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 'Bug Reports' section as well.
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Introduction​

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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 any 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
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Hoppers & Interactions with Lockette​

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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 )
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Duplication Concerns​

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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.
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Economic Concerns​

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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.


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Uses of Hoppers if Allowed​

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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)

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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

 

This is very detailed and definitely explains how they pretty much have been patched. I definitely want to see hoppers back again, but cyp won't add them back until he's certain the exploits have been patched.
By the way, shouldn't this be in suggestions or discussion?

 

big big big support!!

 

You should have put this in "Suggestions" section. I love how you detailed everything, so new players know the reasons of disabling hoppers. I would love to see hoppers being enabled again, as they are a big and helpful part of Minecraft.
Support if this is a suggestion!

 

Very well written and really detailed. However since by the looks of it you are suggesting to bring hoppers back you might want to request a Moderator to move this thread to the correct Sub-Forum.

If this is considered as a suggesting I will remain neutral as of because année duplicate glitch bid found every other day. However if there is an alternative way to prevent duplication of items I will support this.

 

This is an amazingly written suggestion. If there were no more glitches, I would be supporting. Sadly because there are so many, I cannot do this at the moment.
Neutral.

 

I'm going with no support, only reason being hoppers cause a lot of lag (without players knowing it does this - not a lag machine) and most of the time is fully running, hoppers will be used everywhere on islands and this would cause lag onto of the lag that we already get from a plugin. Unless hopper tick times is considerably decreased it will cause lag.

Hopper limits can be added to islands but with the amount of islands there is I don't think this would stop it, especially as players usually have alts with islands on.

 

Skyblock is definitely not in a state where it can afford anything that can potentially cause more lag, or depends on less lag to work.

 

Moved to suggestions~

Support I want hoppers ::

 

That's true. I think it got moved by a moderator (Doughh, thanks for movin'). I didn't read through the threads completely, as I thought the 'help' thread would be applicable.

It could be possible to stop platers from facing hoppers directly into one-another in order to reduce item duplication, but that means we would miss out on the always-useful hopper timer:

Thanks for moving it, Doughh

I agree, the server does lag a bit. You COULD decrease the tick-rate for hoppers in order to add them back in, but the slowness and inconsistiency that something like that adds really isnn't fun for those doing redstone. It's a rough tradeoff, but it could be a way to convince Cyp that they could be re-introduced.

Hoppers actually were recently patched:

The majority of players will likely be using hoppers to pick up items from farms, and this doesn't keep the hoppers transferring items. Many contraptions using them only activate the hoppers for a small amount of time, and ALL contraptions have to be loaded by spawnchunks or a player to have the hoppers active.

Simply doing a restart (to kick AFK players whom may have set up a lag machine) at a consistient interval will keep hopper lag machines down.

Thanks for the compliment!

You said that there are so many glitches?
I'd like to hear what glitches you consider game-breaking, as I may know of ways to fix them.

Also, there are other more broken things on the server, like Dirt Trading. I watched two green-named players trade dirt openly in chat with mods online, and there wasn't any reprucussions that I saw. I may well have missed any kicks/bans that occurred, though.

EDIT 7-3-17
I made a mistake on the hopper timer. It's actually this:

 

I don't care about the glitch, it should be patched by now. Support.

 

I would honestly love to have hoppers back. Support!

 

No support, hoppers were disabled for a good reason. If they re-enable them and you got trusted on an island people would steal stuff out of locked chests that have a lot if rares in them, and then they'd be really mad and probably quit skyblock perminatly. Also you can probably make a duping machine and get super rich and nothing would be worth anything anymore and it would most likely wreck skyblock all together.

 

I'm sorry, but did you even read the post I made?
To re-iterate:
Hoppers CAN NOT pull items from locked chests anymore. This has been patched in Lockette for a while now. You need the permission of the player that owns the locked chest in order to have a hopper take items from it.
The economy itself is already well-off as is, and hopper dupe machines are VERY slow. They would not affect gameplay by any considerable amount.
Please, read the post again.

 

I personally beleive that the benefits of adding hoppers would not improve the server overall - things like automatic farms are very useful and a natural part of .org, but they do not really belong on a building-oriented servers like .net. The ability to sell items while offline hit the economy hard enough - image what would happen if you could farm, sort and sell items without ever having to lift a finger.
I don't beleive, no matter how many bugs are fixed, that hoppers belong on Skyblock.net.

 

I know duping machines are slow but they can make people richer faster. No support still.

 

I think that automation is a crucial part of Minecraft, and the thing with farming/sorting/selling is that you need to first build the machines, and second you need to keep them loaded. If the server was to restart on a timer, these kinds of things could be kept at bay.

Hoppers only mean that the player doesn't have to pick up the items that their farm has: players can already make fully automatic farms and stand at the output with an empty inventory.

However, I agree that hoppers should never be able take items out of, nor put them into signshop chests, in my opinion, as this would make hoppers far too powerful. Never should they work with signshop chests.
EDIT:Changed because I accidentially repeated the quote's opening words. Did not want to seem mocking.

 

Would love to have hoppers! Support!

 

Please elaborate. Hopper Dupe machines can make people richer faster than what, exactly?
It's horribly slow to duplicate items in vanilla MC. Decreasing the tick rate could make it so slow that it isn't worth the trouble to make a machine.

Dupe machines aren't the main problem. Dirt Trading and Island Farming are much harder on the economy than this.