I have been progressing quite a lot over the weekend on the trivia quiz. The last things to do is to check if all the announcements are correct and program multiple payouts in case we have a tie.

This is how it will work: We have a catalog of over 7500 questions, some hard, some easy. Anybody can be quiz master and start a new quiz. The person will pick how many questions there will be and how much it will cost for users to answer. The the quiz master will get a random question. If he likes it, he can broadcast the question. I chose the [O] Offtopic channel for all quiz communication. Users can then send in answers and will be debited the costs. The quiz master can see the answers but not who sent them.

After the quiz master waited some time for answers, he can check which answers are in and then also see the correct answer for the first time. He can then decide to award one user the correct answer or to skip the question because nobody had a good enough answer. It’s in the judgement of the quiz master if he takes the funniest, best or whatever else answer to win. Of course it’s important to be fair, otherwise next time the same quiz master runs a quiz, people will be hesitant to participate!

A skipped question will also count in the number of questions for the quiz. When the initially chosen number of questions is asked, the quiz ends and the money that people paid to answer will be given to the winner(s). There will be a website where people can follow all old sessions and see who did a good job at asking and answering!

Achievements: Psiber contacted me today with an idea to implement achievements. We talked it through in quite some detail and found a good way to implement this. Essentially, all our handmade functions can be extended via achievements, for example the “buy xp” functions. There can be an achievement how often you buy XP and how much you buy over time. There will be different achievement points given to users progressively with milestones in each achievement they receive. Maybe the achievement points will be displayed as a name prefix, we still have to find out if things become too crowded on the screen. Psiber agreed to help me first with the general functionality, and then we can, over time and quite easily add achievements to many things in the system. There will be a website where you will be able to see all available achievements and for each user who has how many overall points and what type of achievements.

I would like to share with you that we have now, about 12 hours of activating the lot refunds in the Lot manager, already 7 main lots and a bunch of street lots in the kingdom returned into the wild! Thanks to the users who have abandoned them so that others can build there!

I have updated the lot manager. You can now chose to abandon, refund or gift applicable lots! The further missing function is the reset option for flatlands and older version lots. Please stand by until this will be activated! Please note that ALL those choices are effective IMMEDIATELY!

Because some actions those actions are now immediately, I removed the actions so far stored in the database. If you previously chose an action for your lot, please do so again now.

Please check if all the chosen actions are executed correctly! All actions are logged, if we find a mistake, we can undo it as long as tell me ASAP!

Hello all, I have been working on a few small features to make the deposit boxes more useful, especially in combination with the shop. These are now available:

• Buy, sell, or offer items directly to or from your deposit box. This uses separate commands: /depotbuy, /depotsell, and /depotoffer. Since these only work on your deposit, you can even use these commands from inventory-restricted worlds (such as the Darklands). Of course, they require that your depositbox is not full, and in order to buy stuff into your deposit, require that you have 1 free space.
• Withdraw items by name rather than just by ID. So you can do /withdraw stone 256 to withdraw 256 units of stone, without having to know the ID. It will even attempt to withdraw from more than one depositbox if the same item is found in more than one.
• /depositall will deposit your entire inventory at once, as long as they will fit in the deposit. This can be useful when used with the lot_reset user, to quickly move your items before a reset.
• /depositbox consolidate will try to combine your deposit slots, so if you have the same item from three users, the shop, and the lottery, it will take all of those slots and combine them into one slot, without needing to move them to your inventory first. This requires that you either have a free slot or that you already have the item in a self-deposited slot.

These commands have been documented on the Money and Trading page. Please let me know or create a ticket if there is any issue with any of these commands, or about any other issues with the shop or deposit. Thanks!

I discovered there was an issue with the Vanity titles. I made the recording by date, but if you were registering 1 minute before midnight, it would expire immediately. So I have to change the system to record the time at which you set the title and also take the proper timezones into consideration. Now everything should be good.

If you login now while the title is still active – and be it for one more minute – you can keep it until you relogin again. Unless, of course, you use the /vanity check command. That will discover the expired title and remove it.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• hydroflame62 (from Architect to Designer)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I spent the day today, after being inspired by the recent suggestions, to make vanity titles. Everyone now can rent a title for any given time. Please see details here or use the /vanity command in-game.

Also, since we have now 5 communication options, I split those all into different pages and revamped the menu accordingly.

Thanks all for commenting on the last post. This was really interesting and gave me some insights that I want to share here. I think the big learning here is that we want people to USE the money instead of just buying something with it (such as a lot) and then don’t do anything with it. The next learning is that I want to stay away from people buying things that affects everyone else too such as switching the weather, warps or similar stuff. These items should be otherwise extremely expensive since they really have a huge effect. The other topic is about who is rich and who is not. The cash is only one sign. you would have to add the purchase value of every kingdom lot and then what they bought from the market minus what they sold and on top of that all the diamonds etc they hoard in their chests. So a realistic picture here is very difficult to paint.

Let me group the different expenses one can have a bit:

• Lots: If someone buys a lot, be it in the Kingdom, Empire or a new world, the issue is that they buy a space, but not necessarily do something with it. We see that currently in the kingdom. It’s not about the one person that has 5 street lots. It’s about every user that has one lot and does not build or even only mines there. It’s dead land that only causes admin efforts and server space. So we have to make sure that people buy this only because there is nothing else better to spend money for and because they really want to build something big and will do so.
• Vanity goods ( = name titles, hats etc): This is something I like a LOT. Why? People can rent those. People can show off an achievement. If rented, the money is out of the system and people have a reason to vote again to get more. They use the money, it does not affect others and the economy or the game. I will most likely do those.
• Services ( = /home etc): We could sell services that otherwise are not available such as /tppos. You could be taxed Uncs for every block that you are transported for example.
• Virtual assets ( = lot members, homes etc): These would be charged only when set, so the impact is not really big.
• Taxes: Everyone likes to avoid taxes as we know. People feel taxes are generally unjust, and it simply breeds behavior. So if I charge people on cash, they will just buy lots, and then we are back to square one. Same goes for a cap in cash. Unless we find a tax that makes people do something we really want them to do, I would avoid those. One interesting tax could be on the ownership of a kingdom lot. Not too much, but if you do not vote regularly for example, one should not be able to keep a main lot. The question is what to do if someone runs out of money when they go on holiday? Reset a whole city? Does not seem fair. It would require a complex system so people do not keep one without paying and not too quickly lose everything…
• Consumables: The XP- market and other consumables can be interesting, but this is a sometimes a bit like “pay to win”. It can have very difficult dynamics, so I would have to think about how that can work and which blocks/items are good sellers. Player heads is one easy option here for example.
• New consumables: Lottery tickets is definitely something we can do. I am also working on a new skyblock system as soon as the lot manager is finished that will encourage spending.

I have been thinking about how users spend their money on the server (Uncs, not real money). This has been an ongoing topic over time and we had several new mechanisms (the kingdom being one) where we tried to get people to spend their money.

Why?

If people do not spend their money, money has less value for everyone and the whole economy slows down over time. People do not offer things in the shops anymore and so on. Right now people buy mainly kingdom lots, but in the vast majority of the cases, people do not do anything with them.

So there are several ways in addition how we can make people spend money:

• Make kingdom lots cost incremental: The first main lot costs 10k, the second 20k, 40k etc, always doubling.
• Make people pay to use other features in the lot manager: adding 1 person? That’s 500 Unc. 2nd person: 1k, etc.
• Selling lots that are only available for higher ranks at 10x the price of a kingdom lot, with progression
• any other ideas?

I am not sure which of those to do or not to do. But think about it like this: If someone spend that much time on the server that he needs 30 people added to their lot, there should be people in that list being able to contribute some money for the privilege…

I have today massively reduced the natural spawning of ZombiePigmen that happens around Netherportals outside of the nether. The issue is that some players built huge arrays of them to spawn thousands of pigmen and harvest them in automated machinery. Now there is a by-lot maximum cap of 10 pigmen.

I disabled those for the same reason I disabled IronGolem and Villager farms. The simply allow you to automate things in the game that turn it into a creative-mode like system. While these spawning methods were initially meant for the single-player experience, users can get together and built far too effective systems that let you harvest too many goods in a too short time and often create heavy lag at the same time.

Nether portals for example cannot be switched on & off automatically, and an unattended system would spawn hundreds of mobs in one lot in a very short time. So I hope you all understand that I switch those off. I know it’s fun to build these automatons, specially the big ones. But they destroy the server economy and the survival gameplay.

I have realized (with some hints from users) that despite the wither arena being smaller now and such, that it was still possible to kill several of them in very short time. So I placed 3 mob spawners into the arena: 1 Zombie, 1 Skeleton and 1 Zombie-Pigman spawner. I also placed 4 open lava- streams from the ceiling.

In the first test, this setup is already proven to be much more challenging. There is a clear need now for people to go in organized groups. I would like to get feedback from some people once someone managed to kill the wither. Currently there is one inside, unbeaten. I want it to be hard, but not impossible.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• iamjonno23 (from DesignerDonator to MasterDonator)
• bdogg73 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• zekurom (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Thanks to the help of sleepystrangekid, we now have a new and improved wither arena! It is much smaller now and hopefully more difficult! It can be reached just as the old one from the city by typing /warp witherarena

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• miner22122 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I am currently working on a improvement of the system where exceptions in the code will generate an email sent to me. This allows me to react in an extreme case at the same time or even earlier than you realize that there is an issue.

On top of that, I am working on removing old code that was used to do the old lot application processes. This is a bit tricky since I have to make sure that nothing important is deleted. So it takes abit more time than just deleting a file.

On top of that, as you all know, I still have to activate the new lot reset process. I am quite busy right now and want to make sure it works properly and not delete someone’s stuff. I will hopefully be able to finish that this weekend.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Tar_Bender (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• cousac (from Architect to Designer)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have now activated the new lot manager. If you are above Guest level, you should use that for any lot changes that you want to do. This includes lot resets and so on. At the same time, I have also re-done the code behind the settler test.

Unfortunately, this is a huge, complicated process. There are several different databases in the background being affected, from user rights over lot management and custom ones. There are dozens of places where the process can fail or unexpected things can happen. Please be so kind and help me debug this by NOT abusing errors. Whenever you use a function, please try to see if:

• you can use only stuff that you are supposed to use. If you can suddenly get lots that you should not, get something for free that you should not etc, please report it!
• you can use all the tools properly. If something fails, please report it!
• check if new users have issues with the settler application. Unless they get a message that they answered the questions wrong, please tell them to be patient and to file a ticket.

Also, I have not enabled the actual resetting of lots yet. So if you chose to reset your lot, please be aware that your choice will be stored in the system but not executed yet. I want to make sure everything works fine before I need to undo lot resets….

I was made aware by ktechwhiz that we did not have a server logo for the server list in the minecraft client that is possible now since 1.7.2.

That made me think that we do not have a real logo for the server at all. I thought it would be great if we had one, so here is the first step in the process to get one: Ideas.

We need ideas for the logo first. What should be in it? It should not be just text in my opinion. I am also not sure that my in-game face would be the best thing, since minecraft faces are already all over the place.

So please post your ideas below as comments! I will then list them all up and the one I like most will win something™!