Your wakeup call

General Discussion Feedback and Suggestions
13

In the past this has been something that has been we may as well wait, the difference won’t be too great - obviously that wasn’t true this time around. Though, this is actually an example of where waiting on Forge is rather important - we have to follow there lead in a number of areas, and given the many many changes made to Minecraft, we would have been remiss going too far ahead without seeing what they’re doing.

Sadly for you, the vast majority of our community uses Sponge for modded servers - we never took off in the vanilla space :frowning: Initially we simply considered vanilla support to be a by-product of Forge, nothing more, nothing less. Yes this changed when Granite was acquired, and became SpongeVanilla - but our developers still in large part contribute for SpongeForge (as that’s what they use).

Well actually, the only things that really needs to be written here is the Mixin updater. Mercury (written by Minecrell, and using libraries from myself) or Srg2Source could be used to modify the actual source code. Its just writing something to handle the workflow.

The reason I’ve brought it up a few times, is that you expect a lot from staff - more than we do.

As far as developers are concerned, its essentially just keep doing what you were doing to be invited to the team. A Sponge Developer is really just someone that’s contributed significantly over time, works well with the team, and given access to some internal chats. They can choose to do additional roles, but that is entirely up to them

Honestly, Sponge’s community is too small for it to be worthwhile - it takes a substantial amount of bureaucracy to work. There would also be the issue of funding, for that sort of structure to work everything really has to be paid for (e.g. Fedora has Red Hat) - Sponge does have sponsors, but its an ongoing matter and one that sponsors probably don’t want discussed openly.

In short, we’d be even slower to get anything done.

We differ on this, personally I think that Sponge’s greatness is with regards to modded. We never really penetrated the vanilla market, with SpongeVanilla.

Like I’ve said we all joined to continue with the status-quo essentially, just with an elevated community position. Some take it above and beyond, but many of us are either students, have jobs, or both - much of us have our time limited.

I also think you may not be clear on how small our developer team is → see Staff — Sponge 8.0.0 documentation and look at the Issue Managers too (for your specific statements). I will also mention that those lists are greater than the actually people working on Sponge (as you can see from our repos) → many are on hiatuses of sorts.

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14

As someone who has chosen to volunteer to help out extremely within the Minecraft community, hearing someone say “you should have known what you got into, why complain” is quite a spit in the face.

I deal with MinecraftForums, PlanetMinecraft, #minecrafthelp, directly working with Mojang on several things and writing my own server management panel. And now Sponge. And I get 0 incentive to do this. I do this because I like doing it. And hearing this kind of stuff makes me think you’ve not tried doing that.

I do it because I want to. I have 0 obligation to do it, nor anything else I choose to do.

You will have no idea the amount of work that is put into any community. And how much they pour into it, to hear things like “you should have known better”.

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15

The thing is to my knowledge (which is public announcemnets and discussions) it was never attempted to overcome. It was ruled out right from the beginning.

I’m not talking about minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months. I’m talking about years. The Forge permissions API implementation is a great example of it.
My favorite part of the discussion is the part where Lavitan essentially say “We should have done it from the beginning”. Which I do agree with. The question remains, why is it not merged then yet?
The code is ready. It has been reviewd several times, it has been confirmed to work and it bridges a gap that never should have been there in the first place. Now this carries special significance with me because I’m on the other end of the issue. I as LuckPerms support get constant complains about that exact gap.

Yes. That was suggestion for the future. One that I came up with right there and then. I’ll properly suggest it on the Ore repo later.
Though I’ve also brought up more than enough other suggestion for the current situation.

The only thing where in hindsight I evaulted the past and not the current state is the PR/issue discussion. The rest remains. And while you think that shimming 1.13/1.14 support is a bad idea for your reasons I’ll say I think it’s a good idea for my reasons.

16

All I expect from staff is that the community is put above themselves in terms of where the project goes. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. I find that to be a perfectly reasonable expectation, why I try to fulfill in my community.

I see. I might actually be able to do that. Though I won’t promise anything. Currently I’m way to short on time.

That’s a region that really needs to be tackled. Hear me out. Sponge in itself is better than Spigot. It’s just unpolished and has the flaw of regularily dropping their vanilla community. Now I know that Sponge is being polished. Now if you mange to provide a reliable vanilla platform that you allow to grow, then it’s only a matter of time before devs start switching for the better platform and ultimately the community itself. All it needs for that to happen is the vanilla platform being reliable. And I think with some future precautions that can be achieved (assuming there won’t be another 1.13 knocking on the door soon).

That’s what I meant. If you manage to consitently push out a decently working Vanilla build before Forge is ready, then that’s all you need to get your footing back in the vanilla market.

That’s not because people don’t want to use it for vanilla, but because as it stands right now it is impossible to do so.

I know it’s small.

A greater general community inclusion, especially in terms of decison making would still be good idea.

17

Again. Not my intention. I am also very involved in the MC community and do a shitton of work without payment. I’m really talking about the payment thing. Why complain about not getting paid when you chose to?
I mean you chose to help out in the community. Eventually you started getting staff ranks. Now why is it spitting in your face when I point out that doing that is accepting reponsibility and expectations?
I know damn well, why I’m not joining the Sponge team (or not trying to). It’s because I don’t have the time for responsibilites it brings. The thing is I’m aware of them.

And heck complaining is fine. I do it all the time. I just find complaining about the responsibilities and expectations is a bit out of place. Especially when they are reasonable.

As I’ve said. I’m doing it for years now.

I absolutely do know. Now there’s no nicer way of saying it other than if “you should have known better” offends you, then yes you really should have known better.
The next sentence will probably also sounds offensive to you, but if you don’t like the responsibility of being staff, you don’t have to be staff.
And before you start ranting about that I have no idea, I do and I do live by these standards. Which means I have way less staff titles than I’d like but I have responibility and expectation levels I can fulfill without getting upset and butthurt about it.

18

There’s literally only two status updates to look at and it’s smack dab in the middle of one of them:

And yet more work gets done, even after your comment. If it was as cut and dried as you say it is, it would be pulled, and I note that you have not waited around to hear phit’s elaboration. Meanwhile, this is an isolated phenomenon. I’ve never experienced slowness like this with any of my own PRs.

Your reasons are ‘because it would be faster’. You do not seem to grasp that Sponge’s reasons are ‘no it absolutely wouldn’t’. The majority of the work is in updating the implementation; the shim would take development time away from the implementation and so it’d end up taking even longer.

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19

You keep talking about this but not once have explained it any further than ‘staff can be a bit deaf at times’. What on earth about Sponge’s processes has been to advance the goals of the staff over those of the community?

That’s what’s going on right now. Vanilla will absolutely come out before Forge because Forge will take even more work. Again, where did you get the idea that it’s in any way a simple and quick process?

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20

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You accuse us of not getting on with 1.14.x and claim “expectation”, but you then suggest you’re too busy to help. There is the old adage “put up or shut up”, and while I don’t want to silence the community, I am insulted that we have all this back and forth going when this time could be used constructively. Ask how you can help us make 1.14 a reality. Comment on PRs to help us see how we might not have accounted for your use case. This are all things that we need to see. Even better, write PRs for us that fix long standing problems. I wish I have time to do more of all of this, but my job and my health have prevented this.

We’re a volunteer OSS project that needs all the help we can get. I would rather not waste what precious little time we have blowing hot air around when we could actually get some decent feedback from people who are both developers and server owners through constructive comments on PRs. We’re always going to have internal governance, but please remember that we have plenty of ways to make your voice heard. We’re not going to accept everything, and not everything will be done as fast as we’d like. Those Ore guideline changes? Turns out that they are much harder to implement than we thought. Reviewers? They’re all busy with work and school. Me? I have a medical issue that I need to be careful with. I am flat out insulted that you insinuate that we don’t care, we don’t listen, we don’t act on the community.

Remember that we are all humans. Everyone deserves decency and respect. Remember that we are volunteers. We will not destroy our lives because someone wants 1.14 now.

You have expectations of us. Our expectations of the community should be clear, to be respectful of one another, and to pitch in when possible. We knew what we were getting into when joining the Sponge team - but I guarantee it was not an expectation. It’s trust.

I trust you’ll help us out with our issues, PRs and constructive discussion?

A note on Ore: we have a tiny team trying to unpick some of the spider-like code to ensure Ore can be upgraded more easily. Want that to move faster? Please go help them. They are crying out for the help. Then we can make sure that we can implement our revised guidelines to the fullest.

We care. Help us to help you.

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21

That’s what I meant with ruled out from the beginning. I know that was said in the announcements. And if it came across like I was saying something else, then I apologize.

What do you mean? (I’m honstly confused) I’ve not said anything for those 29 waiting for phit to say anything. Now if waiting 29 days is being impatient, then I really don’t want to know what you’d consider patient.

I don’t have the knowlege about the code to say for sure. But it has been brought up in discussions that it would have been possible to do.

Sounds great.

I’ve never claimed it was? I’m saying it should become one to give the Vanilla Community an alternative. I’ve always acknowledged that it’s a fair bit of work.

22

So, let’s assume that Ore suddenly was going to allow monetization of plugins. How long would it take to implement so that devs could use it? My conservative guess. A year at least. You know the Ore API V2 that we’ve been working on for months now? I initially thought I could get it out around May or so. Stuff takes time when only two devs are working on a project.

Oh, but I’m probably just not working enough on Ore, right? If I could just put in an hour extra of work every day, surely stuff would move faster? Well, that’s looking away from the fact that working on Ore is almost like a full-time job for me. There are loads of big features and projects that I know perfectly well how to do (in most cases), but stuff takes time to code and design. Every feature you propose is a feature we need to implement. Some just take 5 minutes, some like monetization would probably take a month to get just right. And honestly, there are features I would much rather work on than monetization.

The biggest reason why I do this is because I enjoy it. Not because it brings me fame, or because it opens up future paths for me, but simply because I enjoy it. I’m not going to do something I don’t enjoy doing. I’m sure it’s the same for many others here. So to just say that they should develop something for 1.13 vanilla, only to throw it away later because they probably need other designs to accommodate Forge is just insulting. Sure, if people want to do that, they’ll do it, but I’m not seeing anyone actually do it.

Why bring this up? Because you keep saying that people shouldn’t complain when people say they aren’t paid. The point isn’t that people should pay us for the work we do. We aren’t paid, and for me at least, I don’t mind. In fact, I kind of like it because it means I can decide what I work on. What I definitively don’t like is someone complaining that I should DO MORE when I have put my heart and soul into this project. If I had been paid, sure, it would have been different, I would have worked towards what the ones that paid me wanted. I’m not getting paid though, so I work the way I want. My time and commitment, my rules, and my opinions.

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23

Just to add to this - it’s not. Indeed, perhaps you should have asked sooner. Please consider that we miss things - phit forgot about it as an honest mistake - a simple nudge would be appreciated if you need an answer.

24

The discussion happened prior to that. And then there was the announcement. As it was a purely technical discussion, it didn’t need to be made with non-staff.

I’ve waited longer than that for a reply. When I don’t get one, I badger them again, but I don’t assume they’re never going to respond. They’re only human. They forget things.

I added to the post since you quoted but before you responded:

Different 'it’s, then. It cannot ‘become’ a quick process for vanilla because, again, the vast majority of the work is in the implementation. Especially for an update as large as The Flattening. Just because both implementations are taking a long time does not mean that vanilla can be made faster by ignoring the rest. Fabric did the whole ‘fast and light shim’ thing for 1.13 modding, and now that Forge is catching up to 1.14 you can bet that almost nobody will use Fabric anymore because Forge is so much better for everyone involved. Same scenario here.

25

Never said that. Please don’t interpret meaning into stuff I’ve said that’s not there. I’ve said it’s taking too long. Not that you’re not getting on with it. Big difference.

That’s why I’m not trying to join the staff team. The expections that would fall onto me are nothing I could fulfill in my current live situation. No matter how bad I want to help.
How’s that throwing stones from glass houses? I’ve always lived by the principle that if I can’t afford to fulfill the expections of a role, I can’t expect the benefits from it.
I do live by my word. Always have.

I absoltely see where you are taking insult. And that is a fair point I haven’t considered in my initial post.
Now there’s one key issue then that explains the wildly different perspective of things.

Communication.

Thinking about it makes it clear. There’s a clear lack of communication between the staff and the community. It’s perfectly ok that reviews are not happening because people are busy. But why is that not communicated? Instead people are just left to wonder when it’ll start. Why am I constantly complaining about my Ore suggestions going nowhere? Because I’m not part of those internal discussions and never got the memo that things are complicated.

I’m aware and that’s the exact opposite of what I’m asking.
While it may seem unfair to you that I’m complaining to you about 1.13/1.14 it’s just as unfair that I have to deal with users of my server giving grief about 1.13/1.14.

I wish I could. But I’m not familiar with Scala, nor any of the internal structures of Ore itself. So all I can realistically do is report bugs and offer suggestions.

Doing with the best of my abilities.

Now please don’t forget that the community does not know what you know. It would be much apprechiated if more infomation was communicated and general processes became more transparent. Because as of right now, if I shout into the dark forest I don’t even know if someone heard it (aka if it’s being discussed or not).
Can you understand where I’m coming from here?

26

I’ve never said that anyone is not working enough. Please stop putting words in my mouth.

To maybe make it a bit clearer, I mean everything I say as literal as possible. I couldn’t include secondary meaning in my sentences if someone put a gun to my head, due to me having Aspergers. So for everyone. If I’m saying X, I mean X, just X and only X.

I know that just too well. I work in software development myself. Though it helps switching the perspective sometimes. And again communication is the key, especially if data or and ETA has been announced.

I’m aware. I am a software developer too. That’s why I’ve said it would be a good long term thing for Ore.

You guys should be paid. That’s not even up for debate. But still let you have your freedom of what you do. But I know it’s not possible. And I do understand why you find it ok that you’re not paid. I feel the same way about my MC stuff. I’d love to make money with it, but I want to maintain my freedom.

Never said that. Never meant that. I do understand that if you think that’s what I’ve said, that you are insulted. But again. Not what I said, nor what I want to express in any way, shape or form. My aplogies for not making this clearer.

27

You are basing your complaint on the fact we’ve not worked fast enough for you because others are giving you grief for not being on 1.14. You’re telling us that we’re not working fast enough on an OSS project - something that we work on for free that you could also learn and work on. That’s INCREDIBLY arrogant.

We have zero obligation. We want to do this, we don’t have to do this. We might not have the time to do this that you wiish we had. Believe me, that’s the same here, we wish we had more time. But to insult us by saying “my users are complaining and it’s your fault so I’m going to complain to you, even though it’s OSS”… yeah.

I note what you’re saying. Communication. Sure, we recognise that we could be better, but it works both ways. Ask politely if you’re concerned. Don’t try to throw those you want to perform this work under the bus, like you did with this post. We’re not going to want to help you if you’re going to be rude to us.

We’re going to have a status update soon. Some of these issues will be answered there.

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28

Again, your expectation are above and beyond. If all our staff was held to those standards, we wouldn’t have a staff team.

How entitled do you think you are? Unwilling to help, but happy to pass on the blame - Sponge is always going to take longer than other competing software in the vanilla space, if you really can’t wait move to other competing software in the vanilla space.

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29

Really? I’d only ever hold other up to standards I hold up myself and consider to be fair. I hold you guys up to these standards, because if I was in your place those would be the one’s I’d hold myself up to.

Would you?

Now this has been brought up by several people. And I kinda take issue with the sentiment here. Let me explain.
You do realize that all I really can do is do reviews of PRs, comment on them or make some myself. Fair. The thing is I am not at all familiar with the project, nor with Minecraft’s current internal structures. Now if you’d be so kind and tell me how someone that knows at best 5% of the codebase and 10% of the overall project structure could meaningfully contribute in any significant way?
The thing is, I do what I can. I’ve opened several issues and one PR so far. I try to dig through the code when I have an issue so I can try to give educated suggestions based on that research so people familar with the project (or at least that part of the project) don’t have to do everything themselves.
And before you suggest it, no, I don’t have the time and resources to familiarize myself with project well enough to be able to help in a more effective manner sadly.

I’m glad to hear.

I typically do. Though recently (recent months) this has gotten me nowhere. So while the rant itself is the result of months of bad communication, I pretty much snapped and had to get this off my chest. While it was misguided due to me not correctly identifying the problem, I do understand that it does not excuse my the rudeness of my way.
The thing is, all I really want is communication that’s not made off of me constantly having to hunt after answers.

30

So you want a 1.14 server right? Have you actually tried seen how well they run with lots of people on it? Our server just made the switch to 1.14. We currently have like 15-20 people on it. It’s running like crap. It’s hosted on a modern dedicated machine. And still we get like 5-10 TPS. Even if a Sponge 1.14 version existed today, I doubt that more than maybe 5-10% of all servers would be running on it. 1.14 is really just a bit more official snapshot version.

31

I’m very well aware. And I can sell my users that 1.14 runs like crap. At least better than “there’s no 1.13/1.14”.

1.13 is the version I’d love to get my hands on as of right now. Which I’m also aware is worse performance wise.

Yeah. Really hoping for the full release soon.

32

What we take issue with is that you do not have an understanding of what work is involved because you don’t have the time, and yet you’re pontificating what you want to see. It’s becoming increasingly clear how much you don’t understand about our project. And before you say “communication”, no, we expect some level of research before you start issuing demands. And before you say “expectation”, your expectations are not our promises, they are your expectations, not ours.

It is fine to not have the time. We have no expectation of anybody to contribute, BUT you have been writing your posts as if we should be doing more on top of what our already stressed workload is. What comes off a rude and insulting is that you say you have no time or expectation of yourself, but you have full expectation of us.

Here are our expectations. We expect that the community recognises us as human and that we make mistakes. We expect that the community will work with us when there are issues to resolve, even though we fail to communicate well at times. We expect those who want to make demands put in the work themselves. We expect those who ask to understand that we can only work on it when life allows. We do not expect the community to make life and work sacrafices to do so.

So, I reiterate. Put up or shut up. You have expectations of us that we never promised or signed up to. Our expectation is that you should help us any way you can if you feel that strongly. You’ve said you will, and I look forward to seeing your contributions.

We’re a volunteer project. We try our best. I’m sorry you don’t think it’s good enough, but do not come and start attacking the project when a polite conversation would have been so much better. All that has happened is you’ve riled up those who want to help you.

I think we all need to cool off. I don’t think this is going anywhere constructive.

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