You can now vote on the roller coaster contest. Since most of them are really large and half-buried underground I did not copy them anywhere. Please just fly there and try them out!

I took another random look at the log files and found Cheezedogg using Xray, and banned him of course. Please note that I have another couple of people of whom I know that they are using Xray, just waiting to meet them online. Do not think that I won’t catch you just because I have not had the satisfaction of having you confronted with it.

I have now created a new First Aid page that should help people solve diverse issues when I or Elders are not around. On top of this I created an emergencies thread on the forum that I would like to ask Elders and Masters to subscribe to by clicking the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” checkbox on the bottom of the page. When someone then has an issue, you will get an email. If you fixed the issue, please post another entry to the thread so others know that they do not need lot login anymore.

I currently have towny installed and it keeps to be a recurring issue creating lag. The author of the plugin does not get it fixed. The issue is that towny keeps taking processor time even in worlds where it is disabled. Therefore I will abandon the plugin to the favor of precious stones in the hope that this will work better.

What will be the consequences? Sometimes on Tuesday/Wed next week, all protections in the darklands and nether done by towny will be disabled. I will introduce new, simple (probably chunk-size blocks) of protection through the preciousstones plugin.

I also want to finally open the kingdom for playing. The issue here is that we have a choice of waiting for the coming update with larger biomes. One proposal could be that we start a temporary map once 1.3 comes out with large biomes and make that the kingdom once we can integrate it into the system.

The alternative would be that we create the kingdom now, normal biomes, and do the same thing with the darklands instead. Opinions?

I managed now to implement a basic Karma system, just like reddit. You can give 0,1,-1 karma to a user as long as he is settler and more than 10 days registered on the website. To find out the commands please go to the brand new Karma page on the website.

For those who are wondering about the subjects of the last 3 posts please see this here.

Further, as you can see down here on the left, there is also a new karma-like system on the website. I dumped the facebook/twitter thing and opted for a site-specific feature so people can leave their opinion about stuff w/o having to link their facebook account to the site and leave a simple opinion. So click away and give karma as you like!

After the great feedback from many people I want to give a second attempt to the topic, taking in consideration the worries and additional ideas that were mentioned. I want to start with a different description this time:

Scenario 1:

Imagine you have a karma account. People can give and take karma away from you, depending if they like what you do or if they do not like what you do. The karma is shown to other users so you can show off if you have a lot of karma. People can give you karma for whatever reason, but it is invisible to you who gave you karma – or who took it. The karma given to you expires after 3 months – per each point. You also get some karma for getting ranked on a contest. Karma is only relevant in dimensions such as 10-50, 50-75 etc. Having 1 or 5 karma more or less should not make an impact.

You can also give karma to other people. In order to do so, you get a karma spending account that is dependent on your online time, your level and the karma you received from others. You can use that karma as positive or negative to other people. Giving karma on top of that costs you a little money. So you have to decide if you rather give karma or buy that diamond pickaxe.

Scenario 2:

Imagine we are reddit. You can give one karma or take one karma from every user. That’s it. You have unlimited karma to give or to take – but in the end you can only do a “like” or “dislike” once per user. Everyone the same. Easy and simple. No expiries, no allowances – just like reddit.

The consequence:

For that would be the end of the story. A little bling for you if you are good and nice or maybe not so much if you are controversial. If you are purely bad and annoying to everyone, you might even have negative karma. In the end, having no karma is normal, having a lot is good, and having negative is bad. But if there is a balance of people liking you and disliking you, you will simply be the standard – no karma.

When I as an admin look at people’s karma, I would point my attention to those with the most or the least karma and think if a promotion or maybe a ban is in order. Or I just ignore it. Since

Opinions wanted.

I had some discussions with different users about the user levels & ranking.

The issue: Users want to be ranked up. Currently that requires recommendations or winning contests, both linked to building skills or other hands-on skills that not everyone might have. Just being nice to everyone might be a hard one to get you promoted, but you should get a reward for it. A promotion is a huge step and should not be given lightly, and also in fair manner. Judgement becomes difficult. I am increasing the amount of contests, but not everyone can participate in each contest etc.

The opportunity: We could have a system where people get rewarded in smaller increments for smaller things they do. People could also get punished for stupid things they do. It could become a democratic promotion and banning system. Be nice to enough people and they reward you, be annoying enough and they will eventually ban you.

The risk: We have to avoid that 5 friends are online and they promote each other despite the fact that others hardly know them. Or that 5 jerks group up and start banning random people just for fun. Or all people might start a “let’s karma each other” on a massive scale.

The initial idea: We create something like a karma system in reddit. People get a karma account that starts with zero points. Other people can give or substract karma from others with a command such as /karma user + and /karma user –. Everyone can give karma only once a day/week/month. Karma from a user expires after a month/2 months/3 months. Giving and taking karma could cost the user that gives/takes 100 Uncs.

The effect: People earn things according to their karma. This could be Uncs as an income, a ranking on the website, a chance to get promoted if the karma reaches a high level since I would be more aware who really does good on the server and who is really annoying. With the increasing amount of users this is more and more difficult anyhow.

The easy part: I would create a table that records karma given and taken, in-game functions and online stats. A bit of work but fairly easily done.

The hard part: When would karma expire? What does karma give you automatically? Anything at all? Does karma giving cost something? Does karma taking cost something? How often can you give karma to the same person?

Opinions wanted.

I will be on a business trip this week and only online occasionally. I will try to copy the Egypt contest entries ASAP so everyone can vote.

We have two people on the server who wanted to express their gratitude by donating 0.01 USD – each! Please everyone show your gratitude towards the two users m3dudie and EpicMustoe. I want to make sure that their helpfulness towards the server is echoed by the helpfulness of other users towards them.

For the people who do not understand what is going on here: I failed to set a minimum level of donations to get the status of donator. Those two kind people thought it appropriate to abuse this. The user revpsychology chose to call me a “money whore” due to this issue and is banned btw. I am happy for criticism but please keep the insults for yourself.

I did something stupid (released some sharks with laz0rs…) and the only way to undo it was to revert the flatlands to the status of the status it had at the last backup 20 hrs ago.

Sorry for that.

XP buying is broken since the latest version of the Essentials plugin refuses to take XP commands from the console – do not ask me why they changed it that way. I commented on a bug report that someone else already submitted. If you want to buy XP, comment on the report, maybe they answer it faster then :)

You can now again use mob egg dispensers in the city. This means that stories can be equipped with mobs! I had to submit a bug for a plugin and discuss with 2 developers until some user found out that there is a setting in the plugin that allows to have mobs generally off but allow the exception of mob eggs.

We have had constant CPU lag over the last 24 hours and I am having trouble locating the reason. The first thing that I did was plugin testing and I also changed the settings of the 3D map to use fewer resources. I have for example changed how water it processed and how shadows are displayed. I also now switched off map updates on grass & tree growth and many more smaller events. The map might not be as nice and 100% accurate anymore but it helps reducing the lag.

Further I have installed now max mob limits per world and overall. This will cause some of your mobs to disappear. The overall goal should be that everyone keeps the amount of animals that they actually need for that specific moment. There should be no-one having to keep 25 wolves around, or 20 sheep in every color unless you are building something – in every color. Specially mobs that eat grass cause lag since the server has to calculate their movement, their eating AND the grass growing back which is causing lag.

Since the 3D map is currently trying to catch up rendering the new area of the empire map, there is some lag on the server. There are over 30k tiles to render since the area is quite large. Once that is done, there should be less lag.

I have switched to a new map renderer for the 2D maps and removed the flat maps from the 3D maps software. The 3D maps software updates the map on each edit and therefore creates a lot of processor load. The lot map is only created every day once with another rendering software. I hope that we will have less risk of lag. Currently the server mostly complains about chunk loading and map rendering as processor load causing items. There is some strange pattern/noise now on the 2D map that I am trying to fix however.

I will be AFK until Saturday. Please don’t wreck the server in my absence :D

I have now these three entries in the shop:

dirt	Arlong925	9141		4	100000000.00
snowball	chacha707	9923		38	100000.00
stick	JoBilly	9649		4	25000.00

I will delete them. Please note that anyone else posting stuff like this risks getting their money reset to zero and in case there is also other stuff, banned.

If you have donated enough to become a DonatorPlus, you are now able to switch off snow-accumulation and ice-forming on your lot! Please see the userlevels & commands page for details! Once you switched it off, you still need to remove the fallen snow or ice, but it won’t come back! You cannot enable snow if you are not in a snow biome however!

The darklands have now their border removed and are not backed up anymore. So you are free to roam and to explore. Please wait with massive investments into lots here since it is not certain yet how lots will work in the future there.

Teleporting is now also removed there, and removed all the homes in the darklands. They now point to the same location in the empire.

I now finally deleted the old world. Next steps will be to setup a kingdom as discussed many times before. Once that is done, I will remove the borders from the darklands and switch off backup there, so we have an unlimited mining world.