[Discussion] ECC 2.0 Spawn Project

Having looked at the current spawn project as it was being built, I think that what exists now should probably not be completely thrown out in favor of a wholly new design.

That being said, the new spawn should 100% take advantage of the 128 block increase in height that is coming in 1.17. considering that it is more than possible to create 1.16 worlds that have such a height using mods, there is no excuse for ignoring this part of 1.17 (the whole reason we have to reset!) in the spawn construction.

Since the post here seems to be focused on how to make spawn less of a 'ghost town', there are a few ideas that I suppose I'll throw in:

• Allow players to build stuff beyond market stalls and decorative statues in spawn. An area for casinos, player-run mini-games, item giveaways, or even town portals would all be possible.
• Placing /warp plots right next to spawn
• Placing /warp events right next to spawn
• Put /warp pvp inside spawn, in some sort of arena or through use of those extra 128 layers.
• Maybe place /warp tutorial somewhere that actually connects to the rest of spawn (maybe right next to the exit into /warp plots?). Perhaps we could have a "tutorial coaster" that literally deposits new players into /warp plots?
• Investigate any other uses for areas in spawn before making it into "dead space" like many areas of the current spawn now are.

 

On the topic of direction and organization - I've seen that colored paths in the ground tend to work well - Ie. a green wool/clay path labeled "mining" that someone can follow to the mining warp, maybe a golden path that leads to the shops warp, etc. that all originate from the main square.

Fresh Edit : On that note, I disagree with Oconnor, in that I believe that using the main spawn area (Not including the surrounding towns in this opinion) for anything other than tutorial/directory services would needlessly complicate things. I'd move the current exp/nstar conversion thing and any star tool stores to market warp, that way all the stores are actually where they are intuitively.

 

I like the rollercoaster idea.
I think it would be cool if you had a tutorial coaster. Sort of like your ecc history coaster going right now. New players could ride and see what their first steps could/should be.

 

no blowtube pls that's all i ask

 

A lot of these ideas seem very familiar... almost like they have been copied pasted from an ideas page from a previous administration, that initially made headway into a new spawn, then got promptly killed by the next administration.... now to be claimed as their own?

Anyway, imma be a bit biased here and kind of explain through the ideas that I had (some of which have somewhat survived the 6+ months since the spawn project initially started)

Portals

Generally, adding more portals to the intial /spawn to be obvious. That is, when a new player does /spawn, they should immediately see what is important. I personally class these as portals to mining, market, events, and towns (more on this later). These things are generally what ECC is about, and most importantly, what a new player will want immediatly.

Next is the second most important stuff. That being things like nether and end portals. These ideally should be placed behind wherever someone faces when doing /spawn. Furthermore, with funky flag configurations, these portals can be "locked out" with entry deny flags (with g:survivor iirc added as members), with entry deny messages linking to information about nether / end access.

Finally, and I guess even more out the way, you put other server portals. Even more so now, if any advertising is done people are going to be looking for a 1.17 economy server, not a 1.12 skyblock server. (This infact is one of my gripes with the current tutorial set up, with one of the first things people see on spawning to their left is skyblock). Combining a PvP portal with a survival games portal would cover any PvP in a seperate area off spawn. (Think current /warp pvp just with an added portal to SG).

Server Shops & Market

I think I directly remember saying something along the lines of "has anyone ever actually brought an iron helmet from /warp pvpshop?". Getting rid of a lot of the crap thats sold in the server shops, and keeping it simply to colour shop and block shop as things that people actually use it for. (As well as certain special items such as turtle helmets, which otherwise are unobtainable IIRC).

While the "rotating stock" idea does seem neat, I can imagine it being somewhat abandonded after a while, and very easy to "fuck up" on pricings, with stuff either being too expensive and no one buys, or too cheap and affecting player markets.

Personally, I would say get rid of the EXP shop as well at this point. With vanilla enchanting being enabled (and being substantially cheaper than prices on enchants), I honestly think letting max tools being a player driven market (as opposed to being loosly pegged on nstar / xp price) is the way to go.

As for market, it's nice to see my "pop up stall" idea still being present! This was effectively a response to lots of newer residents ranking up, then asking "how do I get a plot in market then?" and being shot down saying that you basically need lots of money to buy off another player or be incredibly lucky / plan it in advanced. These were to basically be 5 or so chests that a user could rent / request, with flags set that only placing / breaking of signs would be allowed (as to somewhat make management of these stalls something that GameAdmins could do without requestint rollbacks from SA's as with normal spawn shops).

Spawn Walls & Adjacent Towns

I believe the reasoning for removing these walls was to allow for greater intergration between spawn and spawn towns. An example of this working relatively well in my opinion is MainEast's spawn, where the paths have been changed to black concrete as to better blend in with the spawn towns there.

As for moving plots back to within spawn local, massive plus one. As staff, being able to still see plots local as part of spawn local allowed for users to still ask questions in local chat and not be ignored.

As for spawn towns in general, I believe that they should be given to builders who have demonstrated actual builds, as oppose to who simply has the most cash to buy one off another player.

New Portals

These were primarily going to be a farm for new players to make basic money and get food iirc. I however was generally opposed to this idea, as I personally believe that the first thing a new player is going to see is a big portal that says "FARM", and harvest a bunch of crops without planting, either purposfully or by accident. This would leave staff constantly spending time replanting a farm, when, quite frankly, they have better things to be doing.

I also mentioned earlier of a "towns" portal. This would effectively be a heavily curated portal room to various towns within ECC. Not only would this have a showcase of the best builds on ECC, but also have portals to community ran plot towns. Think how cool it would be if a builder could do /warp towns and see exactly where all active plot towns are. Again, I think this would be postive change, as it directs players to "real" towns, and again, frees up some of the time staff do constantly managing the staff plots town. (In case you can't tell at this point, I dispise /warp plots).

Finally, this /warp towns could also bring back to town of the month idea, and allow for competition for builders to actually build cool stuff.

Lag And Performance Issues

While it be nice to fit a lot of stuff into spawn, too much can cause performace issues for our brothers who want to play ECC on their toasters. This is why one of the proposals was to move /market out of direct spawn (as market typically has many signs which generally cause performance issues on lower spec potatos).

Tutorial

This is something that is both a good thing and bad thing. Most new players spawn in tutorial, see a bunch of signs and don't read them. They then end up in the mining world, and complain that they get griefed, house reset etc. Personally, I think it should be cut right down, instead making people use /help commands, or linking the wiki where greater detail should be put anyway.

As for making the tutorial more interactive, I found ways of making it so that pressing a button would put information into the chat box using deny messages. Furthermore, should interactive chat command features return, these work in these messages. (Think a button that a new user can press, they get "Click [/kit starter] for a bunch of iron stuff to get you started!" kind of thing.)

Also, remove the portal that leads to mining at the end of tutorial. Have it go to /spawn. That is all.

Final Thoughts

A few staff members are probably reading this and thinking "what kenny has said is nothing new", and yeah, that's cause a new spawn has been an idea for 6+ months now (and a lot of stuff I've said here is from my own notes made in convosations and meetings when initally planning stuff). While it's nice to see that this project is finally getting some legs on it again, it's a bit disingenous to claim that it is an entirely new idea from this administration team. (Again, I'm seeing ideas that I came up with at the end of my run as GA being still passed round). No matter who runs or works on this project in the future, I hope the people who worked tirelsly on the first drafts of this project get the credit and recognition they deserve.

 

Glad this was mentioned. Nonetheless, glad to see that this project is getting jump started again from the past administration.

 

being apart of the ‘new spawn project’ was pretty cool when i was on the team. i remember @icondigi was the one that was really adamant about this project being finished and i supported that. it’s great to see that the whole project is being revived in a way and also what kenny and nolan said, give credit where it’s due.

nonetheless i love the idea of reviving this project.

 

Hello everyone.

Please allow me to step in here and apologise that the original post did not include further details about how the previous spawn project was started or who was involved.

For those of you who don't know much about the spawn project, this was something that many members of the staff team discussed and brainstormed through last year. The project was officially put on hold to allow the staff team and Clar to focus on building the 10 year anniversary events, in which they did a fantastic job

While I apologise if I miss naming any particular individual here, the spawn project could not have been what it is currently without the tireless efforts of many staff members including @iSneaky, @FuryFudge, @icondigi, @blazwura97, @Mission001, @LimeLush, @kenny0011, @JRigz, @FirstNolan, @Speed42jh, @HypeDav, @TaylorBros22, @Karin_88 and more. Many, many hours of discussion and planning and building, and re-building went into the project as it currently stands, and it would not have ever gotten off the ground without any of you, and I hope that you know I mean that, after working with many of you during the project and our many chats. Speaking for myself alone, I know this was a real labour of love for many of you, and you all gave up your free time to help create this vision we had all talked about, for which I am truly thankful. I hope that we can finish off this spawn project and let many players enjoy the hard work you all contributed to.

While I do apologise that this was not mentioned in the original post, it was not intentional for this project to be claimed as being the work of others, as this was entirely not the case, and the work of many individuals contributed to this spawn project. Now that the 10 year anniversary events have been finished, this spawn project is being restarted, as we informed the team that it would be when we announced the hiatus some months ago.

With that said, I hope you all forgive the misunderstanding that the original post did not clarify this and we can finally finish off this project.

Leaf

 

i do love it i think its makes easier for new players and like - I think player shops should be within towns where players can buy or sell - while spawn shops exist also pop up stalls would be nice to sell things to new players

 

hi everyone your least favorite inactive ex-somebody here,

I would like to respectfully suggest the current spawn builds be gutted. While I don't think they're bad builds (actually, I think them to be pretty good), I think they ultimately don't provide the first impression we want of the server most of us love.

I'll preface this by stating I don't want this to come off as an attack on those who worked hard on it. I know I've had disagreements with a fair few of you. The ideas on this thread are actually really good -- I think @kenny0011 really hits the nail on the head on making an absolutely killer spawn. I'm just not sure what currently looks to be done executes on these ideas... really at all. And of course I'm not trying to discredit anyone here. Everyone who's put in work so far needs to be credited however that's going to be done once the project is finished.

Both shown iterations look to have players starting off in a well, surrounded by portals. Of course this makes portals close and tiered structures are always nice. However I think it's a bit derivative of the lobby server. Moving from one to the other would grant an extremely similar view and that could be pretty confusing to newer players. The other issue with the well is you can't see out of it -- and that leads to less players exploring. The spawn I get the impression Kenny has envisioned has lots of hustle and bustle. Tons of cool features and lots to see. Why not start players off where not only do they have access to portals, but are overlooking are the neat stuff we have at spawn?

The other point I have is the flat garden-esque theme of the more completed spawn. It's gorgeous, though not particularly... on theme? This is EcoCityCraft and to me at least that means cities and buildings and shops. Obviously there are limitations on this, since it needs to be fairly straightforward to navigate and also contain functional space (and too many empty skyscrapers might look a little tacky). Perhaps some of the space could be filled with a tutorial ride as suggested above by @LimeLush which travels above the city and through various buildings -- think Disney's Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover.

I would like to also suggest that even if we don't keep the entire spawn wall, we at least find a way to incorporate the towers and maybe even the flags -- they've stuck around for nearly a decade now through several new spawns and I definitely think we should pay a little homage to them, even if it's decided for spawn to be more open.

Anyway I know talk is cheap, ideas and execution are two different things. So again I'm not trying to diminish what anyone has spent time working on. This is just my 2c about what I think an ECC spawn should look like.

 

As the previous project lead on this project, I'll admit I was a little offended there was no mention of my team and I's tireless efforts to start this project.

For 4-5 Months, I spent countless hours, up all night drawing and planning everything out for this project. I had everything organised from the tutorial writers, plugins, layouts, pros and cons, schematics, areas, builders + MORE.

When we were close to finishing this project, a sudden and unexpected change of administration took place, which immediately resulted in the ending of the spawn project, with no remorse or consideration to the many people and hours who worked on this project. To then have this project started up again, and claimed as a project that took place under the new administration is completely offensive and disrespectful to those who spent so long working on this.

Just to ensure everyone gets the correct credit, the people who helped get this project off the ground include:
@FuryFudge, @iSneaky, @FirstNolan, @DCxCyBeR, @TaylorBros22, @Speed42jh, @kenny0011, @edrandom, @JRigz, @LimeLush, @MadMonster_, @Karin_88, @HypeDav, @oPriam, @ChefCraft19, @TankNoodle, @blazwura97

I appreciate the credit @Leafnova decided to give, which is something that I would've thought would be mentioned in the original post. Nonetheless, I was under the impression I was going to be able to continue helping create this project, but as I wasn't consulted I understand that is different.

In saying that, I agree the project which we started has quite a lot of work to be done. We were ready to open this to the public and make many needed changes which I'm glad are now being made. I do like @Nicit6 's idea of keeping the portals, but being able to showcase more of spawn, it would just need to be in a way that doesn't allow players to get lost and log off quickly (which is what the current spawn does).

In regards to the market area, we came to the conclusion that the new updated version was finished and ready to be carried over. However, would love for people to be able to see it and provide feedback on how we can make it better. (/home icondigi:market)

I still have all my notes, files, documents, plugin recommendations, mockups, schematics & more if you were wanting to include me going forward.

icon

 

The smaller the spawn is, the better. If a building doesn't need to be in there/serves no purpose then just cut it out.
You don't need to make spawn super pretty to look at, leave that for the spawn towns. We got those fancy rules in place now too- so spawn town owners need to actually develop the locations rather than just leave them bare.

Also as it is atm, it looks like the area you warp into is a copy/paste of the lobby. To make it clear that you've changed locations, you can invert the map so that instead of the sunken-in flooring, you would have the player spawn in on a much higher elevation. Also, if you remove the giant walls, then the player can potentially see much farther out and see the spawn towns surrounding the area.

The walls are kinda annoying since for decoration purposes, they aren't anything interesting to look at and they only seem to prevent the user from exploring.

 

out of curiosity -- do you have numbers/what's your source here? (or was this just given in your project scope?)

like I'm sure this happens (and to an extent can't be avoided), but having worked statistics I'm really curious if we have a numbers breakdown of people who logged in briefly and left because they were lost versus taking a look around and just deciding "not for me".

 

I dont know if this will solve the problem, but maybe have a map the player is given to see the spawn and where everything is. Dont know if this is possible or if it will help, but it may be a solution.

Edit: Either that or just make the spawn more organized

 

When i joined the team this "spawn project" was indeed a thing, but it wasnt being worked on at that moment. Yes the new administration took the lead on it as the administration should be the ones behind projects of this magnitude, not someone who isnt. I would also like to note that the new administration did indeed try to talk with the lead of the project and work with those who were building it.

Now onto the spawn build being worked on. When i joined the team and seen the first iteration of it, it was just a flat out copy of the lobby with a library for exp/star tools, an autofishing area, and a fountain with parkour around it, and a board of signs with the makers of that spawn. Does this sound like a proper spawn to you?

It did not even have room for all the needed buildings/things needed at spawn.

I personally look forward to the new spawn project as it will be the community throwing ideas together, not just a handful of members from the staff team. Also administration will take lead and make sure what needs to be done is done.

This thread should be a place to discuss the new spawn and get it done. Not complain about the past. Lets be honest, if anyone else had been put into administration there would not be a big problem. You few who have something to say about the current administration just do not like them. Without being bias about who they are and who the old administration are, the current administration takes lead, are active ingame/forums and are getting things done. They have taken lead of this spawn project as they should, not passing it to others who don't even know what needs to be at spawn, etc.

 

So, it sounds like a pit might not be the best move. What if we did a mountain, or tower, of some sort instead? With a large spiral staircase down, leading to portals or shops as you descend.

This will give us a way to show off the new height, and new players will immediately be able to see the spawn towns. Additionally, since there will be no fall damage, players without fly could easily fall to whatever level they’d like to go to, and just /spawn to return to the top.

Additionally, I like the idea of doing a city build theme. Though @jmichael214 ‘s spawn had a few glaring issues, you can’t deny that it felt like a city.

 

Maybe we could create a thread every administration change for the ex-staff and the new staff to attack each other!

 

My appologies. It seems I somewhat opened a bit of a can of worms so to speak with my comments, with most the discussion on new spawn being focused on two paragraphs in otherwise what I consider a fairly lengthy analysis of the new spawn project.

My aim for my original post was simply bring context to an otherwise somewhat long forgotton project. A lot of the ideas proposed in the announcement were somewhat without context in my opinion, being solutions to problems that otherwise had not been discussed in the announcement. Furthermore, a lot of the original meetings / discussions about new spawn did occur many moons ago, with the vast majority of the team that had these meetings no longer being hugely active. I was simply using my own notes from these meetings as to give further insght to some of the ideas initally drawn up.

As for discussing the actual project, I like @Nicit6 idea for new players to spawn "overlooking" spawn (and that comes from someone who makes it their goal to disagree with everything!). I think it's one of the archive's spawns that has the tutorial as interconnecting islands that spread out across spawn, allowing new players to "look out" over spawn. Prehaps this could be pushed further, with small "bubbles" interconnected via portals, going not just over spawn, but across spawn towns as well (as to make explorers look out, think "oh thats a cool thing" and later search for it in spawn).

I also somewhat like @LaggyTryHard idea for making spawn as small as possible, and instead have greater focus on spawn towns. Let's be real, spawn will always be a pretty static place which shouldn't be changed, however spawn towns have the potential to be much more dynamic. In my opinion, the economy should wherever possible be player driven. The same thinking can be done for spawn. I also like the big brain idea of elevating up the portals (a big brain idea coming from an actual good builder!)

As for the walls, I think it was known this was going to be a somewhat contentious issue. They can always be moved somewhere else, for example surrounding warp plots / events, or even just copy pasting the current spawn, surrounding it with barriers and call it the new /warp pvp.