Hello,
First of all, hooray for removing of gov city warps! Even though the barn doors have been closed after the horses are already out, the situation at least didn’t get worse.
My apologies about this post being so damn erratic, but if it doesn’t make any sense, sober up and try again tomorrow.
To the topic. Here are my two cents about how the server is doing, what has been done wrong and what we have to do in order to fix things. While I do want to critisize the way staff has handled certain issues, I recognize that they have always tried to do the right thing and haven’t deliberately harmed the server. We gotta think what we would do if we were in staff’s position. It’s not easy to balance between what the players want and what the server needs. If admins/techs feel that I am undermining the job they have done, I am sincerely sorry as it’s not the purpose of this message.
Cool, to the topic. First of all we have to name the two things that define hellominers:
- Economy
- Cities
Everything else builds up from those two topics. Economy is more important as it running smoothly will allow cities to be built and people to have jobs. Things can go very wrong if staff starts to fiddle with the mechanics that make the economics run.
The basic mechanism of the server is this (pay attention now, this is important):
- Material gathering: Jobs, mining, farming, grinding, admin shops in GTC (government trade center)
- Material changing hands: Shops, trades, auction house.
- Material being used: Building, admin shops, terraforming etc.
(4.) In all of previous: Player interactions and movement
Gathering is something that is done by everybody to some extend. Typically newer players get jobs from this sector as it’s straightforward and easy work to start with. Keeping gathering attractive gives people stuff to do and is an essential piece in the basic server mechanism (let’s start calling it BSM at this point). Adding features like cargo hub takes new players away from natural gathering and moves them to the overpowered government job that only spawns money and isn’t a part of BSM. Cargo hub creates inflation that increases the prices of stuff, hence making stuff more expensive for new players so it works really against them. Cargo hub also reduces player interaction in money making to zero, which should be unwanted in a multiplayer game.
Suggestion: If not remove cargo hub completely, make cargo hub only available for new players to get them started. Put a 100k bal cap for cargo hub usage. Something to keep in mind as well: Cargo hub is tedious as fuck. New players might get fed up really quickly doing it and leave the server.
People need meaningful jobs. At the moment we have the highest mod/player rate ever in the history of HM. Why not add meaningful jobs to players that require some sort of mod supervision. Some suggestions to replace the cargo hub with:
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Communal building projects. There could for example be a shipyard that makes large ships. Some sort of RP -officer would place an order and people would actually build like a large cruise ship together. The cruise ship could be divided in a few regions and one person is responsible for their own region. Once the ship is ready it would be sailed to customer (vanished) and the rp officer would pay the workers for their efforts. The players would need to harvest the materials for these jobs so it would be an amazing material sink too.
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A building park where new players get to go to build stuff from materials provided in a chest. They get rough guidelines what they need to be building such as “house” or “statue” etc. They make whatever and when they are ready, they can call a moderator to come review the build and pay according to some guidelines. This doesn’t contribute really to the BSM but at least it’s a job that isn’t grinding.
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Material gathering jobs. Could be as simple as “get 640 yellow wools” or something like that. Great material sink and greatly contributes to the BSM.
There should always be a flow of materials going in the server. One way to ensure this is material sinks like GTC. Also private cities being built is a great material sink. More flow would be possible if old private cities / buildings could be just deleted with worldedit making sure that the blocks won’t end back to circulation. This could be a /helpme job as well. “Dear mod, could you please make this building vanish?.” And before you start shouting about making demo jobs disappear: who actually likes doing demo jobs and how often do you get people to do them anyway?
New cities are no longer being built. Part of problem is low player counts, but even bigger part is high city making costs. 250k might not be a lot for most of our active playerbase, but think about this: how long do you think a 10 year old will stay motivated to earn money for their own city? Oh wait, the land value is actually 500k with the new land prices as long as the city hasn’t been approved yet. Take an average 10 year old player and think how long it takes them to earn 500k if cargo hub is too boring and chestshops are too confusing. The struggle is going to be too much. A hyped 10 year old player can bring us 10 more hyped 10 year olds to bring some spark to the server. Do we want to turn our backs to these people with these ridiculous land price rules? Remove the city land value limit altogether for new players! For veterans that use this for their own benefit introduce harsh sentences.
Back to material flows. Another aspect about material flows is the gathering part. Gathering shouldn’t be too easy. If one ingredient is too easily available, it kills the market as it’s not worth buying something if you can get it yourself really quickly. Also the more different sources there are for materials, the wider the market is. Like 10 woodcutters create more market than one, even if the amount of materials gathered is the same.
Here are some examples of overpowered items that work against the economy:
- slimefun lumber axe. If with one hit I can get multiple stacks of wood, there isn’t really need to buy wood from others, as it’s so quick to do yourself.
- explosive pick
- explosive shovel
- unbreakable tools / weapons / armour
These tools also remove the need to craft vanilla tools which is drasticly affecting to the following markets:
- Diamonds
- Enchanted books
- Xp bottles
Just a suggestion how to make the market flow nicely with explosive tools still being in the game:
Remove auto enchanter and auto anvil. Make a custom villager trader that trades a maxed vanilla diamond tool to a maxed explosive tool, but don’t include mending. People would need multiple maxed picks to obtain multiple maxed explosive picks and boy how diamonds and enchanted books would be needed again.
Remove the lumber axe. Also remove blaze axe. Don’t compensate.
Slimefun:
While slimefun adds a whole load of great features, it also adds items to the game that work against the market. It makes materials too easy to get and workers redundant. Also only a tiny fraction of new players are capable of starting to study the slimefun features. It’s like pouring the cup full right away. This puts the players that know sf in an overpowered position. Not all of slimefun is bad, it does bring a lot of good content to the server. But the good content shouldn’t come at a cost of the entire server’s economy’s collapse.
Bottom line:
Staff should think about the 4 points of BSM that are crucial for this server when they are making changes to the server. Irreversible damage has been done by clueless staffers, but not all is lost.
While I personally think that we are spiralling to death, I would be happy to be proven wrong.
-Ara
