It's very common for stores not to be making the most out of commands to automate simple and complex tasks. This blog post will help explain why you need to spend time researching how to use commands to provide the best experience both for you and your customers. This post focuses on ingame commands, if you want to read about Discord commands, or how to deliver scripts or downloads, click here.
What Are Commands?
Commands are the most common way for your product to be delivered to your customers. If you're running a game server then the easiest option is to configure console commands via our plugins. There is of course the option for RCON, MySQL, and webhooks but we recommend ingame commands for this tutorial.
When you are ingame with the OP permission, you could simply type a command and give an item to someone, but you can't be online all the time. When you create a package with Tebex, there are various options for you to fill out, but the most important one we'll focus on is the command fields. The text you input here will be run as a command on your server, but remember, it simply passes whatever text you put in, if it's not a valid command then nothing will happen.
How Can You Issue Items On Your Chosen Platform?
Each game is slightly different in the way that ingame items or permissions can be issued, and the first thing you need to do is spend time researching. In your role as a server owner, or content creator, you will be spending a large portion of your working time researching, and learning about different tools, mods, and how you can make the most out of the possibilities they give you. It is very important to keep this in mind, for server owners, in particular, to be good at running your server, you will need to spend a lot of time researching plugins or mods and understanding how they will work with your own network. Don't expect to become an expert in one day, and keep working towards learning!
Here's an example of a command that could be used. For games like Minecraft Java, for example, the easiest way to issue items ingame is through ingame commands such as:
/give Notch gold_block
This requires the user to have the OP permission, or, put simply, in the case of the Tebex plugin, the plugin needs to have permission to use these types of commands. By using the plugin to issue commands, this means you as the owner, do not need to be online, and you don't need to have a team of admins online to do it for you (which comes with its own risks when giving OP to multiple people!).
Our knowledge base provides more detailed information about the basics of commands and using variables, and you will also find some helpful YouTube videos on our Tebex Academy channel, including this video by Ted that shows you the basics of using commands in your packages. Watch below:
Depending on your game or store, you may want to use an ingame plugin, Discord bot, RCON, MySQL, or webhooks to issue your products to your customers. There really is some freedom of choice here for issuing your goods ingame, but for all of them, you need to research what works best for your game/platform. For example, we would recommend the plugin for Minecraft, but for RUST, RCON is also a very good choice.
Using Permission Managers For Your Commands
Something we often see stores trip up on is writing individual commands for every permission they want to issue the player, directly into their package. You should avoid this, and you should utilise kit or permission systems that you can find with third-party plugins/mods etc. I'll use Minecraft as an example, where you could easily use a system such as LuckPerms. LuckPerms is a fantastic tool used by a large percentage of Minecraft servers, and we would recommend using this for your Minecraft server permission system. We have made a tutorial video for LuckPerms as well, which we hope is useful for new starters to Minecraft server owning, you can watch this here. LuckPerms means you can set a permission group that grants specific benefits to a player once they have purchased the product issuing this permission.
Here's the process for using a permission manager:
- You create your group in your permission manager (in our example, LuckPerms).
- Assign this group various permissions and benefits.
- Input the command to give this permission to the player in your Tebex package. Often just one command instead of many.
- When the player buys the package on your store, they are added to the permission group automatically.
- Want to change the product you are selling? Easy, edit the permission group on your manager (such as LuckPerms). One edit on the manager means you don't need to edit every single command on Tebex! Perfect!
If you don't use a permission manager, then you'll probably be spending a lot more time editing your individual commands on each package, so investing a little research time now will save you a lot more time in the future.
Many of the games supported on Tebex have permission manager systems like LuckPerms (we have a tutorial for LuckPerms here), and we would heartily recommend you investigate using one to make your life easier with managing your groups, and packages.
Commands are the backbone of your store.
Whether you run a Discord community, a game server, or you are a content creator selling your plugins/mods or scripts on Tebex, there are ways to use commands to make your life far easier and automate everything from sending a message in Discord (with our bot), to issuing ranks ingame (and taking them away in the event of a refund or chargeback). Spend some time to understand how you can best use commands for your store, and you will be able to automate far more than you think, making it easier on you so you can spend more time with your community.
Next page: part 4.