monkeypoacher

I don't think claiming territory for your nation should necessarily equal owning the land OOCly. You should be able to claim the freebuild area and hassle the freebuild players if you want. The converse of that is players should be able to settle in your borders if you don't actively keep them out. If you're a real nation, you should be able to deal with squatters, either by kicking them out or vassalizing them. Also, tiles shouldn't be as big as they are and taxes shouldn't be onerous, just enough to make sure you're actively using the land.

I think tile taxes are stupid because they don't encourage you to use the land you've claimed. You just claim as many tiles as you can afford based on taxing the poor serfs in your capital, because it makes you look cool on the map and lets you distribute spoils to your supporters. A more intelligent "tax" system could encourage people to claim land based on whether they can actually use it, and keep people out of remote areas that no one is ever going to roleplay actively in. Also, the proceeds from the taxes should go back into the mineconomy somehow. I am tired of selling iron ingots for 0.2 mina!!

I am a man of compromise: Freebuild along all the main roads and near the spawn/major hubs of the map. Claimable land outside that region. Write a plugin to allow groups to claim plots, based on a required number of players. Instead of activity checks, land claims are "taxed" minecraft items based on a resource they produce and a resource they can craft or trade for. "Taxed" items are actually sold on the auction house, with the claim owner getting the proceeds. This means players have easy access to all resources for whatever the market decides the price is. Also, I would imagine land claims are smaller than existing tiles. More Stardew Valley than Settlers of Catan. Maybe there's some mechanism for letting claims join an existing "realm," but you also can just enforce your nation's authority through RP. No more pastes. No more limited creative. No more opaque, manual review of activity/inactivity by mods, which frees them up to actually moderate the server. An "economy" that doesn't work by punishing players until they interact with it. As for war/conflicts, keep it simple stupid! Stop changing the rules! Metaplay, which is our word for "using the server's meta-mechanics the way they are intended to be used," goes away when you remove the meta-mechanics. Instant, indefinite ban for alienating players on my server based on their identity. Your free speech rights are less valuable to me than my active users. I have no interesting takes on lore. Players who choose to participate in it seem to be moderating it pretty well. Something to be said for lowering the barrier to entry for new ideas though.

This lol. There's nothing even particularly egregious about the screenshots, just two people OOCly hashing out how OOC mechanics are supposed to work. We've only recently started calling this "metaplay" and issuing bans for it, even though everyone does it and it's basically mandatory if you want to keep your nation alive. If people don't like it then we should change the rules, not punish people for making perfectly rational decisions based on them.

Hello. Uninstall EU4 please

I hope no one here is kidding themselves about kowaman stepping down. You do actually need someone to maintain the plugins. We're all minemen trying to survive in a harsh mineworld. His individual shortcomings here aren't important except to demonstrate how unbelievably stupid and self-defeating this system has become

"I do not think I can consider this clearly in RP without an answer to the mechanical outcome" Well if you can't roleplay on the roleplay server without worrying about these confusing "mechanics" maybe that's a case for getting rid of them. Everyone is just making them up as they go along anyway. And apparently getting hung up on the exact way to translate paraslop game mechanics prevents people from doing any actual war or diplomacy in roleplay. Basing anything on "precedent" seems especially hairy. I don't think I can remember a decision staff have made that wasn't widely loathed. "Precedent" is you can ban half a nation's players and then start a war with them. Why does it matter if you're a vassal or a "protectorate," anyway? Can't you negotiate what those terms mean IRP? Other than we've decided that the Prime Rib Region Owner can arbitrarily take your shit and kick you out with no RP. also you're collectively punishing mods because you broke the metaplay rules but it's funny that mods can't be in nation group chats now so go off

"It had to happen eventually," writes Harold Winter Harrenid, chronicler of the Ninth Age. "the eternal recurrence of the same. The blind goddess spinning us on her wheel, up and down, until we realize we are in the same place - and always have been."

It's a matter of perspective I guess. I've been negative about LotC since the day I joined, I'll be negative about it until I forget it exists, or die, whichever comes first. That doesn't make me a doomer. I've gotten a whole lot of enjoyment out of LotC and the lore and community that came out of it. Even though I never log on, it's a treat to occasionally open the forums and read other people's RP posts, to try and piece together what's happened in the of world of [INSERT 5-LETTER WORD THAT STARTS WITH "A"] since I left it behind. I think you're generally right that LotC hasn't changed that much, and that the majority of the changes have been positive (safety for one, obviously). There are obviously people here who care about this server a lot, much more so than me. But LotC has always sucked! It will always suck! It's always been an ad hoc, cringeworthy, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along kind of place. I'll call you on people healing maimings through cloud temple suicide and getting amnesia from golden apples and raise you "*backflips off of roofs and shoots poisoned crossbow bolts at you," or elves tweaking off sugar, or dwarven boat paratroopers, or people replacing their arms and legs with "golem limbs" that let them lift you up in the air. These were good things! Fun, bizarre, emergent pieces of fiction that no one sat down and decided were canon. We either agreed on them or found them too stupid to argue with. If I wanted to read painstakingly crafted, internally consistent fantasy fiction, I would go do that. There's a lot to choose from. But that's not why I come here. I come here because it's where I've read some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever seen someone write in the English language. Someone taking the prompt "you are an elf named Mayilu'taleh (which means "beloved rock" or somesuch in Elvish) in a fantasy world" and running with it from a place of pure improvisation and emotional honesty. I don't think you can separate LotC sucking, it being a minecraft factions server where people write fantasy escapism self insert fiction, from the things that make it a place for genuinely interesting creative expression. You're right, the server has improved. The standards for writing certainly have, to the point where I would argue many of the people here should write their own original fiction. But when we start measuring the quality of roleplay by how extensively redlined and "balanced" the magic lore is, or how professional the builds and skins look, or how many words fit in a single minecraft emote, we lose a bit of what makes this community special. There's a particular strain of aloof zoomer "everything is cringe" attitude that rules on here, and it comes from a place of people not being allowed to roleplay what they want, having to lobby and scheme and bully other people to get to enjoy a sliver of it. TL;DR : Server sucks freebuild now

sure. the other side of it is that if you were going to sue, you'd most likely be going with the grooming / KOSA stuff, which is the most legally actionable but would require you to organize a bunch of people who were harmed by this server a long time ago to extensively document their childhood trauma for the benefit of MAYBE getting a minecraft server shut down

probably? but there would be no payout. I doubt tythus is sitting on a big pile of settlement money

you can pinch the "lore + history" from lotc (aeldin) - it would cost MUCH more than lotc is worth to litigate the confusing IP dispute that would follow from that whether or not it's ethical that lotc stole my adolescence from me, it's clear that there is a market for minecraft-based fantasy escapism, and you could at least be a marginally healthier supplier in that market

i fully believe you that for anyone getting a cut of tythus, ltd., lotc is a passive income generator we could build a better passive income generator though. maybe the solution is a new server.......

If it's a business, it's a business that sucks at capitalizing on the activity it supposedly wants you to generate. How does any of this make people donate more?

thank you. it feels insane even bringing it up because "apply on discord" is so synonymous with doing basically anything in RP that telling someone not to use discord for something is like telling them not to log on. i think to some extent you are experiencing nostalgia; being in the right skype/teamspeak groups still mattered back then. the main difference to now is like you said, discord lets you sort of automate away the inconvenience of having to talk to people in minecraft. also, there is basically no simple enjoyment to be had playing the game without discord, because minecraft mechanics like mining and placing blocks have been replaced with a broken korean MMO and roleplay is inconsequential without being able to build stuff in the minecraft world my pet theory is tythus/telanir/kowaman gets final say over basically any decision staff makes & since all of those people have aged out of actually playing the server, they make decisions to prevent things from happening that would require their active attention. there's a critical lack of vision on every rung of the ladder though. we need to give head admin to a younger zoomer who is actually motivated to do things

blah blah blah more mass bans more voiding roleplay central contradiction of lord of the craft: using GOOD ooc information/mechanics in roleplay is allowed. using BAD ooc information/mechanics in roleplay is NOT allowed. It's hard to think of a constructive definition of 'metaplay' that doesn't include the bizarre OOC-directed behaviors of accumulating tiles, money, activity percentages, and trading descendants of characters created by players who have left the server. But this constitutes most of what happens on LoTC. If you wishcast on Discord about how EPIC it would be to destroy Haense or the Canonist Church, you are a metaplayer, but if you use that wretched Family Echo to create a justification for your character to usurp power in the Haense Discord, you are just Role Playing. It is a matter of perspective. (also: whoever made me a CUCKOLD on the Family Echo: I WILL FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE. YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED) "Metaplay is the degeneration of roleplay. It may occur with or without metagaming & powergaming—but it does not include the facilitating or gathering of RP. It is an intentional subversion of rules and roleplay to serve an OOC motive through malicious act(s)." If this is the definition of "metaplay" then there's really no forgiving the bizarre franken-4X mechanics that govern all roleplay on the server. The most "meta" set of rules anyone could conceive, and they are explicitly directed toward the OOC goals of Nation Leaders to prevent spontaneous roleplay that threatens power structures cultivated through expert manipulation of Discord Roles. There's a magic force field that prevents anyone from doing something more spontaneous or destructive than breaking a window without PRO approval. Want to pitch a tent on the outskirts of town and smoke cactus green and sell counterfeit potions? Sorry, buddy. That needs an entire convoluted set of rules specifically for Nomads, which needs to be internally debated and redlined and means-tested. Or you could ask the guy who owns the region if he's okay with it, I guess. Does that kind of take the spontaneity and fun out of playing a character on this server? Does that 'degenerate' your 'roleplay?' We're all playing Minecraft, but in order to actually Mine or Craft anything you have to fill out a form and pay imaginary money and get people to sign a petition. The fact that you have to facilitate or gather RP is an obvious failure of the system. We all come here to RP. If given the choice, we all RP with each other spontaneously. But it's so unbelievably difficult to find someone to roleplay with, much less do anything particularly interesting once you do, that most people don't bother. They fall back on event calendars, which have to be explicitly allowed in the rules because we've tied ourselves in knots trying to define "metaplay." You have failed completely at preventing OOC motives or information from influencing important RP. All you have managed to do is move RP conflicts out of character. People now fight wars by maneuvering to get their enemies banned, or the rules changed in some key way that changes the parameters around what roleplay is allowed and not allowed. It's maddening. Please stop. Meanwhile, the actual gameplay of Lord of the Craft is set up to be as hostile to spontaneity and creativity as minemanly possible. Everything is protected by worldguard. There are no roleplay hubs. Finding roleplay involves running a command that tells you OOCly where people are, and when you actually go to one of those places you find people mainly AFKing or running around to stim themselves while they talk to their friends on Discord. I'm hopeful that the next map will improve on these conditions a bit, but how much can it, really? If we're too busy trying to correct 'player culture' to bother playing the game?

inland sea lets ******* go

Perfect summary; I think it wouldn't be a stretch to say he's the most consequential knight in LoTC history. The descendants are still fighting the war this guy started.

it's so tedious "activity" means nothing in the case of zoomers doing parallel play sprint hopping + scrolling 100 vertical videos per min. the gulf between that and Roleplay where i actually feel like im playing a character doing stuff in a fantasy world is completely impassable i assume this guy wants to actually make a character and do something in the game not just play club penguin. telling him to go find the place where people are idling in Current Year will not help him

what data are you sourcing?

every single one of these reasons is incorrect. the real reason is that LoTC warfare (despite the embellishments of in character chroniclers) takes place between small units of no more than 200 soldiers. mobility is the deciding factor in these engagements, and an army that specialized in volley firing early modern handguns would be outmaneuvered by the armies of light cavalry and skirmishers that dominate the field. i like to think there's just a bottleneck on developing guns for warfare in the lotc setting- you'd need specialized craftsmen or machine tools to mass produce handguns accurate enough to be useful in free fire, but there's no incentive to develop either of those because handguns have never been proven effective. this is why we have cannons and boomsteel/gunpowder but not handguns.