How to Simulate an Anarcho-Capitalism using Minecraft!

Biggest issue with no /ban that I see is the ease by which a player can set off a server-freezing trap.  Infinite chickens or melons are always fun.  When this happens, it becomes impossible to step in and kill a person by conventional means.  If it's stated up front that such things result in perma-ban and the threat is always carried out, this could be considered the conditions of the universe. 

Hmm. I would need a little more info. How does the infinite chickens/melons thing work? I don't need instructions, mind, just what happens when someone does it, to prevent murder by normal means.

Is it something that could be detected by the server, and autoban? Or would a mod need to be active to watch for something that is impossible to stop via "normal" means? Can the infinite chickens thing be prevented?

We may need to go back to the "everybody gets a death note".

I don't know the full details since I mostly play on a Classic server which doesn't have this, but the gist is this:  There are two basic sorts of memory overflow bombs that can kill the server:  Quick and slow.  Basically, the idea is to spawn more and more of an item until the server can't keep up and bogs down.  One quick trap involves filling dozens of dispensers (all-purpose storage units) with eggs which, when tripped, start firing eggs everywhere which hatch quickly into chickens:  Chickens which the server must then control the behavior of. 

A slow trap can merely be a very efficient automatic farm tucked away in a corner of the map.  Melons are popular since it is easy to build a farm which will keep producing and harvesting them without intervention.  If a large one of these is built and left to run, it will eventually create enough pieces of harvested melon to bog down the server.  New memory fixes make this more difficult, but it can still be done.

As to detecting it?  I don't know.  There might be a method, but I don't believe that it's in wide use.  Even if we're giving the mod /ban powers to deal with this, it will still rely on the griefer announcing himself, which many do and will still likely require a restart from a pre-saved time before the trap went off and an undo of the griefer's work.

Just what occurred to me as a possible solution to make death painful, but also make doing another player in risky enough to be a disincentive to doing it w/o good cause...

ex-Gooserider

Except we're trying to simulate AnCap society in the real world, not in a perfect world where murderers are frozen in place for half an hour.

True, and the question to me is how to compensate for the differences between the real world and the game world...  To me the "freeze time" (and I'm not insistent on the 30 minute number) allows other players a chance to respond, and discourages killing sprees.  It will also act to deter random / spur of the moment killings by making it a "high risk" activity. - Do I want this guy dead bad enough to be willing to chance his buddies response?

The "time out" for those killed (and again I'm not stuck on the time) is an effort to balance the idea that players might want to keep playing in a game, and the fact that real world deaths are permanent...

The game world can never be a perfect simulation of the real world, the question is how to make things work close enough for the simulation to be reasonably good - this seemed like a compromise between giving everyone /ban power, and having instant resurrection making death a meaningless event...

Default behaviour is to name the deceased, the cause, and if there is one, the killer.

This seems to be more than sufficient. If we want to simulate real life a little more closely, we could remove the killer notification, Or we can leave it in to help nip killing sprees in the bud. Personally, I'd rather leave it in, so people could use the chat to hash out what happened.

Basic idea, I'm assuming the "public safety committee" would be doing it's thing in chat...

ex-Gooserider

We have already created an An-Cap Minecraft server, then we decided to make it bigger. Meet Civcraft http://i.imgur.com/AYZTj.png


I am the server owner and its sole administrator. We have a community of nearly 1000 people, with the server often reaching its player cap of 100 for hours on end. This started months ago with AnCapMinecraft a community of only an-caps running on a basic no mod minecraft build out of my kitchen. But it quickly out grew that server, and our ambitions quickly outgrew what was already available. We had a dream of a minecraft server not just for An-Caps but for all stripes of political extremists, as we started thinking about it we encountered the same problems you have been discussing here (its actually interesting to see the other solutions you guys come up with) so we created custom mods specifically to fit the purpose of our experiment. First came PrisonPearl, its a method used to allow players to 'ban' other players. You simply kill a player with a Ender Pearl in your hotbar and then that player is trapped in the end until the pearl they are tied to is lost or destroyed. At first we had a mod that allowed you to physically imprison a player, but we find minecraft would always have another way for those players to glitch out of their prison with minimal to no difficulty, hence PrisonPearl. Second was Citadel, a protection mod that allows you to reinforce blocks consuming resources proportional to the level of protection.  A block reinforced with diamond will resist 1800 breaks, iron 250, stone 25. After the mods we needed a server, thanks to donations (for which the players did not receive anything but an improved server) we bough a server machine with dual Xeon 3.0 ghz quads, 32 gigs of ram and an ssd for the 12 gig pregenerated map file combined with an optmized build of bukkit plus hours of other optimizations to prevent any player from creating too much lag. Then we advertised to most 'extremist' political groups, we have a libertarian city, a couple of Ancap cities, libertarian socialist communes, and countless other communities that I may not even know about. 

We decided against tekkit because custom clients and custom server builds where a both a pain to operate and difficult to gain a player base. We hope that with the advent of the mojang/bukkit merger we can increase our player count (dreaming of 500-1000 players) and create mods like tekkit without the need for client side modifications. I could spend weeks writing about the economics, the conflict, the stories of victory, defeat, building, and trade and i would still never run out.


Your invited to join us at our Ancap city its chords are 4275 -5467, deep underwater AnCapitsan/Rapture/The city of many names is the safest on the server behind the Libertarian metropolis of Columbia.

This is why I love the market. Anything that can be done, probably already is. I know where I'll be playing minecraft if/when I buy the full version.

So, hypothesis proven, AnCap is preferable. Now can we get down to the business of making it happen?

First came PrisonPearl, its a method used to allow players to 'ban' other players. You simply kill a player with a Ender Pearl in your hotbar and then that player is trapped in the end until the pearl they are tied to is lost or destroyed. At first we had a mod that allowed you to physically imprison a player, but we find minecraft would always have another way for those players to glitch out of their prison with minimal to no difficulty, hence PrisonPearl. Second was Citadel, a protection mod that allows you to reinforce blocks consuming resources proportional to the level of protection.  A block reinforced with diamond will resist 1800 breaks, iron 250, stone 25.

Huh.

What do you do when someone uses an Ender Pearl to imprison you personally?  Or your friends and family, the players who have been online the longest, your donors, etc?  Or when one of your players pisses off a member of a guild from Battlefield or World of Warcraft or League of Legends or something, and the ones with Minecraft accounts swarm your server?

I mean, just... teething troubles in general, you know?  Something bad happens that you didn't foresee or couldn't have prevented for whatever reason.  So you go "Oh, well, obviously that didn't count.  It was against the rules!  We'll just undo the changes the griefers made and pretend it didn't happen."

Right?

Hell no, thats why its totally reversible. Once you are imprisoned you can just type /pplocate and it will give you the location and world of your pearl (if it cant find a world position for it you are freed, no logging out with the pearl!) after that you can go and find it and destroy it to free the imprisoned player. Giefers sometimes imprison as many as 10 players during a raid, but they are almost all free by morning thanks to the world of other players. Using citadel to create reinforced vaults (diamond reinforced obsidian must be broken 1800 times, thats quite while to mine through, put a chest with a peal inside of that to help prevent escape) is how griefers are kept in, but if a group of players with the resources wants to free another player they can all work on the reinforced blocks at the same time and cut the time down by orders of magnitude, a group of 20 can break a prison in minutes as opposed to hours upon hours for an individual.

The server was in quite the sate for a while, raids every night cities in ruins. But I held fast to non-interference, regular players had every advantage except organization, except the societal structure they needed to defend themselves proper. To save them from having to create that most essential part of society would defeat the point, so we freed our friends without admin powers and kept up the fight and now, we have won. Its hardly 2 hours before most griefers are imprisoned and held for trial, and less than that before those illegitimately imprisoned are freed. The players stepped up to the task, they managed to create order and stop violence. I have people complaining that the world is now too peaceful!


I don't interfere, even with I or my friends are imprisoned, even when I know there is a band of griefers heading for a city, I work very hard to remain neutral, and it really means i dont play too much anymore, but now I am pretty confident that shaking this order would be difficult. When players join they are spread far and wide, resources are difficult to acquire, so if a group of new grifers join it would take them hours to reach a city, at which point they would not stand a chance against the enforcers wearing such powerful enchanted armor that its worth more than the total income most players make in their entire Minecraft game, one or two of the incredibly rich citizens of the AnCap city have enough resources to single handheldly defeat a band of 20+ griefers.

When the corset comes off, the trunk muscles are weak -- but they are not inherently weak.  Let the person re-develop and they'll be fine.

All the players in minecraft, AnCap or otherwise, are living their real lives under the controls of one state or another.  Like kids on spring break, when the controls are relaxed they get crazy drunk and smash things, but if the controls are left off (bravo, ttk2!), they'll settle down (mostly).

I'd be interested in knowing more about the individual griefers -- what percent are committed troublemakers and what percent are the spring-break basket cases who will eventually catch on?

Many griefers simply get imprisoned permatley. but I think thats more because a large number of griefers are dedicated to the job, going from server to server trying to get banned as fast as possible. A major reason why so many servers have to hide behind whitelists. What I have been plesently supprised by is the portion of griefers, even career griefers for whom the normal play style is just to grief until banned pay restitution and go free to be productive members of society (although with somewhat marred reputations) as the average time to imprisonment goes down more people show up for trials. All trials even ones in semi-satist cities like Columbia are handled by arbitrators selected by reputation and lack of involvement with the affected parties. The AnCaps are the most vocal about ensuring fair and speedy trials for prisoners and often put out ultimatums of action when a player has been imprisoned without a trial.

Most of all people seem attracted to the freedom of the server, with the order and complexity of a heavily regulated role play server but the freedom and space of the usually chaotic anarchy server. I have people tell me every day that they bought minecraft just to play here and long time players that say the server is radically different and better than any other server they have ever plaid on.

Mumble is the voice chat program we all use to hang out and talk, its free and I host a server for it on the same machine as the minecraft server. The community we have built there is incredible, with a large number of regular an caps and with the announcement of civcraft other ideologies or those without ideology. Someone in the an cap channel said "well that's the social contract right?" We all started talking an cap out with him. If you put an caps together you get some crazy business plans and a huge amount of skill. Next weekend we intend to get started on a project to hopefully turn every part of internet service into commoditie that anyone can buy and sell.

Interesting.

What happens when the regulars start harassing newbies?  If you look at diamonds as Money and XP as... well, Experience, a society where the rich and well-connected have a huge built-in advantage over penniless noobs is frankly nothing new or innovative.  

How does the community tend to react when an established player gets bored and starts sniping the spawn area, imprisoning first-time players for sport and stashing their pearls in one of the established supervaults?  Or, for that matter, what do you do when an established player's account or client gets compromised?  (I figure it's bound to happen every once in a while.)  Tactically speaking, they're both the same scenario: the griefer suddenly is the one with seniority and resources.

Well there is no spawn, so sniping it is impossible (players spawn in random locations around the map) but in general the more powerful players are secure enough not to get hacked and when they wish to leave do so quietly. If a powerful player did go rouge they would be imprisoned soon, we have had griefers that thanks to the stolen resources have been nearly on par with powerful players before so its not as if it would be a new level of challenge. As for harrasing newbs that depends on the ideology and individuals involved sometimes they operate with near impunity sometimes it is not tolerated in the slightest.

As for harrasing newbs that depends on the ideology and individuals involved sometimes they operate with near impunity sometimes it is not tolerated in the slightest.

The ideology of the newb or the ideology of the attacker?

Both, I can pull up specific cases but we have such a wide population that I can only generalize at this point. A lot of the statist Libertarians in columbia are pro indefinite imprisonment and will pearl someone at the slightest issue leaving them to rot in the end.

On the ban mechanics:

I have played a good number of retail online games that have a "voting" system.  I know that's injecting a bit of democracy into the situation, but then again so does any real system in which people are in control.  The idea behind it is that when a serious matter (map switch, banning, reset, etc) is called by one player, the other players have the ability to respond to it by voting yay or nay against it.  Some games allow people to make decisions about OTHER situation, so for example, a player requesting a map change to one map may find that the other players want a map change, too... to a different map than the original requester wanted.

That means, for the banning mechanics, that when someone types "/ban Bob", the rest of the players are allowed to vote yay, or nay.  There would be no limitations to the amount of times a person could request a ban.  If nobody overrides the vote, the person is banned.

What this simulates is a committee being called about ostracising a problematic member.  Any time someone would be removed from the collective, others would have the ability to weigh in on the matter if they so choosed.  A person routinely calling for bans of other members might be themselves viewed as a problem, and a separate committee could be called to ban them.

I think it would work nicely.

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After reading a bit more of the situation on the server right now, it actually seems like it might be fun.  It's basically a society against the barbarians.

On the whole issue of making player death permanent: Why not simply start a Hardcore server? If you die, you get banned from the server. Simple. Everyone has the ability to kill everyone else, and everyone has the ability to die. There are ways to set the length of the ban, ranging from hours all the way to permanent banning. People joining the server will instantly know that dying in anyway has consequences because it's a Hardcore server. You don't have to muck around with giving everyone the /ban ability, or be concerned about it being 'god like power' instead of just a deadly weapon.