Why 1.18 support should be dropped
- Constructive feedback and discussion post -
- Post Introduction and information about version 1.18
Minecraft 1.18, Caves and Cliffs: Part II, was released on November 30, 2021. This was almost one and a half year ago. Over time, Minecraft released many new versions coming with changes and updates to the improvement of the game.
Unfortunately, since The Hive still supports 1.18 versions, they cannot access 1.19 exclusive features. As stated here, less than 1.7% of the playerbase was using 1.18 versions back on October 11, 2022. That is 98.3% that do not use that version.
Advantages and disadvantages of removing 1.18 support
- What are the advantages of Hive dropping 1.18 support?
Dropping support for all versions of Minecraft below 1.19 (or even one of the more recent ones such as 1.19.80) comes with quite a few advantages. This includes the development speed of The Hive and the addition of newer Minecraft: Bedrock Edition features. To make it easier to navigate through, here’s list of advantages in detail:
Click me for a list of advantages that come with dropping 1.18 version support
New Features
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New features that were added to Minecraft could be implemented into games of The Hive. As the official Hive Team has stated here and in this article, The Hive has mentioned that they wanted to drop version support in order to add more features to the server, that require more recent versions. As mentioned in the first of the two articles, they wanted to drop support for anything lower than 1.19.30 for that reason
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New blocks and items that were added in 1.19 versions of the game. These could be used by the level designers to create new game maps, hubs, etc. or by regular players in games such as Just Build.
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In addition, Minecraft added even more useful features, such as more text colors in version 1.19.80 that could be used in Block Party (Use 1.19.80 text colors in Block Party) or as rank colors in the future (Hive++ Suggestion and Civillized Discussion Megapost)
Development Speed & Progress
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As stated here, having to support many versions of Minecraft leads to a significant amount of additional work for the developers. Sure, dropping some versions helps to achieve less work, however it’s still a lot of work just to support these versions.
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This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
↳ backend development, quality assurance/beta testing, fixing 1.18 related bugs, updating the anti-cheat, …
Rule Breakers
- Speaking of the anti-cheat, 1.18 versions (especially version 1.18.12) are also the versions most intrusive hackers play on, hence the developers of hacked clients know that this version is what most servers support. Dropping the support for older versions would, therefore, result in a decrease of rule breakers using obvious hacks. This would also allow the anti-cheat developers to focus on certain newer versions, making development much easier.
- What are the disadvantages of Hive dropping 1.18 support?
The main two reasons for why The Hive still supports 1.18 are the following: Significant input delay on devices with Render Dragon and Render Dragon decreases performance by a lot. Another reason back then was pink glitch, which has been fixed/removed in version 1.19.30. In the following, I will discuss the most important aspects of mentioned two “problems”:
Click me for a list of disadvantages and their most important aspects
Significant input delay on devices with Render Dragon
This refers to inputs you give being executed later than you expect. As Mega_Spud has mentioned on that bug report, there is a comment that provides a potential workaround for players by adjusting the V-Sync setting manually.
Render Dragon decreases performance by a lot
This bug is about lower FPS on Render Dragon versions. One of the issues connecting to this, RTX cards causing lag, was fixed about two days ago, see here. In addition, many versions of Minecraft were added that improved the performance of the game in some way.
Summary
Two main issues, many advantages. Less than 1.7% is playing on 1.18, and I assume it’s not all of them that are playing on these versions for input lag and fps drops. As mentioned before, 1.18 is also a version that is supported by many hacked clients and, therefore, played on by a lot of cheaters. This means, that a part of the 1.7% is also accounts of hackers that play on the version to cheat.
Considering there are so many features that the Hive could implement and how drastically they could speed up their development speed/progress, it is very much unfair towards the 98.3% of the playerbase that they “suffer” from it. The Hive has supported 1.18 for one and a half year and at some point it is time for it to be removed.
Before commeting, please make sure to read the full post and do not be like “bUt I uSe 1.18 AnD nEeD iT fOr A lIvInG”. Constructive feedback and discussions would be appreciated and would help The Hive more than just random comments. Also don’t close this Hive, this is a good feedback post, thanks.
