Herr_Fawkes

As of Rev19, we can no longer create iron farms at all. I was ambivalent towards this change at first, since I normally don't place a huge emphasis on iron grinder use, but I'm now convinced that having only 4, very slow spawners on the map is a terrible idea. The nice thing about iron farms is that, because anyone can make one, you'll find them just about everywhere. This means that UMC will likely have a grinder, and, thus, provide a useful source of iron at spawn. This comes in handy for anyone who needs a minecart, or some cheap gear, or anything else iron is used for. Now, we've got four of these bullshit little grinders that don't seem to be upgradeable, and are located at the worst spots for use by anyone at or near the center of the map. One thing that I like about this server is that it tries to preserve the wealth of options that vanilla MC gives players for gathering resources. If I start up a survival world, am I limited to a few iron golem spawners? No! I can make a golem farm myself. On the server, I've got no problem with replacing villager-based farms with actual spawners, to decrease lag, because spawners allow players to gather iron in a way that appeals to them. Now, players are limited to mining, or AFKing for hours at one of the four -remade spawners, which are so slow as to be useless. This change regarding spawners has had several deleterious effects. Rails have become less important as a method of travel, IMO partially because of the reduction in iron availability, and the new rail-related plugin has gone largely to waste since we've regressed to a pre-CARBON level of centralization. Now that Elytra are seemingly harder to get, we're running around on roads that, this rev, aren't too prolific. Emeralds are the new standard for creating beacon towers, which means more time-wasting villager trading. If someone prefers to trade and not AFK at a grinder, that's great, but why should taking hours out of one's day for a single beacon tower be the only option unless you want to wait for literal days at a grinder, and get in everyone else's way? I don't see why allowing people to have and use their own iron grinders is in any way harmful to the server. Yes, spawners make players grind less. However, if you're telling me that the best way to keep new players is to make them mine some iron instead of AFKing, you're joking. I've mined for an hour and grabbed enough iron to make an anvil or three, and enough picks to find a half-stack of diamonds. If I want a really substantial amount of iron, though, I have to dump a bunch of time into mining that I could, with a decent spawner system like last rev's, spend building public goods like rails and beacons. As such, I think it's wise to consider bringing back the Rev18 iron system for next revision.

Hey, sorry I haven't seen this yet. The past few days have been hectic IRL. I've rescinded the note, since you brought it up and it was accidental.

I'm off to Europe for the remainder of the month of October.

I will be gone on a canoe trip up north starting this Friday (the 9th) and will be returning two weeks from this Saturday, on the 24th. I'll be gone to Europe after that, with a week's break in between.

The ideas you're positing aren't bad, but they remind me a lot of the old S server's death spiral. Stuff was changed on a rev-to-rev basis near the end in an attempt to gain more players, but the server died anyway. The fact that we're already talking about big changes like this doesn't bode well for the server. Given the small playerbase, I'd say getting rid of PvP and either replacing it with another server or going to a 2-server format and saving ourselves some cash is the way to go.

Honestly, I didn't enjoy this event as much as I did last year's. That one was super easy to get into. You spawned, grabbed gear, and ran off to the other team's base. There was no need to harvest coal for jetpacks, to fly anywhere. The map last year had plenty of avenues for water travel, and it worked well even with crappy 1.8 boats. I enjoyed this year's map more, because it was really well made and it looked good, but a good map isn't enough to make PvP fun. I say this based on anecdotes from other players, since I never once saw an enemy. The nature of the map made travel much harder, and the fact that you had to do quite a bit of mining to get even a low-tier jetpack, let alone decent gear, disincentivized combat and exploration. I don't care if I lose my diamond sword in a fight, but losing a quarter stack of iron's worth of gear plus the coal fuel, of which you had to carry quite a bit, and your gear? No thanks. I died once, and quit because I didn't feel like going after more gear. Also, Minecraft PvP sucks when it's ground based, and flying around just makes things worse. I used to play a lot of kitpvp, and that was the closest to balanced I've seen the game. Vanilla mechanics got fixed in 1.9, but those mechanics rely on you being able to shoot opponents with some degree of accuracy and/or get close enough to use the shield and sweep attacks. Flight makes the latter impossible, and the former difficult. I'd love to see the event next year repeat the beautiful map design and go back to playable PvP.

If we were to replace PvP with a modded server, I'd be all for it, but a fourth server is too much of a stretch. Bringing people in is a nice thought, but PvP didn't bring in anyone. It's a ghost town. I want to see a bigger playerbase, and if a modded server is really the way to go, then I'd support it so long as we got rid of PvP.

Can't say I'd play on it, or support it. Modded MC can be found elsewhere, and our playerbase is well-sized for the three-server format.

Why not have a similar system to how water/lava flow works? Players craft the TNT, place it, and have a mod come by and light it off. This would remove the concerns people have with players using it to grief, and you wouldn't necessarily need to have region perms to do it.

I can help if need be.

I've noticed that a lot of new players, this rev and last, come to the server, walk around the spawn room for a bit, and leave without ever clicking on the sign to enter the world itself. In past revs, spawn had been designed so that players can read the rules and protections tutorials as they go through a corridor or something. Rev 15's pirate ship is a good example. I think we could increase the number of players who stay past a minute or so by not making them hunt for a way out of what's basically a spawn jail. It may be too late to implement this in rev 18, but I think it should be considered for future revs in general.

My forum email's valid as well.

I think it'd be a neat idea, and it'd be cool to allow independents (or anyone, for that matter) to display a set of coordinates or something else that would indicate their location if it weren't in a city.

I'm on vacation until Saturday, so I'll be on less as the internet here leaves a lot to be desired.

The new render distance makes for some great views.

Iron grinders: I like the new, more compact setup because it gets rid of villager pods, which are frankly pretty ugly to look at. The server seems less laggy as well, which is a definite plus. The nether: The nether's amazing. I'd love to see it done again in the future. Custom flora: Custom trees are naturally more diverse, which adds a bit of flavor to forests that normally isn't there. I'm a fan. Portals: The reduced number of portals was annoying at first, but I've gotten used to using roads. I can't say I've used rails much because I haven't connected Raven Rock's CARTS with the outside world, but I like that there's so much infrastructure again. Reminds me of rev14, which is a good thing. Ore distributions: No problems. Diamond levels are fine, especially compared to last rev. MapWorld: I haven't used it, but I don't see a reason not to have it. Terrain: The custom mountains should continue for sure. Other than that, I'd love to see the Mesa stay at its current size in the future, because in past revs it's been too large for the use it got. Spawn: Aesthetically, I like spawn. It's more functional than I' used to due to the embassies, which are a welcome addition and a good way to attract players to towns. Custom mobs: The mobs make the game more interesting, if not more fun. I've lost 2 13 speed horses in 2 days to Dr. Cuddles. In the future, would it be possible to have the instakill only apply to the player and not their horse, since the way Cuddles works often means that you die before you see that he's not a normal creeper? Other than that, I have no complaints. /help: Haven't used it, but it seems like a good addition.

The spawn embassies are a great idea, but they're rather difficult to tell apart from the outside. I think it would be relatively easy to add a pair of signs above the doors to each embassy, and/or room for beacons. This way, towns would have an easy way of advertising, and players would be able to find embassies without having to look through all of them.

This seems like a good use for at least a portion of an old P map.

What does this mean? And how can one tell if their account is compromised?

The cardinals were too close, and only two (Rose and Clearmont) ever got a city built around them. North cardinal was beset upon by the public safety menace that was Melon Junction, and Westfall was a private build. I like the idea of adding portals to the map if/when it expands, but I think we need 4 to start. The map is logically divisible into 4 quadrants, and it makes sense to have a portal in each. These don't need to be on the cardinal axes. As much as I like the spawn portal, I think it should be removed only because the point of Minecraft is to explore and eventually find the nether portal, not get one at spawn and use it before the other portals are earned. There's no spawn end portal, so there shouldn't be a spawn nether portal.

i can has whitelist?

At some level, it's not the server's job to cater to n00bs who want to show up and xray their way to a few diamonds. The people who show up and immediately use a hacked client/xray aren't equivalent to the people who, as tobylane said, forget to replant or grief a build by mistake. Those are generally honest mistakes made by people who aren't familiar with how nerd's servers are run, but are willing to play mostly-vanilla MC, which is what the server's designed for. Someone who joins and xrays straightaway isn't here to do that. Xray isn't part of vanilla MC, nor will it ever be. The major gameplay in Minecraft involves mining, not xraying. Why should we tolerate players who don't want to play by our rules? Use of xray isn't a n00by mistake, it's an intentional hack. It should be punished heavily. That said, I don't like the edit rollback associated with xray because it screws over anyone who works with an xrayer, and I've never been into punishing the community because one person can't play by the rules. Remember Fort Honk in rev14? When the main builder on that got banned for xray, and when his edits rolled back, everyone else who worked on it got the shaft. So did everyone who used its villagers. We need a smarter punishment for xray, but it shouldn't involve lowering ban lengths because xray isn't an innocent mistake.

I'l be there Friday. Thanks for setting this up.

The biggest problem is that standard signs would ruin builds in which signs are used for aesthetics (chairs, wall paneling, etc.). An easy fix is to create a resource pack for yourself with signs/banners that you can read. A serverwide solution might resemble the optional Thanksgiving resource pack from rev14. You could allow your client to use it when you logged on.

My biggest gripe is probably revision length. I joined at the strt of R14, and it seems like revs 14-15 have worked like this: Month 1: Cities get established, portals are claimed, a bunch of derp builds show up and are left lying around as players leave and never come back. Month 2: Roads are fleshed out, as is the nether/CARBON rail system, cities and player count stabilize Month 3: Spleef begins, not much else happens Month 4: Nightoak preparation begins, the megabuilds begin to get finished Month 5: Most people are gone now, those wh remain are waiting for Nightoak and the new rev. Anyone new who joins asks the inevitable "when is new rev?" question and we all get drunk ingame Month 6: Nightoak, new rev begins It's clear to me that the revs are about two months too long. Months 4 and 5 have very little going on that couldn't happen in a 4 month revision and still leave room to finish megabuilds and do Nightoak and spleef. I think the current vanilla map generation is fine for a short rev, but if I'm playing for 6 months I want to have a crazy map to explore. I'd also like to see the return of a square map, because it allows people to build a perimeter road. Additionally, the mesa was too big last rev and this one, and no one uses it. The map could shrink a good deal simply by getting rid of the huge mesa and jungle biomes that sucked up the far North and Southwest in R15. Of course, we still need jungle and mesa for their resources, but they need not take up a third of the map. As for map size, I thought that R14's 4k square was about right. Travel between cities was easy, but there was still plenty to explore, and the distances were small enough to allow projects like NorTH to be built. In short, we need a return to a square map with more viable biomes and a shorter rev duration to make things more interesting. PvE is about community, and it's hard to have that when the map is so large that it doesn't encourage cities to build near each other. R14 had the Argoth-Ambrosia-Yowie triumvirate, but the closest R15 comes is having Yowie and Avalon sort of near each other. Yes, Ambrosia and Brom are close, but they aren't well-populated enough to be a real community.