Good to hear these news regarding Towny <3 Now, if you let me some comments on them...
At the moment many towns have set their plot taxes for their residents to zero. While this is great for the residents, this is unfortunately not really how towns or cities work. By doing this, we are removing a massive feature of what the towny plugin can offer us. With this update, we encourages town owners to set taxes for the use of the plots.
Asides from the fact that I'm defender of the idea that
taxation is theft, I'm really glad to hear this as, in my experience, had to set taxes to zero due to competition with other towns that lowered their taxes too, and also to not have to deal with newcomers who didn't raise enough to keep their plot for even a couple days (not that I don't like to, it's just that I'm less active nowadays). For sure, you can't break even a town if a) your residents move to other towns or b) your residents live in your town for free.
These changes will result in doubling or even tripling the upkeep of a town, hitting Gotham the hardest.
Such consideration for Gotham lmao I wonder whether the calculations were done after or
before defining the new policies *cof* *cof* (just kidding).
Outposts
YASS! Just by reading the title it was a big yes to me. tytytytyty <3
As we are wanting to use this feature, blatant plot bridges to claim other areas will be dealt with. Blatant in this case is where towns have claimed areas outside of their vicinity. Towns should use outposts going forward for these. Any plot bridges will be dealt with, and is up to Senior Staff judgement. We have highlighted some towns "guilty" of this and we shall be discussing it with them.
I guess, if there were people already managing a way to get their outposts, then just implement the function. It is better for the database than having a lot of claiming and unclaiming of plots from that method, if I'm not wrong.
Key aspects for outposts are the following stats;
[...]
3 - The maximum distance from your town plots is 50 plots
Back in the day when I had a neighboring town very close to mine, I noticed there were parts of my town where I couldn't move my spawn. By checking where I could, I reached a value for minimum distance between towns of ~80 chunks (the only way to confirm this is if our senior admins are so generous to check this against server config files). What I mean with this is that there's huge amounts of Kattalox land that becomes unusable because it's too far for most towns to claim it, but too near to them for other towns to claim it. I understand there's towns with policies such as "no want anyone to build closer than 1 km from my town" (ahem, Tranquila) and that's ok, but also I had an experience where a bunch of guys made a wonderful castle at just 25 chunks from my town and couldn't claim it so had to go away and start over, and another similar experience with long time fellows of this server starting (a castle again) in a plain north of Cherry Town, but this occasion being more prudent (having just a wall done) to check if they could claim it (obviously, if I'm telling this, they couldn't). This last time there was no dynmap, so I relied on memory to guide them to a place I knew was far enough from any town. Third example I can think of is the town of Arcadia, when I found they couldn't claim their base, I managed to find for them the nearest spot, a couple chunks off a shore to the west -- eventually they made a pier to connect the spawn to their base.
So, this is a piece of data that can save frustation to so much people. I say there should be an easy way to check distance to nearby towns and possibility of claiming at any determined point in Kattalox, before planning to build or raising the money for it. Current ones are a) Check the dynmap, do math using the Pythagorean theorem, b) do
/t list to check every town for its spawn location, again using the Pythagorean theorem, and hoping there are not 'not public' towns nearby as they don't reveal their location in
/t <name>. Both methods need to know this value, ~80 chunks radius from any town homeblock (and I neither know how exact is that amount). c) is having $10k to do
/t new <name>, but by that time, most people will have their bases already built there, having to abandon them if the command throws error.
Apart from this I requested, I think it'll be fine to lower the minimum distance between towns, as there's still a wide margin before problems between towns can arise, or to push the maximum distance for outposts up to the limit. Surely it will be interesting to even see agreements for shared spaces between neighboring towns (nvm already exists one: Gotham and Faygo Dreams have a bridge that connect both yay! But currently it is unclaimed. I'll be writing about the claiming rule in a moment).
To allow outposts to something which could be worthwhile, we have changed the number of town blocks you get from each citizen from 16 to 18. This means that you will be able to claim 2 more plots per active resident. Be careful if your town shrinks, you do not want to be hit with the overclaimed upkeep!
TLDR;
[...]
2 - Plots that towns have overclaimed have an upkeep of $10.
Welp... I totally have a lot of plots overclaimed in my town, and with so few residents with me it's a situation I'll be in for long time. Except, I do some cleaning and get rid of all plots I have unused or those I consider not so worth of keeping. Priorities for keeping are I) resident plots in use, II) Valued buildings from former residents, III) Assets that must be protected against griefing (spawners, chests, etc.) and IV) Empty plots for new people that joins. I could enter in more detail about it, but what I want to make clear is that in my situation to break even I'll have to unclaim some built plots which then according to server rules, "1 c. You must claim things that you want protected." and "1 g. If you have the ability to claim, do so. We won't handle every grief case because you were too lazy to claim." those plots would get unprotected against anti-griefing rules, so what I'm asking is if I have some sort of guarantee that I won't be received with a no for response if any grefing event occurred on those plots, given my inability for claiming them again. Because, I still have to keep the priority parts of the town protected, and if the whole town falls to ruin, that won't even be possible.
(By the way, as I had to search for a copy of the full rules on the forum -
https://sentinelcraft.net/forum/index.php?topic=256- and didn't want to open Minecraft only for that, I'd like for them to be accesible also in the site, I guess I remember it used to be that way. I don't even know if they're up to date.)
When I started to write this comment I expected it to be a fun little reaction to news which I feel go well with me and that I know are for the better of the gameplay, and then I ended up realizing details which raised some concern in me so I finished issuing demands that I hope are not too much. As always, I'll be hearing your comments on this.
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