totemo

The lag spikes appear to be a stop-the-world type phenomenon. By bumping up the RAM usage we eliminated a big garbage collection pause on P as a possible cause. As I said at the time, I don't think the individual bypassing of BungeeCord was a complete test, since BungeeCord is a shared resource for all players. If BungeeCord can in some way hold up or disrupt the main game thread then other players on Bungee can still cause issues. Today, I see an admincraft post about this: * https://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/3miu6u/bungeecord_memory_usage_skyrocketing/ * https://www.spigotmc.org/threads/running-bungeecord-with-2gb-of-memory-or-less-with-g1gc.91807/#post-1017207 Indicating that BungeeCord needs a lot of RAM in recent versions and also needs particular GC flags to the JVM. I found out when I sat in on that testing that we're on default args for the BungeeCord JVM. I'd say that's an avenue of investigation. It's possible that there are multiple issues and that BungeeCord is an amplifier of any lag that does come up, as indicated in the post. It would be consistent with the occasional lag around chunk loading when teleporting too. One counter to theories along this line was that neither C nor S (when it existed) was seeing these issues. I think the main lag situations appear to be on logins and saves. As I said last night (my timezone) I do wonder about the name API but I haven't been able to specifically trigger a noticeable latency issue with it. It wouldn't explain the chunk loading anyway.

As you have acknowledged the post, moving it to Closed Ban Appeals.

I'm informed that you've seen the this post. Closing the appeal.

I'll deal with the administrative formalities of your appeal up front and then go into further detail about why you were banned. You're banned for one month. Your inventory and all of your edits have been wiped. The ores you mined are gone permanently. Please open a new appeal on the 16th of October and you will be unbanned. You have not denied being able to see the ores in a non-standard way. You offered the excuse that you had seen diamonds #6 and #7 due to lag, but they are not on a chunk boundary, so that is not true. The last image above shows that you tunnelled directly towards 7 but changed direction within the first two blocks of mining to go diagonally up and to the right to get diamond #6. Diamonds #6 and #7 were mined approximately 1 hour (~03:16 server time) after you had made the rail tunnel off which you branched (~02:00). The rollback shows that diamond #10 was under lava. You mined directly through the wall of the tunnel to the diamond, making a cobble roof as you went. Again this was about an hour after the main tunnel was made. And then you backfilled the path with cobble to try to cover up the fact. You were not swimming in lava to discover the diamond. You mined to it (from a distance) through stone. You mined diamond #3 at 01:12 (red scribbles in the image below) and placed cobblestone in the lava under it. You also mined out a single block of granite in the wall behind it looking for connected ore. You came back 2 hours later at 03:18 and mined diamond 8. You placed a cobble roof in the lava over diamond #9 at 03:20. You mined directly to these diamonds through stone, rather than finding them by lava swimming.

If that was the case, then the coordinates of those diamonds would be on the chunk boundary. That's a coordinate divisible by 16, exactly, or 15/16ths = 0.9375 of the way through the chunk. We're facing positive X. That is these two diamonds are more-or less lined up on a line of changing X. The Z coordinate differs only by 1. For deposit #7: * X = 795 = 49.6875* 16. Nearest chunk boundary: 50 * 16 = 800, 5 blocks away. * Z = -1076 = -67.25 * 16. Nearest chunk boundary: 67 * 16 = -1072, 4 blocks away. For deposit 6: * X = 789 = 49.3125 * 16. Nearest chunk boundary: 49 * 16 = 784, 5 blocks away. * Z = -1075 = -67.1875 * 16. Nearest chunk boundary (again): -1072 You're lying to me. It's late where I am. I'll finish the appeal process tomorrow.

This is not my first xray ban, nor is it Trooprm32's. He was the P admin who seconded my evaluation. Since you contest it I'll give you the opportunity to defend the edits in question. Firstly, please tell me the story of how you discovered the two diamond deposits labelled 6 and 7 in this image?

Yep. I'm disappointed to see that this is not an isolated incident of xray from you during this revision. Xray takes diamonds away from everyone else who plays on PvE legitimately. Accordingly, it's regarded as a serious violation of the rules. You're banned for 1 month, your inventory has been cleared and all of your edits wiped from the map. Subsequent xray offences will attract a harsher penalty. Please open another ban appeal one month from today asking to be unbanned. Here is a selection of some of the 47 diamond deposits you removed today. All ores that you mined have been permanently wiped from the map.

They could be rationed out gradually. In an earlier comment, I suggested allowing them to be bought by gathering materials. @saberfysh suggested competitions (events, admin hunts). Mrloud15 has suggested a starting set of four portals, with four more available later in the rev by some unidentified mechanism. He also suggested de-emphasising the importance of portals by making the Nether 1:1 scale rather than 1:8, which has some merit, though I realise it is controversial because of the inconvenience. It does remind me though that Survival had a very cool custom generated Nether during one rev, which I have said before would be more in keeping with the "vs Environment" aspect of PvE. That further brings to mind the fact that the last time we asked PvE about the map, they had the option of nominating terrain type. That option is conspicuously absent in the above poll. If we are going to fully explore the topic we could also potentially discard Mojang's portal mechanic. With a custom plugin, portals could instead be explicitly connected together such that we could remove the limits on portal placement and let players make their own. Now I'm thinking with portals, the plugin could even require that users mark both sides of the portal using red and blue stained glass with custom lore, thus necessitating that they travel to the Nether side destination via some pre-existing portal.

I see that there is some discussion of the means by which portals are allocated in the thread above. Might I suggest that portals be purchased by collective effort in gathering materials. A certain amount of wheat, a certain amount of potatoes, carrots, beef, eggs, wool, diamonds, wither skulls, blaze rods, ender pearls, a largeish amount of obsidian to really slow people down. All of these materials are placed in a chest and a modreq made. Such a system would favour large groups that can band together to collect those materials quickly. Individuals or small groups would simply not be able to gather those resources quickly enough before the maximum number of portals could be allocated. Surely that is exactly what you want?

On the subreddit, here, I have made the argument that the P admins could generate out the map to a larger size than the map border, and then expand the border mid revision and add extra portals at that time to open the possibility of new portal towns. Therefore I have not voted for a specific map size or revision duration. On the subject of duration, I think we should establish an objective cutoff point, in terms of server population, at which point this kind of discussion thread is triggered and a hard deadline for the rev is set, during which time the new map is made. The cutoff could be, for example, less than 30 players for 2 weeks straight. This would be clarified before the revision begins so that everybody knows what to expect. The deadline for map making should not be short. Previous experience has shown that it takes a lot of time and effort; 6 to 8 weeks would not be unreasonable. People naturally tend to underestimate this because it is not something they don't do every day. Note that it's not 6-8 weeks of work every day; it's 6 to 8 weekends for someone who works or studies. This revision we had a circular map border. I would hope that we go back to square. The circular border is a major pain when mining near the border because it is all too easy to cross and then you warp up to the surface.

By the way, why can't we have that custom Phoenix Terrain Mod generated nether (or whatever it was) that Survival has been getting recently? That's a more hostile nether environment than vanilla nether. I feel like that makes for a better adventure there too. Or possibly do a combination of vanilla nether mcmerged with PTM nether? Not sure what the incentive for going into the more hostile zone would be, tho. :) EDIT: I accidentally the most important.

Ah yes. I checked the old cartos and it seems I've managed to conflate revs 10 and 11. Rev 10 had the diamond plump in extreme hills. Rev 11 had amplified terrain near the border and biom-specific ore generation.

I happen to think that Thrawn21's PvE Rev 8 map generation was a high point. If you will recall, that map had amplified terrain near the world border, outside of a certain radius from (0, 0). I emulated that when I generated Survival Rev 23, but rather than using WorldPainter I simply merged DEFAULT and AMPLIFIED vanilla terrain using WorldBorder and mcmerge (per my tech note in the admin section, buzzie). Thrawn21's map also had biome-dependent plumps: that is ores were plumped differently, depending on the biome, and extreme hills in the amplified region had a fairly extreme diamond plump, if you remember. :3 *cough* Pico Sandy Bank *cough* The other thing that Rev 8 had was awesome custom trees. Whole forests of them. Actually, I liked Rev 7's trees too. I find vanilla trees to be a bit dull. I really like the idea of a more hostile environment on PvE, since it is the "vs Environment" server. But past experience (e.g. PvE rev 2 where it was all amplified terrain via Terrain Control Mod) has shown that city builders don't like it because they end up having to flatten enormous mountains in order to build their orderly, flat towns. So what I would like to see is a map that is normal vanilla terrain and difficulty for the majority, but more hostile terrain and more powerful mobs (e.g. potion buffed, armoured, except when from spawners) in the outskirts. The incentive to take on these difficulties would be better loot drops from mobs and more prevalent ores. So people would have to travel and be well armed. It would be an adventure. If, for example, the map was 8k square (+/- 4k), and everything within a 4k circle of the centre of the map was vanilla difficullty, and between there and the border featured harder mobs and terrain, and more ores, then 78.5% of the map (3.14159265 * 4000 * 4000 / 8000 / 8000 * 100%) would be vanilla and the remaining 21.5% would be a new challenge for people to try.

Cunts.

I think "A more thorough adoption of civcraft's features" is one way of realising the goal and the example I argued for, but at the same time it missed my point. My real request is for a more engaging, intricate and balanced game. I think Civ exemplifies that, but it's not the only way. If you think you're doing it just to be a Civ clone, you've missed my point. My point is that Civ has the features it has because they re-balance the game that Mojang has defined. Civ questions the otherwise unquestioned fundamentals: crafting, ores, crops, XP, the hardness of blocks. Civ provides one possible solution to how to balance these things that has been evolved and fine-tuned over time. When you set up a game that is a blend of old S and Civ, you are changing the balance of the game and you really need to understand that. The game balance is the game. People will always - very efficiently - work out the easiest path to victory and exploit that. A balanced game provides no obvious easy solution; only a complex set of competing alternatives that challenge and engage players. If S turned into something radically different from old S or Civ, I would not mind at all if the game was interesting to a broad range of players and had long-lasting appeal.

This is an attempt to hijack the success of P and put it to the service of S. Consequently: It risks diminishing the culture of the successful server to support the unsuccessful one. The two mindsets are quite distinct. S players will use P to farm resources and build elaborate bases in complete safety, thus diminishing the gameplay of S, where hunting a player who is otherwise distracted by those activities is an essential part of the game. If resources can cross the boundary from the P to the S domain, then P admins must factor S gameplay into their decisions. For example, the spawning of ores and XP in the PvE zone might be changed to accomodate the S players. We have the resources to run 3 servers. We've been doing it for years. The existence of the S server is publicised to P players in the lobby at every restart and constantly on the subreddit. If P players wanted to play on S, they would. S should stand on its own merits. S should provide a gameplay experience that attracts and holds new players from outside the existing population rather than trying to cannibalise P. If you think that this kind of game is what people want, then put it on S, next revision and see what that gets you.

I think it's counterproductive to try to restrict "valid" opinions to the limited group of people who still play S. Surely you want to attract players who are not catered for by the current design of the server, and that means listening to the opinions of people outside of the echo chamber. That said, http://nerd.nu/usage/survival is updating again and I am in the top 10 by usage, so I think that qualifies me as a PvP god with a perfectly cromulent opinion. :) First off, I really want to commend the S admins for creating the premier PvE experience on the Reddit Public servers. I got chased down the road, newly spawned, with no gear or even food by some armoured n00b (he knows who he is), but other than that I have not had to deal with any pesky PvP. Most of the time there are fewer than 10 people on, so if I /ignore everyone else, it's like having an entire brand new map to myself. If, by some miracle, a player does find me, I'm confident that I can just throw down an auto-locking chest for my valuables, so there's no reward for killing me other than the dubious thrill of killing a naked guy. At some point I'll get an ender chest, I guess, but they're no longer essential for ensuring that you don't lose anything, ever. I won't ever have to deal with grief. I don't really have to care about base security, because even if someone does find me they can't do much other than kill me a couple of times and make me go back to spawn. I'll never ever have to be concerned about any kind of loss. All in all, it's more relaxing than C, which has more griefers. So, in that sense, I think S is absolutely perfect and cozy. As long as the numbers keep falling I can only see it getting better. On the other hand, it does surprise me the S admins are willing to write off the more chaotic play style of last rev as an abject failure when there are players who (to my great surprise) consider it to be one of the most enjoyable PvP experiences they had on the servers. I would have hoped that the powers that be would consider fine tuning of that formula rather than abandoning it entirely, seemingly without any further examination. I do want to make some detailed criticisms and suggestions for improvement to S, but first I want talk very broadly about the gameplay design of last revision. It seems to me that there are two completely opposite schools of thought on how to make S fun. On the one hand, there are people that think that we must lower the difficulty of getting gear, and encourage people to clump together. So if you subscribe to this school of thought, you like: Plumped XP. Enchantism or some other means of making enchanting suck less. Spawning close to the centre of the map. Planned roads centred on spawn. Maybe a light plump of ores so you don't have to waste time mining. Locked chests and ender chests to minimise risk and loss. It all makes perfect sense. PvP is the only thing that matters so let's kill all other aspects of the game as much as possible! PvP is its own reward and there is no need to build a reason to fight into the game. The further you go down this path, the more the server begins to resemble a minigame where losing gear matters nothing and you don't even build your own base. The other school of thought seems to be that: Making things take time and effort leads to a greater sense of reward. Putting stuff at risk (e.g. imperfectly locked chests) leads to a higher-stakes, more exciting game. The ability to raid chests gives an actual reason to fight beyond just trying to tick people off. Truth be told, I'm in this latter camp that thinks that greater difficulty leads to a more interesting game. I don't accept the proposition that S has to be super close to the game that Mojang has defined. In fact, I think being somewhat unique might be a selling point for the server. I don't accept that Mojang have designed a perfect multiplayer survival PvP game. Many people question the game balance of Minecraft PvP: potions and enchants. On the other hand, it's not common to hear people question the game balance of block breaking (and placement). The time taken to tear down a wall, whether brick or obsidian, is regarded as some kind of immutable physical law, handed down by God. Why is that? You can't change it in the client, but plugins like Citadel show that it is possible to question this. Resources: Mojang have set them at a level of obtainability which leads to a pleasant single-player experience. How much have they changed the frequency of occurrence of ores since multiplayer was added to the game? In what ways can increasing or decreasing ore frequency lead to a more engaging game? Could the game be improved by making resource distribution less uniform - requiring that players have to travel to find diamonds or iron, rather than simply spending an hour or so wherever they end up? Mobs: again, the difficulty of mobs is tuned by Mojang for single-player. They can be tuned by plugins fairly easily by adjusting frequency of occurrence, strength, speed, gear and drops. Food: Mojang have ensured that crops grow fast enough that a very small amount of farmland is sufficient to feed a player. If you happen to grind in a skeleton grinder, a single block of farmland is sufficient. In addition, every crop grows everywhere. There is no requirement to travel for certain types of produce, other than the need to find it in the first place. Tech tree: Mojang have designed a fairly limited tech tree. You can level up from nothing to potions and top-tier enchants in well under a week. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the tech tree is actually an underrated factor in player retention. Everybody loves the start of the rev because there are some compelling goals built into the game: Finding food: this leads to the quest for various kinds of crops and the establishment of animal farms. Establishing territory (claims). The need to ensure security (a base and chests): this leads to mining for building materials. The need to acquire armaments, which leads to the following supporting goals: Mining for diamonds. Searching for netherwart. Finding spawners and building grinders. Acquiring bookshelves for enchanting. Once you've climbed this limited tech tree you're left with hunting your fellow players and more mining. You must become entirely self-directed in your goals. And I think it is for this reason that usage rapidly declines in the first few weeks after a reset. Players come to check out the new map and new features, build a house and a farm and then feel that the game is over. In terms of gameplay design, I would characterise Reddit Public's "CivCraft"-style S experiment as schizophrenic. It was an odd blend of the casual minigame style and the full-on commitment of CivCraft. Specifically: Players were spawned on the ring road and implicitly encouraged to build there. This is the definition of insane. Players were jammed into a comparatively (compared to CivCraft) small map. We've all played chaos before and we know the importance of putting some distance between oneself and the opposition. XP and ores were plumped and easy to obtain. This lessened the importance of cooperation. Everyone could be a one-man army. The ore distribution was non-uniform - so territory did matter somewhat - but it was not differentiated sufficiently to really encourage people to travel in order to mine. You could still get loads of materials wherever you end up. There was no need to travel a long distance carrying an inventory full of wealth. There was no real incentive to trade crops either, because, per the usual Minecraft mechanics, everything grows everywhere. There was no extended tech tree, e.g. Factory Mod. Factory Mod is a way of changing the crafting and smelting mechanics defined by Mojang. You create a factory to craft special items or smelt ores and give it some relative advantage over Mojang's vanilla mechanics (or you shut down the vanilla method completely and make the factory the only way to do some things). Factories are expensive to make, so it becomes a goal to get all the materials to make one. They require materials to maintain, which makes maintenance another goal. And they can't be moved once placed, which makes people think twice about abandoning a location. Difficult choices make for a more interesting game. Here are some suggested changes that might have improved it: Add the Bastion plugin, which gives a placeable block that prevents attackers from spamming blocks, lava, water and fire. That would have shut down the more offensive grief and could have been a nice trade item if the difficulty of obtaining it has been set correctly. Adjust the Citadel reinforcement strength of stone upwards if it is too weak. Patch Citadel to add scaling factors on a per-block basis. So for example, diamond increases the break time of obsidian by 1800x, but perhaps it increases the break time of chests by 3000x. Essentially: allow fine tuning of container break times to encourage or discourage raiding. Generate the map with a significantly non-uniform ore distribution that forces people to squabble over territory and travel long distances carrying valuables when mining. Consider the use of Factory Mod to expand the tech tree. It's configurable, so we don't need to have the same recipes as CivCraft. We could, for example, change default smelting in furnaces to be grossly inefficient, e.g. 1 iron ingot for 10 ore. And then have several tiers of iron smelting factory with different resource costs to make and maintain, the most expensive one giving the best ratio of output ingots to input ore. Reconsider the role of XP in the game: should it be easy (trivial to obtain) or would it be better to make enchanted items truly rare and valuable. Would we be better off only allowing enchants on tools and not having any armour or weapon enchants? Should XP be obtained in the ways that Mojang has defined? Or could it instead be obtained in a CivCraft way, by mining or farming (which might lead to more complicated goals that would retain players)? If using Factory Mod and crops are a component of recipes then, consider the use of the RealisticBiomes plugin to limit the availability of recipe ingredients (i.e. increased difficulty to farming).

Former tech admin and long term dark-room grinder enthusiast here. A few points: It doesn't matter how well your design performs on C or in single player. The conditions are completely different on P and more adverse to dark-room use. The per-chunk spawn rates may be tuned well down on P to mitigate lag, in the Spigot (server) configuration. MobLimiter may also have per-chunk culling of hostile mobs in its configuration. Thought the plugin was originally conceived as a way to reduce passive mob numbers, it has been adapted to control hostiles in the last year. The entire world-wide mob cap (number of loaded chunks times chunk limit) is spread evenly among all online players. No darkroom will perform well with 120 players online. Wait until there are only 12 players, later in the rev. Your dark room is too small. You need something at least as big as this: http://imgur.com/a/vQjbC#47 . That's 18 floors per tower, with each floor wired to release water behind pistons into the four corners of the room. Except you need to go ahead and wire up all four towers. Or for a more efficient design with parallel-flowing water, hunt down WaterSlide and ask him about some of his Brom dark-room grinders. You need to build your darkroom in the middle of an ocean, so that surface-spawning of mobs is impossible. You also need to light up at least 99% of all cave space everywhere where chunks are loaded, starting with a 15x15 chunk square around your grinder and then moving on to the same area around every online player. Then get everybody to stand perfectly still so that you don't need to light up more chunks. Alternatively, if you can persuade everybody else to log out, you will get the full mob cap in the vicinity of your grinder. Mobs in the grinder are killed quickly, whereas mobs in unlit caves tend to hang around a long time, so dark space in caves counts proportionately higher than dark-room space when it comes to spawning.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: that guy is a jerk. And a slacker.

This is a terrible idea and impossible to implement.

As of today, Watson is updated to 1.7.10. It's been tested with LiteLoader (required), Forge, Optifine, Macro/Keybind and some other stuff. You need to make a .minecraft/mods/1.7.10/ folder to put All The Things™ in. You can find more detailed instructions with download links for some of those other mods at the release pages: Watson 0.8.0 for LiteLoader 1.7.10 Watson Macro/Keybind Support for LiteLoader 1.7.10 The only new feature in this release is some new configuration settings you can use to turn off reformatting and/or recolouring of LogBlock query results in chat.

The ultimate measure of success of s.nerd.nu MUST be player numbers. The ultimate survival of Reddit Public depends on the appreciation of the gaming public, because the server owes its continued existence to appreciative donors. If S transforms into something different from what it has been in the past, that is perfectly fine, as long as people have fun, stay around and enjoy the game enough to support the server financially.

The former. Just two stone slabs stacked together, with the dividing line. Sometimes when you're pillaring up on stone slabs, lag will push you off. That doesn't happen when placing a whole block. It's a convenience thing.

I've wanted that (43:8) for a long time. In a similar vein, I think this would also be nice: It adds a bit of convenience without changing the resource cost of placing doubled slabs in the world.

You guys need to recognise that it's an international server and for the sake of equality we must be tolerant and welcoming of players from non-English-speaking backgrounds. I put up with all of you lot speaking American, even though I find it a little bit off-colour, and despite everything, Reddit Public is still my favourite server.