This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 320, “Fatal Error” when viewing any webpage when logged into website

….as the title says.

I just managed to re-add the list of the user forum posts back to the profile pages.

The links are not 100% accurate since the forum is breaking longer threads into pages, and reading the forum posts from the database I am not able to find out which page to go to. But it points to the right thread at least.

We have now a new section in the user profiles that shows the promotion history of a user. Since we keep the records of Citizen promotion only since January 2016, this is not very complete, but I still find the whole thing informative. For example, here’s Sepengo’s page:

Thanks everyone who contributed to the discussion about the user votes. I have now made the following changes:

• A proposal will have to include a 100 word reason for the promotion. This reason will be public to potential voters, but the promoters name will remain hidden.
• I changed the “power” each voter level has. instead of 1-2-4-8 it’s now 1-3-6-10. This makes it easier for higher levels to down-vote a lower rank promotion and therefore requires more broad support for people on the lower rank if someone from a higher rank objects.
• You can now Vote, Veto, Abstain or “No Vote” on a proposal. If you Abstain, this will be recorded and you won’t be reminded about the proposal anymore. “No Vote yet” will keep the proposal in your reminder. You can still change your mind while the proposal is running.
• There is now a 1 month deadline for a proposal to be completed instead of 2 months.

Future plans:

• I want to allow proposals only every second month, e.g. every odd month of the year (Jan, March etc). DONE!
• The current changes are preliminary and we will see how it goes. Please continue to contribute to the matter and we can then make further changes.

I wanted to point out to everyone that we are having a discussion in the forum about user voting. Please take a look and voice your opinion!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• michelleasaurus (from designerdonator to MasterDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I made a small update to the discord chat. Previously messages sent to the global channel with the /g <text> command while someone was mainly in a different channel would not show up on Discord. This is fixed now.

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Updated:
  • Issue No. 319, Live TPS graph link on website (feature request help wanted )

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Updated:
  • Issue No. 43, Hunger Games not finished (High Priority bug )

In order to give lots back, there is the general question about the mechanics of what can be given back and what that actually means.

Giving back a lot finally means that it should have a quality that justifies the lot to be preserved and never be reset. It’s therefore the same requirement as a winner in a building contest. I plan to enable some sort of a judging process as for the user promotion voting process. So we need to make a list of judgement criteria that allows people to vote on a build by answering the same questions for any possible submission. Possible ratings are:

• Detail level
• Good use of land/space
• Originality/beauty/interesting
• Theme (does it have one?)
• Natural fit with surrounding/landscape
• Others Options?

I would think that a minimum score in each category would be required. On top of that, a sum of all scores should be required as well, and that one should be higher than the combined minimum score of all together. Then we would ask for people to vote on it. But who?

• Only people of a higher rank can vote
• Anyone can vote, but give different influence to lower ranks
• Other options?

Once a lot has been given back, the question comes what will be the reward for that. Again, different choices:

• The right to get more kingdom lots (as written in the update to the previous post)
• Simple rewards (a home, a deposit box etc)
• A rank? While I think that the current ranking system is a bit more for behavior (i.e. being responsible enough to be able to ban others), we could introduce a new “virtual” rank that is mostly cosmetic with a point system. That rank would make someone am “Architect 3” or three star-architect for example. Each star rank would be incrementally more difficult to reach. So one lot given back would make you a 1-star, 5 a 3-star or something like that. It would show up as a prefix or suffix to the name. Essentially it would be like the achievements but it would be very very visible and carried across current ranks.
• Anything else?

What is a good price increment for kingdom lots?

This boils down to the question how many lots one can reasonably have as a project and how many people should be required from a certain size on to participate in the purchase of lots. If one ever only – by reasonable standards – to have one “private” lot and another 2×2 larger project lot, we have 5 lots that should be somewhat affordable for example. For larger projects one should either be really rich or have others support them in buying and building. The current 250k Uncs for 5 lots is a bit on the high side for that.

We can argue that larger builds need 3×3 as a size as well, so 10 lots would be the right number in that range. Specially when one needs to occupy land that is not along the lot borders such as a larger island, this becomes helpful. Beyond that 3×3 sice, I think that builds would become either unmanageable or ambitious beyond a reasonable level – as a single project to be done in a 1-man show.

Then there is the question how much one should pay for 10 lots – in the latter case.

[Update:]

Something completely different than just price limits:

One option that just came to my mind is to make a limit how many lots one can have by checking how many they gave back so far. This would mean that you cannot get 2 lots if you have not given one back so far. So with each lot that you give back, you can increase the limit of lots that you can own in the kingdom. Example:

Everyone is allowed to have x+1 (main) lots in kingdom. You start with 1+1=2. Once you give one back, you are back at 1, you can get 2 new ones (2+1=3). Give those 2 back, and you get 3 new ones (3+1=4) and so on. This way we avoid people starting mega-projects in 2×2 spaces that they can never finish because they cannot even finish a 1 lot build. We might still make incremental pricing, but the fact that someone has finished a lot of builds allows them to increase their size with the assurance that they actually do something with it.

[/Update]

Please comment below with your opinions on this matter.

We have a new achievement type, measuring how many emails you have sent using the internal system. Your current level can be seen as usual on your user page.

So I have been investigating on what is keeping the Villager chunks alive and got some replies there. It seems that there are some very old bugs in Spigot that they tried to fix to make it more work like the Vanilla server, which in turn caused the Villagers to become persistent despite no users being near. This has caused issues also for other servers.

The end result is that I tried to change a spigot setting that might fix the issue, but I need to observe this going forward. For this, I need to get more info from my lag-tracking plugin. There is an issue with it however. If you know basic Java, please stop by on GitHub and help me solve the issue. The issue has been resolved!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• kimijean (from architect to Designer)
• spaceidiot (from architect to Designer)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Opened:
  • Issue No. 319, Live TPS graph link on website

I have now finalized the first step. This means:

• The calculation of levels is working 100% now.
• We have a super-easy way to add new achievements
• We have 3 achievements in place already. I plan to add new ones step by step (like everyday one new one or so)
• The display in the user profile is somewhat usable and informative.
• Levels are updated daily. There is an option to manually update levels for individual users, not sure yet where/when to do that. One option would be when the user page is viewed.

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Updated:
  • Issue No. 308, 3D map error (bug wontfix )
• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 237, umc_donation_java_chart goes until march even in march (bug )
  • Issue No. 228, Fix Automated Donation Process (bug )

I have finished just now the first work on achievements. What’s done?

• Basic registrations for new achievements. They have a name, a level (i.e. a quantitative measure), titles for each rank.
• Achievements are updated so far once a day. Currently it’s possible to be downgraded as well (if money in the bank is one, it can be reduced). Not sure if I want to keep it like that.
• Achievements are currently visible on the users pages.
• We have 2 so far, Money (how much is in your account) and voting (how often have you voted in your lifetime.

ToDo:

• Add many more achievements with fun titles
• Make nicer achievement badges (can I get some help from anyone with either graphical or CSS skills?)
• Make a page that lists & explains all possible achievements (done!)
  
• Hide zero-level achievements from the users page (done!)
  
• Make a reward logic for achievements where possible
• Make an overall achievement completion statistic per user
• Integrate achievements into the in-game /who command

I now also added a feature to the plugin I wrote that unloads all chunks on the server. This is player-safe, i.e. it won’t unload chunks that are in view of players. The server will run this now automatically once heavy lag is detected, after it updated the lag map.

So I will stop working on this now until we have some more lag data or indications that lag is still an issue. If you feel that lag is severe then please check the TPS and let me know if the TPS does not go back up again soon after.