Alternative to Migration Plan - Fresh Start

[Nimrod]

Warning: Any Digiex Member who is not a Minecraft Player who wastes our time by voting in this, will instantly lose 50 reputation, making it next to impossible to ever become a power user. This vote is for the Digiex Minecraft Players only.

Hello all,

This is an alternative plan that in the last few days I have thought about, instead of the current long Migration Plan which everyone has approved. Please take your time to consider this one, and don't rush to answer, as it does involve Migration Faster and Harder. Also let me be clear on one point, two weeks ago I would have never considered this, however from talking to a lot of our long term players and getting feedback, it appears most people are happy to lose there buildings, for a change at a fresh start. For this reason, I'm putting this option on the table for debate.

From playing on the 1.8 Test Server in Both Creative and Survival, and talking to the players. A few things are clear to me. the current CityWorld is a failure already, and with the upcoming Creative World, it will become even more of a failure. Why? Well at the moment, people have to pay for a plot in a city, be ordered on how to build and use there own materials. As it is, very few people are paying for this privilage. Considering CityWorld is over 8 months old now, the Cities are barely functioning. While I admit they are truly beautiful, and so much work has gone into them. Truth be told in Creative Mode as Dionvc proved in 1 day, you can make stuff as good as that when you have unlimited items, fly mode and the other benefits of Creative Mode. So you tell me, when we have Creative Mode and all our best builders, what will be the point of CityWorld? No one will use it, no one barely uses it now, and no one will use it soon. While I think its difficult to let go off due to how much time has gone into it, I think in the honest scheme of things its some dead weight we do need to get rid of. The whole PvP between two cities and all the other plans have never come into light, and never will with a growing smaller MC population.

Secondly, the Economy is beyond a failure. We have tried everything to bring back the shops, but its just not working. We haven't charged rent to shop keepers in over a month as no one is making money, nor is there any stock in the market. Truth be told, the market while it has good ideas, is barely used. Again having a Creative World available will further damage this. Getting rid of the Economy and its related plugins (Chestshop and OddItem) may as well happen. One thing that can replace it, and be more useful is one of the many Sprout mods which allow Player to Player Trades to happen, where in one half of the screen you put your items you want to trade, the other player puts bottom half what they want, and then you agree to trade. (Helps push SproutCraft, and increases player trading!)

Also as part of this shape up would be making the server more private. Lets be honest, we get tons of players every day, a few whitelist but none really stay. Theres a lack of community of our server and a lack of admins or moderators around to help new players, for this reason I suggest if we do a fresh start, we go from the current system to a more private invite/apply server. So we enable whitelist and make people request application via the forum. It would solve the grief and abuse problem, it make the server more friendly and more like the old Alpha days some of us older players remember. It would also make the job of the Admins a million times easier, and allow them to be able to play the game, and less worried about being admins, helping 5 year olds who cant use Google or worrying about an grief group attack.

We can use this chance to sort out our plugin problem at the same time. Currently we have far too many plugins and have completely changed the Minecraft experience from Vanilla. People get Diamond Tools to easy, Minecarts don't act normally, Currencys, Lifts, and more. If we did this fresh re-start we can take the time and clear out a lot of the plugins, focusing only on the basics like WorldGuard, WorldEdit, Logblock etc. This in itself will solve the lag problem our server experiences a lot of the time, due to the many concurrent plugins. McMMo would also most likely go, with Notch introducing XP, its clear he has his own leveling system planned, this would also solve the whole Diamonds and Gunpowered being collected far too much, by digging dirt. Lag removed, more natural play restored.

It will also make the game more manageable for the Admin team. At the moment, with all these complicated build restrictions, stupid cost building costs and permission regions, ridiculous amounts of rules and regulations and a complicated server, it makes looking after players a full time job. Because of this, the current Admins barely come on, because they can't spend there time playing. If we started fresh, and kept a more vanilla playback with just Survival and Creative and a Warp Command to switch between the two. That way, users wouldn't be confused all the time, and could get on with things without constantly harasing the Admins, wanting to buy plots, build this, get items etc etc. It would restore the game for both Players and Admins.

Overall, I think these changes might do the job of making the game once again, fun for all. Our server is currently stale, and the Migration Plan is all about saving CityWorld, which lets be honest in the majority of players views, isnt worth saving. As for those players who would struggle to let go, we could offer saving there buildings schematics in WorldEdit on the old server, and import into Creative only. But it should where possible be avoided to keep with the whole fresh feel. To top it off, in the last week in the test 1.8 never, most of our players have never had so much fun, with a fresh map, which prompted calls for this.

So, now I've explained the reasoning behind it, let me suggest to you how the Refresh would work:

Starting on either 1.9 or 1.10 we could shut the server down for a day.
Remove everything and start fresh.
Creative World (Spawn)
Survival World with connected Nether and Minetopia.
A total of 4 worlds, as theres less worlds, the Creative and Survival could be as big as the old MainWorld (3000 blocks in any direction with a round border). Nether and Minetopia would be 500.

Users would spawn in creative, where a massive spawn structure would exist. If they then wanted to go to Survival they type a command ingame, in which they will switch Inventorys to the Survival one, and spawn in the survival world. Each of these would have there own '/home' to. Minetopia would be the mining / TNT world, where Survival would be vanilla, with Creeper Explosions blocked for safety.
No Rubbish Economy, Just simple Vanilla Minecraft with basic Mods (Home, Player to Player Trading, PvP Toggle)
All Fresh, All New, Simple and to the Point.
A simple, Fresh setup.

Now, please let me know your thoughts. If there is enough people interested, we can put it to a vote.

 

[jessenic]

I 100% agree with this. We had so many players back in the hmod days, we had just few plugins. Now we have dozens of plugins making lag. And I don't really care about old buildings, you can always make new ones, that's how the real world works too. You have to give up something that you don't want to.

 

[Flamzorz]

Where would items stand in this plan? Take them or leave them?

 

[vesa]

i like the idea of having fres start and that items would be harder to get and i dont realy care about my buildings being destroyed only thing i don't like that i would lose my craft book redstone makers but that is not very bad thing eather becose there would be the creative and i could make cool redstone things even whitout item makers.

so i would like to have fres start for second time

 

[Nimrod]

Where would items stand in this plan? Take them or leave them?

They wouldn't. You'd start empty. you can then either go into Creative and Spawn Items at your hearts content. Or enter Survival and have to mine. Also your inventory would be different per-world.

 

[Flamzorz]

Mmmm... I wouldn't really want to loose my items. My buildings I wouldn't mind but items...

Also what about Oldie status and Tree Spawning?

 

[Nimrod]

Mmmm... I wouldn't really want to loose my items. My buildings I wouldn't mind but items...

You were only allowed 2 chests max under the other plan. And in Creative you have unlimited item spawning on demand, so unless your really bothered about having to mine again in Survival (the whole survival experience). Either way, your entitled to object and we have noted your objection. We will see if this idea has an overall majority opionon for, else we will have to keep Cityworld (no other way to keep items).
I honestly expected more objection to loss of buildings, than a few items with item spawning becoming available.

 

[Jozo117]

I agree with this aswell because if you want your items to build things, you dont need them since you can spawn them. If you have your items, you will most probably be building with them in survival which is completely different to the whole point of survival.

The only thing I dont 100% agree with is the cities being removed, this is because if we only have a warp to survival, a warp to creative and 2 sub-warps to minetopia and nether the server will seem empty and having cities will also add to the experience of minecraft, of building an economy to live in, Also my last point about cities is to have them player built/with a group of friends in the server, then choose 2 main cities and have the others just as a /warp command. The cities that are main ones could also be player named by a vote or somthing.

 

[Flamzorz]

You were only allowed 2 chests max under the other plan. And in Creative you have unlimited item spawning on demand, so unless your really bothered about having to mine again in Survival (the whole survival experience). Either way, your entitled to object and we have noted your objection. We will see if this idea has an overall majority opionon for, else we will have to keep Cityworld (no other way to keep items).
I honestly expected more objection to loss of buildings, than a few items with item spawning becoming available.

I spent more time getting my items then constructing my building. Although I will miss my house I am open to rebuilding it even better!

 

[Strategia]

I'll miss Cityworld, I think, but tbh I won't be that sad to see it go either. Like you said, the initial concept has failed quite hard, and for the past few months there's only been a handful of people really active in there, mainly regulars. There's no real lasting appeal other than walking through the cities looking at what people have built, and the market is simply dead. The idea is fairly solid, but we'd need a larger active playerbase, and more scarcity for some items - and more variable prices - if we wanted to keep it. As it is, coins are all but useless, the player trade thing sounds like a fantastic idea as most people prefer to swap items among themselves anyway.

Mainly, what I'll be missing are, like Flamzorz, my items. Quite apart from the obvious diamond tools thing, I've got a lot of iron blocks for decorative purposes, and I'm especially proud of having thirteen cakes, which I made way back when Atlantis was still open. But they're fairly useless, given the fact that I don't go to the Wilderness very often (and if I do, I tend to use magiccarpet to avoid hostile mobs) so I very rarely take damage.

The more I think about this idea, the more I like it. The mountaintop village that got built on the Creative map was just gorgeous to look at and walk/fly through (I love the vines hanging off the bridge, tbh), and if Cityworld goes the way of Old Atlantis (i.e. the one on the old map, not the current, inactive one) it's conceivable that villages and towns like that could spring up in the Creative world. Personally, I hope that there's gonna be a handful of them, spread around the map a bit - not too many, like the ubiquitous four-man villages that infest Freebuild today, but larger cores of maybe up to a dozen (active) inhabitants (hopefully). Then we could finally do what we were planning with Cityworld initially - organised competitions (PvP and otherwise - also Spleef, rough-terrain footraces, mining competitions, build-offs, etc.) between towns.

This would also mesh nicely with my other idea, I'd imagine. (I'm still working on that, I'll post it on the forums when I'm done.)

One thing though - if possible, it might be useful to disable Endermen in the Creative world, if they retain the ability to pick up and move player-placed blocks. Otherwise, you run the risk of mobs dismantling part of your building while you're away. On the other hand, this could mean that streetlighting and water moats could become very useful. Which would also mesh nicely with my other idea.

edit: The thing about my items isn't to say that I want to keep them. They're only items. I didn't feel this warranted a new post, hence the edit.

 

[AlleOpsO]

Yes, I vote yes to a fresh start. Yes yes yes !

 

[Nimrod]

One thing though - if possible, it might be useful to disable Endermen in the Creative world, if they retain the ability to pick up and move player-placed blocks. Otherwise, you run the risk of mobs dismantling part of your building while you're away. On the other hand, this could mean that streetlighting and water moats could become very useful. Which would also mesh nicely with my other idea.

Regarding Creative - Our plan was to have Monsters off, and animals off as they are mostly unneeded and generally add a lot of network load. (A world of 10 players and no animals is 10 entites to update, a world of 10 players and animals is like 100 networked entities to update positions off). That would solve the Endermen problem, and keep them execlusively for Survival world, where they will hunt and kill you.

Regarding keeping items. The only way we can let people keep items is to keep a map from the old server active, and make people move items into chests. This isnt overally viable as we wanted to make a fresh start. Also I dont think having a few players with tons of items, and most players with non in survival world would also be viable and give the map a good start. Is there no way if we went for this option, people could do without items? I mean theres Creative World where you can spawn unlimited.

 

[Skeven]

Regarding items (i'm a bit short on time to read much else than the initial post), I think bringing items to the new worlds would already set them a step back. Sure I'll have someone say "oh well you only say that because you can spawn items" but the thing is, I wont be in the new worlds if they come into existence. Spawning items ruined the whole game for me and with a chance to start completely new is a grand opportunity for me personally.

Additionally, with how mcMMO has mucked up our economy with an abundance of glowstone, double drops of diamond, and the like -- it's just become too awful of a mess to clean up manually. I'm sure we can figure something to maintain a de-facto economy, as I don't feel trading is a very viable method, and have always preferred the market approach. Anyhow, I'll get to this at a later time when I can read the input from everyone.

Edit: Additionally, the idea of a fresh start should have those wishing to maintain survival villages interest, as without a CityWorld to compete with, they're free to flourish. (Within reason, of course. Try to keep to one village or another as we don't want this being another messy freebuild with people in three different villages within walking distance of each other.. we want it to look nice)

 

[xzKinGzxBuRnzx]

I must say I think this idea better than the last. I to have had fun lately just building in both survival and creative. That was extremely rare for me. To be honest, I've built 4 houses already. Which is just shocking considering how I've not really played the game since alpha. That never happens on our current setup. As a admin you really have no choice but to focus what time you do get on to being a Admin and not a player. ;( Not my idea of fun there.

Plugins do need trimming though and trading doesn't seem like a bad idea to me via Spout.

 

[Nimrod]

The topic of plugins, a good place to continue!

Jessenic and myself had a long talk yesterday about the state of the plugins, and how they were A) lagging a powerful server and B) taking away most of the Vanilla Play.

What we concluded was a major trim, and looking at every plugin and decided to take the majority away (including McMmo, All Economy Related, LWC and more).
We would then be left with:
WorldBorder Plugin - Allows us to keep the worlds from endlessly spawning and becoming too big for the server to handle
WorldGuard Plugin - Allows us to manage Fire Spread and TNT/Creeper Explosions
Logblock - Allows us to log the events ingame incase there is any grief, including items coming in and out of chests.
Multiverse - Needed for Multiworld
MultiInv - Needed for Multiple Inventory
Sproutcraft - Needed for Logblock and also SproutTrade

The rest would then be hand made by Jessenic or King. Jessenic is currently working on a simple Essentials replacement which would allow /home and /spawn, as well as the favourite /tpahere and /tpa.
The list above is our bare essentials, and what we aim for this server. We want to keep the experience as Vanilla as possible, and at the same time as lag free as possible, as we do intend to bring the server resources requirement down, so we can migrate either back to self-hosting, or onto a possibly cheaper server as our current server which supports 60+ people is overkill for our public yet still small server which may get even smaller when we introduce a whitelist!

Regarding Donations, we still thank everyone who donated and a special thank you to Strategia and Nitvit. If it wasnt for there donations, our server wouldn't have been up for as long. Everyone owes a lot of there time online to those two. However, the Donations pot has run dry, and besides the odd $10 donation once a month at most, the server fund is once again negative (which is another reason we can't afford to keep the old massive server). So sizing down and starting fresher with a more manageable server is important. Plus King above posted how the old server setup isnt fun anymore for Admins, who have to spend there time helping people with the complex rules and such.

Finally, Regarding Usergroups. In our new server, there will only be two ranks. Normal Player, and Server Operator. The only difference is the server operators can kick/ban and add people to the whitelist. Thats all. We don't need complex usergroups, and we don't need ranks by peoples names. Jessenic is working on the system, but it will likely just be one colour for Ops, and one colour for players and thats it. How the usergroups will merge will be simple:
Visitor - Gone
Player, Oldie, Builder, Trusted - Player
Mod, Admin, Owner - Operator
As the difference between Player and Admin is so small (yes, Admins won't be item spawning in Survival or worldedit'ing!) I hope people can accept the much simpler ranks. It mean's we don't have to piss around with a complex permission system, everyone is equal.

Overall this plan is kicking up mementom, At first it seemed hugely unpopular, however I believe from reading above, every Admin has voted for it, and quite a few players. We will leave it open for debate for the next week or so, and will post when we have further updates. In the mean time, if you haven't given your view, please do. For those who have given there views which are a bit mixed, please be sure at the end of your post to either say if you are for this, or against it.

As it will require some prep work, we would like to know if this is plan is likely to happen, a good period of time before it happens. So we will set a deadline of this Sunday for people to give there feedback and views. And if it does go ahead, rest assured the old server will be up for a good month or two at least for now, its in no rush to finish. and the option for those who can't move over without a building or two, it may be time to start asking Admins ingame to save your buildings schematic with WorldEdit, incase you want it importing into Creative.

As always, we welcome feedback. For those of you that know players who haven't posted yet, please direct them to this thread so they have a chance to have there say!

 

[Skeven]

While I hate adding to the list of requests when we're trying to cut down, I'm trying to keep the hey0 days in mind and wondering what the fate of Craftbook/Falsebook & Minecart Mania will be.

I'd love to see the bank & long railways (Atl -> Ghost) come back, as well as gated cities (for zombie protection) and the like.

Anyhow, I'm off to bed and I'll be back to this in about 14 hours when I'm back home.

 

[Strategia]

I'm with Skeven on this one, Craftbook/Falsebook is a must, if only [Gate] and maybe [Lift] - the former, as Skeven said, to keep mobs out at night, the latter being particularly useful in (and perhaps restricted to) Creative, especially if flying is restricted/disabled (which I'm personally not a fan of - perhaps make it a donator perk) for making the mountaintop castles and chasm-spanning bridges we know and love from the temporary Creative map.

 

[Flamzorz]

What about /back and /tree?

 

[Nimrod]

While I hate adding to the list of requests when we're trying to cut down, I'm trying to keep the hey0 days in mind and wondering what the fate of Craftbook/Falsebook & Minecart Mania will be.

I'm with Skeven on this one, Craftbook/Falsebook is a must, if only [Gate] and maybe [Lift] - the former, as Skeven said, to keep mobs out at night, the latter being particularly useful in (and perhaps restricted to) Creative, especially if flying is restricted/disabled (which I'm personally not a fan of - perhaps make it a donator perk) for making the mountaintop castles and chasm-spanning bridges we know and love from the temporary Creative map.

I'm afraid Craftbook (and later Falsebook) is one of the first plugins we wanted to get rid of, with regards to lag). Plugins that edit the Mechanics or have self timed circuits are the biggest cause of lag, as they have to read every movement, block placement or press and decide if they need to process another event. Its with regret Mods like this, which we are desprite to get rid of to reduce lag.

It's the same with Minecart Mania (which not only that, but its also no longer supported in its current form as the maker is now only interested in Sprout)

Regarding Lifts, espically in Creative. When you have fly mode, all you need is a 1x1 empty hole for a lift shaft, then you walk in and press space to go up, or shift to go down, like a real lift.

Overall, I think over time, selected features of the variety of the mods could make a come back, but would make a come back in a tidy clean form by a simple home built plugin. The problem with a lot of these other plugins, is they contain so many features we don't use, that they end up being bulky, when in reality we only want small functionality from them, like Lifts from Craftbook, and Powered Cart Blocks with Minecart Mania (also note, you can use the official Powered Rails). Gates on the other hand, would be cool to see people use Pistons for.

What about /back and /tree?

Back should be do-able, hopefully Jessenic can read this and let us know if its possible. Tree there isnt really much point, as you can spawn Saplings in Creative, or collect them with such ease in Survival, plant them and come back in 5 minutes and you have a fresh tree.





Overall, to all these posts, we admit were losing functionality, but its the desire for functionality which got us into the situation we have of over 20 plugins and a laggy server (dispite it having 5x 2ghz Cores, and 3GB of ram dedicated to MC which on Vanilla, could handle 100+ players lag free, but on our serve can't handle more than 10) We do need a fresh start, and if over a month or so we find we need urgent functionality, I'd sooner us do it in a clean way, than to bulk on many big plugins.



Edit:

Sorry if that appeared negative, what I was trying to get at was that we do need to be as Vanilla as possible, and regarding a few things we may need, I would sooner us try and see how it goes without first, then if there is a major need for them, I would rather us develop our own in house solution, instead of the bulky plugins available which do so much we don't need. Does that sound acheiveable?

 

[jessenic]

Regarding Lifts, espically in Creative. When you have fly mode, all you need is a 1x1 empty hole for a lift shaft, then you walk in and press space to go up, or shift to go down, like a real lift.

Indeed, and minecraft has ladders too.

Back should be do-able, hopefully Jessenic can read this and let us know if its possible. Tree there isnt really much point, as you can spawn Saplings in Creative, or collect them with such ease in Survival, plant them and come back in 5 minutes and you have a fresh tree. .

The back is a tricky one, as the Essentials /back teleports to last teleport location that comes from Essentials plugin. So that would need some coding, and to be honest I don't like that /back at all. I will make players
teleport to their home beds when they die, though.