Yesterday in chat, I brought up the idea of each each SMP Admin being given Jurisdiction over a town or village. The idea being that we run an open server, and allow non-SCP players to come in on the promise of having a "safe" area to build in. Areas within your jurisdiction are your to protect against griefers, help people build in, help rebuild if a griefer gets through the cracks, that sort of general business. Things outside of the jurisdictions of Admins are, for all intents and purposes, unprotected. This is eminantly practical, in that it restricts the amount of area we each need to patrol for griefers to being essentially the size of Newton. The current map being something like the size of Manhattan makes it hard for us to watch every player, everywhere they go. We learned this most pointedly during the 3 hour period that we ran an open server.
Essentially, anything that happens outside of your jurisdiction amounts to the players fault for building in an unprotected wilderness.
Now, this also amounts to good old fashioned Medieval Feudalism. For the exact same reasons. a MAJOR part of why Europe organized into nation-states was for protection. belonging to a kingdom with a centralized authority meant there was someone to help defend you from invaders. The Lords also benefitted by having people and resources to draw upon.
NOW, in practice this should hypothetically give rise to several distinct towns or villages. I'm leaning towards, for this iteration at least, 4 admins, one settlement each. Tell each pub player that buildings within the city walls fall under the protection of admins and therefore are protected and insured against griefing. griefers caught misbehaving in town get promptly banned, and the townfolk get reimbursed in material for any damage done (although that is entirely up to the admin in charge of the town). Once player damage is in, the Admins can also supply weaponry and armor for their townfolk to defend themselves, etc.
The game for -us- then becomes less "let me find more gold and diamonds" and more "how i run town?"
I don't want to throw the entirely of our current map to the mercy of griefers, however. all of you have put a LOT of work into it. So my proposal is to make this a weekly weekend event. Every friday around mid-day open the server up, switch to the Feudalism map, and run it until Sunday mid-day (exact times will depend on how my work schedule comes out.) Due to school and work related issues, Weekends are the times when we can guarantee both the majority of ops/admins, and the majority of pub players being able to play. ALL current SCP players will be promoted to ops during the Fuedalism Fridays, with a total of 4 admins to have total jurisdiction over their towns. The ops can choose their towns or live in the wilderness as they choose. that's their perogative.
Ranks granted during FF will not necessarily carry over to regular SMP, and ranks from regular SMP may not necessarily carry over to FF.
The rest of the week we run the server as it is now, using the whitelist function to only allow listed players access to the server. Primarily this means 'the people who currently play,' but part of the fun of FF is that we can scout and recruit new players and whitelist them to play on the regular map as well.
SO: Give me your input. If you'd rather not try this, say so. If you think it's a good idea but maybe needs a few adjustments, say so. If you think of any ideas to make it better, or need any clarification on any points i've stated, just say so.
