Anecdotes and Memories from my Time as a Developer

Hello everyone,

For those who don't know me, I was a Developer from October 2015 to March 2017. I had worked primarily on HG and on War 2.0. Recently, @Blamo posted an "interview" we had, and by reading over my answers and noticing how boring and dry they were, I got motivated to write up a few anecdotes I have of my stay here at Brawl.

I included funny, happy, but also sad moments; this "journal" is written for the purpose of passing on stories and bringing up long-forgotten anecdotes.

Spoiler: Halloween 2015 HG Tournament

I started working for Brawl in the beginning of October 2015. A few weeks in, and as I am getting used to the code, fixing a lot of stuff around, squashing bugs left and right, I am asked to organize a Halloween special tournament - no problem. I prepare all of the stuff, and everything seems good... A week before the event, a new bug appears: SOMETIMES, the invincibility does not wear off after the timer ends, preventing people from hitting each other. No matter what I do, I cannot find the source of the bug; the only fix is to reboot the server. The eve of the event, I stay up until 2 AM to work on this, and get up early to keep working on it. Nothing I try works.

The server gets set up and people start joining. Quickly, we reach 100 players, from casual newbies to old MCPVP veterans to JMods and Mods of all servers to the SMods, admins, and the owner (Chap) himself, all coming for the long awaited tournament. Staff is having a big party in the TeamSpeak; meanwhile I am ****ting my pants, hoping the bug will not manifest itself. The server is lagging BIG TIME, and the 2 minutes timer takes 15 minutes to complete. If the bug hits, I will have to reboot the server, or in the worst case, have to call the event off. [I remember telling myself then that I would promptly resign and disappear if this happened!]

3... 2... 1... The fight starts, people are eliminating each other, everything goes as planned, no bug in sight. What a HUGE relief!

Note: I have never found the cause of the bug, which simply disappeared on its own a few weeks later.

Spoiler: Christmas Crisis

A few months later, as I am casually working on HG stuff, I manage to break something critical in the live servers. Basically, we can't push updates anymore, and because someone brilliantly designed the servers, the entirety of ALL player data and (excluding backups) is at a risk of being wiped out if not fixed correctly. One wrong command, and whoosh! Good bye all of the progress everyone made and all the loot everyone worked to gather or buy for the past few days. A great way to start your Christmas holidays, yes. Needless to say, @chickenputty, @NomNuggetNom, @yinscape and I (once again) were ****ting our pants (except maybe for Nom, which has always been surprisingly chill). In the end, chickenputty came up with a mysterious holy command that magically fixed everything... and we quietly buried this little accident so that no one else would know.

Ah, good times..

Spoiler: The Ultimate HG Update

Still during the Christmas holidays, seeing the HG populations drop more and more, I was getting desperate for something that would revive the game. I therefore decided to recode ALL the kits to make for a massive update that would hopefully bring players back into the game. I spent my entire holidays on this, working full time, and managed to recode over 100 kits in a Guinness record time of 2 months! By the end, I was quite exhausted, but also excited to release this. [Here is the update thread]

We all know what happened next: it didn't work. The population kept on falling; the game had basically died a few months later; all of the work was for nothing. Not being able to revive HG (and maybe even causing its downfall) is my biggest regret on Brawl. Perhaps it was because of the bad decisions taken; perhaps it was inevitable; but in any case, it still annoys me today.

Spoiler: Making the Slither Minigame

Throwback to March 2016. I am finished with HG, and am eyeing War 2.0, but suddenly a new internet trend grows: the Slither.io game is becoming big. Spontaneously, the higher staff decide to recreate it in Minecraft - no one else had done it so far. I am chosen to work on it, and given that this must be released ASAP, I complete the entire game in 3 days. Everything is there: game mechanics, custom skins, online shop, leaderboard, etc. I test the game with the staff; it runs smoothly and we all enjoy it.

I tell chickenputty that the game is ready, and I wait, and wait, and wait... About a week or two after, on one evening, he releases the game out of the blue without notifying me, and with no prior announcement. On that particular evening, I was at a restaurant, and only found out the game had been released hours later! I was not so happy, especially when I heard that there were MASSIVE lag issues that made the game completely unplayable - this had NOT happened during testing. It took me over a week to fix the lag issues, but by then, everyone was done with the game, which died quite miserably and quickly.

That was also quite a deception. I should have tested the game with more players to detect the potential lag, but I also think we should have made an announcement with a trailer to build up the hype - and only then release the game - instead of rushing the game out without telling anyone before.

Spoiler: FBI Investigation

I have never really dealt with hackers, abuse of power, or administrative matters, except for that one time when someone had accused @_featherpaw_ (which was moderator at the time) of abusing her moderator powers to kill and take someone's loot on WarZ: I was then asked to verify if she had indeed crossed the lines. The video seemed quite convincing against her, but I nonetheless put my FBI detective hat on, and started digging across the logs, trying to find something that would correlate the recorded video. That was not easy: there was no timestamp on the video, and I had to go through many log files before finding the appropriate one. Only then could I deliver my final verdict: _featherpaw_ did not abuse of her powers, but was rather one hell of a skilled ninja fighter.

Anyway, that was quite exciting.

Spoiler: Designing the War 2.0 Guns

Designing the War 2.0 guns was very interesting. In War 1.0, guns were designed in a linear fashion: each next gun in line was OBJECTIVELY superior to the one before. I hated this concept because it helps too much veteran players (who know what they were doing) and puts newer players (who have no idea what is going on) at a BIG disadvantage from the start.

I set out to change this completely. In the War 2.0 I envisioned, a noob player and a veteran player had comparable equipment, so that if we put skill aside, the two had the same odds of winning a gunfight. Each gun was made to fill a different role. For instance, one sniper was designed for sustained fire; another was made for 1-hit kills; a third had a burst fire mode and a fourth was made for mid range sniping. This also applied to every gun: one assault rifle resembled an SMG and was designed for close range; another resembled more an LMG and was made for long range; and a third was versatile - good for all situations. Overall, each gun had its own purpose and own gameplay style; a player which knew how to exploit his gun's strengths and mitigate its weaknesses could perform amazingly, no matter the level.

I think I did quite well on that front, although of course it's not perfect. I hope that my successors also kept this approach in the following updates.

Spoiler: The War 2.0 Testing Sessions

The Alpha/Beta testing sessions I held for War 2.0 were my greatest moments on Brawl. Seeing the game I had developed for so long come to life was absolutely amazing. I had programmed almost everything, and yet was discovering how the game truly worked along with other people at the same time. War 2.0 was from the beginning very different from War 1.0: it really was a fresh start for everyone. I have never once had trouble getting people to come to the sessions; everyone was always extremely hyped, and some random players would even message me, begging to allow them to join!

The testing sessions began with staff only, and later became available to all players. Seeing the community so excited truly made me happy, and I also loved seeing people slowly adapt to the new game.

These were the good old days! @Lord_Roke, remember this?

Feel free to post any other such stories you have; I'd love to hear them.

@Blamo @xGhale @SoullessAngel_ (from the other thread)

 

I took over a year off from professional development and any serious projects. Last year I've participated in many Hackathons, which was a ton of fun and from which I've learned a lot. Overall I shifted my focus towards learning new things (whether in computer science, mathematics, science, etc.) rather than producing code.

This summer I had a programming job with assembly code, C, and microelectronics - the coolest stuff ever, nothing like Java game development. Next year I'll get into university, probably in Software Engineering or Computer Science.

I received an email notification from your reply to our conversation! I wouldn't have known otherwise. Thanks for that!

 

Good question! Thank you, this got me to think a lot.

They (including me) could have done better, that's for sure. But them screwing everything up? I don't think so. What happened to Brawl (and to so many other servers as well) is something that happens all the time in the economy. I only see this now because I have more experience in life, and a much larger perspective on the manner.

Brace yourselves, here comes an essay-like wall of text!

The Dawn of Minecraft Servers
The Minecraft servers/networks industry became "formal" at around 2012-2013. For the first time, people dedicated their entire time to developing servers with custom content. Servers became actual businesses; you had the directors/admins, the developers, the moderators, the staff; this was a serious thing, and it was working great -- some of you will recall Brawl at that time, and how servers were CONSTANTLY full. Games of all sorts were created, but longer-paced gamemodes were preferred, in general (to the best of my knowledge). However, I'm not exactly sure how things ran at the time since I wasn't so active.

The EULA
What I know for sure is that things changed radically in 2014-2015. The first big thing that hit was the EULA, which pretty much ****ed us all up, and launched a series of events that are responsible for where we stand today. I don't even know where to start to describe how retarded this was. Notch blatantly ignored the fact that Minecraft servers are businesses (and hence MUST produce profit to exist) and wanted his own server hosting thing to compete with them (which was incredibly stupid as well). Again, servers are businesses. They NEED to produce income in order to pay their developers and their admins. No income = no more content is produced = players lose interest and stop playing. Sounds familiar?

The Consequences of the EULA
What Mojang did that day is in my opinion the #1 reason why Brawl has lost everything. Servers that had the resources and the reflexes to quickly adapt to the EULA turned to minigames as a way to continue to frequently produce new content. Smaller servers like Brawl, and slower to react servers like McPVP, did not enjoy the same fate and were left behind. With new content released nearly every week or so on the big servers, populations suddenly shifted TREMENDOUSLY in their favor. This marked the beginning of the minigame era, which STILL dominates today, and was characterized by the sudden loss of interest for longer, slower, and intellectually demanding games such as HG. Instead, players took an interest in fast-paced and simple games that could be learned and played quickly. Hypixel especially knew how to exploit this need for immediacy, and distinguished itself from other servers by creating minigames that anyone with an IQ of -1 or above could enjoy (and even master) within 2 minutes of gameplay. Next thing you know, McPVP shuts down and Hypixel and Mineplex rise to the top; Brawl thrives on the community it had built over the years, but the signs of the decline are already very visible.

What Happened Next
In the years that followed, Mojang pushed stupid update after stupid update with absolutely NO regard for backwards compatibility. I am thinking especially of the 1.9 combat update, which screwed a lot of game mechanics up. This certainly did not help. Some people are saying that the Minecraft community itself has seen a decline. I cannot confirm or infirm this since I have pretty much quit Minecraft after Brawl, but if true, this certainly only aggravates things. The one thing that has kept Brawl alive for so long is its incredibly dedicated and loyal community, one like I have never seen before. This community exists because despite everything, Brawl has always offered high-quality and unique content that could not be found anywhere else: War (2.0), WarZ (2.0), Party (arguably), Capture the Flag, and Wild West were big hits for a reason. While Brawl has lost many players to other servers, those who stayed loved these kinds of slower-paced games and had a strong attachment to the community.

Could it have been prevented?
Yes. If chickenputty had somehow magically guessed everything that would happen in 2014, he would have been able to shift the server in a direction that would ensure its success and growth for the years to come. But he did not guess what would happen, as none of us did, and here we are, years later. Honestly, I don't think there was much to do after 2015. The market had become rigid; the playerbase was already very concentrated in a few, gigantic networks. If anything, 2015-2016 was (hardly) our last chance to bring change, but we failed at doing that in time.

Conclusion
If I was you guys, I would enjoy Brawl as much for as long as it still is up, and remember the good memories I have of its better days; I would not desperate over its decline, which was pretty much inevitable. What happened is much, much bigger than the higher-ups screwing **** up and being incompetent. What happened is a pattern that happens all the time and in every single industry: a few companies reach the top and dominate most of the market, while a lot of companies lie at the bottom with little hope to grow. No matter what, Hypixel will always have the resources and the intel to adapt to the needs of the market and to stay on top. Brawl does NOT have the means nor the information to do so, which is why becoming big again is such an impossibly difficult task.

Let me know what you guys think.

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@HauntedForehead I certify that I have a life and do not waste it on mastering Mario Kart racing.
On a more serious note, what did other (ex)higher-ups say? And what is your take on this?

 

Having fun with a lot of dev stuff, but not in Minecraft anymore; and yes, still in school, going to university soon! I hope after all this time you can now code?! I hope my terrible teaching did not drive you away from coding

@HauntedForehead the ONLY interaction I have ever had with Chap was him paying me at the end of the month. I don't think I will ever find a business owner that so little cares about his business. Him doing virtually nothing for sure counted for a lot, since putty basically had to handle everything on his own.

For sure the development process could have been better - and so could have been the whole administration and running of the network. We all made tons of little mistakes here and there that eventually accumulated, but I don't find it interesting nor relevant to start studying these details. We were not a professional game studio, and were bound to making errors. Also, what is done is done.

I salute your initiative and would love to see what you come up with (if you're allowed to share it of course)!