Now back on topic...
Good idea, but I can see some possible exploits. First, someone could attack a town, then recreate their town just for the pvp protection. Also, how does that support the people that don't want any pvp at all?

There's a few ways we can cater to PvP and PvE players.

• We make it so towns are all safe havens and outside of towns are PvP. There are roads to each town that are exempt from PvP making it safe to travel to each town.
• We disallow PvP entirely except for designated areas. These areas can be at spawn or in a towns specially built arena.

If you have other options please find plugins that support your idea, add the link to the plugin and describe you idea on how you want PvP balanced. I'll reiterate again, if we go with a primarily PvP server I'll still be the only ruling admin. Under PvE with designated PvP areas I believe it will be safe to have moderators to help keep the server in check.

Quite possibly, instead of creating some complicated system for PvP, we could simply just 'allow it', but discourage it and make it punishable in the rules if it isn't justified. What I mean by this is that outside of a perfectly safe spawn, you can technically kill someone if you really wish, but you ideally would have to have some connection to them where you know they're not going to make a big deal about it and otherwise mind. Everyone prospers together making it a common goal to work as a whole to make the map a great place, and perhaps you want to pull a prank on someone or have a small storyline with them where you're an enemy with someone, but any kills are out of good nature and you never actually do things out of hand or any of that unless you know you both mutually don't mind and know exactly what the situation is.
I think this way, it allow PvP to occur out of good reason, and prevents it from getting 'out of hand' since we're all on the map to contribute.

In the 1.6 map, PvP wasn't necessarily against the rules-- it was discouraged. This made it so you couldn't just go around killing random people, while at the same time still having fun plotlines with other players that you know better.

Also, I agree with actually having connection with cemetech.net as a form of whitelisting. I think this will encourage people to actually care about reading at least the minecraft forums for anything. And if you're banned on the forums, perhaps that could transfer over to the server.
On another related idea as just something to toss out, we could have a separate forum on mc.cemetech.net so minecraft doesn't ever end up clouding up cemetech.net related talk in the event that we especially have more activity.

The only thing I have against "justifying it" is that it'll be a "but he killed me!" and it'll just never stop going back and forth. Players won't understand that isn't justifiable. I suppose we could put "No revenge killing" as a rule but I'm a firm believer of "The less that there is to enforce, the easier it is." I don't want to investigate every PvP kill - and I won't - but I don't want 10 reports from my players that they were revenge killed. I have no plugin that tracks kills, all the players use an external chat program so I can't really dig for a motive, and it'd likely get abused as a way to "take out" a strategic player in their PvP plan. I don't want to put a mark against a player who is wrongfully accused but I also don't want to let a player get away with a revenge kill. If I act on all reports, I could end up banning a innocent player all because some town wanted them banned so they could access his chests or whatever.

It's a thin line.

Thus I think allowing PvP in wilderness, like we have now but disallowing PvP from extending into towns and setting up protected pathways would be perfect. Players can explore wilderness at their own risk without worrying about raids or getting killed in any town. I agree that it takes most of the fun out of "PvP" but if players set up structured PvP where they gamble say, 4 diamonds that they can win. It's not as rewarding as a full-on raid where the raider walks away with chests of goodies. Maybe the server could compound the PvP fights with additional rewards. Set up a tournament and eventually the top two players that rose through the ranks duke it out.

I think a forum at mc.cemetech.net would be awesome but not entirely practical, but I'll run it by Kerm if we can setup a light weight forum which is tied in with the Cemetech user list. I think tying the members to Cemetech Accounts would be great so every member can vote and participate in MC discussions.

I'd be all for that. I even suggested maybe no PvP in towns in my earlier post.
Structured PvP can be just as fun as killing someone by surprise if you have the mindset for it. By that I mean, if you just want to play fight, then structured PvP is the way to go. I've always done "arena battles" (as in structured fights, not all were in an arena) with rules like "the loser gets their stuff back" or "winner-take-all full iron no enchants/potions/gold apples." That, to me at least, is a lot more fun than a surprise attack on someone who is AFK or not properly equipped. Gives a bit more of a challenge, I guess.
Also, I've always had a bad experience with whitelisted servers. Probably just me, but I feel it adds more stress to the mods and admins when someone griefs or steals because they let the person in (at least I've always felt that because I have been mod and admin before on whitelisted servers). I also feel that, if we use these forums to add people to the whitelist, it will detract from the real purpose of this site, which is, I'm assuming, helping people understand programming and such-like. If we are going to go the whitelist route, I'd be for making a forum like what Comic said.

Using this to break off on another tangent, the one thing I disliked about 1.7-1.8 is that end game was easily attainable. AFK at a farm for a while, you get levels and gold then buy diamonds and enchant. There's certainly more efficient ways to enchant though. I'd like to make the end-game much harder to achieve. Where earning money isn't easy. I'd much rather be seeing "We're out of resources!" instead of "So and so is cheating" in my IRC private messages every week. I don't want to make it so you have to grind for every denarii you earn. I certainly think we can attain a balance through existing plugins and some custom ones.



We wouldn't have a whitelist per say, just that registering on the forums and "linking" your minecraft username would be mandatory. Players are still welcome to join but they'll be considered Guests, much like they are now until they step over those pressure plates at spawn. The forum registration/link would be those plates.



It wasn't my idea but my thought process on this is as follows.

Yes, Cemetech is largely a programming & technology community and when minecraft activities get loud, our users do complain. Notably during the whole rules revision debacle & topic. However, the amount of other minecraft activity is rather mum. If we did link game and forum together and the minecraft section started picking up activity, I'd likely just set up a database that holds topics and posts that ties into the Cemetech userlist. Nothing fancy. It'd be a simple one category forum rather than the plethora of categories here.

I think even before 1.9, we may have to consider some changes to the server as we're to the point where close to the majority, if not the majority, don't want to engage in this style of PvP on this server.

While by joining the server in the first place and agreeing to everything, including the playstyle, it is more than anticipated that numerous thefts, acts to sabotage, and general opposition between towns and nations was inevitable, there are still major complaints and acts of disagreement. I think that people are flustered by a semi-vague definition of what "PvP" is, namely when something happens they believe is beyond what they expected coming into this server, then arms flail in the air, and we have issues. We all have different levels to which we are accepting of "PvP", and that's an issue.

While things are within rules' bounds, this style of player versus player is not suitable for the majority. Some people wish to define player versus player as actual combat, which is perfectly fine. But the most general definition is any acts against other players. In its most general form, including stealing and sabotaging other player's towns, people are unhappy about. How anyone chooses to define their style of PvP, is independent of the at-hand issue that the majority still does not want to take it to this level, and cannot handle it.

This all said, I think some of the topics we are discussing now for 1.9 involving PvP options, should be discussed now and taken care of. While I am personally okay with being robbed and sabotaged and killed altogether on the map because I believe that is what makes things exciting, we should come up with a solution that yields to those who wish to opt out of that. I proposed earlier in this thread for 1.9 that we should allow people to toggle PvP in their towns, signifying their stance on the server, and thus their PvP stance on whether or not they will participate in free-for-all PvP.

We should also consider making a PvP arena for those who opt out of mapwide or town vs. town PvP, but want to have coordinated and organized matches which are equal ground.

Here's a thought:

We are losing people because of raids and such. New rule: This is now illegal and will result in the banning of the user.

PvP in an arena where both parties agree to terms/whatever would be the best way to handle that level of PvP

Needs more encouragement on building cool things for all users.

Everything you said about PvP was spot on. We do have players that think PvP is mano-a-mano while others play a much deeper game. This is why I am proposing, rather strongly, that PvP be limited to true wilderness only. Towns would be safe from combat and stealing would be discouraged, as that'd essentially be PvP inside a town. We'd set up safe-pathways between towns, or in 1.8's case the railway is already exempt from PvP, so that players who don't wish to combat don't have to.

Everything you've proposed is what I'm advocating for. Though, 1.8 discussion should happen outside of 1.9 discussion.

Since we switched the 1.8 server from PvP to PvE-Creative, there's been some support for upping the difficulty and if increased to max, adding starter kits. In 1.9, if we were to follow this how would you guys like stronger enemies the farther you get from a safe location be? Safe locations being pathways, towns, and spawn.

It could be a level thing. Lv1 vs Lv10 or whatever.
It could be a mob thing. Passive near safe zones vs aggressive further away.
It could be a difficulty thing. Easy vs Hard.

Of course, we'd have to find the plugins for this that are aware of Towny locations.

It could even be a player based thing. Mobs are a level respective to a player viewing them. A mob can be Lv1 to a newbie and Lv10 to an experienced player, the mob then becomes the level for everyone that player saw who attacked. Experience and drops are based on level as well, prohibiting higher level players from farming with lower level companions. This is probably more specific and we may have to find someone to make this plugin.

Something like this would be really cool imo

Server/Player Difficulty:
These are the closest plugins that I could find to what we're describing about customizable difficulty. They're from bukkit, but might give some ideas as where to go with this:
https://bukkit.org/threads/mech-customdifficulty-v4-5-0-monsters-too-strong-or-too-weak-for-you-change-it-1240.20135/

This one I especially like, because it would perfectly solve our differing difficulty preferences:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/dynamicdifficulty/

Of course, if we aren't able to do this, and we end up having to settle on a universal difficulty standard, then we'll have to compromise on something as a group.

On the idea of becoming progressively more challenging, there is in-game mechanics regarding regional difficulty basically involving how long you stay in an area, making it progressively more challenging against mobs. However, this mechanic is not active on easy mode (which is what the server is on) due to the algorithm to calculate the local difficulty level. It only kicks into effect on at least normal difficulty.
The regional/local difficulty mechanism is summarized as such:
Regional difficulty is specific to the loaded chunks around a player or grouping of players, and is weighted by both the amount of time spent and the number of players in that loaded area. The effect of increasing difficulty is capped at 50 hours for a single player, but 50 players standing in one area for 1 hour can achieve the same effect.
Regional difficulty will have an effect on generally the armor and weapons they yield, and the chances they'll be enchanted, but all the effects can be found on a table at the bottom of this section on the wiki:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Difficulty#Regional_difficulty
On the same page, you will find the summary of regional difficulty, in addition to the main topic of general game difficulty, in which you can see how changing the server difficulty between easy-normal-hard will affect everyone.

I think if it's too complicated to try and implement some system beyond giving a starter kit to newbies who want it if we were to go to like hard mode, then perhaps normal difficulty could be a relatively good compensation, and we could still do starter kits if we so wish. On normal, we'd get a small boost in mob difficulty, and also allow regional difficulty to kick into effect, while respecting those who don't want to have as hard of a time starting out.

While it is true some people will still have trouble on easy difficulty or just prefer to not face as much opposition, I feel like part of the perception is that newbies have a hard time with easy difficulty mobs is in part due to the fact that some people just run into the night unprepared to fight mobs, rather than playing tactically and digging underground to gather resources to make them more well defended. Some say that the mobs might scare the newbies off, but I feel newbies that get scared off, even from easy difficulty, are partly those who don't play as tactically. Of course you will likely be killed running straight into the wilderness and not dig down at night.. that's expected. I've seen it happen plenty of times. The problem is, we'd be always constrained to making the server as easy as possible in every aspect to respect what the most inexperienced minecrafters would feel, and what some of the less tactical would do. If the mobs are too difficult for some people and we need to respect that, then likewise would apply to our dynamics of the game such as town startup and running costs, and I don't feel the goal is to make it as easy as possible to do anything/everything.

I think we should encourage the creative freebuilding as much as possible, while still advocating challenging aspects that keep the game interesting and dynamical, whether that be through mobs, economic system, etc. Since there's a good group who prefer the game be easier, and a group who prefers the game be more challenging, I think a compromise between the two would be fair. While my preference is to have it on hard, I know some want it on easy, so perhaps we could settle for normal and starter kit based on a vote if we couldn't change the difficulty per region/person.

Being a fan of ultra-hardcore, I think it would be cool to include a plate at spawn which activates a command block to toggle the natural health regeneration of that player. In turning natural health regeneration off for a player, it would mean that the player can no longer naturally heal by filling their hunger bar, and they will be forced to heal by means of golden apples or potions only. This would also serve as an additional per-player difficulty selector, and definitely would be a challenge for those who choose to accept it.

Spawn Shops:
The spawn shops and their contents should be discussed with respect to the best interest of either the challenging aspect of the server... I feel it should have only the unobtainable goods, but on another hand, if we want to encourage freebuilding, then to what degree to we encourage it? If you think about it, there's different levels of encouraging it-- we could say, hey, you can have creative mode, and everyone can have unlimited materials and freebuild many things, but there'd be no challenge or very little (obviously this is not what we intend). We could say, no creative mode, but we'll charge a generous price at spawn for everything you need. And of course, there can also be anywhere between all materials, or no materials in the shops that are obtainable. Ideally, I feel it would have been best for the beginning of this PvP server to have no building materials that were obtainable, but of course there are things like lapis and coal blocks in the shops.
I feel like if our best interest is to balance both the challenge and the freebuilding aspect, and perhaps the economic interaction between players (playershops), we ought to stick to selling unobtainable materials from the biomes we lack, and maybe the most basic of survival stuff like food. To further balance the more newbie-friendly aspect, while still allowing the server to have its challenges, players could start with a little more cash as to buy a few more pieces of food and/or minecarts if they need them.

I'm liking that Dynamic Difficulty plugin.

Regarding the "freebuild" aspect, I agree. Perhaps we lower offer all decorative blocks in spawn for like 1D a piece. Including cobble/stone. That way players don't tear up the land for building blocks but instead focus on resources such as mining iron, gold, lapis, etc. As far as spawn shops go, if we enable the nether I don't think we'd really need to have these. Unless we were to offer creative-only items, which I think should be saved for treasure hunts.

I think this a reasonable way to go. While I'd probably be one to mine for all my resources possible and obtain everything as vanilla as possible, I can see this working out for good on keeping terrain as nice as possible. I would definitely just keep in mind player shops and still allowing good economic interactions between players to flow and not have spawn take most of the business.

If we're encouraging nice terrain, we should also disable creeper explosions doing terrain damage as another step toward that goal. I would see it being inevitable that a newbie will goof up on or near a nice path and blowing it all up and not being able to fix it. We may even want to consider doing it on this map too since we still share the same goal currently as with prospectively on the next map. I look forward to working with the custom terrain and connecting the world with great paths, bridges, and structures.



I would love to see the nether come back personally. It's an ugly place, but it's a part of vanilla I miss being in and being able to do things like farm wither skeletons. We should be able to turn wither boss explosions damage off too to prevent the terrain anywhere from being obliterated, so we wouldn't need to nerf the wither skeleton drops.
I think in general with the nether, despite its ugliness, it would become a reason to build something nice in it such as a central spawn nether hub and overall make it an okay place to be.

The creative-only and generally uber rare items are definitely what drive participating in map exploration adventures and treasure hunts, and I would like to see it continue to be driven by that. This last treasure hunt was a great example of both a well-orchestrated event and specific to this, nicely rewarded with the rare/unobtainable items. Unobtainable armor and such that is beyond what can be obtained would also be a cool thing to see.

I sped read (?) the whole thread here, and may be stepping on toes or repeating other peoples gaseous emissions, but I'm going to throw my 2 cents here too.

Arena PvP has a certain "honor" to it, one that I'm completely for.

Difficulty increasing based on distance from spawn is a good idea, though small hardcore dungeon areas are also an idea. perhaps both? and the nether should be maximum difficulty, to minimize use of it for teleporting.

the world is a large place, and we should limit what teleporting is done/available.

having in-game councils to settle large disputes could relieve comic's burden of messages.

Ideally we could prohibit portals except for Spawn. That way the only way to and fro is from Spawn.



This is something I wish we setup during our PvP days. Assigning each two two "delegates" for voting or whatever. I think such disputes will be less involved with the PvE emphasis we have now. I'll be monitoring the server to see if better regulation is required.

I started playing on the MC server before I made an account on the forums. Just wanted to point that out.

I agree with generally limiting teleportation. I feel if you have your home set where you want it, and the spawns, you can do virtually get away with most of any map adventuring, and just basically sit around in town all day whether or not you will build anything. Teleportation also makes semi-irrelevant the usage of horses and minecarts or nether, so why use transportation when you can teleport to satisfy most of your needs? If we have limited or no teleportation, it would encourage the making of paths between towns that are safe and easy to traverse. We wanted to encourage the building aspect and make awesome things, so there's not much of a reason to make paths to other towns if you can just teleport to your town, to spawn and to other players in their towns. I'd personally still make the paths, but I don't think there's a need/want to make the bridges and paths around the map is present if we keep teleportation.



In theory, you should still be able to come on the server, but you won't be able to play or do anything other than adventure around without a Cemetech forum account. I think this will be good as a way of not altogether blocking out new user inflow, but rather restricting it. If you actually want to be a part of the server and such, you'd simply create an account and then play. It was also discussed that this would bound users to an agreement to keep updated with the forums.

We have about 300 members who have signed into our server, I assume the probably a two-thirds majority of them don't have an account as well. This wouldn't stop people from joining the server. Anyone can still join but in lieu of the pressure plates moving new members from "Guest" to "Member" it'd be tied to the forum. I feel this would be a better deterrent of grief on a creativity based server. Sadly, this would also deter legitimate players too.

My other argument for requiring forum membership would be to encourage better involvement in server decisions. It'd encourage members to speak up outside of the server. They'll know they can come to the forums and say "Hey, this needs to change..." or "Hey, this would be cool..." I feel like the whole 1.8 fiasco could have been caught a lot sooner had our members actually voiced their concerns and displeasure. I realize there were a two or three posts that should have raised a flag but I didn't realize the problem was so severe. Again, had more members had a monitored channel to speak out things would have changed sooner.

I'm not saying the game IRC channel isn't monitored, I'm saying that I don't make time to read everything that's happened while I've been away. If someone voices concern while I am away it'll likely go unnoticed unless someone highlights me, then I know to scroll back and see what's up.

To be fair, Horses are semi-irrelevant anyway, as long as you're still playing on amplified terrain.