TheRandomnatrix

I like that idea. Give 2 books, one with the rules laid out as clearly and as easy to read as possible, and a second "guidebook" that gives an introduction to the server they're on and all its plugins and features, outlining why we're an interesting server worth staying on. That is basically what we do now, save for more egregious offences like xray and mass grief.

To be fair, a lot of the things he discussed involves rules and policy that involves or leads up to bans and the appeals related to them. Banning people for minor infractions, permabans, how appeals are handled, and the number of rules all have to deal with banning policy in some degree or another. And there's no need for accusations of bashing one server for another, especially since I didn't get much malice from his post. It's not like there's nothing to be learned from the way other servers handle things. There's no reason to start fights. We've had enough of those lately -_- Back on topic. You do bring up some interesting topics Njord, many of which I find myself agreeing with at least somewhat. I'll try to bring up my views on some of them in a bit of detail. Permabans In regards to your points on permabans, I agree that it is kind of annoying how some players can keep getting banned over and over again and not get permanently removed despite being an obvious harm to the community and the staff that manage it. And it is a bit hypocritical to see previously "permabanned" players brought back after some time. However, our policies are always changing through discussions like this one here. We aren't the same servers we were 4 or 5 years ago, or even 1 year ago. An interesting argument I heard against permabans was that once a player is permanently banned, they have zero reason to care about the servers' well being because they know that there is no further punishment that can be dished on them. This has led to said players coming on and disrupting the other aspects of the community(particularly forums, mumble, and subreddit) via spam and other trollish behavior. And while I find such actions incredibly childish and petty, they're definitely encouraged by the lack of possibility of coming back. That's why I agree more with the more commonly implemented policy of increasing ban lengths for repeated offenses, culminating in ban durations of months or even years. That way the possibility of coming back still exists, but by the time it comes those disruptive players will likely be bored and uninterested in coming back. Sure, there will be people who will continue trolling despite whatever punishment is given to them, usually in rebellion to it even if it is completely fair(whatever your definition of fair may be), but those people will probably always seek to cause harm, so moot point. Rules and Spawn It is somewhat of an issue just how many rules we have. I joined way back in rev 4 when pve was still relatively new and we didn't have nearly as many rules, and to this day I can't recall having read the rules at spawn, at least in one sitting, aside from staff related stuff like checking to see if they're all there when setting up spawn(mind you I'm well acquainted with the rules at this point :P). Why not? Because it's BORING. Really boring. If I'm a new player joining multiplayer I don't want to read 50 signs telling me what I can and can't do, I just want to blocks. While the rulebook is at least a bit better and definitely a step in the right direction, it does still seem to be an issue, because it's 24 pages long. I checked. As a side point I'm very grateful for the recent rewording of a lot of our rules making them a lot stronger and more enforceable(eg don't be a dick rule was removed). I think the best approach is to spell it out ingame using guidelines in as few words as possible while still being helpful and not vague, and have a deposit of rules that can be easily referenced such as easy links to the wiki that goes into greater details of the nuances of each and every rule for added insurance against would-be rule lawyers who try to step around them. While you argue to the contrary, I do feel we need to cover every little possible corner that could be exploited because people will try to exploit them. But that doesn't mean that we have to force otherwise decent players to read 30 paragraphs of text, especially at spawn. As a simple suggestion we could have it link you to the wiki when you type /rulebook as well as giving you an ingame rulebook. Color coordinating the rules is also very effective! I recently went to a server where the rulebook had DO and DON'T for each rule and guideline. The easier and less boring it is to read, the more chances people will read it, which is the first step to following them. Banning I also agree that bans on new players who don't know better is a strong deterrent for coming back. Why go through an appeal process when I can just find a different server? Despite this though, I do feel that we've made better attempts in recent times, at least on P from what I've seen, to warn players who commit things like crop grief, chat spam, or hate speech at least once before banning them. If we can make it so that new players know not to do such things ahead of time in a far more effective manner(going back to to the previous paragraph), we'd end up with a lot less new players who want to be productive who end up being banned. I also like the idea someone suggested earlier where instead of "You have been banned. Appeal at nerd.nu/appeal", which leaves some thinking that they're banned permanently if they can't prove they didn't do it, we can instead say for example: "You have been banned. You can get unbanned at nerd.nu/appeal". Someone can probably word it better than that, but make sure people know in the ban message that they are not permabanned and can get unbanned by following simple procedures. I think making that known might at the very least encourage more people to appeal. It can't hurt. Appeals and Alts As for making ban appeals private, I mentioned this earlier in the thread but I feel all it would do is remove accountability from the staff and the playerbase, as well as making archiving much harder. In the long run I think it's a bad idea. For alt accounts and how they are dealt with I think that's a topic that has a lot of points that could be made for or against, and deserves a bit more discussion. TL;DR Permabans don't work in the long run as much as long sentences because it encourages even more trolling Rules in spawn and the rulebook need to be shorter and easier to read for the layman/newbie. Outline the nitty gritty details in the wiki and make it easy to get to that page ingame if people want to see them. Reword the ban message to encourage appealing your ban more, rather than giving the impression of permanent ban

So I was looking at some numbers on the server listing site and found that a lot of the servers listed past 150-200 have less than 500 votes. Considering how we were able to get 40 in about 2-3 days without that many people even voting, it really wouldn't take much to get up there in the rankings where we'd be more visible. Even a small group of people getting into the habit of voting every day for a month or so would put us up there. If someone searched one of our keywords: "vanilla/pve/creative/survival" we would be quite visible. TL;DR With even semi-agressive voting by the community we could be quite visible on the server listing in the next month or two. EDIT: Nevermind the votes reset each month. Still, voting on a daily basis would be good imo

Cool. I guess that begs the question for if we're going to ask or encourage players to vote up the server, and for that matter how to go about doing that in a way that doesn't violate our base principles. I don't expect to compete with the huge servers that bribe their players into voting, but we could at least get a few pages from the top if we put a little effort in.

I've never seen posting images into the sidebar directly to be used for anything other than trolling purposes in my time on mumble. I wanted its removal before the incident in question occurred, and I don't see a legitimate reason for bringing it back. IIRC it's supposed to be completely disabled, but due to technical reasons that isn't possible, so they use an incredibly small file size, and people are circumventing that. If you need to have people see an image, there is nothing stopping you from posting a link that people can click at their own leisure.

That's a terrible idea. It blows any sense of staff-player transparency out the window. All it will lead to is some players starting shit in PMs over serious topics like bans to then use as weapons against the staff, and the rest of the community calling for them to be made public again. I'm reminded of this quote by mrloud. Yea. It kinda is. I think knowing that everyone else will know you(speaking in generalities) fucked up is a far bigger punishment than a ban length, and serves as a pretty good deterrent to those players who are actually invested in being a productive member of the community. And then there are players who don't care what they say and do, in which case they don't have a problem admitting what they did was wrong. Having appeals be made public is better for archiving as well, as it's easy to dig up past bans that way, versus PMs which are infinitely harder to find. I didn't get to say my thoughts on temp-bans before the thread was locked. I sort of agree with Eehee that they are an extension of a kick or mute and are to be done for very small infractions like chat spam or minor crop grief. I can't see myself using them for anything other than a few days at most for a length. It might cut back on the number of newbs who get banned for something minor and never return. However, I do agree with Crockoduck in that a lot of the time they'll either say screw it and move on to a different server, or come back learning absolutely nothing and continue to break rules. I'm not against a trial run for a few months to see how something like that goes. If nothing else it'll become another tool staff can use to deal with people. I do want to point out that I'm strongly against heavy automation of moderation and banning. I've been to my fair share of large servers that implement it to a degree, and most of the time chat is toxic with few to no staff around to manage it, and if you get banned for something it feels like you don't have anyone to bring it up with to get unbanned.

People will always find ways to circumvent chat filters, or use slurs that aren't in the chat filter and say "oh. it wasn't in the filter. That means I can say it"

Just chiming in with an idea I came up with on a whim, so feel free to ignore it. I feel it would work well alongside random spawns, and possibly a smaller map. I've always felt that minecraft, being a sandbox game, severely lacks immovable geographical resources worth fighting over(spawners are technically impossible to move, but are way too common to fight over). I also feel S lacks an overall goal to work towards, and is mostly just random skirmishes between players, rather than clans. The buffs used on CTF serve a good example. Static things placed over the map that provide buffs of some form that can be captured and controlled. The buffs would be relatively minor so you don't become a PvP god if you manage to capture them all, but still helpful enough to where you want to go after them. They could serve as attractors to bring people to an area and encourage PvP, and be protected with a decently sized region to discourage building bases around them to make it impossible for others to cap them. Maybe the longer you hold them the more "points" you earn, increasing your rank as well? Could be configured to work with clans, encouraging people to form teams. Again, just throwing ideas out there.

Yeah. We had a regular thing going on with Den for a while, then the meetings kind of dropped off after becoming a HAdmin. Every time I brought it up it was met with a "we'll see" response. I'd love to see them picked up again, even if we don't have a ton of things to be updated on each time. It was good for keeping communication lines open between the admins and playerbase. :/

With all the discussion on /r/minecraft about the EULA and pay-to-win servers, there's been a lot of people expressing their hate for them. I've taken to Reddit PM'ing those I see the mcpublic subreddit, saying how we strongly discourage that. It may not be the most effective way to advertise, but hopefully a few people will come over. If nothing else it's free.

My view on it is that being a primarily English server, something spoken in a different language is going to come off as incomprehensible to well over 90% of the people playing, which I don't really see as any different than spam. It's impossible to moderate as well. For all I know they could be shouting racist profanities and I'd be none the wiser, unless I painstakingly run it through translation software. I usually just ask those people when they come on to either switch to English or take it to pm/clanchat. If they can't speak English they're going to be hard pressed to participate in a community they can't understand.

I'm interested in helping.

I was not aware of this. Any way to get involved in such development?

Personally speaking, I'm fine with either. I agree with the notion that it's pretty hard to trust someone if you don't know them, which would of course be a 'no', however the 2 vote system leads to ambiguity whether or not it is because of specific reasons or just not knowing them enough. Adding in the third option removes that ambiguity, though I find myself wondering what the ramifications are on some relationships. I fear it may encourage some artificial relation building of people who 'don't know someone enough', where those wishing for modship may act nice around them in order to gain favor. However, on the flip side of that it may also encourage reputable people to 'come out of their shell' so to speak, and get to know more of the staff. I trust the staff to make informed, well thought out decisions on who is responsible enough to handle modship. I encourage that those that do 'no' under this 3 vote system provide additional information to supplement their reasoning, probably in a private setting as is typically done. All in all I welcome the change, at the very least to see what becomes of it. TornadoHorse, on 05 May 2014 - 1:04 PM, said: I don't feel we need a neutral vote. Either you trust someone enough to give them power or you don't. If you don't know them enough but hear good things then at that point you should decide if those rumors are good enough to go on or not.

Hello stephem2. The time you have been banned for far exceeds any time I would have given. Please take the time to catch up on the rules before joining again. Unbanned.

This rev's uber was started by myself, scher, and buzzie, and was planned in secret for a while before we released to the public. Anyone can start one if they get enough support for it from the community. No definite plans, though I'd like to do one next rev as well(albeit with maybe less digging :P)

For reference, these are the previous discussions/polls pertaining to hard mode on PvE, in chronological order: https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/395-raising-p-difficulty https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/987-hard-mode-on-pve/ https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/1089-hard-mode-on-pve-revisited/

Summing up the ideas thrown around in the thread so far. Many of these can be mixed and matched in various ways: No portals except for spawn Portals would be pre-placed, but protected with a buffer to prevent building on them Portals pre-placed at start to be found, but only activated after a certain time period Portals awarded to towns/builds after a certain benchmark is met(ex: player count, resource collection, having road/rail infrastructure). A poll on the forums to decide what towns get portals Everyone can make portals(silly redwall) Portals awarded to players through events or other means such as finding hidden "portal tickets" A few late-rev portals placed across the map to create activity Allowing towns custom portal sizes

I agree. On that note, would all the canals just empty into some large, artificial lake underground?

I still consider the P rev very much alive, and I feel going to chaos would kill that remaining life :S

Some design questions you may want to answer, to better iron out the idea: Will it be above ground or below ground? If above ground, how will you deal with terrain changes like mountains, and how will you deal with oceans you run into? What y-level are you thinking? Will it be point-to-point based on towns(ex: P80-Rose Canal), have point to point with coordinate based stations(ex NW-W station travel) or use some form of indirect routing(something like what carbon has)? If it's town to town how do you intend to coordinate with towns to make it happen? Network design and philosophy plays a HUGE role when working with transport networks on a large scale. How wide and how deep do you plan on making the canals? What kind of materials would they be made of? Stone? Would it use flowing water+signs in the same way as EATS, or would it just be completely flooded water Sounds like a fun idea. Were I not already tied up in rails next rev I might help.

I wouldn't mind a subforum in off-topic, but I do feel the main focus of these forums is minecraft

Count me in. Also, we need beacon light coming through for the lever shrine >:P

That was my main argument against it as well, and why I didn't want it done this rev. However, S_W pointed out that it would be pretty easy to add some exceptions in the routing logic that would account for this. At the very least it'd be no worse than our current system of either doing CW/CCW bits or adding exceptions for all desired towns. It's just another option we can add that will hopefully reduce the work needed. SEA is also kind of an unnaturally large cluster of towns in one quadrant, which I doubt will happen in future revs unless towns specifically try to do something like it again.

I'm against the idea of "trusted users" as it brings in a rank system, which is something we try to avoid here.