I completely disagree with this. First and foremost, I would like to say that I respect your choice in buying an additional Minecraft account, which is ultimately your choice based on what your intentions to do with it were, but I don't think that gives you an entitlement to say this server must allow at least 2 accounts so you don't end up wasting your money... namely, "I didn't pay an extra $27 to be told I can't use it under any circumstances". I understand that. However, you buying a secondary Minecraft account is a risk you have to accept that the server(s) you play on, may at some point in the future may not allow it, if at all. I'd consider you lucky that this server has allowed the usage of multiple accounts up to this point. You have to realize that by having 2 accounts, you're ultimately playing the role of having one person in two places-- it'd be absolutely no different to install a mod on your client which allows you to duplicate your presence on the server, call them two different nicknames, and control one or the other to do otherwise impossible things like AFK at a farm while you do something else with the other in some remote part of the world. If there was such a mod allowed on the server, then there would be no problem with using multiple Minecraft accounts. The fact that you are allowed to use multiple Minecraft accounts, means that people who can find a mod to do the equivalent thing, should be allowed to do so.

Here's the end of the story. You are paying money to buy additional privileges on the server that other people who, mind you, may not have the money to do so, giving you advantages that other people may not have the ability to obtain. It is a privilege to have the ability to use multiple accounts, and makes you rather lucky that the server admins allow it, despite that it puts other people at a disadvantage, since they can't use multiple accounts like you. Just because you paid for an extra Minecraft account, does not make you entitled to the usage of it on this server, or any other server for that matter-- you can't use the "I didn't pay an extra $27 to be told I can't use it under any circumstances" card in a circumstance where you gain gameplay upperhand over other users, and expect to have it. I understand the frustration in spending money on it, and not being allowed to use it on this server in the event that we don't allow it in the future, but again, you should have realized it was a risk that you would face when you made the decision to buy it. Remember in the end of this, that this is more of a matter of fairness to everyone, and putting everyone on the same playing ground. It can't be argued that everyone else can buy another Minecraft account to receive the same benefits. No, it really doesn't hurt anyone in the end that you get to speed up your gameplay by getting to increase the efficiency of some task two-fold, but you are elevating yourself up on a pedestal that other people can't stand on. I personally don't mind people using multiple accounts, especially if it's just a secondary one, but please be considerate of the people who don't have that privilege, and their feelings toward you being able to do what they can't.



I think the agreement on graylisting is relatively set in stone, so there's no much to discuss there other than what bar we set for graylisting. I think increased moderator roles on the next server iteration and even now while on this map might be good to have. The point has been made that there are only 2 admins, which have times of busyness, and can't be around 24/7. Moderators can help to fill in the gaps in which admins are not around by enforcing the rules if necessary, and having the ability to pass out kicks/temporary bans, or otherwise mute users-- which would also be a good thing to have especially for any people who are not necessarily rude, but perhaps more spammy, and need to be quiet for 30 minutes.



I would agree that this has some truth to it, however don't fully side on the idea-- I'll explain.
You need to define what you mean by "majority of players". Most people join and leave the server, so yes, if we require forum linkage, we will almost guaranteed, lose those group of users. I don't think these users-- the ones who don't have much, if anything to say, and are not interested in what they see when they login, are in our best interest as far as the idea of finding users who show interest in our server, and are mature, creative individuals. If someone logs in, reads our server description in what we seek as a server, look over our rules, and explore our spawn and are somehow not interested, I don't think it's even a matter of forum linkage, because they're not interested anyway.

For the agreed smaller percentage of users who do show some level of interest, it is then in our best interest to understand if they at least satisfy our standard for maturity, and wish to contribute to our community. Of course, this is assuming the following is still our interest:


Forum linkage may not be necessary, but I believe we still need a reasonable way of assessing if we honestly do want someone to be an active member on our server or not. I will point out that most of our more mature, more active members do have a forum account. Perhaps we could have another way of gauging if we want to move someone onto the whitelist, but in the end, active members should probably still have a reasonable expectation of eventually creating a forum account to be able to participate in discussions that at least involve server decisions. As our server bases off of forum discussions heavily, it should be emphasized that if someone wishes to play a role in the decision making process of something, that they have a forum account.

Here's what I would say in the end--
We don't need to obsess over forum linkage, but I strongly believe we need to have a reasonable way of filtering through whoever comes online and wants to be whitelisted to be able to play. If we're truly serious about creating a group of people who will be relatively mature and composed, and will be active and happy to be a part of our community, then we need to enforce those standards to meet our needs. If we need to run over to Reddit and YouTube to pull in user inflow to have more potential people to whitelist, then we can do that. Based on some of the immaturity of some of our userbase on the server since January 2014 when we opened this map publicly, I think it would be safe to at least drop off the lower tier of those users who cause some form of trouble or inconvenience, and enforce that standard in the future when deciding who to let on. Furthermore, I don't think the "3 strikes, you're out" policy should still be active. If in the event we whitelist someone who we regret whitelisting at some point in the future based on their immaturity and how we need to give them our attention to put them into shape, then I think the guidelines should be more strict, allowing us to de-whitelist.

Charles seems to share my opinion on this line, I'll voice off here too. I think his mod analogy may be a bit farfetched but I completely agree that this is a privilege more than it is a right. On that note, the only planned PvP will be in arenas, there will be no opting in. Dare I say that the level of PvP played in the earlier days of the server was way to low. More on this later.



This is really the argument you should be focusing on rather than pulling the "I paid $27 twice" card.



As Charles said, a lot of users sign on and leave. Never to return again, or at the very least intermittently. Also, forum linkage would be the graylist. Rather than a mod or admin manually adding someone they just register an account and type in their Minecraft ID. Click save and whenever the changes are synced they'll be able to play.



Parts of this I agree with. One of my personal annoyances is to sign up to a community to partake in an activity. I won't go out of my way to avoid those communities / find new communities but I'll consider my involvement. One of the things with graylisting on signup is that players can still join, engage the server (to an extent) and get a feel for whether or not they want to play. If they really want to but don't want to make an account, maybe an admin can override that in the config file.

Regarding getting weirded out. 100% agree. I personally think that's the #1 thing we have going against us. On more than just minecraft too.



Remember, we aren't PvP anymore. Ever since PvP was disallowed on 1.8 I've gotten zero private messages. To connect with the first quote, a lot of the gameplay was a very intricate and deep. Hence why I think it was low. I don't think it was bad or shady, I think we had two different PvP styles clashing. In one group we have the folks who think PvP is "Haha, I killed you!" and in the other we have the folks who plan intricate raids. After we lost the folks who did the lighthearted PvP, the tensions with the psychological PvP stretched into the forums as we lost members here too.

PvP went way too far and I don't intend on bring it back unless more of our members understand that we run a hardcore PvP server and frankly, we don't have the type of players for that. Maybe 2 or 3; not enough to run a hardcore PvP server.



I agree. Those rules were more for the PvP aspect of the server. Rules and Moderator limitations will be discussed as we get closer to our 1.9 reset.

Maybe it's possible to allow multiple accounts, but disallow for them to be online at the same time (when controlled by a single player)? Players would be required to disclose the name(s) of their secondary account(s) though.



To make things more concrete, what things would a new player that hasn't graylisted yet be able to do, and what will he or she be missing out on if he or she doesn't graylist?


It's ok, I still love you all

Other than the $27 payment of course, since having such a mod could raise issues about people who have to pay $27 to do the same thing. What I mean is, you have a mod which duplicates minecraft instances, kind of like running two Minecraft sessions in parallel, but if a Minecraft mod could physically duplicate a player's presence, and have them individually controllable, then gameplay with those two instances of Minecraft would be identical to having bought 2 minecraft accounts.



Though this is still advantageous, and I still would discourage multiple accounts, this is much better than having 2 accounts on simultaneously, having one do some AFK work, while the other accomplishes something else. It's much more fair if two accounts aren't on at the same time, which is something that is worth discussing.



The graylist, is essentially a whitelist in the most basic ways, but it is a way of describing the idea that players who are brand-new to the server, can still enter the server IP and gain access, spawn into the newbie spawn point, read our rules, read what our server is about and how the system works (not that anyone does that really ), and explore around spawn. They can technically venture anywhere they can on foot in the map, but they will not have the ability to interact with anything or do anything other than walk around. This probably could mean that they could get decently far away from spawn, but of course, they couldn't break or put down blocks, collect blocks, items, eat, or anything. But this is far more than enough to allow a new user to determine if they are interested in our server or not. Simply, if they are interested, a potential whitelisting process might be as follows:

• The new user logs in, joins the server for the first time, and spawns into a room where they have all of the information they need about our rules, server in general, and process of being accepted as a whitelisted member.
  
• Such a process might be something as simple as having an admin/moderator ask them a couple of questions, especially in regard to if they want to be a part of our server. The questions would be put to the point and simple, ideally just being a sanity check, making sure we're not going to accept some incoherent middle schooler who needs to be told what not to do. We could ask them something such as "What brings you to the server? Are you interested in building great things?", or "If we let you play, are you interested in working together with us and why?", or whatever we see fit to ask them. We don't want to be playing a game of 20 questions, but we need to just get some response out of them to better gauge if they are the kind of person we want to be on the whitelist, and part of our group. I don't have as much experience with this personally, so I would see what KermM has to say about how we would gauge this, since he has had prior experience with accepting limited members onto a whitelist in the previous map on MC 1.5/1.6. I remember being asked similar things when I joined Cemetech MC back in MC 1.5.
  
• The admin/moderator makes a relatively quick decision based on the player's responses to the couple of simple questions, and either tells them to have fun-- welcome to the server, or we're sorry, but we will have to pass (in the nicest way possible). It's not easy to turn people down, but we will have to turn some people down if we want to maintain a server of that meets some maturity/community standard, rather than trying to please everyone.
  
• The newly accepted player will then be granted onto our whitelist, with full permissions to do regular actions on the server when an admin or moderator hops on. This may be a slight issue during hours of the day when less or no people are awake, but hopefully if we increase the moderator presence on the server such that we have a couple of moderators online during United States hours, and perhaps at least one moderator on during Europe hours, perhaps we can cover most of the ground. In the event that no one is awake to play the moderator role to talk to the newbie, signs at the newbie spawn should leave the proper instructions for the said new user to "ping" a certain person by saying their name (spelled correctly, of course), and leaving a short message which answers the couple of questions we would ask them if we were online. Once that is done, they can leave and come back at a different time. Since we can see messages from IRC, we can have at least one moderator hop online, write a private message to them through MC, and send it. When they return, they will know if we are interested in having them on or not from that private message. At this point, a moderator or admin will have already granted them permissions to start playing, so they could just start playing unrestrictedly if so.
  

This is just my ideas of what having the simplest graylist might look like. This is by no means what will be exactly implemented, or the views which perfectly reflect those of Kerm's or Comic's-- they can agree or disagree with any of the points I have made. However, this is what I would think is reasonable in the least.

Charles provided a nice verbose response! That's more than I would have written.

But yes, in short, and as mentioned above, a graylist is effectively a read-only mode for non-members. Once they are on the list, they can participate with the community.

A couple of observations from that:
1) I see the advantages of multiple accounts from a PvP standpoint, and like many of Cemetech's PvP-playing public, I can only assume that you purchased the extra account for the PvP advantage. In addition, from a non-PvP standpoint, having multiple accounts lets you circumvent some of the limitations of teleportation, and also lets you make your farms (gold farms, food farms, you name it) bigger and more powerful. Each of those non-PvP uses seems unfair to people who don't have multiple accounts.
2) Why a limit of 2 accounts per person? Why not 3, or 1? That seems a little arbitrary, and the coincidence of it matching the number of account you have makes me worry that you're somewhat biased here.
3) I have KermM the non-admin and KermMartian the admin, and when I want someone who doesn't have their own Minecraft account to be able to play, I de-administrate KermMartian, and let my friend use KermM. From an enforcement standpoint, it feels like it would be difficult to enforce people not using multiple accounts themselves, versus people lending those [known] multiple accounts to other players that lack accounts. This particular point isn't arguing for or against allowing multiple accounts, just an observation that probably will weigh on our decision.

"Majority" of players sounds like FUD to me. I played on Evocat.us, which required you to register on their forums and vote daily for the server for certain aspects of graylisting. I do agree that we shouldn't require forum registration for whitelisting, though. If we can convert them into also learning/sharing their experiences with programming and hardware hacking, all the better, but I agree that it should be something they end up exploring of their own volition.

Damn, I see that argument too, especially since it would save us work. How do we get people to give us their IDs for whitelisting, though? Have them post in a specific topic?

This sounds like something you should be bringing up in one of your famously helpful Suspended topics, please.

I was thinking it could be a new field in the Profile, which connects to a new database. Every X minutes a cron job happens and syncs the database with the "whitelist.txt" or we find a plugin that uses MySQL to keep the greylist/whitelist populated.

The upside, it's user moderated so for those who want two accounts can just change their name in the field. And on that note, if we do go with a 1-account per user slash forum linkage, "guest" accounts should still be susceptible to the elements: Mobs, Lava, Falling, Hunger, etc. It could give users ideas that they could use a second account to explore without fear of death then change their account name when they are at their destination.

We could also make it a non-editable field if the value is not null, thus disallowing name changing.

Ok, good. I think it's important that they can get out of spawn, and wander around our world.
people will only go through the process of graylisting, if they are convinced that this server could offer them the things they want. They can't find out if they like the server when they're locked inside spawn though. They'll probably also need access to the global chat, but automatically get muted when they spam too much.

I even think they should be able to use switches / buttons, the /spawn command and even make use of transport systems such as rails or boats.

Not breaking or placing blocks is something I approve of.

Why do you think that? By allowing non-listed members to interact with the world folks can just have a second account on the server which can interact. If a user joins us and would like to take a look around, they can be given a tour by someone who can press buttons for them in a town.

If you want people to join us, we have to convince them that they will enjoy themselves on the server.
In my opinion that means that you want to show off all of your aces right away.
Since we are going for a server that prouds itself on hard work, and the travel system will be a big part of that, people should be able to experience the travel system to the fullest. I expect the travel system to be working with buttons, so non-graylisted players should be able to operate buttons. I really can't see any disadvantages to non-graylisted people being able to operate buttons and switches either. It's not like they can destroy anything by pressing a button. Towny will still protect people's towns from anyone with bad intentions.
Another things we are aiming for is a mature community. They won't be able to know whether they fit in, unless they can talk in global chat as well.

Not being able to break any blocks nor place any blocks should be enough to encourage people who are interested in actively being part of the server to go through the graylist process.

I'm not sure if it's possible, but if disallowing non-graylisted members the usage of chests and furnaces, that would provide even more security from malicious people.

To make an official statement. I've gone through and created the Moderator category and set the permissions. Moderators will be able to do the following:

• Kick players
• Tempban players
• Mute players

They will also receive chat from the following command: /HelpOp. That command sends a message to all moderators and admins who are online that you need help. This message is only seen by them. I elected for them to receive these messages - even though none ever been sent - because chances are the mods will be able to help out in one capacity or another. If they can't, they'll get a hold of an admin if an admin isn't online.

So, without further ado our new moderators are ElementalVis and tifreak8x.

ElementalVis has shown amazing abilities to create activities on the server. He steps up and builds amazing structures around the server for various other activities such as Abba Caving and the PvE arena on the edge of the world.

tifreak8x has brought numerous members over to the server who have actively contributed and participated. tifreak8x is a great player who excels at finding active players. I look forward to his accomplishments as mod and future friends of his joining the server.

Their moderatorship is currently in trial on the 1.8 server while I test the permissions with their feedback. The list of their abilities and limitations will change over time and will be finalized by the time the 1.9 map is open to everyone. I look forward to seeing more players become moderators in the future!

Thank you, comicIDIOT. I look forward to advocating an active, mature and fun environment through promoting more activities, encouraging creativity, helping others and of course stepping in when necessary as to prevent things from taking away from that environment.

I agree with bringing in more moderators; the more moderators we can get the better, of course within the reasoning that they are continually active members who have proven to be mature, level-headed individuals with good judgement who will also promote and exemplify the values we have here. Plus, it will allow us to divide and conquer different times of the day when others may not be around, as to especially take care of situations when troublesome individuals come online.

With nothing in relation to your post, just to exercise my thought:

As I said somewhere, moderators cannot (un)ban users. They can only temp-ban. They can temp-ban a user for 12 months for all I care but I did this because a perma-ban erases all of the users money and inventory in the process. I'd rather an Admin like Kerm or myself make the final call before perma-banning and being able to reverse the decision with no ill-effects if need be.

I'm entertaining the idea of creating a higher level position which can perma-ban players and provide other privileges but Kerm & I both feel this is enough to maintain the server etiquette and balance for the foreseeable future. If we pick up a lot of new users, and in the process new moderators, this idea may be accelerated but I find this incredibly unlikely over the next year or so.

I think you should have considered CVSoft for moderator, as he has quite a bit of moderator experience and is quite skilled at the job. In any event having more moderators will be a good thing.

I had completely forgotten to thank you for allowing me to be a mod Hopefully when 1.9 fully rolls out, we'll be able to pick up more active players, since we've all gotten some grand plans in the works, from all our discussions that have happened. I look forward to helping out users in whatever capacity I can.

I upvote the idea of CVSoft being a moderator by the standard that he's got a relatively level head and is aware of server functionality, structure, and rules, and values them. I don't think there is anything going against that side of the argument. I've known CVSoft for a while and know him well enough to be able to be a respectable moderator.

On another point though, however, I will say that it's good to have moderators who are both this, and also active on the server. CVSoft has more interest in the 1.9 server, and his lack of presence on the 1.8 server is more due to being worn out from it. I don't want to say anything much more beyond this as to not put words in his mouth and speak for him. However, I would say that based on what I know and think, that it'd be better if he were more active with Cemetech MC, but as mentioned, I think having a few moderators isn't a bad thing so as long as they all have level heads. Having more moderators would simply allow the chance of at least one of them being on to get a grip on a situation, to be higher, which is something I believe is ideal. If not in 1.8, I would consider him for being a moderator in 1.9 (perhaps given he'll be more active?)

Indeed. I certainly plan to promote more players to mods but given the typical player count I think 2 is enough for now. On top of player count I also need to figure out player times. If Mod A & B are typically active in the evening then I need to find some mods to cover the Morning. This is all stuff I plan to figure out under 1.9. As, in 1.8, I'm testing and figuring out mod limitations and permissions, yourself and tifreak can be seen as the beta testers

Not a lot going on so there's not a lot to really test and report back on. But if there's anything you think would make a good moderator function, let me know!



I know him to be a reasonable person as well but I decided to promote active players first.

This posf is mirrored at my site in HTML format. It might be easier to read.

tl;dr Go back to what 1.6 was like, but with SignShops and ChairsReloaded. Moderators should have just enough power to enforce rules and audit players, while being considered authoritative enough to provide technical support. Admins and moderators need to talk a lot in order to provide consistent rulings and rapid communication.

Playing Environment
I've outlined it a few times in previous posfs, in that I believe that for the sake of community unity Cemetech should be a freebuild survival server. Since my days in 1.5.2, stealing from chests has shown itself to be a contentious issue. The move to a factions-style PvP environment proved initially successful, but dirty tactics in eliminating enemies proved disastrous for the public opinion on the server. I think we can all agree that this was the cause of the server activity drop in 2015.

With 1.9, we should disallow stealing from chests, and given that griefing is already disallowed, this will allow builds made without a town to remain safe. There are not a lot of people who have the time to maintain their towns, and with the current rulings on limits of gold farms and the existing costs of towns, it isn't realistic for a weekend player to maintain a town with little benefit from having one under the new rules. Also, the demands of mining for town money prematurely exhaust large regions of the map of resources – I've seen what just two players are capable of mining out.

The use of currency should be limited to the exchange of such for goods and services, and Towny places unnecessary logistical and administrative burdens on the server. We should also have more readily available, but non-renewable, sources of currency, such as iron ore. Gold ore should also be less valuable than gold ingots if gold farming is disallowed (very difficult to enforce if we have a Nether). BosaikNet does not have a Nether and does not permit gold farming, so gold ingots are harder to acquire and are thus more valuable. However, Cemetech does have a Nether and thus gold farming is possible, so gold ingots become easier to acquire and is thus less valuable than gold ore (and less valuable in general).

Self-Maintenance
I outlined in the drama document that communities should be self-maintaining. As it stood in 1.8 PvP, there were two main issues with this: a lack of communication between administration and players, and the lack of a greater good for the community to work together for.

On the former, an example of that would be the use of spawn eggs to convert spawners. I was specifically told on numerous occasions that converting spawners is not allowed because MobCatcher is not intended to do this. However, upon a non-administrative audit of Arcadia (a town owned by someone who happens to be an administrator), I found that their double spawner had been converted into a zombie pigman farm. Upon further questioning, I was told that nothing disallowed this. I wasn't happy about this. Edenia wasn't happy about this. Regardless of whether this was the case or not, it certainly felt like an abuse of administrative power to change the interpretation of the rules without telling anyone, especially when the player profile of an administrator benefits from this and there is already a strong administrative bias against Edenia as a result of legal actions taken by players. This is why I encourage thorough, written rules, to leave as little to administrative interpretation as possible and to ensure consistency in administrative action.

On the latter, a factions environment presents different goals of a community than a freebuild environment. Factions encourages conquering terrain and property of others, and by Zipf's Law, the server will divide itself into a powerful majority and a number of increasingly small and powerless minorities. It does the opposite of encourage unity, which due to effects I will outline soon, is something the Minecraft server needs to provide. A lot of tension forms in factions, and since nobody is perfect, it leaks over to the forums. This causes the events of the Minecraft server to have an impact on calculator community politics, something that is unavoidable when a culture of hate is bred in factions. This culture of hate can't be stopped, as moderating the beliefs of players is beyond infeasible. This is why I support a freebuild environment, where competition between players only betters the server instead of reducing towns to craters. Freebuild also encourages this competition between players, whereas factions forces it. Also, under freebuild, the increased moderation of dirty gameplay tactics results in friendly relations between friendly players (there are bad eggs out there).

All these expectations of player maturity disturb me, and almost directly relate to another point I made in the drama document: "The communities regularly circlejerk about how they are better than the other community, typically pulling their reasoning out of thin, hot air and ignoring the actual contributions of the community." The very concept of "intelligent survival" is very /r/iamverysmart, and both administration and moderation are going to have to accept that they're going to have to deal with stupid instead of making stupid bannable.

My biggest pet peeve on 1.9 is everyone calling it a graylist when it is a whitelist. Everyone by default will have the ability to join the server ('gray' permissions), but only a list of people will have the ability to modify server contents ('white' permissions). Thus, it's a whitelist.

Role and Powers of Moderators
Definitely, moderators should not have the ability to modify town data, such as changing town borders or town bank. I'm not sure what discussion occurred on who is responsible for managing users with changed names, but from what I'm reading moderators will not be capable of this. It's probably safer this way. Moderators need to be able to quickly determine if a player will be a troublemaker, and take the actions necessary to ensure the actions of troublemakers do not impact the experience of innocent players. Moderators should also be able to protect builds with WorldGuard, should the administration either deem it necessary on a per-case basis or if at all. Additionally, moderators should have the power to audit the actions of players if there is reasonable doubt that they are violating rules. With whitelisting, I do not anticipate this to be much of a problem, but moderators having the power to enforce the rules hastens the speed at which rule violators are punished. As I'll detail below, this makes players feel welcome.

It is necessary that moderators are able to provide technical support for the players, and are the initial troubleshooters of server issues. While they will lack the power to change server configuration, at least one moderator needs to know enough about the server to accurately describe to administration what needs to be changed.

My Views and Experiences
During my hiatus from Minecraft, I became administrator of some UT2004 servers. My only previous experience with moderation and administration came from my disillusionment from the way Edenia was treated at Cemetech, and I quickly learned how to actually deal with players. At ComboWhore, I provide mainly technical support and server configuration management. I do issue punishments for server rule violations, but I can be seen as more lenient than other administrators. I respect the personality differences of different players, and differentiate between friends talking smack to each other and someone legitimately being rude or offensive. The environment when I first joined ComboWhore is very different from anything in the calculator community, notably that people have accepted the fact that administration is absent. I use chat-linked IRC to spot rule violations or complaints even when I am offline, and use their forums to issue polls of player opinions and provide repeatable technical advice. I also emphasize the responsibilities of administration to the user's requests, and provide a response and any necessary investigation and action to every legitimate question from the players. I know the people there like the fact that their opinions are actually heard, and it benefits the greater good of the server.

I do intend to take my experiences from ComboWhore and bring it to Cemetech. However, it requires some modification of the forum structure with regards to Cemetech Play. Primarily, I request better separation of Minecraft from FreeBuild, and ideally UT2004/AoEII/whatever you play at Cemetech, being official Cemetech functions, having its own sections in the forum. I feel the Building with Blocks section is no longer sufficient to contain the rapid expansion seen with Minecraft and the less-rapid expansion (renewed interest?) of UT2004, and instead that aged section of the forum should be restructured into Cemetech Play. Moderators/administrators (UT2004's separation of admin and mod is finicky) of a particular server should have moderator status of the server's particular subforum, which (while absolutely necessary) mandates that the actions of moderators on the forums has an effect on the situation in-game, and vice-versa. It also helps people on the forum know who is in charge, and thus who to direct inquiries to.

As part of ensuring accountability of moderators and providing assistance and knowledge to players, moderators need to know enough about their server to answer questions from users authoritatively and consistently between both moderators and administrators. To achieve this, there must be a great deal of communication between administrators and moderators regarding the existing situations at each server and current events. It is harmful to public reputation when a moderator says one thing that an administrator feels is incorrect and has to reverse. Having subforums for each official server can facilitate this communication effectively and outside the view of the general public.

I stress communication plenty because I understand that it is an essential tool to ensuring a positive player experience, which grants Cemetech returning and informed users. It also allows players to have a source of information on features, rules, and known issues of the server, along with making players feel they aren't simply subjects of administration but actually able to elevate legitimate issues to administration. Moderation has to be able to determine whether an issue is legitimate or not, and provide the initial feedback to the user. With multiple moderators at Minecraft, a response time exceeding 48 hours is virtually improbable, which means issues can be resolved much more speedily than the times entering weeks that were seen during 1.7 and 1.8.

As to why I have been so distant towards the 1.8 server, I feel that it is too heavily scarred by the bad decisions made during the PvP era, and the amplified terrain has caused me to give up on my building projects. The construction projects were too ambitious for me (in particular the Hodor gold farm and TERRA Mall), and I don't have the time like I did back when I was in high school. It's all just too much work and too many bad memories, so I'm done with it. I only keep the towns up for the sake of them existing.

I'm kinda glad no one posted in the interim. I will try my best to not respond to anything that is considered "history."



Since you seem to be out of the loop, that's exactly what moderators are and capable of.



You should really keep up with server discussions. I can't find the post but we have settled on a build-centric play style, there is a reference in the second paragraph of my post in the Economy Topic.



I can't find a relevant post but I know there should be one somewhere. We hope to push Abba Caving a bit harder in 1.9. We plan to use a fresh world for each map and afterwards we'd open that map to be mined by everyone but the abba cavers get first dibs. We'd leave the map open until the next officially sanctioned event where we'll generate a new map to replace the last one.



The nether was opened up as an alternative mode of transportation. Folks are free to place an argument to have the nether be mob free, or strictly Zombie Pigmen free. Also re: non-renewable, the above paragraph about Abba Caving also applies here.



I am not familiar with this at all. I don't know when this happened or if this audit took place while I was not very active on the server but, regardless, I was main admin of the server from the start of 1.7. Here's a poor reference to that, and another. If you can't go to one admin why not go to another?



I support this as well. Clear rules will allow my moderators to take care of more issues, gray and broad rules leave a lot of room for interpretation and thus more issues will get passed on to me. Not that I'm against the work but I want to empower the mods to act accordingly. If there's a rule that isn't clear but a mod thinks that person deserves a temp-ban then so-be-it. I'm not going to practice "hover parenting" with my mods. It's also why I promote them, I trust they can make accurate decisions: a verbal warning vs a kick vs a temp ban.

If I recall correctly, there were very few written rules because we didn't want to be a community with these overbearing rules numbering into the hundreds. Not that we had that many rules but, writing them all out would have been very restrictive on everyone. Which, yes, is the point. But as an Admin there were times when I likely would have broken the rules:

• I gave back items folks lost from being looted and death.
• I healed and fed players if they needed it and I knew about it. (I didn't do this all the time, like if someone asked or spammed chat). But if we were exploring together I'd heal and feed them out of curtesy.
• I teleported players around the map to grab their items after death or to quickly get from A to B.
• I helped Selena build a stairway. I built the frame so she knew where the turns and stuff were but she used all of her own materials for the rest.
• Probably more stuff too.

To have those as rules such as "If you can't get back to your stuff, tough luck!" I wouldn't be able to do that. Okay, I still could technically but then I'd be making a black and white rule rather gray. So having few rules gave me lots of freedom to help and have fun with our players and I personally think it had a huge impact for everyone.



I don't see it the same way, and thanks for reminding me that mods should have the ability to add players to the list. Having a straight up whitelist is incredibly limiting. Players who are interested would have to get a hold of an admin - or a moderator! - to add them to the Whitelist. So, they'd likely join the forum to make a post about joining. With a graylist, players can join and interact via chat. It'll let the admins/mods judge the player and the player judge the server. If things work out, they'll get approved status so they can build and join/create a town.



That would be the admins. But with the few times I had to do it under 1.8, I may make it a rule that names are names. If you change it you start fresh, unless of course Towny get's an update to work from the UUID rather than the player name.



While I trust my mods, this is not something I wish to grant them (yet). I expect this to happen infrequently enough that an admin can hop on for this task. As the process may include flying and other privileges that Mods will not have.



Agreed and with gray listing I expect some unknown players to appear innocent so they can become a functioning member then they spread their salty ways.



I hold the same philosophy.

Regarding the stuff I cropped from the quote, Cemetech has a lot of growing to do if we want to grow the Minecraft server and the site as a whole. But I'm not overly concerned about Minecraft+Forum as most people have voiced that the forum should not be required for our MC server; I was pushing for a Cemetech account in order to play on the server but it was quickly decided against. I do irregularly push the topics into MC, such as during the 1.8 Rules Revision, to garner as much voice as possible. Ideally I'd love the forum to become a central point to the MC server but it doesn't sound like a popular idea. I also did this with the 1.9 topics, not as much anymore though.



I can't exactly figure out what you mean by this. Are you planning to bring your moderator experiences over or your playing experience? Both? If it's the former I want to be clear that I have no current intention of promoting you to Moderator under 1.9. It's going to remain with tifreak8x and ElementalVis for sometime. I'll promote players based on various factors, the fact that you are already a mod with a remarkably level head on another server is a plus but it isn't grounds for immediate moderatorship.



Like I said above, I'm not going to be a helicopter parent (or "hover parenting" above) to my mods. It should already be self-evident that I plan to promote players to moderator that speak authoritatively and hold the same principals. I expect players to take up moderator duties before promotion; bringing up rules to violators and alerting an admin or a mod for one. Much like a promotion at work. You don't get promoted then start fulfilling the role, you fulfill the role as best as possible/allowable then get promoted.

My only requests for 'powers' would be:

Being able to see who placed/broke blocks
Being able to see contents of a chest and the logs of interaction
Doing forced teleport in the instance of a user causing havoc and not accepting TP.

Those would be most beneficial as a mod to be able to use the banning and kicking powers more properly, I think.

And I agree, being able to whitelist players would be most helpful, and even setting them back to grey listing in the event of other issues might be helpful.

If you get time during an evening (EST) or weekend, I'll be more than glad to assist in testing of things.