barneygale

Also I think having 2 meetings is silly. I know you're trying to make it more available to people in other timezones, but it's going to lead to very fragmented discussions and ideas. We've had good attendance scheduling for early evening US time on a weekend. Europeans can stay up late (but not unreasonably late), and it'd be morning for aussies, right?

The other server I mentioned was planning to do a joint PVP/PVE map - divided into 3 strips with PVP in the middle. PVP zone is plumped with more diamonds/mob drops/xp - best place to mine is the strip right down the middle of the map (x=0). I dunno, PVE folks seem to pine for some PVP actions sometimes. We had about 80% of the mechanics planned out. I could talk to the others about bringing the idea to nerd if it's really been mothballed now.

AFAIK voting is just a rubber-stamp, as currently (previously?) the head admins won't nominate people they aren't already 100% comfortable becoming mod. On a number of occasions people have been made mod despite a bunch of "no" votes (I believe I had a *majority* of "no" votes!). Separating "no" and "don't know" votes makes sense to me, as it becomes obvious when there is actual opposition to the nominee, which will make the vote less a formality.

TL;DR: vanilla is boooooring; everyone already knows exactly what they're doing before the rev starts; everyone thinks survival won't improve so they don't bother trying; time to hold a kickass fundraiser, buy a new box, run experimental smp servers on it, eventually replace s.nerd.nu with the best. edit: and thanks for your response mrloud! :D

We always seem to be trying to balance two competing factors with survival: making it easier for noobs, and making it harder for experienced players. Perhaps we need to shake it up drastically and try something that levels the playerbase, making everyone relatively nooby, rather than having this big gulf between new players and us oldies. I'm always recalling "the good ol' days" of early revs (particularly 5-10), before the complications of sprinting, hunger or aimable bows. For a long time I've blamed survival's decreasing fun levels on "new minecraft", where we have to build and grind for hours (usually in a clan) to stand a chance in PVP, and then do it all over again when we die. While I think that's partially to blame for vanilla's diminishing appeal, it's also worth considering that in the olden days, really none of us knew what we were doing, and that was the fun of it. The MCPublic survival server felt unexplored - no-one really knew what its limit was, what the best stategy was, or how to be "the best". Every rev seemed to bring new ideas, new projects, new dynamics. There was grumbling about the state of clans, and even back then people complained survival wasn't what it used to be (I'm looking at you, toastthemost), but I think the majority of us felt optimistic and open-minded about survival's future. Now I feel like every rev, people are in this mindset of "this might be the last fun revision" - that no-one has much hope. So I'm sort-of in the "radical" camp where I'd really like to see survival (as we know it) disappear to be replaced by a more interesting, more unique server. We'll probably lose a few die-hard vanilla fans along the way (sorry c4 and many survival admins of the past), but the majority of the community would endure and greatly expand with many new members. Quite what that server would be I don't really know. We've had good ideas floating around at a nerd splinter server that started in 2012, but it's never got off the ground due to lack active staff - and while that may sound a lot like nerd, nerd actually has a whole heap of untapped potential in its playerbase for map-making and code-writing. I have an idea of how we could get there though, which is mentioned in my submission to the poll. If we hold a really good fundraiser (and I've got 3 decent ideas at varying stages of design) we could invest in a second server box, dedicated to experimental and short-lived servers. With enough community involvement we could write some nice custom mechanics, or tweak some existing ones. When we find something sufficiently fun, deep, good for different playstyles, etc etc, then we replace the current survival server and start at rev1. For once we'll all be excited to see what the coming months will bring. Just offering this idea up, would be nice to hear some criticism.

^ that's not to say that the current admins are any guiltier of failing to plan than any previous admins, including myself.

I have a request. If there are topics in the meeting where everyone or nearly everyone agrees, the admins should state what their plan is for the idea. Implement immediately? Discussion with heads within 1 week? Technical evaluation lasting 1 month? etc. I don't want this to be another meeting where we decide everything but plan nothing.

> What are your next coding or Minecraft-related projects? I'm working on the new version of mark2 (mark4/terrapin). I'm also resuming work on a protocol library that will allow people to write their own servers/clients/bots/proxies. > What is your favorite type of automobile? Not really that interested in cars! > What was your first time on nerd.nu like? Brilliant! The CTA had moved to survival while minecarts were buggered on C, so I joined their clan and had some amazing times on survival raiding and getting raided. > What programming languages do you know? Python/Java/PHP (good), JS/C++/Lua/BASH (reasonable). Going to learn C++ properly soon! > What languages have you programmed into your head? English > What is 576 of 72 in percentages? ~12.5%? > What is the best Kirby copy ability where you where a hat and sit still defending yourself? I haven't played Kirby since Kirby's Dreamland on the gameboy > If you had a dog for every time someone has said fall is too brown, and spring is too green (#420BlazeIt), how many Chinese villages would you be able to feed? Spring is pretty much a non-season for me. I find myself thinking "man winter is dragging on so long" right until summer arrives. And autumn is too brown? Never heard anyone say that!

> When is mark4 going to come out? Is it going to be in time for 1.8? If it doesn't come out do you recommend a different solution? No. mark4 is progressing at a snail's pace because I have limited free time nowadays. If I don't stop work entirely, I it will be summer at the earliest. gsand may update it for 1.8, but it hasn't yet been properly updated for 1.7. I recommend people switch to another wrapper rather than waiting for mark4. Check out MCMyAdmin, SpaceBukkit, Minecraft Server Manager as alternatives. > How did you come up with your username? It's a close variation of my IRL name. I used aliases before this, and I expect I'm going to go back to using aliases in the not-so-distant future.

> Why is /r/barneygale private? Because I don't particularly like my rants showing up on google from a professional perspective. /r/barneygale was an outlet for me while I was banned, but it's not really necessary anymore, firstly because MCPublic is much better managed under the current crop of admins than it was ~1 year ago, and also that any issues I have I can bring up privately with the head admins and expect honest responses, rather than obfuscation and aggression. That said I'm happy to give access to people who need it.

> Why did you step down from being an admin? A fellow tech admin told me repeatedly that load spikes of up to 800% were fine > What's your side of the story re: you getting banned for a really long time? I'm happy to accept I deserved to be banned for a long time. I changed my ban reason, banned ludeman's alt, checked the server logs, gave the mcbouncer key to a couple of unsavory characters, used an old ssh account, and probably others I've forgotten. That said I also made an effort to turn my life around and felt pretty frustrated that the admin circle of the day had convinced themselves I was a serious threat, or pretended I was while secretly keeping me banned for personal reasons. The whole thing was stupid internet drama over a video game. I have a much more relaxed and constructive relationship with the head admins now, and I think I'm on reasonable terms with most other people on staff. Happy to answer more specific questions about it!

> What's your family like? Alright! > Do you have a girlfriend? Yes > What's her family like? Alright! > Does she have a brother? Yes! > What's he like?

^

It was more of a radical thought. I think we can improve survival *to some degree* simply by improving here and there - especially infrastructure and making sure new players get the support or clanmates they need. But if we care about success (and I think higher player numbers are more fun even with less vanilla gameplay) we can't make any significant leaps without alienating some of the playerbase, especially oldfiretrucks like me who joined before minecraft's average player age dropped by a few years. To be clear, I don't want survival to become a generic factions server. My issues are that: 1. Our niche is too small 2. Our niche is boring/old There are ideas out there for original servers still. We had some pretty neat ones at the server I work at, but they all dwindle off because we're /tiny/. At nerd we have a lot of experience with gameplay mechanics, lots of builders, coders, etc. If someone said "right, this is a thing" we can do it and have weekly meetings and github repos and whatnot.

Idea 1: 1. Hold MCPublic fundraiser 2. Buy 2nd box 3. Fill it with a bunch of experimental servers (minigames, survival w/ economy, factions, etc) 4. See what is successful and move survival in that direction Idea 2: As I said on the subreddit, we should stop making tight-knit and elite clans, and just play survival more derpily and for the fun of it. A lot of people seem to be in the mindset that every survival rev might be the last ever good one, so they invest nothing into growing the server and everything into getting geared up as quickly as possible and PVPing all the time. Could someone please make a rail network, a hotel, a series of shops, etc! My experience of running a noob clan was very positive. Idea 3: Not really an idea, just an observation. Vanilla is not anywhere near as attractive as it once was. Things like making shops (as I mentioned before) are boring once you've seen how easy it is on a server with an economy mod. Vanilla is really fucking niche nowadays. I'd really prefer it if we were doing our own gameplay style, something sufficiently *different* from both vanilla and standard survival-y servers.

Sounds like fun, I love this sort of thing. Are we going to keep our old inventories/player positions (as with other chaos maps) or will this reset? Also, any chance of doing the odd one on the original minecraft version?

1 week bump

build pics make much more sense for the subreddit imo.

There was a pretty good thread on /r/admincraft a couple of weeks ago called "Server Owners how do you delegate?". One of posts mentioned this: I talked about doing this at nerd with an old head, who seemed keen. It would be good for tech admins because we could never seem to organise and delegate work well. Having one person directly answerable to the head admins (and even perhaps a weekly meeting between them) would be great. It would also be good for the head admins, as we don't really have a "Server Owner" figure anymore. AllNaturalX filled that role for a while, but since then there's never been one person driving nerd and planning for the long-term. Because the head admins share responsibility, no one person is responsible for nerd growing in player numbers, adding new boxes and servers, keeping on top of funds and fundraising, etc. It would avoid "design by committee" which has led to many threads with no conclusions, and many good ideas never properly appraised. Likewise server admins could benefit, as one person would be ultimately responsible for handling (for example) revision launches. This should help avoid admins assuming that other admins are going to do certain things when they're not - I've seen this happen a few times while I've been here. Like the lead head admin, the lead server admins would be in charge of the long-term prospects of the server. It might also be nice to have a lead mod, or lead mods from each server. They could help prioritise moderation, give guidelines on handling problems that crop up, report to the server admins, etc. Like all the other leads, they would not have any additional power - they would merely dedicate less time to day-to-day affairs, and more to planning/managing/designing/supervising. -- How leads are chosen is a bit squiggly. I don't want another "chosen by predecessor" system as it hasn't given us consistently good results. I also think voting would make it into a popularity contest. Ideally it would rotate between staffers in a random order, but we'd need to take into account people who are too inactive, or too new. It might also be too confusing to add more "ranks" (although they're not really that). I don't think this is a *massive* concern because the information is not important to new players. The difference between a moderator and an admin is much more relevant to players than the difference between a mod and a lead mod. It could rotate once every few weeks for mod, once every few months for admins What do you think?

Yah I know. (should have said "they were" instead of "they're")

Those things were put in by AllNaturalX before craftbukkit even existed - they're long-overdue for being switched to /-commands

A modification of the glicko rating system, which is already used by nerd.nu/survival, would be ideal for rankings. Even so, I think SimpleClans added more than just a rating system iirc?

Shall we set a date?

My current favourite Grateful Dead set is here: https://archive.org/details/gd68-02-02.sbd.jools.15801.sbeok.shnf (Grateful Dead are blues/psych/improv) Aaaand here's a hip hop rec: (Mr Lif - The Now)Youtube embedding seems to be borked? https://youtu.be/Rr-Ex1RDloE

Bear in mind that between the 3 survival admins, only one has done a rev launch before, and only one of them. 24hr surely isn't a big deal!