rlf
feature suggestion - flag for solo islands
We have some dissatisfaction amongst our management team with group islands having an unfair advantage over solos. I thought it might be a solution to have a separate topten list for islands achieved by one person, separate fancy title for skylord, and suchlike. To do that I need to identify islands that never had helpers joined or trusted to them. I know you're crazy busy, as are we all, but if this sounds like something of general interest I can give it a shot and send you a pull request when I get around to it.
Well, it sounds like an idea. But honestly, the challengeSharing island was intended to make the advantages more fair.
Not sure how a "more fair" top-10 would be. Because, as you point out, the simple solution would be to let "party-islands" compete against other islands of same size - but then again, what if you were 4, but now are only 2 - how should you be ranked?
How about tracking the maximum size the party has ever grown to and use that to compare?
Or a much more complicated would be to average it over time. Record the times that the party size increases and decreases, then use those to calculate how long it had each number of players, then get the average number of players over time (and then make it an integer). This would be the really cool and fair way, but I know it's going to be difficult to code for.
I'm just dealing with a diehard solo person who keeps whinging that the parties have an advantage getting into the top 10. I don't think the parties have ever complained about larger parties, but this diehard is my co-admin so I cant quite ignore him. And really, doing it all with no help is something of an achievement. It would be nice if there were something we could do to show them off.
To make it so that parties wont have a to big advantage we introduced so that all the challenges are completed per island instead of per player, this way they only get 1 time the rewards instead of when it is set to individual (player) challenges per party member.
As I don't know what your setting is in the challenges.yml (island or player) I cant say if your co-admin has a point or not. I agree that if set to player parties will have an advantage on the amount of rewards they get compare to single player islands.
Unfortunately you cant do anything else here as this is how the system works ATM.
Question @woolwind , do you have challengeSharing set to island? Because, in that scenario, depending on your challenge-setup, there really isn't that much of an advantage being more than one on an island (except for the working-hours, and hey, that should be beneficial).
I get the idea from @supertin - but it would honestly be quite hard to introduce, since averaging a party-size over time, requires us to keep track of it in the first place.
What we COULD do (in a more or less simple way), is to introduce a new /is top command that filters on the current partysize.
That way, players can still "cheat", by getting help from others, then kick them out, but if it's a continously updated scoreboard it might be acceptable.
Additionally, should there be a penalty/category for trustees? Since they can effectively help on the island as well?
Challenges are per island, so that does fix most of the problem. The issue is with the top-ten list. I don't really care about leveling the field between parties of 2 and parties of 8 - just having a way to acknowledge the islander to did it all the hard way. You can't discount the labor effect - alt accounts that can be set to afk mining can grow an island at high speed. Personally I think this is a fine thing - I have no intention of spending hours of my life mining cobble by hand.
I was thinking of a 'solo' flag that gets set to false as soon as anyone else joins or is trusted. I could put that in myself. Then you can use the flag to filter the top list or do whatever else we can think of.
It could still be cheated if you have buddies on staff who can build on the island without joining it, but we'll just have to assume a certain level of staff integrity, and there's always logblock to settle disputes.
i have my self and staff even with the little perks they have excluded (hidden from all rankings) other wise you should a builderpoints plugin that cants placed and removed blocks for every player the plugin exist for creative ,,, i asked the maker to make a version for Skygrid but he wanted to keep the plugin creative still i think its a good way for a personal ranking ...
Solo-flag it is then - and that way, "party-islands" compete against each other, regardless of size. Not sure normal players will understand, why they suddenly are not on the high-score, after they have kicked all their members - but hey - we will find a solution.
if they kick everyone who built the island just to get on the top of the solo list, they know perfectly well they are trying to game the system and shouldn't be surprised it doesn't work :)
Ok, then I propose the following. We keep track of the "maxPartySize" over time, meaning, we stamp the max-size into the IslandInfo. This includes the number of trustees.
We then provide a top-command that takes a "party-size" parameter.
That way, all islands will compete to each other on the /is top, but will only compete against "same-sized-islands" on /is partytop. If players leave an island, the island will still be rated with the max-size it has had - but then the leader have a reason to recruit new members (to the max).
Members and trustees count equally towards the max-party-size. Cheaters will STILL be able to cheat, by simply trading blocks with other islanders, but at least the number of builders will be limited.
Sounds acceptable?