Dumbo52

TPControl I'm in favor of defaulting to Allow mode. I see no downsides that can't easily be dealt with, and it'll make the teleportation system much easier to use for new players. Compasses/Ender Pearls I agree with LetsB on this one, for much the same reason. Ender pearls are a nicer alternative that don't have the problem of allowing players into restricted areas. Even for areas such as /warp Lab and /warp Maze, we can set the enderpearl flag in those regions to DENY. The same can't be said for compasses. Nether I'd be willing to try out a Nether dimension, 1000x1000 or so. I think we should use a /warp Nether and keep portals disabled, though; Nether portal networks can get very messy, particularly when it comes to land claims and grief. I'm not seeing a whole lot of support for the End, though, so we'll probably have only two dimensions. Arrows I'm fine with this, though we'll need to update NerdBukkit to deal with TNT. Grass I'd also like to see grass growth enabled again, assuming this isn't too much of a strain on the server. I've encountered very few instances where the lack of growth is actually useful, and as Wayne mentioned, the safe dirt is always available. The only thing you would no longer be able to do is keep grass directly under other solid blocks, but in my opinion, that just looks silly anyway. Map Size What size would you like to see? While I agree that closer together builds would likely be an improvement, I'm also concerned about limiting the players in terms of where they can build. 3200x3200 or 3600x3600 sound reasonable, but I'm don't think we should go anywhere below 3000x3000, halving the map size.Map Generation It sounds like in general, people are okay with a WorldPainter-Vanilla combination. I don't think large biomes is a great idea for this map, though. We're going with a smaller map size, and large biomes are pretty large, so there really wouldn't be much room for diversity of terrain. Even if we use WorldPainter on a large scale, we still wouldn't be able to reproduce the type of terrain generated in a default world. Default biome sizes would give us much more interesting terrain combinations Large Claims This topic has come up in the past, but I don't remember a decision ever being made. If we are to deal with abandoned builds, I'd like to come up with some guidelines. Already, we don't protect empty land. This means that if someone has claimed a large area of land, we will generally only protect the part which has been built on and ask for players to modreq to expand their region later on. Other people's builds made after clearly marked borders are constructed can be moved at the request of the original build's owner. While this system kind of works in that MIA players won't be there to have those builds moved, it provides little assurance to the players building on the land that their builds won't be moved in the future. I'm thinking that if the demand is high enough, we can check if the time since the player has been online passes a threshold (say, one month) and if so, unclaim the land that was not built on. This is probably something that the admins would need to decide on a case-by-case basis.

Smart_Shark, You were banned for racist and homophobic language in chat. Please note that you are responsible for your account's actions, whether or not you are the one behind the keyboard. We have no way of confirming that this was done by your brother, and as such, your ban will be treated as any other. To be unbanned, please reply no earlier than Tuesday, February 24th (7 days) stating that you have read and agree to our rules.

jhaelenn12, Your ban was originally handled here. Thanks for taking the time to read and understand our rules; you're now unbanned. Welcome back!

I've actually heard from quite a few people a preference to have at least large areas of the map WorldPainted. While WorldPainter isn't quite as powerful a tool as many people make it out to be, I think we could consider WorldPainting only areas of the map to add in terrain that was missing from the original seed and make things a bit more interesting. Some features that have been requested which should be feasible in WorldPainter include: Tall mountain ridges Volcano Small Nether biome Mooshroom island We should be able to generate default terrain and then edit some areas using WorldPainter, merging the changes into the finished map. Amplified terrain has also been mentioned. While amplified terrain certainly looks neat, I'm concerned with how well suited it is to building in Creative mode. Nevertheless, I concede that it may be a neat change of pace to include small areas of amplified terrain, using WorldPainter to smooth the transition between the regular and amplified landscapes. Yes, we plan to expand the map as the area within the borders begins to fill up. I'm thinking that we would split up the expansion into a few different stages over time, perhaps 250 blocks on each side each time. I'm not a huge fan of making the expanded terrain only amplified land; while map expansions are meant to uncover new terrain, the primary purpose is to give players more room to build in. From what I've seen of amplified terrain, though, it's a very different experience from building in default terrain. I think I would prefer to dot areas of the entire map with amplified terrain for those interested in building there; in that case, the ratio of amplified terrain to default terrain would remain constant. I wouldn't mind seeing a Nether region, painted with a lake or two of lava. However, I don't think this needs to be contained only within the map expansions. Might as well offer this type of terrain from the get-go, instead of making players wait. As for the End biome, I'm not so sure. I don't really see End biomes as being very interesting to look at or build in, though if enough people think otherwise, it's possible to include one. Changes in how things are run... We can probably enable arrows, though we currently have no way of preventing flame arrows from igniting TNT. We can look into modifying our version of Bukkit, though, to prevent this. We're also looking into allowing different types of damage in PvP areas. We've discussed allowing ender pearls, as a substitution for the much-requested compass. I have no problem with allowing these, though if we do implement this change, I'd like to see an ender pearl cooldown on Creative as well, to prevent the spamming of ender pearls in order to get into restricted areas. Using WorldEdit to edit biomes upon player request does not have any effect on the terrain. It only changes the biome type in a certain area, which is generally used only for changing the color of grass, leaves, and water. I'd be very hesitant to allow players to spawn mobs using mob eggs, even if we do implement a mob cap. I think I had commented on this idea in a previous discussion, but in my opinion, this would introduce a plethora of new problems and responsibilities without too many benefits. I'd be fine with having animals spawned every once in a while for fun little events, but other than that, I see little practical use of having animals on a Creative server. I'd like to hear other people's takes on this idea, though.

For a while now, I think that people have misunderstood how WorldEdit works and why we're so reluctant to allow players to use many of its functions. Currently, players can use a small set of commands. These commands only aid in selecting regions; there is no potential for filling areas with blocks or making edits of any kind. Players have full access to all commands which can be used to select areas (aside from /region select, a WorldGuard command, which may also be added soon); these commands are only useful in measuring distances/areas/volumes and visualizing cuboidal, polygonal, ellipsoidal, spherical, and cylindrical selections (with WECUI). I'm not opposed to the idea itself of giving players increased access to WorldEdit; sure, it would be nice, but there are still many problems with it. As far as I can see, there are three options to choose from. Give all players limited access to WorldEdit. Restrictions:Only give access to the //set and //replace commands. Allow the operation only if the selection is completely contained within a region which the issuer is listed as an owner of. Limit the number of block changes in each operation to, say, 1000 blocks. Advantages:Players are able to WorldEdit their own regions, decreasing load on the staff.Disadvantages:If not checked, players can spawn banned blocks (e.g. flowing water/lava) It is difficult to roll back WorldEdit-induced grief. WorldEdit logs cannot be easily accessed/interpreted. Many people don't know what they're doing and will end up doing something they didn't want to. Allow moderators to use WorldEdit for players. Restrictions:Only allow use of the //set and //replace commands. Limit the number of block changes in each operation to, say, 5000 blocks. Advantages:Players still get the ability to have areas WorldEdited. There is very little chance of grief or abuse. Disadvantages:Operations are still not logged very well. Moderator workload may increase, specifically with requests for clearing large areas of land. Only allow admins to use WorldEdit for official purposes. Restrictions:WorldEdit can only be used for official purposes (land disputes, contests, etc).Advantages:No potential for grief or abuse.Disadvantages:Players have no ability to have areas edited using WorldEdit. ...And I'm sure there are several other advantages and disadvantages to each plan which I'm not thinking of right now. We're currently under the third plan, which, from my experience, suits most people. However, if enough people really believe it necessary to allow WorldEdit in some form, I'm willing to consider the second plan. The first plan, however, has too many flaws for me to be comfortable with. My take on WorldEdit, if we were to allow it, is that it should be used for trivially busy tasks; namely, filling areas with blocks or clearing areas. While the tool does have the capacity for more complicated operations, I don't see that as its purpose; creativity and detail work should be left to the player, not some piece of software. Even for a complex yet objective task like building a dome or stacking a template, I don't really see WorldEdit commands as improving gameplay that much; that's why I'm in favor of only adding //set and //replace, if anything.

It's Super Verros, all over again. I call dibs on building the flying printer cartridge the revision after that. Don't hold me to that.

I recall this issue having surfaced a while ago, but I thought it had been fixed. Regardless, let's at least restrict using /give on other players on Creative since there's no good reason for having this enabled. Thanks for bringing this up, Nick.

Apologies if we've seemed a bit out of touch; we're doing what we can to get some of these changes implemented. The changes we're planning on making shouldn't be any secret, so to give you an update, we should be able to make the following changes to Creative this weekend, assuming there aren't any unanticipated technical problems with them: Allow default players to make WorldEdit selections (Feel free to use the CUI) Allow players to use the /hat command to put blocks on their head Allow all potions, aside from invisibility Make the TNT block inert and allow players to place it Allow players to place beacons There are still more changes we're discussing which need to be evaluated further before implementing them. In addition, we have been discussing some ideas for the next revision. This time, I hope that we can keep the players more in the loop about what's going on while we make decisions. I plan to start publicly releasing updates about what next rev will look like as we come to decisions. I feel that this will allow the community to give us feedback about what their thoughts are on certain aspects of the next revision. While we're obviously going to be taking your suggestions in before we make these decisions, it can't hurt to also 'test the waters' with the outcome of our discussions to give us a chance to respond to any of your concerns before things start rolling. I also plan on updating the rulebook to reflect some of these changes, as it hasn't been touched since the beginning of the revision.

Methinks this is it: type "/home Dumbo52 u2fan25". Don't forget to set a home there!

So for now, it looks like we have agreement on a bunch of changes: WorldEdit Selections: Give default players full access to worldedit.selection and worldedit.wand. Hats: If there are no technical issues, give default players access to this command. Potions: I assume these are disabled through WorldGuard. Allow potions by default, and set block-potions to {INVISIBILITY}. TNT: We can modify KitchenSink to render TNT blocks inert from redstone and flint and steel. Beacons: Let's remove these from the banned item list; if they get spammed, we'll treat them as any other type of block spam. Other items which may require more discussion: Survival Mode Damage: How do we want to approach this? I know that many people wouldn't be happy with enabling all damage in survival mode. Looks like we could either look into creating a WorldGuard flag to enable/disable damage that we would use in PvP regions (may be more trouble than it's worth), or we can create a "/damage [on|off]" command to enable/disable survival mode damage for a player. I think the second approach would be simpler, though the first idea might have a better long-term effect since I could see the /damage command being abused in PvP. That said, we're not in the business of moderating PvP, so we could just let the players handle that. Arrows: Surprisingly, the CraftBukkit API doesn't allow us to cancel TNT ignition from flame bows. If we enable bows, we would have to either deal with the possibility of "griefing" TNT with arrows in protected regions (the explosions would be disabled by WorldGuard anyway), or we could easily modify the server code itself to disable this type of interaction. If I have time, I'll ping one or two techs to take a look at this and see what can get done this weekend.

Alright, you've been unbanned -- welcome back!

drnose21, Thanks for being patient with me here, but there's one more thing I had neglected earlier which I'd like to go over before we get you unbanned. It looks like your account has in the past connected to our servers with an IP shared by over 400 other accounts. The account you're appealing from looks clean, though, so it looks like your account may have been compromised at some point. I'd like you to confirm here that your password has been changed before I can unban you. My apologies for the inconvenience, Dumbo52

drnose21, You were banned for griefing on the Creative server. Since this ban is over a year old, I'm willing to go ahead and unban you if you read over our rules and reply here stating that you have done so and agree to abide by the rules in the future. Thanks, Dumbo52

kvp22, My apologies for not having responded to this until now; I must have missed your post earlier. Thank you for taking responsibility for your actions on our Creative server. Since it has already been a few days and you have read our rules, I'm unbanning you now. In the future, please remember not to destroy other people's builds without their permission; if someone has built in your way, feel free to submit a mod request to sort things out. Thanks, Dumbo52

I had a nice long post typed out earlier, but i've managed to misplace it -- I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in my sock drawer. Anyway, since I agree with pretty much everything that's been said here, I'll just briefly mention some of the topics which I have comments on. Survival mode - I'm okay with enabling more types of damage in survival mode, for PvP purposes. In the long run, however, I'd like to see a command such as "/damage [on/off]" which determines whether or not the player takes damage in survival mode. By the way, what would you think of disabling death messages? I can see both pros and cons to doing this. Wand - I'd also like to make sure players have access to //pos1, //pos2, //hpos1, //hpos2, and //sel [type], if they're not in the same permissions node as the selection tool. Hats - The last time I requested that "/hat" be enabled, I was told that this would not be given to players since certain block types could cause corruptions in player data. I don't completely understand the logic behind that, so it may be worth it to ask a tech what the problem is. TNT - I posted my thoughts on this in the other thread. I'd like to see this unbanned as a decoration block, so I'll look further into this tomorrow. Beacon - Beacons were originally banned due to the annoyance caused by their beams. Most of the time, though, they are used only as a lighting source and occur in large quantities, which can inconvenience moderators handling baconreqs. For that reason, I'm okay with unbanning beacons. I was also going to comment on the possibility of requesting for a beacon beam, much like we do with flowing water and lava, but I don't immediately see any such functionality in the CraftBukkit API. I'll check on this tomorrow, though. I'll be posting more of my thoughts on this idea in the other thread, but I currently don't think this would be the best way of implementing the 'semi-optional no-flight' idea. Sounds like a plan.Everything else that I didn't mention, I'm in full agreement with.

First off, to those who've noticed, I have to apologize for my absence over the past two weeks. I hope to have more of a presence over the next few weeks to help out with modreqs. One of the most prominent issues being discussed here is the staff. I've stressed before that mod nominations appear to be heavily weighted toward PvE players, and I understand that this is due to the fact that the P player base is significantly larger than that of Creative, but we're in desperate need of more moderators. While people's concerns about players should certainly play a role in the selection of moderators, I hope that the heads will be able to take into account the fact that most "NO"s are from moderators who are unfamiliar with a certain candidate -- and for Creative candidates, that's the majority of the staff. I don't necessarily think our system of choosing moderators needs to be change, but I'd like to make sure the final selection is fair to everyone. Additionally, I agree that the lobby could benefit from a facelift. Including universal rules on sign boards and building an area that looks a lot nicer would be a good start. I'm not sure why the details of the contest haven't been posted yet or what FatherSouth's build looks like, but if its better than our current lobby, I don't see the harm in replacing it. I wasn't aware that a recording had been posted. I'm unable to find a recording on the subreddit or forums; would you happen to have a link to this? I'll try to post more thoughts after I listen to the recording.

Feels like I say this way too often, but... As you can probably tell from my activity (or lack thereof) on the servers over the past week, it's been a very busy year for me so far. I'll try to be a bit more prompt next time, but no promises I'll be on the servers quite as often as I was before holiday over the next month or so. Anyway, these are my viewpoints on a couple of the topics being discussed. Map I agree that vanilla terrain makes the most sense for next revision. Particularly with the new 1.7 terrain generation, I'm interested in seeing how that goes. Large biomes and non-amplified terrain sounds good. For the map size, I'm going to reference a segment of one of my posts from a previous planning thread, regarding part of the reasoning behind map expansions. This hasn't been happening this revision as I had thought it would, partially due to the low player count. It seems that with fewer players, there's just been less motivation for people to claim large areas, so there's still a lot of empty land. Because of this, I'm in agreement that we should start off smaller than 5000x5000. I'm thinking either 3000x3000 or 4000x4000; that's a difference between one third and two thirds of our current map size, respectively. Since we're tending toward longer revisions, we'd also obviously need to expand at time intervals greater than two or three weeks -- at least a month or so. We should decide between expanding at regular intervals and expanding whenever it's needed. Personally, I'm in favor of expanding the borders when we feel that it's necessary, but we should probably announce these expansions at least a couple of days ahead of time. Spawn It sounds like you guys are coming up with some neat ideas. I love the sound of a waterfront city at next rev's spawn -- I don't remember having seen anything like that before, so it should be interesting. I have to say, I loved the look of Bellevue, so I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'd also like to have a section of spawn (possibly underground?) dedicated to a tutorial area, containing much of the information you'd see in our current rulebook, in addition to some more in-depth examples. Warps No surprise that we're keeping Pixelart and Bigtown... It sounds like LetsB is taking care of Bigtown, and Pixelart generally doesn't require too much maintenance from a single user. I'm fine with MasterCommaThe setting up a redstone area if he'd like to, but if not, I'd be interested in managing it. This revision, we began allowing warp requests in an attempt to give warp status to more warps than we had last revision. From the Creative rulebook: "This revision, you will be able to submit mod requests for warps. Warps are given to some of the most impressive builds on the server, accessible via the command '/warp'. Before asking for a warp for you build, you should take a look at some of the other warps to get a feel for what is and isn't warp-quality. If you think your build is up to standards, submit a mod request for a warp, including the name of your build. You will receive either a warp for your build or an explanation as to why your build didn't meet our standards." I'm not sure if there are fewer large builds or if people are just reluctant to request for warps, but we really haven't received very many warp requests this revision. The idea is that we will also ask people if they'd like warps if we see outstanding builds, but as far as I'm aware, that hasn't happened much either. It sounds like we want to have more player-made warps for sure, so to do that, we'd need to increase the frequency of either of the above occurrences -- possibly even both. The latter of these two options is simple enough. We have more moderators than we do admins, and thus, the moderators as a whole tend to see a lot more of the map than we do. We can encourage moderators to either submit a request to the admins when they see a build for us to evaluate if it's warp-worthy, or they could get into contact with the builder themselves and encourage the builder to submit a request, firsthand. Personally, I prefer the former choice, as it puts less pressure on the builder and doesn't get their hopes up like the other option would. This type of exchange would also be anonymous to non-staff, since the modreq page doesn't supply coordinates. This system would essentially let the mods say, "Hey, check this build out; it's pretty neat and might qualify for warp status." The other solution to this issue is to increase the incidence of players' warp requests. It wouldn't hurt to add a message to the announcement cycle saying something like, "Want to have your finished build or community project to be featured? Submit a modreq for a warp to request a global waypoint!" We might as well add some information about that to the spawn as described earlier, because let's be real: only a small proportion of the population reads the rulebook in its entirety. I believe that people planned for something of the sort to go in the CTA station this revision, but that never ended up happening. That's at least a partial solution to the problem of players not requesting warps, but the more challenging issue is that players might not be building many warp-worthy creations. As with each of the other issues I've mentioned in this section, I can think of two solutions. Either we lower the standards for warps (which, while maybe necessary, I'm not too crazy about) or we increase the players' motivation to build cool stuff, which might be addressed by this next idea. Journalism A few days ago, Buzzin brought to me the idea of starting some sort of blog for Creative, detailing some of the notable happenings. I was initially skeptical, but this idea is really starting to grow on me now. I may or may not have even had a dream or two about it... I swear I'm not crazy. Anyway, I think this would be best implemented as either a weekly post on the subreddit or as a relatively short, biweekly newsletter in PDF format. I think that a newsletter could actually be really neat to both read and participate in. It sounds like a lot of work, but I definitely think it could be done if we get a bunch of users involved in the production. Ideally, we would receive submissions from both players and staff members, which would make up the bulk of the content. In addition, we would have a few different recurring features, such as build spotlights, statistics over the last two weeks (players with most block edits, etc.), and a summary of some of the new features on the server. I won't go into too much detail here since this idea probably deserves its own thread if we decide to go through with it, but I think this is definitely an interesting prospect we should look into. When I was initially thinking about this idea, I imagined a newsletter just for Creative, but I'm open to the idea of allowing anyone from the community, including PvE and Survival, to participate, thus drawing less of a line between the three servers. I'm definitely interested in hearing what the non-CAdmins think of this. Flying During Verros' initial flying debate a year and a half ago, I had voiced my support for disabling flight for a revision. Unfortunately, I no longer support this position, even if we whitelisted flight to certain areas; flight has been a part of the game for over two years, and to be honest, I think this change would drive away more people than it would attract. While I acknowledge its potential to possibly create a tighter-knit community and force an infrastructure, I think we should explore other options, since I can't see too many people being happy with such a change. Instead, I support LetsB's proposal of allowing players to modreq for no-fly zones. The one problem I forsee with this is that players might start falling out of the sky when flying over builds designated as no-fly zones. I suggest we both try to be a little selective about where we create no-fly zones (e.g. not giving one to a 5x5 diamond house; determining why a no-fly zone is necessary before creating it) and not extend the no-fly zone itself to the build limit. That is, we should create these no-fly zones as subregions, encasing only the area in which flying needs to be disabled. Entities I'm a bit wary of enabling item drops, primarily due to its potential for abuse. The reason these were originally disabled is that they could lag other people's clients if spammed maliciously. This has gotten a lot better since Mojang introduced automatic dropped item consolidation, but I'd like to get a tech admin to weigh in on the potential consequences of re-enabling item drops. It's also worth noting that drops have very few applications in redstone; any uses I can think of, aside from visual effects, can easily be replicated using other methods. Assuming there's no technical problem with them, I'm fine with allowing both arrows (for PvP) and ender pearls (for getting around). Ender pearls are a convenient alternative to the compass which don't have any of the same negative side effects discussed in that thread.. That said, if people spam ender pearls, there's the possibility of them getting into areas where they're not supposed to be. If it's easy enough to implement, I propose introducing a five second cooldown between throwing ender pearls. I don't see any other throwable or placeable entities as being very useful in Creative. Other Now that we've enabled PvP, I'm fine with any potions other than invisibility, for obvious reasons. A while ago when we began allowing people to request TNT, the idea was that TNT wouldn't respond to redstone at all and could therefore be used as a decoration block. I noticed that TNT still detonates when triggered; techs, would it be possible to make TNT completely inert? WorldGuard appears to only cancel the explosion, not the conversion to a primed TNT entity. Let me know if I'm wrong, but after a quick look, it seems like this can be done by catching onBlockPhysics in KitchenSink and canceling the BlockPhysicsEvent if the block is TNT. I can't think of any other details at the moment; I'd like to hear what you think about each of these aspects of next revision.

endersteve2946, You were banned for griefing on the Creative server: Thanks for taking responsibility for your actions. To be unbanned, please reply here no earlier than Sunday, December 22nd (5 days) stating that you have read and agree to follow our rules from now on. Dumbo52

This. In addition to allowing players to compass through walls past puzzles (and also into 'secret' areas), people normally have their redstone enclosed for a reason. While I wouldn't normally mind if players see my redstone, I wouldn't want people messing with my repeaters, note blocks, and hoppers. Sure, there are WorldGuard flags which prevent such interactions, but the fact is, most people don't even know that these exist. Enabling compasses seems to create several problems without really solving any. As Wayne mentioned, there's a good chance moderators eventually won't be able to use compasses while not in ModMode, eliminating the difference in navigational abilities between default players and moderators. The only real argument I've seen for allowing compasses is that they make it easier to build. This is true, but unless there's a good way of easily preventing any of the issues that have been mentioned here from causing problems, I'm not ready to take this step in granting all players access to this tool.

InsideInside, Thank you for replying and taking responsibility for your actions. Feel free to reply on the 16th to be unbanned.

InsideInside, Upon review of your ban, I realize that I may not have been as scrupulous as I should have perhaps been. Before you are unbanned, I'd also like you to take responsibility for both having griefed and using an alt account to evade your ban. Thanks, Dumbo52

InsideInside, You were banned for destroying other people's builds on the Creative server. You did not build anything yourself; your only goal on the server was clearly to destroy other players' work. In addition, as Cyotie has shown, you recently attempted to evade your ban by logging in on another account. If you'd like to be unbanned and become a productive member of the community, please reply here no earlier than Monday, December 16th stating that you have read and agree to follow our rules.

Unbanned. Thanks for your patience - try not to end up here again.

To clarify, I had just told you that I had not been aware of his recent activity. While the fact that this ban was issued only three days ago does say something about his activity, seeing as mschmidt has not replied yet and I am fairly familiar with the circumstances of this ban, I'm willing to handle this appeal. I had previously talked with you about this ban over Mumble, and we've established that you were banned for breaking a border that you thought to be unsightly. Regardless of the quality of a structure, you are not to destroy or modify others' builds without their explicit permission. Your removal of another player's border is in clear violation of our rules; please take a look over our rules here. Afterward, reply here stating that you understand and agree to abide by the rules to be unbanned.

Feel free to mark me tentatively present for Thursday's meeting. Chances are I won't be able to make the second one, though.