I feel like I'm reading legalese because I am not following this.

• You think it's expected that we create an atmosphere where users feel engaged and are just as capable as those who create mob farms.

I, too, see the draw in creating a machine that is efficient at what it does. But if Player J can create 100 items a minute and Player B can only produce 1 every five minutes, J will value that item less than B. Eventually B will just buy all of that item from J. Player J could end up with a monopoly and start rising the price of that item until another item farm pops up. As such, I think such giant machines should be limited to sorting the spoils of an adventure or a mining expedition.

The Number 1 thing I want to avoid in 1.9 is the economical imbalance we had in 1.8. If we start 1.9 and everyone jumps to a mob farm to create their shops I fear we'll have a similar scenario. Thankfully it looks like we'll be using Lapis as a currency so the gap won't be as big as it was with Gold but I don't want to undervalue the work a player puts in to manually farming cows for meat to sell at their shop compared to someone who automates the process. Which, is where the jobs plugin comes in again. The player can get money from farming cows manually which could be seen as a subsidy to keep the price low. If someone wants to automate the process and sell meat for 2d, the manual labor farmer would have that "subsidy" from the plugin to compete. This plugin would also reward those with currency if they decided not to mine for spoils. They could raise cattle, harvest wood, create weapons, etc and buy their coal, iron, diamonds, etc from those who mined. I feel this is a very self-sufficient model, as not everyone may want to go hunt for lapis ore in order to earn money. I feel like we'll attract a wider player base too as not everyone may find mining enjoyable but they certainly take pride in farming and harvesting.

If after a few months there's some stale progress maybe then we open up the possibility for mob farms or something. But I think it's wise to start conservative and then relax the rules to properly regulate the gameplay as it evolves it's own political, economical and, social structures. And it's here where player input would be critical. They could voice that they aren't earning enough from farming. So then we can decide on a proper solution.

If we do the phpBB-to-MC plugin to, then we ensure every player has an account on the forum to speak up with while also, more or less, gray listing. Though maybe it could be whitelisted to the accounts registered on the forum then those accounts need a secondary permission to participate, otherwise they are just visitors/guests who can only look around.

If we are still considering plugins: http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/silkspawners/

Sometimes, it'd be nice, really nice, to move these buggers to a better place. :<

I haven't had much to say about anything here as I'm not big about plugins, however, I have recently had a growing interest in a plugin that would not necessarily tamper with vanilla terrain look and feel, but rather enhance it so it's still vanilla-like, but better suited for our needs. In particular, I would like to propose that we find a way to increase cave generation frequency. Not that we need to modify how caves look in general or anything, but rather just increase the number of caves we get. I have done a bit of research, and it seems like Terrain Control has this capability in the config files. You can not only increase the frequency of individual caves spawning into the world, but you can also increase cave system frequency. In other words, the world will generate a cluster of caves every so often, so you'll have regions of a large amount of caves all bundled together, which look like a pile of spaghetti, and regions which have almost nothing around... just individual caves, no linkage to each other. In particular for a visual, I would like to draw your attention to this image as a reference to how you can see the clusters of caves, and the spaces between them. Each patch is an individual cave system, with tons of connected and interweaved caves. The open spaces between have a few caves here and there, which are often not linked together, and it's incredibly dry on any caves. Not sure how our map looks like cave-wise, as we don't have cave view on the current dynmap, but it would look similar in ways. If we could take advantage of something like Terrain Control to increase cave generation in 1.9 (or even this map's temporary maps if possible as a trial run), that would be really beneficial to things like Abba Caving, and also would probably please everyone in general, having more opportunities to gather more resources, rather than do something boring like strip mining.
Apparently in the Terrain Control config files, there is something called "Cave Variables" which are easily tampered with, and control the frequency of individual caves, and also cave systems. It seems pretty straightforward to do to the point that I'd like to again emphasize testing it in 1.8 in our temporary world we use for Abba caving and otherwise resource mining. For some additional reference, here's some input from a person who messed around with the cave variables in Terrain Control, and their results explained.

Here's my two cents.

There should be a plugin that makes it so that the farther you teleport, the longer the cooldown. I have yet to see anything like it(but I'm keeping my eyes open, just in case), but it would definitely balance out the transportation issue. Because this way, we can still have teleportation, but:

1. The farther you tp (counts /tpa and /home, but not /spawn), the longer the cooldown.
2. If you tp, you cannot tp again until the cooldown is over.
3. The ONE exception to rule #2 is if you /home or /spawn. In that case, it doubles the cooldown time left. Unless there isn't a cooldown time going, in which case, rule #1 applies, setting a timer.
4. If you go /spawn with no cooldown timer going, then no cooldown is set, other than the usual 3 seconds.

Thoughts? is this a or a ?

I'm a bit confused, though I think I like the idea. It seems you're saying that there is no cooldown for /spawn (except the 3-second one) and that /home can be used even while a cooldown is happening. (But if you want to teleport somewhere else afterward, you will have to wait longer?) Please clarify.

Yup, that's what he's saying. You teleport within, say, a 50 block sphere the cool down will be 3 seconds. within 100 blocks, 10 seconds. Across the map 45 seconds. But when you /home or /spawn 3 seconds after your first teleport, then the count down doubles to 6.

Say, you are at home. Then you /spawn to sell something. You realize you forgot the item to sell. So you TP back /home all within 3 seconds. Your cool down is now 6 seconds. It's unlikely to get higher than that.

But, what if you're across the map? So you go /home to deposit items real quick. You find out the cool down to /tpa back to your buddy is 45 seconds due to the distance. So you decide to head to /spawn so it's a little bit less of a walk. You know have a 90 second cool down before you can /tpa again. You get to spawn and realize you left without a pick and food. So you /home. Cool down is now at 3 minutes. You grab those tools and back to spawn you go! 6 minutes.

Random times and distances are used. I don't exactly agree but I like the concept. For instance, you could keep doing /home and perpetually doubling the cool down. It could eventually get to days then months, assuming someone was so determined. This is how I interpreted his suggestion at least.

Bumping this, since I've not seen any replies directly regarding this as a possibility.

My argument for having it is I've found numerous spawners out and about, but are too far away to make anything out of them. It would be nice to be able to collect these, and possibly sell them off to other users, or trade for other things, so we could all benefit from having a spawner to set up an auto farm for, while we do other things in close proximity. Also, this would be useful if one is found in an inconvenient place while building (rivereye can attest to that) and we wouldn't have to be hopeful an admin would move it, or be forced to destroy it.

I think that's what makes survival fun. The thrill of having a lack of control and working with what is presented in front of you. Being able to manipulate such a pivotal block wouldn't be fun - I honestly think the 100% catch rate for the mob catcher is too high.

If there's a group of players that would like this plugin they need to weigh in. I realize we're going for a "Creative Survival" server but I firmly believe that this is something that shouldn't be altered.

I think having some spawn-area centric plugins would be cool. The current spawn set up has a market like area with a grill, which inspired me to think about making furnaces that are always lit. Turns out, there's a plugin for that. Not sure if it'll be updated for 1.9.

Or use vanilla mechanics so you don't have to rely on such plugins...
To place one at your current location facing north:

Code:

For other facings use another number on the end:
2: Furnace facing north
3: Furnace facing south
4: Furnace facing west
5: Furnace facing east

It's just the lit furnace block and won't let people melt blocks for free.
Tada, 1 plugin less we need to worry about

How about

no teleports at all?

Where did our compromise end up on teleporting? Now that we have plans for such an extensive rail system, I'm pretty enthused about the more limited types of teleportation we had discussed, to encourage people to build more rails so that they'll still be able to quickly traverse the map anywhere. I aim this mainly at comic, but if someone else has a clear picture of where we ended up, that helps too.

We were dropping /tpa, keeping /home, /t spawn, /sethome, and /spawn, last I checked.

Okay, that's what I last remembered too, and it seems like a reasonable compromise to me. I vote that we freeze that as the final decision, unless anyone has huge (valid) objections.

I think that the removal of tpa discourages community, as it makes it much harder to show others builds you've made and such.

The idea is to have rails between cities, amongst other styles of trails and roads. So, not really.

Our spawn server is now on CraftBukkit 1.9, still whitelisted for the completion of spawn (and to wait for a few plugins). It looks like CraftIRC hasn't been updated, so since it uses 1.7 APIs, it seems like it won't be an option any more. How do we feel about PurpleIRC? Is there another option?

I'm not sure if this has already been determined, but I think it would be nice to move away from Towny for this server. Towny, in my experience, has typically restricted me to building a small home and not really knowing where to mine and gather resources. It also restricts the average player from being able to build great structures that are still protected from griefers. (And being able to build freely enables better use of the surrounding terrain.)

Of course, using a plot-based system where everyone is spread out creates some other major problems. Firstly, there is the issue of those random plots of land taken by people that are never built upon. There is obviously no perfect solution to this, but there are a few options. A system may be set up where, if a player doesn't log in for a long time and/or does nothing with the land, an admin can manually unclaim the land? I'm not sure how well this would work, or if it would seem too aggressive.
Also, what should be used to restrict how much land someone can claim? Maybe the more active a player is on the server the more land they can claim? (Perhaps something logarithmic so that no player can claim too much land? And there would have to be anti-AFK measures too.)

Of course, not using Towny (or something similar) also isolates players from each other, though we could perhaps go for something similar to Hermitcraft 4 in which there are various "districts" in which people can set up their base, albeit I'm not sure how well that would work with a non-whitelist server.

I could be completely wrong about this, but I'd at least like to throw this out there for consideration.

Not sure I follow, people outside your town can't destroy or build. If a new user were to randomly log in and go grief, they'd only be able to do so in the wilderness. As mentioned elsewhere, we are having a graylist. So, anyone can join but they won't have *any* permissions until they are added to this list, not even the ability to build in wilderness.



This is a tough one, on 1.8 it was super easy to earn currency and stock pile it. This has let users leave the server for months and come back to their town with everything still claimed. I do oppose it but by hopefully using a non-renewable source for the currency in 1.9 this will be less of an issue and actively encourage users to be on regularly to maintain their towns.



I do recall myself pushing an activity criteria for something during our 1.9 discussions but can't remember what for. The problem with this is that there isn't really a plugin to track such time. There may be plugins that track how long a player has been on the server but it's unable to tell the difference between idling and actual activity.



How does a non-Towny server isolate players? I don't think I quite understand.

We appreciate your opinions!

I'm gunna try and make a case for a web based statistics and block logging plugin.

Web Based Block Logger

I really miss the days we had a web based logger. It allowed an admin to log in to quickly and efficiently check a variety of flags and events around a coordinate. A player could say "My vault is at 123,45,-678." and I'd be able to check users who teleported, opened chests, took/placed items, broke/placed blocks and, other things within a given radius of that coordinate. Compared to the system we had later on where a Bedrock block had to be placed precisely at the location or console commands used, the results where placed in the chat box which (depending on activity of the coordinate and chat) would be hard to read.

Now with moderators they can log in to the web portal and check a location without actually needing to be there or additional Minecraft permissions. As an admin I can teleport to any coordinate in game I need to but mods require a /tpa. Under 1.9 we are getting rid of /tpa so they'll need the requester to be online to take them to the location, that is if we even allow Mods to check these sorts of things in game because I don't know if they'll have access to obtaining bedrock.

Additionally, we're running a "graylist" server for 1.9 which should in theory keep our player base honest and disciplined. But, if my youth is to be a mentor, a system without a method to check is easy to game. If we believe that every player who is accepted is honest we're going to have problems and we open ourselves for drama and tensions that destroyed the 1.8 PvP server activity. With 1.9 and our graylist, we're effectively setting up a walled garden of sorts and I believe it should be in our best interest to make sure the players have a genuine experience and our mods and admins need tools which are easy to use and efficient to check accusations, should any arise.

Back when we had the sign disaster, where a placed sign would lag the chunks around it. We had a new member on the server who was adamant he could fix it. I couldn't get close to check the sign, or even know where the sign was. But with a web based logger I could have entered the CP, entered a rough coordinate and set the radius to 100 blocks and searched for signs that were placed. It would have shown me he placed that sign. It was pretty obvious he placed that sign, because of the timing of this brand new user and his constant nagging that he could fix the problem in "seconds" while brushing off the desire to play on the server.

Web Based Statistics

Perhaps less important than the block logging in my eyes but I still think this is a valid request. Our front for the server is dangerously static and outdated. In order to increase our visibility and interactivity I believe we should have information available on the page. This could have numerous benefits, including the lack of the infamous "Join and Leaves" where players not on IRC log in to check who is on the server. Those players could navigate to the server URL and see relevant information there. It would also make for fun posts every couple of months about player activity: "ElementalVis placed the most blocks this month at 31,337!" "Creeper83 died the most times by falling to his death an average of 13 times a day!"

Anything we can do to increase activity and make the server an engaging experience should be promoted; a statistics plugin accompanied with monthly posts on the forum would be a phenomenal addition. I'm going to redo the structure of the gaming forums so Minecraft is spun off and more easily it's own destination on Cemetech for those who explicitly want Minecraft.

We could use the MC website to also highlight builds individuals and groups have done accompanied with pictures, a description and, coordinates. As well as using the site to promote events with links back to the forum topics.