[Suggestion] Officially approved hopper usage

Hi gang,

Players have asked me a lot about the changed hopper behavior and I've also come across a lot of sad stories where the change wasn't really for the better for those players. Now, I can really understand the dilemma we're having here. Lets face it guys: some players will try to (ab)use some things. And to find a middle ground where you can protect the server from (major) lag and keep people happy... Its easier than it sounds.

So I was wondering....

Suggestion: Allow players to get their redstone build on their town residence certified. So basically: a staff member (who has know about redstone and what things which cause lag) will visit the residence and inspect the build to see if this would cause too much lag. If it doesn't then the player can pay, say, 10,000 tokens and the residence will get an approval flag which will allow the hoppers on the residence to get their default behavior back where timing is concerned.

Now, this is the tricky part: an insurance that players won't abuse this. I'm thinking in the likes of a monitor which checks what kind of blocks are placed. And the very moment any hoppers get placed then or removed the approval flag should be automatically voided and the residence will then fall back to EMC standard timing.

I think that monitor approach should be doable in the longer run, because there have already been announcements about trying to add a more fine grained control over the permission flags. So; getting the build flag to only allow placement of a single block.

There are more caveats to deal with I think. Like people who have tokens to spare, and we don't want to put too much strain on staff. So as an added fail safe I think we might also want to limit the amount of times where a player can apply for certification. I dunno, once per month or once per 2 weeks or so. That would ensure that players don't 'abuse' this or that staff gets overrun with requests.

It's not a perfect solution but I think it would give players who use smaller redstone builds which don't contribute to major lag problems a bit of an extra edge. And that might balance things out a little.

+1

-1

I would not want to pay for vanilla behavior. It's not right IMO.

In addition, Redstone is a "town" thing, so I disagree with the usage of tokens, which are wild/waste exclusive (for the most part).

For the auto-checker thing - not a good idea. For example: I build a small Redstone thing and spend the money to get it approved. I then want to place a single hopper - I couldn't without wasting all the money I paid for the approval.

I don't see the need for this. It doesn't matter if the hoppers are for an "approved" purpose... the server doesn't care - they all create the same amount of lag for it. If you were going to that, you may as well just have an entcount like system for hoppers. Plenty of things don't work like Vanilla, and EMC players have managed to adapt for pretty much all of them so far.

I see this going as well as the mods checking the legitimacy of parkours with prizes.

I seem to remember Aikar saying something about changing hoppers so that items travel 1 stack at a time, but I don't know if this ever happened.

Good idea 2015. /s

I've said this before... but /hoppercount could be useful. Have idk, 200 hoppers in one area max... you may say oh sorting systems blah blah blah.... Lets face it, guardian farms made this change happen.

I have not used hoppers atm, but many people have reported terrible behavior from hoppers.

Sad as it is, I think if as players we remove all our hopper usage and use minecarts, Aikar will revert the change.

Not sure I agree with that. I see your point but... Redstone is also used in the frontiers, and maybe even heavier than in town (this is an assumption on my part of course). As to tokens.. Their only use right now is to change your town residence biome. So IMO the usage is right in line with which we already have.

Of course, thats intentional. Because if you place a single hopper you'd change the approved design. If you don't have a fail save like this in place it would be way too easy: get it approved, add the rest of the 60x60 hoppers you originally intended and off we go.

True. However, as has been said a few times in those threads, the mega farms create a lot more lag than smaller builds. Of course a smaller build would also add up to lag in total, but in a controlled manner.

For example; I would imagine that a semi-automated farm would cause a lot less lag than a fully automated one. To my knowledge its not as if all placed hoppers generate lag per definition. I'd think if reducing their rate generates less lag then having an option to turn them on or off entirely could also be a liable approach.

It would all depend on the build.

Still, I do think we could use some kind of tweak or middle ground (if possible of course). Because the current reduced rate can sometimes really render hoppers completely useless.

A simpler solution that I thought of - have the old hopper behaviour on a server such as utopia. People who depend on it for certain builds can build there instead, as an incentive to become a supporter as well.

Plus 1

What I meant is, this certification would be for a residence - and there are few ways of earning tokens in town, compared to the wild. Tokens (excuse the generalization) can really only be obtained through the wild (killing custom monsters). It's like charging 12 pencils for a hamburger.

But for another build, something as simple as a mailbox, for example - I wouldn't want to pay 10k tokens to make one. Having such strict regulations on even the placement of hoppers would ruin the incentive to become "approved."

-1
My 2 points...

1. I believe that restrictions on red stone works should not be placed at all. Not to mention that you have to PAY to have a red stone machine approved. Plus tokens?!? Tokens are a little more harder to get that rupees my friend.

2.I think it would still be heavy on staffs part to check on every-ones build. Even though they are getting little request. (Tokens are time consuming) Most people have some type of red stone work anyway. So to check almost everyone on the server who has a little red stone machine is strait up ridiculous.

A solution I would like to see, if possible, would be a more sophisticated version of the current solution that becomes more or less restrictive as the number of players on a server increases or decreases. For example, the three second check Hoppers do now would be reserved for when a server is full. If only a few people are on a server, the Hoppers would work normally with increments in between for different numbers of players.

Perhaps there could be some other mechanism that drives this, like server load. Some players are going to create more server overhead than others so this could be monitored using some other criteria, like the total number of server entities, then the Hoppers could be dynamically adjusted.

I'd prefer to see something that motivates people to voluntarily limit the resources they use. I think Minecraft inherently does this, but with hundreds of people collecting resources and an economy, there is not much motivation to be conservative or inventive here. I used to do a lot with water flows but Aikar messed with the mechanics a couple of years ago before Hoppers were added and I never went back wholeheartedly. More recently, there were Hopper Minecarts, but yeah...

In a way, a laggy server is restricting us anyway when we use too many resources. It is good that we are trying to deal with it, but it needs to be done in a way that does not force things to work in ways we don't expect. It seems to me the current change with these adjustments would allow us to play the way we expect most of the time and still be restrictive when needed. People who are idling would be kicked periodically by the afk system and others who are actively playing would adjust their play times to avoid busy times.

Can't speak for the others but I most certainly was!

No criticism on my part, just a comment, but sometimes it is easy to miss some of your updates because you post some in the middle of a thread. Also no excuse by the way because in general I do tend to read through those threads anyway

I guess we need a new meme: #aikarwillfixittoo

(in all fairness: Simon got "picked on" first )

amen

+1

I agree upon this idea
-1, I prefer not paying for a Vanilla Minecraft issue

It would still jack over hopper clocks, unless having an item in a hopper going into it pokes it as well? But in that case I wouldn't see how it would improve lag at all. Unless hoppers check for items all the time regardless if there's an item ready to go into it, which in that case that's probably a good improvement to fix.