Feather Falling Enchantment

[Cryers-]

Vote away.

[elofan]

Don't know why it isn't enabled (again), but I don't really care either way. Most traps/forts/moats that are built well are going to kill you whether you have FF or not, but I suppose it's decent in PvE.

[The Hedge Knight]

Opposed to this. it simply adds another must have item to combat and makes pitfall traps prohibitively hard to build.

[Keelos Penguinos]

Im a fan of feather falling boots, its by no means a necessity in combat but can provide an advantage to the players who cared enough to make full combat kits.

[Benz282]

and makes pitfall traps prohibitively hard to build.

This is the reason why I voted against.

If moderation wants to have any hope of limiting gamey structures, it will have to be based on potential block fall distance. Including Feather Falling increases the distance of that potential value, opening the door for players who haven't stockpiled tons of FF4 enchanted boots to face a disadvantage in combat.

Whether or not moderation staff intends to make such a rule is up in the air, but until a statement is made regarding the issue, unbanning Feather Falling would serve only to complicate the issue.

If "caring enough to make full [enchanted] combat kits" is the bar for entry into pvp, then we may as well have a poll for every pvp enchant/potion.

[Diglytron]

This is the reason why I voted against.

If moderation wants to have any hope of limiting gamey structures, it will have to be based on potential block fall distance. Including Feather Falling increases the distance of that potential value, opening the door for players who haven't stockpiled tons of FF4 enchanted boots to face a disadvantage in combat.

Whether or not moderation staff intends to make such a rule is up in the air, but until a statement is made regarding the issue, unbanning Feather Falling would serve only to complicate the issue.

If "caring enough to make full [enchanted] combat kits" is the bar for entry into pvp, then we may as well have a poll for every pvp enchant/potion.

Good points but maybe the level of advantage feather falling gives a bit smaller then potions or enchantments, I don't think it gives that much direct advantage, besides maybe being able to run away faster cause you lose less hearts when falling. We always dig our trap falls the depth of feather falling 4, and think that most people do this, so I don't really see yet the reason why it should be banned, although your arguments ofcourse make sense. But since the enchanting is way easier right now maybe its quite easy and inexpensive to get feather falling 4 anyway?

And Isn't it a good thing though to add some small things ppl can work on to make them better prepared for war. While I agree that ppl should easily be prepared for war and thus participate faster it would also be cool to see it takes some time to prepare a brilliant PvP kit and that there are differences in kits, swords, bows, it makes them worth collecting etc. Maybe if there was a option that limited the enchantments to a maximum in the server this would be great. Would make swords with unique names actually a thing, like the one sword with sharpness II would be massively famous, and ppl would even fight to get this sword, or maybe I dream to much lol?

[The Hedge Knight]

No it absolutely doesn't give a smaller advantage. The reduction in fall damage for FFIV is similar to the reduction in damage from three pieces of protection IV armour. The issue here is that when you build a fort you have essentially 4 ways of killing people:

Fall damage
Arrows
Melee
Lava/Fire

And Kinda TNT if you built an indestructable obsidian box.

Two of these now have hard counters and hence will be almost useless (Fire Resistance II, Feather, Shields) which means that in order to actually do any damage to a player you have to build a ludicrous fort to accentuate the value of the other three methods. By adding fall damage to the list of partially countered things (FF4 means you can survive a fall of 42 blocks) you simply make the requirements for effective fort design increasingly ludicrous. This isn't just about the time it takes to get a pair of boots therefore. This means that players who don't want to spent the time digging a big ugly moat 45 blocks deep round everything will be at a fundamental disadvantage.

In fact I would say a nice way to encourage players to improve fort design would be to ban FF and fire resistance II (not I though).

[TheEliteDwarf]

In fact I would say a nice way to encourage players to improve fort design would be to ban FF and fire resistance II (not I though).

I think ender pearls cause (if not force) factions to build gamey forts more than anything else.

If you look at the Dwarven city of Map 4 (the map with all the admin-created provinces): http://imgur.com/a/ixfyH

You'll see that the Dwarves put a lot of effort into making the mountain side look natural but with incremental 2 or 3 high blocks so that people can't just hop up the mountain. Our mountain sides have always been made like this and have never been a vertical plain wall.

If you keep looking through the photos you won't see a 150 high wall around the perimeter of the mountain valley that we settled, instead you'll see reasonably high walls and defenses that don't look gamey at all (the bridge over the valley was even 7 blocks wide). We did this because that's how we build and that's the quality of build that we aspire to. However, we know that we could easily make ridiculously high walls that would be "ender pearl proof".

I recall one day walking around that fortress thinking "wow, this is coming along nicely...too bad everyone can just enderpearl over the defenses..."

So, if you want to know what the real cause for gamey forts and less-detailed fort designs is, it's ender pearls.

Just my opinion since you started making a list of things.

[The Hedge Knight]

You know I'm Josstwc right Elite? I know a fair bit about building mountains .

I think the key difference with Ender pearls is that they are actually quite hard to lose well and can lead to an unpleasant death if used poorly. Using vertical walls with trenches in front can actually create fairly effective anti enderpearl traps due to the Pearl's inherent inaccuracy, feather falling spoils that though. Additionally I'm unsure of how the argument that X causes gamey forts is invalid because Y also does. The combination of the two simply makes it even harder to build easily defensible forts. Enderpearls also have the downside of causing damage and being relatively hard to obtain versus potions (unless someone has come up with a way of effectively farming Endermen). A cool change would be to remove them as a drop from endermen (make them drop eye of ender) and make the pearls themselves into a crafting recipe involving said eye and diamonds or emeralds.

I think the simple fact of the matter is that MC was never designed with a particular plan in mind or for competitive play. Its therefore a mismatch of weird and unbalanced features which become utterly OP when they interact with one another.

[Diglytron]

Good points made by both Hedge and Elite, I agree that we should prevent gamey forts from happening. I think more then enderpearls the easyness of building a ugly siege tower above all creates gamey forts, as outside walls basically are useless due to siegetowers, you need some sort of box to counter siegetowers and you need to build ing high to counter them and claim quite a lot of around your castle to counter them. If somehow we could make other sieging options more attractive this would be maybe better then banning siege towers, which is impossible anyway, I suppose.

[TheEliteDwarf]

You know I'm Josstwc right Elite? I know a fair bit about building mountains .

Yeah, I know it's you Joss and I know you have mountain-building experience but for the past maps where you created the world landscapes the mountains were easily climbable so the Dwarves had to terraform them to add tiered layers of 2-3 high edges all around them to prevent easy traversal. My point is that ender pearls don't inspire most factions to build nice-looking fortifications and surroundings when those factions know that they can be easily bypassed. Because of ender pearls, factions tend to group up in one defensive structure like a castle keep instead of defending their town's walls/gatehouses since they know that ender pearls will, as I said, bypass them.

Take a look at this image of the map 4 Dwarven fortress... The blue line indicates the path that an enemy force would have to take in order to get to the 'keep's courtyard' without ender pearls (this excludes the enemy manually placing blocks to scale the mountain side) and the red line shows the path enemies could take with ender pearls.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I think the key difference with Ender pearls is that they are actually quite hard to lose well and can lead to an unpleasant death if used poorly. Using vertical walls with trenches in front can actually create fairly effective anti enderpearl traps due to the Pearl's inherent inaccuracy, feather falling spoils that though.

While using ender pearls in tight spots can be tricky and could possibly lead to death if the user isn't precise, my main concern is for the larger scope of ender pearls allowing users to bypass city walls and gatehouses which forces defenders just to hold up in one location as their entire city is overrun. In my opinion, I would rather see sieges where sections of a city are fought over until the defenders are forced to retreat into their central keep and have a last-stand battle. Your suggestion to have an ender pearl proof trench in front of walls is ludicrous because (after some testing) I have found that a straight shot with an ender pearl can land the user 50 blocks ahead and shooting the ender pearl at an angle over walls allows for the user to go over walls 20 blocks high (if not higher) and bypass those defenses. All while only taking 2 1/2 hearts worth of damage (with plain iron armor on).

Basically, it's ludicrous for every town or base to have to mine out trenches that are 25-50 blocks wide and then build walls 30+ blocks high just to defend their base. Because of this, factions are more likely to build less-detailed fortifications. See image: (the red wool indicates where the user launched from and the respective opposite red wool is where the user landed)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Additionally I'm unsure of how the argument that X causes gamey forts is invalid because Y also does.

I never said that the other arguments don't play a part in the creation of gamey forts. My main argument against your list is that I think that ender pearls are the source of why, more often than not, factions build gamey fortifications. In my opinion, feather falling boots are used as a reaction to deep trenches/moats which are created because of ender pearls. This is my breakdown of your list:

Action: Ender Pearl - Reaction: Excessively high walls, excessively deep and wide trenches, gamey forts
Action: Arrows - Reaction: Shield + Armor
Action: Lava/Fire - Reaction: Fire Potion
Action: Melee - Reaction: Weapon + Shield + Armor
Action: Moat - Reaction: Feather Falling Boots

The combination of the two simply makes it even harder to build easily defensible forts.

True, having both will most likely lead to gamey forts. However, ender pearls allow the user to bypass fortifications like walls while feather falling boots allow the user to react to one type of defensive 'structure' and that would be a trench/moat.

A cool change would be to remove them as a drop from endermen (make them drop eye of ender) and make the pearls themselves into a crafting recipe involving said eye and diamonds or emeralds.

That's an interesting idea. Although, that recipe could lead to larger factions being able to afford them much more easily compared to smaller factions thus creating a monopoly whereas an outright ban would make the playing field fair for all.

I think the simple fact of the matter is that MC was never designed with a particular plan in mind or for competitive play. Its therefore a mismatch of weird and unbalanced features which become utterly OP when they interact with one another.

True, but we have the ability to disabled certain features to help balance out the game. And when there is one feature that is extremely OP and has a longer list of pros under its belt compared to cons then I think that feature should be reviewed.

[Mike92574]

I was pro-ender pearls previously. But based on Elite's argument's I'm convinced they don't really add to our pvp aspect at all. Perhaps it would be better without them. The only negative is that there might be more siege towers, but there's going to be siege towers even if the attacking force possesses enderpearls. I understand Joss's idea about making enderpearls more rare, but maybe just increase the damage that enderpearls give to a player? I'm not even sure how viable that is, but maybe whatever people think. Maybe a poll is necessary??? Though I don't really want to add more polls to the forum

[Benz282]

My initial position regarding ender pearls was that they have a balanced downside to their use due to the damage inflicted upon use. The unbalanced aspect of their use is that Feather Falling reduces the damage taken by using ender pearls, so keeping FF banned would ensure anyone using pearls does so with that downside.

However, Elite makes good points regarding ender pearls' effect on how fortifications are constructed. No matter what, their presence in the game will change how fortifications are built, whether they cause 5dmg or <1dmg (with FF4), in a similar way as FF4.

Ban both and implement a rule against gamey buildings by imposing non-lethal fall distances on traps/ladders.

[Katsumoto]

I've never really liked the ender pearl's ability to bypass defences either. Perhaps we can have a trial period once the war plugin is launched to see what battles would be like wirhout them.

I do feel there's too much emphasis on sieges though. I feel like with the combat changes it would really be interesting to explore different tactics in field battles, where skill as opposed to the gameyness of your fort would play a much bigger part I reckon.

[Ditronian]

At first I really didn't care about the fate of feather falling, but Elite's well laid out arguments against Ender pearls have swayed me. I say ban both of em.

[The Hedge Knight]

Yeah, ban both! Who wants to make that poll? (Bags not me!)

I was talking about the mountain over Solgrundir though and large sections of the one over Ervingur, worldpainting is cheating!

[Mike92574]

I do feel there's too much emphasis on sieges though. I feel like with the combat changes it would really be interesting to explore different tactics in field battles, where skill as opposed to the gameyness of your fort would play a much bigger part I reckon.

Sieges well always be a part of the game. It completely depends on the mentality of the warring factions though. Case and point being dorf and raven war that lasted like 3 weeks and had a total of two seiges, none of them even proper seiges.

[Benz282]

Sieges well always be a part of the game. It completely depends on the mentality of the warring factions though. Case and point being dorf and raven war that lasted like 3 weeks and had a total of two seiges, none of them even proper seiges.

Nobody is saying that sieges shouldn't be part of the game. If anything, reducing the gameyness of forts will increase the frequency of sieges because attackers will be able to stand a reasonable chance of actually winning them. When I see things like the build linked below, I don't see a fortification that anyone in their right mind should attempt to "siege", as to do so would simply be suicide due to the layout of the build (focusing on cheap, instakill death falls).

http://158.69.23.84:31147/?worldname...764&y=64&z=-20

Removing Feather Falling and Ender pearls will reduce the need for players to build gamey "forts" like this, with dimensions so exaggerated as to be caricatures of themselves. Instead of being built around ludicrously-large walls and instakill death falls, with any fort not subscribing to that design being immediately inferior, forts can instead be built with more creative designs that focus on directing the flow of attackers and placing defenders in advantageous positions (which attackers can attempt to circumvent or overcome with strategies that aren't limited to "build siege tower at 255y and carpet across the gap").

[The Hedge Knight]

http://158.69.23.84:31147/?worldname...764&y=64&z=-20

I guess they put all their spine into the structure next door...

[Diglytron]

Nobody is saying that sieges shouldn't be part of the game. If anything, reducing the gameyness of forts will increase the frequency of sieges because attackers will be able to stand a reasonable chance of actually winning them. When I see things like the build linked below, I don't see a fortification that anyone in their right mind should attempt to "siege", as to do so would simply be suicide due to the layout of the build (focusing on cheap, instakill death falls).

http://158.69.23.84:31147/?worldname...764&y=64&z=-20

Removing Feather Falling and Ender pearls will reduce the need for players to build gamey "forts" like this, with dimensions so exaggerated as to be caricatures of themselves. Instead of being built around ludicrously-large walls and instakill death falls, with any fort not subscribing to that design being immediately inferior, forts can instead be built with more creative designs that focus on directing the flow of attackers and placing defenders in advantageous positions (which attackers can attempt to circumvent or overcome with strategies that aren't limited to "build siege tower at 255y and carpet across the gap").

Agree on most parts, but I wonder; even if castles are less gamey, the reward for winning a siege should be higher. I'm ok with sieging the battlemoat, but not just for 3 kills, I want to temperoraliy occupy it and hold it, not just being forced to retreat after taking it and inflicting 3 kills and maybe lose 10 deaths in the process. If there would be temp claims, like claims that only exist in the warphase, this would be also helping what we try to counter I think, it would also force ppl to make peace or win a fieldbattle/countersiege their castle back etc.