Cosmic is Shit

Cosmic is shit. It worries me that the largest factions server in Minecraft is as sketchy as Cosmic is. The admins have very little respect for their players. Since no other factions server is quite the same as Cosmic, they can afford to carry out awful updates and not suffer huge losses, as players have nowhere else to go to experience the same gameplay. I hope to focus on their anti-cheat and appeal system, as that’s where I feel most of the shadiness exists.
	The gameplay is alright. Bosses, outposts, a vast collection of custom enchantments, and more create a unique, far-from-vanilla experience. There is the downside, however, that you can gain an extreme disadvantage if you’re willing to spend large quantities of money on the server. The EULA promised, or at least hoped to rid Minecraft of “pay to win” servers. Cosmic complied, but by using loopholes to keep essentially the exact same system. You can pay for ranks and gkits, just as you could before. Admins like to preach that you can still gain gkits and ranks through grinding and playing a lot. This is true, but until then, your experience is much less enjoyable. As a new player, you can’t use items with many enchants, for example. This doesn’t help you in your quest to gain a rank, and many often rely on players that have ranks to get them for them. Overall, new players struggle, and Cosmic has a lot of reminders for these players that buying a rank is much easier than grinding for one. Their pay-to-win style is obnoxious, but not uncommon. Many PvP servers are similar in that players gain an incredible advantage by spending money, but Cosmic is slightly more pay-to-win than other servers are.
	Cosmic, not too long ago, released an anti-cheat. Hackers and cheaters are a plague that haunts every Minecraft server, but are a massive problem on factions server especially. This is because when you hack to kill someone, you can store the gear that you collect somewhere, and access it after one account is banned by logging into an account that isn’t banned. This is much different from minigames servers, where banned players cannot get their progress back and are forced to start fresh if they choose to start on an alt. Cosmic made positive changes to fix this; They IP ban players that come on alternate accounts to continue breaking rules after already being banned for doing so, and they don’t allow users to use VPNs, so they have a harder time avoiding these IP bans. However, they screwed up massively upon the release of the Cosmic anti-cheat, or C-AC, as they call it. The system automatically banned players that it believed were cheating. However, there was immediately an uproar in the community, as players were being banned falsely. The problem never seemed to be resolved. Tweaks were made, but players still found themselves permanently banned, and when they submitted appeals, it was common for them to be denied, with an admin claiming there were logs to support each ban. A while after, unbans became available on the server store for fifty dollars. That’s right - players could buy their way out of a ban for fifty dollars. This, obviously, appealed to the players that truly enjoyed the server and were falsely banned by the C-AC. Smart. It gets sketchier. I, personally, was an advocate for the anti-cheat. I found it unbelievable that a server the size of Cosmic would allow such a system to run if it falsely banned as many people as it did. However, when they released a second anti-cheat, one that’s so unreliable that it doesn’t permanently ban hackers, it got worse. I’ve never been able to get into Cosmic, but I found the KitPVP server somewhat enjoyable. I was a staff member on Treasure Wars (sort of a sister server to Cosmic) and was messing around on their new KitPVP server with some other staff members from Treasure Wars. Like I always do, I was recording my screen. I hopped into a duel with a friend, and after going in for a couple hits, he froze on my screen. I recall that in Discord, he still saw me moving, although I could not see him moving. I hit his frozen player, and eventually timed out. After logging back in, I was kicked out and banned. I was confident, though. I had solid evidence to back up my ban. I submitted an appeal on their forums, naturally, and expected an unban soon. After submitting the appeal, I clicked on their Server Announcements forum and saw a very recent thread stating that there was a glitch with the new anti-cheat (Shiva) that caused players to freeze and get banned, exactly like what happened to me. This made me happy, since whoever reviewed my appeal would surely see my video and understand that I was merely a victim of this bug. After over two weeks of waiting, however, my appeal was denied with no reason or response, and I found myself unable to submit a new one.
	This is the problem with Cosmic. They have anti-cheats that ban innocent players, and they profit off of it. A fair amount of these falsely banned players purchase unbans because they like the server and are desperate to return. Cosmic makes fifty dollars every time a player completes that transaction. It’s very shady, and I’m surprised people aren’t more enraged by the idea of Minecraft server owners and admins blatantly stealing and scamming their players.