Blacraft Forum

i don't pay for the server upkeep so i can't really comment on that aspect

and i'm not sure if having an advantage is an issue considering, well, it's not like the stuff yqt gets from afking will be used to compete against me in something (or maybe it will?)

my primary concern is limiting lag, if alts are causing lag then i think we should definitely kill them in favor of letting actual players play the game

you do bring up a good point on how instead of paying for the time it costs for the alts to afk we can instead pay to increase performance for actual players. this is a really interesting point and something i'd like to see discussed more

i only skimmed the post and replies but here's my take

1. afk time is needed to prevent the game from being grindy and unfun
2. afk time is expensive in server costs and other intangible costs
3. alts reduce both those costs, at the cost (heh) of real world money

anyway here's my solution which i proposed a few weeks back
1. ban afking, but not alts, so you can still use alts for testing/whatever
2. allot everyone X hours of "simulated afk time" (SAT). X = 100 or 200 should be a good number
3. have people who want to afk time rates of their farm in an unbiased manner
4. each month, people can select how to distribute their X hours across their farms, and using the computed rates, spawn in the appropriate amount of drops they would've gotten

basically, it's simulated afking without the associated costs and problems

To Fiah:
Yeah Blacraft is hardly very competitive. But still we're all playing in a survival world, building with resources we gather with some effort. If someone has alts and it lowers the effort, they can build something more impressive than the others, because they spent some irl money. I don't think that's very good and I think it makes the survival world less of a uniform world for everyone, but closer to a Creative-ish world for others.

To Yqt:
I don't see how more afks minimize the cost - why would players coordinate their alts and not just put them in the farms they want randomly and independently of each other?

You've already built the iron phoenix so I understand it would be annoying if the rules were changed and it became ruined. In the future, people might build farms with the rules in mind that you're not supposed to afk for over some amount. Maybe we could consider something higher than 30 minutes. However I also think if it's 30 mins there's still nothing preventing you from checking up on the game, moving your mouse a bit to stay online, or (depending on the farm design) do something in-game around where you're farming.

To Komrage:
Minecraft survival isn't unfun imo because you can't have a beacon per minute or whatever. It just means you'e gonna put fewer beacons everywhere. You're gonna adjust your building to it every time there's a limiting factor. I think that's part of what makes survival good.

You might afk at a farm so maybe you do something else on your comp but still check up on the game every once in a while. At least that's how I farmed xp back in that terrible skele farm back in like 2012.
Alternatively you might stripmine or build something near your farms to kill time, or build them near places you're often at, if the design allows for it.

I would still allow alts for testing server-related things, which was all I thought you and Yqt were using the alts for initially. For testing redstone designs etc. I'm not sure, again I think if you really need to use an alt to test it, maybe find someone to ask for help.

Your solution is smart but I also feel it's a bit... "theoretical" or Idk what word to use to describe it. In theory it's perfectly fair and solves the problem, but I just don't feel we should sit outside the game and calculate how much afk time every player can have and spend time putting alts where people want them. If we have a volunteer for this I may consider it though.

To Kalassak:
Yeah that makes sense. I also feel it's unfair to take away items from people for breaking rules that weren't really there previously. But maybe they could be compelled to share the items.
Mending books aren't that hard/rare to get tbh and you don't need to farm very much to get them. If you get a villager with the trade you can get dozens of them relatively easily, and you probably won't need more than few dozens to put mending on all the stuff you're using basically. If it were wither skulls or they farmed some other item it might be more serious.

---

I'd say I'm inclined to ban alts for other purposes than testing, re-banning afk machines etc. and having an afk timer where I'm inclined towards 30-120 minutes, but still open to ideas.

Minecraft survival isn't unfun imo because you can't have a beacon per minute or whatever. It just means you'e gonna put fewer beacons everywhere. You're gonna adjust your building to it every time there's a limiting factor. I think that's part of what makes survival good.

I think everyone has their own ideas on what makes minecraft fun, and we shouldn't prescribe just one way to have fun.

Personally, my version of fun isn't that survival has a "limiting factor" (has resource constraints), but rather the fact that with a large amount of cleverness and knowledge about game mechanics, you can build up some sort of technological/industrial base which makes what was nearly impossible in the early game quite easy. Basically, minecraft early game to "end game" (killing the end dragon) can be completed pretty easily, and after that the logical progression for me to utilize game mechanisms to keep advancing the things that I can do.

But anyway the point is that I think everyone should be able to choose how they enjoy the game within the constraints of it being survival smp

You might afk at a farm so maybe you do something else on your comp but still check up on the game every once in a while. At least that's how I farmed xp back in that terrible skele farm back in like 2012.
Alternatively you might stripmine or build something near your farms to kill time, or build them near places you're often at, if the design allows for it.

Latter is impractical in a lot of farms which have an precise afk spot of just a few meters across. The former is possible, but at that point isn't it just saying "you can afk, but only if you can bear the pain/annoyance of checking the game every half hour" -- seems like a weird penalty to me which doesn't address the root issue. This would just give advantage to people with a lot of free time like alts give advantage to people with money.

Your solution is smart but I also feel it's a bit... "theoretical" or Idk what word to use to describe it. In theory it's perfectly fair and solves the problem, but I just don't feel we should sit outside the game and calculate how much afk time every player can have and spend time putting alts where people want them. If we have a volunteer for this I may consider it though.

I would volunteer to do the computations. I don't think it's as involved as you might imagine it is. Here are the steps:
1. measuring the drop rates of a farm -- only need to do this once per farm
2. a spreadsheet set up to do computations -- also a one-time cost only
3. a mechanism to spawn in the drops -- shouldn't be that hard although i don't have anything concrete right now.

Anyway the point is that there's no sitting outside the game computing things. At most, we'd spend 30 seconds entering a few numbers into a spreadsheet once a month. I don't think it'll morph blacraft into some perverse computational game or anything like that. I'm not exactly sure what your objection is about theoretical or whatever.

Also there are no alts involved in this solution, since we could simply say that you can't use alts for the measurement process in order to make things fair

tl;dr: I think alts and afking are separate issues. also, the last two paragraphs of this reply are the most important ones if you don't have time to read everything.

You were the one who originally prescribed it not to be fun if you can't have alts to grind for you. I don't agree with that.

Right. I intended that to be a statement about my own gameplay style, not a prescription for everyone. Also I think you misinterpreted what I said there. I didn't say I needed alts to grind for me. I said afking is necessary. I think the issue of alts and afking are orthogonal to each other. alts just allow for more afking to take place in the same amount of time, and arguably gives an unfair advantage to people with alts. whether we should allow afking is a completely separate issue (and imo, the more important issue here).

The reason it's supposed to be a 'penalty' is because people aren't meant to get enormous quantities of items so easily in my opinion. Building farms is totally fine, advancing beyond mining and gathering. But you should still be playing actively to get those items. If you want more items, build a more efficient farm or spend the time there. Don't go to sleep to get a billion items and drain the server performance.

I would take issue about the last line. Most if not all of the new farms that have been built recently have taken great pains to be extremely lag efficient, for example, explicitly avoiding *redstone dust*, which is an extremely laggy block. Sitting in the middle of desertopia with no farms in range causes far more lag than any of my farms.

I disagree about the need to be playing actively to gather items, because no one likes to grind forever for large amounts of items.

It's not that I think it's hard or complicated to do, it just seems weird in a way. The only thin these alts do is drain our server performance. If we buy one more alt, should we add more time for everyone to spend? What's the point even, of having the alt on the server and paying for it to be up? If we know the production rates, we might as well spawn the items right into the game? I don't feel this is the kind of server I wanted Blacraft to be at least.

So the alt issue and the afk issue is again, orthogonal. I think we should discuss them separately. For the purposes of my solution, we would ignore alts completely in the computation. So I'll just address this last line here:

If we know the production rates, we might as well spawn the items right into the game?

If you feel this is not legit, then I can't really convince you otherwise. But the reason I think it's not a totally crazy idea is because in theory, we could have generated those items in gameplay using the *same amount of effort* (aka almost 0). On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to spawn items into the game if you could mine them ingame because that would be a reduction in the amount of effort spent on the game. I don't meant to say that the only aspect of gameplay is the expenditure of effort of course.

But just one last thing. Here's a theoretical situation which will hopefully make it intuitively clear why I think this is legitimate. Suppose there's this very useful new item you can craft, except due to some bugs in the game, crafting it causes extreme lag to the server for the next 15 minutes, which is annoying. To get around this until the bug is fixed in the next update, we allow players to throw away the crafting ingredients and spawn in the item, which is a no lag replacement for crafting. To me, this seems very legit. I don't know about you.

I don't get why you guys see it as punishment if you can't put an account to gather items for you for days without doing anything.
Was it punishment when you had to strip mine to get diamonds for your first diamond picks? Kill the first mobs?
Now you've made extremely efficient farms that can gather items far faster. See it as a reward you have that instead of punishment? It's a luxury problem really.

I think the issue of alts and afking are orthogonal to each other. alts just allow for more afking to take place in the same amount of time, and arguably gives an unfair advantage to people with alts. whether we should allow afking is a completely separate issue (and imo, the more important issue here).

It's somewhat separate but it seems alts have been mainly used recently for pretty much perma-afking, and brought to my attention this thing because we used to have policies against afk'ing that I just started to ignore after we moved server, Essentials got deleted, there was no kick and stuff.

Most if not all of the new farms that have been built recently have taken great pains to be extremely lag efficient, for example, explicitly avoiding *redstone dust*, which is an extremely laggy block. Sitting in the middle of desertopia with no farms in range causes far more lag than any of my farms.

I disagree about the need to be playing actively to gather items, because no one likes to grind forever for large amounts of items.

It's nice people have been building for performance. From what I had seen recently it seemed like we were having performance problems partially because of alts.
I don't think it's true you need to spend a long time to get a lot of items. Monster farms are extremely efficient, iron farms, chicken farms, I'm sure many types of farms can produce way more items in a short while than you could ever have time to use. Gold farms I haven't yet figured out a very fast design for, and some other items are slow, ok. But still a huge advantage compared to going out in caves or fighting mobs to get them, and I think that's enough.

Here's a theoretical situation which will hopefully make it intuitively clear why I think this is legitimate. Suppose there's this very useful new item you can craft, except due to some bugs in the game, crafting it causes extreme lag to the server for the next 15 minutes, which is annoying. To get around this until the bug is fixed in the next update, we allow players to throw away the crafting ingredients and spawn in the item, which is a no lag replacement for crafting. To me, this seems very legit. I don't know about you.

I don't think you can compare it to a bug. The basic gameplay of Minecraft is mining, gathering, killing mobs and stuff. People are too lazy for that so they build giant farms and stuff, ok that's pretty cool. But that doesn't entitle them to a constant theoretical output from their farms because they feel it's too boring to wait for the way faster farms to produce. I guess we'll just have to disagree on how we view it.

To Blotz: Nice you got yours for free, but it's risky, few people give accounts away for fun without expecting something shady in return. Paying for alts or going to risky, shady sites to get them for free isn't a good thing to reward in the game imo.

---

I think we should ban alts, but maybe we could make some compromise:
1: We leave a month where people can still use alts freely, and everyone have the opportunity according to syule's calculations to be compensated if they don't have alts, so people can get more out of their new farms they expected to use with alts
2: We set the kick time on afk'ing very high, to maybe 8-12 hours, to compensate people for losing their alts. This may be lowered in the future, but that'll be a later discussion not for the next 3 months.
3: The alts may only be used during this period (until March 1) in existing infrastructure or something that's in progress that several hours has been spent on, not infrastructure we begin to make after this post.

I think by the end of February we should have alts phased out of the server for anything else than testing.

Discussion thread:
http://blacraft.createaforum.com/blacraft-general/alt-account-and-afk-discussion/