There is now a limit of 20 repeats on the quiz-section of the Settler application. After 10 tries the page will notify the user that they will get banned if they try too often, without saying when the ban will actually take place. They are then barred from taking the test again and from entering the server.

I had now a counter running for some time to see how often people fail a certain section of the application process and we had now 100 people start the quiz. 23 of the 100 needed more than the limit and 5 did more than 50 tries. Around 10 tries is the average number of tries people do, but heavily outweighed by the people who do so many tries.

So I think to ban someone after 20 tries is justified, since they obviously did not read the website but just try to click random stuff and brute-force themselves through the application.

Please be aware that we will not be upgrading to minecraft 1.8 until we are ready to do so. You will be only able to connect to our server with MC version 1.7.10. If you upgraded, here is an instruction on how to downgrade. Further questions on the upgrade of our server are answered here.

[Update]I have tested 1.8 now and can confirm that the land generation system in 1.8 is identical to 1.7 (as announced). So there will be no benefit in regenerating the Darklands, and we will keep it as-is.[/Update]

Ok, so here is the current situation with the hunger games:

We are now using the same world over and over, but place the game area randomly. The system checks before starting the game where older games were and makes sure not to use the same area twice. We have an area of 360’0000 square kilometers (360’000’000 blocks) and since a game for 2 players only takes 70×70 blocks, it should take a while until we exhausted the space. There is an issue of course were the game might start in an ocean, but you can just stop and start a new one of you don’t like that.

What works and what does not work?

• User rights: There was an issue where people were not allowed to use the /warp or not being able to build. I could not really identify where this comes from, but I am trying to prevent this from happening. If this still happens to you, please report that (here or in a ticket) along with the number of the game.
• Being removed from the game: I have seen one occurance where someone has been removed from the game by being bounced back from the game border. Please try this out. I think I can fix that if it is an issue.
• Trophies: Since we are still testing to make sure it works 100%, there are no trophies or game stats as of now. I will make those available once all the issues are fixed.

So please continue to try it out and report here if anything goes wrong!

Hunger games are now open for testing! There are no trophies to be claimed yet, and there are no leaderboards, either.

Please try out and report any issues to me. Thanks!

I discovered that it was impossible to delete mails. Nobody reported that, so it went unnoticed. I just fixed that. Also, I disabled people sending in-game mails to me since I read them to rarely. People should rather send me tickets. I will work on the mail system in the future so people can get notification via email when they get an in-game mail and so that emails can me managed on the website, but until this is the case, it will stay as it is.

Since being Elder is not only a privilege but also comes with some obligations, I will now start enforcing these obligations.

The issue is that we have people who are proposed for Elder level, and 100% of all active Elders have to vote on them for the vote to be successful. We even send an email to all active Elders to remind them whenever there is a user proposed for Elder status. Unfortunately, some Elders do not want to stop by and Vote. They only show up every two months or so to keep their lots active.

In the future, whenever an Elder fails to vote for a proposed Master within the 2 months of the voting, we will simply reset the lots of the Elder. I will send out a note to the Elders in question to make sure they are aware of this.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• damonc (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I got an update for the 3D map and I am regenerating the worlds again right now. Please stand by until this is finished.

I have seen this forum post and so I have installed a sphere generator on the website here. If you guys have ideas for other similar tools, please let me know.

As you know, we have been using the blog for whitelisting for quite some time. With the changing username, there are 2 issues coming up:

1. If you change your username and comment on something, nobody will know who commented, since the name in the blog will be different than in-game.
2. If you abandon a username, someone else can pick it. But they won’t be able to whitelist here, since someone else who does not use the username in Minecraft anymore, still uses it as their log on the blog.

to identify users, I already store the new UUID in the wordpress table, so I can link a website user to their minecraft persona, no matter if the username in the game changes.

So to fix point 1., I have to make sure that the username shown in the blog stays updated to whatever your in-game username is. The good thing is that there is a so-called “Nickname” on everyone’s profile. If I manage to prevent users from manually changing it, I can update it to always show the username that the minecraft profile has.

To fix point 2. I have to either allow users to register with ANY username and ask them for their current minecraft username and store that one along with their UUID for identification, or I have to set their username on the website to their UUID. Since it would be quite annoying to register and login with the UUID since nobody remembers that 36-digit code, I would have to change the login and registration pages to ask the users for their current minecraft username and lookup the UUID with the code to fill their login-form automatically. While this is cleaner, it also seems more complicated.

The good thing is that the solution for point 1. has to be done in both cases to solve 2., so if I fix that one, it would a good step ahead to solve the issue. This is why I asked the question here, and hope to get an answer soon. To all those who currently set a custom nickname on the website, sorry but that will go away.

This is developing fast. Updates are underlined.

Please read this here. Essentially it means that the platform on which our server is running, will not be developed further by the original team. What does this mean?

• We will most likely not be able to upgrade to 1.8
• We will be able to continue running with what we have, but for the time being, but there will be no updates, no changes, no new versions of the game. No new blocks, no new features. It’s a 100% standstill.

The only valid option for us to work with future versions of Minecraft are the following:

• Someone picks up the work and develops the code further, despite the issues about licensing that is described in the article above. There is still the spigot community, but they have only worked with an optmized bukkit code, and it’s questionable if they will be able to pick up the additional work that is not done anymore by the bukkit guys (Twitter says they won’t Sorry, misread that, they will).
• Mojang takes over the Bukkit work and makes it available under a proper license, since there are only very few servers that actually work without it. (seems that this is a valid alterantive as we can see here and here)
• Mojang finally releases a proper plugin-system which attracts the most important developers that make this server what it is, namely the creators of Websend and Worldguard to work with it. The risk is however that the gap between the end of Bukkit and the first proper native plugin-system for Minecraft will be so far apart that the plugin devs stop working and do not pick it up later anymore.

The main problem finally is that the biggest features that make this server run are the lots and the custom code that we have on the server. Without the protected lots and the work that I put into the system the server basically boils down to a vanilla minecraft server where the only protection that we have against idiots would be a tough whitelist test – all using a manual whitelist approval instead being able to automate stuff.

What will I do?

Well I will keep the server up and running as long as possible. I put 3 years of work into it and will not just drop it like a hot potato. But I will slow down/stop the work on preparing for 1.8 for the time being until I have a reason to believe that there will be actually a possibility to ever get this version.

Seing the mojang team will take this over, there is a high chance that this will continue. The question is if this will speed things up or slow them down. So far, so good, we will see what happens. Please continue building. Nothing to see here.

I made the Settler test even more fool proof user friendly: It seems that some users could not find the radio button on the lots to select a lot. Now, instead of having to click on the radiobutton, you can click anywhere on the lot to select the radiobutton.

On top of that, the “next” button on the top changes to “Choose lot EMP_A1” or whatever lot the user chose. I hope this will reduce the questions.

I now converted the donations, the stories, the banned users, the whitelist, the Unc-accounts and the karma system from usernames to UUIDs.

Further, I implemented a cascading system that tries to retrieve UUIDs from 4 different sources for a user, namely the blog-registered users, another database to store new users, todays logfile (it registers the UUID of every user that even tries to login on the server, stuff found there is then written to the previous database for later usage) and if all those fail, tries to get it directly from Mojang. I needed to do this since I now need to have the UUID even before the user is registered and if I go directly to Mojang too often, they block me for 1 hour.

There are still a bunch of items left that I need to convert to UUIDs, but there are 2 main plugins that I use on the server (logblock and worldguard) that store important information and so all code that I write right now has to work with both usernames and UUIDs.

I will have to wait until those two are updated and then change all the code accordingly. I assume this should be all feasible before we would be otherwise able to upgrade to 1.8, so this item should not be delaying any upgrades.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Stayen_er_Metuar (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)
• Hyddro (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• crstl (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

We had repeating cases of users who registered and never came back for months. Then, they would show up again, after having spent no time on the server at all, and become Citizen status immediately. To stop this issue and on top of that reward people who are online a lot in the first weeks after registering, we have now a new way to determine when someone becomes Settler: After they have been online, in the game, for more than 60 hours.

As before, you can see how far you are to become Settler on the sidebar Server Status box. It will show now the hours you have been online, and if you are Settler, how many more hours you need to become Citizen.

I am convinced that this is a much fairer way to determine who should get Citizen status and therefore benefit the community. Users who reached Citizen status already will not be affected by this change, only existing and new Settlers.

Newly promoted Citizen because of this scheme are:

• stephdeg
• kaizlin
• allicrev
• beau1201
• wickedXxxxlego
• Papa_Jynx
• gamergirlxoxoxo

Congratz!

Oh, yes before I forget, the idea was from pinebenj! So if you had your upgrade delayed because of this, make sure to throw a cake a him :D

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• baronmanfred (from Architect to Designer)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Me88321 (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

AS you know, we have not used the hunger games for a while. The issue was that we always used a new world to do them, but regenerating new worlds while the server was online proved to be very difficult and often either failed or crashed the server.

So I now had a new idea how to do that differently that might be easier to do:

I can generate a worldguard region (the same system that we use for lots) that has an entry/exit flag set. This would disallow anyone who is inside to leave it (except when they die) and anyone outside to enter it. What we most likely cannot do is to shrink the region over time as we did with the other system, but still it would be a proper hunger game – in the darklands. We would pick a random spot somewhere some million blocks out and create a region, set the “no exit” flag and then, when everyone is inside and the game start, we set the “no entry” flag and we are set.

I will have to go through the code of the old system and see what we can recycle. No ETA yet, but I just tested the flags and this seems quite easy to do – much easier than the old system for sure.