[4.0] @danny - Addressing Concerns

[Telanir 6975]

Good evening denizens of the Fringe,

 

 

Many of you are aware of the post that our good old friend Danny has written up, and for those looking for some context, look no further than here.

Because this reply is massive, it made more sense to put it on a new post of its own rather than among the swarms of hundreds of other replies.

 

I will be responding to the part directed to the Technical Team in Danny’s post, as I have played a major role in the development and planning of 4.0, but will not touch on those that are more generally directed.

 

This post contains no TL;DR’s, because it is meant to catch you up to what at least I am thinking, and what has been the design goals for 4.0 to my knowledge. So read it thoroughly, and if you do I will reward smart questions with good answers.

 

There are three topics that I want to cover.

Economy:

1. Context and missing goals

2. Material abundance and the crafting bottleneck

3. An economy will add new paths to our roleplay

4. How the crafting bottleneck will likely affect warfare

Regioning

1. Efficiency of plugin managed systems

2. Freedom of construction and destruction

3. Reformations of conquest tactics

Nexus-Core Interfacing

1. Quantity of commands and adverse effects of more content

2. Personalization, simplicity, and ease of use

3. Advantages of a focused design policy

4. Increased effectiveness of moderation

 

 

 

Economy

In response to there shouldn’t be any focus on building a realistic or working economy.

 

I. CONTEXT AND MISSING GOALS

 

I believe that context is very important in this situation, because traditionally, an economy has mostly hampered roleplay. In our current situation restricting the ability of a new player to acquire goodies does not really affect their roleplay experience.However, we need to realize that right now we are developing the professions systems for the server, and this is a fact that is strongly linked to the situation. The professions will provide us with roleplay, but even before I touch on that I must touch on a broader context. It has been mentioned in the post that combat “roleplay” is prevalent at this current time, and this is as a result of there being very little to do otherwise. What does our playerbase not have that is causing them to react in such a way?

 

This is not the situation to ask whether or not the attitude of the community is declining, but rather it is more important to direct our attention to the plugins of our server. With that said, our players are missing goals to strive to, pixels to achieve and goals to reach. The gaming industry is built upon these little achievements, every little goal reached gives us that warm feeling of success inside and as a result you stick around because the next goal is in sight. Visibility of these goals, having them plentiful and numerous, and easily attained, is the business plan of a successful game. In our situation players have already attained all that they could possibly want. Players can have all the diamonds in the world they want, players can flaunt all the equipment and stacked food they can imagine. There is nothing left to acquire—nothing but land. As an ending point for this section until I elaborate further, we need readily available goals and achievements and an economy may be our solution. More details ahead.

 

II. MATERIAL ABUNDANCE AND THE CRAFTING BOTTLENECK

 

Last year in June, after racking my head for days on end I realized an important factor of Minecraft. Limiting the number of ingredients and resources available to players on the server is not going to limit the number of ingredients and resources on the market. The statement is contradictory but it is not any less true, ambitious players will still flood the market with goodies; they will simply take a little longer and encounter less little goldmines that make them happy when they mine. This means that one way or another our market is going to flood with these resources and there is nothing we can do to stop them. There is a certain satisfaction received from mining a tunnel and finding a large outcropping of ore, digging it up and hauling it into your inventory, it’s why people go mining in the first place.

 

The solution lies at a different angle; there is no denying that we will have material abundance so instead place a bottleneck on production and material processing. Yes, players may hoard all the items they want in the world, and if they lose their precious armor they have little to worry about—they have the materials. The difference is that the number of produced goods such as armor and weaponry is limited by a crafting time, and therefore given higher value when traded on the market. When you begin to see differing values in certain items in the market you have the building materials for a working economy, the rest you need to do is implement a growing and consistent interdependence between players on the server.

 

III. AN ECONOMY WILL ADD NEW PATHS TO OUR ROLEPLAY

 

It is very rare that you will go on the market these days in LotC and find people trading goods. You won’t trade some iron armor for some food, you can make that armor yourself, and you need that food for sprint-hopping aimlessly. The one with the armor can harvest that food themselves just as efficiently. In fact, you would rather trade the food for iron ingots instead of armor for flexibility, but that is another thing altogether. As such, effectively, this situation never happened. It hasn’t happened yet that someone would trade crafted goods out of necessity.

 

If you will labor for materials that take time to acquire, you will gain minas, but not everyone has this luxury. However, interaction between players is in fact, what makes online gaming popular, and in particular, roleplay, which cannot by definition exist without interaction. That is why we need a system where players will be interdependent and thrive on the roleplay that will naturally sprout from the aforementioned connectivity. So instead, with the help of an integrated professions system, we introduce an assisted, yet still free economy. One of the prime features of the professions systems, and one of its key jewels, is the ability to stay relevant regardless of what your profession. Leatherworking is commonly associated with poor quality goods; there are few people on the market willing to pay honest coin for leather armor. A resolution of this problem was to introduce a necessity of the next level of armor to use leather padding. This means that to create a diamond chestplate, somewhere along the way you used a leather tunic to craft.

 

Who is involved in this process? It’s possible that along the way you’ve seen a farmer, hunter, miner, blacksmith, and even a leatherworker perform their part in producing the processed item. In honest pursuit of keeping the economy free, you are still able to regardless of your skill in the professions, play every single one of those roles alone. This is simultaneously both what creates a thriving economy, and what a thriving economy produces. Anyone is still able to manufacture and modify any item that is relevant to anything commonly used. There may be 5 or 6 custom items that can only be crafted by specific people, and in interests of keeping the mystery of roleplay and sprinkling the icing on the economic cake, there are also recipes that can be discovered by gathering/harvesting/mining and learned to give access to more custom but not necessarily relevant items. It is worth mentioning that these harvesters have the ability to instead sell these recipes for some good coin.

 

IV. HOW THE CRAFTING BOTTLENECK WILL LIKELY AFFECT WARFARE

 

As I have discussed prior, there is little to achieve and as a result we are witnessing our players finding what sources of entertainment they can. The power to them I say, but the situation should indeed be frightening because we are also witnessing a finite buffer zone between entertainment and simple uncontrolled chaos. Once warfare loses its entertainment value, and there is nothing else to turn to, we will observe an increase troleplay and harassment, which while being the lowest of lows, still do provide some entertainment to our players. Professions may likely save the day, because there will always be room to improve, and there is also a certain satisfaction that can be gained when you willingly grind away skills and see them level up. Grinding is not a focus of the professions, and certainly not a requirement, but it is possible, and people have voiced certain gratitude in being able to have something to do whilst waiting for their friends to log on or find roleplay. The solution now presents itself, as long as the players have these goals to achieve, warfare will become less likely.

 

In fact, the crafting bottleneck may play a key role in diminishing the frequency of conquest-diplomacy. With the gained requirement significance of armoring and weaponry, it becomes difficult to equip and arm armies of people repeatedly. The difficulty is not significant enough for a player not to be able to craft armor to keep them safe at night, but will certainly pose a challenge to those fond of frequent war. Therefore, we may witness a decrease in combat popularity with the arrival of the plugin. As an ending note, I would like to mention that very few wars end with desirable results for both parties, and may involve an unnecessary amount of conflict and drama. When wars become infrequent and have less of a conquest edge to them we will notice an improved atmosphere. The global warming of venom that has fed into our ‘environment’ will take weeks to heal, but eventually consistent stability will settle our shaky foundations.

 

 

Regioning

In response to it is vital that free land is available. Or it’ll be crap.

 

I. EFFICIENCY OF PLUGIN AUTOMATED SYSTEMS

 

Danny is correct in his assertion that land-claim systems have failed us in the past, and when we frequented them later on, we failed to implement them successfully again. You would think that now is the time to leave a dead and broken system in its grave, never to be touched again. The problem I see is that this dead and broken system was never actually properly constructed; it was never really alive in the first place. It was inefficient, and was controlled by human beings that operated with different sentiments and perspectives. What I have been building up to, is to say that this system that has failed us before failed to be correctly implemented, and there is a correct way.

 

What happens when a group of players pay a tangible, indisputable, hard flat fee, and receive something for it? They expect to have access to what they paid for, forever. If a player paid a massive sum of minas for a plot of land, played for a month and left for half a year, then returning to an unregioned sack of griefing (for ‘inactivity’) you will have a very big, pissed off problem. This is why most moderators would choose to leave them alone; they have neither that much expendable time, nor are willing to face the consequences and backlash. The result is a finite amount of land that is constantly distributed but not refreshed. This is why we need new maps; people claim land, build on land, but never dispose of it. You do eventually receive a map, no matter how massive it is (proportions will not save you from the inevitable), that is completely wasted and irretrievable.

 

Plugins on the other hand, will do the job they were assigned from day 1, they have no schedule they need to meet, and aren’t busy replying to concerned players. They are not afraid of any backlash because that is physically impossible, people can’t blame a GM with certainty for their ‘great loss’ for something that was their fault, which the plugin repeatedly mentioned to them. I assume at this point that very few players are aware of how regions are meant to function, so I will again, provide the context.

 

II. FREEDOM OF CONSTRUCTION AND DESTRUCTION

 

Make no mistake, with the coming of the regioning plugin people are able to build and destroy as they please. However, with this ability, follows a prominent responsibility. What our media team labors to achieve each day may be strengthened by what I believe to be the most powerful recruitment. Our most empowering yet difficult to control media is in fact our own playerbase, because it is our players that reach out to their friends personally, and often that means they will put in the effort to make sure their friends get ample introduction and good support. This can be wielded, and very grateful to this concept I developed a regioning system that can help us not only gain popularity, but essentially, do what the main task is, make sure people got places to build. A claimable, recycling, active regioning system is implemented through a few obvious requirements. The regions that are created at the beginning of the map may be static, but their ownership is in fact, entirely the opposite.

 

Once an eager adventurer has found their preferred habitat, they may quickly craft up a town pillar, and plant it, almost like a flag. This adventurer, with their newly acquired land wields a responsibility. Within 72 hours, they must acquire a certain amount of people (depending on plot size) to become a part of their region. Once they have those people assign their soulstones and officially become a part of the region, you have a nice town that will continuously have the protection refreshed as long as the requirements are met. Only people who have been online in the past 7 days will be counted as part of the population when making a requirement check. As a result, plots are checked on a daily basis, and if a plot suddenly drops below the required amount, the owner is given a week’s warning to get their act together (if plot has been owned less than 3 weeks it is more volatile, and they have 48 hours of warning instead). What happens when the time limit expires and requirements are not met? The protection is disabled and the land is recycled for another eager adventurer to claim.

 

In the event that an unregioned plot is claimed, all ownership of prior citizens is relinquished, the new owner of a plot has complete and final decision as to what happens in that plot. This means that a long unclaimed deserted city can be claimed and recycled into the ground, its’ resources returned into the economy, and a new, active city built over top. Chest protection is also transferred automatically to new plots, if you want safe materials look towards the capitals! If it isn’t claimed at all, then the automatic recycling algorithm will swallow up the town in trees and forestry, and any landscarring will automatically heal. Neat!

 

III. REFORMATIONS OF CONQUEST TACTICS

 

As you have noticed, the system is automatic. This means that there isn’t going to be anyone running around prepared to moderate a region into your control. How does one conquest the regions around them? The answer is actually simpler than you’d think. If the regions around you are unclaimed, send your most trusted advisors as well as emigrate a decent portion of your population to a border territory, and claim it while having the advisor swear allegiance to you. If a region is contested and currently owned, then you have diplomacy at your disposal which, when used properly, can be a truly deadly weapon. Convince the people that living in the region is unsafe, or the leader is not to be trusted. Discredit their leaders and call them out for thievery of the possessions of their own people, and marvel as the population immigrates to your region or simply leaves. Eventually after the plugin realizes the region owner has no people left to live there, it will remove the region protections. At that point the previous owner cannot claim it for another 48 hours, or claim any other territory for 24 hours, and you have plenty of time to seize the territory as your own, to have undisputed control over.

 

How come I have not mentioned the good ‘ol blood and iron tactics? Because if they’ve got walls built around their area, you’re not getting in while those gates are closed mate, trying to roleplay your way through a wall isn’t going to amuse a plugin. The most important thing to note is the reasoning behind restricting conquest of territory. There would no longer be any rules dictating the way you handle your land (other than no landscarring), so therefore you cannot make ‘war rules’ and take someones territory in the event of a victory. All that it takes is for one to look up what these wars cause. Credits to Lago for post: here.

 

 

Nexus-Core Interfacing

In response to aim for a simplistic yet sensible server… don’t over-complicate by turning everything into a GUI.

 

I. QUANTITY OF COMMANDS AND ADVERSE EFFECTS OF MORE CONTENT

 

A simplistic and sensible server is one where you aren’t setting up camp in the Help channel and having a barbecue. This means that you’re spending most of your time in-game, you don’t have a need to constantly check up forums, and you know how to do everything you need in a short amount of time. It is unfortunate to have to burst this bubble and play this card, but we currently have a learning curve that resembles a cliff. This means that once you’ve figured out some basic lore and written an acceptable application, your tenure is hardly over. Now you must learn everything the hard way, you see, speaking from a veteran’s point of view it is very easy for us as staff to overlook these things. We know how to do things; we aren’t the ones asking for help. We are the ones who claim to be too busy to help someone who keeps pestering us for help. This is why instead of us having to claim any of that in the first place; the people who join our server will get to know what's going on immediately. Explaining a tutorial on this post would be irrelevant, the fact is that we will have a simple tutorial that will send you on your merry way, but that is beside the point. We have memorized enough commands to fill entire pages, in fact so much content has been memorized that we forget it the less we use it. But when we do, we have to be rescued by help chat.

 

This is why Nexus interfacing was developed in the first place, to solve the problem of continuous commandeering and new content. It is no secret that our server has an arsenal of dedicated coders who are willing to produce new content, but every time we do we add new commands to be memorized. Nexus-Core quite literally has one command, and that is /me. One of the most important details to note about our new systems is the fact that added recipes don’t need to be memorized to the point where we need a post about it. And even more importantly, the plethora of commands at our disposal unique to LotC as a result of our dedicated development teams, no longer must be memorized either. Even if you believe commands are easier, you cannot argue that there is no learning curve associated with having to memorize new plugin commands. As a direct result of the system there is no learning required in the first place.

 

II. PERSONALIZATION, SIMPLICITY, AND EASE OF USE

 

We live in a generation that has moved on from DOS computing to GUI interfaces and our effectiveness in nearly all aspects of technology has skyrocketed. Why have we suddenly gained so much power and advance so rapidly? Why do we love technology, and play certain games? Apart from generally being an unresponsive black box with bright green text, DOS systems were developed around certain purposes, and used for those purposes. There was no capability for personalization, computers were all the same, you had to memorize how to get somewhere, and memorize which commands did what. People didn’t use them often. With the advent of the GUI and WYSIWYG, it became apparent and almost second nature to customize your computer. Even the simplest things like choosing which programs to download or what picture to have your background set as. They suit our purposes and act as brilliant tools, but the main point here being, computers didn’t become popular until they were truly easy to use and user-friendly.

 

While it may seem trivial, it is actually a detail that is very important, Nexus-Core has a feature that enables users to bookmark and save commands/folders/buttons that they use often. Otherwise, everything is neatly organized into neat folders all around the system that they can get the jist of by highlighting over it and quickly reading a title. You’re not going to find crafting information under “Roleplay Channel Settings”, you’ll know exactly what you’ll find at that quick glance. If you frequently change a setting, you can shift-click it to save it as a bookmark and feel free to use it whenever the time comes. Then you’ll simply type /me or just right-click the Nexus-Interface paper in your last slot (which you can disable). You can very quickly change a lot of information through a rapid series of clicks on the inventory, and in fact many systems in the upcoming 4.0 plugins utilize this to its full potential, and provide a consistency and continuity that provides a safe stability.

 

III. ADVANTAGES OF A FOCUSED DESIGN POLICY

 

As I have just mentioned, consistency provides our environment with a sense of stability. With 4.0 you won’t wake up one morning and expect for regioning to suddenly operate on commands, or a completely changed interface. Having our developers focus on programming around including this system means that you will know what to expect when presented with a GUI menu. The /me menu is not the only thing that utilizes Nexus interfacing, but also regioning as well. Clicking on a town pillar will present you with a screen that gives you no commands to memorize, but just quick and efficient click-work.

 

IV. INCREASED EFFECTIVENESS OF MODERATION

 

Nexus-Core's principles also include easing the job of moderators significantly. It covers the range from regioning, to landscarring, to item-naming and also personal moderation. There are quite literally hundreds of commands that a GM must memorize upon initiation to be considered useful. Now wouldn’t it make sense that the GM is busy helping from day one and not necessarily require tutorials on how to modify every little bit of a player that needs help? GM’s are provided with powertools, player moderation interfaces, multi-command and mass-targeting systems, things that can make a day’s work only an hour or two. Now that’s efficiency!

 

 

This post should describe most of the intricacies that you desired to know, but if you comment make sure you have read the entire post. Sorry folks, no TL;DR’s to be found here.

 

[Wyvernbane 252]

First

[jamesb 218]

first  Erhm, second.

[Destinator 137]

Thanks for this post - very informative and appreciated.

 

Edit: I read the whole thing.

[ACanadianCraft (Nate) 682]

Who actually reads the whole thing?
I don't.

[Telanir 6975]

 

Who actually reads the whole thing?

I don't.

 

 

The beauty of a format is that you can pick and choose to read what you feel concerns you.

 

If you want to know something? Come back to this post later, it wont run away from you. ^-^

Because in fact, I don't expect you to read the whole thing, but I appreciate those who do.

[Stephensj 327]

 Players can have all the diamonds in the world they want

+1

[Thatpyrodude 2008]

And communism has reached LoTC

[Stump 709]

Firestar holds the post up high, cheering for herself. She had done it; this was a victory to be celebrated. "Bring out the balloons and the cake!" Firestar had shouted- For today, she had read the entire of Telanir's post. Along with this, she had finished Danny's post the night before, and about 9-10 pages of replies. Was Firestar the one true god? Maybe. Or possibly she just reads far too much. This would be decided later.

Firestar was done reading for now.


Edit: In all seriousness, this was great read, and only makes me more excited 'bout 4.0. So it better go well, Telanir! I'm cheering for smooth sailing and good times ahead!
I'm also slightly eager to see what Danny has to say about this. I'm fairly sure this clears up everything though.
 

[Heff 2460]

And communism has reached LoTC

Wat

[Eleatic 1033]

And communism has reached LoTC

are the rp defaulters the bourgeois

[Ventusyr 233]

I read the whole thing.

 

I'll admit, I felt quite nervous about the land regions and the GUI system. This eased my worries, however. Very informative and I'm excited to see how things'll be with all of these plugins implemented!

[Wolf Druid Ouity 1461]

We appreciate that you took the time and effort to spell everything out with your reasoning.Thank you for clarifying all of this. ^_^

[Helbolt 129]

Wow, this sounds amazing.

 

I read it all, very slowly so as to soak in every word.  Mainly because I wanted to find tidbits that hadn't been mentioned before, and I did.

[Aislin 4354]

Note: I did not read the whole thing, but I read the land part. I skimmed the rest. **** that.

 

In regards to land, there are a couple of problems I foresee with an automated system. Firstly, with the new war rules it will be nigh impossible to disrupt claims on land. A lack of forced conquest combined with time limits on raids (e.g. 1 raid a day on a settlement) will allow groups of players to simply ignore any form of raid or invasion upon their settlement (by simply logging off during that one raid a day), meaning they can stay there forever even if the rest of the server is trying to claim the land. If raid rules were to be removed, this would not be an issue at all and the land-claim system would probably work fine.

 

However, with no-PvP areas being present, any group that doesn't want to lose their land can simply toggle the PvP flag on their region off. Then what? Supporters of the no-PvP areas claim that groups wouldn't be able to get into these areas regardless, but it's very easy to use cloak and dagger tactics to obtain a key (password) to a gate house, send in a double agent to the opposing guard force or bribe city officials -- thus, there are roleplay ways to attack cities despite not having build permissions.

 

Essentially, these new war rules combined with the land-claiming plugin will give players a free pass to keeping their land forever. Forced conquest was supposed to be substituted with more creative ways of taking settlements, like blockades, raids, coup d'etats, etc etc. It was not removed to allow any group to be free from combat forever, that's stupid.