Honestly, I agree. A lot of players think that the Hive isn’t getting anything done, and don’t have any trust in the system because we as a player base get so little information. We are not allowed to know about anything staff-related for one, which might be for good reason but also makes it feel like stuff isn’t getting done. We don’t what tools the staff have available to catch hackers, which makes it a good thing to stop hackers from coming up with exploits, but it also could be helpful to gather ideas from the community.
The punishment system, and its issues
The anti-cheat also really bothers me. I know that the key for an anti-cheat to work is to not release any of the algorithms/methods that it uses to ban players, but at the same time, a lot of people don’t even realize it exists. When talking with other people, it is commonly agreed upon that the Hive has the worst anti-cheat. This isn’t necessarily because it’s not doing its job, but instead because nobody even knows it’s there in the first place. I’ve never personally seen a player get kicked for cheating. Now, I’m sure that to some extent the anti-cheat does its job. Either a player gets kicked right away for using easier to detect hacks so that I never see them in the first place, or they go completely undetected, which is exactly the problem. What the player base sees is that some random player left the game if they get kicked or banned, giving no credit to the staff team or the anti-cheat. All the player base sees are the hackers that go undetected, which puts the Hive in a bad light. They don’t see all of the hackers that do get punished, all they see are the ones that don’t, simply because we aren’t given any information.
Feature release date improvements
What happened to guilds? We knew they were coming, but the last word that I was given was that the Hive team was waiting for approval from Microsoft, which was weeks if not months ago. Again, there is probably a good reason as to why guilds aren’t out yet, but from what the player base was told guilds were already finished and just awaiting approval, and now it’s been weeks and all anyone talks about is the fact that we’re not kept up to date and that it shouldn’t take this long for something to be approved. Now, the Hive is a great server and I’m sure that the staff team is trying to push out the best quality of content as possible, but the majority of the player base doesn’t see that. All they see (or care about) is the occasional and rare updates and the fact that it takes a fairly long time to push them out. The quest master had been “Coming Soon” for months. “Coming Soon” is a vague statement, and could mean days, weeks, or even months, but when you put that in the hub for every player on the server to see, day after day, with no new information, it seems like the project has just been abandoned. If something is labeled as “Coming Soon”, it should be either finished before anything else or removed until the staff team is ready to take on the project.
Suggestions to the staff team
My suggestion would be to alert all of the players in a game when another player in the game is banned, just so that we can have a little faith that hackers are being punished. Also, it’s better to tease something when it is finished and releasing in a week, rather than months. Players won’t think as much about new games if there isn’t any official word about it, and therefore won’t feel like the developers are taking too long making them. Conversations will be more like, “I wonder what new game is going to be added next?” rather than “Murder Mystery was announced a month ago and there hasn’t been any word since” or “The Quest Master has been ‘Coming Soon’ forever, I wish the staff team would just do their job”. This would make the community have a much more positive outlook on the staff and the server as the whole.
Conclusion
It’s not just that I’m annoyed by the lack of information, it’s that the lack of information is hurting the server’s image. When all these players see are the hackers, they assume that the staff are inactive and that the anti-cheat is broken. When players see that a feature is “Coming Soon” for 6+ months, people assume that the developers don’t care about a project and/or the player base. I understand that the Hive has a smaller developer team (at one point it was 2 people from what I remember), the majority of the players don’t see that, and don’t care. All they care about is their entertainment, and don’t think about the fact that they are getting it for free.