It seems that the recent push for PVP re-balance has left a lot of people confused, so I am going to try and sit down here and make my case, this argument has developed over a long time and a lot of changelog discussions, hopefully once I lay it out it will make sense.

So whats up with Civcraft PVP? Its an important part of the game/experiment, societies are often defined by how they do or do not use force. Yet Civcraft pvp is one of the more vanilla things about the game, or at least vanilla as it was a few MC versions ago, of the several things we would like out of PVP in Civcraft the way things currently work satisfies almost none of them.

• One size fits all, Prot4 is pretty much the only option, there is almost no need for changing strategy, there is an objective best armor, and an objective best way to fight in almost every case, this leaves a situation where organization is nothing more than a formality, a group of halfway decent PVP'ers that band together off the cuff are not likely to do any worse than a formal group with a command structure, this alone may be one of the primary difficulties of forming effective states in Civcraft, without the superiority of organized armies the conditions required for them to form are nigh impossible.

• Skill and ping dependence is huge, only a very small number of people are or even can be effective at a hugely important part of the game, for the vast majority of people the best they can do to help with a large conflict is to sit on the sidelines and root for those who have the proper intersection of time to practice and good connection, this is absurd from the point of realism, you can have two societies and it hardly even matters how many people they have, it all about how many people they have in this small category.

• There is very little supply line, as much as we may have tried to make prot expensive we still failed, there is little to no need to trade or work on PVP outside of whatever small group or individual decides they want to put in the effort of making it, we made an effort barrier not an organization barrier, while we wanted some of the former we needed the latter to really encourage social organization and failed to make it happen.

Ok then, we have some idea of whats going wrong, now what are we trying to do to fix it, this is where we have been for months on end, working on ideas and brainstorming solutions, but the fact of the matter was that no matter what we argued ourselves in circles, wrote thousands upon thousands of words all to end back up with no changes we could really apply to the server.

This is where BergyPVP comes in, its a humbug style plugin that modifies combat, right now its hardly working on Civtest and lots of issues are being ironed out. But its not how it works now that's important to us, its the fact that it provides a concrete way to modify how PVP works on a day to day basis. If we need to add a new type of modification then BergyPVP, being made in the style of humbug, is easy to extend with the new tweak and setting we want to add.

Instead of debating what to do with PVP every week and ending up only back where we started I want to use BergyPVP as the tool to make incremental changes to the Civtest environment based on actual feedback, every change made would be a real piece of progress to an improvement, rather than another comment to slide off the front page.

Then why a deadline? mostly to get things moving and obligate us to hold to whatever we end up changing on Civtest. I don't think we will end up making the one I setup as its not really reasonable considering our current rate of progress, but there must come a day where we commit to the set of changes, if that's not firm and set in advance its not likely to happen ever.

So what do you have to do? The answer to that is simple, get on Civtest and help play around with things, provide real feedback, if we need better plugins to help with this please tell us, we can try and setup a CivPVP like environment to make things easier, although that might separate PVP testing and Civtest it is doable.

Lets stop talking in circles and start making real progress.