My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

[Darkxell]

Hi!

I am definitively quitting the server. I played for a few months and really enjoyed it, buy today's pigmen change announce convinced me to not come back, after having already lost interest because of the way the server is handled. I am posting this thread in the hope to explain why I really think some design choices should be reconsidered. Vulengate is a great server with a surprisingly active and lively community, and I enjoyed being part of it.

Minecraft is a sandbox. A game where the player makes his own game. Basic rules and infinite possibilities. But the rules are not the same for everyone. According to jeb, lead developer, any automatization is considered duping for him. He considers that mob farms and automated resource production is against his mindset for the game. My point here is: Minecraft is a game you play and have fun the way you want to play it.

Yet some of the server's design choices go against this mentality. It is normal for a community to agree on rules together, because in a server, actions from a member affect other players. There is two very big issues I encountered while playing on here:

■ "OP" items: Some non vanilla items available occult part of the vanilla gameplay. For example, fly vouchers. These are a straight upgrade from elytras. This is not an issue by itself, the cost of vouchers is high enough for it to be balanced. The issue is when it comes to make a firework farm, grind enchantments for mending wings, set up an xp farm to fly. Because vouchers are here, all the game content said previously is rendered obsolete. This reduces the freedom of the player as it linearize game progression. A good exemple would be the way enchantments are implemented. They still require vanilla combining to create the best in slot gear. They complement an already existing aspect of the game, they don't replace it by a less complete and more op version.

■ Shitty arbitrary rules: Let's say this straight. No one has a clue about gamedesign here. The server infrastructure is managed without thinking about in game impacts at all, and there is more community management being done than gamedesign work.
Honestly, congratulations to kureen and the moderating team for maintaining a lively and active server by providing regular updates, events, and constant support. This is well done work and is most likely the reason why the server works. But this isn't everything. At some point one needs to think: What is the goal in playing on vulengate? It doesn't need to be explicitly said, and each player will have it's own. But everyone needs to have one, or they are bound to quit quickly, as in any video game.
For me, it's technical builds. I'm not here to build a town, I'm here to create farms, terraform large areas to create impressive landscapes. Yet very little consideration is being made for anyone trying to play the way they want. The pigmen spawner changes reflect this very well. There is a lag problem (which isn't due to hosting 4 servers at once on the same machine, Kappa), and nether portal arrays are part of the problem. Instead of offering another alternative to nether portal farms (like, idk, providing a pigmen spawner for a large quantity of obsidian provided?), the farm was straight up banned. This is an answer to the lag problem, but shows no consideration to players having such a farm. This is unacceptable.
There is many other examples that should be changed:
- The soft mob cap per area implementation is complete garbage
- the nether/end frequent resets
- There is no alternative proposed after the ban of afk fishing
- Tnt dupers are banned (They don't create any resource, they just clear out areas to build in. Let me play on my plot the way I want, as long as it doesn't affect other players!) .

I hope this explains why Vulengate did not meet my expectations despite being a pretty cool server.
I wish you all good luck.

 

[Kureen]

I'm sure you've already set your mind on leaving but I'd like to adress your issues the server has from my point of view.

- The pigmen portal spawning was disabled with immediate effect due to the sheer amount of lag they were causing (causing TPS drops from 20 to 15 from a single spawner/grinder). There's a possibility of us adding different means of obtaining pigmen but the priority here was to disable them.
- How many machines you use for hosting your server does not matter much as long as you allow them to use 2 threads each and enough RAM to operate, which we do.
- The Mob cap is in place because the biggest cause of lag is entities. We could chose to use a mob stacker plugin but we've chosen to have a limiter plugin because it's in our opinion more vanilla like and less prone to have any plugin issues.
- The End/Nether are being reset cause the file sizes of these worlds are ridiculously large (8-10 times larger than the overworld each) and quite depleted near the center. The lack of resources near the center could be solved with a random teleport to it but the file size is an issue cause it makes managing the world more difficult, things such as back ups, and eventually the worlds would grow too large for our storage.
- Not sure what you mean with "There is no alternative proposed after the ban of afk fishing".
- Duping glitches/exploits have been banned cause they are in my eyes not fair cause not everyone knows about them, nor can we expect players to know about them, and they can also have a negative effect on the server. TNT duping had a negative effect because people we're making money from them (impacts all players in a sense), and they could also be used for some serious terrain griefing if someone chose to do that.

It's fine that some don't like the server or the changes are being made, it's unreasponable to expect everyone to like the changes we do. But we try to take as many views into consideration when making any changes so that the vast majority will appreciate them, even if it might not initially look like it.

 

[Shaperme]

Hey ,

first off its always a shame to see someone leave.
That being sayed , all i wanted to say is that i fond this to be a intresting and logical read.

I agrea that server stability is a priority over building TPS Draining machines.
I also feel it's what makes severplay different, and that in itself represtenting what was sayed : "that MC allow's different way's to play it "

A server has constraints and at the same time extra functions compared to single player for example ,
That is deu to the fact of it being sever and thus making a new and different way to play MC,

so i would go without saying u might be doing different thing's as a player on a server ... so expectations do play a part in this example.
I personly rly enjoy the server but must admit i was also a bit lost on wat to expect even after reading up on vulengate
i was left wondering what would work on a server, what thing's i could use from single player and what would not work.
A small guide might be handy ! ,
maybe that's already a thing but all i could thingk of to add.


-to each there own way to play-

-Shaperme-

 

[SpottedChickenSr]

If you do not like the Vulengate servers, well, then you can look around for another server that matches with your wishes better, right? I mean, it's not like Vulengate are the only servers around.

I like the way the Vulengate servers are run. For me only with a world reset I will have to make up my mind if I like to start building from scratch once again or quit playing. The "Old Blue" server reset was quite upsetting for many, but nonetheless for good (logical) reasons.

I played for a few months and really enjoyed it ...

@Darkxell: Well, at least you had a good time during those months, right? ... so, that's something. People come and go, just like IRL. As town Mayor that is something I have come used to. You can't run a server if you want to satisfy all the wishes of any and all players. I personally like the majority of the decisions made by the server crew, most of the time - if not every time - logical choices made.

Anyway ... good luck at what ever server you will start playing next.

 

[CroChapz]

I'll just add up to this instead of opening a new thread, since I also think things could be better but I can't seem to find the reasoning behind some of the decisions made by "upper management". I'll try to sum my thoughts into bullet points and hope Kureen or someone with enough inside info can answer them.

• Why is the server lagging so much with just 64 max players in comparison to some other servers with 300+ players online?
  • Is it because the hardware is to weak? Is it because of the plugins used? Is it a 1.13 thing? I'm a developer, so I am also curious.
• Why is the map so small compared to other servers?
  • The map is small as in if you just walk, you see traces of people already being here: torches, destroyed villages and cut forests, claimed but abandoned bases, and in general just area stripped of resources by someone before.
• Why not improve existing server instead of having a resource world?
  • Having a base on a destroyed map and tp-ing each time you need resources is not ideal. Not reseting the map forever makes it just worse.
• Why not have a reset every year or 2?
  • A fresh start gives also fresh motivation to build something new. Also refreshes the resources so theres always something to do. Bonus: no need for a resource world.
• Why are we drowning in plugins that probably limit performance?
  • I've read somewhere that we got 100+ plugins. Do we REALLY need all of them? Do the players want them? How often are they actually used? They probably increase lag. If we reduce them to the most useful/used ones we increase performance and also when new versions come out, its easier to update as you don't need to wait for so many plugin updates.
• Why 3 small servers instead of one big? Why do all of them (maybe not Yellow) have the same map?
• Transparency is missing! Why not ask the community what they want?
  • I feel like the communication is one way. There are official announcements, support if someone is having trouble and just general chatting. Why not ask the players what would they like? You can easily make a pool on Discord and ask for example do users actually want some features that are not core or critically necessary. It is your server, but in the end its dependent on your community and if the server matches its needs.
• Economy is really bad, why make it so easy to achieve everything?
  • You get keys for virtually every single thing you do on the server. That means everyone has got everything. That means nobody needs anything from others... Maybe reduce a bit the amount of rewards given, or the chance to get good things. Even the vote tools, weapons and armor should be as hard to get as anything from the seasonal crate.

 

[Kureen]

I'll try to respond briefly. Just ask more if there's something you're wondering about

1. Lag is mostly due to poor performance of 1.13 (and will likely be as bad with later versions unfortuntately)
2. We keep the world small and expand it when needed/server updates. It might have gotten a bit crowded recently as we've planned to expand once we update to 1.14 but it's taking longer than expected. The issue with having a too big world is that the world size becomes very large and eventually it will be very difficult to expand to allow for new content from updates being generated. (before the reset the worlds were 100kx100k large which was too large for our liking)
3. Having a resource world is not ideal, but neither is frequent world resets. We're likely to expand the world quite a bit as written above.
4. Resets are a bit controversial, some like them and some despise them. Right now we don't see any major reasons to reset and for players who enjoy resets, they can chose to start playing on "fresh" servers if we open any more, just like when we opened the yellow server, which is only ~4 months old by now.
5. We have a lot of plugins, yes. But most of them have near 0 impact on performance. With the help of various performance statistics we have a pretty good understanding what is the most performance demanding tasks. Our plugins don't hog a lot of the performance and the real culprit is mostly entities.
6. Having multiple reasons is simply due to the fact that one server can only host about ~60 players without major lag implications. We opened the second server 2 years ago because one server was not enough to host 100+ players on the regular.
7. I feel like we don't make too many changes that has a direct impact on the community. And usually before a change is made, there is a discussion among staff to get a general idea of how peolpe will react. But I agree that this is something we could improve on, but I am also having a hard time trying to think of what kind of questions we'd ask the community.
8. Economy is pretty bad, agreed. As for crate rewards, I've tried to balance the rewards you get so that the servers arent flooded with crate items but with enough time and the inability to control how much people buy, it's hard to achieve a balanced economy. And with the jobs, the jobs themselves are somewhat balanced but again, we can't control how much people grind so the economy gets more and more inflated as time moves on. A way to counter this would be more gold/item sinks but those aren't too easy to come up with.

 

[CroChapz]

I'll try to respond briefly. Just ask more if there's something you're wondering about

1. Lag is mostly due to poor performance of 1.13 (and will likely be as bad with later versions unfortuntately)
2. We keep the world small and expand it when needed/server updates. It might have gotten a bit crowded recently as we've planned to expand once we update to 1.14 but it's taking longer than expected. The issue with having a too big world is that the world size becomes very large and eventually it will be very difficult to expand to allow for new content from updates being generated. (before the reset the worlds were 100kx100k large which was too large for our liking)
3. Having a resource world is not ideal, but neither is frequent world resets. We're likely to expand the world quite a bit as written above.
4. Resets are a bit controversial, some like them and some despise them. Right now we don't see any major reasons to reset and for players who enjoy resets, they can chose to start playing on "fresh" servers if we open any more, just like when we opened the yellow server, which is only ~4 months old by now.
5. We have a lot of plugins, yes. But most of them have near 0 impact on performance. With the help of various performance statistics we have a pretty good understanding what is the most performance demanding tasks. Our plugins don't hog a lot of the performance and the real culprit is mostly entities.
6. Having multiple reasons is simply due to the fact that one server can only host about ~60 players without major lag implications. We opened the second server 2 years ago because one server was not enough to host 100+ players on the regular.
7. I feel like we don't make too many changes that has a direct impact on the community. And usually before a change is made, there is a discussion among staff to get a general idea of how peolpe will react. But I agree that this is something we could improve on, but I am also having a hard time trying to think of what kind of questions we'd ask the community.
8. Economy is pretty bad, agreed. As for crate rewards, I've tried to balance the rewards you get so that the servers arent flooded with crate items but with enough time and the inability to control how much people buy, it's hard to achieve a balanced economy. And with the jobs, the jobs themselves are somewhat balanced but again, we can't control how much people grind so the economy gets more and more inflated as time moves on. A way to counter this would be more gold/item sinks but those aren't too easy to come up with.

Thank you for the exhaustive response!
I hope the performance will be better once we hit 1.14.4 as that was kinda the whole point of that specific release.

For map expansion and reset - isn't it a problem that
a) most players flock to new lands that have fresh resources leaving middle of the map a wasteland
b) new servers attract more players and cause uneven player count (for ex. yellow)
c) new players cant easily find new rare resources because they were already exploited (villages, ocean monuments etc)

Would it be possible to make 2 servers only expand on update and 2 a bit bigger but resetting on each major update? Then ppl could choose.

As for involving community, you don't need to always have specific question just when making changes, you can also ask just to see how people feel. In the example of map resets, you could ask a general question like would people prefer a fresh start or keep everything and just expand the map. An ideal place is Discord where ppl can leave a specific response to answer positive or negative. General surveys are valuable feedback even when not used for decision making immediately.