EMC Roadmap - Updated 12/28/2022

This is a successor to the "The Empire of the Future - My vision" by Aikar many years ago. The goal is to modernize the vision, and refocus to the changed needs of the EMC of today. Items lower on the list may never happen, but are included anyway to help communicate the overall direction for the server.

At the time of posting, this is a first draft. As things develop, this thread will change and be updated.

It is important to keep in perspective what purpose EMC holds in the world.
EMC is a PVE Survival Multiplayer server and strives to provide the premier experience in survival gameplay while providing opportunities to interact and socialize with other Minecrafters in a friendly environment.

In Progress Projects:

• New Community Team - Think Tank
  • A new community team led by chickeneer to provide idea and design support to assist developer projects.
  • Example projects include: Updating voter rewards, give a purpose to tokens, design new custom mobs to be implemented by the dev team.
  • Some commentary on why this is needed: thinking about the "design" of content takes a lot of time and brainpower and usually results in less time getting spent on the code side of it all. This allows for more help for the dev team without the logistical obstacles that being an EMC dev requires.

Ongoing Projects:

• Onboarding and New Player Experience
  • Continual efforts to improve the New Player Experience should work towards helping guide new players to learn EMC and get acquainted in a more efficient manner.
  • Adjust tutorial wording and layout to more appropriately communicate what EMC is about and provide a better start to new players.
  • Provide a Tour Guide like experience, to provide orientation to new players after the tutorial world.
• Development on Hosted Events and other Games projects
  • Various holiday events throughout the year often require special code to make them possible. We will continue adapting holiday events to create new one-time or annual events.
  • The Games server holds various hosted and automatic games. Although not our primary objective as a server, as time and inspiration permits we will add more to these collection of games.
• Bug fixing
  • A stable experience is essential to a quality game experience. Exploits and show-stopping issues are always made a priority to resolve ASAP. Lower tier quality-of-life fixes are important but are fixed sporadically without a predictable schedule.

Major Projects in the near future:

• 1.20
  • Mojang's unnamed Java Edition 1.20 update will bring various features which EMC will plan to support soon after Mojang's release.
• Outposts: Empire Land Claiming
  • Ability for an Empire to claim land in the wild
  • Use a combination of Challenge Tokens and Rupees to claim the land
  • Owned by an Empire, not a single player
  • Ability to teleport to/from town to your Empire's land
  • Ability to expand the size of claimed land

Unscheduled Higher Priority Projects: (no particular order)

• Groups: Temporary system for grouping up for mining, events, etc.
  • Make the Group system cross-server.
  • Design a Looking For Group System: Creates a central code place to advertise that you are forming a group for a particular activity such as Mining, Boss Hunting, Minigames, PVP, etc.
• Shops: Create an in-game system to better connect players to active shops and seek-out the particular item they seek. This is not virtualizing shops.
• Other Stuff I can't think of right now: there are lots of smaller projects that may not be notable enough to justify mentioning here.

Low Priority Eventual Projects: (These would be nice, but solid plans do not exist)

• Add an alternative survival experience which is sequestered away from the main EMC smp servers. The concept is to take everything about EMC and put it in a resettable set of worlds which operates on a "seasons" model, possibly resetting up to 4 times a year. Since it is separate, it will not be affected by the endgame economy of the main smp servers. But also gives new opportunities to build-out beginning stages of survival minecraft. Each 'reset', there would be a goal of adding new features/content plus finding ways to archive those old worlds so work isn't lost as in a normal "reset".
• Maybe add a Creative-like Server to do creative building while being connected to EMC's chat and social systems. A barrier to implementing this is that vanilla creative mode is very powerful and dangerous.
• Quests: Would be nice for the server assign daily/weekly/etc quests that give "something" to do with appropriate rewards.
• Dungeons: Some type of challenge environment that has a controlled environment to give a designed experience in balance.

As projects are completed. They will be moved to this post, at some point.

• Update to 1.19.3 and Discord update - Release December 30, 2022
  • EMC's 1.19.3 update will not include the "experimental changes" which will be available in Minecraft 1.20. As a result, this should be a minor update.
  • The Discord update provides an integration between the EMC game servers and the EMC discord. There will be a verification system which will tie your EMC account to a discord account. This allows us to synchronize ranks, enable EMC to communicate between the servers and discord, and provide staff tools to help better moderate the servers. Future features will then be more easily implemented by this Discord connection.
• Empires Empire - Released May 30, 2023
  • First release of the Empires system which does not include Outposts.
  • Empires are most comparable to a "Guild", a permanent group system that persists across all Empire Servers. Will eventually hold ownership for Outposts.
  • You will be able to rep your Empire's tag in chat and in the tablist.
  • Empire controlled bank system for currency collection (rupees/tokens) for empire related purchases. Such as the max number of members in an Empire.
  • Role system within the Empire (Officers, etc).
  • Empire and Officer specific chats that are cross-server.
  • Ability to set residence flags/permissions for members of an Empire on any residence.

Thanks greatly for the update chicken, and for all you are doing for EMC as well. Feliz Año Nuevo EMC!

Empires will release without anything significant purchaseable through them

Just so everyone else has the clarification. This would not interact with /home ownership.
Mechanically, an Empire will have a primary owner at least internally. If you want to create structure underneath that, that is allowed.

It is my opinion that having people setup their own shops and design their residence is part of the creative outlet of playing Minecraft - I would not want to remove that opportunity by virtualizing or simply making "stalls". We just need to connect people better to those shops. I have ideas, but it is a lot of work to implement.

1 I reckon

I mean. Where, anywhere, is there a requirement to declare co-members to outpost establishments? (Rhetorical) Having a designated "sole" owner keeps things the most simple.

I can't imagine programming a line of code that says: "You cannot kick this empire member because the empire owns an outpost". That would be so random.

In general. I have no desire to oversee the politics of people's Empires. Sounds like the least amount of conflict if everyone builds their own stuff. (But admittedly pretty boring to only do stuff alone).