We're a server network. We should act like a server network.
ClownerCraft has been around for over 4 and a half years now. And we have grown a lot since we started, going from a 30 slot survival server to a server network with a whole host of servers within that.
However, when we expanded into a network, some of the choices that I made may not have been the best ideas. One of which being the whole separate branding for mini games - which has now changed. (LogistiCraft is gone...) But along with this, we've always had the survival server as a main server, and I feel this may have confused a fair number of people. So we're trying to make the network work well with itself, making it easier to get around.
We're working on building a new hub server, which will better match the ClownerCraft branding. This new hub will not only give access to all servers, but will include plenty to explore in itself.
When we launch the new hub, we will be changing the way the network handles players joining. This will change so that new players will go to the hub server when they first login, and then after that you will login to the server you were last on. This should mean that if you mainly play creative or PureSurvival theres no need to join survival every time and then switch server.
As well as this we'll add more forced hosts, so that if you want to join a specific server every time, you can. (for example joining with the IP survival.clownercraft.net would always take you to survival).
Among the changes to how you join and navigate the network theres several small things we're trying to make work on all servers. This is to accompany Tokens, Modreq (/report), Bans & Punishments, The announcer and other features which already work globally across the network. One of the big changes in this is to the server rules.
While we aren't changing what you can/can't do on our network - we're rewording and reformatting the rules to work better. On every server you will be expected to follow a global set of rules, which will show up with /rules. There will then be additional rules relating to just that server, where appropriate. The updated global rules are below:
ClownerCraft Network Rules
This is a family friendly network. Keep the chat, your skin, your username and your builds PG. Racism, Sexism or any other discrimination is not tolerated.
Do not try to irritate or harass other players.
Do not advertise other servers in public/private chat.
Do not grief, steal or raid from other players!
Do not spam the server chat.
No cheating/hacking/exploiting. This includes using anti-idle machines.
Only cosmetic mods (eg Optifine, minimaps (which don't show player locations), etc) are allowed.
This updated set of rules will become active within the next couple of weeks.
A huge focus of this work on the network as a whole is to try and make things better for new players. We want to remove as much confusion as possible, and make it easier to understand what our network is about, and how to do things on it.
Despite this work though, we will ensure we don't lose sight of the Building-Based history to ClownerCraft. We're about creativity - and we want to encourage that as much as we can. That's why we love games like SniperTown, which are exclusive to us because they were created by our community! We'd not be here without our community - so we'll be looking into more ways to get more of you involved in the minigames and extra game modes we add in the future.
Changes to how we moderate the network
I wont go into too much detail in this, but we have recently looked over how we moderate our network - and made a fair number of changes to how we expect punishments to be handled. One of the things which was noticed by a few players already was that we tend to use the recorded warnings without anything said in chat anymore - and this is a deliberate choice. It means every warning we give to a player is recorded, and so we can identify those who are constantly pushing the boundaries much quicker.
We've also introduced new ways for us to deal with server issues, which should mean problems get fixed quicker and wont be forgotten about.
Among this we've also restructured how punishments should progress.
This, naturally, doesn't really affect you as a player if you actually follow the server rules.
Discord
Yes. We're finally going to give in and setup an official discord. It may take some time though since, as you can see above, we already have a fair amount of things we're working on.
We will still run our TS3 server as well as Discord for now.
Tidying up
So, as said above a big focus of ours is to tidy up the network. We really want everything to really feel like it fits together. Because of this (as well as a lack of people playing them) we have closed CTF and will be closing our Survival Games server.
We've kinda realised we're better off having a small number of really decent servers than a lot of 'meh'. This is also why we've rebuilt Snipertown in SniperTown 3 - and we'll be doing the same with SpherePVP.
Most people come to ClownerCraft because of our building-based servers, which is fair since that's how we started. So we want to keep creativity at the heart of what we do. We are really interested in what ideas our community can come up with, for minigames, other gamemodes or just builds.
