[IMPORTANT SERVER CHANGES] A fresh new spawn

Agentred · 2015-05-17 04:18:03 UTC

Hey everyone!

So we’ve noticed that many new players experience massive framerate issues at our spawn point. Obviously this is an awful first impression of Arcane, and we’ve undoubtedly lost countless players because of this.

The spawn lag is caused primarily because of all the blocks being rendered, so short of removing nearly every build at spawn, there really isn’t any way to fix this lag. Because of this, I’ve decided that the best option for the server is to create a new spawn point, while retaining the current one.

If you’re opposed to this, please let me know here - However, I think this is the best bet. We simply won’t grow as a server if the majority of new folks leave because our current spawn is already so developed, or just because it’s too laggy. I’d like to see us hit 25-30 players like we used to.

At the moment, the only thing I’m undecided on is if we would want players to be able to teleport instantly between the two spawn points, or if you’d be required to manually travel to the opposite spawn area in order to set it as your current spawn. So here are the options:

Option A Create a secondary spawn point far out in the wilderness, in an empty area. New players would experience an essentially fresh, lag-free server. They wouldn’t have to walk far to find land for building. We’d gain nearly all of the benefits of a full server reset, however old players won’t lose all their hard work.

In Option A, players could travel between the new and old spawn points and use /setspawn to choose where they’d respawn on death, and where the /spawn teleport would take them.

Option B A second spawn would be created similarly to option A. However, players would be able to freely teleport between the two spawn points, and wouldn’t have to manually travel in order to change their spawnpoint. So for example, we’d have /spawn and /spawn2 teleports.
Other Let us know if you think we should do something else entirely - Such as a full server reset, or if you think we shouldn’t do anything at all.

I’d like to mention that should we create a fresh spawn for new players, possibly hire a few new staff members and disable the greylist for the summer - Then I’m very confident that we’ll be able to hit 25-30 players like we did last summer!

Tigakor · 2015-05-17 04:49:15 UTC

I would probably choose Option B with the 2 spawn commands, not really a fan of disabling greylist tho, 25 players or not, greylist stops a lot of grief

Dorndar · 2015-05-17 04:53:53 UTC

I agree on not disabling the greylist

DClem · 2015-05-17 14:09:57 UTC

When I saw the thread, all I thought was : “Oh god, here we go again…”

So, this “idea” is pretty old, since Agent has already proposed it months ago (Click here to see it), and I will basically reply almost the same thing:

I’m strongly opposed to this idea.

1 - Spawns always lag. Move the spawn, and in 2 months, the new spawn will lag as bad. This is NOT a solution.

2 - Our spawn lags less than before. The work we have done with the underground and the redstone machines shutting down clearly has made Spawn better. People with bad computers still lag, but see point 1 about that.

3 - Our Spawn is unique and beautiful. In no other server have I seen an open, central, player-built natural spawn. It is the reflection of Arcane as a whole throughout this first year, it represents each of us. Getting rid of this is getting rid of this feeling of community.

4 - Our Spawn was built to be the center of Arcane. Without new players spawning there, it will completely loose its purpose. We built the Overworld Roads from spawn, the Nether Highways, Simon’s Railway system, the Farm District, the House of Chests, the Spawn Statue, the Embassies. All of that can only work if this is the one and only center of Arcane, not if new players don’t see this ! It seems you see Spawn as an isolated part of Arcane when it is actually at the center of giants systems such as the Nether Highways and the Overworld Roads. Remove this heart and those systems are useless.

Yes, these are ALL threads (but not all the threads) about how we are organizing ourselves to make Spawn a better place. And this is only since the Spawn Cleanup has started.
In game, we’re talking about HUNDRED of hours spent cleaning builds, filling the underground, rebuilding whole districts with massive terraforming (Farms, Embassies and Harbor), as well as very costly improvements (Spawn Beacon Grid) and builds made to make everyone feel as a part of the community (House of Chest, Spawn Statue).

Change the Spawn and all of this work will be of no use, since new players will not see it.

And fyi, just yesterday DrDescartes, a new player, said our spawn was beautiful, and he loved the feeling of being in a town.

6 - We are still working our asses off for Spawn.

Here’s another few topics about how players are still to this date making spawn a better place:

http://arcane-minecraft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=643
http://arcane-minecraft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=705
http://arcane-minecraft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=725
http://arcane-minecraft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=767

Think about how discouraging it is to hear the admin say “Well, I don’t care about your interests in Spawn right now”…

7 - A new spawn will reproduce all of the problems we now solved of our Spawn. It’s not only the lag that will undoubtedly start again at the “new spawn”, but also all the others problems: it will not be linked to the whole world, it will fill up with shitty abandoned builds, it will not have the resources we gathered in our Spawn, it will not represent our Community.

8 - We have to be proud about our past. Why do you try to hide Spawn, the mirror of Arcane’s first year, under the rug ? We should be proud and celebrate how great our spawn is, how great our community is. Making “as if” Arcane was a new server with a new spawn is ridiculous and vain: it will not work, and frankly, it’s lying to the new players.

9 - New Players don’t leave because of the lag. We’ve had a lot of new players recently, one of them has a bad PC and lags at spawn, ok. But the others are still here ! What about the players who don’t even try to be greylisted ? Who knows why they leave ! They don’t even read anything, they probably just logged in by mistake or something.

10 - Lag is not the reason we’re not hitting 30 players. This is a ridiculous statement. We’re not hitting 30 players because we’re in exam weeks, not in holiday weeks. Plus, 3/4 of the moderator team is absent, and the admins are only now returning to Arcane after 2-3 weeks of absence. Not a holiday + Not enough staff + Nothing happening for a month = No motivation to play. And we’ve hit everyday about 10 players, that’s already very good seeing how bad the situation has been in the past few months. But again, lag is not the problem here.

11 - Finally, two Spawns (however that may work, and it won’t) is highly unvanilla. We have, time and time again, praised ourselves for being as vanilla as possible. Are we going to throw away one of the main feature of Vanilla: the one spawn per world ? Are we going to add yet another command ? Once again, we’re gonna sacrifice a bit of our “vanillaness”, and it will be in the best case scenario for nothing or in the worst case it will severely harm Arcane.

So please Agent, reconsider, don’t throw away hours of works into a new off-centered deconnected Spawn.

As a solution, I can only see one, but it is also no very vanilla: Have a “Random teleporter” at spawn, sending the new player to anywhere on the map beyond 5km of Spawn, so that they may quickly be in the wilderness and not have to “endure” the apparently horrible, player-frightening experience that is our Spawn.

As for the greylist: You are out of your mind if you think we can deal with the amount of sh*t we had last summer, with at minimum 1 major grief everyday.

DrZums · 2015-05-17 14:47:57 UTC

First, off, I think removing the greylist is a bad idea for very obvious reasons.

I think there’s a 3rd option that nobody is considering.

We could have a “pre-world staging area” where all new players enter 1st.

It could be a place where all of the rules are explained, and new players have to successfully take some kind of test to remove the greylist (a quiz about server rules). Once they complete the test in this “pre-world” area, they would be given the option to be taken to the normal spawn, or a random point in the world like DClem suggested.

This way people will be less confused, experience less lag, and get a place to learn about arcane’s rules and expectations.

Saroe · 2015-05-17 15:15:39 UTC

At the moment, I think the spawn is actually fairly well made. As DClem said, the spawn will always lag, and I agree with him that lag would not be a new player’s main reason for not sticking around.

As a new player on any server, the first reason I would check out the server is because I like the plugins it has (or lack thereof), and I would stick around because of how welcoming the server feels, be it through community or the way spawn looks.

The only things in the spawn that need fixing right now are some of the empty/unused/confusing features, one of them being the railway (where is it supposed to even go?).

DrZums: [quote]new players have to successfully take some kind of test to remove the greylist (a quiz about server rules)[/quote]
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way greylist works at the moment; taking a quiz would not really change who enters the server.

greasy_bandit · 2015-05-17 16:11:50 UTC

The spawn framerate is fine. We cant worry about trying to keep those players who have insane and unrealistic expectations of games. If they dont complain about low framerate, it’ll be something else.

As Dclem pointed out, our Spawn is awesome and we put a ton of work into it. I’d hate to see it become a ghost town.

The only vanilla solution to this I can think of, is clear the “suburbs” of spawn of long-abandoned builds (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=767), and either finish one or all of the nether highways to the new world end. We should finish one to the end, and recommend new players to it if they are seeking space or an “off-the-grid” experience. It would take longer to implement than a spigot plugin/script though.

Dclems and Drzums ideas are neat too, but not vanilla.

Remove the greylist? No, this is a bad idea.

@ Saroe: The rail network so far only goes west and east of spawn. It is a ongoing project that got abandoned.

rhalyon · 2015-05-17 16:50:57 UTC

Pretty much everything everyone has said reflect my ideas.

New spawn is not a good idea. Either we have a new map or just work on the one we currently have. A second spawn cleaning might be a good idea before the end of the month.

Juxtixe · 2015-05-17 17:56:24 UTC

Agentred · 2015-05-17 18:18:39 UTC

Ok, so as for the greylist removing idea, I’m throwing that out.

Now let me address some things:

The fact is, we see a lot of players leave because they can’t find fresh land to build on after walking for a few minutes. the lag just doesn’t help. I’m very confident that a new spawn would increase playercount.

I really hope this wouldn’t ruin the server for you! Keep in mind this can be a temporary change, we’ll always be able to revert back to a single spawn.

Keep in mind new players will be able to choose which spawn they’d want to start at, a fresh one or the nice developed one.

A fresh spawn wouldn’t lag! And it’s kind of a fact that we lose a lot of new players because they don’t want to play on a developed server/they lag at our spawn.

The entire point of a second spawn would be to avoid destroying all of everyone’s hard work by resetting the entire server. This is an alternative to resetting, and I think it’s a good compromise.

DClem · 2015-05-17 18:41:40 UTC

If they don’t want to play on a developed server, they shouldn’t play on Arcane. Making “as if” spawn was fresh is not being honest with the new players and not being honest with ourselves.

We shouldn’t have to hide the fact that we are a 1 year old server because, allegedly, some players who didn’t stay on Arcane wanted a fresh start.
Or, in that case, consider the Random Teleporter, or the clean-up of the suburbs.
And also consider Zums’ idea of a pre-world thing, because its great.

You keep saying that players quit just after joining “because they can’t find fresh land to build on after walking for a few minutes. the lag just doesn’t help.”. What tells you they leave because of that ? I think they leave because we’re not what they’re looking for, and that’s ok, there’s plenty more new players who love it.

Just on this thread, 2 very new players told you they like spawn, and in game others have also said they like spawn, or that it’s the reason why they stayed.

The entire point of our Spawn is to be THE center of Arcane, THE place where everyone starts and everyone knows. Creating a second spawn would transform our Spawn into a ghost-town, while the second spawn would in a matter of weeks or months face lag, random ugly builds and would not provide a way for new players to venture out easily (while the Nether Highways do ! And their center is Spawn !)

You have already proposed this idea months ago, in the Suggestion Forum, and at the time you finally said:

[quote=“Agentred100”]You guys have spoken, and I’ve reconsidered. I have decided not to make any sort of change to the spawn right now. It just isn’t fair to those who have spent so much time building stuff like nether roads.

As a few people have suggested, we should tear down a lot of the old buildings, preserve the cools ones, and breathe some new life into spawn. I think it’d be fun to make it into some sort of mini-event.[/quote]

Nothing has changed, except maybe that Spawn looks even better now, with even more work gone into it. Why do you keep pushing for an idea that has been refused months ago and that is again refused in this topic by both new and old players?

I beg you to reconsider once again: Moving Spawn means the death of our old Spawn, the one we all fell in love with when we first joined the server. Please, do not impose on us this idea…

In two weeks, once June starts, we’ll easily get 20+ players per day and even hit 30, just because the holiday season will have started almost world-wide.

Agentred · 2015-05-17 18:46:19 UTC

I disagree. There will still be plenty of new players who join in at the current spawn if we give them a choice between the current developed spawn or the fresh spawn.

Juxtixe · 2015-05-17 19:57:27 UTC

Scozzar · 2015-05-17 22:03:00 UTC

Can we first clean up spawn before making any large moves? I’ll be on towards the end or mid-June. I’ll be on quite a bit after that depending on work and stuff. If a new spawn is made, you might as well just do a server reset with a more diverse seed. I think there are still many options left before we resort to a nuclear option such as a new spawn.

Ignitius · 2015-05-18 01:50:09 UTC

So here is my two cents:

I think the random teleporter (or something similiar) is a great idea. I wouldn’t say it’s any more unvanilla than spawn, and if configured to teleport someone, say, 4k out, you’re pretty sure to hit a new patch of land. This gets new players going quickly with their own area, and if they don’t like the spot they can /spawn and try again. I think lag is not an issue (unless the server hasn’t been reset in a while, in which case it just needs to be reset), and I don’t think it is a reason why players are quitting. I’d give it a couple weeks at least and see if it picks back up. If the number of players on this weekend is an indication, we should be at 20+ in a week or two. While a new spawn would be less laggy, if it would quickly become as laggy as the old one as people build and strip mine.

Players don’t play the server for a lot of reasons, and we can’t appease them all. When I joined, I saw a decent spawn, and the quality of builds then impressed me. Spawn has only improved. Our main selling point is our high level of player maturity and friendliness, and the community atmosphere we bring. We are a developed server, there is no getting around that, and no use pretending we aren’t. I do agree that it is a pain for new players to find a place to get started, and that’s why I’d recommend a random teleporter. It will add a quick way for new players to get to fresh, undeveloped land and start building. If they want to be close by to other people, its just a short walk from spawn in any direction until there is room for at least a small build, if not a huge unclaimed area. (It also might be a good idea to be able to teleport groups, i.e everyone within a certain radius, so friends can start fresh together).

TL;DR Spawn is kick-ass, we should wait to worry about player count until we’ve been in summer for a couple weeks, and a random teleporter would give new players a quick and easy way to get started with their own fresh plot.

rhalyon · 2015-05-19 23:21:34 UTC

Random teleporter gets my vote. Spawn is our greatest asset and the entire server revolves around it. The ice highway, the overground highways. I mean, the Eastern Road travels almost 4 kilometers straight to my house, and i love it. I love the feeling of spawn being our capital, the center of the world.

A new spawn just fools people into thinking we are a new server, but they will look at the map and see this is not true. We are an established server and should embrace that. If people dont want to walk for land, then make a nether portal which randomly teleports you at at least 6km out of the center.

Not vanilla but better than losing our greatest gem.