This is long overdue but at last! The best topic yet. Again, I'm sorry this took so long to get out. There's no good reason for it, I just forgot about and then I was bumped about it a few days ago and then again just a few minutes ago.


There were 10 responses. Nothing happened to the last 2 but I took this screen shot before I recorded those responses. I thought I uploaded screen shots of the completed survey but I didn't and I don't really want to go take screen shots and upload them when this is really the only screen shot.



It's pretty clear we need to do something about Towny. I've been bouncing ideas off the mods for a while and I even brought it up publicly a while ago. If we lowered the cost of towny we would see more use of it and, consequently, less thefts by new players. A lot of the feedback I got was that Towny also served no real purpose other than expensive protection from creepers. I got more than one comment that said that. I hear you.

So what can we do it about it?

Should we lower the price considerably? With free upkeep?
Should we make it free with paid plots and paid upkeep?

I'd love to hear your ideas. I plan to get this implemented ASAP - Monday? - due to my negligence in responding to this.
I like the sound of lower price and free upkeep.
I think upkeep is important. We don't want players to make a towny and then go away and then there's a towny that nobody can touch. My suggestion would be 2000 d for a towny, and at least 25 d a day upkeep, to ensure that new players don't immediately found a town the moment they find a free spot, and to keep at least some pressure on players to, like, go mining every so often. I mean, it's called Minecraft, but who takes names seriously?
DrDnar wrote:
I think upkeep is important. We don't want players to make a towny and then go away and then there's a towny that nobody can touch. My suggestion would be 2000 d for a towny, and at least 25 d a day upkeep, to ensure that new players don't immediately found a town the moment they find a free spot, and to keep at least some pressure on players to, like, go mining every so often. I mean, it's called Minecraft, but who takes names seriously?


I really like this idea! I would be down with something like this. I liked having a town but the buy in and the daily upkeep prices were discouraging.
No upkeep is a horrible idea, because there's absolutely no motivation to keep playing on the server; your area will be protected forever (and in a hypothetical world where we have tons of players and still a non-huge map, then we'd potentially run out of space. I would understand decreasing the initial price to buy a town slightly, but honestly, I don't think it's that high: we have several players who have towns as well as hundreds of thousands of denarii. I set the current prices in the interest of pushing people to highly value having a town, and once created, would greatly value putting in the occasional effort necessary to keep paying the upkeep.It seems to me that one of the (overlooked) things we should think about is more places to spend money besides just creating towns, to help vitalize the economy further.
Well, the current towny price of 30,000d for a town is 300 lapiz. This is a LONG time mining without building, or an even longer time with building. And with the setbacks of having creepers blow up your work a few times a week, and griefers having at your place.

Plus 1000d per plot is 10 lapiz. Depending on how efficient you are at mining, 10 lapiz is 1-2 hours worth of mining. For many players, that's all the time they can be online in a day.

Add to that the 100d upkeep for towns.

Add to that the cost of a nation (another 30,000d) if you decide you want to allow allies to help with a project. Otherwise, you've gotta open up perms and expose your land to grief and raid, which gives the admins/mods a headache and players no other real benefit.

Add to that the nation upkeep (another 1000d a day).

This is SO overbearing that you've effectively made players have to choose between having a towny soon enough to make a difference, or having a build that you've gotta keep doing over and over and over because by the time you get it townified, it's been blown up a ton. And, once you have the town, plot prices are so overbearing that it takes so long to claim and build and in the meantime, still is still getting blown up.

Towns have no REAL value on the server anymore, except for creeper protection. Griefing/raiding/pvp is not allowed anymore and gets rolled back. So while we've made towns less valuable in game, rather than deflating the price to match, we've inflated the price by 300%. But it's actually more than that because the last server's currency was a gold standard, this one is a lapis ore standard, which means we have to factor the difference in rarity between gold and lapis, as well as the probability of getting a Silk Touch pickaxe (or the money to buy one). So you're actually looking at more of a 400-500% inflation in price.

My suggestion for towns would be 5000d to create, 400d per plot, and 75d upkeep
My suggestion for nations would be free or 1000d to create and 1500d upkeep (easier to form, but more working together to maintain)
There's some great discussions happening in here. Keep it up guys! Sounds like everyone is favoring a mix between lower prices and keeping the upkeep costs.
I agree on it being extremely too expensive on what little it gives, which can be eliminated simply by lighting up things to keep mobs from spawning in your builds. So that mostly eliminates any need for Towny.

If, when buying a town, the person making the town got something for it that cannot be gotten easily or at all with the purchase of a town, then that would help give incentive to start a town.

Acag nailed it pretty well, though. You'd spend so much time mining all the time for lapis that you'd not have as much time to do the building. You'd have to hope you're lucky enough to have a major monopoly on something to be earning enough money while you're not around to keep your place going.
I think the big issue here with Towny is both the price to buy and the price to upkeep a town once you have it. Honestly, mining is something I don't enjoy doing a ton of in the game. It takes me away from a project I am working on just so I can get an arbitrary item to sell to the spawn shop if I want a town. The economy is not that robust that someone could setup a sign shop and expect it to keep them running on money. At least, not from the experience I have seen, and I have one of those monopolies that tifreak speaks of. Now maybe I am priced a bit high on shulker boxes, but I do believe them to be a bit of a luxury item as well, and not needed for basic day to day work (else, they would have been in the game sooner).

I do think there should be some work to get a town setup and running though. They should not be handed out to anyone who wants one. They should have to put in some time on the server and earn their way in. As such, I think having a purchase price that is a little steep is not that big of a deal to me. However, if we do insist on keeping the only source of infinite money on the server attached to an item that requires time spent away from making their builds, I do think that we should eliminate the upkeep. It was one of the reasons I was not the largest fan moving to an ore for our basis of currency.

Maybe we could find items that would be farmable but still take work to acquire as a 2nd form of currency. Something that farms don't scale well for mass production. Villager trade items would be a good way to encourage some of that. I am thinking of the Bottles of Enchanting would be a great item to consider. It still requires a player to physically make the trades, and is an item that cannot be acquired in any other fashion. The player intervention does prevent large server crippling farms from coming up, and does encourage actual playing. About the only way to short circuit this is with an Evoker farm to drop the emeralds instead of trading for those, and I was under the impression that we might make them unfarmable mobs anyways.

As for nations, I think the barrier for entry once again being high I think is worth it. There isn't as big a need for one to be had, and the benefits can be had by a few towns joining up to create one. However, I am all for a nation being without upkeep. Again, if the initial barrier is high enough, I would only expect quality players to actually one to create one.
tifreak8x wrote:
You'd have to hope you're lucky enough to have a major monopoly on something to be earning enough money while you're not around to keep your place going.

Yea, and as of late, monopolies based on rare spawn eggs have been destroyed. Blazes, ghasts, the mansion mobs, and a few more are uncatchable. So as far as mobs go, the only remaining farmable things are things that literally everyone can farm and are thus un-monopolizable. I was lucky enough to get a blaze farm early enough that some sort of grandfather clause has so far applied to it, and i sell iron at low enough prices that its marketable, but other players may not be so lucky. The economy makes it easy to maintain yourself once you get started, but very hard to actually get started. Which isn't too big of a sin because money isn't really needed unless you plan on townifying.
Here's another way of thinking about things, perhaps: what could we add as benefits of having a town or nation that would incentivize people to create them, if the prestige of having a town/nation isn't enough? Say what you will about PvP, but having protected areas for your stuff that could otherwise be stolen was a great incentive.
Kerm, that was a great incentive on the previous map when stealing of items and open world unprovoked PvP was allowed and encouraged. Since we have moved back to a PvE server with the current map where stealing is not allowed and PvP must be agreed upon, that major benefit has gone away.

So, yes, if there was a way to increase the benefit of the town, I would expect more to be purchased. I still stand behind the fact that we should find a way to encourage people to earn cash without having to dedicate the limited time most of us have to digging around finding an ore. Relying on people to purchase from sign-shops can be inconsistent at best for many of us. I have one of the few monopolies on the server, and unless I have priced myself too high, most of the purchases I have seen recently have been by tifreak and DrDnar making large orders at a discounted rate. The only shop on the server that I would guess has a steady supply of buyers is tifreak in the End with his enchanted books. I can't see people really competing with that as it is tied into the best XP farm on the map as well.
Some great discussion guys. I've stayed out of it for the most part because sometimes I think you guys take my word as final more than you should.

Alex wrote:
I'd love to hear your ideas. I plan to get this implemented ASAP - Monday?


Monday is here! I won't be implementing these changes today. I was hoping we'd have a consensus by now and looks like we've narrowed it down to a lower buying with regular upkeep. Kerm suggested adding more benefits. I'm not exactly sure what other benefits we can add - perhaps towny support plugins? - but is this something people yearn for? Would you guys like benefits that justify the current cost of Towny or would you rather the price be lowered?
I would like to hear what Kerm thinks we can add for those additional benefits. I am at a loss of what those might be at this point in time. About the biggest thing I would get from a town is a different name in chat, but not sure if it is worth the cash.
I'm not sure what it could be; I was waiting to see what ideas you all had. I did think about a kit of rarer items you could get every day, like Evocatus used to have for people who donated real money to the server.
I've tried searching but can't come up with much. Found this, but I can't see how it ties in with Towny; it would be cool if you could set a torch to only trigger when town members approach. Which would be useful for farms or doors. Or even trigger on allies (nation members).

https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/redstone-proximity-sensor.17965/
Hate to be that guy, but has there been a decision made yet on how we will be handling towny price wise on the server going forward?
  
 
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