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Pfft, what wall of text?
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Total Votes : 21

So, I had a bit a lot of feedback about the server that would be almost impossible to implement until the next world reset, so I decided to make a topic for it. Now, before this gets deleted because there is no world reset planned, I will say that although it might not happen soon, the world will eventually reset. The other alternative is that this world is the last one, and we will never get to play with any fancy new world generation features. 1.13 also seems like it will break plugins along with adding fancy new oceans to explore, so there is a small possibility that the world will need to be reset in order to avoid being stuck on 1.12.2. And before this gets deleted because there is already a suggestions thread, I felt that that one was intended more for changes that could be implemented right away, and thought that it would be better to make a new one for things that specifically relate to a world reset. So, keeping in mind that this post is for major stuff that can only reasonably be implemented after a world reset, here’s my feedback on how this iteration of the server might be improved upon in the next version.

The main reason that I play on the server, and probably the rest of you as well, is to interact with other players on the server. Otherwise, I would just play singleplayer where I have more control over gameplay. However, there are various aspects of the server that make the interaction between players less frequent.

This is probably going to be controversial, but I’m not a fan of teleportation like /home, /spawn, and /t spawn. Wherever you are in the world, it is is directly adjacent to your home, spawn, the nether, and the end. This means that if you want to go to any of these places, you can run a command instead of passing by the bases of other players. Ignoring the elytra (which I will talk more about later), if there were no teleportation commands, you would have to build and use paths going through the bases of others, and you could check out what changed since the last time you passed by. It would also give a purpose to Kerm’s rail system, which is completely unbalanced compared to teleportation. A system with higher upfront cost, like a railway, should be faster than a system with no upfront cost, like walking or teleporting.

But the elytra also has relatively low cost compared to a rail network, even if you must build gunpowder and sugarcane farms to use it properly, and with it the fastest way to get almost anywhere on the map is to take a direct path, which often skips passing through any base at all. Now, I’m not saying that the elytra should be removed, or the fireworks stopped from giving thrust. First off, as mentioned earlier minecarts are incredibly unbalanced. They aren’t really that fast yet require a huge upfront cost. I think that they should be buffed. One way to do this would be to make a plugin modifying the way that furnace minecarts work, allowing them to link a few carts together and travel at real train speeds. I would be willing to make a plugin for this if it is decided this should be implemented.

Second, elytra should be nerfed only for long range travel. The elytra are very balanced in my opinion as long as you only use them for hang gliding. They can save you from falling into lava or from a huge height, and they can provide a boost controlled in direction but not distance, similar to an ender pearl but slightly different, in exchange for a armor slot and a medium upfront cost. One way to nerf only long range flight would be to have each firework deal a heart or so of damage, and stop natural regeneration and make health potions less effective while in midair. Once again, I could write a plugin for this.

Third, elytra could have a difficult condition in order to access them, which the community collaborates on. This is similar to this server iteration, where from what I hear (I wasn’t quite around for this bit) the end was closed off for several months after server launch. This gives the players time to make connections like the railway between bases. If combined with #1, players might decide to continue using the rails because it requires less effort (just sit in the cart and it goes rather than using items and needing to steer to move you places.

As for what this condition might be, I was thinking about something similar to what happens on the EVO SMP server. Here’s Grian’s perspective, which I highly recommend watching at some point if you have not already. Basically, the players are using an beta version of the game, and in order to receive updates they must work together and follow hints in structures left around the world by admins, which lead them to portals to a new version. We could possibly do something similar to access the end and elytra if the admins are willing. You could either set up all of the buildings and clues before the start of the world, or add a building and a hint at spawn occasionally until the end is unlocked. If you chose the first option, it would promote stronger collaboration between players. If you chose the second, it would generate renewed interest in the server every time a new clue is left at spawn. Obviously you would have do something to the DynMap if you wanted to effectively hide the structures, assuming they are above ground.

Okay, time to stop rambling about elytra; that was more than 500 words. Anyways, another thing that I feel limits interaction between players is Towny. I really hate Towny. I don’t think anyone on this iteration of the server has said, “Man, I really love Towny!” (Except when I was taking a bunch of shortcuts while making my arena plugin). Since we are a no-griefing server, the only real advantage with Towny is turning off mobs (which you can do in vanilla with, once again, a large upfront effort: making a mob switch). Every other thing it does is annoying. I can’t leave a sign in a town, I can’t use pistons inside a town, and I can’t fix that one stupid stair on ACag’s tower which he is too lazy to fix even though it is obviously supposed to be a full block. It also takes forever to get permissions right if someone wants to help you, as the commands are almost identical to each other (/t vs /town and /towny), and you have to change settings before and after doing things like spawning hostile mobs in an arena and placing fire, which can’t be placed if fire is off and, unlike the rest of the world, burns things down if it’s on. Additionally, if a mayor goes inactive, other players in the town can’t change plot settings until the town dies. Towny also stops me from using shulker boxes, ender chests, and crafting tables wherever I want. This makes it a huge hassle to visit someone’s town. Additionally, I can’t leave gifts for people inside the town. Since I have joined, I have wanted to spell out “GULLIBLE” in the sky over someone’s base and see if I can get them to not notice (of course I would take it down after they saw it). But with Towny, I can only do that to a few people, and I don’t know them as well and they might not enjoy it.

This might sound counterintuitive at first, but I feel that removing the world border and the resource world would actually lead to more interaction between players. Even though players are more spread apart, they would pass each other’s bases more because they no longer have one place to go to access all of the biomes. So, say that the average player lives close to the center of the world. In order to get a hardened clay, they need to fly (or walk, or ride) northeast. They pass several peoples bases. But in order to get packed ice, they need to go west. They pass a totally separate set of people. Contrast this to the current system, where (if they decided not to teleport) would only pass the same person or two while heading to spawn.

There could also be a limit to how close to spawn you can mine, and how far away from spawn you can set home or sleep (which is broken currently but not too big of a deal because of /home). This means that players mining do not infringe on the landscape players are building in, and players are not so spread out that they do not see each other. This also allows players to access different structures. Some players were upset when the only witch hut and ocean monument were claimed before they joined the server. This isn’t too big of a deal because of the spawners and EggCatcher, but farms involving structures are much faster than spawners.

Another thing that I feel the server is missing is a community area, which everyone can build in and players walk through frequently to get to different buildings there. The closest things to that would be the various shop areas around the server, but those are all owned by a specific person, have strict plot requirements, and are commercial only. The other similar areas would be Moon Forest and ACag’s town (whose name seems to be constantly in flux). Those are mostly settled by new players who have their only bases there.

On most survival servers this communal area is around spawn. However, our spawn has a large creative build there. While the spawn looks great and I enjoy finding hidden secrets around it, it is currently the most recognizable build on the server, and in my opinion a creative build should not be the most iconic part of a survival server. Additionally, access to the area around spawn is important to technical players. Items from the end return to spawn, where they could be collected by hoppers. Many iron farms only work in the spawn chunks. And if there are any animals without nametags in an area around spawn, all passive mob farms (except for spawner farms, which are must slower) break. An easy solution which I think almost everyone would agree with would be to put the spawn in a separate world, then have one or more portals leading to the spawn point of the main world.

So, that’s the… uh… first point mostly covered. This is turning out much, much longer than I expected. Anyways, currently the economy on the server is pretty bad. It’s way faster to get money by mining than by selling items. All of the shops are priced so that it’s not feasible to buy items in bulk without mining for a while, but it’s almost always faster to get an item yourself than to fly to a shop. Additionally, shops always always seem to be out of stock. The root problem behind these is because of how easy it is to get a few of one type of item with spawners.

I personally think that using EggCatcher with spawners is very unbalanced. The ability to change spawners with eggs was added to the vanilla game long after EggCatcher was developed. Because spawn eggs only had one purpose when EggCatcher then, and because spawn eggs are unobtainable in survival in the vanilla game that Mojang added the feature to, it’s my opinion that this is unintended behavior. I created an issue on the GitHub asking for a configuration option for this, however the developer still hasn’t responded. To be clear, in the next few paragraphs, I am suggesting that the spawners are unbalanced, not EggCatcher itself, as entity transport is thoroughly broken in vanilla.

The spawners unbalance the economy because they let players get any item, including rare drops like emeralds and gold and prismarine, in small quantities with almost no effort after building one small farm around the spawner which costs like a few wood blocks, a single magma block, a hopper minecart, and a bucket of water. In my opinion, a “healthy” economy would require players to depend on each other for different items. For example, I built a really fast creeper farm and I sell gunpowder. Kerm has a fast ocean monument farm and sells prismarine and ink sacs. However, why would either of us buy small quantities of the other’s drops if we could just use a spawner to get a few of the other’s items? Since neither of us buy drops, why did we each decide to build a farm for one item fast enough to supply both of us? Farms are fun to design and build, until you feel that your effort is being wasted. This scales up to the rest of the server, where instead of everyone making a single farm fast enough to supply the farm with an item nothing ends up being bought. Since nobody is buying items from each other, there is less incentive to go to others’ bases.

Additionally, villager spawners seriously unbalance contraptions that require villagers like iron farms and villager trading halls. In vanilla, you can build a villager breeder, but that requires a supply of food and time. With a spawner, you can get the number of required villagers in seconds, where a breeder would take a while to design and build, plus a bit longer to actually spawn villagers. This means that iron farms and the iron they produce are much cheaper than they are in vanilla. Villager trading halls are much easier to stock, and combined with the vindicator emerald drops from spawners which allow you to get books for almost free, enchantments (especially mending) take very little effort to get. I was able to find a spawner, build a villager sorter, and find a Mending villager in under an hour. I now have a free unlimited supply of Mending books with very little effort in getting the villagers.

I understand that we are a intellectual server, more focused on builds and that it should be easier to get building materials as a result. However, these items are much too easy to get. That makes it really difficult to find an adequate reward for events and things, besides non-renewable items like sponges, unobtainable items (which we are banned from using in PvP events, making them pretty useless), and even faster spawners. Also, from the suggestions thread:
Alex wrote:
We could, but we won't. Since we aren't a PvP server we like to keep a level of challenge for our players.“


Another issue with the economy, which is caused in part by the first issue, is that there is only one buy shop for items on the server. While lapis ore makes a good currency because of how it is impossible to farm and how it is only useful for decoration and making the renewable lapis items, it is frustrating for those who hate mining to try to get money. The lack of trade also means that it is difficult to get money in any other way, although it also means it isn’t as big of a deal as money isn’t really useful except to pay for Towny.

I realize this has mostly been negative up to this point. It’s not that I have a negative opinion about the server, it’s just that this post is focusing on changes that need to wait until the next world reset to avoid breaking things. And stuff that shouldn’t be changed from this iteration doesn’t really fall into that category. However there are a few things that I think absolutely need to stick around for the next world. First off are the events. I really enjoy participating in both the admin-led events and the events led by ACag (although, I guess those are technically admin led now?). They bring some of the players who don’t join as frequently together. Also, every time we use the voice chat for these events, we stay a while afterwards and talk about unrelated things (except ACag, who needs to edit the footage from the event). I hope that we can do events (and voice chats) more frequently in the future.

Okay, I hope at least someone took the time to read all that. If any site admins have not given up reading yet, could you check how this post compares in length to the rest of the forums? Like, is this in the top ten longest posts? Is there a character limit, and how close am I to it? I averaged 110 words per post before posting this, let's see how that changes. EDIT: Only up to 128. Darn. It did take like 10 seconds to post though, a bit odd.

There was a conclusion here asking what you guys thought, but it ended up sounding too much like a YouTube outro again so I deleted it.
Thanks for this post, command! We really appreciate your feedback.

Per usual, I won't respond to anything directly until a few days from now so other members have the chance to start the discussion with their opinions on your topic. Smile
So, a bit of quick sound-off on some of the points command made:

1) Teleportation: Agree and disagree. I don't want to see /t spawn removed. We're not totally a 'explore the map' we're also a 'build cool things' server. It's already tedious enough to trek TO a place to gather materials, if you remove the /t spawn or some other way to get back I can guarantee you that my days of building large, cool structures are over. I don't have the time or the will to increase the time it would take to build by the requisite increase in time that would take. We could remove the /home teleport, but I would also personally like to see /warps to certain other places, like /warp abba, /warp spawn, or /warp startrek.

2) Elytra: Completely disagree on removing/nerfing elytra. I do agree we could make them harder to obtain, but let's be honest... when this server started the rarity was a major point of contention. Comic added the dragon fights, which gave us access to them if we were willing to spend hours and tons of crystals getting them, and then the end event gave us each like 10 of them. I personally don't mind that because the supply is still limited, and its nice to be able to fly. One possible compromise is a plugin to stop Mending from being used on them, so we have to repair them constantly.

3) Economy: The biggest mistake we ever could have made in the rollout of this current iteration was use an item that required an enchantment to obtain as the predominant source of income. As I argued, to some success, a while back, basing your economy of something with a degree of luck involved does not create a fair economy. While it wasn't the biggest issue, as comic soon began exchanging gold for the required enchantment, it did create some early issues with the economy.

4) Towny: A LOT of people like the use of towny... It does a little bit more than provide creeper protection... it also affords moderate protection against griefers and against stealing. However, due to the fact that towny doesn't have the value it would in a PVP environment, I'd recommend (providing we keep to a no-PVP style) having the initial price of a town be FREE, the initial town size of 4 plots, and increasing the price of plots. This allows everyone to protect their land, but stops players from building massive towns quickly and without collaboration, which is kind of the intent of the server. Perhaps if we created a custom version of towny that whitelists things like signs and handles friends accessing stuff better, we could use that.

4) Spawners: Yea, spawners with egg catcher are OP as heck. However, in lieu of building massive, lag-causing darkroom spawners, the block-spawners and their small activation range is something we cannot exactly give up.

An alternative is to remove egg catcher and have mod/admin hosted events where spawn eggs are offered as prizes. The first event of this kind could give each player (or town) one different mob spawn egg to ensure everyone has something to sell that they have a monopoly on. Players could perhaps choose what mob they want in order of who did best, and once players choose that first egg, no one else but them can own that egg. For subsequent events, winners can choose whether to get a different egg that’s not already reserved, or get another egg of their reserved mob.

5) Response Time: One of my biggest issues is the time it took staff to respond to issues in-game. I understand that we all have lives to live, and I'm certainly not suggesting the server is more important. I just found it a bit irking, especially a few months ago, when we had issues with grief, or bugs with towny that caused massive damage... that it took DAYS to fix it. And with other issues, or questions, or requests.. it can take days if not weeks. Less “part of the cemetech community” players would just leave if they saw game-stopping issues being left unfixed. I know this irked many players, and to that end I'm happy to see that we now have more staff (myself and River) so we can respond to inquiries faster. The only thing that could potentially be addressed (perhaps by ranking the staff more specifically) is that with the exception of tifreak (and perhaps Little), the only people who have the ability to actually perform fixes in game beyond just checking logs aren't actually in-game often. I know that I would be having Star Trek events a lot more often if I had the ability to reset the map myself or those who do have that ability were available more often (especially because I avoid trying to bother people too much about this stuff because I know they’re busy and I feel bad needing to bother them at all).

One of the more common issues we could experience is grief and stealing or some other form of damage. Through a plugin, a player could do something like /rollback plot 5 or /rollback town or /rollback area (same syntax as logblock). This would send to the staff a notification that a player has requested an area be reverted, as well as pull up a filtered logblock query that the staff can see. This request would either pop up like mail when a mod or admin comes in game, or shows up in discord/skype or on the console... an admin could simply look into the logs, see what happened and then do something like /rollback approve|deny. If approved, the server instantly performs the rollback, or if the size exceeds a certain amount, waits for no online users.
ACagliano wrote:
It's already tedious enough to trek TO a place to gather materials, if you remove the /t spawn or some other way to get back I can guarantee you that my days of building large, cool structures are over. I don't have the time or the will to increase the time it would take to build by the requisite increase in time that would take. We could remove the /home teleport, but I would also personally like to see /warps to certain other places, like /warp abba, /warp spawn, or /warp startrek.

I've played on servers without any teleportation at all, and it's not a huge deal. It doesn't take more than a minute a two to fly from place to place. The time increase that would be caused by the removal of teleportation would probably be mostly going back and forth to pick up materials from your base. This would introduce a new challenge of inventory management, but it would be a manageable one that players could come up with a solution for. I do this in some part already by putting a lot of my items in shulkers in my enderchest.
And my point was that teleportation and elytra leave very little room for innovation, making things like Kerm's rail network basically useless.
I agree that warps should be kept for the ABBA world and the star trek world, as these exist outside of the main world, however I think that a warp to spawn is both unbalanced and unfair for late-joining players far from spawn.
Now, for obvious reasons I think that /t spawn should work outside the world/nether/end so that you can get back from an event, the museum world, or the ABBA world.

ACagliano wrote:
One possible compromise is a plugin to stop Mending from being used on them, so we have to repair them constantly.

I think this would be fairly balanced, if combined with a train buff. One issue though is that anvil cost increases exponentially, so you wouldn't be able to repair them more than about 5 times.

About towny:
Okay, perhaps I was exaggerating a bit when I said that nobody has ever been glad that Towny was a thing. However, it breaks a lot of vanilla things including pressure plates and pistons on chunk borders. A modified version would take a while to create, and once you removed those features it would basically be a way to lock levers and turn off mob spawning and explosions, which are too OP to be free.

ACagliano wrote:
Yea, spawners with egg catcher are OP as heck. However, in lieu of building massive, lag-causing darkroom spawners, the block-spawners and their small activation range is something we cannot exactly give up.

Darkroom spawners are not as laggy as you might think. They can only spawn a maximum of about a hundred mobs at one time across the entire server, unlike spawner blocks which have no limit. This is the same amount of lag as if these 100 mobs were naturally spawned around the world. The lag often attributed to darkroom mob farms is caused by water flushing used in outdated designs because it is cheap. More expensive farms that use pistons or AI to route mobs have the same impact on the server as a spawner block.
Please don't remove EggCatcher, just its capability to change spawners. It makes it so much easier to move mobs around. I have a jar with this fix already made. Creative players can spawn in spawn egg items that players can still use to change spawners.

I think that a monopoly for each item is on the other extreme. There would be basically nobody to challenge the prices and nobody would buy anything because anyone can choose whatever price they want. That would probably lead many players to just build their own darkroom farms to get items themselves. Also, what I see about spawner farms being OP, besides a few drops like emeralds, is the ability to reuse the one farm to get small amounts of any item. They are mostly terrible for getting large amounts of one item. There should be enough competition that prices stay balanced and inflation isn't a huge issue but not so much that each player can "compete" with whoever is selling those drops without putting out any effort by changing a spawner.

I totally agree with you about the response time, those who can do something are too busy to do so and those who are not busy cannot do anything.
commandblockguy wrote:
I've played on servers without any teleportation at all, and it's not a huge deal. It doesn't take more than a minute a two to fly from place to place. The time increase that would be caused by the removal of teleportation would probably be mostly going back and forth to pick up materials from your base. This would introduce a new challenge of inventory management, but it would be a manageable one that players could come up with a solution for. I do this in some part already by putting a lot of my items in shulkers in my enderchest.
And my point was that teleportation and elytra leave very little room for innovation, making things like Kerm's rail network basically useless.
I agree that warps should be kept for the ABBA world and the star trek world, as these exist outside of the main world, however I think that a warp to spawn is both unbalanced and unfair for late-joining players far from spawn.
Now, for obvious reasons I think that /t spawn should work outside the world/nether/end so that you can get back from an event, the museum world, or the ABBA world.

If we could devise a way to allow players to chain different minecart types together, like create a train, that they could load supplies into chest carts, and travel to their destination, then I'd be behind eliminating most forms of teleport. In that case, we should do away with the buttons to choose to stop at a stop, and have something at a station that a player can press to choose destination and they are taken directly there... with all track switches preset for them.

commandblockguy wrote:
I think this would be fairly balanced, if combined with a train buff. One issue though is that anvil cost increases exponentially, so you wouldn't be able to repair them more than about 5 times.

What about giving each player a single eytra that cannot be enchanted or repaired, but the player also cannot lose in any way, and a player has to do something special (not sure what) in order to get it back to full dura.

commandblockguy wrote:
IAbout towny:
Okay, perhaps I was exaggerating a bit when I said that nobody has ever been glad that Towny was a thing. However, it breaks a lot of vanilla things including pressure plates and pistons on chunk borders. A modified version would take a while to create, and once you removed those features it would basically be a way to lock levers and turn off mob spawning and explosions, which are too OP to be free.

I'm sorry, but I will always argue that, if towny is being used as the server's chief method of terrain protection, players should not have to pay into it. Servers that use Worldguard or regions do not make players pay in-game currency to own a protected area, nor should we with towny. Towny has no value anymore... it should have no price.
That being said, if a player wants to expand their town beyond whatever the starting size is, they should pay steeply for it, as a larger town means less building space for others, more farm space, etc.

commandblockguy wrote:
Darkroom spawners are not as laggy as you might think. They can only spawn a maximum of about a hundred mobs at one time across the entire server, unlike spawner blocks which have no limit. This is the same amount of lag as if these 100 mobs were naturally spawned around the world. The lag often attributed to darkroom mob farms is caused by water flushing used in outdated designs because it is cheap. More expensive farms that use pistons or AI to route mobs have the same impact on the server as a spawner block.

You know more than me on lag. My main concern is activation range.

commandblockguy wrote:
I think that a monopoly for each item is on the other extreme. There would be basically nobody to challenge the prices and nobody would buy anything because anyone can choose whatever price they want. That would probably lead many players to just build their own darkroom farms to get items themselves. Also, what I see about spawner farms being OP, besides a few drops like emeralds, is the ability to reuse the one farm to get small amounts of any item. They are mostly terrible for getting large amounts of one item. There should be enough competition that prices stay balanced and inflation isn't a huge issue but not so much that each player can "compete" with whoever is selling those drops without putting out any effort by changing a spawner.

That's true. However I do think that if a player is able to get their hands on something that produces a type of mob that you can't get anywhere else, like a monument, they deserve that monopoly.

commandblockguy wrote:
I totally agree with you about the response time, those who can do something are too busy to do so and those who are not busy cannot do anything.

It's the joy of running a multiplayer game that requires admin intervention from time to time when players are real people who have other things to do. I also understand a reluctance to assign additional permissions to players when you don't know what they're going to do with them, and the lag issues we have. However, in most of these cases, the workarounds can potentially cause more abuse risk and more lag than what we're afraid of. The recent stuff that broke in the Star Trek world (RE: my post in the Staff Star Trek thread) is one such example of this. It's gotten better now that tifreak and Little have the POWWAAA, but some form of automation of some things might not be the worst thing in the world.

I actually believe that ALL players should be able to logblock their own areas, so they can tell admins exactly what and where is griefed/stolen/broken. It still relies on having someone actually available who CAN do the reverts, but at least it puts less work on those people.
ACagliano wrote:
If we could devise a way to allow players to chain different minecart types together, like create a train, that they could load supplies into chest carts, and travel to their destination, then I'd be behind eliminating most forms of teleport. In that case, we should do away with the buttons to choose to stop at a stop, and have something at a station that a player can press to choose destination and they are taken directly there... with all track switches preset for them.

The chaining of carts (and potentially a speed increase to help balance things and add realism) could be done with a plugin. I have a few concepts already about ways to route a chest cart to a selected station, and if it is linked to a train you could direct the entire train that way. Basically, you include a destination item in the chest cart, and at each station or switch location there is an item filter that checks which item it is. If it is the station's item, the train stops at that station and breaks. Otherwise, it turns the next switch in the proper direction and returns the item to the cart.

ACagliano wrote:
What about giving each player a single eytra that cannot be enchanted or repaired, but the player also cannot lose in any way, and a player has to do something special (not sure what) in order to get it back to full dura.

Just giving the player the elytra is a bit too easy. You could probably give a special anvil tag to the elytra, which makes its repair XP cost 0. Also, elytra currently lose durability based on time used, not on distance traveled. If we do need a plugin to make all elytra free XP wise to repair, this change would be fairly simple.

ACagliano wrote:
I'm sorry, but I will always argue that, if towny is being used as the server's chief method of terrain protection, players should not have to pay into it... Towny has no value anymore... it should have no price.
That being said, if a player wants to expand their town beyond whatever the starting size is, they should pay steeply for it, as a larger town means less building space for others, more farm space, etc.

Terrain protection is against griefers? In that case, the chief protection method should be the whitelist process.
If Towny has no value, yet causes bugs with redstone, it should be removed.
I think that if we are really having issues with space then the map should be expanded or have the world border removed entirely, if the server can handle it.

ACagliano wrote:
That's true. However I do think that if a player is able to get their hands on something that produces a type of mob that you can't get anywhere else, like a monument, they deserve that monopoly.

Well, that's still a monopoly, and they can charge whatever they want. Generally you can go to another monument if you want to make your own farm, but with the current world size there can only be one. Once again, I suggest that the world border be expanded or removed.

ACagliano wrote:
I actually believe that ALL players should be able to logblock their own areas, so they can tell admins exactly what and where is griefed/stolen/broken. It still relies on having someone actually available who CAN do the reverts, but at least it puts less work on those people.

I have also wished for this. It's hard to define "their own areas", though.
commandblockguy wrote:
its hard to define their own areas

Assuming we stick to towny, I propose the following:
1) players can logblock whatever plots they personally own, town owners, the town. They can they screenshot that so that mods or admins know where and what.

2) mods can rollback theft from chests, one chest at a time. Mods can also rollback terrain grief by plot.

3) larger rollbacks still require an admin.

*the reasoning*
Larger, more widespread damage would likely have less of a pronounced effect on the gameplay of specific players. For instance, a broken elevator, or a damaged farm does not need to be fixed immediately, as players don’t specifically need it fixed to play. However, a player who has many chests stolen from or has damage concentrated in a certain area would have diminished gameplay while waiting for a fix. Having more people able to fix smaller areas would counterbalance the necessity of having something fixed faster with the relative availability of someone who can fix it.

Re: towny/grief/whitelist:
And if someone manages to get whitelisted? What then? How will it help. The second layer of defense is towny, as it protects specific players stuff.
commandblockguy wrote:
[Stuff about teleportation and transportation.]


Transportation didn't work out at all like we expected it too. Our idea was that we'd disable teleportation and that'd encourage players to build walkways, railways, or even utilize waterways for transportation. I recall discussing incentives but can't recall where. I've read through the old "Transportation" and "Map" discussion topics to no avail; it was very likely a staff topic. But basically, I suggested that we pay users for creating the connections between towns.

We restricted the map size at the start of the map to keep towns close together and thus, facilitate connections between them.

Quote:
[Stuff about towny.]


We feel Towny is one of those necessary evils. It creates a lot less work for admins and mods when players can protect their stuff. Yes, we do our best to allow mature players to join the server who would respect other peoples builds without Towny but it's hard. We only have a few minutes to judge someones character based on how they answer questions. If we take too long they lose interest. All we can do is take their answers at face value and ask that our mods (and admins) use their best judgement, it's not realistic to ask for a players history. We aren't an employer.

I'm going to respond to a related paragraph here.

ACagliano wrote:
I actually believe that ALL players should be able to logblock their own areas, so they can tell admins exactly what and where is griefed/stolen/broken. It still relies on having someone actually available who CAN do the reverts, but at least it puts less work on those people.


Not happening. It's good on paper but it'll just lead to a direct confrontation between members. "You stole 30 blocks from me." Or the player who was stolen from, may go steal those items back. Things will escalate and before we know it members have a negative experience. It's much better to contact someone with the ability to address it.

"Hey, I'm missing 30 blocks from this chest. Can you check it out?" The mod/admin checks the area, sees the person who took it, and takes the issue from there. Player A is oblivious that Player K was the culprit and they go on having a good collaborative friendship. Rather than Player A directly confronting Player K and creating a hostile and negative atmosphere on the server. Player C leaves because she hates the drama, Player K leaves because everyone is convinced he's a thief (because it's not like other players can see the log block info themselves). Player A throws hard accusations out at other members and start to feel unwelcome by these attacks. Player A is banned. etc etc.

Sure, it's a hypothetical situation but ideas on paper will never be great in implementation. Which leads me into another point:

Quote:
And with other issues, or questions, or requests.. it can take days if not weeks. Less “part of the cemetech community” players would just leave if they saw game-stopping issues being left unfixed.


Speaking for myself, I'm on IRC pretty 50/50 and never on Discord. Any ideas, requests, or questions shared in a chat-style environment will get lost. My IRC account is always online but I may not be connected to it. When I connect, I receive the last 50 lines of chat. So, yeah, I'm going to miss a lot. PM's on IRC will show up but won't persist between clients (i.e. from work to home). The 100% best way to get something seen is to post on the forums.

It may not be immediate but it'll get seen.

Quote:
This might sound counterintuitive at first, but I feel that removing the world border and the resource world would actually lead to more interaction between players. Even though players are more spread apart, they would pass each other’s bases more because they no longer have one place to go to access all of the biomes. So, say that the average player lives close to the center of the world. In order to get a hardened clay, they need to fly (or walk, or ride) northeast. They pass several peoples bases. But in order to get packed ice, they need to go west. They pass a totally separate set of people. Contrast this to the current system, where (if they decided not to teleport) would only pass the same person or two while heading to spawn.


Yeah, we generally kept small biomes to keep with a smallish map. But, we could create larger biomes and thus a larger map. It just boils down to resources. We keep a small map because we ran MC pretty lean. We've since bumped up the RAM a bit but we're still getting some pretty serious TPS issues. It's also entirely possible we'll see less TPS issues with a larger map because everyone will be spread out. That's inline with your counterintuitive statement.

Quote:
There could also be a limit to how close to spawn you can mine, and how far away from spawn you can set home or sleep (which is broken currently but not too big of a deal because of /home). This means that players mining do not infringe on the landscape players are building in,


My only question here is how do we define mining? Is it breaking blocks? Or is it breaking ore? Because, you have to break blocks to build. So, if we prevent mining 1000 blocks from spawn how will a player place and destroy blocks? How will they level the landscape and build rooms underground?

Quote:
Another thing that I feel the server is missing is a community area, which everyone can build in and players walk through frequently to get to different buildings there. The closest things to that would be the various shop areas around the server


The best solution to this is pretty simple. The players band together and they themselves say that this area is a community zone. An admin can come through and set region flags. Such as, an entry message so players know when they enter it.

On most survival servers this communal area is around spawn. However, our spawn has a large creative build there. While the spawn looks great and I enjoy finding hidden secrets around it, it is currently the most recognizable build on the server, and in my opinion a creative build should not be the most iconic part of a survival server.[/quote]

Spawn is a big thing on every server. We wanted to have a giant tree in the jungle, akin to something like Avatar. If we wanted to sort of role-play on the server we could force everyone to have a humble abode in a spawn city. Venturing out into the wilderness beyond the spawn city walls for resources. But, that would constrain a lot of players. They wouldn't have room for farms, for one. And what's the point of resources if you have finite building space in a predefined city limit? Theoratically, we could make it a server thing where we can start with a city center, then we can build an outer wall 100 blocks away. And, as we grow, keep building outer walls. This could also satisfy the technical players who want access to spawn chunks.

Quote:
[eggcatcher stuff]


Yeah, I am not a fan of egg catcher myself. It makes farms way too easy, and as you say enchanting items isn't a chore. I've said it before, I'll say it again. It's really hard to give rewards on the server for events. But, if no one can find a villager that sells mending books, then weapons and armor with that enchantment can be awesome prizes. Which circles back to an over-arching issue I have with the Dragon. I feel like the fight is way too easy. If you die, run and grab some diamond armor, run to the villager farm and get your enchantments again. There's no penalty. Why would I let the dragon drop highly prized items for a feat that wasn't challenging in any regard?

But, if someone needs to collect materials and enchantments for a fight and they die. And they're just completely devastated then a 100% drop rate for rare enchanted items is at least justified. But this is getting away from your point a bit.

Quote:
I understand that we are a intellectual server, more focused on builds and that it should be easier to get building materials as a result. However, these items are much too easy to get. That makes it really difficult to find an adequate reward for events and things, besides non-renewable items like sponges, unobtainable items (which we are banned from using in PvP events, making them pretty useless), and even faster spawners. Also, from the suggestions thread:
Alex wrote:
We could, but we won't. Since we aren't a PvP server we like to keep a level of challenge for our players.“


I'm not 100% sure how to fix this. I think egg catcher would be one step but still unsure about the next. I've tried asking users to only farm what they need (Topic, Point 3) but it seems giant farms are the only thing players like to build. With smaller farms, materials wouldn't be as easy to come by and thus, not as easy to get. But this is hard to moderate. How do we verify a farm is "adequate?" Enforcing this would be pointless.

Quote:
I realize this has mostly been negative up to this point. It’s not that I have a negative opinion about the server, it’s just that this post is focusing on changes that need to wait until the next world reset to avoid breaking things.


We really appreciate this. Constructive criticism is always encouraged, your feedback here is incredibly valuable. You make and explain your points. You could have said "You should have fireworks deal one heart of damage when using an Elytra" and we'd have no understanding as to why you think that. But you go into depth. It's easier to understand the reasoning and agree when that information is provided.

Quote:
However there are a few things that I think absolutely need to stick around for the next world. First off are the events. I really enjoy participating in both the admin-led events and the events led by ACag (although, I guess those are technically admin led now?).


I'm glad you enjoyed those! My only regret is not doing more. Regular Abba caving sort of went to the wayside when Elemental left and other events were sort sporadic. We learned a lot from this. What works and what doesn't. What we can promise and deliver on, and what we can't. We really appreciate all of the players on the server. And feedback is only going to make the next map a better experience.

I'll get to the rest of the posts later. There are other things I have neglected to do while replying to this. Very Happy
Alex wrote:
My only question here is how do we define mining? Is it breaking blocks? Or is it breaking ore? Because, you have to break blocks to build. So, if we prevent mining 1000 blocks from spawn how will a player place and destroy blocks? How will they level the landscape and build rooms underground?

The same way that we currently stop mining in the main world. We ask players not to destroy the terrain to gain resources only in that area. We could also slightly lower the ore count inside the area or increase the size of the caves outside the area.

Alex wrote:
If we wanted to sort of role-play on the server we could force everyone to have a humble abode in a spawn city. Venturing out into the wilderness beyond the spawn city walls for resources. But, that would constrain a lot of players. They wouldn't have room for farms, for one. And what's the point of resources if you have finite building space in a predefined city limit? Theoratically, we could make it a server thing where we can start with a city center, then we can build an outer wall 100 blocks away. And, as we grow, keep building outer walls. This could also satisfy the technical players who want access to spawn chunks.

The community area that I suggested would not be a mandatory thing, but an area where you could put builds where they are guaranteed to get more attention than otherwise. You would not put your entire base inside it, or any farms, just buildings that you want to be more visible to other players, like shops and games.

Alex wrote:
I'm not 100% sure how to fix this. I think egg catcher would be one step but still unsure about the next. I've tried asking users to only farm what they need (Topic, Point 3) but it seems giant farms are the only thing players like to build. With smaller farms, materials wouldn't be as easy to come by and thus, not as easy to get. But this is hard to moderate. How do we verify a farm is "adequate?" Enforcing this would be pointless.

I agree that some types of farms do not need to be as large as most players make them (looking at you, sugarcane). The issue with these types of farms, in my opinion, is how easy they are to make, making it impossible to sell the items output. Nothing has value because it is easy to create your own supply. If it were difficult to farm guardians, then a stack of prismarine blocks would be a great event prize. Currently, you can make a farm "for guardians" almost instantly, so they don't make a good reward.
Also, many types of farms have a strange effort/output curve. For mob farms, the majority of effort is lighting caves or digging a perimeter to empty the mob cap in order to get rates higher than the mob despawn rate, which is only a few times higher than the standard spawner rate. Then farm output increases linearly with spawning spaces, until your killing method keeps the mob cap filled while the farm runs. Then you need to get a better transport/killing method, so that you can repeat until you get close to a theoretical maximum. This means that once you get the perimeter made it would be a waste not to make the farm slightly larger, and this means that for the entire server one or two fast farms for every item is the most efficient way to go.
Of course, this only applies to mob farms. Things like pumpkin and sugarcane farms have linear reward curves. I have no idea why players make huge farms for these. I think about 10 sugarcane plants is enough for basic fireworks and books. If you are making a library, maybe 50 is more than enough. Also, they can easily be shut off automatically because they run on a clock.
Hello Cemetech, it's been a while, and after diagonally reading this thread I think I can give some input on the Towny issue.

As some of you may know I started a server of my own about 8 months ago. We had a very decent playerbase, at around 110 unique players, with 3-5 online at any given time. When starting up, we specifically decided not to include Towny, or similar protection plugin, so player bases were unprotected. Over the 4 months that server was really active, I've had to rollback 4 griefs, 3 of which were committed by the same guy. There was techincally a whitelist, but you just had to fill in your name on the website and you'd be added automatically, so a dedicated griefer could definitely get in. And they did, but it's a trickle compared to the flood towny is supposed to prevent. Even still, for Cemetech, with it's graylist and soul searching I doubt many will even bother. And those that do are simply banned and rollbacked.

My point is, griefing is a far smaller problem than it is portrayed to be, certainly with the right tools to fix them (LogBlock) and with a few mods who know how to use it.

Not to mention the absurdly long titles Towny would give people
[Micronesia:EA] Great Knight Mayor Longbottom of House Targarian: hi

All in all, I think it does more harm than good.
Ideally, we'd have a system that made rollbacks unnecessary. As I start spending less time in MC, the amount of people who are comfortably doing rollbacks dwindles and I'd honestly prefer my moderators spend time playing than moderating. So a system that prevents grief gets big marks in my books. I also realize rollbacks are a routine action, without or without Towny. If there was a light weight version of towny that just gave chest, building, and button/lever protections to a user defined area, that'd be perfect.

At this point, I'd rather forego Towny altogether. Towny is more of a PvP plugin than a PvE as most of our players only use the chest/build protections that Towny gives. And with an established and honest player base, issues should be far and few between.

lennartVH01 wrote:
Not to mention the absurdly long titles Towny would give people
[Micronesia:EA] Great Knight Mayor Longbottom of House Targarian: hi


That is definitely one reason to remove Towny too. Chat is so hard to read when names take up a line themselves; I'm so glad that information gets stripped on IRC.
Alex wrote:
At this point, I'd rather forego Towny altogether. Towny is more of a PvP plugin than a PvE as most of our players only use the chest/build protections that Towny gives. And with an established and honest player base, issues should be far and few between.

I kind of disagree that that's all towny serves. The main reason I got a town this server was for creeper protection. I have to admit that if I had to constantly worry about creepers blowing my stuff up, I sure as heck wouldn't waste my time building grandiose structures. I'd only really ever be on to run PvP stuff. If I'm to understand that we want to maintain the "build cool things" aspect of the server, and we want to remove towny, then I vote that Creeper spawns be disabled, or that mob griefing be disabled in the overworld. I know some among us might think that takes some of the challenge out of playing, but I find it takes the desire out of building, so what gives.

Alex wrote:
That is definitely one reason to remove Towny too. Chat is so hard to read when names take up a line themselves; I'm so glad that information gets stripped on IRC.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to argue towny isn't a burden at times, especially in ways like that. If we can design, or have designed, a custom version of it that allows land ownership, protects from creepers and grief, etc, but removes the over the top stuff and annoying stuff it does, great! Alternative, non-towny land control plugins might worth looking into!
Creeper spawns can be prevented fairly easily by lighting up the surrounding area. You probably see creepers as being more damaging than they actually are because you have their damage turned off and as a result have not lit up your area as much as other players.
The downside of having to light up areas is that you can no longer use darkness in decoration, which is useful in some builds.
You could also use a hostile mob switch, which stores enough mobs to fill the mob cap in a chunk where they are not processed. This also reduces lag from mobs wandering around. However, I don't think that you could set one up on the current iteration of the server because the spawn chunks are protected.
I doubt a modification of Towny to remove features would be a good idea, and that a more lightweight land control plugin might work better. I still dislike the idea of land protection in general (for reasons I discussed above, mostly related to players wanting to leave signs or chests in other players' bases or other valid reasons where they would need to place a block, thus preventing interactions between players). However, I agree it might be necessary if admins are not readily available to do rollbacks.
How about we make a custom version of towny that is player-based.

So players own plots. Every player starts with either 1 or 4 plots to build on. They can append an adjacent plot for a cheap cost or a distant plot at a price that scales up the farther away you get, with a cap.

"Towns" can be generated automatically when you have a certain number of players living in a certain area. Once one exists, you can do something like /plot donate to give a plot you own to the town, and everyone in the town can now build on it for farms and stuff. Towns survive as long as they have enough players in the area to remain a town... no upkeep.

For perms, players can build on their own plots and donated plots. On all plots, any player can harvest, place or break signs, maybe cut down trees. All other forms of break and placing are not allowed.

Other functions:
Signshops. Players can place signshops on private plots and town plots. Signshops placed on town plots give the money to the town, not the player.
What I meant to imply was that Towny is fairly complicated for what we use it for.
  • Integrates with almost every economy plugin
  • Nations are used to create sides in town wars
  • Configurable options that enable and disable what can happen during war time
  • Supports all permission plugins


It takes a lot to support "every" economy and permissions plugin; I've got to imagine that has some impact on how heavy the plugin runs. If we can integrate into an ecosystem where the economy plugin and permissions plugin, strongly support the town plugin that'd be awesome. There's no additional code for 5 other economies, 8 other permission systems, etc etc because they're all co-dependent on each other.

We don't need a plugin that offers deep customization for PvP because we'll never use it and it will just take up overhead.

If we can get the next version of the server to run on 3-5 plugins, that'd be amazing.
  1. Town
  2. Permissions
  3. Economy
  4. Multiverse
  5. WorldEdit


ACagliano wrote:
"Towns" can be generated automatically when you have a certain number of players living in a certain area.


That just sounds heavy because the server will need to check where plots are, and when a threshold is met a town is created; I have a feeling this will not help our TPS issues.
Alex wrote:
It takes a lot to support "every" economy and permissions plugin; I've got to imagine that has some impact on how heavy the plugin runs.

The permissions system is handled by Bukkit, and permissions plugins only implement ways to handle multiple players easily. Towny probably integrates with a few large permissions plugins for the chat system, but mostly lets Bukkit handle the permissions. As far as the economy goes, the jar file is not shaded with all of the economy plugins, and I don't see how a few function calls checking player balance would cause issues.

Since it seems like the main purpose of Towny is to prevent griefing, which requires admin rollbacks, it might be simpler to allow players to mark a chunk as protected, and prevent players who have played for less than a month or 15 hours total from breaking and placing blocks there. This would eliminate most of the need for rollbacks, without detracting too much from the experience for new or long-time players. This would hopefully keep the amount of rollbacks low enough that it wouldn't be an issue with admins' busy schedules. It would also reduce the amount of lag and other annoyances that Towny causes.
The other purpose of Towny is to give players configuration on what is allowed in their plots. This feature requires Towny to listen for every type of event and check which plot the event took place in, which probably creates a good bit of lag. The plot flags which are not intended to restrict other players, like turning off fire spread, mob spawns, or creeper explosions, affect the balance of the game, and it might be a good idea to consider whether these options improve gameplay.

Alex wrote:
If we can get the next version of the server to run on 3-5 plugins, that'd be amazing.
    Town
    Permissions
    Economy
    Multiverse
    WorldEdit

I assume that Essentials and sign shops are counted under Economy, and WorldGuard under Permissions.
It would be interesting to see the systems that players come up without an economy/shop plugin, though. Redstone could be used to exchange items for diamonds, lapis, or some other currency.
  
 
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