Horse glitching is the same as it always was, I haven't seen it cross that line and get to "that point".

You also don't have to ban ALL glitches. Just ban the ones that you can't do in vanilla single player or haven't been approved by the admins.

Edit: Since we are revising the rules, I was wondering if ender chests could be enabled. I was told that they were disabled because they ruin the point of raiding. I don't see the problem with it because you can't fit everything in there and a covered chest is almost as secure. Also if your base gets blown up and you have an ender chest, you will still have something to rebuild with.

I'll re-emphasize this:

I suggested that horse glitching was unfair beyond 1-thick, because it requires lag to do so, as it was proven by a multi-person experiment that results vary. And you have in the past always said that it doesn't need lag to perform higher tiers, yet suggested here that you can simply use a form of lag-induction via straining your connection to manipulate the glitch.

If this isn't crossing the line, where you must violate the rules to make it fair to use to higher tiers of the glitch, then I'm not sure what you think is crossing the line.

Mining through more than one layer requires some lag, but you don't need to mine more than one layer to go through thicker walls, therefore going through thick walls does not require lag.

I also think that the wall itself determines the line. So if the second layer of the wall can be instantly mined, then you should be allowed to mine through that second layer and only that second layer, but if it can not be instantly mined, then the cap should be that first layer.

For formality, here's the new set of rules before the are made official.

1. Rule one is still the same as the original rules.
   
2. A prior post asked about creeper explosions. While I don't cover usage of creepers in towns, if the permission of the town allows explosions then there isn't much that can be done.
   
3. The sub-bullet to this has additional words but the meaning remains the same.
   
4. This was a tough topic of debate. I've opted to allow "Horse Glitching," which means that spawn protection will not be offered. I feel that the lag a client experiences when connected to the server is a risk of PvP for all players.
   
5. Unchanged.
   
6. I have enforced this in the past and am now making it an official rule. While the user kept the main account, any accounts the player used to access the server will be banned.
   
7. For the sake of our server, let's keep memory usage to a minimum.
   
8. This rule is new as well. You may not get a strike every time you break a rule, it depends on your standing on the server (good or bad, not mayor or member) and the amount of times you've broken past rules. If a member is a known nuisance and they break a rule, a public warning will be issued where as if the member is a friendly and active participant it may be more of a "don't do that!" in a private message. Of course, the severity of the action is considered as well. Even the nicest player will get a strike if the action warrants it (such as excessive cursing). The severity of the action may also issue two strikes at once. Temp bans will vary depending on severity as well.

Any last minute discussions, please take place now.

I notice the spawn camping was dropped and replaced with horse glitching. I may consider by self honor code that I may allow a little time for someone to spawn in and do something before I hunt them down-- I would not mind very much if a plugin or something was done to protect against spawn camping for a short period of time (60 seconds did seem a bit much). Horse glitching through more than 1 block, as I have previously stated, is a variable circumstance that creates an uneven playing field. Some people will only be able to glitch through 1-2 blocks to raid someone, and some people will be able to do 4 blocks based on their connection lag. I feel if horse glitching is allowed, 1 block is acceptable since no lag needs to even be taken into consideration.

People would be able to purposefully strain their connection (induced lag), to perform a high tier horse glitch, and no one would be able to tell if they induced that lag. There seems to be talk on how it's not lag dependent via other methods, not having to use a lag dependent way, which I feel would need to be investigated for fairness (no lag dependency--> no means to induce lag) if it exists.

All else looks great to me (:

I notice that these rules still allow things such as item duplication or using bugs in mods or bukkit. This shall be fun

Fair enough. Aside from AHelpers trollish reply the rules stick, Horse Glitching will be limited to 2 blocks via the honor system. These will take affect tomorrow, Sunday at Noon EST.

I continue to feel that we should at least limit horse glitching to one block, as people like me close to the server cannot get it to work. I think letting people abuse the glitch and self-govern is not a good idea at all.

Wait, so duplication glitches are allowed?

Because apparently the dupe glitch is now going to be a thing that players think is allowed, it's been written in.

Thanks for changing the horse glitch term to 1 block. I think that is much more reasonable. You know that's not the case; stop making more work for comic.

Just a note: Cemetech values post quality over post quantity, so if you don't have anything constructive to add, don't say anything at all. Single-word, single-image, and single-emoticon posts are particularly unwelcome here.

I'm bumping this topic.

I've noticed that some towns (and nations) have become incredibly powerful; via size, wealth and bonuses. The server has some healthy - maybe perhaps volatile? - politics about and I foresee abuse of this power.

I would like to propose a rule addition that prevents towns from being engulfed by another town, or combination of towns. If I remember correctly, the town around Shoeblox was created by one user and was part of a nation, which was then benefited by a Nation Bonus. I will enforce this rule retroactively.

From an admin stand point, this isn't to help Shoeblox. Creating this rule and ignoring Shoeblox would be bad adminship on my part since the obstacle around them is a persistent issue that this rule is meant to prohibit. I merely see an unfair advantage that can prevent further engagement on the server from users in affected towns. Yes, Cemetech MC is a PvP server and players should join expecting it but there is still a limit as to what constitutes as fun for the opponents.

As per democratic process, I am open to comments regarding this rule before amending it in.

I do support this rule. The fact that one user can start a town and completely block and/or cut off one of the largest enemy towns is an issue that cannot be ignored.

This seems like way too much administrative intervention to me. The town that got engulfed had plenty of spare plots to prevent its engulfment; it could have poked out spare plots into a spit that would have repulsed the surrounding town. If anything, the administrative intervention appropriate to the situation might be to rebalance nation bonuses, plot costs, and so on, rather than directly intervene in town size and location.

It looks from wearing my user hat as if almost all the rules in the topic have been the direct result of Shoeblox whining to you about the legitimate PvP actions taken in the server. Of course, from wearing my admin hat as co-admin of the server, I do see Shoeblox as the target of attack by the largest of the nations, but I also have witnessed the public and private discussions and politics that make this the case. Speaking again as a user, the point of the engulfment is to force the greatly-weakened town in question to abandon its ugly base, and that doesn't seem like anything that merits administrative intervention. I disagree strongly.

I agree with Kerm on this one, but I don't understand how you strongly disagree with Mind explaining it?

I would like to balance this issue as I feel halfway between the two. I feel that yes, the nationbonus can be possibly abused under more extreme conditions. For example, perhaps a new town just sprouted and you have 10 people gang up on someone and they end up not being able to do anything at all because there is enough force to outrun the person's ability to claim plots to expand the town and escape-- and it's not something that the person can help either if the other party is not willing to negotiate. They'd have to start a brand new town, and the cycle could repeat indefinitely. Then again, I feel even that situation could be gotten a grip on if you were smart and let no one know of your whereabouts. Of course that is rather intense, and not something I expect to happen. With larger towns and a more relevant matter, it's more the matter of a town having lets say 50 plots used, and 100 more plots available to use, but another town prevents them from using it, and they refuse to move.
In this specific case, it was the fact that a 1 man town can completely engulf a large town/city. The main issue I believe at hand is how much work it takes to overtake someone else's work. i.e. Maybe someone spent 50 hours on a town, and then it only takes 5 hours for someone to get the necessary money to overtake the town. I agree that it's rather annoying and can possibly be abusive. However, that's not the issue that it's abusive. There is no recollection of a single instance of the mayor of Shoeblox asking for a negotiation of removing the town, in the least by the co-kings of AE. There is only recollection of complaining about it, so we have done nothing because there was never a deal made in the first place. Therefore, in this specific case, I do not see this as abusive because of this fact, but am open to the idea that plans could get more elaborate to the point where someone can hardly do anything. There were multiple tens of thousands of denarii invested into making this PvP scheme work out, so I feel that it's completely reasonable that if Shoeblox wishes to free themselves of a town trap, they may pay their way out of it without much resistance personally. This is a large-scale equivalent of raiding someone of all of their belongings, and charging them a hefty price equal to the value of their stuff, for them to get it back-- if one even wishes to bother auctioning it back. In a similar way, we have stolen potential plots, and this can easily be auctioned back to them for a price of what it was worth. This is actually not as bad as being completely cleaned out from a raid-- if you lose potential plots you can use and you have a lot you can use already, you can use your belongings to make do with what you have and maybe even negotiate to remove the barrier. If you get cleaned out from a raid, you have no belongings at all, and you have to start from scratch, regardless of the plots you own. In any case from what I can recall, they had more than enough to free themselves. Perhaps there should be a middle ground to where boxing in a town is abusive rather than saying that all box-ins are abusive.

I disagree with the idea of easily poking out plots. If someone was online, that would be more than manageable with a large town as such, but isn't the case. The encasement happened over the course of under an hour, which makes it relatively easy to get away with without someone poking out plots to stop it from happening.

I agree that other factors such as nationbonus, plot cost, etc. would be a fair compromise and administrative intervention. The nationbonus has been used for good reasons though, since there is more room to be constructive, and I feel it would be a disappointment to see the most common usage of a nationbonus go to waste. If there is some rule that rolls out regarding encasing towns that will prevent abuse, I would like to see nationbonus keep its scaling for constructive purposes, i.e. maintain current values per people in nation. My own town, Thaslassius, is an example of what can be done with a larger nationbonus, and will henceforth intend on being an example of constructive usage.

I believe that because no incident has occurred where the other town/nation was unwilling to cooperate, there is no basis for pushing a rule that will undo an incident that was never worked out between the two parties to begin with, seeing this rule is inspired by this incident. Perhaps if there is a more abusive scenario that we foresee, it should be discussed in detail, and we should think about stopping that scenario, rather than retroactively enforcing something against this scenario currently at hand, seeing that again, it can be worked out.


I feel this is highly dependent on what someone considers to be fun, where someone feels something is over the line, and how someone reacts to something. I feel this situation could have been handled more maturely by the victim by not complaining aimlessly about it, and that a negotiation could have been worked. While I do believe that everyone should have fun, I don't believe we can help how sensitive some people are in any general PvP scenario and the lack of fun they are able to have devising a counterstrike or plan, not just specifically this one.

They could have prevented that from happening, yes. But I'm pretty sure AHelper made that city in an evening before Shoeblox had a chance to know what was happening; I distinctively remember getting a PM about how Shoeblox was now surrounded. I'm not intervening with town size and location what so ever. Players are still free to put a border right up to another and make their towns as large as needed.




That is not the case. I have rejected multiple propositions that has been presented to me in private discussion with numerous members. The explosive rule was, more or less, a unanimous decision by the players after the Shoeblox incident.

Yes, there was whining about being killed while their screen was still black but I didn't prevent that from happening. I explored the idea but instead limited horse glitching to even out the field as much as possible. If you felt the new rules were benefiting Shoeblox you should have brought it up. I made sure the rules benefited both sides equally and the rules were reached amicably.



It doesn't and that's not what I'm here to intervene with. I've noticed that there is enough wealth on the server to begin engulfing other towns. I'd rather not let this play out as a game of Age of Empires where you win with domination/total annihilation. With 1.8 around the corner I wouldn't be opposed to letting the current politics play out and then start new with 1.8 with a form of this rule in place but if we intend to upgrade to 1.8 or stay on 1.7 then I find it's in our best interest to keep this server as active as possible.

If we had a larger server with multiple nations and dozens of towns, I'd be ignoring this issue because there would be enough towns and nations to keep their respective financial coffers directed at their fronts rather than obtaining dominance. Whether or not this is intended on the server is unclear to me (I'm going off chat logs and /baltop and related commands in-game).



I too, would like explanation on this. From a player stand point, I've left plenty of servers and stopped playing many games because it didn't feel fair to me. If I have an enemy that is persistently targeting me, I'll leave and find a new server and refer friends there.

As an admin, it's in my best interest to retain users and make the server fun. Dampening the fun of some people can go a long way with increasing the fun of others.



(I'm trying to pick out and side-step all the politics laced through your post so don't say anything officially on that ground.)

Would you mind clearly defining the two definitions you have for boxed-in?



I'm not an expert with the plugins and stuff but I would imagine the cost per plot could go up for every Y plots in the town. Like the first X plots could be the regular fee then every Y after that, the price increases by Z(%).



It most certainly did not. I can't deny they benefit from it, it's not something I've distinctively sought out that would help them. My goal is to make this server enjoyable to everyone for the long term.



As I've been saying through this whole post, I'm trying to prevent a total domination scenario. We don't have the active population to support this play style. If there was a formidable foe (or more) that could stave off such an event I believe the server wouldn't have the scenario I'm projecting.

I have to agree with what Comic is saying. What was done basically prevented a town from doing anything. Shoeblox may have had expansion plans and was saving up cash to make them.

Kerm, you said that people could go ahead and use up the plots they have, but not everyone of use wants to do something like that right now. I like to acquire a plot as I need them, so that I have that flexibility to make changes to my town as needed. For instance, if I had my plots used up, I likely would not be able to use the dungeon spawners I found that were just outside the border of my town. I had the plots to be able to secure them up, but if I had fully purchased my plots, may have had to do some major changes to get them to be secured.

Yes, this new rule does benefit one town greatly right now, but sometimes you have to look also at how the rule will affect towns in the long term as well.

The problem with the precedent we're setting by basing rules off how players get creative (constructively or destructively, to be sure) with the plugins we have is that as administrators we'll end up playing catch-up constantly, and we'll end up with a huge list of rules on one hand and players constantly searching to find new things to exploit before they get outlawed on the other hand. That was part of the motivation behind our original very simple "no hacks, no excessive griefing, no cursing, have fun". Of course, I do agree that as the server matures and the politics play out there's some adjustment that needs to be made; I only wish it could be by (for example) fixing Towny's glitches with walls/chests and walls/spawn eggs rather than making rules about it. Ideally, the plugins would enforce everything we needed, and players would be free to do whatever. This would apply to this particular instance by (1) just tweaking the distance that Towny requires between towns to make surrounding another plan impossible in terms of the number of plots required (2) tweaking the economy to nerf gold production or make plots more expensive or reduce the nation bonuses or kick inactive players (see Charles' post for more thoughts on why some of those options are suboptimal), or some combination of those and other measures.

tl;dr: I believe it's better to enforce gameplay via modifying the game's implicit rules wherever possible rather than saddling the players with a huge number of explicit rules that they must obey and the administrator(s) must enforce.

And vice versa. I feel that our server is designed to celebrate cleverness, creativity, and ingenuity, and situations like this should be used as opportunities for the targets to come up with creative solutions to escape (or politically, infiltrate the opposing town/nation.......).

Yes, that definitely needs clarification. I disagree that it's the responsibility of the administrators to intervene explicitly to create rules that make the server, on average, more "fun". I think it's partially up to the players to keep it fun, and if they're not having fun, to be creative and do what needs to be done. I think the remainder of the responsibility is on the administrators to tweak the game to be equally challenging for everyone without doing so via rules imposed on the users, but instead as gameplay mechanics like more challenging gold acquisition, more difficult defense or offense, more difficult land acquisition, and so on.