300 days of believing in the EMC frontier

Discussion in 'Frontier and Player Outposts' started by kevmeup, Oct 7, 2015.

  1. If I could add my 2 cents here, hear me if you would.
    I've read the threads about how land claiming will work with tokens and DT, but nothing is clearly mentioned about the fate of previously established outposts. What if we don't have enough tokens to buy protection from griefing? I would certainly hope(and would assume) that creations that we have poured hundreds and hundreds of hours and millions of rupees into already won't be left out due to a lack of desire to kill mobs and earn tokens.
    I'm not saying that DT should wait another year, but personally, I've been a paying supporter for over 1 year, and would rather my money go to protecting things already in existence vs a whole new server(assuming DT will be a separate SMP). I think the development team has been doing a n amazing job, but I just wish land claiming would be higher on the priority list
  2. Minecraft worlds are, for practical purposes, infinite in area. Practically speaking, there will be enough room elsewhere.

    You might argue that a player would have to travel further as a result to find somewhere to build. Maybe, but luckily, with Frontier land claiming implemented, players would be able to claim an area for a public nether railway without fear of it being griefed, so it would balance out.
  3. I honestly think we should start to look at BB roleback where blocks are replaceable in a set area.

    http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/coreprotect/

    Some believe it takes more away from Minecraft but it does help with "Taking back" Greifed areas to formal state. I know you have logblock because you can see who greifed but why not take the extra step of actually taking back the damage?

    This is a large issue with EMC at this very moment and how old players are leaving.

    Edit:
    Screenshots my friend!
    dresden72, ShelLuser and Mman like this.
  4. Shouldn't directive #1 for Empire Minecraft be the promotion and creation of expansive frontier Empires?


    Think five years from now. The YouTube team wants to make a video capturing the memories and creations of EMC.

    Are they going to show Dragon Tombs and mini-games? Is that what EMC is about?
    Are they going to show frontier bases cowering under dirt screens?

    Or maybe if EMC has the right priorities, they'll show some truly awesome frontier builds with crowds of appreciating tourists.
  5. Speaking only for myself here, I would rather see protection than replacement. No reports, no bans, everyone is happy. I'd rather prevent grifing than repair it.
  6. With all due respect, EMC NEEDS TO GET IT'S JUNK STR8. If you wanna make EMC the best server, and if you wanna show everyone how great it is, then give it the vital ingredients of a good, fun to play, less headaches SMP! I played on a couple of other servers before emc, servers like factions. Now don't get me wrong, factions sucks. But people who love that sense of being able to wander and live in a vanilla world, while still being able to meet new people and interact with a huge community, will drift towards servers like them if you don't add wild protection. The fun is in actually accomplishing something out there, beyond killing mobs and bosses 100 times and then coming back.

    Want more people to come to EMC? Focus on wild protection before dragon tombs. DT isn't going to bring more people. Imagine, "EMC, the greatest SMP! We have one amazing quest waiting for you to finish! Then, idk do something else."

    Or maybe bringing more people isn't your priority. Maybe you want to focus on the community you already have. I believe that wild protection will benefit the common person a lot more than DT... especially since, at least from what I heard and I may be wrong, Dragon Tomb portals or whatsit are located in wild/waste and need to be found. This'll bring more people into the lands, stumbling on people's builds and maybe, possibly, if the evil is in their hearts, griefing them.

    And if you believe people should have a sense of common good, and that will increase the community feeling, you won't be able to accomplish that without whitelisting. And the reasons why EMC shouldn't be whitelisted are obvious. I won't even go into that.

    That's the longest post I've ever written lol. I mean no offense to EMC's devs, staff, and community. I'm sure they're all wonderful hard working people. All i'm saying is organize your priorities to be efficient, and deliver the best experience to players old and new.
  7. Just a somewhat offtopic comment, mainly because this critter is a bit less known but I had so much good experiences with it on my server... Prism, official site being this one:

    http://discover-prism.com/

    They're not very well known (it seems) but the stuff they can track and restore is kind of mind blowing to me. Of course it does come with a price: it has a learning curve, you need to make sure that you know some basic commands before you can use it, but yah...

    And some of the options, like the way it can handle liquid griefs, is just plain out slick. Definitely something to keep in mind as well.
    carolmoss likes this.
  8. I understand your pain, really. Ultimately it boils down to trying to build a long term experience, but as youve noticed things have been changed in order to accomodate land claiming to come quicker than originally expected and not as restricted (original idea was you must of completed DT, now you wont have to)

    The complicated thing is a derelict policy for the Frontier will be much trickier.

    We have to be careful about how we approach it. There has to be some form of requirement to establish it to ensure active players are engaging land and not someone who's going to leave immediately.

    The goal is to make land claiming something for those who are serious about it, and not 'let me just claim a piece of land for no real reason'.

    As for DT priority being above it? Ultimately just want to see another step of it done then the goal was to move into land claiming even before the final step of DT was to be finished. DT Part 3 is essentially a "Survival update v2" with some of the related elements to it. It's a dose of fresh content. DT 3 isn't as big as 4, so I wanted to get it out of the way to have another round of DT content for those who are waiting for it... and put a use to the fragments and stones.

    Can that be changed? Sure. It's just you're going to have crowds in both sides who want it. By switching priorities, SOMEONE is going to be displeased. My goal was to just stick to the plan, PT 3 > Land claiming (Empires) Foundation > then chicken and I both can work pt 4 and full on claiming in parallel.

    I guess I can create a poll, and once we get an adequate # of responses take that for information on priorities.

    I personally am torn on wanting both... They both are exciting next steps.

    I just wish I had clones to handle it, as these steps are major foundations that are part of my vision that are things I need to do myself, which then sets the foundation for the other developers to finish off elements of it (In the software world, you generally have an architect that designs the system, and engineers implement the system.)

    Additionally, We've tried to help with political policies to alleviate griefing concerns as a measure to hold off until the full system is ready. If you have any ideas on policies that we can change that would help alleviate when griefing DOES happen, please let us know and we will evaluate, or short term ideas to prevent griefing.

    Maybe ideas like new players can't break blocks placed by other players if that player is not in a group with the player, or "Friends" with the player (an upcoming system). things like that we can add as short term solutions to reduce griefing even farther outside of full on protection, that won't take long to implement.
    ThaKloned, 72Volt, kevmeup and 2 others like this.
  9. i've had plans to implement prism, but as said above, rollback policies are tricky to avoid potential for abuse of duplicating items. But its not out of the question.

    Just, it got forgotten. That was one of my goals to implement that to be able to undo larger scale greifing as a stop gap too.

    Maybe ill spend some time here soon to trying to get it cleanly implemented

    I think when I first looked at it I ran into some issues though.
    Gawadrolt and ShelLuser like this.
  10. How about using tokens to ensure that players don't just claim land and run away? I mean, like you have to pay tokens to claim a chunk, maybe 10k-40k or so. That'd ensure that brand new players don't just come on and claim land then never return.
  11. ummm if you can implement this quickly then yeah it'd be good.
    cadgamer101 likes this.
  12. Well... There are dozens of players who already feel this way. They make huge builds in town, show & share it with their friends, and yah... Not everyone plays in the Frontier.

    Totally agreed.

    Yet one has to wonder... Note: just mentioning since I honestly don't have the answer to this myself...

    Do those players fully care about the vanilla "wild building" aspect, or do they care about the "protected building" aspect? Because although there's no denying what you're saying, I also know plenty of players who don't like building in the wild because of the risk that their stuff gets destroyed by creepers and endermen. Obviously also something which can be fixed with some plugins, yet that's not the point right now.

    Thing is: most servers I visited don't really know a concept of a "town world", not in the sense we have. It is possible for players to get a protected area within an established town, yet that gives them a plot which is much smaller than what we have on EMC.

    Other servers actually provide individual protected areas, but more than often you don't get the kind of control over it like you have here (of course this heavily differs per server).

    I don't think there's a black / white area to be found here.

    Because although wild protection is lagging, there is a lot which people get instead of that within the town world.
    Salmatic likes this.
  13. It's really simple to add. Just players need to rename "Common" blocks in an Anvil if they want them to be protected.

    We don't log the common blocks found in normal terrain generation unless it has a special property like renamed in anvil, that reduces the level of logs drastically and makes our logging more manageable.

    But doing that + blocking access to chests to new players should def help. Id expect most griefing is from trolls who join, grief then quit, but a lot of griefing is actually accidental in the sense its a young player (age/maturity wise) who honestly doesn't know any better. They just see something they want, and in single player they grab.

    Sure they should read the rules.... but sometimes their comprehension isn't at the level to understand the rules. And EMC would prefer to not ask age of a user, nor would we force it before letting them play either as when we had forced registration, it just didn't work out in the past.

    So targetting the new players and just not letting them grief, should help a ton. And if you have a friend whos new who is joining you in the wild, then invite them to group. Offline play gets tricky but thats where the friends system will help.

    I just talked to Socks about progress on that, and I'm going to take that task back on and get that system done real quick, then we can implement this idea (which hell we could just say not even just new players, but prevent block breaks of special blocks unless friends and thatll stop griefing pretty hardcore)
    Gawadrolt and ShelLuser like this.
  14. When reading most comments I can't help wonder if I can nail the main issue here...

    Lack of information, no status updates and such. There is a lot happening, yet people don't know about it.

    For example: staff made a poll some months ago about the Frontier and all, but after that things have become a bit quiet. Not quiet on updates and such, you guys did a helluva job on adding new features which I think a majority of players really liked. But on the other hand it also caused a bit of silence on those projects which other cared for.

    So maybe it would be possible to give some small bits of updates every once in a while so that people get reminded that there's actually still something going on.

    As always just my 2 cents of course.
  15. [/quote]

    Just to clarify, i'm not saying EMC is better than any other server. For sure EMC is the best one I've seen so far of it's kind. But I do believe they should appeal to a broader spectrum of players, looking for the vanilla-ish experience. Of course they shouldn't become pvp just to feed the PVPers :p I mean appeal to adventurers and builders alike.

    Town world reminds me of a creative world, except you don't have the inventory and you can't fly. You can't spawn mobs, you don't take damage, you don't get hungry. So there is more of a thrill in building and developing your own town in a survival world like frontier.

    As for players simply looking for a protected area, you can't build iron, snow, gold, or mob farms in town. That makes the frontier the ideal place for building your own supply post. So I think that wild protection would appeal to players both ways. As for damage by mobs, they won't target your beacon or diamond blocks :D plus you can torch around to DECREASE enderman/creeper spawns.
    ShelLuser likes this.
  16. what you mean 'lack of information', 'status updates', 'something still going on'? http://empireminecraft.com/forums/empire-updates/ Is all dated.
    Including a dev road map I occasionally update which is still somewhat relevant and in an overall order of whats the priority.

    I do commonly post status messages on my profile too. But the Empire Updates forum contains everything important to know where things are, as well as the sidebar.
    Gawadrolt, PenguinDJ and ShelLuser like this.
  17. Could container flags also be required at established outposts as well? If a player can't break a block, but can empty a chest, we haven't gained much. Or simply place a hopper under that chest and syphen it out, and viola, another DC of emeralds gone. Plain protection would be the best IMO, maybe not the roads to get to our outposts, because they may need to be shared sometimes, due to the location of them.
    As for the derelict policy, why not have protection be tied to voting and supportership? If you become inactive and don't vote, then in 30 days your protection is gone?
    Salmatic and Dektirok like this.
  18. Prism <3

    I'd add my '2 cents', but I've already done that multiple times in the past, and I don't really feel like doing it again in fear of annoying the devs (I mean, scrapping DT (which I've suggested once, I think, lol) is a bit extreme, but putting it on the backburner and making things the community have requested for years wouldn't hurt, right?).
    Gawadrolt likes this.
  19. True, but that mostly focuses on finished or implemented features. Not so much work in progress. And when there's a large time span between making people aware of something and implementing it then some players can start to wonder if something is still happening at a given moment.

    Exactly.

    And I get the impression that some players picked up the priority on DT as possible set-back for land protection.

    Some of the arguments seen above are also in sense of: "you hear something about $feature and then it remains quiet for several months".

    So I can't help wonder if an occasional update on on-going development could help put some worries at ease. A bit like you did just now, but then without a trigger from the community.

    (and yes, I seriously know how hard that can be, especially when there's enough things going on yet nothing to actually show or mention).
  20. hey...

    i don't have stuff on the frontier, don't like building there...what i DO have is a tonne of tokens...

    if anyone can't afford anti griefing tokenness, let me know, i'll claim and then give you admin rights and you'll ne'er see me again! just message me here, i check frequently!
    Gawadrolt likes this.