[4.0] @danny - Addressing Concerns

[John Ivory 4546]

Good reads, Telanir. It is good to receive some more information about the upcoming map. I eagerly await Danny's reply, though.

 

 

Firestar25 holds the post up high, cheering for himself. He had done it; this was a victory to be celebrated. "Bring out the balloons and the cake!" Firestar25 had shouted- For today, he had read the entire of Telanir's post. Along with this, he had finished Danny's post the night before, and about 9-10 pages of replies. Was Firestar25 the one true god? Maybe. Or possibly he just reads far too much. This would be decided later.

Firestar25 was done reading for now.

[Telanir 6975]

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.

 

You provide very legitimate points that I did not touch upon in my post, thanks.

 

The new rules that have been introduced by the administrative team are for the Fringe, the 4.0 rules for war and conquest are going to be different. In the next map, we are not going to have any raid restrictions or rules dictating how often you can attack and with how many people. This is not a big deal  because if a settlement has successfully managed to wall itself off it shouldn't care how often it is attacked. However, the constant attacks will make life in that area very unstable and people may leave due to discontent, which would be one of the reasons to siege.

 

No raid rules.

 

The next point, you highlighted certain regions getting the ability to turn off any form of PvP. This was a common misconception among staff that I have failed to clarify, 4.0 was supposed to have capital city's only and their current leaders the ability to determine this decision which would only affect their capital city with GM approval. (some basic reasoning required). With the proximity of the capital cities it was already determined that they could not raid one another, they are simply too close and hostilities should be taken care of on the battlefield away from home. We have also discussed having a tournament somewhere in the center of the capital cities where players would still be able to duke it out in case they needed to resolve a dispute with diplomacy by other means. Regions that have been claimed by players are still subject to PvP and that cannot be toggled.

 

PvP toggle for capital cities only.

 

Now, with this stated this brings me to my next and final point. I strongly believe that regardless of what the reasonings are, if a group of players has claimed an area and remains active there, no faction has the right to take their land and infrastructure from them without their consent. This means that if you have all the raids in the world and siege them day and night, seal off their trade routes, butcher their peasants, yet the people remain active and frequently visit their area, you will not be successful. However, as with everything, your attacks will eventually begin to frustrate the people living there and they will leave until their leader tries to solve the dispute with diplomacy or returned fire. If they have managed to seal themselves off in their walls, they will be safe there, if you get someone to join the settlement as a spy and open the gates, you are allowed free entry. But of course, you must remember to role-play and follow standard combat procedures, raid rules are not a special occasion to ignore role-play. (other than wars that have been agreed upon with both sides acknowledging the fact that there's gonna be a lot of killing in a short time frame-- otherwise rp it out then dish it out with pvp if you like).

 

Use creative ways to weaken your enemies. Diplomacy will work best.

 

If you get super creative with your infiltration tactics, no fort or faction will stand in your way. But with that aside, no higher power will be there to transfer the land after any war, you will have to force the plugin to realize that few people live in that region, and let it do its thing with the unclaiming.

 

Hopefully this answers your question. If not, shoot me a reply and we can figure out how to accommodate your concerns in the plugin.

 

Edit: This is all with keeping in mind that regions are protected, and briefing is still punishable. So unless you've found a way to get over their walls legitimately, you will have to approach the situation differently.

 

Edit #2: Make sure that you take my replies as what may be happening, but not as any final confirmation. These have my opinion in them as well being a response and not an official stance so use them as a guideline for what will most likely be the case. :)

[Aedan The Bard 350]

Sounds good so far. Thank you for the information. Let's hope it works as planned.

[Stump 709]

Sniiiip.

Gosh darn it imposter. I'm the real one! I'll always be the real one(and the less successful one.. ;.;)! Harumph! And with that, leaving the thread alone. Don't want to clutter it with off-topic thingies.

Small edit(pun completely intended): 99th post eeeeep. Almost thereee, ladies and gentlemen.

[Danny 2232]

Heya Tel, cheers for replying to the thread. Just before I reply to certain things, I want to clarify that I misunderstood the land system that's going to be actually used for 4.0 - it wasn't given a very clear description with regards to the fact there will be central free land, so that's not an issue anymore. I'm still cynical about the actual land claim system, but that's probably the only thing I feel we can play a risk-game on and if it doesn't work, it's a simple remove. We just have to be ready to take it off if it doesn't work and if it doesn't provide the fun factor.

 

With regards to the economy, I don't discuss not having one / not allowing an economy to form because that's really not something that's possible. What I discuss is not focusing on building one as we've done in the past - every time we have made an attempt to design things based on the ideal of creating a working economy, it's failed and pushed us further from success.

 

The ideal of building an interdependence on players for resources in the hope of encouraging roleplay is simply that, an ideal. Apologies if I misunderstand you, but that's certainly what it appears from what you've said. It doesn't provide any enjoyment value to the server, and indeed it hinders players further from reaching that 'fun' appeal of the server. I don't know if that is what you're suggesting, as you really haven't made it quite that clear or not.

 

My other understanding is that you agree there shouldn't be restrictions on the economy or a focus on building one, but instead players should have the capacity to still make use of one of the vital mechanics of Minecraft, that one being crafting, unhindered. That's truly what I believe, however, I believe they should be able to do it via the default methods, that's another argument however.

 

It is not true that with the removal of warfare-based roleplay people will turn towards trollplay or harassment - it means that, with the encouraging from the staff and the introduction of RP hubs and appeal to go to these places, people will turn to community based spontaneous roleplay as we've seen in the past.

 

I'll miss out your second section regarding Regioning, as like I mentioned prior, there was some confusion regarding that and whilst I am still sceptical, I'm personally happy to see how that goes

 

And then finally onto our old argument regarding UI systems. I ain't gonna return to the debate that we've had time and time again already because it's evident that we're both just as strongly opinionated on it and we ain't gonna budge. What I will say, however, is that I still fully believe that by introducing alien GUIs and brand new concepts on how to play Minecraft, you over-complicate things for new players. People are used to being able to type in commands and having the ability to type /help to get an easy understanding of what they can do, that's something every Minecraft player can do and gets, it isn't a learning curve at all - but I still strongly say that introducing these alien GUIs is a learning curve. I love the tech team and the plugins they create, and I think you're great too, but I think that your GUI system just isn't what the server needs to succeed.

 

I appreciate the reply and I hope you didn't take any offence from any of my remarks or any of them as a direct focus on yourself or your team, however, I stand entirely by everything I stated in that OP (except with regards to land) because I fully know that if we want LotC to return to a strong position, with a large population and growth, great appeal to new players and for it to really achieve it's aim of being a truly fun, free roleplay server we need to take a step back and realise that we have to adopt the Aegisian way of thinking, return to Aegisian techniques and systems but of course improve on them (as there's much to be improved), but this time ensure that we climb up the correct mountain by the correct path, rather than losing our footing and jumping into the crevasse we did before.

[Ever 2648]

off topic but it's pretty weird to see you [danny] make all these suggestions and stuff after you shot a lot of ideas and plans down as admin...

[Danny 2232]

off topic but it's pretty weird to see you [danny] make all these suggestions and stuff after you shot a lot of ideas and plans down as admin...

 

I never shot them down as an admin, I just didn't put my full weight of support behind them and didn't realise the necessity of them - I did exactly what almost every staff member did and didn't realise the importance of them, and I take the full blame for that and as I've done before, I apologise for it. I did, near the end of my time, realise the importance of them (and many I pushed for before 3.0 also) but I didn't ever push enough to try and get them in and I totally appreciate that. I suppose through returning and not being where I was prior, it's been an eye-opener to the realisation that we now do need to push extremely hard for these changes. What I'm doing now is encouraging the current staff team to not make the mistakes that I made by not making these changes become reality.

[Telanir 6975]

-snip-

 

Hey Danny, don't worry about taking any offence, it's all cool, we've both got our sides in this debate but its nothing personal. I'm going to be a little erratic in my response, so please bear with me.

 

In terms of the land-claim system, I am optimistic that it is the right step forward and so we will find out how truly effective it is when the time comes.

 

When it comes to what we are looking for in the server, the point that we want it to be a prosperous, successful and populated server is not a debated fact, in general we all strive to see it become great. But yes, how we are going to go about bringing this about is the question, and I believe that while Aegis was highly successful we had a lot going for us at the time. For one, I believe that one thing that is mostly irreversible is the community, cliques are not going to die off and elitism will be a factor as with any server that exists to this point.

 

When our server was first created the people hadn't met one another yet and the environment was truly a new experience for everyone, we all learned and taught one another. We've "evolved" to what we have now, as what happens in the real world people will assemble groups that they find they have the most success in and stick with them. These cliques are formed, the people know who they are close to, they will stick close to them, we can't change that unless we brew hostilities between the individual players. We can't do that. Aegis had a lot to do with the community, in fact when we didn't have any true quality plugins and expansive and thorough rule pages and moderation techniques, it was all about the community. People were very open because they were not around long enough to believe they knew what was best for the server better than the operators, and it was standard for things to be ok. Either way though, instead of actually looking at the rules or mechanics that were behind the success of Aegis, we should develop our future plans in accordance with observations made on the recent history and current situation instead.

 

With that said, it is dangerous to approach the future of LotC with skeptical pessimism, what I have mentioned is neither simply a dream or an unreachable ideal. I never mean to say that will happen will be completely effective, but I am hard pressed to say that it will definitely be effective. There will be a degree of interdependence yes, it won't be absolute but it will be there. As soon as we can say that a blacksmith is able to flaunt his skills in role-play and is approached to develop greater goods than most people around them can, we are seeing success. Every little step counts, every little bit, and with professions we won't need to implicitly strive to create an economy, that will handle itself.

 

Speaking of an economy, what you said is true, artificially seeking out to create an economy is overall detrimental to our server. While it can create role-play it will create too many inconveniences, however, what we need instead is a natural economy, one that isn't supported by a flood of minas once in a while or hyper-deflated goods through overwhelming quantity. A natural economy would be one that some players have an excess of some material at all times, and are willing to trade it for a limited material that other players might not need. The community knows how to make an economy because they know what they need and what they can sell, we shouldn't interfere with that but we definitely will provide them with the tools to do so. A natural economy, will increase role-play, because the more times you expose a player to other players the greater the chances of role-play occurring.

 

I apologize if I was not clear enough, but as a final little pointer for the economy I never planned to create an interdependence related to any major necessities like foods and building supplies, but if you want to get higher end goods you will definitely have to explore and encounter more people to get it.

 

Next, I would like to mention that we are also in agreement on another topic, but perhaps you misunderstood me. I agree that with removal of war based role-play people won't turn to harassment, but as you pointed out, there was stuff to do in the situation you mentioned. Right now people must expend some kind of effort to reach role-play that isn't of that kind, and for some that isn't worth the bother. It is why we have war-alts from people that log in once in a month to participate in one or two battles. I simply mean that we need to add more stuff to do in general, keeping players busy by having some of them play around with a living and breathing economy will definitely help.

 

And last, yes I know, we've had this argument about the UI before. :)

The problems you mentioned are directly in your post though actually. /help has 90 pages of commands of which at least 70% are completely unrelated to the average player. 90 pages is not 2 minutes of surfing, unfortunately.

 

You mentioned new content over-complicating things, and I agree. But every time we add new commands or new recipes people have to memorize arbitrary combinations of text and spacial placements of materials. I pointed out in my post that we actually have to have forum posts that explain 'custom recipes' and long command lists. Except that we don't have long command list posts for the most part, so players have to jump from news post to news post looking for the plugin update that has the information most relevant to them, or spend the night setting up camp in the help channel, the choice is theirs. But as we may have noticed, the choices aren't exactly pretty. That is why instead of going down this route of a command list that drowns your entire page (type /roleplay and you'll know what I'm talking about) that we have failed to fix and improve every time, we are choosing what you may perhaps call "a lesser evil". Personally I see this as less of something evil and more of something that provides a perhaps novel and unique experience, but you may see that as exactly the problem. It is only as novel and unique as our entire server that is almost entirely based on role-play. In comparisons to other "role-play servers" out on the market we really do look like "hardcore rp" (we're live action rp though).

 

So, regardless of how experienced someone is with Minecraft they will have to learn a lot on LotC, so we're giving them the advantage of not having to memorize books of commands and recipes and just jump straight into the role-play. This is why we had a beta-testing experience, so that we could gauge how successful this system is going to turn out. We had a massive array of players test the system out, and I am glad to say that they loved it. Here are the instructions I gave players to play with the new system: "There's a command called /me, here's 10 loaves of bread."

 

Very quickly I witnessed them adopt and learn the system, and while the first 10 minutes may have been a time of learning, I did not see it inhibit them as much as you may be proposing. Personally I see the UI as something that will help us achieve new heights as a server, and I wholeheartedly would be willing to take any responsibility for what it may ruin. I'm strongly sure that it will never have to come to that though. :)

 

But I agree, we won't really get far if we want to decide on one or the other system. We should get in contact, and hopefully we can do some brainstorming together and find a possible middle-ground that could be even better than both options are standing alone. Thanks for the reply, let me know what you think of this too. ^-^

[Ever 2648]

I never shot them down as an admin, I just didn't put my full weight of support behind them and didn't realise the necessity of them - I did exactly what almost every staff member did and didn't realise the importance of them, and I take the full blame for that and as I've done before, I apologise for it. I did, near the end of my time, realise the importance of them (and many I pushed for before 3.0 also) but I didn't ever push enough to try and get them in and I totally appreciate that. I suppose through returning and not being where I was prior, it's been an eye-opener to the realisation that we now do need to push extremely hard for these changes. What I'm doing now is encouraging the current staff team to not make the mistakes that I made by not making these changes become reality.

 

Well the scenario I'm talking about is the Verge/Fringe; It was like a month before the expected release, and 3-4 before the actual release. I made a big thread saying "hey guys, if we don't do somehting exciting this thing is going to be boring & a huge flop". I came up with a few detailed ideas, asked a few Event Team members for their opinions on what could be fun, stuff like that. I detailed it all out in a thread on the development/GM forums. You replied basically said "I don't think we should do any of this and just let the players explore". Killed all drive I had to work on the project and it got put to the wayside till it was finally released months later than it should have. Everytime I see a player say 'ya verge sucks', I'm a bit annoyed because it should have been more. It should have been better. It sucked and it shouldn't have.

[Telanir 6975]

-snip-

 

Ever, I appreciate your concerns with Danny, but I think they are more personal than they are to belong on this thread. I have nothing personal here, I just want to mention that this thread has a specific purpose-- to figure out what we can do with Danny's current propositions. With all due respect I think we should focus our energies on what is coming, we have made our mistakes and have our flaws, and personally I'm also sorry for your loss in the Fringe.

 

With that said, I don't think we should have the Fringe out of the spotlight, and if any of your ideas are still possible, we should focus on getting them implemented too.

[Danny 2232]

 -snip-

 

I don't agree that the change that LotC has experienced is irreversible. Yeah, it does come down partly to the fact we've grown to know each other and we've built an integrated community around that, however, things have already been changed that show progress is possible and many of these changes are entirely possible, and undoubtedly would yield good results for the server and its progress. Take cliques and elitism for an example - these are things progress has been made on already, admittedly not enough, but the progress that has been made proves it's possible. I hold the view that the way the server was in the past largely did come from the community's attitudes, but those attitudes and indeed the actual servers play-value both directly stemmed from the systems and ways the staff had implemented their aims. 

 

I will give you it - /help isn't particularly ideal currently. I'm not quite daft enough to believe it is - however, with a fuller system it would work well. The /help command is these days fairly clean and easy to use and get, much more so than other Minecraft server's, and that's something unique to us that most definitely gives us the edge.

 

I concede, there is benefits to a GUI system, but I still strongly believe in the command based Minecraft-default system. I'd love to discuss it with you and see if we could come up with a system that the staff team would agree with and one that the entire server would benefit from. In an ideal world, a system where players (upon first logging in) get the choice to use either a command-based or GUI-based interface would be perfect. Whether that's too much work to expect or not, I don't know, but that'd be a brilliant one.

 

Well the scenario I'm talking about is the Verge/Fringe; It was like a month before the expected release, and 3-4 before the actual release. I made a big thread saying "hey guys, if we don't do somehting exciting this thing is going to be boring & a huge flop". I came up with a few detailed ideas, asked a few Event Team members for their opinions on what could be fun, stuff like that. I detailed it all out in a thread on the development/GM forums. You replied basically said "I don't think we should do any of this and just let the players explore". Killed all drive I had to work on the project and it got put to the wayside till it was finally released months later than it should have. Everytime I see a player say 'ya verge sucks', I'm a bit annoyed because it should have been more. It should have been better. It sucked and it shouldn't have.

 

If we're recalling the incident that I'm thinking of with regards to an antagonist, we simply had different opinions on how we could tackle an antagonist system on the Verge. I didn't state exploration should be the only purpose, if I remember rightly, I had different ideas on how the Verge should feature antagonists and when they should be introduced. I'm more than happy to discuss that with you if you want me to, but I think the primary focus of this thread and my original thread shouldn't be on mistakes I've made in the past with regards to not implementing these ideas fully, nor the mistakes the staff team as a whole made by not pushing forward such vital changes. 

[TheBareSheet 194]

Moved to the Great Library. It shall be sorted into appropriate category shortly.