totemo

I don't get where the griefing deterrent comes in. Dying is low cost in vanilla Minecraft. You drop what you're carrying and respawn at your bed. (Read: secret base.) That is the root of the problem and any mechanism that you come up with that does not address that will fail. If you only want proof that somebody killed somebody else, have players drop heads (for example), with lore on them that states the providence (i.e. who did the killing). These are inherently valuable items (worth the bounty) so of course people will trade them and that means that the killer does not necessarily hold the item, but the lore will tell the story. But if you do this, then the bad guy can farm these proof items himself with his own alt. And this should tell you that the value of a bounty hinges on whether you trust the bounty hunter, and whether the bad guy is actually punished in some meaningful way, by being removed from the game for a period of time.

No, Toby this is all practical experience of the Civ server. Remember, we have a working example to study and draw conclusions from. All of the ins and outs of pearling and rescues are well documented on their subreddit. You can go in game or on their mumble server and talk to people. There is no need to infer anything. You can simply ask people what has happened for the past year or more because those players are still around. As a former admin and moderator, I am well aware that players will always attempt to push the boundaries. I'll tell you one other thing: it is very wearing to have to be somebody else's self control. That's what the moderation task is. Being somebody else's self control. You've come on here with dire and non-specific warnings that if players have to take responsibility for themselves then all hell will break loose. My observation of Civ and what the old timers say about it is that, initially, there will be chaos, and then gradually the system will move into balance of its own accord. I know this because great towns and railways exist; because there are 120+ players on at peak time on a map that's over a year old; because those players keep coming back. None of that would exist if equilibrium had not been reached. All of the drama surrounding pearling drives forward a game narrative. The bad guys walk in (sometimes the bad guys are the alts of the good guys), make a mess and unite other players in a common goal of justice, restoration and retribution. Entire towns go on vault raiding parties because someone kidnapped the mayor or whatnot. Parts are played, there are winners and losers. Survivors get to tell stories. So, I am in favour of a game mechanism that is already demonstrably working (pearling) rather than inventing some other way of balancing the cost of grief. I will note one further point about balancing PrisonPearl: the plugin has built-in provision for a daily cost to imprisoning another player. On Civ, the imprisonment cost is 8 coal per day per pearl. Just a reminder: ores are relatively scarce on that map, by design. The cost is configurable: both in the material type and the quantity so by adjusting the the cost the admins can indirectly influence the "justice" system and its abusers.

Most likely it would get out of control at times. There will be people who imprison others unjustly for fun. There may well be a Genghis Khan or a literally Hitler. And then there will be subreddit dramas, impassioned pleas for justice, vault raiding parties, rescues, reprisals, bounties, contracts, politicking, corruption, duplicity, manipulation and other niceties of the real world. For game balance, there needs to be a non-trivial cost of dying. Just losing your inventory is not enough, because you can easily reduce that to a diamond pickaxe, a gold axe for chests and some baked potatoes, and then go raiding people's vaults or griefing their farms. Some servers impose a death ban, which is similar in principle to pearling. However, a death ban is a blunt instrument: how do you adjust it to fit the severity of the crime? Pearling is a more subtle mechanism because it allows the players to develop their own process for dealing justice, just as people do in the real world. An upper limit on pearl durations may be in order. As I understand it, there's also a one-alt allowance built in, so don't judge in terms of an MCBouncer-style ban. It's a different beast and needs very careful consideration.

Pizza? Burger? Something else?

That's not the same CivCraft. The Shotbow code is more properly referred to as CivilizationCraft and it's inspired by Sid Meier's "Civilization". The subreddit for that is r/CivilizationCraft/. The CivCraft that I have been describing is an agglomeration of various mods, as described in this r/CivCraft/ post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Civcraft/comments/1emr0o/welcome_to_civcraft_20_a_basic_guide_to_the_mods/

I commend the S admins and technical admins for their efforts and patience. Without their efforts, S simply would not exist in any form. I believe the primary purpose of this comment thread is to discuss the suggestions listed in the Spoiler section of Mrloud's post.

I said What WHAT?!?

Would it be worth pinning a short post on connection issues at the top of the Problems & Issues forums section? The post could cover: client updating (protocol changes), the current server versions and what clients are therefore able to connect (this text to be updated when the server updates). problems with Mojang's login and session servers, with a link to http://xpaw.ru/mcstatus/ That post would also be linked under the heading Connecting, subheading Problems? in the sidebar of the subreddit.

The customary one month ban duration for xray has passed and you have met our requirements by your attitude and by reading the rules. I retired from the moderator role some time ago and as such no longer have the permission to run the unban command. A staff member will be along shortly to do so, I hope. Feel free to comment on this appeal again after 24 hours have elapsed to bring it up to the top of the list if nobody has unbanned you.

This issue has been around for years, as far as I can tell. I believe the only reason it hasn't been fixed is that insufficient attention has been brought to bear on it. You can generally keep something fresh in a nerd tech's mind by opening a new issue about it at: https://github.com/NerdNu/NerdBugs/issues If you're a tech admin and no crisis is currently occupying your attention then NerdBugs is the job queue, I just had a look at the code, and the most likely cause of this issue is that the Player object representing a player who has been asked to teleport has been kept around to a point in time when it is no longer valid. I believe that the Player can be invalidated by dying, relogging and, probably, changing dimensions. I would suggest that a tech merely need to redeclare User.player as a String rather than a Player, although changing line 168 of User.java (https://github.com/NerdNu/TPControl/blob/master/src/nu/nerd/tpcontrol/User.java#L168) to read: Player p = Bukkit.getServer().getPlayer(player.getName()); plugin.messagePlayer(p, applicant.getName() + " wants to teleport to you. Please use /tpallow or /tpdeny."); would also probably work, though a little hacky. I'll open the issue on github as a reminder to the tech team.

So, prior bans for xray by: raevz, September 2012: http://nerd.nu/archives/index.php?p=/discussion/16769/modernwarfare483-raevz/p1 myself, October 2012: http://nerd.nu/archives/index.php?p=/discussion/17257/modernwarfare483-totemo/p1 and myself again in February 2013: http://mcbouncer.com/userban/9372788 I do not see any particular value in unbanning you. If a staff member wants to do it they should be willing to have their time wasted.

Could someone please unban iCrewchief on my behalf. Thanks.

So I discovered today that the Macro/Keybind Mod has been updated for 1.7.2 after all. To make updating Watson easier for myself in the future, I've separated out the Macro/Keybind Mod support stuff into a separate mod. So Watson can update as soon as LiteLoader is available and the Macro/Keybind Mod stuff can be added by a separate download later. The up-to-date download links for everything are as follows: LiteLoader 1.7.2 (out of Beta now). Macro/Keybind Mod 0.10.02 for Minecraft 1.7.2 Watson 0.6.1 for LiteLoader 1.7.2 Watson Macro/Keybind Support 0.6.0 for LiteLoader 1.7.2 The last link also includes some links to sample configuration files for the Macro/Keybind Mod that make driving Watson a bit easier, and some installation instructions for those. UPDATES: Feb 26: Watson 0.6.1 fixes a problem with the Macro/Keybind onChat event being blocked by Watson 0.6.0.

I think the likelihood is that the initial version of the plugin API will be server-side only. I have no hard evidence for that, though. I doubt that 1.8 will ease client modding.

Yeah. It's now over 3 months since 1.7 was released and MCP is still only Release Candidate 1, as far as I can tell. Not that Twitter makes it easy to find information on this. No official release. The way things are going, I expect we will skip 1.7.4 mod support completely. 1.8 is surely soon upon us.

Ooh. This is interesting. Thank you! EDIT: Okay: there is now a release: https://github.com/totemo/watson/releases I was wondering why I didn't immediately switch to this when they dropped the uploads feature. As it turns out there was quite a long gap there. I'll tag some of the older releases and move them over to this feature another day.

For the last couple of weeks, a small group of Watson "power users" (mainly server admins) have been beta testing Watson for 1.7.2. And yesterday, LiteLoader officially updated to its 1.7.2_02 beta release, so I've made an official Watson release for LiteLoader 1.7.2_02 (beta). That's right, Watson is now a LiteLoader mod. Installation is also a lot easier than in previous versions. Links: Installation instructions and the download links for the 1.7.2 version are at: https://github.com/totemo/watson/blob/master/INSTALL.md The change history for this version is at: https://github.com/totemo/watson/blob/master/Changes.md#05083-mc172_02 The Watson documentation is at: https://github.com/totemo/watson I've built a version of WorldEdit CUI for LiteLoader 1.7.2_02, here: https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bzf2TVOCqgpXaGJwSVZLU0VlQk0 Just drop mod_worldeditcui_1.7.2_02_mc1.7.2.litemod in .minecraft/mods/1.7.2/ and you're done. A few things I'd like to highlight: You must install mod_watson_0.5.0_mc1.7.2_02.litemod into the .minecraft/mods/1.7.2/ folder because of certain LiteLoader features it uses. Putting it in .minecraft/mods/ will not work. OptiFine works - just drop that in .minecraft/mods/1.7.2/. I've managed to get Rei's Minimap working too. Go into the Minimap Options and make sure that the MapMask option is set to "Stencil", or the map will not render properly. Use MagicLauncher to load this mod. Do not put the zip file in .minecraft/mods/ or .minecraft/mods/1.7.2/. Manually set up your MagicLauncher profile to load it from somewhere else. Also expect this to crash if you chain to Forge. It's LiteLoader-only, as far as I know. Watson now defines it's own screenshot key, that defaults to F12. I recommend setting that to F2 and disabling Minecraft's screenshot key. Watson's screenshot facilities are a superset of vanilla Minecraft's, so there is no disadvantage to this. To my beta testers: thanks. I recommend that you grab this update so that you're on an official LiteLoader build by Mumfrey. That means downloading Watson and WorldEditCUI again. Delete the liteloader-1.7.2.jar file from .minecraft/mods/1.7.2/ and run the LiteLoader installer instead. (Linked from the Watson installation instructions.) To the tech admins: I made one small update to materials.yml since the version that was installed on P. I recommend downloading again to get the full force of it. :-)

Okay. This mining happened on the survival server, s.nerd.nu whereas Pico is on PvE, p.nerd.nu. I can't check the logs myself any more, however, a staff member could do an alts check to look for other accounts associated with your IP address and we might still retain chat logs that would show the exact IP address(es) used to login at that time. A techadmin would be able to check. I recommend that you change your password.

And, finally from the 14th, you dug out a large room to uncover diamond 7 under the branch wall (at odds with the low stone:diamond ratio on that day): For diamond 1 it appears that you dug out a room to uncover the iron above, and then dug out all around the iron, having to dig down two blocks to hit the diamond below. People generally don't dig out all around iron, particularly in this case where the shape of the deposit makes it clear that you already have all 8 ore blocks. That concludes the evidence I want to present. Please wait patiently for a staff member to unban you and feel free to bump the appeal if nobody has done so within 48 hours.

Diamond number 2 (14th of August), as already noted, looks blatant: Diamond number 13, from the 16th of August, is another staircase down to diamond by way of gold. Apparently the stone edits for this had already expired by the time I looked at it (on the 25th), leaving just the ores in the logs.

I'll deal with the edits in approximately descending order of suspicion. The final two diamond edits that you made, on the 25th of August, numbered 14 and 15 overall were extremely blatant. They were both "off-branch", meaning you tunnelled diagonally to them, as was a gold edit you made at the same time. In a 20 minute period on that day you mined just over 300 stone to get 11 diamonds and 9 gold. The tunnel went into the side of a branch, then descended at iron. You went off branch to get gold and diamond 14: Then you turned left, by way of gold and iron before both descending and going right to get diamond 15: (note 14 and 15 were originally numbered 1 and 2, because I initially only queried the diamond edits for the 25th, not the preceding 2 weeks). The gold between diamonds 14 and 15 was suspicious in itself because you hollowed out a large room around the iron deposits on the branch. The gap from the iron to the gold was two blocks. It's not possible to keep such a low stone:diamond ratio if you are consistently, randomly mining out such large areas. Therefore, you had foresight of the gold.

It's apparent from my screenshots that I first took notice of your mining on the 14th of August because of a very low ratio of stone to diamond edits: 1268 stone to mine 59 diamonds, a ratio of 21.5:1 which is 3 or 4 times more efficient than typical mining performance. I didn't ban you at that stage. Instead I waited for more suspicious activity. From the looks of what I chose to focus on in my screenshots, the mining is somewhat plausible, with a few notable exceptions that I'll focus on in later comments. The stand-out, of course, is the long stairway down to the diamond numbered 2. A note on numbering: numbers are assigned automatically based on what I have queried from the logs. Consequently they can change depending on the sequence of queries I issued. Numbers are assigned in ascending order by time stamp, except that diamonds are assigned numbers first, then iron, then gold, then lesser ores like coal. So for example, querying additional iron edits will lead to increasing the numbering on gold deposits, irrespective of when they were mined relative to the iron. In subsequent comments I'll tackle specific suspicious edits.

Hi, I'm the moderator that banned you last year. At the start of this year I decided to step down from my staff role to devote time to more important matters. However, I still drop by regularly to keep tabs on appeals for bans I've issued. In the next few minutes I'll be providing screenshots of the specific mining edits that I banned you for in subsequent comments. You've been banned since the 25th of August of last year, so the customary 1 month ban duration has expired. You will need to signify that you have read the rules at http://nerd.nu/rules and then an active staff member will be able to unban you. I have quite a lot of screenshots to present, with commentary, so please bear with me while I work through it all.

If I may comment, I was the moderator who issued the ban at the time, although I have since retired from that role. Oomka123 definitely played on our servers, although I recently deleted screenshots older than about 6 months to free some disk space. It sounds like his account may have been compromised, meaning someone was able to guess his password or steal it using a variety of scams.

Oh shit, I just remembered I have like 10 wither skulls from Christmas in one of my chests. I will have to make some time to get a wither fight going some time soon. :)