schererererer

Time to start minting Schererbucks - signed books pegged at 64 $pudcoin to help deal with the inevitable rampant inflation, naturally with a proper bank backing it with $pudcoin reserves.

Flint definitely wouldn't work - way too volatile and practically infinite for all intents and purposes over the course of a revision. I should issue signed books as Braumbucks - pegged at 100 $pudcoins, lol.

Also, all these items are squarely commodities - you can't peg exchange rates between them, as even trying to do so in the manner of a currency would be extremely volatile due to the low volume of trade and the high variability in de facto rates. Utility is also an essential factor - gold is supremely more useful than lapis beyond a small threshold, and thus even were they to be generated equally gold would still be much more valuable in an average trade. A while back there was a concentrated effort to record trades made to try to peg down a general consensus for the value of different items, and it was soon found that value varies wildly from all sorts of factors including supply, demand, bulk discount, bulk premium, implementation of farming, etc.

Following the ISO 4217 Currency Code conventions, I suggest SPC, although SPUD is easier to remember

I like where this is heading. Braum is looking at building a city on a bridge next rev - maybe we'll build it over a particularly nice section of canal at the edge of a lake. On the critical side of things, is there some measure of ability to afk this system would have? Seems to me that's the major advantage rail lines have over walking and/or horse riding.

Something something fiat currency, something something legal tender.

Canals have actually been tried several times before, but only found use as aesthetics in single cities. The last time someone tried to do merely a test run of city-to-city canals, it died out halfway through construction. Canals are very effort-intensive; there's a lot of effort in digging out a furrow and filling it with water, especially considering it's time sensitive due to the need to acquire land in a mostly straight line. If you want to pursue this, you need to find a lot of active players willing to make this their only priority at the beginning of a revision.

You callin' my spawns bland, son? >:(

They're rebuttals for each of Magnyus' rationales for having an in-game tag that marks a person's "level of trust". My point is the opposite of Magnyus'; that these ingame assessments are neither necessary nor beneficial - that reputation should be upon name recognition only (or by personally looking up raw *continuous* stats, rather than discrete rankings). 2. A tag is implicitly discrete, distilling all those stats from usage, mcbouncer, etc into a single value - practically the definition of a rank or level. If you want to make all the actual information visible to anyone who wants to see it (via a command, basically an expanded /lookup), that's another story (hooking publically available data is fine and dandy and I'd be fine with usage data, but I don't think that many people are looking for this functionality ingame, especially considering how wiki text would flood one's screen, how easy and more functional it is to look up usage data on nerd.nu, and how bans and notes are really a semi-public element (for example we removed ingame public notification of bans because of all the disturbances it caused in public chat)). Notes are still used fairly often, but they are a pretty narrow area of usage - when someone does something that falls short of a ban but beyond a mere verbal warning that we also want to keep track of (or misc notes)- typically things like repeated or moderate crop grief, pvp logging, or repeated disruptions in public chat. No idea what you're talking about when you say the ban lengths no longer apply to the banned... 3. Again, unless you want to make this less of a tag and more of a lookup, this would have to be a distillation of [200 hours played and 2 negative notes] into [Trust Level X], which I fail to see as distinguishable from ranks. If you want a lookup, don't use the words "group", "tag", "icon", or "symbol". 4. The overarching subtext in the phrases "what appears to be the role of a moderator" and "Which many players see it as anyways", which are barely qualified by "has been expressed in the past as not being a promotion", is the implication that mod status is a promotion but denied to be so. If this was not your intention, more clarity would have been nice - something like "Nerd doesn't have an incentive to stick around (though some see mod status as such)." Back to the point, putting a tag on your name defeats the purpose of reputation attached to your name - think "Magnyus" vs "[wowsotrust]Magnyus" (or take your pick of anything more discreet). You remove all the subtleties of the raw elements of how many hours you've played / how many blocks you've mined / what's your k/d ratio / what contests have you won, etc. and turn all those features of your history on the server into a rank. You can't fairly balance them because there's no right way to do so, and you can't have tags or groups in this manner without defined strata, which is anathema to the core of our server philosophy.

Out of my element here, but it seems to me that the line of reasoning based upon the "entities vs blocks" distinction is a bit contrived. Paintings and item frames are also entities, therefore they must also be fair game for anyone to break. It would be better to look at the functions that plants and animals perform; they are both "domesticated" sources of food - simply components that are grown on farms. All the arguments against free breaking of crops apply just as well to the animal case - I'd say if you allow the eradication of an animal farm, why not the same for crops? A more rational justification for permitted eradication of animal farms is the goal of reducing the global population of mobs (and thus the corresponding lag). This has allowed S to not need any sort of mob cap.

The only system of trust I want is the reputation attached to ones' name. A major reason I stuck with nerd.nu when I started was that I, as a brand new player, wasn't viewed by others as worthy of any more suspicion or implicitly less worthy of joining in a project. Server activity is pretty well encapsulated in stats; newbie questions are almost always answered (and get asked) promptly in public chat; we already have a system of notes; we do sometimes have extended ban lengths for people who "should know better". "Visual representation of a player's identity" brings to mind every color of the rainbow used to tag players at various levels of trust. You say you're looking for ways for us to stand apart from other servers, yet our current system rejecting ranks or trusted groups is a great thing that sets us apart from many, many others. The only "incentive" we should have for playing on these servers is the joy of playing with friends. Becoming a moderator or an admin should not be an incentive - mods have no legitimate advantages in gameplay over that of everyone in general, only duties and the tools necessary to fulfill those duties.

What I'm saying is tweaking the formula is tricky when the only feedback on whether 1000 iron blocks or 10000 is a more appropriate value is through the rate of portals being built during the rev. Leaving it low or high will result in dozens of portals or one portal, respectively; changing the value during a map would only work if you start high and reduce, returning the difference in cost to whomever already bought a portal. If we want to continue the important principle of population dispersion, portals have to be there at revision starts. Thus, we need to continue at minimum the current system of portal claims by clicking an announcment sign, to avoid conflict over portal claims. Adding a new portal in a location of choice would need to be very expensive, otherwise individuals could easily spam them wherever they please (and then we'd might as well allow the travesty of unrestricted portal placement everywhere). Even something as labor intensive as 5000 obsidian only takes ~4.5 hours to mine with E4 picks (ubiquitous by mid-revision). Rare items such as diamond blocks follow a similar pattern in favoring heavy miners over builders. It seems we must combine this expense with a cap (eg. the first 4 people to get to 5000 obsidian get a portal). Alternatively, portals can just be a rare grand prize for a major official competition. Too few means not enough to use for transportation across the overworld map, imo (ie. at least 4 in +- orthogonal directions). Too many is when you have a glut of portals in the nether (which honestly can be a bit higher). At the extreme end of this is when portals are too tightly spaced to operate without interfering with one another. On a side note, using activity as a metric is also difficult to put together. One would think that all you need to do is do a weighted sum of city population by member hours online, but you have to take into account region members who aren't permanent residents, residents of multiple cities, and arguments toward other metrics of "activity". This adds up to a ton of work for admins that can't really be automated or made objective, which would be ideal for a sensitive topic such as portal placement.

The other problem with these is that placing portals is a zero-sum game. You could have a few more of them than we do now, but allowing anyone who has passed a certain threshold of activity or resource collection to get a portal will inevitably result in too many or too few portals. You could have the first N cities to reach a certain set of conditions, which really isn't that different from the current portal exploration rush. Awarding portals by admin decision is also problematic in its subjective nature. I am strongly opposed to a single portal at spawn; you negate essential elements of vanilla gameplay for the sole purpose of reducing conflict - effectively making things fair by denying something useful to everyone. Part of the purpose of portals (and stargates in the past) on pve has been to facilitate the dispersion of population away from the center of the map, hence the placement of portals from the very beginning. Without this, you will assuredly see a clot of concentration around spawn with an accompanying spike in land disputes and complaints about not being able to find land. Combining portals at the start with the ability to make one with intense effort isn't really fair for the latter aspirants. You'd have to set a threshold like 1000 obsidian for it to not be a wide rush in itself, and to me that expense seems a waste, compared to the relative ease of rushing a portal. Perhaps instead having a portal be a prize for winning an official contest of some sort could work.

Would you rather build 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

So far we have: C Rev 24: needs latest carto and expanded size C Rev 23: needs latest carto and expanded size C Rev 22: needs latest carto C Rev 21: needs latest carto P Rev 11: needs latest carto

I'll propose an architecture trifecta: pillar, stair, and arch.

The difficulty of adequately answering this question is at the root of our troubles. I'd personally love to see more collaborative builds between our most notable builders, but that's really a player driven element. This could be as simple as centralizing the "megabuild" class of warp-worthy projects in a cohesive collection, or actually working together with others on the design of a build. Another part of the problem is that I like to focus my energies on one or two things at a time; if I'm focusing on building something big on pve (tbh I've probably bit off more than I can chew already) while being pretty busy irl, it's much less likely I'll have the time to devote to a quality project on C. This is pretty much unavoidable, though it could be mitigated by the use of tools like worldedit to optimize time.

As far as I'm aware, this has never been the case, since before pve existed as a server. New mods were always given some level of training for all servers, but not any prerequirement of activity across any more than one.

I don't really play on C that much now, and therefore don't mod so much either, because I no longer enjoyed it. If I'm looking for ease of building, other servers have worldedit, voxelsniper, etc. If I'm looking for more socialization or more challenging/functional construction, PvE better fits the bill at this moment in time. We've never in the years I've been around forced anyone to split their time between the servers. Standard training on all the servers should be the norm today, usually with server admins or else experienced head admins or mods on each server doing the training. The problem comes when tools and rules change; older mods miss updates off their preferred servers and the moderation guidelines and commands pages on the wiki quickly become out of date. Mandating retraining for everyone is an option but very tedious for all involved, especially the trainers. I believe a cross-server modreq check is in the works, which should help for distributing moderation load. On the subject of yes/no voting, the reason there was no "unfamiliar with" or neutral option was to mask the hard no votes from affecting interpersonal relations. I never saw the wisdom in this, since the voters who would really want to hide a hard no are generally those the nominee expects to vote yes. I'd welcome a neutral option, but expect feelings to be hurt and voters to feel socially pressured toward the neutral option. To expand on the voting process, historically the final yes/no vote on mods holds the following connotations: yes as support, no as neutral or very slightly negative, and no alongside a pm explaining why as substantially negative. I have a feeling that some of the more recent vote summations were undertaken without knowledge of this background, reverting to a percentage cutoff or a quota. Iirc, this subject has been addressed in a review of how voting is done - the best way to get more C native mods is still to suggest names by messaging someone on staff or via nerd.nu/applyformod.

Alright, thanks!

I was also wondering about the use of lb to track a leaderboard for community digs. This is standard on C and it has been done before on P, but is it legal now?

I was also wondering about the use of lb to track a leaderboard for community digs. This is standard on C and it has been done before on P, but is it legal now?

We used to have separate server discussion sections for each server on the old forums, and it was not very necessary, with at most only a few active posts ever in each category. Simply putting the name of the server in the title is sufficient if you want to indicate a post is server-specific.

+1 for 10 minute build contest in early January. I'd love to help out with that.

People intentionally being asshats are not likely to respond to suggestions - they're generally the most prolific type of rules lawyer. I see this rule as a snarky summary of our server culture, immediately indicating that our player base is different from the typical infantile and destructive type that one often finds on public servers. It has the advantage is being succinct; while many new players will almost assuredly skip over the full list of rules, this one line will give the gist of what conduct is expected. If you want elaboration on the scope of "don't be a dick" just mentally append "outside the scope of the game", i.e. act within the norms of the server, e.g. harassing people in chat is forbidden but repeatedly attacking someone on S is typically fair game. Honestly, the absence of "don't be a dick" would probably not alter staff responses to incidents that reference this rule. Just because there isn't a specific rule about pearling into an active spleef game does not mean that mods can't take action to stop it until a new rule has been penned. The real issue that I think should be addressed with respect to this topic is personal interpretations of "don't be a dick". That is, when a complainant bases this evaluation upon personal ideas of dickishness rather than server norms.