TheRandomnatrix

Aside from spawn connection, I've been exploring some other options for streamlining connections. I'll most likely use these two features in the next network. Quadrant based encoding: The first and second bits will pertain to the quadrant of the loop the connection is in. This will hopefully reduce the need for CW/CCW bits, albeit at the cost of limiting the number of connections in each quadrant to 8 destinations. Putting trapped chests at switch tracks: A common practice some people like to do is put trapped chests above rail switches, which you can easily open as you pass by to go to a destination as you pass it. I think this would be a good transition at the start for towns as they could still use the loop even though CARBON is being worked on, and would be a fallback if for whatever reason the redstone never gets finished. I'm hoping this would encourage towns to make a connection, and keep them invested more in helping out with the loop. I could also allow for personal connections attached to the loop that don't have an ID using this method, provided the person wanting to make a connection talks with me or another rail person first. A benefit of adding CARBON later of course would be that you could afk on the rails without having to wait for your stop. Another piece of news to share is tc_chris has designed a 31 button CARBON station that improves sign readability a lot more, which I'm hoping will reduce people pressing the wrong button(happens a lot more than you'd think)

For clarification, doesn't S use or used to have a plugin that forced portals to always align correctly with no overlap? Couldn't the same be applied to P?

What if other incentivizing was done to spread out towns, such as for example interesting or useful land gen? Also, when you consider that most towns would think that spawn might become a cluster of towns, they would probably move away from spawn to avoid it. I do recognize the point that it would be making things fair by removing what is considered a core element, though I can't argue just to how drastic the effects might be around spawn since the single portal idea hasn't been implemented. If transportation infrastructure was indeed improved by towns to compensate, then couldn't it be said that many new players could quickly get away from that though? The only benefit of building near spawn in this scenario would be to try to quickly attract new players, which is really no different than any other spawn towns before. I'm personally against awarding portals through arbitrary benchmarks in item collection or playerbase, as I consider that highly unstable given minecraft's and mcpublic's constant change in item rarity. It would also just force towns to grind for things, or treat people as a resource towards getting a portal through player activity, both of which I feel aren't productive. It's also extremely difficult and subjective to gauge activity levels in towns, going with scher's points on the matter. It's a very interesting topic, and I'm glad all these ideas are being discussed.

Adding to that, I've been on my fair share of minigames servers, and while they're fun for a while, they get boring fast. It'd require features to be added constanly to keep it interesting, time of which could be spent on other more important tasks. Also, minigames servers tend to attract a more casual no-strings-attached playerbase, which I feel is not the kind of people we should be catering to.

Requesting a render of Wondrland on fire, and he's holding a purple wool block. :P Also, one of myself holding a bow please. Thanks for taking the time to do these.

Was doing some more thinking about it and was wondering if anyone would be against the idea of two spawn stations next rev: one CARTS-like for personal connections with next to no special requirements, and the other being reserved entirely for towns that comply to CARBON standards. The "personal connection" station could also serve as a buffer for towns wanting quick, easy access to spawn at the start without going through hoops to get it, before moving to the CARBON station later on. Unsure how big the secondary station would be so as to reduce redundancy. Thoughts?

Wouldn't do any good once end grinders got up

Another possible implementation that could tie in with the other ideas is something like a portal ticket. I know there were chests hidden around the map for special colored signs this rev that were admin-redeemable, the same could be done in a few cases for portals. They could also be awarded through very difficult or meaningful events. I seem to remember one rev someone(Nossirom iiirc) got their own warp sign for beating the 5K first. This would have to be done in moderation of course so we don't have 30 people with personal portals, but it could definitely be used by the admins effectively to encourage participation in certain events.

I'm always open to suggestions and concerns. To hopefully answer some of yours with semi-dumbed down, albeit lengthy answers: TL;DR) Spawn station is messy and I agree it could be done better. If towns want a nice rail system, then they need to pitch in too. While tutorials exist, making them simpler and easier to access might be good. 1.) Spawn station's location was very messy this rev for many reasons. I'd initially planned to avoid doing it until Zuziza got excited with the idea of spawn having one, so I went along with it. While Zuz tried to be accommodating(and was by all means not her fault), between avoiding all the embassies and spawn protection, the unique quadrant routing it used, getting the four carbon lines coming out of it to the loop totaling at least 2400 blocks of smartline, and being already dedicated to finishing the loop itself, it was just something that took forever to do. the only reason it was finished was because S_W worked like crazy to get it operational. That's not to say it is an impossible feat, but I think it'll require its own special love and attention from someone. I've been debating using it as a CARTS-like station for underground lines to the CARBON towns, then having the carbon loop connect to it later on to avoid having to make a large trip around the loop to go somewhere. In regards to spawn station actually being in spawn but player run, it looks good on paper, I honestly don't see that working well. I or another rail leader would have to basically coordinate with the PAdmins every rev to ensure that there's enough room for a station, then micromanage that station over the course of the rev. This opens up room for accusations of favoritism which I feel would be somewhat true. I communicated at length with buzzie and tom over my concerns regarding the implications of a spawn CARBON station well before rev12 was even up, and I feel it would just cause too many political problems. It sucks a lot to have to work around spawn protections, but I feel that's the only way of doing it currently. 2.) This one's been weighing heavily on my mind. There were a lot of good people helping out with donations and small offers of work, but it just wasn't enough. We were essentially 3-5ish dedicated people working on a network intended to serving all the existing towns, and while CARBON greatly reduced the workload needed to produce that result, it's just ridiculous to think that that few people have to do all that work in a short amount of time. Because it took so long, a lot of builds ended up encroaching on the lines making it very uncomfortable to protect them. Most of the "CARBON doesn't work!" complaints were because some player griefed a line without knowing any better. It's a huge pain in the ass for me to constantly have to go out and repair the lines which get griefed on a near daily basis. Yes, daily. This could have easily been prevented by getting the infrastructure up and running ASAP so it can get protected before builds surround them. I recognize that the process of connecting isn't the most streamlined, and a lot of towns were just getting introduced to CARBON this rev, but I strongly encourage those more experienced towns to not only do their own connection in the future, but reduce the workload needed to make the loop itself so those services it offers can be provided sooner. 3.) Just like CARTS, I imagine there will always be people who view it as way over their heads. I definitely think the wiki needs more work, however my editing skills are needing(evident in this wall of text of a post) and I'd do an incredibly poor job of making it easy to read. If someone wants to take a crack at it I'd be very appreciative. Overall though, if people have questions about CARBON just come to me or another knowledgeable person about it. If they're willing to put effort into it, I'm more than happy to teach people how to do things. Addendum.) Now a lot of this probably sounds like complaining on my part, but I'm just trying to outline a lot of the problems we faced while trying to make the loop this rev. I'd like to address these in the next network so we can hopefully have a bigger, more reliable system. I welcome constructive criticism on how to make things better.

Correct. Other variations could also exist, such as after a certain amount of time(maybe mid rev) a few portals would be hidden around the map for finding, allowing newer towns that haven't been established at the start a chance to flourish. I did find the method of portal claiming using sign announcements worked very well this rev, as it eliminated any chances of arguments over who found what portal first.

Since Sapphric isn't going to do it, I'll bite the bullet. These are some thoughts I've been having for a while now, and I'd like them to be seen. It seems getting portals has become something of an obsession for many towns at the start of the revision. Having one allows traffic flow to and from your city, allows nether access for material gathering, and is something of a trophy/sign of power as well. However, I also noticed that many of those towns just substitute their infrastructure with a portal. Their roads may be lacking, and in some cases their rails take a hit as well. It was definitely noticeable during the admin hunts that the map is not very horse friendly, due to poor road infrastructure across the map. Clearly towns don't need nether portals to be active or successful, as evident in Port80 and Rose City this rev. So I was thinking, what if in some future rev there was only one nether portal located at spawn. Now before everyone raises their pitchforks and torches, I'd like to some weighing of the pros and cons of having just a spawn portal. The second part is more of side suggestion. In all my time here, aside from one or two updates, the nether has remained largely the same: boring, red, and full of lava. With the addition of custom glowstone ore in the overworld(which I love), I found myself barely ever going a hundred blocks or so from a portal except to mine quartz. Each rev the nether is genned at 2k*2k, and only a very meager fraction of that is used up. Perhaps accommodations could even be made to actually make living or at least exploring in the nether worthwhile for once. I also came across a reddit post on /r/minecraft from the admin of the popular Reddit flatcore servers, in which he posted his server's own custom version of the nether. It attracted a lot of attention, and he was able to use it to bring people over to his servers. I feel that the same could be done for us.

Unless I'm mistaken, I'm not seeing any bans(or any information for that matter) under this username. Please give your ingame name so that we can proceed. If you're not actually banned from the nerd.nu servers, then there is no reason to post in this section of the forums, and I would suggest bringing up concerns with potential rule breaking with staff ingame, of which can be found by typing "/modlist" in chat.

A few weeks ago I hounded Denevien on this very topic, feeling that there should be a renomination process. However, after discussing with him I am now very much against it. Most of the time, the person is trusted enough that there isn't really much reason to not let them recontinue moderating. Denevien also mentioned that a 1 month reintegration into the community be done, which was the case for the recent names in question. There was also a need for retraining for new rules and policies, which was also enforced in the recent remoddings. Old returning mods are expected to be held to the same standards as new mods, and if they fail to meet those standards then they are quickly removed. I feel making a big spectacle of someone returning who may have left for personal reasons to cause more harm than good. I also argued that some of the new staff would not know the people coming back, however when you consider that the we have the "No" vote(don't get sidetracked on whether this should be the case or not. It'll derail the thread and we already have other threads for it) in the voting process to include not knowing someone, then it dawns that not all the staff know each other to begin with. This creates an impossible standard for returning mods to be known by all. Perhaps if an extremely large portion of current staff, including none of the head or server admins, don't know them, but this is often not the case. Also, many of the older staff that quit their position years ago can still be easily contacted to get an idea for why that person left and whether they should be allowed back. They aren't "cutting in line" if they've already become a mod before. It also doesn't slow down or prevent new mods from being created. So long as they are properly retrained and reintegrated into the community then I see no problem. Comparing this to real world government and politics is fallacious and misleading. There can only be 1 president at a given time, whereas we can have an arbitrary number of moderators. There are also other reasons for this being a bad comparison not worth going into.

Making a forum post as per request. Situation: It was brought up on Mumble when Wondrland was asking if autoclickers were allowed on P(presumably to exploit the new fishing mechanics introduced in 1.7 based on previous discussion with him), and was promptly shot down by tompreuss under the argument of "No use of hacked clients to change or modify gameplay that gives an unfair advantage." However, I feel this argument is ultimately unjust for 2 primary reasons. The first being that it does not in fact change or modify gameplay, only sends a right/left click signal at a constant rate which could be achieved by a normal player without the client. If the rate of clicking were to reach a level higher than what a normal player could achieve then I feel it would be against the rules, however the rate would be so high that the effects would not be useful in survival mode and therefore not give a noticeable advantage. The second being that if such a modification is not allowed, then why the use of say rei's minimap, which allow players information that gives them an advantage over other players by showing an overhead map. There is also a level of automation on Rei's in the deathpoint feature, in which it automatically saves coordinates of where you die at a speed no player could. Moreso, why is the client used most famously by the afk account brews_wane which relogs at grinders upon restarts which the PAdmins are well aware of, not banned for doing the automated task of relogging? Clearly they seem to lie within acceptable bounds, but not autoclickers, which in my opinion conform to the rules equally if not more than the two above examples.

It feels really weird to see you go totemo. You've been around for so long I've always considered you a constant in this ever changing community, and I guess I ended up taking you for granted. As a mod you were always kicking ass and taking names on griefers and xrayers, and as a tech you did so much to improve the lives of the staff and the playerbase at large on top of the asskicking. If anyone has had an impact on these servers it's you, and know you'll always be welcome back as staff. Make sure to pop on Mumble some time and please us with your sexy radio talkshow host voice :P

I also want to throw in my "voice of reason." Unless you're(generically speaking) making your flow reqs at 5AM out of peak hours, I find the idea of waiting hours for a flow request to be an exaggeration considering the bulk of most modreqs. And while I'm sure there are many kind moderators on PvE and Creative who enjoy filling out quick reqs to help people, I dislike the idea of pestering mods to do things for you. Making the modreq is the request for help. Asking mods to drop everything they're doing to come on another server strikes me as a bit selfish, aside from when spammers or griefing teams come on to the detriment of others and there are no mods to deal with them. As for grinders and other large flows, it's general practice for staff to stick around and help the person make needed edits. Another necessary point to make that nobody has bothered to say: If safebuckets is being removed it should be at the start of a rev, not the middle, lest builds relying on safebuckets be negatively affected. I also brought that idea up a little while ago in game chat and think that it would be an excellent feature, especially with the lobby system.

Hello Bob_Dobbs. Given the age of the ban I find that any length of time I would have set has been already served. Please state the rules you've broken to be unbanned.

I'm pretty sure you can just achieve the same effect by using the rollback commands in LogBlock and defining it within a selected area and in the past 10 minutes. Failing that, an admin could be present to use WE.

While perplexing, your edits of of Malvagio's base were done without their consent, which is ultimately defined as grief. Since this is your first ban, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and unban you now, but please note that future bans may drastically increase the time set. Take the time to read the rules at nerd.nu/rules and come back when you're ready.

That doesn't seem that far fetched in the sense that it would be very bad if someone were to essentially hold a nerd server hostage because they own it, and possibly demand various rule changes ect. Also, an S town tried to do spleef 2 revs ago. Needless to say it didn't end well. It would have to be staff run for it to really be successful, and as you said it's more PvE's thing. People tend to dislike vanilla enchanting because in when PvP'ing you need your gear to be as good as possible, and having to waste dias and time on crap enchants is worse than letting people pick them. When enchantism was introduced I actually got to do some PvP'ing for once, instead of hiding away in a base not doing anything.

I can think of two such examples that happened to me this week: The first occurred when someone killed all the endermen in the End while someone else was afk'ing but didn't have the occupied light on, causing a small dispute. The second happened just yesterday, when someone thought trade scamming was a violation of the don't be a dick rule, and I had to remind them that that was not the case. In both cases this blanket was completely useless(be it how it was worded or just its existence), possibly even doing more harm than good, and that's a point I'm trying to make.

I did offer rewording as a possible solution besides removal:

“Don’t be or build a dick” Although worded in an amusing way, it is probably the most controversial listing we have, and has spawned countless arguments and witch hunts of players trying to get each other banned. It seems like every few days I have to remind someone that I can’t do anything against a certain player acting unfavorably towards them because they haven’t actually done anything wrong by our standards. So why do we keep it around? Based on this discussion draykhar started regarding the meaning, it seems to be employed to serve only as a catch-all for special circumstances not defined by the rules. I find that to be a bit silly. If we encounter a scenario that our rules do not cover, we should judge that particular situation as best we can if there’s a time constraint attached, and then edit to the rules for covering things like it after some discussion. Regardless of the don’t be a dick rule(which as previously stated we don’t enforce) we’ll be unprepared the first time a situation our rules don’t cover comes up. So I feel that it doesn’t even facilitate the one purpose it is put into place for. If someone is “being a dick”, they’re more likely than not to break an enforceable rule sooner or later anyways. We can start by taking the second half we do deal with, with a simple “No NSFW builds”. Then, if we want to keep the first half we should bring it up as a suggestion of good behaviour rather than a barring of bad behaviour. An example of that might be: “Please be courteous and respectful to others in your time here.” Or we could just remove the risk altogether and not say anything. I don’t expect this change to occur overnight, as the words have been nailed into the community pretty hard, but the least we can do is stop endorsing this outdated phrase.

From my understanding, Mrloud meant that we'd possibly switch to a different chaos map while waiting for 1.7.

I also agree with at least doing a trial run with paid advertising. Judging by those prices listed it's not like we have much to lose from it. This is something I feel we should at least notify the community of before we go through with it, as some people get pissy when funds are "wasted" on things other than directly keeping the servers up.