Piani's PROPOSALS and REFORMS.

[pianiseemo]

In Praise of Yukar9

Best server owner ever. No seriously. Anybody who has worked with him will know he has very rare (and good) traits.

Summary of Problems:
Some of these may have already been fixed. Just for listing purposes.

Lack of Activity and Membership
1. New players unwelcome.
2. Old players bored.
3. Advertising.
4. Forum design.

PvP Specific Problems
1. No incentives.
2. Poor spawn design.
3. Combat logging.

Hacking Problems
1. Lacking plug-ins.
2. Few admins.
3. Unclear rules.
4. Procedures.
5. Whitelist.

In Greater Detail:

Activity/Membership
New players unwelcome.
New players want to see food, trees, fun, vanilla, and PvP. We should have an initiative to get more established players to throw eggs around spawn. Another initiative to plant saplings around spawn. Have events inside the spawn that are very easy to understand. Have a spawn/protected area as small as possible so players can see natural terrain/ build / vanilla. Have a mini-arena inside of spawn so there’s immediately PvP.

Old players bored.
Old players want to see events and action. We need more events and we need to host them more often. We need easier avenues for PvP action- if a mini-arena at the top of spawn attracts new players, a nice terrain for PvP around spawn attracts old players.

Advertising.
Our brand name, Simplicity, might not be ideal (I randomly came up with it tbh). We need a stronger forum post on MCForums. It needs to be bumped. There needs to be rewards/recognition for helping to advertise. I will try to get official YouTube trailer of this server, I encourage you all to record other vids. Go on other servers and tastefully advertise!

Forum design.
Our forum design is unattractive and very difficult to navigate in. We could use a much more attractive background and better subdivision of topics. Please ask me for more clarification.

PvP
No incentives.
We have zero reason to PvP. Add kill stats and kill streaks. Place nether portals around spawn and protect the areas around them. Create more cities like Xestia’s (Dpylz and I will be doing so soon). Make the terrain around spawn a little flatter.

Poor spawn design.
Should have initial tiny spawning platform with clear rule signs. Middle will have a water block drop. Leads to PvP area with maybe 3 events (perhaps a piston suffocation game could be one, and a fistfight arena another, and finally a bunch of torture jails which admins choose between, one a whack a hacker, another lava). Obviously inside the events no PvP unless it’s a PvP game.
Finally only very little water around the spawn (at most 5 blocks wide) and then tiny protected area ring. Should have varying PvP environments (light forest, buildings, flat grass, a little fire). Vanilla terrain should be in very very clear sight with a much more marked glowstone border.

Combat logging.
We must do something about it. In literally every fight I go into my opponent just logs off. Perhaps automatically drops items after 3 minutes off? It is not OK for people to keep holding onto their items, I’ve only begun to realize how serious this problem is recently.

Hacking
Lacking plug-ins.
Admins must have access to anti-xray. We don’t even have bbstick, so we can’t help anybody. We might as well as get anti-fly things as well.

Few admins.
The most effective way (and which we never practice) to catch hackers is to do random TPs. Admins need to be constantly watching players in vanish. To do that, we need many more admins- there are quite a few qualified players on this server. Furthermore, we should have ban counts and other stats to gives incentives to catching hackers.

Unclear rules.
Chunk erroring and other types of glitching should not be OK. If I x-ray, I can always claim it’s chunk erroring. If my friend keeps hacking and I knowingly abet him, I should be banned as well. We need to have very clear rules on what glitches are not allowed and how we will punish you for them. For new players, we could just say “DO NOT abuse glitches, DON’T hack, or ban. No questions.” We should also encourage people to report others for hacking and punish those who abet hackers. Possibly even say that there will be a reward for doing so (of course not really). We should raise awareness about how to post screenshots (lol)

Procedures.
I would like to place honeypots with other admins. We must do random TPs. Modreqs should allow for more space so people can talk in more detail about their situation. We need to have a more easily accessible forum report/appeal section. Hackers should be ridiculed so we need different and more fun jails.

Whitelist
I am of the firm belief that we need a whitelist. Non-white list players could be limited to +/- 500 border. This will prevent x-raying from becoming a huge problem, because hackers are much less likely to sign up.
Signing up for the whitelist simply consists of posting your name on the forum and reading the rules (we could insert a random word in the rules and ask people to repost it to make sure they read them). This would literally take 10 seconds and anybody who cares would do it.

[YoungsMC]

Respect- Very nice ideas, I have more to say on these but I have to go for now.

[RevStoningpot]

just fuck off already we all know you hate the server so go find one you like and leave us the fuck alone

[pianiseemo]

BTW taking a look at the present spawn, I like it very much, it has amazing novelty (having cool roads and creations def encourages new players to join) although I do think it could help for it to be smaller and for PvP protection to be removed in everywhere except for the glass spawning cube.

Not saying that this is currently a problem, because nobody is at spawn to begin with it absolutely is not, but thinking ahead to the future I can imagine it becoming one.

I don't think that the griefed terrain around spawn really helps new players though. Anarchy servers look good when there's reasonable amounts of griefing, but not when the land is 100% barren and you can't survive.

Everyone will start saying "oh herp I can live." True, of course you can live- zombie meat, bones, etc. But does a new player want to go through that? And are new players really good enough to figure that out? Players can improve on their PvP skills as they stay on this server, they don't have to enter as pros.

[pianiseemo]

just fuck off already we all know you hate the server so go find one you like and leave us the fuck alone

[dpy]

As I said in another thread:

I thoroughly agree. We need the anti-xray back, we need some sort of PREVENTATIVE anti-fly mod (our current one alerts admins, but doesn't physically restrain players from flying), and we do need more admins (kirov and mitte are gone, it's yukar, piani, xestia, rev, and I running this thing essentially - and the only two i see online often are me and piani).

I don't support this whitelist idea (sorry bro). I do support significantly more empowered admins - our biggest problem isn't flying, since flyhackers rarely make it 1000+ from spawn without being caught. XRAY is ruining us from the inside - we've even had a couple of longer-time players banned for it lately (dotcompanion, turtlerancher...), which is really upsetting.

Not too fussed about what happens at spawn (RE: pvp events etc). I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the PVP-disabled area, but it's tough to gauge what effect it has.

[pianiseemo]

As I said in another thread:

I thoroughly agree. We need the anti-xray back, we need some sort of PREVENTATIVE anti-fly mod (our current one alerts admins, but doesn't physically restrain players from flying), and we do need more admins (kirov and mitte are gone, it's yukar, piani, xestia, rev, and I running this thing essentially - and the only two i see online often are me and piani).

I don't support this whitelist idea (sorry bro). I do support significantly more empowered admins - our biggest problem isn't flying, since flyhackers rarely make it 1000+ from spawn without being caught. XRAY is ruining us from the inside - we've even had a couple of longer-time players banned for it lately (dotcompanion, turtlerancher...), which is really upsetting.

Not too fussed about what happens at spawn (RE: pvp events etc). I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the PVP-disabled area, but it's tough to gauge what effect it has.

The +/- 500 is intended to help with x-ray mostly. Longer time players have more opportunities to be watched by admins so they'll be caught with time as well.

[Ellidon]

I do like the whitelist idea, though I think that it should be more like -/+ 1000 so that new players can get a decent feel for the server. As to the new players unwelcomed thing, I would prefer to have people on this server be stubborn enough to make it past that hellish area around spawn. Otherwise, they will most likely rage quit when griefed a couple of times. Other than that, it looks good to me.

[trouble_355]

not a fan of white list.

[pianiseemo]

not a fan of white list.

Well I mean it will literally take 10s to sign up for the white list. Nobody likes a whitelist, but of course nonwhitelist people can still play, they're just restricted to a small area.

The alternative is random hackers can keep joining and x-raying the real bases that tend to be outside of the 500 mark. X-raying is clearly a serious problem. I am quite confident that most hackers will not care enough to whitelist themselves.