Finally, the results. I was going to sit down and do this yesterday but when I went to Imgur to upload the photos I got stuck browsing the photos on the front page and before I knew it I had obligations to do like dinner and sleep. I regretfully haven't reached out to anybody regarding their feedback but thankfully there's very little I could follow up on.

We only had ten responses so this doesn't speak for a lot of our users -- 343 players have connected to our server. It's not a great sample size considering we have about 16-20 regular players but hopefully this feedback will help myself and the fellow mods address concerns and help get the Cemetech Server up to where you guys expect it to be.

I'm skipping some questions, such as the rating of the server as a whole and the plugins. As they don't really focus on this part. I'll include them in Part II when I talk about the economy.

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We pride our rules on being common sense. We are a PvE server and as such players are encouraged to work together and be courteous. We have a very stringent no theft policy as players should exercise manners and courtesy when playing. Other common sense rules include no cheating, harassment and, consensual PvP matches only.

We did get some feedback here regarding the rules but nothing I want to come out and state until the mod team and I have had better conversations about the suggestion. Cause I know I'll say something and everyone will jump on board only for me to later say it won't be happening. So, if the team and I come up with something that we think works then we'll either implement it or bring it to you guys for feedback.



Some of the more negative comments were that there is hardly anyone online to the fact that the launch of the server had more of a focus than the continued life of the server. I agree, the server was very active in the beginning and eventually curtailed into a boring server that has very little to offer. Abba Matches were popular until Elemental got busy with school and other activities and no one else really picked up the torch in his absence.

I've started to put together events for the server and pitching ideas to the mod team on how we can help create an engaging community but there are some obstacles in our way. More on that later.



This I expected. There have been regular complains about how small the map is and how abba world is a great middle ground. A majority of users who left additional feedback stated that the main world map size is great but that the abba world was on the small side. I'm going to quote a response:

There is enough space that people can build their areas up without worrying about encroachment on another base, but not so far apart that we would not want to travel to another place.

That is exactly what we were going for. We didn't want it to be a chore to visit another town while also allowing enough room between players.

Going back to the number of players in the community response. We certainly wanted to keep the map on the small side because we didn't expect to have a lot of new players. After all, we are a server for the Cemetech community but we do try to attract outside interest. Tifreak8x streams some of his gameplay and we can attribute a few non-cemetech members visits from that. But again, we didn't anticipate a large external player growth. It seems like we hit the map size perfectly but we lack a continued community to keep things going. Again, more on that later.



You guys rated us pretty well. I didn't think we were doing a terrible job but I threw this in because I really wanted to know any issues that could be corrected, whether it be the mod team or something else. We have three moderators: Elemental, tifreak8x and, LittleMoonBeam. As well as two admins: comicIDIOT and KermMartian.

Now I know that there are players out there that put in a lot of time to the server and help out. It's appreciated. But we don't have the user base to justify promoting more players to a moderator position. I plan to tackle this a few ways. I am creating another moderator level. These moderators will basically be second hand admins, they'll be able to roll back griefing, teleport to players, permanently ban players and, run events. Still working out other permissions and limitations with tifreak8x on this one.

This should help create regular events and encourage a stronger community. I'll be around a bit more because I left my job in December. I've already put time into creating this survey and other endeavors. Without getting into too much detail, my job was a huge time sink. I would get off of work and have 4 hours before I had to be in bed. I had to squeeze in other daily errands into the work days and weekends were often spent having the life I couldn't during the week; My new job allows me to work from home half the time.

Changes are coming. Slowly. But I promise it's happening.



I'm not sure why I included "Other" but I probably intended that to be an "Maybe" option. One notable "Other" responses is that the low number of active players drives the user to pursue other servers or activities. Such as if there are 0 players online, they'd rather do something else than play solo. And, per the poll it's an interesting balance to maintain. Half of the participants are satisfied with the number of players on the server while the other half would like more. Hopefully an increase in activities promotes a healthy amount of players without driving away the positive half of this question.



Just leaving this here for conversation.

• Abba matches are pretty easy for anyone to set up.
• Treasure Hunts are somewhat hard to set up in an active world but I am interested to giving a player or two their own world to set up a hunt inside before opening it up to the other players.
• PvP Matches are another event that should be pretty easy for players to put on themselves.

I was 100% surprised by this. Everyone was satisfied with the modes of transport. In a follow up question I asked about other modes you'd be interested in and only one player voted for teleportation. Considering the debate we had prior to launching I thought this would be higher and am pleasantly surprised that it's not.

Regarding Elytras. We hear you and they will soon be a drop when defeating the Ender Dragon as well as potential prizes in events.

In part two I'll cover the economy side of things. We have a pretty bad habit of discussing a few subjects and ignoring the rest. So to ensure everything is discussed equally I'll be splitting this up.

In response to the map size:

I'm one of those players that loves the exploration part of the game. Give me an enderchest, some shulker boxes, and some basic supplies, and I'll be good for thousands upon thousands of blocks. Sadly, our maps are not adventurer friendly in that way. As I stated in the feedback, I understand why.

Amount of players on the server:

I'd love to see a consistent run of 10+ people. The problem is, finding people that follow rules and are mature. Playing on VanillaVerse has shown me what it's like to have activity all the time with 40+ people on, but there's a lot of pre-16 kids that get on. Moderators are continuously being called to locations because of griefing that goes on, which means they don't get to spend much in the way of time playing the game. So, I'm a bit split on that want.

Events:

I agree that we (as in mods) need to work on more event based things. I've been trying to come up with something, and may have an idea or two. I'll see what I can do in regards to finalizing things and getting to work on it.

Anything that you (comic) would like to ask specifically of me as a player, or as a moderator?

I just want to touch on this so others outside of the mod team know. We are exploring the possibility of hosting the server off of the main Cemetech server. As you may or may not know, Cemetech MC runs on the same sever that hosts our website and the various resources we offer. To keep the Cemetech site at efficiency we have purposely limited the allocated resources for our Minecraft server. It's a long ways off if ever, but we are entertaining the idea.



Yeah, I imagine. It's a balance we need to weigh. We don't want to be super big where we deal with those issues and have mods not able to enjoy playing. I definitely want to touch on this more broadly when I bring up the economy next week or so.



We'll continue our discussions privately as not to derail this conversation so early on. I just wanted to highlight some of the changes that are happening.

I'd love to hold build contests (I'm a builder, obviously :p) I even have a great place to do it at my islands.
I wish we could have a little more in the teleportation department, mainly because where I am you need either that or enderpearls and I *hate* enderpearls, but it isn't that big of a deal. If everyone gets Elytras /tpa would be pretty much obsolete. I just really want /back again.
I'm ok with the map being small-ish, but at some point it does get crowded faster than a bigger map would. And I'd like to keep what I've put a lot of time into around for as long as possible
I prefer a smaller playerbase, especially of older people (like 20+ or whatever), because not only is it less dramatic, there's less for the staff to deal with therefore they get to basically be players as well as staff and personally that's one thing I really like about this place.
As for the staff themselves, I stick to what I wrote in my feedback.

On elytra drop rates: The elytra was added to the dragon in response to what appears to be a pretty common complaint that they were too rare. I'll share an anecdote. As of the time of me posting this, I have fought 30 dragons personally, some of which turned out to not be working, and the rest when it was. I still have yet to receive one. The only time i witnessed it drop one was when I was helping DrDnar get one (which occurred on the 7th attempt). These 7 are not included in my 30. I've burned through close to two stack of end crystals to no avail.

When determining spawn rates, you also have to take into account what it takes to spawn the dragon in the first place. Crystals, which require Eyes of Ender, Ghast Tears, and Glass. Each crystal requires 2 tears, one for the eye of ender, and one for the crystal itself. It takes 4 crystals to spawn the dragon. So the rarity of getting an elytra is not just whatever rarity you have it set to. You need to consider the rarity of getting ghast tears, which are one of the hardest drops to get (considering most of the time you lose the tear to lava, and ghasts have recently been made uncatchable and tears are thus unfarmable). Multiply the probabilities of the elytra and the tears (make sure you account for the probability of 8 ) tears together and you get the actually probability of getting an elytra!

Does that honestly sound like it solves the elytra rarity issue?
Edit: On my 36th attempt, I was dropped one. I still do think the drop rate should be higher . I think 36 attempts is a bit much.

I'm happy to report that, after comic and I spent several hours working on this, we've finally gotten the ender dragon to drop elytra on a trial basis. It's a low drop rate, though, so if you don't get one the first try, keep trying! Also, the elytra drops over where ever the dragon was when you gave it the death blow, so you need to search that area. Be sure to check on top of the central bedrock spire where the end portal forms, and if you kill the dragon while it's over the void, the elytra will fall into the void.

In the end, we used a method that involves making the dragon wear an elytra, so it drops the elytra when it dies. The downside is that the elytra gets damaged as a result, often dropping with only about one-quarter durability left. Elytra can be repaired with leather and an anvil, or have mending applied, so that isn't a major problem. However, comic prefers a more flexible method that involves making a custom loot table for the dragon. He couldn't get it to work, but I'm going to experiment with that a bit. He said he'd like to make the dragon drop other stuff, and the loot table method is easier to configure than my method, which would require a redstone circuit to select different possible drops.

I'm happy to see you got an elytra, ACag. I got another one after just eight more tries, which I'd have offered to you if I'd seen you get on earlier. You have GOT to try aerial combat with the dragon. It's a lot of fun---but stay clear of those wings, they're very dangerous!

That's a great point that I don't think we considered when setting the drop rate. However I still want to keep it low as DrDnar repeats, I definitely want the dragon to drop other items. Perhaps swords with beyond max level enchantments. Once I add in a few items and set their drop rate to the same as the Elytra then players can still get some great gear and loot. But even with this method, for example, if each item is set to 10% for a total of 10 items it doesn't mean something will drop every time and sometimes there may be 2+ items which drop. Ideally there'd be a drop every time but I need to partner with Elemental for that I think.



I know of one Ghast farm in the Nether and I recall looking at one in the over world but I can't remember where nor can I find it. If I remove any Ghast farms and eggs I'd be more susceptible to raising the drop rate. I should also look at the drop percentages for Ghast tears and see if it's low enough to not really matter. I agree there's definitely a balance to strike here.




On the other hand, you guys had enough Crystals to spawn the dragon 36+ times in probably 12 hours. I don't know if that's because you guys have End Crystals stashed somewhere of it it's that easy to farm the required materials. There is an Enderman farm and blazes seem easy enough to farm which makes the the tear the last thing that's required.



This wiki says Eye of Ender requires blaze powder, so 4 tears to summon the Dragon. Is there a Ghast Tear method that I can't find via a google search?

Yea, I had quite a significant reserve, and so did DrDnar. There was a time when I had a ghast farm in the Overworld (could that be the one you recall seeing?), and during that time, I mass produced crystals. After the decision was made to make ghasts uncatchable*, I changed the spawner to something else.
I actually ended up emptying my reserve, and emptying my end crystal store as well, and got the elytra on the last set I had.


You're right, it's just 4. I got the blaze powder confused with tears for the Eye of Ender. Which makes it just 4 tears.

* On a related note, but unrelated, is it planned to get the eggcatcher working via dispensers again? I've been trying to re-activate my mob egger for strays, skeles, and zombies for the arena, but for the past month or so it hasn't worked.

Ah, that must be the one I was thinking of then. I'll go ahead and consider removing the Ghast farm atop the Nether, tifreak8x tells me it was for a gold farm but I'm still a little confused as to why there would be a need for one. I also think the users who built it haven't been online for a while too.

Regarding EggCatcher, it seems a recent update changed the associated value to false, or introduced the value for the first time and is false by default. This is the first time it's been brought to my attention. I'm going to run it by the others/Kerm real quick to make sure there wasn't a discussion in our group chat that I have missed regarding this.

Update: EggCatcher has been fixed and the configuration reloaded.

The Ghasts above the nether is indeed for a gold farm, worked on by lennart and monkey, I do believe. I'll try to get them active in the skype chat and see if they are going to continue that project or what.

The only way to really farm ghasts is to have large flat areas for them to spawn onto, so we'd have to build a lot of platforms over the lava to help increase the rates of their spawning.

I went up against the dragon myself 4 times and was unable to get an elytra to spawn, which made me sad. I'd definitely like to see the chance of drop to go up a bit more than it is right now.

As to other drops, I'd like to see dragon heads and dragon eggs be droppable items. The head could/should be a 100% chance or close to. Otherwise, not sure what other kinds of things you'd like to have it drop in the armor department.

If they wish to continue the Ghast farm then I don't see a reason to raise the probability of an Elytra drop from the Dragon. I also fail to see how a Ghast farm = Gold Farm.

I think the ghast farm also generates zombie pigmen, which drop gold. Moreover, the ghast farm design appears to be based on a Hermitcraft design that they were in a bit of a hurry to finish, because they knew it would stop working in 1.11. I forget the details, but I suspect the reason the farm is incomplete is that it can't work anymore. I suppose I'll research it further and edit this post. Update: It looks like the farm can be adapted for 1.11. It seems it used some translocation magic, but translocation isn't integral to the farm's function.

Additionally, I'd appreciate it if you would post the details of the new EggCatcher configuration in my EggCatcher thread, just to confirm. EDIT: He just enabled automated chaching.

There's a better gold farm design that only employs zombie pigmen. It also doubles as an even more overpowered XP farm.

The Ghast/Goldfarm is indeed a project I've worked on quite a while back, it's still on my to-do list together with the storage room and (yes, still working on that) the hunt. The materials to finish it are mostly up there already.

It's currently a bit low on said to-do list but I'm willing to pick it back up if someone wishes to help build it.

Please do, but make it easily accessible (I.E. ice speedways/minecart tracks in nether)

I would help with the paths, if you want, as that is important to me. I'm only able to communicate through this forum/mc chat, though.

Do you mean the kind of goldfarm which used the pigman AI to make them run off the platform? Because we used to have that exact farm up there in the past using just that mechanic. We wanted to build a different farm since every time we used it people would start complaining about low TPS