300 days of believing in the EMC frontier

• Aikar created a poll to help guide the development priority. Please participate!
• [POLL] What upcoming feature do you desire more?

In the next hour I will turn 300. I figure this is as good of a reason to post as anything.

300 days ago, I joined EMC, made a farm on my res and after about a week, I decided this was the place for me.

I became a supporter and I immediately took off into the /frontier and made a public farm for other people. After all, why play an SMP if you're not going to share your creations with others. I quickly felt the pain of griefing and the insurmountable pressure of thousands of new players each month and that even if 1% of them trample/grief your place, thats enough to wear you out.

I then went out and created an outpost, at first it was just a single cell iron farm and a 2 high block hut with leaves for a ceiling. It grew though to something much greater. Griefing has been a constant fear and as the outpost grows and friends have built as well, the possible loss from griefing increases.

To my deepest sadness, I can't share what I work on every day in EMC with the majority of my friends or great people in town. Unlike people in town, I can't have someone stop by and see what I'm working on without putting my outpost at risk for me and the rest of the members. It's just not worth it to have a guest.

After 300 days in EMC, you have only 1 thing that protects an outpost. Secrecy. You can lock up a beacon, but not the blocks under it. You can lock up a chest, but not the house or farm surrounding it. You can evict someone one or get them banned for griefing, but you can never get your blocks back, your work redone, your animals resurected or your things repaired.

My 300 day wish for EMC is that if you ever get a chance to speak out about how important land claiming is, that you do. Right now landclaiming has been pushed back again.

Development Status:

• Current: Core, Dragon Tombs (pt3)
  Groups, Games Server, Residence

My best guess is, if we don't take on anything new, this development schedule will take 6 months for these items alone. In 6 months 1.9 might be stable.. That's another 3 months to put that in.. So we're looking at 9 months before Land Claiming is even on the table. It's just not a high priority for the dev team right now.

As best I can tell, new content is more important than covering the basics of supporting people in playing their way. If I live in town, no one can destroy my house. If I live in the frontier, anyone can destroy my house. That doesn't sound like even the very basics are covered to me.

Thanks for listening, good luck out there.

Kev

If I could like it 1000 times, I would. Thanks kevmeup for summing up pretty much the same I would say myself. Just to add, land claiming/protection could be done in many different ways, if only it would of be priority. Interesting and challenging ways to achieve the goal are good, but... if it takes years and years for the update to come out because of the coding work it requires, I shall doubt if the interesting/challenging is worth it versus some simpler methods, that would let people feel safe for their Frontier bases and let EMC claim it is FULL grief free for those that want to be grief free.

*slow clap to standing ovation*

I couldn't agree with something more. In my humble opinion, land claiming is the one single most important feature that almost every other online survival server has.... that we do not. If we have an outpost in the wild, we have one thing protecting us and that is secrecy and distance from town (the heartbeat of each server), and due to the live map, even that is paper thin. 99% of farms that need to be in the wild leave a large footprint that can EASILY be seen on the live map.

There was alot of talk by the "Powers That Be" several months back about land claiming. Rough details were released about how it "probably" will be done. Little glimmers have hope have been dropped about the potential claiming process. Even a poll was taken from the general public about land claiming specifically.

However, that was in March. We are now well into October.

We have seen it CAN be done, when Aikar let the general public onto his old outpost. We have been, basically, told how it will be done.

However, those of us who all but live in the wild are left wanting... for months... for years.

I have seen well known and much loved players leave EMC because of this very issue. NZScruffy is one of these. He made the ever-so-popular public iron farm on SMP5. It is CONSTANTLY griefed. I was part of a team to help keep up with it for awhile, but I just could not keep up. He came online after a long hiatus in late July (I think) and basically let several of us know that he is gone because wild property protection is an issue, has been an issue for many moons now, and he doesn't see it ever NOT being an issue.

We just lost another player who has spent almost or over a year working on his "established" outpost decide that he wants to continue his project but no longer will be on EMC. he is in the process of downloading his outpost and unlocking his chests as I type this.

Ey Kev!

First of all: Happy 300!

It still amazes me that you're almost as old as I am; it hardly differs anything because I turned 300 only a few days ago. Yet if I see what you've accomplished in building... Just wow!

(for those unaware: I'm one of the lucky / privileged / very darn proud players who is part of the outpost which Kev mentioned up there)

Anyway, you're fully right of course. However, there's one small part which has been somewhat addressed:

What you're saying is true, but I do want to note that there is a good chance that you can get most of your blocks back through GRIP. An organization set up to help griefed players. Still... Even then it's not unlikely that you're looking at getting most of your blocks back and not all (depending on the nature of griefing).

Although I seriously share your concerns, and fully agree with them, I think it's also important to note that not having protection also brings some other advantages with them. For example: you can go derelict in town and risk losing all your stuff, but that can't happen in the frontier. And although town is limited where size of your builds go, the frontier is almost limitless.

This doesn't change the validity of any of your arguments, but those are things which I think could also change should wild protection become a thing. I can't help wonder if there will be quite some strings attached to it.

Even so: I do fully agree. Aikar does have a history of pushing playing in the wild a lot, and wild protection is an important thing for those who do just that. But... In all honesty I also have to wonder if the majority of players isn't actually playing in town.

Hmm... Maybe we should find out..

That and then there is no protection for those that play the "wild way" ... somewhat confusing, what is the real goal, or is it just pushing for a quick go out/mine/slaughter mobs/run back?

There always will be majority playing in town, due to few reasons you might know/understand and that wont change with or without wild protection, it's just the lack of voicing we don't hear, due to many "wild" players leaving/taking extended breaks or simply giving up on the belief for their voice to be heard. May I also add, there are numerous times I have seen newcomers leaving, once they discover the no fun of getting griefed. Those are people we won't hear a voice from and many other veteran and middle-age players we won't hear a voice from, leading others to impression there isn't an issue with delayed wild protection. It aches my heart when I hear someone asking "Is the wild grief proof" and all I can answer is "well, we have a good system in place for punishing the bad behavior".............

This has already been addressed. You can't keep people from going to your outpost but rather keep them from breaking blocks somewhat similar to in town except you will never be able to restrict movement. This was very clearly stated about protection in the wild.

With all due respect, but that is an impossible scenario. Simply because you will never know who is going to visit the server next and what their intentions are.

And I think there's also a flaw in your reasoning: because if you say build everywhere then this would also mean within already established outposts (which would otherwise have been protected). Yet if I go out and build something in an outpost, even if it were something really nice, then that can be considered griefing.

Ergo: introducing protection would not change that much because there already is a situation where people can't build anywhere they like in the Frontier. The main difference would be that the server would block them instead of having players fix the issue after the facts.

Sorry for 2 posts shortly after each other, but I've put my "contrib. team skills" to some use (we're more or less required to have the ability to quickly find & process info) and I'd like to share my finds. I am quoting some people: please note that I'm not arguing here, merely sharing what I've found.

So I looked deeper into this and I found this post by Aikar:

The original full thread can be found here.

So it seems that the time span could be different (shorter?).

The thread which you're referring to can be found here.

I'd like to quote yet another post by Aikar which also sheds some more light on this (from that same thread):

Figured I'd add the links comments made above ("links, or it didn't happen" ).

Some players have been waiting more than 3 years for Wild Land Claiming(Zone Block Protection from griefers).

Some servers have this from Day 1, and on those servers, it does Not depend on some other feature that takes years to complete (e.g. Dragon Tombs).

EMC could also do this fairly easily, but they want to make it better than the other plugins and they want to make it depend on a feature that takes years to complete (Dragon Tombs).

I know they are working on parts of it, but may be another year or longer.

In the mean time, if your base is so far out and so difficult to get to, that even you do not want to make the trip to town, then that helps reduce griefing. Think no rails, no path, far, far out, and still hidden .

I agree with the OP so many times over. I love building my huge farms, etc. and I'm always building them as if other will be using it. But that's not the case. The risk of griefing is too high.

I was thinking about this the other day. Even if we can protect an area in our base. It may not be big enough to protect the whole area. So someone could TP to your base, then walk out of the protected area and grief other areas. Would love some info on this so we can better plan.

Which makes me wonder if teleporting should actually be a thing, at least during the pilot. I think the protection itself is what counts most for those who feel strongly about this. And I could imagine that the main issue for the staff is making sure that they keep an overview of what's going on.

Problem is, as always, I can understand both sides here. On one hand all Frontier fans want protection, but I can also understand that the staff doesn't want to "just" protect some outposts to prevent possible bias. So instead they try to come up with a completely (or mostly) finished system which can be used by everyone under the same rules. No favorism.

I think that is also fully understandable, but yeah.. Time doesn't work in anyones favor here.

The other servers let You control the Teleport and other permissions to your wild base, so griefing in wild is like in town, only if you give perms to untrustworthy people.

I think you need to ability to TP. If it's just an area of protection without the ability to TP, then you would still need to rail out to your base which means others can still get to you. They wouldn't be able to grief that one area but could do whatever they wanted outside of that safe zone.

I would also be interested to know more about the protected area. Like if there was a way to set perms so that they could TP to your area but couldn't leave that protected area. Or something along those lines.

I do want to acknowledge that Dragon Tombs and Group improvements are both part of the plan for land claiming as far as I know. I'm not saying those wont be great additions. I just want to make it clear, that for the last 300 days and the next 9 months+ the people that will value those changes the most will be left without the most basic protections and we may continue to lose more.

The parallel development time mentioned was referring to chicken's time in the summer. Which is now over. We spent that on name changes as far as I know.

As it is right now, outposts are kind of like using EMC to host your whitelist server. Except you get a shared end with randoms and shotty hoppers. As you can see most the people interested in this thread are supporters, that could easily just buy a hosted server with the supporter money instead. With plugins they could roll back griefing, protect land or chests on their own server with the same small group of people they are in an outpost with. People stick around because they want to be connected, we've got all these amazing people hiding out there, sitting on the bench waiting. There has to be a way to get the basics in before the 9+ month longterm plan.

I can't remember the thread but I think Aikar changed this to be something separate.

Land-claiming is EMC's equivalent to Half Life 3...

Congrats on 300 days, and although I haven't been to your outpost in a while, I remember that it was amazing.

I regret that during my time on the dev team that so many factors got in the way of working on features. If you recall, it took many months for 1.8 to happen. During that time, we weren't even sure what kind of code we would be able to work on in the future. Now that things are more stable, it seems like everyone is too busy.