No support. While pigs do not have any special ability, their drop (porkchop) is still the best food in the game (restoration-wise), restoring 4 shanks and just as much saturation (rabbit stew restores more hunger, but is more work to obtain). As was mentioned earlier, steak is used in trading, as are many other food items, making porkchop an ideal source of food in the early- to middle-game stages. As well, passive mobs in Minecraft tend to parallel their real-world counterparts. Cows have beef, milk, and leather; sheep have wool and mutton; chickens have chicken meat and feathers; horses have leather and the ability to ride; rabbits have rabbit meat and hides; pigs have pork. Pigs are purely a food animal.
Except this still doesn't really make Pigs more useful. You still need a Carrot to breed them, which is a rare drop or requires a Village. Unless you get super lucky (2.5% chance of a rare drop, 3 possible rare drops, makes it a 0.83% chance per Zombie killed) your first night or purposefully don't grow Wheat, you will not find a Carrot before you get Wheat. If you find a Village, it has equal odds of having Wheat or Carrots so neither side has an advantage there.
Aside from them still being harder to breed, Cows drop Leather. Not very useful as an armor, sure. But it is required for Books, which are required for Enchanting. If you DID find A Village, that makes Cows even more useful as both of their drops are used for trades (in 1.8). In addition to that, Carrots are also going to be trade-able in 1.8, so if you did get your Carrots from a Village, it makes more sense to trade them to a Villager, and use Wheat to get Leather and Beef, also to trade to Villagers. You would also be better off saving Carrots for Golden Carrots for potions.
Making other animals worse doesn't make the Pig better. It just makes it look better by comparison, which is a pretty awful way to design a game. The only really good way to make Pigs more useful is to give them their own unique purpose that makes you want to farm them:
Chickens have 2 ways to breed them, their Eggs are used in crafting recipes, and they drop Feathers for Arrows.
Horses can be used for riding (in a superior manner than Pigs), and drop Leather.
Sheep are an easy way to get unlimited Wool, and can be dyed to get unlimited of all colors of Wool.
Rabbits drop a Rabbit Foot in addition to their other drops.
Cows drop Leather and are easy to breed. They also supply Milk.
Pigs do...?
If you truly want to make Pigs better, you need to answer that question in a way that doesn't make any of the other animals worse.
I agree, making cows worse won't make pigs better.
I would personally set beef equal to mutton rather than chicken, but whatever. Either way, nerfing steak would actually be effective unlike making pigs breed more than one pig like everyone else seems to suggest, so partial support; i'd personally rather see a new secondary drop added to pigs than this. It's a simple solution, yes, but a boring one.
In a way, nerfing steak isn't really a bad idea, per se; after all, for a long time, steak wasn't in the game. Every animal had only one drop; chickens only had feathers, sheep only had wool (though they won't get meat until r1.8), cows only had leather, and pigs only had porkchops. It was balanced back then. Then comes ß1.8, which gives cows steak (and at the time they actually dropped more steak than pigs dropped porkchops so they were even more worthless) and thus broke the balance there was before.
So, it's not entirely "making other animals worse to make the pig look better". It's also partially "fixing an unbalanced item two years after it should have been balanced". That said, I think that giving pigs a secondary drop to help them compete with the other farm animals would be better than rebalancing an unbalanced item FAR too long after it should have been balanced. However, this idea would probably be extremely simple for Mojang to do, so this does at least get some credit for that.
Carrots, however, will be roughly twice as nourishing as wheat will once r1.8 comes around (right now it's even more than that), so while you will be able to have a larger pig farm than a cow farm with the same amount of farmland, each porkchop will have a slightly lower overall yield. Also, space doesn't make a huge difference in a game with an infinite world.
Pigs aren't really a jack of all trades; more like a master of none.
-Chickens drop food and feathers, which you need for arrows which are extremely useful (since few mobs can effectively counter a bow).
-Rabbits drop food, miniscule amounts of leather, and the ingredient for jump boost potions. Not very useful but because of that jump boost ingredient they aren't completely outclassed by anything.
-Sheep drop food and can be sheared for wool, which is extremely useful if you are a builder and is quite profitable if sold.
-Pigs drop food and nothing else. This food is slightly better than the food of the above animals. They can also be ridden, but pig riding is less efficient than sprinting. They require the second rarest breeding item.
-Horses don't drop food, but you can ride them and are vastly superior to ridden pigs. They require more expensive items to breed than pigs, but you probably won't be breeding many horses anyway.
-Cows drop food as good as that of pigs, and additionally drop leather which you need for bookcases which you need for enchanting. Additionally, they can be milked to cure yourself of status effects, though negative ones besides fire (which can't be cured by milk) are hard to come by.
So basically: pigs are roughly equal to sheep and chickens and are somewhat better than rabbits. However, they are outclassed by cows in almost every way, and are outclassed by the player and horses in the ways that cows don't cover. Even if cows were inferior to pigs in meat, pigs still wouldn't be terribly useful anyway because food is ridiculously common in Minecraft.
Read what I said to Badprenup. It's not so much nerfing one thing to buff another thing as it is balancing an OP item long after it should have been balanced.
Good points, except for when you said that cows were OP. I see what you're saying when you say that things were balanced when every mob had one drop, but you're missing a crucial point. It's 1.8 that added tons of other mobs dropping food. Do you know what else came with 1.8? Hunger. The game needed more food in order to become balanced. That's why cows got the buff. You must realise that the game back when each mob only had one drop and the game now are two very different things. Cows never became OP, they were buffed to keep up with the changes. The game needed more food options. Cows are perfect the way that they are. They are not OP. The pigs are the problem here, and they must be buffed. As it stands, the pig is the only farm animal used solely for food. Mojang should expand upon that with more/better food from pigs, easier breeding, and faster growing times.
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No Support.
Putting the CENDENT back in transcendent!
I agree, making cows worse won't make pigs better.
No Support.
Good points, except for when you said that cows were OP. I see what you're saying when you say that things were balanced when every mob had one drop, but you're missing a crucial point. It's 1.8 that added tons of other mobs dropping food. Do you know what else came with 1.8? Hunger. The game needed more food in order to become balanced. That's why cows got the buff. You must realise that the game back when each mob only had one drop and the game now are two very different things. Cows never became OP, they were buffed to keep up with the changes. The game needed more food options. Cows are perfect the way that they are. They are not OP. The pigs are the problem here, and they must be buffed. As it stands, the pig is the only farm animal used solely for food. Mojang should expand upon that with more/better food from pigs, easier breeding, and faster growing times.