@Pizza - I wont quote all that again as we end up with 50foot threads
Ok - I am glad to see we are on the same page. Now, when i say that I implemented what was asked of me I mean the following:
After I took over and created the first New SMP, a lot of things were wrong. There were some good ideas there and it worked for a good while but it fell apart in the end, largely (I believe) due to issues that were simply invented by Rose - but I digress.
During those times and, especially in fact, during the times we had temp maps, I would talk to everyone in game and in Mumble and ask them what they thought was wrong and what they thought we needed. A few things cropped up all the time and became my main focus:
1) People were sick of others not knowing the rules are being able to storm into the server and do as they like
2) People wanted an area that had no rules, making it more like the temp maps in which they could self-govern without server side protection.
3) People wanted a far more grand Spawn City that would impress visitors and make it at least LOOK like we knew what the hell we were doing.
4) People wanted guests removed entirely from the main world so that the risk of griefing was greatly reduced
5) OPs wanted to have to spend a lot less of their time micromanaging and dealing with every griefed block and every single complaint
6) An area to build large projects, possible with cheats or "server funding"
To address these I therefore proposed the following (as detailed
here):
1) The AcceptRules plugin so no one could deny they had read the rules
2) Bedlam - it works like a temp map in that there are limited rules (originally it had no ranks either making everyone equal but the OPs argued against that)
3) I built Spawn City
4) Again, Bedlam and restrictions on building for guests
5) Clear rules about greifing - if you get griefed in Bedlam, no one cares. If you get griefed in Homestead, the Griefer loses their rights to access Homestead but YOU get nothing back as you should have res'd!
6) Theme Zones - the single biggest failure of the server as NO ONE used them correctly
This covered every issue and concern. Every play style from the hardcore adventurers to those who wanted to live in peace to those that essentially wanted FreeBuild in SMP were covered. It could have worked. Hell, it
should have worked.
But it didn't. Sure we had issues with Notch updates and sure the permissions fuckups threw us through a loop, but they were MY worries, not everyone else's and I dealt with them as best I could.
The real issues were that a) no one was ever quite "happy and b) no fucker was here!
Is there a solution? Dunno. I have lots of ideas but...how well has that played out before?
Will I come back? Dunno. I am technically unemployed so its not like I don't have the time but I ended up spending my life at my damned desk, getting no writing done. Every day I would turn on the monitor of my server and find 15 people trying to complain about something to me in IRC and every day I would get 10 messages in the forum - be they complaints or threats of attacking the server. I would post over and over, asking for ideas, asking for discussion, asking for input and while some people would turn up and some people would want to help, no one would ever decide anything (look at all the threads to decide how to handle Theme Zones). I needed to know what YOU, the PLAYERS, want and not just have it all left down to me. Every poll I would put up would, if I was lucky, get 12 responses yet everyone seemed to have opinions.
So I left, not 'cos it was all too much, but becasue I thought that
I was the issue, that you lot could not come to me and talk things out with me. I picked 3 people (Spike as he was the most active and engaged and would not shut UP about all the ideas he had
, Green as he is calm, methodical and highly tolerant and patient and Frimple as he is just flatly very smart and slightly batshit, giving me the "off the wall" slant
) and gave them full control over the server and said I would step back as the visible leader but still bet here to run all the tech side of things. This worked great....for about 2 weeks I think? I am not sure what did or did not happen.
I really want to see SMP (and FB for that bloody matter) work - I have spent a stupid amount of time setting it up and it would depress me a great deal if it collapsed. But, like I keep saying, it not up to me. You guys (and the rest of the players - not just the OPs) need to work out what
YOU want on
YOUR server.