As several of you have noticed over the last few days the server has been experiencing some quite extreme lag, this appears to be caused by a problem relating to how hoppers deal with protecting the flow of items, every single second the server is having to check for thousands of different hoppers around the worlds and to try and limit these accordingly. This isn't sustainable for us going forward, so we're going to have a make a minor change to how hoppers and blocks which store items work on Noobstown. We obviously don't want to punish you for making big redstone machines, they're really cool, so we're not going to limit that in any way at this time.

We do have a solution to this problem though which is like to solve the problem we've currently got. It will be happening in two stages to make sure you get chance to make your items safe, (these don't apply to the wilderness world since that uses the /wild unit protection which works differently):

Stage 1 (Today Already Done):

• You will no longer be able to place hoppers underneath or pointing into any block which can store items (chests, other hoppers, droppers, etc.) that you do not own (using LWC (/cprivate, /cpublic, etc.)
• You will no longer be able to place blocks which can store items (chests, hoppers, droppers, etc.) in a position where a hopper you don't own would be pointing into that block you're trying to place.

These two things should make safe any issues with people trying to steal your items or annoyingly give you items when you don't want them to.

Stage 2 (Likely in a week or so):
We're doing this at the earliest of this coming weekend to give you a few days to adjust the following on the tiny chance you fall into the situation explained below.

• We will be turning off all hopper flow protections. Effectively meaning if you've got a block with a hopper flowing in or out of it then when we make this change the items will flow irrespective of any LWC permissions set on either of the blocks.
• Both the block (chests, etc.) and the hopper will be protected individually from players just looking and taking items manually, but moving forward items will freely flow between hoppers and blocks they connect with, irrespective of ownership. This really shouldn't be an issue for the majority of you, your items will still be safe because of the changes made in stage 1. The only issue is likely to arise if you already have a situation where you've already got a hopper following in or out of a block you don't own (or the other way around). If you have then you've got a few days to fix this by moving the blocks so they aren't touching or pointing into each other.

I realise this change might not be something you all want, but it will make things safer in the long term, we need to consider the well-being of the server as a whole in terms of the lag being caused by this. The impact of this change is likely to be non-existent for the majority of you and only minimal for those it does effect.

This might have been quite a confusing post because of the specifics of the issue, so if you've got any questions please do feel free to ask them, I'll happily demonstrate what the change is and how to solve it etc. in-game if you contact me.

...I seriously do not have the time to check my gazillion hoppers and chests and figure out how this new stuff works.
I will just stop using this stuff and let people steal.
...

This isn't a negative change at all, it won't let just anyone 'steal' items.

Sorry if my post was slightly confusing, you really don't have to check everything, unless you've built something in the town world with someone else who was placing hoppers/chests at the same time as you and in the same spots it's really not anything you need to overly worry about. There are really only minimal chances of this being a problem for you, if you've building with someone else (the only time it will be an issue anyway) it's likely you're going to somewhat trust the other player anyway. Plus the issue cannot occur anymore, we've fixed it for all new placements since this post, only old existing ones need checking.

If you've got a situation with something that holds items above a hopper like:
or
And you don't own the bottom hopper then yes it could take your items once we turn it on, but that is really the only situation you need to properly worry about. You can no longer place hoppers like this if you don't own the top block so this situation will not be able to ever occur after the fix.

If you've got a hopper flowing into an item holding block you don't own like:

Where you own the hopper but not the chest (or other item holding block) then your items will begin to flow also, but if you've placed your hopper like this anyway it's likely you were intending for them to go in there anyway.

Sorry if you've had any confusion about it, I'd be more than happy to help you in-game to look into your specifics. This change isn't meant to cause horrible problems; it's meant to make things better for everyone.