Vanilla: Shall we try that again?

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by Keldt, Aug 1, 2014.

  1. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    Keldt, you don't have to "wait" for a plan to happen.

    I would suggest you, who seems to be the most interested party in getting this thing going, to present how you want the server setup. What plugins you want. What settings you want for them. What general world settings (ie. Creeper Griefing, Enderman Griefing, cost of locks, number of locks, etc, etc) and present a plan in a new thread. This thread has gone on too long and has created so many sub conversations it's hard to follow anything. Your polls, to be honest, are not helpful. Real work doesn't happen via polls. Present a plan, and we'll discuss individual line items of the plan. Once there is consensus, then we will begin implementation.
     
  2. Keldt

    Keldt Member

    This is all the information I needed. I've never had to start a server within a community before, so this has all been very strange to me. I've not been sure what actions were necessary in order to get this going again.

    The idea behind the polls, of which there have been only one actual complete one, with the question of starting another having been raised, was to shed light on whether or not this idea of mine even had any good support. Were it not for the poll, I'd still be confused as to whether this idea had enough of a community behind it for any further effort to be worth anything. I did not expect the polls to magically do the work for me, I was simply unaware that all I had to do was make a more solid suggestion thread for things to get started. Some very basic "consensus" on some of the more elementary ideas of my current proposition was gathered and confirmed via my poll.

    All that aside, thank you. This was very helpful, and I will begin gathering and organizing my thoughts to begin work on a new thread with a more solid, organized, and specific plan. I'll probably start writing it up tomorrow, after I've gotten some sleep. Since I've never been into server management and plugins and all that, I'll have to do some research on plugin settings so I know exactly what is needed. I may not have a new thread up for a day or two, but it'll get done.

    Thanks once again, you provided exactly what I needed to know.
     
  3. NMBr2d2

    NMBr2d2 Well-Known Member VIP

    I did a thing [​IMG]
    Its good to see somebody with as much conviction for something to go through as Keldt does, good luck vanilla!
     
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  4. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    Ahhh that is a million dollar question now isn't it?

    The answer is simple. No. So make sure you come up with something that someone besides a handful of people on Creative will find as something worth joining our community for. In other words, I don't think there's much interest (outside a few people within our creative community) who are interested in a peaceful, collaborative, almost Creative experience with the w/ limited resources and gathering aspect of Survival experience. If vanilla is going to be attractive to people outside the community it needs to still be primarily a survival experience (hence why I was suggesting LWC at least cost SOMETHING and not be free).
     
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  5. damnsparks

    damnsparks New Member

    I wrote a bunch of stuff but it can be summed up : I've never seen such a dramatic attempt to keep people from having fun.
     
  6. NMBr2d2

    NMBr2d2 Well-Known Member VIP

    You're a huge help, please, elaborate on your pessimistic attention grabber.
     
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  7. Keldt

    Keldt Member

    Okay, an update after Cyber's last comment.

    So it looks like I'm going to have to be doing some thinking. I may not get that thread up for a little while, because I want to make sure I'm doing this right.

    Here are some of my thoughts, and some commentary on those thoughts, so far (I tried to filter this to only the thoughts that are relevant to what we've been discussing recently):

    A few things are clear to me. First and foremost, I don't think vanilla Minecraft can be taken seriously as a survival game. That is why Minecraft is considered a sandbox game, and also why mods like TerraFirmaCraft exist, and thrive as they do. You get food, you make a shelter, and all that's left to do is automate things and do whatever the heck you want to after that.
    So the way I see things now, the important bit is the latter part of that, the whatever the heck we want to do after everyone has taken fifteen minutes to beat the survival aspect of vanilla Minecraft.

    A second thing I noticed within our community is the fact that people don't want to compete in vanilla. The evidence for this is found in a couple of places. First, in the fact that the last vanilla server was destroyed by thievery. Second, in the nature of the community in the last vanilla server. There wasn't much PvP, and most of the PvP that happened was playful, and not serious. We were considering building a PvP arena at some point, but we never got around to it. Third, in the amount of support for my ideas seen from the creative community.

    Because of these two things, I think a couple of things should be true about any future attempt we make at vanilla. First, I do not think we need to attempt to enhance specifically the survival aspect of vanilla Minecraft, through plugins or any other means. By saying this I mean to continue disagreeing with the idea to put a cost on LWC. I definitely don't think the thievery aspect of surviving Minecraft needs to be a part of gameplay, at all.

    What I've been seeing is that there are some people in the creative community who would like to try survival, but don't like the plugins, etc. on the survival server, and don't want to turn off features everyone else will have on. It makes sense that the current support for this looks very small; we're not a huge community, and I'm sure there are some people within our community who would have filled out the survey but didn't see it or aren't on the forums. On top of that, and as Cyber said, this server needs to attract people from outside the community as well.

    So what I'm seeing as a very tentative end result is that we'll cater to the group that seems to be the largest supporter, and try to make it interesting. In my ideas for the vanilla server right now, I'm picturing a server where we build things in survival, either as a whole community or as small groups, since groups played a significant role in the last vanilla server.

    Cyber may not like this idea, simply because I'm not seeing vanilla as a variant of survival but rather as a sort of mix between our current creative and survival servers. At this point I'm still considering all the things we could do with a vanilla server, but this is the idea I see having the most potential right now. It seems like a pretty good idea to me, since it takes advantage of Minecraft as a weird survival/sandbox game, and focuses on the sandbox part of it. (If this is not what the vanilla community wants, I need to know now).

    I've realized that having a plain "almost-vanilla" server could sound like a pretty boring idea. That's where I was going with trying to start up discussion about community projects and the like. A vanilla server, by default, cannot be defined by its interesting gameplay mechanics, so I've basically got to figure out what we can use the backdrop of almost-no plugins and possibly some interesting terrain to build some sort of interesting and different server from. As I've said, I'm going to be thinking about this for a bit, so the new thread won't be up in a couple of days like I said last night.

    I apologize for yet another lengthy comment, I'm just trying to get things figured out o-O

    Also:
    I don't know what this is in reply to, so I don't know what to think about it.
     
  8. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    If all you want is building as a collaborative group and don't want a vanilla survival experience.
    I don't see what stops you from building as a collaborative group on the survival server.

    This quote put me into kind of a fit of rage... do you even play survival?

    For someone who's always played survival: here is what 99% of the world considers the vanilla survival experience:
    I get wood. I use wood to get stone tools. I build a basic structure. I have to find some food and build a farm so I don't starve to death. I use stone tools to get iron tools. I work to get diamonds and gold. I work to eventually get some obsidian. I open a portal to the nether. Along the way I make an enchanting table and maybe a potion making machine because I need better equipment to survive in the nether and probably fire resist potions. I survive through the nether and at night fighting mobs to be able to construct around 20 eyes of ender. I find the fortress. I open a portal to the end. I go to the end. I fight the nether dragon. I survive all along the way, competing with others for survival. This is the vanilla experience.

    How the hell can you say that is a 15 minute process to "beat" the survival aspects of Minecraft? Nevermind the fact that if you include the fact in the vanilla experience, players can kill one another. So you have to survive from other players wanting to kill you and take your stuff. Oh also in the vanilla experience you have creepers blowing up your stuff, you have Enderman griefing your builds. Vanilla is about raw chaos. What you want is not all this, what you want is something... more peaceful...

    If all you are looking for is a server where you peacefully build things collaboratively with a gathering component, could you please look behind curtain number #2 over here. Behind it you'll find the portal to the ShadeCrest peaceful world, a sub world of Survival. It basically has almost the exact setup you are asking for with some additional things which you can choose not to engage in (like setting up shops).

    You talk as if Survial is not about sandbox building. Like it's JUST about survival and everyone murdering and stealing from everyone. Did you know Survival is split into PVE and PVP worlds? You can just play on the PVE side, not worry about PvP and securing chests isn't expensive. It's really easy to secure chests. I have 110 secured chests in fact. Have you SEEN the towns that have been built on our survival server? Have you seen the large scale projects some people build? It doesn't need to be "vanilla" for people to collaborate. It takes people to work together to collaborate.

    I mean from the sounds of your post you basically want the Peaceful server with free LWC. Why don't you just join and play on the survival server, build together collaboratively in your own area in Peaceful? Have you tried? Pool your money and make a bunch of chests and play together on our survival server. If you don't want to participate in selling things, then don't sell things but basically it sounds like that's what you want. Just play on our survival server in the peaceful world. Oh noes you will have McMMO but 90% of McMMO is disabled anyhow. Oh noes you will have chestshops and rupies, but just don't participate in the economy.

    If you don't want the VANILLA survival experience of having to progress and survive through the overworld -> nether -> end and all the survival aspects that go with it. Just play on our Peaceful server. You can play collaboratively and build a HUGE town with cool stuff. You could even if you want eventually protect it from griefing with Towny once you find that making money isn't as impossible as you think it is and people are looking for things to do / are bored.

    Look, it's not that I don't like your ideas. I just don't think your ideas as you've put them together make much sense.

    Either you want essentially our Peaceful Survival server or you want Vanilla. I don't think you want either. You want something in between... maybe Peaceful Survival with free LWC, no McMMO, no Chest Shops, no warps? I'm still trying to get at what you WANT. Do you want a collaborative peaceful play experience. Or is it that you like Peaceful, but hate plugin XYZ, so basically same setup as peaceful minus a couple of things? If so, is there really a niche enough community that is interested in that? Or is it as some have said, you want a peaceful survival for the creative players?
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2014
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  9. oiShocKWavesv

    oiShocKWavesv Well-Known Member VIP

    And on the last vanilla server this wasn't even allowed xD
    EDIT: As someone who spends 90% of their time on minecraft PVP'ing, this was the biggest turn off for me.
     
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  10. Keldt

    Keldt Member

    Ughhh
    okay.

    *Repair mode activate*

    Okay, so my typing obviously takes less time to complete my thoughts than I do to think things through sometimes.

    Here's what I meant with the whole "fifteen minute" thing:

    You've played minecraft for a while, you know how it works. You get wood, you get stone, you get coal, you make whatever kind of shelter you deem necessary. This may take anywhere from 5-10 minutes, these supplies are everywhere.

    It gets late; you go mining for iron. Iron is not hard to find. You find 26 pieces of iron for a sword and a suit of armor.

    This is where we get back into discussion of what survival is, which is something I really didn't want to do here.

    At this point in the game, I don't consider it "Survival," I consider it a quest to kill the ender dragon. You're not fighting for your life anymore, unless you're in the nether, and hardly even then, especially when you're on a server with everyone expanding even while you're not doing anything. The ender dragon was killed within the first week of the last vanilla server. Everyone else on the server at that point did not have much reason to look for anything past iron at that point. Diamonds are nice, but unnecessary. When I said "beat the survival aspect" I meant just the survival aspect, not the rest of the weird quest-y this-is-kind-of-fantasy-ish stuff.

    *Argument mode take back over*

    This has been brought up. So many times.

    I said in my last post that I wasn't sure if "just building" was what we'd want to do on a vanilla server. Please remember that I'm still trying to think about this. I also said, and I'll say it again, I was trying to move discussion to this topic of what we can actually do after survival has been conquered and boredom sets in. If anyone has any better ideas of what we can do to make vanilla different enough for the survival leaders to accept it, that'd be awesome :D

    Your wording here contains the reasons why we don't just do what you suggest. "Basically" "almost" "some additional things" "you can choose."

    Truly, if all we are looking for is a server where we can peacefully build things collaboratively with a gathering component, we won't be satisfied with survival. Survival comes with so many other components that aren't toggleable. I'll list:

    The other players playing survival are not toggleable. These are players who didn't want to peacefully collaborate on builds, etc. who will have crap turned on, who will be using towny, mcmmo, and all the other stuff that is not vanilla. This is the main reason what you suggest and what I hope to get are not the same thing.

    The economy's existence is not toggleable. If we create a group to build stuff in survival we won't be able to ensure everyone involved will be able to refrain from going to shops and buying stuff. This would bother me. This is nothing like vanilla.

    Likewise, the existence of towns is not toggleable. People will talk about towns, will join towns around us, and there will be towns to work around.

    Is mail toggleable? If so, I'd love to know how to turn it off. I had 6 pages of nothing but absolute spam until I deleted all my mail a couple of days ago.

    Warps are another self-control thing. We can't turn them off. People will use them.

    So yes, we may get some of the basic ideas we're looking for if we do what you suggest. We'll get that, and so much more crap we don't want to have to deal with.

    I thought it was made quite clear we want vanilla.. What about my suggestion is so far from vanilla to be able to call it "not vanilla anymore?" Peaceful Survival with free LWC and all that.. is vanilla minecraft (with free LWC).. Or what is? If the free LWC, in your opinion, detracts from whatever you think the "true vanilla experience" or the "true vanilla survival experience" is, too much for you to accept it anymore, then for all that is good and holy we can put a diamond cost on LWC. It does not make that much of a difference in my mind. If we can please your opinion of what exactly is survival and still get away with collaboratively building or whatever the heck else I manage to come up with for this vanilla server, fine.

    One point I'm trying to make is that vanilla is vanilla is vanilla. You can't call it something else just because I'm not focusing on the survival aspect of vanilla. Minecraft is not a game about survival, it's a game about doing whatever you want. I'm still trying to flesh out exactly what it is we actually want, after vanilla. That doesn't mean I want anything other than vanilla, I'm just getting more specific now. If you're confused about what we want, join the club. It's getting figured out.

    New topic.

    Honestly, I don't understand all the opposition I've been getting from survival on this, just because a vanilla server is "kind of like peaceful, with some crap disabled." Semantics is a useless argument, and forcing a community to exist within and work around another that only meets their standards "optionally" is ridiculous, in my mind. We've got a vanilla server running right now. It is empty. I'm trying to fill it again. Obviously someone thought it was a good idea at some point or it wouldn't have existed in the first place. My suggestions don't change it that much, so why is all this opposition coming up only now? If survival is afraid of losing admins to vanilla, they need to threaten admins with demotion for inactivity, because that's what that is. If too many admins are demoted, promote some mods to admin and get new mods. I agree with what Slebert said a few pages back- that a lack of admins should not be the thing that prevents us from expanding as a server community. We'll get new people and promote new admins.

    Maybe vanilla isn't all that different from one of the worlds in survival, when plugins are turned off, but it still is a different thing. Having a vanilla server would handle all the optional stuff for the player, and it would actually draw in players who are looking for a similar experience. A group created in the peaceful world that doesn't use plugins would never be able to expand within a server that advertises as a survival server with towny and all your other plugins. This server would provide for a specific, and specifically different group of people, thus expanding our community.

    I did not intend to convey that I thought survival had such a narrow scope as that.. Yes I knew Survival was split into PVE and PVP, and I know there has even been a mining world. I played on survival regularly for a few months before I ever joined creative. It's wonderful that securing chests isn't expensive. That's good for you guys. It still requires an economy that is hard to ignore as I stated above. I'm not worried about thievery on the survival server. I hope I won't be forced to play on it in order to get what I and a group of us want.
    I have seen towns, I have seen big builds.

    But this is what is happening:
    You're suggesting we exist within you, as you know. Picture this.

    Shadecrest only has the survival server it has now. People enjoy building large scale projects and towns. All is great.

    Then someone asks for a creative server.

    You give them a similar suggestion you gave me. Since building is a part of the jack-of-most-trades, ace of some, survival server, you tell them to go to the peaceful world, to cut down on some of the pvp survival aspects. You tell them to buy all their materials from the store and just build there in the peaceful world.

    Because why have anything specific when you've got all the pieces, sort of, optionally, right there in Survival?
     
  11. Navarog

    Navarog Well-Known Member

    I think this will be my last post on the subject until it is again about Vanilla. ;D But the previous Vanilla server had rules similar to what _Keldt_ has been suggesting.

    The previous Vanilla server brought in many players from outside of Shadecrest, and according to previous posts appealed to enough Survival players to make a significant difference in the amount of players on the Survival server.

    There's little point in arguing what people want. It is clear what people want from the polls that have been made. You can't change what made the last server popular. The last server was popular and had a large playerbase who almost all quit due to stealing. Z and his crew beat the ender dragon in a week, essentially winning the game for the server. Should we just shut down the server then, because "surviving" is defeating the ender dragon and the server stopped being vanilla survival? Did all the players quit when Z defeated the ender dragon? No, the player count peaked after that. Clearly, people did not play Vanilla to survive. They played it for other reasons. I don't think their reason was Minecraft's gripping combat system (LMB, hold shift + space, fire arrows with RMB. Hope your stuff is better than theirs), I think it was because people wanted to build as a community. That is why my whole group kept going back.

    The reason my whole group quit and the reason why most people quit and the thing that people cared most about in the polls was the stealing problem. If we fix the thing that chased people away from a successful server, I would think that the server would then thrive.
     
  12. oiShocKWavesv

    oiShocKWavesv Well-Known Member VIP

    I don't think we need to be pulling players away from survival/creative when one of our main goals right now is to grow survival/creative.
    [​IMG]
     
  13. oiShocKWavesv

    oiShocKWavesv Well-Known Member VIP

    The difference between survival and creative is a hell of a lot larger than the difference between Survival with plugins and Vanilla with a few plugins. The only issue with just playing on survival instead of creating a whole new server would be MCMMO. Other than that I don't see the issue with just playing survival with the plugins you want and exclude the rest.

    Hide your chests, use and ENDERCHEST for important goods. Or, at the end of the day, suck it up and carry on.
     
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  14. Slebert

    Slebert Active Member VIP

    Since I was brought, I guess I should get involved in this again.

    It takes the Time and Effort of other Admins to find new Staff. This is time that is currently being used to make the community a better place. Such as making custom plugins, and many other things that need to be done, to keep this place up and running.

    Answer me this. If we literally just added LWC & Modreq to the current vanilla server, and got a new 1.7.10 world , would this argument be done? Would that be what the people who use to play on vanilla would have wanted? If so than all we really need at this point is an Admin who is willing to dedicate his time to Vanilla and Vanilla only (A Head Vanilla Admin) If we have this then this could be set up pretty quickly i imagine, and people could stop wasting their time on this argument and work on other more important things.

    This way we have the Vanilla server that you guys loved so much back, with the added bonus of no one stealing, and being able to combat greifers.

    This sounds like its what you guys want, and im sure if you guys can get an Admin willing to take on this task you could have the server you want and be getting new members within the week.

    Can everyone agree on this as a good idea?
     
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  15. Keldt

    Keldt Member


    Oh yes, I knew I'd be jumped on for that one bit.
    I almost put a disclaimer explaining how I understood the difference, but figured you'd understand I was making a point.
    Honestly, the difference in situation is not that great, you're just not used to seeing both a server that's "Survival with plugins" and a server that's "Vanilla with help," in the same community. Vanilla, last time we tried, was different enough from our survival server to keep me playing and not just go to survival, having been reminded of it. I was glad to be able to play Minecraft's survival gamemode with people from this community without having to deal with plugins, whether that was disabling them and dealing with the fact that absolutely everyone else on the server is using them, or using them myself.

    You're still forcing a community to live within another community they don't like as much and I just explained this in my really long comment so I'm done there.
    Hiding chests would be forced. Enderchests would be forced. "Suck it up and carry on," you say. "Read the last sentence of my long post with more sarcasm," I reply.

    I have made it really clear that MCMMO is not the "Only problem." Read my list of non-toggleable stuff in my long post.

    I'd thought that, as a community of servers, we'd want to be pulling in as many players as we possibly can
    with the intent of growing in mind. Huge servers tend to be huge because they have a wide variety of options. Anyone we pull in with a vanilla server may see plugins and towny on a more established survival server and choose to stop playing vanilla and go to survival. This is how this works.

    The only thing with this is that I'd hoped to be able to wait for 1.8 and use the custom terrain generation feature for the world generation.

    Other than that, yes. That is all we've needed. I honestly didn't expect this much debate to happen over something I thought was so simple, after having done practically the same thing so recently.
     
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  16. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    The problem is that it's not that simple.

    You want LWC, Modreqs, Prism, disabled creeper explosions, and disabled enderman spawning. We will also have to integrate it with bungee so survival staff have easy crossover access. This means we need a whole host of other things to support 1.8 which means you will have to wait months after 1.8 before you get this server, just so the creative community can have it's own version of peaceful survival. It's not simple either, just setting up the sever will probably take around 24- 48 hours of work split between about 2-3 people configuring plugins, setting up databases, and the like. You make it all sound like it's simple and fast. Sure putting up a snapshot server with no plugins is fast. What you're asking for is setting up another survival sever which is what we've been saying over and over.

    All because you don't like a couple of plugins and don't want to play with part of the shadecrest community? You want to be a seperate community than survival? Aren't we all part of the ShadeCrest community? In regards to the things you call not togglable, those are things which people think are fun. Even within the survial communtiy some players choose to or not to engage in those features. It sounds like you want a server with less fun options, more restriction. That's fine, but you also want to disable a lot of fun things most people consider fun about the vanilla experience.

    Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using Tapatalk 2
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2014
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  17. bobbylou4

    bobbylou4 Well-Known Member Creative Architect

    I thought we were all one community; one people. :)
     
  18. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    That's what I thought:

    Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using Tapatalk 2
     
  19. Navarog

    Navarog Well-Known Member

    Yes. That's what we had before. Disabled creeper explosions and disabled enderman spawning was only mentioned as an argument against the server.

    The plugins on Survival change the game vastly... In the same vein, why have a Survival server, when you could just get BII in Creative and then go into Survival mode and create your own towns?

    If you don't think the server will have many players, then we won't need many admins.

    Just modreqs and chest locks would be fine... That was the original plan. Everything else would be nice, but was only suggested in arguments against the server being created. We want to appeal to a wider audience, don't we? Would having a Vanilla server not appeal to a wider audience? So what if it takes people from Survival (this was an argument earlier which seems to now be the opposite of people against a new vanilla server now) or Creative? We're still a community.
     
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  20. CyberVic

    CyberVic Well-Known Member VIP

    It's all about level of effort I guess. And for the people who will be doing the WORK to get this online for ya'll it seems like a lot of effort for minimal reward. Also what staff is stepping up yo manage the white list?

    Will discuss with Erik and Ndv about level of effort and feasability to aks for what you are asking. Again, LWC, Prism, and Modreq aren't simple mods to install and getg running as disabling mob griefing. We also have to install and configure other mods particularly our permissions mod and confirgure that. The list goes on and on for those who are not aware of what it takes technically to get all this going.

    I just still feel like it's going to be something a handful of creative people will do for about 2 months, then die just like it always happens. It's a worthy experiment at the very least I guess.

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    Last edited: Aug 18, 2014
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