The terrain is a seed, yes. You just have to tweak the terrain generation algorithm; You can adjust so many variables.

PvP: Yes, that's something I'm going to go through with regardless of opposition. Players will want PvP and I think limiting it to designated areas is the best way to go. But the emphasis of the server will be strictly PvE.

Regarding specialized mobs, yes. I like the idea of opening up The End to player events. 1.9 will actually allow the dragon to be resummoned. Whether or not I'll require the dragon to be summoned by the players is up in the air. (Originally, before I knew you could resummon him I was going to just regenerate The End world for each raid but I think this another option, although the Egg will only be available the first time.)

Back to 1.8, I've tossed out ideas of spawning Ghasts in the over world and a few other Nether mobs. It's been met with mixed reactions.

I've been exploring other servers with the intent on learning more about what's out there in regards to game styles and such. Some of the things I've found interesting with one I'm goofing off on now and again is called vanillaverse.

Some of the things I like about it:

Protection- All chests and furnaces a player places is automatically protected. A player can choose to remove the protection, or give protection access to another player at their discretion, so this eliminates the ability for others to steal.

Teleport- Teleporting here is instant, there is absolutely no cool down time, and no count down.

Their economy is based on trade between people. I see people trading for things either using iron, gold, or diamonds as currency.

Nether is open, no idea if the End is or not.

And their world is massive, something like 60k x 60k overall.

Just some things I've noted as I look around to see what all is offered and how well people take to it.

Nether
I can see this topic from both sides, being that it's a useful tool for traversing long distances when used correctly, but that Comic will probably get hassled a lot by people about portals not linking how they wanted/intended, etc. Comic's idea of having a central portal at spawn is a good one. Perhaps later on after the map has been established and explored somewhat, an admin can create 2-3 more Nether portals around the map?

The End
I think this definitely needs to be enabled at some point, if only at least so that we can arrange a weekly or monthly Enderdragon fight.

Terrain
The preset that Charles showed looks great to me! I'm of the same opinion that amplified terrain can look really cool and lead to some awesome bridges, mountain-top cities, etc. however there is still the need for traverse able terrain. If we restrict teleportation (which I'm in favour of), then being able to safely & efficiently ride horses/donkeys around is a must in my opinion.

PvP
Whilst I'm not a PvP'er myself, maybe it would be good to have a weekly or monthly PvP event for those that are PvP inclined?

A little necro-bump here.

What flavor of a minecraft server will the server be running in 1.9? Sponge or a just a regular forge server? Unless spigot will still be updated... Anyways, I just want to know.

If this is in the wrong spot, I'm sorry.

The server doesn't use Spigot currently, it uses Bukkit (Spigot is a fork of Bukkit), and on IRC I heard there are no plans to use Spigot.

I've never heard of Sponge though.

I have a few things to add and a few questions.

1. First the PvP system. I actually like PvP, but fair PvP. I wasn't one to really mind, but I was targeted quite a bit while building and that was annoying. I might suggest something in between, but I'm not sure if a plugin exists to do this: That PvP occur similar to the active teleportation system. A player can request PvP with another player using a command. If the request is accepted, both players have 5 minutes before they become "vulnerable (only to each other)", allowing for preparation. Once the 5 minutes is up, teleportation turns off. If they deny it, they can't be targeted. And you can't be attacked without accepting a request. Both players issuing a command to end the bout makes them no longer targetable.

2. The nether. I would totally love to see it opened, from the beginning. But not allowing teleporting would make it a hassle to move materials and thereby discourage building.

3. If you REALLY want to see incredible builds, set town and nation upkeep to 0. Off! Totally off! The very presence of an upkeep causes you to worry about funds instead of building. Also, I would sell nothing that is available on the map at spawn. That forces exploration and trading. Relations on the server would actually be better if the economy was something that forced trade and cooperation.

I can't find the topic, but PvP is going to be designated to an arena. Once you enter the arena PvP is enabled, when you leave the perimeter PvP is disabled. You are welcome to search for PvP Opt-In Plugins and post in the associated topic so those who wish to engage in PvP outside of a designated arena may do so.

The Nether will most likely be enabled in leiu of teleportation, but one way or another the Nether is likely to be enabled.

That's not a bad idea. I don't want to see everyone and their alts creating towns though. But with a graylist it shouldn't be an issue since we may just allow one account per person. But that's still up in the air.

Hey guys, 1.9 may be released as early as October. We should be officially updating the server about 2-3 months afterwards once all the plugins we require are updated and checked for compatibility. Please take the time to glance over the various topics in this Minecraft Sub Forum and make sure to advocate for or against changes, features, plugins, gameplay, etc. Even suggest new ideas! As we'll be using your opinions as a starting point.

Of course, Admins (currently Kerm & I) have the authority to go against the common opinion on things if it just isn't feasible, if the idea/suggestion isn't relevant to the gameplay or direction of the 1.9 server and, other reasons.

Thanks for adding that last caveat to short-circuit any whining that we're not being sufficiently democratic. Considering that we'll be graylisting this server iteration, though, I'm looking forward to working with our more mature players, who I don't expect to cause us as much headache as the general public. I'm particularly interested in using YouTube and Reddit to find ourselves some additional older, mature, creative players.

Edit: I'd love to get on a Skype call with several of you (like Elemental, Comic, tifreak, maybe Turq, etc), and have each of us provide a tour of our cities while someone records. I'd love to upload those as a video series to YouTube to show off our cities and advertise the fact that we're looking for 1.9 players.

I was actually thinking of doing something similar, if only for a record of what's been built. I'll try to be in-game more.

That would be great! Would you actually be interested in doing the official recording for this, and I'll put a video together from the footage? Do you have a good method for recording Minecraft already installed and configured?

I can give it a go when I'm online. I use Action! for recording. I can record a screen region, microphone inputs and computer-originating sounds (like game sounds and skype calls).

Okay, awesome. Do you want to try recording a video about Pandemonium, and we'll see how that goes? What do you guys think, 3-4 minutes about each city, and make a single video, or record a few 5-6 minute videos, one about each city, and publish them separately?

I was going to set up a playlist on my channel to show off things for the Cemetech server at some point, just been a bit on the busy side.

I think having a final video showing multiple cities / builds might represent the server in the best way.
Ofcourse, you'll need more footage of each individual town / build than you will be using for the final video, and select the part you want in the post-production process.

Personally, I'd say one video with a brief look at each city/build, then maybe a short video for each that explores it and has discussion about it.

As I may have mentioned before elsewhere, I would highly agree on finding in the least, more mature players to make up our playerbase. In the end, we have to raise the question-- do we want to focus more on allowing everyone in the world on the server, and trying to deal with the less mature people, hoping they'll grow up with enough time? Or are we going to focus more on being a tighter-knit, filtered (graylisted) community which will have already mature, fun members that we don't need to spend time and energy raising up? In my opinion, I'd rather just find a place like Reddit to get a new influx of players who are already more mature, than spending the same or even more time invested in forcing and hoping that some younger people will grow up and behave.



I think we may be interested in a couple of things if we want to maintain a maximum audience that we want to reach out to who view the video(s) we post. I think it would be cool to have an agreed time to collaborate together on a Skype call, and do brief tours of the highlights of our towns. I think the collaboration part of the video will really highlight the sense of community that we are seeking, and will also give a positive impression to people seeking to be on a server which collaborates with one another, rather than a server that seems inactive and non-collaborative. The activity shown through our multiple-people Skype call and server tour will reinforce the positive feedback loop of activity-- more people will want to come online because of the multiple people online that they see, as opposed to a video which shows us individually showing off our towns, and editing them together. This individual-approach to video making would have a tendency to give viewers the impression that activity is low, and there is likewise less reason to "join in on the fun". We could still make individual videos, but I believe the most important video is a video with all of us together. Depending how much ground we have to cover, which would possibly make the video length in excess of an hour, we would also want to consider splitting the video into multiple (2-3) episodes that are each 20-30 minutes long, which is something someone would be willing to watch if we grab their attention. Another option is to split our group tour video into parts based on towns, which has been suggested above to some degree. This would still keep the sense of community in our videos, while at the same time, splitting them to give equal attention to each town we choose to have a tour for. So, we'd have a spawn video, an Arcadia video, a Thalassius video, one for Pandemonium, etc.

I also have video/audio recording capabilities with a free program called OBS (Open Broadcasting Software), which is highly recommended by other more popular YouTubers for those who don't want to pay money for recording software, and want the best possible program. I used OBS to create my scavenger hunt trailer from back in June, and it runs very smoothly with the appropriate settings based on your computer's capabilities, and would highly recommend it.

That said, I can sign up to be another possible person who can record, but we should probably decide who records and hosts the Skype call based on both computer performance, and internet reliability.

If we have the 1.8 map around for at least another month or two-- whenever the 1.9 transition phase approaches, we should probably record the video while 1.8 is still live, but not post the video until we are just about to release our 1.9 map publicly, or if the 1.9 map is already active. This would encourage users to play on a map, knowing that it isn't about to be swapped, since it would be completely fresh and brand new-- which would be another reason to check out our server.

Okay, let's definitely start with the single longer video that provides an overview of the entire server, especially focusing on the major cities (and probably a minute or two about the server infrastructure, namely the spawn and the rails.

I don't support this for a few reasons. I think we should be graylisted like in 1.6, and the increased moderator role will make this much more flexible. However, disallowing multiple accounts altogether isn't the best solution. I have two accounts, and I didn't pay an extra $27 to be told I can't use it under any circumstances. Instead, accounts in a PvP town should be required to be in the same town as any other associated accounts, and multiple accounts should not be allowed to be used for deceit/trickery under any circumstances (players must disclose the username of their second account (maybe Monkey0x9 can keep a list like he does with deaths?)). It's perfectly fair to limit people to a maximum of two accounts per person, and moderation can enforce this by not whitelisting / de-whitelisting additional accounts. But having multiple accounts, especially in a PvE environment, doesn't really have any detrimental effect on gameplay whatsoever.

As far as the forums go, we will lose the majority of players if we require forum linkage. Instead of being able to recommend a player to this server, we force them to sign up for a forum, disclose their email address, check that email account for verification, and be endlessly nagged to introduce themselves to a community which they may have no intentions of remaining with, after they get weirded out by our obsessions with calculators. It'll severely hurt the userbase and reduce the role of moderation greatly. I've been with enough communities to know that only a slim percentage of players (roughly 5% in my experience) would actually sign up for a forum even if repeatedly asked, and then only a percentage of that would actually use the forum. Players come to play, not to discuss on a forum; Cemetech is obsessed with community, so don't let this cloud your judgement: average Minecraft players don't want much to do with it.

Also, I remember a LOT of whining about PvP tensions bleeding into the forums. Under what reasoning would forum linkage make this better?

I kind of feel the same way about this as you do. Not to mention that anything minecraft or server related is hidden away in a dark corner of the forums. For someone who is only interested in the minecraft server, this feels very chaotic.
Just my 2c.