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6 hours ago, THUNDER37 said:

I truthfully couldn’t care less what changes are made to the mine system, due to LoTC’s disregard when it comes to making a proper economy and ensuring we aren’t flooded with mina by the millions within’ the first few months but.. What necessitates this? Are we downgrading the server package due to lack of funding, or is this merely to try and deal with the lag temporarily until we are able to establish ourselves on a more stable version?

 

3 hours ago, RaccoonPete said:

So what is this, just a smaller instanced mine that can be refilled for mina and reduces server load? I like the idea of being able to refill mines through mina since that’ll be a pretty big mina sink (assuming that it’s not dirt cheap). If the main intention is to address the server load, I think this is perfect. However, if you’re trying to fix the virtually non-existent economy of LotC, I don’t think this will address it. These are the options I see for fixing the economy...

  1. Make resources a LOT more scarce. Will increase their cost and you’ll see more people specialize in jobs such as mining.
  2. Give less of a reward for voting. I currently get paid like 10 mina a day to be a guard and am making like 200+ a day voting. Granted, I have a feeling my guard pay is ridiculously low, but still I should not be making so much mina a day voting that I can basically afford anything I need.
  3. Introduce more mina sinks. Best way I see of doing this is charging charters/nations mina for existing rather than have activity checks (I think @Ggt recommended this already). It’ll increase taxes, which in turn will increase the costs of all goods sold assuming they’re scarcer than now.
  4. Make it so people can actually PvP again. My understanding is the majority of resources go to war efforts within the game, and with the server being so bad lately, people have just stockpiled huge amounts of resources reducing the need for them.

As for the new mine ideas, I think they’re all good. Specialized mines can be provided to players at a cost of mina, introducing another mina sink, and will lead to certain regions becoming known for certain materials. Adventure mines (assuming they’re what I’m picturing) will provide a PvE experience for players which I think would be a great addition.

 

It’s unlikely the economy will be fixed this map, mostly there will be tests run for future endeavours.

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15 minutes ago, z3m0s said:

It’s unlikely the economy will be fixed this map, mostly there will be tests run for future endeavours.

 

I figured, too difficult to fix it on this one when everyone basically has massive **** off stockpiles.

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23 minutes ago, RaccoonPete said:

 

I figured, too difficult to fix it on this one when everyone basically has massive **** off stockpiles.

Yeaaah, the upside I guess though is that it’s so fked we can test freely without ruining much.

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37 minutes ago, RaccoonPete said:

 

If people are stockpiling huge amounts of resources without use, then that means that there’s too much supply and not enough demand. The two options to fix this are increasing demand or reducing supply, both have the same effect. The question is, which is more likely to happen and is easier for staff to do?

 

Anything you can grow will always be in ample supply, it’s too easy and requires very little effort. I don’t know the process behind making drugs/alcohol in LotC, but I imagine like real life for the most part they use easily obtainable ingredients. Materials provided at CT rather than the open world, worthless, but it keeps players from having to destroy the world in order to get them. Mineable materials like emeralds, lapis lazuli, and for the most part, gold, are completely worthless. The only materials/goods that have any real value in LotC are land, property (like homes), certain mineable resources like iron and diamond, specialty crafted RP goods, and a handful of goods which are needed regularly like tools, weapons, and armor.

 

So this brings me to the point I’m trying to make; how do you increase demand for these items? Bringing in more players will increase demand, but also supply so that won’t do it. Relying solely on cool expensive RP goods clearly isn’t doing it. So why do you think increasing demand would work?

 

Think of the LotC staff as the Federal Reserve, and instead of printing the US Dollar they print resources and mina. Does the Federal Reserve work to increase demand? No! They control the money supply. It’s not realistic to think LotC staff could reliably increase demand in any meaningful way just as it is that the Federal Reserve would be able to.

 

Resources and goods are so cheap in their current state that if there was going to be a “overconsumption” like you say it already would have happened. Many people, like myself, enjoy playing the economy. It’s very hard to play the economy if there is virtually non-existent due to there being such an excess of resources and goods. In addition, it’s difficult to RP jobs like mining or farming, when those jobs don’t exist because there’s pretty much no point for them to since people can just spend a days worth of mina from voting to obtain everything they need.

 

Maybe I’m wrong and the vast majority of the playerbase enjoys being able to obtain everything with one click of the mouse. However I’m willing to bet that’s not the case.

Increasing demand isn’t the easiest solution, nor is it the solution that would immediately create the stronger economy overall, yet i still think it’s the most realistic answer given LOTC’s nature and history. Therefore I think it deserves to be considered.

 

Let’s start by listing off things that people would be fine with having scarcity in:

-Food: People who want food to be scarce are not very common on LOTC. Food scarcity hurts new players more than it benefits the economy, so I don’t think that the staff would ever purposely make food scarce. There’s slightly more people who’d want there to be higher quality foods that are scarce, but such quality foods are arguably already scarce on LOTC, so there’s not much room for improvement.

-Building Materials: Most people who build things don’t want their building materials to cost very much. Occasionally some key building materials have been scarce in the past, yet it usually ends with the communities who want to build using lots of said material petitioning the staff to lower CT prices or add a resource pit. It would be difficult to make building supplies scarce without having to calm the nerves of some people.

-Wood: This is needed to craft all tools in the game and is a very common building material. With the Wood Pits replacing the old CT tree farms of previous maps, Wood is less scarce currently than it was in the past. Wood could be made slightly scarcer by replacing the Wood Pits with a tree farm, but any further scarcity would require fancy plugins to prevent people from buying saplings and growing their own tree farms. Wood scarcity also has many of the same problems as Building Material scarcity.

-Crafted Items: Making crafted items scarce requires LOTC to abandon vanilla crafting. This has been done before, yet currently the community has divided opinions on the matter. Crafting timers are unlikely to return, and said crafting system would have to be cleverly balanced to generate economic well being without angering the typical slice-of-life RPer who does not care for such things and wants to roleplay as they please without being denied access to any important crafting recipes.

-PvP Gear/Iron: Arguably the items players are most and least willing to have scarcity in. Some people want iron to be cheap to make PvP more accessible, and some people want iron to be rarer in order to make mining and PvP profitable. Iron could probably be made moderately scarce without angering too many people, although the staff would have to tread carefully.

-RP goods (alcohol, named items, drugs, etc): These are already in high demand. Decreasing the supply of most of these goods would lower VIP privileges and directly discourage people from donating to the server. The staff would never do this unless EULA forced them to.

-Animal Products: Already scarce. Could be made scarcer by further lowering the numbers of animals that can be bred, helping reduce lag. Same problems apply here as with food/building materials/PvP gear.

-Diamonds, gold, all the non-iron mining stuff: These are somewhat scarce (with the exception of redstone and lapis), yet making them scarcer wouldn’t do much since nobody needs these materials. Consumption of these materials would need to be created first (like with diamonds being crafted into shulker boxes).

 

In summary, the following goods could be made scarcer without angering portions of the community:

-Iron (to a moderate extent)

-Wood (to a small extent)

-High quality food/animal products (even if they’re already fairly scarce)

-Non-iron mining goods (if given a use)

 

That alone won’t fix the economy. Loads of players paradoxically demand a stronger economy whilst simultaneously dreading scarcity of the materials they use the most. This is why I feel that increasing consumption through optional RP goods is a better option. 

 

And yes, the staff do absolutely have the ability to control consumption. They control the existing plugins, the creation of new plugins, and the removal of old plugins that the server runs on. They have the freedom to interfere in player actions as much as they please. They are not the Federal Reserve, they are Gods. Given coder power, they can increase consumption through suggestion, coercion, or even force. They could force players to buy vast amounts of RP items and waste raw materials or be banned. Doing so would cause a riot and would certainly end the server, yet is entirely within the staff’s power.

 

As for RP items being the most valuable item in the economy not cutting it, why do you think so? By far, RP goods are the most profitable. Even when other materials are scarce, RP goods still perform very well in the market. Even the RP goods that literally anyone can create (drugs) are very profitable. Increasing the types of RP goods that people can purchased will increase the server’s economy beyond any shadow of a doubt and give people more reasons to spend their minas. If done correctly, it could lower stockpiles of resources as well, something that lowering production cannot do until a new map comes out.

 

And what’s to say that the current economy of LOTC is even all that bad? I’ve heard sine argue that the economy is doing quite good right now. Some more economical nations have plentiful well-stocked market stalls with plenty of customers (most notably Sutica). Purchasing power through voting is through the roof and thus easily lets new players get by. Labor costs are quite low, yet an entrepreneurial fellow could use that as an opportunity to make a good profit on some key materials while simultaneously selling at good prices and staying in stock. During times of intense warfare, many materials fly off the shelves almost as fast as they can be restocked. The surface level of the economy is functional enough to roleplay economical actions even if the economy is weak in reality. Since Minecraft economies are not usually very strong anyways, LOTC’s economy is certainly not the worst economy on a server.

 

Given a few tweaks to production and a healthy increase in that which can be consumed, LOTC’s economy should be adequate without making building expensive, having food be rare, or requiring loads of mining to PvP. Simply give redstone, lapis, gold, emeralds, and diamonds more use, replace Woods Pits with a tree farm, slightly reduce iron production, and add in more RP good plugins like the Hoo-Kah and alchemical herbs we have currently.

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Reminds me of when nexus was around @NotEvilAtAll. Although some features from nexus I could do without.

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16 hours ago, A_New_Noob said:

grr have regenerating ore veins scattered along mountains

 

But for now this is good

regenerating chunks corrupts the world over time. 

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22 hours ago, THUNDER37 said:

I truthfully couldn’t care less what changes are made to the mine system, due to LoTC’s disregard when it comes to making a proper economy and ensuring we aren’t flooded with mina by the millions within’ the first few months but.. What necessitates this? Are we downgrading the server package due to lack of funding, or is this merely to try and deal with the lag temporarily until we are able to establish ourselves on a more stable version?

Chunk loading is a major issue concerning current lag problems, by reducing the amount of chunks loaded where they can be, it may help some.

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Going to try and keep this response focused on the actual mines, but I’ll likely make some tangential comments on things others have said. I’ll preface this with something quick.

 

1184774880_NewStats2.PNG.1a0cf44acdad89efcf0317d69f292e6b.PNG

 

And for pictures too big to upload. Have a link https://imgur.com/a/q8Y7KnB

 

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve done a fair bit of resource gathering. Please do not take this as a brag, I just want to give credit to my opinions to follow on the current state of the mines. The area I carved out in those photos was so I could find out what levels certain resources were generating at.

 

Right now, mining is a time consuming grind which can go on for ages as you struggle to find what you need without concrete information on where to find what you’re looking for. It’s not just about how many resources are in the mines, it’s knowing where to look for them. I remember that when I actually got around to playing on the server about half a year ago, I wanted to help a friend get some redstone. I grabbed my pickaxe, went into the Druid mines, and spent two hours where I found more diamonds than I did redstone because I didn’t know how the LoTC mines varied from normal minecraft other than the changes in cave generation.

 

Unless you get information by word of mouth, and/or experimentation like I did, the only resources which can really be consistently found are iron and coal. What’s the best way to find the others though? Well it’s often caves, but the problem is that you might need to mine 2000+ blocks in one direction to even have a chance at finding a cave that nobody has already discovered and plundered. I can testify to this since I’ve mined a tunnel twice as long as that looking for untouched caves to mine gold needed for bulk RP items made by Quavnir.

 


 

So, how does this actually translate into the new mining system? I had a brief look at the test CT mine, and the amount and spread of resources looked very interesting to me. Though this was limited since things like diamonds seem to have been all dug out already (that’s not a complaint, just a note that I don’t know how common they really are while I write this). I’m glad to see that changes are being made, and having accessibility to resources is a good thing. Especially if we can see them in building, RP items, and whatever else that isn’t limited to just PVP gear which is generally easy to get anyway.

 

I want to be able to mine without needing to spend 10 minutes and half a stack of potatoes to run down my tunnel in the Druid mines just to find new caves again. I’m not kidding, I timed it and counted it one time to see how long it was taking just to get into an area where I could find things again.

 


 

I’m glad to be seeing changes made, and hope that more information will follow soon about the new systems when they come.

 

Cheers,

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Just build pre-made mine shafts and excavations and have the ores respawn every day. Make it so nations can buy their own pre-built resource mines and each mine can be expanded for a certain amount of mina’s. IE, tier 1 has one mine shaft with 64 iron ores and costs 2k to build and the ores respawn automatically once per day. Tier 2 has four times that amount and some diamond and gold ore spawns and tier 3 has 2x the amount of tier 2, etc etc. Maybe make the mines different based on the region it’s in, IE a tropical mine will have more diamonds and gold ore but also be riddled in vegetation and have a lot less iron ore while northern mines will have more iron ore and even gold ore but less diamond ores.

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How quickly does the test mine refill?
I’ve turned up to mine and it’s been totally dug out underneath for diamonds. I’ve found some odd bits of gold and iron, but otherwise all that’s left is coal and lapis. Has to be said that CT mines always look rough as ****, and nation mines tend to be less intensively mined(from my experience in Urguan and Druids), so potentially this could work going forward.

 

Edit: Returning from my trip, it’s occurred to me- In Urguan we have a miner’s guild. You pay for a permit to mine, you meet a quota and you keep whatever else you dig up beyond that quota. In this instance, who pays to refill the mine were this system implemented? Do I have to alert an RO to have the mine refilled? Or can anyone do it?

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3 hours ago, Aethling said:

How quickly does the test mine refill?
I’ve turned up to mine and it’s been totally dug out underneath for diamonds. I’ve found some odd bits of gold and iron, but otherwise all that’s left is coal and lapis. Has to be said that CT mines always look rough as ****, and nation mines tend to be less intensively mined(from my experience in Urguan and Druids), so potentially this could work going forward.

 

Edit: Returning from my trip, it’s occurred to me- In Urguan we have a miner’s guild. You pay for a permit to mine, you meet a quota and you keep whatever else you dig up beyond that quota. In this instance, who pays to refill the mine were this system implemented? Do I have to alert an RO to have the mine refilled? Or can anyone do it?

2 week cooldown currently, might be changed but overall 70% of the blocks within have to be mined out before it will trigger refill. 

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