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Shotbow
Feb
01
First of all, I apologise that The Weekly Arrow is a bit later than normal. I was in the hospital for three days while the love of my life recovered from having this little treasure. That aside, it's time for The Weekly Arrow! Bringing all the latest announced, unannounced, and redacted changes from the last week.
Annihilation
- The Annihilation Lead Admin, BeatBoxCow, has announced a weekly event wherein the Annihilation Staff members will play a game with the people they help protect from the baddies every day! Go check out the information post and be sure to attend at least once
- Classes were bugged for a short amount of time due to changes on The Shotbow Network back-end (in preparation for Minecraft IGN changes), but have all been fixed. If you're still having trouble with class unlocking, make sure you let the Technical Support staff know.
- PvP has been disabled in the CraftyBomber lobby - excellent news for all the streamers who were having trouble playing due to their fans being more than a little excited
- The development team is working on refactoring GhostCraft to make it more like SMASH. The benefits include partying up to join a map, maps never being full, and the ability to quickly and easily add as many maps as we want to! These changes aren't done yet - but we wanted you to know they were under way!
- HCFactions has a long history of posting their own weekly changelog. You can read their changelog on the /r/hcfactions subreddit.
- Majicou is now the Lead Admin for MineZ: Classic
- The build team fixed up some building errors in MineZ 2
- Lava Spire has been removed from Ranked play.
- Bugfix: Cloud in a bottle no longer completely locks your player in place.
- Bugfix: Players are no longer able to swim in flowing lava
- Bugfix: Players can once again be knocked through the bottom of Swamp
- Bugfix: Large parties can no longer join maps if the amount of players in the party is more than the map can handle
- Bugfix: Players no longer have access to /me
- Bugfix: EU player reports are now received by the report system (Unfortunately they previously were not)
- Bugfix: Sweepers is no longer using the Shared XP system. To increase your XP multiplier, consider Going Premium!.
- LavenderGiraffe recently took the time to completely furnish the housing for When in Rogue - Make sure to drop into the Alpha-test of the game and check it all out!
- Kensai111 has continued work on a new, flat, and planned-to-be responsive layout design for the forums.
- Majicou has added the following web moderators to his team:They're here to keep you rowdy lot civilized, and they're sure to get a lot of flack for it. Be sure to treat them all with respect!
- > 14,400 "/report"s
- The various development teams continued to coordinate on preparing The Shotbow Network for username changes.
- New bug report system! The developers finally have a JIRA instance setup. Instead of a thread, bug should now be reported at http://shotbow.net/forum/p/bugs/. This initiative includes a brand new Bug Tracking Team lead by SocomX1 (similar to MrDarn's old Buganeer team).
- The build team continued work on [REDACTED]
- The PR team put together another great Weekly Arrow with the combined assistance of the entire Shotbow Network staff.
Do you use Google+? Well, even if you don't (which is a shame because it's one of my personal favorite social mediums) we'd super appreciate it if you went and followed our Google+ Page! The PR Team will be making a continued effort to post events and more to the Google+ so you may choose to add them to your calendar.
Follow us at +TheShotbowNetwork
Reminders
- Don't forget you can earn additional daily XP by voting for The Shotbow Network at PlanetMinecraft
- Final Day to play Shotbow Games is February 28th - make the most of it!
There's been a lot of talk, rumors, etc. about the next games to be removed or cancelled and I'd like to clear up any misconceptions. We are not currently in the process, nor are we talking about removing or cancelling any more of The Shotbow Network's games. We do reserve the right to make changes to our games and remove them as necessary, but we are not currently in internal discussion to remove any more. You can rest easy knowing we announced all the cancellations and retirements last week.
That said, especially as you can tell from the changes above, changes are coming to all games in an effort to bring them up to part with the quality you expect from The Shotbow Network - so stay tuned for the newest Golden Age of Shotbow.
See you next week, Shotbow!
(Last Week's Arrow)
Jan
25
Things really geared up this past week - Lazer is starting to feel better and the administrative team had an all-hands cross-continental meeting in order to flesh out the State of the Shotbow and make sure everyone is on the same track with where we're going, where we need to be, etc etc.
Below, you'll find some specifics on what we did. We've retired a number of old projects this week, which is always an incredibly sad experience, but we hope that you feel better with the knowledge that we do so to truly refocus our efforts on where they're needed.
Annihilation
Do you use Google+? Well, even if you don't (which is a shame because it's one of my personal favorite social mediums) we'd super appreciate it if you went and followed our Google+ Page! The PR Team will be making a continued effort to post events and more to the Google+ so you may choose to add them to your calendar.
Follow us at +TheShotbowNetwork
Reminders
And that's the last of this week's changes. See you next week, Shotbow!
(Last Week's Arrow)
Below, you'll find some specifics on what we did. We've retired a number of old projects this week, which is always an incredibly sad experience, but we hope that you feel better with the knowledge that we do so to truly refocus our efforts on where they're needed.
Annihilation
- Annihilation was recently moved over to our shiny new Server Deployment System (mentioned in previous Arrows as "revolutionary" and redacted). The new system creates servers as they are needed - so let us know if you're having any issues finding a game to play!
- In staff news, Maggie_May_Play stepped down as the Lead of the Annihilation Admin team, handing the reigns over to BeatBoxCow. Congratulations to him, and good luck with all those reports!
- Additionally, the Annihilation Admin team has been given a little more freedom to improve their productivity. This should increase the amount of reports being handled.
- In GhostCraft news, Warehouse & Sanctuary triumphantly returned to the game alongside IamMcIovin's community submitted map Confined.
- Bug Fix: An issue on Confined where one of the ghost spawn points dropped them into the void was patched.
- Bug Fix: A Spectator sign was added to Confined.
- New map Dusty Roads was added and subsequently removed due to crashing the server everytime it was selected in rotation. We hope to be able to launch in soon with an additional map after resolving the issue.
- HCFactions 4.0 was launched as part of Map 23's Start of the World.
- Vortex has temporarily been removed from the game due to bugs. We hope to bring it back soon.
- Bug Fix: Player houses no longer disappear after adding an offline admin to them. Previously undeleted "disappeared" houses have been restored in full condition. More information available in lazertester's announcement.
- MineZ RP, a project meant to fill a niche in the way MineZ Classic was played has been cancelled due to the changing landscape of Minecraft games and the shrinking of players interested in that niche. More information available in Navarr's announcement.
- After a long tenure on The Shotbow Network, Shotbow Games is being retired. The final day for play is February 28th, 2015 and a generous parting gift is planned for SBG players. More details available in Zombry's announcement.
- To encourage more players to enter ranked matches, a prominent podium has been added front and center to the SMASH lobby - relying less on players noticing the less obvious signs at the SMASH billboard
- In addition, the SMASH tutorial signs were updated to include information on how to grab and throw players.
- And finally SMASH, like Annihilation, was added to the new Server Deployment System.
- Bug Fix: Minecraft Achievements are no longer announced to the server.
- Unavowed - The Shotbow Network's original entry into the MMORPG genre has been cancelled. More details can be found in kensai111's announcement.
- Received >11,500 "/report"s
- Due to the recent confusion with what minimaps may be used on the Shotbow Network, our client-side development staff has updated the original Rei's Minimap for 1.7.10 and 1.8. Links to this version can be found on our rules page.
- Spring has come early to The Shotbow Network! Released alongside some backend changes for HCF's SotW, the lobby has moved over to a lovely new Springtime format. Christmas is officially over, and hopefully now it'll stop snowing so much where I live.
- A result from the previously mentioned all-hands meeting: The Shotbow Network staff have been OK'ed to play Shotbow Network games on their main accounts. This has previously been discouraged, but with some bug fixes disabling ways staff could unintentionally cheat they've been cleared to play! Feel free to keep a keen eye out for off-duty staff taking a break from reports to play the games they love.
- Work began this week on a new support system being planned to replace Ban Appeals & Player Reports. An ETA is not yet available, but the web team hopes to put out an early version soon.
- With ten days (at the time of this post) left before Mojang allows players to change their username, the Web & Systems team continued (albeit possibly with a little more panic) to prepare The Shotbow Network for these upcoming changes.
- The PR Team this week continued to respond to questions directed over Twitter and Facebook, and cross-posted ban appeals made from Facebook messages to the Ban Appeal forum. At time of writing, the PR team made the following comment: "There's just no end to them! Even if you double-tap 'em they just keep coming back!!"
- And finally this week the PR team assembled the third Weekly Arrow - making a few poor attempts at comedy and assembling far more information that I want to every week.
Do you use Google+? Well, even if you don't (which is a shame because it's one of my personal favorite social mediums) we'd super appreciate it if you went and followed our Google+ Page! The PR Team will be making a continued effort to post events and more to the Google+ so you may choose to add them to your calendar.
Follow us at +TheShotbowNetwork
Reminders
- Don't forget you can earn additional daily XP by voting for The Shotbow Network at PlanetMinecraft
- Final Day to play Shotbow Games is February 28th - make the most of it!
And that's the last of this week's changes. See you next week, Shotbow!
(Last Week's Arrow)
Jan
23
I'm sorry to say that Shotbow Games or SBG will be removed from the Shotbow Network. By removing SBG, we can devote more of our resources to improving the network and it's infrastructure. I apologize to the people who tried to help revive this gamemode by collaborating with me to think up ideas back when I was still another player as I have failed in doing so. I believe that retiring SBG was for the better as it wasn't very original and it may have been a tad too "pay-2-win" (hulk) and on top of that, it strained the network's resources by adding a game that needed constant developing and as you know, we didn't have that dedicated developer. The last day to play this gamemode is February 28, 2015.
SBG's lobby spot will be given to either a pre-existing gamemode or a future gamemode.
Anyone who has purchased at least one lifetime class for SBG will recieve 25,000 xp as a parting gift.
Edit: The parting gift is done automatically.
Post in the Q&A Thread if you have additional questions.
SBG's lobby spot will be given to either a pre-existing gamemode or a future gamemode.
Anyone who has purchased at least one lifetime class for SBG will recieve 25,000 xp as a parting gift.
Edit: The parting gift is done automatically.
Post in the Q&A Thread if you have additional questions.
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