Rules - Looting

Malcovent

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Probably one of the most controversial areas so i'd like to get some input on how we approach this before any rules are drafted up.


Chest looking has usually been approached in two fashions

Chest protection- Where either a plugin protects the chest (passwords, grief protection) or grief rules stop the access of covered chests.
Chest must be accessible' - Where all chests must have a viable path, even if said viable path is near impossible (combi-locks, jump courses, etc.)

Both approaches have their issues, and both approaches have their merits. I'd rather not directly put this to a vote - as the vote will inevitably be a split between PVP'ers and PVE'ers. I'd appreciate if people could give some reasoned input on their preferred approach, or suggest an alternate approach that ideally -

- is satisfactory for both PVE and PVP'ers,
- Can be summed up in a single sentence (No overly long complex rules system., complex systems aren't followed).
 
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I prefer the second option - you have a way to protect chests and have to actually spend time to protect your chests rather than using a command or blocking it with dirt. Effort needs to go into the system, but there is still a way to get in. Perhaps more complex locks could be banned so you wouldn't have to spend a whole week trying to get into a chest room, but I'm not really sure how this would work.

I am definitely opposed to no chest protection, as looting would be a massive problem, and often being looted is enough to discourage many players from playing.
 

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Why not demand that every chest be deemed accessible, through means of redstone or otherwise, but everyone also has a number of protected chests to their name? With this, people can hold some of their valuables and goods in said chests, but everything else is exposed.

You could also allow the options to purchase some/more "chest locks" with diamonds, since I believe you're seeking more options for them.

The problem with this, I suppose, is that raiding would likely only yield you minor goods, depending on what's being held in a player's protected chest...

... I would suggest a lockpick mechanic, but I'm not quite sure how the lockpick/lock difficulty algorithm would work out... But, might as well throw it out there, in case someone gets inspiration from said idea.

- - - - -

I was going to post another post due to the mindset switch and slight change of topic from this point onward, but I'll just keep it on one post--

To be honest, coming from a PvE'er who stealth raids, I personally loved the system in which you had to keep all your chests open! It was a brilliant idea, and added a nice and fun aspect to raiding, base building, and base defense!

... But, I lost all my love for it with all of the rules added afterwards.

"If maze to chest, must be # blocks long."

"If trap on way to chest, must have a safe passage to chest available."

"If trap exists, cannot kill or trap the player."

These are only a few, but I know several more were askew in favour of raiders. From this point onward, I only saw raiding being made easier, when it should have, in fact, been made much harder.


For example, I feel that mazes shouldn't be restricted whatsoever. It's a trap in its own right, and should at least be proven to have a clear passage through it.

Yes, mazes should always have a safe passage through it to the chest, which brings me to my next example:

Instead of demanding a surefire and harmless passage being required to the chest, I suggest at least one non-lethal trap. (ie; Poison, short fall with climb/alternate route, long fall with water drop and climb/alternate route, etc.) Having a dead end puzzle would be even better!

And with the mention of non-lethal traps, I bring up the option of having lethal traps. Besides-- You're not supposed to be carrying valuables on raid runs, so what have you got to lose?


I could go on and on about this, but I'm just going to post this now before I lose my wall of text. I'll likely bring up more points and suggestions as they come along, as this topic is usually what makes it or breaks it for me, in terms of enjoying my SMP experience, among other things.

Edit: Oh gosh, texting essays is so tough. I wanna BBC this up, but that's... A lot of brackets...

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Notme

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Can we have doubled volume of enderchest, so it can act as large chest? We can keep our most valuable stuff here in private.
-------------
Aaand clan chest suggestion:
Having 2 - 3 clan only access chests would be nice (so only you and your clan can access it).
Protection of clan chests against outsiders would depend on clan activity.
If weekly average activity is less than 5 hours week, then there is no protection for clan chests.
5 - 10 hours per week - 1 clan chest protected.
10 - 15 hours per week - 2 clan chests protected.
And so on. That would punish inactive clans, like block decay would punish inactive players.
You could assign priority for clan chest protection, so this one with less valuable would be lootable for everyone, in case weekly average activity falls below required threshold.

TL;DR
Double enderchest for players, and clan only access chests, that has conditional protection against outsiders.
And for other chests.... hide them very well in as deadly and complex as possible maze you can build.

This way your enchanted books/tools/weapons, ores and valuable mob loot would be protected, while rest of stuff would be more or less accessible.
If there was wish fountain, that could accept any crap you throw in and give you something more valuable (or currency, that would be usable in wish fountain shop only), then even raiding cobblestone would be useful, if you are too lazy to mine it :p
 

LISTINGS09

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A 'lockbox' much like others have suggested, that you either have to pay to access, pay to maintain sounds nice. Tying it to activity in some way would be a good way to reward the player and keep them coming back.

I think 'accessible' chests, are a bit of a minefield;
  • Loopholes - If you have any rules at all you'll have to clarify them as players forever try and worm around them.
  • Time - Ton of pressure on staff; understanding rules and answering questions; 'Is this legal', 'Is this broken?' etc.
  • Doubt - Anyone who does lose their stuff will always want to check if they were griefed or stolen from 'legally'.
  • Function - How to ensure that the chests remain 'accessible' because the chests owner never uses their 'accessible' method again.
All other chests 'accessible', would be sweet if the player HAD to always use their 'accessible method' to access their chests. Can't think of any way to make that practical and lightweight for staff/players though.
 
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Ogarci

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Imo everyone's enderchest is more than enough space to have inaccessible materials. Fit in there what you refuse to lose, everything else must follow Malc's second option: everything must be accessible. Primordia was the last server I specifically remember having this (i havent played a ton since then) and it worked out great imo. Like Malc pointed out, you can make near-impossible methods of gaining entrance, dirtcake and I had an 8-digit combination lock and all of our stuff was safe.
 
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Duffie

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Primordia was the last server I specifically remember having this (i havent played a ton since then) and it worked out great imo. Like Malc pointed out, you can make near-impossible methods of gaining entrance, dirtcake and I had an 8-digit combination lock and all of our stuff was safe.
Actually, there was a more recent SMP, Journey to Elysium or the one after, that had the same idea, but was extremely restrictive in what you could do in terms of traps, puzzles, and vaults. ;c

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Actually, there was a more recent SMP, Journey to Elysium or the one after, that had the same idea, but was extremely restrictive in what you could do in terms of traps, puzzles, and vaults. ;c

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Ah right, I remember. Iirc Primordia's only restrictions were that the trap/puzzle whatever couldn't murder the intruder and everything else was fair game.

Sorry for referencing Primordia so much, I just really liked it and it's probably the one Ive played the most.
 
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Duffie

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Ah right, I remember. Iirc Primordia's only restrictions were that the trap/puzzle whatever couldn't murder the intruder and everything else was fair game.

Sorry for referencing Primordia so much, I just really liked it and it's probably the one Ive played the most.
Absolutely no complaints from me. I loved Primordia, I just hated being a peaceful leader figure leading a clan of bloodthirsty players. xD

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Malcovent

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How would people feel about this

We want people to have to seriously think about what items they want to preserve in the event of an attack, so what I'd suggest as a way to appease all players is the following.


  1. Upon founding a clan, the founder is given a clan chest in his/her inventory. This chest starts with 4 slots that only clan members can access - for every 5 members in the clan, the chest gains 4 slots.
  2. We stand by the 'all chests must be reachable' rule with no bars asto the complexity of the design however there can be no personal shortcuts - users use the same route to access the chest that any raiders would need to take, for obvious reasons.
  3. Enderchest slots nerfed. 27 personal slot chests defeats the purpose of all the above changes. I'm leaning towards 8 slots.
Naturally 1 and 3 we believe can quite easily be enforced by a plugin, 2 will need to be moderated but, historically hasn't taken up too much time to moderate.

The end goal should be that raiders have something to look forward to, Clans are able to store only their most precious goods, and that there is some benefit/accountability in the mechanism regarding group sizes.
 

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To be honest, coming from a PvE'er who stealth raids, I personally loved the system in which you had to keep all your chests open! It was a brilliant idea, and added a nice and fun aspect to raiding, base building, and base defense!

... But, I lost all my love for it with all of the rules added afterwards.
same here that's pretty much exactly what i felt
 

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I think I made a post talking about revisions to the Kami chest/redstone rules in the staff forums (Which were awful at their current state.)
Idk if you saw it or not. If not and you don't have access to the kami section, could one of the admins PM that post to Malc? It might be helpful, to at least look at it.

Anyway I personally would love something like that of Primodia/revised Kami. To be 100% honest, feeling like I have to cover my chests/doors with dirt, drives me away from an SMP. Maybe also consider adding a chest/door locking plug to get the best of both worlds (With a chest/door limit of course...)
 

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I'd like to not have to worry about coming on one day to find that I've been just randomly set back to square one.
I can deal with protected storage limitations, as long as it's enough to ensure that I don't lose all the powerful swords and armor I've spent months mining and grinding for. I could probably deal with a heavy loss of cobblestone or dirt or wood, since those are things that are pretty easy to generate and mas-produce, unless I had some serious projects in mind.

To put shortly, I kind of just want to do survival with friends and possibly a few new quirks without really being in danger of spontaneously losing a mountain of diamonds or something to people who probably already have more than I do.

If I had it my way, we'd all be towns or villages under a big nation or something and we could fight, but the losses would basically be monetary at worst while the gains would be, while nothing extraordinary, definitely something that feels worthy of your time.
And we could have multiple nations with multiple villages where the nations might be at war or just different, I don't really care as long as I can escape the random cut-throat bullshit found in just about every factions server out there and yet not get bored by the lack of player-to-player collaboration you find in single player or the tiny servers that simply don't have enough players to have towns or clans.


And ramblings about factions servers below if someone is really that interested in external affairs. Much of it is kind of from an odd scar of sorts that is none the less deep, so maybe don't read this...
Have I stressed enough about the chaos of factions servers? Because you basically die for not having started with god-tier weapons and armor on those crap piles, not to mention that if you die at all before you land yourself in a big god-faction, you're pretty much hopeless for the remainder of the server's life.
The only time I ever really got to enjoy a factions server was on a server where normal players could not only go into a plots world, make god-gear in creative mode, and come back to the factions world with their stuff, but I got lucky with an incident where a staff member had W/Eed my faction base out of existence and I logged on to find myself being spawn-killed by gravity, which completely destroyed my faction power.
Because of that above incident, another staff member instructed me to move my faction base further away from spawn or something, and then basically gave my faction permanent power, which basically allowed me to survive the bullshit spawn killers that awaited me in the future.

I moved my base pretty much immediately, and I basically had to deal with basically half the factions that allied me just randomly turning enemy and trying to spawn kill me, which was actually kind of fool hardy because I chose to live in the sky. At one point, I built a small public pvp arena near the living area of my base with a warp attached, and literally the first few people to use it tried to raid my base and started using enderpearls to get onto my base (despite enderpearls being a banned item on that server). I also had to deal with this one person who had donated to get special perks, such as creative mode in factions world. For about a month, he tried to destroy my faction using creative mode in any way possible, including creeping up on my faction land and setting up his own faction RIGHT NEXT DOOR. This resulted in a really nasty stalemate where basically neither of us could actually destroy the other, and that stalemate sparked controversy in the server, resulting in the server getting a new plugin that basically discourages the use of creative mode or even flight to do battle, and the guy might have even gotten banned.

I eventually lost the faction due to the world it occupied being deleted, and my claimed chunks not being unclaimable any more.

A year later, I returned to the server and found that plots inventories were now separate from factions inventories. However, there was this sort of server-wide olympics tournament going on that had only previously happened in early beta days. I somehow managed to win first place in it (major victories being the hide-and-seek game, where I survived at least 5 minutes longer than the person in second place, as well as the survival games event that I mostly won due to the other competitors not being competent vanilla survivalists + one of the staff gave me a diamond sword when I was mining. Yeah, doesn't really follow along with real survival games.), which gave my the rank of Intern, which was basically equivalent to our trial mod. A week later, I got demoted straight down to bare-bones player (not even one of the donor ranks, just default player) because I called two honorless idiots (who would say they would do a 1v1 with me, but then double team me anyway under the pretext of "defending their friend") "scum", in which half the staff on immediately jump on me with all the flame they have because apparently I used a word that qualifies as a "swear word". Like, two major grievances with that: 1. why did they chose to make the prize for 1st place so damn easy to lose completely? 2. who the f*** makes a factions server and disallows swearing?!
I might have stayed a bit longer if they had let me at least have some kind of donor rank because I did win that olympics thing and get Intern as my prize, and I did help resolve a couple of issues in the sort week I had that rank, BUT NO!!
Welp, I've not been on the server since the day they demoted me, and if they haven't changed their ranking system since then, well, I think you know what 1.9.3 has for that trash.

I also tried doing Mineplex's new factions server: Champions Clans
Champions classes are so broken, I basically didn't stand a chance when I tried to breathe fire on this one kid with a basic rouge class, and the fact that I can't keep the vital shit I need to do anything with after getting RKOed , which costs an arm an a leg by the way, immediately turned me off.

Mod edit - Trimmed off the end of your message. In the interest of avoiding thread derail, If you're going to ask someone help to develop your own server, can you please keep it to a separate thread\profile message? Much appreciated.
 
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Friendy

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A 'lockbox' much like others have suggested, that you either have to pay to access, pay to maintain sounds nice. Tying it to activity in some way would be a good way to reward the player and keep them coming back.

I think 'accessible' chests, are a bit of a minefield;
  • Loopholes - If you have any rules at all you'll have to clarify them as players forever try and worm around them.
  • Time - Ton of pressure on staff; understanding rules and answering questions; 'Is this legal', 'Is this broken?' etc.
  • Doubt - Anyone who does lose their stuff will always want to check if they were griefed or stolen from 'legally'.
  • Function - How to ensure that the chests remain 'accessible' because the chests owner never uses their 'accessible' method again.
All other chests 'accessible', would be sweet if the player HAD to always use their 'accessible method' to access their chests. Can't think of any way to make that practical and lightweight for staff/players though.
Imo everyone's enderchest is more than enough space to have inaccessible materials. Fit in there what you refuse to lose, everything else must follow Malc's second option: everything must be accessible. Primordia was the last server I specifically remember having this (i havent played a ton since then) and it worked out great imo. Like Malc pointed out, you can make near-impossible methods of gaining entrance, dirtcake and I had an 8-digit combination lock and all of our stuff was safe.
I like the idea of bringing back the Primordia rules. Not sure about the clan chest idea though.
Only problem with this rule is that it is quite obvious a fair few players X-RAY, no matter what anyone thinks, while that rule was active people were x-raying all over the gaff because if there was a "legal" way in then they could get away with simply x-raying their way to the legal entrance, and then walking in, technically, without breaking any rules.

In my opinion I dislike both suggestions of having chests blocked and having a legal way in, I think there should be a plugin that allows you to "protect" ONE double chest which is definitely more than enough space to fit in your ultimate valuables, then make it so there has to be a legal way in no matter how difficult it may be - for those that may argue "Oh but they will just make a 1k long block tunnel" well they may do, but that increases the risk of some noob accidentally griefing into the tunnel and then raiding the shit out of their base.

Or just do the smart thing, sky base with the only entrance being an 8 digit combination then you can simply leave your chests unlocked as the only way people are getting there are with wings, then they still have to crack the code.