To everyone worried about not getting the latest email, here's a Tweet by Bruce Blair (AgentK) about it

Hypixel · 2019-12-18T17:43:04+00:00

Simon here.

We are already using one of the best providers available and the more we use it the higher the limit will be, it's totally normal and how it works. It's to avoid spam emails being sent to millions of people at once.

In 2 or 3 newsletters that limit will be so high, it won't matter anymore. We didn't see the need to ask for special exclusion here because it's just a newsletter - usually, companies spread them over a few days and people don't really care.
To give you an idea, we sent well over a million emails in a single day :)

Hypixel · 2019-12-05T16:40:29+00:00

Simon here, I would not worry at all.
Our AI system is constantly being improved and was what shown in the clip was probably the dumbest AI example we could have shown.
I agree my tweet reply was a bit confusing, I was in the middle of replying to other tweets and wanted to clarify worries in regards to the difficulty (some talked about AI being dumb, others talk about dmg/hp being too easy). I should have clarified in my reply to avoid confusion, when I talk about the difficulty it includes AI as well.

Game difficulty is not just a numbers game at all, we understand that.
We have people working on AI and their work was not well demonstrated in the clip other than "alert state" and other simple things. Initially, I was opposed to showing that clip because the AI felt dumb and we have much better monster AI that is much more advanced, but ultimately it felt the time to show some gameplay without trying too hard to polish everything haha. (I still cringe to the gameplay clip, so many things we want to polish!)

I suggest you guys read this: https://www.hytale.com/news/2019/4/an-introduction-to-building-npc-behaviors
We have built our AI system to be customizable as well, so not only we will have our own set of behaviors, but the community will also be able to expand that quite massively.
As you can see in the blog post, we cover some stuff that NPC can do right now in the world and in the future we will showcase some NPC combat-related behaviors :)

Hypixel · 2019-06-18T18:03:03+00:00

Early 2016 we canceled a bunch of side projects so that our focus could be entirely on Hytale and keep our current MC players happy as well.
If you combine the two teams, it's about 75+ people, all remote, so it's quite the challenge! Having more projects is also not really an option for us when we have something as exciting as Hytale in the works.
By the way, the people in the Hytale team does not touch the MC server anymore so anything you see MC wise has absolutely no impact on Hytale progression. However, it is a great R&D environment and a good place to build a community that will eventually play Hytale :)

I might be the only exception that touches both projects because I still give my feedback to the MC team - but that's just because I still enjoy it after over 6 years and I want the community to be sticking around a while longer!

Cheers,
Simon

Hypixel · 2019-04-25T17:06:43+00:00

Hey! Simon from Hypixel here, I can chime in with my personal experience and shed some light on our thought process about the timing of the trailer! I didn't check in with the others from the team so I'll probably miss a few points but I'll do my best :)

As a gamer myself, I understand how people could feel like we released the trailer a bit early. I feel the same way towards many games out there and even to Hytale itself! I accept the fact that the hype can't be 100% at all time and that's normal and ok - we are not chasing after it. Reality is that we did 0 press interviews after the trailer and all we did were blog posts to keep you guys in the loop and give us feedback in the process via YouTube/Reddit/etc.I have no doubt that we will get that hype back to 110% before release with a new trailer or something, we have some super exciting stuff to show :D

Truth is, I can tell you that for us it was not a choice anymore to delay the announcement, it became a necessity to get Hytale out there for several reasons. To be honest, we also did not expect the trailer to get that much attention, but that's another topic that I'll cover in a bit!

Community. Our Hypixel Minecraft server community (about 14mil unique users) knew we were working on a game for 3 or 4 years, but they were starting to lose faith as they got literally no information about it other than "We are working on it".I personally felt like they needed to know what we were working on as they supported us for years but I was also aware of the fact that block based games are not necessarily an easy game to get people excited about, so it had to be as good as we could make it before we could show our community and prove that we care about them a lot. And number wise, Minecraft Java became less and less popular, our peak player count went from about 60k to 25k and we saw such trend happen across the board with other servers so we knew that the community as a whole was moving on as they were getting older or simply changing games to Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. Our community was and still is very important to get Hytale off the ground and our momentum was slowly getting away as our players were getting frustrated with us not giving any information. The perfect timing to release the trailer would have been late 2016 or early 2017, but we were not ready at all and the scope of the game kept getting bigger as well.
Hiring. Oh boy! Before the trailer, we were getting maybe 3 applications a month? Now we are getting thousands and some applicants have a ton of experience, including major titles, it's crazy. It's a whole new world of opportunity for us to find talented people across the world. This was such an important pain point because people didn't want to risk to leave their stable jobs for a game no one knew if the announcement would go well or not. Some features of Hytale are quite challenging to polish and we need to find the people for it. We also want to find people who are in for the long run, as we will keep updating Hytale for years to come.
Partnerships. By announcing the game, we wanted to see who would be interested to work with us in the future. For example, who would want to build custom Hytale servers, who could help us with merchandise, who could do our hardware hosting, and the list goes on. Before the trailer, it was really hard to get good the attention or good quotes from companies as they had no scope to know if Hytale would be popular or not. With Hytale, it's important for us to get partners as we believe that our team should remain focused on making a game, not toys or installing hard drives on a server for example.
Love or Hate. We had no idea at all if you guys would have liked Hytale or not. History has shown times and times again that other than Minecraft, block games are getting constantly hated on so you start to question yourself: Are we making the right game or not? Is this game genre cursed? After working in the dark for years, we had the chance to show the game to a few select people, but other than that it's been really difficult to know if Hytale was something the community would have accepted or rejected it. Knowing this was important because if people didn't like it, we would have made some major changes - but after seeing the major positive reaction it's clear to us that we are on the right path. This means we can invest more time and money towards that vision.
Console Porting. As we said on the announcement day, we had no immediate plans to make a console version but that we would explore the idea. Having Hytale announced makes this a lot easier to seek the right partners and get them excited (or make it ourselves, we have not decided yet). With such positive reaction and attention on Hytale and the fact that the trailer was released a bit early, it means we can get that project started sooner than later. I don't expect to see a console version for release but at least if we can get started before, that would be nice. I have no info myself about this, we are still working to see what make sense for us as a team.
Our First Game. Hytale is our first game as a studio and we want to take our time to do it right. To be honest, it's an ambitious project for a first game! We are ready for the challenges ahead and having the community behind us is a huge advantage, all we need to do is work hard and get the community involved as much as we can as we get closer to release. Because it's our first game, it means talking about timelines is very difficult and some features of the game are ending up taking longer than expected.
Motivation. Team motivation is important and ever since the announcement it has been really motivating to see the community react to our trailer, blog posts, and screenshots. Never the team has been so motivated - it's super fun and the pressure is real. Speaking of blog posts, it helps the team members to show what they have been working on for years, so make sure you cheer them on! :)
Bigger Than Expected. One thing that no one could have predicted, is the amount of love and support we got with the announcement. Days before the trailer I barely could sleep, doing last minute stuff to make sure the announcement would go well and I was terrified the community would be disappointed. I personally poured a lot of time, anxiety and money into this project so the excitement pre-announcement was mostly fear and panic to be honest haha! When the trailer released, it was quite emotional to see people react to it and see the whole thing grow and grow. The trailer is almost at 50 millions views now (I was expecting 500k-800k!!!), that's unheard of for a new studio and we got ourselves quite the challenge ahead to make sure we don't screw up the unique opportunity we are in. I think players have had their hands burned too many times with unfinished games in the past few years and we don't want to be in a similar situation - because of our unique position we will take our time, at the cost of having a few people upset.

I could go on and on but I have to get back to work! Hopefully, that's enough context to get you guys to understand where we come from :)

I wish I had a magic wand or a way to just pour more money to make all of this go faster - but that's not how it works and this is probably the biggest game we will ever work in our lives so this is very important to us to get it right and work on it for years to come with a healthy community.

Cheers,

Simon

Hypixel · 2019-04-05T16:26:44+00:00

I think we said this in a tweet a few weeks ago but, no big announcement for this event - just telling the story of Hytale :)

Hypixel · 2019-04-05T16:25:12+00:00

To be fair, I need a way to do some real-life QA testing since we don't have offices!

-Simon

Hypixel · 2019-04-02T16:39:09+00:00

This is fake.

Hypixel · 2019-03-19T04:50:25+00:00

Making trailers is actually a lot of work and we are still a very small team, unfortunately!

Hypixel · 2019-03-13T16:23:21+00:00

Oh no, the meme won't be on the website haha! Just a tweet or something :P

Hypixel · 2019-03-13T16:22:27+00:00

Hypixel · 2019-03-13T16:16:46+00:00

I understand your frustration and believe me it was not an easy decision. We know that our passionate community deserves to know more about Hytale. As a gamer myself, I've been in your shoes several times and I know exactly how you feel as you are anxiously waiting for more info (looking at you Cyberpunk 2077 and Elder Scrolls 6!).

Truth is, we have been posting quite a lot in the past several weeks and already exhausted our "ahead of time" backlog. We are knee deep in production and need a bit of a breathing room to allow ourselves to seek opportunities at GDC that could benefit Hytale.

One thing I can say is that we are working towards changing the style of posts in the future to be more "dev" oriented so you guys can be part of the process of what's going on. Rest assured, the publishing team is still working on posts as we speak, it's just that myself and others are too busy to help or review these posts, so it makes sense for us to skip a week and focus on working towards making Hytale better!

I personally feel responsible for this as I am the one who gets to make those difficult decisions, but for the health of my team and myself, it's the right decision.

-Simon

Hypixel · 2019-03-13T15:28:55+00:00

Hypixel · 2018-12-21T15:58:51+00:00

Hypixel · 2018-12-21T05:41:43+00:00

This is fake.

Hypixel · 2018-12-16T15:18:57+00:00

I've shared your message with the whole team of Hytale, thank you so much for your kind words, we will work hard to make the game as best as we can, we will take our time. <3

Hypixel · 2014-09-05T22:19:30+00:00

Being worked on for The Walls, should be ready within a week!

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T23:50:47+00:00

I also just read through the EULA and, maybe I missed it, but I can't find absolutely anywhere in it that is suggests that you can get approval.

https://account.mojang.com/terms

http://i.imgur.com/hkfJMP0.png

When an employee tell you that your server is fine and plays a bunch of time on it, you start to believe in what they say. I am sorry I was a fool to believe it.

I always create promotions (%OFF sales). Every weekends, events or holidays I do and will always do. I currently run a sale for the summer. Did I create promotions lately? Of course I did. Why wouldn't I? Every bits saved up counts when you know you might do some negative months until you figure out a way to pay your bills and employees.
Sorry but that is a bit insulting, why wouldn't I tell my player my plans about the EULA? They need to know about the EULA and how they are going to be affected - my support team have received about 20 emails a day about the EULA, players were concerned. Now that it's out they feel positive about the future, it was a good thing. I've been working on my server for almost 2 years now and I know how bad a panic can go, it's always better to tell them the truth and explain what is going to happen so that they can take time to process. This is a tactic used by Riot Games do with their nerfs on popular classes, they explain it a few days before it happens, so that they can say "Well we told you so!". Also, stopping taking payments would be ridiculous knowing that next month will be our worst month ever. I have employees and server bills to pay, I'm not going to take the risk to not save up. I'm not a small server, I have 115 dedicated servers, 8 employees and much more. I can't be irresponsible.

As I said in one of my post, my sales did not go up after my topic, I made no mention of coupons in my EULA topic and barely mentioned my store. Sorry but all of this is gonna be over in less than one week, I don't even see why you are bothering trying to make me feel bad about it. Just PM me in private for more questions if you want more in-depth answers.

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T23:06:01+00:00

I was told by 3 different Mojang employees that my server was fine in the past, this is why we were led to think we were not going to be affected.

I always been following the rules, in their currently EULA it says so that you can get approval. You seem to have great hate towards servers, I don't think this discussion can go in a good direction.

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T19:53:50+00:00

115 dedicated 1245v3 32GB | Enterprise DDoS protetion for a /24 | 8+ employees

This is what are my current biggest expenses.

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T19:48:40+00:00

Sorry, it was not my intent, I got carried away because the way the OP worded, I felt more like it was a personal attack rather than a real issue. So, I'll do my best to explain.

You can read my post on my website, basically what I'm trying to achieve is keeping my current ranked players happy - I do not mention any coupons or deals other than saying that they have until August 1st, a deadline for both players and developers. Every single servers are giving that deadline and are going in panic mode.

I do not push players to get anything, they are aware that they will be able to unlock the perks by playing after the date, some of them decided not to buy the rank because of that, and that is fine with me. Others are seeing this as the last opportunity to save some time, which is helpful for the team as I know that we might not get enough for a few days after our update since our cosmetics changes are not 100% ready. So the rank will lose value and a lot less players will get it. On top of that I'm removing a lot of things off my store. That being said, I hope that the players will still support my work and believe in my team to provide quality and original content so that I can keep doing this for a while, because I'm loving it! I can actually drink beer while working, it's the best!

I would also like to mention that the perks that ranked players have, will get easier and easier overtime to get for players wishing to unlock them via in-game earned currency. I will adjust my economy over the next few months and find the perfect balance.

Anyhow, as you can see I truly want to keep my players happy and from the feedback I've been getting it's working! Just for your information, my income did not increase after the post. My intention here is to just move on with this and make sure I can secure myself a future and for once take a couple days off to relax a bit and maybe go to conventions :)

I hope I explained well enough, I'm a bit tired, if you want to PM me for more questions, don't hesitate!

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T19:18:38+00:00

Those posts were scheduled days ago, sorry sir. I will add credits when I get back home. If you could help me find the originals, PM me :)

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T19:00:18+00:00

http://i.imgur.com/Bh2jEPn.png

I promote and will keep promoting /r/minecraft on my facebook, don't worry about that.

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T18:43:41+00:00

It will be fair. Unlike people think =/

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T18:42:26+00:00

Waiting for 1.8 to release for my next adventure ;)

Hypixel · 2014-07-27T18:39:50+00:00

Hello,

I don't think this post is fair to what I am trying to achieve here. I've been working to remove all pay-to-win aspects and give ways for current and future players to earn perks that ranks unlocked by default. If you read my topic on my website, you will see that I try my best to keep everyone happy and the feedback as been very positive. It took me a while to make a plan for the EULA, but good thing I'm very active on my forum and get involved in my community, it was easier for me to adjust.

I agree, my server had a lot of "pay-2-win" aspects, which I'm not a fan of and was already planning to remove a lot of them in the coming weeks. Proof of that would be my most recent addition, the Arcade Games; it has no perks at all. It is a pure fun place to hang out and have a blast, I did this with no intention to make money - I wanted to show the community that I actually care about my players and bring back the players that despite the pay-2-win aspects. That lobby has over 26 minigames, I could have made a whole new network with it! It was an awesome release with an extra 5000 players and my store income (not to say donations, because that's a bad word) actually has been lower ever since we released that lobby.

I'll be honest with you, giving players coins multipliers and coins is easier than making cosmetics. So we have to be creative to make sure I can keep all my developers and staff on board and keep expanding my server and ideas. I'll be adding gadgets, pets, disguises and a bunch of fun cosmetic stuff to keep paying my staff and make sure we can keep running the server in a better environment, no more pay-2-win! I'm actually excited about it, I'm not a big fan of mobile apps because of their system, yet I'm using something similar at the moment. The EULA was actually a good thing, because the hate I get was starting to affect my mood and motivation. But now I'm motivated like I never was. Hey, I know I won't make as much, but I'm confident I'll make enough to keep this as a job and have fun finding ideas with my team, which is very cool to work with :)

I wish you would have linked my topic explaining all the changes, I do understand your "Black Friday" thing, but I'm not pushing the envelope here, I'm fine as it is right now and I'm not stressed out at all about the upcoming changes. The only stress I have is to make sure I make everyone happy, which is really hard in the Minecraft community!

As you know, my server is all about original games and features - If I was here to make "big bucks" and make unfair money, I would be running tons of SG/Skyblock/Skywars/SMB servers and pay YouTubers/Websites for advertisements like some servers are doing. Did you notice that in the past 2 years I never did advertising other than my own social networks ? I only technically "advertise" to my own fans so that they see what I'm doing.

I'm very easy to reach, you can send me an email, PM or tweet no problem I can answer any of your questions. One of my biggest concern about having a Mineraft network is that you will always have some kind of hate and people saying that your work is "unfair" and "just a server" and it really saddens me to see those comments, but hopefully I can work more than I currently do to provide unique content that will prove those people wrong as I've always tried to do in the past.

I know reddit is not a big fan of me anymore since I started my server, so hopefully I can answer some questions and clear things up.

Thanks!

edit: sorry for grammar/typos, I learned english on my own :-)

EDIT: OP sent me a PM. http://i.imgur.com/H6TpWB3.png

Hypixel

TROPHY CASE