Category Archives: Poll

Server moved, what’s next?

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The server move is done, everything seems to move fine and the performance improvements are really significant. In the past, the minecraft server was using 100% of the available processor resources even with nobody online, now it does not even use 3%.

So that’s done! What’s next? We have several things I could focus on next:

  • Life insurance: We could have a 1-time insurance where you run a command and it would remember what you were carrying around with you and charges you a fee. When you die, you can use a second command and get back what you lost. Very practical if you die in the End or Aether. The mechanic here is just an example, how it would actually work, when you pay and how much would have to be figured out.
  • Buy lots anywhere: Lots in the empire and all other worlds would be up for sale with incremental prices like for buying homes. Empire lots would be more expensive, flatland lots cheaper for example.
  • Making a concentrated effort to get more players on the server
  • Anything in this list here.
  • Anything else?

Please tell me what has the biggest priority for you personally.

New user level progression system?

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How do people level up? When does it happen? We have 2 processes:

  1. Contests. People win contest and get upgraded. The problem here is that contests take forever. People need time to build things, and I need a lot of time to close the contests since it’s quite some work for me. I do not want to stop making contests, but having this as a primary way of upgrading people is dysfunctional in my opinion.
  2. Recommendations: I get recommendations from Elders regarding users who are showing potential for upgrades. I accumulate those for some time and then occasionally (I guess about 2-3x a year) go through the list and do upgrades. The issue here is also some delays and insecurity. The submitters do not know when there will be a followup and it becomes a bit of a guessing game for people when what happens.

What do I want instead?

I would like to have a process that is more regular, regulated and possibly automated. In an ideal world, there would be an interface on the website for the high ranked users where they can submit proposals and other members can support or decline this. Once there is sufficient support by all members of a certain level, the user level upgrade is executed automatically. The process would of course be completely secret so that we do not get into vote-buying/rigging or that users of a level are not pestered for votes to be given to other users.

How could this work?

User A is being proposed for promotion by user B. User B would need to be of some (higher) user level to be able to put someone forward for this proposal. People of various levels can support this. Depending on the level of the supporting users, the support can be stronger or weaker (measured in a point system). Higher level users can also veto such promotions. Once a certain amount of points are reached, the user get’s automatically promoted.

Please give input if you think this might work, what your concerns are and so on.

Thursday Update

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There will be another update on Thursday for minecraft. While by now developers can easier catch up with the new versions since they can download the daily snapshots, there is still a risk that the mod will break on that day for some time at least. What to do then? We can either start a new map or put up the last one that we had up over the holidays. Please vote on the right.

P.S.: The cake is a lie.