[AC] Planning Creative Revision 26

[marting11]

We need to start to think about planning this :)

 

 

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I suggested for the current revision to expand its borders from 5000x5000 to 6000x6000 somewhere around mid-january. Dumbo and Buzzin seemed to agree about this.

 

 

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I thought the idea of making Revision 26 a short test revision with flight turned off was just an idea thrown in a meeting, but I learned today that this is apparently the actual plan. The idea is to also test a couple of suggestions for the creative server (the only example buzzin told me was enabling ender pearls) on the span of a month or so on a new revision.

So I want to say that I completely disagree with this whole idea.

All the current CAdmins were around when flight was disabled on C. I know it was fun and I know some of you are nostalgic. Flight was disabled because it wasn't part of the actual game; we always made the effort to stay as close to the vanilla game as possible. Flight is now in the vanilla creative mode and is now an essential part of the game. It is incredibly useful to build things, which is the point of the Creative server.

Sure, this idea may bring back some people for a short period of time for the nostalgia of it. But I doubt it would last long. We need to think more about the future players, not the past ones. Think about the new minecraft player, who played Creative in singleplayer and is now accustomed to flying being the norm. He would come on here and have to play like this is 2011. I doubt this will attract a lot of new players...

An other problem with a test revision is if people know it's a test rev, large scale projects won't happen, and some people wouldn't bother building knowing the revision will be short.

If we are going to test this, in order to have an actual relevant comparison between flight and no flight, we should have a quarter or half of the next (normal lenght) revision in a no-flight zone. This way we could compare how people behave in the two zones. Just put a wall between the zones to avoid people dropping from the sky when they enter the no-flight zone.



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Ideas for a "normal" revision 26
Map : 1.7 map generated will the large biomes option, with worldpainted areas for pixelart & bigtown and for spawn and others if needed. Have a large part of the map be plains, since most of the people build in this biome. Not too much forests but more than the current one.
Spawn : Keep most of it overground.
Spawn city : If you don't mind, I'd like to be in charge of the design of the next spawn city. It would have a more realistic layout than the current one. Something like http://redditpublic.com/wiki/Bellevue
CTA : Do not prebuild a CTA station. It goes against the idea that it's a community project. CTA could have a reserved plot in spawn city but should not be in the actual spawn.
Pixelart : Keep it at bedrock, that was a good idea. Other than that this warp seems in good shape this rev.
BigTown : Could be at bedrock too but does not have to. Have a couple statues prebuilt. Some kind of "tutorial" statues with the dimensions of the parts of a skin on it.
Redstone : If MasterCommaThe still wants to do this I have no problem.


 

[buzzinbee]

The ender pearls wasn't an example sorry, we hope to have input from the community for what we want in the next revision.

[buzzinbee]

My idea for spawn city would be having a little bit of a gap from spawn to the city and allow more natural terrain there to keep the spawn from being over crowded. CTA is not going to be pre build that was a bad idea. Next revision I'd like the map to be a lot more small, I also would like to have a lot of interesting scenery, creative isn't just about placing blocks it's about making use of the surrounds you have. I personally don't like flying over plains for a long period of time it becomes boring, I would like some areas of plains but I'd also like areas with natural mountains so players can explore a bit more and build around and include the environment. 

[buzzinbee]

Oh and we talked about this it seemed like a nice idea for next revision's spawn, we should have some kind of story behind the spawn, we were discussing the idea of maybe a plane crash spawn or based on an r/minecraft spawn, a spawn including some kind of fairy tale design with dragons or some kind of creature looking like it's either attacking or protecting the spawn.

[LetsBFehr]

Okay sorry I'm a bit late to the party but here's my ideas/suggestions for next revision.

 

Map

I'm with Buzzin on this one, I think smaller would be better.  We always can expand if needed.  The current map was mostly empty for months and even today has some parts that are vastly empty.  If we are going to improve the sense of community on Creative, I think a smaller map where builds are closer would be better.  I also would like to do a vanilla map.  World Painted maps are fun, but since this one is heavily world painted, then I would like to see the next one more vanilla, with caves/forests/rivers/mountains.

 

Spawn

Spawn definitely should be above ground.  The old tradition of having the player walk through a maze and passing all the rules signs seems to be passed, let them spawn with a rulebook and fly out.  I think a lake or something would be cool, with maybe a ship being attacked by a dragon or an estate on the lake's edge.  

 

Spawn City

I trust marting in making it successful.

 

Warps

Pre-revision Warps: pixelart, bigtown (with plots/tutorials, I can build this), and maybe redstone towers.

I think the warp policy should change.  From what I have experienced talking with people, it seems the consensus is that warps are reserved for really good builds and really big towns.  I really would like this to change and us be a little more lenient in giving warps.   Right now we only have 4 warps on C that were not built by a member of staff.  I think it would encourage growth and cooperation and people building more if we showed that their build doesn't have to be front page /r/minecraft material to get a warp.

 

The Flying/No Flying Debate

I think that flying is essential, but being able to set a region to no-fly where the person would be grounded upon entrance would be extremely beneficial.  A problem I see with C is that besides building together, there isn't much people can do.  Pvp has already been very popular, but I think if we could expand and have the no-fly regions a modreq-able thing, then  a whole bunch of opportunities open up such as spleef/parkour/mazes.

 

Miscellaneous Ideas

-Try to prebuild as little as possible.  Things like arenas and main roads should be built when the rev launches.

-fix pvp so that /mode enables you to use potions/be hurt by falling and fire.

-Entities.  Allow them again?  I feel like some cool redstone things could be possible and it's always a complaint I get from people trying to build dropper/dispenser contraptions.  Idk about the technical shortcomings of this or if it's possible, but just a thought.

 

That's all for now.  Discuss/critique.

[buzzinbee]

I think we should test out drops and things like arrows, even ender pearls. If they cause too many problems we can always remove them but I think there are a few benefits to these things, would we be able to enable certain potions whilst keeping others banned for instance I don't want invisibility potions being enabled however instant health pots and speed pots for pvp are useful. For spawn city I'd like some more natural sections around spawn but I'd also like to see plots working with the terrain, I don't like the creative servers where everything is completely flat, it's really really dull. That said something like Bellevue working with the terrain would be very nice.

 

EDIT: I still feel that we should have a period where the map is in no flight mode, we can really get a feel for how it works that way, then after a bit swap it to flight. This way a lot of the perks of no flight should kick in such as the necessity for roads being built and builds being closer together. Once flight has kicked in the map should then look actually fairly nice and it might encourage players to continue to build in close proximity to each other instead of flying off doing their own thing. 

[Dumbo52]

Feels like I say this way too often, but... As you can probably tell from my activity (or lack thereof) on the servers over the past week, it's been a very busy year for me so far. I'll try to be a bit more prompt next time, but no promises I'll be on the servers quite as often as I was before holiday over the next month or so.

Anyway, these are my viewpoints on a couple of the topics being discussed.

Map

I agree that vanilla terrain makes the most sense for next revision. Particularly with the new 1.7 terrain generation, I'm interested in seeing how that goes. Large biomes and non-amplified terrain sounds good.

For the map size, I'm going to reference a segment of one of my posts from a previous planning thread, regarding part of the reasoning behind map expansions.

A player recently talked to me about his concerns regarding map size, which have not been previously addressed here. At the start of the current revision, said player marked off a large area of land and began not ating a rather interesting-looking build. Well into the revision, though, when the build was looking well developed, he destroyed the entire build and began another large build in place of it. This was unfortunate, not only because the previous build had looked great so far, but particularly since there had not been sufficient room in the map for him to claim an area for his new build. If there had been enough room, he probably would have been able to work on both projects.

The root of this problem seems to be that people inherently tend to spread their builds apart, across the map - and there's nothing wrong with this practice. This can just inconvenience other players who are aspiring to start larger projects. During the first few days of a new revision, there is typically a mad dash to find large swathes of land to claim; this is really the only time during which a player can stake out a large plot of land. A week or two later, this task is much more difficult: it becomes rare to find a good two-hundred block span of empty terrain without running into somebody's house.

It seems, then, that the most favorable method of claiming land is to mark it off soon after new terrain is opened for building. This is not limited to the beginnings of revisions. Our map expansion from 4000x4000 to 5000x5000 provided an additional opportunity for people to start new projects on new land, for example. I'd like to increase the number of such opportunities in order to encourage players to create large builds. My proposal is that we split next revision into quarters, each two or three weeks long. During the first quarter, the map would be 4500x4500 blocks. At the beginning of each subsequent quarter, we would expand the map size 250 blocks on each side until we reach 6000x6000 in quarter 4. Hopefully, this would give players four opportunities in total to utilize new terrain. I imagine that this system could aid those players who join mid-rev and can't find any free space in which to start building.

This hasn't been happening this revision as I had thought it would, partially due to the low player count. It seems that with fewer players, there's just been less motivation for people to claim large areas, so there's still a lot of empty land. Because of this, I'm in agreement that we should start off smaller than 5000x5000. I'm thinking either 3000x3000 or 4000x4000; that's a difference between one third and two thirds of our current map size, respectively. Since we're tending toward longer revisions, we'd also obviously need to expand at time intervals greater than two or three weeks -- at least a month or so. We should decide between expanding at regular intervals and expanding whenever it's needed. Personally, I'm in favor of expanding the borders when we feel that it's necessary, but we should probably announce these expansions at least a couple of days ahead of time.

Spawn

It sounds like you guys are coming up with some neat ideas. I love the sound of a waterfront city at next rev's spawn -- I don't remember having seen anything like that before, so it should be interesting. I have to say, I loved the look of Bellevue, so I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'd also like to have a section of spawn (possibly underground?) dedicated to a tutorial area, containing much of the information you'd see in our current rulebook, in addition to some more in-depth examples.

Warps

No surprise that we're keeping Pixelart and Bigtown... It sounds like LetsB is taking care of Bigtown, and Pixelart generally doesn't require too much maintenance from a single user. I'm fine with MasterCommaThe setting up a redstone area if he'd like to, but if not, I'd be interested in managing it.

This revision, we began allowing warp requests in an attempt to give warp status to more warps than we had last revision. From the Creative rulebook:

"This revision, you will be able to submit mod requests for warps. Warps are given to some of the most impressive builds on the server, accessible via the command '/warp'. Before asking for a warp for you build, you should take a look at some of the other warps to get a feel for what is and isn't warp-quality. If you think your build is up to standards, submit a

mod request for a warp, including the name of your build. You will receive either a warp for your build or an explanation as to why your build didn't meet our standards."

I'm not sure if there are fewer large builds or if people are just reluctant to request for warps, but we really haven't received very many warp requests this revision. The idea is that we will also ask people if they'd like warps if we see outstanding builds, but as far as I'm aware, that hasn't happened much either. It sounds like we want to have more player-made warps for sure, so to do that, we'd need to increase the frequency of either of the above occurrences -- possibly even both.

The latter of these two options is simple enough. We have more moderators than we do admins, and thus, the moderators as a whole tend to see a lot more of the map than we do. We can encourage moderators to either submit a request to the admins when they see a build for us to evaluate if it's warp-worthy, or they could get into contact with the builder themselves and encourage the builder to submit a request, firsthand. Personally, I prefer the former choice, as it puts less pressure on the builder and doesn't get their hopes up like the other option would. This type of exchange would also be anonymous to non-staff, since the modreq page doesn't supply coordinates. This system would essentially let the mods say, "Hey, check this build out; it's pretty neat and might qualify for warp status."

The other solution to this issue is to increase the incidence of players' warp requests. It wouldn't hurt to add a message to the announcement cycle saying something like, "Want to have your finished build or community project to be featured? Submit a modreq for a warp to request a global waypoint!" We might as well add some information about that to the spawn as described earlier, because let's be real: only a small proportion of the population reads the rulebook in its entirety. I believe that people planned for something of the sort to go in the CTA station this revision, but that never ended up happening.

That's at least a partial solution to the problem of players not requesting warps, but the more challenging issue is that players might not be building many warp-worthy creations. As with each of the other issues I've mentioned in this section, I can think of two solutions. Either we lower the standards for warps (which, while maybe necessary, I'm not too crazy about) or we increase the players' motivation to build cool stuff, which might be addressed by this next idea.

Journalism

A few days ago, Buzzin brought to me the idea of starting some sort of blog for Creative, detailing some of the notable happenings. I was initially skeptical, but this idea is really starting to grow on me now. I may or may not have even had a dream or two about it... I swear I'm not crazy. Anyway, I think this would be best implemented as either a weekly post on the subreddit or as a relatively short, biweekly newsletter in PDF format. I think that a newsletter could actually be really neat to both read and participate in. It sounds like a lot of work, but I definitely think it could be done if we get a bunch of users involved in the production.

Ideally, we would receive submissions from both players and staff members, which would make up the bulk of the content. In addition, we would have a few different recurring features, such as build spotlights, statistics over the last two weeks (players with most block edits, etc.), and a summary of some of the new features on the server. I won't go into too much detail here since this idea probably deserves its own thread if we decide to go through with it, but I think this is definitely an interesting prospect we should look into.

When I was initially thinking about this idea, I imagined a newsletter just for Creative, but I'm open to the idea of allowing anyone from the community, including PvE and Survival, to participate, thus drawing less of a line between the three servers. I'm definitely interested in hearing what the non-CAdmins think of this.

Flying

During Verros' initial flying debate a year and a half ago, I had voiced my support for disabling flight for a revision. Unfortunately, I no longer support this position, even if we whitelisted flight to certain areas; flight has been a part of the game for over two years, and to be honest, I think this change would drive away more people than it would attract. While I acknowledge its potential to possibly create a tighter-knit community and force an infrastructure, I think we should explore other options, since I can't see too many people being happy with such a change.

Instead, I support LetsB's proposal of allowing players to modreq for no-fly zones. The one problem I forsee with this is that players might start falling out of the sky when flying over builds designated as no-fly zones. I suggest we both try to be a little selective about where we create no-fly zones (e.g. not giving one to a 5x5 diamond house; determining why a no-fly zone is necessary before creating it) and not extend the no-fly zone itself to the build limit. That is, we should create these no-fly zones as subregions, encasing only the area in which flying needs to be disabled.

Entities

I'm a bit wary of enabling item drops, primarily due to its potential for abuse. The reason these were originally disabled is that they could lag other people's clients if spammed maliciously. This has gotten a lot better since Mojang introduced automatic dropped item consolidation, but I'd like to get a tech admin to weigh in on the potential consequences of re-enabling item drops. It's also worth noting that drops have very few applications in redstone; any uses I can think of, aside from visual effects, can easily be replicated using other methods.

Assuming there's no technical problem with them, I'm fine with allowing both arrows (for PvP) and ender pearls (for getting around). Ender pearls are a convenient alternative to the compass which don't have any of the same negative side effects discussed in that thread.. That said, if people spam ender pearls, there's the possibility of them getting into areas where they're not supposed to be. If it's easy enough to implement, I propose introducing a five second cooldown between throwing ender pearls. I don't see any other throwable or placeable entities as being very useful in Creative.

Other

Now that we've enabled PvP, I'm fine with any potions other than invisibility, for obvious reasons.

A while ago when we began allowing people to request TNT, the idea was that TNT wouldn't respond to redstone at all and could therefore be used as a decoration block. I noticed that TNT still detonates when triggered; techs, would it be possible to make TNT completely inert? WorldGuard appears to only cancel the explosion, not the conversion to a primed TNT entity. Let me know if I'm wrong, but after a quick look, it seems like this can be done by catching onBlockPhysics in KitchenSink and canceling the BlockPhysicsEvent if the block is TNT.

I can't think of any other details at the moment; I'd like to hear what you think about each of these aspects of next revision.

[buzzinbee]

I still like the idea of no flight even for just a few weeks or so, however if we do go with /modreqs for no flight regions we could add region flags just outside the flight zone stating you are about to enter a no fly zone. Upside this allows people to see that they are then flying into a zone with no flight, downside it could get a little spammy. A player brought up to me the topic of rule books, they stated that people don't really read them and instead we should have the signs up with a few tutorials for people to look at. I say we should do this and keep the book that could be obtained by a command, this way you don't have to read through all of the book you can look at signs with examples and it's a little more user friendly in my opinion. Again I would like to hear thoughts on this.

[Cyotie911]

I'm not meaning to impose on anything here, I am strictly curious. During the last big Creative Player Mumble Meeting there was a lot of support for a whole map Short test revision that was no flying. I had made the Suggestion to possibly have 2 creative servers running at the same time. One with Flying and one without. This idea was liked and approved by everyone and is really the only way to get an accurate description of how much the actual user base really wants flying or not by which server gets used more. Both these servers should be advertised a head of time do allow players to decide which type of server they might want to build on. My Idea would be for players who connect straight to c.nerd.nu to be taken to the lobby server and there be 2 different warps there and signs and such saying "This portal will take you to our non flying creative server" and one saying "This portal will take you to our flying enabled creative server".

This was supposed to happen at the beginning of a rev because that is the only time you will also get an accurate count of players online that might not be just on for the "new server" draw count (will do away with the favoritism that could be shown towards a new server if they are both brought on at the same time).

I had also confirmed a while back that the techs felt that another server (brought online for a short rev) wouldn't put a ton of strain on the box, provided that the other servers revs had been online for a while and weren't suffering from the huge player count new rev draw.

Okay I'm going back to sleep now. You guys can take my words and do what you would like with them. I just wanted to make sure that The outcome of the last player meeting was represented and I would make good on my promise in that meeting as best as I could, so I at least wanted to bring it up to you guys here. Also, sorry if there are grammatical errors and such throughout this post. I've been real sick for the past few days (and I'm not better as of now)

[buzzinbee]

D: Yikes hope you get better soon Cyotie. I like the idea of having the 2 servers if it's not a huge strain, i presume we'd start off with the same spawn the only difference would be the flight? I think that would provide a reliable comparison between the two ways in which you can play creative.

[Cyotie911]

The only thing I would suggest is that there needs to be roads on the no flight server. It kinda makes navigating the server treacherous with no flight, if you leave it up to you players to create the roads. I think it would be okay to put the roads in the flight server too though.