Factions Mystic S3: Another major refinement

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Nothing short of the word “outstanding” can describe the unexpected success of the second season of Factions Mystic. We peaked at 816 players, absolutely something we have never expected. That used to be our playercount the whole network and now we can have it all on a single Factions server. While performance did leave something to be desired, it was still an amazing improvement over the previous season. Though we did notice that season two did run into some major stability problems nearing the end of the map, that is just an artifact of the higher than expected playercount. Most plugins simply don’t scale past 500 players, even Essentials which is the plugin that all major servers use for the base of their server, uses multiple gigabytes of ram while handling 800 players. So how do we scale further as we will need to in Season 3?

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Turns out, we still have a lot to do for optimizations. Such as stacked spawners (which has been improved and bugfixed dramatically over the last few weeks), optimizations to entities (tiles and mobs alike), and optimizations to world structures. To elaborate further on that last bit I’d like to explain how Minecraft ticks chunks. Whenever the server ticks (which it does 20 times a second), every chunk is scanned for blocks to update. Snowblocks, grass, dirt, and crops all are very intensive in this matter as they are dynamic blocks that can either melt, spread, or grow respectively.. Meaning that they can change depending on the world environment (Snowing weather would create snow blocks on the ground). However when there are over 10k chunks worth of snow blocks being ticked during peak hours, this can add up to around 10% of our cpu usage being used just because of snow blocks. The solution to this was to entirely remove the Blizzard world and replace it with the Mars world we had before as sandstone blocks don’t require any CPU practically. (Less than .1% CPU usage with 10k chunks)

Onto stacked spawners, we tried really hard to make them work during the previous season, as everyone knows it didn’t end so well. People had their data reset multiple times a day and there was some serious memory leaks. Also mobs weren’t particularly keen on dying for hours on end. To resolve this for this season, we’ve entirely redone the data structure of the plugin and how it handles stacking (Which fixes data retention issue and mob “lag” issues). We are still testing the plugin with tens of thousands of spawners and so far is good, but we plan to do a more substantial beta test after EOTW tomorrow to ensure they will not break under any circumstances.

Of course, we’ve done more things than that, but I found those two topics particularly interesting. Here’s the list of changes we’ve done,

• Readded mob spawner stacking (third’s time the charm right?)
• Readded the new mob stacking plugin to work alongside the new mob spawners
• Removal of Blizzard world in favor of a Mars world to optimize chunk ticking
• Fixed brewing stands not stacking sand (Only reason it took this long is because our latest version of our core plugin which handles /tntfill and all tnt mechanics had a memory leak in testing that was pretty annoying to fix).
• Further updates to our anticheat (Fixing crash exploits and more holes in our protection)
• Actual working KoTHs with rewards that matter (Custom enchantments books as well as a higher end set of armor)
• An entirely overhauled /tntfill command (/tntfill <radius> <amount>).
• Preparations for the third revision of our custom server software (Nicknamed SuperiorSpigot) which will offer substantial performance improvements.
• Optimized memory system on the dedicated server for better utilization of the CPU resources.
• One time rewards from ranks are now returned on SOTW via the /onetime command. (Can be ran once after SOTW and only if you purchased a rank before EOTW of the previous map)
• Many memory leak fixes to our leaderboards plugin which was causing the server to crash near EOTW.
• Changed build teams which resulted in us not getting a render, and this post being delayed an entire day.

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Since we’re nearing the end of summer and will be much more busy with content with future seasons of Factions as well as other servers. We will be extending the length of this season back out to our normal 7 weeks, giving another 2 weeks of payouts for people. The rewards ranking has been kept the same though, so overall payouts are up substantially. From $6,900 USD worth of payouts to around $9,700 USD worth of payouts. These rewards will be given out weekly and distributed accordingly below,

1. $225 USD PayPal + $300 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
2. $150 USD PayPal + $175 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
3. $125 USD PayPal + $125 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
4. $75 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
5. $60 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
6. $50 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
7. $40 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
8. $30 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
9. $15 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card
10. $10 USD MineSuperior Store Gift Card

With 7 weeks of payouts, there will be 7 different dates for payouts. The payout dates are as follows for the curious readers in our audience,

• August 3rd, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• August 10th, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• August 17th, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• August 24th, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• August 31st, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• September 7th, 2019 @ 3PM ET
• September 13th, 2019 @ 4PM ET

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The most important part of the post and the only thing most people read other than FTOP. That is of course, the launch details! We’ll be ending the current season in 11 hours from the time this post goes live (So Friday @ 4PM ET), doing our last payout then and letting the server descend into absolute chaos. After an hour past EOTW, we’ll be shutting the server down to prepare for season 3. Which will occur the following day, Saturday @ 3PM ET.

For those curious about grace period, that’ll end on July 31st @ 4PM, at which point all protections against TNT and creepers will be instantly removed. Commencing the raiding session.

For what is being kept, here's the list so you can figure out what you'll have for SOTW

• Ranks (and all of the perks you get with them and one time rewards)
• Tags (We even keep your last used tag).
• Commands such as /fly
• Purchased kits such as /kit raid (Which we do plan on revamping to make it more worthwhile)
• Sell wands (If they were purchased during Factions Mystic Season 2)
• Chunk busters (If they were purchased during Factions Mystic Season 2)
• Faction power (If they were purchased during Factions Mystic Season 2)
• GKits (If they were purchased during Factions Mystic Season 2)

And for what isn't being kept from the last map, as usual,

• Spawner purchases
• Crate Key purchases
• In game balance
• mcMMO levels
• Any bases
• Faction claims
• Inventory
• PlayerVaults

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With all of that said, I’d like to once again thank all of the players who help make our dreams possible. When we first started taking Factions seriously again back in Inferno in December. We had never imagined we’d be hitting these players, never in a thousand years. We can’t thank you enough for the criticism and love all of you have given us. It helps us define who we are today and who are becoming. We do plan bigger updates in the future, this one was caught during a company retreat (Which was to strengthen the bonds of the management team which was very successful) so we had to dial back on the features. However we believe season three will still be an awesome season for everyone, just like all of the previous ones were.

 

I hate build teams who don't give us renders, made me waste nearly 12 hours for nothing. Reminder for next time to actually get one pre-made by a professional.

The builds are good though, so is the server.