Ideas for Farming:

-Make certain crops grow far better at different times in the year so that not every crop is profitable at once? This might encourage people to mix up what they are growing in their fields and could give some more variety to people’s diets.

-Reduce the amount of wheat gained per plant down to 1 when using a hoe. This means that hoes only exist to be faster and easier than breaking crops by hand and do not improve production so much that everybody is sitting on massive stocks of hay all the time. Perhaps the increased wheat yield could be given back to players who take some kind of farming skill or profession (If skills/professions are to be added back in 7.0).

-Caskets could be added back into the game when diamond hoes are used to farm crops. This would give people a reason to use diamond hoes, which improves the value of diamonds.

-Silly little events could happen while farming just like how silly little events happened when chopping trees back in Nexus (Remember the Pomegrenades? That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about). If done correctly this will make farming more interersting and enjoyable.

Ideas for Animal Breeding:

-Remove the cap on how many animals you can breed per restart, and replace it with a 75% failure rate on animal breeding. This both allows dedicated players to produce more meat if they have the time and forces you have to use more crops in order to breed animals, which could make meat more costly (due to it taking more resources to make meat), and more plentiful (because people can make more meat over an extended period of time).

-If a 75% failure rate seems to strange, perhaps a custom crafting recipe for “Animal Feed” could be added to the game. This “Animal Feed” has a 100% chance of producing a baby when two animals are bred with it, but costs a lot of farm produce to craft. (Carrots, potatoes, hay bales, etc. could all be crafted into this Animal Feed in whatever crafting recipe seems fitting).

-Special items could be dropped by animals which could then be used in custom crafting recipes to create all sorts of fun things.

-Eggs, Milk, Feathers, and Leather could be used in more recipes in order to give them more value (See: Cooking)

Ideas for Cooking:

-Custom crafting recipes galore, all of which unique in some way

-Just like how food provides basic buffs in most MMOs, LOTC’s custom food recipes could provide speed, jump boost, haste, and night vision when used in certain permitted areas. This makes sure that bakers will have more to do and more to sell. (Note: Foods providing speed buffs and jump boost should only work on roads, Foods providing haste should only work in mines and the Resource Isles.)

-Just like how Berserker axes are different from Iron Swords yet still more or less their equal, certain foods could have similar mechanics. For example, a certain custom food could give metric tons of hunger and saturation yet blind you for 20 seconds after eating it, or a certain potato could heal you up to full health yet remove all of your hunger and saturation so you are almost starving.

@Treshure @Man of Respect  it’s time to get to work fellas

TLDR: certain features you've taken for granted will disappear. Worlds will break. Everything will take time and cost money

• 1.13 Spigot status is still officially in "development" status but is getting more stable. We might try to update on this map, although its just as likely we won't / have a temp map. Either way expect stuff in the current world to break when we officially make the switch. Break badly ?
• Despite this md5 is a genius and a diligent Spigot release scheme has made most of our off-the-shelf plugins immediately functional in 1.13
• HawkEye, our block logging plugin, is officially discontinued in 1.13. Because the logging is so closely related to the names of materials this one will very likely no longer work properly. This means we have to switch to the only option left available: CoreProtect. This will cause a lot of feature loss and a very big work effort to get the transition going, and can be considered the major holdup. The alternative is to do away with block logging, but suffice to say the GMs don't trust you guys ?
• NoCheatPlus is discontinued and likely not functional with the 1.13 protocol. I doubt this will upset anybody
• ArcheCore works, but we might turn off seasons altogether for 1.13
• Our version of WorldEdit is mostly okay but important people up in the coding community have recommended against its usage. What we end up doing here is mostly a judgment call, but the choices are stability (less world corruption chance) vs speed (ability to do calculations without upsetting the main game loop). Regardless of which option is chosen we might have to ask people to use large WE operations sparingly or during server valley hours.
• NPCs have been very difficult to make compatible but Tofuus has been giving it his best efforts and succeeded.
• Most smaller plugins should work fine except when they do fancy/stupid stuff that calls the Minecraft code directly.
• Our disguise plugin has gone premium in 1.13 and might not be available. This breaks mob Hunting and the ETs ability to be a minecraft mob.

Obelisk gets to be in a category all of its own:

• Most Obelisk modules should work out of the box
• Data conversion is really difficult for Obelisk modules because things are encoded in Base-64 for reasons beyond my comprehension. This makes it even more likely we will just move to a temp map when this 1.13 stuff is done.
• Our chat plugin named RPEngine is the largest issue as it is utterly chaotic and not maintainable. To prevent future dev suicide urges we will likely use this opportunity to switch it out for an off-the-shelf plugin like VentureChat. However, you can expect a lot of feature loss to occur from this, for example the continuity feature or the mumbled speech through walls.

So I decided to make this thread so people could discuss these things and develop ideas for LOTC that look forwards towards the future instead of backwards into the past. Just because Nexus has been removed permanently doesn’t mean we cannot add back the few elements of Nexus that people liked along with newer ideas to create something that works for everyone.

So, what are your suggestions?

Will Nexus Come Back?

Short Answer: No

Long Answer: There's been an argument going on in status updates for several days/weeks now by a few dedicated individuals who want to see some features of Nexus reintroduced. In a nutshell these are all advocates for a mechanically feature-rich Roleplay Server as opposed to the feature-light philosophy that the Dev Team has committed to in Atlas. Certainly, with the stagnation that always comes when maps pass the halfway mark of their lifetime it is natural that people just want " more things to do". There's also been a distinct lull in staff proactive-ness which many people blame many different causes for, further reinforcing the stagnation. Indeed, then, any system, even one as grindy and antithetical to roleplay as Nexus might seem like a welcome diversion from the monotony.

So why aren't we just "reactivating" the plugin? Maybe bring it back temporarily while we wait for 7.0? Why don't we just take SOME features which SOME people might have liked and release Nexus-lite? The reasons for this are many, but there's 4 I'd like to discuss off-the-cuff with you all today.

Reason 0: Roleplay IS the content

I really can't put it any easier than this. At the end of the day, this IS a roleplay server. Content plugins such as the Magic Plugin and the Skills Plugin have been pitched in Aegis and Asulon as a way in which Roleplay can be guided and enhanced. However, this is no longer Aegis. LotC has grown far beyond anything that could be encompassed by a mechanical plugin. We have a massive history, endless lore, and an amount of playstyles equal to the amount of players we have on this server. Every single one of you has their own unique way in which they enjoy LotC. And your only limitation to this enjoyment is your imagination (and the server rules!!).

Nexus, on the other hand, is a mechanical plugin governed by global rules and hard limitations. It's a plugin that tells you what you can't and cannot do. And in order to  make a plugin function it needs rules which are universally valid. This runs amok with the way a lot of people choose to enjoy this game. Not everybody falls neatly within the context of Blacksmith or Stonemason or Mage. In fact almost nobody does. To force people to pick such "professions" kills a lot of the magic of LotC (the metaphorical kind, not evocation). Nexus is a  lot like a vending machine were people need to chuck in coins (in the form of grind) in neatly-defined slots in order for the candy to pop out. This experience takes away from what is most important on this server: To tell a story, and to share an experience with other people.

In more recent plugins, I've opted for a much lighter experience where centralization is key. Hunting and Caravans are both plugins that are relatively light and force people to come together in the same space in order to enjoy it. For better or worse, this have let to people meeting each other in a way they wouldn't have before. The grind, furthermore, is not mandatory as Minas are not strictly necessary to gain a PvP advantage. While you might have your qualms with the plugins, they are at the very least unobstructive to the main attraction on this server, which is Roleplay.

Reason 1: The Inescapable Cycle

Anybody that's been lurking feedback threads as long as I have knows there's a cycle the forums go through. A feature is introduced, and the people who hate it take to the forums and ask for its removal. The feature is then amended, but for the really discontent people this isn't enough, so eventually whatever was the issue gets removed. Then the people who actually liked the feature want it to go back the way it was, and so the cycle continues. Limited Creative is the best recent example, but similar things can be seen in the never-ending "Remove Freebuild" vs. "Bring Back Freebuild" discussion that starts with every new map. More vs Less Nations is also popular, when any removed Nation will take to the forums and demand the criteria for nationhood be revised, which will inevitably only lead to a surplus of nations requiring the tightening of the rules once more.

Should Nexus be brought back in any form, it will be greeted by the same people who hated it before and still do now. Although many people consider the Energy System an improvement, there were just as many who vehemently oppose any kind of resource gating on a Roleplay server. There's also dedicated Lore Keepers who were against the conflicts of the mechanical nature of the plugin against the free creativity of lore. There were a lot of discontents. Nexus was a massive project and it wasn't discarded "just because". It in fact took months of (ultimately futile) tweaks and rebalancing, and subsequent criticism on these measures, before the plug was finally pulled on the project. People who liked Nexus probably never saw the forum as much as I did in those days, but you will just have to trust me that the Remove Nexus camp was large, and they weren't the friendliest or most reasonable of chaps.

Reason 2: Time Investment

Big projects require a time investment much longer than pretty much any other team's project. Nexus, for example, would require no less than a year of coding up to a release, followed by at least 6 months of heavy rebalancing of the various features, and a lifetime of light tweaking and rebelancing as the community shifts and evolves. This is a huge time investment. Even just "reactivating" Nexus won't just work out of the box. The codebase of LotC has since changed to be completely incompatible, and Nexus had become a very unstable beast to begin with. Just getting to the point we left off would take a large amount of work. And this is the Nexus that so many people hated to begin with. To actually begin improving the system beyond its foundations to a point where it will be welcomed by the majority will take a lot of planning. Planning which will likely require multiple teams to work together and give their opinions, but only a single or duo of coders to actually do all of the heavy lifting.

I like to think in similar terms whenever someone comes to me with a "Magic Plugin". I know that coding such a thing, given the amount of highly divergent lore we have, would be an absolute mammoth of a task. There's been a lot of people in the past that have wanted to code such a thing, but I just know they won't have the willpower to push through a hesitant community for the better part of a year. It's in fact an arduous journey a coder will have to go through to make a fully completed Magic Plugin. It's going to take a really special person to pull it off.

Reason 3: Opportunity Cost

Devs don't just code and produce content plugins for the community to enjoy. Our task list is expansive and any commitment to one task means less time to spend on the other. If nothing else, the day-to-day maintenance, bug-fixing and support queries make up a sizable chunk of work. And we're a small team. Our caurrent team has individuals such as Seventh and Wrynn who can focus on smaller content plugins, but the main crew is either inactive (such as myself and 501) or focusing on more important things such as updating to Minecraft 1.13 (Tofuus) or facilitating functional tools for an increasingly complicated staff roster (Kowaman).

Without a doubt there will be people who (rightly) point out I should just quit if I am inactive. And that's fair. However a large amount of this server runs on code I've written so it's likely better for all of you if I stick around just in case things get out of hand.  Beyond that my time is my own to spend how I'd like, and right now I am just not too inspired to launch any large content updates for LotC. However, I did release smaller content updates that I believe worthwhile without obstructing RP (Hunter, Caravans) and pushed work on things I believe in such as the application and voting overhaul.

In Conclusion

I wrote a lot, so thank you if you actually chose to read through it all. I didn't go back and edit because I want this to be a honest, from-the-heart discussion where we don't diss each other or point fingers or act like we know better than everyone else. So to conclude I invite you to pitch in your own thoughts about this server and how you interact with the content plugins in it. Which ones you enjoy, which ones you'd like to see, and which ones you can live without. Also let me know how Nexus has affected your roleplay and how the way you roleplay has changed after it, if at all.

Hugs and kisses,

Sporadic.

When I made the moronic decision to rejoin the LotC tech team the title of my application was "remove nexus". Indeed, I think undoing the monstrosity that I had helped create was the least I could do to absolve myself of past sins. Nevertheless, even if Nexus were purged from the server, the problems that we once tried to solve still exist.

Thus came the proposal for Native, first called NativeSkills but more recently Project Native. I envisioned it both as a profession system as a guiding philosophy for all future plugins. With Native, we would take all of the parts of Nexus people liked (custom foods, drinks, click-and-go workstations, RP items, weapon variety) and strip all of the content that people disliked (grinding, endless craft times, OP PvP gear, deleting core vanilla features such as 3x3 crafting).

Furthermore, we would commence development but for the grace of a few core rules that I have come to identify as tantamount over my years of experience here on LotC:

• Release content focused on centralization.
• Don't take options form players, but reward the things players do that help the RP on the server.
• Don't restrict vanilla minecraft, but rather add on top it.
• Don't produce content that incentivizes or forces long periods of grinding over roleplaying.
• Make content that is true to Minecraft, but include the lore that makes LotC special wherever possible.

The philosophy is simple, but the execution is not. The resulting system was far more complex than Nexus could ever be. And make no mistake, Nexus was complicated to code. And the only reason it was even doable by a few volunteer coders in their free time was because we could do exactly those things players did not like... because it saved us time in the long run. But of course, this only served to remind us

Nexus was as much Telanir's creation as mine. Alas, now Max is a full-time "Chairman" that hasn't written code for years, and I'm an old ******* man who can't be seen hanging around with you kids anymore. I've written too ambitious for an amazing profession system once, but truth be told unless we Kickstarter it there's no way to find anyone with the skills and time allocation to really knock it out of the park.

But as they say: Perfect is the enemy of good. I've shelved about half the ideas and opted to keep it simple. There are a few smaller, simpler plugins that don't take as much time from me, but are still going to be fun and engaging for you (hopefully). And, of course, they will keep to the rules I've posted above so you will never see the like of Nexus encroaching on LotC again.

The Llama Caravan plugin is the first step in a Patch 6.2 you will soon see launched. Thanks to everyone's testing and feedback, I'm now on the path of creating a basic Pet Protection plugin that will cure Llama autism (for the most part, since a lot of their retardation is just innate to Minecraft). We will then release as many as three trade routes, each of them starting at CT but ending somewhere else, and cycle through them one week at a time. This measure will make sure that our desire for centralization is met, as there will only ever be one profitable road to venture. This forces people to meet each other, maximizing the chance of RP.

The second measure is the sparsely revealed HuntLite plugin. Dredging through the code of the late Teegah we've worked it into a spawning algorithm that doesn't bog down the server and ensures the same degree of centralization we've wanted from other plugins. Native-Hunting will randomly activate one of 9 areas per day, allowing you to fight one of 9 random mobs (and one secret one ;). These mobs are area-bound and their spawning is such that lag factories aka mob grinding caves will be a thing of the past. Some of these mobs you may already know from tried and true Lord of the Craft lore.

As a little spoiler, here's a page from our bestiary:

But don't worry, lore-haters, because the strongest mob of all is the dreaded Unlorethy, which is sure to pose the greatest challenge to aspiring Hunters yet, and it ALWAYS calls PvP default. I dare you to try and shelf him ?

Expect to see these critters soon, either in the areas designated by them (There will be a guide at Cloud Temple to show you the way), or within the hands of the Event Team, which will be able to spawn these beasts to spice up your Event Experience.

The third measure is an expansion of our Cloud Temple stores. Because let's face it, for Minas coming in there needs to be Minas going out. I've spoiled a little about this before, but I will spoil some of it again, because I think it will be interesting.

As I've mentioned I've worked really hard to turn some of our old plugins into Attributes. These Attributes you may have seen in the Persona menu before, governing stats such as how many Soulstone slots you have. Now, however, almost EVERYTHING is an attribute, and you can boost all of these

For example, new players get a temporary -80% Hunger attribute, but for the right price your Persona can get a permanent one by consuming an Elixir. More of the studious type? I've revamped the Soulstone plugin so that each of your Personas can have a red soulstone pillar, as long as you first study one of the Tomes that keep this hidden knowledge. Pet protection? More knowledge on animal husbandry can be gained from studying one of our books. Knockouts lasting too short, another Elixir will give your comrades extra time to revive you.

As with the Shop Of Wonders, there will again be oodles of new equipment coming through the CT by foreign Llama caravans. As always, we try to keep away from things that completely upset the balance of PvP, such as diamond armor. Regardless, despite this requirement we hope you will find some use of the items for sale, and feel like your Minas-hoarding ways have not been in vain. Most of all, we want you to know that your VOTING has not been in vain. Of course, you are still fully encouraged to Buy and Sell RP items with your money, as these are the items that truly make Lord of the Craft what it is.

The fourth measure... well, let's not give away too much already. After all, anticipation is half the fun.

Hugs and Kisses,
- Awe

PS I know nobody cares but the forums now include emojis. Native was going to allow emojis into OOC chat too but somehow nobody else on the dev team was excited

?

What I'm saying is you better keep hitting that motherfucking vote button.

BUT all this vote-whoring is going to feel cheap in due time if not already. There should be other ways to make Minas. Of course, you can make your own shop and sell items from the resource islands, OR sell a batch of RP items renamed by your favorite pocket GM. But in the end this can only net you other people's voting money. There is no real source of income beyond that.

Either way, any Minas-making method should take the following very important factors into account:

1. Any Minas source should be accompanied by a Minas sink so that Minas has an inherent value
2. Any Minas source should not lead to excessive grinding as it has in past maps.

Let's investigate both points.

1) is basic economics. In real life, any currency is backed by a central bank which guarantees its value. In LotC, Admins need to back up the Minas which items which have value. We need to sell items that players want, so that indirectly players want Minas. This is a very important point. Nobody is going to sell their cool Lore-Items or RP artifacts for a worthless currency. And if they dont do this, there is no economy.

However, guaranteeing value is not as easy as you think. Pretty much everything that is currently being sold at Cloud Temple, someone has come to me in discord/on forums/ingame and said "but what if instead... you just give us that item for free.". No exceptions. If not for free then for almost-free, for various arguments which generally boil down to the same. Either way I generally have to deny the request for the above reason.

PvP items are the same. Most things in the Shop Of Wonders, people have said it would "destroy PvP". Most of these claims have been unfounded. However, it illustrates the difficulty in selling high-end items players want, because many people will riot if we sell anything that upsets the balance of PvP.

Lore items, lastly, are very hard to attach value to. People who write (artifact) lore will generally never attach a true material cost to their lore. Of course, many lore requires ingredients (e.g. symbols), but these ingredients are usually only collected by the lore-holder themselves so they don't encourage a supply/demand chain which would stimulate an economy.

2) is what the Remove Nexus Club is all about. It's very simple. We learned from past mistakes. In essence we want to make sure that people don't  spend hours in the mineworld or resource island to grind stuff to sell to Admin shops (hence, we don't have admin shops). We dont want people building giant underground mob farms which lag our server (hence, no Minas from mobs). And we don't want people to sit in front of their array of workbenches in the middle of nowhere (hence, no Nexus).

Ideally, the way to make Minas is through RP, but there is no mechanical way to guarantee this. We can only encourage you to sell RP items, start a shop, or play a travelling merchant, but most people simply won't because there's no real incentive to. The perogative for this one is with the players, not with us staff. So please go ahead and make it happen.

So what are we actually doing?

Two new money-making plugins are coming down the tubes. One of them I can discuss today because it is very straightforward: It's a new Trade Route plugin.  It works as follows:

• Point 1 sells item A cheaply and buys item B highly. Point 2 sells item B cheaply and buys item A highly.
• Players sell item A at point 1, travel across the road to point 2, sell item A, buy B, and return.
• The items in question are unstackable, highly volatile, cannot be teleported with or placed in any chests.
• The player will need to transport the items using a Llama caravan.
• The items are lost on death, exposing the trading player to significant risk.

The main attraction for using this kind of plugin is that it forces people to "grind" by walking up and down the main road, which many players hope to be the central point for all kinds of RP to occur. Hopefully we can encourage people to come here more often, now. The main road might attract highwaymen which are looking to intercept trading players. This in turns leads to guards and mercenaries which in turn apprehend the highwaymen. And, if we are lucky, the resulting ado and commotion leads to the popping up of various roadside taverns and shops which are drawn to the new source of activity.

Additionally, we're releasing new items for sale. In the face of our restrictions, we've settled on a series of Elixirs: one-time drinkable potions which boost a Persona's statistic for the rest of the map. They can only be used once per Persona and give a variety of benefits, examples of these are listed below:

• Taking less damage from mobs
• Dealing more damage TO mobs
• reduced soulstone cooldown
• Slower hunger increase
• Higher "Bleedout Time", the time it takes for a Knocked Out player to die.
• Amount of players that can use your Red Soulstone pillar.
• And more...

And there you have it. There's other things in the tubes that I don't want to divulge on just yet, but feel free to comment on what's been revealed so far, and what you think of our development philosophy.

On vanilla Minecraft PvP combat

This is my ramblings and thoughts while working on what I believe is the top priority for LotC right now: Remove Nexus.

Good news for the PvP purists: 6.0 launch is very likely going to look like a vanilla Fringe environment.

This is not so much an executive decision made by the Techs or Admins as it is a necessity due to the massive time constraints we've been exposed to. I've done my best, but ultimately I am only one volunteer and I do have a life outside of LotC (hard to believe I know). Kowaman has quit and 501 has become occupied with other things, leaving me to hold the fort just as in the good old days. So what started as a lot of exciting ideas I had during the tech team meetings of yore has turned into maximum damage control mode to get the Nexus-less systems up to snuff.

But all right enough rep-farming let's talk about the issues that have generated probably the most tech-related feedback since my return: Minecraft PvP.

Privately I've done a lot of math on this subject and took into account all the effects of percentages and how 1.9 armor calculations drastically changed the balance of a lot of things. I'll spare you the details but here's some important takeaways I've learned:

• Armor toughness caused total damage affect the amount of armor reduction.
• Every extra point of damage added had a greater effect than the damage point before it. As a result, weapon percentages became exponentially good.
• The fact that extra percentages had greater effects made grinding much more rewarding, creating a huge gap between grinders and non-grinders.
• On diamond armor, these effects are up to 50% more pronounced

Basically, Nexus had always been poorly balanced, but the 1.9 armor really pushed it over the edge. Grinding was OP. Furthermore, Nexus had tried to balance axes and make them viable in PvP for RP variety. Then Mojang tried to do the same thing with swing timers and Axes got double-buffed. Luckily techs removed attack speed since then, but of course the other issues remained.

With 6.0 it's more or less back to the drawing board. Trust in the techs has been very low for a variety of reasons which I shall also not get into but as we get back into swing we hope to restore the community's faith in our team. I don't believe a minimal vanilla pvp setup is our end game; the lore of LotC is too far advanced for that, and we want to implement mechanical representations of things people have achieved through character development. After all, this has been sorely missing in a grind-based achievement system: Too often were people good at something in-RP, but not mechanically, and vice-versa.

The last time I was seriously involved in a skill system was 1.7. Since then the game has progressed a lot and there is a lot more features for us to code and integrate into the RP experience.  A lot of this, for better or worse, has affected combat, often in ways we didn't intend. As 6.0 progresses, we want to see how exactly people perceive these combat features and how they feel these fit into a roleplay server, if at all. We must look at the lore side of things as well, as very often things that are "accepted" in lore would be blatantly overpowered if implemented mechanically. Past discussions on e.g, the Necrolye, Spectre and Construct race have definitely proven this.

This is something that is going to take a very long time. I hope, given that I continue to have time to dedicate to you all, to be able to discuss the specifics of this in the near future.

But for now just enjoy the prospect of diamond-free, enchant-free, Nexus-free roleplay. I'll admit I am very skeptical about this kind of setup and the possible precedent that this baseline might set for future updates, so the best thing for you all to do is to be excellent to each other and prove me wrong.

On food expiration and seasons

This is my ramblings and thoughts while working on what I believe is the top priority for LotC right now: Remove Nexus.

Food expiration has never been a popular feature. It is painful for players to have to collect food every 2 days and confusing as well as annoying for new players. In order to make it less painful, various features such as salt, coolboxes and most recently /bread was added. That last one, /bread, is so convenient it completely negates expirations and, in fact, the need to gather food at all.

So why even have food expirations?

Telanir set out around 4.0 to have a way to make farming useful. For example, learning magic is cool and a whole team is dedicated to making it special. But being a farmer is being a nobody. Nobody really needs other people to get food for them.

So, on the one hand, the farmer is a staple for medieval RP and people that choose to play one should feel rewarded in RP.

On the other, not having food is so annoying it kills RP for the people being hungry.

Right now food expirations don't work, but I'm wondering if they even could work? Right now here's some of the paths to take post-Nexus:

• Make food gathering vanilla. It would be easy and everybody could do it. We could make farmer useful by creating a few "special" crops which have other purposes.
  Pros: Easy for newbies, vanilla, simple. Cons: Have to come up with new ways to make farming useful (generally this is done through PvP benefits which people also don't like)
• Tie expiration dates to the Seasons mechanic. Food expiration would be greatly increased to be less annoying, but still expire every IRL week so that every RP "year" farmest must harvest their crops to feed people during the winter.
  Pros: Immersive. Ties in with seasons and winter which are popular mechanics. Cons: You will need to learn about the LotC calendar and timekeeping.
• Don't have expirations, but restrict the amount of food that can be harvested by non-farmers.
  Pros: mechanically simple. Very easy to understand. No burden of learning plugins. Cons: Hard for devs to balance. Hard for players to get food which will disadvantage newbies and less active players.

I might do more of these. let me know what you think.

On rebuilding the core plugins of LotC

This is my ramblings and thoughts while working on what I believe is the top priority for LotC right now: Remove Nexus.

This one is going to be very technical and honestly is just there for me to go on tangents, for you to realize the absurd scale of work that goes into reworking plugins, and for maybe that 1 dude out there that is interested in code stuff.

People often have the (very justified) question why Removing Nexus is so difficult. Why not just, like, delete the jar file from the server, reboot, and you're done. The short answer to this is "it's complicated". The long answer is going to be given here.

around mid-Anthos, people still believed the Skill Plugin and Magic Plugin, which had been promised by every single Tech ever and delivered by none of them, were the obvious next step for LotC. As the newest Senior Technician, I was not privy to the marvels that went on in Maxim's workshop, but I was budding to get some major work done. So I set out to build my own plugin.

This plugin ended up being a cornerstone of the LotC pluginbase. However, nobody outside of the Dev Team knows that it exists, what it does or even what its name is. The reason for this I didn't like making promises, and I still don't. The plugin does its job and does its job well, but I never advertised it the way some previous techs tried to sell their work, as they had managed to dissappoint many people this way and caused their successors to be held responsible.

The issue being that this cornerstone plugin does a lot of the things that are often attributed to "Nexus". And while a lot of these features need removing to satisfy the players, the code is inextricably woven in with a lot of vital features which cannot be removed or LoTC collapses.

Another issue we have right now is the way we handle custom items. Custom items, of course, have become REALLY important on LotC. People want their lore items that are renamed and redescribed, with custom bells and whistles and want to be able to properly buy, sell and save these items without them getting mixed up with "vanilla items". Nobody wants to lose their lore artifact item because Minecraft thought it was actually a block and tried to place it. The answer to "why can't you just remove everything and revert to 3.0 plugins?" is always "custom items": The old plugins of 3.0 do not work with the Item Metas (name, description, potion effects, etc) that LotC is a huge user of for 99% of its roleplay item representations.

A lot of what me and 501warhead are doing right now is the most boring of boring stuff to end users. Restructuring databases, reconsidering the way personas are loaded at start-up, modernizing old hacks we used which have become outdated and ugly for newer versions of Minecraft. We are also reworking how custom items are handled in a cleaner way which is made possible due to modern Bukkit (Spigot) features.

These things, however, are sufficiently large-scale that they cannot be implemented without an entire item wipe, which is why we are waiting until 6.0 to launch this new core system. Getting it ready in time is going to be a stretch goal- I've only returned to the Tech Team for a few months and it took many weeks to even get the ball rolling- but it is something that is very important to get done in time.

Thank you if you somehow managed to read all of that. The work continues.

On bonuses and the races that get them

This is my ramblings and thoughts while working on what I believe is the top priority for LotC right now: Remove Nexus.

When we announced racial bonuses in '14 the thread exploded. 300 posts or something and a wide array of complaints. Making racial bonuses everyone is enthushiastic about is impossible: Everyone will always want something different. Racial bonuses were of course implemented initially to give each race a distinct "profile" based on lore. We wanted people to feel like encountering an Elf would "feel" different than encountering an Orc, for example.

This, however, came at a heavy cost many players were not okay with. And as such, we should not be okay with them either.

PvP race bonuses in "Nexus" have proven to be a major source of anger towards the Devs. Their necessity should be reevaluated. While creating distinct identity for the races is important, right now I think this can be done only through racial +xp% bonuses (or at least, a bonus of that nature). Hence this option I am exploring for feasibility (and as always, many things are liable to come up between exploration and implementation).

An alternative, oft-suggested by players, is a selectable Persona-based bonus. In short, a pick-your-own-racial-bonus system. Telanir once promised a system "based on the Skyrim skill trees". To me, that seems much too RPG even though it is a great source of character customization. It is important people feel their Persona is unique, but such customizations are best obtained against a backdrop of lore and roleplay. However, because it's something players really like, it is also something that I have been looking into.

Of course, doing away with bonuses altogether is the final option, but in my opinion this is a missed opportunity. At the end of the day, plugins do add a unique factor to LotC which can enhance RP in a way little else can. We try to entice new players to partake in LotC, which is increasingly difficult as the lore expands and the complexity threshold increases. We must not forget that most new players will be veteran minecrafters but very new to Role play, and have no idea about "races" or that the game experience is supposed to differ between them. Thus, sometimes something gaudy, even when the veterans object, is the best way to go forward.

Let me know what you think.

Nexus in a nutshell