Shotbow

Happy October Survivors!

For several years now, MineZ has been the host of many Halloween tricks and treats, bringing new and exciting content to the game for a whole month. This year is no different, as we have brought together some of our favorite classic events and upgraded them for 2020. This year has been monumental for MineZ, and we hope to continue delivering quality events for the foreseeable future.

But enough talk, let's see what we have in store for you this year.


Treats with plenty of Tricks

The MineZ Treat Chest is probably the oldest trick in our arsenal. Many of you will be familiar with this event, and know generally how it plays. However, I encourage you to read on to understand some of the changes for this year's treat chest so that it may be fun and fair for everyone.

Treat Schedule & Loot

Every Saturday at 1pm Central Time, a special "Treat Chest Shrine" will begin to form in the world. An announcement will be broadcast 10 minutes in advance to the location of the chest. This is to give players a brief moment to prepare and get themselves ready for the inevitable fight for the prize.

This year we stepped back and really wanted to make opening the treat chest feel worthwhile. Not very many people have opened one, but even those that have will recount simple renamed items being the stars of the show, as well as a singular themed pumpkin. Simply put, while these items are valuable collectables, they don't provide much interactivity in the game.

This year, we have decided to line the chest not only with these collectables, but also items that actually DO something. You may find some of your favorite legendary items in these chests, or even entirely brand new items.

Rules

Soon before a Treat Chest Shrine spawns, preparations will begin on the server side. If there is not already more than one server, another MineZ Public server will be temporarily started to house the event. The broadcast will announce the specific server that will hold the event. (Usually the last public server in the list.)

Once the 10 minute timer begins, the following rules will apply. Failure to comply with these rules will disqualify you from the event, or risk action being taken on your account.

1. The 10 minute timer serves as a preparatory period to travel to the location of the chest, and get your gear in order. Fighting and otherwise being a bandit is allowed during this time.
2. You are only allowed one, and only one account for the duration of the event. Should you log in a second account at any time, no matter the location or status, you will be promptly removed from the server. It is your responsibility to adhere to this rule, and any attempts at abusing alternate accounts will be met with punishment.
3. When the chest spawns, the server will be whitelisted to prevent hopping, and also to assist in the denial of alternate accounts. It is your responsibility to be on the server when the chest spawns, or you will not be able to participate. You will also be unable to rejoin the server, so please plan accordingly.
4. As always, all other Shotbow Rules apply.

Common Treat Chest

Starting October 5th, another type of treat chest will spawn. This one might be more familiar to you, and will be similar to original treat chests. These will spawn with a server broadcast, announcing their spawn location. Chests will alternate between 12 PM CDT (EU time) and 6 PM CDT (US time) each other day.

Each treat chest will consist of an assortment of Halloween goodies, rares, collectibles, useful items, and the traditional spooky pumpkin. This chest will of course pale in comparison to the legendary treat shrines that spawn once a week. This option allows for many people to potentially claim this variant of treat chest.


Disclaimer: Should player abuse become a major issue in claiming these chests, we reserve the right to modify how common treat chests work and generally relaxed rules around this variant.

Spooktacular Exploration

What would a holiday event be without some decorations? For the whole month of October, you will find that many of your favorite towns and locations have been completely reskinned for Halloween. These reskins are not only visual makeovers, however. For you will also find unique loot throughout these locations, as well as generally more powerful items.

For loot in particular, you will find special Halloween themed chests, each with their own special items to collect. Not only are these items fun collectables, they also will have very practical uses in your trek across the world.

Something Wicked this Way Comes

With each passing week in October, the veil between our world and the terrors of the beyond will slowly begin to fade.

More and more features and dangerous creatures will seep into the world for players to experience and cower in fear from. The world will continue to morph and evolve throughout the days and weeks of October. It's almost as if it's alive...

Be sure to keep an eye on the MineZ Changelog to keep up with the updates, and be sure to stay tuned for upcoming Halloween Cosmetics that will be hitting the Shotbow Store later this month.

Additionally, starting in the Second Week of October, we will be running a MineZ Halloween Head Hunt on the map. These heads will shuffle three times total through October, giving players the opportunity to participate in three separate head hunts, each with their own prizes.

More information will be shared in the second week of October.

MineZ Admin Applications Update

Originally announced in the Adventurer's Update thread, applications for becoming a MineZ Admin are now officially closed, and all applications have been reviewed and finalized. Thank you to everyone who applied, and please give a warm welcome to our newest recruits!

• A_g_n_i (Agni)
• Detective_Mark
• robdoom
• ShadowLAX

Additionally, we would also like to announce that MineZ Admins are now able to assist more directly with potential issues you may come across in MineZ. If you haven't already, be sure to join the Shotbow Discord to chat and hang out, as well to request assistance if something goes awry during your travels.

A Quick Word on Development

While we have been hard at work to deliver a great Spookfest event, I am sure it is on everyone's mind on what may come after it. The MineZ Team has been in many talks about how we want to move forward and communicate our priorities to the community. While we are not ready to publicly share a priority map, we hear you loud and clear, and we are aiming to release some sort of priority map within the next month.

Keep in mind, a "Priority Map" in this sense is not the same as a "Road Map". Simply put, we are unable to provide concrete timelines for when to expect features in the game. However, we still want to open up and at least share the direction we are heading for the future.

We hope to continue expanding our transparency the best we can, so that everyone is on the same page.

Closing

October is once again upon us, and we have been hard at work trying to deliver a memorable Spookfest for everyone.

While we have gone through many transitionary periods through the past few months, and have had a few setbacks, we hope to continue the momentum we have built up and move forward into the Autumn and Winter months.

As always, thank you to everyone for your continued support and feedback. We look forward to seeing you all participate in the festivities!

Thanks for flying Shotbow!

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Hey everyone! My name is Mistri and I'll be your host for this month's edition of Dentril's New Moon. Without further ado, let's jump right into the updates!

Updates
Network Updates
As a result of the non-stop efforts of lazertester and aet2505, we have fully transitioned our backend to Kubernetes, a new cutting-edge technology. If you're interested about the technical aspect of this update, or about our legacy server deployment system, check out this awesome write-up about the transition!

With this update comes better reliability and stability, and also better tools for our developers to diagnose and patch issues as soon as possible. While you may not notice it at first, we will gradually be able to handle stability and lag issues faster starting now. Let us know if you notice any differences in the comments below.

Annihilation Updates
A new Annihilation update, Nifty Boron, was released early this month. It included many class changes, balance changes, bug fixes, and a lot more! You can read all about it here, and check out its teaser trailer here.

Community Events
The community-run Annihilation Clan War has continued, with staff commentary available for your pleasure. This month, we premiered match 16, which can be viewed here:



(Writer's note: the ending of this Clan War had me on the edge of my seat. It was a fantastic game and I highly recommend you watch it!)

MineZ Updates
This month, we released an awesome update for MineZ, called First Steps. It includes new mobs, legendary item changes, and much more. It's jam-packed with fantastic content — if you haven't already read about it, you can find the full thread here.

As usual, work continues on MineZ, so expect to see some updates in the next few days!

SMASH Updates
This month, we announced an official tournament for SMASH, complete with a bracket and prizes. You won't want to miss this, even if you're not an avid SMASH player! View info about the tournament here.

Statistics
SMASH Rankings
The summer season has just ended, and the results are in!

• 1st - Sonicboom_ - 75,000 XP
• 2nd - Yesus42 - 50,000 XP
• 3rd - Viral333 - 25,000 XP

Network in General
Staff updates:

• InstantLightning, Red_Epicness, and roby08 joined the Jr. Developer team
• Roquel was promoted to MineZ Co-Lead
• Veghetto was promoted to SMASH Co-Lead
• PokeTheEye was promoted to Film Crew Co-Lead
• Samstag1 rejoined the team as a Full Admin
• wmn was promoted to Full Builder
• A_g_n_i, Detective_Mark, robdoom, and ShadowLAX joined the MineZ Mini Admin team
• Spark_Warrior was promoted to Localizer

Other statistics:

• A total of 88,055,343 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 1,696 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 402 on September 6
• 73 ban appeals were resolved in the last month
• 6 Rank Upgrade Requests were handled in the last month
• 750 support emails were handled in the last month

Closing Words
Thanks everyone for tuning in. Happy October! Get ready for a spook-tacular month.

As always, I'm your host, Mistri — catch you next month, and thanks for flying Shotbow!

This is going to be a slightly more technical read than most of our postings, you have been warned.

After a hiccup or two, we have completed an (almost) invisible fundamental change to our server infrastructure: Every one of our Minecraft servers is now deployed into a Kubernetes cluster for orchestration, instead of a home grown orchestration layer we’ve been using for over 5 years we’ve simply referred to as “Deployment”.

Deployment: A Legacy



Deployment was an amalgamation of Python scripts, cron jobs, and database polling to keep up with the state of the servers, roll new ones, destroy expired ones, and give us insight into what was currently running.

When this first was created it solved a HUGE need and was miles ahead of our old method of “Login and run script A if we need another MineZ server, edit the server.properties, and execute the start command. Login and run script B if we need another Anni server, edit the server.properties etc...”.

It helped us break the model of server instances being uniquely managed (Anyone remember the old days of MINEZ_07_US loyalty?), and instead allowed us to have repeatable units we could scale out and in at will.



Over the years, developers have added and removed from it to automate additional common tasks and it has been very useful, but its deep underbelly became a scary place that no one dared to venture into, since it was impossible to untangle the web of scripts and schedules at its heart.

Sometimes rsyncs of the server files would fail and we’d have to dig through our servers to find what went wrong. Other times, some bad data broke one of its unspoken “rules” and it refused to work entirely. It became a gigantic, spooky, mysterious volcano that could erupt at any moment.

Ultimately the key shortcoming of Deployment was that it was tailor made to only run our Minecraft instances, what happens if we want to run something else like a new database, web service, or even host another game? We knew there had to be a better way, and we happen to have the background necessary to put it to work.

Enter Stage Right

Adam (aet2505) and I both work professionally as Software Engineers dealing with Kubernetes (k8s) on a daily basis.

I asked him what he thought it would take us to get everything running in k8s and we both sort of verbally shrugged and got to work. As many of you know, I am based in Salt Lake City, Utah, what you might not know is that Adam is not.

The time difference between us basically meant at least one of us could be working on it around the clock for almost 2 weeks straight, provisioning the cluster, establishing deployments, creating a dockerization strategy for our instances, and testing out how Bungee liked the networking model inside the cluster (spoiler alert: It loved it).

Every Rose Has Its Thorns

The biggest hurdle we hit along the way was that Kubernetes pods are inherently ephemeral, meaning they come and go at will, however we want our Minecraft servers to only shut down under specific circumstances.

To solve this, Adam established a Custom Resource Definition he aptly named “MinecraftSet” and created an operator that facilitates our desired control loop. This operator will keep the number of instances above the minReplicas, and a scalar can react to server state changes (like population) as well as ask if it is ready to shut down.

This lets game creators respond to shut down requests in the existing event driven pattern inside of Spigot and indicate whether it is safe or not. This has afforded us the flexibility to deploy a server that is usually fine to shut down on demand such as DBV and a server that should NEVER shut down in most circumstances like Annihilation using the same pattern.

Annihilation itself is able to own the logic governing shutdowns by influencing the control loop based on game state instead of a script running on a mystery box (could you imagine every game terminating just as Phase 3 starts!?).

Like Popsicles In Summer

Once we overcame that hurdle, we found a few problems that existed in our deployment world had simply melted away.

Because of Kubernetes’ networking model, all Minecraft servers could simply run on port 25565. Every instance is deployed into a “pod” in the cluster, and receives its own IP address. We had swathes of code for figuring out which port was available and ensuring that port is published when the server registered with our router that was simply deleted (deleting code is the BEST).

Managing storage was a bit of a pain, but PersistentVolumes in Kubernetes and volume mounts in Docker allow us to to handle storage in a way that is transparent to the server running. Using Prometheus, we are able to discover and scrape metrics on running instances automatically, allowing us to create useful Grafana dashboards for everything from server health to player report spikes.

ArgoCD helps us reconcile our repository of Kubernetes manifests with the running cluster, provide single button rollback support, and a quick glance view into what is running as well as server logs. Previously reverts consisted of tracking down the plugin, configuration, or build that had changed, manually reverting it, then re-releasing.

In this universe we can rollback with ArgoCD, which takes the pressure off the team so they can take their time diagnosing what went wrong with a rollout and easily roll forward again with the fix. Here’s When in Rogue in the ArgoCD interface:


One of the new additions I am working on is a proper social system, starting with Friends and soon with network-wide parties. This has a backing web API and is built on a graph database which is well suited for this kind of problem.

I was able to spin up the dev stack in minutes, with full discoverability and connectivity from our Minecraft instances to interact with it. This has allowed me to move quickly to create rich social features that will improve your experience with us here at Shotbow. This has also enabled some of our new devs to dive right into crafting new experiences, ensuring a safety net so those working with established modes can experiment and rollback easily, and has also increased our ability to monitor and support the infrastructure that powers these games we love.


If you enjoyed this technical deep dive into Shotbow's core infrastructure, be sure to let us know! We may just continue to do more of these "Devblogs" in the future!

But for now, as always,

Thanks for flying Shotbow!