Open Discussion around Server Resets

Your premise is that they want to maximise income, which hopefully is false.

 

Those enticements are there to get more donors, and i agree with them, and yes i do agree that holding non-donors as if their lesser is a problem, we're on the same page now, the argument is over.

 

Why? Keep in mind that this income isn't to the personal benefit to the owners, its to the community as a whole. Maximising income means better infrastructure to run more packs for more people faster and with better connections. How is this a bad thing?

Edit: Or hiring good coders and staff, etc.

 

At the expense of an enjoyable experience for non paying players.


As a donor, my opinion is that donators should get nothing. Yep, zilch. Absolutely nothing.

 

Exactly what is at the expense of non-donors? Or let me rephrase this, what have I advocated for that would give donors preferential treatment? This is off topic, I was advocating for an overhaul to the reset system so that it maximises retention by making players less upset. The longer you keep a non-donor on a server, the more time you have to convert them to donors. So what's the problem?

 

The mere fact that they get anything is already preferential treatment. Expanding upon what they get is wrong imo.

 

he didn't suggest that.... and given me and @bryan84 's past history it's quite surprising we can agree on anything, trust me

 

So how do you intend for the server to pay for itself? Also, how does this impede non-paying players from having fun? Nothing is being taken from non-donors to give to donors....

 

Im guilty of this. I tried playing Infinity 5 when it came out but I could not endure permanent sub 10 tps in the first week.

ps: when is regrowth coming out?

 

What's a shadow site?

I wan't suggesting that everything I mentioned be implemented, I was just tossing out ideas on how you could maybe implement them. Frankly I just think that having an automated message come up that says "Players have asked for a reset due to crowding etc., please click here to vote", let them vote for the restart and while this is going on have messages that say "There is a restart vote in progress, if you're a new player and don't want to chance it, try "Ferret Invasion" or some other pack and " or please try back again in a few days, reset or not it'll be out of limbo in (countdown from when vote started)!" Make the voting short, like 2 days and the 3rd day is the reset. All I'm saying is that the Surprise your base is gone with no warning!" party is the worst kind of surprise party. This should keep that from happening.

^^^Forgot to mention, if you do implement voting, I'd weight the votes of players who've been on consistently in the past 3 weeks heavily while making the newest and oldest votes count least. That way you don't get old players who've done everything and rarely play now voting no to keep their awesome base alive. Same with people who just logged in and want to get a cleared playing field. I wouldn't give all players an equal vote on this, it should be decided by those who have the most to loss or gain, not a lost soul wondering in.

Another alternative; I remember there being a claim system (maybe Towny) that would revert claims when a claim is abandoned. Instead of resets, a lot of the time you could just regen the chunks that non-current players have claimed. So if a player is off for a month, replace his chunks with the natural area that preceded it with a copy of the chunks from the original world gen. *That* would clean out the vast majority of crowded servers; I stumble across peoples bases constantly and never know the person. A lot of times, out of curiousity, if I can get the name of the player I'll type /seen playername and it's always months. I think if you routinely cleansed the server of bases abandoned more than say 3 wks, the need for frequent resets would diminish; also maybe periodically regen areas of the world that have been overharvested if that's possible to do.

A third option is that maybe there could be a subscription based model where you have a server that runs better hardware, more cycles for a certain mod that is spun off popular packs, and you charge a flat fee for access to Premium mirrors of the free packs with travel in between like the old monster nodes or something. I know that on the surface this sounds like I am advocating for what i said a few posts above I wasn't in favor of but.... If dedicated players, who tend to be the most resource consuming from tps standpoint can pay for a better server they reduce lag on the free servers by moving there. I think a reasonably priced subscription model like that could help the whole server because it moves the non casual players to a dedicated area and it provides income to help subsidize servers with low proportions of donors. I mean donating to a decent tier can be expensive for someone without a lot of disposable income but even a broke person can probably afford $5-10 a month, so 15-30 cents a day to play on a fast server. As long as people on the free servers can do the same stuff and get the same gameplay w/o negative incentives to coerce them into subscribing, I don't see this being a problem. Its just like being willing to spend money on getting a good internet connection if you already have an OK one for free. Think of like municipal wifi vs fios.

Did the survey ask how people felt about resets or just about gripes in general? When restarts happen it always suddenly seems to come to the forefront on the chat of any server I've been in where it was brought up.

 

Let me google that for you there you go

 

I've heard the term shadowsite before it just didn't make sense in context. But thanks for the super nice snarky ajax scrip [DOUBLEPOST=1442702526,1442701115][/DOUBLEPOST]

Before reading the below, since MS bought MC, have they converted it into C++? Or is the a way to convert it into another language that has natural multithreading built in?

What you said is interesting and potentially feasible. I'd use sharding to eliminate the problem of scalability though. How about a setup like the following. I like the idea of a centralized player data tracker but I'm thinking more along the lines of there being "words" or dimensions of a few chunks that are seamlessly integrated into the overall map; just make it tileable for expansion. Essentially any X amount of chunks are a private server and you simulate on their own thread and what happens when you reveal a new chunk when you're exploring. When boundaries are crossed, you essentially transport from a private dimension (thread) that looks the same as the reg ow to the actual ow. I had half finished typing the below when i really got into the details of your idea so there's a lot of overlap:

Is it impossible for a server to be setup using hyperthreading where ea premium player has a large "island" like crash landing that integrates into an overworld where the player data is synced across? That way you could have a zone where you had awesome tps that would integrate into the regular map sorta seamlessly, or maybe a dimension running on its own thread. Synchronization would occur at the borders when you move back and forth between them. So basically the island is a private dimension that perfectly maps the ow, with only certain chunks represented in the island so that everyone has the experience of 1 map. It should also be possible to have a party of friends that have perms to enter your dimension. It's been awhile since I've looked at the actual architecture of how smp works nowadays but by almost by definition, chunks allow for sharding since they're discrete; this is how massive website datasets (ie mysql - see facebook clones) winnow down massive datasets to discrete elements that are manageable. I'd think you parallelize portions of the map onto different hardware and only synchronize at the borders. This could be made almost trivial using portals to control boundary transfers. I admit it would require a good degree of coding to make this happen but I don't think its insurmountable. As long as you can sync player data through every boundary using a repository you shouldn't have problems with inventory or thaum or bm for that matter. Admittedly its been awhile since I've had to project manage something as complicated as this but it seems possible to me but I will admit that with my limited understanding of the current architecture this may be naive.

 

You're talking about win10/PE right now lol, normal isn't getting ported to C++

 

I would definitely be in favor of some form of transferring a base, even if no items could be kept. As for claim blocks, I can see why people would dislike losing those, even if it doesn't particularly affect myself, because of donating. Actually to be quite honest, I think the claim block system could use some Quality of Life changes. I'd prefer if we got more from voting, yet have the count of blocks be network-wide (consistent across all MyM servers). It's always frustrating trying to decide between some mod-packs and then wasting your votes on one only to have all your friends play another, or other similar situations.

 

to para-phrase from the website, it's minecraft PE, carbon copy, literally the same thing