luke_gardner

I never, in ~20 revisions of playing S, had to put more than ten minutes of effort into leaving spawn. Even on the worst occasions when I was fully under attack and had to figure out alternate routes besides the roads, I never had to spend more than 10 minutes getting away from foes. The map is huge and the game has no radar, if you can't escape spawn you are not playing the game very well. If you can't access the exact road you want in exactly the way you want then you are being unrealistic and are not recognizing that you're playing on a server called "survival." No one, in many revisions that I've seen, has actually stood at the spawn point with a sword swinging at newly spawned players for longer than a minute or two. If what you want to discuss is "unimpeded ability to return to base," then let's talk about beds. Because that's what this topic is really about: beds

I have a small urban garden. I mostly grow peppers so that I can pickle them and then put them on foods inappropriate for pickled peppers - though one could contend there are no foods which don't belong with pickled peppers and I would certainly agree with that person while still fully aware that it's a ridiculous position. I would love to be a gardener, but mostly as a hobby and not as a profession. Once you start putting coercion into the equation, hobbies lose their fun.

My junk is perfect, we don't even need to discuss it. I'm pretty sure you smell like socks, but probably ones just out of the dryer. I am not really sure.

No. I only bought pellet guns out of magazines.

My Dad would easily win. He has years of Pong and Asteroids under his belt and putting my Mom in front of any new controller she is unfamiliar with is a truly comical display of ineptitude.

This is insanely cool

I don't know where we're falling on this but I've definitely done it when I had spare fire resists, unexplored lava pools and time to spare (and didn't feel like mining). It's pretty easy to lose the diamonds to lava unless you're clever about setting up your retrieval mechanism (I just created a cobble room around the diamonds). You can usually get more diamonds doing traditional branch mining in the same amount of time & effort, by the way. It's not so profitable, as it costs potions and armor to do effectively (and there's a very real risk you will, y'know, die in lava).

You can't fix a broken game with sheer willpower, uni0. I spent a lot of time trying. Back on topic - there are things that could be done to improve the server but almost all of them have dissatisfying downsides. We still haven't hashed out what S really is. Is it a PvP server? A war-games server? Do we want players to interact with each other, or the landscape? Do we really need a centralized spawn? Do we really need locked chests and no-griefing rules? What, exactly, are we aiming for? Right now the server is just a competition to see who can cause grief without actually griefing. What sort of audience does that draw? The way things are going - I'd rather just play a real PvP game. That way I don't have to devote hours to getting established just to have incredibly boring fights with really obnoxious clans. Even with setting the maps up to make players do things certain ways or adding this or that plugin, there's only so much the admins and mods can do to shield the server from bad players and bad behavior that don't break rules but clearly disrupt things (which is, in my perspective, a huge part of why the server is fucked right now). When the game comes down to who can be the biggest dickweed of all the game eats itself.

The server does not need gameplay changes, it needs consistently higher numbers - roughly equal to P - to flourish. We've thrown everything at this server and seen what's stuck and, basically, no feature we add has a direct impact on bringing people in. Major changes bring resentment and argument, minor changes get fought over tooth-and-nail at every turn and doing nothing leads to more berating for being "lazy". I remain unconvinced that a "PvE server that happens to have PvP enabled everywhere" is really a good idea. This game has too many working parts, takes too much time and requires too much grinding for such short and unsatisfying fights. PvP is a dick-wagging competition, not an interesting component of the game. Without improving the actual fights (something we can't do) we can only change the things that lead up to fights, and that doesn't really get at the real problem. Things are out of balance. Unless you can get and retain new players each revision, the server increasingly becomes a small server for a small group of people who are mostly friends. Minecraft is not the new kid on the block and we are not a unique server. As erisian wisely told me months ago: the size of this server does not even remotely justify the hand-wringing and drama that accompanies it.

I rode about 75 miles in a day recently. It took a long time and I was exhausted, sunburned and very dazed afterward. I didn't eat enough and it made the ride suck a lot more than it should have. I also did it on a single-speed, but Chicago is flat as heck so I don't think that made much of a difference. I like the Lake Shore Trail, but the North Branch Trail in Skokie makes LST look like a piece of shit. It's incredible. 30 miles of winding hills nestled in the woods with huge ponds, streams and lagoons dotting the landscape. It's amazing that it's only 10 miles from Chicago, too. I commute on Milwaukee Avenue and Damen Avenue, both very busy streets with bike lanes that see lots of car and cycling traffic. I've logged about 2,000 miles on my bike since October. I want to ride across America and Canada on a recumbent bike sometime in the next 5 years. I really, really want to ride Manteo to Murphy (a route in North Carolina that covers the longest road in the state, about 620 miles) on a road bike to see how fast I can do it...I might even do that this year. I'm really interested in touring and not particularly interested in racing, but all types of cycling appeal to me. I just bought aerobars and mounted them on my bike today. I went from 18mph averages to 22mph averages just because of the aerodynamic position those bars let you get. It's a little funky to get used to leaning over so far and steering with your elbows, but it's comfortable and fast which is hard to beat. I also just bought some Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires to replace my old Gatorskins. Touring tires are a little slower but the confidence and comfort of knowing your tires won't go flat unless God himself intervenes is worth having to put a little more effort in. I need a lighter bike with gears soon. I'm going to save up for a while to get something that I really want. "Buy something nice or buy something twice."

My biggest fuck-ups revolve around how I handled some situations with people, probably alienating them and hurting the server community. That is part of being an admin - you cannot please all of the people all of the time and you would be a fool to try. So that sucks, but I'm sure that I made a lot of good calls as well. In terms of sheer server-breaking nonsense I accidentally set 2.5 million blocks to zombie spawners on S, covering roughly one entire quadrant of the map. I quickly typed //undo once I realized what I did, lagged out, logged back on in fear that I'd totally corrupted the map but somehow EVERYTHING WAS FINE. But for about 45 seconds there were 2.5 million zombie spawners on S. Yikes. That still pales in comparison to some of the other admins' awesome WorldEdit fuckups that have happened during my time.

I heard about Minecraft through reddit sometime in 2010. I got my start on a small server that used Cuboid (old-school WorldEdit) and had no rules whatsoever. It was an insane server and an absolute blast. I was into just sculpting cool things to look at and devastating the landscape. Skuld went back and looked through the logs for nerd.nu once and I was on the server on first day that he had logs from. I am fairly sure I first played on nerd.nu around October 2010. I remember the first revision of S, but I only played for half an hour or so because I found it too intense (oh, irony). I played a lot of Minecraft Classic. My dog Tank is in the album I posted in my first post. I'm a dog groomer by trade, so yes, I definitely love animals. I have a pet bird as well. Cycling, skateboarding and baseball are fun sports to play. My dream job is to be a dentist and have my own practice. P isn't my favorite server (sorry guys!) - I was always a fan of S. My favorite non-nerd server was 2b2t, but it's not always up. I've had a pretty good track record as far as mistakes go. Definitely have made a few mistakes, a few of them pretty bad, but nothing is impossible to fix or resolve! I think I've mismanaged more than one interpersonal situation on the servers. I definitely fucked up a few land claims really well and pissed some people off. I've also deleted chests and had to deal with the ensuing fallout. Rolling back the wrong player by using tab complete is painfully terrible, and I've done that a handful of times. But mostly my fuckups came from dealing with people, not putting the wrong command in. I've probably pissed off every admin at some point. I'm opinionated, brash, drastic and can be lazy. That makes for some tensions.

I'd have to say: a really poorly planned treasure hunt at the beginning of a revision, where some guys I played with coincidentally got good loot and some guys I didn't play with got comparably crappy loot. There was no foul play but it looked SO bad. I still regret it. It was a huge mistake. Beginning-of-revision giveaways are bad juju for S. It really pissed off some people and they were 100% rightfully upset. I got read the riot act by some other admins and deserved it. You live and learn, though. A close second was removing enchantments on S, though that had far more interesting fallout.

I've been riding bikes since I could walk, so that. I love bicycling. I ride 12-15 miles a day just going to work, and more if I have time. Skateboarding is a close second. I've been injured (back) for a year or so, making high-impact activities less appealing than before as they hurt a lot. I'm an outdoorsy sort of person.

The Cubs are truly awful, and the people who go to Wrigley really weird me the hell out. I took my stepdad there because he'd never been to Wrigley and I think anyone who loves baseball should check out that little rinky-dink stadium. It is so painfully small and shitty, but you've got to respect it for staying true to its roots for so long. It's really the stadium I picture when I think of baseball...the ivy is so iconic. The Cubs won that game (they were playing the Mets) 8-2. We left early, because traffic is a total disaster after those games. I used to live about a mile from the stadium and Wrigleyville got old very fast - so many drunken bros, so many cops roaming around, so much nonsense. It's a wild place but not one you want to stay in forever.