This is kinda on the topic of the economy, and I wasn't entirely sure I should post it yet or wait for the topic on the economy, but I've seen some things happen recently that caused me to decide i should. I'm posting this as a suggestion to make mods/admins lives easier with regard to griefing/looting.

Recently, the server has seen a spike in people coming on and griefing or raiding. This has occured both in townified areas and in un-towned, but developed areas. All of these events have required mods to investigate, and admins to roll back and deal with. I know admins/mods are busy and probably don't want to constantly be coming on to fix this stuff. But, as the admins/mods, they are expected to get these things fixed fairly timely.

I mentioned this briefly in MC-chat last night, but a simple way to fix this would be to resolve something that could fix this. The prices for towny related things need to drop, significantly. The server is supposed to be "intellectual, freebuild", not "mine for hours to keep up costs-build" :p This includes towns and nations. 30kd is insane for town pricing when the only thing you get is creeper protection (server already forbids everything else towns would protect). So keeping prices so high doesn't hurt players, it just in the end really gives the mods and admins more work. If towns were cheaper and people could afford to protect their land, cases of griefing would go down, requiring less mod/admin work on fixing.

In cases similar to mine, where I was forced to expose plot perms to allow friends to help me build an area, cheaper nations would help this. Right now, the options for this are: (1) personally claim every plot so my friends have access, which is very tedious, or (2) allow outsider perms for the plot, which exposes you to griefing. Having easier access to nations would close that loophole, and lead to less cases of town griefing. It's my personal belief that nations should be cheap, if not free, to form, but expensive to maintain.

One fix to the problem was forcing the spectator leveled people to remain within the borders of spawn. I was told that it's possible to do, but then they'd supposedly not see all the cool builds and then want to join in and that that solution was not ideal.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what else one can do besides using a plugin that locks chests to that user so no one else can open it unless they are a friend.

The economy is a huge hurdle. I looked through the economy topic because I know we touched on this but it seems we never publicly discussed the price, just whether or not Towny should be included. I do recall having some discussions about it. However I thought it was 10kd to form a town, not 30kd. Which, regardless is still expensive.

It was brought up that Towny should be a luxury not a necessity because the server was no longer PvP. We would encourage PvE and manners, that our greylist would vet any bad apples from playing because we'd be super stringent on who we allowed to join. We're now a year into the servers life and I think we couldn't have been further from reality. While theft and grief is not rampant and terrible, it is an issue. Since I can't find any of my public and prior stances on Towny prices I'll state what directions I am entertaining. We should do one of two things with Towny.

• Have it be free, or really cheap, with upkeep for plots
• Lower the price to a few grand and eliminate upkeep.

This way there is still incentive to get currency and hurdles to overcome to found a town but not prohibitive. There are some amazing builds on the server and the players have some great items in chests. I don't like hearing how a player, who is not greylisted, took items from chests. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to stop them. We can stop these players from breaking and placing blocks but not from opening chests. You can put blocks on top of chests but then those players can just lure a creeper into your home. I think making Towny more affordable will help make the server a better place.

But I don't think Towny should be free. I still want to encourage players to play and work together. Making Towny free would allow anyone to make a town where ever and whenever they desire with no regard to anyone else. We'd have a bunch of 1 person towns dotting the map, and probably in Abba world. There's definitely a balance to strike here.

If its a spectator, they can't place or break anyway. This doesn't fix, I don't think, the people who are members and grief. A chest-lock plugin would be nice! What's not fun is that most of our user base respects the no-grief rule and no-steal rule, so we haven't had to worry about land and chest protection. But it appears the server is getting more popular, and with that comes increased risk of griefers.

I agree the best short term fix is lowering the town/nation costs so players can protect their land in a method that IS currently supported. Perhaps the next step would be a chest-lock plugin to protect chests. Actually that might be more important because its harder to restore chest contents than to roll back grief.

Is there a plugin that lets players approve or deny access to chests they placed on a player-by-player basis? Say I place a chest and you go to access it, i get asked if i want to allow that and I say yes. You can now access it whenever. (Can be applied to all chests too). If someone else opens it and i say no, they cant open the chest. Is this feasible to program?

I'm ok with Towny not being free. There definitely needs to be a balance, like comic said. Personally I'd go with the "Lower the price to a few grand and eliminate upkeep." option because I'm a once-and-done kind of person, but I'm ok with easy upkeep. Maybe my friends can help me since I don't really have a way of making money yet
Way back in the beta days when I was staff on a server, they had Lockette for chests. I don't know if it's still around, but basically it was a sign with [Lockette] at the top then list all the names for that chest that you want to access it. It was a bit annoying adding more than three people to those signs, but it's an option.

Lockette might be a bit too prohibitive. As you need to specify each player's name who can open chests, and what about players who use item frames to show what's in chests... those would have to go bye bye.

To solve this issue, not sure if it will be addressed, but i posted a suggestion to the towny developers to add chest access permissions to towny itself. The same resident/ally/outsider set would work for towns and the friend/ally/outsider set for plots. If they end up adding that, it would solve a lot of problems. I'll update you guys on any attention the feature request gets.