Welcome Ya’ll to another entry of Spying on Staff. 

Cerberus had to leave the meeting a little early this week, but we had enough time to discuss the big item that was on his list to talk about.

This might be a controversial change to most folks, but we’ve noticed an increase in intentional dying on the server as a means of travel. This isn’t what graveyards are meant for, and as a result, we are looking at ways to discourage dying as a means of travel. A solution that was proposed was a sort of “graveyard sickness” where certain permissions wouldn’t be available for a brief period after each death. To go in depth on the solution we came up with:

  • Upon death a player will receive a temporary permission (30 minutes) that will cause various NPC’s to refuse service to the player.
  • The services we would like to have temporarily disabled after death:
    • Bank
    • Guild Vault
    • Player Shops
    • Server Shops
    • Auction Houses
    • Enderchest access
  • Port Authority, Dragon Travel, and other means of quicker travel will remain available for players to use so they can get back to their items without them despawning.

A few examples of how this would function: You are out near your city mining in the wilderness and a creeper sneaks up behind you, killing you and sending you to a graveyard. You are still able to use the Port Authority to return to your city and go back into your mines to retrieve your items. This would not be any different to how it is now, and the game wouldn’t punish you for dying.

Scenario Two is a little different: You are out at your wilderness farm and have loaded up your enderchest with shulkers full of goods to sell. You intentionally kill yourself to respawn in a city so you can use Port Authority and / or Dragon Travel to sell your goods. This is where the 30 minute ‘debuff’ would come into play, preventing you from using the enderchest and shops at your destination until the timer runs out.

Our reasoning for wanting to make this change is our philosophy is dying should not be an intentional affair, and shouldn’t be something that becomes a regular part of a player’s strategy. We feel like the solution we came to is extremely fair all around and most importantly, we aren’t punishing people for dying. I feel like 30 minutes is a good time to arrive at since a player can get back to a city within that time frame, removing the strategy of dying to get there quicker.

There would be some areas where dying will not give you the debuff, such as mob arenas, dungeons, or the festival would not apply it. What are ya’lls thoughts on this? I think intentional dying makes the game pretty unfun, in my opinion. ~Cerb

Cerb was pretty busy this past week, so he is still working on new documentation and adding new heads to the headshop.

Some quest outlines were shared by NeonKittyzz for discussion. We definitely want a quest line that helps teach the brewery plugin to players and maybe helps them in their quest for finding recipes.

Tdub has brought forward that sharks seem to be giving minimal to no damage and are behaving really oddly in terms of their movement mechanics. Upper staff will be taking a look at their mechanics. 

As well as sharks, it seems like shulkers aren’t dropping shells as much as they should be, and Azher said he would look into whether that is the case or not. 

Like I said, it was a short meeting. While brief it did allow for us to bring up some legitimate topics of concern and also allow for us to share in some progresses along our individual projects.

Thank you all for reading, and see you next week! 

NeoTokyoNora ~<3