barneygale

Hi friends, I've returned from a several-week absence from the server to find the entrance and porch of my house blocked up and protected. As I was not added to the region, my porch became a player trap (i.e. I could not escape without being TP'd out by staff). I must give this particular griefer some credit, as they actually /mail'd me to let me know they were about to grief my build, though they didn't let me know about the player trap I would spawn into. Regrettably I couldn't read their /mail from my hospital bed. Ordinarily this thing would be easily sorted by a /modreq, and my experience here has been pretty uniformly positive over the last few years. I usually trust in the effectiveness of the staff to remove grief so I don't have screenshots of my completed porch (pre-grief). Here's my land claim: } Note that while this claim abuts spawn, it is not in spawn (as confirmed by /rg i). And while it looks like a mess here, I matched the east roads blocks in further development of my build. The area is perfectly passable and was visited by several staffers before the griefer set their sights on it. And here's the joyous scene I spawned into today: Note the warnings in chat where I cannot break the blocks in my own build. I had to /modreq to escape my griefed, protected home 😞 The complicating factor is that this player is actually a staffer. From this I take that an appeal will be fruitless, but perhaps some lessons could be learned for future incidents. Ideas: If staff follow a different rule set to players, could it be published? Should penalties for staff rule-breaking be the same as for regular players? More severe? Less? If building player traps is still a rule-breaking offence for both staff and us plebs, could staff training be improved so that newer staffers are less likely to make this mistake? I'm not naming the staff member though they may wish to name themselves. Cheers

I didn't play for all that long so take it with a grain of salt. I would like to see: - Smaller map - More frequent (shorter) revisions - Fewer nether portals - No mesa/desert/whatever at spawn. Trees pls Would be good to divert some resources towards retaining new players. E.g. maybe some sort of recommendation rewards or a group of players who will mentor new players when they join? I know a lot of people do this anyway but it could always be better. A lot of new players slip through the net. Would also be good to have a nice website that ties together all the PVE info, deadmap notwithstanding. You could always hire a freelancer for a while to build it for you, if the 2020 sysadmin whisky fund isn't fully depleted.

Pez that video does look super fun but I haven't played with those items yet, nor have the majority of the server playerbase. For us scrubs who just want to get building asap it's a choice of sword or bow. And in that situation the combat is nowhere near as fun as it is against even skeletons or creepers. So maybe elytra should unlock once you have the tools to take them on in a fun way?

I'd prefer a nerf or at least something that allows a bit of variation (e.g. some sort of opt-in) but I'm not sure the tech admins have the time for it.

Yes this is a vanilla server. Yes Phantoms are in the vanilla game. But they're still awful and I suspect Mojang will neuter them eventually anyway. Previous discussion:

First of all I thought it was a good rev - I had fun and I thought the gameplay was generally pretty well balanced. Only commenting below on bits I have direct experience of: > The Spawn Building Loved the design but I'd prefer it was 10% the size in future. You could build some big cool shit elsewhere on the map and keep spawn simple. > The Overworld Map size was good I thought. Could be smaller. I really liked the seed and the biome distribution. Ore distributions also nicely balanced. > The Nether I didn't use the nether too much but it seemed fine! The custom terrain gen made navigation easier I think. You could consider making the nether terrain much harder to nerf portal travel and encourage horses+rails, but that's probably a matter of taste 😉 > Portals The number of portals seemed fine. IMO could stand to have fewer but not more. Is there any way to make vanilla portal placement work? The fact that towns claim portals on day 1 and then go inactive a few weeks later contributes to revs dying off I think. Players joining later might not have the luxury of the best land, but at least they should have the same sort of access to fast travel. If you're worried about grief, make it so they can only be lit in your region or something (with a corresponding region in the other dimension). If you're worried about too many portals, give it a huge resource cost or make it unlight itself if it isn't used in a few days. > All the Things I don't want to dick on peoples achievements but this challenge seems like a massive cop-out to me. Why would I collect items so that the admins can delete them? People volunteer for this?! I know towns/cities are overflowing with materials within a few weeks and I suggest the admins have a plan for how those materials could be put to good use. E.g. make a huge bedrock-lined tunnel that runs through the map. 3 months later allocate sections to cities to build an assault course like the old '10k' event from years ago. Or have some area of The End that can only be reached by building a diamond-block bridge. All other materials disappear when placed. Or some sort of wishing-well where certain materials will curry favour with the gods, or curse you / your town. Make just the right combination of materials and the whole server gets some fun effects, e.g. everyone has a sheep dropped on them from sky limit, or all mobs catch on fire. You could waste a lot of materials discovering just the right variants of materials to sacrifice. But really, just anything better than "fill your chests so we can delete them" 😕 > In the past there has been end of rev events such as ending the world in Chaos and a Zombie Apocalypse, would you like to see the return of something like this? Do you have any other ideas for how to celebrate the end of rev? 1st week with PVP enabled, 2nd week chaos. As a general note I'd love if end-of-rev survival became an official, planned thing. It could revitalise the lead-up to the next rev as people fortify their homes, hide their stashes, form defensive allegiences, etc. It could still all end in a day of TNT and chaos, but between 1 week and 1 month of PVP at the end of the rev would be amazing IMO 😄

Part 1: Why Phantoms are shite If vanilla minecraft was perfect we wouldn't be running paperspigot and dozens of plugins. In my view an extension of the "vanilla with sprinkles" slogan is that we don't make gameplay modifications without good reason, but we do modify vanilla game play quite substantially when it makes sense. Portal restrictions, world size, creeper/enderman/villager/golem behaviour are all non-vanilla and all have a big impact on gameplay. Mojang have a rich history of adding half-baked additions to the game but phantoms take the cake for me. First: the combat is boring, substantially more boring than minecraft's janky combat vs skeletons, zombies, creepers. Every 10s seconds you get a change to time a melee or bow shot as a phantom dives. If you're lucky you can hit them with a bow while they're circling - maybe its just me, maybe its a product of playing a US server from the EU, but I find this very difficult - their movement is unpredictable and vaguely "laggy" that makes bow shots really hard. Second: the "just sleep in a bed" argument - beds are already used for something useful (setting spawn point) and layering phantoms on top of that makes beds less useful. Play styles like my own hermit/vagabond lifestyle are much harder, because I'm constantly having to choose between phantoms and a sensible spawn point. Given the combat is so boring, and that phantoms take away (rather than add) to the gameplay, I propose we "do something" about phantoms, maybe via a custom plugin. Part 2: Some suggestions (mutually incompatible) Phantoms only spawn if you're wearing elytra (my personal favourite) Phantoms only spawn if you have sufficient armour points Phantoms only spawn during thunderstorms Phantoms only spawn after >~25 days awake Thoughts/suggestions? Cheers

Cool that sounds very doable! Did previous revs have pre-built spawn stations or is that new for rev 23?

I'll dig up some info on TRAVEL and DEEP, but I'm a pretty casual player so if it's the sort of thing that involves pistons every x blocks I find it hard to get excited. I'd hope that with a well-designed rail network you can get almost anywhere with 2 changes of fewer, and as long as the rails and stations are safe you can still do a bunch of AFK travel (its pretty much the reason I prefer rails). Even so I'll check it out!

Rail building is dying down a bit in the current rev so I thought it might be useful to reflect on the rail infrastructure in rev 23 and share some ideas for the next revision. Things that work well: Getting your rail connected to the greater PVE rail system is very accessible, both in terms of the skills you need and the resources. Previous PVE revs had very complex rail systems which were a little inhibiting. Item frame stations are compact and easy to build In my experience, everyone has been very accommodating when it comes to connecting up or making pragmatic edits Things that could be better: There's a lot of duplicate/parallel rails that take basically the same route but make different stops. I think these resources would be better used connecting up towns/cities that have no rail links, rather than building 'express routes' The rail station (and portal) at spawn are too hard to find for new players. Not super hard, but still too hard. Interchange between portals and rails is a little confusing in a couple places Almost all rail lines (even fancy resource-intensive ones) are underground! So, a few thoughts and possible points of discussion: I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing this, but I'd love to see a super-simple spawn with really obvious food, portals and rails. The staff can always build huge/crazy stuff away from spawn ? We should favour connecting new settlements, even if you have to make multiple stops, over building express lines parallel to existing lines. Spawn probably has too many possible destinations (32) that promotes parallel lines and discourages hub culture. I think this could be reduced to 16 or even 8. I'd love to collaborate with other rail builders on an above-ground network, especially an overground ring. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic of rails. Cheers

^ this is the whole problem with opening these discussions to the community - everyone here already has a server to play on. You see it as a 3rd server, but many people who prefer PVP minecraft won't play much or at all on PVE or creative servers. They're not represented in this discussion. nerd.nu pvp isn't going anywhere unless and until a staff member with a love of pvp minecraft makes it their passion project to start a great pvp server under the nerd.nu banner. Whoever that staff member ends up being, I hope the head and tech admins provide them with the support they need to make it a success. But let's not kid ourselves - a server reworked or restarted from some half-arsed forum thread will fail. If you want my view: vanilla PVP survival minecraft isn't dead. Another server I play on has a several hour-long queue just to get in. Minigames or the extinct "PVP" server aren't in nerd.nu's genetics. s.nerd.nu died largely from poor management (including my own), not because of some fatal flaw in vanilla survival gameplay. If minigames is taking up RAM with no-one playing on it then I suggest you take it offline, but I hope the head and tech admins are listening closely to the wider staff; if a mod has a good idea and the motivation to see it through to completion, please let's all rally behind it.

And I'm obviously aware that the nerd admins don't trust me any further than they can throw me, so I'm not expecting any sort of day-to-day involvement if people want to pursue this idea. I can share the code, the tech admins could fork it and maintain it, and if people wanted me involved to fix bugs and whatnot I'd be happy to help (but would understand and expect that people wouldn't want me involved beyond supplying the initial version for careful code review!) edit: it was easier than I thought! Try connecting to 2b2t.space from a 1.13.2 client. Disclaimer: this is still very buggy and it's running on an underpowered VPS. Shout if it goes down. All sorts of things will crash your client or possibly the server, but walking around the world seems to work OK for me, so check out the beta 1.7 terrain gen at least!

FWIW, I wrote some custom software to make the 1.13 --> beta 1.7 proxy work. The source code is currently private but I'm happy to share with any nerd admins. It's a totally different project to the spigot plugin. As proof this is a real project, here's a spreadsheet showing how I'm doing the translation between the old and new protocols: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bEhQIA7TKq6qtQvSb6lh1KdO3Pf92YvENWxjuNyEuOQ/edit#gid=0 I'll try to get a demonstration server up at the weekend (someone poke me if I forget)

A few ideas for you: Run a super low-effort old-school vanilla s.nerd.nu server. No need for any fancy plugins or complicated designs, just put together a spawn and some //stacked roads in an afternoon with a few people, throw it up, and see if it does any better than minigames. You might want to start with quite a limited world border initially, and reset the map a few times a year. I say this because there are vanilla PVP minecraft servers out there doing well, and I recognise the names of quite a few PvErs who started out on survival and might be tempted to split their time. Run a rolling snapshot server. Not sure if spigot provides snapshot builds nowadays but I'd suggest running it in chaos mode all the same. Reset 1/4 or 1/2 the map if the terrain generation changes (my personal favourite because a) i worked on it and b) it's a unique mechanic and you don't see many of those in minecraft!) run a 1.7 beta server. Users can connect with the original beta 1.7 client or a modern 1.13 client if you run some custom proxy software I wrote! I chose beta 1.7 because it predates a lot of the minecraft mechanics we take for granted, such as hunger, sprinting and enchantments. There's a certain amount of nostalgia in the minecraft community for the game as Notch wrote it, and given nerd's claim to fame is being the oldest running server, perhaps running a genuine beta 1.7 server for modern clients might be popular, or at the very least a noble experiment :)

Banned for ban evasion way back when. My main account has long since been unbanned, so could this alt also be unbanned? Thanks.