Changing player portal functionality.

[NOTschfv]

EDIT: Forgot to hit 'Keep me signed in' and so when I originally went to hit submit I was redirected and lost a lot of the post. I can't be bothered to write that again so here is a previous draft I had saved. Always do your work else where and then paste it in here x)

There has been some discussion surrounding player portals as of late, and if currently they are too powerful. Most of us will agree that the base game does not provide adequate means for travel and transportation, and thus the need for player portals is born. However, in their current state player portals are far too powerful. Ultimately, it is significantly detrimental to the vanilla-esque experience simpvp strives to deliver. This evidenced by the fact it is currently possible to walk less than five thousand blocks from spawn, press shift once, and instantly warp over 25 million blocks away. The mechanic was introduced years ago back in 2015 and has seen little change since. On the other hand, both Minecraft and Sim have changed considerably. Portals need an update that reflects these advancements by increasing the difficulty to create and use them; convenience and immersion must be balanced.
Let's start off with some possible solutions.

Limiting the amount of the blocks you are able to travel through a single pair
This is the most straightforward option. A cap on the distance you can travel with one press of the shift key. Obviously, the actual amount would need to be decided after further discussion between community and admins, but my initial thought would be that it is not possible to travel more than ~500 thousand blocks with a single pair. Taking this a step further. Banning inter-dimensional travel with portals. This would mostly affect end-overworld portals. While many will cry foul at this, I see it as a net good, as it would provide incentive for players to leave their bases, which is at the heart of the issue.

Changing the crafting recipe
Another very clear solution. Diamonds and lapis are not as precious as they once were. With the amount of diamond blocks players gain trading services and items, one could argue that lapis lazuli is more difficult to obtain between the two, which is ridiculous. Changing the recipe and replacing the block of lapis with a block of netherite poses a much greater challenge when creating player portals. This is a fair price to pay for the ability for instantaneous teleport across hundreds of thousands of blocks.

Time limit or cool-down
A relatively obscure solution, but nonetheless a good one. A cool-down could mean one of two things. The first being a period of time after using a portal where a player is unable to warp again. It could be twenty minutes, it could be twelve hours, the actual time would need to be determined by the community. A cool-down would force players to really consider whether or not they want to use the portal or not. Taking away from the convenience might lead to longer stays in areas or decision to travel via nether highway instead of portaling.

The second idea regarding time would be an expiration date on a portal itself. Portals currently exist indefinitely, after only one 'charge' (a diamond and lapis block placement), which is quite powerful considering, again, the materials needed to construct one. With this solution, players would have to 'recharge' or build new portals in the location every X amount of days/weeks.

A mix and match of the above solutions and more
By no means are any of the aforementioned solutions perfect. Nothing is to say we keep certain aspects of them, and leave others behind. There are alternatives that I haven't even mentioned. Rather than flat out rejecting the idea, take a moment to brainstorm, and try to imagine some change you would be comfortable with. Maybe we don't change the crafting recipe, but the distance a pair can span is limited, and they have to be recharged once a month. Let's think outside the box here.

Okay, but then what do we do with existing portals?
There are two options here. A transition period where the new portal rules are in place, but old portals function for a set amount of time before no longer functioning if they are in violation of the new rules, meaning that, for example, an already existing portal that only transports you 100k would continue to function if the new rules prevented portals from taking you more than 500k blocks.
Or grandfathering. Again, pretty straight forward. Portals that existed before the changes were implemented continue to function and the rules only apply to portals constructed moving forward.

The advantage that would come from grandfathering is not all that greater than the advantage established players already have. It is not as if existing portals are magically invincible and unrecoverable- they could still be found, used, and destroyed.

But this is annoying/inconvenient! It would really change how I play!
Yeah, it will be more challenging, and that's the whole point. I have no doubt that most players will still be able to construct chains and use portals to significantly reduce the amount of travel they must do and that is okay. The goal in these changes is not to fuck people over but instead to provide incentive for folks to not live as hermits millions of blocks out without risk. There should be more risk. There should be inconvenience when it comes to teleporting across the world.

There will be compromises and no solution will be perfect. At the end of the day, though, it is better to make changes and deal with the compromises than it is to continue allowing portals to be this significantly overpowered.

[KoriJenkins]

This is a complicated issue in that I don't think it's necessarily an issue at all. I'll explain my thoughts point by point.

Distance limitation/dimension limitation: On this I see reasons to agree and disagree. With a distance limitation you'd have my attention. I've long been of a mind that traveling straight to the world border after a 3 minute trip from Spawn is stupid. Where I take issue, however, is in the proposed distance itself. 500k. That's 60 links for a world border trip. On dimensional limitations I entirely disagree. I can see how distance might get hard to work with there as the reason for it being outright removed, but honestly that's a sacrifice that probably should just be made. My end base potentially not having nether or overworld access would be cancerous.

Changing the Crafting Recipe: Agree, but I actually would combine this with the distance limitation feature. Having portals for convenience to get from farm to farm is really fucking useful at a base. Increasing the cost would encourage players to build, say, trading halls closer to their base, thus creating more lag. So perhaps small range portals can be made that only go about 10k with the current recipe, and long range inter-dimensional portals require netherite.

Time limit: No, sorry. If I'm paying more netherite the portal is going to have few to no restrictions. Or alternatively if I just want to get to and from my trading hall. I see no way of implementing that in a manner that isn't a complete piss-off and wouldn't just create alt frenzies.

The best proposal here would be to combine a recipe change with a distance limit. Cheap portals go 10k or less, Expensive netherite portals go up to a million. There could be a possibility of additional netherite blocks increasing the range. Say instead of using 1 in each portal you used 2, now it's twice as far.

Even with those proposed changes I'm sorta brought back to my initial position: no change is really needed. Bases are still actively discovered, abandoned, griefed. We're in the middle of the "Second Burning Age" an era in which base abandonment and destruction has never been higher. There are really only 2 megabases that have survived for more than a year, Segoria and Revalia, and just a handful of smaller-scaled bases in general that have survived that long.

On that note, even the bases that have survived long-term are not insanely active. Segoria's members rarely log on, Revalia's members keep to themselves and it's rare to see every SFR member on at the same time.

While I think there are changes that could be made (cost, distance) I question whether the need to do so exists.

[Burger]

Forgot to hit 'Keep me signed in' and so when I originally went to hit submit I was redirected and lost a lot of the post phpBB moment

Limiting the amount of the blocks you are able to travel through a single pair: 500k blocks really isn't that far in SimPVP terms (also people would just keep the portals in the nether and still travel many millions), but I like Kori's idea of cheap portals having a smaller distance while expensive ones allow for further. I don't know what numbers would be appropriate though. This would probably just be an inconvenience more than a challenge tbh, the only long-distance portals I have are for convenient access from near-spawn to various old bases.

Banning inter-dimensional travel with portals: No, this is the only one-way means of getting to spawn. I know that the point of banning it is to add risk/challenge but pls no. Honestly the only people who would be able to find your new onion network from spawn to base would be xrayers, so you'd be inconveniencing everyone else while rewarding hackers.

Changing the crafting recipe: I agree, portals should be a post-end-game feature since they're so powerful, but diamonds (and lapis obviously) are so easy to come by on Sim. I worry that 2 netherite blocks (72 ancient debris) is too expensive for a single portal link but maybe I'm just poor.

Time limit or cool-down: No, this would just be a huge inconvenience especially when travelling around your base. Depending on the cooldown, it could take hours to travel across your onion network.

Overall I don't think there's much reason to change them, they're not super OP or anything. Maybe just make them more expensive.

should remove /world doe

[TonTheKidRS]

For the most part I agree with what Kori said. There are just a few points that I want to point out. As is, if people really want to be hermits millions of blocks out, they can just destroy any portals they have. Obviously that comes with the risk of them having to make a long trek again, but that is the cost of being absolutely secure. I'm not exactly sure why portals are considered over-powered. Theoretically it is possible to make one from within a few mins of spawn to millions of blocks out, but then you loose all the reasons of having your base millions of blocks out. If an x-rayer finds your portal you are still screwed. The distance requirement is easily bypassed by putting portals right next to each other so you can still effectively insta-teleport millions out. The only thing that could maybe work is changing the price of portals. Personally, I can see supporting this and being against it. New players on the server should have the ability to use portals and having them be super expensive is counter-intuitive for that. While some older players have a good supply of netherite, other people do not. I understand that this would be something to make the game more difficult, but having a secure portal network that is still useful is already difficult. Personally I see no reason to make this change, although if it was made the only way I would support would be a distance limitation, perhaps with longer portals costing more.

[SengornLeopard]

"Banning inter-dimensional travel with portals. This would mostly affect end-overworld portals. While many will cry foul at this, I see it as a net good, as it would provide incentive for players to leave their bases, which is at the heart of the issue."

Exactly the opposite would occur. People would make far out bases and then because there is no easy means to leave... they would not leave. Interaction on the server would fall to an all time low.

I agree with making portals more expensive, they are an upgrade to nether portals. I love the idea of using one diamond block and one netherite block for the portal. But why not a piece of debris instead? Crying obsidian is relatively difficult to acquire, but new players can barter. Those would make wonderful player portal frames- perhaps with changing the frame to crying obsidian one could omit changing the diamond lapis combo. I would like to change both frame and activator blocks however.

[Yukar9]

Limiting the distance traveled: Wouldn't change things noticeably for people, would just slow down long travel slightly, in that players would build portal chains instead. What would happen to existing portals over the limit? Alternative and slightly equivalent idea: Make traveling by portal have some delay, for example 1 second per 100k blocks.

Portal cost: Yeah, there's been noticeable inflation since 2015.

Interdimensional travel: The main idea behind portals was that they should come with risk. That they would make the world smaller, and not just be a /home and /spawn command. The end and one-way portals mostly mitigate this risk, and the largest risk of using portals is currently x-rayers. On the other hand, making it more dangerous would, as has been mentioned, certainly reduce player interaction.

More to the post itself, I assume the post is mainly for gathering ideas and thoughts from the community, and it does well at that. If we want to move any of the ideas to implementation, we need just a single clear proposal that people can have a yes/no opinion on.