I’ve been playing survival pretty intensely for the past few months, but in the past couple weeks it’s just gotten insane. Progression is being broken regularly and staffers are ignoring it, because they can’t really enforce the rules, or there isn’t a coding solution, or they’re too busy with other things to care enough. I do love this server and I’m not trying to be pissy and smear it, but it’s gotten so ridiculous I don’t want to play anymore.
First of all there’s something happening with the seeds causing dungeon mobs to start spawning way too early, like first day. Add to that a few loopholes and exploits with the DGs, and ppl are getting dungeon loot within hours of restart by farming dungeon mobs for bones and keys and then fishing for dungeon crates just barely inside the dungeon biome. No one is naming names or reporting because a few of the most popular regulars are doing it and anyone else involved gets phat lutz. They’re even talking openly about it in chat for staff to plainly see in phase, but nothing has been actually done because no one has extensively recorded and reported irrefutable hard evidence, and no one is entirely sure if a seed exploit is specifically against the rules, or even progression breaking.
Another big problem for progression is Duke. Debuffing it halfway through the week was an unbelievably bad balance decision because it gives everyone flying mounts and endgame gear capable of taking down every other boss, but ppl have figured out various lag and rail exploits to kill him even before it’s debuffed, like last night. Now for the rest of the run there’s no challenge left for the better players except waiting for boss timers to expire and/or exploits to take them down early.
On top of all that are the usual godmode, max digging speed, and xray cheats that allow some players to burn through the blocks and go straight to every world chest within -minutes- of a hard reset and every regen after that. The evidence is indirect - those of us trying to play by the rules find nearly every world chest already looted, and the ones cheating brag about their finds in chat, but nothing is done about it unless someone happens to catch them doing it -and- record it for reporting. Which almost never happens.
What appears to be going on here is a lack of staff involvement and broken tools for players to alert them like /pingstaff. Glasia seems to be the only one actually paying attention to phase and only intervenes in the most extreme and blatant cheating/griefing incidents. Many more go unreported and generally ignored. Big Russ is training for mod and tries to be helpful, though there’s only so much one player can do. A few other staff do occasionally show up to deal with problems but not nearly often enough. They’re usually busy with some other area like zombies and pvp. The result is good players not able to do anything about cheating unless they really want to spend hours exhaustively documenting and reporting, cheaters doing whatever they want and just denying it if called out, and gray area exploits breaking normal progression on a regular basis. It might as well just go full anarchy 2b2t if nothing is actually done (or can be done) about it.
And don’t even try to shift the blame to the players for not policing themselves better. We all know the reporting system is a pain in the ass and doesn’t actually stop the abuse no matter how many kiddies get banned every day.
I do feel sorry for the few remaining staff that actually care. It’s not a paid position and there’s a constant avalanche of bs they have to slog through every moment they’re online. Maybe once long ago they were greater in number and involvement, but these days it’s just another great server/empire withering and dying.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
