Flatlands Users Nowhere to store DL mats
Hello! I'm Crypticsilhouett and I officially welcome myself to the Unc forums! You can call me Cryptic, CS, or Dan. I don't really care which.
Now on to my first post:
I noticed when I first joined and decided on a flatlands plot for my first lot. I have definitely enjoyed my time on the server and inevitably decided to stick around. Sticking around means making friends and taking strides towards recognition within the community. While the biggest part of why I'm loving this place so much is due to the fact that there is little to no elitism displayed by the higher ranking members I want to attain one of those prestigious and fancy colors regardless.
An issue I noticed with this is that the one surefire way to do just that is to win contests. The only problem is that because I enjoy building in creative far more than in survival I pigeonholed myself into having a tougher time ranking up. While I understand the purpose of the Darklands for both creative and survival builders alike one issue strikes me as somewhat uneven; Flatlands players don't have a place to store their loot. Sure I could store my mats in the Darklands themselves but the issue with that there is no guarantee some jackass won't steal your hard earned slime balls and that the Darklands are reset occasionally. I know I would find it somewhat upsetting to not check the website for a few days and come back to find a new DL and all of my stuff missing.
There are a few ways around this currently with the easiest and most common being to make a friend and beg them to let you have a meager sized area in their lot to store your crap. There are numerous problems with this of course with the most glaring being that most people aren't as charismatic nor brilliant as I. ^_^
To Put it simply Flatlands players get the short end of the stick three fold considering that so far creative contests are far and few in between, it's far more difficult to start from scratch in DL vs an Empire lot, and they have nowhere 100% reliable to store their stuff. I'm not sure if this is by design or possibly a slight oversight but I believe it is something that needs to be addressed.
Perhaps we could add 1 more world with tiny sized lots (16x16?) that would be branded as the "Storage World" or something? I'm not sure how feasible this would be to create quickly considering how the plugin seems to be coded to work at the moment. Currently when you join you are given 'Lot slots' to fill. When you first join you have a maximum of 1. You can choose any lot to fill up your slot. When you rank up enough you can get 2 or 3 and can choose again any available lots until you hit your designated max. Changing it so that new players have 2 slots to fill would simply enable them to choose 1 flatlands and 1 empire for my current example which would completely defeat the purpose of any additional world set aside for storage. In short, it seems this would take a decent amount of configuration before it would become a reality and I don't expect any changes quickly if at all.
Who knows? Maybe I'm overcomplicating it but i digress. I'm rambling. The point is I feel things are a little unbalanced at the moment and I would love to see some of the imbalance remedied. Thanks for making it this far!
/end essay
There is the shop. Get stuff from the dark lands, put stuff up for sale for a reasonable price. If it does not sell the u have until you need. If you do sell then you can use the money to but what you need. Also after a contest is done all the stuff is returned to you in a deposit list. Just leave until needed again. Done forget when you vote that you get items that are in deposit until you pull them.
I'm super charmtastic. I would let you store stuff on my lot, if you had 10 tons of cobble or something, you could store your best stuff in an Enderchest maybe?
I'm not sure enderchests are safe, since unco mentioned somethin' aboot it quite a while ago, which I forgot, and lost my 8 stacks of buckets. XD
It is kind of your own fault on picking flatlands. That's why I have noticed alot of flatlands people liking the survival because most don't notice the fun you have, a remedy to this is become a citizen, then get a aether lot and you can store your stuff there.
Sent from that apple thingy!
To Vixen,
I am well aware of this "solution" and though I did not mention it directly, there are a few issues with it I had thought of.
First and foremost, cataloging every last stack of your items is extremely tedious work even for someone who is just starting out and doesn't have much. When was the last time you took a look at how many different individual items/blocks there were that you could legitimately obtain in the game? They number in the hundreds as I'm sure you're aware. We're talking pages and pages of items to put up for sale. Not to mention we're not talking about a one time - place all your cobble up and then you're done with cobble - thing. This would have to be done EVERY TIME you gain more of an item you've already put into the shops. Not to mention that any items that have taken durability damage can't be stored in the shop. This means basically every piece of equipment you've ever used will be stuck in your inventory until it fully breaks or you lose/drop it.
To make matters worse I could foresee many players not wanting their items to sell regardless of the price they put up for them. People would end up selling their stuff for exorbitant prices just to prevent them from selling because of the rarity of the item. Would you want to scour the shop's pages trying to overlook 30 people who have put items up for sale with the intent of them never selling? This is a poor solution that simply makes more problems than it would potentially solve. I'm not saying this is the biggest issue ever. I don't think we NEED this to be fixed immediately. It is not gamebreaking. It's just very inconvenient and a little unfair. We don't need to try killing cockroaches with nuclear warheads.
To Crsti/Daiyamundo,
Unfortunately, yes enderchests are another poor solution. Not safe in the slightest. Also, I don't need help storing my stuff. Psiber offered to let me store my stuff in his lot within my first couple of days. I'm not bringing this up because it's a huge pressing problem for myself. Rather like I've said It's not a huge pressing problem for anyone. I just want others who join the server to have no reason to be dissatisfied with their experience.
To Richard,
I never said I don't like playing survival. I don't think it's particularly common for anyone to say they hate creative/survival vs. the other. I just don't think those who simply prefer one over the other should be penalized. I am a huge proponent of balance in video games. I see server owners as devs for their own little games within a game. Balance is not achieved by consistently manually leveling out a playing field as a game progresses. That's fake balance. When you do that you rob from people who have made their way and give to those who failed to try.
True balance is created when everyone starts out on a level playing field. Currently with this setup It doesn't seem like that's the case.
P.S. Good god I sound like I'm preaching. I was going to say I hope I'm not coming off as a pompous ass but I believe that ship has long since sailed. Regardless, please don't see this as me simply shooting down other's ideas as much as it is me arguing my stance. Nothing personal I hope. :D
I must say,when is almost anything balanced in a game? Hahahahah. Try playing other games with professional developers for years upon years of experience and try to complain to them about balance. It's hard to balance a game and sometimes can't be done with the player base constantly complaining when one little thing is out of place. Why do you think their are so many patches in games? Nothing is balanced half the time. Not bashing you,just balance is hard to make.
Buy a kingdom lot? unlimited storage!
To Sleepy,
I understand what you're trying to say but please forgive me when I say I don't agree in the slightest. lol. For starters, since when are patches acceptable at all? I remember days when glitches in games were found and fixed before games were launched. It's too easy to use the playerbase as guinea pigs. When the developers keep balancing in-house the game gets balanced appropriately. The masses are stupid to put it politely. Of course if you leave it up to them nothing will be agreed upon.
I will grant you that in some cases achieving 100% balance is far more difficult than others. By the same token, just because something is difficult to obtain, does that mean it is not worth trying to gain? From a developers standpoint, 100% balance is only as hard to obtain as you make it. I could talk about this for hours and hours without getting tired. There are so many different things you can do to remedy any imbalance in any game. Most of them revolve around subtlety and managing the number of potential options for weapons, abilities, etc. one has at the given moment.
Fortunately for this particular topic, we only have 2 choices to balance. I wish it were this easy all of the time.
Creative is creative. You chose creative, you are creative.
You have darklands access ONLY for the contests AND the kingdom builds. If there was no kingdom and no contests, I would not even give you darklands access.
What does that mean?
It means that ONLY if you have a contest lot or a kingdom lot, you also have a reason to go to the darklands. And then, well, you have either type of lot to store your stuff. I admit that storing your stuff in a contest lot is not ideal, but guess what? You chose to have unlimited goods and the easy life of a flatlands lot where everyone else needs to mine every single stuff they need. I guess you can take the hardship of that.
You are strong. Take it like it is. Don't expect the world to bend around you.
Regarding your point on patches, - that it is unacceptable to have them- I think you do not know what you are talking about - at all. Take this server and it's setup. Making no patches would mean you expect me to have foreseen that this server would develop from a small, 10 people a day to a 400 permanent users community - with all its impact. There are always things that work for some, but not for others. And the complexity that escalates when a couple of million people play a game is not foreseeable when you beta-test a game anymore. On top of that, today's game designers work on quite tough budgets and fierce competition. They are often forced to release a game before they can spend years of testing an MMO like LOTRO or WoW. So saying that it is unacceptable to have patches is not only unrealistic but simply impossible.
Hmm. Point taken. I understand. I guess I did forego thinking about the other side of it. Those who choose Empire have no way of playing creative without playing on a friend's plot much like Flatlands don't have a place to play a relaxing survival game. Maybe I was thinking along the lines of a spoiled little child after all.
About patches - When I said "glitches where found and fixed" that was a misnomer. I agree wholeheartedly that there are many things that you simply cannot foresee from a devs standpoint, glitches included. Things like game balance, terrain exploits (getting into normally inaccessible areas), slowdown, and things like that however, are completely preventable. Those are the things I'm tired of seeing.
Maybe this is opening up a new way to make money. People can have massive storage facilities and other people can hire them to store a bunch of things. Yes, I realize the problem of trust and greifing but its just an idea.