Update So This Is What I've Decided...

Where are the promised global ranks?

Well, they’re coming… Slowly. I've been speaking to @DenialMC about what needs doing and we've been running into some difficulties with the playtime rank up plugin. How I intended on setting it up was quite different to what you see on most other networks. If you play on Survival, Skyblock or Creative you’ll know that we have four ranks on them. I didn’t want to become like everyone else where there would only be one normal rank and about six donator ranks. I don’t find that interesting and quite frankly, it’s lazy. I want to still give the experience you all love about trying to rank up without it causing any issues. Instead of it being playtime based on one server and money based on another, I wanted to bring it all together where everyone has a global playtime on all of the servers. For example, you have 50 minutes played on Survival and you go to Skyblock, you also have 50 minutes. I find this better overall as you can play on your favourite server and still get a good rank on the others because of it. This is exactly what I also wanted from the purchasable ranks.

This next part is solely to do with purchasable ranks and what’s going to happen with them. If you’ve purchased a rank on one server, it will carry over to all of the others. However, the perks will be separate per server. If you’ve purchased ranks on multiple servers, you will receive a free coupon for the value of the rank and you’ll be able to use it for anything on the store! If you did purchase ranks on multiple servers, there will be a separate forum to post there on to receive your coupon.

Finally, I am going as fast as I can to get these global ranks out of the way and have them ready as soon as. I cannot deny that people will lose ranks and that there will be issues. I’ll do what I can to prevent this as much as possible. If you lose your rank, post in the forum stated when the global ranks are finally implemented into the rest of the network.

As a clarification, the prices of the ranks will not be changing. They will remain the same price that they have always been. Prices stay the same, your perk count quadruples.


Where’s Creative? Why are there only three servers in the selector?

Okay, this is a big one. I’ve come to the decision that I no longer want to run unnecessary servers that use up more resources than they provide. The first server that comes to mind on this is Creative. Whilst it gets a few people at peak, it does not help us financially and is a strain on our hardware without paying back. It has been a dead server for nearly a year and if anything, was not at all up to my standards of running servers. That is why I have decided to pull it. Will it be back in the near future? I don’t know. Maybe… We’ll see where the networks goes from here…

KitPvP is sort of another server that is getting towards the same fate as Creative. However, I did not pull it down for that reason. It deserved to be revamped. People loved it but it was getting boring for the simple fact that there were only a very few select kits and one map that wasn’t very big. For the past two weeks, we’ve been in the process of revamping it and creating a new map and redoing all of the kits in preparation of the global ranks.

Vanilla 1 and 2 are now fully discontinued and shut down from the network. They will no longer be accessible. Unfortunately, due to an error in the transferring of the network files, there have been some complications with both 1 and 2s worlds. At this moment, there is nothing we can do. I apologise about this but right now, I can’t do much. When 1.8 releases, there will be another vanilla server opened. Whether it’ll stay after the main servers are back are yet to be discussed.


So what’s the plan?

I want to bring plenty of new servers to the network. But it’s not easy right now. We’re working on getting KitPvP back up and then global ranks. Once that’s done, it’s full steam ahead. NCWarfare is coming… Eventually… Prison is being delayed for now.

The biggest reason for us doing what we’ve done with the servers is so we can focus on the important stuff. Survival is our origins. That is the server that got us where we are today. I wish to keep it our best server. I want to be able to devote more time to both that and Skyblock. Then our staff numbers will not be divided between so many servers, only three. This will be much better overall as there will more than likely be multiple members of staff on each server throughout the day and night. Voting is another thing I wish to improve. Better rewards are especially one of them. Better rewards in the per chance rewards is another I wish to do. Prison-OP is a great example of what I wish to do with the network. The voting rewards very fair items and monetary gains. This will be the case for both Survival and Skyblock. Expect those changes soon.

Spawns

Both Survival and Skyblock are due new spawns. For Survival, this will be the start for something a lot of people have been looking forward to and have been asking for months for; The Nether and the End. They will both come with the new spawn! The Nether will be unlocked with the rank of Dedicated and the End Supporter. The reason behind this is that we wish for them not to be destroyed within the first week and instead, be conserved over time. With the new spawn, it’ll enable us to be able to properly lay out everything we need and not overload it with unnecessary stuff like our current spawn has. This means much easier accessibility to the player markets, meaning much more traffic heading there. So plots will definitely have a much higher value in the new spawn and should drive even more income and profits to those lucky enough to get a front store.

Skyblock is long overdue a redo of spawn. We have been using this spawn for almost a year now and it is now time to change it. More to be said on this soon enough.


Trial Moderator Applications

I have been getting asked this a lot by quite a few people. Simply put, they’re not coming yet. We’re simply not equipped to begin accepting a high amount of applications just yet, nor are we in dire need for more as of right now. They will be available soon enough. That’s all there is to say about it. Just remember, Trial Moderator is a test to see if you’re capable of dealing with high amounts of players and making sure to deal with their requests/issues within the best possible way. That also means that we expect high quality applications that consist of at least 500-1,000 words. Want to know the length of that? Try checking this entire post, that’s over 1,000 words. We do expect that you take your time in filling yours out when they’re released otherwise you’re just wasting your time. We treat these applications like any employer would with a job application.

Downtime

If you don’t know about the downtime issues, please read the thread here. These issues should now be fully resolved. We have fully transferred the final parts of the databases to our proper backend servers so the issues with NTP floods on the database server should now be over and we can go back to normal!

Where did you find the server?

Shown in the image below, you can see that the results of our poll have paid off and we now have a clearer picture on who found the server and where. The results are quite interesting and are somewhat what we expected to be.



I’d like to thank everyone who took part in the poll and that you’ve helped us greatly in shaping the servers up appropriately.


Minecraft services

On our statistics page, I have now added uptime monitoring for all of Mojangs Minecraft services. As we as being able to check the servers play count and our services uptime, you can now view that and Mojangs services. You can view the page here! https://www.noble-craft.net/pages/stats/

1.8 Update and name changes

Recently, Mojang announced that they’re going to be implementing and allowing name changes to everyone in 1.8. This may sound good to you, but to us, it’s really not. Currently, all player data files are stored and read as your in game name. This is changing. When you login, you will have what’s called a UUID instead. This means that if you change your name, the server won’t recognise your account by its name, it’ll recognise it by its UUID instead. So yes, that does mean that if you change your name and someone else takes it, the will have full access to your stuff. Obviously we’re not doing nothing about it. We are working on getting the plugin converted to use UUIDs as quickly as possible but right now, it’s going to take time. Luckily, Jeb mentioned that it won’t be until at least May that we see 1.8 being rolled out so hopefully we’re fully updated by then. If not, we’ll continue to work on it past the 1.8 release date until we’re fully updated.

Thanks

I’d just like to personally say thank you for keeping this network alive. Without you all playing, voting and donating, this network would not be near where it is today. 2014 has already been an amazing year and it just keeps getting better and better! I look forward to seeing what the future holds.

Again, thanks.