And no, it isn't. You don't just build "Gorzan's Gorilla Striker" with Legos; you build whatever the heck you want. Except, of course, if the box only has the pieces to make that bike ... which is how Legos are now. And it's what Jeb wants to turn Minecraft into.
I disagree, if you want to play Lego, use creative mode. Survival mode is TOY + GAME RULES. If you don't want to be bothered by the rules, they have given you an out.
I do not care if they leave golems dropping I iron when killed by the environment, but the overlapping village crap has got to be fix just to make the village rules sane. That part was completely unintended and in my opinion, needed to be fixed for village code to be cleaned up and improved in the future.
The game is not static. If you want it to be, pick a version and stay there. If I were them, I would call it DONE and move on to a new codebase and make a new game. Those who want the new version and new additions can buy it, everyone else can stay with the old version. They need a revenue stream to stay in business so it has to come at some point. I am happy that has not happened yet, but I will understand when it does.
Yes. I completely agree with A_Hard. let people play the way they want to play. (snip) I wish people would just think about other people's opinions and views, rather than push their view as the ultimate deciding factor...
This so greatly resumes lots of posters in this topic here, because it puts in the same small paragraph two statements that ultimately contradict.
The thing is, all those players saying "let us play the way we want", which seem great in theory, do not seem to take into account another "basic" tenet that tend to impose limits on this total freedom.
Mainly:
- There is a whopping difference between singleplayer vs multiplayer.
Multiplayer just has to force some limits on the freedom of the way to play. In singleplayer, grinder farms are hundreds of times more efficient than the designed way, making them a VERY attractive "way to play", and it's all good if the player decides to use them or not. In multiplayer, grinder farms are ALSO hundreds of times more efficient than the designed way, making them a VERY attractive "way to play", this means we should say go to to hell to all those players that would prefer playing / grinding the basic way, because grinder farmers will definitely grinder farm, and thus gain a MASSIVE advantage over those players who grind the way the game was intended, making them big losers, right?
It is obvious which one is the "culprit" here. The "lemme play the way i want" argument here is actually an argument FOR the basic-way-o9f-play player AGAINST the grinder-weay-of-play player, not the opposite. Because in the end the basic-way player's way of playing has no effect on the grinder, but the grinder-way player's way of play has a clear negative effect on the basic player.
In the end it's all about what is FAIR, capiche?
"Letting us play the way we want", SEEMS like a good argument. Until a player's way to play is let's say "make TNT chain explosions under the stone houses of other players, and put lava above their wood houses." aka griefers. A non-griefer player's way of play doesn't impose anything on the griefer, but a griefer's way of play has a clear negative impact on the "normal" basic players. Then it becomes all VERY clear how '"let each player play the way he wants" looks good at first glance but becomes utter crap as soon as more two or more players are put together. In a multiplayer server with strong competition and economy, making grinder farms can easily be seen as tantamount to griefing put against the entire competitive game and/or economy.
In multiplayer servers where each player stays in his own corner doing his own thing, this it all end up being a lot closer to single player play, so who cares. But in multiplayer servers with ANY kind of competition or economy exist, then the fact that grinders are WAAAYYYY more efficient than "normal" play skews everything up. Not just a little skewing here, but a "really strong dynamite kick to the apple cart" kind of skewing. And YES, the player that feels that he should play the game as it was designed, as it was intended, WILL get "screwed up". HIS immersion and playstyle will get cramped because the obvious way to win is through making grinder farms that reduce every mob in thge game to mere tools, statistics, and spawning mechanics.
So yeah, let everybody play the way they want... sure! But only in single player!
But in multiplayer, things BADLY need to be much better not only to make them more immersive but even more important so that things are both fair and balanced.
This means that, given the choice, grinders just have got to go. Plain and simple.
While unfair to the mob grinders makers, nerfing grinders would actually be more fair when you try to balance for the entire player community.
When grinders are only twice as effective as normal grinding, you guys might have some kind of case here. Grinders would STILL be advantageous, but at last not ridiculously so. The player "pays up" with a huge time and material investment in advance, and then it takes a LONG time, much, much longer than what he spent, before he "wins out" over the players that meanwhile used their time to grind the normal way. But eventually, he starts having more, but never "ridiculously more". So there is a REAL tradeoff not an illusion of one. Because currently grinder farms are actually hundreds times better than hunting, and after his grinder is done the player merely has to go to bed doing nothing in the game (laving his Steve in a very safe place merely standing on a pressure plate), and by the time he wakes up, yeah, he's got as much loot as DOZENS of other players that would have done the normal hunting grinding all night long (including the time the first player needed to make the grinder in the first place). That is just abusive and a clear exploit.
And ultimately that previous paragraph weights WAY more in the balance than "lemme play the way I want!".
My personal opninion here is that it is the entire mob spawning rules that should be upgraded so that mobs spawn much more naturally in a way that cannot be so easily controlled by players. And Monster Spanwers should have durability, too. The SIMPLEST and easiest way to do it would be for natural mob spawning to happen only on blocks that were naturally spawned, never on player placed block EXCEPT in special circumstances that DO cost player ACTIVE time (no merely standing somewhere) and/or has a resource cost. so yeah a grinder would still be possible, but it's efficiency would only be a normal-sized lever of the player's overall performance, and NOT scores / hundreds times better.
That Lego ad is so marvelously true to form. There's rarely an opportunity to come up with an image and an expression that fits so well with the product being advertised. It is indeed beautiful in more than one way.
We are indeed apparently breeding a new type of kids. The 50s all the way to the 80s, where a technological revolutionary period that promoted pure creativeness. Lego is perhaps one of the most visible links to this period. But in many ways, cellphones and the internet are too. I've been appreciating your Lego analogy since you first used it.
Lego is today(*) what Minecraft is going to become in the near future. And those ads are no longer possible. Instead we have kids with perfectly built AV-8 Harriers. And the logo should read "What it is is detailed instructions". So long creativity in its most pure form. So long Enlightenment period of the 20th century. Welcome to the 21st century where your kids are no longer engineers; they are now architects. Minecraft follows this pattern of reasoning, in which a toolbox with tremendous potential for pure creativity is being slowly eroded into a constrained box of lego pieces that only fit other lego pieces if you follow the specific instructions and rules. And, disappointingly, so many people seem to be just fine with this. With a game that limits their creativity in the name of an arbitrary set of rules that could actually not exist and let players instead build their own rules.
But most of us saw it coming before it happened. It's not a surprise to a few of us that when multiplayer Minecraft was starting to become a reality, this game would change forever. Nothing like a game server to destroy a perfectly valid singleplayer concept.
---
(*) It is possible to buy in a small specialized shop outside Cascais, Portugal, the old freestyle lego pieces. They are still manufactured. Unfortunately most outlets don't care or even understand Lego, being that they will put your Lego box right to the spider man action figure. So they don't see those pieces. But on specialized modelling stores, Lego as we remember it can still be found and the person behind the counter will smile in appreciation and implicit understanding if you go for it, instead of the Lego Lunar module.
There's a much simpler solution than your proposal to prohibit all features which would permit any playstyles other than your own:
gamerules
Turning off drops from mobs not personally killed could be a gamerule.
Monster spawner degradation could be a gamerule.
Etc.
And then your server owner could enable those, so that you and your friends who like clicking on blocks, who like wandering around in the dark to slowly gather xp, etc., could do that. People who would rather do other things on other servers could do them.
"Not everybody wants to play the way I do, so they should all be forced to" is not a solution. Not one that will lead to more long-term players of the game.
It's almost like minecraft is a government now 'the nerf has been repealed!'. Senator! What is your view on chicken jockeys and do you condone the use of mods?
(irony mode on)
Yes, of so much yes! If we play on a multiplayer server with let's say and iconomy plugin and some players want to play with cheat enabled to /give themselves stacks of diamonds, who a re we to tell them that ain't right, right& After all, that's how way they want to play!
(irony mode off)
As far as game design is concerned, game balance, at least a MINIMAL amount of it, *is* a little thing that usually falls into the "very important" category of things.
The problem is not the fact that automatic farms give potentially infinite resources "for free". First of all, it ain't really for free because you first have to build saif mod grinder farm.
The problem is that these automatic farms are orders of magnitude better in providing resources, than the way the game intends for these things. If the gol of the game is to encourage exploring and mining, then the game features should REALLY encourage exploring and mining, rather than sticking in one place and going afk whike your local farm produces tons of stuff.
Think of it this way:
Player A takes say 1 hour to mine stuff, and gets X amount of said "valuable" stuff. This is a constant "getting X amount of stuff per hour of 'work' done."
Player B meanwhile takes the same 1 hour to make a grinder, spending K amount of simple construction materials. In that first hour he goets nothing in return. However, then afterwards he goes AFK and for each hour if going AFK he gets LOTS MORE THAN X amount of the valuable (or at least desired) X stuff.
And the more times passes (and we're not taking months if playing here, but mere HOURs within a SINGLE gaming session), the more Player B takes a bigger and bigger whopping lead over layer A.
If Player B had to say invest 1 hour to get only a TINY production bonus, to "recoup his time investment" only after a LOT of time has passed, then yeah, automatic farming would be great. But the HUGE difference makes it so the game is effectively shouting : Don't go mining or go exploring. Make grinders !".
Jeb only fixed a major, known bug about the way golems spawned, which was long overdue in coming anyway. Even with that little fix, grinder farms stay vastly overpowered and unbalanced.
The nerf was stupid because you could get around it with wolves or with a program to auto hit an attack button or a taped down mouse key.
People playing multi who want to use mob towers to afk farm would jut come up with a program to auto hit and auto eat when needed.
But really how smart is it to nerf something a LOT of super popular mods are base around, the idea that if you learn mechanics and spend large amounts of time resource gathering you can auto farm parts of the game. What would be next? Water auto destroys wheat and leaves no drops?
Shouldn't take the "mine" out of Minecraft. Just my opinion.
Farms are for lazy kids or redstone users who hate the other parts of the game, that's just the way I see it. I'm not gonna walk on eggshells for peoples feelings lol. All the outcry about farms being nerfed says to me is they're too casual in a already casual game to actually play it as it was meant to be. Saying someones "limiting the game" because you cant get free gold/iron is kind of crybabyish, especially when the games only limited by your imagination. The only thing the nerf hurt is peoples comfort zone because they lack the attentionspan to get things the hard way.
I really hope pigmen and iron golems lose their specific gold/iron drops. It really cannot be argued against that it gives a unfair economic advantage in multiplayer, even if other players have the option to make gold/iron farms as well. Devaluing a item so you can be lazy is just stupid. Just being straightforward, sorry.
Some may reply and say "well mining is arbitrary and boring" , well I respond with "why are you playing a game halfly based around mining then?".
The only real argument for iron/gold farms I can really see as legitimate is using them to get gold/iron blocks for build projects that would otherwise take an insane amount of mining beyond anyone's rational attentionspan for gathering materials.
I don't think his decision would have been much different if he read these forums instead.
Quite a bit different actually. Reddit is reknowned for being a hugbox by those who are actual outside observers who aren't caught up in the upote system and circular opinions. So much so that when Notch fled /v/ he went to reddit to escape actual proper criticism.
If we're going to ask why he asked "why must he only listen to reddit" you'd only need to look at what I said above as reasons why they should expand their accepted sources of feedback, even if it comes with the occasional "stupidcensorship"-ish posts. Maybe getting a fire lit under their butts would make them hire more people and get more things done. Minecraft has been broken for a long time for a reason.
As far as game design is concerned, game balance, at least a MINIMAL amount of it, *is* a little thing that usually falls into the "very important" category of things.
That's for competitive games. There is no game balance in a sandbox game. Nor is there game balance in a building game. Balance is a concept for people who want to measure their e-peen against their buddies. It's the rallying cry of people who lose games, and has been since the first Mortal Kombat game came out and people realized they could spam projectile attacks to win without any skill. Obviously, since the other guy figured out how to win and you don't want to just get down to the reflex/luck test of who started first, the game is broken.
You were handed a big box of LEGOs. Your first inclination seems to be "I want to play LEGOs with other people - against other people." Okay, you and people who share your mentality can do that. But that doesn't mean LEGOs need to be changed. It means you need your own rules for when you play together. It's been suggested time and again that game-rules should be used to allow competitive multi-player servers their 'balance', and that's the only solution that should be considered. If you want them to limit Minecraft to the way it was intended, you shouldn't be allowed to play multi-player, let alone whine about balance. It's a single-player sandbox.
It's possible to play multiplayer and not play against each other. People do this pretty regularly. Obviously they need no 're-balancing' to make the game work with multiple people sharing a sandbox. But the argument that comes from a batch of people who only marginally want to pretend they're not trying to kill each other and just go play a FPS remains that the game is broken. The game's not broken. The players are. You want to play something other than Minecraft. That's fine. It's what mods are for - to turn the structure of the game sideways so that you can do something different. But claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong. There's no reason your ing-contest needs can't be met by adding some game-rule options to multi-player games, but there's also no reason others need to be lumped in with you or have the rules that you need to play angry-Minecraft imposed upon them.
Farms are broken? There's nothing to stop anybody else from walking into your farm after they've spent a few hours playing how they like and then killing the mobs or taking the loot from your grinder. Then they get everything and you have nothing. Communal storage sucks, huh? Of course, when you're supposed to be sharing your sandbox and playing nice with the other children, it doesn't matter - but we all know some people are incapable of such social niceties - that's why they're on the Internet, enjoying the anonymity that lets them behave in a way nobody would tolerate in the flesh.
There's a phrase I heard years ago: "The Internet taught me that there are millions of people out there that I don't want to know." Change the last word to 'game with', and it's just as true. We don't all play the same, and nobody should be yelling "my way or the highway!" at everybody else. Find a way to have your play-style without imposing it on others, and everybody can be happy. Otherwise, you can find other games that support your playstyle. Of course, you'll probably get killed immediately in such a game by somebody that's been playing since it was in beta and therefore 'deserves' to be far better than you, but that's your fault for not getting started at the beginning, right?
So, according to this string of tweets, it looks like he will be repealing the nerfs because of the uproar on Reddit.
Are people really that lazy?
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I am curious as to what the demographics are for the people who use farms, are indifferent to farms, or oppose farms. I don't think that it's as straight forward as: those with tons of free time to grind are opposed to farming and those with little free time use farms.
Survival isn't competitive multiplayer. Thus, there's still no need for 'balance.'
In fact, there is no multiplayer mode, and that's the issue. You can start your single-player game-mode on a server and let multiple people play on it, but you're still in the same single-player game-mode used by people who don't even have anybody to interact with. Those game-modes don't need to be torn apart to make it more 'fair' for people who can't play together in a cooperative manner. Playing against each other needs to be treated like the separate beast it is.
(...)
But claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong.
(...)
First off, cool down a bit on the direct insults (and yes your post contains several of those). Flames rarely serve a good purpose.
Because second, "claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong" is exactly what I was going for. My argument is that MC should evolve to suit the community's needs, NOT specific playstyles over others unless that is what Mojang is trying to aim for. Anyway you can't ever please everybody, so the game should at least aim to please the audience that Mojang SAYS that the game is made for. Which is exactly why I believe all automatic mob grinding in general is in dire need of a really solid nerfing.
The "default" game setting is the Survival game mechanics, and yes that should be "balanced" to fit the needs of the many, not the needs of the few, because those mechanics are the same in the single and multi players environments. Not all servers have a form of economy or competition, but many do. As soon as you make two players interact together in ANY game, the seemingly nice rule of "doing anything you want" will always hit some kind of wall. For those people insisting on that total personal freedom (always their own, of course), then there is always Creative with Cheats enabled, or, on a Multiplayer Survival Server, pulling a "lord" Gaylord Steambath (see: The N00b Adventures).
Let's check WHAT behavior the game actually says it is to reward, according to Mojang, and then let Mojang adjust the mechanics to fit that, and not something else. Mojang's official stance is that the game should encourage mining and exploring. Having grinders be not "just a bit better" but be actually lots better than the "casual" way to get resources, is actually saying quite the opposite: "stop wasting time exploring & mining, make automatic grinders instead!". Thatis what the game actually rewards. And by a huge factor, too.
All I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with automatic grinders. But there is something very wrong with Mojang saying the game should encourage exploration and mining, and then programming game mechanics which do the exact opposite.
Taking my use of the word "game balance" and forcing it into some form of comparison to immature penile contests: wow, I find myself thinking that was totally uncalled for and that it feels like my words got twisted really out of context. My girlfriend also thinks many things in Minecraft are really badly balanced, too. Hmm, does that mean I should wish you good luck trying to convince her that her opinion are "also" a bad case of a "me am better than youuuu" ego problem?
Survival isn't competitive multiplayer. Thus, there's still no need for 'balance.'
In fact, there is no multiplayer mode, and that's the issue. You can start your single-player game-mode on a server and let multiple people play on it, but you're still in the same single-player game-mode used by people who don't even have anybody to interact with. Those game-modes don't need to be torn apart to make it more 'fair' for people who can't play together in a cooperative manner. Playing against each other needs to be treated like the separate beast it is.
On a lot of server, it is competitive. However, I still agree 100% here! There are just so much differences between these two "realms" that applying the exact SAME game mechanics to both is a real can-o-worms in the making.
My entire argument was based on the "premisce" that Mojang doesn't want to make 2 separate set of game mechanics (they already have trouble enough adjusting Game Difficulty as it is lol), but only one if possible, ergo we got a single set of game mechanics for both Single and Mutiplayer and that probably won't change anytime soon. I was also on the opinion that given the fact that in Single Player, the player HAS ultimate control over the kind of world he creates and wants to play in, and given that the player can always have the easy option to start his world in Creative or with Cheats (and toggle Cheats off and on at his leisure), thus the default mechanics really only need to be adjusted for multiplayer.
In short: Auto mob grinders do not absolutely need to be super powerful in Single player because of the very mitigating presences of Creative and Cheats modes. Meanwhile, in some survival settings, which aren't negligible at all, and which fit with the play behavior that Mojang says is to be encouraged, there is a need for these same mob grinders to not overshadow the normal mining & exploring way (well, at least not by such a huge factor).
"claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong" is exactly what I was going for. My argument is that MC should evolve to suit the community's needs
So the game you literally paid for should cease to exist because what Mojang assumes might be the majority of players want it to be something different? Seems to me like people who want a different game should get a different game, not expect everybody else to give up their game for this new game.
NOT specific playstyles over others unless that is what Mojang is trying to aim for. Anyway you can't ever please everybody, so the game should at least aim to please the audience that Mojang SAYS that the game is made for. Which is exactly why I believe all automatic mob grinding in general is in dire need of a really solid nerfing. The "default" game setting is the Survival game mechanics, and yes that should be "balanced" to fit the needs of the many, not the needs of the few, because those mechanics are the same in the single and multi players environments.
"Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things.
It can also be about adventuring with friends or watching the sun rise over a blocky ocean. It’s pretty. Brave players battle terrible things in The Nether, which is more scary than pretty. You can also visit a land of mushrooms if it sounds more like your cup of tea."
Minecraft is a building game`. Monsters are a secondary concern, and exploring for rare biomes is barely an afterthought. Mining is only implicitly part of the game. The idea of competing or even trading with other players isn't even a consideration. That's Mojang's description from the home-page.
Given those priorities, Survival is about you trying to stay alive while you construct grand things. You can try to stay alive as a group with others, and that's multiplayer. We're still not in need of balance to make how I play 'fair' with how you play. This is the issue that keeps getting blithely swept aside in the 'balance' arguments. The game is not about interacting with other players - that was added as an afterthought. Since you're not supposed to be worrying about other players, there's no mechanics to make the other players 'fair' because they're not supposed to be relevant.
Not all servers have a form of economy or competition, but many do. As soon as you make two players interact together in ANY game, the seemingly nice rule of "doing anything you want" will always hit some kind of wall. For those people insisting on that total personal freedom (always their own, of course), then there is always Creative with Cheats enabled.
I know this concept just never seems to sink in with the nerfing crowd, but people who build cool things like to do it with some limits. Creative gets boring because there's no challenge. Enabling cheats is equally boring because there's no actual challenge. Builders play on Survival because they want to build cool things that work in the world, not just look pretty. They build these things so that they can rise from a nobody with nothing punching trees to a master of machines who has grander ideas than "Ung, now hit other thing!"
Survival is the actual building mode. Creative (and cheats) are drawing blueprints, while Survival is your construction project. And your construction project might run into issues with its supply-lines, terrorist critters, or even just needing to feed the workers. This isn't so much "total personal freedom" as it is "I learned physics so that I could make go through my own little technological revolution and start thinking bigger.... and now you're trying to rewrite physics so I'll have to start over."
You're right that the second we allow people to interact, there will be some bad apples ruining the bunch. No, that's not an insult to you, that's simply saying that humans as a group seem incapable of peaceful coexistence. Minecraft at present tries to get you to do just that - peacefully coexist with the other people who're supposed to just be playing with virtual LEGOs. But that doesn't mean you should take away everybody's virtual LEGOs, it means that if you want to play as a group you should have additional rules to enforce 'fair' play.
You start trying to make this 'fair', and you need to remove half the game. Lava-source, TNT, and even water-source can all make the game 'unfair' if you know how to use them. I could rig up a system to grief you by sitting outside a spawner-trap which I've built a conveyance system to your bed with, so that every time you respawn you're swarmed and killed - for bonus points, I set up a dispenser to keep putting out eggs in your room to keep the mobs from despawning. But wait, nobody's equally skilled at killing all the mobs, so all the mobs need to go to make it fair...
This is the whole political issue people don't want to talk about with equal rights for everybody. Everybody's built differently. If you're only allowed what the least-capable can handle in everything, you have to effectively cripple everybody. Otherwise, you have to acknowledge that fair treatment means sometimes you come out ahead, and sometimes I do.
Let's check WHAT behavior the game actually says it is to reward, according to Mojang, and then let Mojang adjust the mechanics to fit that, and not something else. Mojang's official stance is that the game should encourage mining and exploring.
First sentence seems right - as long as Mojang isn't arbitrarily changing what they say the game is whenever it suits them.
Second sentence is logic that gets shot in the gut and left to a slow, painful death by the homepage for Minecraft. https://minecraft.net/
As much as some of the multiplayer crowd would like to think so, the game's not about what essentially boils down to a constant grind for... no reward.
Having grinders be not "just a bit better" but be actually lots better than the "casual" way to get resources, is actually saying quite the opposite: "stop wasting time exploring & mining, make automatic grinders instead!". Thatis what the game actually rewards. And by a huge factor, too. All I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with automatic grinders. But there is something very wrong with Mojang saying the game should encourage exploration and mining, and then programming game mechanics which do the exact opposite.
Most games have a progression of capabilities which eventually makes what you first did seem pointless. Minecraft really isn't any different. Your first wheat farm, you probably planted it all by hand and harvested each block individually. Did you ever learn how to use water to clear out your farm so that it was as simple as pushing a button and then collecting the drops after replanting (thus cutting the time it takes you to harvest the field almost in half)? It's just like how you make your first pick out of wood, the second out of stone, and eventually you get to iron and/or diamond - and you never want to go back to a wooden pick.
Until the latest snapshots, I played almost entirely without enchantments. It means I can't get nearly as much ore from a block, most tasks take significantly longer, and various hazards are more dangerous. By the same logic that farms should be forbidden, so should enchanting tables. It's not fair that I get less for my time than MasterCaver does (I use him as an example, because he's repeatedly implied people like me are stupid for not having a set of fully-enchanted super-gear equipped all the time), so enchanting has to go. And just like with mob-farms, the people who enchant heavily will admit that it doesn't really take that long to set up and maintain, so the payoff is significantly more than doing it the 'right' way.
You're right that the game greatly rewards you for doing advance things in Minecraft. Enchanting, brewing, and automation have to have a pretty hefty payoff for them to be worth doing at all. Otherwise you'd skip the time-investment up front because there's not enough immediate payoff to make it seem worthwhile in the time-frame you can be certain you'll keep playing the game. You don't really seem to have any backing for the claim that Minecraft implies these things aren't what you're supposed to do. In fact, building complex constructs is more of what Mojang advertises to be Minecraft than anything it's being called less than.
Taking my use of the word "game balance" and forcing it into some form of comparison to immature penile contests: wow, I find myself thinking that was totally uncalled for and that it feels like my words got twisted really out of context.
The entire context of this conversation is complaining that automation gives people an unfair supply of resources. It boils down to "He has more than me, that's not fair!" or perhaps "I've logged more hours of game-time, so I should have more stuff!" and it is immature. Nobody has an unfair advantage. You can build the same things. You can even sneak into their factory and use their things.
On a lot of server, it is competitive.
Tell that to the servers building massive cities as a team effort, or perhaps the one running the tree-spirit challenge. Truth be told, it's not the game that's competitive, it's the people you're choosing to play it with.
However, I still agree 100% here! There are just so much differences between these two "realms" that applying the exact SAME game mechanics to both is a real can-o-worms in the making. My entire argument was based on the "premisce" that Mojang doesn't want to make 2 separate set of game mechanics (they already have trouble enough adjusting Game Difficulty as it is lol), but only one if possible, ergo we got a single set of game mechanics for both Single and Mutiplayer and that probably won't change anytime soon. I was also on the opinion that given the fact that in Single Player, the player HAS ultimate control over the kind of world he creates and wants to play in, and given that the player can always have the easy option to start his world in Creative or with Cheats (and toggle Cheats off and on at his leisure), thus the default mechanics really only need to be adjusted for multiplayer. In short: Auto mob grinders do not absolutely need to be super powerful in Single player because of the very mitigating presences of Creative and Cheats modes. Meanwhile, in some survival settings, which aren't negligible at all, and which fit with the play behavior that Mojang says is to be encouraged, there is a need for these same mob grinders to not overshadow the normal mining & exploring way (well, at least not by such a huge factor).
This is where we come to our issue.
You present the argument that farms are comparable to cheating, and thus removing them (or at least removing the reward of building them to the point of virtually removing them) is acceptable because people could always choose to cheat in single-player. That's an insult to everybody who took the time to understand Minecraft enough to build a farm in Survival. They're advancing their character, not cheating, and it's not thier fault you refuse to level up.
You further argue that the game as we all paid to get it should cease to exist simply because Mojang is being lazy about competitive multiplayer. Multiplayer is an afterthought. Competitive multiplayer isn't even being considered. If it were, they'd have mechanics to make it viable without modding Minecraft or extensively monitoring it as the server staff. Minecraft shouldn't devolve into LEGO Doom. This was never presented as a game that largely revolves around killing your buddies, and restructuring it to accomodate that whim shouldn't even be a consideration.
.... Wow, I hope you don't ever make any sort of video game with that attitude, ALL games except for pure sandboxes (creative mode), even singleplayer and non-competitive games need balance.
Please.
Let's break out Devil May Cry, shall we?
I'm going to an early hallway and repeatedly walking in and out of it to grind up my abilities because there's no balance. You know how I can say that? If you play straight through, you'll struggle a lot. If I grind that one hallway, I can build up a weapon enough that I'll never struggle. The boss is going to be no more powerful against my powered-up uber-dude than it is against your scraping-by speed-run, and I have tons more power to throw around.
This is how it is in most RPGs. You can play through and struggle with every challenge, or early grinding leaves you wondering why everybody said that boss was so tough. There's no game-balance for different playstyles.
Switch over to the Dynasty Warriors hack-and-slash games. You can keep progressing through story-mode and it'll get harder and harder... or you can just keep grinding your favorite character up on the first level until he cakewalks through the rest of the game. There's your balance. Play 'right' and it'll be difficult. Play smart, and you'll have significant advantages over those who do what they're 'supposed to'.
Look at the Fallout and Elder Scrolls lines. You can play freeform, but that's for chumps. The people who look up builds, know the prerequisites for everything well in advance, and have checked where they go first to get their preferred boost as early as possible have it way better.
Game-balance is a bad joke. You'd literally have to force everybody to play the game exactly the same way and have zero reward for any behavior to maintain a 'balanced' game. Good luck selling that.
I don't think they should be broken, just nerfed extremely so they aren't literally hundreds of times faster and better in absolutely every way, thus overshadowing everything else completely.
Let's look at that reasonably.
If you completely removed farms, you'd see the proliferation of bots. Bots are the bane of big multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, where they try to force you to grind up resources. You instead get a nice little program that will go about the grinding for you. When you require grinding, people have their computer grind for them. If you make farms even just marginally worse than a straight-up slaughter, and the game's half as competitive as several people think, you'll see bots.
The next step up from bots is farms. When the novelty of whatever task is actually a form of grinding wears off, you find a way to have the game do the grinding for you. For the people building farms, the element of the game they're automating has lost its appeal (or maybe never even had any appeal to them). They still want to play the game, but not that part. So they've taken the time to set up the game to do it for them.
Ever heard somebody talk about going AFK? Of course you have. AFK is the answer to "My farm doesn't produce resources fast enough for my use of them." So when you talk about reducing the output of farms, you're telling people they should AFK more. I could leave my computer running and a character idling on a server for more than 20 hours a day that I'm not actually playing Minecraft, but that's just additional load on the server. Let's both admit that I could waste everybody's time and resources, but we'd rather that I found the game while I'm actually playing satisfactory and felt no need for such behavior. That we have people who go AFK now proves that farms are already not performing as well as some people feel is needed - there's no need to make this worse.
Not to mention the extreme breaking of in the cases of iron golems, endermen and the Wither.
Personally, I'd like to know how anybody actually manages the sense of immersion that talking about the magic circle implies you've found with Minecraft. Steve is our silent protagonist and the only male in an otherwise hermaphroditic world made of 3'-cubic blocks, where 3' cubes of water or lava simply generate more fluid all around them, your fist is more durable than diamond, lava will destroy a 3' cube of iron dropped in it but not a bucket made of a fraction as much iron, you can carry on your belt enough stone to build 9 bunkers - or only 9 bowls of stew, and volcanic glass is the toughest material anybody can affect.
You can turn off the lights of your vault-like stronghold, walk a bit away from it, stare at the only entry, see nothing go in, and yet encounder a vast horde of psychotic enemies that have magically appeared in your base when you go back indoors and this doesn't break your 'magic circle', but somebody actually using the same "things magically appear here" mechanics to kill golems does?
The logical holes to this reality are large enough to swallow a car. Mob farms should actually enforce the 'magic circle' because they rely upon consistency within the natural laws of our LEGO world. If they didn't work, it would add another level of artificial rules tearing the fabric the game's already-thin reality
Until the latest snapshots, I played almost entirely without enchantments. It means I can't get nearly as much ore from a block, most tasks take significantly longer, and various hazards are more dangerous. By the same logic that farms should be forbidden, so should enchanting tables. It's not fair that I get less for my time than MasterCaver does (I use him as an example, because he's repeatedly implied people like me are stupid for not having a set of fully-enchanted super-gear equipped all the time), so enchanting has to go. And just like with mob-farms, the people who enchant heavily will admit that it doesn't really take that long to set up and maintain, so the payoff is significantly more than doing it the 'right' way.
Um, just where did I imply that people who don't use enchantments are stupid? The closest that I can recall is that enchanting anything less than diamond or not enchanting diamond is wasteful. Also, while my tools may help me obtain stuff faster I still need to actually work to get them, then take care of my stuff to ensure it doesn't wear out. Well OK, you need to work to build a mob farm but afterwards there is virtually no additional investment on your part, infinite iron and gold for free, like Creative mode; while if I want more iron or diamonds I have to actually go out and find a cave or dig a tunnel, as opposed to just AFK-ing overnight and returning to what, 4 double chests of iron (I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine, and of course Fortune doesn't affect iron)?
Also, you can't even begin to compare enchantments to using mob farms - enchantments are an INTENDED game mechanic that you work to obtain while mob farms are an EXPLOIT, and Mojang should have the right to remove or hinder exploits without being forced to revert their changes by the community (at least one change, which wasn't reverted, was actually a bug fix - what's wrong with that? If you exploit a bug you have to realize it will eventually be patched). By contrast, they are actually making it even easier to get top-end gear, including impossibly OP items that were impossible to ever repair before 1.8, or making it far easier to repair currently very expensive items like my pickaxe (instead of one diamond for 37 levels you can use a new pickaxe to fully repair it for far less, if not indefinitely, but a single repair can restore 4x the durability, making such items practical for everyday use by people who don't do nothing but mine and kill mobs while caving - even making mob farms less of a need).
Also, like skeletons, I think they add a good challenge to the game, requiring you to adopt specific strategies to effectively fight them; the only people who complain the skeletons are hard are those who don't enchant Power V, Infinity I bows; a Sharpness V, Knockback II sword is also a good idea (I also see people saying they hate Knockback - but really? Knock those pesky zombies away).
Your wording clearly indicates that any annoyance I have with skeletons is because I foolishly don't have the super-bow that obviously everybody should. I generally don't join these conversations because you're usually in the middle of defending your playstyle and/or your modding (neither of which I see a reason to take issue with), but that's certainly not the first time I've seen you posting like top-tier enchantments are something that comes from a bargain-bin. I doubt it's an intended slight, so I largely ignore it, but it doesn't go unnoticed.
Also, while my tools may help me obtain stuff faster I still need to actually work to get them, then take care of my stuff to ensure it doesn't wear out. Well OK, you need to work to build a mob farm but afterwards there is virtually no additional investment on your part, infinite iron and gold for free, like Creative mode; while if I want more iron or diamonds I have to actually go out and find a cave or dig a tunnel, as opposed to just AFK-ing overnight and returning to what, 4 double chests of iron (I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine, and of course Fortune doesn't affect iron)?
You've been watching vids for the Foundry/Trench designs, huh? Well you can rest assured that those exploits are fixed (don't ask why one of the two keeps working if you already had it, but you can't make them now), and basic spawning cells that were left working produce more like 1 iron/minute. The double-cell farm I built... months (maybe 6 now?)... ago in a world I idle with my nephews in has produced maybe half a chest of iron. Granted, I don't play that world that much, but it's still far from the godsend people seem to think it is.
So in the 8 hours that you play, you mostly-incidentally get 4 double-chests.. while my farm would take around 57.5 hours to produce one single-chest. Now you can normally stack these around 3 high, so it's only a bit over 19 hours for that single-chest if I build a full tower, and if I build 4 towers I can bring it down to around 5 hours - so that in ten hours of activity I gain around 1/4 the iron you're claiming.
Personally, I don't have the patience to build 12 individual spawning-cells, herding and using water-elevators to get villagers over 150 blocks up into the air in 4 different towers that are each 65 blocks apart from corner to corner, so I don't even expect to get that production-rate. How much iron can I get in an hour of gameplay before it becomes an issue? If your answer is somewhere around 8 stacks, then I doubt anybody building an iron-farm in 1.8 is going to exceed the desired limit.
Also, you can't even begin to compare enchantments to using mob farms - enchantments are an INTENDED game mechanic that you work to obtain while mob farms are an EXPLOIT
Mob-farms are all intended mechanics of the game. The exception to that rule is the bug that has been fixed which allowed the absurdity of the foundry and trench. I won't argue that those didn't take it too far, but the backlash on normal farming is blown far out of proportion.
By contrast, they are actually making it even easier to get top-end gear, including impossibly OP items that were impossible to ever repair before 1.8, or making it far easier to repair currently very expensive items like my pickaxe (instead of one diamond for 37 levels you can use a new pickaxe to fully repair it for far less, if not indefinitely, but a single repair can restore 4x the durability, making such items practical for everyday use by people who don't do nothing but mine and kill mobs while caving - even making mob farms less of a need).
1.8 certainly does look to be shaping up as a brave new world for enchanted gear. From the snapshots, I'm looking forward to actually getting a reasonable way that I can try out some of the stuff that you use on a daily basis. That only furthers the point that there's no need to nerf farms, though. And the fact that I'll be using a Sharpness V sword means that any game-balance you might have imagined existed before just got heavily skewed again.
I apologize for dragging you into this. It's just that I'm well aware that your playstyle means you gain far more resources from what you do without farming than I do even with a small amount of auto-farming going on. If what I do is "too powerful", so is what you do.
I disagree, if you want to play Lego, use creative mode. Survival mode is TOY + GAME RULES. If you don't want to be bothered by the rules, they have given you an out.
I do not care if they leave golems dropping I iron when killed by the environment, but the overlapping village crap has got to be fix just to make the village rules sane. That part was completely unintended and in my opinion, needed to be fixed for village code to be cleaned up and improved in the future.
The game is not static. If you want it to be, pick a version and stay there. If I were them, I would call it DONE and move on to a new codebase and make a new game. Those who want the new version and new additions can buy it, everyone else can stay with the old version. They need a revenue stream to stay in business so it has to come at some point. I am happy that has not happened yet, but I will understand when it does.
This so greatly resumes lots of posters in this topic here, because it puts in the same small paragraph two statements that ultimately contradict.
The thing is, all those players saying "let us play the way we want", which seem great in theory, do not seem to take into account another "basic" tenet that tend to impose limits on this total freedom.
Mainly:
- There is a whopping difference between singleplayer vs multiplayer.
Multiplayer just has to force some limits on the freedom of the way to play. In singleplayer, grinder farms are hundreds of times more efficient than the designed way, making them a VERY attractive "way to play", and it's all good if the player decides to use them or not. In multiplayer, grinder farms are ALSO hundreds of times more efficient than the designed way, making them a VERY attractive "way to play", this means we should say go to to hell to all those players that would prefer playing / grinding the basic way, because grinder farmers will definitely grinder farm, and thus gain a MASSIVE advantage over those players who grind the way the game was intended, making them big losers, right?
It is obvious which one is the "culprit" here. The "lemme play the way i want" argument here is actually an argument FOR the basic-way-o9f-play player AGAINST the grinder-weay-of-play player, not the opposite. Because in the end the basic-way player's way of playing has no effect on the grinder, but the grinder-way player's way of play has a clear negative effect on the basic player.
In the end it's all about what is FAIR, capiche?
"Letting us play the way we want", SEEMS like a good argument. Until a player's way to play is let's say "make TNT chain explosions under the stone houses of other players, and put lava above their wood houses." aka griefers. A non-griefer player's way of play doesn't impose anything on the griefer, but a griefer's way of play has a clear negative impact on the "normal" basic players. Then it becomes all VERY clear how '"let each player play the way he wants" looks good at first glance but becomes utter crap as soon as more two or more players are put together. In a multiplayer server with strong competition and economy, making grinder farms can easily be seen as tantamount to griefing put against the entire competitive game and/or economy.
In multiplayer servers where each player stays in his own corner doing his own thing, this it all end up being a lot closer to single player play, so who cares. But in multiplayer servers with ANY kind of competition or economy exist, then the fact that grinders are WAAAYYYY more efficient than "normal" play skews everything up. Not just a little skewing here, but a "really strong dynamite kick to the apple cart" kind of skewing. And YES, the player that feels that he should play the game as it was designed, as it was intended, WILL get "screwed up". HIS immersion and playstyle will get cramped because the obvious way to win is through making grinder farms that reduce every mob in thge game to mere tools, statistics, and spawning mechanics.
So yeah, let everybody play the way they want... sure! But only in single player!
But in multiplayer, things BADLY need to be much better not only to make them more immersive but even more important so that things are both fair and balanced.
This means that, given the choice, grinders just have got to go. Plain and simple.
While unfair to the mob grinders makers, nerfing grinders would actually be more fair when you try to balance for the entire player community.
When grinders are only twice as effective as normal grinding, you guys might have some kind of case here. Grinders would STILL be advantageous, but at last not ridiculously so. The player "pays up" with a huge time and material investment in advance, and then it takes a LONG time, much, much longer than what he spent, before he "wins out" over the players that meanwhile used their time to grind the normal way. But eventually, he starts having more, but never "ridiculously more". So there is a REAL tradeoff not an illusion of one. Because currently grinder farms are actually hundreds times better than hunting, and after his grinder is done the player merely has to go to bed doing nothing in the game (laving his Steve in a very safe place merely standing on a pressure plate), and by the time he wakes up, yeah, he's got as much loot as DOZENS of other players that would have done the normal hunting grinding all night long (including the time the first player needed to make the grinder in the first place). That is just abusive and a clear exploit.
And ultimately that previous paragraph weights WAY more in the balance than "lemme play the way I want!".
My personal opninion here is that it is the entire mob spawning rules that should be upgraded so that mobs spawn much more naturally in a way that cannot be so easily controlled by players. And Monster Spanwers should have durability, too. The SIMPLEST and easiest way to do it would be for natural mob spawning to happen only on blocks that were naturally spawned, never on player placed block EXCEPT in special circumstances that DO cost player ACTIVE time (no merely standing somewhere) and/or has a resource cost. so yeah a grinder would still be possible, but it's efficiency would only be a normal-sized lever of the player's overall performance, and NOT scores / hundreds times better.
That Lego ad is so marvelously true to form. There's rarely an opportunity to come up with an image and an expression that fits so well with the product being advertised. It is indeed beautiful in more than one way.
We are indeed apparently breeding a new type of kids. The 50s all the way to the 80s, where a technological revolutionary period that promoted pure creativeness. Lego is perhaps one of the most visible links to this period. But in many ways, cellphones and the internet are too. I've been appreciating your Lego analogy since you first used it.
Lego is today(*) what Minecraft is going to become in the near future. And those ads are no longer possible. Instead we have kids with perfectly built AV-8 Harriers. And the logo should read "What it is is detailed instructions". So long creativity in its most pure form. So long Enlightenment period of the 20th century. Welcome to the 21st century where your kids are no longer engineers; they are now architects. Minecraft follows this pattern of reasoning, in which a toolbox with tremendous potential for pure creativity is being slowly eroded into a constrained box of lego pieces that only fit other lego pieces if you follow the specific instructions and rules. And, disappointingly, so many people seem to be just fine with this. With a game that limits their creativity in the name of an arbitrary set of rules that could actually not exist and let players instead build their own rules.
But most of us saw it coming before it happened. It's not a surprise to a few of us that when multiplayer Minecraft was starting to become a reality, this game would change forever. Nothing like a game server to destroy a perfectly valid singleplayer concept.
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(*) It is possible to buy in a small specialized shop outside Cascais, Portugal, the old freestyle lego pieces. They are still manufactured. Unfortunately most outlets don't care or even understand Lego, being that they will put your Lego box right to the spider man action figure. So they don't see those pieces. But on specialized modelling stores, Lego as we remember it can still be found and the person behind the counter will smile in appreciation and implicit understanding if you go for it, instead of the Lego Lunar module.
gamerules
Turning off drops from mobs not personally killed could be a gamerule.
Monster spawner degradation could be a gamerule.
Etc.
And then your server owner could enable those, so that you and your friends who like clicking on blocks, who like wandering around in the dark to slowly gather xp, etc., could do that. People who would rather do other things on other servers could do them.
"Not everybody wants to play the way I do, so they should all be forced to" is not a solution. Not one that will lead to more long-term players of the game.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
(irony mode on)
Yes, of so much yes! If we play on a multiplayer server with let's say and iconomy plugin and some players want to play with cheat enabled to /give themselves stacks of diamonds, who a re we to tell them that ain't right, right& After all, that's how way they want to play!
(irony mode off)
As far as game design is concerned, game balance, at least a MINIMAL amount of it, *is* a little thing that usually falls into the "very important" category of things.
The problem is not the fact that automatic farms give potentially infinite resources "for free". First of all, it ain't really for free because you first have to build saif mod grinder farm.
The problem is that these automatic farms are orders of magnitude better in providing resources, than the way the game intends for these things. If the gol of the game is to encourage exploring and mining, then the game features should REALLY encourage exploring and mining, rather than sticking in one place and going afk whike your local farm produces tons of stuff.
Think of it this way:
Player A takes say 1 hour to mine stuff, and gets X amount of said "valuable" stuff. This is a constant "getting X amount of stuff per hour of 'work' done."
Player B meanwhile takes the same 1 hour to make a grinder, spending K amount of simple construction materials. In that first hour he goets nothing in return. However, then afterwards he goes AFK and for each hour if going AFK he gets LOTS MORE THAN X amount of the valuable (or at least desired) X stuff.
And the more times passes (and we're not taking months if playing here, but mere HOURs within a SINGLE gaming session), the more Player B takes a bigger and bigger whopping lead over layer A.
If Player B had to say invest 1 hour to get only a TINY production bonus, to "recoup his time investment" only after a LOT of time has passed, then yeah, automatic farming would be great. But the HUGE difference makes it so the game is effectively shouting : Don't go mining or go exploring. Make grinders !".
Jeb only fixed a major, known bug about the way golems spawned, which was long overdue in coming anyway. Even with that little fix, grinder farms stay vastly overpowered and unbalanced.
People playing multi who want to use mob towers to afk farm would jut come up with a program to auto hit and auto eat when needed.
But really how smart is it to nerf something a LOT of super popular mods are base around, the idea that if you learn mechanics and spend large amounts of time resource gathering you can auto farm parts of the game. What would be next? Water auto destroys wheat and leaves no drops?
Farms are for lazy kids or redstone users who hate the other parts of the game, that's just the way I see it. I'm not gonna walk on eggshells for peoples feelings lol. All the outcry about farms being nerfed says to me is they're too casual in a already casual game to actually play it as it was meant to be. Saying someones "limiting the game" because you cant get free gold/iron is kind of crybabyish, especially when the games only limited by your imagination. The only thing the nerf hurt is peoples comfort zone because they lack the attentionspan to get things the hard way.
I really hope pigmen and iron golems lose their specific gold/iron drops. It really cannot be argued against that it gives a unfair economic advantage in multiplayer, even if other players have the option to make gold/iron farms as well. Devaluing a item so you can be lazy is just stupid. Just being straightforward, sorry.
Some may reply and say "well mining is arbitrary and boring" , well I respond with "why are you playing a game halfly based around mining then?".
The only real argument for iron/gold farms I can really see as legitimate is using them to get gold/iron blocks for build projects that would otherwise take an insane amount of mining beyond anyone's rational attentionspan for gathering materials.
I don't think his decision would have been much different if he read these forums instead.
Quite a bit different actually. Reddit is reknowned for being a hugbox by those who are actual outside observers who aren't caught up in the upote system and circular opinions. So much so that when Notch fled /v/ he went to reddit to escape actual proper criticism.
If we're going to ask why he asked "why must he only listen to reddit" you'd only need to look at what I said above as reasons why they should expand their accepted sources of feedback, even if it comes with the occasional "stupidcensorship"-ish posts. Maybe getting a fire lit under their butts would make them hire more people and get more things done. Minecraft has been broken for a long time for a reason.
Here's my favorite:
That's for competitive games. There is no game balance in a sandbox game. Nor is there game balance in a building game. Balance is a concept for people who want to measure their e-peen against their buddies. It's the rallying cry of people who lose games, and has been since the first Mortal Kombat game came out and people realized they could spam projectile attacks to win without any skill. Obviously, since the other guy figured out how to win and you don't want to just get down to the reflex/luck test of who started first, the game is broken.
You were handed a big box of LEGOs. Your first inclination seems to be "I want to play LEGOs with other people - against other people." Okay, you and people who share your mentality can do that. But that doesn't mean LEGOs need to be changed. It means you need your own rules for when you play together. It's been suggested time and again that game-rules should be used to allow competitive multi-player servers their 'balance', and that's the only solution that should be considered. If you want them to limit Minecraft to the way it was intended, you shouldn't be allowed to play multi-player, let alone whine about balance. It's a single-player sandbox.
It's possible to play multiplayer and not play against each other. People do this pretty regularly. Obviously they need no 're-balancing' to make the game work with multiple people sharing a sandbox. But the argument that comes from a batch of people who only marginally want to pretend they're not trying to kill each other and just go play a FPS remains that the game is broken. The game's not broken. The players are. You want to play something other than Minecraft. That's fine. It's what mods are for - to turn the structure of the game sideways so that you can do something different. But claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong. There's no reason your ing-contest needs can't be met by adding some game-rule options to multi-player games, but there's also no reason others need to be lumped in with you or have the rules that you need to play angry-Minecraft imposed upon them.
Farms are broken? There's nothing to stop anybody else from walking into your farm after they've spent a few hours playing how they like and then killing the mobs or taking the loot from your grinder. Then they get everything and you have nothing. Communal storage sucks, huh? Of course, when you're supposed to be sharing your sandbox and playing nice with the other children, it doesn't matter - but we all know some people are incapable of such social niceties - that's why they're on the Internet, enjoying the anonymity that lets them behave in a way nobody would tolerate in the flesh.
There's a phrase I heard years ago: "The Internet taught me that there are millions of people out there that I don't want to know." Change the last word to 'game with', and it's just as true. We don't all play the same, and nobody should be yelling "my way or the highway!" at everybody else. Find a way to have your play-style without imposing it on others, and everybody can be happy. Otherwise, you can find other games that support your playstyle. Of course, you'll probably get killed immediately in such a game by somebody that's been playing since it was in beta and therefore 'deserves' to be far better than you, but that's your fault for not getting started at the beginning, right?
Are people really that lazy?
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In fact, there is no multiplayer mode, and that's the issue. You can start your single-player game-mode on a server and let multiple people play on it, but you're still in the same single-player game-mode used by people who don't even have anybody to interact with. Those game-modes don't need to be torn apart to make it more 'fair' for people who can't play together in a cooperative manner. Playing against each other needs to be treated like the separate beast it is.
First off, cool down a bit on the direct insults (and yes your post contains several of those). Flames rarely serve a good purpose.
Because second, "claiming that Minecraft should change to suit you is simply wrong" is exactly what I was going for. My argument is that MC should evolve to suit the community's needs, NOT specific playstyles over others unless that is what Mojang is trying to aim for. Anyway you can't ever please everybody, so the game should at least aim to please the audience that Mojang SAYS that the game is made for. Which is exactly why I believe all automatic mob grinding in general is in dire need of a really solid nerfing.
The "default" game setting is the Survival game mechanics, and yes that should be "balanced" to fit the needs of the many, not the needs of the few, because those mechanics are the same in the single and multi players environments. Not all servers have a form of economy or competition, but many do. As soon as you make two players interact together in ANY game, the seemingly nice rule of "doing anything you want" will always hit some kind of wall. For those people insisting on that total personal freedom (always their own, of course), then there is always Creative with Cheats enabled, or, on a Multiplayer Survival Server, pulling a "lord" Gaylord Steambath (see: The N00b Adventures).
Let's check WHAT behavior the game actually says it is to reward, according to Mojang, and then let Mojang adjust the mechanics to fit that, and not something else. Mojang's official stance is that the game should encourage mining and exploring. Having grinders be not "just a bit better" but be actually lots better than the "casual" way to get resources, is actually saying quite the opposite: "stop wasting time exploring & mining, make automatic grinders instead!". That is what the game actually rewards. And by a huge factor, too.
All I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with automatic grinders. But there is something very wrong with Mojang saying the game should encourage exploration and mining, and then programming game mechanics which do the exact opposite.
Taking my use of the word "game balance" and forcing it into some form of comparison to immature penile contests: wow, I find myself thinking that was totally uncalled for and that it feels like my words got twisted really out of context. My girlfriend also thinks many things in Minecraft are really badly balanced, too. Hmm, does that mean I should wish you good luck trying to convince her that her opinion are "also" a bad case of a "me am better than youuuu" ego problem?
On a lot of server, it is competitive. However, I still agree 100% here! There are just so much differences between these two "realms" that applying the exact SAME game mechanics to both is a real can-o-worms in the making.
My entire argument was based on the "premisce" that Mojang doesn't want to make 2 separate set of game mechanics (they already have trouble enough adjusting Game Difficulty as it is lol), but only one if possible, ergo we got a single set of game mechanics for both Single and Mutiplayer and that probably won't change anytime soon. I was also on the opinion that given the fact that in Single Player, the player HAS ultimate control over the kind of world he creates and wants to play in, and given that the player can always have the easy option to start his world in Creative or with Cheats (and toggle Cheats off and on at his leisure), thus the default mechanics really only need to be adjusted for multiplayer.
In short: Auto mob grinders do not absolutely need to be super powerful in Single player because of the very mitigating presences of Creative and Cheats modes. Meanwhile, in some survival settings, which aren't negligible at all, and which fit with the play behavior that Mojang says is to be encouraged, there is a need for these same mob grinders to not overshadow the normal mining & exploring way (well, at least not by such a huge factor).
So the game you literally paid for should cease to exist because what Mojang assumes might be the majority of players want it to be something different? Seems to me like people who want a different game should get a different game, not expect everybody else to give up their game for this new game.
"Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things.
It can also be about adventuring with friends or watching the sun rise over a blocky ocean. It’s pretty. Brave players battle terrible things in The Nether, which is more scary than pretty. You can also visit a land of mushrooms if it sounds more like your cup of tea."
Minecraft is a building game`. Monsters are a secondary concern, and exploring for rare biomes is barely an afterthought. Mining is only implicitly part of the game. The idea of competing or even trading with other players isn't even a consideration. That's Mojang's description from the home-page.
Given those priorities, Survival is about you trying to stay alive while you construct grand things. You can try to stay alive as a group with others, and that's multiplayer. We're still not in need of balance to make how I play 'fair' with how you play. This is the issue that keeps getting blithely swept aside in the 'balance' arguments. The game is not about interacting with other players - that was added as an afterthought. Since you're not supposed to be worrying about other players, there's no mechanics to make the other players 'fair' because they're not supposed to be relevant.
I know this concept just never seems to sink in with the nerfing crowd, but people who build cool things like to do it with some limits. Creative gets boring because there's no challenge. Enabling cheats is equally boring because there's no actual challenge. Builders play on Survival because they want to build cool things that work in the world, not just look pretty. They build these things so that they can rise from a nobody with nothing punching trees to a master of machines who has grander ideas than "Ung, now hit other thing!"
Survival is the actual building mode. Creative (and cheats) are drawing blueprints, while Survival is your construction project. And your construction project might run into issues with its supply-lines, terrorist critters, or even just needing to feed the workers. This isn't so much "total personal freedom" as it is "I learned physics so that I could make go through my own little technological revolution and start thinking bigger.... and now you're trying to rewrite physics so I'll have to start over."
You're right that the second we allow people to interact, there will be some bad apples ruining the bunch. No, that's not an insult to you, that's simply saying that humans as a group seem incapable of peaceful coexistence. Minecraft at present tries to get you to do just that - peacefully coexist with the other people who're supposed to just be playing with virtual LEGOs. But that doesn't mean you should take away everybody's virtual LEGOs, it means that if you want to play as a group you should have additional rules to enforce 'fair' play.
You start trying to make this 'fair', and you need to remove half the game. Lava-source, TNT, and even water-source can all make the game 'unfair' if you know how to use them. I could rig up a system to grief you by sitting outside a spawner-trap which I've built a conveyance system to your bed with, so that every time you respawn you're swarmed and killed - for bonus points, I set up a dispenser to keep putting out eggs in your room to keep the mobs from despawning. But wait, nobody's equally skilled at killing all the mobs, so all the mobs need to go to make it fair...
This is the whole political issue people don't want to talk about with equal rights for everybody. Everybody's built differently. If you're only allowed what the least-capable can handle in everything, you have to effectively cripple everybody. Otherwise, you have to acknowledge that fair treatment means sometimes you come out ahead, and sometimes I do.
First sentence seems right - as long as Mojang isn't arbitrarily changing what they say the game is whenever it suits them.
Second sentence is logic that gets shot in the gut and left to a slow, painful death by the homepage for Minecraft. https://minecraft.net/
As much as some of the multiplayer crowd would like to think so, the game's not about what essentially boils down to a constant grind for... no reward.
Most games have a progression of capabilities which eventually makes what you first did seem pointless. Minecraft really isn't any different. Your first wheat farm, you probably planted it all by hand and harvested each block individually. Did you ever learn how to use water to clear out your farm so that it was as simple as pushing a button and then collecting the drops after replanting (thus cutting the time it takes you to harvest the field almost in half)? It's just like how you make your first pick out of wood, the second out of stone, and eventually you get to iron and/or diamond - and you never want to go back to a wooden pick.
Until the latest snapshots, I played almost entirely without enchantments. It means I can't get nearly as much ore from a block, most tasks take significantly longer, and various hazards are more dangerous. By the same logic that farms should be forbidden, so should enchanting tables. It's not fair that I get less for my time than MasterCaver does (I use him as an example, because he's repeatedly implied people like me are stupid for not having a set of fully-enchanted super-gear equipped all the time), so enchanting has to go. And just like with mob-farms, the people who enchant heavily will admit that it doesn't really take that long to set up and maintain, so the payoff is significantly more than doing it the 'right' way.
You're right that the game greatly rewards you for doing advance things in Minecraft. Enchanting, brewing, and automation have to have a pretty hefty payoff for them to be worth doing at all. Otherwise you'd skip the time-investment up front because there's not enough immediate payoff to make it seem worthwhile in the time-frame you can be certain you'll keep playing the game. You don't really seem to have any backing for the claim that Minecraft implies these things aren't what you're supposed to do. In fact, building complex constructs is more of what Mojang advertises to be Minecraft than anything it's being called less than.
The entire context of this conversation is complaining that automation gives people an unfair supply of resources. It boils down to "He has more than me, that's not fair!" or perhaps "I've logged more hours of game-time, so I should have more stuff!" and it is immature. Nobody has an unfair advantage. You can build the same things. You can even sneak into their factory and use their things.
Tell that to the servers building massive cities as a team effort, or perhaps the one running the tree-spirit challenge. Truth be told, it's not the game that's competitive, it's the people you're choosing to play it with.
This is where we come to our issue.
You present the argument that farms are comparable to cheating, and thus removing them (or at least removing the reward of building them to the point of virtually removing them) is acceptable because people could always choose to cheat in single-player. That's an insult to everybody who took the time to understand Minecraft enough to build a farm in Survival. They're advancing their character, not cheating, and it's not thier fault you refuse to level up.
You further argue that the game as we all paid to get it should cease to exist simply because Mojang is being lazy about competitive multiplayer. Multiplayer is an afterthought. Competitive multiplayer isn't even being considered. If it were, they'd have mechanics to make it viable without modding Minecraft or extensively monitoring it as the server staff. Minecraft shouldn't devolve into LEGO Doom. This was never presented as a game that largely revolves around killing your buddies, and restructuring it to accomodate that whim shouldn't even be a consideration.
Please.
Let's break out Devil May Cry, shall we?
I'm going to an early hallway and repeatedly walking in and out of it to grind up my abilities because there's no balance. You know how I can say that? If you play straight through, you'll struggle a lot. If I grind that one hallway, I can build up a weapon enough that I'll never struggle. The boss is going to be no more powerful against my powered-up uber-dude than it is against your scraping-by speed-run, and I have tons more power to throw around.
This is how it is in most RPGs. You can play through and struggle with every challenge, or early grinding leaves you wondering why everybody said that boss was so tough. There's no game-balance for different playstyles.
Switch over to the Dynasty Warriors hack-and-slash games. You can keep progressing through story-mode and it'll get harder and harder... or you can just keep grinding your favorite character up on the first level until he cakewalks through the rest of the game. There's your balance. Play 'right' and it'll be difficult. Play smart, and you'll have significant advantages over those who do what they're 'supposed to'.
Look at the Fallout and Elder Scrolls lines. You can play freeform, but that's for chumps. The people who look up builds, know the prerequisites for everything well in advance, and have checked where they go first to get their preferred boost as early as possible have it way better.
Game-balance is a bad joke. You'd literally have to force everybody to play the game exactly the same way and have zero reward for any behavior to maintain a 'balanced' game. Good luck selling that.
Let's look at that reasonably.
If you completely removed farms, you'd see the proliferation of bots. Bots are the bane of big multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, where they try to force you to grind up resources. You instead get a nice little program that will go about the grinding for you. When you require grinding, people have their computer grind for them. If you make farms even just marginally worse than a straight-up slaughter, and the game's half as competitive as several people think, you'll see bots.
The next step up from bots is farms. When the novelty of whatever task is actually a form of grinding wears off, you find a way to have the game do the grinding for you. For the people building farms, the element of the game they're automating has lost its appeal (or maybe never even had any appeal to them). They still want to play the game, but not that part. So they've taken the time to set up the game to do it for them.
Ever heard somebody talk about going AFK? Of course you have. AFK is the answer to "My farm doesn't produce resources fast enough for my use of them." So when you talk about reducing the output of farms, you're telling people they should AFK more. I could leave my computer running and a character idling on a server for more than 20 hours a day that I'm not actually playing Minecraft, but that's just additional load on the server. Let's both admit that I could waste everybody's time and resources, but we'd rather that I found the game while I'm actually playing satisfactory and felt no need for such behavior. That we have people who go AFK now proves that farms are already not performing as well as some people feel is needed - there's no need to make this worse.
Personally, I'd like to know how anybody actually manages the sense of immersion that talking about the magic circle implies you've found with Minecraft. Steve is our silent protagonist and the only male in an otherwise hermaphroditic world made of 3'-cubic blocks, where 3' cubes of water or lava simply generate more fluid all around them, your fist is more durable than diamond, lava will destroy a 3' cube of iron dropped in it but not a bucket made of a fraction as much iron, you can carry on your belt enough stone to build 9 bunkers - or only 9 bowls of stew, and volcanic glass is the toughest material anybody can affect.
You can turn off the lights of your vault-like stronghold, walk a bit away from it, stare at the only entry, see nothing go in, and yet encounder a vast horde of psychotic enemies that have magically appeared in your base when you go back indoors and this doesn't break your 'magic circle', but somebody actually using the same "things magically appear here" mechanics to kill golems does?
The logical holes to this reality are large enough to swallow a car. Mob farms should actually enforce the 'magic circle' because they rely upon consistency within the natural laws of our LEGO world. If they didn't work, it would add another level of artificial rules tearing the fabric the game's already-thin reality
Um, just where did I imply that people who don't use enchantments are stupid? The closest that I can recall is that enchanting anything less than diamond or not enchanting diamond is wasteful. Also, while my tools may help me obtain stuff faster I still need to actually work to get them, then take care of my stuff to ensure it doesn't wear out. Well OK, you need to work to build a mob farm but afterwards there is virtually no additional investment on your part, infinite iron and gold for free, like Creative mode; while if I want more iron or diamonds I have to actually go out and find a cave or dig a tunnel, as opposed to just AFK-ing overnight and returning to what, 4 double chests of iron (I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine, and of course Fortune doesn't affect iron)?
Also, you can't even begin to compare enchantments to using mob farms - enchantments are an INTENDED game mechanic that you work to obtain while mob farms are an EXPLOIT, and Mojang should have the right to remove or hinder exploits without being forced to revert their changes by the community (at least one change, which wasn't reverted, was actually a bug fix - what's wrong with that? If you exploit a bug you have to realize it will eventually be patched). By contrast, they are actually making it even easier to get top-end gear, including impossibly OP items that were impossible to ever repair before 1.8, or making it far easier to repair currently very expensive items like my pickaxe (instead of one diamond for 37 levels you can use a new pickaxe to fully repair it for far less, if not indefinitely, but a single repair can restore 4x the durability, making such items practical for everyday use by people who don't do nothing but mine and kill mobs while caving - even making mob farms less of a need).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
The most recent time?
Your wording clearly indicates that any annoyance I have with skeletons is because I foolishly don't have the super-bow that obviously everybody should. I generally don't join these conversations because you're usually in the middle of defending your playstyle and/or your modding (neither of which I see a reason to take issue with), but that's certainly not the first time I've seen you posting like top-tier enchantments are something that comes from a bargain-bin. I doubt it's an intended slight, so I largely ignore it, but it doesn't go unnoticed.
You've been watching vids for the Foundry/Trench designs, huh? Well you can rest assured that those exploits are fixed (don't ask why one of the two keeps working if you already had it, but you can't make them now), and basic spawning cells that were left working produce more like 1 iron/minute. The double-cell farm I built... months (maybe 6 now?)... ago in a world I idle with my nephews in has produced maybe half a chest of iron. Granted, I don't play that world that much, but it's still far from the godsend people seem to think it is.
So in the 8 hours that you play, you mostly-incidentally get 4 double-chests.. while my farm would take around 57.5 hours to produce one single-chest. Now you can normally stack these around 3 high, so it's only a bit over 19 hours for that single-chest if I build a full tower, and if I build 4 towers I can bring it down to around 5 hours - so that in ten hours of activity I gain around 1/4 the iron you're claiming.
Personally, I don't have the patience to build 12 individual spawning-cells, herding and using water-elevators to get villagers over 150 blocks up into the air in 4 different towers that are each 65 blocks apart from corner to corner, so I don't even expect to get that production-rate. How much iron can I get in an hour of gameplay before it becomes an issue? If your answer is somewhere around 8 stacks, then I doubt anybody building an iron-farm in 1.8 is going to exceed the desired limit.
Mob-farms are all intended mechanics of the game. The exception to that rule is the bug that has been fixed which allowed the absurdity of the foundry and trench. I won't argue that those didn't take it too far, but the backlash on normal farming is blown far out of proportion.
1.8 certainly does look to be shaping up as a brave new world for enchanted gear. From the snapshots, I'm looking forward to actually getting a reasonable way that I can try out some of the stuff that you use on a daily basis. That only furthers the point that there's no need to nerf farms, though. And the fact that I'll be using a Sharpness V sword means that any game-balance you might have imagined existed before just got heavily skewed again.
I apologize for dragging you into this. It's just that I'm well aware that your playstyle means you gain far more resources from what you do without farming than I do even with a small amount of auto-farming going on. If what I do is "too powerful", so is what you do.