[Rev 20 Mid-Rev Feedback!]

@Sir_Didymus

Spoiler

On 2017/7/9 at 5:59 PM, Sir_Didymus said:

Bringing the spawner costs in-game would certainly be preferable and we can look into seeing how feasible that is. I see you dislike the wither-skeleton hunting aspect of cost collection - do you have any alternatives in mind?

 

It’s unlikely that vanilla-esque portals will be a possibility within our set-up, but nevertheless we have noted the request from you and some others in this thread, and will discuss it along with other possibilities. If we decide to go for a custom nether again as you prefer, what sort of things would you like to see in it? Do you think the nether should be more or less difficult to traverse than this rev?

 

In regards to the overworld map, there are certainly options to tweak in terms of how biomes appear and in what frequency. Some of it is up to lucky random generation, and we were fairly new to the config whilst prepping Rev 20, but we will definitely be looking in more detail at what sort of things can be edited if we choose to use it again. Ore generation is definitely a major thing to get right, and you’ve given some interesting suggestions here that we’ll add to our discussions. With spawn, I think stables would be a handy addition, and I also like your ideas about tutorials being accessed by warp, and the concept of curated plots for specific purposes.

 

Mapworld appears a little underused at present and we’d be interested in any ideas you have for how to make it more appealing to players. An external program is something we could investigate, although it seems that none are currently updated to 1.12 that I’ve found so far.

 

I see you dislike the current way we approach special spawners. Assuming they make a reappearance next rev, how would you see them ideally working? You mention an ‘exploration quest’ - do you envisage them as a prize for completing a scavenger hunt, or similar?

 

For the maze event we wanted to ensure that PvE were represented in the upcoming fundraiser, and weren’t sure that many PvE players would participate if the building was done over on the Creative server. The cost of this decision was access to WorldEdit, although many people have built excellent mazes nevertheless. And on a more personal note, apologies for your not having received feedback yet on your maze. Though we’ve accepted it into the fundraiser and done cursory testing, we’ve not yet finished detailed testing that might warrant input from the builder. In future similar circumstances, I’ll endeavour to let people know where we’re at sooner rather than later.

 

Spawner Costs: The issue with wither skeletons is that their spawn rate is relatively low, and only in specific, small areas of the nether inside fortresses; also, nether spawns as a whole fluctuate even when alone, and can quickly drop off to nothing if other people are in the nether, which, just like the end grinders, has a habit of shunning builds in those areas. Spending 20 minutes on a flattened fortress circling just to see a single spawn set of zpigs is infuriating to me. Best ideas I've got are to make them spawn all nether at higher proportions (though this doesn't stop the spawn rate issue, only ameliorates it.) Alternatively, make them like regular skels in the nether, have some skels in the overworld spawn as wither skels (danger is that this will normally mess with spawners).  Or, dodging the wither heads entirely, create a new essence, like the EoF, that drops extremely rarely, perhaps from all nether mobs, or from all surface mobs at specific times (new moon?)

As for the help command, I could write it with a little help with the spigot specifics from a tech admin, mainly data storage, and from the admins, for actually writing the help topics.

Nether: I liked the last custom nether, but I'd like to see it a bit more vertical, and add a few more lava rivers to spice it up. Was it done as biomes added to a normal generator? It'd be a fun side contest to design more diverse nether biomes. As for the danger / difficulty, I don't consider any part of minecraft travel to be dangerous at this point, so I'm not a good judge of things.

Overworld: Completely understand about the worldgen; just one thing if you go back to normal: FLAT BEDROCK. For spawn, my idea is more to make it a more tight-knit community affair, small center and pve members getting to build close so new players can see very quickly what the playerbase can do. (Just curate it so they see the better parts of what the playerbase can do, and nothing left unfinished) Specific plots for a rail station builder and embassy wouldn't be unwelcome either. Sorry if it seems an insult to the admin team that pours a great amount of work into the current spawns.

Mapworld: An additional point that someone already mentioned in this thread, and also applies to mazeworld: Going to spawn, stripping naked, and using a sign is a real pain. Creating an extra server and using something to pipe / mirror all text between the two would be better; as impressive as your work to have creative mode in pve areas is, I'd much rather just /pve-Mapworld. like /creative, and have worldedit.

Spawners: Scavenger hunt, puzzles found in unique places in the world, something like the quest for atlantis or the adventurer's guild stuff? (I've honestly not done any of the current or past questing stuff) Just anything that makes finding them more a test of ability and directed effort, rather than dumb luck and willpower.

Mazes: I think it should have been a choice. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a creative build would take only a cursory check using schematica's material list to check for forbidden blocks, a worldedit save, and a batch transfer of all cleared maze saves by a tech admin from creative to PVE / Fundraiser event server.

Thank you for your time and attention to this feedback.

[Rev 20 Mid-Rev Feedback!]

Iron Grinders:  I think the cost structure is fine, though I personally abhor wither skel farming, which is the primary cost right now. The costs aren't too hard to find, though new players might be confused by the alert/imgur link setup.  I wonder how hard a searchable help function would be to make, "/helpsearch grinder" giving you a list with iron grinders, grinder rules, etc to choose from and see; so we could bring all the rules in game and into one more accessable command.

Nether Portals: Good number for this size of map, and easy to find in the initial rush.  I'd still prefer a plugin that allows mods to 'link' portals manually, letting us get closer to the vanilla system.

The Nether: Standard nether is all sorts of boring to me. I liked the custom nether from the few previous revs, but wouldn't mind some more cave/mountain-ness to bring it closer to the vanilla style.

Map Generation: Map size is fine, custom biomes are alright, but distribution should change a bit (Less floating islands and clay mountains?) and larger biomes would be nice. As far as water, I'd like only one smaller ocean, possibly a corner, with plenty of large rivers and a few lakes. (No clue how controllable terrain gen is for this)

Ore distributions: Gold, gold gold gold, and gold. Seriously though, not a huge fan of the 'everywhere' ores. I'd like to see each biome have its own strata combined with the boosted vanilla ores; say swamp has lots of coal and iron from surface down, with only normal other ores, and mesa would have boosted gold from y40 to map height, but lower/unboosted levels of ores otherwise (including normal gold rates for lower y levels as if another biome), Extreme hills could have y50+ emerald ore and slight diamonds added, etc.

MapWorld: As nice as the map tiles can be, they've always seemed like too much work. Also, no floor/ceiling placement is a bit of a dealkiller. My ideal, pure fancy, would be to see an external program that palletizes images into the 16,384 byte map color data, which could be uploaded and saved as a map super easy, and then be bought with an ingame command.

Miscellaneous: For the test world, if and only if you can manage worldedit, like C proper. Blogposts were nice as they are.

Spawn: Current spawn is good looking, but a bit annoying to get around, has no stables that I saw, and generally lagged my comp. I'd like a return to a smaller spawn building, akin to rev 2, perhaps with signs used to warp to tutorials / etc elsewhere. Surround it with a lot of curated plots that are given out during events and the like for players to show off their best work in a spawn theme.

Special spawners: I like the 'natural' spawners and their structures added by biome bundle, though the 5+ spawner dungeons/grinders are a tiny bit ridiculous. As a special spawner locating expert, I have to say I really dislike the current hidden sign approach.  Too much luck and terrain scanning, no real challenge except time. I know it requires a large amount of admin effort, but I'd much prefer an exploration quest or something that runs in episodes for the first month or two, or perhaps a system like iron grinders: Naturally occurring mobs of each desired type drop a ' <monster type> core' at a much rarer rate than EoF, which can be used like the iron grinder system (but only leveling up to the power of a normal grinder). If worried about too many spawners over the rev, have each core dropped/used lower the drop rate a tiny bit, and keep them 200+ spaced out. As for added spawners, WITHER SKELETONS. I hate hunting them.

Events:  I'm not a big event player, but I don't mind anything listed being part of the server culture.  Though I did have some issues with the fundraiser maze event; the inability to worldedit was annoying, understandable for the weird P creative 'worlds' setup, being also unable to use C for it less so. Far more bothersome was that I gave nearly a week for any sort of feedback on my completed maze so I could correct any problems for them, and so the maze checking operations could be spread out more; however, I heard not a word about it.

Closing Thoughts:  Seems to be going well, I hope the uber project finishes.