Suggestion: Placeholders for Peaceful Towns

[benevolent2012]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. An issue mentioned in the Siegewar FAQ : An entire nation is peaceful and does not wish to fight, but rather wants to use the Towny-Nation feature as something like a 'social club' or 'trading company', and with complete immunity to military conquest. What can I do ?

Describe the solution you'd like Placeholders such as isPeaceful=true (outputs boolean whether the town is peaceful or not, similar to %townyadvanced_has_town%) would be very helpful in compatibility with tab or condition-based plugins. For example, I might not display the nation name in tab if the town is peaceful (since it isn't technically involved in geopolitics) or add a special prefix in tab or chat for peaceful town members.

Describe alternatives you've considered

1. Using the TownyCultures plugin. However, although the cultures plugin does keep an identity/commonality between groups that started out as peaceful, it doesn't fully alleviate the concerns of those peaceful towns that do not wish to participate in geopolitics entirely. (Some people don't feel comfortable that their town is "conquered" because they chose to be peaceful. Of course in my humble opinion, I would love to tell them to bear with the consequences of being peaceful in a geopolitical world, but I can't satisfy everyone... 😢 ). More importantly, the cultures plugin doesn't necessary stop other non-peaceful towns from choosing to claim that they are a peaceful culture (since any mayor can use the command to join that peaceful culture), so technically any town can be "seen to be part of the [peaceful] culture," so "there could be infiltrators" (to quote @LlmDl 's words).

2. Separate sandbox and geopolitical worlds. But geopolitical world is more popular since more people play in it (yes, my personal issue, but just listing the things I've tried for the past few months).

Additional context Placeholders would just be very helpful in general for applying the siegewar plugin to other non-towny plugins. It might seem very useless to the plugin developer himself, but for us server owners, we use placeholders extensively and they are a very useful tool without having to code another add-on.

[Goosius1]

In addressing this, there are some important points:

• Peaceful town do not get "conquered". That was never the intention and there is no in-game text to that effect. Instead, they "peacefully transfer" between nations. That is an important perception change which may be do-able without the need for code work from anyone.
• Another perception change which might be do-able without code is in in the area of culture. Culture is just not about thinking in terms of enemies/friends/infiltrators. This questions actually came up just yesterday, to which I answered:

  Culture is just not about that sort of geopolitical infiltrator/enemy/friend thinking. For example, consider if a Brazilian music festival was held in the U.S. If the government there decided to ban all participants of Iranian heritage in case some might be agents of the Iranian government ........that would be completely missing the point (and also quite unacceptable nowadays from civil rights points of view)

• The change of nation for peaceful towns is (I believe) is the last remaining thing of any value which imperial-minded players can actually get from these towns. Hence it may be the absolute minimum which they will put up with. Consider what imperial-minded players have already ceded ..... they cannot attack the town, kill its players in plots, plunder its money, destroy its buildings, change the mayor, salt its earth, or even tax it). If that last remaining effects of perceived nation change were to be taken away in some way, I.M.O that is bending over backwards to suit some peaceful players, at the expense of severe annoyance for conquest minded players.
• So some peaceful players prefer to play in a geopolitical world but literally not be involved with geopolitics at all ..... what will they want next? ----- will they request that all public war notifications turned off, and any discussions of diplomatic relations in the general channel to be met with a 3 day ban?....
• I would really like to know what exactly these peaceful players want?. Because I think that will be important to find the best solution. So.......do they want to pretend to be nations in the RL sense, with all the titles etc., but not actually be?, do they want to be trading companies?, do they want to like closed private societies (like the Freemasons or something?.
• FYI, although I am hopeful for you that something can be done without taking away the nation tag, the technical aspect of the requested placeholders should (I think) already be there. Just look for town.isNeutral(), that is the backend name for the peacefulness flag.

[LlmDl]

I'll be adding a isTownPeaceful and isNationPeaceful placeholder to Towny to cover that aspect of this ticket.

[LlmDl]

  - Placeholders:
    - %townyadvanced_is_nation_peaceful%
    - %townyadvanced_is_town_peaceful%
    - If the player has a town/nation which is peaceful the language string "status_town_title_peaceful" will be shown: "&b(Peaceful)".
    - Addresses https://github.com/TownyAdvanced/SiegeWar/issues/72

Let me know if this can close the ticket here @benevolent2012

[benevolent2012]

Replying to the comments

@Goosius1 Great points and I fully agree with you in your statement,

"the change of nations for peaceful towns is (I believe) is the last remaining thing of any value which imperial-minded players can actually get from these towns. Hence it may be the absolute minimum which they will put up with"

I have been keeping up with your very active comments on LImDI's #siegewar-admins discord channel and I really do appreciate the work you, LImDI and other contributors are putting into the plugin's development.

From my best understanding, this group of players simply want to be completely "separated" from the geopolitical world, while not being separated at the same time... It does not seem to be the logic that is preventing them from realizing that this would never work, but their ego that is preventing them from doing so. To quote what one of them said to me:

"i still have no interest in that. i don't want my stuff to be occupied by somebody else, even if it is in name only. I took the time to build it, and claim it, it's mine, and my time is finite. As I said, I have no time or interest in trying to compete with people who have more time to dedicate to the game just to keep my stuff as my own, cause then I'm being punished for having a life away from the game."

As you can see, there are a lot of first person pronouns being used in that sentence 😄, while at the same time, I've received positive comments such as

"Personally that does solve most of the problems for me"

So, this request (Thank you @LlmDl for adding the commit so quickly 👍 ) is not really because there is an issue with the peaceful town system, but just a feature request to hopefully allow for some flexibility and application to other chat or placeholder-related plugins.

will they request that all public war notifications turned off, and any discussions of diplomatic relations in the general channel to be met with a 3 day ban?....

I am afraid of that as well. What in the world would request next? But at this point, I will try to appease them. In the Dynmap, they would be shown as conquered (since the geopolitical minded players focus on the map and their territory), but in tab only their towns will be shown with a little peaceful tag. The nations for these peaceful towns change anyway & they do not really seem focused on which nation they are part of at a given point of time, so this would hopefully satisfy that specific group of disgruntled peaceful towns, while still allowing the satisfaction of geopolitical players to conquer various parts of the world.

Additional Point/Info And for the Peaceful Culture, the only aspect (not a problem or an issue just a reasoning on my end) that I can comment on is that anyone (any mayor) can join that culture, regardless of whether they are actually peaceful or not.

[Goosius1]

Ok cool thanks, good to have those data points about the player set.

Anyway well done, good job you too for the hard work you are clearly doing on the server side!!!!

Regards -G