So here is the next round of upgrades:

• Estebanismo (to Architect)
• Rickard2012 (to Architect)
• pagreiferto (to Designer)

Here some additional points:

• when someone reaches negative points equal to the positive value needed to get promoted, the vote will count as “failed” and the user will be blocked for 2 months before they can be proposed again.
• there is currently no way to withdraw a proposal. I am a bit reluctant to do that (it’s work, ya know), I think it’s just as easy for a proposed who thinks they made a mistake to simply alter their proposal vote from “support” to “veto”. Opinions?
• [Update] If a vote is not closed after 2 months, it will be counted as “failed” and the user cannot be proposed for another 2 months.

So the first upgrades from the new voting system are in:

• Akium (to Architect)
• iamjonno23 (to Designer)
• chrispypancake (to Designer)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

So I finalized the software except 3 points:

• it does not consider vetos from elders any different than others. It’s only a point-issue. I want to enable something but am not clear yet on he method.
• Karma is not yet displayed anywhere. You can however click on the usernames and see the karma on the user’s own page.
• the promotions are not automated. The system automatically closes votes when the required points are reached, but the promotion itself is not done (yet). I want to run the system for a while a keep that manual to see the dynamics of vetoed entries etc.

I have built it so that I can see all votes and their weight on the proposals. Every proposal will be hand-checked by myself (I will do that once a day or so for now). Later, once I can confirm that we are happy with the system, we can automate it. So you guys can go ahead and submit real proposals, as well as cast real votes.

I have setup a voting test page already, all I need to do is expiring votes and the actual promotion once someone hits the proper vote number. Please do me the favor and cast some test votes. If someone finds something that is inconsistent with the rules described in the last post, please tell me!

From the feedback (thanks, guys!) I conclude that this would be a good idea, at least to try. So let me outline here what this can ultimately look like. We would implement it in stages, starting from the top levels, but eventually work our way levels down:

General Rules:

• Any and all asking for promotions or karma is off-limits. Repeated offending will be banned.
• Settlers and Citizens will stick with giving/receiving karma. We display the karma in the voting process to simply give additional information on the proposed people. Specially if people are very controversial (+10 & -10), this should be a sign that someone maybe isn’t Master material.
• All levels (except Settler and Citizen) can vote to promote by one rank if the proposed person has a lower rank.
• All votes are secret. Nobody can see how many votes someone got, and you can see only who is proposed if you can actually vote on them.
• Higher level votes count double. If a Architect votes on a citizen, it’s +1 vote. A Designer can give +2 votes, the next level +4, then +8 and so on.
• If someone has been upgraded, they have to wait at least 2 months before they can be proposed again. Someone has to be Citizen before being recommended.
• A negative vote will be subtracted from the points.
• Votes cast expire after 2 months to make sure people do not linger in the proposal system for 6 months.
• To recommend someone, you need to be 2 levels above the proposed person (or Elder).

When will someone be upgraded?

I made the following spreadsheet:
So there are 11 active Elders, 11 Masters and so on (Column A/B). If we assume that Architects have a voting power of 1, and we double at every step, Elders will have 8 (column C). Assuming all users of a level vote for someone, their per-level voting power per level is 88 for Elders, 32 for Architects (Column D) etc. Since everyone in the table can vote for an Citizen to be upgraded, the accumulated voting power for that level is 88+44+14+32=178 (Column E), for an Architects to become Designer it’s the same but less the Architect votes (88+44+14=146) and so on (column E). Then we assume that all Elders votes together should always be enough to promote someone, so the max vote required is 88, (100% of Elders) and then less than that when we go lower (Column F). So we could vote a Citizen to Architect with 26 Architects (Field G5) or with 4 Elders or 7 Masters or 13 Designers. Or any combination of those. This method puts the main power in the most regular users and makes sure that we need more users with each level we go down, but Elders can always rule the game. It will be hard to get 26 Architects to vote for something. To have 4 Elders in one vote will be easy enough however. They are online a lot and talk to each other anyhow. It also makes it quite hard for someone to come in with friends and affects the voting process since there would be quite some people required.

Rejected method:

There are two possible base methods: The one above where we assume that the combined power of all Elders should be enough for anything, or one where we want a certain % of all possible voters to be counted. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. I tried around a bit and chose the first one. If, alternatively we used the same vote power (1,2,4 & 8) and left the % progression the same, but made the % depending on the overall available voting power, we would get this:

I found this unreasonable since even all Elders would not be able to promote someone to Master. Of course one can compensate with higher voting powers for Elders, but then we just get back to simulate the first model.

We might change this in the future if we find out that there are not enough people being able to accumulate enough votes, but for now I want to keep this.

The link here on the right side for http://minecraftservers.com has been fixed. Please test and tell me if the vote registers.

You can now again deposit and withdraw enchanted items!

I have not been online a lot recently, since I have been traveling too much for business. I was only 1 week at home every month since June and therefore had very little time for games and the server. This week I am again on the road, but from next month week it should calm down a little and I will have more time to spend on the server.

I am currently in discussions with the developer of the websend plugin that is driving 90% of our in-game functions such as the shop, the contest system and many more. He sent me a new beta-version that should fix a lot of things such as enchanted items in the shop. Since the last beta he sent me did not work, I hope this version will. Unfortunately, I am spending a lot of time in cars right now and this is not the right environment to test new plugin beta versions without the risk to leave the server crippled for several hours in case something does not work.

So please be patient, I hope to have the latest version tested in the coming 24-48 hours. I hope I will also be soon able to close the contest and move it to the city.

I am also looking forward to 1.7. I will most likely do the following due to all the new biomes:

• Reset ALL empty lots in the empire.
• If I can manage it, allow everyone a one-off reset of their empire lot(s) within the first months after the new version goes live.
• Not sure if I reset the nether, so far I do not know if something changes there
• not reset the kingdom/aether/flatlands lots or change these maps in any way
• darklands will of course reset, too
• I am not decided yet if we will have a temp server. From the learnings we had at the last upgrade, and the ease to downgrade with the new launcher, I most likely will not do so.

So I discovered that it was possible to drop items through the ender portal. The portal being in a creative world, this is quite an issue since it means diamond armor for free.

I now removed the “vanilla” ender portal and replaced it with another one that does not allow to drop items through. No need to say that any proof of people exploiting this stuff will get them immediately banned.

I discovered today that there is a loophole: When people get muted, the server checks if the user account exists or not. It did so by looking for a website account. If the user however deleted their website account, this check failed, and the user could not be muted.

So what I did first was to make a fallback that looks for the userfile on the minecraft server in addition in case the website account does not exist. On top of that, I now added a process that removes people from the whitelist and boots them off the server as soon as they delete their account on the website. Thanks to Albertpuding helping me testing!

While we did not have this issue before, I think it’s an good process to have people removed from the server as soon as we do not have an email address on file for them anymore. It keeps the accountability for them up, at least a little :) and also stronger links what happens on the website with what happens on the server.

You might have read that there are new biomes coming up in the next minecraft version. I am not sure if existing words will suddenly have new biomes, but I do not think so. Most likely only newly generated terrain will have new biomes, but what is certain is that new biomes come with differently shaped landscapes. I have concrete plans how to get them into the game:

• Reset the darklands
• re-create the “mint” copy of the empire that we use to reset lots. This means that newly reset lots will then have the new features. I will also reset all currently empty lots. There is a chance that we will have more terrain ruptures (clear cut lines between lots), but those will be something we lived with and will have to in the future, even if someone decides to flatten their lot etc.
• I will most likely not do anything in the kingdom and other worlds.
• Unless there are important changes in the nether, I will not reset that one, either.

Of course I have no idea when the new version will come out. This is just a heads-up on what will happen to the map since those new features are discussed on reddit and other forums.

I have received notes that the server crashed/reset today and some users lost stuff (one person apparently a lot). I went and looked into the logfiles and found that a plugin froze and then unfroze again, halting the server for some time (not restarting it btw). In this process, it seems that changes done on the server were lost (or not saved).

I was asked subsequently for help from 2 users, the one who lost a lot today, and from someone else who lost other stuff in a similar incident 2 weeks ago. Because of these requests for help, I would like to highlight the general issues with these problems and how they can be resolved (or not) in order to get a better understanding from everyone:

Why this happens
There are a LOT of reasons that can happen. Sometimes, they are user-caused (someone does something that freezes the server, be it by intent or accidentally), but this is rather rare as far as I can tell. More often, it’s a plugin causing trouble. We are running a long list of plugins, and many of them are either in Beta or Alpha/Dev status since they have not been released as a stable version since a LONG time, or because they stable version, despite not being that old, came up with a serious bug I and had to use a DEV snapshot. In other cases, some plugins update almost every week and I simply cannot keep up with every release, since it is not even really clear if the new version changes anything that really matters for the server. When there is a problem, the server freezes for long enough that changes during the freeze do not get saved to the disc and once the service continues, those changes are somehow ignored or overwritten.

What I can do
Well, I try my best to keep up with the plugin updates. People who are on the server around 20:00-22:00 EST see me restarting the server quickly, which is usually because some plugin updated. I also occasionally donate money to plugin authors to coax them to update their stuff or fix a bug quicker. I further chat with them directly and submit trouble tickets to get rid of bugs or add new features. For example, most recently I donated 25 USD to the author who is responsible to enable enchanted items in the shop again, and I am texting him with reports and testing DEV versions for him to speed up the process. But of course these authors are also just people with their own lives and have other priorities also, so sometimes we just have to wait.

What I cannot do
One of the biggest issues is that I have ZERO transparency of what happens during a freeze, what information was stored, what wasn’t, who had what before and what was lost afterwards. So if someone comes to me and tells me he lost 1 diamond in a freeze, they can equally claim that they lost 100 diamond blocks in the freeze, and I would not have any way to check what is the actual amount lost. While I know that most of you are honest about this, the issue is that once I start refunding this kind of thing without having ANY checks or verifications, there is basically a guarantee that these request will exponentially grow since people WILL abuse it. Just like people abused the AFK machines to work around the normal AFK kick, just to get some mob heads. Imagine what they will to for 100 diamond blocks! In the worst case I can imagine someone doing something odd to freeze the server, just to claim later what has been lost. This is why so many rules on the rules page are around the topic of “no handouts”, “no refunds” etc.

So, as much as I regret this, and as much I feel sorry for the people who lost stuff, there is nothing I can do. Unless you are suffering from a repeatable, traceable bug, there will be no refunds in case of crashes or bugs. This is why it says on the FAQ Page:

I lost something during a crash/death/theft/whatever, can you give it back to me?
No. I cannot. I cannot verify what you had before and I don’t hand out stuff. If you had bad luck, that’s what you will have to live with. If someone tricked you, same. Same goes when I personally kill you as a reminder when you violate a rule or ignore a FAQ.

I have now enabled a /kit minecart command which you can use to get a minecart. Duh. The max usage is once every 30 seconds to prevent excessive usage/spamming. I would be happy if people can make proposals on how to reconfigure the minecart blocks since the spawning does not work for us anymore.

I decided to make a proper donation page now. It includes an interactive chart showing the donation balance over the months. I thought it’s better to include some more information why the donations work as they do and give some more transparency.

One question is if users want to be publicly listed with the amounts they donated. There is a chance for an opt-in and a opt-out list. I would like to get some feedback from those that have donated more than 1 months if they are against being listed on such a page or would not mind. If nobody objects being shown on the page, I would make a top-X list and anonymize individuals that do not want to be named.

Update: There is now also a list that shows the top 25 donators without name. If you are among them, it should show the line where you are. Someone please confirm. Also, there is now a mention of the average (currently 14 USD) donation amount near the donation form.

I have just recovered the server from an issue where a simple spawn & transport elevator has created 1900 minecarts and crashed the server massively, and repeatedly. It took me almost one hour to fix this. Due to the massive amount of minecarts in the area, it was even hard to go there without my minecraft client freaking out.

I therefore made the decision to (as discussed earlier) remove minecart auto-spawning from the system. Therefore, unfortunately, all minecart riding systems must be now manually supplied with minecarts that you have to craft yourself.

As a compromise, I am thinking about making a command that would simply give you a minecart instead so you can place it without having to craft it. This will not happen in the next 6 hours however.

I have now finished programming a new back end for the donations. So far, I always manually inserted donations into the database. Since this required always some time and a proper browser, I know have a much easier and faster process that also automatically sends a thank-you email to the user, instead of me having to do a lot of manual input and email writing.

While this will be a little less personal, it will however speed up the process and make sure that donations are activated much sooner than so far the case, even when I am on a trip. Thanks again to all donators, all those are a great motivation to me to keep the server up and running!

I have recently installed and tested a new plugin that detects and prevents AFK-Machines such as water-flow movement loops etc that users have been using to harvest drops, XP and others around farms and spawners. Please note that I do not like these at all. I have now a logfile with locations and usernames of the people using those. Please remove these contraptions ASAP, otherwise I will come over and replace the whole setup with bedrock or something else creative.