I still think that the economy could work. It's obvious that it was just set up badly. I also think that because it was added in when the map was already fairly developed, people were used to playing without it, causing it to be left unused. I think if it's there from the start, more people will make shops. It shouldn't be given up on just because it failed once, I've seen it work on dozens of servers.

Also, I feel like the increased difficulty level would really help. Right now, people are making houses thousands of blocks out and living there. This isn't good if we want to be a Minecraft community, instead we're just a bunch of people who happen to be on the same world and happen to trade occasionally and build stuff once in a while.

Hello, everyone. My name is Snipe and I've been brought in to help the transition to the new world. If you have requests, feel free to write them down on paper and place them in the box labeled "Requests". If the box labeled "Requests" starts making sounds like a paper shredder, don't be alarmed; the system is working as intended and your request is being processed.

-----
But seriously, I'm in favor of getting rid of mob bounties and updating the admin shop.
And yes, people were supposed to make their own shops. It might help if in the new world we have an area dedicated to shops so people will know where to go. I suspect one problem with the shops is that we have too few people so there is little incentive to make a shop anywhere but at the spawn (because who would go to your house just to see what/if you're selling).

Nice to see the biggest proponent of the economy finally show up to the party.

So at this point I'm actually in favor of just dumping the economy; there are lots of problems with it. Even if we get rid of the mob rewards, like Thomas pointed out, we still have the problem of there being certain farms that make it easy to get lots of iron/gold ore, so then we have to think about what resources do we have to restrict (eg: You can't sell it to the admin shop) to make it so that you can't farm money like that, either? And then figuring out what admin shop prices should be would be a big hassle, making sure that people don't abuse it, doing stuff like what Teo complained about. And I don't really think very many people are going to make shops or use other people's shops, anyways. And if the admin shop is working correctly, people shouldn't be using it very often, too, which raises the question of why even bother with it if it's not going to get much use, and we have a bunch of other things to deal with?

Part of why I wanted to keep it was because of the limited resources, and how it makes me hesitant to make things with the resources I've found, but after seeing that you can get diamond armor and tools from villager trading, and that you can make iron and gold farms, I don't really care that much anymore. I mean, I don't like it how sand and clay are limited resources, which means I probably won't ever use them as a building material, but it's not that big of a deal.

So I ask you sniper: Why exactly should we bother with it? I agree with kroto, I think that we can make it work (or at least not be dysfunctional like it is now), but do you really think that when functional, it will add enough to the game to be worth the trouble? And more importantly, how do you think we should fix it? This current economy is bad and does not work. We should not let an economy this dysfunctional happen on the new server.

And note that as an admin, you can actually try to implement your changes to the economy now rather than later (which would be ideal, because a dysfunctional work-in-progress economy is better to have now rather than after we've reset the server and we should be busy setting up HQ and stuff like that). Since I'm at the end of my semester, though, I'm quite busy and might not be able to see and critique any changes for a while. But that's what other members are for, right?


I also plan on replying to kroto's post soon, regarding difficulty. I have limited time, though, so I decided to make a post directed at sniper since it involves an issue that's more prominent right now (economy instead of difficulty), and since I don't think he's actually participated in any of this debate so far.

First and foremost, I apologize.  I’ve hardly been active as of late on the Interguild (though I’ve made an effort to be on the server more), and even when I knew I needed to chime in on this debate I neglected it, and as such the amount of unread posts grew and became even more imposing.  I’ve taken the time to read and reread all the posts so as to try and gather a list of what seems to be the most important topics.


Firstly, new difficulty.
While at first I was in favor of increasing the difficulty, as it seemed to me that survival had become somewhat easy, I figured that it might be fun to bring up the difficulty to hard so as to make it more challenging and, to my reasoning, inspire a greater sense of community on the server because you would be needing the fellow server mate’s help more in order to survive.  However, after a talk with Quirvy on the server I realized that one of the reasons that I was finding such ease in my Minecraft travels was because I had purposely made it easier.  I had (have) a boss set of full diamond armor whereas I could swim in lava for extended periods of time and hardly receive a scratch.  I made this set of armor and wore it willingly, and if I wanted to make the game more difficult then I was perfectly capable of making it harder.  I also failed to take into account the less “hardcore” players (Like Quirvy, if you don’t mind me picking on you) who don’t try to simply gather as many resources as possible and amass a vast array of supplies so as to make the game easy.  They wanted a more relaxed kind of pace, whereas I’m the kind of player who enjoys forcing the game into “submission”, if you will, and doing whatever I want.  After all that was said I realized that there wasn’t really any point to increasing the difficulty.  Normal is a good balance between the extremes and allows any player to make their game harder or easier for themselves if they want to.


Secondly… and lastly... the economy.
I’m going to outright say that I am against economy.  The thing that I liked about the pre-economy survival world was that it seemed like just the right balance between near-vanilla play with the security of plugins like LWC and LogBlock and the prevention of block damage through explosions, among a couple other small things.  I remember that we had this sort of discussion some time ago on an older host about how vanilla the server should be, and I’m still of the opinion that it should be mostly vanilla with little plugins that alter the actual gameplay.  Now, granted, the current economy has got some major issues and there are many ways that it could be improved to make it many times better, I still feel as an economy takes away from the game.
Now that that’s said, I’d like to say that after reading Quirvy’s posts I am more willing to compromise on keeping economy under the circumstances that effort is put into it and it is kept very minimalistic and prices are adjusted with inflation, as happens in real economies.
- I think that unlimited amounts of items have to go.  â€œNow how is that an admin shop if it’s not unlimited?” you probably didn’t ask yourself.  What I’m proposing is that resources, like the favored example sand, are released at periodic times, similar to how a store would receive a delivery.
- Money needs to be harder to acquire (Obviously, the monster rewards are going.  It’s a disaster) , and I feel that selling resources is a good way to be able to earn money, but it needs to be a way whereas it’s (I’m trying to think of a way to put it) not the primary way, not the easier way to get resources.  It needs to be a second option.  Naturally, the problem is that if it’s too hard then it won’t be used at all, but if done right, it might work.  Renewable resources like anything farmable, wood, etc, cannot and should not be sold nor bought at the admin shop.  Only important resources like iron and gold and diamonds and coal (Coal is shaky though, because it’s easy to get and people can just sell all their coal and use charcoal) should be sold and at a loss to the player, so that selling the, say, iron to get money for sand would be a slight loss than if he had actually used that iron to go and get the sand himself.  The admin shop needs to be a backup.  I feel as though this isn’t a good way of explaining it and it sounds bad, but please refute so I can improve upon it.

I know that many of these are redundant, but I felt it was necessary to put my two cents in and then grow from there.


Now, one more thing that I feel needs to be addressed.  As admins we’ve done a poor job of keeping up to date and actively participating with the things that go on on the server and this thread.  I myself was gone from… I don’t know, March? April? and then through most of the server.  I didn’t manage my time well enough and got burnt out on Minecraft at the end of the school year, and I barely played modded or vanilla Minecraft until the end of the summer.  Sniper hadn’t logged onto the IG for about two months prior to that post he just made, and Livio has been inactive (Though that’s more of his trademark now =P) , too. (To put this in prespective, there have been 9 posts on the server admin board in 2013, 5 of which were from August when Sniper became admin (But none of which were from me as that was when I was still on “hiatus”)) Sniper said

and this makes me wonder what is actually happening with the upcoming update.  I realized a bit ago with the world reset and the new economy/no economy, it’s be a good idea to update the plugins we have to new ones, as some of the ones we currently have are old and aren’t currently maintained. For example, we have Multiverse for our multiple worlds, but that hasn’t been updated on Bukkit since Nov 27, 2012.  Every update has the chance to break the plugins and the longer you wait to update to new ones the greater the risk.  The only problem is that I never attempted to contact Sniper or Livio to let them know that, “This is what I want to.  What do you want to do?”  I was inactive (Without an excuse other than laziness.  I have two high school classes and no job. =P) and I had a great lack of any sort of attempt to let my intentions be known to them.  Communication is obviously lacking and preventing a sense of unity of the ones in charge (From what I understand, this is how the staff on the site want to appear and rightly so).  As such, this is an issue when trying to create a sense of community on the server.



There is no Mushroom Island biome on the survival server, and as such any mycelium in the world has come from illegitimate means, so I removed it.

(Side note: I didn't realize how much of a wall of text this was going to..)

I like the economy and admin shop because it minimizes the need to either:
1) Store every resource you come across in case you need/want it later and/or
2) Grind for resources when you don't have enough of the ones you want.

For instance, if I flatten out an area of land for a large construction project, I might have 4 or 5 double chests full of dirt and cobble, or else I need to make an incinerator. Then, if I want mostly smooth stone, I'll need to also wait for all the stone to smelt. It's so much less of a hassle if I can just trade my currently unwanted resources for money that I can then use for whatever I want later.

I think that farming money is not really an issue, as people could just farm resources the same ways anyway, especially since villager trading is allowed.

Getting rid of the economy will just trade large bank accounts for large vaults. I don't see how that's really any better.  

The thing that I see is that having a large bank account sacrifices mobility, in a sense.  If I have my own vault of resources then I can have it where ever I want.  In my base, an outpost, spawn, anywhere.  The admin shop would help people come to spawn not to interact with other people, but to get what they want from some automated thing and leave.

And I believe there already is an economy in the game, of sorts, which encourages more interaction.  If I have a double chest of cobble that you want and you have some iron or diamonds that I want, then we can exchange.  There's no need for an added medium of money into the game because you have other people who can fulfill your needs and you can fulfill theirs.

I can see the downside of having that wealth in a convenient wallet instead of a couple dozen chests, but I feel like utilizing the vanilla mechanics is better for the community feel of the game.

And if you say that then the two people have to be on the server at the same time, then that's not true either.  The Interguild's PM system and this very topic can be used to initiate trades and haggle prices.


On a different note, there's the matter of a seed for the new world, which I failed to mention in my other post.  I've posted on the admin thread a seed that has every single biome, both new and old, within a 5000 block radius of spawn.  We can either use this seed, or if you feel like that's cheating, we can simply leave it to chance to try and give us a good world.  One reason I say that we should use a predetermined seed is so we can utilize all the new features in the game.  If we get a seed that doesn't have all the new biomes then I feel as though we'd be missing out on a portion of the game, so I support the predetermined seed.

For it to have that affect, I feel like it would have to be hard enough that it wouldn't be feasible for one to try to survive on his own.

But then the more I think about it, that doesn't really make sense, anyways, though, because monsters only come out at night. Whenever I'm going exploring right now, when nighttime comes, I place a fencepost and attach my horse to it, and then promptly either sleep or disconnect until daytime. Even when I'm building stuff near spawn, I usually don't work at night because it's too risky. Raising the difficulty isn't going to prevent people from moving away from spawn, it's just going to make it harder to go between houses near spawn at night and explore cave systems.

And why do you want us to all stay at spawn, anyways? Unless you're talking about Darvince's house, which is kind of weird being in the middle of nowhere, I'd rather people build stuff away from spawn as opposed to everything just going down at spawn. We don't have this massive map just for us to stay in one place. What fun would that be? I agree that we should be working together and stuff, but I feel like increasing the difficulty in an attempt to force teamwork on everyone is kinda cheap. And building things further out aren't anti-community; Perseverance was a group project that me, Darvince and Thomas worked on. I know that at least Jazz and mymop have been there recently, and Livio and Bmwsu may or may not have also visited it. The zombie farm that's a little further out from Perseverance was also a collaboration between Thomas and Bmwsu, too.

Maybe the reason you don't think there's any collaboration going on is because you don't try to initiate any? I mean, I guess I'd still like more collaboration, but I don't think it's a problem on our server. And I think that trying to force collaboration by making the game harder is a bad idea, anyways. If the game is really hard enough that people need to collaborate, what do we do when there's nobody online? Just play on creative until someone else logs on?

While it's technically true that you can "farm" stuff using villagers, I wouldn't really call it that; it's much much much less efficient than skeleton farming, or farming jungle wood, or really any material that's farmable. (and that's also sort of why I don't care about keeping an economy; villagers can already sort of give us an economy)

That said I do sort of agree with you; I think if we have an economy, we shouldn't ban selling all renewable resources to the admin shop. Basically that would mean we can only sell dirt, sand, clay and diamonds. I would have no problem with being able to sell oak or birch wood to the admin shop, since it's not easily mass farmable. Jungle wood, I would oppose, since if you get 4 saplings you can really get a lot of wood. But there's also the question of what prices we would give it? How many stacks of wood is a diamond worth?

But of course, I don't even think we should bother with an economy simply because it creates all of these issues that we have to solve, and I feel like it would just be easier to not do the economy, especially since I'm not really convinced the economy adds that much. Some of the things that you mentioned I sort of like because I think they're part of the game. It's survival, you're not supposed to be able to gently float by and build anything you want. I sort of like that you have to wait for the cobblestone to smelt into normal stone, and find some other work for you to do while that happens. I liked having to build that massive tree farm for The Hotel. It made it all feel like much more of an accomplishment when it topped out.

So I'm actually in agreement with Teo from earlier, here. I don't think that we should ever be relying on the admin shop for building materials, the only exception being non-renewable resources. If you want to build stuff without needing to put much effort into it, that's what creative is for.

Granted, part of the problem with the current economy is that you can get boatloads of cash without even trying, but even so if we make a new economy I think that the price of buying building materials should be high enough to discourage people from being lazy and just using the admin shop for building materials, or rather high enough that they need to put a good amount of effort into acquiring them.

The difference between farming mobs and farming resources is that in farming mobs, the less you do while you're online gets you the most money.

I'd just like to add to this that we should probably reset the map by the time we upgrade the server to 1.7

By the time we update?  The reset is going to occur the same day that we update to 1.7.  The .jar will be updated and then the plugins will be updated, the world will be started, and then plugins will be configurated... in theory it shouldn't be hard, but in reality there will be annoying glitches and such.

Are you saying that when we have the ability to update to 1.7 we'll reset the server immediately, or we'll only update to 1.7 when we reset the server? Because I don't think we should rush into this; ideally we should give enough warning so that we have more than 2 people on the new server once the server resets. And I also think that what we do with spawn should be a collaborative effort, and thus that we should have time to plan or just in general figure out what we want to do with it.

Yeah, there will be a warning.  Ideally, it would happen sometime within a week or two of Bukkit releasing a recommended build, as we need to let the plugins update as well.  I always figured that the reset would happen as a result of the update, and I don't see a reason why the update should be dependent on the reset.  People are itching to update.

As for spawn, the best way to approach it might be to try and chose a theme that relates to the biome that we start in.  I don't know if people want a predetermined seed or a random seed, but I can tell you guys the biome we'll start in if you guys choose the predetermined seed.  If it's a random seed that's wanted, then we should create a list of the different kinds of themes (desert, ice, temperate) that might happen and then try build some "sketches" ahead of time on the current world.

I think that the server should just be reset whenever we're ready. Obviously it has to be done after the update comes out, but if the update came out today I don't think it would be wise to suddenly be all like, "Alright guys, updates out, we'll reset the server in a week." I feel like if it does get released, we'll definitely have more motivation to figure everything out as fast as possible, though, so we will probably have the server reset not too long after the update is released. But we do need to figure out what to do with the economy, difficulty and new spawn.


Seed should be mostly random. If we get a bad seed, (bad spawn location, lack of interesting biomes within the border), we can just try a different one. If we want to build spawn in a specific biome, we can just try a bunch of random seeds until we spawn in one. Or we could always just move the spawn to a desirable biome.

The poll will be changing soon to another question soon, so for now here is the results of the poll regarding the economy:

I think that the answer to the current poll should sort of depend on what we want to do with spawn. If we want to just build some big skyscraper like the Hotel and put spawn there, or make a giant village, then random seed. But if we want to do something more specific, like build a fort in a jungle or desert biome and call that spawn, then we should generate random seeds but discard ones that don't have a jungle/desert/whatever close to the center of the map.

Definitely no predetermined seeds, though

What is a seed?

i'm pretty sure a seed is what is used to determine a MC world

A seed gets plugged into the Minecraft world generator and changes how the world is made. The same seed will always give you the same world (unless there's an update).

What Kro said. If you want a little more technical information, the Wiki is your friend.

Linky.

Why can't I get on? (I have no idea what I'm doing.)

I wanted to build my pointless minecart ride.

I feel like a predetermined seed would ruin the whole idea of surviving with what you're given and exploring the world. The seed should be random if we want a real Minecraft survival experience...

You're probably running the game in 1.7.4, while the server is currently running on 1.6.2.

To fix, when you open up minecraft, before hitting "Play", click "Edit Profile" on the bottom left corner of the window, and then change the "Use version" option to "Release 1.6.2".

Can we get an ETA of the world reset?

Would you guys mind if I made some more rails on the beacon hub?

I don't mind if you do.

As for an ETA, I don't know.  It all depends on the Bukkit update to 1.7.  You can watching this page to see when a recommended build comes out, because that's probably when the reset will be announced.  And then, once the plugins update, we hope to update soon after.  Your best bet is to just watch the Development builds and read the comments on them and see how stable they are, because that would be an indicator of about how close it's getting.