I thought and still do think that some of the pro-blueprint arguments are persuasive and well written despite us choosing to keep blueprints disabled. It's a little sad to see one of them becoming just a weak personal attack.
How come this server isn't dead yet?
Thus far claims that the no blueprint uploading policy will lead to the downfall of the server haven't really come to fruition. Comparing monthly player count from
Starmade Server List we're currently the third most popular server around with monthly player count having risen since we started. And the difference between us an the current most popular server
Brierie being only 6 more monthly players.
well I was interested in playing here when i saw they redacted the original no blueprint thingie, then.... well.. re-redacted it again hehe.
Alternatively: have you considered limiting players to 1 or 2 uploaded ships under a certain mass size? That way they could bring a medium ship or two, but if they wanted a big OP ship they'd then have to build it on the server? Yeah it might.... make moderation slghtly more annoying and time consuming, but it would appeal to a lot of folks who are proud of their own designs and like to bring one or two with them, or who suck at building ships and would like to cruise around in something that works. Just a "compromise" idea.
Yea... sorry about that re-redacting thing... though that was a while ago we intentionally didn't give an official post about the change because I expected it might be temporary, it was and we changed back within a day after some incidents.
Thats a good idea, thank you. As XMB said we're considering a allowing moderated blueprint uploads and limiting them based on mass plus per player sounds good. Preferably we'd implement that through a semi-automated system which we'll be looking into.
Disallowing BP uploads ultimately causes ships on the server to look like absolute ass because those things take a decent amount of time to build in creative mode, and tsa expects people to do that with limited resources and re-build said ship every time it gets destroyed? Tedious, unfun and serves no purpose. People are not gonna build pretty under these conditions, its all gonna be Joelbrisco styled doom cubes at the very best.
I really do feel like everything about the no blueprints rule has been said already but I'll respond to this quickly: If you think disallowing BP uploads will cause the server to look bad then come on and see for yourself, there arn't millions of doom cubes going about, almost everything that I've seen has been well designed except from the ships used by people that wanted to grief the server.
Also to clarify not every time it gets destroyed, blueprints are enabled, we just don't allow blueprint uploads.
DO NOT PLAY ON TSA. It is a terrible server. I have taken the time out of my day to write this review because the admins are abusive, the server latency and management is terrible, and the server's advertisement is misleading
1. The admins are abusive, they spawn in 200k bathtubs and leave them floating around. They spawn in whatever they need and all have ganged up in their little admin faction. Oh wait! Don't kill them though! If you start blowing them up when they are trying to fight you then you'll be BANNED!
2. The admins take horrible care of the server. There is over 200 entities at spawn, which makes the game extremely hard to play when 90% of people will receive 1 FPS in these conditions. The admins allow scrubby players to crash ships into planets and then just leave them there. A lot of noob's have just created accidental lag machines, butttt the admins are too occupied banning pvpers and spawning in bathtubs to take care of this.
3. The servers advertisement is misleading, this server claims to be a PVP server in the description, yet if you fire a cannon in someone's direction you'll be IP banned. The admins seem to ban people who might make their precious lag causing noobs to leave. My friend was banned because he DEFENDED himself against two people who grappled onto his ship and then started shooting at his ship with laser pistols.
In conclusion, do not waste your time on the TSA servers. The admins are terrible, the ping is terrible, and if you try and PVP at all you will be banned.
How incredibly false almost everything in that post is amazes me. As XMB said already:
If you can find proof of this then I would be very interested to follow it up but as of current its just empty threats.
IKindaCrashALot, you've been banned twice now. Once temporarily for bullying much smaller factions and demanding a 'tax' for protection or killing them until they leave the server (and several did leave directly because of you), then a second time recently for spawn camping. If you disagree with those bans make a ban appeal on our forums, they're all public but otherwise don't just go making up lies.
Drama aside, I can definetly say the server is certantly not that good in the preformance department. In my brief moment on TSA, the server was in an almost constant state of high ping, and the massive amount at entities in the spawn sector makes for an unwelcoming experience to never players.
StarMade is wonderful but isn't without its problems, we try out best to keep the server as lag free and with the highest uptime as possible, for the most part we do. We do clean up spawn periodically including recently when someone flooded it with 100s of NPC to intentionally cause lag.
Our sever currently has very good 99% uptime (as rated by
Starmade Server List) above most other popular servers like
Brierie (at 98%) and
FreaksRUs (at 96%). Regarding ping the server is based in Europe so its inevitably that people in some locations have high ping but within Europe
ping is very good.
Honestly the PvP tag should be removed. There is no true PvP.
We've never said hardcore 'if you can't survive then leave' PvP is a part of the server, we've mentioned PvP once very briefly and left it as a tag on the server list (
as almost every single other server has). We do actually try to be welcoming to those that are new, casual or just don't enjoy the idea of dying over and over. I'll change some of the description to make that more clear but its never been said heavily and removing the tag would be silly, we do allow PvP even if its not in the hardcore form that you like.
And I totally agree with Warsong's replies to the rest of your messages.
What objective parameters have been set in terms of defining what is desired and undesirable within this server? Admittedly the current configs do not yet offer sufficient controls over ships and stations to my liking which unfortunately leads to rules, which require enforcement. Without clear and accurate parameters your leaving your admin team open to allegations of corruption.
Thanks for the suggestions NaStral, we are aware that some of the rules are a little too open to interpretation and that's something we'd like to amend soon, though to a point that will aways be an issue.
I would also suggest not playing with the general populace on your admin accounts as anything you do in a competitive fashion will immediately be in question. Even then It's doubly important to accept losses to other players and move on. Banning a player immediately after a competitive loss looks really really bad. It shows you cannot accept that others may have greater experience and knowlege than you and you instead have resorted to admin powers to "win". This in turn decreases the player base's confidence in the admin team's ability to resolve disputes.
Having been an admin on several Minecraft servers where staff ranks are clearly split and logged based on trust (lower trust moderators would just not have the ability to spawn in anything or do more than temp ban) I understand where to desire for separation especially since StarMade has none of this. (AKA there is one admin rank and they can do everything)
I currently think an admin could easily switch to their admin account if they intended to break the rules and every admin command on every account is logged anyway regardless of account. I appreciate the suggestion but currently I don't think it would be much of a barrier to admin abuse, it will always be down to trust in a situation when people don't know 100% of the time what an admin has done or is doing. May even slow admins down in responding to incidents. We're working on something to improve this but it's not finished yet.
Well that was a long post...
To conclude, thanks to everyone that has been playing on the server (there are happily quite a few of you) it's nice too see the server still doing well and we'll continue to try and improve it. Thanks as well to almost all of those that have been posting in this thread and our own forum, we are listening to suggestions.