totemo

This CTF, though there may be some benefit to completing some of the minigames for the prizes (some of which are rather good), they're mostly there for fun. In this event, you will need to weigh the benefit of holding the buffs.

As of yesterday I have lowered the red and blue safe area regions back down to Y20 so that the dungeons that I pasted in would be protected. I lowered the no mans land regions down to the same level, but I guess they don't have to be that deep and I may take them back up. Each team will have 3 zombie dungeons, 2 skeleton dungeons and a spider dungeon under the safe area. The spawners themselves will be protected by single block regions to prevent own-team griefing. The dungeons have some fairly epic loots, including XP bottles (not that XP will be in short supply with all these dungeons and PlumpXP), enchanted books, records, saddles, leashes, horse armour, the occasional diamond tool or weapon and, perhaps most importantly, carrots and potatoes.

Xray bans are for one month. Please read the rules (http://nerd.nu/rules) and open a new appeal on the 14th of October, stating that you'l abide by them from now. Here are some screenshots of your edits:

Wow, that's a blast from the past. Aireal's ban would have expired after a month anyway. Please take the time to familiarise yourself with our rules (http://nerd.nu/rules). You are unbanned.

Not really relevant any more. All staff will be able to play. Being a staff member will not automatically make you cognizant of opposing team chats - you will need to be in ModMode to moderate that. However, staff will be divided fairly between both teams. So even when not in ModMode, there will be people around to keep an eye on it.

Nope. I wrote it a couple of days ago.

I discourage all staff from availing themselves of this service in the stongest possible terms.

There no sign action to add an enchantment at the moment. However, if it is acceptable to simply replace the player's inventory (which it may well be when handing out free equipment prior to a minigame) then an admin can create whatever enchanted items they want in their inventory and use the "/easy-signs inventory" command to give an exact copy of that, including the enchanted items.

BAM! I rolled you back in full. Start again. You're unbanned.

Read the rules (http://nerd.nu/rules) please. Reply below quoting the rule that you broke.

Looking at your past appeals and recalling our Mumble conversation of the day, where you initially denied any wrongdoing with the phrase "I can't be more honest with you", you'd have to concede that you are quite frugal with the truth. This is your second xray ban. It's interesting to me that in your previous xray ban you denied xray right to the end. But then in our conversation the other day, you said something like "I'm done with all that", implicitly admitting your past actions. Perhaps in both cases you were using "something similar" to an xray hack? I have conferred with the S admins. Your ban is for two months and any subsequent serious issue will likely result in a permanent ban. Please read the rules (http://nerd.nu/rules) and reappeal on the 7th of November, stating that you will abide by the rules from now on.

I have added a 'potion' action to give a potion effect, 'leather' to give coloured leather armour and 'inventory' to give the player an exact copy of your current inventory (at the time of setting up the sign). This should cover all of the use cases and uni0's concerns.

You have not responded in a long time. If you want to be unbanned, read the rules and open a new appeal. State that you have in fact read the rules. Closing this appeal.

That will be ok.

About a dozen of the staff spent a few hours testing the latest plugin version. The problems that were identified with it were: Can't capture a flag while holding a flower. Will not fix - no event sent from the client. Left click the flag you damned hippy. FIXED There was a particular slot in double chests that could not be accessed. On that basis I will save a copy of the current binary in case later changes introduce a significant problem that is not identified until the day the of the event. The following changes were suggested as improvements: IMPLEMENTED Disable crafting of helmets. A very good idea. IMPLEMENTED Preferentially allocate players to the losing team. (Suggested by TheRandomnatrix.) Definitely doable by factoring the team scores into the weighting. Each capture scored by a team decreases the probability of adding a player to that team by the same amount as having an extra player already on the team. IMPLEMENTED Automatically return flags carried into a team base. We have a timeout on hold of flags away from their home, but this suggestion seems like a reasonable addition to prevent the base protections (building and PVP protections) from being abused. IMPLEMENTED Add deaths to the score keeping. Possibly the health boost power blocks were not allowing regeneration from the buff while standing on the block. Need to check in a more controlled environment. IMPLEMENTED Turn soul sand into a power block and add slowness. IMPLEMENTED Personal preference: I'll decrease the strength of the poison potion for yellow stained clay by one level (from 4 down to 1) because they're very strong and change the colour to lime green so they are less easily confused with orange. Configuration change. A single contact still does 3 hearts damage, total. IMPLEMENTED Make carpets work the same as solid wool blocks in the team colour. Doable. Must be done carefully. This bridge was mostly crossed when I got soul sand working; both block types are shorter than a full block. NOT THIS TIME Add a /top command so that players can see top scorers in each category. I've run out of patience to do that this time round. All of the other changes above were minor in comparison and minor changes are the only ones I want to do this close to the event. tompreuss, TheRandomnatrix and I spent some time on event configuring and checking the minigames area, making sure that warp and item signs are in place and that they can't be abused. I believe that the minigames area in the End is now complete, save for taking down a few temporary signs. I'll indicate which issues I have fixed/implemented on my private test server. None of the newly implemented features are on event or the nerd.nu event test server (event.nerd.nu) but I'll put them up there soon.

Barlimore, sorry I missed you in IRC earlier. I believe that the plugin is complete. If there are issues with it, I don't think that they are serious enough to prevent us from going ahead with the 14th. The gravest problem that we had with it before - one staff member allocated to two teams - occurred after he did a ModMode transition. I since fully diagnosed that and discovered that ModMode can cause internal errors in the server that result in players not ever appearing on the player list. And that breaks almost any plugin you can imagine. It's also why the server sometimes did not feel the need to send people chunks, particularly if they logged out in ModMode from the End. The simple fact was that due to the internal error, they were not on the player list, so the server did not send them chunks. ModMode is now rewritten and those problems have not recurred.

I hope you make a speedy and full recovery.

(Public Mod Chat) While working on some other plugins recently I've become aware that the way that ModMode changes player state actually causes much more severe problems than I originally thought. So I went ahead last night and rewrote ModMode again using a much more conservative mechanism for switching modes. Testing has been without incident and I will be rolling out the new version on all the servers today. No specific action is required from staff. As a precaution, I will be backing up staff player data from the moment just before the new plugin is installed. If there is a problem with the new plugin that somehow slips through the net, we'll be able to restore your player data. Note that on the first use of ModMode you will need to clear your inventory and empty out your ModMode ender chest (remove the items from the ender chest and do /ci). Be very certain that you are in ModMode when you do this. :) The most significant difference you will notice is less glitchiness when a ModMode state change causes you to move from one world to another. Other than that, there should be no significant differences. Still unresolved issues: I'm informed that the LogBlock toolblock is still being disabled when you pass through a portal. I believe that to be unrelated to the ModMode code and either a configuration issue or a problem with bPermissions. I will investigate it further in due course. Seeing other vanished moderators may still require that you relog. This could also be bPermissions or could be something to do with how I'm (mis-)using the undocumented VanishNoPacket API. I suspect that sometimes moderators still don't get their full permissions when changing mode. I hope to install a later version of bPermissions soon after I've tested it privately.

I might extract the alts code (it's custom and separate from our normal MCBouncer stuff) and gather that kind of information on the regular servers, if I have time. The thing is, that kind of alts checking will only ever really work on people who are unaware or unsophisticated. It's pretty easy to thwart just by resetting a router if your IP is dynamically allocated (as mine is) or by going through a proxy of some sort. I've put it in there because it's not too hard to do and it will stop a few dummies. But I expect, as is usual, we will have people who are determined to ruin it for everyone else. There's really not that much I can do to stop them. And I was deliberately obtuse in the commit message where I added that (something about "improving team allocation") but the people who are really determined to ruin it will read ALL the code. I've made two more technical changes: I've done a major rework of ModMode because it was corrupting the internal state of the server when leaving ModMode from one world and arriving as a normal player in a different world. If you've ever had problems with the End or the Nether, that's the fix. I believe it will no longer be necessary to reset player data as a moderator, ever. I modified CutePVP so that if you're in ModMode, you can edit the enemy team's base. If you're an admin: use ModMode.

I actually moved the first join spawn point a bit and added those doors in after I wrote that all. Yep. That was my feeling. I sent a .tell to JohnAdams1735 to that effect, yesterday. The last technical problem that I'm aware of is that ModMode continues to mess up the server in ways that make moderating this event particularly difficult, because it fails worst when the End gets in the mix. I have about 10 days to fix ModMode.

Thank you very much. As of today I consider the plugin to be complete. (https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/879-ready-for-another-round-of-ctf-plugin-testing/) To deal with easy-signs in the end clearing player inventories, I've added periodic reattachment of helmets when players are on a team. Yesterday I set up blaze and ghast spawners in the overworld (query my sponge placement coords for locations) and I individually protected them all, as well as defining protection regions around the team buffs in the NE and SW corners. I've just had a look at the first join spawn area. One thing that strikes me is that with the current spawn point I fall straight out of there without getting a chance to read anything. So I guess I need to move the first join spawn slightly. How can we stop people from inadvertently dropping down or being jostled down the hole?

Plugin changes as of today, from my commit messages: Periodically reaffix helmet to deal with /ci. Prevent helmet farming in The End. Backup the configuration and log teams and scores at 10 minute intervals. (That's 144 backups per day. I'm fine with that - it's a small text file - I'll just clear the backups/ directory periodically during the testing period.) Identical IP addresses are allocated to the same team, irrespective of team balance, provided that there are no more than 5 names associated with the same address. If there are more, I assume that the address is a proxy and that assigning everyone from that address to one team would just lead to stacking. I now consider the plugin to be complete.

We've also had the converse problem of selfless people donating everything to the team cause only to have some idiot turn all the diamonds into completely unusable diamond helmets or to have somebody from an opposing team steal it all with one of their alts. There will be no forced communism. There will also be no shortage of materials. The ores are plumped to a somewhat ridiculous degree. Automatic locking of chests can be enabled.

'Griefing' is internet jargon for performing some action within an online game intended to evoke unhappiness in other players. In Minecraft, that usually constitutes breaking other players' builds or not replanting their crops. In your case, 'rail grief' means that your account destroyed part of a rail line (of which we have many on p.nerd.nu). You're unbanned.

Didn't even know that existed. The way the new plugin works, if you are in ModMode, you will see the chats of both teams and you will be listed (/teams command) as 'staff'. Otherwise not. The normal /list command will also be available. The system is set up so that anyone on the staff can participate in the PvP as they wish. If you don't want to play at all, simply never type /join and you will never be assigned to a team. Just now I've added a /koth command for the minigame in The End. It keeps track of the total time in seconds that a team's red or blue wool block sits on the bedrock platform at the top of the KOTH arena. The two subcommands of interest are '/koth score' to show the current score and /koth reset (staff only) to reset the scores and remove any block in the scoring position. Typing '/koth' on its own shows usage. Requires some testing by unprivileged players. Works in my own testing. The /koth command is written so that it can be reused on any of the servers with up to 16 distinct teams (all wool colours).