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barneygale

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Posts posted by barneygale

  1. Sounds good!

     

    1. If many people want to apply, you could hold a competition during the S rev to decide who gets a place. Perhaps a build competition so entrants have to have varied skill in building and surviving. Maybe something functional like a competition to build roads or arenas?

    2. Would the map border stop shrinking before the end portal is outside the map? Or is the objective not to kill the dragon, just to survive?

    • Upvote 1
  2. Random spawn probably makes more sense on a server where griefing is allowed, but it's a nice change and along the right lines.

     

    Would have been nice to see an ore plump to compensate for the weirdness of the new setup.

     

    Would have been nice to make things easier at the start. The combination of no safe spawn, no food and the rev beginning in the middle of the night (wtf?) made it a deathfest for the first a while.

     

    I'd like to see admin-sponsored competitions for building infrastructure. I'd also like to hear back about protection for public-use buildings/infrastructure.

     

    I'd like to hear from the admins regarding what they think is working well, what isn't, and what their plan is from here.

  3. Necromancing this thread to point out that Dumbo's creative meeting was really good, and a blueprint to be followed in future survival meetings.

     

    Dumbo + others took the time to examine and respond to peoples ideas, and gave people specific questions rather than "what do you think about x?". It felt like a meeting rather than a survey.

     

    Props to Dumbo and hopefully the next survival meeting will be improved.

    • Upvote 4
  4. Going to post here to try and generate some discussion, then we could hammer out details

     

    1. Status of the new nerd.nu website, now approaching 2 years overdue. I have a website partially coded up already. If the rumoured PHP one is no further along than mine, can we finish mine and run it? It had an overwhelmingly positive response from everyone who saw it in action.

    2. I suggest we open donations year-round

    3. I suggest we give players cosmetic perks for donating - a badge on their (new) profile, possibly custom welcome messages, coloured asterisk next to name (like "<*barneygale>")

    4. I suggest we give players badges on their profiles detailing what events and competitions they've entered, and special badges for winners and runner-ups.

    5. I propose a more formal partnership between developers within the community and the tech admins, and more encouragement from the admins for technically-minded people to contribute their skills and time.

    6. The tech admins could run a "changelog blog" where they'd occasionally post about changes going into the servers.

    7. In the meeting, I'd like to debate adding dedicated subforums (on the same level as General Discussion) for creative, survival and pve, as we had on the old forums. If we could allow each side a few minutes to lay out their case and then have a straw poll at the end, that would be ideal.

    8. In general I'd love for us to talk about how to make progress faster. Do we need specific people to take responsibility for different projects? Currently I feel power-sharing is giving everyone an excuse to do nothing, because it's never solely your responsibility to get X or Y done. I'm not sure I have any particular suggestions for solving this but I'd love to hear anyone else's. I think a lot of servers really benefit from having one person in charge, and we did well under Nat. The same could be applied to individual servers (i.e. have a "lead" c admin, but they needn't take an unfair portion of the work).

    9. Would be good to hear what the survival admins have been up to, and what's been decided so far

    • Upvote 7
  5. All indications point to the survival admins working hard to turn survival around, and they have my support. But it might be useful to have a more general meeting, as the problems facing survival also affect the other 2 servers to some degree, and there's probably things we can attempt to make the staff more active, more "dynamic" (in the sense that everyone is encouraged to contribute whatever they're good at, and with clearer responsibilities. Those would be the things I'd talk about I suppose.

    • Upvote 1
  6. > I could also be crazy and there could be huge problems between the servers, but I personally haven't seen anything.

     

    It's not really a massive problem, but I'd like nerd be more competitive with other servers. We're the oldest continuing minecraft server, and at one point we were one of the biggest (being a hugely popular target for avo in 2010-2011 etc). We've had a head start in both time and maturity/technical ability of staff, yet player numbers have at best plateaued over the past couple of years. We haven't kept pace with the advances in custom minecraft gameplay that other servers have taken full advantage of.

     

    Though PVE's vanilla-esque formula has managed to cut its own niche reasonably effectively, survival has been suffering. Servers half our age are attracting an order of magnitude more players, and the active minecraft playerbase in general seems to have been growing the entire time our numbers have been stable or declining.

     

    Creative is another open question, and I'm personally in favour of dropping the no-roleplaying rule there. Roastnewt made a good case for this on mumble recently - creative is pretty much virtual lego, and when kids build a launch pad, spaceship or moonbase they want to actual inhabit them and have some fun playing make-believe with their friends. Players of creative minecraft are no longer pot-smoking college students folks - there's no point promoting an atmosphere of adult conversation if it means missing out a huge chunk of its potential appeal.

    • Upvote 3
  7. Uhg I think it would be really terrible to only allow english. This question has come up before and I think I recall Lude quite firmly saying people can use whatever language they want. The only situation where it matters is when a mod needs to talk to the player about something (land dispute, etc) and even then there's a reasonable chance we have someone on staff who speaks their language.

    • Upvote 9
  8. Yah I mean if you think this could take at least ~40 days we can definitely squeeze another rev in.

     

    Could make it a "best of" rev using old arenas, spawn, terrain gen, possibly old-style mechanics? Community voted?

    • Upvote 3
  9. Longer revs would work if there was content constantly added. I've heard from a couple of people who are quite keen for quests/challenges being the main focus of survival, with the normal gameplay playing a supporting role. People always seem to be up for building 5k-style challenges - we could add small ones every 5 days and record completion count/times per player.

     

    If we're keen on doing a major overhaul of survival, I think we could still end this rev early and have the next rev as "the last ever revision of survival as you know it!". It's going to take a few weeks to get a "new survival" that will stay interesting for at least a few months. We might as well start a new rev while you're working on it.

    • Upvote 4
  10. Here's a chart of the length of survival revs historically:

     

    tY6fMo0.png

     

    Current rev is 71 days old, older than all but the most recent 4 revs.

     

    Can be bring rev lengths back down to 40-60 days so that activity doesn't drop off so drastically? Every time we have a dead rev more people leave and don't return.

    • Upvote 11
  11. If anyone's interested in working on any of these with me (map design/coding/promotion etc) I've had conversations with the heads where they've indicated that if a group of players give them a fully formed fundraiser event that's decent, they'll run it.

    • Upvote 1
  12. I've also heard rumours that MCPublic will run out of money soon...

     

    I've got a couple of event ideas:

     

    Zombie/infection event: http://www.reddit.com/r/mcpublic/comments/1swf2w/idea_for_next_fundraiser_zombieinfection_event

     

    Underground dungeon keeper RTS-inspired event: https://gist.github.com/barneygale/d98bdef065d076387cf1

     

    I've also got another one in early concept stages, briefly explained to Mumberthrax a few weeks ago. I might get my gf to do a couple of sketches for it, as I can't draw for shit and it's hard to describe the terrain (this literally came to me in a dream).

    • Upvote 2
  13. Some feedback on the meeting!

     

    It was good to be given a say, and it's especially good to bring everyone together in one place (nearly) to talk about things. Barely anyone is inclined enough to regularly check forum threads, so definitely more people were involved in discussing survival's future than would be otherwise. totemo's civcraft thing sounded pretty great, though it would be bad to rip it off completely.

     

    One thing I disliked was the loose management of the meeting. If you listen back to the meetings Torn/Four_Down ran, we were interacting with everyone suggesting things, pointing out problems, trying to promote a conversation and find common ground etc etc. The beginning of this meeting seemed pretty disorganised - the admins would perennially warn people for being off-topic, but did nothing else to encourage people to stay on-topic. It didn't really feel like a dialogue - it felt slightly like we were just putting verbal suggestions in a suggestion box. An admin said something like "any suggestions for minor changes?" and I thought "well yeah, there's been hundreds, where do you want to start?".

     

    So my suggestions boil down to

     

    1. Try to enumerate each option on the agenda, and don't ask really open-ended questions with no qualification/context.

    2. Admins: don't guard your thoughts! It's okay to have opinions on our suggestions, and it's okay to talk sensible realism down to us.

    • Upvote 6
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