[Suggestion] Token rewards other than mob killing.

Krysyy beat me to the group part, but there's something else to this as well: mining is bound to result in you discovering caves and other generated structures; exactly the areas where mobs can (and will) spawn. Including enraged ones, which earn you tokens for defeating them (apart from the optional extra's such as dragon stone fragments, diamonds, etc.).

I agree that we do not "own" anything. The only person who owns anything on this server is Aikar, since tomorrow he could shutdown the server and everything I "own" here would be gone.

But short of that, I do have things I control. That is what the issue is. If I mine a block then take it to town, I control what happens to it. We have all effectively mined many many chunks worth of our servers. But we have little control over what happens to items we have touched outside of Town. The control we do have is after the fact control and you, not we, arbitrate it. Although my thoughts regarding it have changed over time, I can understand fully what some people feel over this issue.

For mining, I think it should be mining ores (you'll get ores if you're doing any sort of mining) and you should only get tokens when you mine a naturally generated block. This'd be to prevent people from farming their ores by placing them and picking them back up immediately. Hopefully there'd be a way to track this; if not, you could just exclude things broken with silk touch.

Coal Ore: 1/4 token
Iron Ore: 1/4 token
Gold Ore: 1/2 token
Redstone Ore: 1/2 token
Lapis Ore: 1 token
Emerald Ore: 2 tokens
Diamond Ore: 3 tokens

Over a week of mining I probably got around six stacks of diamond ores, so that's over 1,000 tokens from mining diamonds alone. Add in the other stuff and you're probably up to around 3-4,000 a week. Not bad, considering that's 2-4 minibosses. Of course, it could use some tweaking.

Allowing any significant amount of tokens to be earned in only one way goes against the "play your way" EMC advertises so much. Why should features be withheld--features that reduce griefing--from players who don't like to fight mobs? Anti-griefing is the first step, Empires actually fully prevents griefing--to the point where the response will be "you gave perms, it's your fault you were griefed" like Town is today.

So requiring a large amount of tokens--that are only able to be earned in one way--for something as substantial and universal and griefing protection seems counterproductive if you're trying to improve user experience by decreasing griefing. Because let's face it, not everyone likes the bosses (my attempt to help this can be seen on the blog =P), and going group mining/collaboration isn't an option for some people.

Not everyone actually wants to play with other people. Some people enjoy the community but want to spend their time alone at their base, and there should be no punishment for that. But time and time again I hear "EMC is meant for group play" and although that may be true, we shouldn't be excluding the people who want to play solo. One thing in particular makes me worry a lot is Dragon Tombs. It's been said that you'd need a group to enter the tomb. But as I said, that's not an option for a lot of people. By the time you can manage to find a few friends the portal might be gone, or the portal might be too far out. Nobody's going to go three hours by nether rail to someone's base for a dragon fight.

Take, for example, a group of players who got together to start a base out in the wild. They have had constant griefing problems, and want to protect their land. However, this group really dislikes mini-bosses because they aren't the best fighters. So, they turned mini-bosses off and play on a low difficulty. These players are still supporting the vision of playing together, but aren't slaying mobs. So when Empires comes around and they want to claim their land, they can't because of their lack of tokens.

These players would be downright excluded from having good griefing protection because they don't feel like dying over and over trying to bomb rush a few minibosses. And even if they did decide that they needed to get some tokens though minibosses, it'd take a long time before they scraped together enough tokens between the group to do so.

I was trying to clarify what I see as the main issue, which is that we all want to feel secure wherever we play. I hope whatever is developed for anti-griefing resolves that problem for many of us.

My point was, (Sorry if I seem a bit passionate about this, I will try to remain respectful ) Even though it is your land and not ours, we spent a lot of time and money building stuff that others were unable or unwilling to build. Skare's gold farm is every bit as amazing as anything that Mumbojumbo, The zipkrowd server, or any other famous Minecraft players. If he took the time to build it, singlehandedly, shouldn't it (for all practical purpose) be his? Wouldn't it be great if Emc rivaled those famous youtubers? If you are going to risk losing the creations built in the frontier, then what's the hope that Emc will ever build something great, or be as well known as Zipkrowd or Hermitcraft?
Why is it that anyone thinks that building a gold farm that produces a dc of gold blocks per day is somehow less difficult than killing 5 enraged mobs? And to top it all off, your saying that someone else with more tokens might be able to type /claim, and Viola, its now THEIR gold farm. That is the concern that we have with Aikar's vision for the future. If this were a brand new, empty frontier server, then everything that he has planned would work perfectly. But it's not, unfortunately. So now here we are, very concerned citizens who've spent a lot of time and energy in the frontier, hoping that our voices will be taken into consideration before any changes are made.

So tokens for things like mining (see my last post; that was posted after I had most of this written) or manually breaking crops would be really beneficial to these players. Some manual tasks that could reward tokens are:

• Mining (see above post)
• Harvesting crops
  • 0.005 tokens per item broken manually. Just over three stacks of wheat/carrots/something else will give one token. If you have a big farm and regularly harvest, this can add up.
• Killing normal mobs from full health (bad auto-farms!)
  • 0.5 tokens per mob. If the mob damages the player, cancel tokens. If the mob cannot reach the player (excludes skeletons), cancel tokens. Reward skilled combat.
• Brewing potions
  • Each potion = 1 token. Potions must be taken out manually.
• Placing blocks
  • I don't know, maybe ~0.001 tokens per block? One token per 1,000 blocks for something as easy as placing blocks seems good.
• Drinking potions/eating food (I don't know lol)
• Anything that requires actual player interaction to complete that can't be farmed

Minuscule amounts of tokens really add up.

Also triple post. Deal with it.

This would create a sale of token market through ores. I'm thinking maybe more like every 1000 blocks mined that were not placed by a player gives you tokens would be a more reasonable solution to prevent a token market from being created.

This is not a bad idea. For my witch farm I dug out every block within a 64 block radius and got about 3-4 DCs of coal ore which would work out to be about 3.5k worth of tokens. It's not over board in totals and still requires a lot of work. And this is solo digging over a period of a few weeks.

Silly Penguin, this is Minecraft. Someone will always find a way to farm it

I'm not sure that they are. The town world has no (edit: hostile) mobs, full protection and does not require tokens.

Also, as Krysyy already mentioned earlier: right now the most likely scenario is that people who vote would also earn enough tokens to do some land claiming. The bottom line is basically: tokens are earned from putting some kind of effort in. Why would it be unreasonable for EMC to request that players put a bit of effort into the game to earn some extra's?

Because the main reasons to go out into the Frontier (while you don't like fighting mobs) is because either you want more building space than the already available 60x60 / 120x120. Or you want to build structures in order to earn money (grinders, gold farms, etc.). In either case I don't think it's very unreasonable for EMC to ask for a bit of extra effort in order to earn some extra rewards (such as land protection).

No, its not their fault but it is their responsibility. There is a major difference; in the end it's the griefer who's at fault.

In one year time I aquired 120k worth of tokens and most of that was done solo. Which brings me back to my previous post: unless we know the costs attached to land claiming we can't really comment on the whole process yet.

Voting comes to mind.

Your guess is of course as good as mine, but I don't think that those doom scenario's are very realistic and only produce unwanted controversy. I mean: just look at the requirements which players have to go through right now in order to get their outpost established... And so far rumors have already been that one requirement of land protection would be to have an established outpost.

And you can't establish something when it sits within 5k (from the top of my mind, it's late right now) from another build. Let alone if you try to confiscate something which you didn't build in the first place.

As always just my 2 cents.

I have to disagree with this. I think it would be unreasonable to have to pay to protect our builds. Whether it's a little house or a huge outpost, it's time and effort to build, maintain, etc. Would be a shame to have to limit yourself in the off chance someone comes to grief you.

The way I understood whats coming is that placed blocks will always be protected and the tokens are for claiming that land, TPin, etc.

Which then raises the question: why chose for the Frontier instead of town? Town already provides you with a fully protected building area.

Farms!!!

Because in the frontier you have mobs, potentially unlimited space, seclusion (if that's your want), more of that 'vanilla' feel. They way I like to play cannot be done in town. In town you have a 60x60 block of dirt. That does nothing for me. (And that not a knock on anything town) I mean we're not asking for a lot, just protection. If I could only chose 1 thing, that's what it would be. Any blocks placed by me or my group is safe from 'outsiders' looking to destroy.

Ditto