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haloman30

CU Updates #31 - 1.15, Sales, Reflections, and Thank-You's

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Howdy folks! We've updated our MC server to MC 1.15.1! Luckily, 1.15 didn't bring a great deal of API changes, so the move over was fairly straightforward. With this update, we're hoping to fix most of the lag and performance issues our server has been having as of late.

 

In this announcement, we'll be detailing some of our plans if 1.15 doesn't solve our performance issues - as well as a couple other noteworthy bits.

 

Christmas Sale!

 

Just a quick note before we get into the actual announcement - we've got a Christmas sale running on https://donate.chaoticunited.net all the way until January 7th. If you've been waiting to pick up a rank, now might be a fine time to do so!

 

The Backup Plan

 

The ideal scenario is that updating to 1.15 would fix most, if not all of the TPS issues as of late. 1.14 was rushed out by Mojang - which is why 1.15 is so light on actual features. It was primarily a bugfix update - to clean up some of the mess that was made in 1.14, as well as various issues that have been around for much longer. My personal favorite (besides the lag) is sign colors. On (I believe) 1.8 through 1.14, signs placed facing north or south would have any colored text appear sort of muted. My theory is that they were trying to reduce the "neon" effect that colored text on signs had on 1.7 and prior. However, this created readability issues on multiple occasions. The colors simply appeared darker than they were on those two directions. On 1.15, however, this has been fixed - at long last.

 

But, I digress. There is still a very real possibility that 1.15 won't fix all of our issues. In this case, we'll need to do some further investigation but the most likely next step at that point is migrating to BungeeCord - for good. For those of you who are new to CU, we've tried BungeeCord before - multiple times. The only two times it "stuck" was during our merge with Nuclear District, where our MC server as it exists now (except older of course) was linked with ND's survival server, and when we had a Semi-Vanilla server, which was also linked in a similar fashion. Both setups were retired once the other server stopped existing. ND closed their MC server, and eventually their community entirely, and Semi-Vanilla was closed with many of its core ideals brought into main MC survival.

 

This attempt at BungeeCord would be a long process for us, and would require a lot of custom development. Currently, our MC server has a very strong sense of interconnectivity. You can talk to anyone, from anywhere. You can go to any player, from any world. You can go to Minigames from SkyBlock, then to Survival, then TP to some guy in Creative. If we migrate to BungeeCord, this is something that we MUST retain. Some of the more obvious things, like cross-server chat, are fairly straightforward. However, replicating the ability to warp anywhere, TP anywhere, use mail, private message, and so on between all servers is a whole different beast - and none of the available offerings are satisfactory. My goal when it comes to enhancing/replacing features with new technologies is to preserve the look and feel for the end user. That means all the specific details. The formatting, colors, and anything else must be exact.

 

To put it short, if we do BungeeCord again, you as a player shouldn't be able to tell, at all - besides the improved performance, there shouldn't be any weird oddities or clunky operation.

 

But, this is all theories at the moment. The hope is that 1.15 just fixes everything and we can keep on trucking like we have been thus far. Only time will tell.

 

Relay Servers

For those who aren't near North America and are experiencing lag (whether from distance or network issues in their area), we have decided to implement several relay servers to help ensure you get a better experience on MC. The relays act as a middleman between the main server and your local internet - reducing the strain on both sides of the connection, ensuring a smoother experience for those further away from the US or Canada.

 

The currently available relays are as follows:

  • France: fr.mc.chaoticunited.net
  • United Kingdom: uk.mc.chaoticunited.net
  • Australia: au.mc.chaoticunited.net
  • US East: us-east.mc.chaoticunited.net (will be available within the next day or two)

 

Special thanks to some of the Errite Games, LLC staff (Michael as well as a few others) for contributing servers in these areas. We are also working on finding a server in South America for a relay there as well. Don't worry - we aren't leaving you out!

 

Reflections, and a New Decade

 

So, let's talk about the elephant in the room. The big, lovable, and incredible elephant. We're alive again. Some of you new folk have probably heard - but it wasn't even 2 months ago (November 2019 for those reading in the future) where having even 5 players on MC at once was a big deal. And 10 was unheard of, except for very specific special events. But for the past week or so, we've been maintaining really good player counts (compared to the past).

 

For those of you who are new, we've been around for a long time. Chaotic United dates back to 2011, with what's often called the "old Chaotic United". This was a period of time from 2011 through 2014 where CU was under mostly different management. I'm not gonna get into all the details here (there's reading you can do here on the website if you're interested though - check Help > History in the navbar), but this current iteration of CU is the "new Chaotic United", which started in September 2014. Between September 2014 and this December 2019, we've largely been at rock bottom in terms of population. That's not to say it's been outright dead for five years, you'll notice builds and structures from people who were clearly here before. But the way those all went were largely the same - some special event or thing happens, a bunch of people get on for a little bit, then a week or two pass and it drops off almost entirely. Another week and it's gone. That's it. Back to 0/20. Even when we had strong bursts of 10 people on for a couple days, they didn't last at all. Usually they lasted even shorter than a week most times even.

 

What I'm seeing with this however is something different - an actual steady, stable growth. We've got a long way to go still - but for the first time in over five years, we have real traction again. Chaotic United is finally starting to grow as a community again. I'm not an emotional guy typically - but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't moved by that fact. Seeing this continue to happen...

 

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Seeing this starting to become a regular thing is a truly beautiful thing to see. It's all I ever wanted to see. I (and alycat - who's also an Owner as well but is preoccupied currently) started this project back in 2014 because we didn't want to see CU fade into the shadows. Year after year, we'd make an announcement post, with server updates, on the various anniversaries of ND, old CU, and the new CU, all with the same promise of future plans of growth. And I'll be honest - when I wrote the 1.14 announcement topic, I halfway expected that I'd be doing the same thing again a year later. Now? I think that announcement was it. I think that was finally the starting point.

 

Real quick, I want to give a big thank you to @AwakenedRage for his work the past few days on MC. He's put in countless hours over the past few days - fixing the server when everything got horribly damaged, as well as doing a ton of backend stuff fairly quickly and setting aside his other projects temporarily to ensure 1.15 has a smooth (and swift) launch. He truly is the ntx2 of this generation of Chaotic United - and I don't say that lightly.

 

Additionally - I don't want to stroke this man's ego further, but I have to credit @Z0mbieslayer2013 for a lot of this. It was he who originally pointed out what we needed to do to start all of this - voting. It seems obvious, but I simply didn't realize that voting would do anything. I figured that we didn't have enough people on the server, and we would still be buried hard by the competition - so why even bother? He told me that a server he'd played on previously had gone from nothing to 60 players from doing voting. Nothing else. Just votes. He showed me how shit the previous vote rewards were, and guided me in the creation of new vote rewards. This new system was the catalyst for everything we've seen in the past month. It only took 5 years for someone to finally ask the question: "hey guys, what if we voted?" :lmao:

 

Of course - I've gotta thank the rest of the staff team as well - as they've been doing good keeping up with voting for the server consistently - which gave us the extra boost we needed to get us seen. The result? A playerbase. An actual playerbase. For the first time since the shutdown of the old Chaotic United all the way back in early 2014, we're starting to grow again.

 

For those of you who are new, I and the rest of the CU team would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You are a part of this community's rebirth.

 

And I think that's the best way to enter into a new decade. Who knows what the future will hold? Only time will tell. But based on this, I think we're gonna have one hell of a ride coming up.

 

Thank you all - players and staff alike - for everything.

 

- The Chaotic United Team

 

A note from Michael/Eptic

Hey everyone,  normally I leave these announcement posts to Halo. However with this particular update there are a few things I wanted to talk about here that involve me heavily more then Halo.  First off, the boost in activity on the server. I am also amazed that all it took was voting (Even though I thought we were already doing it), I have also been brought concerns regarding maintaining the servers with there rarely being times in the day where players are not on the server. Beforehand we did not really have more then basic measures of keeping the server maintained, and often then not I would have to bring the server down for maintenance to do this. I am happy to say that, we have integrated measures to greatly reduce the need to take the server down. This does not eliminate the automated restarts (but we have changed the times that this happens). These measures were implemented during the past two days where we took the server down for an extended period of time . We are continuing to integrate as much as we can to not disrupt your experience on the server and are looking into different technology that can benefit the community.

 

Next, I want to address something involving my future at CU. Some of you may remember that I intended to move away from CU near the end of  the year to move onto other projects. While i do confirm that I am involved with other projects. I no longer have any intentions to leave CU. I assure everyone that I am not going anywhere and intend to keep Chaotic United on a road to success in all of its IT/CS related aspects. Furthermore, I plan to be more involved then I have been in the past two years in regards to things other then the back end and lurking around. 

 

Lastly,  I also  want to give  my sincere gratitude to @Atomicbeast101 for his assistance with the move to 1.15 and giving us valuable feedback while CU enters a new era. Not only has he been helping on a technical level, he has also been helping in the staff/moderation side of things as well. Which has allowed us to get 1.15 out to you all quicker without cutting any corners. 

 

Adding on to what Halo said before, thank you everyone for everything. 

 

Regards,

Michael/EpticRage/ErriteEpticRage

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