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/