Remove Portal(Pigmen) Farms

[ribagi]

Portal Farms was created as a byproduct of Ghasts, and Endermen not spawning. Not directly, but after a change which overrode the Pigmen spawn event to randomly change Pigmen into Ghasts and Endermen. This was because the Nether didn't exist. There were no Nether forts to allow Endermen to spawn in. Ghasts flat out didn't spawn. After sometime people figure out that Nether Portals spawned Pigmen, ergo Ghasts and Endermen spawned too. 

There have been incident after incident in which Portal farms have caused a large amount of issues. At first, very basic farms produced so much ghast tears and endermen skulls that their value fell fast. Carson's first farm created stacks of Ghast Tears within the day and 5 beacons. It was nerfed after the first day. 

The next time when Portal farms created issues was when a massive portal farm outside of Carson created too many pigmen that mustercull started to kill every mob on the server. 

There was even an incident when an even grander portal farm(Not Carson this time) was created. This one was a whole view distance with multiple levels of portals. This time the problem didn't come from the large number of pigmen not being killed but rather the huge pile of items on the ground. Around 800 all together. This created lag so hard that after all the items were destroyed, the TPS gained 8 points. 

All of this was pre-nether.

Since we have the nether now, people can go out and find mobs alot easier. The need to portal farms is now very low.

[Jacob Sokora]

>endermen

I think you mean wither skeletons

[staygroovy57]

Sorry, I think you meant to say "Wither Skeletons" rather than "Endermen"....?

[Jacob Sokora]

Even so I agree with Ibagi, it would get rid of a lot of lag (remember that render distance farm I had to write a mod just to get close to?) and increase the cost of beacons because they may sell for 200d but they're extremely cheap to produce

[ribagi]

Wither skeletons look like endermen. Rite? 4 in the morning mistake.

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

This change would have a very large positive affect on performance seeing how almost all hostile mob farms are nether portal grinders, it would also increase the cost of potion materials and perhaps lead to more people investing in Nether factories and in creating farms in the nether that will end up on a different shard for 1.8.

Please for the love of god do this as soon as possible.

[justin kilpatrick]

Oh this is going to cause a riot, what if we just moved them to the Nether?

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

No just deal with the riot it's less work

[justin kilpatrick]

if we shard out the nether i would like to encourage grdindy stuff there, different server with much less load most of the time. 

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

The abundance on the server is insane, as the owner of the servers largest portal farm I can tell you that we made our money back in hours of operations, just make people deal with it and rebuild in the nether. Not to mention the ammout of people whoa farms you'll miss and piss off.

The number of issues related to world editing the farms in outweigh any possible benefit.

[anthonyb]

Oh, hey. Yet another suggestion to FUNDAMENTALLY ALTER EXISTING GAME FUNCTION long after people have invested in infrastructure.

If you want to do shit like this, roll another version iteration of the server; it's not fair to continually fuck people who have invested in the server for its established functionality only to have you yank the rug out time and time again.

Your refusal to go to 3.0 yet drastically change our current iteration blows my mind.

[Jake Jungbluth]

Make it a natural disaster 

[anthonyb]

So your proposal to me complaining about huge fundamental changes in the game is to propose another huge fundamental change, a natural disaster?

[Arieh Kovler]

Ttk said a while ago that Civcraft will not be static. We won't be afraid of change just because it's inconvenient.

I am sceptical here because I also remember the debate over portal farms when they began and it was Matta and iegabi arguing that they should be allowed and not disabled.

That said, it's worth having a conversation.

[anthonyb]

There is a great difference between static/dynamic and absolutely abolishing a longstanding pillar of the game.

You are spot-on with your assessment of Ribagi's and Mattas posts as well, I just refrained from making the comment before you. Of course it is those who already have 'infinite' resources who want to break the ladder for others to climb up there -_-

[Andrew Jawa]

​Portal farms were a hack to fix the lack of them spawning in the overworld nether biomes.

Now that they can be found in the nether, it would be worth either disabling portal farms or replacing it with something that respects the limits of the server.

[Nick]

I think it would give too much advantage to those rich few who can build nether factories. Reducing the efficiency of portal farms to encourage nether resource gathering might be fine though.

N

[Jacob Sokora]

I don't think disabling portal farms is the key here, but rather the spawning of ghosts and wither skeletons in place of pigmen. Normally withers would spawn in nether fortresses but since we don't have those we can't do that. The best we can do is either limit the special mobs to nether biomes or implement some other way for them to spawn. (Factories anyone?)

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

No we need to remove the spawning all together, we cant assume people will act rationally. Some farms are also located in cities meaning they stay on all the time even if we nerf.

On 15 Mar 2015 01:08, "Jacob Sokora" <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:

I know it's atrocious, but people aren't going to build and afl portal farms just for gold. Anyway no matter what we do we need a way to spawn the withers 

On Saturday, March 14, 2015, Matthías Valdimarsson <goldma...@gmail.com> wrote:

No jacob, the point is to remove the lag caused by the pigmen, we need to disable this useless feature asap to improve performance, which anyone who plays will tell you is still atrocious.

[Greg Boiczyk]

What if you cancel the pigman from portal spawn event but still let ghasts and wither skeletons spawn in their place a certain % of the time?

[Jacob Sokora]

So they would just only spawn in nether biomes or the nether?

[Greg Boiczyk]

Yea

[justin kilpatrick]

well if SOMEONE where to test humbug mob drop multilpliers on Civtest right now we could cut the number of pigman spawns by a factor of 8 (already configurable in humbug) multiply their drops by 8 and then discuss this with much better server performance. 

[Robert Berrier]

They should be twice vanilla rates without multiplying items that were picked up correct?

[Jake Jungbluth]

Yes 

[Robert Berrier]

I know this thread is getting off track but is the mob drop multiplier live on the test server? I just did some testing and seem to be getting vanilla drop rates.

[justin kilpatrick]

the multiplier might need to be turned on, but the code is online there, whats the command for that? 

[Robert Berrier]

Someone more familiar with humbug will have to chime in, the best I could say from looking at the code would be "/humbug lootmultiplier x" where x is the desired multiplier.

[Nick]

humbug loot_multiplier generic 2

humbug save

N

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

Is it on now?

[Andrew Jawa]

According to changelog yes

[Matthías Valdimarsson]

So when are they being disabled?

[justin kilpatrick]

I think we are ready to multiply loot, waiting on advice for mustercull changes that would need to coincide with that. 

[Gavin Jenkins]

This thread seems way off base. Why would everybody be so eager to screw over a bunch of players for NO REASON?

I'm the first to get on board with something that would annoy a lot of players if it's obviously better for the server. But this is not. Getting rid of portal farms altogether is just a terrible solution to the problem

PROBLEM: lag. A small amount of lag, mind you, even with no changed I believe ttk said 3-7% from portal farms. But sure, we want to minimize this, I agree.

Would getting rid of portal farms altogether solve that problem? Yes. Nuking China would also solve the problem of outsourced t-shirt production, too, though. This comes with really annoying repercussions for players. Digging up a whole portal farm that has been reduced to a pointless eyesore would be numbingly tedious, and it's inherently poor balance to take infrastructure investments and then equalize people out of nowhere randomly.

Again, if these things were necessary then they wouldn't be the end of the world. But they are not, because there are literally like a dozen other better ways you can solve the portal farm lag that do not involve any of those costs to balance and fairness and player annoyance.

1) Set the cull limit on pigmen to 2, set the spawn rate on pigmen to 1/10th normal. Increase drops by 10x. Congratulations, you now have 0.3-0.7% lag instead of 3-7% from portal farms, and you did absolutely nothing to annoy any players or to unnecessarily unfairly remove investments from them. Much better solution.

2) Make pigmen teleport to an adjacent block if it doesn't have obsidian under it when they spawn. This alone would cut the lag in about half, since pigmen spend about half their time on the frames milling around, and now they start going toward the slaughter immediately. And this can be additive with #1 as well, so together they'd get you to 0.15-0.35% of lag.

3) Hell, if you want to get rid of the lag completely and have no mobs, you could even do that, but still there'd be no reason to screw over people invested in infrastructure. Make a factory that generates rotten meat and gold and whatever in reasonable ratios not from being run with fuel, but based on how many purple swirly blocks are within range of it. Boom! existing portal farms are still rewarded investments, but no mobs whatsoever to lag from them. Players are not annoyed at all.

and so on, you could come up with far more if you wanted to. Though already any of those would do it just fine.

Annoy players if you have to, sure. If you don't have to and you do it anyway, you're just being a bad, lazy developer.

[Sean Chambers]

> Annoy players if you have to, sure. If you don't have to and you do it anyway, you're just being a bad, lazy developer.

Really? Is this really necessary in a discussion about the pros and cons of a proposed change? Probably not. 

Now with the ad hominem out of the way, the point he's getting at is the fact that portal farms were originally a side effect of a deficiency during the reboot.

When I first began playing civcraft I appreciated the fact that changes to the server for technical or game mechanic reasons introduced new aspects to the landscape of the game. I can appreciate the fact that changes force people to adjust strategies differently and try new things. Otherwise, the social norms don't get shaken up enough. It is an experiment after all. Right?

It's common knowledge that managing a minecraft server (not to mention the player count that civcraft has) is no easy task. The api to minecraft isn't even supported by Mojang for petes sake. Anyone who is able to contribute should be provided with the utmost respect. Not only the devs, but the players, admins etc. 

I think we should appreciate the fact that discussions about optimization at this level can even occur with minecraft. 

Sean

[Gavin]

sigh, always forget reply all.

It's an experiment, yes. In civilization building and social interaction. Not in what lab rats do when you turn their maze upside down arbitrarily and unnecessarily just to see what they do. If you can explain a solid reason why eliminating all portal farms clearly enhances the civilization simulation, then let's hear it.

I apologize for the ad hominem, but it's simply obnoxious to players. And obnoxious things need good reasons if you're going to do them, which as far as I can see have not been stated. "Lag" is the only real reason stated, and as mentioned, there are many many ways to address portal farm lag while being much less obnoxious to players.

Imposing hours and hours and hours of migranes and wasted effort on players because at best nobody wanted to take the time to think of any of a wide variety of better solutions just isn't okay. And that's at best -- because honestly it seems worse than that. People already brought up the headaches it would cause above, and it seemed to fuel agreement rather than give pause like it should. I get the distinct vibe that the motivation isn't even lack of effort in coming up with something more elegant, but may even be leaning toward "haha yeah, let's screw the semi-power players who have resources to farm stuff" which is even less okay, and no better than discussion forum ad hominems at the end of the day if true.