Factions Questionable Upcoming Changes

[Gargap]

ChoiceCraft has been around for a lot of my life, I think this is something most of our current player base can relate on. Having returned to the server not too long ago I was surprised to see how the community had shrunk to a very solid number to a rather dull one. Granted, Minecraft as a whole has had its fair share of difficult times to overcome, losing a lot of its' players as time passed — something I believe will continue in the coming years (strengthened by the fact that Hypiexel is releasing a new game). Though, I still managed to enjoy myself on the server as only a small number of changes were made, most that didn't affect the gameplay overall to an extent where I felt as though CC was not right for me anymore. Having made new friends here, I'd like to thank the CC staff team for keeping this server alive — even if it only has a 5-10 player count on a daily average (even lower for Factions).

However, the recent update the staff team had presented has left a lot of the Factions players confused and disappointed, I've caught wind of individuals who are most probably going to quit the server due to the enabling of tnt, the live map removal and the return of a 1.8 styled server (I don't necessarily mind this part of the change). I'd like to wrap up now, I've enjoyed my time here at CC and was hoping to continue playing over the coming months, a fresh start provided via the reset which me and the other factions players had been looking forward to, however the pros will not outweigh the cons of this reset. I'd like to ask the staff team; Murd, S4, and the rest to rethink this carefully, that being said I hope success for the server whether I leave or not, but I don't believe completely change the USP and core competencies of the server will lead to success either.

 

[Shabz_ox.]

I agree, the server has long had its' uniqueness that made it special to the community, the same positives are being taken away. I hope the staff reconsiders their proposed changes

 

[s4ndal]

Hello @Gargap and @Shabz_ox.

While I understand your guys feedback, we have put a lot of thought into these changes.

When we relaunched Factions this past Summer that was based it on the original ChoiceCraft Factions meta, it led to a lot of the same issues that we experienced back in 2013-2016.

1. Raiding is nuanced w/ glitching and plugin tricks, which effectively gave veteran players a greater advantage
2. Veteran players would learn how to protect against these limited raiding techniques, which resulted in many Factions being impossible to raid

With our relaunch came a lot of our veteran players. In a short amount of time, the bases were bullet-proof, so the only way to defeat a rival faction was betrayal.

We were seeing 10-20 players online during peak times, but the player-base got bored when Factions became effectively Survival with invisible guys trolling you occasionally.

Another thing we did was open up Survival and eliminate the Whitelist. What this resulted in was a large overlap between Survival and Factions. We need to differentiate the experience on each server and avoid each server being the same.

One thing I do want to note, we did not want to create a stereotypical Factions server with 2 week maps and TNT laying waste to the main map.

While we have enabled TNT, we have custom TNT dynamics. What I mean by that, you can use TNT to get into a base and blast through the walls, BUT we have TNT block damage healing enabled. What that means is when TNT is done, within 5-10 seconds the block damage begins to auto repair.
The benefits we see with this:

• A simpler way to raid a base
• The block healing allows simpler raiding, but the griefing damage is not permanent - so players can still build nice bases

As for Dynmap, @Murdox_Mobius and I have gone back and forth on this one. Here are some points on this decision:

• Due to raiding being simplified, we wanted to make it easier for players to hide and build hidden bases
• The map is enormous and there are fewer Stargates, so finding a base will require players conduct scouting missions
• The view distance is set to 11 chunks and the player tracking is set to 128 blocks (default is 48), so you will be able to track and stalk players much better

So the primary reason of removing Live Map was to make hiding easier and finding your opponents more challenging.

We hope this detail helps explain where we are with all of this. I am the original creator of the ChoiceCraft Factions server from 2011, so I do not take these changes lightly. However, I have confidence the changes to this meta will provide a unique experience while also fixing some of the issues we had with the original meta.

Thanks!
-s4