This is just an idea I'd like to explore; get rid of the portals ability--or at least hinder them. Portals accomplish one major thing: They make travel more convenient. Now, at first glance that sounds like a nice feature. However, portals had a few consequences on the previous iteration of MassiveCraft. For starters, they were the founding blocks of raid portals. Those portals made it incredibly easy to camp outside of factions and endless lay siege to a faction until a party gets board and logs off, which led to some fun conflicts, but it was equally annoying. Especially on the receiving end. The other consequence, is it makes it far too easy to have an immune and defendable "saferoom". The old Vanos /f home was blocks below the surface and untouchable to raiders. It was an extensive tunnel system in which faction members could hang out in and accomplish things while raiders trample around on the surface. By the end of our era, we seldom left it. This isn't fun for anyone, as raiders get bored and defenders are locked underground or in a box somewhere. So what do I suggest? Either remove portals entirely and replace it with some sort of enhanced movement feature, or alter portals making them slightly less convenient. This will force people to interact with factions closer to them and prevent factions from monopolizing the PvP scene. Wait? Stop the monopoly of PvP? Portals had that much of an affect? Yep! If players can't bounce between massive potion brewing facilities and enchanting rooms and member storages, it makes it more difficult to extend an empire. Likewise, if a large faction can't teleport around the map and smother-out small factions as the pop up, it'll give smaller factions room to grow and interact with the neighbors/environment. Lastly it would force defenders to get more creative about how they design their bases, to provide an architectural advantage. On a side note, it would also make victories feel more "victorious". If a defender can wipe a raid party, theoretically it should take more time for that party to reemerge and regroup, making pressure feel much less constant, and be in favor of the defenders who have access to /f home, as opposed to the aggressors who can just force the defending party into an enclosed area and camp there. So more specifically here's the changes I would make (pick and choose your favorites): Remove portals and add more movement based traits. This would allow raid parties to traverse land relatively quickly, but more than just a few steps from their /f home. Or, nerf portals so that just a few per account are allotted. This way, players can build secure portals if they choose, but cannot liter them around the map. (I would not recommend this alone, as larger factions will have a direct advantage). Or, remove portals and add another defensive feature that would make securing an /f home similarly easy. Like special walls that the enemy must break down to get past, giving defenders more of an opportunity to fend off a raid. Or, adjust portals to cost money to make (again, would not recommend on its own as rich factions will monopolize and dominate smaller factions.) Or, just remove portals and see what happens. Or, EDITED BASED ON USER FEEDBACK remove portals and add horses that could be summoned via command or gui, that when killed, can be recreated using the same command sequence. Like if I entered /horse and opened a menu that showed me my "stable" and "tamed horses" as eggs. I could then click an egg to summon a horse and travel around on that, not worrying about it dying or despawning, because I could simply recall that horse, similar to a pet feature. Then we could also personalize horses through that menu by picking patterns or names (all for a price of course). Or, add a timer in which portals cannot be used again until a certain cooldown is reached. Or, add durability to portals in which they will break after a certain amount of uses. Or, decrease the range that portals can be made (so that far away portals that teleport you around the map can’t be made). To be honest, I'm really just bored of PvPing outside massive towers until a faction gets bored and logs off. The reason Vanos picked on smaller facs, was because they tended to have more town based builds, so raiding was more fun when you were strategizing your infiltration plans, and looking for entries and vulnerabilities in their designs. Fighting at maximum security towers was just so lame, especially when it turned into god armor and potion kit pvp. Quoting my post from here.
Using horses to travel would be so much fun if they were actually viable and with portals, they aren't. Just something I thought about from this post...I don't really have anything to add aside from I like what you stated. I think remove portals.
Limit portals? Yes. Remove them? No. IMO portals should be restricted to your own faction, and limiting your amount of portals on your faction to like 3 or 4 pairs.
I like the idea of limiting it to the faction. I also added three more suggestions to the bulleted list: adding a cooldown to portals, limiting the distance one can make a portal, and making it so portals become consumable with limited uses. Thoughts?
I don't think you have any idea how big Essalonia is tbh And it's a big map with NO WATER INLETS which means no flywater It took me 20 minutes to run 5000 blocks. For comparison, Essalonia is 12000 blocks, of much harsher terrain than what I ran over. AND that was in creative without having to eat or deal with mobs. 12000/5000=2.4 20x2.4=48 You really wanna spend 48 minutes running across the map, for the sake of "immersion" and "travel"? Really? I don't think you do, and I think you don't think you do either. Also, horses really aren't as fast as you think they are. At absolute BEST, they are slightly less than 3x faster than running at speed2. They also have the disadvantage of taking mad fall damage, as well as just straightup not being able to traverse certain terrain, as well as lagging, kicking you for flying, etc... Increase the price of portals? Maybe, but you have to remember that we're going into a fresh world, with no emerald blocks on the start. It'll still be fairly difficult to obtain emeralds anyway.
Just a roleplayer browsing late at night, and wanted to toss my two cents in. Tunnels have nothing to do with portals. How will removing portals fix that issue?
This has been discussed internally within the staff team, but portals is a trickier issue for some. There are some calls to keep portals the way they are, make them more expensive or scrap them entirely. The last option I do not believe is necessary, the middle option is possible. The CreativeGates config can be easily edited to select what item is used to create portals (i.e. clocks and emeralds), both of these parameters can be changed accordingly. I believe if we are going to make portals more expensive, we should swap the clock for a more expensive item or get our Tech Department to code a feature into the plugin allowing for a regal sum to be taken out on portal creation. Just a hypothetical idea. In factions, there is a config value that can be edited to force claims to be connected. This means that a factions claims cannot be scattered around the map. The main advantages for this is the concept of city's becomes more viable as a faction has to focus around a certain area, and thus their facilities grow around their area. In a smaller area, there is less of a need for portals. A disadvantage to this would be builder factions, they like to build a variety of city's for their members to live in. Another disadvantage may be lag for players. If there's too much compounded into one place, then that can lead to severe FPS lag in the surrounding region and kill lower end PC's. Just an idea that has been bounced around and would like to get some opinions on. Regardless, for now CreativeGates will remain the same until we see the need for it to be nerfed, but I doubt it will come to that.
If the feedback isn't enough to convince you to at least try something different with portals, how will you ever find out whether there is a "need" to nerf portals?
The feedback is about two or three people. Everybody else uses portals, and quite frankly the world is so big we kind of need them.
That is simply false, and your points against the idea aren't strong enough to simply brush off the entire suggestion as if you just singlehandedly settled it.
Portals are fine as is. They allow for quick travel around factions, bridge the gap between far away bases, and create quick conflict by raid portals. Travel is nice, but portals will always be a viable option for those who do not want to spend 75% of their time just travelling from point A to B.
This was discussed within the PvP think tank as well as some staff chats like Cnoc said. One of the suggestions I made that seemed to be well supported was to change the item required to create portals to a nether star or other unobtainable item. That would mean staff have full control over how easy that item is to get, either through quests, admin shops, mob drops, custom recipes, etc., and could easily either reduce or increase the viability of portals.
There's been one person's feedback that said remove portals. The rest (being two [including yourself], like @Zacatero said) just made small suggestions that portals be nerfed. Meanwhile there has been at least an equal amount of people (3)'s feedback arguing against or simply not being in favor of the remove or nerfing of portals. No one is attacking you or the thread, calm down.
Where do you get your numbers from? By the way, don't just go assume people are mad over emotionless text. How about you quell that voice in your head that reads everything with an angry tone?
Keep the discussion on topic. Don't attack other people's arguments, constructively criticize them if needs be.
Spoiler: Response to Edrom Well, I get my numbers the same way you would. Looking at the people on this thread who've responded with opinions for or against the change. I'm not upset myself, as I think traveling via horse and roads again would be actually be a really cool idea. Maybe even underground subways or what have you. I'm not reading "everything" in an "angry" tone, I think your posts were maybe unintentionally aggressive by the tone of them, as you don't seem to notice you're coming off as abrasive. Maybe I came or am still coming off as angry as well, and I'm sorry. My point with my original post was to not start to derail the thread with statements coming off as hostile like @CnocBride said. A question for @CnocBride about portal configuration. Is there a way to limit the distance that can be between portals? I think that might be a good way to encourage travel again and also not make portals completely unusable but also not be able to teleport everywhere across the world.
Sadly, no there is not. It could be configured into the plugin. @TheComputerGeek2 can provide insight into this.
I disagree with removing portals, though perhaps some way to nerf them would be acceptable. More expensive would work, but I personally am in favor of regulating portals and making them only activate in faction territory (if that last part can be done). By regulating I mean that portals could be limited to utility & peaceful use only, to prevent the creation of raid portals that just make raids into drawn out waiting games of "who gets bored and logs off first". This would tie into the claimed-creation aspect by making it that much easier to locate a raid portal and get staff involved. That said, portals don't really have any effect on base design - replace a portal with an iron-door airlock and you have the same secure, underground features as you do right now - so I don't see how that can be part of the argument.
As Winterless stated, we'll be starting over, meaning the portals in my opinion will already be expensive enough, Emeralds is the one ore I tend to find the least of and in my opinion, portals encourage PvP. I do think that PvPers tend to stick to the 1 or 2 PvP factions around making it so that smaller factions can't really defend themselfs but it doesn't create a monopoly in my opinion.
Here's a long comment that I wanted to type earlier, but only having my phone and being at work made typing a long post and quoting multiple sections less than ideal. In the upcoming version of the server I hope to see a rule against claiming your raid portals. In current day Massive the only reason people started doing this was because of MassiveRestore. They were lazy and didn't want to have to rebuild their portal every time the chunk it was in restored (which is a bit ridiculous considering the huge intervals of time between chunk restoration, but whatever) and figured it easier to just pop down a one chunk claim at least 10 chunks out and call it a day. I know a discussion of this being a possible rule has already occurred in various channels, and it does have some support. But what if the faction just decides to claim a chunk and throw down a portal anyway? Thankfully moderation tools the staff have at hand make it super easy to see that so long as a report is made, and I'm sure reports will be made if one faction suspect another of possibly breaking the proposed rule in question. This section really overstates the effect to which portals have on PVP. They're essential for fast response times yes, but the issue at least in current day MassiveCraft is that once the raid portal has been set down, it can never be disabled by the defending faction because of the claim. My above comment section would at least make being able to disable the portal a possibility for the raiders, and as you mentioned, portals are sometimes used to harass new factions on the server. It doesn't take an established player on the server to go grab a shovel and a pick and start checking the boundaries of their city for raid portals to take out and harvest the emerald blocks from. If the defending faction doesn't even choose to go out and at least try to find the enemy raid portals, then they don't get to complain about being raided. Your point about people bouncing between their potion brewing facilities and enchanting rooms is very low on the list when you lump it in with all the other possible, note I said possible because people have differing views on this, portals create overall. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the time it takes a person to travel within their faction claims to prepare for a fight/return to one, I'd put more emphasis on the actual act of taking the portal back to the raid. Because you are right you later state: Let the people get ready as quickly as possible within their own faction claims, but do punish them if they died and are in the process of returning to the fight. That's why of the possible solutions you posted, this one is at most the one I'd even be somewhat ok with: This one is kind of double purposed: It slows down people returning to the fight if they have to pay attention to how many uses a portal has left. And if you have 10 raiders streaming through a portal multiple times after dying to return to a fight, the uses go quick. If someone doesn't pay attention and they try and go through and they get a message like "As you attempt to enter the portal, the magic keeping the gate open becomes unstable and collapses on top of you, severing the gateway" and the raiders on the other end don't have emerald blocks and a named clock to make another one, your current raid operation just got crippled until you can get the portal set back up. For this purpose I'd like to see something like a "host" or "home" portal setup, which is always the portal built in faction land. So if you have a raid portal with one end in your raid hub and one end in the wilderness outside someone's base, the portal in your hub is considered the "home or host" portal, and then either one of three things could happen: When the durability of the portal gateway runs out, the "home" portal blows up taking the emerald blocks with it, and then you have to rebuild one side. When the durability of the portal gateway runs out, the wilderness portal blows up taking the emerald blocks with it, and then you have to rebuild one side. When the durability of the portal gateway runs out, both the "home" portal and the wilderness portal blows up and you have to rebuild both sides of it. This way the response of raiders is significantly slowed down if they aren't paying attention to their portal's durability and they try to get one too many raiders in their raid party through the portal and it blows up in their face. The other purpose of this I mentioned is that if the portal blows up and the emerald blocks go with it, people will need to continue to grind for emerald to keep their portals up if they accidentally blow them up through durability use. Maybe make portals in faction land not have durability, which would only allow option #2 of the "home and wilderness" portals situation to happen, but having to constantly replace all your travel portals in your base would be extremely taxing. I could see how it would make sense, but finding the perfect balance between convenience and fair is extremely important, and you might have to trade one thing (wilderness portal blowing up) for another (portals in faction land not having durability) to find that perfect balance. Really, I think you laid too much emphasis on how much you think portals had a negative impact on PVP overall. If you were to rank things that negatively impacted PVP, and we all agreed (for the sake of this example) that portals had a negative impact, the list might look something like this: Things that negatively impacted PVP on MassiveCraft: Broken PVP mechanics People not taking their factions and the game seriously ....... ......... ............ .............. .................. ...................... 9894181894. Portals I say this because back in 2012-2013 MassiveCraft, portals were exclusive to premiums, who could also wear diamond armor while non-premiums couldn't, and were kind of the standard bearers for PVP. Premiums facilitated a lot of PVP for premiums, and honestly PVP probably would had happened at a much smaller scale without portals. The worlds back then were a decent size smaller than the size Essalonia is (12K x 12K), so if the complete removal of portals back then would have crippled or at least severely reduced PVP due to world size and raid response times, it'll be just as or more crippling in Essalonia. I don't think, and I really hope I'm right, that we won't be seeing too many claims like this. With the 50 member cap, claim power is valued. I would imagine the reasons a lot of those raid towers are kept in current Massive is because they were already claimed when the cap was implemented, and thus not unclaimed, even if the faction that had them claimed didn't have power to claim anywhere else or where overclaimed. They just didn't see a reason to get rid of them. With the complete reset, one world, and limited claim power from the start based on the 50 member maximum, you won't have factions that for lack of a better word have "grandfathered" in claims that even if they're overclaimed they wouldn't lose when the cap was introduced.
This is similar to the way towny claims work. You can only claim land that resides by already existing land claims, and if you want to claim elsewhere, you have to claim the land as an outpost for a large sum of money. I dislike the way towny claiming works because it discourages builders to create multiple cities, and it pushes for towns to centralize because it would be far cheaper to only expand their initial claims. Massive's current claiming system benefits the skilled builders it harbors and encourages them to design multiple provinces, while also giving PvP factions the ability to claim raid portals for quick travel to enemy factions if necessary. I am not fond of this idea. The staff team shouldn't control or try to limit the portals by changing the materials required to create one. Emerald is a fairly rare material that is readily available in the world if someone wanted mine the materials for a portal. I think there is a beauty in that because it rewards people who take the time to mine for those materials rather than forcing them into a quest or easily purchasing the materials at an admin shop. Changing the material and creating an admin shop as the only way to obtain the new item could be a possibility in the future when the economy starts to become inflated. It would be a good way to push money out of the economy.
I do very much like the idea of portals not being able to link anywhere outside your own claim. This would force regional conflicts and alliances and long distance trade. Horses would have so much more value. Yes, the map is big, and that's awesome! But being able to travel across it in the blink of an eye makes it so very small. Some Oblivion Crisis style side solution would have to be made for still allowing temporary raid portals. Just /f home-ing to your nearest ally may not cut it.
Okay but if I buy livestock or horses I can't teleport it. And I've had to do that in the past so... And /trade doesn't work worldwide anymore so... And the different regions of the new map have specific resources so... Not sure where you're getting that omniscient answer from.
I'm not sure if it's been said before me, but removing portals would make "boat travel" impossible (as my method for it depends on portals). I can see why it'd be useful in other ways, but this is a major negative for me. Though, of course, you could always make a system where you apply for a staff member to make a portal between the boats, but that's a lot of work.
