Blog

Howdy!

It’s been a busy week for me—and thanks to y’all, an incredibly successful one!

Let’s start with a few of those successes!

Successes of the week

Mercy Road, 24-hour charity D&D stream, raised over $8000 for Child’s Play!

Y’all are amazingly generous, and I cannot express enough how much I appreciate your support for this weekend’s charity D&D game benefitting Child’s Play!

Saucefire ran a great game, and I was fortunate to play with an incredibly fun party.

If you missed the game live, please enjoy the video-on-demand here:

Babilar’s Earth Day Parade

Thanks so much to the Babilar crew for hosting the final build contest in our S8 parade float build contest series!

The barges, ships, and sea-life y’all constructed were beautiful!

Congratulations on first place go to MantuaMaker2 (AKA Grace)! Check out her build, and many others in the VOD below:

My Music City Multi-Con footage featured as evidence in video by creator being sued for defamation by Billy Mitchell

Okay, this is a weird one. I’ve seen the documentary King of Kong a few times, but I never expected my work to be mixed up in that world.

King of Kong documentary subject Billy Mitchell is suing YouTube uploader Karl Jobst for defamation, and my video of Mitchell playing Pac-Man at Music City Multi-Con is being used as evidence that Mitchell lies to crowds?!

You can watch the whole thing if you like, but my small contribution starts at 13:55

New Discord Channel #spam-servers-you-operate

We have a lot of folks in our community who create cool spaces to hang out and play games.

If you’re running any sort of server you’d like to welcome other community members to join you  on, feel free to post information about how folks can join via our latest Discord channel #spam-servers-you-operate.

Please note that this is intended to be a place to showcase leadership of our community members elsewhere, and not intended as a place to post links to popular Minecraft servers you don’t operate. Thanks!

Windows re-installed on production desktop

Thanks to everyone for your help with test streams this week!

It seems like my Windows re-install was successful at obliterating whatever weird conflict was causing my graphics driver to frequently crash.

I’m planning to build out better hardware redundancy in the back half of the year to ensure future flukes like this don’t derail my production schedule as significantly. Thanks for your patience!

Inquiries

“Will the Q&A portion of the weekly [project management] meetings be on hold completely until the April 24th meeting or will Q&A be simply limited to clarification on Agenda topics in the weekly meeting?” asks Kindalas

Questions pertaining to agenda items will be answered as they arise.

Removing the Q&A segment is intended to avoid scope-creep of project management calls into subjects that would be better addressed on the agendas of other meetings.

Please raise concerns about those subject in the appropriate Discord channel for each. If you aren’t sure which to take them to, Tommy and I will be using #sustainable-growth as a bit of a catch-all until we can refine our process.

Community Meetings

Experimental Server meeting to be re-scheduled due to low attendance

NJ and I will select a new date to be announced in the next newsletter.

Upcoming Meeting Agendas

Thanks to our Community Liaison, ThatTommyBoii for helping compile feedback and suggestions from the community into agendas for upcoming meetings!

Experimental Server – TBD pending rescheduling

1. seanard suggests the BlazeandCave advancement pack
2. Maahes suggests the Decorative Blocks mod
3. Mr. Hardluck  suggests the Hats Plus mod
4. Maahes suggests the Crazy Features datapack, specifically for the bendy pistons.

Quarterly Meeting – April 24th at 11am US Central

1. Meep suggests consideration of content accessibility. 
   1. Captions for screenshots with important information
   2. Audio descriptions for videos
   3. Transcriptions of meetings
2. netcropolis suggests consideration of how to ensure roles usually covered by volunteers in similar communities are filled properly here
3. Mr. Hardluck suggests more community game nights such as UHCs, Mario Kart, Among Us, pinball challenges, etc.

Broad Server Meeting (Aviva Meeting) – April 24th at Noon US Central

1. Aviva suggests Joe hear why folks play on the servers and why they take part in the community to help him better understand the community and their goals
2. Netcropolis and surfrock suggest hiring and setting clear responsibilities for server operators and administrators
3. Em suggests create better feedback mechanisms such as polls for specific items under consideration
4. misterlantz and Em suggest clearer communication about differentiation between the servers and pre-launch opportunities for community feedback
5. ZedrikCayne suggests clearer warning labels on Joe’s weird art ideas
6. Sami suggests better communication around encouraging community members to create their own server

Vanillish Survival – Meeting on May 14th at Noon US Central

1. Joe presents state of project
   1. TBD launch date
   2. Server operator role
   3. Server defaults at launch
      1. Keep inventory: on
      2. Mob griefing: off
      3. Sleep percentage: single player sleep
2. No community requests or suggestions made yet. Please submit those in #tbd-vanillish-next

Everstorm Server Obituaries

CurtisDoesADig died as he lived: starving, and in between a skeleton and a hard place.

Videos last week

We met up with Scar and Cub for some fun, plus we managed to capture a major server configuration change live on film!

Upcoming Travel & Conventions

Here’s a few events I’ll definitely be attending. I hope some of y’all can make it!

• PlayOnCon: July 7–10, 2022 in Birmingham, AL
• Pinball Expo 2022: October 21–23rd, 2022 in Schaumburg, IL
• Music City Multi-con: October 28–30th, 2022 in Lebanon, TN

So long and thanks!

I feel if I thanked everyone this week, I’d just end up repeating the entire Successes segment of this newsletter again!

Even so, I do want to credit our Community Liaison ThatTommyBoii for help with this newsletter. Thanks, Tommy.

Until next time y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN. Keep adventuring!

 

Howdy!

Welcome to the second issue of our newsletter!

Thanks to feedback from the community, you may notice that we now have colorful headers to help break up the text!

Here’s one now!

Constructive Community Feedback and Flexibility

ThatTommyBoii promoted to Community Liaison!

Y’all may have noticed over the last year and a half or so that ThatTommyBoii has been an incredibly helpful and engaged member of both my professional staff and our broader community. I noticed too, and created a role that suits his aptitude and excellence in both capacities.

I am excited to announce that Tommy has accepted a promotion to the role of Community Liaison. He will be responsible for ensuring that community feedback is acknowledged and added to publicly-visible draft agendas in advance of the appropriate public meetings.

Tommy will also be responsible for ensuring those meetings are streamed and recorded, and that useful summaries are written and published in the following week’s newsletter.

Congratulations, Tommy!

Sure, Tommy is great, we all know that—but, what kind of meetings, Joe?

Quarterly New Business Meetings

Let’s say you have a suggestion for improving the Discord and want to propose a temporary experiment to see how it goes for three months, where do you take that?

You take it to the Discord channel #next-quarter-new-business-agenda-requests! Tommy will make sure that your proposal and name are added to the draft agenda for next quarter’s New Business meeting, during which you or a proxy can present your case either on voice or in writing.

It’s kind of like petitions—except not in character!

Myself and other community members will have the opportunity to ask questions and comment. After review, experiments that seem to make sense at the time will proceed. Each experiment will have a feedback Discord channel created so that folks can weigh in as it runs.

As this is a new system, we’ll hold our first Quarterly New Business Meeting on April 24th at 11am US Central, immediately before the Minecraft Server Roadmap meeting at noon.

After that, we’ll do another Quarterly New Business Meeting each June, December, and March.

Experiments that seem promising can be altered, expanded, or extended at the next Quarterly New Business Meeting.

Proposals for paradigm shifts that are too broad to test effectively in a temporary manner will be considered for inclusion in the agenda of the Annual Patreon Community Structural Review the following September.

Annual Patreon Community Structural Review Meeting

Every September, I’ll host a meeting where I will consider long-term and wide-ranging permanent changes to the structure of the Patreon tier system and Discord server.

We will review some of the experiments attempted after the quarterly feedback meetings and decide what may or may not make sense to roll out server-wide or in a more permanent fashion.

A note on tempo

The Patreon Discord was founded in October of 2016, and I haven’t had the staff to be able to set aside time to really explore and consider significant restructure or changes in an orderly way until now.

When attempting to determine an appropriate tempo for testing and implementing big changes, I realized that monthly petitions for the Minecraft servers have a good feel to their pacing given that those servers run for twelve to twenty-four months at a time.

The Patreon Discord has operated as a community center for six years now, and has demonstrated a value that warrants considering how to keep it running well at a scale of twelve to twenty-four years. Using roughly the same proportional thinking, we end up with a major meeting once per year.

The quarterly meetings will allow us to ensure that that annual tempo doesn’t fall too out of step with emergent needs. Other discussions can also be scheduled as needed to focus on specific topics, such as the Minecraft Server Planning Discussions.

Patreon Minecraft Server Planning Discussions

I’ve previously scheduled a few planning meetings with the community about what kinds of game rules, modpacks, etc. we should consider in the future.

If you’re interested in shaping the agenda for each, you may do so in advance in the appropriate Discord channel.

• April 10th at noon, US Central: Experimental server discussion based on notes in #2022-experimental-next
• April 24th at noon, US Central:  Broad server expansion and operator role roadmap planning meeting based on notes in #sustainable-growth (thanks to Aviva for proposing that)
• May 14th at noon, US Central:  Vanillish “Survival-Comfort” server discussion, based on notes in #tbd-vanillish-next

What is or isn’t in-scope for Tommy’s New Role?

Tommy’s new role is scoped around ensuring community concerns and feedback are heard and addressed.

I recognize that y’all have been ill-served by me mingling the day-to-day planning of my schedule with concerns that impact the whole community—discussion of which y’all deserve to have properly organized and documented.

As such, my project management calls with NJ will be narrowly refocused on my workload, and the Q&A agenda item will be removed indefinitely pending  review on April 24th.

NJ and I have discussed the requests to record those calls, but have concluded that concerns about both privacy and production value distractions would undermine our ability to work effectively during those sessions.

I’m optimistic that the new meeting process Tommy is taking point on will be a more appropriate and productive home for addressing the concerns of our growing community.

This is a pretty broad overview, what if I’d like a clarification about the implementation details?

This is an example of a great question I don’t have a perfect answer to yet. Until I figure out a better process, please post your question in the #sustainable-growth room opening with the word “Inquiry:” in the following format:

Inquiry: will Tommy still be working as a moderator too?

I’ll search for the term “Inquiry:” as I compose the next newsletter and will get back to you with what I hope is a batch of well-reasoned responses that look something like:

---

“Will Tommy still be working as a moderator too?” asks JoeHills

At present, Tommy’s new duties are in addition to (not a replacement of) his existing moderator responsibilities.

As the community grows in the future, the duties of the Community Liaison may expand to the point where also serving as a moderator is impractical, so Tommy and I will be keeping an eye on that.

---

Based on the volume and manner of inquiries received, I’ll iterate the inquiry and response process from there.

Serious inquiries only, please.

Everstorm Server Obituaries

• NJ died at the bony hands of a skinny-dipping skeleton.

Upcoming Events

Two big events this Saturday, April 9th!

Sean Hills to guest judge Earth Day Parade Float Build Contest

The Babilar neighborhood from the Season 8 Vanilla SMP server will be hosting a parade float build contest celebrating Earth Day on April 9th at 11am US Central Time.

All $10+/mo Patreon members are welcome to participate, and the event will be in creative mode, so no in-game prep will be required!

D&D charity stream!

On April 9th at 2pm US Central time, I’ll be joining Quinn Murphy, Ryan North, Jack Packard, and Kat Welsford‘s D&D party to play for three hours of a 24-hour charity stream benefitting Child’s Play, an organization that helps medical facilities obtain, install, and maintain game systems for children.

We’ll be live at https://twitch.tv/saucefire!

Travel & Conventions

Here’s a few events I’ll definitely be attending. I hope some of y’all can make it!

• PlayOnCon: July 7–10, 2022 in Birmingham, AL
• Pinball Expo 2022: October 21–23rd, 2022 in Schaumburg, IL
• Music City Multi-con: October 28–30th, 2022 in Lebanon, TN

Two videos last week!

In addition to the behind-the-scenes work I’ve been doing this week, I’m really proud of the artistic and collaborative efforts I’ve achieved with my friends in my two latest YouTube videos!

If y’all missed either of them, I hope you’ll enjoy them when you can!

Thanks and so long!

Thanks to everyone who posted in #sustainable-growth over the last few weeks! There was too much valuable feedback to thank everyone who influenced my decision-making by name, but please know y’all are all appreciated.

There’s a few cases, though, where I can clearly say that one individual’s feedback felt like it captured what the community was trying to say in a way that resonated with me, and then led directly to particular actions on my part.

I want to thank and credit for these specific constructive contributions:

• Em for suggesting a better-defined feedback response methodology to both ensure folks feel heard and allow ample time for other community feedback on suggestions before responding myself
• Phali for inspiring the creation of this newsletter as well as encouraging a serious review of how I can better delegate
•  QueenDarkLady for helping me understand that the ability to restructure the community over time is a requirement that demands prioritization independent of my own availability or competing responsibilities
• SurfRock66 for pondering a self-governance model that provided me a thought-experiment framework through which to explore “what could be the most valuable goals a group like that might achieve?” and “what efforts toward those goals could I most productively delegate to staff?”

And finally, additional thanks to Tommy for helping me review and edit this issue!

Newsletter feedback is always welcome in the #newsletter-feedback channel, so I’ll see you there!

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

 

Howdy!

Welcome to our first attempt at a weekly newsletter!

I’m not sure which parts will work and which won’t. Let’s find out!

Expansion!

Thanks to Yirggzmb for piloting our first server operator role on the Deep Slate Nine server. I consider the experimental pilot a huge success, and spoke with Yirggzmb afterwards about setting up a more formal structure later this year.

Folks who played on the server can leave feedback in the Joe Hills Meta > #moderation-processes-and-hiring room in Discord.

Upcoming

Mario Kart practice stream this Thursday night!

I’ll be avoiding April Fools’ spoilers on March 31st by streaming Mario Kart 8 with friends at my normal stream time of 8:30pm US Central.

Confirmed players so far include Samihiggins, Mr. Hardluck, and NJCoffeeJunkie.

Earth Day Parade Float Build Contest with Sean Hills

The Babilar neighborhood from the Season 8 vanilla server will be hosting a parade float build contest for Earth Day on April 9th at 11am US Central Time.

Our musical guest judge will be Sean Hills of “Sean Hills Sings Joe Hills” fame.

All $10+/mo Patreon members are welcome to participate, so get your barge brainstorming underway!

D&D charity stream!

On April 9th at 2pm US Central time, I’ll be joining Quinn Murphy, Ryan North, and Jack Packard‘s D&D party to play for three hours of a 24-hour charity stream benefitting Child’s Play, an organization that helps medical facilities obtain, install, and maintain game systems for children.

Our dungeon master, Saucefire will be live from 11am US Central on Saturday the 9th until 11am US Central on Sunday the 10th at https://twitch.tv/saucefire, so I hope you get the chance to check this out, even if you can’t make my time slot!

Patreon Minecraft Server Planning Discussions

I’ve got a few planning calls with the community scheduled about what kinds of game rules, modpacks, etc. we should consider in the future.

If you’re interested in shaping the agenda for each, you may do so in advance in the appropriate Discord channel.

• April 10th at noon, US Central: Experimental server discussion based on notes in #2022-experimental-next
• April 24th at noon, US Central:  Broad server expansion and operator role roadmap planning meeting based on notes in #sustainable-growth (thanks to Aviva for proposing that)
• May 14th at noon, US Central:  Vanillish “Survival-Comfort” server discussion, based on notes in #tbd-vanillish-next

Conventions

Here’s a few events I’ll definitely be attending. I hope to see some of y’all there!

• PlayOnCon: July 7–10, 2022 in Birmingham, AL
• Pinball Expo 2022: October 21–23rd, 2022 in Schaumburg, IL
• Music City Multi-con: October 28–30th, 2022 in Lebanon, TN

Books and Media

I’m going to try to write a bit each week about shows, movies, and books I’ve enjoyed.

Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham

If you like fantasy novels and the Baltimore parts of the Expanse Series, this is the novel for you! That means I really liked it, but I’m not sure how much it would resonate with other readers.

Everstorm Server Obituaries

• Michaelsocks was killed by a golem he tried to rescue from a tree.
• seanard was killed when he foolishly opened his front door to a zombie riding a chicken.
• netcropolis met his end when he decided to cave for the first time in 1.18 on a hardcore server.
• MisterLantz died making a parrot friend.
• Gritmonger was killed by a creeper while trying to make a creeper-and-mob-proof tunnel of cobble.

Monthly Petition Notes

These are an edited version of my notes from petitions. I’m sorry.

2022 Experimental Server

1. Gracious AKA Mantuamaker
   1. Requested: two llama eggs to get pack animals on the server
   2. Add-on request: Mars requests goat eggs
   3. Proposed solution: Seanard wants to expand world border
      1. Joe asks Seanard and Kindalas to get new center and diameter coordinates
2. Seanard wants to update to 1.18.2
   1. No problems raised
   2. Have to update the mods
   3. Joe queues mod audit updates for mod and jar
3. Mr. Hardluck presents prox mod request
   1. General caution but enthusiasm
   2. Joe commits to installing in the next 30 days
4. Michaelsocks asks for otherwise disc and pigstep disk
   1. Traded golden apple for otherwise disk
5. Mars requests super powers for an hour
   1. Joe grants them and also provides everyone milk
6. Mars on behalf of maahes wanted a bunch of riptide five tridents
   1. Joe requests a mechanism to provide that in game, and Apoteosis mod is mentioned, waiting on more feedback
7. Mallora data pack request
   1. Enable bundles recipe from vanilla tweaks
   2. Joe  queues
8. Shapeless crafting data pack
   1. Joe queues
9. Mr. Hardluck requests Scar-style hat mod
   1. Joe says that’s not technically feasible because of the way HC does hats, but is open to other suggestions
10. Michaelsocks requested spyglasses for everyone
    1. Granted
11. Mallora wanted player head that said slain by joehills
    1. Joe creates one… with a sword
12. Seanard requests Joe allow players to slay him to earn player head
    1. Granted.

Deep Slate Nine Vanilla Server

1. Kindalas requests sleeping percentage change
   1. Player vote results
      1. Most popular was 30%, but that did not have a majority of votes
      2. 2nd most popular was 50% with almost as many votes
   2. Judgement: Joe set to 40% for now, with intention to slide to 30% in a month
2. Kindalas requests committing to no end resets on the server
   1. Benefits
      1. Allow mapmaking
   2. Downsides
      1. Run out of elytra
      2. Run out of dragon heads
      3. Run out of endstone
   3. Joe commits to not resetting the end, as expanding the worldborder later should fix those
3. 5th Alice requests a rabbit spawner
   1. Stated goal is to open rabbit stew shop without generating lag
   2. Tech analysis shows desert is within worldborder and wouldn’t be a lag issue to build a regular rabbit farm
4. Meep requests Thorns V on elytra as accessibility offset
   1. Technically not possible
   2. Desirefire suggested protection 5non-elytra armor in lieu 
   3. Thorns 5 on boots, helmet, and pants instead
5. Crohn requests adding data packs/discord bot to allow discord to repeat audio for visually-impaired players
   1. After discussion of privacy issues with publishing server logs elsewhere and the technical issues of JAWS, MisterLantz is taking point on helping Meep solve the issue
6. Sami petitions on behalf of soragirl18 for lost items
   1. Crohn44 will offset the loss out of personal inventory
7. Des requests Discord rooms
   1. #ds9-quarks: spawn coordination text and voice chat
   2. #ds9-holosuites: share works in progress
   3. #ds9-fire-caves-of-bajor: Nether coordination text chat
8. Phali reports two villagers kidnapped
   1. Other players offer their own
   2. Joe gives everyone a polar bear
9. 5uperStone requests skeleton spawn egg to convert a spawner
   1. Kindalas offers to offset boon by destroying own skeleton spawner elsewhere
   2. Joe grants wither skeleton spawn egg
10. NJ requests four unbreakable shields for people who helped her when game started
    1. Sami requests same for CryingRug
    2. Meep has similar add-on request
    3. Solution: /give @a shield{Unbreakable:1,EntityTag:{Invisible:1b},display:{Name:'[{“text”:”Help for the helpers”,”italic”:false}]’,Lore:[‘[{“text”:”This shield was given to you because you helped someone.”,”italic”:false}]’]},Enchantments:[{id:loyalty,lvl:3}]} 1

Possible future sections

I ran out of time to include everything I wanted to in this first newsletter, and I’ve heard a lot of great suggestions for things I’d like to try in future weeks, like a list of VODs with summaries.

Patreon folks with ideas, please leave them in the #feedback-newsletter channel, thanks!

Additional thanks

Thanks to ThatTommyBoii for helping out with this weeks’ newsletter!