PCBT, Rules need to be limited

For the nth time i’m in agreement with Ruby et al. You guys are overly Authoritative in the way you carry out your regulations and it’s totally unnecessary.

Is PCBT meant to be a service on behalf of players to make the game more enjoyable? If it is why dont we have a poll on whether people want it or not and stop discussing the matter…

i really dont get why u dont like PCBT rules. i like them, they r needed. on last map, before reset, rails looked like some crap made by 5y old, one block wide, with powerup. i have this kind of rails in konin, but only in city, working as trams, showing best places, so players dont have to fly around - so its used as a trip advisor, not transportation. for that, i have nice, detailed (more then they should be) rails, that follow pcbt rules, and add some additional detail like electisity lines, signals and road crossings. and that looks cool, and i want only pcbt following rails near my city. with rules, i know nobody will build any bulshit near my city, and that is good. im sad that there r no rules for roads and air/sea transport rules were suspended, coz imo, that was a good thing too. rules dont close u in the box, rules make u more creative, coz u have to find a way around, and at the end, its better then making random shit.

BTW: fix that god damn chunk XD or just lemme join, i reset my account, should be spawned in spawn not in badchunk.

Your opinion that PCBT’s rules are good is exactly that: your opinion. If you want PCBT rules to be followed in your town, Great! go ahead.

However, this is more about the people who do not like them, and do not want to have to follow them. Which is why I suggest PCBT not be a mandated, PCB-official organization, but rather a private organization on PCB. It should be optional, not mandatory to let PCBT run transportation in your city.

I agree with Ryan, Ouhai and Madant.
On the old server I actually liked the dodgy one-block rail systems, they may have looked bad, but I thought of them as kind of querky with a sort of “soul” in them.
The PCBT rail systems look like a more regulated “state run” rail system, that the players have little control over and only the “shady” high-ups on the PCB heirachy know anything about it.
I liked the rivalling of the players train companies on the old server, with the main PCBrail or whatever it was called, and YoshiRail, run by Yoshi, and my rather too late LordsRail, the logo of which is my forum picture.
On this server I was planning to start LordsRail, and make it an intercity connection between my cities, which I had hoped would be rather close together in an ice biome, which they luckily turned out to be. Now I am told that I can’t actually do this, so I am going to have to instead try to grow each of the cities enough so that they actually overlap their borders, so the rail links can be classed as an internal rail route. This however, cannot be done if someone decides to build a city between my two current cities, which would mean that I could not join them up, as long as I didnt completely encompass that city, leaving enough block room so not to be within render distance.
I don’t like, either, having to be told what type of station the one in Winterly Rock will have to be and what shape it has to be. I had built it to be 38 blocks long, which I thought long enough, especially since the sea was right at the end of it. I then got told that the platforms needed to be at least 60 blocks long, which made me have to destroy quite a lot of something in front of one of the tunnels, and have to spend several hours on making it longer. I had finished and so I asked Yoshi to come and inspect it. He said that it was actually only 57 blocks long, and thus made it irrelevent and not a proper in-the-rules station, and also wasting the roughly 6 hours of work that I spent making it longer. I see it stupid that the rules about these stations are so tight, I was 3 blocks off it and yet I still could not make it an official station.
I think that players should be able to make railway lines, whether they look good or not, to other cities so long as the other mayor agrees and the distance is not too long (i.e. over land where a decent sized city could be made, within the render distance laws). I think this would make the server a lot more player run and make it have a better commmunity - people collaberating to make link between cities - it would also make the server a lot more “personal”.

I hope I may have changed some minds;

Max

Personally i like things being nice and neat, therefore i think PCBT is a good way to shape up the new map. However if we destroyed all work that didn’t look good then we might as well be like WoK and have a builders rank. PCB is a free build server. Everyone is allowed to build whatever they want. Thats the point of it. Even though some cities on PCB look ugly and are squares of gold blocks… No one has tried to stop those people building in the history of PCB, so why start now?

Max, in your particular case I would be prepared to give you permission to create your own localised railway for your medieval projects, as we would most likely not go to any of your other projects.

The reason for the 60 block rule is because that’s how long our trains are. It’s not some random number we came up with, our standardised trains are Locomotive-Carriage-Locomotive, which is 60 blocks. At 57 blocks, the train would have not fitted in the station.

If you ASK us if you want to build your own line, we will most probably accept it, especially if (like in your case max) we wouldn’t serve it anyway.

Unless 57 blocks instead of 60 means that there’s a door which runs into a wall, I don’t think there’s really a problem. IRL trains sit with their ends past the end of the platform all the time.

I’m agreeing with Ryan, Ruby and Co. Mainly because on normal real world tracks there is a variety of trains etc. and to destroy someones work because it doesnt fit to “your rules” is quite frankly wrong. I also hate the look of the rails as the look far to futuristic and they should look more like american/british tracks do. i agree there should be some sort of sanction where people cant just build hundreds of different tracks as it will turn into a huge spiderweb but i think we should be allowed to build a variety of trains such as steam, cargo, passennger etc.

Well said Meta

We’re currently discussing the time frame of introducing Phase 2. Hopefully there will be an announcement of Phase 2 by the end of today.

Quick summary: Phase 2 allows for all types (freight, passenger, whatever), for different networks, providing it has a purpose, and doesn’t pointlessly duplicate on another network. There has been a sorta trial of this phase, permission was given for a member to connect a city to an airport, and another city. If you’re doing something new, it will be approved.

The intention of this is to create a more unique version of the 1.7 rails, as it encourages people to diversify, they will need to come up with new ideas and not just make another cross-map passenger line. New styles will be encouraged, different types will be encouraged.

The reason for the current status was to ensure that the regulated line has enough map coverage, and was never intended to be the permanent situation.

im assuming this “phase 2” has come around due to what we have said. Im still not sure why airports arent regulated anymore please explain

How about altogether skipping the approval process and make a post with GUIDELINES, not rules, for people to follow? The approval process has absolutely no point other than to stall people’s build projects before they have even begun.

With added freedom to build comes added freedom for rubbish builds to come up. I understand that it can be seen as restrictive but this is necessary. People seem to be ignoring the whole reason why PCBT was even a thing. Such a system was made necessary by tons of unregulated one block wide mine cart rails that frankly choked the previous map. The deregulation of rails would lead to the same outcome that the deregulation of airports produced, but On a much wider scale.
Sure, there were good airports, but there were also bad airports. PCBT isn’t here to make sure only mediocre train systems get through, it’s to make sure the bad ones have a chance to be improved instead of just leaving them to rot.
People here are arguing that their building skills have gotten much better since the last map. Frankly, I agree. I’m one of them. I will put my hand on my heart and proclaim that not only is Ceres much better than Silver Mountain, the latter was subpar to the point of just plain being shit. None of you posting now are in the Silver Mountain category. But the problem is not you folks in the post-amateur stage, it’s those who have just joined and are still building badly. They will be the ones to create the next YoshiRail, the rail systems which are ultimately unnecessary and a blight on the landscape.
If we deregulate rails, the last creative map will just happen again. If we deregulate rails, then yes, things will change.
But they’ll change for the worse.

Nope, phase 2 was always a plan, we have just slightly changed the scheduling. It was initially called “Secondary Projects”, but we changed to phases.

The requirements of the approval process would just be:

[ul][li]It shouldn’t needlessly duplicate something else[/li]
[li]It should, if possible, integrate with existing transport in the area[/li]
[li]It should be original[/li][/ul]

As for delays, so far the longest delay waiting for a reply regarding stations was just under a day, and the only reason for that was because I had to ask Yoshi if it would fit into the current network.

A Phase 2 approval process would simply be a matter of checking the above three thing. We wouldn’t need to try and add it to a line, we’d just check if there was something similar already.

As for using guidelines over rules: There is no purpose to setting guidelines for style with something like this. The purpose is to ensure quality. You cannot ensure quality if it’s optional. The people we are trying to target with this are the people who wouldn’t follow the guidelines anyway.

cough cough Loving the look of all staff arguing with one another in a public thread. >.>

In all seriousness, I’m neutral, although this thread seriously looks like it became mostly reasonable between members, but a damn near pissing match between staff at some parts.

That is the most true statement I have ever heard.
-Max

Because nobody follows guidelines ;D

I have a rule board up @ the warp in Port Royal and people still don’t follow it. And those aren’t even guidelines.

I fail to see the pissing match. There are well thought out and reasoned points on both sides. It’s probably one of the best discussions/debates to ever happen on these forums.

Anything which requires someone to fill out a form or having to wait for one from a specific group of people to come online is too long for the creative map. When people come to build something, they want to build it now, not tomorrow, or 2 hours from now.

As for using guidelines over rules: There is no purpose to setting guidelines for style with something like this. The purpose is to ensure quality. You cannot ensure quality if it's optional. The people we are trying to target with this are the people who wouldn't follow the guidelines anyway.

I wasn’t suggesting guidelines for style, I meant something like stations should be x blocks long, there should be x blocks between each track and x blocks between the track and the wall/road next to the tracks.

Also the reason that they’re guidelines is that people can CHOOSE to follow them. That’s the whole point. Guidelines say ‘this is how we would like you to do it, but feel free to do it however you want’, which on a freebuild creative map is the most amount of restriction over builds (aside from location) that there should be.

JmvRail still has a glimmer of hope?