User:YOMPISBAD/Open letter

An Open letter to MCO

Pride: “A feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired” (Luxico Online Dictionary). Arrogant: “Having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities” (Luxico Online Dictionary). How do you differentiate between someone who is prideful, from someone who is arrogant. Determining if a subject is prideful or arrogant is an intuitive task for an outside observer but when the observer is the subject, they fall into a paradoxical loop, constantly asking “should I trust myself?”. For if they always trust themselves, they might have a delusional pride; they might be arrogant. As Anais Nin perfectly put it: “We don’t see things the way they are, we see them as we are.” Such is true for not just individuals, but groups of people, as per the players and staff team of MinecraftOnline, the oldest minecraft server that’s map has not changed since its creation in 2010. Having such a unique title, it’s not surprising that MCO has strived to be unique and different from other servers. Unfortunately, I feel that this strive to be unique has almost been a curse for the server’s well being at this point, both in terms of performance as well as its staff. The following essay will be broken up into multiple sections. Each section will have its own issue as well as possible solutions to fix this issue. Many issues are interrelated with one another so the pacing might become slightly convoluted. Note, while this essay does have facts and information, it is also an opinion piece and should not be treated as if I believe it is without scrutiny.

Stasis: A period or state of inactivity or equilibrium (Luxico Online Dictionary). From the performance to the progress of updating the server to a newer version, everything is slow. Players keep playing or coming back with the promise that MCO will update to a newer version, which will increase the performance and magically make everything for the server better. So when is that going to happen? “Soon”. Using a word that gives a relative and vague sense of time is a smart way to give users a false sense of hope. That “it will happen, we just have a few more things to work on” - Anna. They’ve been saying that the update will be “soon” ever since 2016, that is 4 years. In that time, Trump has been elected in and elected out, we’ve had waves of memes, whole youtube careers have come and gone, even scares of world war 3. But has MCO made the update and changed with the times? No. This stasis is a problem, but not one that can be changed directly. The state of MCO is merely a byproduct of other issues the server is facing, more specifically: mis-management, philosophy on moderation, delusional pride and neglect. The only way to resolve and get MCO out of its stasis, is to address its causes.

Mismanagement

If I asked you who was in control of MCO, your first response might immediately be “the admins, of course.” Okay, but which one of the 33 admins calls the shots and makes changes? Why is someone who has not been active for months, someone who, for all we know could be dead, still seen as having the same amount of power over MCO as someone who is consistently active? Better yet, none of the so called admins are necessarily administrators in any sense of the word, they’re more along the lines of senior moderators. Not only that, but certain permissions, such as the logs of block placements, are not accessible to the moderators and only the admins. If a moderator’s job is to moderate, should they not have the best possible resources to help them? A recent example was when a player complained that a moderator had griefed their house by placing excess blocks in the middle of it. The only person who could check the logs to see who was in fact guilty of the grief was an admin at the time was afk. There were 4 mods online who simply didn’t have the permissions to solve the issue. Not only that, why was there only 1 admin online when MCO has 33 admins in total? Who’s in charge of promotions and demotions, and why have inactive admins not been demoted? If you do not show up to work for weeks, you get fired. Furthermore, there are some admins who honestly call into question what it means to be an admin. WaffleNomster is the most recent example of this. Spending nearly 2 hours sitting in my base while I was afk to eat dinner. I come back and they’re still sitting there, I continue to work on my base, I come back to the main area and see they are still sitting in my base. They were not afk either, they were talking in chat. This passive aggressive act is unbecoming of someone supposed to represent the best of the best. Later, when the topic of transitioning from 1.7.10 to a newer version of minecraft, WaffleNomster chimed in “but that takes time and effort”. Now this might sound harsh, but if you are not willing to put in the time and effort to help make the changes in order to make MCO a better and more easily accessible place, then you should not be in an administrator’s position. Or you need to admit that the change to a newer version is highly unlikely after all these years. Someone needs to take any kind of action, but no one is. Is this really something you feel proud of? If you are a regular player reading this, is this the type of admin you look up to? Admins who do not know anything that is going on. What of the 44 moderators on the server? At most, there are likely 15 moderators active.

Griefing & Moderators

Perhaps one of the greatest continuous lies told on the server by the moderators is that “intentions matter”. If you believe that intentions matter to grief, and also believe that editing someone else’s build in any way constitutes as a form of grief, then you are nothing but delusional. But that in of itself does not matter because MCO does not care about keeping an active player base at this point, but only to drive away players who might do damage to any of the builds on the server. If that means ruthlessly banning players at the beginning who simply can not imagine that the server is almost completely unprotected but would otherwise be welcomed in the community, then so be it. If it means losing out on potential donations from players who have sunk tens of hours into the server, then so be it. If it means essentially treating the server like a museum that can have no alterations to anything on display, then so be it. Your intentions do not matter because MCO does not care if you play or not. MCO is almost treating their server as if it were a museum. If you believe MCO is essentially a museum, you should be put in adventure mode so you cannot build or do anything except look and chat. That’s what you do in a museum after all. Like you’d get kicked out of a museum because you accidentally trip and get some fingerprints on a painting, you get banned from mco for altering anything that is not your own work, no matter how inconsequential it is. This makes sense for a museum, but not for a game where the underlying premise is that the world is a complete sandbox. “It’s about protecting history” then why not download the world and have an archive of it so you can always go back and explore history, not needing to worry about it getting destroyed? Oh wait…

SlowRiot: delusion and neglect

SlowRiot is as far from a server owner as one could be. He pays for the server to be kept running and that is it. He has never talked in the official mco discord, and takes days to respond to admins. FurtherMore, he has not logged onto the server since August 8th 2020, which is over 4 months as of this essay’s publication. SlowRiot is also reportedly losing money on hosting the server at this point, which means keeping the server online is something he needs to consciously do. Supposedly there was a 2 week period in which the server was completely offline because SlowRiot simply forgot to pay the hosting service. SlowRiot is a neglectful owner that is not above heavy scrutiny. I feel that this is the basis of all the problems of MCO. A simple solution to this would be if an admin who cared enough bought the server from SlowRiot, had the initiative and drive to push the server to an update and optimize the server to allow a better playing experience. Some admins often talk about how they’re getting hardware upgrades and have spent hundreds of dollars already in upgrading the server to become a beast of a machine. So then why does the server run so poorly? Because so much hardware can only help when the issue is in the software. SlowRiot in all honesty deserves a whole essay of his own, but you have already read this far so I will elaborate here.

“He pays for the server you play for free on, so I’d say he’s pretty cool.” -- TheDarkrai85. Is your bar for what makes a good owner that low? Sure he may have done some great things for MCO in the past, but it’s important to be able to differentiate between the past and the present, and that the issues facing MCO right now aren’t gonna be solved by doing nothing. SlowRiot is a neglectful owner that should not be seen as a role model. In addition, SlowRiot holds an attitude of delusional pride that has been accepted in the MCO community, that the players often share: “praise Riot”.

Just because it is custom, does not make it good. Likely the main issue for the server’s performance is due to the fact that the server is still using CanaryMod and edited hmod plugins, some of which being 9 to 10 years old. Craftbook and the anti-grief plugin being used are good examples of this, using script-based code rather than completely compiled java. A few weeks ago, there were a couple commands on the server that broke, so you would expect thrown errors to be in java, right? After all minecraft servers are based on Java and jar files… It was an issue with python. Python, a coding language more suited to be run client sided, was being run server sided. Now this was just once instance, and honestly over 10 years, I am genuinely worried about how the rest of the code looks inside of the server. Trent is often quoted saying “It’s not an issue with the plugins” which leads people to immediately start blaming the actual version of minecraft the server is running on: 1.7.10. But minecraft 1.7.10 runs fine server sided, look at any pvp server that still supports 1.7.10. The reason the server has performance issues is due to SlowRiot’s unreasonable need to keep MCO as custom as possible, even if it means choosing to have actively worse performing code.

“A simple solution to this would be if an admin who cared enough bought the server from SlowRiot, had the initiative and drive to push the server to an update and optimize the server to allow a better playing experience.” I mentioned this earlier but never elaborated on it, so now is the best time to do so. While this may be the obvious, if not hard, solution, it is nearly impossible as SlowRiot values the server at tens of thousands of dollars. Please keep in mind that SlowRiot is actively losing money from running the server, so even shutting it down would do him some good. While you may think the domain name alone of “minecraftonline.com” is worth a couple hundred if not a few thousand easily, SlowRiot also values the code that goes into MCO itself at tens of thousands of dollars. Unless he expects to pay the developers nearly all the profits of selling the server, valuing bad code at tens of thousands is at best crazy and at worst completely delusional. So the future of MCO may look grim, with the server having connection issues as well as donations and active players slowing down, how should we preserve the history of MCO?

Well if you wanted to download the world only for the purpose of protecting history, according to SlowRiot, that makes you a thief as all builds on MCO are property of SlowRiot. Now, can we take a moment to realize how insane this sounds? That the world of MCO is the intellectual property of SlowRiot, that someone can even own the specifics of a minecraft saves “region” file? Not only that, but the builds the players make aren’t property of the players themselves, but of the server? This in all honesty is evidence that SlowRiot is nothing short of delusional, and that his mismanagement and neglect for MCO has driven it to the point it is today.

Conclusion

From this, you might assume I hate MCO. I don’t. It’s quite the opposite in fact. I care about the server enough to write this, and voice my concerns in a way that will hopefully reach the people capable of making the change that I can not do. You may disagree with all my points, you may agree with only a few, and if you don’t know how to feel, that’s okay as well. There are many things I haven’t touched on that I still feel should be said, but this has gotten unreasonably long enough. MCO has many, many, many issues, and the root cause of many of them is SlowRiot himself. His arrogance, delusion, and misguided philosophy has slowly killed the server it once helped create.