"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.
Man,... I followed this 'should farms be nerfed or not' discussions months ago and I'm surprised it is *still* going. It would be nice if all parties at least could agree that everyone has different playstyles? These discussions are pointless because everyone is defending the way *they* like to play and that's a personal thing.
Personally I love building big contraptions like mob farms and such. For me that's the appeal of the game and if that was removed I would probably stop playing Minecraft. But I can equally see the arguments the nerfers are saying. That's just another way to play the game.
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Is it monumentally painful to have somebody point out that farming is built into the game? Let's see how much it hurts:
1) Mobs spawn.
2) Water pushes mobs.
3) Mobs fall down chutes or swim up when in water
4) Mobs die when they take damage.
5) Mobs drop loot when they die.
It's all intended. You have were given lemons, sugar, ice and water, and you claim that making lemonade is a violation of the spirit of the gift.
a really screwed up idea of what balance actually means
I see you have exactly this issue. Game balance in its simplest terms is you do your thing, I do my thing, and we get comparable benefits in the long-run. Nobody's supposed to come out ahead. It's obvious you don't understand this, because the moment you add options there's the potential for one combination of options to provide superior results than another, and this is where allowing different forms of play ultimately always leads to an unbalanced game.
Regular mining and resource gathering is something like X + 10 skill for Y + 7 power
So the whole 5 rules of thumb you had to learn to branch-mine all the resources you want can really be that difficult? Regular mining is almost an unskilled task. You could give caving a higher assessment, but since it's arguably less reward because of the time wasted dealing with mobs and navigating the irregular surface, you return to a question of balance between playstyles - you shouldn't be caving if you're actually concerned with the acquisition of ores.
The funny thing here is that when people start in on the iron farms, you often see the argument pop up that people don't need farms because you find too much of the stuff just from casual gameplay. Further, the anti-farming crowd neglects that a farm is a fixed location and while you can start a mine just about anywhere you have to travel to your farm every time you want to get reward from it - thus adding a 'hidden' upkeep in time-investment to the farm. You can decrease that cost by stocking up more and visiting less, but ultimately you have an anchor-point which keeps you traveling back to a central location in order to gain anything. So your mathematical equation is something like:
quantity * value = Start(skill*time*loot) + Grind(skill*time*(loot+incidentals)) + Upkeep(skill*time*loot)
For branch-mining, the start-values are all near-zero, upkeep is fairly low, and the bulk comes from grind.
For farms, the start-values are all significantly higher, the grind-values are near-zero and upkeep is fairly low.
For caving, you're multi-tasking. You have to divide your time spent by somewhere around a factor of 4 because you're also exploring like a tourist, dealing with mobs, and actively pursuing other materials.
Then we hit non-iron-gathering tasks. In theory, if the game were truly balanced, I'd get some payoff other than personal satisfaction from building a castle. I spent hours in-game, and I actually net a loss in resources. This is where we return to the issue that once you introduce choice, you remove balance. For the game to be truly 'fair', I should end up near the same increase in 'character-wealth' that anybody doing another task gets. Perhaps it would be a different form of wealth but it should be of comparable value. Instead, building is what character-optimizers would refer to as a level-dip. You do some minimal amount of it to gain all the real benefit (a safe base to sleep, craft, and stockpile in), and then you stop - because after you get the initial rewards there's no reason to progress further.
Sounds at first like the farmer has it worse off, but lets go for 10 hours, miner has X160 and Y80, and farmer has X27 and Y100, the miner has more X and less Y because spending that much time mining will end up depleting resources in the area, he has to worry about mining tools, food, all that stuff far more than the farmer, as well as actually be playing.
This is blatantly unbalanced, the ideal 10 hour curve should be X160 and Y80 for the miner (which is a fair and well crafted curve), and X27 Y30 at most for the farmer.
And you're going to accuse me of not understanding balance?
Now let's tag in the incidentals that you blithely ignored. When you compare an iron-farm to mining, you get stone, coal, iron, redstone, emerald, lapis, diamond, and maybe even obsidian depending on how it's approached. For the miner, these values all increase over time. For the farmer, there's only ever iron. Further, you're forgetting the law of diminishing returns. While the iron-farmer ends up with significantly more iron than the miner, he also ends up with no use for those double-chests full of the stuff. After the first chest or so, you've reached a saturation-point where it holds no real value.
So what you have is a bell-curve for the iron-farmer where there's an ideal point that he can say he came out ahead because he has more iron that he has a use for, compared to a whole set of bell-curves for the miner which results in him ending up better off for the bulk of the time because he has other resources which hold higher value than just another stack of iron. The miner starts out ahead because there's no payoff for the farmer until his construct is completed. For a time after that, the miner is still ahead because he has the other resources. For a short window, the farmer is ahead because he has enough more useful iron to make up for the ever-growing pile of other resources the miner has. Then the miner reaches his saturation-point, where he has enough iron, and the farmer's vast piles of same-old-same-old mean nothing. Ultimately, the miner wins because he reaches saturation-point on more resources.
For the farmer to reach the same point, he has to farm iron golems, witches, nether skeletons (or blazes, if we give blaze-rod an equivalent value to coal), zombie pigmen, nether-portals, and villager-trading - it's something of a losing endeavor to try to compete across the spectrum doing one part at a time compared to all-at-once.
I don't think so. I used the LAN cheat and went into gamemode 1 and it cost 65 levels.
Um, how did you try to repair it? Like this?
Read the Wiki VERY carefully... note that I used ONE diamond to repair it... also, i see you are in a snapshot which makes your argument a moot point... this was in 1.6.4 (I THINK 1.7.x is still the same). I also see that you failed to rename your pickaxe (not that there is any point anymore).
Again, here is the calculation based on what the Wiki says:
Cost for Efficiency V = 1 x 5 = 5 levels
Cost for Fortune III = 4 x 3 = 12 levels
Cost for Unbreaking III = 2 x 3 = 6 levels
Added cost for three enchantments = 6 levels
Added cost for prior work penalty (renamed) = 2 levels
Total base cost = 31 levels
Cost per unit = number of enchantments (3) + 3 for diamond tools = 6 x 1 unit = 6
Total cost = 37 levels
Also note that this is ONLY for 1.7.x and earlier; the Wiki might as well delete their Anvil Mechanics page when 1.8 comes out, or at least explicitly say it only applies to older versions.
And please stop getting on my case... you know what I mean by this...
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.
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
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.
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
*The game says +X attack damage, which is added to your base damage of one, ever since 1.6.2, which ironically means that an iron sword by itself is now as powerful as a pre-1.6.2 diamond sword and a diamond sword now kills zombies (22 HP with armor points) in three hits. So again, an example of making the game easier.
You're quite right that I didn't acknowledge your straw-man argument which implies that something as simple as water pushing mobs is not the game functioning as its creators intended. Nor will I give it significant effort the second time you post it. Anybody who'll follow along with an absurd claim which boils down to asserting that everybody who worked on Minecraft's code is too stupid to realize how their own game works isn't going have their faith changed by facts or logic.
I think you have a fair grasp of the rudimentary concept of game-balance. I'd guess it largely comes from the handful of links you posted. But your education in the field seems to be oversimplified and lacking some of the more advanced concepts which invalidate your attempts to turn two different situations into a pair of equations which should theoretically net the same end-value. Even the math I presented to refute your own is oversimplified - the word 'incidentals' is likely a paragraph-long equation of its own were we to take this risk-reward assessment seriously enough to discuss the numerical superiority of mining over farming.
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Ah, you are correct in that I misread a bit. Even so, it looks like once the world catches up with the fix for the trench/foundry, you'll see that only the most ambitious spawning-cell stacks compete with the iron you're getting simply from enjoying the way you play. That 'free' (after hours of building) iron isn't going to overshadow your own gameplay.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
Kinda proving the point on the bell-curves thing there, thanks. You're at a point where you don't need iron, or coal, or gold, likely not redstone or lapis, maybe even not really diamonds or obsidian. So over the course of a month, you've rendered a collection of farms pointless from the competitive view - there's no value to having even more of what you don't need or use.
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
OP? Perhaps not. But we're talking about game-balance here, where a 75% increase in strength is going from something with a measure of scarcity because it can be a headache to acquire to a setup where it's quite possible to get that and more with minimal trading effort. If you really believe that Minecraft should be a balanced game, the new proliferation of high-end gear throws many of the old equations out the window. It's certainly a world ahead of the unenchanted iron gear-set I normally walk around with.
You know... I have no problem with farms. Why? Because you have to put forward a conscious effort to make them... Not easy... A lot of the complaints about them being in refer to multiplayer... But the server owner can define the rules of the server, so that's really not an issue...
That said, this game does need more balance. I find myself getting bored of Minecraft a lot these days, because as an Alpha player, I know most of the game's mechanics... I do think there has been some much needed difficulty added to the game as of late, but one of the problems Minecraft has had since about mid-beta, around the time they introduced beds, is not difficulty, so much as inconsistency. Some things are harder than they should be, and a lot of things are too easy...
Let's take ridable pigs for example: Because of their slightly wonky controls, and limited speed boost, It would make sense for them to be an early game mode of transport. Horses being the obvious upgrade, because they are in general, a superior mode of transport. Then followed by rails for speed. So, why is it harder to get a carrot on a stick, than to tame a horse? I'm all for gameplay freedom, but if you have features, other features shouldn't render them pointless... With that, the obvious solution is to make carrots easier to get, or horses a lot harder to tame... (Also, while not necessary, it would be cool if you could eventually create a makeshift glowstone powered horseless carriage as the top transport tier... Maybe require a really hard boss' drop to create...)
There are so many issues like this... Leather Armor (and leather in general) being harder to get than Iron, The upgrade from compass to map being so easy that it renders the compass useless as a tool, the lack of tiers of weapons, tools and armor (mainly the fact that you jump right from iron to diamond. Should be at least one material inbetween.), the clear drop in difficulty once you get enchanting, etc. The list literally goes on and on...
So, in short, while I think the game has balancing issues, farms aren't a particlarly big one...
The compass being worthless as a tool...You what mate? Its going to get more and more useful the more laggy fps eating junk they tack onto F3 like they've added to the snapshots.
(...) So the game you literally paid for should cease to exist because what Mojang assumes... (...)
Wow. To try to keep it short I'll take only the most extreme example here. Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist? Could you be more twisted please ? And you belive yourself to be reasonable. Facepalm.
But not surprising, given the way I cant help but feel your overall attitude constantly rubbing me off in an agressing way. Me no likey u badly.
Hopefully I have some faith in Mojang making at least semi-good design decisions in the long run rendering this entire "discussion" moot.
Anyway, given that I can't help but see more word-twisting and more "Xtreme hyperboling mad skillzz" going on, continuing this discussion seems too much kind of pointless now. So congrats, we've reached the bottom ! Yay!
I now leave more patient (or aggressive, depends on te PoV really) people like MasterCaver and SVKG to try to go on with this useless discussion.
Just like "all squares are not rectangles", farms are not by definition exploits. The game is designed to support emergent behavior and Mojang has made it clear that they love to see the creative things that people come up with. Unintended does not always mean bad.
Minecraft Creative Mode is an amazing sandbox and when you are playing in this mode there really are almost no rules and therefore no balances issues.
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
What is bad for the game is more than 95% subjective, and the folks making the game have veto power. If you don't like this go play another game.
In my opinion they appear have made 3 big mistakes in the past year:
Not enough of a long term plan for what features they are going to add and where they want to take the game as a whole.
Not enough code review leading to end users being exposed to coding defects* that should have been removed before a "stable" version was released. (Not talking about snapshots here.)
They have listened TOO much to some vocal minorities. I would rather have them make plans for the game and stick to them even when parts of the audience (who don't have access to the big-picture view) complain. Designing by committee is a great was to end up with crappy product.
I think number three is partially due to failures related to number one.
Jorg
*I prefer 'defect' to 'bug'. Too many people treat bugs as things that appear out of nowhere. Defects in production code do not appear out of thin air. They are caused by lack of planning, rushed programming, and incomplete testing. Heartbleed is a perfect example.
(Edited to remove unintended emoticon and fix formatting.)
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
Where did they actually made it clear that iron golems were not intented to be a source of iron? They fixed the bug that allowed monstrosities like the foundry but I don't think they ever stated that the 'normal' iron golem farms were bad. At least I haven't seen such statements or claims from any of them. Do you have a source for this? Just a honest question as I'm curious what Mojang *really* thinks about this as opposed to what we think that Mojang thinks about it (if you get what I mean )
Anyway, I'm currently playing heavily modded MineCraft (about 149 mods right now) and it is interesting to see how the things that some people here dislike so much (like automated farms and such) are so heavily built upon. I'm playing with mods that allow (amongs others) the following things:
Get five ingots out of every ore (diamond, iron, gold, ...)
Get practically infinite inventory space due to ender pouches that connect to remote storage systems in your base.
Get armor that basically makes you almost unkillable (I'm specifically talking about armor made from bedrock)
Mine bedrock (see above)
Create any type of material (enderpearls, glowstone dust, diamonds, ...) using simple recepies (but with other items that are relatively rare to find)
Make fully automated farms for everything. You can automatically shear sheep, milk cows, fertilize crops, harvest and replant them, same for trees and so on.
Grow plants from which you can get enderpearls, diamonds, even netherstars.
Automatically mine large areas and collect all resources.
Despite all these things the game is *still* a challenge because of the following:
There are considerably stronger mobs around which are pretty tough to kill and can also destroy your base if you're not careful
The machines to do all the above (five ingots out of ore, automated farms and so on) have massive power requirements so you need to do a lot of building to get to that stage.
The 5 ingots per ore is absolutely essential because these machines need a HUGE amount of resources.
Together with the power requirements many of these machines also have huge risks. I recently accidently turned part of my base to lava by placing a big solar tower too close to it. Other machines can actually explode if you don't handle them carefully. And machines like the nuclear reactor are even more potentially dangerous as you can imagine.
I find that even with all the above mentioned advantages, that I'm still constantly out of resources. So the game is still pretty balanced.
I also think that in the base vanilla minecraft it is really not that different. It also takes some effort to build all these machines. Especially in survival (I *never* do anything in creative, way too boring) and for me *that* is the appeal of the game. I don't want to constantly mine, hunt for food and so on. That's good for the beginning when you're just starting but at some point the game should progress to a deeper stage. You shouldn't have to do exactly the same things like you were doing in the beginning. It is nice that the game actually changes a lot when you progress to middle and end game.
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
The compass being worthless as a tool...You what mate? Its going to get more and more useful the more laggy fps eating junk they tack onto F3 like they've added to the snapshots.
The game isn't calculating any new information -- it's just displaying more of it. The new f3 screen isn't causing lag.
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Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist?
No, turning the game into a 'balanced' multiplayer monstrousity that gives up everything which makes a sandbox or sandbox-hybrid game appealing in order to make it 'fair' to grinders means the game ceases to exist. Listening to the crowd that cries about anything that resembles a grinder is the first step to removing the sandbox from this sandbox game.
You can call it word-twisting all you want, but if you actually consider the big picture, you're saying that going onto a snowy mountain and yelling is "just noise when you've got plenty of space, nothing worth getting excited about - what's an avalanche?".
Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules.
...And still no balance. For the simplest example, let's contrast cows and pigs. Both give a meat that needs cooked and provides comparable 'healing.' You can find them with equal ease.They have identical breeding behavior (frequency, trigger-condition, and number of young). However, cows require an easier resource to acquire for their breeding-trigger (wheat instead of carrots), and provide an additional resource when killed (leather). In contrast, you can gather a handful of resources - which require that you farm cows - to 'unlock' a novelty element of pig-riding - which is really not worth doing. As such, even your food-resources are unbalanced.
Even something as simple as the ubiquitous cobblestone-generator destroys a degree of scarcity-of-resources - a fact that's the foundation to the 'skyblock' play-style.
Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
I think b and c are misconceptions here. Waiting for a quote to prove otherwise, but from what I see they had no issue with the spawning-cells that have been around for quite a while. Where things got to them was when village-stacking came up and things like the Iron Foundry and Iron Trench appeared - making it so that two hours work and a night AFK became more iron than an entire group of gamers could use - even building a number of pyramids all over the place..
We saw iron golems' loot turned to a PK-only drop, but that seems to have been an ill-thought response to the foundry/tench. After significant complaint over golems no longer dropping iron unless you turn on them personally (which made building your own and actually using one even more punitive while only marginally inconveniencing most farms, by the way), they turned around and figured out how to break village-stacking - and now seem okay with the cells that they never bothered 'fixing' before being back in operation.
1. Not enough of a long term plan for what features they are going to add and where they want to take the game as a whole.
2. Not enough code review leading to end users being exposed to coding defects* that should have been removed before a "stable" version was released.
Both of these are evidenced by seeing iron become a player-kill drop for golems.
Turning iron to a drop only from a player-kill was counter-intuitive to building your own golem and taking it along for the help it could offer - you had to kill it yourself when it got vulnerable to recoup some of the resources you put into the thing.
Meanwhile, the issue this was meant to address was only mildly inconvenienced. You stopped the grinder at one hit from dead and then finished them yourself for XP as well as loot. So the 'fix' was worked around within a day by anybody who gave it any thought, and 'punished' the undesired behavior by 'forcing' the player to get XP as well as iron. If you set it up properly with a grinder leading to a kill-box, you could even still AFK with your character auto-punching and get the same amount of loot as before.
The later fix to village-stacking was what seems to have been the intention in the first place - and actually worked to slow the gain of iron by farmers to a reasonable pace.
They have listened TOO much to some vocal minorities. I would rather have them make plans for the game and stick to them even when parts of the audience (who don't have access to the big-picture view) complain. Designing by committee is a great was to end up with crappy product.
And that vocal minority is likely the competitive multiplayer crowd.
Honestly, how many servers can you find, with how many active users? I highly doubt we can come up with the numbers to match the millions of copies of Minecraft that Mojang boasts about selling. But the multiplayer crowd has an advantage to being heard over other users: they're already online. Multiplayer is the vocal minority that even seems like the majority because it's prevalent where opinions are being polled.
I like mobfarms, they add an industrial aspect to the game, and allow you to do something after getting a nethers star that isn't just mining more diamonds.
Mobs from mobfarms also are the only way to automatically separate armor and weapons from other unstackable items.
I don't like too powerfull grinders,(especially those that clearly use bugs) like the gold farms above the nether or the iron trenches.
If you take grinders into account when you desing the server economy, I think you can get very intresting results, where some players have lots of some items, and others have lots of others. Because things like diamonds are not farmable, even players without grinders can get something valuable to sell for large amounts of resources.
Grinders are using intented mechanics in suprising ways, item duplication is just abusing glitches.
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.
Personally I love building big contraptions like mob farms and such. For me that's the appeal of the game and if that was removed I would probably stop playing Minecraft. But I can equally see the arguments the nerfers are saying. That's just another way to play the game.
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Is it monumentally painful to have somebody point out that farming is built into the game? Let's see how much it hurts:
1) Mobs spawn.
2) Water pushes mobs.
3) Mobs fall down chutes or swim up when in water
4) Mobs die when they take damage.
5) Mobs drop loot when they die.
It's all intended. You have were given lemons, sugar, ice and water, and you claim that making lemonade is a violation of the spirit of the gift.
I see you have exactly this issue. Game balance in its simplest terms is you do your thing, I do my thing, and we get comparable benefits in the long-run. Nobody's supposed to come out ahead. It's obvious you don't understand this, because the moment you add options there's the potential for one combination of options to provide superior results than another, and this is where allowing different forms of play ultimately always leads to an unbalanced game.
So the whole 5 rules of thumb you had to learn to branch-mine all the resources you want can really be that difficult? Regular mining is almost an unskilled task. You could give caving a higher assessment, but since it's arguably less reward because of the time wasted dealing with mobs and navigating the irregular surface, you return to a question of balance between playstyles - you shouldn't be caving if you're actually concerned with the acquisition of ores.
The funny thing here is that when people start in on the iron farms, you often see the argument pop up that people don't need farms because you find too much of the stuff just from casual gameplay. Further, the anti-farming crowd neglects that a farm is a fixed location and while you can start a mine just about anywhere you have to travel to your farm every time you want to get reward from it - thus adding a 'hidden' upkeep in time-investment to the farm. You can decrease that cost by stocking up more and visiting less, but ultimately you have an anchor-point which keeps you traveling back to a central location in order to gain anything. So your mathematical equation is something like:
quantity * value = Start(skill*time*loot) + Grind(skill*time*(loot+incidentals)) + Upkeep(skill*time*loot)
For branch-mining, the start-values are all near-zero, upkeep is fairly low, and the bulk comes from grind.
For farms, the start-values are all significantly higher, the grind-values are near-zero and upkeep is fairly low.
For caving, you're multi-tasking. You have to divide your time spent by somewhere around a factor of 4 because you're also exploring like a tourist, dealing with mobs, and actively pursuing other materials.
Then we hit non-iron-gathering tasks. In theory, if the game were truly balanced, I'd get some payoff other than personal satisfaction from building a castle. I spent hours in-game, and I actually net a loss in resources. This is where we return to the issue that once you introduce choice, you remove balance. For the game to be truly 'fair', I should end up near the same increase in 'character-wealth' that anybody doing another task gets. Perhaps it would be a different form of wealth but it should be of comparable value. Instead, building is what character-optimizers would refer to as a level-dip. You do some minimal amount of it to gain all the real benefit (a safe base to sleep, craft, and stockpile in), and then you stop - because after you get the initial rewards there's no reason to progress further.
And you're going to accuse me of not understanding balance?
Now let's tag in the incidentals that you blithely ignored. When you compare an iron-farm to mining, you get stone, coal, iron, redstone, emerald, lapis, diamond, and maybe even obsidian depending on how it's approached. For the miner, these values all increase over time. For the farmer, there's only ever iron. Further, you're forgetting the law of diminishing returns. While the iron-farmer ends up with significantly more iron than the miner, he also ends up with no use for those double-chests full of the stuff. After the first chest or so, you've reached a saturation-point where it holds no real value.
So what you have is a bell-curve for the iron-farmer where there's an ideal point that he can say he came out ahead because he has more iron that he has a use for, compared to a whole set of bell-curves for the miner which results in him ending up better off for the bulk of the time because he has other resources which hold higher value than just another stack of iron. The miner starts out ahead because there's no payoff for the farmer until his construct is completed. For a time after that, the miner is still ahead because he has the other resources. For a short window, the farmer is ahead because he has enough more useful iron to make up for the ever-growing pile of other resources the miner has. Then the miner reaches his saturation-point, where he has enough iron, and the farmer's vast piles of same-old-same-old mean nothing. Ultimately, the miner wins because he reaches saturation-point on more resources.
For the farmer to reach the same point, he has to farm iron golems, witches, nether skeletons (or blazes, if we give blaze-rod an equivalent value to coal), zombie pigmen, nether-portals, and villager-trading - it's something of a losing endeavor to try to compete across the spectrum doing one part at a time compared to all-at-once.
Um, how did you try to repair it? Like this?
Read the Wiki VERY carefully... note that I used ONE diamond to repair it... also, i see you are in a snapshot which makes your argument a moot point... this was in 1.6.4 (I THINK 1.7.x is still the same). I also see that you failed to rename your pickaxe (not that there is any point anymore).
Again, here is the calculation based on what the Wiki says:
Cost for Efficiency V = 1 x 5 = 5 levels
Cost for Fortune III = 4 x 3 = 12 levels
Cost for Unbreaking III = 2 x 3 = 6 levels
Added cost for three enchantments = 6 levels
Added cost for prior work penalty (renamed) = 2 levels
Total base cost = 31 levels
Cost per unit = number of enchantments (3) + 3 for diamond tools = 6 x 1 unit = 6
Total cost = 37 levels
Also note that this is ONLY for 1.7.x and earlier; the Wiki might as well delete their Anvil Mechanics page when 1.8 comes out, or at least explicitly say it only applies to older versions.
And please stop getting on my case... you know what I mean by this...
Oh, you really misread what I said; reread "I see videos claiming up to a chest of iron per hour, something that takes me around 8 hours to mine". The "4 double chests" assumed you AFK'ed overnight for 8 hours (a typical sleep time). And true, those farms are now broken for the most part but you can still get free iron for no investment whatsoever. I don't even really need that iron either, I could just mine what coal I needed and a few diamonds here and there for repairing (far less without having to constantly repair my pickaxe) and basically play the same way.
Also, here's a screenshot of some of my stats from a previous world which I played for about a month (not 24/7 of course, averaging around 3-4 hours per day) to show that I really do mine that much iron - never mind coal!
Sharpness V is hardly OP; a regular diamond sword (8 damage per hit*) kills 20 hitpoint mobs in three hits and Sharpness V (14.25 damage per hit) requires two hits, hardly a big difference, except for mobs like Endermen and armored mobs. In fact, a wood sword (total of 11.25 damage) actually has a much bigger benefit because it always adds 1.25 damage per level no matter what the base material is.
*The game says +X attack damage, which is added to your base damage of one, ever since 1.6.2, which ironically means that an iron sword by itself is now as powerful as a pre-1.6.2 diamond sword and a diamond sword now kills zombies (22 HP with armor points) in three hits. So again, an example of making the game easier.
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?
You're quite right that I didn't acknowledge your straw-man argument which implies that something as simple as water pushing mobs is not the game functioning as its creators intended. Nor will I give it significant effort the second time you post it. Anybody who'll follow along with an absurd claim which boils down to asserting that everybody who worked on Minecraft's code is too stupid to realize how their own game works isn't going have their faith changed by facts or logic.
I think you have a fair grasp of the rudimentary concept of game-balance. I'd guess it largely comes from the handful of links you posted. But your education in the field seems to be oversimplified and lacking some of the more advanced concepts which invalidate your attempts to turn two different situations into a pair of equations which should theoretically net the same end-value. Even the math I presented to refute your own is oversimplified - the word 'incidentals' is likely a paragraph-long equation of its own were we to take this risk-reward assessment seriously enough to discuss the numerical superiority of mining over farming.
Ah, you are correct in that I misread a bit. Even so, it looks like once the world catches up with the fix for the trench/foundry, you'll see that only the most ambitious spawning-cell stacks compete with the iron you're getting simply from enjoying the way you play. That 'free' (after hours of building) iron isn't going to overshadow your own gameplay.
Kinda proving the point on the bell-curves thing there, thanks. You're at a point where you don't need iron, or coal, or gold, likely not redstone or lapis, maybe even not really diamonds or obsidian. So over the course of a month, you've rendered a collection of farms pointless from the competitive view - there's no value to having even more of what you don't need or use.
OP? Perhaps not. But we're talking about game-balance here, where a 75% increase in strength is going from something with a measure of scarcity because it can be a headache to acquire to a setup where it's quite possible to get that and more with minimal trading effort. If you really believe that Minecraft should be a balanced game, the new proliferation of high-end gear throws many of the old equations out the window. It's certainly a world ahead of the unenchanted iron gear-set I normally walk around with.
That said, this game does need more balance. I find myself getting bored of Minecraft a lot these days, because as an Alpha player, I know most of the game's mechanics... I do think there has been some much needed difficulty added to the game as of late, but one of the problems Minecraft has had since about mid-beta, around the time they introduced beds, is not difficulty, so much as inconsistency. Some things are harder than they should be, and a lot of things are too easy...
Let's take ridable pigs for example: Because of their slightly wonky controls, and limited speed boost, It would make sense for them to be an early game mode of transport. Horses being the obvious upgrade, because they are in general, a superior mode of transport. Then followed by rails for speed. So, why is it harder to get a carrot on a stick, than to tame a horse? I'm all for gameplay freedom, but if you have features, other features shouldn't render them pointless... With that, the obvious solution is to make carrots easier to get, or horses a lot harder to tame... (Also, while not necessary, it would be cool if you could eventually create a makeshift glowstone powered horseless carriage as the top transport tier... Maybe require a really hard boss' drop to create...)
There are so many issues like this... Leather Armor (and leather in general) being harder to get than Iron, The upgrade from compass to map being so easy that it renders the compass useless as a tool, the lack of tiers of weapons, tools and armor (mainly the fact that you jump right from iron to diamond. Should be at least one material inbetween.), the clear drop in difficulty once you get enchanting, etc. The list literally goes on and on...
So, in short, while I think the game has balancing issues, farms aren't a particlarly big one...
Star Trek DS9 and Doctor Who FTW.
Wow. To try to keep it short I'll take only the most extreme example here. Nerfing auto grinders a bit = the game ceases to exist? Could you be more twisted please ? And you belive yourself to be reasonable. Facepalm.
But not surprising, given the way I cant help but feel your overall attitude constantly rubbing me off in an agressing way. Me no likey u badly.
Hopefully I have some faith in Mojang making at least semi-good design decisions in the long run rendering this entire "discussion" moot.
Anyway, given that I can't help but see more word-twisting and more "Xtreme hyperboling mad skillzz" going on, continuing this discussion seems too much kind of pointless now. So congrats, we've reached the bottom ! Yay!
I now leave more patient (or aggressive, depends on te PoV really) people like MasterCaver and SVKG to try to go on with this useless discussion.
Just like "all squares are not rectangles", farms are not by definition exploits. The game is designed to support emergent behavior and Mojang has made it clear that they love to see the creative things that people come up with. Unintended does not always mean bad.
Minecraft Creative Mode is an amazing sandbox and when you are playing in this mode there really are almost no rules and therefore no balances issues.
However, as soon as you switch to Survival mode, you switch from playing in a sandbox, to playing a sandbox game that has rules. Mojang as the creator and maintainer of the game rules gets to decide what emergent behavior they consider damaging. They have made it clear that a] towns were not intended to overlap, b] iron golems were not intended to be a source of iron, and most importantly c] they consider both a and b to be damaging to the game they intend Survival Mode to be.
What is bad for the game is more than 95% subjective, and the folks making the game have veto power. If you don't like this go play another game.
In my opinion they appear have made 3 big mistakes in the past year:
I think number three is partially due to failures related to number one.
Jorg
*I prefer 'defect' to 'bug'. Too many people treat bugs as things that appear out of nowhere. Defects in production code do not appear out of thin air. They are caused by lack of planning, rushed programming, and incomplete testing. Heartbleed is a perfect example.
(Edited to remove unintended emoticon and fix formatting.)
Where did they actually made it clear that iron golems were not intented to be a source of iron? They fixed the bug that allowed monstrosities like the foundry but I don't think they ever stated that the 'normal' iron golem farms were bad. At least I haven't seen such statements or claims from any of them. Do you have a source for this? Just a honest question as I'm curious what Mojang *really* thinks about this as opposed to what we think that Mojang thinks about it (if you get what I mean
Anyway, I'm currently playing heavily modded MineCraft (about 149 mods right now) and it is interesting to see how the things that some people here dislike so much (like automated farms and such) are so heavily built upon. I'm playing with mods that allow (amongs others) the following things:
- Get five ingots out of every ore (diamond, iron, gold, ...)
- Get practically infinite inventory space due to ender pouches that connect to remote storage systems in your base.
- Get armor that basically makes you almost unkillable (I'm specifically talking about armor made from bedrock)
- Mine bedrock (see above)
- Create any type of material (enderpearls, glowstone dust, diamonds, ...) using simple recepies (but with other items that are relatively rare to find)
- Make fully automated farms for everything. You can automatically shear sheep, milk cows, fertilize crops, harvest and replant them, same for trees and so on.
- Grow plants from which you can get enderpearls, diamonds, even netherstars.
- Automatically mine large areas and collect all resources.
Despite all these things the game is *still* a challenge because of the following:I find that even with all the above mentioned advantages, that I'm still constantly out of resources. So the game is still pretty balanced.
I also think that in the base vanilla minecraft it is really not that different. It also takes some effort to build all these machines. Especially in survival (I *never* do anything in creative, way too boring) and for me *that* is the appeal of the game. I don't want to constantly mine, hunt for food and so on. That's good for the beginning when you're just starting but at some point the game should progress to a deeper stage. You shouldn't have to do exactly the same things like you were doing in the beginning. It is nice that the game actually changes a lot when you progress to middle and end game.
Just my opinion.
Author of RFTools, RFTools Control, RFTools Dimensions, Deep Resonance, Immersive Craft, CombatHelp, NICE, Aqua Munda, Ariente, XNet, Interaction Wheel, The Lost Cities, Lost Souls, Need To Breathe, EFab, The One Probe and co-author of Not Enough Wands and RF Lux.
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The game isn't calculating any new information -- it's just displaying more of it. The new f3 screen isn't causing lag.
v
No, turning the game into a 'balanced' multiplayer monstrousity that gives up everything which makes a sandbox or sandbox-hybrid game appealing in order to make it 'fair' to grinders means the game ceases to exist. Listening to the crowd that cries about anything that resembles a grinder is the first step to removing the sandbox from this sandbox game.
You can call it word-twisting all you want, but if you actually consider the big picture, you're saying that going onto a snowy mountain and yelling is "just noise when you've got plenty of space, nothing worth getting excited about - what's an avalanche?".
...And still no balance. For the simplest example, let's contrast cows and pigs. Both give a meat that needs cooked and provides comparable 'healing.' You can find them with equal ease.They have identical breeding behavior (frequency, trigger-condition, and number of young). However, cows require an easier resource to acquire for their breeding-trigger (wheat instead of carrots), and provide an additional resource when killed (leather). In contrast, you can gather a handful of resources - which require that you farm cows - to 'unlock' a novelty element of pig-riding - which is really not worth doing. As such, even your food-resources are unbalanced.
Even something as simple as the ubiquitous cobblestone-generator destroys a degree of scarcity-of-resources - a fact that's the foundation to the 'skyblock' play-style.
I think b and c are misconceptions here. Waiting for a quote to prove otherwise, but from what I see they had no issue with the spawning-cells that have been around for quite a while. Where things got to them was when village-stacking came up and things like the Iron Foundry and Iron Trench appeared - making it so that two hours work and a night AFK became more iron than an entire group of gamers could use - even building a number of pyramids all over the place..
We saw iron golems' loot turned to a PK-only drop, but that seems to have been an ill-thought response to the foundry/tench. After significant complaint over golems no longer dropping iron unless you turn on them personally (which made building your own and actually using one even more punitive while only marginally inconveniencing most farms, by the way), they turned around and figured out how to break village-stacking - and now seem okay with the cells that they never bothered 'fixing' before being back in operation.
Both of these are evidenced by seeing iron become a player-kill drop for golems.
Turning iron to a drop only from a player-kill was counter-intuitive to building your own golem and taking it along for the help it could offer - you had to kill it yourself when it got vulnerable to recoup some of the resources you put into the thing.
Meanwhile, the issue this was meant to address was only mildly inconvenienced. You stopped the grinder at one hit from dead and then finished them yourself for XP as well as loot. So the 'fix' was worked around within a day by anybody who gave it any thought, and 'punished' the undesired behavior by 'forcing' the player to get XP as well as iron. If you set it up properly with a grinder leading to a kill-box, you could even still AFK with your character auto-punching and get the same amount of loot as before.
The later fix to village-stacking was what seems to have been the intention in the first place - and actually worked to slow the gain of iron by farmers to a reasonable pace.
And that vocal minority is likely the competitive multiplayer crowd.
Honestly, how many servers can you find, with how many active users? I highly doubt we can come up with the numbers to match the millions of copies of Minecraft that Mojang boasts about selling. But the multiplayer crowd has an advantage to being heard over other users: they're already online. Multiplayer is the vocal minority that even seems like the majority because it's prevalent where opinions are being polled.
Mobs from mobfarms also are the only way to automatically separate armor and weapons from other unstackable items.
I don't like too powerfull grinders,(especially those that clearly use bugs) like the gold farms above the nether or the iron trenches.
If you take grinders into account when you desing the server economy, I think you can get very intresting results, where some players have lots of some items, and others have lots of others. Because things like diamonds are not farmable, even players without grinders can get something valuable to sell for large amounts of resources.
Grinders are using intented mechanics in suprising ways, item duplication is just abusing glitches.
I keep using up all my up-votes for the day on your posts. I've completely agreed with virtually everything you've written in this thread.
You seem to be one of the few people here that actually "get" it.