On the State of TWiTCraft

[asim0v Profile]

Before I get into the post I want to add this disclaimer. The following post contains my own thoughts. I am not speaking for the moderators as a whole in any way, shape, or form. This is merely a way to bring up topics that I feel need real discussion to improve the server.

The world of TWitCraft is now old. It has been in continued existence for over a year. In that time, we have seen cities rise and fall, players come and go, commerce ebb and flow. Yet there are many players that have been with us since the beginning still playing. The players are what make TWiTCraft what it is today, not the buildings or world or rules. What follows in this post is a collection of my thoughts about improving growth in TWiTCraft and how to deal with some of the issues that have plagued us since the very start.

With the opening of the Leoville city limits to player building, there has been an influx of players making their homes and shops within the city - more the latter. Due to the way in which Minecraft renders entities, the increase in shops has led to a significant increase in signs, which leads to the increase in lag most players experience in the city. To be sure, there are many players that do not experience the lag because of their computer systems, myself included. Nevertheless, it does remain an issue. The Flea Market outlawed chests and item frames to cut down on the lag affecting the area, which solved 2/3 of the issue. The remaining portion is the signs. SignShop is our chosen sale plugin which necessitates a large amount of signs to sell items. I have not yet investigated alternatives that would remove the sign component, but it is something I am going to do. If anyone has a recommendation, please make it.

Leoville spawn got a major update recently. This update is only the start. The lobby is in dire need of an update as well, which I intend to begin immediately. While I won't go into details as to my intentions, I will say that I need a copy (either a world download or the schematic) of the old Leoville for the design I am planning. If anyone has a copy of old Leoville, please let me know.

The idea of Flatland was to have a world dedicated to prototyping builds before committing the time and resources in the survival world. Working out complicated redstone mechanics or just testing a build out is great, but it seems to be the vast minority of activity in the world. There are more players using Flatland as a creative build world than I had expected. This becomes somewhat of a problem since the world gets reset when Outworldland (the resource world) gets reset. If there is truly a desire for the players to have a creative world to build to their heart's content without messing with the survival aspect, we should seriously consider creating a new creative world. A vast amount of so-called drive-by griefing happened in the last creative world and still does in Flatland due to the vast and easy amount of damage that can be caused. Should we decide to make a new creative world, it should be whitelisted so drive-by griefing cannot happen.

The server currently allows a maximum region per player of one, unless a moderator intervenes and adds another. This has and does happen for players that have had a second home griefed multiple times. Despite our best efforts and tools, there is damage that we simply cannot repair. Allowing players to have more regions and/or larger regions would help alleviate some of the limitations of our tools. We try as best as we can but invariably there will be bad players that get on just to wreak havoc. While we are on the subject of regions, allowing players to setup shopping districts protected by regions would also be a great benefit. The Mirage Mall and the soon-to-be-decommissioned Sky5 Mall have this setup already, but there are other shopping malls and districts that would benefit greatly from the protection. Basically, I am calling for a review of our entire WorldGuard protection policy.

Travel around the server is yet another topic for discussion. The original intent was for players to make their own transportation systems to far-off areas and to allow for expansion to happen organically. What we have seen, however, is a vast expansion around the city limits of Leoville city due to the significant time and resource investment in creating these transportation systems, not to mention the time to get out to them. The now defunct Pod Sixia near the edge of the world border required a 10-minute minecart ride to get out there, a major reason for the abandonment of the project in my opinion. There are several possible solutions to the problem of travel. The vanilla solution introduced was horses. However, horses right now are rare, expensive, and prone to griefing. Yes, we are implementing a plugin solution for some of those issues, but I don't believe it's a good solutiont to basically require players to have horses to quickly travel around the server.

Let's talk about Stargates. As I understand it, the Stargate plugin is installed and ready to go. The moderators just need to decide on how to implement it. Stargates are one solution and quite a good one. The one problem is most of the proposals require purchasing of a stargate for a large amount of in-game currency. Now I am on record of saying I think an actual monetary economy in Minecraft is silly, so my opinions on the subject obviously have that bias. What I am proposing is the implementation of stargates for fast travel to cities or large projects (see Aquadome, Netherroad, etc.). Stargates are an easy to operate solution for the issue of travel.

Warp points are another solution. I believe it's the Essentials plugin that allows for the creation of warp points around servers. Allowing players to set a public warp point for cities and/or large projects would help players traverse the large world of TWiTCraft, hopefully allowing for an incrase in housing and shopping areas further away from spawn. Restaurant at the End of the World, anyone? The idea of warps cascades nicely into yet anothe topic of travel, homes. Since the /home command is a specific type of warp, I am combining the point. Players want a second home point. There are several ways of doing this, either with warps or enabling the player permission to teleport to their regions.

Most players now have multiple homes and multiple building projects around the server. I do not wish to belittle or make redundant the amazing work the Department of Transportation has done, but DoT is essentially one person at this point. I cannot speak for him, but I can say that if I were in his position. I would welcome the respite from the constant rail and road building.

The idea of having a second class of player with more privileges has been discussed recently. I am not dismissing it entirely, and it might even work as a good solution to give established players that have been with the server for a while the extra permissions and privileges I have already outlined in this post. I am, however, arguing that not just a specific class of player should have these things available to them but all players should.

The world of TWiTCraft has a border around it to prevent players exploring tens of thousands of blocks in every direction and making generating a gigantic map. I think it's time to expand the borders of the world some and get some fresh terrain generated. While we are nowhere near running out of usable land yet, allowing players to explore and fine new areas is one of the essential components of Minecraft in my opinion. Of course, having such far-flung regions would require a faster mode for transportation to and from for them to really become viable for anything more than just exploring.

The last thing I want to briefly touch on pertains to everything in this post but nothing in particular. The idea of TWiTCraft was to keep the server as vanilla as possible. I think everything here fits that criterion as well as other things we are using. Regions are not vanilla, nor are multiple worlds or worlds that exist solely to be strip mined and reset every month, rolling back changes players have made, using signs to sell items, or even an economy period. These things, rather, and an evolution of Minecraft to address limitations of the game in a multiplayer context. I am firmly of the belief that everything here fits that.



Chevron Locked [added 8/6/2013]

Stargates are an idea that has been discussed for as long as I have been playing on TWiTCraft. It's a plugin we used on Chatcraft, and it's a plugin that is still maintained on the server to this day. It's used in a very limited context though, only being used to access the old Chatcraft realms to those with special permisssion (played on Chatcraft). I am now putting forth a proposal for the implementation of Stargates into TWiTCraft in a context that helps to solve our issue of lag in Leoville by spreading out players/commerce and adding a faster means of travel. This two-pronged approach will involve both Stargates and another teleportation, either via multiverse portals or other means.

Stargates
I want to get this one out of the way right now: no one will be able to purchase Stargates. Stargates will only be at key locations: Leoville, Flatland, the resource world, and at the new DoT hubs which happen to be half way between Leoville and the borders of the world in each cardinal direction. This will allow players to access any of those locations from any Stargate. Furthermore, with the addition of fast travel from any of those locations, players will be encouraged to build up cities around the DoT hubs or close to them. We could even established a second Leoville location or hold a contest for players to design a city.

Multiverse/Teleportation
The second method of fast travel *will* allow for players to purchase them. The exact form will differ depending on the method decided upon, but the basic idea will be for players to pay a fee and have a portal (just going to use Multiverse as an example) installed at a location of their choosing in the survival world and a linking pair accessed via a central location.

Having the two different methods allows us to maintain the Stargate network for official sites only and not clog the dialer with hundreds of locations.

[Robrotheram Profile]

As Head of DOT, Yep I Would welcome a respite, My plan for DOT Rail when I took a master hold on it late December was to sort it out, there was loads of different lines around and stations making travel slow and confusing to get to places. With Hubs 2000 blocks from spawn in NSEW directions this was so that people did not have to build their own line close to leoville to get to places, but instead connect them to the new hubs. To my knowledge this is done. There are still some smaller projects I have ideas on but I am not planning building a line to everyone's project. If there is something people need from DOT please contact me via the forums (DOT has a area for discussion) or twitter or in game mail.

In regards to second class of player. Maybe new players for the first time have a grace period or since most heavy greifing that takes time to put right is in creative I do like the white list idea.
For Travel I prefer star-gates rather then another command to teleport. since it will make things interesting.
For everything else I agree.

[asim0v Profile]

Honestly, I favor having both stargates and the warp commands. Stargates for large enough projects (details would need to be ironed out) and/or sold. For everything else, the warp commands. It's been a while since I've played on a server with warps, but I believe the command was just /warp warpnamehere. Not terribly hard.

There are also 2 other travel options, neither of which involves another plugin. It's fairly simple to setup a multiverse portal to teleport to a specific location rather than just another world. The same thing could be accomplished with command blocks and a button.

[VanteS]

Curley made a schematic of old leoville, I also made a copy called "OldLeovilleSpawn" I believe, look for it in the schematic list.

[thesillychicken Profile]

I would post an opinion but I need to regain the trust in the mods before I can provide input.

[Timberwolf1777]

As my several posts on a variety of the above subject threads have indicated over the past year, I am an avid supporter of many of these suggestions. TWiTCraft needs an infusion of energy & a feeling of change in what has become a stale world. A combination of world border expansion and stargates/warp points might be just that solution without resetting survival.

As for the cluster of leoville shop lag issues, I am inclined to agree with Dio that shops may not be the best idea inside leoville limits. (I know that I do have a shop just outside leoville thereby creating bias but even if I had to also remove it, I would still feel this way. I lose more money than earn with my shop anyway.) If shops inside leoville were banned, maybe allowing stargates to shopping areas be placed in the lots instead of actual shops would be a good compromise.

Thanks for posting your thoughts asim0v. From a fellow TWiTCraftian who also started on day 1, I appreciate your desire to give a bit of "new" to our world.

-Timber

[pixelsinner Profile]

I know I'm very new to TWiTCraft (and SMP in general), and probably my input really isn't as valuable as some, but I was pondering on many of the points brought forward. Although I also tend to agree on most of them, there are a few ideas I'd like to toss in the pot:

- The flatland/creative conundrum is an interesting one. I think it's important to separate the flatland approach from a regular seed, but with creative gm. I'm not privy to resources available on the server side so this is worth what it's worth, but a flatland to test AND a creative world, in a normal seed, could be explored. Those with grandiose ambitions but with a flair of survival could potentially find their fill.

- The Stargate vs. warp vs. DOT issue is dear to me; I actually go out of my way to use transport rather than warp. This is just me, but I always have a sort of "cheating" after-taste when I warp... That being said it is near impossible to travel only in real time from end to end. In this perspective I'd opt for Stargates. It just seems -again imo- that it's more "in game" and to use the server's own mission objective, "vanilla". There is something almost too easy about warping left and right. The gate system, although imperfect, offers some sort of control: by making them either not available or limited to players might be a way to achieve convenience while keeping that challenge associated with world exploration.

Disclaimer: I'm big on the world exploration part. Everyone has a reason why they play MC, and in my case that's one of them. To me there needs to be, in a Survival setting, an element of satisfaction associated with accomplishing a task, whether it's traveling to the ends of the world or building a castle. However I realize not everyone would feel as strongly as I do on this.

- The economy is a vey nice variable in my opinion. Obviously it's not vanilla, but keep in mind that even in a vanilla MC, there is 'some' economy between the player and villagers, with emeralds of course. Introducing the economy is in my view a replacement of this. I do nonetheless agree it could be better implemented, technically with signs but also theoretically in that it is fairly easy to set up shop... maybe almost too easy.

- Lastly, Leoville. This is a left field idea, and I don't mean to offend any of you guys who have spent countless hours building cities, but maybe actually setting more than one "official" commune would be an idea to alleviate the stress on Leoville? Not to say you have to stop independent development or even regulate it, but having maybe 2 or 3 official cities, with duplicated services, could not only lighten the burden on Leoville, but also maybe contribute in solving the transportation issue. I mean, could imagine the US being centered around only one city?!

So that was my 2 cents. I'm sorry if I sound over apologetic but I really don't want to be out of my place by making these suggestions.

Cheers!
pix

[Timberwolf1777]

Thats an interesting idea ... maybe an additional survival spawn location or three. Each with a bank, twitmart, etc and a command like /spawn1, /spawn2, etc to get to each. That way there would be multiple & equally easy to get to population centers ... interesting.

[asim0v Profile]

- Lastly, Leoville. This is a left field idea, and I don't mean to offend any of you guys who have spent countless hours building cities, but maybe actually setting more than one "official" commune would be an idea to alleviate the stress on Leoville? Not to say you have to stop independent development or even regulate it, but having maybe 2 or 3 official cities, with duplicated services, could not only lighten the burden on Leoville, but also maybe contribute in solving the transportation issue. I mean, could imagine the US being centered around only one city?!

I think a lot of the problem stems from transportation. Cities have been built elsewhere by players (heck, I founded the first player city on the server), but transportation is a problem for most of them. I've seen large-scale city projects get started then get abandoned when no one else came out to build. If it takes a 10 minute minecart ride just to get out there, it's not something you want to do. I know because I tried to build at Pod Sixia, but the extreme distance was a severe hindrance. All of my resources were elsewhere, requiring another 10 minute ride back once I had filled my inventory. I've seen the same thing happen with other cities too.

Yes, the Netherroad does make transportation easier, but it's still an annoying way of traveling. On the servers I've played on that had warps, communities would spring up all over because you didn't have to settle in just one place. It didn't take an exceedingly long trip to get resources to build somewhere.

I do like the idea of multiple "official" cities too, but I'd rather have the other cities be player run, hence my focus on transportation rather than expanding official settlements.

[pixelsinner Profile]

It would be interesting to see how player-run cities would develop with easier transportation; my question I guess is can such cities have the same amenities as Leoville (bank, access to resource world, etc)? Then again, maybe in the case of player cities, maybe you want to keep certain things exclusive to LV so that there is a reason to go there in the first place...

[asim0v Profile]

It would be interesting to see how player-run cities would develop with easier transportation; my question I guess is can such cities have the same amenities as Leoville (bank, access to resource world, etc)? Then again, maybe in the case of player cities, maybe you want to keep certain things exclusive to LV so that there is a reason to go there in the first place...

ATMs have been setup elsewhere (Sky5 has 2). Adding in portals to the resource world and/or spawn is trivial, though it has not been done before. That's another idea to explore.

[HGLCraft Profile]

Thanks for putting it all out there asim0v, you can see how much you are about the TWiTCraft community.

I support the sentiment of everything that you say, and even as a recently new addition, I can appreciate the plateau that has been reached.

As I got into the game, I have tried a number of servers and have seen all of the different functions that are possible; however the reason why I chose TWiTCraft is because of the great community, and I think the community feel comes from some of the "realism" of the Survival world, including the DOT, having the explore and having to work out where to set-up a base, a shop etc.

The main reason why I recently set-up a shop in Leoville was because I liked the idea of being part of the community (contributing something back) and setting up shops away from Spawn is a lot of hard work, because of the restrictions and lack of warp.

If it was possible to have multiple warp points, /home and /work, or as asim0V suggested, being able to warp to your regions (and being allowed to have 5 or so regions) then this would make it much easier to set-up shops in different locations and to have a good (out of the way) storage facility.

I think the star gates are definitely needed to encourage growth in other areas, although I would not like to see them overused, I like the idea of travelling from pace to place and seeing builds / other players along the way.

Therefore in Survival I would recommend;
1. Ability for players to create 5 larger regions and warp to their own regions
2. Create star gates from spawn to the DOT Hubs, outer settlements and and a few Landmarks
3. Remove all shops from Leoville (offer to move existing shops to one of the star gate locations) and replace the first ring of sites with public facilities (star gates, rail stations, nether road stations, resource portal, stables etc) to make it easy for new players to work out where to go. Obviously reduce the cost of Leoville rent for those that still want to maintain a house.

Could make for some interesting times.....

[Goobler Profile]

I also agree with most of asim0v points and to be honest i'd be happy with just one more /home setting (it'd be good to setup between your central location and shops, homes, the like) as for the shops in leoville, it all comes down to courtesy to other players, I've tried to keep Merritt's Landing shop aspect pretty small and contained though, I too could be considered large. I think it's something we as a community should pledge to (total ban of them, limit on signs, pledging to not use item frames). I also agree with more regions though I'm not particular on the number of them.

[Warriorbox Profile]

I would like to see the map opened up for movement a little more easily, but I don't understand some of the options that have been put forward. Could someone please give me more information about stargates, and warp points, what they are and how they work.

I like the idea of several cities in the world, with multiple atms, shops, public buildings.

Need more information before I can comment further. Hoping for some help, thanks

WB

[Labtec7 Profile Website]

I quite like all the points that you made here! Alot of the thoughts run parallel to my own and I would only add that we have special events on the server perhaps to make more activity for those that come to the server for its sense of community..I speak from that point of view anyways.

[Timberwolf1777]

To address the possibly confusing plug in options discussed in this thread, I'll try to explain some of them below.

Stargates: EDIT: See asim0v's explanation below.

Warp points: These I believe are setable teleport destinations just like the single one we currently have access to:
(/sethome & /home)

World border: Minecraft should (in vanilla) generate the world in all directions infinitely, thereby allowing a player to walk in a direction forever. In order to save server resources and prevent dynamap rendering issues, an invisible, impassable border was placed 5000 blocks from spawn in all directions. This border distance is arbitrary however and can be expanded to give us new land to explore (chunks to load), resources, & places to call home.

I think thats all that would confuse me if I was new to MC server play. Is there anything I missed?

Therefore in Survival I would recommend;
1. Ability for players to create 5 larger regions and warp to their own regions
2. Create star gates from spawn to the DOT Hubs, outer settlements and and a few Landmarks
3. Remove all shops from Leoville (offer to move existing shops to one of the star gate locations) and replace the first ring of sites with public facilities (star gates, rail stations, nether road stations, resource portal, stables etc) to make it easy for new players to work out where to go. Obviously reduce the cost of Leoville rent for those that still want to maintain a house.

Could make for some interesting times.....

Nicely stated HGLCraft. This was the vision floating in my head too.

[Warriorbox Profile]

Thanks Timberwolf, I think that covers everything I was confused about. Thank you very much.

In favour of some, or all of these, depending on the opinions of those who have seen the effects of these in other servers... what are the pluses and minuses? Will they create more or less lag overall, when you split up the shops into several areas rather than one area in leoville? Do stargates and warp points themselves cause lag? Are they worth it for the sake of the regeneration of interest they may bring?

Does the community want to complicate the entrance point, for newcomers who are already confused?

Does the community really wish to expand or are we happy in our little group of founding fathers, old hands, medium termers, newbies who don't stay long, and young'uns?

These are my rhetorical questions, not really asking for direct answers, but I will be reading this thread to hear all that other folks say

WB

[asim0v Profile]

Stargates: These are basically nether portals but somewhat similar to the resource world portal, instead of taking you to the nether, each gate is a linked pair with the other side placed somewhere else in the same world. This would basically allow teleportation between fixed points with each gate having a unique paired destination.

Stargates are not multiverse portals. Stargates have a dialer that can connect to a pre-defined list of locations from the same gate. You just have to "dial" the location you want and activate the gate. What we use in Leoville and to get to the resource world are multiverse [sign] portals. They are nether portals that have a sign on them linking them to another location. They can only go to one location each, though.

The thing about all of the transportation options I outlined is they are all already in the game via various plugins. Permissions are just turned off.

[VanteS]

I just want to thank Asim0v for posting this topic, its nice having these sorts of discussions on TWiTCraft.

Here are my opinions on the topics that have been brought up, keep in mind they are only my opinions.

Leoville Lag
Shops shouldn't be allowed in Leoville. Players running on older hardware are presented with unbearable lag at spawn. Shops should be moved further away and spread out or moved to a designated area where lag is to be expected.

Regions
One region is enough for each player, I'm afraid that if we allow multiple regions then players will region all the things. The current method of allowing one region per player and an option to submit a modreq for a moderator to create additional regions is sufficient.

Travel
I've never had an issue with traveling large distances in TWiTCraft, the nether is an excellent means of travel. I can get to most of my properties within seconds, my builds further from spawn do take longer to get to but that is exactly why I built so far in the first place, I can have buildings far from spawn without much fear of griefers and ne'er-do-wells. Stargates would be nice to have to reach distant villages and attractions, I think the hold up is a discussion on how to implement them.

As for warp points or second /sethomes, I am completely against using them in TWiTCraft. When playing on other servers with warps enabled, it just feels cheaty being able to teleport all over the place. Why build roads at that point? I get the same feeling when playing on "survival" servers with the magic carpet plugin, at that point why call yourself a survival server when players can fly and warp/teleport all over the map?

No matter what we do, TWiTCraft will continue to feel "dated" and in need of "freshening" because the survival map is over a year old. What we need is a survival map reset and it appears that Jeb is working on new biomes for 1.7, if you haven't seen his latest tweet: http://i.imgur.com/Wi1Q8mO.jpg

It would be a perfect opportunity to reset the survival map once 1.7 is released and it would solve that dated feeling many of us are struggling to deal with.

[pixelsinner Profile]

I think we're really going in the right direction with this discussion, and I agree with what Vantes is saying (yes, I AM kissing up to mods, thanks for noticing

IWhat we need is a survival map reset and it appears that Jeb is working on new biomes for 1.7, if you haven't seen his latest tweet: http://i.imgur.com/Wi1Q8mO.jpg

It would be a perfect opportunity to reset the survival map once 1.7 is released and it would solve that dated feeling many of us are struggling to deal with.

I agree that would be great, but (and I really have no clue) would it be possible to offer players the opportunity to stock some resources off world temporarily? I know we're no where near a reset but I think it would be ashamed to lose anything and everything.