totemo

First.

I don't read these forums enough. This was great @c45y. We don't do nearly enough documentation. Thank you.

Here are my thoughts, from the notes I jotted down a month ago. Technical: Most things worked well. The only unresolved truly technical issue I can recall is that the glow effect on flag holders persists across a restart, when the flag holders will have dropped the flag. The reset procedure was the biggest failing. The team regions were not reset between rounds, leading to grief of region-protected areas. Any last minute fixes to villager trades, and possibly regions (e.g. the blaze spawner building was not protected), got lost whenever the event reset. I doubt this was tested. Some of the death messages were wonky, with &z etc appearing in chat. Some long standing problems with EasySigns may have cropped up again: No loot from signs if you don't have free inventory slots. Sleep signs don't work if you are standing in the sign hitbox. Map design: The map was beautiful and so detailed. It's a shame that there is so little time to appreciate it all fully when playing the game. There were several problems with the bases: The flags were all different. Why? One of lime's flags had a larger protection area around it, which meant that more blocks had to be placed to block up three entrances. In a competitive event, why would you build in a handicap against one team? Surely you would try to make the environment as fair and equal as possible? The piston based airlock doors were a clusterfuck. The base regions did not protect the spawner under the base islands. Why not? We did this in 2013, and a record of the planning that went into that event is still on these forums. (Pro-tip: a thorough reading of that post would have prevented some of the other problems in this event.) Grief is cheap and easy. This issue is related to the lack of consideration given to the rules and reality of PvP in the Gameplay section below. Prior Communication: ​We failed to communicate some key aspects of the event to players ahead of time (or at all). Particularly, the existence of spawners under the bases. Also, the PvP rules. Gameplay: It is a great irony that we provide a PvP event for a group of players who almost exclusively play PvE or Creative. At the time of writing, the PvP server has now finally been laid to rest, but in a practical sense it has been dead for years. ​I consider CTF in space to be, if not ill-conceived, then at least poorly balanced from a gameplay perspective. The game degenerated to preventing someone from touching the flag. If they could touch it, they could escape with it. The jet packs were completely overpowered for PvP. It was very difficult to hit someone with a bow or a sword, and impossible to catch someone once they had the flag. It took way too many hits on someone with diamond armour to take them down. The event generated into a relay race. As is typical in CTF, having the flags away from the base exacerbated the problem of lack of defenders. No consideration was given to the possibility of competitive grief of spawners etc and I imagine that dissuaded people from making XP grinders. No consideration was given to the rules of PvP in this event. There was no reference to the rules from Survival in the information post, for instance. In past events, the rules were spelled out in terms of the rules of our extant PvP server. But in this event we had people making up the rules as they went, with no experience in moderating a PvP server. Despite a long-standing practice of ruling against abuse of LWC locks for base protection on our servers, this practice was allowed in flag defence and no definitive rule was set, leading to escalating rule-brinkmanship. Did we learn nothing from the past? No consideration was given to mob grief. It's a bit tricky to build your defences out of wool when all your sheep are dead. Nobody considered red-green colour blindness as a potential problem with the team colours. Lime team were at a disadvantage because the only cactus to dye sheep was 1000m away from lime base and lime dye also requires bonemeal. Red team had a base full of red flowers. Why wasn't lime team yellow team? Additional villagers were added to the shops to provide these items, then lost when the map reset. One spawner for a whole team of players (when they find out about it on the second day) is insufficient. The XP buff, if there was one, was insufficient. Some of the alert messages were ungrammatical. Suggested Improvements Minecraft PvP is imbalanced enough with people on the ground. Allowing people to fly away simply lets people avoid the fight altogether. Flying is not good gameplay here. Making the flag slow the carrier down would have made re-capture possible in this event and would even be a good idea in a ground-based CTF. If you're going to have a PvP event, write down some rules and tell people what they are; don't make them up as you go. More play testing. I hear this event had only a couple of hours of testing. Some more would surely have uncovered a lot of the problems. One final improvement: ditch team-based PvP as the primary focus. Run a completely novel game-mode - MMORPG like or zombie survival, or something. These can allow PvP if it adds to the experience.

It's an old ban, so would have expired long ago if you had appealed. In future, please take care not to edit other players' builds, if you did, including but not limited to placing water (or other blocks) on them. Also, please familiarise yourself with the rules of any of our servers that you use, listed here: http://wiki.nerd.nu/wiki/Rules You are unbanned.

While you're thinking about it... You're banned for a month. Your inventory has been cleared and all your edits have been wiped from the map. Open a new appeal on the 19th of August, as a reminder to us, and you will be unbanned. You mined 28 diamonds with a mere 276 stone edits, off the sides of pre-existing branch mines made by other players. This is stone:diamond ratio of 276/28 = 9.85 stone per diamond ore, which is extremely unlikely during legitimate branch mining. Examination of the tunnels (shown below) demonstrates that they are diagonally direct to ore, proving xray vision. In the screenshots that follow, I have marked diamond ore with light blue stained glass, and one shot show lapis in dark blue stained glass.

By the way, that's the second rule "No excessive trolling." The truth is, your name is a very offensive phrase in Venutian. I am not obliged to substantiate this claim in any way, but several of the aliens on staff back me 100%.

I think you're wasting my time. I don't like your name and you're a serial troll. Therefore, you will change it if you want to be unbanned. End of story. You obviously don't know Korean and your name is not any kind of Korean that any of our Korean-speaking staff members can understand. Go away, kid. Come back in August.

Let's cut to the chase. You did xray didn't you? Now stop wasting my time and admit it. Your inventory weirdness was me. My only regret is that I didn't put your pants on your head and get a screenshot.

You need to write the word in hangul and provide me a reference to where I can confirm this translation of yours.

Oh it's Korean? Oh well that changes everything. I studied Korean for a while, but I always found the vowels really hard. Just write out your name here in hangul, with a translation and I will reconsider my stance. We have several proficient Korean speakers on staff.

You killed a snow golem with a melon. It was a deliberate act. It was not an accident. Ordinarily, such an action would not attract a ban. However, you have 5 notes attached to your account and numerous past appeals on these forums under various names: Jan 8, 2016: https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/3926-ikakatorr-totemo/, where I said "You seem to take up a disproportionate amount of staff time trolling. We're sick of it. Please stop that." Jan 16, 2016: https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/3939-ikakatorr-totemo/, where I said your next ban would be a week minimum. July 2015, https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/3614-ashpls-crockoduck/ August 2015, https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/3649-expiredpickle-c45y/ I could warn you but that would just lead to more notes on your account. Your most recent warning was from Silversunset about shoving players towards lava, in June, one month ago. This time round, you PM me after killing a snow golem in a region you have no permissions with. Now there are two problems with that. Firstly, if I EVER have to spend more than 5 minutes of my time deal with a problem that you have created EVER AGAIN I will most likely ban you - and if you make more work for another staff member, I will ban you. Secondly, your stupid, unpronounceable, just barely typeable name is a headache for staff. Partly this is because CommandHelper sucks at tab completion and many of our moderator commands are still written with that. But the other part of it is that you chose the name to be that way and I consider it to be more trolling. So here's what's going to happen: You are going to go away for a couple of weeks. You've used up your good will for July. You are banned until August 1. You are going to change your name to at most 6 letters. AshPls would be a great choice. If I don't like the new name, you stay banned. If you change it to something unpronounceable later, you get re-banned without warning.

The majority of people straight up lie to me in xray appeals. They have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. I was hoping to have updated my log visualisation client mod a few days ago, but so much has been happening I still haven't got around to it, so we're doing it the old fashioned way. Long story short, you mined 45 diamonds from 974 stone (a stone:diamond ratio of 21.6 : 1) and you did it all with double-wide tunnels. So halve that ratio: 10.8 : 1, which is an amount of effort indicating either that you were mining exposed ores in caves, or xraying. An examination of your tunnels shows that you were threading from one diamond ore deposit to the next or slanting your tunnels down to the ores. Your inventory and edits were wiped from the server and the ban duration set at one month. You may open a new appeal in these forums on the 26th of June as a reminder to us and you will then be unbanned. Screenshots of your tunnels and statistics follow. Diamonds are marked with stained glass.

Hi. Yeah, you were banned because you xrayed. The server logs your edits and then I swing by later and look at the tunnels. You mined 22 ore in 4 deposits over the course of 4 minutes, mining only 69 other blocks in the process (ratio 69/22 = 3.14 : 1), indicating that you were either digging up exposed ore in a cave or mining very directly. An examination of the tunnels in question showed that there were no exposed ores, instead: you mined straight to ore off someone else's tunnel, for the first and fourth diamond deposits. did a zig-zag tunnel from one diamond to the next (again off someone else's tunnel) for the second and third diamond deposits. I also caught you digging out a couple of blocks in a tunnel wall to get to lapis. I didn't waste time looking at all of your ore edits, however. Your inventory and all your edits have been wiped. You're banned for one month. Open a new appeal here on the 7th of July and you will be unbanned. I've marked the diamonds with stained glass in the screenshots, which follow.

Wow, that's a doozy. Liked and subscribed! Please do a tutorial. Threats too. Be sure to link the screenshots in your youtube video. We always appreciate good or bad publicity for the server. I can't wait! I'm gonna add an extra 2 weeks onto the ban duration for that. Setting your ban duration at 6 weeks plus change. So a month's ban would take us out to the 1st of July and two weeks makes that the 15th. So you can come back to these forums on the 15th and open a new appeal as a reminder to us and you will then be unbanned. An apology wouldn't go astray. If not to us, then to Owl50 for being such an embarrassing fool. And now onto the formal part of the appeal. In the last day you've mined 524 stone and 112 diamond ore so that's about 4.7 stone for each ore mined. Impossible when branch mining. And while we're at it, it's "branch mining". Strip mining is taking away layers of dirt from the surface. And that sign on your chest should have been "valuables" not "valuebles". Right, now these are screenshots of your tunnels. The diamond ore is marked with light blue stained glass, because I've been too busy to update my mod to show those (SOONTM). The long straight tunnel is almost always your mate Owl50's branch mine and the short direct-to-ore tunnel off to the side is you. Over and over again. Oh just for variety here's some you saw under the floor of Owl's tunnel: Same old same old:

As stated on your appeal, your first log in was 1.5 hours after ACrispyTortilla's ban. You had absolutely no interest in the server until ACrispyTortilla was banned. Yeah, right. I therefore have every reason to believe that you are the same person and in any case the possibility exists that you will share the account. Both bans stand until mid June.

Well then, tough tortillas. (See what I did there.) BubbleBass' first log in was 1.5 hours after ACrispyTortilla was banned. Both accounts remain banned until the 15th of June.

And let's add another two weeks to your ban for evading it as BubbleBass. Let's say 15th of June as the new unban date.

Thanks for your honest appeal. It was a bit silly, since you were getting tons of diamonds in a legit manner on the same trip. You're banned for a month, as is the custom of my people. Open a new appeal, as a reminder to us, on the 1st of June and we will be happy to unban you 15th of June for evading the ban as "BubbleBass" and we will consider whether it is appropriate to unban you at that time. And then you get to start over fresh, with nothing. Yay! \o/ A selection of embarrassing screenshots follows (as is the custom of my people):

In case you are confused or think you have a loophole, xray texture packs or other cheaty means to see stuff through walls counts as xray. You mined directly to 4 diamond deposits over the space of a few minutes breaking only 65 stone to get 14 ore, which indicates essentially no effort in finding them. The tunnels were very short, direct and extremely improbable. Therefore xray. You're banned for one month. All your edits are gone and your inventory has been cleared. Reappeal here on the 30th of May and you will be unbanned. Screenshots follow. Diamond deposit 3 was actually already exposed off someone else's branch mining work, but unlikely to be seen from the pre-existing tunnel you walked down. I'll take "Things that just don't happen for $200.".

The custom nether brought a real "vs Environment" experience to PvE this rev. The vanilla nether is severely lacking in challenges. There were some complaints about wither skeletons being harder to find, but there was no shortage of them, because 80% of skeletons spawned in the plains biomes are wither skeletons. That made exploring the nether much more interesting and challenging than past revs. And the new terrain features (nether houses etc) were an incentive to explore much more thoroughly, since, unlike nether fortesses, their locations could not be easily predicted. For additional generation options, perhaps we could get giant mushrooms, or even custom giant mushrooms. Custom dungeons would be a great addition. Perhaps we could go further in customising the terrain and allow stone and overworld ores to spawn in the nether? The game doesn't give us a lot of options in naturally spawned mobs unless we resort to plugins. So, I don't agree with excluding overworld mobs from the nether; they were interesting and challenging.

Willravel is the moderator who issued your ban. All of the nerd servers aggregate their bans to c.nerd.nu, but you were most likely banned on s.nerd.nu during the revision that we ran CivCraft plugins. It's customary to allow the moderator who banned you to handle the appeal. If Willravel does not reply within a day, then I or another staff member will deal with it. It's a very old ban and I have no hesitation in unbanning.

We don't care how you see through walls. If you do it to gain an in-game advantage, such as mining a bunch of diamonds in a short amount of time - as you did - then you will be banned for xray. That said, a bunch of the diamonds that you mined suspiciously were not on the outer wall of a 16x16 chunk, or a 16x16x16 box or even an 8x8x8 box. In fact, I think it's far more likely that you started running a hacked client as soon as it became available, recently. Your edits have been rolled back in full and you are banned for one month. Open a new appeal on the 27th of April to be unbanned.

Sure. Old ban. You're unbanned.

The main thing was was not replanting crops (about 77 of them) and a couple of dozen building blocks that were obviously someone's build. There was also some murderisation of horses which while technically ok, in context I interpreted it as just more malicious actions. You're unbanned. The screenshots below are indicative but not comprehensive.