StarQuest #8: BungeeCord Woes

Originally posted on Jul 15, 2014

When I started on the BungeeCord project I expected it to take about a week. So naturally it ended up taking about three months. During those three months, the main server was more or less miserable. Overcrowded, congested, buggy, and understaffed, it was pretty much the Atlanta of minecraft servers. The development staff didn't spend any time at all improving it as our efforts were all on BungeeCord. Three times, we thought we had finished with BungeeCord and were ready to put it up on the main server. Three times, we failed miserably. As soon as the code hit the server about a thousand bugs appeared that we had no way to fix, so we had to fall back on the old system. After the third failure we decided to create a BungeeCord beta using the new solar system to test out everything before we put it up on the main server. Even with a beta, a huge quantity of bugs were never found and when we put it up on the main server there were hundreds of bugs to fix. Nevertheless, we had a semi-playable game on the main server running BungeeCord. The players rejoiced, until they realized it was actually a worse experience than before, and then they were sad. 

From that day until the present, we have spent the majority of our development time trying to fix bugs that come from BungeeCord. It has been two months since then, and there are still bugs that appear. 

During this period, several other things of note happened. Firstly and most importantly, we gained a new developer as StealthyDev joined the team. He joined a couple of weeks after we transferred the main server to bungeecord, and I memorably told him that he probably didn't need to worry about learning to work with bungeecord because "George and I have almost got that fixed up". Since then, Stealthy has done almost nothing for SQ but work on bungeecord bugs, and continues to work on them to this day.

During the bugfixing period, coming home to work on StarQuest was more stressful than any schoolwork I had. I came to view school as a break from work, and the evenings became the times to dread. To help relieve the stress, I picked up a couple of new hobbies.

The first was resuming work on the Age of Steam server. I'll do a short segment on the origins of the Age of Steam project soon, but here I'll just say that it had been worked on on-and-off for nearly as long as StarQuest had existed. Campermangreg was kind enough to create a modpack for me, and in my spare time I worked on building a spawn city for the server. That city has since been lost to a corrupted world file, but it was a great stress relief at the time.

The other hobby I picked up was Guns of Icarus Online, a fun game I picked up from Steam. I formed a team with some of my staff members and we had a good time on it. As the staff members invited their friends to the game, our team grew to include several prominent members of StarQuest's playerbase. In casual conversation between matches, I would often speak about various features that I had planned to add to SQ, and the work I was doing on Age of Steam. Because both GoIo and AoS are Steampunk themed, AoS in particular was a popular topic of discussion in those conversations. The GoIo team used SQ's teamspeak to communicate, which was a move that I would come to regret later.

At the time, we didn't do much communication with the playerbase; we fixed things, and we figured that they noticed that we had fixed them. The devs didn't go online much because our real work happens outside of the game, and being ingame just took time away from getting real fixes done. When we were working on StarQuest, we worked hard; when we got tired, we wanted nothing to do with it. That didn't leave a lot of time for socializing with the playerbase. 

All of this came together to form a pretty terrible public relations crisis. After being pissed off over a bugfix that fixed a problem in a way they disliked, a group of several prominent players began to get very angry. Several of them had been part of our Guns of Icaurs team, and had heard me discuss plans for the future. All of the rest of them had been in teamspeak, and saw me in the Guns of Icarus channel a lot. What they never saw was me doing any work on StarQuest at all. To them, it looked like we didn't do any work at all on SQ anymore. After analyzing the situation for awhile, I can't really blame them for thinking that way; for them, all of the evidence pointed towards the conclusion that they reached. 

They decided to quit the server, and posted on the forums in anger. Rather than deleting their thread, I replied to it, because I could see where their points were coming from. After that we had quite a lively debate for a couple of days, which were some of the most depressing days of my existence. I had considered these people my friends, and to have them turn on me like that was extremely painful. In addition to that, about the worst insult you can say to a StarQuest developer is that we don't care about the server, which was the central point of their arguments. I have never come closer to closing the server than I did those days. The words and encouragement of a few choice players were enough to see us through, barely. 

After we finished the arguments, we decided to do more to communicate with the players. One thing that we did to improve communication was to create this blog. And on this blog, I decided it would be a good idea to do my best to tell the story of StarQuest and Dibujaron, from the beginning to the present, in an objective fashion. I knew that the vast majority of the playerbase hadn't been here for most of the story, so I thought it would be a good idea to share it with them.

So I did. That's the story so far. It's not over yet; this is not the last chapter. There will be more installments of The Journey, as more things happen. But as of this post the story is up to date with current events.

I hope you enjoyed :)