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Metagrass
1st March 2017, 22:49
Rule Changes to Agriculture

Currently, towns have a limit of 8 trees each, which is not enough to have one of each type of tree, or to have even fuel a larger amount of oil lamps. This issue can be fixed easily as follows.




Maximum amount of fruit trees be removed. Instead they can be placed on the 3 farm plots each town gets. This would allow a town to have more trees if they wanted at the sacrifice of farmland,



Animal pens be changed to 8x8. Most small towns don't have the room for a plot per animal. Also a 16x16 pen can be hard to fit in and still look nice in towns.


Donation benefit changes

The current benefits to donating are extremely limited. Donating allows you to simply play on happydiggers other servers. I would love to donate to happy diggers to get the benefits of the other servers, but that would mean leaving all my friends behind on the regular servers. A simple solution would be to move to a donation rank and perk system as follows.




Donators have no teleport cooldown on the main TFC server.
Higher donators can use /hat
Donators can give themselves nicknames.
Donators given access to 5 homes per donation rank

Heptagon_ru
2nd March 2017, 08:57
While waiting for owners to reply, will share answers I know.

About donation changes: changes #1 and 4 are breaking Mojang's EULA. EULA forbids pay-to-win, i.e. allowing some players get advantage over other players via paying money. This would lead to problems for server owners.
EULA is one of the main reasons the servers were separated.

About trees: this would add lot of work for staff members. It is not trivial to count farm land placed in some irregular pattern. Plus bushes. After your change staff would have to calculate how much space is taken by trees, substract it from 3x16x16, etc - much more time. Counting trees separately is much more easier and can be done from the web map.
Also - how do you propose to account the tree? Each tree block is equal to one farmland block? So basically each tree substracts about 55 blocks from farm?

About pens: the size of pens was selected after some experiments and it is very undesirable to reduce it in any way. Less space => exponentially more bumps animal<->fence => more server load => more lag => more unhappy shouts :)
Also having one animal in one chunk allows to unload animal pen chunks from memory quicker.

About "hard to fit and look nice" - well, it is a design challenge :) Also it is a reason to group into bigger towns and share resources (again reducing server load). 10 towns with all trees, farm, anvil, etc are worse for server performance than one town with 10 members, 8 trees, one anvil, etc.

Elbe97
2nd March 2017, 11:21
Currently, towns have a limit of 8 trees each, which is not enough to have one of each type of tree, or to have even fuel a larger amount of oil lamps. This issue can be fixed easily as follows.


All you need is a stable fruit supply, right? Try to get something like this: 3× olive tree, 1× apple, 1× cherry, 1× plum, 1× banana or peach, + 1 tree of your choice (e.g. lemon tree or one more olive). With a proper storage (freezer, droppers) and a bush farm, you should have plenty to eat and store for winter (making sandwiches recommended).

Also, it'd be hard to determine how much of farmland equals to a fruit tree. It could lead to misconceptions among players and definitely would result in a greater demand on activity and work for the staff.

A short note to the "animal pen rule":
A town with a single resident has 16 claims (chunks). 2 outposts max. (a freezer + a mine suggested = 3 claims), 8 animal pens = 8 claims, farms/bushes ≈ 3 claims => 16 - 3 - 8 - 3 = 2 claims left, enough for a house for a single resident. Plus nation bonus 10 claims by default which I didn't include in this "idealistic" calculation.
By the way, nobody pushes you to build the pens one by one in single chunks, i.e. you can build a structure that maintains more pens on top of each other (for animals without need of grass - e.g. pigs, chicken).

I won't say anything to your suggestions to the donation system, some of these perks already exist in certain ways, some were discussed earlier.
I just wanted to point out that the current rules might seem a bit tight, but you can live with them, it makes the game a bit of challenge. Also we should keep in mind that we are talking about the Freebie server ;)

Jiro_89
2nd March 2017, 20:49
Thank you for your input and suggestions. Now, let me explain why things are the way they are without getting super technical.






Maximum amount of fruit trees be removed. Instead they can be placed on the 3 farm plots each town gets. This would allow a town to have more trees if they wanted at the sacrifice of farmland,



It took several months of trial and error to find a good balance for how many fruit trees a town can have. The more fruit trees, the more entities, the more lag. Tick time goes up fast the more trees that are loaded. This problem is compounded with all of the teleporting players are constantly using to load more area, more fruit trees, and other tile entities. Regarding not having enough fruit trees, you can always trade with another town if you are missing a particular fruit you're after but have 8 fruit trees planted already. It's a server not singleplayer, be social :)






Animal pens be changed to 8x8. Most small towns don't have the room for a plot per animal. Also a 16x16 pen can be hard to fit in and still look nice in towns.



Heptagon was dead on about the 'more bumps = more lag' and about the EULA violations. We have spent a lot of time discussing how we were going to setup the freebie server to prevent EULA violations and we came up with separate servers for freebie and donations to allow folks to have options if they so choose.

We have several years worth of experience running TFC servers and have had our fare share of problems relating to anything you can think of. We've used those events to establish a well polished system that, while not perfect, is fine tuned to be as lag free as possible to maximize the average user's gaming experience.

InsaneJ
3rd March 2017, 09:10
We have plans to change the Donor servers in the future. It is going to be a while before we do anything mind you. The idea is to make the donor servers more attractive. One of the ideas we have is to have a donor "FTB" server which will run another mod pack every 3 months or so. This will hopefully keep it more interesting than just TFC. Right now after you're done with TFC, there's not much else to do. Hence the periodic change of mod pack to spice things up.

Other than that I can't tell you too much about the donor plans yet. But keep in mind that we will never add pay to win perks to the public servers. Donors can only expect to gain cosmetic perks on public servers. Game changing perks are only allowed if all the players on the server get the same ones. A big reason for this is that we want to keep with Minecraft's EULA so we can maintain our presence on the TFC forum. Another big reason is that we think it's unfair for people to be able to pay to win while others may not have that option and we don't want a cut throat server like a lot of Minecraft servers seem to be nowadays.

If you have more ideas, please share them. While we may not be easily inclined to increase the limits on stuff you can have for performance reasons, they can spark discussion and help us figure out what to do in the future with our servers :)