Shotbow

Thanks in part to a lot of great feedback we've received, the Shotbow PR team has been hard at work to give the Media Program a complete overhaul - and we are happy to announce that we have done just that!

There are a couple major goals to this program:

Expand Shotbow's Partners

As you might be able to tell from the header - we now have two levels of partnership with Shotbow - our Media Creators, and our Media Partners. These levels are primarily based on views of content, instead of our previous mishmash of subscribers/views/etc. It is our hope that the requirements have been brought down enough to bring many more producers into the program without making the rank meaningless.

Ensure our playerbase has entertaining content to watch

We want to make sure that our current players have great content to watch - to remind them of all the fun they can have on our network (in addition to hopefully encouraging new people to join). As such, we plan to do a lot more co-promotion with our Media Partners - echoing them out to the community and making a list of current and active producers easily available to Shotbow players.

Improved global outreach

Recognizing our large, global audience - We've begun to add regional liaisons for the Media Program. Where before, I was the sole liaison, new additions to the program will receive a liaison based on the language they speak. Our initial regional liaisons are for English, Japanese, and Dutch - with more possible in the future!

Increased interactive events

And one of our bigger and stretchier goals is to increase the amount of interactive events in our games. Events thrown by Shotbow staff are fun, yes - but they tend to be more fun when the community and our producers are involved in them. Our highest tier - Media Partner - is entitled to event planning with the Shotbow Staff team, though even Creators are invited to request events and fun. A new, large addition to help with this is that we plan to offer our Media Partners the ability to hold Shotbow Rank giveaways.

Shotbow now supports Minecraft v1.12!

We are currently supporting 1.12 through a protocol patch - meaning that our games are still running on Minecraft 1.9, and are accessible to all clients running 1.9 and up.

Our current plans (subject to change) are to make 1.12 the next base version our games can use. What does this mean? It means in the future you might have to use 1.12 to connect to certain games. We've done this in the past when we supported 1.7/1.8 where some of our games necessitated connecting via 1.8. This is likely a good bit off, so there's no need to panic yet.

Enjoy the update!

New Staff

With 1.9 out of the way, we spent some time this past month bringing in new staff again to help get the ball rolling. You might even recognize some of these people:



Joining the full admin team is Fluffoon as the Community Manager, Kingey as the Film Crew Lead, Robertthegoat as a new Jr Developer, noobfan, Unicycle43, sunlost, and gunso_!

Non-full staff joining us include Valkyrion as a Film Crew editor, Mistri as a member of the Public Relations Team, and Saber527 as a member of the Mine Theft Auto administration team.

Please do give them all a warm welcome to the team!

Network Changes

Region Consolidation

For the second time in its history, Shotbow is consolidating regions. EU.shotbow.net now points to US.shotbow.net, and games will be figuring out how best to consolidate their stats and inventories across regions. You can read more about the decision in HighlifeTTU's post: EU Server Retirement

Media Program Changes

Starting with the spelling, there will be some fairly large changes coming to our partnership program. The biggest thing we're going to do is open up the floodgates to more creators. We'll have more to say on these changes later this month.

New Updates

Return of SMASH



We're so pleased to be able to announce the return of SMASH to the network - now on 1.9! Superbob101, Kingey, and JesseTheDemon have been hard at work to bring you back one of our most loved games.

Perhaps most exciting of all is the return of the SMASH Ranked system!

There's a lot more news involved, and you can read all of that over in the SMASH Changelog for 1.9.

Annihilation Class Update



Following the awesome re-launch of SMASH to 1.9, our development team followed it up with the Annihilation Class Update!

The action-packed update includes more tweaks than I can enunciate and brings a whole new class: Robin Hood. You can read all the beautiful details in the Annihilation Class Update changelog.

Since such a large release was planned, we also took the opportunity to give Annihilation it's own logo. What do you think?

Civ-War



Shotbow is very pleased to announce that we are in early talks to bring you Civ-War -- the latest refresh of the game originally known as CivilizationCraft. We'll have more to say about Civ-War in the coming months.

In the meantime, you can check up on their progress at Civ-War.com.

Death by Void



Not a lot to say here, but we did refresh the imagery we use for Death by Void. You can see it.. well, right here!

New Partners



In the last month we were pleased to announce our partnership with Lancey of the Lanceypooh YouTube channel. Lance was recording a MineZ series where he and a friend try to see how far they can survive without dying while mapping out the world.

The Coming Moon

There's a lot expected to happen this month, with the brunt of the work of region consolidation happening early on. Some games are still deciding on how they're going to merge, but you can expect that the staff at the helm have the best interests of their players in their hearts.

In addition to the great consolidation, the Public Relations team is hoping to launch their revised Media Program before July.

And in the meantime the MineZ build and development teams will be hard at work on Origins Part II and possibly the return of the Revelations podcast.

That's all we've got - I'm Navarr, your host, and thank you for flying Shotbow.

Dentril's New Moon image provided courtesy of Mistri