People still fail to replant trees and repair creeper holes. And some harvest an entire deserts worth of sand. That's the sort of stuff we've been repairing. Catching player-griefing, while very good doesn't address this.
Yes, especially in the frontier, this is quite the issue. The frontier never gets reset... Just occurred to me, is there a way you guys (staff) could reset the ground in the frontier, but not buildings? Besides repairing it in Creative mode, I mean... just a side thought
I'm still looking for a list of all possible EMC commands. Also the Flag system is very confusing. I think there should be a more detailed section on just res commands and flags.
The frontier is never reset. That's what Harp was saying, is to reset the ground around the waypoints to heal the scars.
What he's saying is that when they reset they reset EVERYTHING. I don't think you can just reset the ground... :/
I noticed something about the current tutorial (and I'm tired, so this may not make total sense.) It's not a question, but more of a setup consideration. At the end of the tutorial, players are given the options of going to town, learning more, and going to the frontier. I think it would make more sense to offer them to go to the waste in lieu of the frontier. I find a LOT of players going straight to the frontier. No brand new player is purposely going to go out and explore the frontier to build right away without stopping in town to or collect materials in the waste. Most will want to gather materials first, and in doing so, will mine the frontier. We of course hope they are not griefing after just having completed the tutorial but sometimes they are because they suddenly have structures surrounding them. Also, going straight to the frontier (or waste I guess) hinders their ability to ask questions. When I was new, I ran out there and couldn't find my way back to the outpost to teleport and had no idea how to ask for help. It was confusing and I almost gave up and left. Also, upon teleporting to town, there are further teleports to the waste and frontier anyway, so maybe it's a bit redundant? So anyway, not a question, but hopefully a suggestion that makes some sort of sense with my recent insomnia.
Replanting trees is simple, but for sure replacing deserts is hard. Fortunately, you can just build a town or something on the cleared area.
We aim to have the periodic reset area set back up, but what you propose is not possible due to the regen mechanism without doing it all manually.
I'm remaking it to look like a wilderness. It's extraordinarly large areas, so no single structure can cover the mess, even non-desert biomes. The end result of the landscape griefing is that it looks like fractured-hellscapes. So to replant trees you need the dirt which is usually lacking. And with all the literal pits in those area's (i.e. it's nothing but pits atop of pits) even if it were all dirt, just planting trees would make it more difficult, and dangerous, to traverse. So what me and others have been doing is: Step 1. Refill the land with dirt. In some cases this actually means capping off, 6 or so blocks deep, as the pits are a dozen or more, blocks deep. Step 2. Sculpt "close enough" landscape once everything is around 63 for elevation. (i.e. build hills) Step 3. Plant biome relevant trees for 99.9% of the trees... then mimic mother nature with the occasional oddball thrown in. Step 4. Revisit the area frequently and repair creeper holes that other people have left. (I built a trail long before I started repairing the landscape and many people use it, yet neglect to repair near it.)
So what are the extents (radius?) from spawn on the periodic reset area's? And when is the next (recent first?) one anticipated? I would like to reclaim my stone brick slabs for my trail before it. Also, when that's reinstituted, will there be a giant message across the screen whenever someone builds within it, saying "This is the periodic reset zone. All structures will be destroyed when this area is reset"... or something similar?
When it is active, it's the yellow box around the spawn on the Live Map. Since it's been broken for a while, there will be VERY advanced notice before it is reactivated so that players can collect anything they built there.
As a software engineer I can tell you that it should be technically possible to do, yet would be very bad for business to try. Why? 1. It would take a very long time and a lot of mental effort to code up. That's a lot of time and effort for a feature that's used once or twice a year and affects, and I'm guessing at this, at most 1% of the players. 2. While it was being coded up we would still need some way to handle the desolation of the landscape near spawn. For that, the "dumb" reset area would be used. That's exactly what we have now/when it's resumed. 3. Discerning the difference between a "structure" and "garbage left behind by lazy players" is remarkably difficult. That means whatever was coded would have very quirky results. Quirky results are difficult to explain. Simple results, such as everything is reset in that area, are easy to explain. When you run a business you want your customers understanding what they're getting. They stay happy that way. Happy customers are return customers, which are good for business. Put another way: I know that, as a player, I wouldn't want to decipher someone else's logic as to why only parts of my building got whacked. Especially when the result was letting in creepers, who then proceed to wreak havoc... I would be very upset at that. But at the same time, I have no qualms about my entire build disappearing, if I were to knowingly build within the periodic reset area.
Well, still, please consider adding a message. Getting a warning every minute or five, saying "Um yeah. this is gonna go bye bye on the next reset" in chat, or across the screen like the server reset message will help tremendously in ensuring people build only where they intend to build. Why? Not all players use (nor know about!) Live Map. Plus many of us don't turn on our own avatars. . . We don't want others messing with us or our builds...etc. So even if we had it open we wouldn't inherently know that we're building within the reset zone without spending lots of time with debug mode open and setting up key coordinates as way points in the likes of voxel map. Oh, and I know that a bunch of players don't use voxelmap, or other mapping plugins. So they have to either a) reveal their locations on livemap, security risk until AG is released; or b) ... i'm not sure what else they could do to know that they're close to spawn, but not in the reset-zone. I'm drawing a blank on that one.
Once changes are closer to re-initiation, we will make any and all adjustments to ensure that people understand the system.
I don't want to continue to derail this thread, but I'm curious to know what tutorial this was. Is there a place I could find more information about it and exactly what the confusion was? I will submit some questions on the form provided.
The confusion had to deal with prompting the player to actually perform the command, place the sign, etc. Many got confused no matter how many giant arrows or signs we put. We have a plan in place for the system of the new tutorial, we just need to know what the community thinks are the most important questions. Then we can go from there.
