Blacraft Forum

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 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.

I agree you should be able to enjoy the game pretty much within smp, maybe with a very few exceptions. But I think it should only be with one account.

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.

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 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

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.

Kalassak: If those who didn't have a chance to do the alt thing got maybe 1 day of alt time to spend I think your issue could be solved.

would like to point out--

moving your mouse every 30 minutes to escape the AFK timer shouldn't be a valid option because then it's trivial to write a script that moves ones mouse every 30 minutes with no way to really verify if it was done by a script or a person, thus negating the purpose of an AFK timer

I don't agree it's trivial. I think only a few people in this community would probably have the skills to do that and I think we can trust them with not doing it. AFK timers used to work pretty much fine on this server a few years ago I think.

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

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.

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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.

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

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