server got 1.16 compatible some time ago and we still can’t use the new Netherite items or go into the new nether biomes. Updating the server completely to at least 1.16 or higher and removing 1.15 support could allow you to enable these things which would be really cool and also would make players come back to the server to try out these new things.

 

2. CTW

 

• 1.8 downgrade
  
  Yes, this was talked about multiple times, but we still got no real answer to why id doesn’t get done. The server has no players currently, so why don’t you give it a try and    put it back to 1.8? In that version it had the most players since there was the old PVP system and also the chat still worked. There is nothing to lose, since the lobby server can just be 1.8 up to 1.16 compatible, and in there you can choose between the different servers that just require different minecraft versions.

 

• Advertise this gamemode
  
  There are not many minecraft servers having a gamemode like this. The only one that I can think about is Hypixel, which usually has a lot of lag and doesn’t have a good anticheat. So why not use this as an advantage to get players that like the concept of Capture the wool and don’t want a lot of lag? Use sites like reddit that have categories where you can promote a minecraft server.

 

That was a lot of writing, hope it was worth it.

Thanks to everyone taking his time to read this, if you want feel free to comment your own ideas or give feedback.

And yes, the formatting is weird since I made it in google docs and the website doesn't seem to like that xD.
 

[xtomyserrax]

Heyyy thank you again for your words. This kind of community posts help a lot and its an amazing way of being heard. The other day we had a talk with @brunyman in order to address some issues you are talking here, I hope he reads this too.

 

About PS, WorldEdit being able to destroy claimed regions issue has been fixed and the fixed version will be added when we update to 1.16

 

About other topics I think I agree with almost all of them. About creative it is a hard topic because many people payed for that so its hard to change that but Im not the one who could make a decision about it (I agree that something called PURE Survival doesnt have sense to have creative, and also economy in PS is useless). Just as a reminder to higher ups, we had this post: 

 

And about bugs, well we have a list I made with a lot of found bugs which I wont share the number because it is sad but in my case I will do my best to do what I can to fix them (I cant do much but yes offer some help, for example I fixed a loooot of bugs related with the protection plugin in PS which hasnt been updated yet because of what I said before) and well I know that higher ups will try to give Network a little bit more attention.

 

Thank you again for taking your awesome time on writing this, people's opinion is always welcome!