Minecraft Name: @jmichael214 Suggestion: Provide higher-quality tools than stone with /kit starter, either iron or diamond. EDIT: And/or increase the amount of food included in the kit. Reason: The server has a fairly steep learning curve as it is. We are now in the time of year when more new players appear, and we are facing the reality of declining numbers for the server and for Minecraft overall. Moderating our learning curve and/or improving the new player experience a bit could help us retain more of the new players. Kit starter currently provides a full set of stone tools, a workbench and four cooked pork. Even if we don't want every player on the server to be able to get a free set of diamond tools every day, I would think we could switch this to iron and make the very beginning of the ECC experience a little less intimidating. EDIT: as a number of players have pointed out below, the amount of food provided now can easily run out while a new player gets up to speed, thus the addition of food above. Any Other Information: I recognize that this could have an economic impact, and that some players sell iron tools -- but I don't think the impact on the economy or those players would be major. Iron tools do not carry a very high value -- even ordinary diamond tools without enchantments don't. Link To This Plugin/Is this a custom addition?: I don't know, but I would guess this would not be a complicated switch, technically.
-1 Steep learning curve? It's friggin Minecraft It takes 10mins to find iron and smelt it for the same tools suggested, maybe a hour to find diamonds max. If not...by that time... you should easily have enough iron and red stone to /sell hand and buy enough diamonds for whatever you need. If a new player is too lazy to do that, then ECC isn't the place for them anyway. Man I miss the "hardcore" days....
+1 When I joined I didn't want to mine ANYTHING with stone tools so I litterly just chatted until someone gave a dia pick
-1, What kept me on this server was actually getting cheap tools and the non flashy spawn with the wood portals. I disagree that to a new player starting with diamond tools is better. It actually confused me more as a mine craft noob because when i joined servers and they just gave me this stuff I was like isn't diamond good?. The basic start attracted me to this server and I think it should stay basic.
I think that more food should be added to kit starter. Perhaps change the porkchops to half a stack of baked potatoes? I know if I were new on any server I'd probably give up if I ran out of food and was unable to find any - I don't think many of the new players on ECC are different. However, I agree that iron tools should be added to kit starter. ECC is very hardcore for new players now - whilst it doesn't take much for bare, unenchanted tools, the time and dedication it takes to get enchanted tools, and then get mayor and donation features after that is significant. Iron tools are a small boost that I think builders should be given, because if the adding of iron tools manages to grab in one extra player that stays and remains active for a long time then it will be worth it. I don't think I've ever seen a builder that didn't want free iron or diamond tools. I'm not saying they don't exist - you are proof of that - but most builders would like these improved tools, and I believe they're more likely to stay as a result of that extra boost.
I agree that food would be much more important than tools: with a very reduced amount of mobs, beginners literally have to jump between starving to death and making money. Maybe turn the porkchops to 16 instead of 8, and add a hoe, 4 raw potatoes and 4 carrots to start a small farm. +10 to something like this. The fact that most people want something isn't good enough a reason to just give them. Putting to an extreme: I want to be EcoLegend, but if I could just do /kit ecolegend, I would leave the server after a day of boredom. The steep curve is where the fun actually comes from, both in Minecraft and ECC. In vanilla survival you don't even have wooden tools: you have to literally punch logs with your bare hands, make wooden tools, mine, get coal, build a shelter and make torches in 10 minutes if you don't want to succumb to hostile mobs. Here on ECC, with limited mob spawning and /kit starter providing basic stone tools and sticks and coal to make torches, you can fully pledge those first 10 minutes of play to get iron ore by yourself. Then, with the food you get with that same /kit starter, you can pledge the following hour to get diamonds, instead of hunting passive mobs to avoid starving. In one hour you get diamond tools all by yourself, and when you are EcoLegend a few years later you can actually feel like a novel self-made Scrooge McDuck in Klondike. -100 to higher-than-stone tools in /kit starter. The only people who might apparently benefit from iron/diamond tools in /kit starter are noobs who have never ever played survival MC in the first place and don't even know that they can make their own tools. but it's not giving them iron or diamond tools the way to help them: If you really want to help them, just give them the knowledge. With 1.12, this knowledge could just be added to /kit starter. "Knowledge is power" (cit.)
I add my personal experience to my above comment concerning boredom. When I joined ECC, I had quite some survival singleplayer experience, but all my attempts at joining servers had failed miserably: in almost every server I could "start" with all sort of /kits giving me enchanted tools and weapons, like, once per hour, but I had no clue what I was supposed to do with all that bonanza. Ok, I start already as a god, now what?
I'm confused.... are debating the difficulty of acquiring iron tools?? Look I understand that we want to cater to newer players to get them to stay but come on.. Again if you play Minecraft and can't handle starting your journey with stone tools then I have to ask why are you playing the game at all. Can you imagine.... No mining world.... the only safe place to mine was a plot you bought in a town because if you mined in the wild you could be killed by other players. Some maniac named @UnknownRider hunting new players day and night (yeah I ran screaming like a little girl, I'm not ashamed to say it)...there was no enchanted anything.. a max eff5 tool cost 50k... when there was enchanting and it took 2 hours farming blaze in the death trap called the nether..And that's just the beginning.. I know several players including myself that made president in a very short time (some only days) under these conditions and it was the greatest experience ever. Quite honestly I don't care what we give new players... I just wish we could get more who actually want the experience above.
I was here in 2011 and I can say with utmost certainty that there's never been pvp in the wild as long as I've been on ECC. The mining world, however, was introduced in March of 2012 and it had pvp.
I joined March 2012. There was no mining world then and for some time after I believe. I could be wrong about the PvP though. May have been another server. But I remember the whole idea of the Wild being dangerous and scary... pretty sure PvP was enabled for a short time.
Found this from 2011... I win. https://www.ecocitycraft.com/forum/threads/pvp-wild-grief-reasonable-suggestion.2816/
-1, Hardcore Economy, Coral. Hardcore. Seriously, it's not that hard to get better tools, most just give them out. But as many pointed out, starting out well discourages people. It just wouldn't be as interesting. And as @ajp79 said, new players have it way easier nowadays. Stuff was a lot harder back then. And although there was no PvP in the wild for me, I, too, miss those times.
Your forum date states March 2012. While there was pvp in the wild, you never experienced it. Nor did I. Besides, I still think iron tools are a welcome change for kit starter. They are not a large change, however I know that many people would simply give up if they only got stone tools; they can get those within 3 minutes of starting to play minecraft. Although I do think iron tools should be introduced, I more support the idea of more food being in /kit starter. 16 raw potatoes and 32 cooked potatoes I think would be a good replacement for the porkchops already in the kit; it gives players food to eat and food to farm. As for your "ECC should be hardcore like it was back in the day" argument, ECC is more hardcore now than it's ever been. Great tools are more expensive, pumpkins aren't worth $2/block, and donation features are the most expensive now/ecd than they've ever been (except for the EULA scares and when /buyfeature was a thing). In 2011/2012, you already had the equivalent of a melon sword just by having an eff4 axe, which did not take that much to get. (They were maybe 20-30k if I recall). Also, this was stated in the thread: "I know PVP is in a one week trial period, but if it PVP stays, I'd like this suggestion to be considered." It was a trial period.
Meanwhile in a server with a low player count... You guys may want the hardcore experience but not everyone who comes here does. You don't have to use /kit starter Nor do new players. But they can if they don't want to invest too much time in a new place. I suggest adding enchants to iron tools. Unbreaking? Fortune? Accommodate new players..? Edit: Also it seems older players are the ones who don't want to embrace the new idea? That seems silly.
What I (don't know about others) am saying is that having too much given to you might make you bored. If you're given a good pickaxe immediately, you don't see as much incentive to progress. If they don't want to invest much time they'll probably just be drifters (playing for a few weeks only). If you actually work towards a goal, you're more inclined to stay. And it's got nothing to do with me being reluctant to embrace it or not wanting others to have it easy. I'm merely stating my experience, and not like I asked for such, but in the long term, I'm glad that that is what I got.
If someone doesn't want to invest one hour to get iron tools, they are not going to stay in here, anyway. I raise the stakes: why not just introduce a command /kit ecolegend? Exactly! You don't have to use /kit ecolegend, if you don't want to! Let's introduce the command /becomus goddus as well! Ok, let's be serious. The whole point of ECC is being an hardcore economy: you're basically saying that ECC shouldn't be ECC. How many hardcore economy servers do you see around? One. How many random want-it-all-want-it-yesterday servers do you see around? Dozens. Spoiled brats are not going to stay here anyway, because it's not shiny enough for their tiny brains; on the other hand, if you try to turn ECC into a not-as-shiny-but-exactly-as-dozen-other-servers-for-what-matters server, you're gonna lose a ton of players: not the players that are already here, but all the potential players coming that were specifically looking for something different; and you're gonna lose them, because they're not gonna find something different, anymore. And (if this wasn't stressed enough by me and others, I'll repeat) if someone doesn't want to spend a single hour doing something (gathering iron) that usually requires double that time in singleplayer survival, I really don't understand why would someone like this stick to anything. Uhm... I don't think I could be considered an old player, I've been on ECC for less than half its lifetime. This is not about being here for a long or a short time: it's about the concept of the server itself. So, you see, of course players who've been here for longer are more likely to understand and appreciate the concept of the server. And, because this is the only hardcore economy server in the whole world, of course they don't want to let something so precious be turned into something dull.
