Hey everyone, Hope you guys been having a great week. This week was quite interesting with minecraft and the hive so today i will mainly be talking about hive’s shocking announcement earlier this week. Meanwhile, Mojang has just dropped their first snapshot of the pale garden and the creaking as experimental.
On October 1st at night for me the hive made a shocking announcement on their state of the server where they talked about the state of their server, Their upcoming region agnostic update, and a progress update on Skyblock horizons. I was expecting some sort of announcement as when i was looking through the backend of their website but all of this especially at the time it was posted really shocked me.
The first thing to highlight from the blog is about season 2 of bedwars here is what they said, “Our minigame team is currently working on Season 2, which will be our first fully themed season. This season will bring new gameplay, items, maps, challenges, and cosmetics. Additionally, Season 2 will launch with a special limited-time game mode that will have you playing BedWars in a completely new way.” I am curious on what they mean in regards to new gameplay but am very excited also one of my friends who is a data miner showed me the npc for this new bedwars LTM so i wonder what this LTM will be.
Next thing i want to mention from the post is the following paragraphs,
“As summer has ended, we’ve started focusing more on smaller updates, allowing us to update many of our games in various ways. You can check all of these out on our updates website. We have more of these planned for the coming months; this also includes new maps. Despite expanding our team, we have a good amount of our creative resources committed to our upcoming MMO/SkyBlock server. As we'd rather use these remaining resources on persistent game updates, we’re not going all-out on our seasonal events for the remainder of this year. We still have our Halloween and Winter themed updates as usual, including existing and brand-new seasonal maps.” This means the hive is taking a different approach with updates similar to what mojang is doing with minecraft instead of waiting months for a major update Hive is now making more smaller updates as we have seen throughout the last few weeks i think this is just for the rest of the year but may be wrong. They also explain they aren’t going “all out” on their seasonal events so dont expect anything exciting from them this year. It’s nothing new the events were small last year so expect it to be similar next year but hive-o-ween will be a more looked forward to event than winterfest where there is nothing exciting to it last year. Hive-o-ween is expected to release within a week or so i can’t confirm this since there is no indication as the new murder mystery map i expected to release yesterday did not happen which might be releasing later today so once that releases will help me get a better picture of its release.
We also got some huge news on Hive’s upcoming region agnostic update here is what they said, “We’re currently in the process of updating core parts of our network to get ready to enable what we call “Region Agnostic”. We’ve mentioned this in the past, but this has been a slow journey as we’re committed to protecting both the stability of our regions as well as providing the correct player experience. Our core goal with Region Agnostic is allowing players to play “on” their own region, whilst being able to queue into games on other regions without a full switch. This logic will be decided per game queue: if we can reasonably matchmake with players exclusively in the same region, this will always be the default outcome. However, we see a vast number of players join relatively empty regions during off-peak hours, try and play a game with low(er) player count, and leave after a few minutes. With Region Agnostic, we’ll find these players a match of the game they want to play, prioritizing the best possible latency. As you’ll be using our enterprise-grade routing, rather than relying on your own Internet Provider, most players will have a better experience using Region Agnostic matchmaking rather than switching regions directly. Player happiness is vital to us as we make this change. We will start out with the least played games, which benefit the most from this change, and are often not PvP games and thus less latency driven. Even if latency does affect the experience, players being able to use Platform Based Matchmaking more often should still provide a net positive in those scenarios. Players will be able to opt-out of Region Agnostic but should expect severely impacted queue times if they choose to do so. We’ll provide in-game messaging as this feature is launched and enabled. Over the years, we’ve added more and more games without removing any non-LTM games. A number of our games are struggling to fill lobbies, especially during off-peak and outside of holiday seasons. For now, we will monitor the impact of Region Agnostic queues as they release and evaluate the health of these games. If despite this these games continue to struggle, we might make the decision to vault them: however, this won't be until 2025 at the earliest.”
This update sounds really exciting however i want to talk about the last paragraph. They admitted of some games struggling to fill lobbies and it will affect the region agnostic update. They say they will monitor the impact and health of the games and if they continue to struggle then they will make the decision of vaulting them and that’s the main subject i wanted to talk about. Right now the games that struggle are ground wars, block drop, gravity, and block party. And ground wars and block drop are the more concerning gamemodes these games have not gotten any updates for years now and now that hive is making these mini updates they can actually focus on updating these gamemodes with a mini update if enough content is added in these mini updates then these gamemodes could get revived and have a less chance of getting vaulted but if fail with the updates then its over for these games.
If they do vault them then they may just at some times release them as LTM’s since block drop and ground wars used to be LTM’s which i probably wont mind but some players will be disappointed if they do vault these but it wont be til 2025 of vaulting them. So this is where hive has one chance to fix this situation.
They also gave a huge update on their new server skyblock horizons here is what they shared, “Our upcoming SkyBlock/MMO server, SkyBlock: Horizons, is our studios biggest undertaking since the initial release of our minigame server back in 2018. This new Featured Server entry, which will be ran almost entirely separately from our minigame network, is built on an updated tech stack. Our minigame server runs on a custom “Minecraft compatible” server platform: for the SkyBlock server, our server internals team has been hard at work on a significantly improved version of this. This has also allowed us to make bigger and more impactful changes, without threatening the stability of our minigame network. Over time, certain improvements, new features and other changes may also make their way back to our minigame network codebase. It’s important for this type of server to feel alive and bring a sense of community and collaboration: both in how the world feels, the interaction with NPCs, mobs and other characters, but also the interaction with other players. We’ve made the decision to host the server exclusively in a North America – East region, which provides a balanced experience for most of the Bedrock multiplayer player base. As this type of server is more PvE rather than PvP, we’re of the opinion that the benefits far outweigh the downsides of this. The world of SkyBlock: Horizons is vast. A huge open world awaits you, containing many unique mobs, resources, towns, settlements, and quest lines. As of writing this post, the main world contains over 140,000 chunks and takes 15 minutes to run from one side to the other - you'll definitely want to use the various modes of travel available to you. With a huge open world, personal islands, skill levels (in addition to a global level), main quest line, side quests, and so much more, Horizons will be a true Minecraft MMO. We've made excellent progress in world- and terrain building, visual and audio design, the new code base, and many other areas of the experience. That said, it’s vital that the launch-day experience is one that feels right, and something that we’re proud of and know that players will have a good experience with. Additionally, some legal, operational and monetization-based steps are still in progress, some of which depend on external parties. With that in mind, we are currently targeting for a full release during the Summer of 2025. Whilst there's a lot we can't share just yet for various reasons, we're excited to showcase a lot more closer to release.
Skyblock horizons is going to be epic with it being more of a PVE style and hearing about its world and various modes of travel and these quests sound awesome i am really excited and can not wait for it to release next year. I was definetly disappointed hearing that its delayed to next year since they explained a couple months ago it was releasing this year but oh well the wait will be worth it. i did find it strange they never posted an update on the skyblock horizons website or send a newsletter i just thought it would had made more sense to do that. These models also look so cool.
That’s all for today folks i hope you have an amazing weekend and stay tuned for hive’s upcoming murder mystery update which hopefully releases today so stay tuned for more next week.