What is your Minecraft Username?
ThePixelbrain

What is your Discord name, including numbers (e.g. john01dav#6953)?
ThePixelbrain#7269

What is your current rank?
Member

What rank are you applying for?
Moderator

What is your time zone?
I am from Germany, so my time zone is Central European Time (CET). (UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer)

How long have you been playing on Modded Minecraft Club?
I have joined MMCC on the 23rd of September 2020, which means that on the day of writing this application, I have my first anniversary. (I did not intend that, I just found that out myself. 😃)
I played Enigmatica 2 Expert until the end of October 2020, and I have recently started playing Omnifactory. I have played Omnifactory together with a friend before that on my private server. He quit and I decided to restart on MMCC because playing alone is not as much fun. Because I just restarted, I will be actively playing this pack for the foreseeable future.
I have been active on the discord for the last year, also in the time when I have not been playing. I regularly checked new posts (except the #gerneral-channel) and answered upcoming questions.

How often and at what times (In US-EST) can you be on each day (please be detailed)?
I am usually online between 11:00 am EST and 5:00 pm EST on weekdays and 5:00 am EST to 6:00 pm EST on weekends.
This might vary from day to day, because I am still studying at university, so I do not have a set schedule that works out every week. I would consider this my “core hours”, as I am usually online around those times, but there will most likely be days when I am playing at different times.

How long have you been playing Minecraft in-general?
I created my first Minecraft account at the end of 2012. I have actively played it since then, except for 1-2 years. It is crazy to think that it has almost been a decade now.

How long have you played Modded Minecraft?
I started playing Modded Minecraft in May 2013 because of a famous German YouTuber project back in the day. They played FTB Lite and I instantly fell in love with it. I have mostly played Modded Minecraft since then. I played loads of different modpacks, however, I spent most of my time on 1.7 and 1.12 packs.
I don’t want to know how much time I spent on Modded Minecraft in total, and luckily, there is no way of finding out. MultiMC added a feature in recent updates to show your total playtime across all instances. My total playtime sums up to 4172 hours and that’s only MultiMC and only instances that I still have installed. I know, I was shocked as well.

In what ways have you already helped the server?
I have helped the server by being an active community member. When someone had an issue, I tried to help them.
I also gave feedback in the #feedback channel to improve the server further.

In what ways do you plan to help the server after you become a staff member and how will holding your requested rank help you do that?
I want to be able to help the community more, which I can achieve by becoming a moderator. As moderators have access to most discord permissions and all in-game permissions, they can help in ways non-staff members cannot. Giving players refunds due to griefing, bugs, or other things, finding lag issues and solving them, removing trolls from the community, or processing member applications are typical tasks of a moderator.
I am always open to new challenges and tasks, but these are the typical tasks of moderators I am aware of.

Why do you want to become a moderator?
I got into situations where I wanted to help another player and knew how I could, but I was not able to do so because of not having the required permissions. It was rather frustrating, so I decided it is the right time to write an application.

Why do you play on Modded Minecraft Club rather than other servers?
I enjoy the mature and relaxed community and staff. The server has done many things right that other servers fail to do. There are three main things I would like to point out.
I like the public moderator guidelines in the wiki. It sets a clear standard on how this community is run and what to expect. I especially like the second guideline “Staff members should not issue punishments in any scenario, but instead should take actions to protect MMCC's community”. I have played on servers that do the exact opposite. Moderators competed about who has banned the most players and recklessly banned long-time players who did small mistakes that were clearly made by accident.
I strongly support the decision of having most servers running on pure Forge and not use anything like Bukkit or Sponge. I have played on a server that has countless bugs due to running on Sponge, which ruined the fun for me. (This was by the way the reason I searched for a new server and found MMCC.)
Giving players no in-game benefits for donations is something I strongly support. Too many servers out there are trying to make a profit from their Minecraft server. It lowers the playing experience and is probably one of the reasons public servers are played so little.

In what ways would you improve the server if you owned it?
I would implement a ticket system on the discord server, so people do not need to create a forum account. I would also try to make world downloads available sooner, as not knowing if or when a world download is released could cause frustration and restrain players from playing on MMCC.
Oh: And a capybara bot that posts cute images of capybaras in the #capybara channel, because who doesn’t love them?

Have you ever been a staff member before (on a different server)?
I have been a staff member on two public Modded Minecraft servers.
I was a moderator on MyFTB in 2016 and 2017. Back in the day, MyFTB was the largest German-speaking Modded Minecraft server, with up to 400 players online simultaneously. Their interpretation of a moderator rank seems to be quite like the one on MMCC (full in-game permissions).
I am currently a low-level staff on Bedcraft. I am a helper, so I only have very limited permissions, as I haven’t been on this team for a long time.
Furthermore, I have run private servers for my friends, so I know how to work with Minecraft servers and Linux.

If so, are you still a staff member? If not, why not? Please be detailed:
I am still a member of the Bedcraft team. I played FTB Ultimate 1.4.7 on their server (You are not the only one still enjoying this pack, Kasta. 😃) and am currently inactive. This will not conflict with becoming staff on MMCC. The owner is aware of my application and is completely fine with it.
I have left the MyFTB team myself due to a lack of motivation of playing the modpack. The staff team does not allow inactive staff members and asks for activity on the Minecraft server.

Have you ever been banned? If so, please explain why in a detailed manner:
I don’t like going into this, but I will not lie in my application: Yes, I have been banned once.
I was banned on MyFTB in 2017 after my time as a staff member due to duping World Anchors. They are limited to donators and one anchor per player. However, they tweaked World Anchors to not have offline chunk loading, making them act the same as Personal Anchors. (They can achieve this due to giving every player their own dimension and unloading it once the last resident leaves.) As we were multiple players in the same base, we did not want to put down Personal Anchors for each person. Automatic refilling was disabled, so we decided it was too tedious to refill that many Personal Anchors. I then decided to dupe World Anchors to use them instead, because I saw no reason why they should be limited to one Anchor only. The fact that they are, has historical reasons because they were added as donator items way back in 2014 when they worked as offline chunk loaders. I expected this to go unnoticed and that no one would care. I was wrong and banned shortly after that rightfully for duping. I wrote an appeal one year later (I didn’t play MC in that year) and it got accepted.
I was 16 years old when the incident happened, and I would not do this again. While I did not harm any other player's experience and still think this limitation does not make sense, it was wrong to flout the rules. There were better alternatives, like proposing a rule change.

Why should we choose you over other applicants or maintaining our present size?
If you choose me as a future staff member, you will bring someone into the team that is willing to help other players. I am currently studying computer science in my fifth semester at university, so I know Java and Linux. I’m willing to help to improve this community further and have ambitions of becoming a developer and an admin in the future.

Please rate your English skills from 1-10, 1 being no English and 10 being a native speaker with perfect grammar:
I am from Germany, so English is my second language. I successfully completed an English for General Purposes course at C1 level at my university. This is the second-highest level, the highest level being C2.
It probably results in a 7-8 on the scale.

Do you speak any other languages? If so list them and rate them 1-10:
German – 10 (native speaker)

What advice can you give to deal with people who have trouble acting maturely?
You should keep calm and give them clear instructions on how to behave in this community. Taking further actions depends on how frequent and how bad their behavior is. If they are disturbing the community and are unwilling or incapable of following the rules, they may be muted or in extreme cases banned. If you are uncertain about how to evaluate the situation, you might ask another staff member for their opinion.
However, it is always important to follow the principle of “Don’t feed the trolls”. If someone is clearly trying to challenge a staff member (especially when the person just joined MMCC for the first time), they should be removed from the community without giving them much attention.

What would you do as a moderator or admin if a new player joins and spams the chat with suggestions to make the server better?
I was confused by this question, as I am uncertain if I understood it correctly. The fact that the player is spamming implies, that he is not giving any constructive feedback and is just bragging about negative aspects of the server.
I would inform the player that he can make constructive feedback in the #feedback channel on the Discord server. If he is not interested in helping and just trying to disturb, I would mute or in extreme cases ban them. The procedure would be quite like the one explained in the previous question.

What would you do as a moderator or admin if a player was griefed but they did not claim their build?
As the rules claim, a player who has not claimed their stuff is not entitled to a refund. However, staff members may provide refunds, even if players are not entitled to them. I would make a case-by-case decision and usually offer the player a refund, especially if it is a new player.
I would also try to find out who griefed the player and punish them to protect MMCC's community from further griefing.

Would you respond differently if they claimed their build? If so, how?
Yes, because players who claimed their build are entitled to a refund according to the rules. I would always give them a refund.

What would you do if a player joins the server for the first time and suddenly brags in chat about having many more items than they should have at that point in the game?
I would inspect their base while being invisible (vanish and/or spectator mode) and see if they do anything illegitimate. I would not confront them directly, because I could potentially warn them about my suspicion.
If I do not find anything illegitimate but am certain that the player has done something, I would ask another staff member for assistance.

Link to any previous staff applications you have made to this server:
I have made no applications yet.

If you have made previous applications and any were denied, why were they denied? If the reason for denial was not included, then please attempt to figure it out:
(See above)

Link to any staff applications you have made to other servers:
Applications to MyFTB are not public and I have no access to them anymore.
I did not apply to Bedcraft, because I was asked by the owner if I want to become a staff member.

What is your username on each of the following websites (for any you are aware of, have an account on, and are willing to share)?

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/pixelbrainlp (It’s an empty channel)
Minecraft Forums: /
FTB Forums: /
Spigot: /
GitHub: https://github.com/ThePixelbrain
Stack Exchange: /
Sponge: /

Do you have a phone, ipod, or tablet? We do not need a phone number, but we use two factor authentication for which a device that can run android or ios apps is necessary:
Yes, I have and use a 2FA app.

Are you willing to use a password manager for your Minecraft, Discord, and MMCC forums accounts? If you don\'t know what a password manager is finding that out is part of the application:
Yes, I already do.

Provide any additional information you would like to include:
I would be proud to become a member of this team and support the MMCC community. 🙂