Poor documentation of server rules #4415
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Reference: your-land/bugtracker#4415
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According to sign near spawn and by augustus, there is only one rule "Be excellent to each other and yourself".
That rule can be interpreted in many different ways, is ambiguous (what is seen as excellent by one can be seen as rubbish by others)
and does not cover actual rules that are used for deciding and doing intervention by staff.
By observing bugtracker, I see lot of staff actions is correcting or removing some construction of others, based on some undocumented criteria.
This arises lot of questions:
This assumes construction in wilderness and not inside cities, as those impose often some rules of their own
Lot of uncertainty is around the 150 blocks reservation around protected areas.
This is not enforced technically, only by staff actions.
Consider following scenario:
A protects area between x=-40 and x=0
B protects area between x=150 and x=190 some time later after A
(assume y/z bounds are same for both areas)
In area between those with 0 < x < 150:
If A builds anything there, can B demand its removal?
If B builds anything there, can A demand its removal?
if C builds (unprotected) road there, can A or B demand its removal?
If A adds another area protecting from x=0 to x=30, would that be ok?
If B adds another area protecting from x=120 to x=150, would that be ok?
For this rule, it is not apparent to me what is its intended effect or what was the intentions/motives behind adding it.
In some cases, due to the outdated documentation, staff even enforced rules in contradiction of the written rules.
Sign on public farm says that "no penalty for not replanting", I've heard staff forcing people to replant. If that is to be a rule, then let's write it.
Or at least not write it's contradiction :)
There are some "rules" spread via chat and rumors.
I've heard that "killing a whale will result in you being banned from entering cities". Is that true, or are we allowed to hunt whales for food? (not sure if they will actually drop food, though ... never killed one :)
There are actually several existing undocumented or poorly documented rules enforced via having/not having privs:
This would need minor improvements, but is not that bad as previous points
The more realms traveled the more be "excellent" is observed.
while I agree with more docs, find that its not poor as per titlepost.
Flexibility answers alot of this,
A.
A1. 1. Ocean building priv is presented in its warning, and asking on
most servers to do large terraforming is standard so thats
definately under the be excellent and asking.
The same goes for era specific and questionable builds ->A1.1.
2Rply: being kind to your neighbors also falls under A1.
, just to point out both and all circumstances require communication,
so getting it done and having the person talk is already needed and
is in a sense, prompted.
3R: Also falls under asking, again communication A1.
4R: each owns city is their/has own rules, hence itself under the guide of YL
Encourage all to talk bout any of this at any time :) -Horus
With ocean builder, the purpose of the rule was fairly apparent (prevent floating platform builds on the ocean), even though it has some flaws (doing false positives in some cases). It is not just warning, after 12 warnings you are hard blocked to place anything over water anywhere. Balcony in your house near the lake? Covering irrigation ditch with a farming dirt? It is over water, so no, you can't. Staff is fairly willing to handle ocean builder privs to people, so not really a big deal.
Still not sure about airship-style builds - so far I've not seen anything in the sky not built by staff. While having base in airship is impractical (risk of gravity-assisted death), it may have its beauty. On bugtracker, I see staff often removes any build that is floating in the air. From technical perspective, builds in air does not block airships or anything, so only reason to remove them is if they would give some unfair game advantage (I don't think it is the case) or based on aesthetics/style.
This implies that aesthetics or style can be alone a strong enough reason for removing a build, right? It would be nice to have some examples of acceptable style, or perhaps few borderline examples telling why this is bad, but still somewhat acceptable.
Style/taste is very individual. What one sees as a beautiful medieval-styled dungeon, another can see as horrible gloomy abomination of dark corridors.
And for that "150 distance between areas" rule, I tried to guess original reason behind it, but failed. First I thought that it is to have place to expand, but current implementation rather blocks you (I am unable to expand my base beyond approx. 20x20 size it has now)
#2708 (comment)
It might be nice to have that more detailed description somewhere more accessible to everybody, especially newbies (and good to know you can build a Zeppelin, at least if it looks good :) )
The rules should be short and simple. If one sentence is: "If you have any questions about the rules, contact the staff", then that's better than trying to write everything down to the smallest detail. Nobody reads it and no one can remember it.
on blocky survival, there were about 12-15 rules. at some point i wrote some exegeses outlining specific cases and the results, but these were mostly for other moderators and particularly not for new players.
on your-land, there's a whole lot of exegeses in gitea that aren't visible in-game, but the interested parties can still access them.
"Be excellent to each other and yourself" aka "Don't be an arsehole" is on purpose nothing one could try to find a loophole in. All the other things you believe are "hidden" are derived from this one rule.
The more specific rules are, the more people will like to discuss that their specific use case is not covered by this and that rule. Everyone understands what "be nice!" means.
If there is a wall guarding a cake, people will turn their mind to how to climb the wall. If there is a free kitchen, free ingredients and an example cake, people will turn their mind to cooking. Sure, some will eat the cake, some will shit in the sink, some might steal the fridge. My target group are those who at least attempt something - not even necessarily a cake.
To your examples and why there is no general answer:
IMO yes, as long as it fits. Making an airship carrier will most likely be a piece of art by itself, but not really on topic. Making an awesome medieval ship right outside someone else's harbour, blocking their entrance is most likely on topic but without the harbour's consent the wrong place to do such a thing - especially when cannons are aimed at the harbour and similar aggressive moves come with it. Make the most awesome ship right in the path of where we hold our monthly rowboat races is most likely also not the best of ideas. You get the point?
IMO yes, as long as it fits. Take a couple of the above examples and apply them to airships and balloons.
IMO yes, as long it is obvious, there is no (or at least very little) chance some unsuspecting person might be troubled by it. If you make a well people could fall in, provide a way out. Consider that not everyone has crystal boots and can jump a 2 block obstacle.
We already removed a Millenium Falcon - and placed it near an area where it was deemed fitting. I personally don't want people try the rules and now build spaceships and UFOs and Death Stars all over, only for me having to find and discuss and move them. If you want to build pure futuristic, I'd recommend a different server - suspension of disbelief is already pretty stressed when it comes to floating cobble.
There are plans to technically enforce this.
This is meant to prohibit people buildings and protecting a cobble wall right outside the doorstep of your awesome castle. This server is SO huge, there is not the slightest need to build near anyone.
It's not protected, so everyone can break it again. Can you think of how two excellent people would solve this?
If x is the distance to the other persons area: Not without their consent, because it goes closer than the 150 meters. The person who was there second decided to build near the first. It doesn't come as a surprise to him, that he has a neighbour very close by. He can hardly complain when this suddenly causes inconveniences. At most the one who came first could ask the second to move elsewhere, because he intends to expand in this direction. Sure, the second could then point to the rules and say he doesn't violate any, because he keeps a 150 meter distance. But ... does the second really want to settle where most likely his neighbour doesn't want him?
True. That's some thing we need to change. Meanwhile, there IS a penalty for not replanting, you can get locked out of the public farm by area ban.
They drop a lot of meat. Cities may have their own rules, they must make them public and utmost accessible, but then those rules can be enforced in those cities. If your city demands and everyone knows that people must wear a tomato skin and every wednesday people may only move backwards, then you can punish them for not doing so.
Yes. You can play without ever coming into contact with any rule. That's why they are not global and why you need to know them only when you use a certain mechanic above the basic gameplay.
If you want to have a skin, you may, but it must adhere to the skin rules.
If you want to grab food from the public farm, you must replant.
If you want to create and area, you must comply with distance rules.
...
Noone ever forces you to use any of those things. But if you do, you need to agree to the rules. There is no global rule against taking pictures but in the sauna you are forbidden to do so.
A false positive would be someone who wants to build a ship? He will ask and get the priv and can be instructed on why this thing exists. Ever since, the number of floating cobble huts on the ocean has vanished to none.
There is
/faq tnt, but since there is no way for a normal player to obtain this priv at the moment experiments and exceptions notwithstanding, there is no need for documentationWhen you are afk, there is no way to tell you to shut down a machine. As soon as you see that notification, you shut down your machine. This is common sense, unless you demand people carry a pager and when it beeps, they rush back to their PC and push a button.
We trust YOU to do the right thing. That's what this is all about. Sure, you could be malicious and not replant right enough to not trigger a staff reaction, you could build a giant wall right outside someone's reach but well within their sight, sure you could go afk and leave that mesemachine running and pretend you didn't see the shutdown notice. But ... why? You don't jump the queue in your local supermarket and you don't sell arms to Africa. You are here because of your own enjoyment. If you want to find loopholes and hack the planet, then do so, but then report them and help us improve.
There will be no very good place unless you make it happen.
Typical way, which I use machines on other servers is (once machine is tested and debugged) to load goods (like here a full chest of cobble), estimate time needed to finish the work (cobble -> gravel -> dirt -> sand -> glass) ... so that could take like 30 minutes, then switch the machine on and go AFK for those 30 minutes. You can't leave the machines running and go exploring, as those machines would stop and if you have nothing to do in the vicinity of the machine and you do not want to stare in the wall for 30 minutes, you go AFK.
So wonder if such approach would be acceptable here.
If I hear the message, I can of course stop the machine, but if I don't hear it due to being AFK - there are no evil intention, just I am really not sitting behind the keyboard. The staff can still teleport to me and push the big red button themselves though :).
it sounds like alt accounts were not allowed on that server? that changes the game a lot. we allow alt accounts, though i personally want more restrictions on them.
at the very least, there needs to be a clear way to shut off your machine that staff can toggle. providing a switch and a sign is usually enough. making use of a "mesecons_onlinedetector:online_detector_off" is certainly helpful but not strictly required, particularly if the machine is something that is only doing any sort of action every few seconds. the throttling provided by the mesecons_debug mod is over-zealous currently and it's unlikely that your machine is going to cause meaningful lag right now, no matter how involved it is
They are, but such approach won't be useful if you need those manufactured materials for your further construction. You then need to wait for the result.
What additional restrictions would you like to apply to alts?
Yes, rules mandate a big red button to shut the machine down :)
I could incorporate online detector (or rather two of them with OR gate, as I have an alt here :) in the design, that would nicely solve the issue of possibly forgetting to turn the machine off before leaving ;)
Seems like the explanations sufficed? If not, we can happily reopen and discuss some more :D