elbeau

I'm sorry for the delay in responding. Like Trooprmn32 said, you will be unbanned after replying that you have read the rules.

At this point it's pretty common to log on during peak hours and find yourself alone on the server. Even the zombies are bored. Although they may play during other hours, I haven't seen an admin on for a week or so now so I don't know if they know just how lifeless the server is at this point. I'll be happy to help prepare a new map or do whatever else I can to help us move on.

Since you emphasize telling the truth in your post title, I want to be clear that with the first banned account you tried lying and only told the truth when you realized the lie wasn't working, then after talking about how you were going to be honest like I mentioned above, you logged on with an alt account and when asked about it you lied about it being an alt. So, no, you do not get points for honesty right now.

As you later admitted in chat with me, you logged on with a hacked client. These client hacks were detected by our server and alerted me so I started following you vanished like you said. I watched you dig straight down through grass and smooth stone right to a hidden chest (http://imgur.com/OVbrLmu). I jailed you and we had a conversation where you admitted x-ray and I said that since you were then being honest about it that I would support your ban appeal after the ban period was over (ban period for x-ray is 1 month). I banned you, then within minutes of being banned, a new player joined and our server started detecting the same client hacks as it did for you so I had our admins do an alt check which showed that it was an alternate account of yours. Using an alt account to get around a ban is also against our rules. I will not unban you at this time. You will need to ask again after the x-ray ban period has expired.

Grinding for hours to enchant PVP gear that is gone in a matter of seconds during a fight is a horrible waste of time but is an absolute requirement in order for anybody to PVP. Nobody goes around in poorly-enchanted diamond suits. You either go around in a fully-enchanted suit or you go around in crap armor. The fact that there's really no middle-ground is not easily fixable, but we can make it so that players that don't have time to grind for hours can still enjoy the PVP environment. Finding diamonds for a suit is enough of a time investment that we should make it easy to get that suit up to par. A PVP server should not require a player to spend several hours grinding between fights. I would really prefer to make armor enchants practically free. The easiest way to do that is with a huge XP boost. Unfortunately the XP boost also makes it too easy to enchant tools & weapons, but it's still preferable to having to enchant the stupid suit. X15++

I like the questions you chose very much. I feel strongly that land claims must come back along with plugins and/or rules that make it reasonable to build nice bases on main roads. This, along with a return to a central spawn with cardinal roads and no bed or random spawning, is a tradition on S that we should not do without.

Although it's not specified in the title or content of his post, this issue does relate to a specific modreq that gsand is hoping to get resolved. It has been taking longer than usual to resolve so I was simply asking for patience while we handle it.

X-ray is one of the most difficult issues to handle correctly. Like Willravel said, we're dealing with folks who seem to be disguising it better than others have in the past. When you compound this with the fact that it requires rollbacks, cleared inventories, and a significantly long ban period, we need to be very sure that a player isn't just a victim of coincidence. In almost all cases, the evidence against an X-rayer is circumstantial, and circumstantial evidence can be misleading. For instance, when I first played Minecraft I played just a little bit in single-player mode then logged onto S because a friend of mine had recommended it. At that time I was more afraid of creepers than I was of other players and I didn't know a thing about modifying my client or using texture packs, etc.. So I spawned on S, walked around a little until I found a place to build, piddled around a while, then realized that I really needed to go mining. I dug a staircase all the way down to bedrock directly into a vein of diamond ore. I was excited so I started strip-mining that whole area and found another vein nearby. I wasn't X-raying or cheating in any way, but if someone had investigated me for X-ray at that moment they would certainly have come to the conclusion that I was guilty. They would have been wrong, but I would not have had any way to prove it. Now I'm the one trying to detect X-rayers and I'm running into folks who just seem to be overly-lucky at finding stuff. Part of me wants to jump to a quick conclusion that they are X-raying based off of one or two coincidences, but another part of me remembers that first day on S. X-ray is a BIG problem right now, especially now that chests can be broken. We are working hard to solve it, but it's not a simple task. Please be patient while we do our jobs carefully.

It's great to see larger numbers of players that have tried out this rev, but that's not the whole picture. If we simply wanted more people playing, we can simply turn S.nerd.nu into a MC arcade like other servers which have hundreds or thousands of players playing at a time. The downside would be that we wouldn't be much like s.nerd.nu anymore...but apparently a lot of people are OK with that so let's just turn it into an arcade. All in favor? My point is that s.nerd.nu is not just a hostname that we like connecting to. It's a server with its own brand of fun. It's not an arcade, it's not chaos, it's not PVE, it's not factions, it's not creative. It's S. Among other things, a player has always been able to choose between teaming up and going solo on S and has ALWAYS been reasonable to build an impressive base. Many things have changed over the years, but S was always a place where cool stuff could be built in a dangerous environment. Now there are no impressive builds and solo players feel like they're playing hide & seek. That's not S. It's this new place at an old hostname. Fortunately this is a test rev and it has brought old and new players out of the woodwork. I think we can find a balance between the good things from this rev and the bad things that are causing frustration and S can be S again in the near future.

Lapis for reinforcement is a good idea. Villager trading has been disabled because it made emeralds (a reinforcement material) too easy to acquire. Replacing emeralds with lapis blocks would be a nice switch that would allow us to also bring back villager trading.

Correct...I missed that point, and it's a good one.

No, what it would mean is that the person who is offering the bounty can decide if a potential collector is worthy of their trust. If you don't know or trust a potential bounty hunter then your bounty is safe. Nobody would lose a bounty to someone that they don't trust.

Excellent and much needed cheat-sheet. Thanks!

I haven't messed with collecting bounties yet, but if it's possible to abuse them in the way you're describing, we could solve it by simply having a way for the person who wants to collect the bounty to get approved to do so by the one who placed the bounty before they go off to kill the victim. This would keep bounties in place (which I REALLY like), but would also avoid the possibility of the abuse you describe.

Doesn't have to be. The line can be arbitrarily chosen for what is or isn't revertable. For example, you could say something like: 1. Only rollbacks of surface structures. 2. No rolling back chests, redstone, or pistons. 3. No rollbacks unless >30 blocks were broken (or 100 or whatever). If a player knew that that's all the risk they were exposed to by building something nice-looking, they'd probably be a lot more likely to build.