Introducing Vote Dashboard + Dentril's New Moon February 2022

Hello Shotbow! Today I am excited to announce a brand-new project which we call the Vote Dashboard. Check it out at vote.shotbow.net.

If you've been following recent news, Shotbow has been investing more time and resources into advertising, and one of the ways we're doing it is by encouraging voting on MinecraftServers.org. Over the last two months, we handed out 50,000 XP in XP codes for everyone, thanks to your continued efforts for voting.

What's new?
Now, instead of just being rewarded for votes on 1 voting site, we're expanding to 6 voting sites. This will allow you to vote 6 times per day! For each 2,500 votes across all voting sites, we'll automatically release a 2,500 XP code! This XP code will automatically be posted on Discord and on the voting dashboard.

What does the dashboard do?
The dashboard has some awesome features:

• Conveniently provides links to each of the 6 voting sites that we support.
• Automatically keeps track of votes across all 6 sites, and updates the live counter accordingly. You don't even have to refresh! Your vote will be shown on the counter automatically within 5 seconds.
• Automatically creates XP codes (which last 3 days). Each XP code is posted on the dashboard, and posted in Discord — in a brand new channel called #voting-rewards.

The dashboard also has built-in infrastructure to keep track of who is voting. In the future, this enables us to reward individuals with extraordinary contributions to the vote counter (i.e. we could give a special cosmetic to someone who reaches X amount of lifetime votes). The possibilities are limitless!

Important note
Some of you may have noticed that our vote counter got reset on MinecraftServers.org yesterday. Over the last few days, users have been illegitimately voting for Shotbow in order to increase the vote count. While we appreciate the sentiment, we do not condone illegitimate votes. The staff team at MinecraftServers.org has notified us that our votes were illegitimate, and cleared all of the hard work that the community has been working towards over the last month. We strongly encourage you to refrain from illegitimately voting, as it will only harm Shotbow.

How does voting help Shotbow?
Voting on voting sites will increase our rank on public voting lists. New players who are bored and looking for cool servers to join will have a higher chance of seeing our server on the voting list if we have more votes, so this will help us get new players in the long run. Plus, you get free XP if you vote, so why wouldn't you?!

Why not individually reward players?
Shotbow used to give you 100 XP for every vote that you made. However, the Minecraft EULA was revised significantly a few years ago, and the changes made it illegal to give soft currency in exchange for voting, if the soft currency was able to be spent on in-game advantages. Since Shotbow sells classes and other in-game advantages for XP, we had to stop giving XP out for votes. This solution, which gives all players equal access to the XP, is EULA-compliant, and we have now implemented this change for everyone.

Closing words
We'd love to hear your feedback about the new vote dashboard. Thanks for being such an awesome community.

Thanks for flying voting Shotbow!

Updates
Network Updates
Exciting news: we've added new hardware to help with player surges and events. This includes beefier CPUs that allow us to handle a large influx of players concurrently online at the same time.

MineZ Updates
This month, we hosted many Traveling Snowman events. The Snowman Event travels all across Valar, spawning in somewhere in the world with a huge amount of loot, legendaries, and rare unobtainables! Players come from all over to battle it out for the rarest of items, prestige, and bragging rights!

We recorded many of these exciting events. All of the recordings are posted on our YouTube channel, with more to come soon!

Additionally, we've done an extensive overhaul in MineZ performance — we'll be doing a write-up soon about all the changes we've made. For the time being, you should notice some significant performance increases when playing MineZ. Let us know what you think!

Please send some gratitude to MrJack & the MineZ team for putting a ton of effort into hosting the Traveling Snowman series over the last month. Shout-out to GunOverdose for recording and editing the videos of the event. And huge thanks to lazertester, Robertthegoat, swipe, and other developers who helped with MineZ performance increases.

Annihilation Updates
Annihilation released their Crispy Cobalt update this month. This included exciting class changes, a redesigned scoreboard, bug fixes, and more! You can read all about the update here.

In addition, we've opened a feedback thread. We want to hear your top 3 ideas for how Annihilation can improve. Please take some time to post here if you haven't already!

Statistics
Network in General
Staff updates:

• Outra was promoted to Localization Lead, while Samstag1 steps back to Co-Lead
• pigplayer has been promoted to Full Admin
• BasicAly joined the team as a MineZ Mini Builder
• Axyy and GunOverdose joined the Marketing Team
• GunOverdose joined the Film Crew

Other statistics:

• 2,256 in-game reports were handled in the last month
• 69 ban appeals were resolved in the last month
• 30 Anni Clan Wars were hosted in the last month
• There were 1,026 players banned in the last month
• A total of 101,567,280 XP was earned by players this month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 284 on January 30

Closing Words
Thanks for tuning in this month! I'm your host, Mistri—thanks for flying Shotbow!

Some people have created botnets that vote multiple times (think hundreds of votes) per day. They bypassed the security measures put in place by the voting sites.

Those stats are collected midnight pacific time on the last day of the month, so still 3 more hours. I posted the thread early today because the Vote Dashboard uses UTC time and I wanted to release it at midnight UTC on February 1st.

TLDR I'll edit them in tonight or tomorrow.

Edit: added!

Thanks for finding that! Should be fixed now, and I just added an additional 430 votes to the counter.