I want better Kingdoms (ranting)

I keep saying it:

1) The council would be one more bureaucratic step that the server does not need until a time that ImDeity has several developers. Which we currently do not have.
2) The current player concerns are the same player concerns that have been around for over a year. He is aware of them.
3) Most of these issues will take 5x the amount of time to be resolved because, once again, we don't have enough developers and the constant updates to minecraft mean each plug in has to be updated before work on upgrades can be done.
4) Currently you have a couple of choices: Become a developer yourself and submit the work to imdeity or help find more developers. Don't just ask ImDeity to be a developer. It's like a job interview. You need a resume, a portfolio, etc.

On another note I will say communication on ImDeity does suck. You know why? Because on top of all the duties Imdeity, smc, sr mods, mods etc have to do you also have everyone messaging them to some extent in /tells, ts pokes, ts messages, website chat, website conversations, etc. I can't count how many conversations I've added staff to that I see almost no response or sent tells to that get ignored due to random tells, people wanting op, people asking for food, people complaining about grief without doing a ticket, etc while they are trying to do their jobs working tickets, moderating chat, moderating forums and doing their own minecraft things. I know all this goes on because I've been on the tail end of some of it when I was running the build team. So now in order to get anything done I have to corner someone in game and get them in ts since the chances are they didnt see my message, tell or conversation.

Now until we get more developers lets put this entire post on hold.

 

^ This <3 .

Add up all the time I've spent on moderating since I became a moderator in the summer of 2011 and if you just look at the amount of time that I spent on mainly noobs being noobs... It's alot, and I like doing most of it, but it's just like having your dream job, it's still a job. I don't recieve anything in return and neither does Deity from the average player, it's always "More more, give me more!" , people aren't gratefull that this man, who's the only capable programmer on the server is working hard to develop and maintain the server.

Show some gratitude for the continued services the staff and mainly Deity have provided you since you started here.

And yes communication sucks, we're working with international people, all with different timezones, lives and things to do. Deity gets a ton of messages daily and doesn't even reply to mine from time to time, because his inbox is jammed with alot of conversations.

Deity is a hero, not a computer. Hero's need off-time aswell.

 

strydier, I'll address each of your comments in kind.

1)Which is better; having a group of players who decide what to bring up to Deity/staff based on the complaints/information they have gathered or having a group of players who decided they wanted to become mods for whatever reason, who have their own goals, and who have better access to Deity then the rest of the player base which makes up the server?
2)It's great that he is aware of them, I'm glad he is aware of them, and until Gwen made the statement that quests had to be finished before classes could be upgraded, classes appeared to be being ignored. That portion is communication. Now, as a player, with that knowledge, I then question why quests weren't finished before other things, like the new spawn, which in my opinion wasn't as needed as some other aspects of the game. Sure it looks nice, but the old spawn would have worked just as well for placement of NPCs for quests.
3)I fully agree that due to minecraft constantly being upgraded, plugins take more time to finish/fix; however, as has been asked multiple times, where is the path to developers? It's one thing to say there are no developers, yet it's completely different to say there are no developers and give no way for those developers who may already be in the community to help.
4)I addressed this in #3 and you also made a further interesting point about this in your closing statement. What is the path for developers to help Deity? Your own statement shows that even if a developer had a portfolio, would that portfolio even been seen by Deity due to how busy he is? There are plenty of times when people have complained that they have tried to contact him about things and never seen a response, or in some instances, have managed to get hold of him about stuff and then never gotten a response about the subject, though action has been taken without informing the person who originally brought up the problem and thus left that person in the dark about how they were supposed to proceed in regards to the issue (assuming the issue still had merit).

In conclusion, you have responded to most of the current threads with "there are no developers" without offering any path to a solution. There have been a few "would be" developers who have asked a few times for a path to take, which would be seen by Deity. So, before you respond another 30x with "we have no developers" perhaps you should open your mind and help the players help Deity.

 

1: Incorporating people into staff that want to do stuff for the server is what would make a good council (wo)man. We don't select mods because they decided to become for some reason, we pick them by maturity, helpfullness and most definetly not for people that just enjoy being popular.
2: The new spawn <-- No relation --> Quests, these are the subjects of different departments. Deity even didn't build more then one block at the spawn. The NPC placement has been looked at with the new spawn, as most quests wouldn't have fit in the old spawn, it lacked creative space, as jamming up to 50 NPC's in the old spawn would be ridiculuous.
3: The path to developers opens when you apply for moderator or if you're volunteering for it. This is a valid point, there is no "Programmar's application" page, however the ideal programmar is not the average programmar, it's someone who can keep up to Deity's/Van's levels, which is very high. Deity once said of the likes of this: "If I would take any programmer's work and had to check it, it would be quicker if I made it myself."
4: Once again, the full inbox. I will make a thread for developers applications, however the quality issue remains.

 

To address the issue of communication between staff, what the staff had a totally separate form of communication(either a staff only convo or something off Imdeity.com). This way Deity would be able to speak, communicate, and discuss with the moderators in an isolated environment? Another thing you could do is disable convos and mail for deity(excluding everyone, or just non-staff). Players would instead start a convo with a moderator, and the moderator could solve it her/his self or tell Deity through the separate mode of communication. If a particular moderator is overwhelmed with convos, they could transfer them to another moderator, or even to a trusted friend if the question doesn't require staff. Just a suggestion!

-Jack

 

I think that I can address this one on somewhat of Deities behalf so, as strydier would say, "y'all" will stop complaining about getting a generic response about the server having "no developers" back. Firstly let me say that this response is mostly due to a few people annoying me, "ermergerd kingdoms is broke. This needs fixing, that needs fixing, come back and fix it" (primarily from someone whose name rhymes with le_dogs), and secondly due to the fact that I love to write long drawn out posts, and haven't done so in a long time. Also note that these are solely my impressions on the whole "developer" talk as it was when I left it (in regards to the developers we were jamming our fingers in to check if they were ripe), and the temperature of these devs may have changed in the past few months, but with regards to these "no devs" complaints, it would appear they haven't. Another warning, this may get a tiny bit technical

Everyone keeps stating these facts about how developers are not seen and they don't have the opportunities to be seen, etc, etc. That is a load of bullsh*t. Deity may not respond to every single message he get's within the first few days, however I know for a fact that he does indeed check them. When you have hundreds of messages coming into your inbox each week you tend to learn to scan for more pressing matters and respond to those and put the others on the backburner's. The backburder would include things such as "Developer Applications" that are deemed "unfit", as well as all the "ERMERGERD HALP" messages. Just because a response is not had, does not mean that it was not seen. It's probably better to assume that in that case that you are not qualified enough...yet. Now onto the fun part. These people who want to become developers already know what is missing/broken on the server, and what could be improved, it's why they are asking to help out in the first place. If everything was working perfectly, they wouldn't assume that they could be of any use at all in the first place. That being said, there have been some in the past who have done exactly as they should have. Im going to bring up Kill3rTaco atm simply because I distinctly remember the case with him. Way way back, Taco noticed that the /mail system I had implemented was lacking something. The ability to send items across the system. So what did he do? Without inquiring about anything, he went and wrote his own version that corrected this issue. After he was done it, he had released it on Bukkit and publicly supported it to which myself and deity had noticed. (You can actually go and read deities comment from way back when). After we saw this, we decided to take a look through his code to see if he could have been any use (we were more looking at his logic/structure, rather then syntax) and he didn't appear to have a knowledge-base behind him that would have accelerated any development for the server however that was more due to him being new to the BukkitAPI and it didn't appear (from what I remember) that he had a very OOP design behind his code, so we decided to simply keep him under our eye rather then bring him on to the team just yet. Time went on and Taco realized that he could have made his code more efficient and better and support MySQL (which I dont think was in his original release) and he re-coded the plugin. Sure this specifically isn't something that was taken into the server, because it disagreed with how we thought the /mail system should function, however the point is, he got it out there all on his own, which is exactly what he should have done.

Just shy a year later before I had left, for reasons I will not go into, I had organized a team of developers to collaborate on creating a plugin that would give users access to the nether with certain restrictions imposed to keep the economy balanced. These were all developers whom had expressed an interest in joining the team and we wanted to test them out. I gave the team of 4 a long list of things that would be required in the final version and set them out on it seeing who would take leadership roles and help others. Mind you the plugin wasn't something that was "simple" for any developer and would have taken Deity or myself a few days or so to get right, but it took them about 5 months to complete the list, and things were still missing/not working as we intended in it when progress had finished because Deity and I had become to busy to do any further testing. Although the 4 of you were doing your best, im afraid that it wasn't up to "par" that we would have required a developer to be at. You still had a long way to go before you were in the right mindset, however that is something that simply comes with time and practice. Somewhere in the middle of the 5 month period another developer approached us with quite an impressive "resume". I gave him the same specifications and the same task, to see how he would fair against it. It took him about a week to complete the plugin with little guidance, free of all apparent bugs and exactly how we wanted it. Needless to say, I was shocked. It was then that we decided to keep an eye on the previous team rather then give them any direct projects and instead test out the new developer by kinda going through the same process that I had gone through when I was "tested". Give him a buggy plugin that needs fixing and see what he can do with it. This is mostly to test how someone can adapt to others coding conventions so that they wouldn't want to rewrite everything themselves which is the hardest thing to do. It's much easier to think how you think, rather then comprehend how another thinks. It's similar to telling someone to get to a street address in another city, and then deducing their pathway. The piece of "crap" that we gave him was McMMO. That POS plugin. Now this is where my story kinda ends because he had cleaned up a bunch of the plugin as well as wrote a drop system that VV had previously wrote in a system that was much better then the over the top predecessor was. However he had kinda dropped off the face of the earth at that point and where we he we have no idea. Shortly after this I had left the server and the rest you very well know. If he were still here today I would expect that my position would have been replaced with him however that is not the case. As for the plugins which were used to test all these developers, I cannot say what has/is happening with them as I do not take an active role here anymore.

If these developers want a "straight arrow" guiding them down a path with one exit, they are never going to go anywhere. Take some initiative and create/fix what you feel should be there. In the worst case scenario, you end up learning a bunch of new things and another plugin to add to your "portfolio" to later show the owner of the server, else a future employer. I sincerely hope that you (you will know if that pertains to you), continue developing and learning the joys of thinking like computer scientists.

Also don't go knocking people like strydier, who reply with "There are no developers". Some things can only be answered by select people, and im sure this post was as enlightening for him/them as it was for you.

TLDR; "We have no developers"

Stay sexy my friends,
Zeben

 

That would be me. For the reasons you stated, I decided to go hardcore and bug you about it. As the author of the plugin, fixing a major glitch could take you a few hours versus someone who has to understand the pages of code before delving into the potential bugs.

I am specifically referring to the "plot glitch." If it wasn't for this glitch in Kingdoms-2, Doha would have already surpassed 1000 residents by now.

 

You know what I mean, Van Derpen.


I'm done arguing with the others. I already stated I supported the council IF we had enough developers to make it of some use. We don't so the council serves no purpose.

 

I just have to say.... LOL

public class Hello {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}

I am sooo good!

 

Hm... still better than me, i cannot even try that simple code.


Back on topic...

MCMMO
From discussion it seems that we learned to use MCMMO as source of glowstone dust (other useful rare drops need too many levels). That is a bit too little for plugin that is designed to allow us to develop some skills. Yeah, that skill development was only fun before we hit power level cap...
So this needs something new. New skill system, new scoring system, new reward system.


Gold

I have been thinking and it is not that simple. First, Vault takes both gold ingots and gold blocks, so it would need removing gold blocks from code (still easy). Worse part is that with gold blocks returning to economy, we can soon expect duping issues. Now we have no gold in economy, so whoever would try to sell gold ingot or gold block is immediately suspected to hack.


Enchanting

Yeah, i had to change my opinion. I am not sure if bottling XP works, so it would be better and easier to let everyone enchant.

 

The levels required for item drops are adjustable, as are the drop rates.

 

I was also thinking, and maybe there could be a way so that Deity could remove the Gold Block -> Gold Ingot recipe and make it so that only ingots can be sold through the vault system. That way Gold Blocks won't be duped for money reasons, and besides, the only way I know how to dupe on the server (I haven't done it, I just know how to do it) has been 'patched' by Deity so that it would be useless to even try duping it that way.

 

So if we want MCMMO mostly for "rare drops" from excavation, how would people like to have more variety of "normal" drops and less "rare" drops?
For example:
level 10
seeds (0,5%) from digging grass
carrots (0,2%) from digging dirt
level 20
apples (0,5%) from digging grass
potatoes (0,2%) from digging dirt
mushrooms (0,5%) from digging mycellium
stick (0,2%) from digging sand
level 25
glowstone dust (0,2%) from digging sand (25 times less than basic mcmmo setting, so it would be 2-3 glowstones instead of full stack for same effort)
level 40
feather (0,2%) and egg (0,2%) from digging grass
leather (0,2%) from digging dirt
red mushrooms (0,5%) from digging mycellium
string (0,2%) from digging sand
level 50
ink sac (0,2%) from digging clay (now we cannot obtain them except for buying in Deity Shop, similar as glowstone)
etc...

Drops should be allowed in mining world only, otherwise we can forget about having nice landscape in main world.

 

It's called the staff forum , we got it, we've had it for about 100 years, but that doesn't promote communication, not live communication. Communication going trough the staff forum is delayed and can't be used for sensitive cases, aka Sr mod+.

Beisdes even the staff members don't always read the Staff forum, much as the average player doesn't access the forum either

 

So that's where you get the thousands of posts HMMMM
<3
Edit : What the heck i can't get my message out of the quote...
Edit2: SMC was joking about making a "hello world" program, but I can't even seem to handle the /quote] thing
We just found the worst programmer on Deity....

Arwenden Edit:
I did it for you.
Forums sometimes buggy ;P
Ty, you're the best <3