Server changes, 20 minute /fix delay, and Redstone bugs.

To start the rant, 20-minute delay for /fix is simply insane. If I wanted to repair my armor it would take 80 minutes having it timed it perfectly. Furthermore, repairing tools takes far too much time. Proportionally the amount of things available for us to do is vastly limited when compared to before. After the Redstone bug, and finding numerous core aspects of Redstone that are still broken, I am seriously considering quitting. There is simply far too much limitation on both creativity and basic gameplay that the previously attractive features about this server have disappeared. Donating so much money for a rank only to have the main appeal, /fix, in effect removed feels very much like a rip-off. It looks like a Bait and Switch - we are not getting what we initially paid for. I sincerely hope this gets addressed promptly with a solution that works for both players and staff. If nothing else please put some effort into solving all the remaining Restone bugs. Thanks, and sorry about the aggressive rant. It felt necessary to voice the opinion of my fellow players in Economy.
-Vvyovx

 

I don’t see a problem with the cool down it just 20 minutes not the end of the world and as far as I know it was made to reduce the lag.

 

It isn't just economy. It is survival too. I agree with what you say and as a major donator to this server I feel betrayed. I also see no difference to lag. It is as bad as ever. I don't think the cooldown of /fix to stop us from creating efficient stone gens will make any difference to lag. I am looking to see this decision reversed very quickly.

 

I completely agree with Vvyoxv. There's no point in limiting /fix.

On the point of redstone being broken or partially fixed and what not is a little bit annoying. I'm under the impression that if I wanna use my fully auto stone gen I must replace all the redstone and observers in order for it to work. I am still uncertain, and I believe the whole community is, on this topic.

I believe there should be "alerts" server wide to let the players know, especially ones who don't check forums , that there is an on going issue or problem.

Please keep us updated is all I am asking. I - we would like to know.

 

Totally agree instead of
Noobcrew just upgrading to 2 hosts he keeps limiting us to the point where he is limiting everything I need to be able to run just a simple wool shop.
It would be extremely beneficial if he just upgraded to a new host and did some advertising for skyblock
It would increase player growth, which means more people spent money making him more money and it would also be beneficial to the staff team as new applicants would come along

I agree we should also stay notified with every little update we don’t know what’s going on nor no one is telling us the whole story

 

I rarely ever lag. I play on 1.12. Wheres the lag? The only time I lag is when my internet decides it wants to go take the browns to the superbowl

 

The problem is noobcrew is running too much data for 1 host if he were to just spend a little bit more extra per month we could get a whole new host and have 2 meaning we don’t lag and we would be able to use as many hoppers ect as possible

I’m taking a break until this problem is fixed with repair because it’s essential for me to be able to run a simple wool shop I have people who shear for me and I have 8 shears that means it would take me 2 hours and 40 minutes to repair everyone shears when they need it

 

I agree with 20 minutes being a little over the top, but maybe a 3-5 minute wait between fix wouldn't be so bad. It would reduce some lag, and we wouldn't have to wait so long to fix our items. However, the server has been quite laggy lately, so hopefully something such as less lag will come out of the new wait time. Thanks for sharing your opinion!

 

Haven't seen any reduction in lag just because of a cool down on /fix.

 

If fix is to be limited, limit it for all of the new donators, and advertise that as a perk for their rank. People paid to be able to fix, they should be able to with ease.

 

eeeeehhhh
i mean fix was supposed to be a donor perk in the first place, and it does cause a bit of server lag. I wouldnt agree with that.

 

Yeah 20 minutes for /fix? I don't think it was the cause of lag, anyways
I agree with you

 

/fix only repairs an item - that doesn't cause any lag in itself. It's just changing one value. To me it seems very much like a Bate and Switch because we simply are not getting what we paid for. Quite scammy if were looking at it from a legal perspective...

 

nah /fix used to have a cooldown i think and people still bought it

 

Ah I didn't realize, how long ago was that? I'll definitely need to adjust my play-style a bit but at least it isn't the end of the world. Just feels like another hard limit.

 

Unless you got that much time on your hands then yea. We don't have 6 hours to spare just to repair tools, weapons, and armour sets

 

We don't know for sure that two hosts would fix it. He may end up spending extra money, advertising the server and then making everything worse because more people are playing the server bringing it back to it's old laggy state.

I cannot remember who said it, but I believe the main cause of the issue is coming from the Skyblock plugin that is extremely innefficient. Only way to solve this - reset the server, or possibly (but most likely not going to work) the devs code a new plugin/pay someone to code a new plugin that has every feature the same and does everything the same but at the same time being more efficient. If this is done wrong it would not work however.

 

The lag could mean the decline of skyblock.net as we know it. The player count is barely increasing, if at all, even though players join so often. Even active players are finding themselves not wanting to play because of how bad the lag is. The server will certainly not get better if the lag isn't fixed. While making our redstone machines will contribute to a lag-free server, and I encourage everyone to do so, Noobcrew and the developers need to do their part in fixing the lag, especially fixing the ping, but so far they've done nothing but limit what we have, which I am not along with.

 

To help clear up everyone's confusion, we would like to make it clear that the recent issue with redstone being entirely broken for a few hours was not at all intentional, but rather an accident caused by an update to the servers, that was not supposed to affect it in the way that it did. Before it was pushed to the live server, no one had tried to test breaking and/or placing redstone, because it was not something that should have been affected. It should all be fixed now. We never meant for it to seem as if we are no longer going to update players when various aspects of the server change significantly; if we had known that it would affect the server in this way, I can assure you that some sort of change log post or public notification would have definitely been made.

With regards to the /fix cooldown, that was implemented primarily to discourage extremely large farms, that end up being used to just afk all day, which significantly contribute to the lag, and have no positive community impact. If players are allowed to quite literally afk on their island, spam /fix for multiple hours per day, and come back to thousands upon thousands of items, with virtually no effort needing to be put into the game, that greatly decreases the incentive to actually work for anything, or interact with the community. As some other people have stated, it has become more of an "afk"-block, per se, rather than Skyblock. We understand that 20 minutes might seem like quite a long time, and we are open to suggestions, as nothing is set in stone; however, I personally believe that at least some sort of cooldown is necessary, to ensure that some amount of effort needs to actually be put into the game. The hard part is finding the balance between a cooldown that is short enough as to not make it too difficult to be able to rely on /fix when necessary, yet also discouraging the giant automated farms that require absolutely no effort after the initial set up, due to the fact that there was no need to worry about tools running out of durability even if being away from your physical computer for multiple hours at a time.

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It isn't so much that the /fix command itself causes any significant lag, but rather that it was being exploited as a way to spend the minimum amount of effort possible, in order to gain massive amounts of materials. Limiting this command will help to limit some of the laggy behaviors, and hopefully help lead to significant improvement in server performance, sometime in the near future, while also providing more incentive to actually work for your items, rather than allowing the server to continue becoming a competition of who has the most money to spend on alternate accounts.

Please don't feel bad for bringing this up. We appreciate all feedback, and are open to suggestions, if the community believes that it will genuinely help. It seems to be quite a common misconception that the only way to address issues such as this one is to "gather together", per se, a large number of players, to "back up" one's argument and/or concerns. Just to clear up any confusion, we are always glad to take feedback and/or suggestions, regardless of whether it is done through private interactions, or community discussions such as this one. This does not guarantee that we will always be able to implement every change, as there are many factors that we must consider, some of which may not be as obvious initially, but we genuinely do appreciate when players are able to provide feedback about the server, and help come up with suggestions. Please don't hesitate to contact any staff member(s) with feedback, suggestions, or questions that you may have.

I believe I have addressed quite a bit of this concern earlier in my reply; however, I would like to reiterate that it is not /fix itself that causes lag, but rather that the cooldown on this command will help to limit laggy behaviors, that are contributing to the decline in server performance, that were only possible when players could quite literally spam /fix multiple times per minute, making the worry of paying attention to item durability basically nonexistent. Players began using it to essentially give their tools the 'Unbreakable' attribute, while afk mining with massive farms, rather than using the feature to occasionally fix their tools when necessary, as a thank-you present, per se, for donating to the server.

Again, similar to my previous response, I believe that the first section of my reply would be prove useful in answering some of these questions. To quickly summarize, the redstone was never meant to be affected in the way that it was, which is why there was no update posted, until after everything had already happened. If we were intentionally disabling redstone, we most definitely would have tried to make sure that we posted some sort of official update.

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If you read through this thread, I believe that both Mafro and Matt provided an excellent response. The issue is not with the host, but rather with the way that players are using the server. Changing hosts will do little to help the problem. Mafro also nicely summarized how adding a cooldown on /fix will limit behaviors that cause significant amounts of lag, and how this change could also help newer players.

While nothing can be guaranteed at this time, this is a much more realistic possibility. We realize that 20 minutes may seem a bit extreme at the moment; however, there still needs to be some sort of cooldown on /fix. Using this specific suggestion of changing it to 3-5 minutes, before even considering changing it, we have to consider the possible side effects, as well as if a shorter cooldown time would still be able to accomplish the same goal of limiting laggy behavior. This is the kind of feedback that, as I've stated before, we genuinely do appreciate. An opinion was stated, a possible change was suggested, the effects of this change were considered, and it was left for others to discuss.

The only way to realistically combat this issue is to enforce a few limits. It was never our goal to add as many restrictions as possible, and we genuinely try to reserve adding new limits like this for situations in which it is absolutely necessary. If users do not begin to change the way in which they play on this server, there is not a lot that we are able to do. As I've already gone over in a few previous replies, the host is not the problem, but rather it is the extremely laggy islands created by players that ironically spend more effort figuring out how to not spend time/effort while still receiving the same benefits, than they would if they just played normally from the start.

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It is also important to remember that the server has actually been doing extremely well, when compared to the state of Skyblock, even just a couple years ago. Not too long ago, there was a time when we would quite literally regularly have less than ten people online, for hours at a time. After coming back from a trip, I remember logging on to the server to only two people, other than myself, currently on the server. This is not to say that it cannot be improved, but rather that these changes are not the end of the world, and people will start to adjust to them. On classic, there was a time when a cooldown on /visit, /warp, and /home, I believe, was implemented, which was also extremely controversial at the time. The cooldown on the ability to fix items, which generally should easily outlast the cooldown, assuming that you are not using them while afk for multiple hours at a time, is rather insignificant when compared to some of the restrictions that have been placed on the server in the past.


In the mean time, we are always doing our best to address these sorts of issues, in a way such that the players are happy, while also keeping in mind that there are some restrictions that are necessary in order to provide a smoother experience for the entirety of the server, rather than only catering to the specific group of accounts that significantly contribute to these issues in the first place. Please understand that while we cannot make any guarantees, players are always free to come to the staff team with suggestions, feedback, or questions that they may have, as long as it is done in a respectful manner. The best way to do so is often through the suggestion and/or discussion section of the forums, as that allows others to provide their input as well; however, many of us are open to having private conversations, if some users would feel more comfortable doing that instead.

 

getting a new host isn't the issue its the solution in my opinion. if we can spread the servers across multiple hosts then we can cut down on the current data all in one server and allow us to have less stricter limits.

if the issue is tons of stone caused from mining with a Diamond Pick why do other items like shears or armor also have to have a cool down when they do not contribute to the lag?