Treshure

Did y'all ever get around to making a new player plugin? Not saying it has to be mine, but I still think improving the newbie experience via plugins Is the best pound for pound return on investment that you can get

Malin's Irish goodbye has given elves PTSD for generations. If he ever came back with the milk, shit would go wild

Abandon the mina system and let players figure out a physical currency to barter with. Let voting mina be converted to a small selection of materials (iron, gold, etc). If you want to control for the amount of currently available physical currency, limit the amounts mined in the mine world/overworld, depending on how you're running it. Any attempt at a real economy is just going to be another flip to players complaining that this shit is too hard, that they hop on to roleplay and not to grind, etc etc. Minecraft is a resource abundant game, so the effort to instill "realism" will also change how people interact with the game in a noticeably negative way. Just model the economy towards behaviors that are conducive to roleplay. If you're transferring tons of iron as a payment from city to city, for instance, have it so that a large amount at one time weighs down the player and requires a mule/military escort. Set up opportunities for bandit ambushes. I dunno. I think the huge problem is that voting for the server is such an essential activity that there may never be enough of a mina sink to counter it. At the least, physical currency can be easily forgotten about, robbed, or despawned after death. Certainly more so if you stop propping up currency with an NPC banking system that is artificially secure. We've been at this for many, many years. Too little results by playing things too carefully. Just go wacky and see if you can make something work in the spirit of making conducive roleplay.

A Petraman claps. "WE COME FROM CROWS! KAWKAW!"

Summed it up as best as could be. @SquakHawk My harping on intuitive & effortless design has gotten worn and tired at this point, but I think it's worth bringing up again in this conversation. @Lojo613 and @Srihit the solutions on the nail - grant players maximal freedom and use plugins to deal with the fallout as much as feasibly possible. Every step we remove from the roleplaying process is another foot into the bureaucratic, out-of-character meat grinder. The reason we hold organic, free-build projects like the Fringe or the Whispering Crossroads in high regard (or any regard at all) is because of the free spirit of roleplay they embodied and thrived within. Nobody remembers build quality. Everyone remembers the experience. I think it's important to question the paradigm used to make decisions in map design. I believe that instead of trying to perfect a system that players can exist within, it is more important to design a system that relies and thrives upon player-led interaction. In praxis, this would look something akin to a map without pre-builds or even roads. Players would be encouraged to stake their claim, and Story Team members would lurk in the dangerous corners of a still unexplored map. Without the creation of a perfect "present" of a map ready for players to consume, players will actively be thrown into the mix to shape the landscape and story of the map. Staff resources would be directed to designing a map in size, story, and geography that would facilitate the most roleplay and engage the player with their environment. This is in essence a completely different approach, but I think it merits some discussion.

I'm digging the way you're using plugins to overcome the need for manual moderation. Tech Team has been putting out some solid shit - thank you for all that coding.

A faint creak had alerted Nob to the four legged intruder - his old hound, come through the backdoor and snaking past the aged farmer. Nob pulled open the door that the dog had crept between, and with it he was met the vastness of the setting sun. Where the sun had left, shadows now draped, and the entire country now held a soft twilight purple before all would sink away. That old farmer smiled and thumbed his tape recorder.

case in point

LotC has been suffering crab mentality surrounding Discord for a very long time. We continuously thought that it couldn't get worse after everyone shuttled into their Teamspeaks circa 2013, but that has been proven against again and again since then. Discord has got to go.

The transparency is always refreshing. I think that direct intervention can only be justified once. It would be far more preferable and less disruptive to smooth out a system that Iviarelle's group could have fallen back on. You might recall me arguing about this earlier with Narthok's rebellion and their subsequent lack of anywhere to go. I think this is just a learning moment for designing around behavior. Our systems have to reflect how roleplay naturally plays out, including the recurring scenario of rebels having a cause without a home. There are of course more issues at hand, but I believe they can be addressed in the same manner.

The Wayward Druid smiles in a lost, distant grave.

Not sure where this warped view of elven aging has come from. The precedent that I thought was universally known is that an Elf physically matures identical to a Human by reaching adulthood at 18, and I've been roleplaying elves for 9 years. The only difference is that an Elf just does not physically age afterwards. It appears to me that you're trying to conflate wisdom with maturity. What you should really ask is whether or not we should ban eighteen year old Humans from romance RPing with Elves. If an Elf can live to ten times the span of a Human, should Humans be able to romance them at all? Now you see how the waters get muddy. Elves are superhuman, so they are taking our traditional idea of what is enough to be an "adult" and stacking on top of that. That's why lots of people roleplay their elves as cold, stoic automatons; the idea of playing a centuries old immortal is literally beyond us. I think that this thinking is very proactive, but it swings a little too far in the other direction.

Wanna play some VR soon? I don't have a gaming PC at the moment but I did pick up an Oculus for my birthday.

Of all the bitter exchanges we've had, my only regret is allowing the conversation to become a question of character rather than ideas - and make no mistake, this is something that I instigated. Life is shitty and friendships will fall apart on LotC, but there is only one thing that brings you and I and everyone else here: the singular passion for roleplay. I'll put my baggage aside and appreciate your efforts towards a better server and niche, if at least for one post. You've put in a hell of a lot of quality work and made sure that the goodness will continue. Cheers to that, and enjoy your retirement. 🍻

it was a brutal winter when I had shipped a tub of mass-gainer to heero so that he would not starve to death because of an """empty refrigerator""". I have not received any correspondence afterwards. Please respond.

This one pulls a bit on my heart strings since I was in very similar waters a long time ago. Although I agree a lot with what others have said above, a simple break isn't the solution here. To explain, let's break down the hours. 630 hours spread out across 2 months (60~ days) averages out to 10.5 hours a day, every day, for two months in a row. It is very difficult to not get upset at a negative RP event, such as war, if the majority of your waking time is invested into LotC. That world becomes your world. I don't know what your situation is, and I certainly can't tell you how to use your time. I only want to warn you that LotC is a different beast than other video games. It's a living and breathing world with the heartbeat of hundreds of concurrent authors throughout the day - thousands in the weeks and months. It's a great escape, but the curse of its engrossment can last longer than you needed it for. Practice moderation like with all things. It is possible to balance roleplay with the rest of real life, but it's not the same prescription for everyone. Check in with yourself periodically -- if you feel that you're becoming too involved, then you probably are. Empower yourself to make that decision because, at the end of the day, it's just Minecraft.

I've cleared the air and apologized with those I've mentioned in the video. Have you? Because mentioning their age was one thing they explicitly asked not be done -- and you just did, today, in your reply. As for the aforementioned cases? You controlled every single one of them and shut it down based on the reasons for the video. I quit because when I finally made a stand, you said that you would bin the safety situation because it clearly wasn't attracting any of the other Admins' interest. You mention that I attacked your personal character in our private arguments -- was that before or after you said I was out of my mind because I had run out of my medication that day? You want to keep dragging out personal stuff into a public forum? I mentioned you in the video as a means to the argument's end - you took that personally, and drew on our personal falling out to paint me as some reckless actor hellbent on boosting his own image. If you want to insist on manufacturing these fantasies, do us all the favor to unblock me on Discord and dump these thoughts there. What a waste of everyone's time reading this.

This is a malicious response dressed as something empathetic. Your reply is infested with contradictions, and I refuse to respond beat for beat at risk of riding down your own lane of delusion. The response that @Llirprovided is much more potent and worth reading. I'm going to ask that you get me out of your head. Instead, read through the pages of these responses and see the stories that people have offered up about themselves. I've received an equal amount of folks reaching out through Discord, telling their own stories as minors on the server, many of whom feeling that they could not share it otherwise. Tell them that this is a "small rock in the road". I'm not claiming ownership over any of this, and I'm actively refusing to present anything to the those who identify with it, because it's not about me. But you're not looking at this. You say the video has a fantastic message in your reply, and then quickly turn to accusing it of inciting lynching and throwing around buzzwords. You mock the idea of it spreading "awareness" (your double quotations, not mine). People are excited that these things are being talked about? You say it's not safety - it's a lynch mob. The entire reply insinuates how excessive the video was, but then you promise measures to instill more safety features for the Community. You end in thanking several community leaders for making good of this "heinous" event, when it was the explicit point of the post to defer action to community leaders. You are hilariously tone deaf, but not only that, you try and twist the truth into one of your own making. It's a bad move to make so publicly, and I hope that others recognize the malpractice in this reply. I also want to warn you to be careful of projecting your own feelings into this. I've never called myself a "beacon of hope and virtue" - this is coming out of your head. I did far more than play your little pet character during my tenure, but I'm thankful that I don't feel like I have to justify myself in your presence anymore. It's disgusting that you take this situation, debase it, and then proclaim that you are going to be the one to fix it and make it right. You come off as a deeply insecure human being -- I had only wished you kept it to yourself this one time.

This is one of the things I wish I could go back and insert into the video. The “intuition” in my head says more about getting specialized training and more ability to look into a situation — someone with training to look for insidious signs of grooming, for instance, may need less “nails in the coffin” than someone who needs it spelled out for them. I don’t think witch hunts or throwing around the word “pedo” is going to do us any good. Ideally, I want to start putting together resources to help learn from and educate player leaders & their groups.

activated my trap card lmfao