WickedCoolSteve

Sounds like a wonderful idea. Anything that facilitates interaction between the three server communities is great.

Please forgive my lack of technical knowledge in this area. What's the impact on server load by such a plugin? IIRC the last time we tried something like this was with WG a couple years ago and it melted the server. How is this different / how have things changed since then?

I think, from the perspective of someone on staff, it's easy to reflexively say that we should keep things the same because that's how it's always been, it's kept us safe, ect ect. I know I personally have this impulse when initially presented with changes in policy like this. Hell, I remember back when safebuckets was introduced. Back then all liquids were mod placed and there were reservations about letting players lay down any kind of liquid without staff involvement. But in the end people opened their minds to change and a competent (at least for the time) technical solution was implemented. The world didn't end and the final result was an improvement in the experience for both players and staff. Now, times have changed. I'm not saying people have changed, because they haven't. There are tons of good people that play here, but there are also legions of trolls and griefers hanging around. Such is the nature of a non whitelist server. The risk from human behavior is the same as always. What has changed is the technical side of things. Smart people with good ideas have come up with new solutions. I think in general we should push to reduce limits on gameplay as much as possible. Fewer modreqs mean players get to play more instead of waiting around and staff get to play more instead of dealing with fairly menial tasks. There is a certain probability of increased fluid griefing, yes. But perhaps the gain in overall enjoyment of the game and servers by everyone involved outweighs that risk. That being said, there are specific risks with regards to liquids that do need to be adressed and I admit my knowledge of how certain plugins work these days is probably a bit out of date. For example, if someone managed to dump a bucket of water into a complex redstone contraption like a CARTS computer (http://redditpublic.com/wiki/CARTS) would logblock be able to roll it back and not fuck things up? If not, would it be possible to prevent fluid damage to redstone and rail without causing massive server load like the last time we tried it (good ol summer 2011)? There are merits to change here, sure. But in my opinion there are also a lot of potential issues that would have to be addressed before the benefits of the change outweigh the risks.

I just want to add something, hopefully to help inform the next thread. First off I think it would be awesome if everyone just took a day or so to chill out. Second, when the new thread is open please, please, please remember that there is a substantive technical and policy issue to be discussed. We can all debate the merits of all sides of the topic without resorting to implied or explicit personal attacks. To the staff I say please keep in mind that players you disagree with have valid points, even if they may be brought up in a manner you find impolite or disrespectful. To everyone else I say please keep in mind that there is no conspiracy or power grab that is fighting to maintain the status quo here. The current policy is in place for reasons that made sense in the past and may (or may not) make sense now. We must be able to talk and debate the issue without lowering ourselves to the level of petty attacks and pissing matches consisting of arguments about who's the bigger douchebag. Let's all be cool and do this right and in the process help move MCPublic forward and make it a better place.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Though of course this issue it the purview of the sadmins so it would be good to hear what they think.

I personally would oppose any rewards for voting in the strongest terms. The concept goes against some of our core principles. You can't "buy" items, rank, status, ect here. Our servers are about providing an experience that is both free and "as vanilla as is practical in muliplayer." People earn items and blocks by playing the game. Simple as that. In my opinion we don't need to sell our core values in order to get votes on an advertising service. We need to advertise more and get the word out about our servers, sure. But I think that giving away any kind of reward in order to obtain votes would be akin to selling out. We should sink or swim on our own merits.

Warning, long stream of consciousness incoming. First off, thanks for making this post. You bring up a bunch of good points and I'm looking forward to a productive conversation. Although this post comes with the obvious backdrop of tensions in the community (both inside and outside of the staff) I want to emphasize strongly that you're not rabble rousing, you're not stepping outside of the scope of your position, and that your concerns are valid. I don’t feel like your brining up the up/down vote buttons was out of line. Anyone in this community would have been within their rights to raise the issue, including you. For the first time we have access to software that allows us to judge the opinions of the community as a whole in clear concrete terms. The poll feature on these forums is a powerful tool, one that I am excited to make more use of. It's true we have a pretty thick bureaucracy here. Looking back through the history of the servers one can see how it came about and how, when everything is working in sync, it runs the community fairly well. I'll just give a run-down as what I see as the responsibility of the various layers of administration. Note that although they've been placed in a particular order, I don't believe that any one is "better" than the other, it's just a way of organizing. Also consider that in many cases, each group inherits the “responsibilities” of the group that comes before it. -Players not on staff: Have fun, play the game. Contribute to the community with ideas, opinions, ect. -Moderators: Continue to have fun, but also manage many of the small day-to-day actions needed to keep a server running. Complete modreqs, moderate chat, moderate the subreddit, ect. Contribute to brainstorming and voting on new mods, work on events such as CTF, and generally contribute to discussion on server policy and how things are managed. -Admins: I feel like the various admin positions are significantly different from the moderator position. In the most general terms mods have a small scale focus and admins have a much broader focus. This is partially due to the fact that there is sensitive information that is generally best kept on a need to know basis, and also that when it comes to making decisions about potentially contentious issues it is often best to be able to move forward quickly rather than to be bogged down by discussion. I loathe to drag real world politics into this, but look at the US Congress for example. Endless unproductive discussion with very few results to show for it. We’re providing a service (multiplayer minecraft gameplay) and it’s often best if decisive action can be taken without much delay. These people have access to avenues of communication (forums, irc, in game) that allow that targeted discussion to take place. -Server admins: Groups of three that have general control over the direction and “feel” of individual servers. Ideally server specific decisions will move forward with a consensus of the server admins, at worst a ⅔ vote. Organize and run server-specific events. Propose rule changes to individual servers that can be specifically enforced. Handle admin reqs and other issues that require specific intimate knowledge of the server. Prepare the maps and spawns for their servers. Determine and communicate times for map resets and new revisions. Contribute to planning and discussion of issues that affect both the servers they focus on and the community as a whole. -Tech admins: Keep the servers operational. This includes keeping plugins up to date, keeping the servers online, bringing on new features via creating and modifying various plugins. Maintain security of the servers including denying access to mcpublic services by individuals that would cause damage to server infrastructure. In the end have final say on server security issues. Generally use technical expertise to provide advice and guidance on software, server hardware, ect. -Head admins: Facilitate communication between the various admins and mods when necessary, including coordination of map resets. special events, and Minecraft updates. Sign off on rule changes on the servers including server specific rules and general mcpublic rules. Moderate and resolve disputes between various staff members and groups of players. Remove staff members when necessary. In very rare cases remove players from the community when they are especially dangerous or disruptive. Provide final approval on new moderators and admins.Sign off on expenditure of funds. Perform server admin tasks on any of the servers when comfortable in order to reduce the workload of server admins. The tldr would be: players have fun and speak up when you want, mods manage small day to day issues, server admins manage the direction and vibe of their servers, tech admins keep the lights on and the house secure, and head admins coordinate the various groups and generally maintain the health of the intraserver community as a whole. Of course, the workloads I mentioned are not always exclusive to any particular group, and there are doubtlessly many functions that I did not mention. This is just my basic off the cuff rundown. When all the groups are working optimally and working well with each other I think things run very well. I can speak for the head admin group in saying that we’re still finding our footing with our current setup. It’s fair to say that we all relied on Lude for a lot of management and also as liaison with much of the community. I can say for myself that I’m trying to change my behavior by being on mumble every night and am trying to spend more time on C and S. I think there is an important balance to be struck between expediency and transparency. Like I said before, I believe we’re not here to play government, we’re here to provide a service. If we get bogged down in endless discussion, or need to present everything we do to public review before following through we won’t get much done at all. That being said, it is important that we involve the general community in the running of the servers as ultimately everything we do is for them. I suppose the question is, what would that look like and how would it differ from what we do now? Like you say Dray, in the absence of information people generally assume the worst. Perhaps we should consider some sort of regular “report” on the actions and plans of the various admin groups. Maybe some kind of regular, smaller mumble meetings would be a good idea. Perhaps on a rotating schedule as to accommodate different time zones. A regular town hall style conversation with a generally open floor with the administration would go a long way I think. The drawback, of course, is that it represents an increased workload for an already busy staff. I’ve thought of something along the lines of a google doc with a continuously updated list of issues being worked on. It’s one more thing to maintain but it could be useful. One of the best tools I think we have available to us at the moment is the new forums. We can accurately poll many users and gauge their preferences on particular issues. Although it’s nice to ask on reddit, I feel like feedback there is strongly biased towards people who are more extroverted and comfortable speaking out and defending/explaining their position. Yes, we’re the reddit servers but we all know how reddit comment threads can be counter productive when it comes to honest/open discussion. Often anonymously voting on a list of options will give a better feel of the desires of the community. I feel like we’ve already seen productive use of the forum voting mechanism with things like auto locking pve chests, pve terrain, forum up/downvotes, ect. It would definitely be good if we could easily add links to forum voting threads to the rotating server messages without having to bother techs. I think one problem with all this is that there are some things that we don’t necessarily want to talk about before we’re ready. For example, announcements of map resets are often tricky. People obviously appreciate notice but as soon as the announcement is made server activity falls off a cliff and there is often “end of rev grief.” Therefore it is often best to develop the map and plans for reset “in secret” until the optimal time for announcement arrives. Though I suppose part of the dialogue we need to have is where the line should be drawn. Anyways, I could keep going for pages and pages. I suppose I should stop here in order to allow for some discussion. I’m sure I didn’t cover everything in the initial post and I’ll gladly expand on anything that I either covered or didn’t.

Creeper damage to blocks (even with limited targeting) would radically change gameplay on the server for the worse. I would personally oppose it in the strongest terms.

One of P's greatest strengths is its accessibility to new players. This is in part due to the way the way the community has organized itself with things like the UMC and cities that provide large quantities of free resources to new people. However, the server difficulty also plays a large part, and in particular I'm talking about not being able to starve to death. When someone new joins and is overwhelmed by the server and doesn't know what to do (or is perhaps too shy at first to ask for help), at least they don't have to worry about their hunger meter killing them. They can take their time to learn the ropes. Personally, I think it would be great if mobs were harder because lag essentially neuters them. However, if increasing difficulty enables starving to death, then I feel it would be a bad move for the health of the server. From a quick glance at the attributes wiki page that Tharine posted, it doesn't look like there's anything to deal with hunger in there. However, maybe we could look into a solution from the tech side to remove the starving and yet increase the rest of the difficulty?

The cobble on the mountains is a "feature" of WorldPainter that can easily be removed if we want to. The vegetation isn't in its final state yet. We're just genning it mostly naked right now to get a feel for the terrain. Normal grass distribution and other features like forests will most definitely be in the final copy. This CTF will be using a different map setup than we've done in the past, it's not really one large contiguous space. We'll be using slide's fancy new lobby system to run the event on multiple "servers." Each team will get its own map. So the map on slide's server would be blue team's map. The center of the map is editable only by blue team. The second ring is where the flag is located, and will contain the pre built flag stands and can not be edited by anyone. At present we're thinking there will be 4 flag spawn locations, the flag will respawn randomly at one of the 4 spots, this will hopefully reduce camping. The outer most portion of the map is wilderness and can be edited by either team. On the edge of the map (no mans land) players will be able to build portals. These portals will teleport you over to the edge of the other team's map. So, basically, there will be two of these maps, with players able to build portals and teleport between them as they battle.

Right, so considering the fact that we need to continue to move forward with developing this event, and the fact that the final gameplay will be significantly different than what rockonn had originally assumed (hopefully we can incorporate as many of his ideas and work into the map as possible), slide has moved forward with developing the terrain for the maps (along with the plugins that will run the event). It basically follows the plan he posted above. There will be one of these maps for each team. Some notes: We're thinking 4 flag respawn points instead of 12. Ores will be plumped but not excessively so. We will ensure that both sides have equal access to resources, unlike last time. Tharine had the idea of turning the leaves in at least some of the forest areas into wool that the teams can then harvest and use to construct defenses, similar to the wool mountains from last time. Hopefully the maps will be finalized within a day or so. At that point we'll upload them to the event server and whitelist it to mods and admins that want to help with the prebuilt portions of the bases (located in the second ring where the flags will be). No design for that has really been talked about, so be thinking about that. We'll also need builders for KOTH, probably a 100x100 area.

Of course it's wonderful that initiative was taken. I'm very happy about that, but at the same time we haven't come to a solid conclusion on sizes and designs yet so it's important not to go too far too fast, especially without additional input from other team members. Now that a bit of work has already been done I think it would be good for us all to see what we have before moving forward.

Just upload it to dropbox or something similar and post the link. The techadmins will then be able to download it and will put it up on event.

rockonn would it be possible to simply hand your map over to the techadmins so they can put it up on the event server for us to work on? This really does need more than one person working on it.

Rockonn, the design of these maps and bases is extremely important and, honestly, a very difficult task. I'm concerned that you've already started without really getting a clear go ahead from the rest of the team. I would appreciate it if you could stop work for the moment and show us what you have. We all need to be on board with this very important feature before moving forward. If you're working on a server please post the IP so we can check it out. Thanks.

I agree with kitcatbar here. I think at the most we should provide a fairly basic pre built area, but allow the players to customize from there. Many of the people that will be playing this event are not interested in pvp and will be more into the building and fortification side of things.

Rockonn, are you working on just the bases or the map as a whole?

Hi everyone, We will be hosting our next staff meeting on Mumble on Saturday, June 15th at 1pm EDT. The primary objective of staff meetings is to both update staff on the state of the servers and recent changes, and encourage active communication both among the staff and with the entire player community. This also gives everyone a chance to pose the questions they've always wanted answered, and to discuss topics relevant to our community in a large group. At this particular meeting, we'll be discussing some of the new features on the servers and changes in our server tools (such as the forums). We'll also discuss some recently-written guides on how to more effectively handle particularly difficult aspects of moderating, such as xraying and PVP logging. Finally, we'll talk about how to broach the topic of advertising our servers to the world at large, and announce some upcoming events. All this and more! As always, everyone is invited to join and participate, both staff and non-staff. Initial discussion will be limited to mods and admins, but we'll open up the floor at the end to questions from players. All players and staff are welcome to PM the head admins ahead of time if there's a topic you'd like to discuss, especially if you won't be able to attend the meeting itself - we'll make sure your questions get answered. (You're welcome to talk to the head admins about issues anytime, not just staff meetings. Any of in-game/Mumble/IRC/forum PM/Reddit PM work!) These meetings generally run about 2 hours. Server admins: please be prepared to talk about recent (~last 3 months) and planned upcoming changes for your server. Tech admins: please be prepared to talk about recent (~last 3 months) and planned upcoming changes to our server tools, commands, and infrastructure. Mods: if you're available, please try to attend. If not, we'll post a recording of the meeting. Thanks!

I also get this while using Dolphin browser on IOS.

Unbanned. Welcome back!

As far as I know, nothing like logging villager trading capabilities is possible, though a tech admin would have to weigh in to confirm. For now your best bet is to put valuable trades in restricted areas where only trusted people have access.