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TheAcademician

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Everything posted by TheAcademician

  1. If all the cards fall in place we'll likely have an announcement to make regarding the end of the current revision and the future of S this weekend.
  2. I have closed the survey and will be closing this thread shortly. I'd like to thank everyone for providing their feedback on these features :]
  3. The survey hasn't received any new responses in the past couple of days so I think it would be prudent to close it on Wednesday (1/7). Thanks for all the input so far, everyone :D Spread the word around to any mods you feel may have input :] I hope to have a post up in a few weeks at most to have people comment on the features we have decided to go with.
  4. Fundamentally, S in the future will be as far from vanilla as feels necessary to be fun. The gameplay that is provided by vanilla MC pvp, in the way we currently run it, is pretty much past it's life point. We've tried all the small fixes that the community has suggested over the years to revive the gameplay, and some not so simple, and it's pretty clear to me and the other S admins that those bandages aren't working. To that end there have been several ideas brought forth to us to try and deliver a more fulfilling experience. This survey is a mostly unfiltered list of those ideas on their basic levels, and, while there are plenty of options that we are excited about, none of the items on this survey are "guaranteed" especially because no details of any mechanics have been fleshed out. There is no plan at this stage except that S will be receiving a much needed overhaul, and that's why this form exists. We wanted to gather opinions on these features and weigh the results. At the end of the day S will still be about PVP, and this survey is just a stepping stone to make the server better.
  5. Hello everyone! We S Admins are continuing to work on the new revision plans. To further that goal I've come up with a form with many of the options we're considering. We've been passing the form around the admin team and some mods that have already seen the pertinent documentation about these features. Now we're opening it up for any staff to provide us some feedback on these proposed features. Many of the options on the form require some basic explanation. The original documentation we compiled from all the suggestions is a bit wordy and so I will provide a brief summary of some of the more non-intuitive options. The Server Cauldron-based Modded Server - Uses Forge mods to add custom items, biomes, realms, etc. This would greatly increase the freedom we would have in building a server with the options on this form such as adding custom NPCs, ores, furniture, and other cool stuff. The downside is that players would need to have the mods the server is running to log in. Using an existing modpack or rolling our own and making available are viable options here, and there are a few avenues of making that easy to use for the playerbase. The Map Persistent World - Provide a static and unified experience for players. Many areas of the map would be off limits for modification by players. Lots of pre-built structures and landscape. Revisions would be longer, and new content and areas would be added on. Dungeons - Not just spawners in a room. These would be custom made (probably by many members of staff) large areas that players would need to group up to clear for rewards. Raids - Dungeons on steroids, need more people, get more loot. Instancing - Areas (Dungeons) are private to a player or group of players. This prevents outside interference when clearing a dungeon or raid. Non-Vanilla Mob Spawning - Spawn mobs based on locations or other circumstances, not on light levels. Custom Generation Custom Nether - A Nether that is more custom built like the overworld and isn't just a place to quickly travel between portal locations. RPG-Design - The world would be custom made and designed into continents, island, zones, biomes, etc to fullfill a narrative purpose for the world. This option works way better with persistent worlds as we don't have to redesign a custom map every time. Ores only available in certain parts of the map - Possible only in mines/quarries, but also possible to have specific areas rich in certain ores. This depends heavily on other options. Ores regenerate - Mostly relevant to mines/quarries, but this option mostly prevents strip mining the entire map by allowing people to acquire new ores by re-mining the same areas on a timed basis. Designated Areas - We have some ideas that revolve around varying areas of PVP, which ones would you like to see? Gameplay Partying System - Allow people to group up and take on PVP and PVE objectives together. Custom Abilities - Instead of just swinging swords and shooting bows, players would have additional abilities that would allow them to do more damage or place effects on their opponents. NPC Clone At All Logoff For 15 Seconds - Policing combat logging is a problem, to resolve it, an NPC clone would spawn any time you logged off for 15 seconds (or more) regardless of combat status. PVE/PVP Specific Gear - Much like now, some enchants are better against players than mobs, this could be expanded to have armor and weapons of many types that are good against mobs but not players, and vice-versa. Disable Minecarts/Track For Players - This is mostly relevant for a persistent world setup as it would be difficult/impossible to build cross-world tracks. There would be exceptions for people building inside their own areas. Hearthstones - An item that attempts to return the player to a set location. Would have a "cast" time and cooldown period, and be interruptable by combat. Classes - We're considering adding classes to balance the mechanics of PVP and allow for more interesting gameplay in general. These would likely be stuff like knight, rogue, hunter, etc. Class-restricted Potions - Only certain classes can use some potions, ie: rogue uses invisibility as part of their abilities. Guilds - Clans by another name. Formed by 3 or more players to unite against their foes. Factions - Non-player run factions (think fighter's guild, thieve's guild, etc) that the players can join. Professions/Crafting Remove/Replace Vanilla Crafting - To facilitate a lot of the other options on the form, most vanilla crafting recipes would need to be removed. Some of the more simple crafts could be kept in some form (think torches) but most item/armor crafting would be replaced. Meta Materials - These would be crafting materials made up of combinations of other ores/items. ie: 3 diamonds and 2 iron produces Cut Diamonds. Economy Players Can Make/Purchase Locks/Lockpicks - Non-bank chests would need to be locked, people would be able to pick those locks. Players could purchase varying toughness of locks, thieving players could buy varying levels of picks. If we use NPC factions, possibility of unpickable locks/skeleton key rewards. PVP PVP Toggling - Players would be able to "flag" themselves for PVP or turn it off. Players not flagged for PVP could still be killed in any non-PVE area but there would be consequences. Karma - A punitive system for players who kill people who are not flagged for PVP. Players with karma would be able to be attacked at will, even in PVE zones. Attacking a player with karma would not flag anyone that is not flagged for PVP. If you have further questions feel free to ask them below and I will try to clarify as best I can. Please keep in mind that this form is not definitive for the future S revision plan, and any and all features are still on the table :] Here is the form! Please do not distribute this link to anyone not on staff at this time, thanks!
  6. I can't fault people for wanting an active in-game admin as certainly not everyone who plays on S is necessarily active here, the subreddit, or elsewhere in the community outside the game. I didn't really give too much thought to it when I accepted the position, my priority was to help the team do something great with some of the ideas I had seen and discussed with the other admins, mainly Mumber. I'd say my S ingame activity isn't a huge priority, as my ingame activities are focused elsewhere when I play MC. I would rather not just sit semi-afk at spawn while doing other things just to rack up hours on the usage scale. I think that's unhelpful and dishonest about my intentions. As to the future, I have every intention of playing on S if we get this new revision off the ground, which I certainly have high hopes for. I suspect we'll suffer some stumbles and need to tweak stuff as we go, but I'll be there to experience it alongside the other players.
  7. I'm simply trying to address the concern that some feel that to contribute to S I have to be an active player on it with (varying) hours of time in per day or week or other metric that has been chosen. Do my responsibilities to my build on P outweigh spending time designing/building stuff for/on S? Yes. Do they outweigh the time spent working on new revision plans and other S admin concerns? No. The effort I'm putting into discussing stuff with the other S admins and working on our new revision plan has very little to do with the time I spend building stuff in-game, especially when I started the city project months ago.
  8. To expand a bit on what I stated in the main post. We talked about development meetings quite a bit as a group, and decided that, especially in light of how all previous S meetings have gone combined with the high tensions surrounding S, that a meeting of that scale would be utter chaos. We absolutely do want feedback and suggestions, however, we all feel that asking people to write down their thoughts will be a lot more productive and worth everyone's time. The choices we're going to make gameplay-wise will more than likely not be popular with a lot of people. I don't 100% know how the others feel, but I am completely OK with this. The server needs something new, and trying to make it work with everyone who currently plays is an untenable situation. I understand that a lot of people, especially among our S moderating staff, have a lot of passion about S and what it would take to make it fun again. I respect that, but I think in the end the best they can do is submit suggestions and let us try and make something happen with them.
  9. I can't speak to what occurred during the time I was as a techadmin, so if the other's want to specifically respond to this point they can. I've only been an S admin for a week. All I can tell you is that as soon as we have something worth sharing, it will be shared. The current state of any future revision plans is a scrumptious but very ingredient-heavy idea salad that needs to be thinned out to what is actually core to the ideals we want to have for the server.
  10. Being a Tech Admin has it's perks, and it was certainly more quiet for me that it has been during the short amount of time I've been an S Admin. As a bit cheesy as it is, I think the big reason I made the switch when Mumber asked me about the position was the fact that I had always thought S could be way better than it was. I didn't build two gigantic cities on S, putting in an astonishing amount of playtime and effort, because I hated the idea of MC PvP; I built them because I wanted to try and foster a more friendly atmosphere, a community. I made quite a few friends doing that, regardless of how much that effort wore me down in having to deal with certain people which was the one, but not the only, reason I left S. Having been friends with Mumber I had always shared with him some of my ideas about how to make PVP fun using philosophies lifted from other games, and conversely he had shared with my some of the struggles he was going through in administrating S. Lately I was even brought in to comment on some of the suggestions that I mentioned in the main post of the thread, and I was excited to assist with that even as a techadmin from the sides. I'm happy I get to help shape it more as an S admin now, but it will just take time to get there. In the end, I decided that, while the Tech position was probably a lot easier, even attempting to help out in administrating S was worth the effort to try and deal with it. I wished the response could have been better, and there probably was a time when it would have been, but I'm confident that given their choices of candidate, the other sadmins chose who they felt would help them the best right now. I may not be passionate about S as it currently is, but I am passionate about making it better, and I think that counts.
  11. Greetings everyone, your new S-Admin Aca here. I know you've all been wanting to hear more from us on the admin team regarding the future of S and what our plans are to address the obvious problems. I don't have answers for everything, but I will do my best to address some things. The first thing I will address is the negative reaction from people regarding myself being chosen as the new admin for S given that I haven't played there in a while and many people don't know who I am. Many have asked why I'm not now actively playing on S; to which the simple answer is that I'm still building a portal city on P, mostly alone, and that is an obligation I cannot simply drop. That said, I think I have a fair handle on how S is doing. I played S for several revisions exclusively, and besides the Civ revision the gameplay is basically the same as it was back then. I've worked with the S admins on a few projects while as tech, the biggest of which was to develop CobraCorral. As a player I always believed that S could use some more community in-between all the killing of everyone. That's why I worked with uni0 on building our SHIELD clan base in Rev15 which had public arenas right next to one of the spawn portals. I also helped design and build Egreth with Mumberthrax in Rev20 and Sanctuary with uni0 in 21, two very successful big cities despite the near-constant attacks levied against us. For those and several other reasons I think I'm qualified to join the admin team, and I'm glad that the other admins felt that I was a good candidate. I know there is a great deal of frustration among S players over this, and I understand this will not alleviate all the points and questions raised by the community, but I hope in time you will find me to be a suitable choice. Mumber, redwall, and Beast have been actively collecting suggestions over the past few months for how to rework the gameplay of S to be more, quite frankly, fun. There's only so much that Minecraft vanilla PVP can offer and it seems like S tapped this out a long time ago. Over the last week or so I've looked back through all the S posts tagged on the forums for suggestions, and I can say with confidence that 90% of them have been tried in revisions to near 0 effect on popularity of the server. The recent suggestions that the admin team have received range from a bit out there (admittedly, some of mine are too :D) to minor changes that could draw more people in. I know many of you like the vanilla-esque style of gameplay that S currently has, which was supported by the fact that the S26 (Civ) feedback post here was entirely a call for the admins to return to that gameplay. However, it's become clear that not only are a rather vocal minority of S players tired of this type of gameplay, the community as a whole doesn't seem to be consistently supporting it either given the player numbers we have been seeing over the past few months. The future of S however is currently more lava than it is obsidian. I am spending much of my out-of-game time working with the other admins at the moment to compile the ideas we have received to see if we can come up with a plan for how future S revisions will unfold. Due to the amount of suggestions and the fact that many of these require technical considerations are the main reason behind the lack of communication from the S admin team to this point. We honestly don't know at this time what S28 may look like, and there are no specific details to share on our considerations at this time. Know that in all likelihood S28 and beyond may be a very different style of gameplay than you're used to on S. However, the focus on S will always be PVP, and, more importantly, to try and make that PVP worth engaging in and sticking around for. This is not an easy task, and it takes time. Lately a great deal of posts and discussion has come up about how the S community can better help form these next revisions. I've seen calls for public meetings and logged IRC development chats among others. The Nerd admin teams as a whole have always been very open to community ideas and suggestions, and S is no different. If players or groups of players want to provide us with additional suggestions we're all for it and happy to receive them. That being said, we have no plans at this time to publish any public information on our current revision plans or participate in public meetings to discuss how the new S revision should be built. Ultimately the S admin team requires the latitude to craft the gameplay of S with community suggestions, but not community interference. When we have a better idea of what our plans our, and have had the time to internally review it with the rest of Nerd staff, a public post will follow for everyone to discuss what they feel about it. Your best places to provide suggestions to us is our uservoice located here. . I hope this clears the air on some subjects, Thanks for reading. Play more blocks! -Aca
  12. I had some thoughts on this and Mumber asked me to share them here, so I will attempt to do so. The current moderator nomination system isn't broken, but it certainly seems to be less effective than it really could be due to the nature of how it is done. Every few months we combine and toss names around en masse and try to come up with a list of potential candidates. This usually leads to a very bloated thread where it becomes very easy to lose track of who is being discussed and what names are in contention. My proposal would be to do away with the mass nomination thread and instead utilize a sub-forum to PMC that would allow anyone, at any time, to nominate a player for a moderator position. Discussion would then center around 1 person per thread, and people could provide testimony and evidence of their reasoning for/against the candidate. Server admins could also post criteria they are looking for specifically at the present time like, "We really need more moderators during X time, please focus on finding someone who is active during this time that may be valuable." Anyway, those are my thoughts :D
  13. I'd like to bring up the topic of land claiming on P since it's been on my mind a lot lately, and I've spoken to many people about it in-game recently who seem to feel similarly. I'd love to have this as a public discussion in the future, but for reasons that will be apparent I figured I should start it as an admin-only policy discussion for the moment. Currently on P no land claims are enforced, and I've always heard the reasoning behind this is due to P using WorldGuard to protect builds from grief so no such claims policy like S had (at the time) was necessary. However, P also only protects limited areas with some form of in-progress build (at the moderators discretion of what constitutes in-progress), which is a completely sound policy decision as WorldGuard is meant as a grief prevention measure. Players are encouraged to work out any land disputes on their own until staff involvement becomes necessary. However, the current lack of an enforceable land claim policy on P leads directly into large land use disputes, of which P usually has 1 or 2 each rev. It also causes a great deal of worry for cities which have to ask people not to plop down on a plot before they have the infrastructure in place to warrant a region and hope for the best. I'll admit to bringing this topic up out of personal interest, though it has been on my mind a lot since I transitioned from playing primarily on S and occasionally C, to spending all my time on P. I'm very used to being able to grab a section of land and mark it off and build at my leisure, knowing someone isn't going to plop down a house in the center without consequence. As many know I, with the help of some awesome friends, managed to carve out a 600x600 area of roofed forest (I have 150k log destroys alone from the experience) for building my city, Itamashi. I own the usage rights to light the SE portal, which is still unlit at the moment for the very reason that it limits access to the area and reduces the possibility of someone building inside the land we've cleared out. I've even been advised by several P staff members to keep it unlit until I can get a protection on at least some areas, which to me seems a bit out of touch with how things should work. The scale of this project, and the fact that it's basically myself and Mumber, would seem to indicate I shouldn't dare light the portal until I'm finished some time around the end of the map which I think is incredibly unfair to myself and everyone who could use it for transportation. I don't worry about the usual P players doing anything untoward as they are generally respectful of such claims regardless of staff intervention, but there is definitely a population of players on the server who can, and have in the past, exploited this lack of policy. To the point, I think the P admins should to come up with some policy on land claims that is both fair to large scale and small scale builders while preventing large, unused, claims from being maintained indefinitely. There has to be some sort of compromise on this issue. I don't think my giant plot deserves a region (in fact my last city wasn't protected until 3 weeks before the map ended), but I also don't think all the work I've done so far should be capable of being taken away. I have some ideas, but due to my bias on this matter I'm not going to salt the earth. Thanks for reading, and I would really like to see some discussion on this.
  14. To my knowledge, nobody has ever been banned for it, it's just been a rule. The difference between taping your mouse button down and using software to autoclick is speed. Does this really matter much in terms of afking at a grinder? Not really, at least as I've seen demonstrated. I'm personally not comfortable allowing gameplay automation tools out of principle, but I don't see any harm in this being unbanned unless it can be demonstrated that it gives a clear advantage over someone who simply tapes their mouse, etc.
  15. This is an MCBouncer issue due to their server being under DDOS.
  16. I don't know how anyone can, honestly, conceive the notion that this community is dying. While there has certainly been a bit of rabble going on the forums I don't see any reflection of that going on in the community as a whole. And while it's certainly easier to air grievances here, there's hardly any indication even here on the forums that the community is nothing but attempting to improve the experience on the servers. The latest S revision and all the feedback on it is a testament to this point, as far as I'm concerned. Honestly I see this poll as another attempt to get inflammatory responses from players and staff alike and it is completely unproductive. This is unfortunately something I've come to expect from certain members of this community and I still find it unacceptable. We on the staff are always open to feedback and I don't think posts such as these are helpful at all. If you have specific grievances or have a great idea please make a post about it and let everyone discuss it. Making generalized opinion polls helps nobody besides the 24/7 news channels.
  17. Having reviewed what you did I am satisfied that the ban has gone on for an appropriate amount of time. Please review everything under nerd.nu/rules and enjoy your time playing here. You have been unbanned.
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