Although I am a strong advocate of keeping the transportation system as it is in the current map (all teleport commands, but also more conventional transportation such as roads and trains), I feel like the suggestion KermMartian makes would be the best compromise.

/Spawn seems essential to me, since spawn is often used as a social hub where people meet up.
/town spawn this is one of the least useful teleport commands if you ask me. I wouldn't mind it very much if this wasn't available in 1.9
/home One of the most useful commands! I use it for instance when building tall buildings, to get back up onto the wall when I had to go down to get more blocks. Also very useful when moving items into a newly built vault / storage. I think it would be one of the worst commands to take away.
Additionally, if it would be possible to attach a cost to each /sethome, I think that would be fair to limit it's use.
/tpa I really like this command to quickly group up with other people and do things together. Afterall, that's why we play on a server, so we can do things together. Taking this away would create a bigger threshold for people to group up in my opinion.
That being said, I would be willing to compromise and give up access to /tpa as well.

Conventional forms of travel
I would love to see even more roads across the landscape, connecting towns to other towns and spawn. If done right, it would also be possible to facilitate travel via horses this way.
Railroads provide another fast way to travel, which can definitely make travel easier, but they do have to function as intended. There have been a few problems with the rails in the current world, which dissuaded people to use them for quite some time.


I agree with this for 100%!

Can you be more specific about the problems the current rail system has, so we can avoid those pitfalls in 1.9?

The biggest issue that I was aware of, was the direction selection not functioning for quite some time. I know this was mostly out of your hands, but even after it suposedly got fixed, it turned out not to be. I think it was fixed eventually (to be honest I haven't used the rail system lately, I have traveled a lot by foot throughout the world). I do know of some minor hiccups that have been manifesting in the last few months. This is mainly limited to the minecart stopping at several stations while no buttons were pushed to get off at that station.
Like I said, there haven't been that many problems, or very big problems, but this was a protected and well planned rail system that wasn't really complex once it left spawn, and used command blocks to function properly. If lots of people will work together on a massive, complex rail network that will be built in survival, there are bound to be more problems than this.
If we want to rely on conventional forms of travel, we will have to make sure they will function.
I know I for one wouldn't be able to construct a rail network where you can select your destination.

P.S.: I hope this post makes any sense, I wrote this as I'm about to get some sleep

/tpa If this command would be in the game, it would make other methods of transportation pretty much pointless, as people could just tp.
/spawn I don't think it should be removed but there should certainly be a cost to it to encourage more conventional methods.
/home should tp to your bed.
/town spawn Again, with this command, it's kinda pointless to travel between towns by train.


The server shouldn't start out with a pre built rail system. The comunity should build the main structures with their own resources and any commandblock magic can be installed when the rail is finished.

PS I'd love to help with the commandblocks

What if you don't have a bed to tp to? Also, the /spawn command is very useful when you want to get to spawn. It's a natural meeting place, after all; it also has the shops there. When I played a few days ago, I was using the /spawn command constantly to get from home to spawn so I can go on the train tracks.

Speaking of the rail system, does anyone know exactly why it only goes north? I'm guessing it has something to do with the redstone involved...

I'm 90% sure /tpa will not be included in 1.9, I'd have to read this topic again to remember where the majority of users stand.



I believe /spawn should be free, since as caleb1997 mentioned, since it is a hub and travel to the server provided spawn shouldn't have a fee.



Not everyone uses beds. I would be all for going vanilla and disabling /sethome (and thus requiring users to use beds to set home) but the general consensus wants both commands.



Yes. I don't want this because it'll effectively circumvent the danger of PvE. If you can just teleport to spawn then go /home to get back to a cave there's no risk to the reward. But, the general consensus is that they want this too and I found out that the fee for teleporting is stupidly low compared to the amount of money circulating on the server. Regardless if /town spawn and /sethome are enabled, the cost to teleport will be reflective of the economy.

The economy is another beast, I strongly dislike how out of balance the 1.8 economy is (teleport fees are effectively useless). I'd like to figure out how to regulate the economy so things remain fair, constantly adjust the cost of teleporting to reflect inflation or deflation and/or, disable teleporting for a month or so while the economy normalizes and then appropriately price the teleportation fees.

Dibs on setting up shop as a TSA-esque deal and [s]stealing[/s] confiscating any remotely pointy objects for safety reasons. Because safety is important. Myes.

Anyways. As far as my own two cents go, I'd personally be fine with just /spawn and some sort of home warp. Especially if we're encouraging the usage of roads and railroads.

I've read this topic again, but it looks like I haven't voiced my opinions yet, so here they are:
So what I would suggest is disable all teleport commands except the /spawn one which costs a little bit of money. The reasons for this are the following:
/tpa: I think most people already agree on this that it'll be excluded in 1.9, so I'm not going to talk about this command.
/t spawn and /home: They're kind of the same, if only 1 of them exists they're gonna have the same function, teleport to your home which is in your town, or teleport to your town where you home is. I think this isn't needed because if you die (in vanilla) you spawn next to your bed where you last slept, and most beds are in your home.
Why there might be some resistance against removing these commands is because if you die on the current server you get spawned at spawn, instead of at your bed. So when they've died they're going to use /t spawn or /home most of the time to get some "rescue" gear. This makes people unfamiliar with the vanilla bed/death mechanic because they don't know it. What I think is that beds are a good alternative to these 2 commands.

So if this is implemented people have always 2 places they can start their journey from, spawn which will always be accessible by the /spawn command and the place where you last slept so most of the time your home/town. This also encourages to not only make rails go from spawn to various places on the map (like a single-star-network of rails and roads) but also from town to various places on the map (including other towns and big community farms or even playershops in the wild), thus making more a web or multiple-star-network of rails and roads. This means that there will be places where there is an intersection and station of various rails and roads so you can easily go to such star point and continue your journey to your final destination. These star points will be a big town most of the time, but we can also artificially create one on a place where no big towns are nearby.

I also know some people don't really like reducing the teleport commands, so I know that there will need to be a compromise. What I can suggests is maybe adding a teleport command with a very high teleport cooldown, so maybe instead of 30 seconds cooldown, 1 hour cooldown (as example). This highly reduces the teleporting from one place to another over and over (ie. to bring materials from place A to B). But this makes people who can only hop on for a very short to check someones build/contraption out, by teleport to a closer "star point" in the transportation system. Or why not if we implement that instead of the /t spawn or /home command a "/warp [star point on the map]" so you can actually teleport to a few important intersections of rails and roads which is more useful than just your town, but also encourages to make more paths/rails.

I wouldn't include a cooldown, as that still just allows people to build for an hour and then tp back to get more stuff. Instead what I'd suggest is still allowing /tpa but have their inventory be emptied when they get there (Like a sort of mincrafty share-screens). After a fixed amount of time (say ~1 minute or so) tp them back and return their stuff.
This still allows for people to quickly check out other people's builds without being able to actually "go" there.

I actually like this idea.



I like this idea too.

I'm not sure what one I want to get behind and advocate for but I really do like these. Here's what I'm thinking though. The warp point idea may take some time since all mode of transportation will be player built. Meaning it's only going to be as helpful as there are intersections and hubs to travel from. Where the teleport cool down could be a last resort. Back when I played Final Fantasy XI Online, there was a cool down of 2 hours to visit your home city or something like that. And the warp spell had like a 15 minute cool down. It's been a long while since I played - 2004? - so my times may be off but I certainly am familiar with the idea.

That was the point, encourage people to make more transport options .
But I can see that the /warp command will be useless at the start of the map, when there are almost no means of transport (excluding walking). Most people may also need to adapt their way of playing because there are less teleport commands like they're used to. So instead of a slow change, that'll be a more drastic change. So I suggest if the /warp is implemented that we should at least have a third teleport command with /spawn and /warp excluded. The /warp command itself can also remove the need of /spawn if you add a warp at spawn, but that is just lowering the number of teleport commands available and not the gameplay, so something psychological.

If we'll be using the /warp command we also need to determine when something is a big enough intersection to get a warp to it. And who can set warps a moderator (which I heard that there will be some in 1.9) or just the admins?
As you can see we need to work some things out, but we still have time until bukkit/spigot is out with updated plugins.

Indeed. I'm eager to get the map and spawn finalized sometime in the next week or two so we can start working on spawn. Then, we can decide other things as we check off completed tasks.

With out officially declaring anything here's my idea for warp prerequisites:

As far as eligible warp points, I propose any time there is an intersection with three or more towns connected; Spawn is an eligible town in this regard. And it must be 300 blocks away from the nearest town? Just so players can't get greedy and build a town then connect other towns to it and call it an intersection, or build an intersection just outside the border of their town. I believe that would make an unfair advantage for those towns.

Having the intersections far enough out would promote alternative methods of travel. There can be a provided rail, horse stables, river/boat, etc.

It could also satisfy the reimbursement discussion over in the Economy topic I believe? Where a player or town is reimbursed for the time and money spent in a pathway connecting itself to other towns and/or spawn. I wouldn't peg 300 blocks as a hard number but it would at least push folks to make an effort on a path and spread out a bit, since there would be a soft minimum of ~600 blocks between towns here.

I feel that making a warp for every intersection with 3 towns connected a bit too low, I think there will be quite a lot of intersections that will connect 3 or more towns. This makes that there will be quite a lot of places to warp to, which then again defeats the purpose of making long, cross map railroads or even High Speed Rails (Piston bolt). What I imagined is 1 or 2 really big intersections which will start existing when the map is big enough (if we're gonna have a map that expands) so that you won't teleport for only 500 or even 1000 blocks. You also said things about a minimum distance from towns and other intersections, which I agree with.
Of course if this will be combined with once every [insert long cooldown time] this becomes less of an issue the higher the cooldown time is.

But thinking about this, do we really need to create such strict rules about where there is going to be a warp and where not? I actually would like to see that the building of rails/roads would go more natural instead of forced, because the latter will give less qualitative paths/rails and that is not what we want.

As for cooldown times, they should be implemented. After all, teleportation could be abused. My suggestions are:

1. The farther you teleport, the longer the cooldown. If you tp a 150 block distance, a 20 second cooldown would be ok. If you tp 3/4 across the map, that's another thing, and have a appropriately longer cooldown time, like 10 minutes or so.
2. As for removing /tpa .... I'm against that. It allows people to meet up at there houses, or if someone needs help, they can ask for it, and bam! someone comes. It also promotes player-player trading, which can be beneficial. If Person A has redstone, and Person B has iron, and they both need what the other has, then they can /tpa to one of them and trade.
3. I do not, however, support a cooldown period for /home. I myself have gone to spawn, and then realized that I forgot something at home. But I can't /home right then and there, because I have to wait 15 seconds for a cooldown period. And those 15 seconds(or whatever the cooldown period is right now) could be spent doing something else.
4. But to balance out what I just said, if you just teleported, and go /home, it should double current cooldown time. This way, it's there if you need it, but it teaches users to not abuse teleportation. And to remember everything that they would need.

There's my say.

I like the idea but not aware of any plugins that would help enforce this.



Duly noted but at this point I believe you're fighting an uphill battle. Others would like /tpa removed to promote traveling, exploration, towns a close distance from each other and, connected towns via paths and other transportation. I also view the removal of /tpa as a balance. In PvP, which is how the 1.8 server started, /tpa can be beneficial since other players are the enemy wherein PvE the mobs are the enemies and /tpa is a really good way to circumnavigate the threat. Yes, this was possible in PvP but you also faced raids and other challenges from human opponents.

Again, in PvE those diamonds you're carrying from a day of mining are to be brought back to home as safely as you can. Yeah, sure you've got /town spawn and /tpa and /home in 1.8 but that also eliminates the PvE threats. If it were solely up to me, I'd remove teleportation aside from a few like /spawn and /home. As if I included /town spawn then folks could have their home in the cave and just get around the PvE aspect that way.

Which is why I'm a fan of point #4 and cool downs in general. If there is a cool down it will still encourage folks to weigh the PvE aspect.



That's a fair point, excluding one or two commands from the cool down. I would assume /home and /spawn? If this is possible, I don't see why not.



Again, comes down to the limitations of the plugin. If there's a plugin that can do this I think this is perfectly reasonable as well.

If /spawn is allowed, both people can go to spawn, the central place on the server and they can trade their stuff at spawn, this makes it not needed to have /tpa to trade their stuff.
I think that playershops will also be enabled, so you can just go to someones shop (which will be best made close and easy accessible from spawn) to buy/sell/trade stuff without even the need of teleporting (if for example town A makes his shop in town B).

Pulling this from the spawn thread, to show off my thoughts for a rail system I'd like to see employed, instead of having long rails going to no where, and still needing to travel a long way to get to some towns.

I'd also like to see these rails on the ground, not up in the sky. I think some might also agree with that :p

I'm liking what Kerm said on teleporting, keeping everything but /tpa. I hope that's how we'll end up.

Perhaps you could try and make your own plugin.

Yep, that's more or less what I'm envisioning for the rails too. Have you taken a look at the rails and roads in the Museum World? I think they're much more what you're thinking about. The only problem with your plan is that diagonal (ie, non-cardinal-direction) stretches of track can be difficult, but perhaps we should try anyway, because they'd be so much more interesting that strictly straight runs of track.

Sure I like the idea but, I have zero motivation to make a plugin for this.