barneygale

Nat is reachable by email even if he's not around day-to-day.

You'd think so wouldn't you

Personally I think the voting feature is stupid and abusable, but if we must have it, I suggest we adopt some rules from reddit's reddiquette: As an example of what this is to address, an admin said this in a public channel, concerning a recent thread: The same admin also went through the profile of a player and downvoted all their posts. I think this feature promotes a turf war between different perceived "factions" of the community, and it's complete bullshit. Can we remove the feature or adopt reasonable rules? Thanks

I'd prefer the money goes through a disinterested party.

Excellent summing up and ideas Dumbo. I like the idea of "resetting" to the beginning of the ban period for each evasion. Thanks for your response.

Excellent! Thanks for your response.

Could we revisit safebukkits? The two writers of the original plugin have already said they think it's a bad idea. Can you imagine a popular livestreamer coming on survival, making an underground farm 30 minutes in, and then discovering water doesn't flow? Lets idle for 90 minutes until a mod logs on! Lets not give new players a convenient reason to log off and not return.

Please make the data used to generate the graphs publicly available.

Reposting this old thread for some of the younger staffers who might not have read it. All credit to Ludeman84. Customer service... ...that is the most important aspect of our role on staff. You're here as a moderator because our servers need volunteers to serve the community - working with players and behind the scenes to keep the servers running smoothly. We hope that you enjoy the experience, but also that you realize the responsibility involved. Excerpt from Survival chat last weekend: http://paste.thezomg.com/7060/86701021/ (names of non-staff removed, as this isn't about them) Folks - this is unacceptable. For us to display such a lack of professionalism - in public chat, no less, where multiple players asked for the arguing to stop - reflects poorly on the entire staff and the servers as a whole. People can be and have been demodded for displaying this kind of behavior, especially if this persists. You are expected to be courteous and respectful to all players, even if you feel they are not reciprocating. We expect a certain standard of conduct from our staff in serving players and dealing with each other - this should have been made very clear to you when you were first added as a mod. If there is a situation that you don't feel you can handle, defuse the conflict by deferring to an admin or another moderator. It's better to log out for a bit than to lose your temper. If you're feeling stressed or burned out by moderator duties, we're happy to temporarily remove your mod powers, at your request, to give you a chance to take a break. We'll be more than happy to re-enable them whenever you're ready. If you're having difficulty dealing with a particular player or group, don't go it alone! Ask your colleagues for help, as help and advice are always available. Please use these resources to help provide the best possible experience for our users. Let's not have a repeat of this incident. One more point - keep these arguments with players OUT of public chat. If you have a prolonged issue to sort out with a player, move it to /msgs, or IRC, or Mumble, or wherever you need to to go. It is your obligation to stop this, however that has to be done. Talk to just the people who are involved and get it resolved, don't drag the entire server into it by hashing it out in global chat. Thanks for listening, and thank you for all the time you invest into making this a great community. I hope that if we all keep this in mind as we volunteer on the servers, the community as a whole will grow stronger. If you have any questions please come find a head admin, we'd be happy to talk to you about it.

Requesting a graph of connections alone. Thanks.-

> The only people I ever hear complain about it being ban happy are the ones getting banned. I don't hear 99% of p complaining, or 99% of c complaining? Those servers are staffed by the same people and somehow, they get along with us and the rules quite nicely. Have y'all ever, even once considered that y'all are the problem? I don't understand... even... what! The point you're trying to make is... that.. few among our rather small playerbase is complaining about it being ban-happy? What a startling insight! The people who aren't banned aren't complaining about being banned! Whodathunkit... A brave argument, but it rather forgets there are 100,000 minecraft players who will never join the servers without having to register a forum account. Most people won't even bother going to nerd.nu/appeal. Many were banned for minor griefing that would be a week-long tempban on any other server. You seem to think of your job as quality-control for the servers, like a bouncer at a nightclub with a dress code.

Do you not agree that MCPublic is seen as a ban-happy server?

~~ High Scores ~~ 1. trevorman - 14k bans 2. Verros - 4.9k bans 3. cyotie911 - 4.9k bans 4. barneygale - 3.5k bans 5. Boredeth - 3.1k bans 6. marting11 - 2.7k bans 7. Barlimore - 2.2k bans 8. Dumbo52 - 2.1k bans 9 .c45y - 2k bans 10. totemo - 1.9k bans

Certainly when johnadams was head admin it wasn't enough to admit fault, she was also desperate to see me beg/submit. Only a small minority of staff called it out at the time.

Slightly unsure about circular road (1 north-south road would be my preference), but I agree with everything else.

Via nerd.nu/donate?

To be extra clear, I don't think the staff are any worse than the staff we had when numbers were booming. I think the playerbase has shrunk principally because vanilla-y survival's old niche is much less attractive nowadays. But unless we're ready to let survival become a shell of a server, we need to work significantly harder than we ever have before. In 2012 I could rely on the continued popularity of vanilla to mask the slow pace behind-the-scenes, but that shield is gone now.

If anyone's curious, this has been the worst rev launch by peak players since records began in rev 11 - almost 3 years ago. We peaked at 45 online players in the first week, down from 148 in rev 14 and 154 as recently as rev 21. I don't say this to pour salt in wounds, and I think the survival admins have been no worse than previous admins. In terms of answering private player queries they've been really good in my experience. But I feel like right now we need twice the public dialogue, insight and free time than any previous survival admin team has been able to give. "Good enough" for me when I was survival admin is nothing like "good enough" is today. If we don't turn it around now, we're fucked. A lot of the players I speak to seem to think we're already fucked, and that the end is drawing near. I actually get questioned for my optimism (yeah I know!), but what alternative is there? I'd really like for the staff (and the players if possible) to organize themselves to squeeze out as much talent and free time as we can muster to save survival. If that means doubling the survival admin team, or reorganising survival staff somehow, or giving players more opportunities to contribute, then I say LETS DO IT! I feel like the survival community (staff + non-staff) probably does have the time to spare for making survival great again, but for whatever reason the structure and culture of the community has done an absolutely pitiful job at making the work rewarding, well-distributed, accountable, etc. Almost everyone is responsible for nothing, and no-one is solely responsible for anything. We either need a massive injection of people into the existing system, or a reform of the system with the aim of moving our pace something beyond glacial.

> As for banning people, not accounts, it's a nice ideal but the nature of the Internet makes it practically impossible. By that philosophy, someone who gets banned would have all of their alt accounts banned immediately, which would require the staff to have knowledge of those accounts (and any future accounts that individual might gain in order to evade, not to mention borrowed/hacked accounts). Alts can only be banned as they come to the staff's knowledge, which is often only after the fact of an evasion. I don't think the "people, not accounts" mantra requires the admins to ban every known alt immediately. The important thing is that, once an evading alt is known, it gets banned. The inverse of the policy would be "accounts, not people", which I've rarely seen used in other communities. If (theoretically) nerd were using this policy, then using an alt to bypass a ban would be perfectly legal. The question over whether to ban alts the moment the main account is banned is orthogonal to the issue. So IMO the issue is not whether all alts are immediately banned, its whether alts are banned for evading a ban at all. If we believe this is wrong because the idea of a ban is to keep a *person* from playing, then why do we keep those alts banned after the person has paid her debt? Don't get me wrong - I don't want us to be lenient on ban-evaders, I just think the increased ban time should be applied uniformly across all of the offender's accounts, rather than applying solely to the evading account.

The idea that people are banned, rather than accounts, is something I totally agree with. It's the basis of the "don't use alt accounts to evade a ban" rule. But the punishment goes completely against this creed, by giving individual accounts potentially longer bans than the main. If we want to keep the permabans, I suggest: > If you are caught playing on alt accounts while another of your accounts is banned, your alt will be banned and your ban made permanent Basically I just find the idea of banning some but not all of a person's account really weird. It seems to lend an advantage to players who can throw money at alts, something survival admins have always been keen to avoid.

Rather selfish topic as my alt was banned for ban evasion. Rules state: > If you are caught playing on alt accounts while your main account is banned will result in your alt accounts being permanently banned. Ignoring the weird grammar ("if you are caught [...] will result"), this seems rather unfair to me. We should be punishing people, not accounts! Exceptions have been made to this rule before, and I'm hoping one will be made for my alt. I needed to use it cus I'm writing IRC relays. I actually borrowed an alt account from edk, which is perfectly legal for me to use. It seems like a bizarre situation where I can legally evade a ban on one alt by using another alt! And the reason that alt is banned... evading a ban using an alt! I suggest the rule is modified to something like: > If you are caught playing on alt accounts while another of your accounts is banned, your ban will be extended and your alt will be banned too. You could be more specific about how much the ban is extended by, but I think it's super-weird that I, as a person, can be unbanned and considered a normal player, yet still have an alt account banned.

I sort-of like random spawn but I miss roads

Ah I guess I only saw the season where the dragon was the target. I think it would be interesting to run UHC instead of post-rev chaos, and have everyone enter (no limited/defined teams). The shrinking map border is still a cool idea. It would be interesting to see what happens. You could conceivably design a whole server around that mechanic!

[for the record, it's also where topics that don't require secrecy are discussed]

Another idea beside deathbans: all your chests are unlocked for 1 minute