New Ranks, new Staff, End Frontier, Survival updates, and much more!

With the New Year behind us and the cold air of January all around us (well some of us at least, some people have a lovely warm January, but that's not important, I'm not jealous...), I wanted to give a roundup of what's happened recently here on New Eden and what we're releasing this month.

Before we get into changes though, I want to say a special thank you to those who have recently become Monthly Donors or bought one-time purchase Perks through our Online Store.  Donating to New Eden through the store helps us to invest in better servers and deliver an even better experience, if you want to help our head over to store.neweden.co.

Special shout-out to @MyHxney who is our top Donor this month, wooh!

New Ranks and changes to existing Ranks

Recently we made a bunch of changes to ranks.  The two main changes you'll notice are the addition of some new ranks and it now takes less time to rank up to some ranks, here's a summary:

• Member can now be achieved with 6 hours of play time but registration on the website is still required
• Member+ can now be achieved with 48 hours of play time
• Experienced is a new rank after Member+ which can be achieved with 72 hours of play time
• Trusted is a new rank after Experienced which can be achieved with 150 hours of play time
• Senior has been changed slightly to have a minimum play time of 350 hours but a nomination is still required, and also has a slightly different prefix in-game
• Senior+ is a new rank after Senior which can be achieved with 700 hours of play time
• Elder now has more defined requirements: former Staff who left on good terms now get Elder, current Staff are the equivalent of Elder in terms of the perks they get, and anyone who isn't staff but has contributed greatly to New Eden (but chances are they would already be or have been Staff).

The Perks that each rank get's have also changed, but here's some highlights that have been previously requested:

• The higher your rank the more Land Claims you can own in Survival
• The higher your rank the more Plots you can claim in Creative
• Soon it'll be possible to gain more credits per vote for Perks the higher your rank is
• Other new Perks that were previously only available in the Store or Perks

Other changes include Architect and Mayor now becoming sub-ranks.  For now those who have Architect or Mayor will still have it as their main ran, however this will be updated in the future.  As a sub-rank Architect shows with a pink @ symbol and Mayor shows as a light green #, if you have any suggestions for better symbols feel free to let us know.

You can find out much more about the new ranks and what each rank gets on the Community Ranks Guide Page.

There have also been some minor changes to Staff Rank permissions, All Staff now no longer get Moderator specific permissions by default.  This is to allow us to make it easier to expand the staff with more diverse roles, for example a member of the Development Team will no longer automatically have all the Moderator permissions that someone in the Community Team might.  However that doesn't mean that Staff who aren't Moderators can't have Moderator Permissions, but this will be decided on a case by case basis, and has already been given to current members of the Development Team.

We're excited to welcome some new Staff Members

Recently both Sayu and Armadyl have joined the Staff, both in the Development Team.

Armadyl has joined us as a (Software) Developer and will be helping to develop new features for New Eden services.  Sayu has joined us in a new role created called Strategic Development Manager, the Strategic Development Manager is responsible for long term planning of some large projects, along with research in various areas, and expanding the Development Team into new areas.

We're very excited to have both of them on-board and expect it to increase the speed at which we can deliver new features to our services.

We're taking the Frontier all the way to the End!

Very literally actually, because there is now a Frontier World generated as The End, specifically the islands where you can find End Dungeons, Boats, Chorus, and whatever else is there.

Like all Frontier Worlds (the regular and the Nether) it resets on the 1st of every month at 3am server time (currently Central European Time), so don't keep anything valuable there but feel free to mine it for all its resources!

So have fun mining away, avoiding Ender Man and trying not to fall into the void!  To get there when on the Survival Realm type /warp frontier_the_end, and to find out more about Frontier Worlds check out the Resource Worlds Guide Page.

Bug Fixes and Changes to Survival

There's a few new bug fixes and changes to the Survival Realm which were very recently implemented:

• TNT now works inside Land Claims, for more information see the "Things to Keep In Mind" section of the Getting Started with Land Claims Guide Page.
• The /rtp command is now less evil and shouldn't try to kill people in lava or walls, refactored quite a bit of the code behind that command, as a result it should work properly in the Nether and no longer has an unhealthy obsession with ice!

Other General Bug Fixes and Changes

We've also made a bunch of other fixes and small changes recently:

• Play Timer is now synced between all servers, so now your quest to your next rank-up should happen a little quicker, yay!
• Discord is no longer spammy by default, yay! The default notification settings have been changed from "All Messages! to "Only @ mentions", you can change this back to All Messages in your Notification Settings if you like.
• We hit over 100 people in the Discord server!  Wow that's a lot of people, but it does mean that Discord no longer shows offline players on the Player List, sorry nothing we can do, well we could kick people, but we're not going to do that... well not yet anyway XP
• /help and /info are now more helpful!  They now list some basic commands as well as linking off to the Guides.
• The darkness has finally lifted over Creative and it shall forever be day!  More specifically it's now always 12 noon in the Creative Server (Plots and Build Off Worlds)

If that wasn't even here's a few more less noticeable tweaks and changes:

• We're now much better at detecting if a server happens to crash, yay for service monitoring!
• The TAB List Header and Footer are now no longer drunk and are now properly centred #soberSausage
• /colours, /colors, /colour, /color now show additional formatting codes
• The MOTD in the Server List got updated again
• Renamed the Discord Channel "#mc-petitions-suggestions" to "mc-help-suggestions"
• There's now over 11,000 choices in the Head Database, use /hdb to access it