Server game mode ideas!

[Jason_D_Black]

I realise now that since the war is going to start at 3 PM I'm probably going to miss the whole thing since 3pm us is 9pm with me so I'll have fun for 2 hours or 3 and then I go to bed --"

[Struan]

With the new movie coming out and several people competent in sculpting and red stone. An hourly hunger games arena might be a good idea. Several of us who know how to create things could help design the place.

[FM113]

So I once played a faction server with a twist- it was skylands and it used a sort of airship plugin, where players would build airships with wool and wood, and depending on the size of the ship, it would have different properties. The players would then fly around waging wars with these warships. The spawn had docks made for creating these, and places for them to be parked at own risk. Stealing other airships, breaking them down/using them was of course permitted.

Don't think was the exact plugin, but something alike those lines:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-mods/ships/

[vxi]

It would be nice to just try a simple mc3 on Skylands, maybe this time with lots of admin shops and player trading on the side instead of being focused on player trading. It didn't work out very well.
I'd also like to use gold or iron as currency this time instead, because I'd rather have to pay a lot of something I can actually get than pay a little of something that some people will inevitably try to horde and monopolize with.
I also frankly don't understand the point of a map border. The only reason I can think of for one is to limit the file size of the map, which, really, I doubt will go dangerously high.
If we started another mc3 map I'd be interested in teaming up with someone, because I'm pretty lonely currently on this mc3 map.
I like the Mob Arenas, I'd keep them.
Maybe a more convenient way to travel long distances, like a mod that offers player-created teleporters that lead to specific other teleporters for an emerald each and make emeralds purchasable in the admin shops for a bunch of money (like maybe 4 gold/16 iron), and have the teleporters require an emerald block to create. That way, emeralds are like the teleporter resource. I'm sure they'd be used a lot for it, and it would help players connect and do things together, possibly making more people come online or stay online. And maybe even have a special type of teleporter for transporting items only, and have it more resource efficient.
Other than that, keep grief protection and maybe add something where you can claim specific land to make into player arenas? I'd love to own a little coliseum for dueling my friends on my property.

I made a big teleporter thingy because I was bored. If this was really implemented, teleporters would probably be no larger than 3x3x3, unless people did it for aesthetics.

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[ragenidhogg]

is that someone's phone number next to the teleporter?

[dyl1138]

That teleporter looks awesome!
Unfortunately, the skylands and infinite map generation both cause issues with an in game economy. Since there are practically no rare resources and a select few valuable ones, an infinite generation would further decrease the already weak value of most items. As for skylands, resources are TOO limited and map resets would need to happen often to repopulate the place with ores, rare mobs, etc to spark usage and trade. Also, a teleportation mechanism based off a bukkit plugin is awkward and can be done better in any one of a large selection of mods. However, this would require all users to have a modded client to join, and that can be a big no-no for servers that want to grow. I would love to discuss the pros and cons on the topic of j2 mc hosting a mod server, but I'm trying to keep this brief. A way to claim land and modify its traits (pvp, tiledrop/tile pickup, etc.) would be nice, but too easily abused. There would need to be safeguards. There are definite benefits in each feature, but the downsides are very problematic IMO.

[vxi]

@ragenidhogg - I think so. It's "818-714... Something" in cause you couldn't make it out.
@dyl1138 - Thanks!
Rarity of resources on Skylands generated maps - If there are too few resources on Skylands maps, the resources obtained from things like Mob Arena could be a bit higher, or it would maybe just cause more players to play on Mob Arena. I like the idea of depleting the map of resources quickly. Also, with admin shops, there are unlimited resources but there are also unlimited amount of purchasable items, making it kind of even out. I've played on lots of maps with great economies that had hugely impacting admin shops.
Rarity of animals - Buy animal eggs in admin shop?
Teleportation plugin - I don't think it has to be Bukkit based, does it? The admins (or one of them, I'm not sure) are quite good at coding, and I think a good teleportation plugin could be patched up quickly and easily enough.
Safeguardless PvP zones - Just have it so that the player-made PvP zones would have to be within boundaries of their own non-PvP zones?

Was still a little bored so I decided to take a few screenshots of what it might look like to have a teleporter in a normal home. The teleporter might have a furnace or something somewhere around it to put the emeralds in for transport?

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[ragenidhogg]

Just commenting on the rarity of animals, I'm pretty sure there are plugins out there which can control the rate of mob spawning, so that problem would be gone. And the rarity of resources could easily be countered by increasing the rate at which ore spawns, like how it was during Three Kingdoms, but nerfed. Just my two cents, would be interested in your guys' feedback.

[vxi]

Rage, that sincerely was two cents. Not much to respond with, other than that could work, too.
Are people really interested in a mostly normal mc3 skylands map? I think it would be great to try out.

[FM113]

No feedback on my idea?

[ragenidhogg]

@vxi - Just one question, will other dimensions also be formatted into a "skylands" type? Because it could be a pain in the ass when fighting the enderdragon and having to step over random holes in the ground while avoiding looking at other endermen too.

@FM - The flying warships is a really neat idea, but does it involve movecraft? Because if it does, the last time I played on a server with that plugin, it was extremely buggy. That was back in beta 1.8 though, so it may have been patched up quite a lot.

[vxi]

@FM113 - I began talking about Skylands because you brought it up. You can think of all of my ideas relating to Skylands as feedback.

@ragenidhogg - Hard to decide. On one hand, the Nether would be really interesting and making Nether portals between to Overworld islands to travel faster would start to get really cool looking and feel really fun to do. Like if you had two sky islands, but the Nether portals for both of them were on the same Nether island? That would be so cool, wouldn't it?
On the other hand, it might get tiresome. "Want a break from Skylands? Well, too bad! All the dimensions are Skylands!" Just doesn't sound right. It's too bad there isn't a fourth dimension, because since you can't use The End to travel between two Overworld spots (other than from the portal to The End to your spawn point) you can't have a nice flat second dimension to travel through + a islandy dimension to travel through.
So, unless we can think of a creative solution to this other than creating a new dimension, I'd say there should be a poll; "Which dimensions should be Skylands? [All] [Overworld+Nether] [Overworld+The End] [Only Overworld].

[vxi]

Alright, so I'm still obsessed with thinking of game modes that J2 can try out, and I suddenly decided to try to make a list of crippling factors for coming up with ideas:
1. People can't be online 24/7. When thinking of gamemodes like epic Lord of the Ring style kingdom battles and such, this is a huge factor. In Three Kingdoms, each kingdom had around 350 or something members by the time it ended, but barely any were online at the time.
Solutions to this problem:
-Game sessions, instead of week or so long sessions we have small sessions of around 30 minutes to 2 hours, I'd say.
-Number of players have to be on to be able to do certain things, like PvP and enter other teams' bases.
2. People are going to be immature.
-Extremely user-friendly child-proof gametypes, so that your whole team can't be screwed up because everything hinged on one person.
-Whitelist. This can be a really unpopular solution but it solves a lot of problems at the same time. Controversial?
3. The gamemode becomes unpopular pretty quickly.
-Variety in what can happen in the gamemode itself.
-Change gamemodes frequently (which is what we've been doing, obviously).

So I think the best assortment of these solutions is short game sessions, user-friendly gametypes and variety.

I thought about a gametype kind of similar to Three Kingdoms.
It would be like a territories gametype where the large map has 10 or 15 or so territories about 20x20 in size that you can't build in, with one block in the center. When you break the block, it refreshes all the land around it to it's natural formation (in like a 15-20 block radius?) and you claim the territory. You can edit the whole map any way you like and it's pretty much a normal map with wood and stuff. So, the first group to claim all territories wins. What do you think?

[dyl1138]

Mini games are the way to go. I was watching a Sethbling video about health boost/Zelda and it gave me an idea for a pvp arena type mode. The general idea is that you can give a health boost potion a negative value and reduce the max health of a player. So, here's what happens. All player spawn in with, say 4 hearts (8 hp) and whenever they take damage, a timer starts counting down. When it hits 0, you lose a heart of health. The timer can be extended/stopped by healing via food/attribute/potions. So, this keeps an intense pace to find these health sources while at the same time keeping healing in the game. Verticality would become an interesting factor, but a medium to large map is recommended. This would be adventure gm with 5 minute rounds. Player retention would be achieved by providing rewards in the way of more classes/minigame lobby res slots for joining the forums or playing or voting for the servers. Classes would start with the same health but different weapons, and armor can add protection/max health factor (either positive or negative). Naturally some enchants are very powerful in this gamemode. Also the death messages can record who dealt the last blow on players who die by the hploss clock penalty. Server resource consumption is low. Ideally there would be a system of joining where you type a command to join the lobby list, and are teleported to the actual lobby when enough players sign up into the lobby list. After each round, all players are kicked back to the lobby and can either sign up again or resume what they were previously doing. Leaving the server would cause it to teleport you back to what you were doing the moment you log in, thus further preventing confusion. A cross promotion scheme is also possible where playing on the server normally will you rewards for the minigame and vice versa.
tl;dr- THE WALL OF TEXT WILL CONSUME YOU SOOOOUUUULLLLLL. Or your time. One or the other.
...Thoughts?

[Eviltechie]

Mini games are the way to go.

I am not a fan of minigames at all. They're somewhat a pain to code, they don't retain players well, they don't attract mature players, and you're going to need to cozy up to somebody famous to bring players to your server.