Shotbow

Letter from the Co-Lead
A follow-up by Navarr

There’s not a whole lot to say this month - we’re still chugging along on GhostCraft, and I’m doing my best to keep what small marketing engine we have running. One of the tests I ran this month with that was live streaming the Annihilation Tournament games to Facebook (as well as our many other platforms).

While we did not get a lot of live viewers on Facebook, we did get a lot of views and likes on the videos afterwards. While we may not continue live streaming to Facebook (due to cost), it’s very likely I’ll get back in the habit of cross-posting our videos there.

If you haven’t yet, please like us on Facebook at http://facebook.com/ShotbowOfficial and several or all of our various games’ pages. We’ll be expanding what games have pages depending on popularity and request.

In the same marketing vein, we also launched our newsletter this month. If you haven’t signed up you can do so at http://j.mp/shotbow-signup. This was very important to us as our previous system for getting out news and information just wasn’t working. If you haven’t yet, please do sign up. As of right now, we’re sticking true to sending an XP code with every newsletter send to the list.

As for transparency - I guess I don’t have much I can say here. I’ve certainly noticed some of our developers reaching out to the playerbase on the forums more often for ideas, comments, concerns and the likes. But as for how we’re doing - I’ll need you to tell me. Please leave a comment on the forums telling us how we’re doing in regards to our goal of more transparency. Please be constructive - if you think we should be more transparent in some way, tell us what that way is.

Thanks for reading, and as always - thank you for flying Shotbow. I leave you now in the capable hands of Mistri.


Hey folks! Hope everyone is doing well. For those of you with finals, good luck! I personally just finished mine (hence why the New Moon is a few hours late), so the next few weeks will be dedicated Shotbow time! Please enjoy this month's New Moon.

Updates
Annihilation Updates
This month, the Annihilation clan tournament continued, and was livestreamed here:


Statistics
SMASH Rankings
The 2018 Spring season is in session, so rack up that ELO quickly before it's over! The current standings are:

• 1st - _BrightDarkness_ (1183)
• 2nd - Acstes (1169)
• 3rd - mattu34 (1153)

Mine Theft Auto
MTA Leaderboards for May 2018
Combat:

• 1st - Lexio KDR: 214:1 (214.0)
• 2nd - NoHaxJustMike KDR: 164:1 (164.0)
• 3rd - Red_Flowers KDR: 334:5 (66.8)

Arrests:

• 1st - Lexio Arrests: 53.0
• 2nd - erai1210 Arrests: 45.0
• 3rd - Killereilite2 Arrests: 34.0

Experience Gained:

• 1st - 8ge Experience gained: 263289.0
• 2nd - Xx_wankosoba_xX Experience gained: 42950.0
• 3rd - harucari Experience gained: 42031.0

Minigames Won:

• 1st - Portoss Minigames won: 145.0
• 2nd - harucari Minigames won: 118.0
• 3rd - Lexio Minigames won: 80.0

Network in General
Staff updates:

• PokeTheEye rejoined the Full Admin team
• 66tee rejoined the Full Builder team
• Wayvernia was promoted to GG Lead
• Marine_PvP was promoted to MineZ Co-Lead
• ArcticStorm141 joined the Anni team as Mini-Admin
• Mistri joined the Website Moderator team
• Camarum joined the Localization team as Slovak Translator
• Snaaaap joined the Localization team as Portuguese Translator

Other statistics:

• A total of 71,891,263 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 3,284 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 672 on May 13

What can I do?
Play on Shotbow, invite your friends, and invite their friends! Make friends and invite them to Shotbow! Spread the word about our amazing games, and in return we'll work as hard as we can to make your experience the best it can possibly be.

Developer Corner
By Navarr

The feedback to last month’s developer corner was pretty good. I’m happy to see that many enjoyed reading up on what exactly it is our developers are doing.

One of the hardest parts of writing this is deciding how much we can or should say about what our developers are doing. For example - when someone is working on anti-cheat type things, we can really only say that we’re improving admin tools, or the game, or something else - and likewise that’s pretty much all I can say when I get a “we’ve fixed a ton of small bugs in x.” I’m doing my best over here.

As always, your reminder that we’re not making promises as to how soon or long it will be until we release anything mentioned here. Developers move about different projects as needed/desired.

That said, we are currently pushing for Gold Rush to hit an Alpha as soon as we possibly can.

Murgatron
I’ll be honest, I’ve never really considered Murgatron a developer - but he keeps sending me monthly updates, so I guess I’ll talk about what he’s been doing. Let me just look over these notes.. Hmm, yeah.. Can’t really say that out explicitly.. Maybe I can reword it? Ah, yeah, here we go.

This month Murgatron was happy to report that he worked together with the Development Team to help fight back cheaters with the second best tools available to us - technology! Fighting off cheaters is a cat and mouse game that requires constant attention, and Murg and the Development Team were on top of it this past month.

He was also proud to report that he continued working with the team to move Gold Rush forward. He believes we’re very close to an alpha release, which should play well with our internal goal of launching that this summer.

Robertthegoat
Robert has been spending a lot of his time working on Gold Rush. There’s lots of tweaks, bug fixes, and other things going on here. One exciting thing perhaps is that he’s very focused on ensuring Gold Rush has localization support (at my behest). This is great news, as I have been pushing since its inception for Gold Rush to be one of, if not THE first game on the network fully localized into Japanese. Our expanding localization team is standing by ready to translate - so I can’t wait for that alpha!
In addition to Gold Rush, Robertthegoat took some time to work on quality of life improvements to GhostCraft. The staff have been getting together and playing it a few times this month and after witnessing some bugs he decided he wanted to round them up and squash them like.. Bugs…

DocCodeSharp
Doc has spent a great portion of this month focused on internal processes (yes, still - you wouldn’t believe how long some of that type of stuff takes), squashing MineZ bugs and refactoring it’s code for stability purposes, and performing other quality of life improvements related to keeping cheaters off our servers.

skillerfox3
Skiller has been working on Gold Rush alongside Robertthegoat to fix those bugs and polish that game. He specifically mentioned some quality of life improvements like adding death messages and improving the existing map objectives.

Have I mentioned yet how excited I am for Gold Rush?

Anyway, here's one final thing I'd like to say: no comment from a developer doesn't mean they didn't do anything, it just means that they may not have told us what they did. Anyway, thanks for reading, and see you next month!
- Navarr

With that, I bid you farewell. I'm your host, Mistri. See you next month!

Updates
Network Updates
We have some great news—1.12.2 support is currently being tested. Stay tuned for more info.

Annihilation Updates
This month, many exciting things happened in Annihilation!

To begin with, the Annihilation clan tournament continued, and was livestreamed here:


Next up, we announced changes that will be coming to the way you join a team, which should hopefully fix the team stacking issue. Read all about it here!

Finally, we had a large update patch to Annihilation, which included many new balances and cool features! Read all about it here.

Gold Rush Updates
Development pace has increased on Gold Rush. You can view a stream of a staff test game that we held earlier this month here:

Slaughter Updates
Two new maps have been added to Slaughter, Moria and Burrows.

Statistics
SMASH Rankings
The 2018 Spring season is in session, so rack up that ELO quickly before it's over! The current standings are:

• 1st - Acstes (1169)
• 2nd - _BrightDarkness_ (1169)
• 3rd - JirenX (1144)

Mine Theft Auto
MTA Leaderboards for April 2018
Combat:

• 1st - NeedVini KDR: 89:1 (89.0)
• 2nd - Wafuuu KDR: 42:1 (42.0)
• 3rd - AVAchqn KDR: 18:0 (18.0)

Arrests:

• 1st - clover0321 Arrests: 56.0
• 2nd - NoSkill_00 Arrests: 32.0
• 3rd - Tyrmo Arrests: 28.0

Experience Gained:

• 1st - _hage Experience gained: 145781.0
• 2nd - Nanacoro Experience gained: 71540.0
• 3rd - AMeno_ToRIFuNE Experience gained: 43409.0

Minigames Won:

• 1st - InfinityAura Minigames won: 120.0
• 2nd - DonutMaster35 Minigames won: 103.0
• 3rd - Geromo1561 Minigames won: 96.0

Network in General
Staff updates:

• DocCodeSharp was promoted to Lead Developer
• Lomrun_ was promoted to Full Builder and Co-Lead Builder
• JTGangsterLP6 was promoted to Full Admin
• windex_07 was promoted to Full Admin
• Nalacion, Talef, and Pichu2002 joined the Mini Builder team

Other statistics:

• A total of 120,671,421 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 2,048 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 737 on April 15

Player Peak
This month, we are still up really high and close to 1,000 players online at one time. However, if we can hit over 1,000 players online at one time during the next month, we will do a Platinum rank giveaway on the Twitter!

What can I do?
Play on Shotbow, invite your friends, and invite their friends! Make friends and invite them to Shotbow! Spread the word about our amazing games, and in return we'll work as hard as we can to make your experience the best it can possibly be.

Developer Corner
We're trying something new this month. Last month the issue was raised that, despite some of our attempts at communicating development work, tasks, and what we've been doing - we've fallen short in being open enough with the community about the work we're doing.

As such, starting this month - and hopefully for the next couple at least, we'll be hosting a Developer Corner in the New Moon. Here, we'll gather up data on what our developers have been working on, removing the classifieds, and running hype-control on it.

AS ALWAYS, this is what we're currently working on. There's no guarantee that it will come out soon - or in some cases ever. Let me re-iterate: WE ARE NOT MAKING PROMISES HERE. You got that?? You hear me?? It's important for you to connect those dots if we're going to be more transparent. This is your reminder that our developers are volunteers, that they work in their free time as a hobby, and they do their damn best. I hope we're on the same page - so let's move on to what they've been working on!

The interviews below are from the perspective of Navarr. Enjoy!

skillerfox3
This past month, Skiller has been focusing his attention on Gold Rush and quality of life improvements across the network - as well as some fun cosmetic stuff.
The most fun, perhaps, is a spiffy cake balloon made for the awesome Mint_LimeLemon
This is a very special one-of-a-kind balloon that, at least for the near future, no other player can get! This was awarded to Mint_LimeLemon after their awesome twitter post of ANNIHILATION COOKIES!
Skiller also worked on quality of life improvements for Annihilation, including auto-complete for /vote, and admin commands.

DocCodeSharp
Doc has spent this week working on improving our processes - including Quality Assurance & Testing for bug reports, patching our Spigot instances to more easily support Minecraft updates like 1.12.2 and 1.13.
One big thing that Doc has also been working on is a long-term refactoring project for MineZ to improve the codebase and stability of the game.

Jeroenhero
Jeroen's big projects are a new /help command (such as on SMASH) that will be localizable, making some pets, and some quality of life improvements across the network such as admin tooling.

Robertthegoat
Robertthegoat was pleased to share with me the tonne of things he worked on this month. Most of which are sadly quality of life improvements and experimental features for current games like MineZ. However, on top of that he continued work on refactoring core pieces of the Wasted codebase (used for Wasted Sandbox, Gun Game, and Control), as well as spending some of his time on Gold Rush!

Galap
This month, Galap's primary tasks have been quality of life improvements for Annihilation - such as beating back cheaters and work on the priority queuing system for defeating team stacking.

Navarr
I’m also pleased to announce that I worked on Chat Bot this month - with significant assistance from Mistri. Unlike other pieces of Shotbow code, Chat Bot is open Source and available for viewing on GitHub. Of particular note is the new command !playercount, which already has daily use in the Shotbow Discord - which can display the playercount across all of Shotbow or for an individual game, as well as some work being done to enable localization of the bot, allowing it to respond in a language appropriate for the Discord channel its in.

That's it for the Developer Corner. Please let us know what you thought about it in the comments below. Thanks!

Letter from the Leads
What follows is a letter from the Network Leads. Please enjoy!

It's that time of year - we're in the slow part surrounding finals right before summer break. Although, you may not be able to notice that this week as it's the start of Golden Week - a week full of holidays for the Japanese here on the network. To those in Japan - enjoy your vacation! We'll be delighted if you decide to spend some of it on Shotbow.

As Network Leads, it's our responsibility to do our best to keep an eye on the network, set the direction it's heading in, and ensure that we're doing the best we can do in all areas.

It is in this vein that we've realized two significant areas we need to improve upon - which we may have already known, and which you may have also already known:

Transparency & Marketing

By the time you read this letter, you'll have noticed that we're already working hard to improve upon this facets of the network. In regards to marketing, we have launched a new mailing list that should allow us to send out update emails and more once again - without rendering the rest of our infra useless.

In addition to that, we're putting more focus on our social media again - such as Facebook, and we've been streaming the Annihilation Tournament on multiple platforms at once - Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, and Mixer. We're doing our best to start putting our content back out into the world to help drive players in. We hope to expand this focus to rehash our approach with voting websites.

In the realm of transparency, we're encouraging developers to talk to the community about difficult implementations and changes we want to make to our games - such as the new queuing system in Annihilation.

In addition to increasing community outreach and feedback, we're trialing a new monthly system to help inform players of what our developers are doing. You'll notice in this New Moon that there is a developer corner. We've spent the last month keeping an eye on the developers and, more honestly, asking them around the end of the month to tell us what they've been working on. We've compiled this and modified it to control the hype and ensure we're not making any promises in order to keep you in the know.

Remember as always to keep realistic expectations of an all volunteer staff team - as many of them have finals coming up as well.

These two facets are our primary focus this quarter. Though it goes without saying there is still a continued focus on getting new players, keeping our current playerbase, improving our games, and bringing new games - but we figure you'll read more about that in our Developer Corner.

And as always, Thank you for flying Shotbow.
We'll talk again soon.
— Murgatron & Navarr

With that, I bid you farewell. I'm your host, Mistri. See you next month!

Hey all,

Due to our most recent email blast (which you may or may not have yet received) requesting sign-up for our new mailing list, we are being temporarily rate-limited to Google mail, Yahoo mail, and likely other email providers.

This means that registration emails, forum notifications, and other such emails delivered by the Shotbow.net forum system will be delayed.

Please do not request multiple /changemeail or password reset requests - your emails will be delivered eventually (hopefully), and spamming our system will unfortunately make it take even longer.

Emails from Buycraft or emails with support should work as normal.

Messages sent through the Contact Us form may be delayed, but will appear instantly in a secondary system we have in place for reading them.

I hope for this inconvenience to resolve itself within a week, but it may take some time yet.

Thank you for your understanding, and we're very sorry for the inconvenience.

P.S. Sign up to our mailing list to receive important announcements in your email.
UPDATE: We are no longer experiencing email delays. if you are missing mail, please be sure to check your Spam folder.