Edit: After getting my hands on a book i found out that it is Chen who has dug into my room. So now i ask, would you mind if i removed or possibly rerouted your staircase, Chen?
Chen's been digging all over the place...it's getting tough to tell who did what down there. Koishiville repeat go!
EDIT: It's time for another Third-Party Server Report by the resident crazy journalist crow! (it was on my past post, but I think it fits better here)
DISCLAIMER: In some cases names have been withheld to prevent a direct attack - and if that does happen, it was unintended. Also, the expressions stated below are not those of any of the Ops, other players, or any other entity. These are just the observations and suggestions of a crazy journalist crowSERVER DAYS 3-10General - Micspamming and TS use seems to have died down. I do not mind this at all.
- There seems to be a town up on the islands, mainly built by those who I collectively call the Potato Brigade. In fact, I think there are
too many buildings by the Brigade members alone within that small area.
Start spreading out up there! I have nothing against many works, but if they're all lumped together in one area it
makes the game too easy isn't that fun!
- In the meantime, those of us who are predominantly below are (1) having a crazy arena/grinder build festival and (2) are facing property issues. The former...well, I think slimes are a factor in this. Latter? Well, I'd advise against trying to own a specific layer of the
entire map and disrupting many others' mines in the process. It may be efficient, but a better, less troublesome idea is to dig your own straight 4+km tunnel for your resources or build on the surface and mine down within that territory, rather than spread out all over the place to make border demarcations impossible.
- Expansion has so far been mainly to the northeast and south. West is rather stable (well, on the surface - underground it's very active), and north is predominantly for arenas and grinders.
- EPFort mk3 is getting there....
- Clay and Sponge chests were added and are a real hit! The former seems to be too successful seeing that the Potato Brigade pulled over 2000 blocks within half a day.
- I'm liking the new death messages a lot. For those of you who remember 'pull a Jquan' back in DDR's, we've now got 'Critical Shift Fail Error' to replace it. It does well considering that PX, BSoD, and I had a
lot of these when building the base layers of the grinder.
- I find the jokes with my name quite funny (examples: she_EP, cre_EP_er, Theeponomics). Is this a continuation of the Stuffman/Strafe movie parodies (eg. Revenge of the Strafe, Indiana Strafe and the Temple of the Stuffman) that we started on the last server? :V
- Theeponomics seems to have made a comeback thanks to users' projects and my (past) overload of wood. I may consider running an exchange store using iron, gold/lapis, and diamond as tender, and call it RecettEP for the laughs. (Though that may also mean I have to get a faerie skin too - welp.)
- I think we confirmed the existence of Rukin's Law - the more people are crowded in an area, the less likely it is to be well-lit. I have no idea why those of you living together in towns and villages simply cannot get proper lighting done. Granted, the situation is improving, but it's still a bit of an issue that makes it one reason I tend to live further away.
- Schematic imports are working well! I think, though, that some of us are choosing to 'import now, work on area later' instead of building up first and then getting old items back. Doesn't that nerf the game difficulty greatly?
- Plans for underwater projects seem to be running against each other territory-wise. Last night I saw a bunch of sponges set up on the ocean floor next to Cadrin's underwater base, making the airlock a bit ineffective. They're removed now, but honestly, scout for new areas!
- The intra-Potato Brigade Sign War seems to have calmed down a bit, but we're having too many signs in one area. 'Welcome to Sign Land' indeed.
- One peculiar player seems to have highly irrational behaviour in-game, resulting in all sorts of random structures, additions, removals, and labyrinths. Keep an eye out.
- The Potato Brigade's shared abode may prove to be an eye-sore for the neighbours. Should they ask for a change, please respect that, or move the whole place elsewhere.
- Server restarts
actually work!
Chat & TeamSpeak - TS and MC Chat occasionally turns to a bit of a flame war. Topics of contention include how to pronounce 'Mokou', favourite Pokemon, Nintendo vs. Sega (as a casual tech and game industry analyst, this was one I found particularly annoying)...and while I don't mind such discussion at times, I wonder why we're so charged when we're talking about these subjects. Why not lighten up a bit? :yukkuri:
- I have noticed that some players have bombarded others (normally Strafe) with requests ranging from 'stop the rain!' to 'how does my house look?'. Given how often they pop up even I'm getting a bit bothered. Also, I don't see why Strafe and others (aside from potential frequenters of said buildings) are getting bothered to act as aesthetics judges. They say 'you be the judge' for that....
- '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'. There has been too much tilde spam as of late. Please stop with that...it's neat the first few times but has already been overdone.
- 'POTATOES! THE GAME.' No idea why these are just randomly said, but I find it makes no sense.
- (common internet stuff) It seems that abbreviations are getting mixed up everywhere once they're thrown out. If it's something that you don't think everyone knows already, I'd say spell it out. I got confused when two players said 'GG...' ...I automatically assumed Guilty Gear, not their intended Gentleman Ghost.
- I see that many of you on TS send me requests, and that is good...except that we seem to get a lot of similar albums and artists. Well, if I'm running without any requests this will be a likely consequence, and for that I will say :derp:. But if I'm running on requests for a bit, then I have a little more right-of-way. Long story short, I say increase your request variety if you send in lots - I don't want 5 songs from the same OVA within 24 hours!
- This is more of a personal rant, but it is peculiarly grating when western otaku
arbitrarily insert Japanese catechisms and sayings and/or spin it off in a very strange manner. I've seen messages such as 'EP IS A USODA' which...well, are downright odd. Make up your mind with the language...oh, and I would much prefer kana over romaji if you're on the livefeed and/or TS. Others using that can read it perfectly provided they have the proper fonts set up.
- It'd really help if a couple of our users read up on a few grammatical rules (
namely the difference between 'they're', 'their', and 'there'). OK, so this is the internet, but it's not easy for us non-native English users to understand it if it isn't at least in a decent form.
- I know some of you have sent in suggestions for death messages, and while it'd be nice to see them, it's not necessary to scream for its appearance in MC chat. If I was an Op and heard these, I'd flatly ignore that request due to the source user making a fuss out of it!
- If there was a client-side mute function in MC for players to ignore chat from others, I'd be using it already. Until then we'll have to either find a mod or plugin allowing for that, wait until Notch puts it in, have them muted server-side, or (the easiest bet) ignore them entirely.
Miscellany - No sign on moderators yet, and we have 50+ people on whitelist according to Strafe this morning. If timezone and time-based mods are put in we likely need one for PST (GMT -8) alone, due to a large number of players in that area. Given that Stuffman and Strafe cover EST (GMT -5) and CST (GMT -6), respectively, we may not even need a mod from those areas
(much to my chagrin :V), though DDR and Jes (both MST (GMT -7) residents)' gimmick seem to suggest the contrary. Also may consider one for Europe (GMT & GMT +1) considering we have quite a few players from those areas as well.
- Spawn protection's still on, even though I've constantly heard that it already has been turned off by Stuffman. I have no explanation for this either other than 'this is what servers do by default' (going by the protected spawns in the past two servers, and WorldGuard didn't help on DDR's for removing that).
- (to Ops) I know that users can RMB any existing block (minus painting, I think) using a book to track edits. But for non-existent ones they have to place one, which shows their mark too. Should we give out the necessary command that allows them to investigate without prior block placement? I already know and use this incredibly useful command (heavy /bb log user here). Given that DDR allowed /bb log for MotK users, I don't see any problems with giving this out on a sign. (I didn't mention the actual command for obvious reasons)
OVERALL: Still have very few problems with it. Now that we've started making camp things are getting to order...except for maybe a few nitpicks here and there, but not too big of a problem. We're quickly repeating a Koishiville situation, however, and that is not a good sign. So I suggest spread out far and wide, and start flying, working, and playing solo to reduce some of the stupider aspects of chat.
On the other hand, I don't want to see a DDR server situation where everything's located all over the place (which was why I did the overpasses and subway there in the first place).
