Survival Revision 22 Change & Discussion Thread

[Tharine]

Having finally managed to acquire enough time to sit down and concentrate on putting this together, I am pleased to present the official discussion thread for Survival’s upcoming Revision 22. I would like to preface this post by emphasising very clearly that there are no set plans for the ending of the current revision and the starting of the new one at this stage. This post does not aim to suggest that the change in revision is imminent, only that we are now ready to move forward together as a community in discussing how we would like to approach this transition.

 

To start things off, I have prepared a not-too-lengthy poll - which you can find here - with a range of questions that i’m hoping will help to spark some proper discussion on where we stand in this uncertain territory as a server in need of a fresh revision, and especially as one awaiting the long-overdue 1.6 update from Mojang. Poll formatting doesn’t allow a lot of room for the necessary in-depth descriptions for particular questions, so please be sure to read through the entirety of this forum thread for the appropriate, relevant text that accompanies this poll. You might not be able to accurately respond to some of the questions without referring to what is written in the remainder of this thread.

 

As a final note before getting into the accompanying descriptions: I have been working on preparing some form of discussion thread for some time now, ultimately deciding that a good place to start would be to focus solely on improvements and changes we could make that surrounded the change in revisions. However, this is by no means the only ongoing discussion that pertains to Survival. Following last weekend’s staff meeting, several players from the community (predominantly Survival players) were prompted to open up some serious discussion about where we stand as a server, what changes that might be beneficial to our community as a whole, as well as some specifics for Survival in particular. You can find and contribute to this particular discussion here on our subreddit. I would encourage anyone interested in the betterment of our community to get involved with this, no matter what server you call ‘home’.

 

Accompanying details for the poll:

 

Revision 21

Nothing particularly necessary to comment on for this section, but for some amusement, here's what to expect during end of revision chaos: http://i.imgur.com/EotHGCB.png [individual experience subject to varying levels of chaos]

 

Revision 22

Of particular note for this section, the proposal for the short-duration, chaos-style map would perhaps involve something like having a map the same size as our current revision, complete with the world border in place (we don't have the server resources to have it be forever expanding with the other two servers running), and have practically all chaos rules. SafeBuckets would be turned off, creepers and TNT would do block damage, but we could keep things like PlumpXP and the no-leather book recipe in place, so that things aren't a huge grind for such a short-lived map. This one's definitely open to a lot of interpretation, and if it's an idea that you might be interested in, please give suggestions for how we might be able to get this set up!

 

Rules & Guidelines

Policies regarding the handling of land claims

 

In all my time moderating on Survival, we’ve never had a strict procedure for how we handle overturning long-unoccupied claims to other players. Typically it is the large, unused claims found near to spawn or surrounding the closest portals on each road that players inquire about the status of, and more often than not there are a number of complications that face us in determining whether or not we should hand over the land to that user. However, one of the recurring problems this revision was the repeated assurances from players that they would absolutely make use of their land - ultimately leaving large portions of prime land unused for weeks on end.

We would like to see fewer issues with handling reclaiming land in the future, so something I thought might be worthwhile to suggest is having a stricter set of policies regarding unused land claims. I’ve found from experience that a request-based system works best for deciding whether or not land should be available for reclaim. That meaning that any unused plots of land are fine to be left alone so long as no one has inquired about them. Upon a modreq being placed for the land, we would go about contacting the landowner and waiting a predetermined space of time before perhaps deciding to turn over the land to the person that initially requested it. Things usually aren’t that simple however, so I would love to hear input on how we can make this sort of thing work.

 

Rules that govern base camping

 

This is probably one of the most contentious issues on Survival as of late, and one we would definitely love to properly get a grip on. What is your opinion of base camping? Do you think we should put back into place rules that consider base camping as 'unlawful' in particular situations, or do you perhaps think we should ban it completely? As listed in the poll question, a proposal on the matter was made in this subreddit post at the start of the current revision - do you feel this is appropriate, and if not, please provide what you think would be a good solution to this issue!

 

Upcoming Features

Only one question under this header, but it focuses on a handful of plugin suggestions that have been brought up in the past few months. In order:

 

Enderpearl Cooldown - Aims to counter issues such as mass-spamming enderpearls to escape from suffocation or drop traps, as well as nerfing the use of pearls as an effective escape tactic in combat.

 

Combat Tag and CombatLog - two suggestions for an alternative response to combat logging. Such plugins would result in (near) immediate consequences for logging in combat, such as through killing the player upon logout in combat and dropping their inventory. Such setups would run alongside our notification system (or include their own), meaning that players who do log out during combat will still be moderated in the appropriate fashion.

 

PvPTimer - A provision for players upon first joining the server that would allow them to explore and get settled into the map on their first day without fear of being killed the second they've gotten the most basic materials available. Such a plugin comes with a set timer, which can be cancelled upon the new player taking actions such as initiating combat with another person, or equipping armour. We would be including very clear guidelines for new players on how to make the most of this protection while it lasts.

 

Overhauling the enchanting system - As mentioned in the staff meeting last weekend, we would like to propose introducing a complete overhaul of the vanilla Minecraft enchanting system. Enchantism, written by our own smiler100, aims to remove the gambling aspect that comes with the enchantment system set up by Mojang. Entering into an enchantment table brings up an entirely different screen where you can place your tool in the topmost slot and select what enchantment you would like to place on it, instead of putting in 30 levels and hoping for the best. We understand that this is a pretty major change in terms of the mechanics that we typically mess with, and if there is an overwhelming desire not to implement this, it's not something we have to do. We do hope however that there are many people who would enjoy such a change, as this will make acquiring tools, and particularly PvP gear, much easier for everyone.

 

Reintroducing villagers with controlled trades - Our dear villager friends have been absent from Survival for some time now because of their silly antics involving trade exploitation. However, with the changes Mojang made a while back, as well as the fact that plugins such as Rebalance Villagers exist, we can take the villagers' trading system entirely into our own hands. Draykhar and I have already worked on a config setup for this plugin, with the goal in mind that villagers should no longer be any easier to acquire diamond armour from than mining the required materials yourself. We've disabled the trades for sugar cane (reeds), wheat, paper, and both plain and written books as these are the fastest, and easiest, track to easy emeralds. We've also adjusted the prices somewhat to better reflect our goal. For the sake of getting this post put up in a timely manner, i've refrained from fleshing this out a bit more just now. I can come back and comment with a bit more detail on this one when I have time. Similar to the enchanting proposal, we would be really keen to hear feedback on what might be the best approach to handling this.

 

Feedback

Nothing really to add to either of the questions in this section, but I wanted to take the opportunity to find out what kind of times are most suitable for people to attend events (particularly for the beginning of new revisions - although this one is heavily favoured to times that tech admins are available for support at such a time), as well as what avenues people typically use to keep up to date with the servers.

 

If you have any comments in addition to the points already brought up for discussion, please feel free to post them! 

[AC130]

It's my duck! :o silly Tharine. ;)

[EeHee2000]

Tharine! Hear me out on this, I have a WONDERFUL idea. I was thinking, could players have the choice to put their most beloved items in their inventory, and spawn with it next rev? That way, players would be able to keep some remnants of the previous rev and not lose everything they have worked so hard for - whilst still not having a chest room of maxed out stuff. I would really love if you gave this some thought, thanks!

-Eehee

*dribble*

 

EDIT:

If not an entire inventory of "remnants", perhaps just the option to put the "remnants" into the hotbar only, and wipe everything *except* players' hotbars? 9 items would be kept, as to avoid a player having a full inv of Diamond Blocks for example. Thanks for reading!

Edited June 20, 2013 by EeHee2000

[Tharine]

Whilst I understand the allure of being able to start on the new map readily prepared with your remnants from the old world - I think we're going to stick pretty close to our namesake and say that no, it's not in the spirit of 'Survival' to start anywhere but from scratch when we start up the new rev.

[edk]

If not an entire inventory of "remnants", perhaps just the option to put the "remnants" into the hotbar only, and wipe everything *except* players' hotbars? 9 items would be kept, as to avoid a player having a full inv of Diamond Blocks for example. Thanks for reading!

 

9 stacks of diamond blocks, then?

[EeHee2000]

 

9 stacks of diamond blocks, then?

I fakken hope not.

[SpiderMan]

Tharine! Hear me out on this, I have a WONDERFUL idea. I was thinking, could players have the choice to put their most beloved items in their inventory, and spawn with it next rev? That way, players would be able to keep some remnants of the previous rev and not lose everything they have worked so hard for - whilst still not having a chest room of maxed out stuff. I would really love if you gave this some thought, thanks!

-Eehee

*dribble*

 

EDIT:

If not an entire inventory of "remnants", perhaps just the option to put the "remnants" into the hotbar only, and wipe everything *except* players' hotbars? 9 items would be kept, as to avoid a player having a full inv of Diamond Blocks for example. Thanks for reading!

 

Too Exploitable.

 

9 Slots:

1. Sharpness 5 Diamond Sword
2. Protection 4 Diamond Helmet
3. Protection 4 Diamond Chestplate
4. Protection 4 Diamond Leggings
5. Protection 4 Diamond Boots
6. Stack of Diamond Blocks
7. 16 Eyes of Ender
8. Stack of Blaze Rods
9. Stack of Carrots or Potatoes

Edited June 28, 2013 by gsand

[Ozomahtlii]

Looked over this post and made a suggestion post without seeing this one, so I'll just link to it

 

https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/490-suggestion-disable-hurting-people-from-the-same-clan-on-s/

[Ozomahtlii]

Is there any update on what may or may not get changed about the google document?

 

In specific the hopper traps maybe?

 

It would be awesome to have some updates whenever one of the S. admins have time :)

[uni0]

Is there any update on what may or may not get changed about the google document?

 

In specific the hopper traps maybe?

 

It would be awesome to have some updates whenever one of the S. admins have time :)

 

There is a thread about hopper traps that you may wanna chime in if you have feedback on that https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/427-hopholes-discussion/

[Ozomahtlii]

There is a thread about hopper traps that you may wanna chime in if you have feedback on that https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/427-hopholes-discussion/

Yeah but I was wondering as there was no S. admin that posted there I thought I'd ask here, and maybe (not sure if it is possible) to have it added in the poll :p

[Draykhar]

There is a thread about hopper traps that you may wanna chime in if you have feedback on that https://nerd.nu/forum/index.php?/topic/427-hopholes-discussion/

Yeah but I was wondering as there was no S. admin that posted there I thought I'd ask here, and maybe (not sure if it is possible) to have it added in the poll :p

 

I'll see that I post my opinions on it tonight. 

[Tharine]

I actually intended to get the results of this poll put up a couple of weeks ago, but in hindsight it appears that finding myself distracted by other tasks has actually allowed a decent amount more people to get their responses in prior to review! With that said, at current there have been 58 responses in total to the poll. I cannot say for certain whether such a number represents our Survival community as a whole, but I feel confident in saying that it represents a decent chunk of the active community. While we won’t rule out any further responses for consideration (although certainly by this time I feel that most interested players have already provided their opinions), now is definitely a good time to assess what we’ve heard back so far. The responses in full can be found by going here, however I will be including a screenshot for each accompanying description of the results for easier reading/viewing.

 

(Sidenote: Seems you have a limit on the number of images you can include in a comment on these forums, so i’ll be sectioning off the results to account for this)

 

Given what’s happened between now and the creation of this poll, I feel it’s pretty safe to say that the questions pertaining to Revision 21’s state are no longer applicable. Events in both mine and Draykhar’s personal lives kept us incredibly busy in the lead up to the end of the revision, and we ended up having to work around that, as well as things such as the 1.6 update and the planned CTF event, in getting things together in the end. For the sake of it though, here’s what the responses to those questions looked like:

 

Responses in regards to the fate of Revision 22 were quite similar, and it was interesting to see the mixed views surrounding the idea of a chaotic interlude. Given the circumstances, we ended up going ahead with the miniature chaos event (which is still ongoing, we'll commence the third round pretty soon, keep an eye on the subreddit for information regarding this). Here are the responses for these two topics:

[Tharine]

It seems that the majority of responses for the question pertaining to land claims were that people had interest in some form of stricter handling of land claims, but they would rather wait until a formal proposal is made.

 

There was a definite mixture of suggestions on how people would personally like to see land claims handled (thanks for that solid input, Unce ), so i'll try to restructure the proposal I laid out initially to best reflect the feedback we got. Going for a steps-based procedure:

 

Relinquishing land claims will be handled on a request-based system, but requests for land with not be accepted prior to the second week of the new revision. Requests must be made through the /modreq system, and players must clearly indicate which claim they are interested in overtaking by standing in front of/inside/next to it when making the modreq and including the name of the claim owner (if their name is known). We will not relinquish existing buildings to other players, only land claims that appear to be going unused. The main reasoning behind this being that no one would enjoy, say, coming back from vacation or an extended period of no free time only to find their house now belongs to someone else who was able to be online in the time that they were not. We would not like to impose requirements on players that they inform us of their being absent in order to secure their land claim, so this is one point i'm pretty keen on sticking with.

 

Following the submission of the modreq, a staff member will assess the current situation, including:

• Whether it appears that the claim is in use.

• Whether the claim owner is currently active/banned for a significant duration of time (i.e. banned for a month or longer).

If it appears that the claim is not being made use of, then the staff member will go about contacting the land owner to inquire whether they intend to make use of their claimed land. The person being contacted will also be given a particular time frame to respond by before action may be taken on their land. For the sake of consistency, we can organise having a forum thread for all staff to easily see what requests currently exist/have been handled already and in the event that there is no response from the player contacted or they continue to not use their claimed land despite requests we can talk as a collective staff group on whether it would be fair per individual case to relinquish the land.

 

To spur on discussion on this, how does this setup sound? What kind of time frame should we be providing players to respond within, and should it be longer/shorter depending on the current stage of the revision? From the responses you've now seen from other players, are there any ideas in there that you would like to incorporate into this design? The proposed design is kind of the bare basics of handling relinquishing claims, so ideas such as using protections to mark land claims or requiring that claims be marked with names of their owners can easily be incorporated into how we deal with land claims as a whole.

 

[Tharine]

Now, given that i've heard only negative individual feedback on the current status of base camping throughout this past revision, I was admittedly quite shocked to see the difference in opinion on whether or not we should be enforcing rules on such an issue.

 

It seems that thoughts on the matter are quite clearly divided, so what do we do when opinions are so evenly split? I think it's time to open up discussion on the reasons as to why we should or shouldn't be enforcing rules on base camping, and see if we can come to some kind of conclusion that works out for the better of the community as a whole.

 

[Tharine]

Onto the questions regarding plugins!

 

Another very interesting difference of opinion in regards to bringing in an enderpearl cooldown plugin. Similar to the topic of base camping, I would like to encourage greater discussion of this one as we cannot make any appropriate decision when the votes are so evenly split.
 

 

It seems that a great majority of respondents are interested in seeing a more hands-on combat logging plugin brought into play, although there are definitely several people who are either undecided or would not like to see such a plugin implemented. Given the lead in votes, I would like to say that we will be going ahead with at the very least trialling one of the plugins previously proposed to handle this, with the idea in mind that if it turns out to be something that is not suited to our community, that we can certainly change it or remove it altogether. I will work on discussing an appropriate config for this with Draykhar when I have the opportunity and we'll see how soon we can get this set up on the upcoming revision.

[Tharine]

It appears that the majority of responses were indeed in favour of implementing a plugin that would allow new players a sort of 'grace period' that would protect them from combat whilst they get settled into the map. Draykhar and I have looked at the config settings for this, and admittedly i'm going to have to get him to remind me what kind of time frame we felt would be most appropriate for this (i'll edit/update this post when he does, if he doesn't comment himself). The plugin we proposed also provides the option of protection upon respawn, which is something we were considering as well in an attempt to combat spawncamping. We assessed this in regards to the spawn of Revision 21 and determined that X seconds would give you enough time to run to the outer area of spawn without being killed, but once you hit the road region using the fastest method possible, you would be free to be killed again. I'd like to see how people feel about this idea, in addition to the other topics that require further discussion. In regards to the first-join PvP protection alone, I would like to say that we will go ahead with this in the upcoming revision, but I would like to hear the opinions of the people that stated they would not like to see this implemented, as I feel that it's important to address what concerns you might have about this plugin.

 

Thoughts are still very mixed on the idea of implementing a duelling plugin for Survival, something which was brought up initially about 6 months ago. There has for a long time existed a thread for discussing this plugin, so if you honestly have an interest in seeing this implemented, or you have reasons as to why you would not like to see it implemented, please make your thoughts known here. At this stage, we cannot implement any kind of duelling plugin as there has been too little discussion of it to progress forward.

[Tharine]

Given the responses for this one, I think it's pretty safe to say we'll be going ahead with bringing on board the Enchantism plugin next revision. There already exists a thread for discussing the plugin here, and i've bumped the thread with some questions to prompt further discussion of this particular plugin now that we've seen that a lot of people are quite interested in it.

 

 

At an immediate glance, it appears that the 'yes' votes for this are the runaway winner of the poll. However, looking much more closely, it can be seen that the combination of 'undecided' and 'no' votes almost stand up to the number of yes votes. I would like to say that we're going ahead with implementing this plugin, but i'm going to be setting up a separate thread for this topic so that I can go into much greater detail about what it will entail and meet the concerns that people might have over this. I know that Draykhar has been handling the villager trading decisions moreso than I, so I will be getting into contact with him if I can and making sure I get my details correct for said post. I'll see if I have the time to get this set up sometime within this week.

[Tharine]

As for the final two pieces of feedback, i'd like to thank everyone for providing their responses for that, even if it seemed a bit at odds with the rest of the questions. Figuring out what times work best for particular people for events has always been a bit of a struggle personally speaking, as i'm based in Australia and as such I live and play the game at quite different times to a lot of our playerbase. As well it was good to see what kind of statistics we had from Survival players in what MCPublic services they make use of. For continuity, here are the screenshots of the responses for those two questions:

 

I'd like to thank everyone that participated in the poll for providing their input on issues that pertain to the upcoming revision and what changes we're looking to make in regards to that. As well as continuing the discussion of the more contentious results we've found, i'd like to hear feedback on how we can better our methods of gathering input from players, as this is the first time i've constructed something like this and I already know of a few ways that I could have written this up better.

[TornadoHorse]

This must have taken quite a while... Great work, Tharine! :D I won't comment on everything, but here are my opinions on a few of the topics.

 

I think land claims are handled pretty well at the moment, and I haven't seen any circumstances where there should need to be any change. There was an incident where the player who had their land claimed over was unsure of what was going on as it seemed it wasn't clearly explained to them by a member of staff, so maybe this could be worked on in the future? Apart from that, I believe that the current request system works very well.

 

The base camping results are split directly down the middle because it's the base campers vs. those being camped. Basically, people need to grow up and realise when they're overstepping the line. It's true that base camping can occasionally encourage PvP, but in this past revision it has been the case that players have been base camping just to annoy and frustrate another player. We shouldn't be wasting staff time with petty things like this. Players need to be more mature. If it gets to the point where a staff member has to get involved, I think it should be after about 5-10 minutes of camping. Punishments would always start with a warning, and could in extreme circumstances end up with a ban.

 

Enderpearl cooldown also received a split response. Again I believe this is players who use pearls to escape fights vs. players who use them to chase down others. I am in favour for this to be implemented, just a 2-3 second cooldown. It would stop players from spamming pearls to get away from a fight, but still allow you to evade fights if you use them well enough. It would eliminate glitching, although admittedly it hasn't been a problem in the recent revision.

 

Logging in combat has always been a problem, there is no doubt about that. I would be happy to see a plugin implemented, however I can think of a few issues with it that I think should be considered. The biggest problem I can see is lagging out in the middle of a fight. I am probably a little biased about this as I have very bad lag issues, but I don't think it would be fair if a player lagged out in what would have been a fair fight. Another issue would be being hit by a friend (or anyone really) just as you log out without realising, and you lose everything you had on you. This is something that can't really be avoided with a combat logging plugin, but would be a downside.

 

I think having a first-join protection timer would be a great idea. I think 1 hour would be a good amount of time to get people settled without them abusing their protected time. I think that they should be able to terminate their protection with a command. I was going to suggest that their protection be broken if they try to attack someone, however this has it's flaws. For example, the player may not know that it would be terminated if they attack people. I do not think that players need any sort of PvP protection for every respawn. I haven't seen spawn camping be a problem for many revisions, and there are ways that the player can stop it from happening, i.e. leaving spawn a different way.

Edited July 14, 2013 by TornadoHorse

[Draykhar]

Spoiler! Do NOT click if you do not want the RebalanceVillagers plugin specifics told to you!

 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eifx7f22uhwb3tw/t54vXdSJrA

 

This link contains the configuration files for RebalanceVillagers. I've left out one portion that isn't finished, but this is the majority of it. Enjoy, and please bring any concerns you have with it up!

[EeHee2000]

Spoiler! Do NOT click if you do not want the RebalanceVillagers plugin specifics told to you!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eifx7f22uhwb3tw/t54vXdSJrA

This link contains the configuration files for RebalanceVillagers. I've left out one portion that isn't finished, but this is the majority of it. Enjoy, and please bring any concerns you have with it up!

I took a good long look at this, and I'm pretty happy with the useful little perks to it! I'm going to love the new configurations for stacked items and values. This was also written up pretty well - I applaud you on that. I'd love to see this added sometime soon, if it isn't already implemented.