A Question

[Artagan]

Only problem with this is that it'll blur the line between petty rivalries and server RP. Lots of people avoid that stuff entirely and love RP, and forcing the two together might turn people off of both.

And nouv, I don't actively seek out conflict with you. It's totally up to you how good our relationship is.

 

[Cryptite]

Also note that it does not necessarily require admins for an RP event to happen. Blessjung was able to create (for a short while, anyway) a pretty popular community event in his auctions. He came to me with an idea, it made sense, I backed it (in that I gave him an alcove in spawn to build the auction area), and all without major admin interaction, a community event was created that many people too part in.

I do feel that perhaps many more things on this server could happen without my having to drive it all.

As for the RP stuff, like I mentioned before, what asy and I are concocting takes some front-end work of coding on our part, but the idea is that it's no longer us coding for a week to set up an event that lasts an hour. We mean to try to create circumstances that can exist for long periods of time and that can drive the server in ways that are entirely up to the playerbase. Take the plague. The coding on that was pretty simple, but how the community discovered and reacted to it was fairly player-run. All I had to do was set up some simple conditions like how it could be healed, then it was up to the Lokan community to discover that on their own.

These are the kinds of things that asy initially wanted for the server. The reason it was so anarchistic when he mostly ran it was because he didn't have the time that I did. The less rules, the better, the server (in a sense) ran itself. To me that wasn't quite sustainable and, obviously, I had different visions for the server. I saw that some areas could be improved, and then, as my knowledge of Java increased, I realized I could literally shape the server in exciting new ways. But I quickly got myself into trouble by creating systems and events that required my full attention to run. So I've started to take a step back and switch from implementing a New-Cool-Thing-A-Week to trying to fix bugs, polish what we have, and essentially get the server to a place where if i took a step away from it for a week, the server (as I saw it) could still go on. Hence the previously mentioned stuff. Hopefully I can come up with some ways to add cool new things, but allow the community to take over.

You may see these kinds of things in the coming days.

 

[Jedoi]

More RP going on? Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! That a GREAT idea!!!! I love RP, and I mostly understand it. I've played half a year and only been to one event, but I actually understand more of it then I let on. For some reason I act like I know less then I really do. :/ No clue why, but Oh well. But more RP going on would be AWESOME! Thats a great idea!!

 

[KenuDragonfire]

Just an example Art; you know I have mad love for you.

The issue though is, we have a world where these events happen, and where we fight Preksak, the bad guy, we're also fighting each other, and that dynamic is never really introduced into the RP. I think it'd be very interesting, you can't have a society trapped on a random world where people don't fight and have conflict. We have conflict outside of the RP, but it never really happens inside RP. Maybe have a dynamic where it's two alliances, and one is these bands of peaceful survivors and guardians and peacekeepers of the world, and the other is this shaky alliance of warriors, thieves, and extreme miners.

Then, we have artifacts in the world; these alien artifacts that the two alliances try and control and use to their advantage: The Guardian alliance wants to use them to cleanse the unholy world of sin (look, I don't know how to make this morally ambiguous, I figure making them zealots is the best way), and the Thief alliance wants to use them to make sure they survive so they can profit off of the phat loots that they are going to make off with once they escape the planet.

Just a suggestion, not sure how well it'd work out, but figure it'd be cool to have RP incite warfare among Loka. Then again, admins on the Guardian side would be the ones placing the artifacts, so might run into an issue there.

 

[Artagan]

Just an example Art; you know I have mad love for you.

The issue though is, we have a world where these events happen, and where we fight Preksak, the bad guy, we're also fighting each other, and that dynamic is never really introduced into the RP. I think it'd be very interesting, you can't have a society trapped on a random world where people don't fight and have conflict. We have conflict outside of the RP, but it never really happens inside RP. Maybe have a dynamic where it's two alliances, and one is these bands of peaceful survivors and guardians and peacekeepers of the world, and the other is this shaky alliance of warriors, thieves, and extreme miners.

Then, we have artifacts in the world; these alien artifacts that the two alliances try and control and use to their advantage: The Guardian alliance wants to use them to cleanse the unholy world of sin (look, I don't know how to make this morally ambiguous, I figure making them zealots is the best way), and the Thief alliance wants to use them to make sure they survive so they can profit off of the phat loots that they are going to make off with once they escape the planet.

Just a suggestion, not sure how well it'd work out, but figure it'd be cool to have RP incite warfare among Loka. Then again, admins on the Guardian side would be the ones placing the artifacts, so might run into an issue there.

Polarizing everyone into two good guy bad guy factions would make very few people happy. Bad guys generally want to be seen positively for their own personal gain, and you know sometimes good people want to be edgy and do something bad. If we did do some kind of powers struggle like that where players could choose sides, the sides should be ambiguous. Also uh, we should use something besides artifacts. The Artifact is it's own mysterious thing, we don't want to sully it.

 

[adderman500]

My original statement was a very simple summary of what i think the server is good for. If I wanted to go into more detail I wouldn't have just said PvP exists, I would have pointed out all the magical things and specifics within that field. I could have done the same with towns. But because I couldn't be bothered to do that, I didn't write an essay hoping you'd get what I mean.

With regards to thinking that we are too broad in what we want to achieve; I disagree. If there are towns, there will be raiders. So they come together under one bracket. We have an arenas/bg system which is used often and is a lot of fun. And then we have an RP event once every 6 months or so. That seems fairly concise and one of the nice things about it is that players can be very free as to what they want to do.

 

[KenuDragonfire]

Just an example Art; you know I have mad love for you.

The issue though is, we have a world where these events happen, and where we fight Preksak, the bad guy, we're also fighting each other, and that dynamic is never really introduced into the RP. I think it'd be very interesting, you can't have a society trapped on a random world where people don't fight and have conflict. We have conflict outside of the RP, but it never really happens inside RP. Maybe have a dynamic where it's two alliances, and one is these bands of peaceful survivors and guardians and peacekeepers of the world, and the other is this shaky alliance of warriors, thieves, and extreme miners.

Then, we have artifacts in the world; these alien artifacts that the two alliances try and control and use to their advantage: The Guardian alliance wants to use them to cleanse the unholy world of sin (look, I don't know how to make this morally ambiguous, I figure making them zealots is the best way), and the Thief alliance wants to use them to make sure they survive so they can profit off of the phat loots that they are going to make off with once they escape the planet.

Just a suggestion, not sure how well it'd work out, but figure it'd be cool to have RP incite warfare among Loka. Then again, admins on the Guardian side would be the ones placing the artifacts, so might run into an issue there.

Polarizing everyone into two good guy bad guy factions would make very few people happy. Bad guys generally want to be seen positively for their own personal gain, and you know sometimes good people want to be edgy and do something bad. If we did do some kind of powers struggle like that where players could choose sides, the sides should be ambiguous. Also uh, we should use something besides artifacts. The Artifact is it's own mysterious thing, we don't want to sully it.

Yeah, I sort of mistakenly used "artifact" as a term for "ancient magic thing that does stuff", while forgetting that we have a major lore point is that we have an incredibly important artifact called "The Artifact". (best lore writer evar 2013)

The characteristics of the sides was just a quick suggestion, I figured that might be cool, but your points are totally valid and we can probably come up with a better idea than mine that more accurately fits the server than crazy people and "bad" people.

Adder, the issue with having an RP event every 6 months is that there's about a week of hype building up to it (... The sky goes dark...) and then a week of people still being excited after it. A major RP event is cool, but what if a new member of the server joins for the RP, hearing that there is an announcement that a big event will come. Then, they miss it, (cause you know real life) and then they have to wait another 6 months to enjoy what they joined the server for.

As for raiders and towns, the town experience is great, but the experience for raiders isn't. Why bother PvP'ing if you have to be concerned about getting banned for griefing or excessive killing, waste a bunch of TNT to get into a town that you might not even be able to steal from because the chests are buried, and then either kill the unarmored noobs who run around punching you or get killed by admins using smite or teleportation.

Having arenas is cool, and Crypt (not us, the community, him, doing like 100% of the work) did a fantastic job of crafting them for Loka, but they shouldn't be the best Loka's PvP has to offer. They should be a way to entertain players who want to try PvP, but don't enjoy losing their things and to test their mettle against the hardcore PvP'ers, allowing more people to be involved in the community that doesn't commit mass murder. Instead, it's the highlight of our PvP, even though we still allow our open-world PvP to exist, making the build experience worse for the people who enjoy building. If we don't choose a vague direction to go in that allows at least one facet of people who might join the server to be interested, then we're just mediocre in all categories, and then nobody really wants to join our server.

 

[Artagan]

The characteristics of the sides was just a quick suggestion, I figured that might be cool, but your points are totally valid and we can probably come up with a better idea than mine that more accurately fits the server than crazy people and "bad" people.

Hey, thanks.

As for raiders and towns, the town experience is great, but the experience for raiders isn't. Why bother PvP'ing if you have to be concerned about getting banned for griefing or excessive killing, waste a bunch of TNT to get into a town that you might not even be able to steal from because the chests are buried, and then either kill the unarmored noobs who run around punching you or get killed by admins using smite or teleportation.

Yeah, pain and suffering on the part of the raider is definitely the most egregious fault in our world pvp. People like thief and psy are not being dissuaded from raiding towns because they aren't getting even more loot than they already are. Being concerned about griefing and bullying is a part of being on the server, making certain people immune to those rules so they can have fun destroying other peoples stuff and bullying them doesn't sound like the best of ideas.

 

[Cryptite]

Have to agree with Art here. Exactly what you described, Nouv, is exactly what raiding is all about. Unless of course you were being sarcastic. If raiding a place was meant to have a 100% success rate, then nobody would ever build a town because there would be no point.

If you're nearing the point where you're worried about camping or excessive killing, then you haven't been PvPing anyway, you've just been murdering unarmored people for an hour and nothing else. Thievery and Raiding are supposed to be challenging.

Finally, the last part about getting insta-gibbed by admins is soon to change, so towns full of admins won't be invulnerable anymore, despite the fact that Albion is targeted more than anything because Thief/Zor/Psy get a greater thrill of raiding an admin town just for the bragging rights.

I still maintain that perhaps the dynamic of this server will change once we get new players.

 

[mopb3]

perhaps the dynamic of this server will change

Nah... Not gonna happen so long as the current playerbase remains. And lord knows we aint' going anywhere soon.

 

[Zor95]

despite the fact that Albion is targeted more than anything because Thief/Zor/Psy get a greater thrill of raiding an admin town just for the bragging rights.

Wrong. We just want to kill Art (though I wouldn't turn down vault access).

 

[Thieflord304]

Wrong. We just want to kill Art (though I wouldn't turn down vault access).

What he said.

 

[mopb3]

Careful you lot, sounds like you're skirting awfully close..

9. Don't Bully Other Players
9.1. Don't repeatedly kill the same person.

 

[KenuDragonfire]

The characteristics of the sides was just a quick suggestion, I figured that might be cool, but your points are totally valid and we can probably come up with a better idea than mine that more accurately fits the server than crazy people and "bad" people.

Hey, thanks.

As for raiders and towns, the town experience is great, but the experience for raiders isn't. Why bother PvP'ing if you have to be concerned about getting banned for griefing or excessive killing, waste a bunch of TNT to get into a town that you might not even be able to steal from because the chests are buried, and then either kill the unarmored noobs who run around punching you or get killed by admins using smite or teleportation.

Yeah, pain and suffering on the part of the raider is definitely the most egregious fault in our world pvp. People like thief and psy are not being dissuaded from raiding towns because they aren't getting even more loot than they already are. Being concerned about griefing and bullying is a part of being on the server, making certain people immune to those rules so they can have fun destroying other peoples stuff and bullying them doesn't sound like the best of ideas.

Yeah, I definitely didn't do a marvelous job explaining that bit there; what I mean is, if we're going to have a PvP system where it isn't just cut-throat mass murdering do whatever you want, then our open-world PvP needs to provide something in exchange for having those rules in place; I definitely think it should take some brains to raid, but if we're going to have the entirety of Loka be in the PvP world, people shouldn't be able to get out of being attacked or stolen from via two blocks of dirt, at least from a raider's perspective. However, with our small community, there aren't major changes we can implement into PvP to fix it without relying on getting large influxes of new players. If we are going to change things on Loka for the better, it's best to fix the issues that we can immediately change and for the most part agree on, like a more fleshed-out and active role-play storyline.

And Art, I thank you for providing constructive criticism upon my ideas, glad to see that you are not just accusing me of hating the server and demanding me to be banned. It... it means a lot to me :cry: .

 

[Jedoi]

Active RP storyline. Thats awesome. I love the RP, its actually kinda why I came. The "Abandoned World" sounded really interesting, and thats why I'm here. Because I found the "Abandoned World" interesting on the Minecraft forums server list.

 

[Artagan]

Yeah, I definitely didn't do a marvelous job explaining that bit there; what I mean is, if we're going to have a PvP system where it isn't just cut-throat mass murdering do whatever you want, then our open-world PvP needs to provide something in exchange for having those rules in place; I definitely think it should take some brains to raid, but if we're going to have the entirety of Loka be in the PvP world, people shouldn't be able to get out of being attacked or stolen from via two blocks of dirt, at least from a raider's perspective. However, with our small community, there aren't major changes we can implement into PvP to fix it without relying on getting large influxes of new players. If we are going to change things on Loka for the better, it's best to fix the issues that we can immediately change and for the most part agree on, like a more fleshed-out and active role-play storyline.

And Art, I thank you for providing constructive criticism upon my ideas, glad to see that you are not just accusing me of hating the server and demanding me to be banned. It... it means a lot to me :cry: .

Thanks. I do agree with you to a point, and I think new players will help with a lot of the problems we're bouncing around.