No Prefix I Hate This Server With Passion

I doubt any of you have the courage to read this entire thing. ESPECIALLY the admins

Before you say the old "mad coz bad" argument I just want you to get an idea just a glimpse of how destroyed this server has become. Shotbow used to be a beaming server with 3000+ players. Imagine in annihilation you right clicked that compass and saw many stacks of dye, able to choose which voting youd like. Able to choose from many games which one to play. Now, less than 44% of the time are there any games if at all active. All your players went to hypixel or quit the game. It has utterly been traumautizing and demeaning. On top of the usual problem of low player count, there comes along the problem with seeing the same players everyday, on and on seemingly 24/7. You'd think that these people have jobs or education to fullfill, but they have been sucked in. Addiction is quite an understatement. Their lives are engulfed in annihilation. This is literally all they do. Its sickening to think that a game, dominated by people, some of which are likely using ray-tracing, xraying, autoclicking, and other cheats shotbow staff could care less about, has absolutely no room for moderate players like myself to succeed. If you side with them, you are effectively agreeing that we should justl leave and let your server become nothing more than a friend group. Consider me very dissastified. Heavily dissastified. Now I know what you will do (I'm not a fortune teller)!. You will ignore all the points I said, and simply state that I'm mad that I lost a game or 2, or that I'm not good at the game, or that I have no reason to complain as everyone is just "good" nowadays. Think outside the box. What made you the sore-loser cocky minecraft addict smelly no-carreer goal-free care-free built-like-a-sack-of-shit fuckface that you are? Meeting the ubiquitously high expectations that you have just assigned me. And whats the only way out? To cut this addiction. You won't find me playing on this server again or on minecraft for that manner, and any attempt to get me back to the game will result in me reciting this paragraph in verbatum.




^That was the Shorter paragraph



There is a spanish speaking discord server going around in which a handful of players waste their life by attempting to win every game on this server. They know who they are. They often laugh or say toxic statements or phrases that discourage other people with normal lives to play. Initially, this game was about having fun and being a good teammate. Now its constant berrating, being judged, competition created seemlessly out of thin air, untetheredstress, more than I experienced studying for finals during test week. You will log in to annihilation, wait for the next game to start, see the next people as they look at you with a scolding attitude, and hopelessly join the "unstacked" team. Its the same story every single time. Even when vsyo and Medicx won that game with less players, they were not the "underdog" team. Its always the same stacked team winnning all the time. Never any room for the underdogs. Many people have had the same problem but theyve never had the time or energy to speak up about this. This is your opportunity as a player/developer/admin reading this to stop and do something about it. And if you're confused, just think back to when shotbow was great. When shotbow admins didn't permenantly ban people for simply saying a few "hurtful" words. When shotbow was a 1.7/1.8 server with good knockback and acceptable hit registry. When the server itself was big enough to hold many players so that mineZ won't crash with just 50 players on. When shotbow admins rigorously spectated games and read reports to ban cheaters instead of standing by or refusing to ban certain players simply because they have a few strings attatched. In an effort to balance the game ever so slightly, shotbow has stabbed itself in the neck. While minecraft continues to get more and more popular, servers like shotbow continue to take a nosedive.

TLR You don't want to fix this server. You don't want to help. You don't want shotbow to be popular. You're selfish and all you care about is winning. For that reason, you will suffer the consequence of addiciton and the death of this server.

thank u for this gem

Not wrong, but I think he's focusing too much on the wrong things. Let's take this from the top:

Administration/Staffing:

There used to be a lot of very skilled and talented people on the team who were able to manage the automated anti-cheat system. Put on frequents special events. Quickly develop new game features and updates. They kept good relations with the community. They were fair, respected, and well-liked. They are gone. Some of it was just people moving on, fine. But the infighting pushed a lot of talent out of the staff pool. Aside from poor public outreach, communication, general pretentiousness and condescending attitude towards the community, their failure to manage the next point drove the player community to other servers far more than teaming bands of Spanish-speakers.

Cheating/Hacking:

STAFF) There used to be a handful of staffers who were actual coders who kept the anti-cheat ironclad, you were hard pressed to ever get away with anything without being banned automatically in a heartbeat. Today, we all know they're just hiding behind that year's old ban appeals guidelines saying they 'rigorously test with our anti-cheat.' Whole games have been ruined by Vapers, Civbreakers, and B-hoppers. We all know it's practically just manual bans these days. Made by people, who are biased and get things wrong; see players section for more details. No fucking way has Shotbow staff retained anyone with the capability to update and maintain the anti-cheat software to the standard of the 2012-2016 era. But you know has been able to pay and fund an operation to bypass anti-cheats? That's right, hack clients vendors. You guys take applications on plenty of things, but proficiency in say, software engineering, IT networking, and coding abilities? Bullshit, what are you sponsored by Microsoft? The ban appeals forum, in-game report system, and bans forum in general need major overhaul. Most of the time it's easier to ignore or deny ban appeals even on good evidence grounds because the staff simply do not have the ability to check the technical evidence presented, nor do they likely keep any recorded video evidence of the persons accused in a massive file storage somewhere. Of which they wouldn't be able to present to you the evidence on which your ban is based. Well, maybe you guys do but you say they won't because of attention-seeking or public shaming. Oh, yeah but people can report and post on a publicly-visible forum VIDEO EVIDENCE of hackers. People can put a shit ton of their personal details and info onto their Shotbow page, but heaven forbid people know they were reported and banned. The community deserves to know and make their own judgements. Same goes for the report elo system, I mean CSGO has a public elo system so people get to make judgements. Even if a player hasn't gotten banned by an admin, if 99% of the people in a server agree the person is cheating or chat spamming or whatever else, everyone who plays with the person should know. People will just call out in chat haxer, everyone /rp soandsoplayer combat, etc., like word of mouth exists. You're supposed to be the best right? That's why you're staff and everyone else isn't right? You run this place and here the server is, dying.

PLAYERS) Royia is right, the vast majority of the current small player base are cheating. Not everyone, but most. Whether the staff want to admit it or not, if you're premium like Platinum or Emerald you're very likely to always get away with it. Admins cry, nuh uh, and obviously chat abuse and game-breaking stuff no. But individual advantages yes. You pay the big bucks to keep the server going, you know who you are. If you are premium and not hacking about to run in here going nah I'm just better, congratulations. Really, we'll send you a purple heart in the mail, thank you for your service. This great server would be nothing without your sacrifices. All aside, at this point hacking or cheating in one way or another is the ONLY way to remain competitive in Annihilation. The average CPS or mouse clicks per second is about 6.5. The world record for FASTEST CPS is 14.1, and you may think so what I'm not using auto-clicker I'm just built different. Bullshit, Shotbow rules and (current) admins have stated in the rules, forums, and Shotbow Discord that using autoclickers, exploits, drag-clicking, buttefly-clicking, etc. are all actions that constitute an unfair advantage. When a premium player is coming at you with a 25+ CPS, keeping in mind 14.1 is THE world record, you're fucked. Either you whine to admins who will do nothing because they're Platinum, Gold, etc. or you also hack-up. Same thing for radar, you're invisible, hiding behind a wall, and an enemy runs from the other side of the area to attack you. Your best course of action is to client up, because both are technically hard to prove. Assuming you're not already hacking cps has to be really high to be definitively abnormal, so even though you know you're clicking hard at 6.6 CPS and the person is clearly going 45 CPS, without some external client counting peoples' CPS you're outta luck. How do you prove someone's using radar or x-ray unless an admin watches them clearly and blatantly raid chests that are hidden or immediately seek out players invisible or hiding? It's painfully obvious the staff are out of their depth, we can have flying fire aspect knock back hyper-speed aimbotting player and it takes several minutes for them to be banned, why? Because someone has to manually come in and confirm their hacking, if the anti-cheat were as good as that years-old post says it is they'd start flying and be banned immediately. Automation with no mistakes right? All of these failures of the staff to keep the hacking at bay has destroyed the honest player base.

General Server:

There used to be a lot of exciting game modes and I should premise by saying a lot of these problems could be solved by fixing the staff problems and hacking. Wasted, Shotbow Games, and Ghosted were all really fun. Maybe the player base for those in particular died off quickly, but they were very cool. MineZ got pretty heads-over itself with the dungeons and the extra beginner crutches, like moving the PvP line. But part of what made it challenging was the struggle of carefully starting out in any town for competing beginners and kill-hungry decked-out players. The beginners crutch feels like it was made to prevent people from getting made and rage quitting after being killed in Carmi by full irons for the third time. Put some of that thoughtfulness into the overall well-being of the server. Of all the games, Annihilation being biggest draw demonstrates how much people relish PvP combat. MineZ is an outlier for the dual EvP/PvP aspect. Death by void notwithstanding. I say a top-down purge and reformation of the staff is how you start to make changes that slowly bring people back. Sure the Discord population count looks very plump. But people vote with their time, and a couple hundred players max on weekends basically amounts to a vote of no-confidence. Get off your high horses.

This conversation is old, older than Shotbow. Possibly older than anything in human history, and that thing is this: passing judgement with incomplete information. Do not waste the time of the community, administration or volunteer workers soapboxing about how terrible the state of the server is in, as far as I'm concerned the idea of garbage in garbage out has some truth to it. That being said, nothing that is said or done will be enough to erase all of the negative disposition towards people in positions of power, that's a historical constant. However being the change you want to see is a more healthy expression of admiration than anger, and it's easier to engage with which also serves to solve or salve communication problems. (which I believe is the real problem)

I've been known to act in a slightly egotistical way before, I don't try to hide it. But I would be remiss if I didn't put in more work to maintain relations.

People will claim your views state the obvious, but someone's own feelings on a topic would feel pretty obvious to them, but very likely less obvious to others. When all that's posed are opinions, why should one give up theirs? "This conversation" will only move forward with strong assessments of what you know and can prove or reasonably assume instead of what part of the 'life cycle of a player' you're apart of. (i.e.: says "dead server" = dead player)

If you wish to continue talking about this I would advise you to do some research as to what has been said on both sides on the countless other threads that touch on these points as well and commenting on a more productive thread than the spitting image of the original Xbox Live. I should've unwatched myself after I had my laugh. *shrug* nobodies perfect

Thank you for reading. If you have any clarifying questions, shoot.