Hello everyone, this is Cayorion writing! I recently had a session on TeamSpeak where I invited all players to join in and ask me questions. This happened around two a clock in the morning (USA time) and only about 10 players could participate. With this in mind I decided to write this news post so everyone can feel included.

Slayer1618: What happened in the recent update?
I updated the core server software (PaperSpigot) and all plugins (both external and inhouse). That mostly means bug fixes and performance improvements. The only thing I can think of that directly affects players is the return of the command /drop. This command was disabled due to a duping bug a couple of months back. I have now fixed the bug and reenabled the command. It was Omnomivore who reminded me to do this.

Onearmsquid: What inspired the reduction of housing prices in Regalia?
I honestly don’t know. MonMarty is the lead planner for Regalia and he is not currently online, so we can’t ask him. The MassiveCraft staff team is divided into different departments with different purposes. We don’t always know what is going on in different departments. This is actually quite efficient. As a department leaders MonMarty, Thortuna, Gethelp or Addrion don’t really have to ask my permission to make changes in their departments. They have the experience required to form good decisions on their own.

Oldmanwilikers93: When is Skull Splitter damage going to be fixed?
I was actually not even aware of this issue. We are not the developers of mcMMO. That plugin is so called “external” as opposed to developed “inhouse”. Upon checking our configuration file all looks fine. This may be a bug in mcMMO itself or a conflict between plugins. I’ll see if I can find the cause within a month. If not I’ll create a bug report for the mcMMO developers.

Onearmsquid: When is there going to be more KOTH events?
I think there are two types of KOTH events on MassiveCraft. There are those that are held manually by the MassiveCraft staff and that is based of our plugin MassiveQuest. Then there’s the KOTH events taking place on this map: http://map.massivecraft.com/?worldname=koth1. Those events are powered by an external plugin. That plugin has proven buggy and Gethelp have not been able to fully set it up, I think. If you want a KOTH event you should bug Gethelp or Thortuna ingame and maybe they can start one for you manually.

LordSylveon: Why aren’t relations shown under /f f anymore?
We (the tech department) removed them because the command output was too long. Big factions could have loads of relations which led to the command being unusable. The current solution is however not good enough. There should be a short version just mentioning the amount of allies and then the first few. Then maybe a button you can click to see all or a tooltip with more information. Currently we are however really focused on developing new Premium features so this Factions feature will have to wait a bit.

Meronat: Why do all your plugins depend on the plugin MassiveCore? Is it because of your network infrastructure?
Yes, it is partially because of the network infrastructure we have. MassiveCraft seems to be just one server but it’s actually 8 servers seamlessly cooperating as one. This is quite advanced and MassiveCore helps us with that. The main reason is however that we have over 35 inhouse plugins to maintain. If I want to fix a bug I often need to fix it just in MassiveCore. Fixing a bug in one plugin is much easier than fixing the bug in 35 different ones. So by making all of our plugins share code there is less code to maintain.

Meronat: Will Factions be converted to Sponge?
No I do not think so. Sponge is a great idea but till it actually succeeds as a project I will assume Sponge is going to fail. Spigot is the current industry standard and that is going to be very hard to change. Even though Sponge has a better API and better licensing, most good plugins are made for Spigot and don’t exist for Sponge. The players on MassiveCraft just want the sever to be stable and work. They don’t care whether we run Spigot or Sponge, right? Say I spend half a year porting all our plugins to Sponge. We could still not switch over to Sponge because Citizens and mcMMO and most other great plugins aren’t converted.

MCXXCLV: Why was blocking with swords disabled?
The feature was removed by Mojang in Minecraft 1.9. It was not our choice to remove this. Many players are of the opinion that Mojang messed PvP quite a lot in Minecraft 1.9. On MassiveCraft we have worked really hard to remedy this issue. I actually spend a full month just coding on PvP tweaks. The resulting plugin is called MassiveCombat. You can read all about it here https://www.massivecraft.com/massivecombat. It is also available for purchase as a premium plugin on Spigot Community. MassiveCombat fixes almost every PvP balance issue. Blocking with swords is one of the few things we have not readded through MassiveCombat yet.

LordSylveon: Is the plugin MassiveMagic still a thing?
Yes, I certainly hope so! MassiveMagic is being developed by Ulumulu1510. I made the plugin design specification but Ulumulu1510 is the only developer in the MassiveCraft technology department actively working on it. Due to high load in his university studies he has not been able to work on MassiveMagic for a couple of months. I have played around with the prototype though and it looks really really great. Me and Ulumulu1510 hopes to be able to code some on this during the summer.

Onearmsquid: Are you going to do something about Gift4All possibly ruining the market?
It should be noted that the Gift4All constituted 18% of the server income over the last 30 days. This really makes a difference for us. Running a Minecraft server is not exactly cheap. We pay for 10 dedicated rack servers, DDOS protection, advertisements etc. Imagine if you will that those 18% gives us better DDOS protection. We actually increased the Gift4All prices once already to make them less purchased for the sake of the ingame market. I think they were 9USD previously and now they are 13USD. The EULA compliance situation is also the main reason we added the Gift4All products. If you had to choose between Pay2Win and Gift4All I’d personally say Gift4All is better.

Meronat: Is /color command EULA compliant?
Yeah I am actually 100% sure it is EULA compliant. We have made a habit out of asking Mojang directly if a feature is EULA compliant or not before we add it to the server. All of our premium features and shop features have been validated by Mojang enforcement. This is actually a great way of running a EULA compliant Minecraft server. You can read more about EULA compliance here: https://www.massivecraft.com/shop-terms

Meronat: How is EULA compliance coming along? How many premium players do we have nowadays?
EULA compliance is coming along great! Initially a few players cancelled their premium membership. We have since added quite a few new premium features and now we are seeing an increase in premium members again. We are also far from done improving our premium feature package. I’m personally coding a disguise plugin right now, meaning players will be able to disguise as mobs outside PvP. On a side note MassiveCraft is going really great over all right now. During this year we have had a steady increase of players: https://www.massivecraft.com/stats-week

Glameoow: Can you decrease MrsBaver’s unarmed mcMMO skill level, please? It is 10000 and I can not possibly surpass it.
Yeah maybe! I’ll bring it up during the next direction meeting. I can’t do that myself right now, but I’ll ask MonMarty, Thortuna and the rest of the direction department next time I meet up with them.

HashtagFlow: Are you going to change Regalia again?
Regalia as a map is changing all the time. The world department adds new districts and improves upon existing ones continuously. I don’t think that Regalia will be completely replaced within the next two years. We did such a big rework of Regalia a couple of years ago. The current map is great and we are really satisfied with it. I don’t think any other Minecraft server has a capital city close to Regalia. The sewers are however undergoing a lot of rework and chances are we are going to get a brand new sewers map to improve living and roleplaying in the sewers. I’m not 100% sure but I think MonMarty mentioned this is being worked on.

MCXXCLV: Is it possible to implement WorldEdit into survival where it takes survival blocks instead to infinitely creating blocks?
This is possible for sure, theoretically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already coded a plugin that does this. In practice however there might be problems if we implemented such a feature for our Factions survival maps. Say someone wants to attack you but you simply spawn a castle where you stand. This suggests that the automated build process needs to take time and can not be instant. It could be sweet with some NPC workers getting spawned that builds for you. However… in reality I’m far to preoccupied coding on the Premium mob disguise feature right now. It’s really unlikely we will add this feature.

LordSylveon: Are you planning to work more on MassiveTraits any time soon?
We recently had a bug squashing spree (https://www.massivecraft.com/bug-squashing-spree) and it’s likely we are going to have another one soon. There are a few bug fixes in MassiveTraits we would like to fix during that upcoming spree. Such as FlyWater and FlyWeb negating each other. As for brand new traits that may have to wait a while. It is a problem for us in general that we have to few Technology Department staff members. If you know any good coders please send them our way! Just apply on the forums like for any other department. There is also this page: https://www.massivecraft.com/tech-recruitment

MCXXCLV: Will there be higher tiered weapons and armor?
We do already have item tiers. Tiered items can be obtained by voting and from MassiveMob drops. All of these tiers are mentioned here: https://www.massivecraft.com/massivemobs#rarity-tiers-amp-drops. The only tier that is unavailable is the Legendary one. The legendary tier is actually a bit of a joke. The tier before is Epic and the description of such mobs go like “Every 10000 mobs. Call your alliance.”. So even epic mobs are close to nonexistent. Legendary MassiveMobs would take all players on the server to cooperate and the fight would last for about 1h or so. Then there is a 10% chance that the boss drops a single Legendary item on death. A joke good sir! I deem it highly improbably we will see a Legendary mob on MassiveCraft this year. Addrion is the staff member that configures the MassiveMob bosses. Maybe he can be persuaded to make one.

HashtagFlow: Who did the textures for the resource pack?
MonMarty is the lead resource pack creator. It is my understanding that our resource pack is a combination of material from many other resource packs and some textures we have made ourselves. I think our resource pack is mainly built from John Smith and Dokucraft.

That’s all for now folks. I hope you learned something new about MassiveCraft! I’ll probably host another Q&A at a later date. It was really nice to sit down, chitchat and answer questions about our server. Now I’m off to code vigorously on those mob disguises. I made a really nice feature where bear disguises walk on two legs if you hold sneak. I hope to see a lot of upright walking bears on MassiveCraft soon.

Thanks and Regards,
Cayorion