buzzie71

An analogous discussion happened for P - from what I can piece together from old threads, initially there was great resistance among staff at the time for having PvP arenas on P, primarily because of the fear that PvP is the specialty of S (it will take players away from S to P as well as be redundant in the bigger picture of the nerd servers). The compromise that was made at the time was that PvP arenas on P were to be "reasonably sized" and simple (like this one), with the understanding that bigger, more complicated PvP arenas (and even arenas where PvP is a secondary feature, such as jousting) can and should be built on S instead. Over time, the size and arena criteria became clearly defined in the rules (40x40x40, access-restricted, etc.) and the complexity restriction on the arenas sort of faded out on its own; most recently I have seen and enabled PvP not only in straight-up PvP arenas, but in jousting arenas, king of the ladder arenas, an archery arena, and other arenas that required PvP and met the regulations put forth in nerd.nu/rules. Despite these changes on P, which the staff a year ago worried would negatively affect S, the Survival playerbase appears not to have changed greatly, at least to my knowledge. TL;DR: Given what has happened on P, I doubt the statement that having PvP arenas on C will detract much from S.

Excellent repurposing. Hopefully once public perception of the page shifts, we will get some good candidates from it :D

I have previously expressed a negative opinion towards removing the "Don't be a dick" rule, but shortly after I posted (in the archived forums) I realized my argument was empty and I guessed I held onto it only for historical reasons. I maintain that the tone it sets for the servers and the rest of the rules is excellent, but frequently I see players trying to get other players in trouble for legal gameplay because they were being something that the accuser (and not necessarily the staff) defines to be a dick. The most hypothetical scenario I have to offer: Base camping is not illegal on S, but for someone not used to S gameplay or S rules it can easily be seen as being a dick - here you are trying to build/farm/survive, and this blasted diamondclad kills you and then sticks around to stab you as soon as you get close to your own build, wtf?. -> argument about whether the supposed perpetrator is being a dick. (EDIT: Striking out this example because after some conversation I realize this is not a great example.) The most concrete scenario I have to offer: The End is frequented by P players to level up at the fastest rate. Popular opinion holds that End grinder spawn rates go down if there is anywhere else besides the End grinder that Endermen may spawn, and thus even mentioning intent to build an End grinder when one already exists earns a player discouragement, if not some animosity. A second, private one was indeed constructed largely in secret last rev, and when news of it was made public, some of the players against the second grinder (for reasons of privacy or reduced efficiency in the first, public grinder) were quick to call the builders and their town dicks, while the players who built it rebutted that the rule was irrelevant in this case. The Padmins ruled that grinders must not be access-restricted as the second End grinder was, but did not, and to this day still do not, announce or enforce a limit on the number of End grinders in the End. My point is that though we might believe it is a great rule, players use it for their own ends, for purposes that we, as staff, do not support. Even as a staff member, I will say up front that I do not intend to ban or enforce any ban for solely "being a dick;" in my opinion it is about as flimsy of a ban reason as "driving a red car." I don't believe this means "don't be a dick" must be necessarily removed as a concise description of the server atmosphere and its rules, but I would support its removal as a rule itself.

Looks like it's possible to obtain a jump strength value from a horse as well as its color and fur pattern (I think). If memory serves me well, I think it's possible to get the horse's max HP from a method in the LivingEntity or Entity class. Beyond that, I'm not sure how to get a speed stat on the horse :S (http://jd.bukkit.org/rb/apidocs/org/bukkit/entity/Horse.html)

The invincibility of horses when not being ridden was a feature implemented as a grief prevention measure. I imagine it is very much possible to make horses invulnerable even when being ridden, but my first reaction is that the impossibility of killing horses would mean players would be riding on an unkillable steed (can traverse normally dangerous terrain with no consequence; kind of cheaty) and players would be unable to kill their tamed horses for whatever reason.

My guess is that there are players who think we (the staff) are intimidating and are worried we'd act against them if they flat-out asked if they could be mod. Perhaps they would be more forthcoming without someone to potentially think bad of them (and say so) listening to their request.

I am quite liking this plan actually :D

Just found another arrow kill on P; turns out admin logs do log the player, mob killed, and coords, and they match rather well: 2013-10-28 22:21:50 | [KitchenSink] [MobKill] <Player>|COW|world|398|64|892|C[24,55] 2013-10-28 22:21:55 | [KitchenSink] [MobKill] <Player>|COW|world|397|64|892|C[24,55] Looks like this has been resolved.

This was discussed in the Mumble meeting, but I will post what we (the Padmins) have stated here: Taking sand from unbuilt desert is resource collection, and as such we will not require players to do any terraforming to make the harvested area look aesthetically pleasing (eg. leaving one layer of sand, or filling in the collected area with dirt), though players are free to do such fixing on their own. At the same time, if there is plenty of area to harvest sand from, please do not go right up against a town or a build to harvest sand at their fringes (this is equivalent to, say, building a dirt structure up against someone's build - you must leave a respectful distance). Link to notes

Bumping: next meeting is scheduled for (TBA)

Oh I meant that there was work being done to link P/S/C/X with the lobby - it was something I recall from the days when Unity was under construction (pre-P rev11).

I think work on a server lobby was done before; not sure what stage it's at or whether it will be implemented :S

From my experience I favor how mods are picked out now, where players assume they aren't going to be mods and just be themselves, and existing mods see their true® personalities. That being said, my time zone coincides with the server's most frequent time zone, and I can see merit in having an actual application for mod as well, if nothing more than as a self-nomination for the staff.

Oh yes :D

My all-time favorite is still Ace Combat 5. Beyond that, I also enjoy the X series of games, Star Fox, and some Sonic.

We'll keep watch on this; thanks for reporting. If you have any concerns such as this in the future, remember that you may contact a member of staff or include them in your modreq - those are better avenues for making us aware of them.

For the contest idea, you have my support.

Just to bring this thread to a sense of completion even though it's been a few weeks since the start of rev 12, here is (approximately) the thought process I went through for the Endgame quest. Want to know where to find the sets? Want to know where I got the ideas for the stars? Come have a read: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WKRs-LoLHJ_rsOvOOIq_TO_tSCpc6L1p-OiZ9kAhbw8/edit?usp=sharing

As per the results of last week's poll, we have run Hard mode on PvE for a week to see how it goes before taking a vote again now. At time of writing, PvE is still on Hard difficulty, though that should be toned down to Normal shortly after this is posted. So with the last week's trial period in mind, decide: would you like to see PvE switch to Hard mode (what has been running on the server for the last week), some sort of partial Hard mode where some aspects of Hard mode are implemented while others are not (for example, higher attack damage from mobs but no starving) or stay on the usual Normal difficulty that has historically been the norm on PvE? If you choose partial Hard mode (the second choice), please leave your thoughts about it in the comments below: what features of Hard mode do you want to see implemented, and what features of Hard mode do you want to leave out? If this becomes the most popular option, we'll be sure to get some particular discussion or a poll going about the specifics of this unique mode; once that's been decided on, then we can see if it's possible for us to implement it. Please note that we make no guarantees about the implementation of partial Hard mode, and failing to find a way to implement it and balance it with lag reduction (more plugins will lead to more lag), we will fall back onto Normal difficulty. That said, you have our assurances that we will make every attempt to implement it should that be the most popular option. EDIT: Forgot to mention, we will end the poll on Sunday 23:59:59 EDT. The topic should close at that time, but discussion of the results will likely continue elsewhere past that time. Stay tuned!

As a first opinion, I don't see a problem with players having access to /lb me, unless there was a technical reason for removing it (increased server load from frequent use of command) or a gameplay reason for removing it (xrayers attempting to fudge block edits to make their ratio look legitimate). I admittedly have no context for either cases and am curious to see how this discussion unfolds. That said, if I may add another question for discussion: what do we think about giving players access to their kill data from /lb kills? (We could disable this in the End; last rev more than 4 million Endermen were killed and querying LogBlock for that information took noticeably longer.)

Ahh, blast it ><. I stand corrected then, my fault.

Did you check for edits by LavaFlow or WaterFlow (think it's the former)? Try coal-blocking one of the hardened blocks. I know on S that lava flowing into water and causing water to turn to stone will leave an edit in the logs by LavaFlow.

Oops, my fault ><. Should be fixed now!

In retrospect, a lot of this is stuff that has not been properly explained through the logs, and it would be mean of me to dictate what all the ambiguous things meant exactly. It is ultimately up to you, the reader, to fill in the holes with your imagination, and so I have left my notes and things hidden behind links and spoiler tags that contain my lines of thinking. Open them if you wish, but please do not feel compelled to believe everything I intended. For then this makes me a lecturer, a pedant, and though certainly I intended for parts of the story to be explained one way, it would be a bit rude if I were to demand you thought the same. [EDIT: Oops, forgot to make them publicly viewable! Links fixed :D] There's actually more that I have, but for now, I have compiled and added commentary to the file I have that holds draft logs and their notes. Enjoy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10TGBWRtkQNFsjL6REtpJ8U5g0jjrzTdwadlqCVPsG2A/edit?usp=sharing This is the timeline that became the basis for the first round of logs that were found in Unity: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W6xpFbnTCqe8NpIXMSkHFp4iU3gYpOqgQ0isrIOoGm8/edit?usp=sharing A player brought up the glyphs that TheRandomnatrix had posted to the subreddit (which I had posted to the first PvE Mumble meeting as an early sneak peek to all who attended). The glyphs were not substitutions for letters, nor were their particular pixel arrangements or symmetries significant - they were merely a string of ideas, with each glyph symbolizing one idea. When creating this, I had an idea for what I wanted the glyphs to symbolize, which I'll keep in a spoiler tag below: The last thing to properly declassify is Endgame. With any luck a progress thread will be moved to The Archives soon, and I can provide additional information in this thread.

Ahh yes, the cave. I will admit I felt guilty when I heard word that you and others were looking for the cave, because it actually (as far as I know anyway) didn't exist; I admittedly didn't think anyone would go looking for it :S. This was written in mainly in anticipation of a quest that would unlock a glowstone trade sign at spawn upon completion, similar to what happened in rev 10, in which case there would be room to expand on that one particular incident. That didn't really happen, and so the only resolution to that plot point ended up being that sign in Endgame. As for Julian Brennan (pretty sure that was the name I had? :S), it is true that he is, well, dead. He was introduced into the story initially to provide a second perspective of events, and I was originally going to add more logs from his point of view. It would be cool, I thought, since while John Smith knows a lot, the AI doesn't know everything, and having an extra character would help paint a more complete picture of events. In the end, I ran out of creative energy and only had that one log from him on Unity, so you didn't miss much. The decision to kill him in the way that he died was actually decided on long after the first round of logs was released, in an attempt to explain multiple unclear points in the plot. A small bit of trivia: he is named after the protagonist of X3: Reunion; no real reason why :P. I had drawn up a draft log which wasn't released that explained what happened to him (and coincidentally, why Unity was stranded in the first place and why John Smith's reported crew complement went from 201 to 200). I'll release all the notes I have as well as the logs I've written regardless of whether they made it onto the map, but for now, have this one that explains what happened to Julian Brennan. (It expires in a month, so if you choose to save it, now's the time :P)