Hello all! The June GSM is now over, and we managed to get it done in three and a half hours, even though we had a record-breaking number of topics in Section One. Thanks to everyone who submitted items for discussion, so let’s talk about what happened!
As always, the public portion of the meeting can be viewed here.
Staffing updates
We are pleased to announce two promotions in the staff ranks:
- sesese9 has been promoted to the Trial Moderator position.
- megascatterbomb has passed his Trial Moderator probationary period and has gained full Moderator privileges.
Congratulations to both of these players, and welcome aboard!
CoreProtect log post-mortem
As Frumple noted in a previous post, we have dumped all CoreProtect logs up until June 15, 2018. This means that any block changes made before that date are no longer available, and we will be unable to roll areas back to before this date. We will need to run purges about once a year to remove old records, which may take some time to complete. Our first such purge will likely happen in either spring or fall 2019.
Policy changes
We’re changing a few policies and rules, all of which are effective immediately.
- At the last GSM, we announced an amendment to the warning policy where players with two active warnings or a double warning will be required to send a reflection statement in order to be re-promoted, and brought it into effect about two days later for all current and future players in this situation. This has been in effect since mid-May, and will remain in effect going forward. Our apologies for not making this clear.
- We are shortening the promotion delay for all ranks below Senator. Players are now eligible for promotion 1 week (7 days) after receiving their last promotion, provided they have no active warnings. This means:
- The promotion delay between Member and Citizen remains at 1 week.
- The promotion delay between Citizen and Trustee has decreased from 2 weeks to 1 week.
- The promotion delay between Trustee and Councillor has decreased from 2 weeks to 1 week.
- The promotion delay between Councillor and Mayor has decreased from 2 weeks to 1 week.
- Promotions from Mayor to Senator, Senator to Governor, and Governor to Premier will continue to be handled through the City Rank Promotion Batch process.
- These time limits only apply for your player rank, not town ranks. Therefore, any towns that you own which are below your current player rank are not subjected to promotion delays. For example, if you are the mayor of a Senator city and a Councillor town, the Councillor town can be promoted to Mayor as soon as it meets the other requirements; you do not have to wait a week to get promoted in this case.
- The General Rule “Do not advertise other servers” has changed to “Do not advertise servers unaffiliated with the MRT”. This means you are permitted to provide links to Discord servers and other resources for the towns, transit organizations, sporting events, and other events on the MRT, but you may not advertise other Minecraft servers, or auxiliary services connected to those.
- The MRT Road Guidelines have been updated to remove the use of carpets. We strongly encourage players building roads to follow these guidelines as closely as they can, though they are not official policy.
We have also adjusted some perks and permissions:
- An additional Premier perk has been added. Premier cities can have custom icons appear on dynmap, instead of the default purple flower that is currently in use. If you’re the mayor of a Premier ranked city and would like to have a different icon mark your city, please email the admins a 32×32 PNG image and we can upload it. (If you’d rather have a non-square icon, please use transparent pixels for the rest of the image; dynmap requires this exact size.)
- Players between Trustee and Premier, inclusive, can no longer use /npc vulnerable to kill NPCs created with Citizens, due to abuse and a few players spamming the chat with vulgar names and death messages. Please use the /npc remove command or ask staff for assistance with removing an NPC. Staff can make NPCs vulnerable if needed.
Trustees and above can now use /npc path to allow NPCs to move around. Though the plugin has a very high limit on the number of nodes in a path, please try to keep NPC paths short and reasonable.Update: This will not be enabled for now, as a bug exists in Citizens that prevents NPCs from properly sitting down when instructed. When this issue is fixed, we will re-enable /npc path.- We will be adding specializations for administrators and full moderators. These are additional titles that will be awarded to reflect the special duties that staff take on, either in addition to or in replacement of “normal” jobs (rules enforcement, WorldEdits, day-to-day community building, and so on), and will be listed on the main website and other locations as needed. We’ll discuss and award our first batch of specializations at the next GSM in July.
Finally, we clarified the 7,500-block Senator airfield rule: this size limit does include fences and other man-made boundaries, and will be enforced strictly. Therefore, airfields that are 7,501 blocks in size are not allowed. Natural boundaries such as cliffs and shorelines will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Airfields that are too large need to become compliant as soon as possible.
Roads
We did not receive any road proposals at this GSM, but we did review a proposal to enable driving on red terracotta blocks. These are used frequently for bus and bike lanes, however the uCars plugin uses these blocks for traffic control setups. We’ll be testing out driving on the beta server, and if it all works out, we’ll enable it on the main server in the next few weeks.
Beta Server
We are currently testing out an update to Dynmap, as well as a new plugin, FastAsyncWorldedit (FAWE), on the beta server. Since FAWE is very experimental and has crashed the beta server a few times, we’re keeping the beta server whitelisted to staff only for the time being. We will likely keep the beta server whitelisted until mid-July.
Anniversary Events
We are starting to plan events for the sixth anniversary of the MRT, on July 13, 2018. Staff will be hosting a variety of events in the days leading up to July 13 or the following weekend, and we’ll post announcements here and on Discord when the calendar is finalized.
Arctic Line Announcements and Station Names
Frumple’s Arctic Line announcements pilot project has gone well, so in the coming months we hope to expand it to the entire Arctic Line. When the project is completed we’ll post the resource pack template, and you’ll be able to record your own versions of the announcements. Eventually this may be rolled out system-wide.
In order to get the announcements recorded, we will be assigning names to the unnamed Arctic Line stations. Effective immediately, the remaining stations are named as follows:
- A4: Sanford
- A5: Cornus Southeast
- A7: Watchfield East
- A17: Freshney West
- A18: Chestwick
- A19: Voltsphere (change to Taiga Line, T24)
- A27: Lancaste
- A28: Cicero
- A29: Lucerne Gate
- A30: Lucerne
Please contact Frumple if you have any questions.
Property Auctions
- XE7-XE8 Merchant City has been transferred to Tom_Pairs.
- C93 has been transferred to Vulpicula.
- The Morihama Ferry Terminal has been transferred to Cookie46910.
- C14 North Haven, while requested by AlfiePops, was retracted before the start of the GSM and was not transferred.
Premier City Reviews
We reviewed proposals for Premier for the cities of Dabecco, Laclede, and Utopia, and while there were varying levels of support, none of these cities reached the 85% threshold that is required for promotion. Full feedback is available here.
Event and Funding Requests
- SkyjumperTalon has requested funding for another mini golf tournament on June 30, which has been approved.
- Additionally, SkyjumperTalon requested funding for end-of-season prizes for players who have participated in MRT Golf Association events. Due to the complexities involved in managing this funding, and the relatively small amounts, this has been denied.
- The Event of Events, proposed by SkyjumperTalon, was denied as we don’t think it will get as many participants as was originally proposed, and has too many events on one day.
- SkyjumperTalon’s final event proposal this GSM is for a Hunger Games style event, however this was denied as not enough information was provided by the GSM (in particular, the date and time).
- MinecraftYoshi26 has proposed a new structure for running the screenshot contests, which has been approved. The first iteration of this new structure will be accepting submissions through 11:59 pm UTC on June 30.
SLE and JLS station allocations
We opened the Southern Line East (stations S0 to S26) and Jungle Line South (stations JS1 to JS14) at this GSM, and have awarded the following stations:
- SE2: Amber_Pine
- SE4, SE5: MC_Protocol
- SE8: TalonPlays
- SE9, SE10: Camelfantasy
- SE12, SE13: SigmaTheEnigma
- SE17: CortesiRaccoon
- SE20: MIKE24DUDE
- JS4: TalonPlays
- JS6: Funky_Flounder
- JS7: DaMarMan111
- JS9: Needn_NL
Any stations not listed here are released for general claiming, though by the time you see this post they may no longer be available. Please remember the 300-block and 500-block rules when building at open stations, and note that claims that don’t have significant development within two weeks can be released upon request.
Upcoming Events
- The Evella Expo is currently ongoing setup, and the expo itself will start soon. Exhibitors can register until June 20 and must be set up by June 23, and the expo itself runs from June 25 through July 2.
- XII TacoBurritoAThon will occur in Elecna Bay at 5:00 pm UTC, June 30.
- The next mini-golf tournament starts at 7:00 pm UTC on June 30.
- The first session of The Amazing Race 9 will begin at 7:00 pm UTC on July 1.
Frumple is planning on doing livestreams on Saturday, June 30 and Sunday, June 1 to showcase the Evella Expo and Amazing Race 9. You can watch these at twitch.tv/frumple.
Thanks all!
Chief, on behalf of the rest of the staff