Suggestions in relation to griefing, grief-group-voting and some other general issues

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

Many have complained about the issues of griefing and what the last few updates have done in terms of it as well as people having some lag issues. Long-term world in a public as well as just public server scenarios in general have things that can be fixed, but currently have nothing really to deal with them without pretty high maintenance of the server by server host and admins. So, here are my suggestions on the matter and remember; even if you don't like my explicit suggestions, doesn't mean you should dismiss the approaches altogether. Things can always be different and might even be better if done differently, so whether you like them or not or have something better to put on the table is always open here (unless the topic gets locked for whatever reason):

* Players must be at least day 10 in order to cast a vote

* Players have a delay in voting if their vote fails early and somewhere mid-game. The delay would be a day long at first (from day 10 to day 19) but would decrease every 10 days (by half from the last delay, so 8 minutes, then 4, then 2, then 1 and last being no delay at all or 30 seconds) until day 50.

* Players can get more vote power every 10 days until day 50, when their vote power would be at maximum (1 vote would equal the vote of five day 10 - 19 players). This way newbies who are griefers, even if waiting till day 10 or so in an older world, if tried to kick out mid or late-game players would fail and have themselves be kicked out instead.

* Upon being kicked, players would be sent back to porta/a spawn point far away from any flammable structures and would loot all but a maximum of a stack of each of the basic resources if they had any on them (logs, flint, grass and twigs).

* Players can't light structures on fire

* Players can light items/plants/flammable craftables or place down flame-inducing craftables (e.g. campfire) only if there is 3 or less flammable items/plants/flammable craftables.* Players cannot place down items/plants/flammable craftables within 4 turf range of something that is already burning or smouldering.

* Players cannot attack mobs via fire dart, fire staff or torch if they are nearby flammable structures (10 turf range).

* Hammer requires 3 moon rocks instead of 3 rocks to craft and has 750 durability instead of 75 as well as requires alchemy engine to craft.

* Various things take a varying amount of more times to hammer than before (e.g. Ice Flingomatic takes x5 more times, which is 20, normal Chests require x3 more times, which is 6, Crafting machines, crock pots and ice boxes require x4 amount of times to hammer, which is 16 etc.)

* Structures can have their hammer hit health renewed via various resources (only takes 1 of them to get a structure from 1 hit away from being hammered to full amount) (e.g. Ice Flingomatic, Crock pot, Ice box each need cutstone to be repaired, Science machine requires either rocks or logs, alchemy engine requires either cutstone or boards, Prestihatitator and normal chests require boards, Shadow Manipulator requires Living logs, Basic farm logs, Improved farm rocks etc.)

* After hammering or hitting a structure via hammer a player will not be able to pick up any items from the ground (unless it's a sign, a directional sign, a pig head or a merm head and perhaps some other structures)

* A new structure called Safe is introduced, which acts like a chest, is infammable, has 6 inventory slots, requires 1 gear and 4 cutstone to craft and an alchemy engine to prototype (It cannot be hammered unless open and only by the player who has it open and when hammering requires 20 hammer hits (doesn't close upon being hit by a hammer, only once hammered) and can be repaired via cutstone. When first placing it down, you have it open and can attach a code to it which everyone except the person who has crafted it has to type the correct 4-digit code attached to it in order to open it the first time, after which they can always open it without problem). Since gears are quite, but not too rare especially late-game, crafting them too much would not be too big of an issue.

* A new item called Lock is introduced, which can be attached to Ice Boxes and Chests. It requires 1 moon rock to craft. Upon being attached, the structures it is attached to will act kind of like the Safe and will only be possible to be hammered when open and only by the player who has the structures open. For the lock to be taken off, the chests/ice boxes must be open and the lock can only be taken by the player who has it open. With this, Scaled chests + Locks can replace safes as well as the normal chests. Since normal chests won't be possible to be burnt by players directly, securing them could still be a viable option. Since moon rocks are pretty rare, locks won't be too expensive and abundant.

* A new item called Lock Pick is introduced, which can unlock locked chests, ice boxes and safes for the player who uses it without typing in the code initially. It would require 2 thulecite fragments and at least a broken ancient pseudo station and would have 10 uses. So long as this item is kept secured, this would disallow griefers, unless they go to the ruins, get some thulecite fragments and craft a lock pick, come back and open the chests, they could not open locked chests, whilst allow mid and late game users to open chests that have been either abandoned or are unnecessary or something along the lines. Keeping Lock Picks in chests secured by a lock or safes would be the smart way to keep them away from newbies and griefers, so that only the people you trust and possibly some others who are late-game players can only access the stuff in them, which could perhaps contain some rarer resources, such as gems, thulecite, living logs, nightmare fuel, gears etc. and perhaps some of the common resources as by late-game you would most likely have tons of it and having about half of it locked away so that a looter griefer couldn't take it all would be a smart way to do it.

* Beefalo have a limit of 100 - 200 in terms of their populus in the world.

* Spider queen, upon spawning would never leave a tier 1 spider nest. Instead, when killed, a spider queen would drop 2 spider eggs. This would not only help with spider overpopulation but also make combatting spider queens more necessary as well as make Webbers more useful.

* Spider nests cannot be placed down by player or by spider queen upon despawning (would not despawn due to these conditions) about 10 turfs in radius from a road, any man-made turf, any structures or the portal. Spider queens, upon spawning, if are within that range of those things would have their despawn timer paused (it would also pause whilst the queen has been aggroed by something in general). The spider queen, unless aggroed would not migrate towards any of those things. Unless aggroed, it would stay and could only place itself down as a tier 1 nest within about 5 - 10 turf radius from a "den point". The "den point" would initially be established for each den upon world generating at the exact point where the den has been generated. The point would stay in the same place all the time, however it would change to a different location if the initial world-generated point was next to any man-made turf, structures, roads or perhaps even portal somehow.

* No player can place down a spider nest ANYWHERE in the world if the world has 30 or so (somehow... may be if you set the spiders to more or lots? In which case the limit should probably be higher with these options, like on more 60 and on lots 120) nests in the world already.

* Players are immune from being aggroed by hostile creatures for 1 day upon joining.

* Skeletons do not have fixtures/bounding boxes for them anymore (this is to prevent exploits by using them as impassable walls as well as in terms of griefing, as it is possible to surround the portal with a few skelletons and trap all of the newcomers)

 

The following are some things I'm suggesting simply for convenience sake or due to some broken mechanics that really need fixing:

* Disable prediction by default and have it as an option in the Options menu of whether to enable it or not.

* Abigail, Shadow Minions and possibly some other passive mobs or structures cannot be attacked via Ctrl + F or Ctrl + Left Click in PvE.

* Walls can only be attacked via Ctrl + Left Click and not Ctrl + F.

* Various resources, such as bee hives, rabbit hutches or pig houses that can become non-renewable due to griefing, natural causes or crappy world gen will respawn in certain ways and possibly even repair themselves in some ways (e.g. if 4 homeless bees meet each other, they would find some free space on a non-man made turf and make a bee hive, perhaps the same with killer bees or even hounds that didn't come from hound attacks, wargs or walrus, pigs would aggroe on anyone who tries to or succeeds in hammering or burning down their houses and would repair/rebuild their houses, same with bunnymen and their rabbit hutches etc.)

* Mini glaciers spawned by pengulls, upon being mined would disappear, unlike the mini glaciers in rocky or mosaic biomes. Pengulls would also respawn as they do in single player, instead of stopping to spawn completely after about 2 or 3 winters.

* A new structure called Shadow Chest is introduced, which acts like a chest, is inflammable, has 6 inventory slots, requires 4 living logs and 4 nightmare fuel to craft and a shadow manipulator to prototype. It couldn't be a chest that could have a lock attached to it, instead you could attach a gem to it if it doesn't have one already attached and take a gem off of it, if it already has one attached, but only if its inventory is empty and it is not open. Each Shadow Chest that has the same coloured gem attached to it, would share inventory. This could be useful as you could place one down by the portal and place it nearby portal, in order to send items from your base to newbies or from various bases across the world. A Shadow Chest can only be hammered if it doesn't have a gem attached to it. It cannot be destroyed by Deerclops or Bearger either if it has a gem attached to it and based on what gem the chest has attached to it, it would a certain magical effect on the creature or player who tries to destroy it (blue = the player/mob freezes, red = the player/mob lights on fire, purple = the player gets teleported somewhere in the world as if teleported via telelocator staff, only telelocator focus would not have an effect on the spawn and so the spawning would be random place in the world every time, orange = player teleports somewhere nearby (within 5 turf radius of the Shadow Chest) and loses 15 sanity upon being teleported,  yellow = gets hit by lightning, green = the hammer breaks/mob goes to sleep). A gem could not be removed from a Shadow Chest nor could a Shadow Chest be opened whilst a Shadow Chest with the same colour is open. If one Shadow chest of a certain gem colour is opened, that Shadow Chest and all the other Shadow Chests with the same coloured gem would emit tiny area of light. Upon being hammered, a Shadow Chest would have Mr Skits escape from the place it was destroyed from. A gem could only be removed from a shadwo Chest via Lock Pick. A Shadow Chest could still be destroyed by a Weather pain even if it has a gem attached to it, in which case, it would only loot the contents it has if it doesn't have a gem attached to it or if it's the last Shadow Chest with the attached colour gem it has.

 

If these things aren't implemented or aren't dealt with in some good way, I would then be glad if someone made a mod for this, perhaps then call it "PvE fix" or whatever, because these things really need some serious addressing and though the things I've suggested might not be flawless, from looking at it, to me at least, they would seem like an improvement to the currently broken/badly functional game mechanics as it stands.

[TheGoodDarkHero]

Players should be able to be aggroed, but only if the player attacks them first. Other than that, quite a good coverage of this subject.

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

10 hours ago, TheGoodDarkHero said:

Players should be able to be aggroed, but only if the player attacks them first. Other than that, quite a good coverage of this subject.

That is actually what I meant with that. And thank you