Improvable Towns

So, I think you all know that we have a lot of towns on our server. Like, a lot. Tons of them. Anyways, I ended up talking to a friend about the difference between a town and a city, and I had a little bit of an idea...

What if, to found a proper town, you had to buy a permit? Like, the Mayor's office in Spawnington could sell Building Permits that allow you to found a proper town, complete with a mark on Dynmap.

With that, we could also sell different amenities that only an admin could provide in these towns.

Want a resizer in your town? Buy a Resizer Ticket, and an admin will come and add in the needed buttons in your town! You could even sell different versions. A Basic Resizer, with 1x, 0.5x, and 2x, an Advanced Resizer with all of the previous as well as 4x and 0.25x, and an Elite Resizer with all of the previous as well as 8x and 0.125x. Each one would cost more than the last, but if you own a lower one you get a discount towards more expensive ones.

Want a certain shop in your town? For the right amount of cheese and a large amount of that item, you can get one set up!

Want a teleporter set up in the Spawnington hub? Buy a Teleporter ticket!

Now, the reason I think this would be a good addition to the server:

1. Encourage teamwork. By adding some high goals that could be difficult for a single person to reach, you'll give people a reason to work towards a common goal.

2. Limit town-fever. Instead of people focusing on building more towns, they'll have more reason to instead focus on improving the existing ones.

3. Create value in currency. Cheese, our server's currency, only had a few real uses until recently. However, more and more cool shops are springing up. By adding even more options to spend your cheese on, you're giving people more options besides hoarding it.

OH WOW!!  It's COLGATE!!! AND SHE'S POSTING ON OUR FORUM!!!!!!!  BREAKING NEWS!!! 

But yes, this is an amazing idea, now that we're going on a custom item binge on the server.  And in fact it's not a "new" idea per se as long ago I did have in mind charging people for the right to have a custom command block shop, redstone contraption, Schematic backup, and more, but we lacked the technology to make it happen so the idea festered and died away.

But now it's back, and your proposal is a lot more specific and fine-tuned, and it can be done much more easily with the updated /give command in Forge Essentials (and today's New Cheese).  And like with the ATM machines, we could have multiple locations all across the world that could sell these things, not just in Spawnington, but perhaps, but conceivably Eclipse and Glasgrow too (basically any location that can have some sort of "City Hall" to it, and this could be another purchasable add-on).

I'd love to discuss this more with my folks, but I think it can be done.  ^^

Wow this is a really good idea... I would say what points are good about this but youve nailed it on the head there xD from the limiting of this spam of towns, to encouraging teamwork and adding something players can save their cheese for!

Yep, this is awesome ^_^ we need to repurpose some kind of town hall or something to sell these things to people. The tickets will likely be paper with custom names and lore that they can hand in to moderators for services taht you mentioned, or maybe more.

Anyways, im going to list your ideas for features players can purchase for a town plus some of my own with suggested prices for each.

• Teleporter - TPs players from spawn (or another location) to an area in town (you must build the teleporter yourself beforehand)
  
  40k Cheese
  
• Size machines - Resize at your town, instead of trekking all the way back to spawn! Great for any builds that are meant for different sizes in your town.
  
  Basic - Sizes 1x 8x and 0.125x - 20k
  
  Advanced - Sizes 1x 2x 4x 8x 0.5x and 0.125x - 30k
  
  Expert - Sizes 1x 3x 2x 4x 8x 0.75x 0.5x and 0.125x + Half size and double size machines, for that refined size number - 40k
  
• Custom Shop - Player must provide money plus a stack of the selected item they want to sell to set up a shop townmembers and outsiders can use for convenience. Prices will be set by the moderators to match the existing cheese shops.
  
  Normal (cheese payed is taken into  the void, like a normal shop - 18k
  
  Player (pays cheese earned to the town cheese pool) - 25k
  
• ATM Machine
  
  Base - Cash in normal Cheese and Blue cheese from the saftey of your town - 5k
  
  Regional currency - Convert an item into your own currency for your town! Have gold (or any item) that you can cash in for cheese (at half price),  or convert your cheese into gold (or any item). - 5k each
  

Lemme know what youd add or change about these: Are they too cheap? or not enough things? =]

It's tough to say anything that hasn't been said, but this is a great idea! Take that, tiny noob towns!

I see a few things that I'd change with the prices, Shadow. The Teleporter and Size Machine options are a little on the pricey side... If anything, lower the Teleporter cost? Some towns aren't going to be built within walking distance.

Ooo, idea. Lower the price of the Teleporter based on the distance from spawn. Further you go, the less expensive it'll be to a minimum of say... 7.5k? It'll encourage players to expand, instead of having a ton of towns right next to spawn.

Flammole wrote:It's tough to say anything that hasn't been said, but this is a great idea! Take that, tiny noob towns!

I see a few things that I'd change with the prices, Shadow. The Teleporter and Size Machine options are a little on the pricey side... If anything, lower the Teleporter cost? Some towns aren't going to be built within walking distance.

Ooo, idea. Lower the price of the Teleporter based on the distance from spawn. Further you go, the less expensive it'll be to a minimum of say... 7.5k? It'll encourage players to expand, instead of having a ton of towns right next to spawn.

oooh!  I like that idea as well!  
and all these prices seem way too expensive in general, but I guess the reasoning goes that people need to spend a bit of time to earn the necessary amount of money to buy these I do agree, though, that teleporters can be priced based on distance, and even discounted based on desirability.  So if someone founds a town in an uncharted territory they could get a pioneer's discount; if it's along a major potential roadway route, they can get an island-hopping discount.  ^^

Some additional corrections...

- The /pay command cant be used when the player is not present, so either we make the players present on the server to be able to manage the shop... OR we revive the use of Old Cheese to make that behavior possible.  

- Regional currencies should be sell-only, since buying them will be the same as making a custom shop (minus the crazy-expensive price).  ^^

Spoiler:

Well, I was working on something similar, but Shadow beat me to it. I left what I had in the spoiler above, in any case...

Some extra ideas I had. I know that we have a lot of special biomes like the redwood forest, monster island, and the mesas. With town permits, you could sell special permits that allow people to set up a town in a special biome as well.

Would it be possible to set up a Town Bank? Like, a special way to deposit cheese into a specific town, so individuals could contribute to a town directly? Just curious. If so, donation areas could be set up in a town hall.

Anyways, here are some of my other upgrade ideas...

Teleporters between cities (not Spawnington). Want a teleporter between your city and Glasgrow? How about one connecting you to another nearby town? Now, this idea's a bit dangerous, so it would need to be pretty highly priced. If its too cheap, people will buy a lot of them and never bother building roads. In addition, if they're too easy to get, traffic to Spawnington could potentially lower, which wouldn't be that fun. I'd suggest that if this is made available, a limit of 1-2 teleporters is placed on each town.

Maybe "Mile Markers" along a road that can be used to speed you up for a short time?

The ATM idea is really good, but maybe add some tiers to it? Allow cheese transactions at the cheapest, blue cheese at the middle, and bulk blue cheese at the most expensive?

I'm sure there are a lot more ideas that could be used for this, so I might post some more later. For right now though, I'm out.

This is a great idea, especially with more potential towns on the rise, I'd rather see current projects thrive more than be abandoned for new ones. I definitely value quality over quantity, in a server where size is a key in design it's very important to value the space for newcomers. This also could breathe life into towns or lands which were formally neglected, since I assume the expected town criteria would be revamped if need be.

Now pricing is an interesting challenge, since you want to appease to both newer players and those who have just too much cheese. Maybe there could be different types of permits, or even a formula to determine pricing based on land or material use? Never really fair when someone could meet the bare minimum town requirements at smaller sizes (The standard five wooden boxes with some moderate protection via glowstone).

Alas that would probably be too complex and not solve that inflation issue you bring up. Technically since you can grind for cheese via xp, it probably isn't too much of an issue to have a few expensive elements to make your town stand out from the rest. Since not everyone is a builder, having worthwhile attractions and shops contributes to town appeal (having specific currencies can also help with this when deserved).

The admin service itself is a good mention, mostly to the extent of being for only favors a normal player cannot do. I'm liking the ideas here and definitely support this, after all the pricing is decided I don't see why it shouldn't become a reality.

Ciabatta wrote:- The /pay command cant be used when the player is not present, so either we make the players present on the server to be able to manage the shop... OR we revive the use of Old Cheese to make that behavior possible.  

Hmmm... It's a shame the /money commands don't offer some sort of "bot" to pay to. Otherwise, this would be a pretty easy job. What we need to find is a way to send it to a "town pool" of money that only the owner(s) of the town can access. The Old Cheese method might work as a sort of "regional currency".

(Oh, if 1.6 had a way to spawn blocks... we could remove them from the player's inventory, then spawn them to the town vault...)

Hehe, well. ..

This could be done by reviving another dead idea... the one about different "races", and specifically one of the last suggestions to tie a "race" to a town. Since command blocks can be limited to specific scoreboard teams, we could conceivably use the team/race's score as a town "mutual fund" of sorts.

The downside is that this woukd require a clean purge of all existing teams right now so we can draft new ones, so I pity anyone who hasnt cleared out their cache of Old Cheese. But the benefits would be enormous. .. we could even have a Staff team which could make it easier to design admin-only locations. ^^

well, I finally have some spare free time, it's time to brush off my writing skills and create a new guide with which to make this town-improving idea official server doctrine.  ^^

I also need a server map as well so we can keep track of all the various towns and cities in existence, and their rough borders. ^^

I really like the new guidelines that will be going into place for the town. I am right now working on a town and i would want it to become a town when i am finished with it and i will be really happy if i would be able to prove i have made it a town with the permits an i can wait till it is all made up and ready to be purchased. I also have another thing to add i may be a novice now but I will be upgraded to a vetren next week and I'am saying that only people who are vetrens should be able to buys towns permits So that would mean i would have to wait but it would make the players have some time on the server to get towards the goal and get used to the server and its player on it. So thank you for reading this and have a nice day

Hmmm... well I was going to leave ranks out of this, but I suppose it makes sense to ensure that the would-be mayor should be sufficiently-trustworthy. After all, if they want to achieve a veteran rank sooner (due to awesome building skills and a great personality), they can always apply for an early promotion on this forum.

I have a question: how would already existing and thriving towns be affected by this new protocol?

Raddaman8000 wrote:I have a question: how would already existing and thriving towns be affected by this new protocol?

Well we're definitely not going to charge any kind of backpay, of course. It's more of a go-forward thing... so the day these permits are implemented is the day we cease to offer free shops or specialized add-ons (with some exceptions). So consider all preexisting towns to be "grandfathered" in.

Okay, today I implemented the very first "permit" purchase at Mr. Mayor's House (now identifiable via the Dynmap icon of the same name).

There you can purchase a "Key to the City", which you can redeem for a Dynmap label officially registering your build area as a town/city/municipality.  Each "key" costs 7500 cheese, with a 500 cheese rebate applicable if you found your town in an area that will encourage development (such as in an unexplored region). 

Bear in mind, town requirements are still in effect -- it must have:

• At least 10 significant structures based on the theme of the city
  
• Some road infastructure
  
• Proper lighting
  
• Mob defenses (either as lighting or a wall of some sort.
  
• Must be sufficiently spaced from other towns/cities.
  

However, teleporter requirements are no longer required since teleporter permits have to be purchased separately (more to come here).  

Additional permit news will be posted here.  

Hello i was wondering if there could be a price set on telepoter areas and also to have shops and bank command blocks set up on the server because i have 2 new player in my town now and they are having problems getting back home to the town with out the telepoters so if these can be put in i would apprciate it thanks and have a good day