I would like to be a mod. Hopefully my neutral stance during the last war shows that I can remain neutral, but seeing as I'm active on the server, I probably can't

I appreciate the support but I'm not asking for mods yet - and will not respond to any requests/"applications" for future mod-ship, as this is the discussion topic for 1.9. I'll make another topic about mods and all that later on.

okay. Cool beans. I'll be sure to visit that topic when it exists.

Mods are definitely a good idea. I didn't understand why we didn't have any when I first came here since I had only ever been on servers with at least two staff members on at all times. Comic, I don't know how you survived without mods honestly. With all the work administrators have to do--it's maddening!
Since you want to start with non-players first, I'd suggest looking at any forum staff that have MC and maybe recruit them (if they are willing, of course) because of the fact that they have some administrative experience already. Tifreak, Merth, his majesty the elfprince, geeky, the others-- I think they would definitely be good candidates to at least look at, in all honesty, but it's up to you. Find people you can work best with.
I've also seen that people feel better about the administrative team on a server if everyone is either 18+ or close to 18+ (by close, I mean maybe one or two are 17). I guess it's a maturity thing, which makes sense if you think about it.
As for recruiting active players (should you ever get to that point), definitely look for some that are really chill and don't have any beef with anyone. I can think of a few that would be wonderful candidates, but again, it's all up to you.

I'm sure there have been developments and changes of opinion since this thread stopped being discussed. So, to recap the current discussions:

• Transportation being limited
  • Lack of teleport to promote a more robust transportation network between towns and spawn.
  • Enable the nether.
• Non-PvP
  • Although arena PvP would be permutable or PvP in designated areas.
  • Possible events and rewards for PvP matches
• Non-Farmable Currency
• Prohibition of Multiple Accounts
• Enable a Gray-list for players.

This is the gist of topics going around. There are other ideas but these seem to be the most popular. I encourage you guys to read the the prior six pages of posts to get fully caught up again. If you reference a previous post, please quote and state what page it's on so other users can follow along; it's been 3 months since the last post, we all can use a refresher when trying to take posts in context!

What's a gray-list?

Who all besides Charles wants to limit tpa? No thanks, /tpa system as it is is fine. I'm not going to try to fight the rails to get places, or spend an hour walking to a place, just to walk back. I was fairly certain we'd gotten this down to just leaving it as is.

Definitely want nether. I want End as well, hopefully enough people come in and voice their interest in it.

Vanillaverse doesn't really have a currency, you trade what you want for a fair price. I see trades for iron and diamonds for things, some people trade gold. That might almost work, but that eliminates the possibility of player shops and such, which is something we've discussed on skype (which you need to join).

I wholeheartedly agree with this ^

I want to limit tpa as well. You'd still have /town spawn and /spawn, but teleporting to other players would be dissallowed. /home was also being discussed about being disabled. My idea is that Spawn would be the central point then it's up to towns to build the transportation infrastructure between each other and spawn. It'd make the rails likely easier to navigate as you'd have direct lines to towns. Builds would be protected by WorldGuard.

A gray list is where anyone can login and join but they can't participate until they "apply" to become a member. On Cemetech we'd have it tied in to the forum member list or something. The plus side for that is everyone will be aware of the forum so they can start threads about things and participate in discussions just like this. The downside is that we'll get less members because not everyone wants to "apply" to a or "join" a website in order to be on a server. So, the quality of players might go up but the number of players will drop.

Regarding the nether. It'll be tricky to implement. I feel like the nether is a bad alternative to transportation but I've had only a limited experience with transportation with the nether and portals under 1.6 or so. It's likely gotten better since then; where portals on the overworld all linked to the same portal in the nether. So, if we do have a Nether it'd be a spawn-only thing. I'm open to change that though.

I don't think that the teleporting commands should be removed, because then more player time would be spent traveling, and that's not as fun as actually playing the game. Would you rather spend a second getting to your destination and 20 minutes caving, or 7 minutes traveling, and 13 minutes caving?

Regarding the gray list, an idea is that new unregistered players could build in the wilderness areas, but couldn't join towns, earn money, or buy things.

And the nether. I think that there should be no restrictions on it's use, as it is used for more than just transportation. The nether is the only place to get glowstone, nether rack, nether bricks (and related), and quartz. Also, I think it'd be a cool place to build a base.

Well, you're asking the wrong person because yes. I prefer a more vanilla experience and if we're going for PvE I think it's goes hand-in-hand. You just got a great bounty of loot from spelunking in caves. You need to now make it back to your home to deposit it. You got to be careful to consider your distance to your home and the resources you brought with you. The fun is mining for materials and making it back home with that loot.

Bring in teleportation and now you can mine without a having to worry about anything. Found a diamond? Set your home point, teleport to your town, deposit and then teleport back to your home point and continue mining. There's no challenge in that. And when it was PvP I could see the argument there, the enemy was a logical person not a monster. You had to defend against raids more than against mobs.

But in PvE the enemy is the mob, we should at least make them a threat. Keep in mind I'm proposing to allow /town spawn and /spawn so you can always get to your town spawn or server spawn. But you'd have to travel on foot back to where you were mining or working. I'm also proposing the protection of pathways between towns so towns don't need to extend their borders. Once a path is built, whether it's foot or rail, I can protect that pathway from grief, deny mob spawns and so much more.

I think you've just changed my mind

Still haven't changed mine at all. I don't need to spend the majority of my time traveling between towns, I like what people build. But of course, you won't make everyone happy with decisions made, so it's up to you guys on that one.

I feel like we should enable the nether with allowing portals everywhere. I also don't see why that is tricky to implement as it is just vanilla behaviour. Or you mean portal linking not done correctly? That is just because users don't link their portals by placing them at the right coordinates. If you build your portal in the overworld, you should move the spawned portal to x and y coordinate of the overworld divided by 8. If everyone does that there won't be any problem. This is due to the fact that 1 block traveled in the nether is 8 blocks in the overworld, and the portal spawns in a random nearby possible location.

Regarding the teleportation, I agree with only /spawn and /t spawn and no /tpa if netherportals are enabled everywhere on the map. It also is because the nether is in the start of the world slower then if it's more end-game play. In the begin you create easy pathways to speed up traveling, later when you have the recources you can create railroads (wich probably is gonna be first on the bussiest nether path) or maybe ice and trapdoor paths (=ultra fast, but uses your hunger bar a lot). So the speed of traveling through the world is more dynamic too, as it grows with the time of the world. But of course, paths in the overworld will come too, because they tend to look a lot better, and they can be traveled by horse (horses and nether aren't the best combination).

Wich leads me to the terrain generation, because amplified can't be easly traveled by horse. I'll keep this short because Charles has suggested custom terrain generation with a nice worldpreset. You should go back and look at his post about it.

I also agree with tifreak to enable the end, especially because in 1.9 it will be something different then before.

Customized Terrain

I'm reviving this in addition to Monkey0x9, because I think this is something that will make the server unique, for at least one reason. There are 2 types of people in this [minecraft] world: Those who like amplified terrain, and those who don't. However, there is a very elegant solution to this that doesn't mean splitting the world in half to make half amplified and half normal. It's kind of like that, but kind of not. Custom terrain generation is a huge step forward in the randomization of worlds, in that you have control over the style in which it then randomizes according to. As mentioned earlier in this topic, there are also some preset options already made which we could easily grab and not have to do much work at all with, if any.

One in particular was a preset called "Mountains And Plains"-- http://worldpresets.com/?post_type=world_preset&p=644
I went on singleplayer to explore some of it and get some screenshots galore: http://imgur.com/a/JS1d9#0

That particular preset caught my eye before, and is one that Kerm mentioned, and others support. Opinions on this preset, anyone? What is so wonderful in my opinion about this customized preset, is that it manages to find a way to naturally satisfy both regular and amplified terrain fans. If you flip through some of the screenshots I have in the above link, you will see that there are regions where the land is more level and easy to traverse, and places where the land is more amplified especially in extreme hills. It goes even further than this-- the "amplified" bits are actually more aesthetically pleasing than default amplified terrain. The terrain still does unrealistic things, as it is Minecraft obviously, but it's smoother, does less crazy things, and even has multiple flatter areas or plateaus within the amplified areas so that maybe even some non-amplified fans could still actually enjoy it. As for the lower or otherwise flatter terrain, there is a very good mixture of it such that there seems to always be some of this between any extreme areas. When people want to travel from point A to point B on the map, they absolutely have the option to not have to deal with amplified terrain by simply travelling through these beautiful, wide flatter valleys. These would make for very nice path building on top of the convenience of travelling over it. Could go further, but seriously, just look at the screenshots I took-- it speaks my mind.

To add something new to this, keep into consideration that 1.9 will also have a new dungeon and more structures otherwise with new blocks, similar to what we saw happen with 1.8. Some structures will also exist in the end, making more reason for the end to be enabled, which is another separate point to discuss in and of itself. 1.9 snapshots will be rolled out soon, so I think it will be a good opportunity to share some thoughts on 1.9 aspects including perhaps some terrain related stuff.

Transportation
I very honestly think that transportation won't be that much of a problem, especially if we settle with having something like the server and town spawns available. As Monkey0x9 very elegantly put it in a way I don't think much more needs to be added to it:



Yes, especially at first you will need to rely more on taking a little more time to go from A to B. But that is something that evolves with time as the server as a whole evolves. I am not a fan of the idea that all should be easy from square 1, and also the idea that things should still be easy in the end. I have to say, I really love good builds, and I couldn't agree more with liking the sight of the builds. But the thing is, I think our need for good transportation over time as we develop from the start, will bring good builds, particularly outside of towns. If we can freely teleport to all of our common locations, this absolutely wrecks the reasoning for creating paths. Why create paths from town to town and to and from spawn if you can teleport to others, and to both spawns? Adventuring to random places doesn't encourage making official paths, since you likely won't go there again. In creating paths from the lack of teleportation ability of any degree, we encourage more builds outside of towns that contribute to the overall good looks of the map. While I am in favor of ideally ridding teleportation altogether, I wouldn't say that we'd need to rid all of it. As comic put it, we can compromise this by having limited teleportation of some form. Whether that be certain teleportations, or finding another way to reduce its potency, that'd be okay.

But then one could argue, well why do you need to care about it? Can't we just enable teleportation altogether so that those who wish to do so, can freely do so, and those who don't want to, don't have to? Well... sure. I guess. The problem is, one doesn't simply not use it and not have internal conflict. What if two people want to meet up for something, but one person uses teleportation, and the other opts out? If I were in favor of teleportation, it'd be a burden to have to always wait for the other player because I could just teleport at the blink of an eye. And I as particularly the person who wouldn't want to use it, would feel like I'm a burden to others, and would be urged to use it to not keep people waiting on me because I'm the odd man out who is stubborn about not using teleportation. This is why I would use any amount of teleportation ability, if given the abilities to do so, to the fullest extent.
Furthermore, this further pushes people away from doing things like building stuff in the wild such as paths. Part of the motivation I would have as a builder, would be that I not only get to enjoy it myself, but enjoy having others enjoy it. For me personally, it would be more of the latter. Why would I build a path from A to B in the wilderness, if I knew most to all people would just teleport around it and never bother using it? I did things like make a recent treasure hunt, because mainly I really enjoy seeing others play it and get to enjoy the experience themselves.
The other thing with teleportation, is that it defeats the purpose of horses other than having them because they're simply awesome. I'm sure some people like just having them in their barn all day, but I'd love to actually ride it too. Technically, the problem with even having a town spawn is that if you want to ride a horse to anywhere, you need to ride it back-- and if you don't care to make the return journey because you can just teleport back, then why even have horses other than for decoration? Minecraft 1.6 was all about the latest and greatest in being able to ride horses from place to place, and I've kind of almost forgotten about the fact that they're meant for transportation because we use teleportation all the time on the current 1.8 map.

Another thing to consider with respect to a possible enabled end: we would have enderpearls in especially great amounts if that be the case. Enabling the end would allow virtually unlimited access to enderpearls, and would help to compensate for the time to travel to a destination that might otherwise take a while. But that's just vanilla behavior, nothing special. Needed to make this a point though, because we have lacked great quantities of enderpeals on the current 1.8 map mainly due to the fact that there is no end world.

Graylist

I would highly advocate this. I think we need to figure out and draw a line as to what crowd we want to be addressing and dealing with. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with leaving a server open to public, but then you have many more troubles to deal with from random strangers, we could have a tendency to address what makes all the new users happy, and such and such. If we focus on establishing a community of mature users, and limit who we let be members of our server, then the job will not only be easier, but we can focus on "us", meaning the community that we establish with each other, and the friendships we make. Other well known communities that are actually whitelisted such as Mindcrack and Hermitcraft, are well known for their smaller, tighter-knit communities, and friendships with each other. I feel if we establish something similar on some level by simply making membership by short application to make sure we generally accept mature and constructive people, we can definitely increase the quality of interaction with any average member. And since it is all a positive feedback loop: people will tend to go on when people are on, because people are on. As long as our membership count is reasonable, it will sustain itself. We might even see more members online at any given time because we all know each other more, and have a greater tendency to want to be online with the people we know.

Difficulty

I bring this up again to the spotlight, because this directly has to do with the standard we want to set on the server, which can be based on who we let on as members (potential graylist). This 'difficulty' is not directly referring to mob difficulty, but could include it. I am referring to any and all things that makes gameplay more interesting in the least. We can either make the average Joe happy, meaning everything is easy and convenient and you don't have to lift a pinky, or we can stretch ourselves a little and keep things either more interesting, or even edgy. Being very honest, I know I hate when creepers blow stuff up and I have to fix it, but I still love it at the same time. I like having to fight off mobs that actually pose a threat when I go certain places. I like the idea of adventuring with no teleportation, and making sure I'm returning safe. It's what keeps things mixed up and interesting. When I'm in full protection gear and got all my endgame status going, the game is far too simple and it's easy to feel it gets boring beyond the casual building. All of the extra complications also help me to value more what I do and have. So again, should it be such that we make sure Joe surely won't die to zombies the first night on the server, and that it always remains easy to simply build with ease, or do we have it so that it is a little less convenient to perform certain tasks and a little more difficult to deal with enemies?
However, I think while we should discuss this, we should discuss it in particular after 1.9 snapshots roll out. The game mechanics will be changing, including more proper fighting. That said, it could get harder naturally in ways, and that is the points that we should then address-- will it be difficult enough overall to keep things interesting?

Since everyone here is discussing 1.9 things, I should offer my two cents:

Amplified terrain looks really cool, but it's more than a pain to work with. The y-values for various parts of a build are all over the place, often exceeding 60 meters difference, making terraforming too difficult to reasonably accomplish alone. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, horses are worthless as the rider will quickly cause one to plummet to its death. This discourages map exploration, and creates a dependency on nether transport or teleportation to get from point A to B. A freebuild server is better suited to a non-Amplified world, as there is ample room to create structures and sculptures, and they would be visible over a longer distance.

If we're going to use a gold-based economy, having the Nether will devalue the currency. However, it simplifies transport and provides ready access to some hard-to-get materials. Creation of withers could cause problems with map griefing, so that should be kept in check.

We should have an End, but have it disabled until we can assemble a group of people to fight it. Killing the Ender Dragon is an excellent opportunity for a Cemetech Minecraft event (HRWO-esque?).

We should graylist to match 1.6 and UT behaviors, and that would give us the ability to keep members in check with their forum behavior. As far as multiple accounts go, we paid a lot of money for those and they prove useful in non-PvP environments.

If we're going to have an Amplified or otherwise vertically enhanced map, the difficulty should stay low; mobs and fall damage are too much on higher difficulties. If we have a normal height map, setting the difficulty to Normal would be completely reasonable.

Some people liked PvP, others did not. I had proposed a system where PvP would be controlled at the Towny nation level, and only people in PvP nations could attack others in PvP nations. This assumes we use Towny to that extent in the 1.9 world. My biggest issue with the PvP in 1.8 is that stealing was allowed; this led to covert raids that occurred at some unreasonable hour of night while the victims physically could not be online. This encouraged building fortresses and discouraged any actual PvP. I have proposed a rule that states that multiple accounts used by the same person for PvP must be in the same or an allied nation, to prevent Shoeblox from happening again (there's still whining about that to this day, it clearly caused more problems than fun). Additionally, quirks with lag combined with the always-accessible behavior of wooden things would encourage the use of glitches in order to steal or otherwise enter a restricted area. This, combined with the no-stealing proposal, would support disabling chest/door opening in areas without Towny switch permissions. Instead of sneaking through a door and emptying a chest, the user would have to kill the opponent to gather valuables. This can also be taken a step further and have homesets disabled, to devalue breaking into one's town; for a non-PvP environment, this would be a nusiance -- perhaps disable setting homes in non-allied territory? Forcing people to travel to an enemy town somehow also disfavors Amplified terrain.

The difficulty does NOT change the fall damage. For more information, check: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Difficulty

Nether & Nether Portals
That's it. I'm still personally wary about multiple portals, I think it'll cause more "Hey, my portal didn't work correctly! Can a mod check this out?" than I'd be capable of addressing, and I'd probably tell them "Tough Luck, and make sure you make your portals correctly." If we only have the one portal at Spawn, it'd encourage a central Nether city and a reason for folks to travel to spawn. Again, this is me wanting to encourage exploration. I feel like our 1.7-8 Spawn was under explored. I put empty hidden chests around and people did find them but I feel like Spawn should be a central location for some server activity. Overworld Spawn can be where the raids start for The End. I was thinking we should put player shops at Spawn but I think that'd actually hinder exploration to other towns, haha.

Edit: Some Link I wanted to work in but forgot about, http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Nether_Portal#Portal_Search_and_Creation

Terrain Generation
I agree with both sides. That an Amplified-esque map can hide builds and user creations behind giant mountains. But I also feel mountains can be a great inspiration and bring bridges and towns that utilize the terrain better. But at the same time, a more flat world can see some wonderfully built towns as well. I think this will be the highest point of contention when it comes to finalizing everything.

I'll check out Charles's Preset and explore some seeds. Recheck them when 1.9 is released. What are some features you guys want? Lots of open space with some tall mountains? A mix of both? More flat than anything?

Player vs Player
In hindsight, yes. We did not have the active player size to support this type of gameplay. Even if we were to have a rule where someone from the town had to be online in order for a raid to be permissible it still would have sucked. Most times there was 1 person online per town (unless there was a raid organized). And requiring one person to be online for their town to be raided is just as bad as no one. If we had a server where there was 10-15 people online all the time then I could see PvP and raids working better.

Since we're going with PvE, I actually think we should raise the difficulty. Like I said above, we need to make the mobs a threat.

Graylisting
Bringing on an "approved list" for 1.9 will ensure quality builds and quality play. The other reason I want this is for dissuading multiple accounts. If we tie the forum into 1.9, and introduce a new field in the user profile for a Minecraft name then it'd effectively limit one account per person.

And, as a forewarn, if this happens and users are found to be creating multiple accounts on Cemetech for their second account on MC, they will see swift action on both Cemetech and the server, as multiple accounts are not allowed on Cemetech.

Difficulty
I mentioned it in the post, but I'll say it again under this point. Since we're going PvE we need to make the mobs a real threat and upping the difficulty is a good idea. I'd also be for a plugin, that introduces levels. Mobs can have a higher level the lower you go in a cave, the farther from a central point (aka spawn) or the farther you get from an "established" town.

By established, I don't just mean "Hey, there's a town here!" A town with so many plots or members. In the real world, just because there's a house in the forest doesn't mean it's safe. You generally have to find a town with a few houses and a population. But, I think that might be asking for a very niche plugin and I can't program that.

Towny
I think it's a subject none of us wanted to touch in 1.8 since town populations directly reflected other perks, such as town size. But I think we should have an X-day grace period, after which players who haven't logged in are purged from towns. While this would have been a great factor in PvP to retain users - rather than members asking their friends to hop on a join their town only to never login again - this same aspect can have a similar effect in PvE. If we do find a plugin where mob difficulty is affected by towns, then an active/large town should be rewarded with lower level mobs outside their borders. While a town that's succumbing to inactivity will be overrun by tougher mobs.

However, we do have a few active 1-2 player towns in 1.8. And again, I'm not sure we have the user base to justify this type of mob difficulty slash gameplay.

I'm with Tifreak. The teleports contribute greatly to being able to explore the world. When you take those away, we will only be spending time on walking to our personal mine, and walking back when our inventories are full again.

I would have even gone further, and expand the current teleport system by making every /town spawn available to every player.
This way people can explore all the awesome towns that are being built.

If someone wants a more challenging PvE experience, no one is forcing them to use the teleports.

I totally agree with every point Comic made.

tp/transport: I personally would limit teleport to spawn, maybe one or two more, but, w/e. This is a per-user view.

Difficulty: I heavily support scaled difficulty settings, making the difficulty setting amp up depending on where you are.

CharlesSprinkle's Terrain: Dude, that's beautiful. Is this still seed generated? I may play around with this on my own.

Graylisting: agreed, no further comment.

PvP: It was brought up that coliseum battles would be okay for PvP; is this still planned, or not?

PvE+: Can we possibly get specialized mobs as some server events? While the treasure is nice, I don't entirely find treasure hunting fun, since I do it all the time mining anyways. How anyone handles this is up to the admins.