schererererer

Hah, yeah, I told dobreira that I'd ask about it since I didn't know the answer to either question. That improved implementation would be nice for P in those rare but serious cases if someone maliciously kills a valuable horse. Since it's such an uncommon occurrence, it's not terribly pressing though.

What I was thinking of was disabling the ability to kill ridden horses with swords and bows, but leave in environmental and mob damage. On a related note: it's a fairly unlikely situation, but if someone intentionally kills another player's horse, is an admin physically able to spawn a new horse with identical stats?

If I recall correctly, we have been using other free advertising opportunities where we can. The other thread here was the most recent set of actions over free advertisement opportunities, but it fizzled out a few months ago. If we'd like to segue into doing more of that right now, we can bump that thread and continue from there. We could easily have more contests to design ads to use. I think all of our publicity should stress the following: No donator perks No ranks Professional and active volunteer staff Strong community Another related thing that could help is submitting more cool stuff to /r/Minecraft (the most successful would likely be builds) and having the server address in the comments so people can visit to see them in person.

I haven't gotten a chance to check this out myself, but I've been told that horses are damageable by players while being ridden. Given that owned horses are basically invincible while not being ridden, I feel like this is maybe an oversight? Is it technically feasible to remove the ability for players to damage ridden horses on P?

We could combine applications with our current method. The problem with anonymous review is that self-submitted applications are invariably positive, when in reality we need a holistic look at a person. Things like personality and professionalism come through best during spontaneous interaction, whether it be in game or on subreddit or forums.

Are you changing the parameters of the search for just the search bar? The default searches just "This topic". Click on that to change it to "Forums" or whatever other category you want.

I like the idea of having applications, and agree with Cyotie's points. This will be great for getting those helpful yet quiet players, and players who are online when fewer mods are present. People have said that the best candidates don't volunteer for the position, but that's really not always true. We've been moving toward greater professionalism over the years - this is yet another great step in that direction.

This really only applies to tree farms - trees in the wild, even jungle trees, generally don't need to be replanted (Though trees that are obviously landscaping shouldn't be cut down). The closest thing in the rules that might apply to this is the clause about spamming blocks (or block destructions in this case). Although with sand mining there is a purpose to the action, the end result is still a very unaesthetic and often annoying to traverse area. We have two conflicting ideals here: the right to gather natural materials without excessive restriction, and the right to not have your builds surrounded by blockspam. Huge amounts of sand or grass replacement shouldn't be a prerequisite to gathering sand, but neither should we have to suffer chaotic marring of the terrain, especially with builds that harmonize with the landscape. It's actually tradition to cover over excavated desert with grass - can't find the thread, but we've had this debate before and this was the community solution a long-living problem. Maintaining a desert is a bit trickier. The issue of preservation of natural beauty in general is pretty well respected by most players A bit of clarification here - on PvE, worldguard protections (or things that merit wg protections) are the standard for defining ownership, and are restricted to builds (and forms of directed, constructive terraforming). Fencing off an area, especially a large one, does not guarantee or indicate ownership. Under the rules as they stand, there is no proper way to protect undeveloped land from harvesting.

Thanks, unbanned.

Thanks for your honesty. Please reply to this thread quoting the specific rule you broke, from nerd.nu/rules, and then I'll go ahead and unban you.

Thanks for appealing. Make sure to read the rules before logging back in onto the server. Unbanned.

Hi there - If I recall correctly, the circumstances were that several people in this same city did the same as you and (at least partially) destroyed their own builds. We had two concerns with this: that these accounts may have been compromised and no longer under control of the original owners, and that leaving a mess of assorted blocks floating around is effectively equivalent to randomly spamming blocks (which typically qualifies as griefing). This was over two years ago, so just be aware of this facet of our griefing rules. Thanks, unbanned.

Hi there - If I recall correctly, several people in this same city did the same as you and (at least partially) destroyed their builds. We had two concerns with this: that these accounts were compromised and no longer under control of the original owners, and that leaving a mess of assorted blocks floating around is effectively equivalent to randomly spamming blocks (which typically qualifies as griefing). This was over two years ago, so just be aware of this facet of our griefing rules. Thanks, unbanned.

I feel like this same argument could be applied to seeing who owns a region, who locked a chest, etc. Stopping it should be as simple as saying "don't play detective."

I don't see a problem with access to lb coal ore and stick; use of /lb tool can toggle tool activation. Running of /lb me, et al. typically are only problematic for large selections encompassing very active players. Limiting this to region owners would effectively prevent malicious use in order to strain the servers.

This is already covered under the rule banning player traps. I'd honestly be only actually concerned with players fencing off individual animals (particularly rarer ones) in the wild and leaving them as grief bait. Would this be dealt with as such? Aside from that, these changes are a pair of nice clarifications.

Thank you for injecting a reference point into this quagmire. Far too much of this "discussion" right now is debating the merits and attributes of individuals themselves. From what I can tell, the primary motivating factor that comprises the "elephant in the room" is the accusation and subsequent perception (warranted or not) that a significant portion of the staff have a predisposition toward unilateral action, hostility and/or indifference toward criticism, reduced transparency, and have made a variety of minor abuses of power - particularly accusations of favoritism. The members of this camp feel that these problems have been brought up and summarily dismissed in the past over the course of many months, and that a large number of active, prominent players have mostly left nerd.nu in response, until recently fairly quietly. They contend that administration has ignored these complaints up until now, when Tharine's departure and revelation of troubling conversations made in confidence were revealed, and believe that there has been no response from staff besides denouncements of 'drama' and 'toxicity'. I feel as though almost everyone involved has the best interests of the server in mind, though I'm not familiar with all of the specifics, because there are people on both sides (and in the middle) whose opinions and thoughts I respect. The "us vs them" mentality does us no favors in what is certainly not a simple matter. My primary concern is with this theme of polarization - it is from here the suspicion of criticism, siding with "allies", and disregarding "enemies" come from - on both sides of the aisle. I think that assumption of good faith is severely lacking all around when it comes to sensitive issues. I do have specific concerns with some of the enumerated problems above, but this is the root aspect we must deal with - through collaboration and compromise.

I concur with tristan's suggestion that we start with normal then move to hard afterward. With a large number of players on, it is conceivable that the growth rate of foodstuffs could decrease to the point where acquiring food in sufficient quantity would be the biggest challenge. Could this be added to the poll as an option, or even a combination of this with the current option of re-evaluating the difficulty level after a week?

Time for a history lesson. Revisions 1-4 all ended due to primarily technical reasons such as map backup loss or file corruption. Coincidentally, these were all around the 2 month mark, and revision 5 was reset after a similar timeframe due to natural population decrease. In rev 6 we decided to hold off on resetting when we reached that duration due to continued, though diminished, activity on PvE (around 20-30 peak as compared to ~60 toward the rev start). A key point to note is many if not most of these regular players were new, and thus provided vocal opposition to a reset. We kept an eye on graphs of population trends and in-game activity and after careful analysis decided to end it at an inflection point near the 3 month mark. Revision 7 followed the same trend, resetting at the 3 month mark, while 8 and 9 reset closer to 2.5 months. Revision 10 was a little over 4 months, and revision 11 is currently just shy of 5.5 months in length. In the grand scheme of things, the "3 month revision length" is more a motto to embody the balance struck between long-term and short-term players; ultimately we cut a rev based on player activity trends. The elongation past expiration of revisions today is a result of trying to balance the lifespan of a map with minecraft updates and special events, which both sometimes have a dearth of predictability.

The "Not familiar enough" vote is intentionally rolled into the no votes to provide a measure of anonymity to the "hard no" votes. Initially, we didn't have such a fleshed out nomination process, and the debate on people happened more behind the scenes. It was basically the status quo that people who saw no votes attached to their name would infer that they were not well known, potentially avoiding friction. The most recent results were surprising because over the past year or so we've typically come to a consensus over nominees in the nomination thread itself. Today we show support in the thread, rather than restrict it to new nominations and objections alone, as it was previously.

This is the key difference between the existing allowance of limited pvp arenas and Darkelmo's proposition. Currently, the only permissible pvp on P is effectively the genre of cage matches. This was intended to keep the missions of PvE and Survival distinct, which is why it took months before any pvp on P was officially approved by the head admins, quite a while ago. Attempts to make larger (and thus typically more tactically interesting) pvp arenas on P have consistently been shot down under this doctrine, partially due to concerns that the PvE server with large pvp regions would leech regular S players who would prefer a mixed play style.

I think we've had a bit of miscommunication. I've been on the volunteer staff of a concert band music festival for several years now, in addition to miscellaneous bits of volunteering, and I completely agree with everything you've said about volunteers. My gripe is with the people who use the phrase "we're just volunteers" to deflect attempts to discuss improvements to policy and procedure.

Children of Men. Good choice.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, and think the concept can be expanded to include a number of other issues. From the beginning of the nerd.nu servers, our operations have been pretty hastily constructed, running on common assumptions and unspoken conclusions. I've been a part of many organizations, some much smaller and dealing with less money than we do, that have a much more rigorous and established foundation. The role of each server; roles of various staff positions and their number; priorities for resets, plugins, and expenditures - all these have been at the root of ambiguity leading to conflict, but could easily be encapsulated into a 'constitution' that enumerates the form, operation, and direction of the servers. People always talk about how this is "just a game" and how we are all "just volunteers", but I think we can do better than to fall into such fallacies. We can and should be professional in the operation of a service that supports thousands of people - it will smooth operations, set much better precedent, and help reduce drama in the long run.

I'm curious to know what moving forward here would entail. If the banning moderator/admins proceed with their original line of action, that is one that garners vocal opposition in open discussion, there is no effective difference from our current system, besides the hosting of these discussions between players in public rather than private. We currently have a general policy of not discussing bans outside of ban appeals partly to smooth the appeals process and partly to reduce frictional drama generated by the throwing about of accusations and denunciations (which occasionally happens regardless). On the other hand, if a consensus, majority, or plurality opinion in an open discussion thread has actual weight to throw around in the final resolution of the ban, it is to some degree a vote. The pure facts of these cases are typically settled and agreed upon, so a discussion would only impact the realm of banning philosophies - that is, the subjective rationales for ban length and breadth - which are deep-rooted, slow to change in most people, and are unlikely to be swayed in a single thread.