New town system suggestion.

So some have heard me say this and I decided to make a post for it with my opinion on the current town system and as to why I think it should revised if not making a completely new system.

Towny
Currently the only plus to having the town is owning a town and the automatic taxing and purchasing of plots, it costs a lot to start which is understandable, but then it gets worse with the huge upkeep. Players (especially new players) are being discouraged to join a town due to tax and being kicked out of town due to running out of money by being inactive. While voting is easy and prevents being kicked out of towns, not everyone plays or even votes every day (ties into voting problems and can be fixed without an alternative town system), some players quit after being kicked out of town and while others attempt to go back or just go elsewhere.
As well as being locked with using 16x16 plots that have no space in-between so you almost have to use an entire 16x16 area for the road and space in-between houses.
The plot size restrictions can also make it harder to make a good looking town.
All of these are in my opinion many reasons as to why there aren’t many towns, why they die, why some people quit the server as well as quality of towns may not be so good looking due to limited space.
I never really have liked towny and probably never will.

Though my suggestion is able to provide a new way to make towns without towny, while it may require more admin/mod input (and especially in the early stages if it was to be input), while some of the problems can be fixed without a whole new town system of which I am suggesting it can fix many of them.
I am suggesting a system that completely relies on the World Guard plugin, I have seen it done, this is how it was done on my previous server and I am drawing the main ideas of it from there.

Regions
Towns would be purchased and the region would be created by an admin which would encompass a certain size, (just gonna use a 128x128 as an example) which would include the entire y axis and would be equivalent to 64 16x16 towny regions. The town owner would be given permission for his new region given to him, he would then outline plots to be made and indicate the exact size of the plot with a sign and corner blocks. E.g. 25x20 20+ 10- This would mean that the plot is 25x20x30, with the height being 20 blocks up above the ground and 10 blocks down including the floor of the plot. This region would be made by an admin/mod.
This allows town owners to place regions anywhere within their town as well as making a restricting height limit and depth level of their house. Making towns of any shape and form possible, making for more organized and better looking towns.
For expansions to towns there could be another town plot next to it, following my example from before, another 128x128 right next to it, so the total size of the town would now be 256x128.
The expansion would be a separate region added rather than the actual region expanded.

Flags
Flags are certain modifications to the region which can be turned on or off and the permissions for these can be changed for the different ranks so that only mods and admins can change certain ones while owners of regions can only change a few of them.
Flags includes mobspawning, pvp, chest protection, notification for leaving and entering the region, ice forming, snow forming, ice melting, snow melting. These are only some of the ones but would be the more notable of the many that there are.

Ownership
Every region can have owners and members, members are able to do things in the region that is prevented by the world guard region, i.e. building and world guard protected chests <---( of course won’t be protected just an example) while of course they can’t override pvp protection.
Owners are able to add and remove other players from either the region, so this would also give the possibility of co-ownership where two players have the same amount of permissions.
And for extra convenience town members who owns a plot can add anyone else they want as either an owner of their plot or a member which allows for people to live together in the same plot. And if there is a town project the mayor can just add people to the specific region that the project is confined in.

Parenting
For the grouping of the regions and what gives owners of the main town region permission to the all the individual plots is parenting.
By every sub region inside a town are be parented to the main town region, which gives all owners and members of the parented region permissions to the child and owners of the parent are able to modify owners of the child region but not vice versa. This also applies all flags from the previous region onto the child region.

This system allows towns to be highly customizable due to player plots can be customized to just about any size that the mayor wishes to do and can make towns an easier feat, as well as the number of flags that can be changed, as well as the convenience for player plots.
However the down side is that everything is manual, this includes buying plots, adding people to the town, the creation of plots will take a long time to begin with as well as training mods/admins to make plots and perhaps the fixed town region size compared to the customisable towny 16x16 extensions. However I believe the outcome will be great if this is implemented, better town system, more and better towns and more players staying.

A combination of towny and the WG town system could be possibly, keeping the towny town for the purpose of /t spawn, /tc (if it gets fixed) showing the population count, taxing if we keep it.

Any questions about my proposal can be discussed in the post, I may have missed some things.

TL;DR
Currently making towns is not appealing and towns are dying and in my opinion we need a new system to make people want to make a new town and for players to join towns.Towny sucks.

For those not familiar with WG and wish to learn about what I am talking about here's the wiki: http://wiki.sk89q.com/wiki/WorldGuard

 

TL;DR Towny sucks. Please fix it.

 

Advantages

Restricting height limit will be great, as, for Sisu at least, public facilities reside in the same x/z coordinates as the spawn, so everyone is allowed to build/break everywhere to allow this to take place. Also will stop people mining in town, building too tall, etc etc.

With mob spawning, it grants the ability to allocate certain areas of town to killing mobs. Eg. town gates or a mob arena similar to mine, arch's or nikle's. Would also work well with the first point by having mobs spawn underneath a spawn area.

Notification for leaving/entering. Would this be for outsiders? Not sure how other's feel, but I would like this in some situations. Eg. A lot of the time I'm not in town, as I have lots of projects to be doing out of town, so pretty much I've had one PvP encounter. Being notified would allow towns to have some knowledge they're being raided, adding to the advantage of being in a town and making raiding harder. Yes, this is now unfair on the raiders, but we could try a sort of outpost thing. Aka, a border x amount of blocks away from town that does notify players, or something similar.
Pretty much, this could work, maybe.

Disadvantages
Oh man, all that effort? Eh, I personally don't mind if the advantages are worth it, mods being able to do it too will lighten the load further, and their responsibilities don't extend too far in game at the moment.

(lazy edit, first point in plots is easily worked around, only minor inconvenience)
What about plots? Also a bit of a pain, as for the town mayor, they need an admin or mod before they can expand or add plots (Big tick marks on adding players to town, and them not being able to build until someone can make them a plot (Unless of course anyone can build within the town area as long as they're in the town, and individual plot systems aren't used). Also, a few extra steps in the whole process of buying plots. Instead of just claiming, it's ask a mod/admin -> money to admin -> money to zroxami/shadecrest ->plot made ->perms added

And what about towny?
I'd say we still keep with towny, just for the one chunk that is /t spawn. This way there's still the start up cost, independent of mods/admins, plus taxes if so desired, upkeep (nerf plz, PLSSSSSSS, regardless of what happens with this thread, upkeep needs nerfing), and other town advantages: ease of adding/removing players, town messages, /t online, /t list and other ways to see what towns there are and who's in it

 

Mob spawning flag
I am not too sure if it is possible to enable it in one area of the town while it is disabled in the main town region, this I'll have to do some research on due to possible overlapping regions. However mobs will not disappear if they walk into the town so a wall is needed most of the time.

Notification for leaving/entering.
It doesn't work that way, the player who is entering the town gets a welcoming message or whatever the mayor decides. This isn't so much of a big feature it is just one of the things that could be added as a flag to towns.

Effort
You will be surprised at what it takes, the only time on the server where it was really busy was when a town was expanding and renovations were made and that was when only admins were able to do it and mods were made nearly for the sole reason of taking a load off of the admins.

Making plots are not made on the spot of purchase, the town owner would place signs indicating the size of the plot, corner markers as to where, region name and does a /modreq(I can go into detail of naming plots for better organization.). So a town owner requests a bunch of plots to be made, which are then parented to the town plot, then the town owner can wait until someone wishes to buy them, the player hands the money to the mayor and the player gets the plot. The only regions that would be purchased from an admin would be the town expansions and the initial town region, not the player plots.

And what about towny?

The start up cost could just be given when you get your town region (made by an admin).
To be honest I'd say that we make towns pay for /t spawn, since it'd be a plus for towns, while people will still use a public /home, it is a lot easier for new people to just use /t spawn and would be more appealing however the other features would be really good to keep.

 

saw this a while back, we should def switch to this if we use WG instead of towny
http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/mctowns/
using regions is pretty basic, we could teach admins/mods in less than a day.
EDIT: a good alternative since town chat isn't working, although I would really like a town chat system

 

Looks very cool, I would be interested in testing this if we were to attempt to do this town system.

 

WG plots can have specific owners who can claim and stuff. All this would be easier with the increased amount of staff these days though.

There are other alternatives to WG plots, here is a decent one: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/plotme/

As for another town alternative, check this out: http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/simplezones/
its like wordguard crossed with towny but way easier to use! i will try this out sometime.

 

If a test server was set up I could probably set up some example regions in less than 10 minutes if some people wanted a physical explanation of how it would work. Though I'd have to do it just with world edit and I could experiment with the MCTowns plugin later.

 

imaxorz can we try this?

Also need a rethink for prices

 

One thing though with this is the removal of the dynamic for nations. Unless a huge overlay region could be done?

 

Well with nations, all the towns that are part of the nation can be parented to the capital.

 

I can set it up on the test server later, but I need to see if permissions are working there first

 

Okay talking in teamspeak with a few others they like towns, the regions are garbage with them you don't really know if your apart of that town. They don't have a actual thing I can look and see that yup Sisu's region has 30 members mayor is me and so on. Towns aren't expensive and you don't need taxes.

If you vote everyday I could keep Sisu running on the money I get. Also we had a few ideas suggesting we get town channels which towns could purchase so its like town chat but more ways for towns to spend money. Overall towny is great and much better than regions, I say we keep towny and just focus on the problems with it.

 

Could you please re-phrase or correct some of the things you said, I don't quite understand what you are trying to say in some of it.

World guard is highly customisable for towns which is what makes it great, height limit on player plots, customising the size of the plots and with the MCTowns plugin, it may be able to do all of which towny can and more, minus a few things (I have not tested MCTowns). I feel that the pros of towny is greatly outweighed by the downsides compared to world guard.

Now while some people do like towny, many of them haven't tried making one and most people don't like change. However I feel it is clearly evident that towny is a bad town system and I feel it is hurting our player count and even the number and quality of towns.
I'd like to try and convince the people who like towny to want to switch to WG.

 

Most of the people on team speak are usually playing ftb and possibly don't know the problems with Towny as much as the other people that spend a lot more time on survival. Towny is incredibly expensive and time consuming to run a town. There's a reason not many people make their own town.

 

Okay I guess but towny isn't bringing are player count down its people not voting.

 

It's not one single thing, magetime. It's a combination of many things that need to be improved.

 

for those interested this plugin is now on the test server. reply to this post if you are interested in testing. Only people we can absolutely trust will be allowed as permissions are not working on the server.

 

Well of course I'd be up for testing it, did you get permissions working for me to make examples?

 

I can help too