Recent update reduced hopper cart effectiveness

Thanks Aikar, we purposely went with hopper carts as we felt it would have the least effect on the server, glad we don't have to change over.

Thanks Gawadrolt for the info on your testing, this helps

For my two guardian farms I have used flowing water to wash all the guadians into the middle then kill them with lava, when they are all in the middle you only need a hopperfloor of 16 hoppers as I us a 4x4 area for the kill room. Not sure if this is a good design but it's what I found on YouTube And it works really well for me.

You could possibly add some ice under the water, it seems to speed up the movement of mobs. Doesn't make a big difference, but it might help somewhat.

Packed ice works better as it doesn't melt but yes you're right when saying ice speeds up item/mob movement when under a moving stream of water.

And due the nice change of 1.8, where (packed) ice broken by a pickaxe breaks way faster now (being about equivalent to netherrack?), this is a very viable option now. Breaking a few large packed ice trees should be sufficient for a 60*60 floor I suppose?

the thing with guardian farms is that they will spawn in a 20x20 area as long as there is no where else for them to spawn in their nine spawn chunks so you don't need all that much ice if at all, this is the tutorial i used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=200P9dnsyJo

you only need 16 hopper floor. and if ppl would build thinking of the server, hoppers would not have been nerfed and we would not be talking about this right now... now ppl are going to use more hoppers as the carts don't work as well. cant hoppers stay the same and we have a hopper count like /entc limit?

please dont hate this is just my thoughts.