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Alright, so this is a big post with a lot of words, I know. Just do your best and try to get through it, I put a fair amount of time into this.
--THE STATE OF THE SERVER ADDRESS--
My fellow Freedians, I am posting now in light of current events, that I may do the best I can without being staff to help this server. Recently, we have absorbed Orcworm, and to all old Orcworm players, welcome to Freeds. We have done and are continuing to do everything in our power to make this easy for you, so we do hope that you will keep playing and join with the Freedsuniverse community. I believe that we can use this merge as an opportunity to get things done and improve the server. Now, there are several issues I would like to address, being essentially economy, Towny, and a proper sorting of problems. I thank you all for taking interest, and I ask that you please hear me out.
The first issue I would bring to the table is economy. For those Orcs who were not aware, Freedsuniverse has been suffering economic difficulties for a long time now, and though we have made small stabs at fixing it, nothing has been substantial enough to work. One very popular thread currently is the Gil -> Freeds thread, where Orcs can ask for their old Gil balances back in freeds. This would seem to me to be an idea that, while pleasing the Orcs, would further destabilize the economy of this server. One of the actions taken towards fixing the Freed economy was a wipe of everyone's balances, setting everybody down to 100 again. Adding in new players who start with thousands of Freeds is counterproductive. Seeing as this is the case, and seeing as how we want everyone to be treated equally, I suggest we take this time to go for a full economic reset.
Along with this should come economic reform to prevent insane destabilization from happening again and to encourage more player-to-player communication, for which I have a very detailed and thought out plan. After setting everybody's balances back to around 50, we would create an admin shop where players can sell all items of value for low prices to replace the killing of mobs as the way of getting money. Then, hard working players could manage to make enough money from their extra stuff that they would be able to set up a market or a town with its own markets with better prices for sellers and where people could actually buy goods. As people flock to the shops to get better deals on items they sell, they can also buy what they need, giving the shop/town owner more money. This creates a wealthy upper class of town/business owners. The average person would go to the city to get more money for selling their things, and would form a good sized middle class. New people would enter as lower class, with only around 30 freed. The new people would then likely flock towards towns, where they can sell things at higher prices than at the admin shop, and in that way, the admin shop, the only way of destabilizing the economy by creating more money, eventually becomes unused. This nice class system give people something to strive for, and without money constantly being generated (like it had been with rewards for mob-killing) the money will be going from player to player, shifting power, instead of becoming a stagnant upper class server. With all of these economic policies in place, I think we would be taking quite a nice step forwards in improving the server, and making a more functioning economy for the new larger playerbase.
The next big topic for the server is Towny. Yes, Towny gets it's own section, it damn well deserves it. Towny is the most powerful and utilizable plugin of its kind. If we want an active community building economy server, there is no better plugin. For all the Orcs who dont know what this is, and for Freedians who have horrible misconceptions, Towny is a plugin which, on a basic scale, has a wonderful way of setting up in-depth towns, with taxes, division of town land ownership, outpost claims, and the ability to upgrade to a nation and join other towns together under your banner. Each area of protected town land is controlled by the owner, giving the owner the ability to limit different block permissions, and even making it possible to distinguish allowing permissions among enemies, allies, and town members. It also has 2 built in war functions which allow for land capture, assassination of leaders, bankrupting enemy nations, and even spoils of war when you win, and all in a very controllable system. The last main things that makes Towny great are the fact that Towny has multiple ways of harnessing an economy that is getting out of control, and that it can be anywhere from 0-100% player run, allowing for a server to decide what is just the right amount of staff involvement.
Now, what can Towny do with all that? The truth is, Towny can do a host of things, but I focus now on its main use. Towny has the incredible ability to create an organized, active, virtual society. It gives people something to get rich for aside from being rich, the ability to have zoned land that you own, and the chat markings of a town leader. It also gives middle class people more of a reason to go move to a city; Towny cities can be much more involved and fun, and grant you nice protection from enemies. Then with the nation upgrades, towns that stand economically and militarily above the rest can show what they are made of, uniting many smaller towns under one capital city. As multiple nations rise to power, wars can break out, with structured combat systems that actually lead to gains and losses for nations and towns involved. Leaders of nations can award valiant fighters or great merchants with chat titles, and even grant others the ability to help them rule with the assistant status. Economically, Towny has an automatic tax system which is customizable for each individual town. If a tax isn't paid, then the citizen of the town is kicked out. These taxes dont just feed the leader though, they are needed to pay for a town/nation upkeep, and the money put into the upkeep isn't necessarily lost forever either, it is put into the pool of money for rewarding the winners of wars. If a town fails to pay it's upkeep, then it is deleted, and if a nation doesn't pay what it needs to, then the capital city is stripped of its power and the union between towns is dissolved. Within each town, a mayor can decide to sell different town sectors to citizens, and have the town upkeep paid by taxing the landowners. Also, a mayor can designate certain town sectors to be shops, arenas, embassies, or wild plots, giving a specific area to build shops, a pvp-enabled zone within one's town zone, a place where non-citizens can buy within your city, and allowing for natural areas within one's town. Towny isn't only able to determine how land works within towns, but also allows for the staff to set specifics on how close or far towns have to be in respect to one-another, allowing for the creation of a focused area where civilization thrives, and then for a uncivilized wilderness for people who enjoy that style of minecraft. This also means that pvp rules could become less strict, people could live in the protected civilization areas if they want to avoid it, and if they do want to be pvp-ing all the time, then they can live out in the wilderness.
With all of those capabilities, Towny makes the game of minecraft much more interesting, and leaves the player with a lot of options of how exactly they want to use Towny to accomplish various goals.
The third and final topic I wish to discuss is a general fixing of problems, and how I think it should be handled. Needless to say, there are plenty of minor problems that we have with the merging of the two servers, and it will take a fair deal of sorting to fix it all. One thing that I must immediately advise we do not do, is leave things as they are, or do as little as possible to just make the server run. What I highly recommend is a complete server tune-up. We have added a fair number of plugins, and changed data for some others. The best thing we can do now, in my opinion, is to run through all of the different plugins we have and test them and fiddle with them until they work properly with permissions, and with all other plugins that we have. It may take some time, but it is the best thing we can do. We must really try to get rid of as few plugins as possible, and only do so when absolutely necessary (i.e. an exploited plugin, a plugin that does not work with a more important, less replaceable plugin). Secondly, we should generate a new world, seeing as right now there is a great divide between the Orcs and the Freedians, with neither group having much reason, if any, to go to the other server's world. The only way to really integrate the two groups is to have a single map, and choosing either of the current maps would leave half of the sever unhappy, and give the other half a large advantage. The other large reason for getting a new map is the fact that there is a minecraft update soon with actual changes to world generation, and one of the most important things about running a server is, unless you are a server who exists to be antique, to stay up-to-date with the current minecraft world. Yes Pat, the current Freeds world is only a few weeks old, but it is still not the updated world generation, and because you allowed item carry over, most Freedians already have well established bases. That's largely unfair for the Orcs who have to lose all of their builds and start fresh while the Freedians can relax in their fancy homes. Some Freedians may recognize the feel of this idea from my post about a Grand Reopening for Freeds Universe. That would be because this stems from the same idea. The only difference is that now, we have a reason. Now we really have got problems between plugins to sort out, and, more importantly, now we really are a new server, we are now the combination of Orcworm and Freedsuniverse, and we should give ourselves a nice welcome to the minecraft world with an established opening of the united server. We are supporting a large playerbase and an active community, so we should do our best to make it the best time they have had in minecraft yet.
There has been quite the change to the server recently, and now is the time to take action and be spurred to get positive results. I have been an activist for making the server better for a while now, often with very slow improvements, if any at all. One thing I remember Boblobster saying was that a major factor needed for change was staff incentive, and that was likely only going to be produced through a rush of activity. Well, now we have a rush of activity; we have plenty of things to fix up and make better, and an influx of people to make some plugins more useful. And maybe, just maybe, this means that we can get something done now. I thank you all for reading this and hearing what I have to say, and I hope that you all consider these points for the server.
--Previous posts that go into more detail--
Economy
--THE STATE OF THE SERVER ADDRESS--
My fellow Freedians, I am posting now in light of current events, that I may do the best I can without being staff to help this server. Recently, we have absorbed Orcworm, and to all old Orcworm players, welcome to Freeds. We have done and are continuing to do everything in our power to make this easy for you, so we do hope that you will keep playing and join with the Freedsuniverse community. I believe that we can use this merge as an opportunity to get things done and improve the server. Now, there are several issues I would like to address, being essentially economy, Towny, and a proper sorting of problems. I thank you all for taking interest, and I ask that you please hear me out.
The first issue I would bring to the table is economy. For those Orcs who were not aware, Freedsuniverse has been suffering economic difficulties for a long time now, and though we have made small stabs at fixing it, nothing has been substantial enough to work. One very popular thread currently is the Gil -> Freeds thread, where Orcs can ask for their old Gil balances back in freeds. This would seem to me to be an idea that, while pleasing the Orcs, would further destabilize the economy of this server. One of the actions taken towards fixing the Freed economy was a wipe of everyone's balances, setting everybody down to 100 again. Adding in new players who start with thousands of Freeds is counterproductive. Seeing as this is the case, and seeing as how we want everyone to be treated equally, I suggest we take this time to go for a full economic reset.
Along with this should come economic reform to prevent insane destabilization from happening again and to encourage more player-to-player communication, for which I have a very detailed and thought out plan. After setting everybody's balances back to around 50, we would create an admin shop where players can sell all items of value for low prices to replace the killing of mobs as the way of getting money. Then, hard working players could manage to make enough money from their extra stuff that they would be able to set up a market or a town with its own markets with better prices for sellers and where people could actually buy goods. As people flock to the shops to get better deals on items they sell, they can also buy what they need, giving the shop/town owner more money. This creates a wealthy upper class of town/business owners. The average person would go to the city to get more money for selling their things, and would form a good sized middle class. New people would enter as lower class, with only around 30 freed. The new people would then likely flock towards towns, where they can sell things at higher prices than at the admin shop, and in that way, the admin shop, the only way of destabilizing the economy by creating more money, eventually becomes unused. This nice class system give people something to strive for, and without money constantly being generated (like it had been with rewards for mob-killing) the money will be going from player to player, shifting power, instead of becoming a stagnant upper class server. With all of these economic policies in place, I think we would be taking quite a nice step forwards in improving the server, and making a more functioning economy for the new larger playerbase.
The next big topic for the server is Towny. Yes, Towny gets it's own section, it damn well deserves it. Towny is the most powerful and utilizable plugin of its kind. If we want an active community building economy server, there is no better plugin. For all the Orcs who dont know what this is, and for Freedians who have horrible misconceptions, Towny is a plugin which, on a basic scale, has a wonderful way of setting up in-depth towns, with taxes, division of town land ownership, outpost claims, and the ability to upgrade to a nation and join other towns together under your banner. Each area of protected town land is controlled by the owner, giving the owner the ability to limit different block permissions, and even making it possible to distinguish allowing permissions among enemies, allies, and town members. It also has 2 built in war functions which allow for land capture, assassination of leaders, bankrupting enemy nations, and even spoils of war when you win, and all in a very controllable system. The last main things that makes Towny great are the fact that Towny has multiple ways of harnessing an economy that is getting out of control, and that it can be anywhere from 0-100% player run, allowing for a server to decide what is just the right amount of staff involvement.
Now, what can Towny do with all that? The truth is, Towny can do a host of things, but I focus now on its main use. Towny has the incredible ability to create an organized, active, virtual society. It gives people something to get rich for aside from being rich, the ability to have zoned land that you own, and the chat markings of a town leader. It also gives middle class people more of a reason to go move to a city; Towny cities can be much more involved and fun, and grant you nice protection from enemies. Then with the nation upgrades, towns that stand economically and militarily above the rest can show what they are made of, uniting many smaller towns under one capital city. As multiple nations rise to power, wars can break out, with structured combat systems that actually lead to gains and losses for nations and towns involved. Leaders of nations can award valiant fighters or great merchants with chat titles, and even grant others the ability to help them rule with the assistant status. Economically, Towny has an automatic tax system which is customizable for each individual town. If a tax isn't paid, then the citizen of the town is kicked out. These taxes dont just feed the leader though, they are needed to pay for a town/nation upkeep, and the money put into the upkeep isn't necessarily lost forever either, it is put into the pool of money for rewarding the winners of wars. If a town fails to pay it's upkeep, then it is deleted, and if a nation doesn't pay what it needs to, then the capital city is stripped of its power and the union between towns is dissolved. Within each town, a mayor can decide to sell different town sectors to citizens, and have the town upkeep paid by taxing the landowners. Also, a mayor can designate certain town sectors to be shops, arenas, embassies, or wild plots, giving a specific area to build shops, a pvp-enabled zone within one's town zone, a place where non-citizens can buy within your city, and allowing for natural areas within one's town. Towny isn't only able to determine how land works within towns, but also allows for the staff to set specifics on how close or far towns have to be in respect to one-another, allowing for the creation of a focused area where civilization thrives, and then for a uncivilized wilderness for people who enjoy that style of minecraft. This also means that pvp rules could become less strict, people could live in the protected civilization areas if they want to avoid it, and if they do want to be pvp-ing all the time, then they can live out in the wilderness.
With all of those capabilities, Towny makes the game of minecraft much more interesting, and leaves the player with a lot of options of how exactly they want to use Towny to accomplish various goals.
The third and final topic I wish to discuss is a general fixing of problems, and how I think it should be handled. Needless to say, there are plenty of minor problems that we have with the merging of the two servers, and it will take a fair deal of sorting to fix it all. One thing that I must immediately advise we do not do, is leave things as they are, or do as little as possible to just make the server run. What I highly recommend is a complete server tune-up. We have added a fair number of plugins, and changed data for some others. The best thing we can do now, in my opinion, is to run through all of the different plugins we have and test them and fiddle with them until they work properly with permissions, and with all other plugins that we have. It may take some time, but it is the best thing we can do. We must really try to get rid of as few plugins as possible, and only do so when absolutely necessary (i.e. an exploited plugin, a plugin that does not work with a more important, less replaceable plugin). Secondly, we should generate a new world, seeing as right now there is a great divide between the Orcs and the Freedians, with neither group having much reason, if any, to go to the other server's world. The only way to really integrate the two groups is to have a single map, and choosing either of the current maps would leave half of the sever unhappy, and give the other half a large advantage. The other large reason for getting a new map is the fact that there is a minecraft update soon with actual changes to world generation, and one of the most important things about running a server is, unless you are a server who exists to be antique, to stay up-to-date with the current minecraft world. Yes Pat, the current Freeds world is only a few weeks old, but it is still not the updated world generation, and because you allowed item carry over, most Freedians already have well established bases. That's largely unfair for the Orcs who have to lose all of their builds and start fresh while the Freedians can relax in their fancy homes. Some Freedians may recognize the feel of this idea from my post about a Grand Reopening for Freeds Universe. That would be because this stems from the same idea. The only difference is that now, we have a reason. Now we really have got problems between plugins to sort out, and, more importantly, now we really are a new server, we are now the combination of Orcworm and Freedsuniverse, and we should give ourselves a nice welcome to the minecraft world with an established opening of the united server. We are supporting a large playerbase and an active community, so we should do our best to make it the best time they have had in minecraft yet.
There has been quite the change to the server recently, and now is the time to take action and be spurred to get positive results. I have been an activist for making the server better for a while now, often with very slow improvements, if any at all. One thing I remember Boblobster saying was that a major factor needed for change was staff incentive, and that was likely only going to be produced through a rush of activity. Well, now we have a rush of activity; we have plenty of things to fix up and make better, and an influx of people to make some plugins more useful. And maybe, just maybe, this means that we can get something done now. I thank you all for reading this and hearing what I have to say, and I hope that you all consider these points for the server.
--Previous posts that go into more detail--
Economy
- Spoiler:
- Lorecraft wrote:Alright, so here's what I'm thinking on this matter. I agree largely with bob, all items of value should be able to be sold to some admin shop for very low prices. Things like bread would sell for 50 f, coal for 75 f, iron for 1 freed, gold for 3, diamond for 10. THEN, hard working players could set up towns using the money they obtained, and set up their own markets with better prices for sellers, and where people can buy things (the admin shop would not allow you to buy anything). So you have it similar to the real world, you have people working hard to gain some initial funding, and then using that to start a business or a town and get happily wealthy off of that, creating an upper class. Then new members will join in the lower class (I'm thinking start with 30 freeds?), but their journey to middle class would be made easier by joining a town where prices are better for seller (so that encourages people to be in towns). Then, once they have some wealth, they can try and get up with the upper class by working hard and doing business deals, or by proving themselves as a great pvp and earning money. And the Upper class wouldn't have to be stationary either! The people could easily rise up against this wealthy group of people and do something like fight them off, not buy from them, leave their towns, etc. So you see, what we have here is an economy that really flows from player to player, with the source of generating NEW freeds (the admin shop) quickly falling out of use because it brings in much less revenue than trading with players,and the best thing is that this will all promote an active society!
Just my thoughts.
- Spoiler:
- Lorecraft wrote:I think there's a nice easy compromise here. [talking about pvp areas and rules]
Just set a defined boundary for civilization and wilderness, and allow pvp in the wilderness, but ban it from civilizations (except in times of war of course). So, in other words, big towns and cities get protection from pvp (except in war times). This doesn't need to put a limit on people though, as people move into the wilderness and civilize it, making little settlements, those areas get connected to society, and gain pvp protection.
That doesn't mean that you cant live alone either. If you want, you can go way out into the unexplored territories and make a nice hut, and be prone to pvp all the time. The wilderness would be the place for the daring loners, who always want to live on the edge of danger, or even just a place for people to take fun expeditions, or lonely walks. It would be the type of area where one might even consider letting creepers do block damage, or letting fire spread.
Civilization wouldn't have to be continuous though (however there would be less of the "far from society" appeal in the wilderness areas between cities), there would be official protection in big cities and towns, and some of the closer surrounding roads, but other roads and in between areas would only be as protected as people could make it. Then we can get the nice "highwayman" and "knightly escort" aspects, while getting rid of the problem of too much of the map being pvp free. Civilization could also have arenas, and those can be like a pvp world, where official pvp matches are held as a test of skill, for all the intense warriors who have nothing to do during times of relative peace.
Again, just my thoughts on the matter.Lorecraft wrote:Well the super cool thing is that towny can do most of this for you if you dont want to do it yourself. If we left it up to players and towny though, civilization would likely be much less organized and more scattered over the map. Towny also allows players to warp to a town spawn even if they don't belong to the town, just with a set price. And again, towny has its own wartimes function which even allows capture of territories by other kingdoms.
If we did want to put more organization in it, we could set a large area around spawn (like enough room to be building towns in) to pvp free, then as towns crop up we could zone them ourselves and slowly unzone the rest of the areas around spawn. The theory here is that we give people enough room to build safely so that they can build up these towns without fear, and then hopefully the idea of expanding near each other for protection would catch on and the previously described society system would start happening. This would require giving the staff the last say in what qualifies as a town and what doesn't, so that they can zone it. Alternatively, we could do all the same things but make the players use towny to zone everything themselves. This would probably require lowering the prices in towny.
If we did use towny for it all, but didn't want to let it go out of control and have society at random points on the map, we could do something like "you are only allowed to make a town within 500 blocks of another town". This would also make nations that form much stronger, as their towns would be right near each other and able to help out (much like in real life).
There is a third way, a sort of combination, just to utilize both towny and zones. Have players spend on their town spawn claim, and then have staff zone the rest of their city. With this, people are encouraged to expand their town even if they dont currently have a lot of members (towny doesn't let you claim more than your population and the 10 extra claims), and it would also allow us to keep towny prices high because people would only need to pay for one claim.
Now to make this all work smoothly there are some other ideas that would have to be put in.
1. Towns cannot get their starting townzone block (towny or otherwise) until staff deems it a town. This does a couple of things, it encourages people to build in the protection zone around spawn initially (because if they were allowed to get it zoned before hand then they would be safe wherever they chose to build), and then afterwards it encourages people to be right near other towns for their protection and easy carrying of items to the area.
2. Staff get the last say on what is a town and what isn't. Players can just deal, and they should learn to anyways.
3. Players get control of their zone flags. Not sure f this is implemented already. Last time I tried playing with flags I didnt have permission to them.
- Spoiler:
- NOTE: this was before any talk of merging, so it talks about Freeds only. The new plan would be slightly revised.Lorecraft wrote:Upon much reflection as to the general state of the server, I had an idea. Please hear me out and seriously consider everything I have to say here.
The server has been running for close to two years now, and the age is starting to show. Many of our plugins are breaking, the playerbase is changing around, the economy has been through hell, and the sense of community and togetherness has been lessened, if not lost. What can we do about it? We can take all of this and turn it into a big plus. We can do grand reopening for Freeds Universe.
So essentially this is how it would work. We would get a list of things to fix, and make our own, then close the server off for staff to work. The staff would then make a new world, take out all problematic plugins, and reinstall them fresh and new, latest versions, and make sure they all work and fit with each other. Test all the perms to make sure what should work works, reset the economy, check to make sure everything runs smoothly, maybe install some better plugins to replace old ones, properly configure Towny, and then test it all a final time to make sure every aspect of the server runs nice and clean and smooth. Finally, once we are done tweaking and perfecting the server, we announce a Grand Reopening for Freeds Universe, get as much word out there as possible, try to bring back some old players and get plenty of new ones.
I have considered all of the cons of doing this, but in the end it seems the pros would outweigh the cons a million to one. The big con here is that the server would be down for a lengthy period of time, probably running past 2 weeks and close to 3 (if the staff works at a moderate pace), and this might cause some players to lose interest. It would also make us pretty starved for a server bill whichever month we did it in. There are, luckily, ways to combat both issues. So the way we combat lack of funding is to make sure we can get together a month's pay before hand (advertise it as a fund for the renewal of Freeds or something). Then there are multiple ways to combat lack of interest. For one, we could give the event plenty of hype before hand to sustain the player's interest until the epic reopening party. Secondly, we could make a special Forum thread for updates to tell the players how things are going. I suggest doing this anyways, because it also encourages the staff to keep a steady pace so as to have something to tell the members. Now, I couldn't come up with any more cons, so when you consider all the good that this would do our server, it really does vastly outweigh any negative side effects.
As for timing, I think it would be smart to aim to do this when the new Halloween update comes out. We would be having a little bit of down time and need to be doing a bit of tidying of plugins anyways, so this would just be extending the good we do in that time. Also, this is a big update so we would have the wanting to play on multiplayer with the new update as another way of keeping people interested.
Freeds has run pretty well for almost two years now, with minimal downtime and maximum playtime, but the server is getting a bit rusty. It's time to restore it to its former glory, polish it up and replace the rusty bits with the latest models. Heck maybe even add a few new features, and then throw the server the grandest of Grand Reopenings Minecraft has ever seen!
