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.

The Teamspeak server is now on uncovery.me. Please reconfigure your clients.

The nolagg plugin had a std. setting that limited items to 80 per chunk. I increased that now to 200. So if you have a farm, it will most likely output max 200 items per harvest. I hope this is enough. You can add another button that does the rest and harvest it in section.

I would like to ask all masters & elders not to change the spawn areas anymore. There are several issues that happened recently:

• someone redecorated the story house. This is an issue since one of the stories said “look out the right window”. The window is gone now. The lower floor that was built instead will never be used and is only a gadget hardly anyone sees. While the house looks nice, it has lost functionality and adds confusion to new users
• someone added about 10 signs to the golden “lessons” building, about 5 of them said “read the website” in different wordings, and other instructions, help etc. FYI, there is a FAQ entry that we do not want to have signs with instructions how the server works in spawn for a good reason.
• Someone added about 6 signs that point to the portal house to spawn. It makes it look terrible. If the portal house is that hard to find, we need to change the system instead of making the spawn look like crap.

If you think there is a chance to improve how new users experience the server or how the immediate spawn area looks like, contribute at the issue tracker instead of running around plastering everything with signs. If you are too lazy to contribute through the issue tracker, then rather leave stuff as it is. In the end it is me who has to fix stuff again otherwise.

There are many items that are existing in game, but which you cannot obtain in survival mode, such as a fire block. There are other items such as nether warts which have a block (115 in this example) and an item (372) that have a similar name, but only the item is available. The block is marked red in the wiki’s item list. Until now, if you searched for netherwart in the shop, it would show you item 115, but if you tried to buy it, it would not have any sellers. However, plenty of 372 are in the shop.

To stop this confusion, the shop now will warn you if you try to /find or /search for an unavailable block. It will also tell you if you put up a purchase request for one of these.

I just fixed the issue that some enchanted items cannot be retrieved from the shop. I fixed remaining enchanted items in the shop, so whatever is in the shop now with an enchantment, can be withdrawn without a problem.

I heard now several times that people were griefed by using switches to start harvesting mechanisms or luring away animals though open doors. The only way to stop that, would be to enable users to disable switches, as we do it in towny. There is an issue with that however:

In the empire, 100% of the area is covered by lots. Many of the lots have large builds or even walls. Most of the doors now are iron to keep the creepers out. If we allow blocking of switch-use, we run the risk that new users have to take massive detours to reach their lot due to closed doors.

Since the griefing is only occasional, I would recommend instead that you remove the switches and buttons that allow access to your most important assets and place them only when you use them once you see that you are a victim of griefing.

If we see that this is a more widespread issue, we can think also about alternative methods. At the same time I will see if we use a monitoring plugin so we can ban those users right away.