Hello,

earlier today I was sent a link to this subreddit, which was the first time that I heard about this new server. After browsing through the information provided on your server and especially its plugins, I was confused and had quite a few questions. When discussing those things with friends, their reaction was the same confusion, so I'm making this post, to hopefully get a few of our questions answered.

The first half is mainly directed towards /u/psygate, because I would assume that he wrote most/all of the plugin code.

Beforehand: I'm not here to stir shit or cause conflict. I'm also not speaking officially for anyone or anything, I'm just voicing some shared thoughts, concerns and questions.

1. On reinventing the wheel

What was the motivation behind rewriting the core plugins of civcraft? For example it seems like your ultimate goal with Amethyst, Ivory and AscendedPrison is to let them have the same functionality as NameLayer, Citadel and PrisonPearl with minor additions that suit the style of your server.

Obviously coding plugins like this, testing them etc. is not a one night project, but instead the work of weeks/months. Based on the fact that open source versions of those plugins already exist it seems a bit silly to go through the effort of redoing everything. Also while arguably some of our plugins have a bad/almost unmaintable codebase (RB, Bastion, IE), NameLayer and Citadel are definitely not one of those.

Working based on the existing civcraft plugins would have saved you a lot of time and we would both profit from features being added by either party.

So why was ultimately the decision made to copy the exact plugin concept, while throwing away all preexisting code?

2. Performance

In multiple places, for example here terms like better server optimization are being thrown around. What exactly did you do to noticeably improve performance and what was the motivation behind that?

Arguably Citadel and NameLayer really aren't the big boys in terms of performance issues, for example in timings from today, Citadel was using 0.66 % of tick and NameLayer 0.09%

Did you have actual performance issues with those plugins, that justified a need for performance improvement?

3. Open source

Is the source code of your plugins publicly available somewhere? If not, will it be at some point? And if that's also not the case, why did you decide to go this route?

4. Admin policy

Where do you see your server longterm in terms of admin involvement compared to CivEx or Civcraft? Full Laissez-faire or more like CivEx, actively removing offensive content/players and punishing grief? For example if someone built a swastika town that persecuted certain minorities ingame, would you intervene?

Will the admins on this server also actively play and get involved in conflict?

5. Goals

What hole is this server trying to fill/ where does it see itself? I think we both agree that there are already more than enough civ knockoffs are out there, so how does this server plan to be different and attract players compared to more established servers?

In advance thanks for your time