I wanted to post something to possibly try and convince Server Moderators and Admins to re-enable hoppers, so here we go. This has been mirrored to the 'Help' section as well. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hoppers. Most modern minecraft contraptions use them, and they revolutionised MC back when they were added: MC version 1.5 . This block's revolutionary new mechanic allowing it to pick up items changed farms and redstone for the better, allowing players to free their time up for other projects and improving quality of life drastically: No longer did players have to check their farms every five minutes. No longer did you have to smelt everything by hand. No longer did you have to spend hours sorting items. Sadly, this isn't the case on Skyblock.net, as hoppers have been disabled and stripped of the ability to pick up or transfer items. There have been a couple reasons I've heard for this: -They can steal items from chests -They can duplicate items I will go in-depth on how these issues affect a server, and how they could be solved -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hoppers & Interactions with Lockette-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, the first concern This honestly sounds quite scary—being able to lose your items to other players is a big deal, and not being able to fully lock them up can be a major concern. Back when there was no island protection, there was an exploit for the Lockette plugin, allowing players to 'steal' the items out of another player's chest. Players had to put a second protected block under their containers, or risk loosing their items. Thankfully, this has been fixed: Server runs on lockette version 1.8.23 Patch was released: (Can be found here at: Lockette Change Log - Pages - Lockette - Bukkit Plugins - Projects - Bukkit ) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Duplication Concerns-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that the first concern has been shown to be fixed, the second concern: This is true to an extent: Hoppers across chunk borders can sometimes duplicate items. The cause of this, is lag. To help make it understandable, we'll define lag as a large spike in 'ping' for every player in the server, and distance ourselves from 'frame lag', where the individual player's PC is struggling to run the game. Generally, on both multiplayer and singleplayer worlds, there is a baseline amount of load, and therefore a constant 'ping' —the time it takes for information to get from client to server and back. When the server is forced to do many calculations very quickly (lag machines, loading new chunks quickly), it will be forced to focus on calculating the current task, and will slow its communication with players. This is where other players, mobs, and fluids seem to 'freeze': the server is directing power away from those processes. Since these calculations take time, the server will have to 'catch up' the players and objects that should have been running during this time. This is the point where everything seems to happen in a flash: blocks are placed, mobs move at seemingly warp speed, and players move to where they should be. During this 'catch-up', hoppers must also speed up to compensate. This can occasionally lead to a duplicated item. The more lag there is, the more likely the hoppers will speed up to compensate, and result in an extra item. The good thing is, though, that this duplication does not happen every time the server compensates: It is only when another error (that has not been found, and would be the error that could fix this whole thing) happens at the same time as this compensation. All we know is that the second error is rare to have happen at the same time as the 'catch-up'. This rarity means that hopper duplication machines must be made rather large to actually dupe useful amounts of items, and therefore are very easy to spot. This server already bans lag machines (for good reason, they ruin gameplay), therefore mods/admins are already required to police islands and redstone. Adding this sort of machine to the list would be trivial. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Economic Concerns-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With the duplication bug as it stands in 1.8.9 - 1.12, there is a level of concern that Admins and Moderators may have regarding how the bug will affect item trading and the usefulness of donor perks. Since the hopper item bug requires a large machine to get a useful yield, it would take a rather large machine to outpace the item generation from Donor kits, cobble generators, voting, /ma j and standard farms. This means that hopper duplication farms would be a poor investment, as long as there are other more efficient means of acquiring the items that players would want to duplicate. Due to the slow nature of the duplication glitch, 'dupers' without obvious machines would never be able to outpace the 'money sinks' in place on the server: things such as villagers destroying grass if they trade for it and the fact that grass can be placed as a block and not picked back up. These money sinks outpace grass generation means such as voting by such a wide margin that practical duplication machines are not possible: too big and a mod finds out, too small and voting/kits are faster. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Uses of Hoppers if Allowed-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Because of the ban on hoppers due to Item Duplication, we are left without an integral feature of Minecraft, leaving the server at a disadvantage to other servers which allow hoppers to be used. This means we miss out on things like these: An automatic smelter An automatic item sorter A simple randomiser, with adjustable odds A simple casino machine (Adding together the second and third machines) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All in all, I think hoppers should be re-introduced, as they are one of the most useful blocks currently in the game. I greatly look forward to having an open commentary between Moderators and Admins, and I hope to convince you that Hoppers should be re-introduced to the Skyblock network of servers. Regards to whomever read this, Luigi22qwerty
