Some thoughts on where we are going...

[yottabyte]

Most of your proposed solutions include using client mods like IndustrialCraft, Buildcraft, Forcefield etc. This is something we try to stay away from. Requiring people to install mods to join the server is a bit of a hassle and I'm sure it would cause us to lose a lot of potential new and old players.

Locked chests can be picked if the owner hasn't been online for a certain time. I think it's 2 weeks normally. I do agree that it's a bit of a paradox when you don't want people to only get attacked when they're offline but at the same time that wouldn't encourage them to come online if they can only be attacked when they're online. We've been having the same struggle when trying to come up with a good way of doing town raids/battles which leads to the next point.

We can all agree that the town protection at the moment is kind of stupid. We had an idea from the start of the server but it proved to be full of issues so we eventually scratched it. Ever since then we've been trying to think of feasable ways of doing the wars/battles between towns. Actually, it has been more than a year since we first started to brainstorm ideas for it. I'm starting to feel like there just isn't a perfect way of doing the raiding, wars, whatever you want to call it.

I believe that the emeralds economy will be of great use once we get a better NPC trading system and player shops. We still only have vague ideas on how we're dealing with this so unfortunately the economy is pretty stale at the moment.

We have been discussing some ways of improving the server. What we need is a goal for new players. One idea that we discussed was that we let towns (factions) battle to control this huge fort somewhere in the map. The fort would have a constant flow of supplies and therefore the faction that controls it would have an advantage in defending it. A problem with using player built towns instead of a special area for the battles is that players have to risk getting their hard work destroyed so no one really wants to have a battle in their own town.

Again, this is just a small idea that we've discussed for a bit and there's still a lot of details to be covered but it would give players a goal on the server and I think advertising could be done a whole lot easier.