only two items in this patch, but both will be popular:

• Mob Arena - "four". Head west from spawn along the banks of the loch, and turn right at the end. In the valley, there is a mob arena. Type "/ma join four" to join and "/ma leave" to leave.

• Nether. Accessed via the portal near spawn. Only one portal. We do not allow cutom portals to be generated because of the ability they provide to grief. The new nether is not fully generated. It's 1200 diameter round, so it has generated a fortress.


More portals, arenas and (maybe) another nether fortress, to come....

• Replaced spawn's coloured hats and boots with plain hats and boots. Now properly protects against extreme weather

• "/reply" now works.

• Server Messages now trigger information about the server. Every 9 minutes.

• Transporter plugin disabled (server - to - server transports will not be used)

• mayors can disable explosions. This will be revised subject to siege testing.

• General chat increased to 650 metres range. You can still escape it, but players at spawn will always be heard by everyone.

• Spawn is now protected against creeper explosions

• Mobspawn is denied at spawn

• You can safely drop down the glass/lava chute at the Tower of Eternity in to water at the lowest level.

...



More to come tomorrow.

Couple of sticky teething problems going in to Round 1, but we're there.

pvp.ragnacraft.com

is open! No whitelist.

Round 1 is coming this week. We're in the process of finishing off the map, thanks very much to elementzero1 who is working on the custom map for this round.

• The map is 1200 diameter, ~600 radius (1,130,973 m squared) . It's a substantial increase on the total land area from beta round.
• There is no whitelist (subject to ongoing review)
• Global bans will be enforced for rule-breakers
• Game-rules (i.e. order of play) will be updated, to make sure the winning criterias and game-stages are understood by all.
• Easter eggs have been randomly seeded in the world. These include: special shops you can buy items from; special shops you can sell items too.
• Mobarena will be available
• Mobs in the wild will drop bounty
• The official advertised address for the server is mc.ragnacraft.com. (pvp.damnation.eu works also).
• The website at http://www.ragnacraft.com has been given a bit of tidy up to reflect the PvP-only focus (some things left to do there).
• winners from the last round will receive a 50% bonus toward their new town.
  all participants in the beta have an option of a 25% bonus toward their new town.
  (bonuses will be paid as cash-back to town bank when the town is founded.)
• All job-stats from beta round will be reset.
• All towns and nations from the beta round will be reset.

Expected go-live date: Tuesday 14th: 18:00 GMT

We're up to 1.5.2. Everything (apart from the invis shield) seems to be ticking along nicely.

It looks like we're almost at the end of this cycle. The town "teo505" appears to be largely uncontested, with the leader of the only credible opposition waving the white flag, unless someone steps up, the beta phase will be closed in a day or two, with a new map ready (hopefully) by the weekend.

Meanwhile, there are a few discussions to have.

Firstly, I'd like to know your feedback, combined with input in to the details for the next round

1) Map Name.... Prisma ofc.
2) Map Size ..... 1200 *1200 (based on your experience of Round 1, will double-sized map be too big?)
3) War settings ..... subject to feedback, but likely to remain the same
4) Economy settings .... again, subject to feedback, but I think it wasn't too hard to get a town considering some people had two....
5) Mob Arena's will be added as a way to make money and also to provide "control points" on the map
6) Mob Kills to make money, not much, but a little.
7) Jobs - was it fun? Did it add something to the server? Did it make you want to log in more frequently?
8) Nerfing traps and XP grinds... did it work? Did you still manage to find ways to grind mobs with little to no risk other than from enemy players?
9) communication.... subject to feedback... likely to remain the same... did it work? Was limiting range of general enough to keep the secrets and sense of suspense (and minimise trash talking).
10) Victory conditions - have they been explained clearly enough?
11) Transfering from Round 1 to Round 2.... this is a big one. You can't keep your stats, but I do want you to have something to start with. Getting the town up and running is, I think, a bit part of the challenge, and being the first town is quite a good indicator. I'd like to think that the "winners" would be happy to get a "free" town to start them off with. I also want to offer the beta nations a chance at 50% of a town too. I think I may have offered other things to all beta players, so if I forget anything, remind me (and link the source please).

12) New players - I basically plan to run a black list (no white list) for Round 2! Then a few adverts on minecraft forums, and I think we will get a good few people joining. However, it will be reviewed, if it gets out of hand, then it will be whitlelisted.
13) the official server address used for advertising will be pvp.ragnacraft.com. pvp.damnation.eu will also work, but keeping them separate to me is a good idea to avoid too much confusion between the two very different play-styles and communities.

I'd be most grateful if you could provide your thoughts on any or all of the above, and any other stuff you think is relevant moving forward to Round II

thanks all, it's been great to see so much action on the server, even if it wasn't as busy as you all hoped, I think we've all learned enough to challenge the rest of the world now

(cross posted at http://damnation.eu/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=3409)

We're about to hit the battle point in New Prisma. We'll be upgrading PvP to 1.5.2 asap, and then slowly ramping up the pressure on towns and nations with an aim to having the beta round complete mid-May.

In other news, mc.ragnacraft.com has been updated to 1.5.2. No major casualties with the plugins which is always nice.

I'm leaning toward an acronym to cover the basis that we have talked about above:


tribe
ancient
RagnaCraft
damNation



obviously not but you get the idea. If we could come up with a suitably smart looking and intelligent acronym that MUST be available as URL then we could move with that.

I'm thinking that we have a week or two left on this.

RagnaCraft will remain the name in use on the PvP "universe". RagnaCraft Adventures, will remain the name used for Kurusca's adventure "universe". damNation will continue to the "universe" name for PvE.

The new website will merge user accounts, post counts and so on where ever possible. This forum will remain visible, though much of it will be locked. The change is likely to happen at the end of May.