If you haven't noticed, the Avicus shop has been updated and modified quite a bit.
Rank Updates: The Avicus hub has a new feature in which sufficiently upgraded users have trails that follow them upon double jumping. 5 total trails are now available in the shop. The kit, "random" has also been added to Emerald and Diamond which randomly chooses a kit when the game starts, even if not unlocked by the player.
Rank Subscriptions: We now offer options for monthly payments for one fifth of the price for each rank. We hope this allows one, that users whom are unsure of purchasing the rank experience the rank as a trial of sorts, and two, to offer those whom are unable or unwilling to buy a rank due to the cost an alternative option. Those who do not intend on playing Avicus or Minecraft for the 5 months have a more affordable option. Note that prices may change in the future if necessary.
Pets: Pet packages have been changed and prices have been changed. The pet packages that people have previously purchased will remain unchanged.
Google Wallet: Due to popular demand and its easy implementation, Google Wallet has been added as a payment option in the store.
Sales Issues: Please use the support contact form and select "Sales Issue" as the subject and describe the issue.
The Avicus 2.0 update consists of an incredible amount of changes to the server. I’m pleased with what has been accomplished in the past few months despite the seemingly slow progress on the server as far as server developments go. It’s all been mostly private until now. A big thanks to the staff for testing features and suggesting new features with Avicore and the new map developers for doing tremendous work accepting and creating new maps for everyone to enjoy on the live rotations. Without further adieu, I present to you the official list of updates, changes and new features now live on the Avicus Network servers.
- Website
- New theme
- Social links on bottom of page
- Support page contact form and voicemail number
- Forums Update
- Subscriptions & My Subscription feed.
- My Discussions & Replies category
- Custom categories/feeds allows users to group categories together to follow multiple categories more easily.
- Rearranged categories.
- Enhanced forum discussion validation for titles, body and tags.
- Unread discussion count displayed next to each category. Unread post count displayed next to each discussion, click to view the latest unread post.
- Mark All Read
- Staff have colored names only. Allow for finding most reliable/official information faster. Ranks displayed under avatars.
- Permission based locking, archiving and tagging.
- Online users displayed in order of rank
- Post revisions allow for staff to track changes to posts and revert changes.
- View count based on session rather than each page view. Bots are excluded from view count.
- Profile Update
- Stats tab displays statistics based on all time, one week or one day periods. Adding monthly statistics soon.
- Enhanced HTML validation and completion
- Social network validations
- Shop
- Now accepting Google Wallet
- Monthly subscription now available for 1/5 price of permanent rank.
- Premium kits for premium users are listed
- Trails available for premium users
- Pet shop updated and now working in game.
- Leaderboard
- Includes new game modes
- Orders users including prestiges
- Rational K/D Ratio requires a user to have greater than 70 deaths to be placed on the list.
- Avicore (In-Game Update)
- Team Selector inventory item
- Team Chat
- /channel team (/c t)
- /channel global (/c g)
- Public map repository http://maps.avicus.net
- Kit selector inventory item with icons
- User’s whom spawn creatures are awarded kills when their creature kills someone
- Spleef detection and prevention
- Regioning
- Allows for protecting and modifying areas
- Triggers allow for things to be called upon region events... Explained and with examples at http://docs.avicus.net
- Nexus
- Game added!
- Avicade
- Game added back!
- Nebula
- New shop items, subject to change
- TDM added to rotations once again
- Categorized servers (to an extent)
- Explosion gadgets at end of game! :D
- The Walls
- New/modified kits
- Improved team killing/trolling prevention
- CTH
- Spawn protection
- New & modified kits
- Tp as spectator
- Confirm prestige
- Website temporary and permanent bans
- More accurate rules and additions to ruleset
- Maps. Rotations available for viewing at http://maps.avicus.net/maps.yml
- Map Developer and Developer rank.
- Director rank, and modifications to existing staff rank purposes and permissions.
- Reset password without help of admin using the same /register <password> command.
I'd like to congratulate the following users on their promotions during the Avicore update
AviGill
Community Manager -> Director
Howsie22
Staff Manager -> Director
izjust4fun
Sr Mod -> Manager
The_Detonator_
Sr Mod -> Manager
tel6331
Sr Mod -> Manager
1Theodore1
Jr Mod -> Mod
Updates on staff applications will also be coming soon.
Recently there have been quite a few large "lag spikes" that have been causing numerous issues. Timing out, kicking from games, AntiCheat glitches and more. I'm aware of the issue and the cause of the issue, but in order to fix it we may have some downtime later tonight.
This doubles as a message to the players that we are aware of the issue and a warning for the possible downtime that could be anywhere from one to six hours.
Edit: No server downtime was necessary. The issue was due to the enormous strain placed on the database when updating the stats/leaderboard. Existing stats are transferred to a secondary database and scanned as opposed to the previous system where experience and kills/deaths was scanned in the live database.
Haven't made a post here for a while, so I thought I'd share all the stuff that has changed since the last post. I'll add more items to the list as I remember them, as I'm sure there is more than just this... :P
Most of these changes were made a while ago, others right now.
- Forum viewing on mobile: Navigation shown below main content.
- Faster forum performance and accuracy in displaying recently updated discussions
- Stats no longer lag servers and update every 15-30 minutes.
- Discussion/reply validation no longer counts spaces
- Disabled bukkit:___ commands
- Objective timeline displayed on profile.
- Inaccurate/wimpy overall player count glitch fixed.
- OITC
- Spawn issues potentially fixed
- Armor is one color, unique for each player
- Kills shown in inventory
- Time remaining in inventory
- 4 seconds of invincibility
- Red Alert
- Kits work now...
- Nexus
- Armor is not removeable
- Invisible armor/item glitch potentially fixed
- Armor is colored based on team color
- Block chests
- Apple drops fixed
- Minimum player count
- No opening chests
- Nebula
- Arrow prices/amount in shop fixed
- Duplicate death messages fixed
- Minimum player count added, based on team size for map
- Level 10 durability enchantments removed, replaced with simple “Durable” text in lore of item. Acts the same as durability 10.
- /toggle command
- Added compasses to The Walls
Due to issues with a crashed table in our database, I've taken the servers offline to prevent further damage. Repair to the database is underway but I'm not sure when it will be finished. Hopefully within the hour, though it may extend past that.
I'll try to keep you posted.
Update: Maintenance Over (roughly a half hour after post)
Hopefully the workload is less and distributed better, along with a more collaborative approach to the server. With a great power came great responsibility, and now we're happy to announce the map development team has expanded to a ship of four; AwarriorVenom, itaity, Evocal, and TheMasterCow. As for both Evo and I, we're going to try again and hopefully leave everything harmful behind. This is a new leaf, a new avicus, and change will come for the better.
- AwarriorVenom
- itaity
- Evocal
- TheMasterCow
Give a warm welcome!
Hello everyone,
I am happy to announce that I was recently promoted to Director of Staff for the time being (until Howsie comes back). No, it's not permanent; however it's in my best interest to officially oversee the whole staff team and make appropriate changes.
I cannot wait to discover what the future holds, and let's see if we can perfect the staff team o//
Thanks for your attention.
Jozz.
Here’s some touching music to accompany you as you read:
The Seal Lullaby
Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,
And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
The moon, o’er the combers, looks downward to find us,
At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow,
Oh weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,
Asleep in the arms of the slow swinging seas!
Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936
Avicus has been through a lot. It’s only a year old and yet has already experienced love, neglect as well of times of rejoice and times of sadness. What has remained true and constant throughout is the dedication and good work of our staff and the community’s devotion to the network. Despite its slippery and somewhat elusive history, there remains a certain cohesion within the apparent disorder. A cohesion that cannot be broken as it is embedded strongly in the collaboration of everyone on Avicus. We have remained strong as an ever changing community of individuals throughout the most difficult of times. I hope to see this continue and only strengthen. “We have come a long way, but not as far as we will go.” Let’s make a difference today!
SO! What’s new on Avicus today? Quite a few things actually!
- 1.8 Protocol Support
- Popup Messages
- Translations (Arabic, German, Pirate Speak, Portuguese, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch). Fix errors or help translate more languages at www.translate.avicus.net
- /match in Nebula
- /stats
- 10 Prestiges ADDED (15 Total)
Play nice with 1.8, it may have bugs. Report any fairly significant issues with these updates at www.github.com/Avicus/Issues/issues as always.
Update: In response to everyone's desire for some more options for products and colors, I have opened up a more standard store at www.avicus.net/swag. Prices there are generally higher than the Teespring offer we have setup, but there are more options and the products can arrive much quicker.
Update 2: We have now cancelled the Teespring offer to lessen confusion. Upon contacting Teespring, I have learned that the products they display appear quite different to how they look in person.
Hello everyone.
Over the past few weeks, the senior staff have been discussing possible ways to improve the efficiency of the staff team.
We came up with an alteration of Howsie22's idea (which was to originally to demote all staff (including Directors, and then re-promoting the worthy ones)). However, only the Moderator team will be affected (Junior Moderators & Map Developers are excluded).
Essentially, this is how it's going to work:
1) Demote all mods, to a regular rank.
2) Opinionated discussion
3) Senior Staff will mark each moderator, privately.
4) Dig deep into evidence that may or may not effect the fate of the staff member being discussed.
5) Finalize the data in which the senior staff has completed.
6) Take action; promote the moderators who passed. Permanently demote the ones who didn't.
This process will take up to 2-3 hours, depending on the efficiency of the senior staff.
This will occur @ 6PM EST Saturday 29th (9AM AEST Sunday 30th).
Can you make a difference?
Potentially, yes. If you have any complaints on a staff member, please log onto Teamspeak and search for this: http://prntscr.com/5az38a
All senior staff who will be participating in this event will be available. Do not troll us with pokes, as you will be punished for it. We will consider all evidence provided, as long as it's suffice.
Thanks,
Senior Staff
Sorry about the issue that occurred around noon (CST) today. I'm still looking into why our backend server failed on us. Looks like we're back up to speed though.
Forums are also online.
In preparation for the name changing update Mojang is expected to release on February 4th, there may be some brief downtime in the next hour to make some changes to our backend. It shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes if anything. Just a warning!
The computer is working hard to repair the database. Some corrupted data due to hardware failure I believe. That is all, thanks for having patience.
The update has largely been a smooth and successful transition. Thanks to the hardwork by the map devs and the testing done beforehand, few serious errors existed prior to launch, and ones that did were ironed out pretty quickly. If you have errors to report, head on over to avicus.net/issues and report them if they haven't been already. I'm here to keep the community in sync with the bug fixes and improvements over the past week or so. You can expect dev updates fairly routinely in the future, but not weekly like this one.
- Fixed monument credit farming exploit (we'll punish those who took part in this... we have records).
- Rotations have been made public! https://github.com/Avicus/Rotations. Follow the rules when contributing to the repository.
- Made map pages live (example: avicus.net/maps/Axis), but sort of hidden. When we get more map.png's and make reviewing possible in-game we'll add a maps tab to the website.
- Game selecting is more clear, each type of game has it's own category in the game menu.
- Fixed cancelling friendships.
- Progress towards making scrims live! It's coming :D
- Modified minimum player counts required for numerous servers. Finding a good balance that prevents credit farming, but still enables good quality games with lower player counts.
- I'm aware many lost a lot of time online for some reason. Still looking into fixing this!
- I'm also aware of all issues listed on the issues page. They'll all be addressed over time.
- We plan on releasing scrimmage servers mid- to late-April in beta (limited availability).
- Advertising is in the works, we're thinking up methods to get people interested in Avicus.
Thanks for reading! We'll keep you posted when we have more to say!
Just worked on this today since I was bored in class. You can go to your profile and edit your profile picture to use Gravatar, a service that hosts profile images by email. Follow this process to setup a custom image:
- Set your email through the edit profile page, we'll send you a confirmation email.
- Go to your email inbox and find the confirmation email.
- Setup your gravatar.com account and image. Use the same email you just used with Avicus!
- Select "Gravatar" in the edit profile page under avatar (once email is confirmed).
Not sure if anyone has noticed, but the servers have been restarting to support Minecraft versions 1.7.2 through 1.8.3. We supplied our reasons towards upgrading but many other servers have not followed suit in the switch which has been detrimental to our players and player count. Those who choose to use a 1.7 version will likely experience slow network connection to the server, but the features they desire. 1.8 users will largely have the same experience. We encourage the use of 1.8 because, although we have support for 1.7 currently, it is only a matter of time before we go full 1.8 once again. The much undesired PVP changes will be back, and that is not within our control. Please voice your concerns kindly to Mojang, not us.
Note that it may take up to an hour or so for some users due to the delay in DNS updating. For many it will work right away, though some game servers have yet to restart.
Hey, check out the new stuff on the website on the homepage and under the Competitive tab in the navigation bar!
Note: Right now a slot only facilitates a single team. In the future we will allow inviting other teams to join.
Hey,
Unfortunately, the 3 lobby servers are down currently due to a failure in the YAML (on my end) and they have not brought themselves up. I have made an effort to fix it by reverting the 2 commits causing it, but it still has shut it down. The synopsis of this issue was that I was trying to update to a new configuration/parser, but I did not finish updating the whole thing which caused an internal error, closing it down. The main edit I did was to UUIDs, however it still did not survive. The 2 different versions, not currently known, I suppose aren't compatible and it was silly to update the lobby first.
As the player count gradually drops, I apologize for any inconveniences or failures on behalf of myself, and not of the staff team or any else. I will be trying to do anything in my power to bring it back up, but in the meantime to play on the servers use d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶l̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶o̶p̶ ̶a̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶:̶ ̶m̶c̶z̶o̶n̶e̶0̶1̶.̶a̶v̶i̶c̶.̶u̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶.̶ Apparently this feature has been removed recently without informing me. Server is down 100% it seems.
Please take notice that while it is worked on by the team, I advise you to look at the terms of service and see 3a, as well as section 4. Thank you for complying and understanding that sometimes the server has technical problems.
Announcements!
It's been a while since I posted an announcement - here's some things that may be news to you. I ramble on. Condensed version below:
tldr; New host, might switch again, idk. New Avicore YAML stuff soon. More development, better development. Tournament wrapping up, it was awesome, more to come!
New Host
We recently moved most of the MC servers over to a new host. Right now we're seeing how they operate here on very different hardware and in a new location. Don't assume anything is set in stone - I'm actually not too happy with how it's working out so we may be looking for more options. We've been cutting some corners to make ends meet, but I'm pleased with how we have progressed despite some difficult pressures that are largely outside our control.
Announcements and Things
I have been working on big changes coming to Avicore soon - YAML enhancements that I have yet to go over with the map devs so that means it may be a ways out, but it's something to keep in mind. It should add new capabilities that allow for new, unique & custom game types via a simple map.yml file. I know many who are eager to get new games on Avicus and are going out of there way to do so. I'm hoping this makes it much less difficult.
Some new things to hit the credit shop soon, and perhaps new things in the real shop over at avicus.net/shop. We'll have an announcement, don't worry!
Don't forget about the merchandise shop! It's still up.
Oh, and a new dev? Maybe. It's been an interesting process for me learning about the dynamics of group development since I recently took on a job at a software company. It occupies a lot of my time, but luckily I can apply these lessons to how we operate at Avicus. Avicus needs some more organization on the development side more than anything and I'm ready to make changes now. So expect a new feel to the development side of Avicus.
Tournament
It's been a fun tournament, but The Omega Championship is wrapping up soon! Tune in this weekend for some great matches. I'd like to thank everyone now who has helped to make it possible: the officials, refs, map devs and staff who have chipped in. And thanks to the players who have complied to the rules and made the matches exciting to watch. We will be having more awesomely organized events in the near future.
We have a new developer on the team! Please welcome Javipepe! He will be helping out squashing bugs and adding new features to the server side of Avicus. With this new addition, we are looking at ways to improve Avicus, and one would be the organization of the development side of Avicus. Here's some of the goals I would like the dev team to pursue:
- Increase transparency - We'll be posting bimonthly to monthly developer updates featuring recent changes we have made to the server.
- Develop with the server & players in mind - We will be adding features and fixing bugs in the best interest of the server and players. Suggest your ideas on the forum, but keep in mind we also have our own agenda and ideas to improve the status of Avicus!
- Place an emphasis on stability and quality of the server.
I recently pushed some fairly significant changes to the servers that hopefully help abolish server side lag spikes.
I rolled out Minecraft 1.8 (dropping 1.7 support) on a couple servers today and if all goes well, we will be full 1.8 when the time is right. If you are already panicking based on that, know that we're doing this because we love our players and want to give you all the best server experience possible. We'll be working on optimizing our server for 1.8 because other plugins have dropped development on the older versions and it has become a hassle lacking the new features and latest fixes. We're talking less lag and more cool features with updates, at least that's the plan :P
In addition to the version dealio, you're all test subjects with a new anti-cheat plugin that I have high hopes for, but it will require some fiddling for it to better suit a PVP server (again, only on a couple servers right now). It's not developed by us, but it is designed to be a more efficient and lightweight alternative to NoCheatPlus which we have used for some time now. We may switch back, who knows!
Finally, I made some changes to Avicus and Avicore which target potential sources of block lag. Those are deployed on the select few servers.
Server Test Subjects (updated 8/22/2015 2:00 AM EST)
- DTM01
- CTW01
Edit 2: Try out full 1.8 (no 1.7 clients connected) using this IP: 1.8.avic.us
Avicus was down intermittently over the past 12 hours due to a database failure. After attempting to restore it automatically, which failed after a few hours, I needed to instead restore it from a previous version. Luckily we backup at regular intervals throughout the day so most is saved. In fact the only thing that was changed is the "deaths" database which keeps track of who killed who. After a long night of a series of unfortunate events (another db failure... hard drive dismounted) we are finally back up.
Apologies for the lack of communication in the meantime, and of course the extended period of downtime. We try our best to keep Avicus up for as long as possible, but events like these are impossible to predict, troublesome to prevent and, often, difficult to recover from.
We have some updates in store for Avicus soon, and I'll be more closely monitoring the status of the database going forward.
I think we can all agree that updates to the server are long overdue. Today we implement one new feature of many to come in the coming weeks and months.
Crates & Keys
After every match, you have a chance based on how the match went to win a random crate (currently Alpha, Beta or Gamma). You'll find them in your backpack in the lobbies. Inside each crate is a lottery ticket and a random item from the credit shop, but to unlock it, you must use a key purchased from the Avicus shop. There will be more ways to get keys, but we'll be talking about that in a future update.
Lottery
Each week there will be a lottery that rewards lucky players with different prizes each week. Prizes could include ranks, credits, items from the credit shop, beta testing opportunities, and much more! To be a part of the lottery, simply click a lottery ticket in your backpack and you'll be entered into the random drawing. Redeem prizes with
/redeem. Tell us your ideas for prizes below if you would like, we're listening! See www.avicus.net/lottery for the current lottery info.We're really excited to be releasing this feature as just the beginning of new and interesting enhancements coming to The Avicus Network. We hope to integrate item trading and buying/selling in the future as requested. Stay tuned for more updates! Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Edit: We realize this isn't a game changing feature, it's something fun we threw in to preface some big things coming up :P
Within of the many to-come updates, today, along with Keys, Crates and Lottery, we are presenting the long-awaited voting rewards. This is very easy to do!
Vote once per day at each of these links to win up to 250 credits or even temporary premium ranks!
Have fun, and remember to vote!
Have fun, and remember to vote!
Hey!
Because of the fact that we are only two, and we both have in real life duties to fulfill, and we are sooooo and I repeat soooooo off timezone-wise, we have set up a new organization system because we realized that we never talked and discussed what needed to be done, our priorities, general questions to each other, and the setting of To-dos for next week.
I guess after this short introduction the idea would be to explain these to-dos to the community on a weekly basis, and as we work on a different branch which changes do not get reflected at https://avicus.net/revisions, their state too. It is like that because Kylo and I are now having weekly meetings to set this values for the forthcoming week, which will exponentially increase the number of things that get done, and consequently (but not in that of a blatant manner), the new things you guys will see on the server.
Our first meeting within this new system was supposed to be last week but as I was away, we postponed it to yesterday. Yesterday, as it was the first meeting, we had a plethora of topics to talk about and to argument into. The things that are primarly getting done (minor things are not listed, and maybe confidential ones too, ex: staff related...) are:
On my side:
- Add some new links to the website. (DONE - not pushed). Within this commit a link to https://avicus.net/vote will soon appear in the top navbar, and both this link and the one that will head onto http://avicus.net/lottery will also appear in the bottom navigation panel.
- /rules with link to http://avicus.net/rules (DONE - not pushed). This is quite self explanatory :p
- Death messages clearing (Halfway there - not pushed). Within this commit, death messages in which you are involved in will appear bolded to you for better easy-seeking of them, cool, eh?
- Finish up the new and server-by organized /stafflist (DONE - LIVE). This was mostly already done, but we finished it and pushed it to the network yesterday, so... go try it!
- Fix /reports command (PROBABLY DONE - not live). The /reports command shows the most recent reports of the server, and right now apparently it was taking the last ones. Probably fixed already.
- Fancy main page lottery flair (NOT DONE - not live). The main page is getting a bit stale and thus kylo will be working on giving it some life. The first thing to probably come will be a big lottery link / info display.
- Check 1.8 update branch (Halfway there - not live). We have many, and really, MANY things to check for the 1.8 update. As kylo knows the structure of the plugins he created better than I do, he's looking at possible bugs and memory leaks before making any live.
- Lottery winners actually getting their prize (Almost there - not live). Pretty straightforward too.
- Server picker / board huge revamp - More information on this to come soon.
- Avicore revamp
- Cute tablist - Feel free to suggest how you'd like to see a 1.8 tablist .(EDIT: No it's not the scoreboard but the tablist, sorry messed up)
- Loads of other ideas, and maybe even your idea too!
Happy avicusing!
Small announcement!
If you haven't already noticed, Avicus has been fully integrated to 1.8.
You can no longer use 1.7 anymore when you log into Avicus now... Sorry!
Message from Javi:
If you are one of the 1.7 guys, please don't claim the whole universe and stars and pickle jars are with you. Mainly... because they are not.
What changed?
Today, the staff have revised the ruleset to allow swearing as long as it isn't excessive or directed. This is pretty much the same as it was before swearing was made illegal, and we encourage the staff to update to this new update as we update swearing guidelines and inform the staff to not punish off of it. All active swearing punishments before the rule was updated are still going to be active, as the rule was broken when it was active regardless. As well as this, we will have a senior staff member work on a more uniform document on which swearing words may be legal, and which ones may be illegal. More about the swearing rule is not set in stone, however for the future we may have more open debates about it. As well as this change, we have defined exploits better. Under this, we have mentioned severity, exploits in gaining advantage, and more of an "instance" view. It was to differentiate between small-scale abuse such as block glitching, and being able to, say, teleport other users into the void.
Why would you revise it?
We revised it because it was causing more harm than it was helping. I don't believe in "hiding harmful words" on the internet, especially since (taking a gander) that a majority of our playerbase is teenagers, and from that, I can tell alone that most are okay with swearing being possible. Censorship is one thing I don't want Avicus to turn into.
What next?
Feel free to suggest rule changes in this thread, and discuss it further.
The senior departments are established to be more efficient in certain reaches of the server. The senior departments were established by the current administration (though gilletteracer74 did a variation of this in the past) for it to be split into several different categories that are deemed the most important by the server. Keep in mind, this may be an old revision: there still needs to be reconsideration of some of these roles.
Department of Training* = GrapeSmoothie / sessp / Theoretical
- Manages mentors
- Manages training docs
- Works close with staff
Department of Feedback and Staff Consistency* = Theoretical / Fouled / Zeusy
- Works on improving the staff team constantly
- Partakes in forwarding feedback
- Consistent with the rubric system
- Works close with ALL staff members
- Regulates the Moderator Testing Team
Department of Appeals* = Zeusy / timaeusTestified / sessp
- Expected to be final man for all appeals
Department of Appeals* = Zeusy / timaeusTestified / sessp
- Expected to be final man for all appeals
- Expected to be final man for all reports
- Can overturn final ap/rep/em decision from moderators
- Expected to actively handle emails
Department of Staff Recruitment* = GrapeSmoothie / Fouled / timaeusTestified
- Manages staff applications
- Manages referrals
*Department of Staff Recruitment* = GrapeSmoothie / Fouled / timaeusTestified
- Manages staff applications
- Manages referrals
The development team is expanding again, this time with the addition of ALM. :O
He's a talented developer who can assist us in web and server development. We're hoping he can bring more life to Avicus through focusing on areas that desperately need attention.
Welcome ALM to the Avicus Network development team!
Its been a while since the administration team has posted a community update, but we would like to continue making these updates for the community, to ensure that everyone is up to date with current events on Avicus, and to introduce new things.
Recent Promotions
As you can see, various promotions have taken place over the last week or so. Currently we have a new administrator, a new senior moderator, and a new developer. We wish these individuals a big congratulations on their new roles in the staff team, and are looking forward to the future with them.
Staff applications
Staff applications are closing soon! We thank all users that have tried out for staff by submitting an application, and we wish a congratulations towards all of the new moderators accepted into the team. Keep in mind, staff applications will not be opening for the next couple of months.
New senior moderator departments
ViceWatercolour recently introduced the senior staff departments publicly through a thread -- https://avicus.net/forums/e87a4ca4e
If you have any concerns regarding particular issues, you can refer to the senior departments, and direct your concerns toward the particular head(s) of that departments.
Department of TeamSpeak* = Newcleus / Vice (Assistant)
- Gets "TeamSpeak Developer"
- Manages channels
- Manages ranks
- Go-to for TS issues
*Department of Training* = GrapeSmoothie / TheTNTPotato
- Manages mentors
- Manages training docs
- Works close with staff
*Department of Relations* = Arigenn / Vinnx
- Keeps community/staff in check
- Partakes in forwarding feedback
- Keeps clean slate with other servers
*Department of Documents* = ViceWatercolour / MidnightBeats
- Manages presentations
- Works closely with others
- Manages documents
- Organizes things necessary
- Takes initiative
*Department of Email/Appeal/Reports* = Newcleus / Vinnx
- Expected to be final man for all appeals
- Expected to be final man for all reports
- Can overturn final ap/rep/em decision from moderators
- Expected to actively handle emails
*Department of Sponsoring* = GrapeSmoothie /
- Actively finds YouTubers
- Actively finds Streamers
- Gives information to an admin
- Organizes a doc with link info
*Department of Staff* = Arigenn / MidnightBeats / Posighdun / Rinn
- Works closely with staff
- Handles issues regarding staff
- Concentrates on improving staff quality
- Concentrate on promotions and demotions
Community Slack
Ever needed to have a more direct service to contact staff members, and suggest various ideas you had in mind? Easily contact an administrator to be added to the community slack (avicommunity.slack.com) by giving them your email, and you can participate in the chat service. There are various channels such as #announcements, #feedback, #general, #random, #requests, #support, and other various random chats for users to talk about. More information on this slack service can be found here -- https://avicus.net/forums/5edc7dcc9
Mentoring Team
Lead by GrapeSmoothie and Rinn, there is currently a group of particular moderators who will ultimately mentor new junior moderators, and have a little more say in particular promotions or demotions within the staff team. This team was announced formally by ViceWatercolour this week in a thread found here -- https://avicus.net/forums/4fba0121e
Regards and Happy Holidays,
The Administration Team
I advise you sit down before reading this... I've added AAC (the AntiCheat system we use) back into Avicus.. It'll be okay. Before you freak out and exclaim that AAC is literally a product of the devil and it should be burned at the stake, please actually read this post and you might get an idea of why we are doing this!
It is added back with the intention of ironing out the root cause of some major issues that we faced when it was deployed on our servers earlier. An anti-cheat system is necessary in filling the role of moderators where they should not be needed. Checks for spam bots, blatant flying and other movements can easily be detected by AAC and handled accordingly. Other checks, such as with block breaking, block placing and intricate movements cannot be always be detected by AAC, or worse it may produce false positives. This is the biggest issue we are dealing with. We know that many of you have already seen some of the side-effects of this plugin when poorly configured. We have since changed some options in the plugin to decrease the number of checks and its responses to these checks. If the plugin was perfect, all of these checks could be enabled, but as we have discovered, it has some issues. As we receive reports of more false positives, we will consider disabling their respective checks.
Please comment with your experiences on the server as of 2 PM CST (when all servers should have restarted) here www.avicus.net/issues.
In other news, we are getting really close to some awesome plugin development and website updates (more backend enhancements, but still big updates nonetheless)! Expect some development updates soon.
Just a small notice that some web services, such as avicus.net, maps.avicus.net and docs.avicus.net may experience brief sessions of downtime over the next few days (1/29 - 1/31) as we transfer them to a new server. Other services such as Minecraft and TeamSpeak should remain unaffected.
In the past, the administrative team has promoted a third administrator to help out with workload, and it seemed to work out quite effectively, unfortunately certain complications occurred in the past after that promotion that caused it to fall down a bit.
After lots of discussion the administrative team has once again decided to bring another administrator in the team, and because of this we hope that the entire staff teams efficiency will pick-up. We predict a bright future for the administrative team, and the staff team as a whole, and we will say to expect lots of new and fun things.
Please congratulate PeachyYas or Rinn on his promotion to Administrator!
Hey!
This week, the Administrative Team has set our goal to updating and adding policies that we believe need to be implemented or fixed. Some of these policies have been suggested by ViceWatercolour and have been accepted, others have been created by Arigenn, Posighdun, and I in our department.
Updates are as follows:
(N) POLICY 3.6 - Developer punishments
Developers do not receive proper punishment or moderator training, therefore may not warn, kick, or ban any users on any Avicus platforms. If any given developer (excluding any who has received an additional rank given the permissions to deal punishments) is caught giving out an infraction without the permission of a senior staff member, they will receive a warning. If more than two of these incidents occur, the developer will be taken to the lead developer directly for further action. A developer may only punish if they ask permission from a senior moderator, or administrator.
(N) POLICY 6.1 - Administrative Demotion Policy
Administrator demotions are handled by the owner exclusively. No other user or group may impeach an administrator. An administrator or senior moderator should be given 3 days before demotion to wrap up projects, prepare posts, clear up things, assist with others in transition, and contribute final works before gone. They are alerted before their demotion, and after the third day, gone.
Groups that are formed to assemble and impeach a senior moderator or administrator should be given no mind and ignored, as shutting them down causes unnecessary drama. If there are valid complaints, it should be processed through the owner.
(U) POLICY 3.5 - Authority Respect
You may not lie to authority, abuse your powers, mislead the community, mislead your fellow staff, break the rules on other networks, be immature, create groups that's purposes are to harm a person, or group of people, be irresponsible, lead others into retirement, discriminate, be inactive, be disobedient, or represent the server poorly in public. This policy will be enforced on all staff members (senior moderators, moderators, and junior moderators), and administrative action will have to be taken through staff warnings, or demotion.
(N) POLICY 10.1 - Staff Referral Usage
A. Staff referrals are in placement to where any staff member (excluding map developers) that have been staff for exactly 1 month and over can ‘refer’ or recommend a player for a junior moderator trial. The user recommended must have over 24 hours of playing time, at least 4 pages of forum posts, and be active on a majority of services.
B. They are bound to the same conditions as a junior moderator normally is, except they didn’t get in from applications.
C. There should be a majority vote by the entirety of the moderating team excluding junior moderators, and a template should be used somehow to tally your vote (e.g. a green box provided in the stickied thread). When a referral meets a majority of no, it will be locked.
D. The user cannot know that they were referred from staff due to confidentiality purposes. This is the only user-related restriction on referrals. They also cannot request a referral.
(N) POLICY 11.1 - Translation Project Rules
The rule translation project is to include the languages that are relevant to the user base. These would be at this current state English, Spanish, and German. Any other languages may be added, however they are not required to be updated consistently with the others. If a ruleset is outdated past a translation and it cannot be updated properly, in a time frame of 2 weeks, that specific ruleset translation is considered deprecated and removed from the website. If there is an incorrect translation, the senior staff are to forward it immediately to a developer (if the user does not do it themselves). Incorrect translations, minor or major, should be attended to with any available user to translate it. Keep in mind, revising or translation will not be available to users who are not fluent in a language. If the community wants a new language to be added, and they veto for it under proper basis, they may make such a request for the language, and ALL staff groups are intended to discuss it. Under no circumstance for a translation language request should it be private. A translation team is not recognized officially as a staff group, but a translator group is recommended to tackle the rule project. The translation project is lead especially by an administrator.
(U)
POLICY 2.2 - Retirement Policy
Reassessment is a system used to reconsider if a staff member has been falsely demoted from the network, or wishes to return. The staff reserve the right to decline any reassessment request for consideration. If a retired staff member wants a reassessment, they are to contact the user relevant to the group (mapdev -> head mapdev, mod -> senior mod), etc. and wait up to a few days for an official response. If a user returns, they may only return once on that condition. Multiple retirements will not be permitted, and will restrict you from rejoining the team.
KEY:
(N) = New policy
(U) = Updated policy
Any comments/suggestions about these, other, or future policies should be posted below.
Footnote: Expect a new/updated appeal system with guidelines/rules soon!
Footnote: I'll update this thread whenever something in the policy changes.
Regards,
The Avicus Network Administration TeamThe Senior Staff team would like to introduce a new appeal system that will be in place starting today, as the previous system had a few flaws that resulted in the system being ineffective.
Essentially the new system will work like;
When someone appeals, their appeal will be sent in a thread form on the forums. If the moderator who banned this person is still staff, this moderator will proceed to negotiating with the player that wishes to be appealed. Once a final verdict has been reached, and the user is happy with the decision made, a senior moderator will review the appeal. If the senior moderator is happy with the response given, they will proceed to lock the thread, and that will complete the appeal.
If the punisher is no longer staff, a senior staff member will step in and negotiate with the user instead of a moderator, and will reach a final verdict.
Thanks,
Senior Staff Team
I'm sure you have had many questions regarding this new rank that the Administrators made, called Manager.
Previously on Avicus, there was a rank called Manager, which essentially worked close to the Administrators although it lacked a purpose, and was removed. What the administrators have done is re-created this rank, and furthermore re-added a purpose to it.
Those promoted to Manager will be expected to constantly involve themselves with the community. They should be transparent about their work and try to have the best communication as possible. Managers should try to always listen to community ideas and suggestions, but also keep them in control. They will also partake in staff related activities, and manage the more staff centered senior moderators. Managers will have more authority than Senior Moderators and will be involved in more decisions, but they will NOT have absolute power over Senior Moderators. These Mangers will be put into assignments with the administrators, and they will work really close to the admins.
1. Staff Warn and Demotion Management: (Arigenn & Sulorak)
This person will essentially have to be strict on all staff members, and will be in-charge of organising staff warns on the staff team. They will have to keep up-to-date with what the moderator, and senior moderator team is doing in order to have a strong and valid opinion, in the event that a demotion may occur. One of the higher senior staff teams points , is to be more strict with demotions and staff warns, and to ensure that the proper people are being punished.
2. Transparency Management (Iron & Peachy)
This person would handle community updates, staff spotlight, and other events towards the community that will essentially push for transparency towards the community, and furthermore the entire staff team.
3. TeamSpeak 3: (Sulorak)
These managers will continue to do their normal jobs as the TeamSpeak Heads, fixing issues, complaints, and generally managing the progress of TeamSpeak.4. Head of Senior Departments (Peachy & Iron)
This person will manage and regulate senior departments, and constantly encourage progression updates on the department's. They will ensure that the seniors are working to the best of their abilities, and they will have to work incredibly close to the senior moderators.
We hope that this Manager rank will help the server greatly, and that it will improve the efficiency of the higher senior staff team greatly. Furthermore, we would like to congratulate Iron and Sulorak on their promotion to this rank.
I do not encourage arguments regarding this decision here, and punishments may be given to players that cause any trouble. You may contact an administrator on the Community Slack privately, or you may contact one of us on Skype.
Regards,
The Administrative Team
Just a heads up that the entire Avicus network may go offline sometime during the early days of March. We will attempt to make these changes during our least played hours, and will let you know at least a day beforehand. While this maintenance occurs, you will no longer be able to access the website and servers. (TS will be up, however)
After the update is complete, expect some new and exiting things to happen. A dev log will be posted sometime soon to provide some more information about what has changed.
You can follow us on twitter: @AvicusNetwork, for updates.
Hey all!
If you haven't noticed, we've been quite short on Senior Moderators lately. Over the last few weeks, we have discussed candidates for Senior Moderator, and have recently conducted interviews for the position. Although every Moderator who had an interview showed amazing potential, we have decided to only promote three Moderators. Congratulations to Zeusy, Fouled, & Theoretical on their promotions to Senior Moderator!
Regards,
The Senior Staff Team
Thank you all for your patience and assistance throughout the process of pushing this big update to the servers and website. This project, lead by ALM, was an enormous one to take on, especially for his first project here at Avicus. There are yet issues to be fixed, but the majority of those that have been reported have been fixed within a matter of hours. Continue finding and reporting bugs over at avicus.net/issues.
Nothing changed?
Most of the changes are there for the developers and senior staff team, they make the website more efficient and customizable. If you must know, ranks are now stored in the database as opposed to a configuration file, and permissions for basically every action on the website is defined which means we have a lot more power to control what rank can do what. There are only a few noticeable "features" that an average user will see and are so minimal they aren't really worth noting. But don't you worry, finally releasing this update means we can actually get to real Avicus server development. Tangible features and updates that will improve the experience of playing on the Avicus Network.
licentia f (genitive licentiae); first declension
- Avicus Devs
Thank you all for your patience and assistance throughout the process of pushing this big update to the servers and website. This project, lead by ALM, was an enormous one to take on, especially for his first project here at Avicus. Many people have chipped in to help test and fix bugs. There are issues yet to be fixed, but the majority of those that have been reported have been fixed within a matter of hours. Continue finding and reporting bugs over at avicus.net/issues.
Nothing changed?
Most of the changes are there for the developers and senior staff team, they make the website more efficient and customizable. If you must know, ranks are now stored in the database as opposed to a configuration file, and permissions for basically every action on the website is defined which means we have a lot more power to control the actions of any rank. There are only a few noticeable "features" that an average user will see and are so minimal they aren't really worth noting. But don't you worry, finally releasing this update means we can actually get to real Avicus server development. Tangible features and updates that will improve the experience of playing on the Avicus Network. We've also got another cool website update coming within the next week or so :O
Amended: 1.9
I know many of you are curious about the status of 1.9 and Avicus. An official post will be coming soon, but we will be updating eventually. We will do our best to please as many players as we can in the process, which means reverting some 1.9 gameplay features to how they behave in 1.8. Again, we'll know more about this soon. Our focus recently has been on the permissions update.
- Avicus Devs
licentia f (genitive licentiae); first declension
For the longest time the community slack was a place of low moderation and lenience. There were many arguments and unnecessary drama. In order to resolve this and overall improve the atmosphere of the slack, a new system will be implemented.
The Community Slack is a privilege provided by the slack admins for the community of the Avicus Network. Disobeying the rules listed on this document will result in a punishment in the form of a channel kick, a warn, a temporary deactivation or a permanent deactivation. The punishment is dependent on the severity of the rule broken and the judgement of the slack admin. Previous punishments will be taken into account when punishing an user.
If you have questions, suggestions or want to report a user, please contact one of the following slack administrators:
- Maintain a calm and civilized atmosphere in all channels at any time.
- Scamming (stealing information, money, accounts or other private information through deception or trickery) is not tolerated.
- Spamming chats, channels or private/direct messages in an annoying or bothersome fashion is not allowed.
- Linking to material that may be considered objectionable is forbidden. This includes ear rape in the music channel.
- Provoking or insulting a specific people or a group is not tolerated.
- Distributing personal information or pictures among other users without consent is strictly against the rules.
- Threatening users in any way will be punished accordingly.
- Leaking staff information or information that is or was intended to be restricted is not allowed.
- Listen to the directions given by your fellow users and especially by the slack admins.
- Group Mentions and slackbot commands that ping certain users or groups should be used with caution. If you are unsure, contact an admin first.
- The #announcement channel is solely for announcements, posts without permissions will be deleted and result in a punishment. Ask a slack admin before posting.
Your slack username should indicate who you are and be related to your minecraft ingame username or a name you are known for. If you are unsure if your username is appropriate, contact a slack admin and he will review it.
Your slack profile picture should also be appropriate for all users. The slack admins will approach you in case of a user being offended or disturbed by it.
Certain names and profile pictures can be deemed inappropriate by the slack admins.
Refusing to change the username or picture will result in a temporary deactivation of the account.
One of slack’s features are slackbot commands that can be used to ping a certain group of users. Use them with caution. They normally start with an exclamation mark (!).
- !slackadmins | Alerts the current administrators of the community slack.
- !admins / !administrators | Alerts the avicus administrators
- !devs / !developers | Alerts the avicus developers.
- !seniormods / !seniormoderators | Alerts the avicus senior moderators.
- !seniors / !seniorstaff | Alerts the avicus senior staff (seniors + admins).
- !mods / !moderators | Alerts the avicus moderators.
- !mapdevs / !mapdevelopers | Alerts the avicus map developers.
- !officials | Alerts the avicus officials.
- !rules / !help | Links this document.
- !coinflip | Lets you throw a coin (can be head or tails).
The slack consists out of various channels with different purposes. The rules can alter from channel to channel. Look at the description of the channel for more information.
- #announcement | Dedicated to announcements and important information.
- If you wish to discuss anything that is posted in this channel, please head to #general.
- Do not post in this channel without explicit permission by one of the slack admins. Failure to do so will result in a punishment.
- #feedback | Give feedback to anything avicus or community slack related.
- Be constructive and give feedback in a calm manner. Try to back up your argument with evidence.
- #general | This channel is for anything that pertains the slack or the avicus network.
- Since all users are in this chat and can't leave, try to get along.
- #help | If you need help ask here and others can help you out.
- Keep the atmosphere calm and civilized.
- #maps | Anything map related goes here.
- Questions and suggestions regarding maps should be asked here.
- It’s not limited to avicus maps, all types of maps outside of avicus are welcomed.
- #music | This chat is for sharing and listening to other's music and posting your own.
- No ear rape or objectionable music or music videos.
- #news | Talk about news stories and debate about new related subjects.
- We have a designated bot for this channel called diggbot. He’s pretty self explanatory.
- #random | A place for non-work-related flimflam, faffing, hodge-podge or jibber-jabber you'd prefer to keep out of more focused work-related channel.
- Out of all channels this is the most lenient one. The general rules apply to some extent.
- Use /mute if you don’t want to get notified but don’t want to leave the channel.
Along with the new rules a new punishment system will be implemented.
It consists of 4 instances that don’t necessary have to be followed by the slack admins.
Evidence is not necessarily needed, users can request evidence but it’s ultimately up to the admins to provide it. Punishments are not up to negotiations, yet if you approach the admins in a civilized and calm manner, it might get reverted. Past punishments will stay how they are but will follow the principle that evidence is up to the admins.
If a user is breaking a chat/channel specific rule or is found disturbing the calm atmosphere of a chat/channel he will be removed or an unspecific amount of time. The user is not allowed to join the channel by themselves until the time set by a slack admin ran out. The admin will notify the user for what he was removed and for how long. Rejoining the channel will result in a next higher punishment.
Warns will be issued if an user is found guilty breaking a chat/channel rule or rejoining a public channel by themselves after getting kicked out of one. It’s a reminder that the behavior is not tolerated.
Temporary deactivations are the next higher instance of warns. If an user collects more than 2 (two) warns or breaks rule which severity warrants this instance, his account will be temporarily deactivated for an appropriate time. The time depends on the severity of the rule broken. The maximum amount of time is set to 30 (thirty) days and temporary deactivations to 2 (two), exceptions can be made in time and amount.
Permanent deactivations can be appealed after 2 (two) months of continuously deactivation and good behavior towards other users and slack admins outside of the slack.
Upon receiving the notification of the account getting deactivated, you have 20-24 hours time to approach an slack admin on the manner, do it in a respectful manner. In this time period you are not allowed to post in any of the public channels, disobeying will result in an instant deactivation.
A deactivation should not be appealed on the forums, rather message a slack admin on skype or another communication platform.
All rules in this document are up to change and it’s the user's responsibility to stay updated with it. There will be no grace period for rule changes, a change will immediately take effect after it was added, changed or removed.
A big Thank you to {tag=2d6f79100ad94d87b5285beb41c150ce}, {tag=107265d9d273459f957970394b30d91a}, {tag=5b700f637ff4400689b73fc21f61239c} and {tag=f4eae547b4d8434898447e444e31b389} for helping to compile this new concept and overall trying to make it better and more fair.
Also welcome {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800} as one of the slack admins that will support us in the future!
EDIT: We've pushed beta to the live servers. Avicus now supports 1.8 through 1.9.2 (which was released today).
Test Avicus 1.8-1.9 right now using
beta.avic.us to connect.Report game-changing bugs! Some things such as your player name not appearing correctly in the tab list is a result of poor 1.8-1.9 support and is unlikely to be fixed. The boss bar is also a bit glitchy.
Edit: We're running 1.8 with modifications to support 1.9 clients. 1.9 features are not enabled.
Hello Avicans!
The development team has big news to report! A new game manager plugin is coming to Avicus that we like to call, Atlas. As most of you know, since the Avicore update, we have used Avicore to manage games. Since then, nearly two years have gone by and Avicus has obviously changed dramatically - our community has shifted towards the competitive genre, and our minigames have become somewhat stale due to the limited features Avicore is able to support. This is what Atlas is aiming to address.
We want Avicus to properly host games for the competitive Minecraft community in addition to reestablishing the casual gaming community within Avicus in the long run. This is why Atlas is coming, and what it makes it so great. It is what you have been waiting for, and what the developers have been working hard to complete.
Atlas differs from Avicore in many respects. I’ll do my best to list off these changes:
XML: Currently Atlas only supports XML. We may provide support for other markup (YML, JSON, HOCON) in the future, but is unlikely. Map developers are starting to learn Atlas XML and I will be helping with the process of converting Avicore maps to Atlas maps.
Translations: Every message sent to a player can be translated. Map developers can even (and are strongly encouraged required to) provide translatable messages for team names, objective names, and in game messages and warnings. The documentation website for writing map configuration files supports translations as well. Help get your native language translated at translate.avicus.net.
Objectives: Under Avicore, objectives are defined by the gamemode of the map. For example, only DTM maps can define monuments and only CTW maps can define wool. Atlas maps, on the other hand, can define any number of objectives in one map (monuments, wool, hills, score caps and more all in one map!).
New tab list: The tab list has been organized to show teams, spectators and game information more clearly.
No death screen: We have disabled the death screen and replaced it with a popup message. Upon dying during a match, a player can now spectate the game until they desire to respawn (map developers can toggle this).
More modules/elements: There are many more features available in Atlas of which map developers should take advantage.
Zones: A zone is a region that has special qualities. For example, you can give an item or a potion effect to a player when entering an area. Or, you might want to define team bases where only one team can enter and are exempt from player damage.
More regions: Points, cuboids, cylinders, circles, spheres, joined, translated, inverted, intersected, subtracted, above, below void and more regions are available. See the Atlas documentation for a complete and descriptive list.
Spawns: Spawns are used to define where a player should be teleported to and what items they should be given when they appear in the map or respawn after a death. Many types of regions can be specified here.
Better objectives: More options for wool and monuments are provided. Some examples include: monuments as a region as opposed to a single block, monuments as any type of material instead of obsidian, optional fireworks upon completion, and disable crafting of wool. See the docs for more information!
Hills: We have scrapped the “capture the hill” behavior of hills and now provide hill objectives. Teams compete for control of any number of hills by having members of their team possess one for a certain amount of time.
Events, conditions and triggers: For the more savvy map developers, we leave you with the most important change last. These three map elements allow you to modify almost any event that occurs during a match. The documentation explains how to take advantage of events.
I know you’re eager to try it out. We are too! We want to see this in action on the live servers as soon as possible, but we must be careful not to rush it. We are extensively testing the new plugin with map developers and selected staff members. Public testing will be happening soon and it will surely be announced ahead of time.
A note on the next tournament:
It’s very possible the next tournament will be running on Atlas if all goes smoothly and it is so desired by the players and the tournament organization team. We’ll do our best to keep Atlas working on 1.8, regardless of what happens with the main server, which means the tournament will likely be on 1.8. This is assuming there are no changes made to 1.9 gameplay and the perception of 1.9 gameplay that would persuade us to upgrade.
- Avicus Development Team
Hello Avicus Community,
The Administration team and the Management team has been creating a brand new copy of the staff policies for our staff team to follow. We have decided to announce this to the community, as it involves you guys quite a bit.
This thread is a basic overview of all BIG changes that we have made to the policies. The final and complete copy of the policies can be found here.
POLICY 3.3 - Assignment System
Essentially this is a feedback system that the staff have created to ensure that all staff members are giving and receiving peer feedback.
POLICY 3.6 - Leave of Absence Policy
Staff now can only take 2 months or less Leave of Absences, only if they will remain completely inactive over this period of time
POLICY 5.4 - Running out of Strike Points
Any staff that loses all of their points, will be demoted without question
POLICY 7.1 - Duties of a Senior Moderator
We have re purposed the Senior Moderator rank a bit;
Senior Moderators would focus on communicating, listening to, and improving the Moderator/Junior Moderator team. They will act as role-models for Mods and become more or less the "ideal" Moderators. The Senior Mods will be Moderators with the most abilities, experience, and maturity who would help Mods with any difficult situations, aiming to improve their quality, relations, etc. This would put a large amount of meaning to the name "Senior Moderator." Senior Mods will not have an official vote for promotions/demotions regarding other senior moderators, managers, or administrators, but they can give recommendations/vouches/feedback.
POLICY 7.4 - Behavior Agreement
Senior Moderators now have their own behavior agreement
POLICY 8.1 - Duties of a Manager
We have also re purposed the Manager rank a bit;
Managers will be in-charge of different parts of the server, and will act as overseers for their specific part of the server. One Manager and Administrator would head the community, one Manager and Administrator would head server development, and all Managers and Administrators would head staff development. They would work as an executive team, and would essentially execute things that the administrators had planned. They would be in-charge of the senior moderators.
POLICY 8.3 - Behavior Agreement
Managers now have their own behavior agreement.
POLICY 8.4 - Assignments
Since Managers head our server now, each one will be assigned to a particular department, and all of them have a staff duty to complete. Administrators are involved in these assignments as well. If you have any problems regarding a certain part of the server, you may approach the respective managers or administrators.
Server Development - (Arigenn and Fouled)
This will consist of managing advertising documents, working close with officials, map devs, and developers, listening to suggestions, and further progressing Avicus to ensure that it is growing constantly.
Community - (Rinn and Palaemon)
This task will consist of running community events, ensuring community relations are well, running community updates, and tending to community problems.
Staff - (All managers and administrators)
Managing Staff Calendars (Fouled) - This task will consist of managing staff dates, meetings, finishing projects, certain events within the staff team and community, deadlines, and other miscellaneous dates. They will then sort these into a simple calendar, which can be easily made through finding the months calendar on the internet, and using paint to edit it into the picture. These are a full staff team resource, and should be made every month for all staff team members.
Managing Training Documents (Rinn) - This task will consist of managing all training documents within the team. You will have to ensure that they are all up to date, and are well thought out. These will include the senior moderator training document, administrative / management training document, and the moderator training document.
Managing Staff Warning Documents (Arigenn) - This task will consist of managing a simple document that will contain staff contact information, age, timezone, and their record. This will be a resource sheet for the management team to keep track and monitor staff behavior.
Staff Spotlight (Palaemon) - Managing Staff spotlight will consist of choosing a particular staff member, who you believe deserves a recognition for their hard work to be in the ‘spotlight’. You will pick one person biweekly, and basically you will submit a variety of questions to the user, for them to fill out and re-submit back to you. You will then paste it into a thread, and edit in an introductory part.
POLICY 9.1 - Duties of an Administrator
We have outlined what an Administrator does;
Administrators will be overseers of the entire server. They will work very close with the staff team as a whole, and will constantly put into play different items for the server. Administrators in their spare time, will assist a particular manager department.
POLICY 9.3 - Power and Authority
Probably the policy that affects the community the most, this policy will allow administrators to make executive decisions without evidence. If the administrators want to take action on a problem, they will hold a vote, and the action may only be taken if it is unanimous (including the owner).
9.5 - Transparency
Administrators must remain transparent with their work.
9.6 - Behavior Agreement
Administrators now have their own behavior agreement.
Thanks for sticking with us for this long, heres to our first step towards a better Avicus!
Cheers,
Administration and Management Team
Hello players of Avicus,
After months of planning, we’re very excited to announce Battle of Eternity, the 3rd Avicus Network Tournament!
Information Thread: https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/2c8ba13a6
Hello fellow Avicusses!
Today we have decided to create a small section of the forums for you to ask the senior staff team directly questions of whatever matter you think we could provide an answer too, and is still Avicus related and doesn't treat personal matters with a staff member. Staff complaints still go and go only to support@avicus.net
Only senior staff will answer your questions, and no other but you can reply to your thread.
Please still abide by the rules and keep it chill.
Regards,
Javi
Thanks to Keenan we now have rules in multiple languages :D
But the main reason for this announcement is because the English rules have been updated. Please go and check them out when you can avicus.net/rules/en
We added rules A9, C3, C5 and edited rules B1, B8 & E1
We also brought back the old other section which was removed in the past for unknown reasons.
Finally, after months of hard work we have a version of Atlas that is ready for Public Testing. I do apologise for the deadline being pushed back by a bit but nonetheless it is here. When I've got the go ahead to give everyone the IP of the testing server from Keenan I will do so. I would encourage everyone to, at some point, join the server and to give us feedback. This version of Atlas is in no way the final version, we still have a bit of a way to go, and a lot of things still need to be done but this will give you a sneak peak on what's to come in the future of the Avicus Network.
As always all bugs that you encounter are to be reported on Github, here. Please don't message staff about it, use the Github issue tracker. I will create a suggestion box, in a moment, for any ideas people have to make the current plugin better. Like i mentioned above, this is in no way the final version so please keep that in mind. There will be bugs, like always, but the sooner we know about them the quicker we can fix them. If you want to keep up to date with development of Atlas then view the Atlas tab under the development section, at the bottom of the website. I'd also appreciate it if you gave us feedback for the maps as well.
Once I release the IP the server will be open 24/7 for public testing, Greg and myself will be holding Public Testing Sessions on top of that, to make sure everyone gets a turn. Statistics won't be tracked so don't worry about any of that.
Just a couple of quick points;
1. The server and plugins are in beta and are in no way ready for full release (they work, just lacking front-end features).
2. Report any issues on Github
3. Connect with 1.8.9 or later in order to play.
4. This BETA server still falls under our rules, so it is expected you follow the rules.
IP: beta.avic.us
Upcoming Sessions;
Session 1 - 6pm EST Friday 29th of July
Session 2 - 12pm GMT Saturday 30th of July
Session 3 - AEST Sometime Sunday 31st of July
I hope you all have fun testing and I look forward to reading some feedback.
- Peter, Ethan and Keenan.
Server costs have been high, and sales have been running low lately, but in addition, these servers are hardly played. We have been considering removing them for the past few months, if not longer, and now is the time.
The following servers have been turned off until further notice:
- CTH01
- SG01, SG02, SG03
- Walls02, Walls03
- Nexus01
Elly has joined us to help make Avicus a better place. Say hello and get ready for awesome things!
Welcome to the team!
Many names (including mine) have network-wise changed to Kevin due to an attack. Please don't worry too much.
I am Javipepe, and avicus is down for maintenance for the time being. We are working to get avicus up ASAP.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Hello Avicus!
Today we are introducing a very awaited feature. A set place for all the livestreams to be hosted, a hub for avicus content and the go-to for live content. The page contains the current medias' twitch channels embedded (alas, can be reproduced from this page), plus the official Avicus one.
If you see that there are certain medias that are not there it's just because they didn't have their twitch username in their profile so I couldn't add them. However, any senior, admin, dev or official will be able to do so at any moment with ease, so if you are a media and you are not there / want to be removed / anything to do with this page, make sure to contact one of these people. A small feature to look for in the future of this page would be a highlighted stream (most times the Avicus Official one) so that people can clearly see where the action's at. A link to this page can also be found in the "Competitive" dropdown in the navbar, for easy navigation.
As always, report any issue at our issue tracker.
Have a good day!
We're taking the website and servers offline sometime in the next 30 minutes to make the Atlas update live! Check Avicus' Twitter for some rolling updates.
After months of intense development, lots of planning and of course so much hype... We are very proud to be releasing the Atlas update. It is a complete rewrite of Avicus' in-game plugins. Three new and essential plugins, Hook, Atlas and Compendium have been built with scalability and better performance in mind. In the long run we believe we will have improved gameplay quality and moreover bettered the entire Avicus experience. We have also aimed to improve our competitive scene and quality in operating and managing tournaments and scrimmages.
As many of you already know we are deprecating YAML as our map code in favor of XML. This is one big factor that has delayed the update because it has been no easy job for the map developers to convert every map to this new format. For our avid builders, we have set up a documentation page for Atlas XML at atlas.avicus.net. If you are interested in what Atlas has in store for matches and maps, visit the Atlas announcement post here.
Things to note!
- As stated previously, this is a complete rewrite of our plugins. Yes, we know that there are certain commands missing and many things may be not functioning properly. Many things that appear to be missing are just features that we have yet to re-add to the server. Most things, have been added back already, but some may take more time. This includes The Walls. I repeat, we do have plans to add back that gamemode, given we make some changes to it to improve the game!
- Scrimmage servers will be temporarily taken offline for some time while we prioritize the main network servers. We are working to update our scrimmage plugin to match with our new systems. We will provide more information about this in the future.
We'll be updating this list as we think of the features that we have added.
- /add and /remove friends
- fancier /friends command
- Friend server join messages
- New leaderboard
- New, organized tablist (Must use Minecraft 1.8.1 or later)
- Atlas
We hope you enjoy the update and, as always, leave feedback below and report issues at avicus.net/issues.
Sincerely,
The Avicus Network Development Team
Hey!
As you are probably aware we are rolling the Atlas Update but as any update it came with its cool features, plans for the future, missing features, and bugs.
In this thread the development team will log all the tackling of the two latest, features that we had that we removed, and our beloved bugs.
Regards,
The Avicus Network Development Team
For the second time ever, we will be promoting a fourth Administrator into the team. He will be helping a lot with the work load of the team, and hopefully as we aim to grow Avicus, he will aid us in making this easier. He has been an amazing senior moderator for quite a while now, and we both believe that he deserves this move up into a big role.
Please congratulate {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800} on his promotion to Administrator!!
This is a new world record, the very first FLAT administrator.
(Special thanks to hugWulf, Slicorn, & ALM)
Since the release of Atlas, and before, the map developers have been wanting to release a server that is a continuation of our old OiTN (One in the Nebula gamemode), and in this server we crossover elimination (limited lives) with our signature gamemode This server includes the following:
Gamemodes available at Frenzy:
- One hit kill, limited lives maps
- Classic deathmatch, limited lives maps
- Free for all, limited lives maps
- More to come...
The maps loaded in rotations for this server are:
Block Fort by {tag=da98a2f1673c4cecb547e0a342abfde4}
Campfire by {tag=0e56116560bf49e6aa383db002ad7d08}
Shadient by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6}
Elevated by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6}, {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}, & {tag=4b50f55529e04fd7aef8d20a157df16e}
Freezing Point by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6} & {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}
La Cove by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6} & {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}
Presta by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6}, {tag=38cc237d92724e01ad24f5b0110130c1}, & {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}
Simon by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6}, {tag=38cc237d92724e01ad24f5b0110130c1}, & {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}
Spore by {tag=d9b4ffbc11d0453aa93f82dc59fca4b6} & {tag=50849f8fdd104947b0cf5d91fa3634a2}
Tree Frog by {tag=4a05be898b8b4dfe848edf6c42967c9a}
Supply by {tag=c29bef37d8e242a9b74604f2df78f374} & {tag=9116d3fa14004adaaecd2eae1d73e383}
We require more maps! It'll get stale quickly without them. If you have any old TDM maps lying around, and they can be converted, please contact me and I'll add them to my testing list.
We are continuing to develop this gamemode, and it can be accessed with /server frenzy.
Feedback is welcome in this thread, and we encourage it.
EDIT: This is not in the server menu yet. When a dev wants to add it, it'll be there.
After reflecting over statistics regarding how long an average player on Avicus spends, the Administrators came to a conclusion that one of the current problems is retaining users, getting them is one thing but keeping them on the server is a completely different thing. We questioned if we were targeting the right audience or if perhaps the average player didn't even know what Avicus was and what it provided? We came to a conclusion that we had to do something regarding keeping new users, so Keenan and the Developers have been hard at work making a tutorial plugin and then working with the Map Developers to implement it.
What's it?
Basically the Tutorial is a slide show, ingame ,that shows the player a) What Avicus is about b) How to play it and c) How to play each map. This plugin won't exactly be of much use to all of us regulars you know what's going on, but it will more benefit new players.
How can I see it?
Go into the hub and click on the emerald. We'll also be introducing mini tutorials into maps, so that each time it cycles you can see how to play on that specific map.
All in all, hopefully this will help new players find out what Avicus is really about and hopefully we are able to hold on to players.
On a side note
Advertising has kicked off and we're currently experimenting to see what kind of effect it will have on the server and if we actually see a player increase in the current advertising schemes we are doing.
- {tag=8242e55ecc6a458ab272a2b34918045f}, {tag=89f514e1f0f549778ddc77ef030a8b46}, {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800} & {tag=ec00f0bb1c4548768f112b033b35c7e2}
We will be deploying a change to the server soon that will attempt to limit team stacking on all matches. You will be unable to join a match if your addition to a team gives that team an unfair advantage, based on the number of players on that team in comparison to the other teams. We may modify the amount of imbalance that is allowed if we feel the need.
Premium users cannot bypass this as that would not be cool (in addition to being pay-to-win in a somewhat indirect way - o hi EULA).
In addition, some friendlier "players required" messages will be deployed in the next day or so (yes, you can click "1 Yellow" or "1 Red" to join those teams).
Scrim01 through Scrim04 are now online. You can reserve a slot at www.avicus.net/scrims. They are currently in beta so don't expect 100% functioning features.
With the return of scrim servers, the officials have decided to announce the TM 4 gamemode:
Considering King of the Hill & Capture the Flag are fairly new additions to the server, players will need to adapt to it more before a tournament is made on those gamemodes. The gamemodes that will be played this time around are Destroy the Monument & Capture the Wool. This is all the information that we will announce about TM 4 for now.
- Officials
Hello!
As you may have heard we are introducing a new automated appeal system and will bid adieu to our old, forum based, appeal discussions. This should profusely increase productivity within the staff team and it will be fairer for players, earlier responses, fancier user interface, etc... So please thank {tag=c2a4c847653e482ab62ed7f8b64330cb} for leading this project and creating a new awesome system. How to use it? Explained below!
The Appeal an Infraction subforum is now in thread-read-only mode, which means you won't be able to create new threads over there, but existing threads will still be dealt with and you can create new replies. We will hide the subforum when there's no appeal left to handle over there.
Oh no! You got an infraction! An unfair infraction! Burn the staff! Well time for an appeal. You'll simply head off to https://avicus.net/appeal or if you are that type of person that is truly complicated you can go to https://avicus.net/appeals and click the "Submit Appeal" button. Longer? Yes Better? That I don't know.
You will then be faced with a page with all your infractions and a respective "Appeal" button:
Select the infraction you want to appeal, and click the "Appeal" button next to it. This will lead you to the next new page, where you will explain how the staff was wrong / you were right / my cat hacked NASA. How? Type.
After you are done telling us the story of your life, you are then to click the "Submit Appeal" button. Are you ready? I don't know, are you?. When your appeal is filled in it will ping the staff needed so that they can come extinguish the fire. Now how to carry on with your appeal.
The appeal tree will be shown on top, below the infraction, date, and staff that dealt it. Under it you will find the action panel. Juicy fancy buttons, eh??? Well only staff get those :) You do get two, though. You can comment on your appeal, which is basically responding to it again to add extra information / explain NASA fingerprint security exploit, etc. Then you can also escalate; if you, after discussion, still want to burn the staff member that punished you, you can appeal to the senior court, the senior staff team. Click the button, it's all done. The previous staff member will lose privilege to deal with the appeal, and seniors will get to work and reach a final verdict. Now about the rest of buttons for the staff:
- Appeal → Appeals the infraction
- Unappeal → If the button was already clicked, it can be undone with this new button. The function? You guess it.
- Close → Closes the appeal, user can still respond but it indicates that a verdict has been reached.
- Re-open → Re-opens the appeal. It was closed, now it's open. Boom.
- Lock → When the appeal can just get nothing but worse, a final final verdict has been made and simply the point of its existence is gone, senior staff can lock the appeal and user can't comment any further.
- Unlock → If we mess up and kill the appeal before it was to be killed, we unlock it.
If you find any issue, please report it at our issue tracker. As always, thanks for your attention.
Happy Appealing,
The Development Team.
Teamspeak has currently undergone some leadership and structural changes. Most of everyone's questions will be answered here.
Why?
Teamspeak, up until now, has been run and managed by the Teamspeak developers. Recently the Senior Staff Team has been planning to change who manages Teamspeak back to how it originally was. This was done for a number of reasons but mostly because it's easier if Teamspeak is managed by the Senior Staff Team as they manage every other official Avicus service. There are other smaller reasons as to why, but it really makes sense if one body manages everything and not just the majority of it.
What will change? Will it affect me?
No, all that will happen is the Senior Staff team will manage Teamspeak. So if a moderator doesn't follow policy on Teamspeak it goes to the Senior Staff Team ect. We will be dealing with the issues that occur on Teamspeak instead of the Teamspeak Devs. So nothing big is really changing/happening that would affect the average Avicus teamspeak user, just some internal changes that most of you won't notice.
What's currently happening with Teamspeak right now?
Right now Teamspeak is down and it will be down for a bit while we try to fix some things. We will alert everyone when it is back up.
Just a general note to all those who want to cause trouble regarding this issue, we'll be using network bans.
Senior Staff will be happy to answer anymore questions/concerns anyone has regarding this change in Teamspeak.
Hello,
A few hours ago, I deployed some much needed updates to our current friendship system here on the website.
Firstly, a small count badge has been added to user profiles which actually shows the number of friends a user has.
Secondly, a here is where the big changes begin, I've added a page to show your full list of friends. This page will show any online friends you might have (sorted by server), all the rest of your offline friends, any friend requests you have sent, and those which you have received.
The X's beside each avatar will allow you to remove the friend/cancel the request. The + icons beside the received request avatars allow you to accept the friends requests you have received over time right from one place.
Thanks, and hope you enjoy the update!
{tag=c2a4c847653e482ab62ed7f8b64330cb}
Hello Avicus!
Today, the devs and mapdevs and proud to announce a new gamemode for the network, SkyWars! Both teams have worked hard for weeks to bring this new experience to The Avicus Network, and I would like to thank all that were involved.
We are continuously working to improve this gamemode and add new features and maps, and we need your help! You can post maps in Map Submissions and propose features in Server Feedback.
You can play now on
/server skywars1 and /server skywars2.We hope you enjoy!
Thanks,
The Avicus Development Team
HOWDY
I have decided that after a long while as Administrator, that I will be retiring down to Senior Moderator. I believe you all can agree that I have been a quite inactive leader to this community, and unfortunately I do not believe I should remain an Administrator if I were to keep this up.
I've been busy with all kinds of school activities I've been having, and even though after today a lot of my inactivity should clear up, I will only remain a senior moderator. I really hope to progress Avicus further as a senior moderator, and I still hope to be a strong leader in this wonderful community I've gotten to know over the past 3 years. Thanks for all your support towards me as your leader!
Cheers,
Your friendly DADMIN
Hello Avicus!
Today I am happy to announce that we have added a new developer to the team! {tag=eb1216878b1a4944bd4de0a818d9dfe2} is joining us as a plugin developer and will be helping us out with fixing issues and adding new features to the server.
He has worked on many projects that Avicus uses and even helped write the version of Bungee we use! He is actively helping us work on optimization features and has already committed over 2,000 lines of code! He is sure to aid in the development of Avicus and is a great addition to the team!
Thanks,
ALM
Hello everyone!
I just wanted to let all of you know that Avicus will be going down for some scheduled maintenance for up to two hours on Saturday December 24th at 2:00 PM CST.
Thanks,
ALM
Hello everyone!
I am proud to announce that as of 20 minutes ago, you are now able to rate and give feedback on maps that you play.
A message will be displayed at the end of every match that will allow you to rate maps on a scale of 1 - 5.
After you submit your rating, you are given the option to write additional feedback in a book.
Ratings will be shown on the corresponding map's website information page. The map devs will be using this data in order to choose maps for rotations that a majority of players enjoy.
This is sure to help make Avicus map development more reliant on player opinions than ever before!
Thanks, and Merry Christmas!
The Avicus Development/Map Development Team
After recently having an Administrator meeting, Fouled and myself have decided that we need to increase transparency between the staff team and the community. The administration logs will be filled out when an update/progress has been made regarding anything related to administrating the server; eg advertising, ect. Obviously we aren't going to put everything on here and some information is classified but the stuff the the community can and should know will be posted below.
- Peter & Fouled.
About
In a bid to get teams and team members more active the Senior Staff will be coordinating weekly Mega Scrims at the listed times below. Megascrims will always be held on the weekends, at times that are best for everyone. The times will vary from week to week but the days won't. I'll get a proper megascrim channel going soon and I'm going to try to see if we can get a permanent server for the purpose of Megascrims, if not then we'll just use scrim servers.
What's a megascrim?
A megascrim is a scrim where members from multiple teams play each other in assigned teams. 2 captains pick and assign players to the teams and then we scrim. It's kind of like a Football match you might have at recess. There are no assigned teams, you just turn up, pick teams and play. Well that's how a megascrim essentially works.
How do I participate?
Anyone can play as long as they have access to Teamspeak, you don't need a microphone but you need to be on Teamspeak in assigned channels. If you want to play you simply come onto Teamspeak at the assigned time and move into the assigned channel (more on that later). You must also be on Avicus and be able to play on the server. You don't have to post here, you just show up. I want to stress this, you don't have to be a regular to play. All you need is Teamspeak so virtually anyone can play as long as they have Teamspeak.
How will this differ from Unofficial Megascrims?
They'll differ in 2 ways. A) These will be more organised and B) Unlike unofficial Megascrims, these will be hosted weekly at a set time.
- Hosted by: Posighdun
- Time/Date (EST): Sunday, 4pm GMT..
- Maps/gamemodes: DTM, DTC and CTW.
- Time/Date (EST): Sunday, 4pm GMT..
- Maps/gamemodes: DTM, DTC and CTW.
- Senior Staff
Walls is now supported thanks to {tag=eb1216878b1a4944bd4de0a818d9dfe2} . We're currently testing it so it shouldn't be too long before you can play it.
Because now we're using XML, compared to when we used YML, this will open up some new doors as to what we can do in Walls. A module has been added that makes it possible to put falling walls within the XML to recreate the old Walls gamemode, and this may be used with other gamemodes depending on the usage. You may submit maps as we go through testing phases at this time.
- Administrative & Development Team.
Hello!
I am happy to announce that Avicus will now be accessible during Mojang session server outages!
You will be able to connect as long as your IP matches with one of that last 15 IPs you log in with. New users will not be able to connect during session downtimes.
This fix is deployed now so any future session outages shouldn't be an issue for our users.
Thanks,
ALM
UPDATE: We managed to fix the bugs it was causing so 1.7 will be staying for now.
Hello everyone!
I am pleased to announce that we have rolled out support for Minecraft 1.7! This feature is in BETA and we ask you to report any issues to us on our issue tracker.
NOTE: We do not support the custom tablist for 1.7 clients, so do not report this!
Oh, and we also support 1.11.2!
(Shout out to {tag=38cc237d92724e01ad24f5b0110130c1} for helping me test the initial release)
Thanks,
ALM
After the senior staff meeting we'll be hosting a live Q/A with the community on Teamspeak. This will take place directly after the meeting, so around 7pm EST this Saturday. We'll have a survey then and there to get questions and answer them live. I encourage all of you to show up and to have some kind of questions ready for us. This will be recorded and uploaded as well.
If you cannot make the time but you have a question or two you want answered then fill this form out and on the day we will answer it. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScTDwnJ5S1D9KAtEq_odgSs7JPP7QW_yimZpLU7rMulfW-NvQ/viewform
Note: If you're going to ask silly or stupid questions then you'll just be removed and your question will be ignored.
In the Q/A session a few weeks ago I said that I would be opening translator applications very soon and restructuring the role of a translator. If you speak a language other than English, at a decent level, and you’ve always wanted to help Avicus in some form then may I suggest you apply for translator.
What’s a translator? Any specific languages?
A translator is someone who translates a language. We’re open to all languages but Spanish is probably a priority.
What would I do? How much time would I have to commit? How much work is involved?
You would be responsible for translating things such as rules, Atlas, announcements and various other things. An hour or so at most per week. You would be working with others who speak the same language, so you won’t really be bombarded with work.
Do I get anything from it? Any rules?
A cool badge. You also get access to staff discord, crowdin and some other stuff. You would be required to follow the Avicus Code of Conduct, but I’ll explain that more to the people who are accepted.
How do I apply? Any requirements?
Shoot me an email at peter@avicus.net and include the following; IGN, age, discord tag, languages you are fluent in other than english, how fluent you are in them and why you would like to become a translator.
Only requirements are that; You have discord,you are active on all avicus platforms and have 1 day ingame time. You also cannot be banned on any Avicus platform.
(Joke applications will receive a two week website and ingame temporary ban, and yes I’ll easily be able to tell who sends in a joke application.)
Good luck. I’ll answer any questions below if you have any.
Peter
Hello everyone!
Today I am happy to announce the addition of lifetime and match recaps!
Here's a picture of a recap after a match.
The recaps will appear when you die, when you join spectators, and when the match ends.
They will appear only if you have done something in the time span of the recap.
The recaps can include (if you have done)
- Kills
- Kill Assists
- Deaths From:
- Self
- Others
- Natural Causes
- Destroyables:
- Damaged
- Repaired
- Leakables Leaked
- Monuments Destroyed
- Flags
- Captured
- Dropped
- Picked Up
- Hills
- Captured
- Assisted with capturing (on the hill when your team captured a hill)
- Points earned
- Wools
- Touched
- Placed
We track a few more things, which we might display later. (Most used weapon, time joined, time switched teams, etc)
Thanks, and I hope you enjoy this new feature!
Austin
It has come to our attention that CloudFlare, the service we use for DDOS protection and HTTPS encryption, has been affected by a MAJOR exploit.
This exploit potentially allows malicious users to gain access to sensitive user data, including passwords.
We recommend changing your password as soon as possible.
More info can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5vu3yn/cloudbleed_seceurity_bug_cloudflare_reverse/
A list of sites affected can be found here: https://github.com/pirate/sites-using-cloudflare
Thanks,
Avicus Administation
After talking to the rest of the Senior Staff we have decided we will be opening up staff applications in March. We're looking for active people more than anything else and we're going to be quite lenient. If you wish to apply for a moderating position then on the 3rd of March post your application under the Staff Application subform.
Dates:
24th of February - Announced.
3rd of March - Staff Applications open.
10th of March - Interviews start.
3rd of April - Applications close.
Application Format & Criteria:
Will be released within the next few days.
Rules:
- No vulgar language, unless being used in the scenario section.
- Do not make troll applications, they will result in a permanent website ban.
- Do not harass Senior Staff about your application, doing so will decrease your chances.
- These applications are only for Moderating staff.
- You must use the proper formatting, using anything else will instantly get your application denied.
Criteria
- Must have at least 1 day of play time.
- Must not be banned.
- Must speak fluent english.
- Must be active on all Avicus services.
Application
Age:
Timezone:
Do you have access to TeamSpeak? Yes/No:
Do you have access to Skype? Yes/No:
Do you have access to a recording software? Yes/No:
CRITERIA 1: SELF REFLECTION/EVALUATION
Do you have any experience as a staff member on any servers?
What is your biggest weakness and how do you believe it will affect your moderating? What is your biggest strength and how would this affect your moderating?
How do you believe you can help improve the Staff Team?
What qualities does a leader need to have in your opinion? Do you consider yourself to be a leader? Why?
What attributes distinguish yourself from other players that qualify you to be a moderator?
What skills do you believe you should have when interacting with the community? Do you believe you have these skills?
How much time can you commit to being a staff member (Rough Idea)?
CRITERIA 2: GENERAL SITUATIONS
You are currently undergoing your junior moderator trial. A ban evader is online and he is constantly ban evading and hacking. You are the only one online and the only one who is able to be online. What would you do?
Another staff member is constantly joining and harassing other people on Teamspeak in their team channel. The staff member is also referee and has physical permissions to be in that channel. However the leaders do not want this staff member in there and they have asked him to leave multiple times. What would you do?
A player appeals a punishment you gave them. You realise that the evidence file is corrupted and therefore there is no physical evidence. You know however this person did indeed break the rules, what would you do?
You are in an Avicus team. One of your teammates is also an Avicus Staff member. One day in your team discord the team member/staff member posts a screenshot of a thread that only staff members can see. The content in the screenshot isn’t very important/confident but only staff members could see it on the forums. If anything, what would you do?
One day the Senior Staff team makes a decision you do not agree with. You do not know all the details of the decision or the circumstances in which they were made and you were simply told by another staff member. However you do not like the decision based from what you know. What would you do?
CRITERIA 3: OTHER
NOTE: This is a new criteria and these questions are less to do with right/wrong answer and more to do with us getting to know you. Please answer these honestly. There is no right or wrong answer.
What would getting moderator on Avicus mean to you?
How passionate are you about Avicus? What does Avicus mean to you?
Do you speak any other languages than English?
Do you have anything else to add to your application?
Good luck to those applying
- Senior Staff.
Unfortunately {tag=eb1216878b1a4944bd4de0a818d9dfe2}, due to some personal issues, has decided he will be stepping down as developer. He has only been here for a few months but he has certainly made an impact on Avicus. Quite a few things wouldn't of been possible without him so thank you. I'm sure you'll be missed.
I need help with Administrator, as I am the only active one and university is really starting to take its toll on me. So I've decided that we need another, active, admin. Please congratulate PieZ on admin! He'll be helping me with pretty much everything. There will also be some more changes very soon.
We have now turned the Staff Discord into a public discord for all of Avicus to communicate on. I encourage all of you to invite as many people as possible.
Link - https://discord.gg/Z3CP9Ht
It is now an official platform, so if you're networked banned you will be so on there too, and you must uphold avicus.net/rules in addition to the rules listed on the discord.
Hello Everyone!
When we released the prestige update about a week ago, we implemented a simple leaderboard that accomplished the simple task of seeing how much XP each user had. After about a week, I am happy to announce that we have finalized the leaderboard design and have completed the release.
This finalized design includes:
- Accurate Ranking
- Total XP
- Level
- Prestige Level
- XP for each gamemode
Just a note that the game-specific XPs just began being tracked on Friday and that they are not completely accurate. Any XP gathered before this is marked as nebula.
We hope you enjoy the update. More to come soon!
The Avicus Development Team
The admins, map devs and the dev have been speaking of the current state of the server and we have decided that we are not happy with how our gamemodes have been playing. We want to make our server unique in a great way and dive into new possibilities. With that, we have decided that competitive gameplay that mirror other servers is not the correct way. Before we completely cut off our old gamemodes, we will keep them up on normal servers for a week after this post and start transitioning these new maps for public gameplay on /sv future. We know you guys are excited to know what new gamemodes/maps we have in store for you guys so here is the rotation for the first set of testing:
Bounce Mania
Coretest TE
The Dojo
Dragon's Den
Dragon WarZ
Quintus Duo
Salvo
Titans
Walluar
We hope you guys like the new direction we are taking and we are highly anticipating the positive results.
Hello everyone,
A few minutes ago I pushed a long-worked-on update that completely revamped the way Atlas determines winners and handles ties.
Previously, if more than one competitor had the same amount of completions the match would simply tie and no one would get any rewards. Also, if no one fully completed an objective when a scenario's check was reached, a tie would also be reached.
Before I explain the new system I need to explain some terms:
Competitor: Player (During FFA) or a Team
Shared Objective: Objective that can be completed by multiple competitors (has no team above on sidebar.)
Specific Objective: Objective that can be completed by only one competitor.
End Scenario: Stuff defined in XML to customize when the match should end (see docs for more info).
Ok so here's how it works,
If a competitor completes all objectives that are required for it to win, it will win.
If the total amount of completable objectives is completed and no competitor has completed all of their needed objectives, the competitor who has done the most (completed, damaged, touched, gotten the closest (during competitive)) will be chosen.
If multiple competitors have done the exact same thing, a ranking will be displayed with the most to the least who have completed that number of objectives.
Ties will now be a lot less frequent and false ties should now be nonexistent.
Also, monuments with no owner will be colored the competitor who has completed the most, or will be white is there is a tie for most.
Thanks, and enjoy playing.
ALM
You guys are long overdue for an update post so here we go. I had an admin meeting with Fouled yesterday and discussed many things;
In regards with the moderating team:
- Staff Activity and Improving quality of moderators.
- Getting a few more senior staff.
- Updating the Staff Code of Conduct.
- Updating rules and punishment guidelines.
Events:
- After talking with Fouled I decided that we should try a different a new approach with events.
- Basically I'm looking for people who would be willing to host events that we organise. So, seniors would organise the events and then a specific member of the community would run it, we would give them all the resources they need to host it.
- We also talked about hosting more multiplatform events, that is not just events on the server itself.
- Prizes were another point of discussion. With the new events that will come we'll be offering a range of prices.
- If you would be interested in a hosting role then just get in contact with me on discord.
Advertising was another area we discussed. I've already done most of the basic stuff when it comes to advertising, it's more about actually finding people who will advertise. So I'll be working with a few people to make that happen sometime soon.
Transparency. I'm trying to get back ontop of it all, all of the weekly update posts and all that. I'm also trying a new approach, that is, we're starting to involve all the areas of the server in our work.
Finally here are some things we actually physically decided/did:
- We decided there will be a content creator rank coming, more on that later this week.
- I changed the guideline for how to handle off topic posts.
- Finally, we made the advertising rule more clear. That is, videos posted on the Avicus forums must have somewhat avicus related content or we'll delete them.
If you have any questions then post them below.
- Peter
Transparency. I'm trying to get back ontop of it all, all of the weekly update posts and all that. I'm also trying a new approach, that is, we're starting to involve all the areas of the server in our work.
Finally here are some things we actually physically decided/did:
- We decided there will be a content creator rank coming, more on that later this week.
- I changed the guideline for how to handle off topic posts.
- Finally, we made the advertising rule more clear. That is, videos posted on the Avicus forums must have somewhat avicus related content or we'll delete them.
If you have any questions then post them below.
- Peter
A content creator rank has been something we've been trying to implement for a while now. Special thanks to Kashike for making it. The purpose of the rank is simply to get Avicus content out there and to help smaller channels grow. If you meet the criteria below then you may be eligible for the rank.
Prerequisites:
A Youtube or Twitch channel with 150 subs (subject to change) and you must be uploading at least 1 Avicus video/stream every 2 weeks. This can be altered in special circumstances.
Perks:
- Forum rank
- Discord rank + channel
Full teams + choose team permission.
More perks such as /nick and other perks are planned.
To apply for the rank simply submit an application under Content Creator Applications. The format will be released sometime tomorrow.
- Posighdun, Fouled & Piez.
After a month of discussion and wanting to update the server based on user feedback, we are announcing The Renaissance Update. This update will act as a rebirth to Avicus to bring in a new player base and hopefully give more of a variety of gameplay options for our community. This update is not going live at the moment but we will give you more specific information about the update when the time comes. But, here is a list of what we can tell you about the update:
-Capture server which will have a full capture the wool rotation.
-Walls server which will bring back the beloved gamemode to the server.
-Deathmatch turning into Conquest with a whole revamped rotation and more king of the hill.
-More donation perks are being worked on which will bring more reason to donate to the server.
-Advertising Team will be advertising the server and this is not a joke this time.
-Content Creator is added to give back a little to our glorious community members that decide to record on Avicus.
-Race to Victory 2 ;)
-Temporarily remove CTF until more maps are submitted.
-Since people are going to ask if I don't put it in here, yes Destroy is staying and its rotation is changing with new maps and some old ones.
We are open to any criticism and ideas and when this update is implemented, we will be very close to our community and hearing your thoughts about it. We hope that you guys come on and try the new maps out and have fun :)
In the last few months, the Global team planned out a whole new update for the server. Unlike most updates, this will not widely change the server but instead, make the server easier to market and advertise to newer players. We will be bringing new game modes to the server and celebrate the old. Here is how the servers are going to be formatted:
NEW Capture (Capture the Wool)
[CTW] Apollo 13
[CTW] Cake
[CTW] Golden Drought III
[CTW] Antaran
[CTW] Green’s Farms
[CTW] Madness
[CTW] Apache
[CTW] Deadlock
[CTW] Ender Hill
[CTW] Revolution
[CTW] Haunted Hallows CTW
NEW Walls
[Walls] Garden
[Walls] Mt. Blizzard
[Walls] Lands
[Walls] Hawaii
[Walls] Mini Walls
[Walls] Village
Destroy (Destroy the Monument & Destroy the Core)
[MIX] Kollad
[MIX] Nevran Remastered
[MIX] Sunbeam Temple Remastered
[DTC] E Minor
[DTM] Galloway
[DTM] Starshine Beach
[DTM] Halcyon I
[DTM] Dust Devils
[DTM] Rendezvous Redux
[DTM] Sandstorm
Conquest (Team Deathmatch & King of the Hill)
[KoTH] Green Hill Zone
[KoTH] Overgrown
[KoTH] City Scape
[KoTH] U-Bahn
[TDM] Downtown
[TDM] SuperPRISM
[TDM] Actrix 2
[TDM] Rapture
[TDM] Ancient Lake
[TDM] Illegal Office
We will also be keeping a very close eye on feedback for these rotations. Here are the threads for the different servers:
Server Capture - https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/c3b677672
Server Walls - https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/b9d52ca63
Server Destroy - https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/e9ac2fb88
We also have a new lobby so check that out!
We would like to thank everyone in the Global team for their hard work on this update.
The administrator team is pleased to announce that Austin, {tag=c2a4c847653e482ab62ed7f8b64330cb}, will be joining us in directing the operations at Avicus! He has helped tremendously as a developer since the time he joined us more than a year ago, and with this new position he will have an even greater impact.
Although he is still an active developer, this change in leadership will allow us to work with Austin to establish specific short- and long-term goals for growth, new features and expansion. As always, the staff team welcomes your ideas - taking your concerns and suggestions into consideration. We want to hear your wildest, game-changing, interesting and fun ideas that would Avicus more awesome.
I'm happy to be working with Austin and I am excited to see what great things will come out of this!
Thanks,
Keenan
Hello everyone,
Today we have released 2 new gadgets that should help liven up rotations and make playing more interesting.
We've added the Vote Start Gadget which, when used, will start a randomized map vote with up to 8 maps!
We've also added the Map Selection Gadget which allows users to select which map they want to play next out of a selection of predefined maps for that type of server.
The vote gadget can be bought by anyone with a donor rank and the map selection gadget can be bought by diamond users.
You can also buy these in 5 packs at avicus.net/shop
Thanks,
The Development Team
Hello everyone, ALM here!
I am pleased to announce a new and exciting feature that has just been rolled out in Atlas. This feature is MVP. MVP is not a new thing in games, and sports in general, so we thought it was about time to make it worth all that hard work you guys put into winning matches.
When we introduced match/life recaps and facts, we implemented a system that tracks every action you take in the match that has an effect on whether or not your team wins or not. These actions include completing/touching/repairing objectives, getting kills/killed/assisting a kill, and leaving/changing teams. With the new system implemented for this update each action has a "score" which is determined by a multitude of factors. Even each actions' score can vary based on factors surrounding the cause of the action.
Some of examples of this are:
- Knocking a player off of a ladder will have a higher score than plainly killing a player.
- The efficiency of the tool used to break monuments/cores
- The health you have when capturing a wool/flag
- The amount of players on the hill with you during capture.
This feature is in BETA and therefore no rewards will be given out yet for top players, since all the bugs have not been worked out and the best way to test is with people doing all kinds of things in matches.
Once all the bugs have been squashed and the scores balanced, rewards will be given to the MVP of the match (if they are online when it ends).
Enjoy,
The Avicus Development Team
So as of recently, there have been a particular amount of retirements which brings upon new promotions. First things first, if you are not aware, PieZ and Posighdun have retired from the position of Administrator for their own reasons, such as wanting to focus on other things more, but they'll probably state their reasons sometime. They have been awesome people to work alongside and have put a lot of work for Avicus and deserve a big thanks for their contributions and time and effort they put into things. I hope they do well in the future. Thanks!
Due to those retirements, there comes new promotions that lead to a spark of new ideas and discussions. After discussion with the other administrators, we have decided to promote the following Senior Moderators to the role of Administrator:
- {tag=a9f11454beac4cc3a1381780802c8794}
- {tag=bff56e079469477281be84fc627ea113}
Both Crazy and Camemes have shown good work ethic as a Senior Moderator, both working promptly and efficiently and show results, an example of this is the progressing mentoring and staff application systems. Both of them will be a good addition to the team and I hope to work well with them. Please be sure to congratulate them!
More updates to come soon!
Hello,
Recently, an enormous controversy occurred when former staff members shadowolfyt, Camemes, and SnowSX3 created a podcast, which ultimately resulted in two of them being demoted. The Senior Staff have decided to provide a detailed explanation to you, the community, to further explain what occurred in the eyes of the Senior Staff team and why action was taken. A Senior Staff Q&A is being planned to further erase any confusion in the community, and we thank you for bearing with us.
PODCAST:
The first thing to discuss is the podcast. It was advertised prior to it being posted on the forums for the whole community to see. While it did contain feedback we are taking into consideration, the way in which the information was presented and discussed is something we do not support. At Avicus, we do want to hear constructive feedback from our community - including staff members. We want our network to have leaders who are willing to communicate their minds maturely and respectfully, which sadly did not happen in this situation.
When feedback is presented in a way that is positive and constructive it creates an environment where we can make change. However, the majority of this podcast did not present the feedback in a constructive way. Jabs were taken towards recently demoted staff, past promoted staff, current Admins and more. A leader should not be involved with content which involves disrespect and shame towards a network in which they represent. The podcast was reviewed by the Senior Staff team. The following timestamps mark areas that we found were inappropriate for staff members to make.
BREAKDOWN:
6:33 - Avicus player count dying joke - not too bad
Numerous gay jokes in the beginning
24:40 - Disrespectful remarks towards Fouled, mocking with clapping and sarcastic tone
24:50 - Similar remarks towards ALM
30:40 - Somewhat rude statements telling streamers to "fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off"
31:10 - Once again, disrespectful sarcastic comments towards a certain person being their favorite official, said by Cammy
32:10 - Jab towards a referee, sarcastic comment towards his inactivity
32:22 - Uncalled for remark towards recently demoted staff member
36:05 - Rude comment at past senior's promotion
40:10 - Masturbation jokes
49:44 - Poking fun at admin team, claiming it's "Cammy's team" since he's supposedly the only good Administrator from his POV
51:10 - Plenty of comments regarding ALM going on a "warpath", and Cammy having to be a babysitter to him - said in a mocking tone
51:59 - Cammy talking about how he had to clean up ALM's mess, once again disrespecting him and his work
1:00:32 - Highly inappropriate comparison of ALM to Hitler's Nazi reign
1:09:11 - Bluntly stated that promoting ALM was a terrible idea
1:29:50 - Sarcastic comment towards at-the-time head of social media
1:31:19 - A rude comment directed towards an Administrator
RESULTING PUNISHMENTS:
We would like to make it clear why only ⅔ were demoted. After careful review of the podcast and taking into account nuances such as tone of voice and the manner in which the suggestions were made, we came to the conclusion that Snow was trying to provide feedback in a constructive, not destructive manner; however, a couple of inappropriate comments were still noticed. The other two individuals constantly made rude jokes, leaked some info, and were generally negative towards the network. Snow, on the other hand, seemed to be hesitant to trash the network and to join in on the ridiculing. Snow has been dealt with differently and accordingly.
As this is a developing story, we will address events based on the order in which they happened. Since their demotion, Cammy and Shadow were first banned from different Avicus services. Cammy was banned from TeamSpeak for attempting to give himself and Shadow hidden permissions. Shadow was banned from Discord for posting a website directly targeting an Admin which contained personal pictures.
Within the past 24 hours, Cammy and Shadow have now leaked classified Avicus documents. It is unfortunate that this is the route that they chose to take. As many of us knew Cammy and Shadow for quite some time, we were all shocked by this behavior. As a result of these actions, both are network banned from all Avicus platforms. As a reminder going forward, any former or current staff members that partake in the leaking of information can be network banned. It is important to speak up if you see something.
In a few days time, we’ll be hosting a Q&A where we will allow anyone, staff or community, to ask the Senior Staff any questions regarding the server's future and the events that took place recently. More information on the Q&A is yet to come. We thank you for understanding and it's important that we work with each other as a team rather than against to ensure the best possible outcome for the network.
Cordially,
The Senior Staff Team
Hello all,
We would like to announce the ending of the Summer 2017 prestige season! This means 2 things: The first is that a new season starts NOW where you can compete for the top spot AGAIN and that we have 3 new top users of the season!
The top users are (in order):
- {tag=ed8373099b404961a0436028db50511e}
- {tag=6f8edd64a26244dd9ad177d65d068520}
- {tag=6add5dab5c124931b9ca9839b646638e}
Enjoy competing for the top spot in the Fall 2017 season!
ALM
Hey all,
Today we are extremely pleased to announce 2 NEW ADMINS! Please congratulate {tag=2d6f79100ad94d87b5285beb41c150ce} and {tag=7a72eafdfa6c48a0beffd9acd53edca0} on their promotion to the Administrator role. Both have gone above and beyond their duties as seniors and have both proven that they are more than capable of fulfilling the role. They will be filling in the gaps caused by recent demotions/retirements, and we can't wait to see all of the wonderful things they will accomplish with the new shiny orange tag!
Thanks,
Austin and Keenan (and Sli)
Hey all,
Today we are announcing the (re)formation of a team of people mostly outside of staff that are being used as a kind of “think-tank” to gather ideas for the server and the future. This team is simply called the “Assembly Team” and they are a group of hand-selected people who have been picked on the basis of previous experiences and their talents. The team is in place to help grow the server and to help plan out a roadmap of upcoming plans. We formed this team to get more of a connection to members of the community and what they want/need to keep playing on Avicus.
The team was formed on Monday, but we have already made some progress. We are looking at ways to better the arcade while also maintaining our current games (more on this soon). We are also going over suggestions from various members of the community regarding new premium features and how to improve our current features and pricing structure. We plan to release more information about this in the coming days, and will be working a lot to gather feedback on the proposed changes being made.
The team is made up of {tag=257138bc7dff451e83c1d053c73e471c}, {tag=5a0b55defddb448caf5070856cbf39ee}, {tag=fbd4b4d461864581b408666bb8a12df4}, {tag=0b8f95fa0f404f289fd0b8e243bb6800}, {tag=2a16deb72e504c33b95d1296151321b9}, {tag=42b105207c51425292d98b65df108b12}, {tag=3cce00809faa48f982cf64410305822a}, and, {tag=a9f11454beac4cc3a1381780802c8794}. Feel free to contact these people to pass on suggestions and to get information passed on to the team.
Hopes to a bright future,
Austin
Here's a version in Spanish: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YewwDZE6ssVdPwqPyTZ5Z7d9dLKU0f_v5ZE4mvOnu-M/edit?usp=sharing
Hello everyone,
We believe that the current premium package system is not beneficial for our player base. Our current system is quite old, so we felt that it was time for an update.
The new ranks and their perks are:
Iron (NEW) - $10 permanent
- Join full teams on any server.
- 1 Weekly Map Vote Gadget (Allows you to start a vote from a randomly generated map pool based on the server’s gamemode.)
- “IRON” prefix ingame, and rank on the forums.
- Access to premium chat ingame and on discord.
- All gained credits are multiplied by 1.25.
- Can use gadgets in spectator mode.
Gold - $20 permanent
- All Iron Perks.
- Choose your team on Capture, Destroy, and Conquest.
- “GOLD” prefix ingame, and rank on the forums.
- All gained credits are multiplied by 1.5.
- When the user joins or leaves a server, it is stated in chat.
- 1 hour maximum scrimmage server reservation.
Emerald - $30 permanent or $5 monthly
- All Gold Perks.
- Choose your team on Walls.
- 1 Weekly Setnext Gadget (Allows you to set your map of choice on a server.)
- 2 Weekly Map Vote Gadget (Allows you to start a vote from a randomly generated map pool based on the server’s gamemode.)
- “EMERALD” prefix ingame, and rank on the forums.
- All gained credits are multiplied by 1.75.
- 1 hour 30 minutes maximum scrimmage server reservation.
Diamond - $50 permanent or $8 monthly
- All Emerald Perks.
- Choose your team on Nebula.
- 3 Weekly Setnext Gadget (Allows you to set your map of choice on a server.)
- 2 Weekly Map Vote Gadget (Allows you to start a vote from a randomly generated map pool based on the server’s gamemode.)
- “DIAMOND” prefix ingame, and rank on the forums.
- Access to minigame beta-testing.
- All gained credits are multiplied by 2.5.
- 2 hours 30 minutes maximum scrimmage server reservation.
Bedrock (NEW) - $75 permanent or $10 monthly
- All Diamond Perks.
- 5 Weekly Setnext Gadgets (Allows you to set your map of choice on a server.)
- 3 Weekly Map Vote Gadgets (Allows you to start a vote for maps of your choice on a server.)
- “BEDROCK” prefix ingame, and rank on the forums.
- Access to bedrock chat ingame and on discord.
- All gained credits are multiplied by 2.75.
- 3 hours maximum scrimmage server reservation.
We have listened to your feedback and developed this new system to give you a wider range of choice for what you want to purchase.
Some of you may be concerned about how this change will affect YOU. Feel free to reply to this thread with questions and a senior staff member will reply. Here are a few pre-answered questions that we thought might be helpful.
Q: What if I already have a rank?
A: If you have already have a permanent rank, you will be upgraded to the next highest rankl.
Q: Can I upgrade from my current rank to a higher one, and how much will it cost?
A: Yes. Upgrading to one of the new permanent ranks will only require the difference to be paid. (LIMITED TIME ONLY | This offer expires on Jan. 17)
Q: What if I already have a recurring rank?
A: Monthly ranks will continue normally, and expire on their expiration date unless renewed.
Q: Do you guys allow rank upgrades now?
A: Yes, any permanent rank can be upgraded. Rank upgrade pricing is as follows: the difference between the two ranks + 10% of the cost of the new rank.
Q: When will this system be put into place?
A: We will be rolling out the system on December 18, 2017. This should give you all time to make upgrade arrangements and for any pressing questions to be answered.
Thanks,
The Avicus Administration
Hello,
On the 7th of December, Avicus is closing a chapter of its history. Our TeamSpeak license will be expiring then, and we are not planning to renew. Over the past four years, the Avicus TS server has been a great place of friendship, community, and enjoyment for everybody. In recent months, however, usage has drastically declined. The TS server’s usage level no longer justifies the price of a yearly license, and the funds would be better spent towards the other servers’ upkeep.
Now, while this is a close to one chapter, it is an opening to on that should be even more exciting. We will provide all the necessary channels in our Discord guild. We will also be holding events in the coming weeks which we encourage you all to join. We are also working to always have staff in the VCs so you can hop in and chat with the people who make Avicus great! Discord provides all of TeamSpeak’s necessary features, and it is completely free. The discord is also easier to join for new users and is easier to moderate.
We would like to thank all those who have helped make the TS a better place (including our many former TeamSpeak developers), and hope that the good memories made will not be forgotten.
Sincerely,
The Avicus Administration
Heloohoho all!
Day 22 (Dec. 22)
With the Christmas Mini-Tournament being kicked off tomorrow, It seems as though it's time to bring back the Hall of Fame! We are bringing back the Old Hall of Fame but adding more recent events but we need your help! The Hall of Fame has special areas to show off events that occurred during tournaments. Here's an example:
My Elves asked me to tell you guys to give us events that you believe deserve to be showcased in the Hall of Fame! Please respond to the thread or discuss in #competitive in the Avicus Discord.
Here's also a picture of the top 3 finishings for the last 3 tournaments:
and if you've never seen the Hall of Fame, here's a snippet of the rest of the Top 3 awards:
The Hall of Fame will be released with the end of the Avicus Christmas Mini-Tournament (How ALM Captured Christmas) as well as a special room dedicated to the Top 3 of this event:
But if you look closely, there's a room below the First Place statue. This room is that "secret prize" I've been talking about for the First place team! This room is going to be a permanent addition to the Hall of Fame. Each player in the winning team will receive a personal 20 by 20 by 30 zone inside this room where they get to build whatever they want (as long as it follows server rules. If abused, the winning team will no longer receive the prize and the second place team will instead be allowed to build). Good luck to the teams participating in the tournament! Hope that your team may be the winning team so I get to see all your creations inside the How ALM Captured Christmas First Place trophy room! May the best team win! See you guys tomorrow.
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Day 20/21 (Dec. 21)
Hello everyone. Today's wonderful announcement is in regards to the Super Nebula Event that will be happening starting Friday and ends Monday. What the Super Nebula Event is will be a surprise. Not only will the server be open for 4 days, each day will have a new assortment of old throwback maps! Each day will get 16 maps that will total up to 64 old maps that have been on the server at one point. Remember maps like Dry Heaven 1? How about Encryption? Maybe you guys will recognize maps like Venomous TDM or Coconut DTM! You can find the maps listed here: https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/7fbc5cf14
Another quick announcement. The Mapdevs will be returning the Hall of Fame! More details to be this weekend.
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Dec 19 (Dec. 19)
Ho ho ho, today I have some holly jolly new web icons for you! Feast your eyes upon the cold-as-ice snowflake, and the warm-as-fire gift! Get them, along with the christmas tree icon, at https://shop.avicus.net/
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Day 18 (Dec. 18)
For the 18th day of Christmas, we have another morph being released as a promotional gift! You can obtain a White Rabbit morph which will be released within 24 hours to the general public. Make sure to acquire all 3 morphs mentioned (Snow Golem, Avi Claus, and the White Rabbit) before the 31st or else they will be gone forever! The tournament is also on the 23rd so make sure to be there! There may some gifts that will be given out on livestream by yours truly so be ready for that! See you tomorrow!
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Day 17 (Dec. 17)
Today is going to be a little short. I’m here to announce that our new ranks for Avicus have been released! Learn more by going to the Avicus shop or by going to this thread: https://avicus.net/forums/discussions/0228d003e. All current donators have also received free upgrades to their ranks! Make sure to support the server by donating. I hope to see you all tomorrow and the following days for the daily presents!
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Day 16 (Dec. 16)
We're almost to the final 25 days and there's a week left until the highly anticipated Christmas Mini tournament! Make sure to sign up for the secret first place prize which I will announce later this week. Now for today's gift, I have updated the server's destroy and capture rotations with even more holiday maps! Capture has some new maps such as a Christmas version of Darkwoods and Madness. Destroy on the other hand has Christmas versions of Quintus, Luar, and Ternio! Go out and have some fun with those maps!
Also, make sure to be here tomorrow for the discord event which will start at 1 pm EST in the Avicus Discord!
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Hello everyone! There is no need to worry. The snowstorm has finally passed and our elves can finally get back to work. For today’s gift, we have something special. Avicus now supports Dynamic rotations and it will be put in place in the next couple of days. What this means is that the server’s map pool will adjust depending on how many players are on the server. If the player count is low, you may see a variety of small maps for a small player count. Once that player count increases, you will start seeing bigger maps to fit the player count and maybe some small rewards in the rotation for getting the player count up high. You can make a suggestion either by making a pull request, by suggesting it to a Mapdev on discord, or by responding to this thread. You can find the repository of our rotations here. We can now have countless numbers of rotations used for one server and in the future, we'll potentially support automated rotation cycling every day and different rotations on special occasions or holidays! We also have customizable rot names for such events and automation. Thanks for tuning in let’s hope this snowstorm doesn’t hit us again.
Make sure to be here on Sunday (the 17th) for our discord party! The time of the event will be posted in our discord (which you can join at http://avicus.net/discord) as well as the game being announced a couple of hours before.
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Day ?? (Dec. 14)
Hello? Is anybody there? Oh, finally! This message is getting through. Our North Pole headquarters was recently hit by a severe snowstorm and we have lost all communications. This snowstorm halted our present delivery so we will have to deliver more presents and double up days! With the terribleness communication because of the snowstorm, I can still only send out one present for today. For a limited time only, you can get an Avi Claus Morph from the credit shop for free! Get there before the snowstorm reaches mainland! The snowstorm is coming back so that means our communications will start going down again. I hope I can communicate with you guys again
tomo........
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Day 11 (Dec.11)
Did anyone hear about our upcoming Super Nebula Event? Starting on the 22nd, you can play some old maps you may remember or some you may not remember. Here's a list of maps that may seem familiar to you or unfamiliar, but they were all a part of the server's history! What maps do you remember from this list?
Bleened Rings Origins
Dry Heaven 1
Mistrock
CherrylandMC
Boolean 1
Ternio
Broken Ages
Rendezvous 3
Palm Rust Origins
Decay
Gladiator
Broken World
Trinity
Wasteland
Senex 1
Diamond Shore
Windmill Plains
Alpha Complex
Mystic
The Minefield Campaign
That's all for today. Expect some big things to be announced in the near future of this calendar!
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Day 10 (Dec.10)
Hello everyone. Today isn't going to be as special as the previous day with a new feature (expect some more in the following days *wink wink*) but instead, I have decided to send this message in order to remind players that our Christmas tournament, How ALM Captured Christmas, has been announced and revealed in the last couple of days. I am here to tell you guys to make sure to sign up as this is the first time in the server's history where you don't need a team to sign up! You can join in as a single user and create a whole new team with others who joined as a single. More information can be found here or here. You can also now set 3 of the maps in the map pool on a scrim server (which you can reserve at https://avicus.net/scrims). The maps you can now set can be done with the commands:
/sn Draxel Holiday
/sn Yukon 2 Holiday
/sn Alpine Holiday
More maps will be available for testing soon! If you find any issues with these 3 maps on a scrim server, please ping a Map Developer on our discord server.
That's all for now. Make sure to join in on this festive tournament as there may be a secret reward your team may earn for winning this mini-tournament that you won't want to miss out on!
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Day 9 (Dec. 9)
For the 9th day of Avimas, we are releasing a limited edition Christmas Tree Web Icon that you can obtain by donating one or more USD to the server via the Avicus Shop. This web icon will only be available until the end of the month (31st). You can buy the web icon here: https://shop.avicus.net/
Remember that the present hunt is still ongoing! Make sure to check out the new portals near the Map Development Team board to continue the hunt!
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Day 8 (Dec 8.)
For Day 8 on our calendar, we have our Conquest and TDM Map playing. We might play some walls maps too depending on how many people show up! You might also see some old TDM maps. We will begin at 6 PM EST on a server that will be announced later today.
I hope that I’ll see you guys later at the Conquest Event!
Tomorrow and for the next couple of days, we’ll (hopefully) have more presents that you guys can actually be using on the server! Be ready for those.
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Day 7 (Dec. 7)
Can't you believe It's already been a week? Today's small notice is just a reminder that today at 8:30 PM EST, there is going to be a discord event. Hop onto discord and come join the rest of the community in a game you guys voted to play! Here is the vote link: http://www.strawpoll.me/14571124. And that's all for now, I'll see you guys again tomorrow!
A quick reminder that The Conquest Event tomorrow will be at 6 PM EST. Come on and give us your opinions on the Conquest gamemode!
Another portal for the present hunt has opened! These newer portals will have harder to find presents to good luck hunting!
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Day 6 (Dec. 6)
Hey everyone. it's day 6! Today we are releasing a long requested feature from #suggestions in our discord.
We have added the 1k, 10k, and 100k credit blasters to the gadget store. Now you can shower your friends with even more credits!
Also, speaking of Discord, tomorrow's event will happen there! Be in a VC at 8;30 PM EST to join in on the fun!
Adding to Yesterday's present hunt release. One of the portals has been opened for you to access a different lobby. You can now enter the sandstone portal!
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Day 4-5 (Dec. 5)
What a week it has been so far, and I am just getting started bringing you all kinds of holiday cheer! Sorry for not delivering yesterday, we had some issues at the north pole. Nevertheless, today I am releasing 2 presents to make up for lost time.
Present Hunt: The first feature is a present hunt! When you log in to the lobby, you will notice some presents (labeled with nametags) that when you click, you can claim the present. Currently, the presents you have claimed don't show up anywhere, but they are stored and we are planning to use them for some rewards and achievements later in the month. As a part of this hunt, we are bringing back some old lobbies. Every 2 days, a portal will open up that allows you to teleport to an old lobby. These lobbies contain even more presents that you can claim. In order to claim the reward, you only need to claim 2 in each lobby. If you claim all in a lobby, you will get even more rewards when they are added.
Snow Golem Morph: We are also releasing a FREE snow golem morph that can be purchased in the in-game store for the rest of the month. Morphs also work now so enjoy that.
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Day 3 (Dec. 3)
Isn’t it a wonderful sight to see all our players coming together in the month of December as we approach the Avimas Celebration? Today on Day 3, we have a small schedule of future events you may come join in on during the month of December. Here is the list of important events/days that you may want to look out for:
- Day 4:
- ??? - Announcement on the 4th
- Day 7 and Day 17:
- Discord Party - Play your favorite games on Avicus or outside of the server with the staff team and the community. More info to be released on the 5th.
- Day 8:
- Conquest Event. Get a sneak peek of new Conquest Maps as well as testing new concept gamemode ideas for the conquest server. Play through old and new Conquest maps. More info to be released on the 6th
- Day 9, 10, 15
- Contest Map Testing (More Info Soon)
- 9th: 4 pm EST
- 10th: 11 am EST
- 15th: Undecided (All times subject to change. Official announcement will be posted soon)
- Day 20:
- SetNext Event - Play your favorite maps on the server by asking Map Developers! More info to be released on the 15th alongside the map list.
- Day 22:
- Return of the ___________ (More info on the 16th)
- Day 22 to 25
- Super Nebula Event - Play through the history of Avicus and throwback maps for 4 days (Friday through Monday).
With those events out of the way, there is one more important event happening this month that I would like to tell players first hand before the real announcement is made. Here is a sneak preview of the banner (don’t tell the officials that I got it):
And this concludes Day 3. Make sure to log in to witness these events as well as logging in every Sunday to join the Nebula Server! See you guys tomorrow.
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Day 2 (Dec. 2)
With the Christmas Maps being released yesterday, I believe it's that time of year again to spice up the lobby to become festive just like the new festive maps in rotations. You can log in now to witness the new Festive Lobby! Here is an album for those who can't log onto the server,
See you guys tomorrow for Day 3!
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With the Christmas Maps being released yesterday, I believe it's that time of year again to spice up the lobby to become festive just like the new festive maps in rotations. You can log in now to witness the new Festive Lobby! Here is an album for those who can't log onto the server,
See you guys tomorrow for Day 3!
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Day 1 (Dec. 1)
Today I am proud to announce that we have updated our Destroy and Capture rotations with a set of special winter versions of our maps! These new and exciting maps are sure to liven up the winter holidays here at Avicus, and I hope the bring some joy to your heart!
A lot of people have worked extremely hard on planning and developing these wonderful things that I am presenting, so I would like to give a special shoutout to my elves the Assembly Team, the Developers (and Junior Developers), the Map Developers, and last but kind of least, the Officials!
Merry Avimas and Happy Holidays!
See you soon!
Hello everyone,
It is with mixed feelings that I must inform everyone that Avicus will be shutting down on January 25th. On that date, our servers will no longer be accepting connections and the website will no longer allow new content to be posted or updated. Running this network has become increasingly expensive over time, and it is unfortunately no longer economical to continue with this wonderful endeavor which started back in 2011. Along with an increasingly diminishing and inconsistent playerbase, Austin and I have become increasingly busy with college and employment and Avicus is becoming more and more of a burden than a fun hobby. Money flow is at an all time low, and with the impending new year, we have decided that it is time for this chapter of our lives to close.
We have been at the lowest possible server plan for a while now to support our internal infrastructure and downgrading is unfortunately not an option. There is no money to hire developers, pay for any form of advertising, or even to pay for simple server upkeep. We can’t expect anyone to want to develop for something with an overwhelmingly unstable future, or to want to make plans when there is nothing to aim for. We have weighed all the options, and it is with a heavy heart that the shutdown option has been chosen.
Over the past six years, Avicus has evolved from a simple Hunger Games server to a Walls server, and then to a combination of the aforementioned games with one lobby. Over time, Nebula was added and became increasingly popular. Other games, such as Frenzy and SkyWars have come and gone, but Nebula has always remained. We would like to thank everyone who has ever worked as any member of staff over this time and especially would like to thank the administrators and developers who have poured in countless hours to make this server great. We ask that you use this last month to enjoy Avicus, and to not let all of their hard work go to waste just yet. After this server closes, we wish you all a great life and that you would go out and live it and not stay tethered to a video game. That is what the owners and admins are going to do, and we encourage you all to go out a live life to the fullest.
Thanks you all again for everything you have done to make this server and our lives great,
Austin and Keenan
Shutdown FAQ We will update this post as more questions arise.
- Why is Avicus shutting down?
- We decided it’s time to move on. The playerbase has been shrinking for over two years and we can no longer afford to keep Avicus online. A lack of players and money means we can no longer afford to develop Avicus or keep the servers online.
- Why didn’t you sell Avicus to another network?
- We will entertain any serious business inquiries that are sent to info@avicus.net during the process of shutting down.
- Don't offer to run Avicus as your personal hobby, it's too expensive.
- Why not accept donations to keep the server alive?
- We were ran off of donations in the beginning, it wasn’t sustainable. We considered this but it wouldn’t be enough.
- Will any purchases be refunded?
- Unfortunately, no.
- When will the Minecraft servers turn off?
- The Minecraft servers will no longer accept connections on January 25th.
- Will the code become open sourced?
- We have not decided what to do with the source code. Once a decision is reached we will make an announcement.
- Is there an event planned for the last day of Minecraft servers?
- We are most likely going to plan a Throwback event sometime before shutting down the Minecraft servers. We’ll update you when these plans are made.
- What if there is some miraculous growth over the next month and an influx of purchases?
- This is unlikely. If it does happen, however, we may reconsider under extreme circumstances.
- Can I get unbanned since the server is closing?
- No, all bans stand as is.
- What about the discord?
- The discord no longer really serves a purpose. It will likely be removed sometime in February.
Ho Ho Ho
Hello my children. Since I missed Avimas this year, I have decided to open the server back up for a couple of days.
You’re Welcome
Signed,
Your favorite Avi Claus