Bye

Hello,

Having seen my outpost once again extensively griefed, I've decided to scrap my subscription and leave EMC. I've come to the conclusion that my own idea of having fun enjoying a game was not compatible with such behavior.

Feel free to PM me if you want ownership of the outpost.

Bye all, especially to those I enjoyed playing with.

I'm so sorry for that. Though, I understand, you are not the first person with this story...

Please take care, and I hope you pursue your passions in the future.

If we can prevent you from leaving, please PM me (or another staff) and we will look into this for you. Last thing we want is to lose something because of griefing. I hope you reconsider.

Due to how EMC works, I hardly see what you could do. Maybe there is a technical way to 'roll back' the affected map chunks, and it is likely that the users involved can be banned.

But you cannot prevent griefing from happening again in the future. You cannot prevent the offending players to create another login and keep playing as if nothing happened - it has happened several times in the past. Moreover, there is nothing you can do to prevent me thinking: "well, has anything been stolen or broken since Yesterday?" each time I'd log in.

I'm playing computer games to relieve pressure from work and real life necessities; if I have to start worrying about what may happen into the game itself, then it makes no sense to keep playing it. There are plenty enough other, friendlier ways to have fun and relax with (online or not) friends than EMC.

The most I expect is to have the afflicted chunks somehow restored, so that if another player wants to get ownership of the outpost buildings, (s)he can do so without facing endless hours of tiresome cleanup work.

This saddens me to no end. You, Allicanto, Gawadrolt, Robobozo, antimattermatt and Phalanx12 were some of the first players that talked to me and helped me out when I first joined. I hope you change your mind and stay or at the very least check in occationally to chat. I for one will miss talking to you

Hey, I talked to you briefly yesterday, after this happened (but I hadn't seen this thread yet then).
If you do go, good-bye. I'd prefer to see you stick around, of course, but the third paragraph here seems a very solid reason for leaving. You could pay us a visit now and then, though.

i apologize for the repeated griefings... i have experienced this at some of my now abandoned outposts, and it is definitely no fun... i am glad to see Krysyy and the staff team are so willing to help and are truly interested in finding a solution to perhaps your case, and if deemed impossible or improbable, at least it could help out someone else within the community!

#EMCstaffareamazing

Lol, coming from your previous status ("yay im unbanned"), I interpreted this slightly differently from probably (and hopefully) intended.

haha, definitely, considering my reason for my unfortunate ban (which did not effect anyone except myself and staff and was not griefing) could come off as slightly ironic, but i would never grief anyone's property or builds... nonetheless, i will not be going into any specifics for the reason of the unfortunate break i had to take from in- game as i do not see any positive reasons to publicize my prior mistakes, although I do acknowledge 100% I made a mistake.

I'd think that there are two sides of the issue.

The first one is technical. The current system of protection marks blocks as protected as a players places them. This means there is no way to prevent new blocks to be laid down in empty spaces (which is one of the ways the griefers acted). It is just pretty easy for a griefer to cover a whole structure with hard to remove blocks, disturb lava or water areas, and so on. There is also no practical way to protect the pre-existing landscape.

Moreover, establishing an outpost doesn't define exclusive permission on the chunks around its central point. This means that someone could still freely build on the outpost territory, even not being aware of actually stepping on someone's else's territory. This is an issue both for the outpost legitimate owners and also for the nice guy spending time to build, just to realize (s)he was not allowed to and needs to go away.

Chest protection should work the opposite way: that is, making them private by default, and allowing them to be shared if wanted. The current system also promotes spending rupees to lock them; I understand the idea, but not everybody is interested by playing the "Let's make money" game. I know I never was: I enjoy building large structures, not spending time buying and selling DCs of items and hunting down rare stuff just to monetize them.

The second one relates to the human factor. It seems pretty clear that the only players who really care about the rules and links given in the tutorial are those who don't really need to read those, and would naturally behave properly. Those who don't care just skim through it without even really reading those. I am not sure you can do anything about that: in all online games, one can expect immature and negative players to come. It is up to the game mechanisms themselves to ensure that they cannot harm the experience of others more than for a very limited part.

The issue is compounded by that many timezones are poorly "covered" by staff members. Most days, I could only play during early-mid evening, GMT+1; many staff members are just not playing during that time. I, as a player, have no way to prevent a griefer to lay random stuff around my outpost if no staff is available to stop him. What am I supposed to do? Stay online and shout around until I enter a staff timezone? I've to wake up at 5:45AM the next day to go to work; how am I supposed to do this? Answer: I cannot. The best I can do is send a PM and cross fingers. If I have to worry about what may happen in-game, then as I said, it is pointless to keep playing.

I'm actually not quite sure my frustration is really "understood", to be honest. Some buildings took literally months to finish, because my gaming time is pretty limited, and because I enjoy having to hunt resources instead of going the "easy way" of buying them from town shops. Why would I even try to attempt this again on EMC, if any random kid can come and mess it all? At my office, my boss would likely describe this as "break of trust between the customer and the provider". If I cannot trust EMC to be a nice, fun place to play, then I don't play there anymore - that's maybe harsh, but that's how it works. Does your staff arsenal include tools that restore such trust? I think no such magical wand exists.

Regarding the details of the griefing you need: just PM me with whatever you'd want me to provide. I likely won't be able to give a full report on everything, as the worldmap shows a rather large area being damaged.

@Others: It was entertaining to talk and play with nice players like you. Who knows, maybe our paths will meet again in another game?

This is a post I can get behind, but you asked a rhetorical question that I think can be answered.

If you enjoyed the resource-hunting and the building, if you had a good time playing on EMC, that would be the reason to attempt it again. If you were trying to accomplish some goal like "Build an empire", I'd advice against trying another time. But if your goal was having fun, or, as you said it was, "relieving pressure from work and real life necessities", then that goal was likely already met many times in the past, and can probably be met again.

Last summer, I got a tool to rip Game Boy games. I was so excited that I tried it on all of mine. Over the following weeks, I found out that for over half of all games that supported save data, the data was gone, and I had to start over. This greatly disappointed me, as I had put a lot of time into playing the games. But then I realised that the reason I had played the games was not to have cartridges with a save on it that showed I beat the game. I had played the games because I enjoyed doing so, and had been having a good time. Those good times were still intact! And it is quite likely that I'll be replaying some of the games later, now that my saves are gone. Not to get the saves back, but to once again have a good time.

I hope this story doesn't take poorly with you; I do not mean to deny you your frustration or your decision. But when I read that question, even though it probably wasn't meant to be answered, I wanted to respond.

that analogy really spoke to me, as I ran into a similar dilemma.. dang you are the king of deja- vu, lol

I see no reason to spend days building resources, if in the end, those resources are stolen, or if the buildings they were used for are defaced. I can play the resource-hunter in singleplayer and not have to worry about griefers.

My way of enjoying the game is building large-scale structures and complex redstone mechanisms. If the buildings gets damaged and the redstone broken, if my limited gameplay time is about checking everything is ok and fixing damage, then it isn't fun anymore - it is one of maintenance and upkeep. And yes, I had some long-term goals I wanted to achieve. Obviously, I'm not the "target audience" of EMC in this.

You enjoyed the path more than the destination, put it shortly. Yet the analogy is somehow flawed; i'm not leaving because the server had technical issues. I'm leaving because I do not entertain playing with bullies, disrespectful people who don't give a damn about others. There are other games that I enjoy as much as Minecraft (RPGs and strategy games being my favourite genres), where communities do not, for various reasons, attract such nasties.

As for Minecraft, I'll keep playing it - solo, or with a few selected friends, who share my values of mutual respect and cooperative play.

Not at all! Just know that it won't change my decision - if anything, it just makes even more clear why I can't enjoy playing here again.

I've read this... and I think lauwenmark has made a few good points...
I never knew you, but i hope you can find a way to enjoy the game somehow, good luck.

And Krysyy- I've seen this before at PWU builds on 8. If you don't know who griefed, only where, not when even (or just a general time frame of "it was last checked on x and by y it was griefed), then /report isn't all that helpful and I've had to poke staffz in the past- usually to get a shrug because the block wasn't protected (due to that system not being implemented at the time of the build).
What about the main case of "I dunno who did it, nor an exact time of when", and about "There wasn't buildmode for this build?"

Furthermore, I never have fully agreed with "Claim land and no one else can build on it" from other servers because they're often small, but in the case of EMC I have seen far too many cases like this where outposts receive... unwanted changes. Is this system already coded for Empires?
We have no release date for that. Could even a small version of the protection be implemented instead of constant reliance on buildmode easily bypassed in void areas?

Too late.

Not always possible/convenient/practical.

More extensive explanation text in /staff when none is around.

Again, what infos do you need?

I'm not talking about dealing with my own stupidity - I'm used to it, having to deal with it on a regular basis; I'm talking about playing with the fear that toxic players will ruin the fun. So no, that's quite not the same thing.

Then don't try explaining why they are wrong - I'll be bluntly honest by saying this is how most of your message sounds to me (with the slight bitter aftertaste of PR damage control). Instead, acknowledge the issue and how the player itself percieved it, and take that perception bias into account when designing a solution.

Good. I hope you find elsewhere what you had hoped to find (and presumably once had) in EMC.