cevkiv

Alternately, it could work like this:

The town is a protected area. Anyone who is not a member of the town will get "flagged" as a criminal when they attempt to break a block, pick a locked door, or open a locked chest. This flag persists for as long as they are in the city limits, and for sixty seconds thereafter. Anyone who is flagged as a criminal can be thrown in jail if beaten to "Death" with the baton. The baton will have no effect on anyone not so flagged. This would allow people to come visit the town for trading purposes without having to worry about getting thrown in jail by some asshole when they haven't done anything.

Under the system I suggest, where someone can only be jailed if they're within town limits (it probably needs to be slightly larger than town limits, as someone might try to run away after getting caught), they have to be where they're not supposed to be to get thrown in jail. And if they're not thrown in jail for a good reason, someone else in the town can let them out. The system could also be set up to where their friends could break into the town to let them out of jail by letting anyone, regardless of whether they're a member of the town in question or not, let someone out if a town's jail.

Instead of handcuffs, you could have a baton. Someone who is "killed" by the baton gets sent to jail. Trespassing (setting foot inside a town you're not a member of) would flag you (this flag would not be visible in the game). The flag persists for sixty seconds after you stop trespassing. So if someone is trying to break through the town wall, someone can go outside and beat them silly with the baton and send them to jail. The person can attempt to run away, and there is the possibility they can get away, but if someone runs from me and I don't think I can catch them I'll just shoot them full of arrows.

This is why a vote system is bad:

Four players are online.

Three players dislike the fourth player.

The fourth player has done nothing wrong.

VOTE HIM INTO JAIL ANYWAY.

A vote system just makes another way to grief. It's too easy to abuse. Three or four assholes could join the server when there's only 1 or 2 people on and then throw them into jail.

The other button creates a tool (a pair of hand cuffs, say), which may be used by any player on the authorized list of the Hearth Stone on any non-authorized player within the protected area. Doing so would teleport the unauthorized player to a jail area. The Jail Area would be defined by the placement of a special Jail Block, and the area itself would be a 5x5 cube with the Jail Block at its center. Blocks and doors within this 5x5 cube are not breakable under any circumstances by players within the Jail Area -- they must be released by an authorized person of the protected area within which the jail is situated.

Jail Block (placable craftable block)

I have no idea what the items used to craft this would be. Probably lots of metal bars. It should be roughly as expensive (resource wise) to create as a Hearth Stone block. The jail block would provide a way to take care of griefers who are caught in the act. It creates an area, which is linked to handcuff items produced by the Hearth Stone block whose protected area the Jail Block is situated in. This area is where people who have handcuffs used on them are teleported to. Blocks within the Jail Area are not breakable by persons within the Jail Area -- they must be released by someone from outside the area who is on the authorized list of persons in the Hearth Stone of the settlement where the jail is located.

Thanks, I appreciate that, it would work but I have a couple problems with it, starting with my previous argument this is unbelievable . A vote for jailing in a democracy or similar government would be nice though. Its almost unnecessary really also if they have a tag over their head saying here is a bad guy and then have some kind of capture with guards/police it would be really exciting, a magic vote is boring and somewhat of a let down. This system could be abused very easily (like cevkiv said) foreign dignitary walks into town with a hundred guards and then all the sudden he randomly disappears because a leader said so, the same could happen during war. Finally, think of all the political possibilities that are lost sabotage would become impossible a fugitive harboring situation could never occur, even espionage would be limited as at any time they may randomly disappear even if they are well armed.

That's not why it's easy to abuse.

The option to throw someone into jail via a vote is too easy to abuse.

I mean, if we are going to use a system, cannot we use the default minecraft system, with a sign/chest? we could just slightly modify to interface.

That's a bukkit plugin, or, at least, I've never seen a non-bukkit plugin implementation of it.

TFC doesn't run on Bukkit. It's a mod of vanilla minecraft. So any implementation of a chest protection system needs to be done inside of TFC. I think tiers of chests, with better locks as you go up the tiers, would be sufficient, provided there were tiers of lockpicks that could be used to bypass the locks.

If only there was a way to only activate the block being destroyable if a certain number of people are doing the same in the area that aren't allowed to destroy said block normally. That way a one-man passer-by greifer would have effect on the block and would require either a band of raiders from the wild or a decent chunk of another town to actually make an impact. of course even with enough people to destroy the blocks the rate at which destroyed would still be slowed.

I don't follow you. Are you talking about a way to open protected chests without destroying them? That could be accomplished by adding a lockpick item whose use allows you to open doors or chests in the protected area.

That's what I'm thinking. I hate the fact that it isn't all between the players with no game interference. What if the player uses the stall right in front of the shopkeeper, that would anger me. No interaction, no haggling, I can't be generous or rip anybody off.

I haven't been keeping up with this topic because it's so big, so I'll just ask. What was said about currency and minting? Also Cevkiv, Does this mean every item has a fixed value?

No. The way I imagine it should work instead of each item having a fixed value, when someone sets up the shop for sale they would be able to choose what item they want and in what quantity in exchange for whatever it is they're selling.

This would enable the ability to compete for buyers, as if one town is selling leather for 1 silver coin (or 10 wheat, or 1 copper ore, or whatever), another town could compete with them for business by undercutting their price, either by requiring a lesser amount of coins (if there is a system of coinage), or by requiring less of the item that the other town is asking for. If my town is asking for 10 wheat for a piece of leather, your town could sell leather for 8 wheat. If my town is asking 1 gold coin and 3 silver coins for an ingot of silver, your town could sell the same item for 1 gold coin and 1 silver coin.

I actually had the time to go back and read the entire thread (you'll have to excuse me, I was on holiday at a festival and when I got back it was 14 pages).

I don't know if you ever saw, but I suggested block fortification some time ago with it's own thread (in fact, it was my first suggestion )

I can totally understand why you would interpret what I said as a desire to grief, but I can assure you, I hate griefers because they stand totally opposed to what I love in these games. I like ordered and meaningful conflict, happening for a reason with a distinct target and motivation in mind, where the target can defend themselves. Griefers stand for meaningless and random destruction and looting, and that is the last thing I want.

Had you specified that several people could break the same block when talking to me, I would have been much less resistive regarding your suggestion for block fortification.

I took a look at CivCraft and am inclined to agree with their methods. Understand that I didn't want diplomacy because I want to see peoples hard earned possessions ruined or people being forced into a single system of government. I only want to ensure that my style of play is protected as well as yours, which is to say that I don't want a system which prevents faction based pvp and the destruction of towns. I can't stand the seemingly overwhelming opinion that minecraft should be a game of "caring and sharing" I don't care for and certainly won't share with everyone on a server. That isn't because I'm an asshole, it's because I don't like communism or pvp free servers. I want to host a server like medieval Europe, full of politics, war, subterfuge and factions working with and against one another, not some fluffy socialist cottonball where your house is always safe and the only thing you have to worry about is the (frankly pathetic) vanilla mobs.

I try to keep up with the suggestions forum, but there it's somewhat hard for me to keep track of everything that gets written in there. I have no seen your thread.

I dislike the ability of anyone to destroy what I make under any circumstances, but I understand that other people enjoy this, and I do think that a balance can be struck between the two ends of the spectrum without making either side feel entirely put out.

I apologize for the lack of reiteration. This is one thread that I have actually been devoting the time to reading every single post that comes along (maybe not thoroughly, but I have yet to skip over any of the posts). I didn't want to clutter up the thread by restating my idea over and over and over again, although perhaps I did that anyway with the great deal of arguing I did.

I would love it if this was a world where everyone wanted to get a long and not destroy what others worked so hard to create. However, I understand that different people have different ideas of what constitutes fun. I think that with a minimal system of rules, you could get anything you wanted, from monarchies to democracies. It would all depend on what the person creating the town wanted. If people didn't like it, they would be free to make their own towns or move to other towns on the server. If the town owner demands taxes, there should be a mechanic where they can punish (remove citizenship/imprison) people who fail to pay their taxes. If the citizens of a town vote that all houses should be made in a similar style, they could enforce it by kicking offenders who refuse to remodel out of the town.

A judge once said, "I know I've come to the right decision when no one is entirely happy with it." I do not like the idea of people being able to destroy my things, but I am willing to accept it if it is made time consuming to do so. Similarly, you do not want a system where it is impossible to destroy another's city. Is asking you to assemble a group of people to make it possible to do in a reasonable amount of time, or to require you as a lone individual to devote a serious amount of time to do so so unreasonable? What we're really trying to do here is come up with a way to deter casual griefing without removing the ability of groups of people to go to war with each other while not making people who build defenses feel that the defenses serve no purpose.

I think it's possible for us both to get some of what we want. Neither of us can have it wholly our own way without the other person feeling screwed over. But I do think it's possible to strike a balance between the two sides.

Psycho, a simple solution for shopkeeping would be the creation of some sort of barter stall or trading post block or group of blocks (much how a bed takes up two blocks, this item could take up multiple blocks), which has an inventory which can be stocked, and a method for trading a specific item, set by the shop's builder, for the item stored in the shop. So if a town happens to be the only town on the server with a large supply of native gold, the townsfolk could set up a trading post that would allow people from other towns to trade something that the townspeople want in exchange for the gold that others might need.

Whistling past the graveyard. There's no point in having block protection if it can be bypassed completely with the click of a button. It should always be extremely hard for a single individual to destroy a city, and still hard for a large group of people to destroy a city. It's not unreasonable for 10 people to take an hour to destroy a city of 10 people. If they can destroy it quickly there's no point in having block protection. If it takes too long, no one will be able to do it. Destroying a city should be something that takes a determined group of people. It shouldn't be something that can be done on the drop of a hat with a click of a button.

I feel very passionately about game design, and I have spent a great deal of time studying the subject: Reading books on the matter, digging up articles written by influential game designers, listening to lectures on the subject, and playing a wide variety of games, sometimes games I don't even have interest in or enjoy, simply to give myself a wider familiarity with the subject. I see a lot of suggestions in here that reek of people who have no understanding of the delicate balance that must be struck between security and freedom. It should not, under any circumstances, be possible to completely bypass block protection, as that entirely defeats the purpose of block protection. Similarly, it should be possible for a single, extremely determined individual to bypass block protection and commit theft, or for a large group of determined individuals who dedicate a reasonable amount of time to do the same.

If the city I and others have spent dozens of hours building and designing can be destroyed in ten minutes because block protection can be completely bypassed by another other city, what is the point in having it in the first place? There would be no point.

The way to strike a balance between security and freedom is to have block protection always be in effect, but to provide ways for those who are willing to spend the time and/or resources to lessen its effectiveness. This rewards both those who take the time to build defenses, as they will always be at least somewhat effective, and those who take the time to build the things that counter those defenses. That is good game design. It rewards both sides of a struggle for their efforts without making one side or the other feel that their efforts were completely wasted.

Too much of what I read in this thread strikes me as griefers bitching that people want to make it hard for them to grief. That's really all it comes down to in my mind. The very people because of whom we desperately need these protections would be the very people to complain the loudest about their existence. Of course a criminal would complain about something that makes it harder for him to commit his crimes. And destroying what another has worked so hard to build without their consent is a crime.

A system whereby the time required to break a block is multiplied would serve to deter the casual griefer, but would not stop several determined individuals. If it takes 64 times as long to break a block, that would require a great deal of time expended by a single person, enough to deter all but a very determined individual, whereas a group of say, 8 people would only take 8 times as long as normal to break the block, or a group of 4 people sixteen times as long to break a block. Oh me, good heavens, it took you 20 extra seconds to break that block! Poor you, you little griefer. What a horrible world, where you actually have to devote time to ruining other people's fun.

Seriously. This entirely comes down to "Griefers don't want protections that stop them from having fun at other people's expense." That's it. That's the sum of this argument over block protection.

[edit] added more than just a pithy comment.

Furthermore, in regards to the above comment about calculators, before we had calculators we had other tools we used in their place, such a slide rules. We no longer use slide rules (generally) because calculators are more efficient and capable of a wider range of computations in a smaller amount of time. You still have to understand the concepts behind the math to make that calculator do the work.

[snip]

First off, you're mistaking passion for anger. That's understandable, because this is the Internet, and subtle things like tone of voice and facial expressions cannot be conveyed via mere text.

Secondly, I'm not responding just to you in specific. I reply to specific things you say, but my words are targeted at a wider audience. I am not trying to put words in your mouth, but to make a point.

Thirdly, I'm done "arguing" with you. You have made it obvious that it's not worth the time or the effort. I can explain things to you until I become arthritic, but I cannot make you understand.

[edit] replaced "under become arthritic" with "until I become arthritic"

This, in my eyes, is far worse than a war system. Why should it take me extra time to break a block just because it belongs to someone ? That is ridiculous. It shouldn't take determination to break blocks. If you wanted that, why not make everyone go to war using their fists ?

To deter assholes who get their kicks out of being assholes to people. If it takes me time and effort to build something, it should take someone else time and effort to destroy it. There needs to be a balance between security in one's possessions and the freedom to be an asshole. It should be possible to be an asshole, but not easy or quick. The fact that you want it to be so easy to grief makes me think that you are the very sort of person that a block protection system is designed to thwart.

No, it shouldn't be very labour intensive to destroy peoples prized possessions in war, namely because it isn't difficult to mine a huge area out in a short space of time. If it took 4 hours to make a small mine, then I would agree, but seeing as you can demolish the natural landscape in minutes, I don't see why peoples stuff should be special. Even if it only took an hour, when was the last time you slept for a single hour, then woke up and jumped straight on your MC server to check that your town wasn't gone ?

Please, go read a book on warfare, particularly in the period for which Terrafirmacraft is supposed to be set. It was incredibly resource intensive to destroy any fortified city. So resource intensive, in fact, that the best way of defeating the city was to simply starve them out. Even when siege weapons were available, it still took a considerable amount of time to destroy walls, and siege weapons were just as likely to be used to fling heads and plagued corpses over the city walls as they were to be used to destroy the city walls.

It is not believable that it should be easy or fast for a single person or a group of persons to destroy a city.

Perhaps not, now that there are so many nations involved in global politics, but this would not have been so hard when there was less factions to cover. Yes, if you use the literal interpretation of the word necessary then it isn't, but as I was clearly using it in the hyperbolic sense, you are nitpicking.

Maybe you've never actually had to argue with someone before who know how to argue, but the best kind of correct is technically correct. You are wrong. It doesn't matter how wrong you are. You are still wrong. "Just a little" late is still late, and "just a little illegal" is still illegal.

The point is that you know your relations with factions not players. Why on earth would it list every player on the server, and whether you're at war with him or not ? The purpose of the GUI is to give a general overview of the political state of the server. It's not tell you which players you need to look out for, but which factions are liable to attack you etc.

You are quite right, we shouldn't spoon feed information to the players. Why do we have a blacksmithing bar at all actually, we should just let them guess. Oh and the temperature gague ? Forget that, it's information, we don't like information here.

Apples and Oranges. A blacksmithing bar is necessary because you need some sort of feedback to determine how well you're doing. In real life, this feedback is easily available because I can just look at the damned item I'm smithing and figure out what it can and cannot take. You can't do that in TFC, hence the bar. Similarly, in real life I can determine how hot something is by just looking at the damned thing in question and using its color to gauge how hot it is. Which is what the temperature gauge in TFC amounts to.

It's not spoon feeding them vital in game information, it's preventing unnecessary (and non gameplay enhancing) confusion.

Honestly tell me you wouldn't get angry if new players came to you and asked "are we friends with x faction ?" .. Yep, sounds like a good time to me ¬.¬

No, I wouldn't get angry. I do not get angry at people who ask legitimate questions. I do, however, get angry at people who cannot understand basic concepts.

Admitting it panders to laziness and admitting it is useless are two different things. For example, calculators pander to laziness. They are also not necessary, as we got by before they were around.

Calculators do not pander to laziness. They exist due to the fact that it is impossible for the average human being to do even simple mathematics in their head. Go ahead and tell me in less than ten seconds what the square root of 5836729 is. You can't do that. Not because you're lazy, but because of the very real limitations of your brain. The calculator is, ideally, a tool, not a crutch. This system you propose is not a tool, it is a crutch.

Not true. By your own definition, wheelbarrows are largely unnecessary actually. If you are trying to carry a large amount of rubble, why not just move it a few pieces at a time. Oxygen is necessary, wheelbarrows aren't

You've obviously never done any sort of hard manual labor. If you had, you would not say that "wheelbarrows are largely unnecessary." Have you ever had to move a three hundred pound piece of rock that you can't break into smaller pieces because it needs to be intact? A wheelbarrow is necessary in such a situation, unless you have better tools, like a bulldozer.

The thing I was referring to was the GUI which aids the user in understanding political relations on the server and prevents needless agravation for the old players, as you won't have people asking about diplomacy every 5 minutes.

I doubt that one would be asked that question every five minutes. In fact, I'm sure it wouldn't happen, and I think you know that, and I think you're deliberately lying because your point is unsupportable.

Wait wait wait wait, what?

At the beginning of my post I specifically said that computer controlled law enforcement wasn't being asked for, I know that doing so would be nigh impossible.

All I said was that there is still a need for laws to be recorded and the Home Stone provides that and since the Home Stone is already going to be a thing, why make the storage of a list of laws outside of the home stone since according to the OP, it would store information on the town. You give the town owner a screen where he can type in a list of laws. All that would be is words, like what I am typing now, not game play parameters, that would be just stupid. I did say that a way the Home Stone could be used to enforce laws is through the owner of the Town. The town's owner decides the sale of property in his town and who is a citizen, you break his laws, he maybe imprisons you in a designated jail, you act up again he takes away your land using the Home Stone, you doing something really stupid after that, he revokes your citizenship. That would all be player controlled, I never said it would be automated. The Home Stone would just provide a means to felicitate those actions without the need of typing chat commands which Bioxx has said is one of the reasons for the Home Stone in the OP.

Right now there is no way to actually enforce anything without getting moderators involved. Giving town owners the right to revoke land, assign to jail, invoke monetary fines, or revoke citizenship is a way to enforce laws and keeps moderators out of player game play.

So all you're saying is that making a sign out of sticks and wood is too damned hard.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There is already a perfectly good method of conveying information to other players while offline: A sign.

There may be a need for a special sign that can only be placed by the town's owner, but there is no need to needlessly complicated something in the way you are suggesting.

As to penalties for things, you are once again needlessly complicating things without understanding the complexities involved in enforcement. How do you assign and revoke land? You need a mechanic to do that. Invoking monetary fines requires a mechanic, not only for a system of money, but for levying fines and taxes, which does not need a specific system of its own. Revoking citizenship is easy. If you would read the post I made, the system I suggest allows for everything needed to create as complex a system of laws as you could ever want, while still being mechanic-light.

I would disagree for the simple reason that, while war should be a purely social construct, if any block protection which would be effective against griefers is implemented, it would be totally unfeasible.

Untrue. Read the post I wrote about the system I proposed. It's entirely possible to create a form of block protection that can be bypassed by a determined individual with a great deal of time, or by a determined group of individuals by pooling their time and resources, while still stopping the vast majority of griefers, because your average griefer just wants to break something, not devote their time to breaking things.

As I explained above, if block protection is strong enough to prevent griefing, then it inherently prevents war (since war is effectively organised griefing against one another). If it is not good enough to stop griefing, then it is not worth having block protection at all.

I saw what you said earlier about server op's who want block protection and how if an admin enables it, he obviously doesn't want blocks broken. This is a vast oversimplification. Firstly, you certainly don't speak for all server op's, secondly, the desire to prevent mindless, vandalism style, undirected block breaking and coordinated, politically orientated block breaking are two different things.

It is entirely possible to implement a system of block protection that is compatible with the idea of war between cities. You're just not thinking creatively enough.

The war mechanic is necessary for another reason: The dispersion of players through time zones. If a town didn't have to declare war on another town, they could simply walk in and destroy it when all (or most) of the players are offline. This could be interpreted as an "ambush", but it really isn't much good for gameplay, as the attack will be easy for the attackers and upsetting for the victims. Combine this with the fact that, unlike IRL, players don't have a constant presence on the forum, so even if the attack was uncovered, nothing could be done about it. If the war mechanic was put in place, it would allow the defenders to prepare a defence or even pre-emptively attack.

With a block protection system, they couldn't simply walk into town and destroy it when all (or most) of the players are offline unless they wanted to take the time to do so. The point of a block protection system is not to make it impossible to grief, but to make it time consuming to grief, because that deters griefers. Is it really so horrible if it takes ten people an hour to destroy a town? Shouldn't it be time consuming and labor-intensive to destroy a town that people worked so hard to build? It should. Destroying a town isn't something you should be able to do in minutes, even with a large group of people. It should take a large amount of time. To offset this, there should be "siege weapons" added that can be built that reduce the time it takes to destroy protected blocks, but are very resource-intensive to make, so that only groups of people could get them.

The war system does not introduce rigidity,

nor does it prevent players using their creativity while playing. For example, what you said about trading to the enemy, what about the war mechanic stops you doing that exactly ? It's not like you can't enter an enemy town, you just can't break things. The politics of the server will still be just as complex with a GUI (which as danny pointed out, is necessary for larger servers where there may be many factions) as it only explains your own political relations with other towns (information which is available already, presuming you have someone recording it). It is also believable and realistic. Can you seriously tell me that factions in the past would not keep a record of the political relations with other nations?

It is not believable and realistic. There is nowhere I can go in my town to look up an official list of what the relationship of the United States is with every other country on the world. And a GUI/list is not necessary for larger servers. I don't think you understand what the word necessary means. It means you literally cannot do without it. Oxygen is necessary for life. This system that lists faction relationships is not necessary for the functioning of a town system. It's simply a crutch for lazy people.

The only thing the war system does is attempt to level a playing field which is set off kilter by issues caused by the fact that this game is a game. In a constantly populated server, I would agree with you. Unfortunately, this is simply not feasible, so we as players need help.

Once again, a properly thought out block protection system solves all these problems, without creating needless complexity and extraneous crap.

How would you not be able to lie ?

It's not like the GUI would list all members of that faction. If you approached someone and they didn't know what faction you belonged to, how would they know ?

Alternatively, if they did find out your faction, the more sensible players who kept track of server politics would know anyway. The GUI doesn't tell you anything new, it just makes it easier to find.

Yes, it does pander to peoples laziness.

In the same way that wheelbarrows IRL pander to peoples laziness. It makes a job easier. I don't see you complaining that hauling rocks isn't hard and tedious enough .....

Apples and Oranges. Wheelbarrows are necessary because of the physical limitations of the human body. There is only so much that a human being can carry. The wheelbarrow amplifies the human ability to carry things. This system which you and others propose does not amplify the ability in which the game is played, it limits and constricts for no god damned reason.

[edit] dropped a negator

I don't think anyone was implying physical implications for laws.

As an example, for towns on my server, the person who starts a town decides on building zones, architecture theme and material them. Players who decide that they want to build in that town have to abide by building codes, if they fail to than the town owner has several options. First option on first offense is to talk with the offending user and tell them what is wrong with their building, second offense the town owner is allowed to remove the offending building if they refuse to fix it, third offense the town owner is allowed to kick the person out of his town with enforcement by the server moderators. This is to keep arguments down and for towns to look nice and feel right. Again, signs to writing rules is a bad option for 1) Limited space, 2) Each letter on a sign is an individual entity and they have unlimited draw range, large billboards cause entity lag (which is why optifine has an option to smartly cut off letters on a sign after so many blocks depending on how many signs are in a chunk), 3) Billboards are ugly and the Home Stone is designed to store information already.

Having laws stored somewhere allows for the owner of a town to set up how he wants his town run and if it is all in a place everyone knows where them to be, offending users cannot just go "well, I didn't know". Also, in my above example on how towns are run on my server currently, the fact that a town owner has to rely on moderators to enforce their town's laws right now is bad, having the Home Stone allow them to fine an offending player, remove property rights or remove citizenship removes the need for moderators to meddle in players actions.

For writing laws it doesn't have to be a set of parameters a town owner has to select from, it could be a screen where he can just type out words, like how the 1.3 writable books work.

Honestly, if the Home Stone has to be there to define a towns controlled area, I would say make it as useful to all citizens as possible, an information hot spot seems a reasonable thing to do.

You are failing to understand this: It is impossible to create a computer system that can deal with all possibilities. Only human beings are capable of dealing with the new. You are limiting the freedom of the players by having the computer attempt to enforce a predefined set of laws, not to mention the degree of difficulty in creating the system that defines and creates the laws.

Nothing anyone has said about the idea of laws has shown a reason for there to be a specific mechanic hard-coded for the creation and enforcement of laws. That is something the players are able to do themselves, and to a much greater ability and flexibility than any computer system can do.

Minecraft is, at its heart, a sandbox game. Sandbox games rely on the fact that there are extremely few rules and restricting mechanics. At it's heart, Minecraft's "rules" could be simply construed as the laws of physics for a world. Everything else that happens in the world, including how players interact with each other, is a natural, organic response to the very basic, limited ruleset that is the laws of physics.

What makes sandbox games so good is the freedom they allow. What makes Minecraft good is that you can do pretty much anything you want, within the limits of the game's physics. Any addition to the game, such as block protection in the form of cities, or law enforcement in the form of a jailing mechanism, needs to be kept as rules light and minimally invasive as possible. The barest minimum of functionality, and no more. Instead of creating a complicated system that allows the implementation of laws in a city you instead create a system that allows players to enforce laws on their own. The ways of being human are bounded, but infinite. Humans can create an infinite number of laws, and in a greater nature of complexity, than any preprogrammed system can create. While you might think a hard-coded mechanic for laws is a good idea, what you're really doing is limiting the freedom of the players by confining them to a preset idea of what laws should be.

Under an open system, where, for example, an area can be designated as a jail, with a way to confine people to the jail so that they cannot leave unless another person not in the jail gets out, you can have a wide variety of laws in a complexity that allows for solutions to problems that cannot be foreseen until they arise. That's the difference between humans and computers. A computer can only do what it is told, and cannot adapt to something new. A human being, or a group of human beings, can create unforeseen, innovative responses to situations that occur without prior warning.

By implementing a bare-bones systems that allows the enforcement of laws without confining those laws to a preset, restricted, set of ideas you are allowing the players more freedom to adapt and to be creative, which is what sandbox games are all about in the first place.

Furthermore, as to implementing "laws" -- what sort of laws are we talking about here? And how would you create a mechanic that would enforce them?

There is no point in implementing a system that allows the "ruler" of a "town" to create "laws" if there is no mechanic to enforce them. You might as well wave your hands in the air, it'd do about the same amount of good.

Something that lets you see the rules of the town would be good -- and we already have that: signs. Maybe we need a special kind of sign that can only be placed by the owner of a town, and is distinguishable from the normal sign, so that one can tell it's "legit", but there's no need to create a totally new functionality when you can just adapt an already existing one.

Furthermore, how would you enforce these laws? Particularly for more esoteric things like, "Houses can only be made out of basalt brick". How do you create a mechanic to evaluate that law? And how do you create something to enforce it?

A lot of these suggestions I see being made have no concept or appreciation of what computers can do, or how computers are made to do the things they do. For every general case of law you would need dozens upon dozens of variations, and many laws would have special-case parameters, leading to tens of thousands of possible permutations that would have to be taken into account. That is a lot of programming. And while it's not the most complicated thing in the world, it's not very straight-forward.

Again, you don't need some sort of mechanic for laws. A simple sign that can only be placed by the town's owner that can be used to display laws would suffice. Things like, "No cobble or dirt houses" or "keep all roads 3 blocks wide". Anyone who violates a law could, under the system I proposed, simply be removed from the list of "citizens" of the town and then jailed for violating the law. There's no need to needlessly complicate things when the players themselves can take care of things.

I would say, "No" to the idea of an in-game readable list of how cities relate to each other because it removes the possibility of deception on the part of players. If the server is PvP, being able to lie to someone without them knowing it's a lie until it's too late is something you would want.

Sure, there is really no need for a GUI if it is just two communities going through day to day politics of trading and bartering land rights until someone pisses off the other and they go to war to settle a dispute (just as an example), but on larger servers, where you have many many different communities all with different levels of political standing (allied, neutral, trading partner, bad standing, war, etc) it would be nice to have all this information stored and visible at the cities homestone rather than on a massive wall of signs that would require (depending on the size of the server and instability of the leaders) a lot of rearrangement. That is sloppy, it is also, more importantly, slow. Having it as a viewable GUI of "Political Standings and Relations" would be a nice addition that doesn't force restrictions on the playerbase and will allow new users to figure out the information on their own as well as allow city leaders to easily keep up on news in the world and think accordingly on what they should do next. Doing this would also help take a step of having all the towns information stored within the homestone.

Thinking over this I really can't find a con to just having the information stored in a clean format that everyone would know how to find and the less players rely on giant walls of signs to convey information the better (or at least until Jeb decides to redo how signs and lettering work so that each letter isn't an individually rendered entity and not just, you know, a texture). It isn't forcing players into a system, if they don't want to fill in their cities standings with others, it will just now show up. I would think of this as adding tools for servers to develop how they want their kingdoms to work, not strict systems they are forced to comply by.

The point still stands that it's entirely unnecessary. Your argument for this feature is that people are lazy and/or stupid. While this is true, I see no need to cater to it.

Also, is it possible to redo the lighting system to allow light levels above 15? Is it possible to implement other light sources, such as, say, olive oil powered lamps, with a higher range than torches?

If protected town areas do not by default stop the spawning of hostile mobs within their area, a more powerful light source with a larger radius than a torch would be nice. Maybe a lamppost or something similar. Having torches scattered about every few meters is... aesthetically unpleasing. Also, they should burn out eventually.

Furthermore, if you were paying attention, I'm not saying that there should be no way for people to go to war with each other. I'm simply suggesting that there does not need to be a specific war mechanic, nor a GUI for determining the relationships between settlements. Both of those things (the disposition of two settlements between each other, and war between two groups) can be achieved without specific game-enforced mechanics.

I didn't suggest a hardcoded restriction? All i want is a little Gui, that shows relations, and allows for leaders to edit them, and others to see it. there need be no restriction of innovation, with what most of the suggestions here state.

Sigh, also just suggestions here cevkiv, no need to get worked up, some people like warring servers, some don't.

There are suggestions, and then there are suggestions. I could suggest that TFC make my coffee for me in the morning. Not all suggestions are equal in terms of feasibility, necessity, and/or suitability. As I understand it, this thread is a platform for debate about what should and should not be included in the upcoming version. If your idea is so flimsy that it cannot withstand reasonable discussion, it probably does not need to be used. That's how you identify bad suggestions -- you discuss them, their outcomes, their effects, and what those will be and whether or not they are wanted or needed.