Hello everyone,

I used to play SB back in 2014-2016 and I wanted to give it another go. So far I have been having a lot of fun honestly, i've had good conversations with people and have enjoyed building up my island. The problem though as I see it is one of limitations. I have encountered several already that have made me groan and just ask myself why. I have invested time effort and in game money into ventures that just haven't paid off because of arbitrary rules the server has that honestly make the game much less fun to play.


IMPORTANT SPECIFIC LIMITATIONS
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Nether Chest Collection Limitations -
I wanted to speak to this first because I had an encounter yesterday that at the time made me want to completely quit the server. I was exploring the nether when I came across a Bastion and was excited to take up the challenge of defeating it with my limited kit and resources. I did manage to clear the entire bastion and looted a few chests. Elated at my accomplishment I went to open the main loot chest when I received a message "You have already opened many chests in the nether, leave some for other people" then the loot that would have been in the chest was erased. Not only was this a smack in the face to how difficult the raid was but it genuinely made me very upset. The nether gets reset every month as it is, resources are difficult to obtain and there is not an active population large enough to justify such a restriction. With the Nether being endless and there being endless supply of resources there why is this in place? Not to mention there was no warning, no chest counter to let me know how many I had left. I was just left distraught knowing that my raid's biggest prize was just gone. This restriction does nothing but make the game less fun please remove it.

Villager Trade -
Firstly, I can understand the rational behind removing villager trades from the game. It is to protect the economy of the game and prevent individuals from abusing the villager trade mechanic from overproducing specific resources. Here is the thing though, who cares. Honestly, I understand that some of you agree with this restriction specifically because it protects the economy but crop hoppers have already destroyed it.

Once a player is able to get crop hoppers going they can afford to buy anything. It is an infinitely scalable system that gives the player passive income that requires no involvement from the player other than for them to be online. At least villagers require the player to build a breeding center and train the villagers by actively making trades with them. It also gives players a sense of accomplishment and excitement when they train a villager and discover a profitable / useful trade. It requires the players to interact with the game as opposed to just sitting AFK to allow them to gain infinite money.

Lastly, villagers are just a fun component of sky block. I remember back in the day making a little village and breeding farm. I was able to get some good trades and interacted with other players to trade books, tools etc. This doesn't happen nearly as much as it could now. Player engagement is focused primarily on the server shop and less with player shops. I will discuss this point a bit more in the economy section but I believe the player will have a much more enriched experience if they are active and interacting more with other players.

LESS IMPORTANT SPECIFIC LIMITATIONS
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Iron Farm Prevention -
I can already see the complaints on this one. "the economy would be ruined if players were able to make an iron farm", "The price of iron would drop and everyone would be able to buy as much as they wanted" Yes, I mostly agree with this. Players would have an increased amount of iron that could be put towards any number of things that they wanted. My question is though is that a bad thing?

My rational behind this and the other points in this section is that yes, resources need to be scarce in sky block. However, iron farms give players another resource to decorate their island, they are also just fun to make. The spawn rate for Golems could be turned down significantly to lessen the impact on the economy, but it is another piece of a larger issue at hand. Player interaction and limitation of action.

Not allowing players the option of even creating this type of farm is just limiting and reduces the amount of things that a player can actually do on the server. Further, it's another resource that can be commoditized and sold in player shops. Currently player shops sell iron at an exorbitant amount determined by the /shop price. Why would a player search for and discover a player shop that may or may not have anything in it just to save a small amount on a purchase they can make in 5 seconds using the /shop feature. Removing this restriction will drop the price of iron globally and make player shops more competitive with each other and the /shop. It gives players a reason to search for player shops, interact in chat, and just generally be more active.

Dripstone Lava Farm -
Once again, Why is lava a resource that needs to be widely protected? The vast majority of players do not require a lot of lava. Most players would collect the lava to turn into obsidian and then either sell it as another commodity, (increasing player interaction) or sell lava buckets, (also increasing player interaction) or even just sell it directly to the shop as another stream of income. This isn't a game or economy breaking resource. It is totally understandable not allowing the player to collect it from the nether. Doing so would just introduce an infinite amount into the market. However, lava farms could have their tick rate reduced making them slow and inefficient while still giving the player an activity and a sense of accomplishment.

Personally, I spent two days searching for dripstone in player shops (not to find any) before being told in chat it was in the decorations category so I purchased 6 of them for almost half of my money. 5 of which I used to make a dripstone block and dripstone farm, the other one I used to try to make a lava farm. This is the only reason I was interested in it. Come to find that nothing was being collected in my cauldron. I wasted so much time effort and energy into doing something cool only to discover that it was server blocked. The point is, instead of feeling accomplished I felt disappointed. Instead of interacting with other players and buying from their shops I interacted with a menu. Instead of finding player shops that sold the resource nobody had it because it is now useless other than as a decoration.

NOTES ON
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The Economy -
As I mentioned before removing these restrictions would introduce more specific resources into the economy. Prices will drop, and resources will be more abundant. Personally I do not see this as being a bad thing. It will give players a greater opportunity to build, interact with each other, trade and use their shops and advertising functions. Currently players do not shop much at each others stores because it just doesn't make sense to make the effort to find a player shop to only save a couple bucks compared to the /shop function. These restrictions, and others I did not mention here only serve to drive the economy to a server based focus. The player's greatest economic interaction is with the /shop menu instead of with other players. The protectionist policies put in place here just don't afford a flourishing market to form. If all else please ease up on these restrictions and give players the ability to interact with each other and have fun. That should be the whole point here, to relax, expand, meet new people, and have fun.

Server Lag -
Just wanted to bring this up a bit to head off this discussion. Yes, the entity count will increase with the removal of all these limitations. With proper management it would not be enough to cause issues with the server. Entity count will increase anyway with a growing server population (of which these suggestions would foster) and they would not generate so much lag as to be noticeable to players. Villager caps are a thing, slower tick rates (which are already in place) reduce server lag and prevent entities from getting out of control. The server already has many built in plugins like mob stacking that prevent the server from getting too bogged down.

P.S. A couple alternative limitations for villagers
- Villager pop limits on island. Additional population limit can be purchased from the website and generate money for the owners.
- Villagers could be cured and traded with but not bred. This gives players a fun workaround to get their villagers but at a drastically reduced rate.

Conclusion
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These types of restrictions only reduce engagement and foster disappointment. Something in the middle can be reached for each one of these issues to protect the economy; but outright disallowing them just makes the game less fun to play. I am posting this for myself and for the community as I hope to foster better expanded and enriched player interaction that benefits all.

Thank you for reading.

 

I agree here. Before the 1.19 update we could raid nether chests all we like. Now they've both nerfed the loot from the chests AND limited how many chests we can raid. I understand nerfing the loot, but limiting how many chests you can raid is barbaric overkill.

I understand the motive behind removing villager trading. In vanilla, it is terribly unbalanced and skips
the need to build many farms which are seen as core to the skyblock experience. Personally, I think villager trades should be modified instead of outright disabled.

I absolutely hate iron farms. They (like crophoppers) require no effort to build and give a relatively valuable item. I'm completely content having the only renewable way to get iron be though a stone generator.

I don't understand the reasoning behind why this is disabled. Back on classic, pre 1.7, obsidian farms were a thing. It was arguably apart of the original skyblock experience. From 1.7-1.16 lava/obsidian farms no longer existed, and now they are apart of the legitimate gameplay experience. I see no reason why it should be disabled.

One more thing you didn't mention:
Dirt Trade is Disallowed
Okay fine, it's to discourage island farming... Then just make it so that you need all the starter dirt to reset the island? If you moved dirt to another island, sorry, but we won't let you reset the island whilst you have actively island farmed.

 

The loot chests in the nether have only recently been reintroduced. For the best part of the last year the loot was removed entirely pending review because of the chance to get ultra rares like nether scraps. Scraps can only be obtained through traders or crates to keep their value/rarity. Its annoying but keeps things fair for everyone.

Likewise with limiting the chests available per player, this gives other players a chance to find loot too. One thing that used to annoy me was when the entire nether got looted within the first day or two, leaving nothing for anyone else to find. This could come across as hoarding loot away from others. So having a limit of ten chests per player keeps it fair. Maybe there should be a chest loot counter visible for the player. As for items dissapearing after reaching your limit, I think the chest should simply not open to begin with.

I agree that we should have some form of villager trading. On survival they have /warp grass where you can trade for basic starter items, maybe economy could have their own villager trade center with nerfed trades too. I love curing villagers with different biome and workable aesthetics, but that's all they're good for. And considering they're difficult to spawn, trap, cure, etc, it would make having some villagers actually rewarding . The concern would be if the trades are better than player trades, as the focus is trading with players. So maybe the nerfed trades would work there.

Well I mean, you've kinda answered yourself here

Iron is cheap enough already, I sell iron lower than 350 each, and that is cheap considering most shop items are more than 500 each. As to obtaining iron, lots of players trade using iron, crates can win you lots of iron, people have iron kits (which is another suggestion to bring back) and player shops sell iron very cheap. There's otherwise such as vote lamas too.

If we were to enable iron farms, then iron trading would simply cease to exist. Iron farms can become way overpowered and are too easy to gain bulk iron which is a valuable resource worth keeping it's value.

Obsidian isn't really a widely sold item. Maybe people who make large pigzombie gold farms would need it in bulk, but majority of players dont. As to being able to farm lava, the main reason it's disabled is to keep lavas value as a starter island item. If people desperately needed to, they could reset their islands to farm lava buckets. Which goes against the server rules. (See island farming rules) being able to farm through dripstone, would also lower the price by a lot, therefore loosing its value as a starter item. To gain lava, the servers default method has always been to right click an obsidian block with an empty bucket to turn it back into lava. This method can be farmed, and is a profitable way to sell bulk lava. When I had excess obsidian, this is what I did and I profited by 1k a bucket.

As sky also says,

This used to be a thing, but the way the server is set up now makes it more challenging but also more rewarding.

Unfortunately server lag has always and will always be a thing. Lately the staff teams have been working to reduce the tps drops, and it's been helping here and there. With a server of this size being run on outdated or non supported servers lag will always be a thing. /skyblock survival is usually better for tps.

Ahh with this, unfortunately that's one of the things changed recently. Mobs no longer have ai to help reduce lag.

I understand how these limitations make the overall gameplay less enjoyable, but there are also other features like crophoppers that can improve on them. Some features could definitely use a rework for sure.

Great Post, hope to read more from you soon

 

I disagree with your statement that’s these restrictions are killing the fun, like others have mentioned the nether chests are a new system they are looking at, for months we had no loot! So that’s probably going to change after they see how this system works.
You seem to gear your suggestions for just getting more stuff and mass farming things, it’s not a good system, some things need to be rarer than others. And have different ways to be produced instead of more afk farms and mass villager trading.

A skyblock with iron farms is a broken skyblock, iron is in plentiful supply if you actually look around, trade with people, reach out, mine it. You just seem to want to take the effort out of everything.

If everything was farmable through villagers and iron farms etc this server would be dead, it leaves you nothing to work towards and grind for if it’s handed to you on a plate.

 

Take away a man's meals for a year, and when you offer him mere crumbs, he will mistake them for a feast.

The nether is as big as the overworld...