this post is going to get a tiny bit personal, so if you’re not in the mood to be a little upset probably best to not read it, though it’s about the community drama right now.
When me and my friends started working on the United SMP, the QSMP had not been announced at all and Quackity had kept things very close to his chest with what he was working on. We were all probably thinking the same general thing, we need another Minecraft server to play on.
The idea was just to have a server to be able to just hop on Minecraft and play survival Minecraft again, and after squidgame we all agreed that it would be awesome to have it be creators from around the world. So I instantly started working on the translation mod, and was really excited to storyboard ideas for the SMP! Calling with lots of creators about it, expressing excitement and brainstorming and really getting excited to play Minecraft again.
After the QSMP was announced I was surprised and reached out to quackity expressing support for the project and letting him know I was working on something to bring creators from around the world together too, and that we should chat about it! His SMP announcement didn’t mention any translation stuff, and was English and Spanish based so I still was thinking that conceptually they were different enough to co-exist, and even was hoping to share the mod with Quackity if he was interested in using it. Quackity didn’t reply to me at the time, and obviously I assumed it was due to being overwhelmed and busy with the QSMP and all the messages he was probably getting. I reached out to multiple members of the QSMP that I’m close with after quackity didn’t reply to me, and got varying reassurance from them that the QSMP was a passion project to bring Quackity’s two biggest communities of English and Spanish together, and that the servers were completely different with hardly any creator overlap or idea overlap based on what I was planning. Those creators even all expressed strong interest in playing on both, and excitement about all the communities coming together, and this new ERA of SMPS. I expressed my interest in sharing the mod with Quackity to them, and how I would be giving it to the public for free, and asked for advice on how I should approach him about it without him feeling like I was trying to butt my way into his project or something.
after talking with them though, it really encouraged me to continue working on the idea, with the idea that it wouldn’t really be a me thing, that there would be 6 other owners and it could be a big community project, with an open source translation mod to bridge the community together. On my original owners list, Quackity was actually the idea for the “owner” from the Spanish community, as this was before I knew anything about the QSMP, and I wanted every language to have a figure to make decisions so it wasn’t just one guy making decisions. I figured at this point he probably wouldn’t be interested though, and thought that was fair enough obviously with his new SMP.
Then I uploaded my translation mod video, which was planned as an April Fools joke, and posted a simple little promotional photo graphic. The next day Quackity announced a translation mod for the QSMP, with the same functionality, and obviously with the same general idea of bridging that language gap even more by literally live translating! I can’t pretend that I wasn’t a little bit taken aback, and even slightly disappointed as I knew this would probably lead to drama. But at the same time I was also super excited and hopeful for the future of Minecraft content, I was excited to share ideas, potentially share development to make things even easier and better for the community, and just have a cool thing to talk about with Quackity that we both worked on and were clearly passionate about. Ideas and work like that are really hard to put together and take time, passion, and dedication.