Requested Change:Instead of having an engineer, mod, or admin run a trial, use /trial me.It will ask you questions in the chat and check if you’ve passed the trial.
Reasons for change:There will be no need to wait for a staff member or engineer to connect to the server.
Reasons for no change (optional but recommended):Staff or engineers won’t be able to do as many trials. (But I’m not saying they’re completely unable to do trials, and if someone prefers to do it with a staff member or engineer, they can.)
My understanding is, you run trial, answer questions, and if you answer you get builder.
The issue is that this makes it much easier to cheat on the trial questions compared to trialing with someone else. People can just feed those questions to an AI or do a web search. Zero effort to get the builder status.
Additionally, the point of trialing isn’t just answering questions but also showing effort with redstone capabilities. You have to build an ALU with redstone, and a simple trial command cannot detect patterns resembling ALUs as there are tons of different ALUs out there.
However, there does exist an official ORE Binary Quiz (ORE Binary Quiz) where you can practice answering trial questions without actually being trialed, if it helps.
I’m not a staff member or anything, this is just what I think personally about this.
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Okay, I understand, but I mean it needs an AI detector. (I’m making this petition so I don’t have to wait for the staff or engineers.)
AI is, unfortunately, also a problem, for many reasons. I’ll list some.
- The algorithm behind AI is actually very complex for a computer, so ORE would need dedicated high-performance GPUs and computers just for an AI. For a community server it’s not worth it. Electricity bills and maintenance would be very complex. This isn’t a business or commercial software. Rather, this is a community where people are free to learn together.
- Many people (from what I learned based on past mistakes) on ORE are highly against AI, so if they happen to know that ORE is hosting one, many people would lose interest in the server and reputation will be damaged.
- AI relies on patterns, and sometimes a player may build an ALU that doesn’t work, which the AI may think is a working ALU and therefore pass the trial with incomplete redstone knowledge. Highly similar to universities or schools which hope the most that you successfully educate rather than intentionally make you pass. Better be safe than sorry. Even if it’s trained on many builds, you never know, it may still misinterpret a broken build as functional.
- If they rely on AI on this server, it’ll look like the server is just very low-effort, because actual people aren’t taking their time to help. Without AI-based trialing becoming mainstream, people actually get to talk to real people and understand that a lot of effort is taken here.
If you do need to be trialed, you can hold TAB in the game to view all active players, and if you see an Engineer or Moderator, ask them if they can trial you. For now you can try the ORE Binary Quiz just as a practice.
so I don’t have to wait
Additionally, I’d like to add: you don’t need to hurry up. It takes quite a bit of time for most people to get builder (if I had to guess, around ~2 weeks for most people). It took me 8 months to get one. You don’t typically join, learn, and get builder overnight. Many people had to go through delays like these to get it.
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Hypothetically, even if the server did consider a command like this, having to program it, test it, validate it, and train the AI would take another few months or even years. Sooo, at the end of the day, a person trialing you never gets old… and for a good reason.
I would put this in suggestions instead of petitions since as far as i know petitions is for more urgent matters but hey what do i know?
So, this “/trial me” command can be done by an Administrator in the server console
It’s very simple, since administrators have access to the server console, so scheduling it is very easy (you simply set Programming and that’s it)
I’ve moved this to suggestions as it is more of a suggestion than petition.
Automated trials as an idea have been around off and on for over a decade. We have a current idea on how they would work, including testing on redstone mechanics and skill, and still require Staff / Engineer oversight. That said, it isn’t as straightforward as “simply set Programming and that’s it”. That vastly understates the development required to put this together. Having AI detection sounds nice as well but take that “development required” and multiply it a few times.
Additionally, any automated trial system will have a progressively harsher delay between trials. By the time someone, for instance, fails 8 trials in a row, the delay between trials may be upwards of a couple months, or may even be barred from automated trials as a whole.
Regardless, people having to wait for a trial often does come down to Staff / Engineer unavailability, but that is not applicable to you.
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“but that is not applicable to you”.It matters to me because I’m a student, so I’m making this petition
I assume nick was trying to refer to your trial attempts without explicitly saying so.
I’m also not sure how I feel about someone who, for lack of a better way to put this, has an unusually hard time with trials trying to tell us how the system should be changed. Your circumstances are not the standard we should define our system by and I’d feel better hearing from those with more typical interactions with the trial system.
I think an automated system could work, but I’ve seen the idea get negative reception from our community in the past and think it needs to be a long and delicate process of refining a system based on feedback from trusted members. We shouldn’t just swap out a system on a whim, it needs to enforce a similar level of knowledge and, while we’re not hyper-focused on it, should avoid introducing additional vectors for cheating. Currently we at least have some level of interaction that the trialer can use to determine if something seems fishy, but that disappears with an automated system. Given we already have some people attempt to use AI during the trial, I think it’s best to be careful.
Suggestions are where ideas initially go and Petitions are where they go if they’ve been rejected by staff (basically a more serious demand for us to consider things if enough people show support).
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I just want to clarify that I don’t aim for my response to be rude, but I think it’s fair to point out that someone with a unique trial experience trying to suggest we change trials is a conflict of interest. I’m entirely interested in improving our trial system (and have made some progress on that front), but I’m not sure this particular suggestion is unbiased or done in consideration for how it’ll impact the rest of those involved.
Is it very difficult to program?
If it’s easy or normal to program, please accept this suggestion
Did you read any of what we just said?
yes, i did
I’m not trying to be rude, you could try
Nick already explained and outlined our current plans and considerations for an automated trial system.
You’re getting hung up on it being “easy” or “hard” instead of our long responses outlining the different issues and considerations that this sort of system has. As nick said, we’ve had people suggesting automated trials for over a decade, but it’s not as simple as writing an automated system and calling it a day.
I see, so you’re saying it would be very difficult to implement and that you had already thought about it before.