People who actually play on Survival, what changes would you like to see the next revision.

[SpiderMan]

Since both subreddit threads were downvoted to zero, I thought it would be better to move it to the forum.

 

Actual players of S, what changes would you want to happen next revision that you think will make the server more popular.

 

http://nerd.nu/usage/survival/

 

Discuss.

 

-gsand

;D

[nickeynickey123]

More furniture-based builds and bases.

[tobylane]

Reddit threads were downvoted, but here we'll have little idea what isn't liked. People will reply, then it'll turn into hostility and the thread will be locked. Could we save ourselves the trouble?

 

We have had one group's point of view many times over, and that will be 90% of what we hear here. Can we do something specific to get new voices on the forums?

[TornadoHorse]

Reddit threads were downvoted, but here we'll have little idea what isn't liked. People will reply, then it'll turn into hostility and the thread will be locked. Could we save ourselves the trouble?

 

We have had one group's point of view many times over, and that will be 90% of what we hear here. Can we do something specific to get new voices on the forums?

 

If it is turned into hostility, I will remove the comments instead of locking the thread.

 

I'll ask it again and again, please stop grouping us all together as 1 voice. We are many different individuals who all happen to believe that survival is in a bad state and we all want to change it. Everyone who wants to be involved in discussion can be and generally is involved.

[Gizzletinks]

 Number 74 on the list but I guess I still count.

 

       Rev 26 was great apart from the player count. Now survival is becoming more and more like PvE, why would people chose survival over PvE when its similar but PvE has more players. Survival shouldn't be full of care bears, it should be a hostile environment in all aspects. Survival used to run on hostility. What I mean by that is, people played, not just for themselves, but to destroy their enemies. It can work, think back to last revision with the Civcraft players. The Civcraft players joined and harrassed and killed us using their numbers and huge amounts of playtime. They were huge dicks to everyone, and everyone hated them, they weren't scared about being assholes to people because they weren't scared of being banned for harrassment after some noob cries to an admin, because they could just go back to civcraft. Everyone decided they disliked them so much, most of the regular S clans declared war on them. Clans that were previously enemies were now together fighting for one cause, to destroy the civcraft scum. The S regulars played a ton the first few weeks, geared up, and had small skirmishes with the civcraft players, such as this and this. Then after everyone got geared up and ready to fight, they raided the discharge base, and took them out completely. Discharge decided not to rebuild, as they had all their stuff on civcraft to back to. But think about it, What if they had rebuilt? It would have been an all out war all rev long between the S regulars and the CivScum. I want something like that to happen again, wether it is on a civcraft style map, or a cardinal roads no griefing revision. Killing a common enemy like DisCharge with fellow S regulars, some that I didn't even like, was probably the most fun I have ever had on S.

 

                 admins, please to not ban people for frivelous reasons on S.Survival has always been hostile, and the less hostile it gets, the more players we have leave the server. Survival needs to be hostile, players need to have all their playtime fueled by hatred!

 

 

TLDR: S is becoming PvE, make Survival really stand for Survival.

Edited October 23, 2014 by Gizzletinks

[EeHee2000]

I wholeheartedly agree with what GizzleTinks is saying. Survival is not meant to be a welcoming server - you're supposed to jump in and fight for your gear, your base, whatever it may be that you've spent the most time on. I think a great way to reflect on how Survival should be is to refer to DayZ. It's supposed to be hostile, that's how it's played. We have PvE for building mini-communities, and Creative for straight up building, but the competitive sense is home to Survival. 
As Gizzle said, there was a lot of hostility and rivalry between the core Survival playerbase and the CivCraft players, who jumped on and treated everyone like sacks of shit. Within the first day our clans had basically formed to make a huge raiding party, and the actual fights and raids themselves were some of the best experiences many of us have had on the Survival server. Despite the whole matter of literally everything on the map being xray-raided to shit shortly after we finished our own raids, we had a pretty damn great time and I think nearly all of us really want a tense experience like that to come around again. 

[dizney07]

Right now it feels like we're accommodating the casual players that want to build with some threat, when the core majority S players that have been here throughout many revs don't want to play that way. They want to pvp, raid, and be better than the other clans all around. S was fun last rev because we had a pvp oriented goal we were trying to achieve. A group of jerks came on to our server and was trapping and raiding people. We wanted to destroy them so badly that we all came together and focused on something that we all thought would be pvp oriented.

 

I don't have any kind of goal for next rev like that. A group comes onto the server and harasses someone? It doesn't matter. It doesn't affect me or anyone else actually playing without pearling and raiding. So what's my goal? Build a base, fight on some road for a bit, get bored and leave after two weeks again? I want a reason to play. I want to be scared to log in, I want to fear someone turning the corner, I want to feel the rush that pvp used to bring (and brought last rev). 

[tobylane]

Ok, hostile environment is what you want. Chaos, with world border on, tnt off, no LWC, griefing/camping/bed breaking allowed? How can we be tense for you, but sufficiently welcoming to new people?

 

As we are aiming for exactly what you want, we may need to not look at player count as a sign of success, its whether you are happy with the server regardless of how many people there are to play with. How would you judge success of getting what you asked for if there's few people to play it with?

 

Tornado the group of S players that play is diverse and has many voices, the group of S players who come here and ask for major changes don't have substantially different opinions. If the forum had a diverser range of S players then there would be many voices.

[TornadoHorse]

Ok, hostile environment is what you want. Chaos, with world border on, tnt off, no LWC, griefing/camping/bed breaking allowed? How can we be tense for you, but sufficiently welcoming to new people?

 

 It will be welcoming to the players who also want that kind of game mode. We market our server as PvP and Raiding, we use paid advertisements our server as PvP and Raiding, and funnily enough those who join will be looking for PvP and Raiding.

 

As we are aiming for exactly what you want, we may need to not look at player count as a sign of success, its whether you are happy with the server regardless of how many people there are to play with. How would you judge success of getting what you asked for if there's few people to play it with?

 

It's one of those things that I'll keep on asking until we get an actual answer from the sadmins: How are we measuring our success? a) Happiness of the current players b) Player count. Once we know this, we can then decide what our approach is. If we're only going to try please our current players and maybe bring in a few more then it should be totally community run. If we're going for the player count, whatever the community says shouldn't matter. We should do what we think is best to get a large amount of players whilst still being a bit original and unique. I don't care which of these options is chosen, but we need to stop trying to please everyone, it doesn't work.

 

Tornado the group of S players that play is diverse and has many voices, the group of S players who come here and ask for major changes don't have substantially different opinions. If the forum had a diverser range of S players then there would be many voices.

 

We don't have any other S players, that's it, we're all used up! There are a few more casual players who weren't seen much after last revision and the only ones who've stuck around are the ones who really want to make change. I'm sorry if you're not happy with who plays on S and what they think of their own server, if you want to go and hunt down anyone else who plays on S for their thoughts on the revision be my guest, you'll probably be wasting your time as if they wanted to get involved and give their thoughts then they would have done so already as this "Lets change S" stuff has been going on for years.

[djt832]

Just from listening to everyone on the subreddit and forums, its pretty clear to me that we all want a reason to PvP. Even though there are wildly different opinions of where S should be going, the majority of them revolve around generating PvP. Though this rev we aren't trying anything drastically new, there are a few more arena events that should be taking place. Hopefully we can keep up on the arenas this rev, rather than letting them fall apart. I know I will be trying to keep up on them. 

 

As far as changes....I would like to try some unique gameplay ideas. I know a few people have been submitting them. I would also like to see the PvP rebalanced, and I think Gizzletinks has posted a few times about a potion/armor set up that helps balance that. 

[tobylane]

I entirely agree with the first two parts.

 

We don't have any other S players, that's it, we're all used up! There are a few more casual players who weren't seen much after last revision and the only ones who've stuck around are the ones who really want to make change. I'm sorry if you're not happy with who plays on S and what they think of their own server, if you want to go and hunt down anyone else who plays on S for their thoughts on the revision be my guest, you'll probably be wasting your time as if they wanted to get involved and give their thoughts then they would have done so already as this "Lets change S" stuff has been going on for years.

 

The activity page tells me something different. I'd like to at least hear from more people once - telling us that you speak for them, or that they don't want to use the forums.

[Gizzletinks]

I entirely agree with the first two parts.

The activity page tells me something different. I'd like to at least hear from more people once - telling us that you speak for them, or that they don't want to use the forums.

Almost everyone in the top 10 has posted in other survival threads over time, and they want the same thing, more pvp

[djt832]

I entirely agree with the first two parts.

 

 

The activity page tells me something different. I'd like to at least hear from more people once - telling us that you speak for them, or that they don't want to use the forums.

Toby, this thread was created by gsand to get an idea of changes users would like to see for the next survival revision. Please try to keep your posts inline with what the thread is about. 

[dizney07]

Ok, hostile environment is what you want. Chaos, with world border on, tnt off, no LWC, griefing/camping/bed breaking allowed? How can we be tense for you, but sufficiently welcoming to new people?

 

As we are aiming for exactly what you want, we may need to not look at player count as a sign of success, its whether you are happy with the server regardless of how many people there are to play with. How would you judge success of getting what you asked for if there's few people to play it with?

 

Well now do we need to have griefing allowed to have that feeling? Most ideas I come up with revolve around uncraftable loot of some sort (such as books when enchanting is turned off). If you come across one of these, and are far away from home (assuming there's no enderchests), it creates fear, anxiousness, and excitement. 

 

We don't know how the admins judge success. For me, last rev was successful due to the fact that we finally tried something new, and it worked. It may not have worked for the entire time, but it worked for about the first two weeks. So why not try and build off early success. But now I'm repeating my earlier post

[SpiderMan]

Reddit threads were downvoted, but here we'll have little idea what isn't liked.

 

The point of this thread is to post opinions of actual players.

 

People will reply, then it'll turn into hostility and the thread will be locked. Could we save ourselves the trouble?

 

Why not have a moderator delete the hostile comments?

 

We have had one group's point of view many times over, and that will be 90% of what we hear here.

 

Yes, because those people actually play on survival.

 

Can we do something specific to get new voices on the forums?

 

Actually implement the features that the members of the survival community have suggested.

 

The activity page tells me something different. I'd like to at least hear from more people once - telling us that you speak for them, or that they don't want to use the forums.

 

https://nerd.nu/forums/index.php?/tags/forums/Survival/

 

There are a bunch of threads, lol.

 

 

-gsand

;D

[jchance]

The new survival rev should have Potato as the official tuber of S.   If that was the case I'd play on S again.

 

Russet 3:16

[dizney07]

The new survival rev should have Potato as the official tuber of S.   If that was the case I'd play on S again.

 

Russet 3:16

 

jchance pls this thread is for players who actually play on survival and everyone who actually plays on survival knows that carrots are the only way to go 

[roastnewt]

While I agree with the sentiment of this post, I don't think nerd.nu/usage is the best way to determine who's a "Survival Player" (speaking as the person who's #1 on the list )  I played so many hours on last revision because I enjoyed that gametype, but I can see other survival players who didn't like the raiding / large-clan pvp aspects of having very low playtime last revision, even though they're still "Survival Players."

[Natdog]

http://nerd.nu/usage/survival/ - has been off since Aug 16

[totemo]

I think it's counterproductive to try to restrict "valid" opinions to the limited group of people who still play S.  Surely you want to attract players who are not catered for by the current design of the server, and that means listening to the opinions of people outside of the echo chamber.

 

That said, http://nerd.nu/usage/survival is updating again and I am in the top 10 by usage, so I think that qualifies me as a PvP god with a perfectly cromulent opinion. :)

 

First off, I really want to commend the S admins for creating the premier PvE experience on the Reddit Public servers.  I got chased down the road, newly spawned, with no gear or even food by some armoured n00b (he knows who he is), but other than that I have not had to deal with any pesky PvP.  Most of the time there are fewer than 10 people on, so if I /ignore everyone else, it's like having an entire brand new map to myself.  If, by some miracle, a player does find me, I'm confident that I can just throw down an auto-locking chest for my valuables, so there's no reward for killing me other than the dubious thrill of killing a naked guy.  At some point I'll get an ender chest, I guess, but they're no longer essential for ensuring that you don't lose anything, ever.  I won't ever have to deal with grief.  I don't really have to care about base security, because even if someone does find me they can't do much other than kill me a couple of times and make me go back to spawn.  I'll never ever have to be concerned about any kind of loss.  All in all, it's more relaxing than C, which has more griefers.

 

So, in that sense, I think S is absolutely perfect and cozy.  As long as the numbers keep falling I can only see it getting better.

 

On the other hand, it does surprise me the S admins are willing to write off the more chaotic play style of last rev as an abject failure when there are players who (to my great surprise) consider it to be one of the most enjoyable PvP experiences they had on the servers.  I would have hoped that the powers that be would consider fine tuning of that formula rather than abandoning it entirely, seemingly without any further examination.  I do want to make some detailed criticisms and suggestions for improvement to S, but first I want talk very broadly about the gameplay design of last revision.

 

It seems to me that there are two completely opposite schools of thought on how to make S fun.  On the one hand, there are people that think that we must lower the difficulty of getting gear, and encourage people to clump together.  So if you subscribe to this school of thought, you like:

• Plumped XP.
• Enchantism or some other means of making enchanting suck less.
• Spawning close to the centre of the map.
• Planned roads centred on spawn.
• Maybe a light plump of ores so you don't have to waste time mining.
• Locked chests and ender chests to minimise risk and loss.

It all makes perfect sense.  PvP is the only thing that matters so let's kill all other aspects of the game as much as possible!  PvP is its own reward and there is no need to build a reason to fight into the game.  The further you go down this path, the more the server begins to resemble a minigame where losing gear matters nothing and you don't even build your own base.

 

The other school of thought seems to be that:

• Making things take time and effort leads to a greater sense of reward.
• Putting stuff at risk (e.g. imperfectly locked chests) leads to a higher-stakes, more exciting game.
• The ability to raid chests gives an actual reason to fight beyond just trying to tick people off.

Truth be told, I'm in this latter camp that thinks that greater difficulty leads to a more interesting game.

• I don't accept the proposition that S has to be super close to the game that Mojang has defined.  In fact, I think being somewhat unique might be a selling point for the server.
• I don't accept that Mojang have designed a perfect multiplayer survival PvP game.
  • Many people question the game balance of Minecraft PvP: potions and enchants.
  • On the other hand, it's not common to hear people question the game balance of block breaking (and placement).  The time taken to tear down a wall, whether brick or obsidian, is regarded as some kind of immutable physical law, handed down by God.  Why is that?  You can't change it in the client, but plugins like Citadel show that it is possible to question this.
  • Resources: Mojang have set them at a level of obtainability which leads to a pleasant single-player experience.  How much have they changed the frequency of occurrence of ores since multiplayer was added to the game?  In what ways can increasing or decreasing ore frequency lead to a more engaging game?  Could the game be improved by making resource distribution less uniform - requiring that players have to travel to find diamonds or iron, rather than simply spending an hour or so wherever they end up?
  • Mobs: again, the difficulty of mobs is tuned by Mojang for single-player.  They can be tuned by plugins fairly easily by adjusting frequency of occurrence, strength, speed, gear and drops.
  • Food: Mojang have ensured that crops grow fast enough that a very small amount of farmland is sufficient to feed a player.  If you happen to grind in a skeleton grinder, a single block of farmland is sufficient.  In addition, every crop grows everywhere.  There is no requirement to travel for certain types of produce, other than the need to find it in the first place.
  • Tech tree: Mojang have designed a fairly limited tech tree.  You can level up from nothing to potions and top-tier enchants in well under a week.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the tech tree is actually an underrated factor in player retention.  Everybody loves the start of the rev because there are some compelling goals built into the game:

• Finding food: this leads to the quest for various kinds of crops and the establishment of animal farms.
• Establishing territory (claims).
• The need to ensure security (a base and chests): this leads to mining for building materials.
• The need to acquire armaments, which leads to the following supporting goals:
  • Mining for diamonds.
  • Searching for netherwart.
  • Finding spawners and building grinders.
  • Acquiring bookshelves for enchanting.

Once you've climbed this limited tech tree you're left with hunting your fellow players and more mining.  You must become entirely self-directed in your goals.  And I think it is for this reason that usage rapidly declines in the first few weeks after a reset.  Players come to check out the new map and new features, build a house and a farm and then feel that the game is over.

 

In terms of gameplay design, I would characterise Reddit Public's "CivCraft"-style S experiment as schizophrenic.  It was an odd blend of the casual minigame style and the full-on commitment of CivCraft.  Specifically:

• Players were spawned on the ring road and implicitly encouraged to build there.  This is the definition of insane.
• Players were jammed into a comparatively (compared to CivCraft) small map.  We've all played chaos before and we know the importance of putting some distance between oneself and the opposition.
• XP and ores were plumped and easy to obtain.  This lessened the importance of cooperation.  Everyone could be a one-man army.
• The ore distribution was non-uniform - so territory did matter somewhat - but it was not differentiated sufficiently to really encourage people to travel in order to mine.  You could still get loads of materials wherever you end up.  There was no need to travel a long distance carrying an inventory full of wealth.
• There was no real incentive to trade crops either, because, per the usual Minecraft mechanics, everything grows everywhere.
• There was no extended tech tree, e.g. Factory Mod.  Factory Mod is a way of changing the crafting and smelting mechanics defined by Mojang.  You create a factory to craft special items or smelt ores and give it some relative advantage over Mojang's vanilla mechanics (or you shut down the vanilla method completely and make the factory the only way to do some things).  Factories are expensive to make, so it becomes a goal to get all the materials to make one.  They require materials to maintain, which makes maintenance another goal.  And they can't be moved once placed, which makes people think twice about abandoning a location.  Difficult choices make for a more interesting game.

 

Here are some suggested changes that might have improved it:

• Add the Bastion plugin, which gives a placeable block that prevents attackers from spamming blocks, lava, water and fire.  That would have shut down the more offensive grief and could have been a nice trade item if the difficulty of obtaining it has been set correctly.
• Adjust the Citadel reinforcement strength of stone upwards if it is too weak.
• Patch Citadel to add scaling factors on a per-block basis.  So for example, diamond increases the break time of obsidian by 1800x, but perhaps it increases the break time of chests by 3000x.  Essentially: allow fine tuning of container break times to encourage or discourage raiding.
• Generate the map with a significantly non-uniform ore distribution that forces people to squabble over territory and travel long distances carrying valuables when mining.
• Consider the use of Factory Mod to expand the tech tree.  It's configurable, so we don't need to have the same recipes as CivCraft.  
  • We could, for example, change default smelting in furnaces to be grossly inefficient, e.g. 1 iron ingot for 10 ore.  And then have several tiers of iron smelting factory with different resource costs to make and maintain, the most expensive one giving the best ratio of output ingots to input ore.
• Reconsider the role of XP in the game: should it be easy (trivial to obtain) or would it be better to make enchanted items truly rare and valuable.  Would we be better off only allowing enchants on tools and not having any armour or weapon enchants?  Should XP be obtained in the ways that Mojang has defined?  Or could it instead be obtained in a CivCraft way, by mining or farming (which might lead to more complicated goals that would retain players)?
• If using Factory Mod and crops are a component of recipes then, consider the use of the RealisticBiomes plugin to limit the availability of recipe ingredients (i.e. increased difficulty to farming).

[SpiderMan]

[Wall o' Text]

 

I honestly hope there is a well though out and thorough reply to your post.

The past few threads critical of the changes have been immediately labeled as trolling as a way to discredit the points given by the person being replied to.

 

-gsand

;D

Edited October 28, 2014 by gsand

[JackTheLumberr]

S need to change radically as rev 26. I personally do not like CivCraft, and it perhaps not been as everyone would have liked but the change is the key to revive the flame of Survival. Try something new. Invent new survival mode, because this community can not be found anywere in the world!  And it would be a real shame to lost it...

[Veltoss]

Why not have a balance between PvP and casual friendly? Every player has a limited number of chests they can protect. Let's say 5 chests (just as an example). Something small. Now they can only protect 5 of them. Any thing they want kept safe they have to keep within those 5 chests. Anything else has to be put in raidable chests, so players will have to hide them and/or trap them.

 

 

[XkinOEC]

^I really like that idea, but maybe not 5 chests... Maybe 2, simply because a double sized chest is considered a single chest to the lock plugin. and well... 2 of those is plenty to hold armor and diamonds and anything needing protection. 

[c45y]

I like it how this current revision is. That to me is the survival I enjoy.

 

I would like to see more work done on realistic leaderboards / pvp profiles, similar to the work done at ( the now broken?) http://nerd.nu/survival/ page. As I understand it there is work currently being done in this area, I would like to see that direction explored more than in game changes.