FOREWORD
before I start this long list of suggestions, I would like to first off give a shout out to some of the institutions that I will be suggesting improvements for.
First, I would like to thank the staff. Many people assume that being a staff member is easy. However, this could not be farther from the truth, as I know from my own catastrophic attempts at trying out as a helper on smaller servers. Being a staff member takes dedication and effort, and no matter what the situation, they do their best to help.
The same goes for officers. Despite the rage that we've all felt over a false arrest, they do their job spectacularly and overall make the server a much safer and more enjoyable place. Despite me being an utterly terrible example of my own beliefs, we should treat staff and officers with much more respect than we currently do, as their jobs are far from easy. (Obviously all players should be respected, but I believe that these two groups, in particular, find themselves beset by angry players.
Suggestion #1: Slightly increase mob spawn rate in /warp wild (But still keep it lower than normal Minecraft)
At the moment, the server has a few useless jobs, including taxi driver, vice president and, though some may disagree, hunter. Why is hunter useless? By mining, I can make around $200 a minute just off the job, and easily another 350 more If I sell the resources. Even a high-level hunter only receives around $100-$200 per mob they kill. While this would be significant in a normal minecraft world, spawn rates in the wild are but a fraction of normal. This leads to an arduous job only truly practical at night that also pays very little. In addition, players are susceptible to being killed and losing their items in the wild. Again, for comparison, mining is far easier, requires less effort, pays more and is far safer.
In addition, finding materials is extremely hard in the wild. Because spawn rates are so low, the only real reasons to go there are for a free building area or gathering of resources like stone, wood, and ores. I understand that this would make nether stars and other rare items more common. However, the ramifications of a few more nether stars would be relatively minor economically. Due to how rare wither skeletons are even in normal minecraft, the wither would still be very hard to spawn. Furthermore, because nether stars are extremely expensive, their value would drop to a slightly more reasonable price. At the moment, beacons are too hard to make, right-clicking with them often yields junk, so the only great use for them is in slimefun, which is not of interest to some players.
The maybe 25 to 35% increase in spawn rate would make the hunter job more worthwhile and the wild much more appealing to players. In short, it would balance a job and turn a desolate landscape into a significantly more lively place.
Suggestion #2: Add Self-Defense.
Ohh, boy. I know this one has come up before, and there’s no doubt legitimate reasons against its implementation. Self-defense. What I’m proposing here isn’t really a radical rule change. It’s just the ability to fight back when combat-tagged. However, this is what I suggest. Fighting back with lethal force, like a sword, is still jailable. However, if you try to keep them away until police can respond, such as grandpa’s walking stick or another knockback item, you are not able to be jailed
This feels perfectly reasonable, does it not? The ability to fight back with NON-LETHAL force. The last part makes it hard to abuse, as it is still illegal to kill someone. This would give police critical time to make the arrest before the person was killed. It’s a bit late to make the arrest after the murder, and this is how we could make the jobs of many officers easier.
Now, how would the police know who was the assailant? Well, they could clearly see one person hitting with a stick or some other weapon, while the other struck with a sword. The assailant would be using an offensive weapon, and the victim would be using a non-lethal weapon. This again closes all potential ways to abuse the system. If police see both people using weapons, then they are both breaking the law. It would be easy to notice the assailant and easy to make the arrest.
So is that really too difficult to do? No extra plugins, no revamp of the laws, just a little bit that permits non-lethal self-defense. Seems pretty reasonable to me, especially if it means someone can buy precious seconds and not drop some of their hard-earned money on death, or have to pay an assault bail for defending oneself.
Suggestion #3: Have More Staff
The McCities staff team does a stellar job. That being said, they alone can not handle all the requests for help from players. Very often there is only one member online, and they are noticeably very busy, or even no staff online for long stretches of time. It would be great to have a few more staff members. There are many qualified individuals who would love to give it a try, so what’s to lose?
Suggestion #4: Changing the Economy.
This is the big one. It may just be me, but over the course of playing on McCities I have noticed the economy change drastically. Too much money is being pumped into the system, making players far richer. From an economic standpoint, the pie is steadily becoming larger. However, the increase in the size of the economic pie is not matched with a new flow of players, nor is it matched with prices adapting accordingly.
For example, in real life, if I mine and then sell to buyers, the amount of money does not increase like it does on McCities. The amount that the diamond is worth is added to the pie. However, consider McCities. Instead of a private corporation or a government paying me, which keeps the pie stagnant, the money spontaneously appears. When I sell to the shop, the money also just appears, instead of in real life when the money comes out of someone else’s wallet.
This makes money less valuable. After all, when there is too much money in the system, inflation starts to occur. If all the players are richer, then they will want more for what they sell. After all, the old prices aren’t worth the goods anymore, as the old price isn’t much to them at all. The pie keeps getting bigger, but the slices become so big that a smaller slice hardly matters. What has been created here is in effect a pie with infinite potential for size but a much lower potential for more people to share it.
This leads to two problems.
1: Shop prices are stagnant, so even when money is less valuable the shop does not adapt. This could make the shop ridiculously cheap in the future.
2: New players who join are extremely poor. If you start as a tourist and 90% of the server has enough money to become executives, then it is very, very hard to get a start and find someone of similar economic status
So what solutions do I propose?
I have no definitive solutions, but I can provide several ideas.
1: Discourage selling items to the shop. This is not to say that I want abolish the shop, but merely have more players set up chest shops that buy for a higher price than the shop. The buyer gets the resources they need for much cheaper than buying from the shop, and the seller makes more than they do in the shop. And for everyone else, it keeps inflation in check. If more people are motivated to pay for materials from other players, the value of money is kept in check.
2: Encourage people to buy more from the shop. When people buy from the shop, the total money actually decreases, as the shop is effectively an infinite stash of cash that is inaccessible to the player base. The small decrease in the size of the economic pie can be used to counterbalance the insane amount of money flowing in from the largest money-making jobs on the server, such as the fishing and mining industries.
3: Encourage player-to-player trade as a job, perhaps even have a new job called “Merchant”. Merchants would receive a percent bonus on any item that they sold or bought on /ah. Instead of more and more wealth being pumped into the system, the increased player trade would result in a redistribution of player wealth and items, keeping the size of the economic pie at a reasonable size. It would also encourage more people to do business with others, instead of merely selling everything at /warp shop.
before I start this long list of suggestions, I would like to first off give a shout out to some of the institutions that I will be suggesting improvements for.
First, I would like to thank the staff. Many people assume that being a staff member is easy. However, this could not be farther from the truth, as I know from my own catastrophic attempts at trying out as a helper on smaller servers. Being a staff member takes dedication and effort, and no matter what the situation, they do their best to help.
The same goes for officers. Despite the rage that we've all felt over a false arrest, they do their job spectacularly and overall make the server a much safer and more enjoyable place. Despite me being an utterly terrible example of my own beliefs, we should treat staff and officers with much more respect than we currently do, as their jobs are far from easy. (Obviously all players should be respected, but I believe that these two groups, in particular, find themselves beset by angry players.
Suggestion #1: Slightly increase mob spawn rate in /warp wild (But still keep it lower than normal Minecraft)
At the moment, the server has a few useless jobs, including taxi driver, vice president and, though some may disagree, hunter. Why is hunter useless? By mining, I can make around $200 a minute just off the job, and easily another 350 more If I sell the resources. Even a high-level hunter only receives around $100-$200 per mob they kill. While this would be significant in a normal minecraft world, spawn rates in the wild are but a fraction of normal. This leads to an arduous job only truly practical at night that also pays very little. In addition, players are susceptible to being killed and losing their items in the wild. Again, for comparison, mining is far easier, requires less effort, pays more and is far safer.
In addition, finding materials is extremely hard in the wild. Because spawn rates are so low, the only real reasons to go there are for a free building area or gathering of resources like stone, wood, and ores. I understand that this would make nether stars and other rare items more common. However, the ramifications of a few more nether stars would be relatively minor economically. Due to how rare wither skeletons are even in normal minecraft, the wither would still be very hard to spawn. Furthermore, because nether stars are extremely expensive, their value would drop to a slightly more reasonable price. At the moment, beacons are too hard to make, right-clicking with them often yields junk, so the only great use for them is in slimefun, which is not of interest to some players.
The maybe 25 to 35% increase in spawn rate would make the hunter job more worthwhile and the wild much more appealing to players. In short, it would balance a job and turn a desolate landscape into a significantly more lively place.
Suggestion #2: Add Self-Defense.
Ohh, boy. I know this one has come up before, and there’s no doubt legitimate reasons against its implementation. Self-defense. What I’m proposing here isn’t really a radical rule change. It’s just the ability to fight back when combat-tagged. However, this is what I suggest. Fighting back with lethal force, like a sword, is still jailable. However, if you try to keep them away until police can respond, such as grandpa’s walking stick or another knockback item, you are not able to be jailed
This feels perfectly reasonable, does it not? The ability to fight back with NON-LETHAL force. The last part makes it hard to abuse, as it is still illegal to kill someone. This would give police critical time to make the arrest before the person was killed. It’s a bit late to make the arrest after the murder, and this is how we could make the jobs of many officers easier.
Now, how would the police know who was the assailant? Well, they could clearly see one person hitting with a stick or some other weapon, while the other struck with a sword. The assailant would be using an offensive weapon, and the victim would be using a non-lethal weapon. This again closes all potential ways to abuse the system. If police see both people using weapons, then they are both breaking the law. It would be easy to notice the assailant and easy to make the arrest.
So is that really too difficult to do? No extra plugins, no revamp of the laws, just a little bit that permits non-lethal self-defense. Seems pretty reasonable to me, especially if it means someone can buy precious seconds and not drop some of their hard-earned money on death, or have to pay an assault bail for defending oneself.
Suggestion #3: Have More Staff
The McCities staff team does a stellar job. That being said, they alone can not handle all the requests for help from players. Very often there is only one member online, and they are noticeably very busy, or even no staff online for long stretches of time. It would be great to have a few more staff members. There are many qualified individuals who would love to give it a try, so what’s to lose?
Suggestion #4: Changing the Economy.
This is the big one. It may just be me, but over the course of playing on McCities I have noticed the economy change drastically. Too much money is being pumped into the system, making players far richer. From an economic standpoint, the pie is steadily becoming larger. However, the increase in the size of the economic pie is not matched with a new flow of players, nor is it matched with prices adapting accordingly.
For example, in real life, if I mine and then sell to buyers, the amount of money does not increase like it does on McCities. The amount that the diamond is worth is added to the pie. However, consider McCities. Instead of a private corporation or a government paying me, which keeps the pie stagnant, the money spontaneously appears. When I sell to the shop, the money also just appears, instead of in real life when the money comes out of someone else’s wallet.
This makes money less valuable. After all, when there is too much money in the system, inflation starts to occur. If all the players are richer, then they will want more for what they sell. After all, the old prices aren’t worth the goods anymore, as the old price isn’t much to them at all. The pie keeps getting bigger, but the slices become so big that a smaller slice hardly matters. What has been created here is in effect a pie with infinite potential for size but a much lower potential for more people to share it.
This leads to two problems.
1: Shop prices are stagnant, so even when money is less valuable the shop does not adapt. This could make the shop ridiculously cheap in the future.
2: New players who join are extremely poor. If you start as a tourist and 90% of the server has enough money to become executives, then it is very, very hard to get a start and find someone of similar economic status
So what solutions do I propose?
I have no definitive solutions, but I can provide several ideas.
1: Discourage selling items to the shop. This is not to say that I want abolish the shop, but merely have more players set up chest shops that buy for a higher price than the shop. The buyer gets the resources they need for much cheaper than buying from the shop, and the seller makes more than they do in the shop. And for everyone else, it keeps inflation in check. If more people are motivated to pay for materials from other players, the value of money is kept in check.
2: Encourage people to buy more from the shop. When people buy from the shop, the total money actually decreases, as the shop is effectively an infinite stash of cash that is inaccessible to the player base. The small decrease in the size of the economic pie can be used to counterbalance the insane amount of money flowing in from the largest money-making jobs on the server, such as the fishing and mining industries.
3: Encourage player-to-player trade as a job, perhaps even have a new job called “Merchant”. Merchants would receive a percent bonus on any item that they sold or bought on /ah. Instead of more and more wealth being pumped into the system, the increased player trade would result in a redistribution of player wealth and items, keeping the size of the economic pie at a reasonable size. It would also encourage more people to do business with others, instead of merely selling everything at /warp shop.
