Minecraft Forums

Quote from reaverofdarknes1»

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You seem to be approaching this from the angle that a player must get stone tools. I'm approaching it from a different angle: they shouldn't be forced to get stone tools in order to have a good game experience. I'm thoroughly confused by this statement, to the point where I went back and re-read the OP to make sure I didn't miss something. To me nothing about your suggestion makes only having wood tools a better experience. It doesn't make wood tools more fun or more useful in any way. It actually makes them worse in an effort to force the player to use them more. It almost seems like manufacturing Stockholm syndrome, but for a tool tier. Beyond that, there is nothing saying that a player can't have a "good game experience" with only wood tools in the current game. If someone wants to play hardcore survivalist like that they absolutely can. Nothing stops them other than the temptation of knowing that by upgrading they will get to do more cool stuff and be able to get resources faster. Nothing about your change affects that.
I didn't say anything about providing the player with a list of the possible ways to get cobblestone. I put the list here for you guys just in case you thought there weren't very many ways to get stone. You're reading into my suggestion TONS of things that aren't there.
I'm not reading into anything, I never said the game would inform players of how to do that. I said that the game is already confusing for new players trying to figure out how to progress if they don't use external knowledge sources, and that this change would make worse. At some level you know that too, otherwise you wouldn't have gone out of your way to list all the alternative ways to get Cobblestone in order to highlight that players can still progress past wood tools. 1.) There's nothing about crafting a wooden pickaxe that suggests to the new player that it can mine stone for making a stone pickaxe. That is what YOU assume from your experience as a veteran Minecraft player. What is suggested to a new player is that it can be used on stone, and indeed it can. Regular stone takes 5 seconds instead of 10 seconds to break with a wooden pickaxe, were my suggestion implemented.
No, that is what I know because I know what a pickaxe is and what it does. I have since I was about 4 years old, which is before Java existed (and I don't mean Java Minecraft, I mean Java the programming language). And yeah, I am going to assume that most new players are going to have some idea of what a pickaxe is before they pick up the game, even younger kids. I think that is a fair assumption. 2.) The recipe book will help new players figure out the recipes regardless of what the recipes are, because the recipe book is updated along with the changes to the recipes. I don't know why I have to say this.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. The recipe book isn't the problem, the problem is you've locked progressing past the first tier to extremely obscure scenarios which will confuse new users. The problem isn't that they won't be able to see the recipe for the stone pickaxe. The problem is they'll have no idea how to get it and the most obvious solution (use the pickaxe for it's intended purpose, breaking the stone rock that is everywhere in the game) won't work. Instead they have to get lucky enough to find cobblestone in the wild, get TNT and a way to detonate it, or get lucky with a Creeper explosion. 3.) The new player does not automatically assume that they need to immediately upgrade their pickaxe the moment they get it. YOU assume this, because playing Minecraft has taught you this. In fact if the player has a little common sense and has never played any game similar to Minecraft, they will most likely assume that they will NOT be upgrading the pickaxe immediately. Going against this basic common sense is actually damaging to the player's experience, not the other way around.
That is a fair response. A player may not immediately think to upgrade to new tools (provided they are completely unfamiliar with most survival games or any other game with upgraded equipment). I don't think it lends any strength to your idea, but you are correct that some people may not think to upgrade immediately. But they will after playing for a while, wondering why all their equipment sucks and breaks blocks slowly and doesn't drop anything and probably isn't having that much of a "good game experience". But maybe they like that, different strokes for different folks. 4.) Your selection of options for gaining cobblestone, which come from a position of experience, are not the selections that a new player will make, and they will not feel some interior drive to go into caves to make creepers explode, nor will they feel a need to hunt for lava on mountains to play with. Much more likely, they will stumble upon a NPC village eventually (because let's face it, in the majority of worlds you will encounter one within your first 500 blocks of travel), and there they will find cobblestone. Since there are so many ways to acquire your pickaxe upgrade, it is a given that a player will eventually encounter at least one of them without ever trying to seek any of them out. All the game needs to do is make sure the player can identify it when they see it.
Yes, again that is my point. I'm saying you are locking new players into parts of the game that they may not find enjoyable by making it confusing and difficult to proceed past it. You aren't changing anything to make the start of the game more fun, just forcing people to be in it for longer. You've decided that the beginning of the game is fun and are assuming that all new players will feel the same way.

All of your gripes come from a position of experience and entirely neglect to see how things actually are for a new player. No, my gripes are coming from thinking back to when I started playing this game and how I would have stopped playing if I would have been dropped into the world, got wood tools, and then had no idea what else to do. Luckily I had the wiki to inform me of stuff to do, because this was way back before advancements or the recipe book and all of that stuff that helps inform the player of how to play. Almost all players WANT to feel like they are progressing in games, because that is an innate trait of humans. We are hardwired to get some feeling of satisfaction from getting things done, which is why our brain releases the feel-good endorphins when we do that. That is the core of designing a good gameplay loop. You give the player a task, the player does the task, and you give them a reward and tease a new bigger task.
It's only tedious because you're stuck on the idea that you NEED to get to stone tier. It's also a lot less tedious than you're probably thinking--you should try looking for cobblestone in a fresh world some time and see how long it takes you. More often than not, you will stumble across it in a fresh world before you even have your first permanent house built. A lot of new players will probably wind up with cobblestone randomly in their inventory just because a creeper blew up somewhere in their vicinity. No, it is tedious because it is tedious. Because it relies on random chance and specific events to occur that are mostly not within the player's control. And just to be sure, I tried it. I started a new world in Creative mode on a random seed, then started wandering off in one direction looking for cobblestone. I imposed a couple rules on myself. One, I would not specifically seek out places where I know cobblestone would generate, meaning I didn't run immediately to the Plains biome because a new player wouldn't know there are Villages in that biome, and they wouldn't know that cobblestone was in Villages. Just straight walking in one direction and occasionally turning to the left or right about 45 degrees and walking that way for a bit. The alternative was to kind of move in a spiral outward from spawn because most new players will likely stay close to home, but I elected to do it this way. Two, I waited half a day to start as a reasonable approximation for a new player to get wood and get those tools. Three, no flying. Only sprinting, walking, or swimming. I was only able to play for 1.5 Minecraft days so far, but no luck. And I want to mention I'm being extremely charitable, because in Creative mode I don't need to worry about mobs or hunger and I can sprint forever. A new player in Survival will not have those benefits.
Don't knock it till you try it. I don't need to be lit on fire to know that I won't enjoy being lit on fire. Sometimes you can know you won't enjoy something without having to actually experience it, based on prior knowledge and knowing things I personally enjoy.

Why is it the worst part of the game? I think you're insinuating that it's the worst because it's the weakest. But I would argue FAR to the contrary, it's worst for many reasons related to a poor new-player experience that you are making worse (imo) and forcing them to stay there longer, and that veteran players' sense of need to escape it comes less from a desire to advance and more from a negative experience in dealing with it. The raw strength of the tier doesn't determine how fun it is to play in. Every tier can be different strengths and they can all be fun to play in. It's high time we make wood tier fun as well as relevant. Again, I want to reiterate my earlier points in this response. This isn't making wood tier more fun to play with, it just forces people to do so for longer. And no, my "need to escape" it has nothing to do with dealing with that particular part of the game, it 100% comes from me wanting to advance because that's where the parts of the game I enjoy are. That is where other tiers and enchantments and making fun redstone contraptions and the Nether and brewing and getting to see more of the world via Nether portal travel and going to a Stonghold and killing the Enderdragon (although I personally think that fight isn't fun) and exploring the End is. And biggest of all, that is where I can do my favorite part of the game, which is work on making large structures or villages or whatever I enjoy WITHOUT needing to sink dozens of additional hours into the game slowly getting resources and being locked out of hundreds of blocks and items) that would come with being stuck on Wood tools. I'm reasonably certain that if you ask a typical person to choose between only being able to do a few things (and being restricted in how fast/well you can do those things) or being able to do all of the things in the first option, being able to do them faster/better if they want to, and being able to do a hundred additional things, the person is likely going to choose the latter. It is the choice between going to a Chuck E Cheese and having to wait in line for each game versus being at Disney World with their Fastpass thing that lets you get to the front of the line (AND still being able to go to the Chuck E Cheese whenever you want to).

I have a solution: go back to the old editor. I hate WYSINWYG. Even if it worked, there would still be no need for pre-rendering the details because that's what the preview function is for. Now I'm not saying it's not a nice functionality, but I will say that making a proper WYSIWYG system is actually far easier than this spaghetti mess because this mess is loaded with extra unnecessary algorithms that try to second-guess what the person wanted to do, and makes automatic changes that were uncalled for. It teleports the cursor position (sometimes but not always) when you backspace, adds or subtracts extra line breaks depending on an arcane and poorly thought out list of situational reasoning, adds and subtracts MANY tags under MANY circumstances and frequently can't even keep track of its tags properly, and to make it especially bad, the whole pre-rendering system has a separate write-up from the actual render, so if whoever is editing it forgets to carry a change over from one to the other, what you see drifts even further from what you get.

These aren't bugs, these are FEATURES that are so cumbersome. They aren't failing to work as intended, they are implemented with a lack of foresight and a very strong lack of testing. The solution is to stop adding them and start removing them. It isn't hard to fix, it's hard to keep on breaking it just as it was hard to implement the broken mess in the first place.

Just get rid of it already. Add a lightweight WYSIWYG system that doesn't second-guess anything, no auto-correct, no auto-complete, ONLY tag-tracking. It'll be seventy five times easier to write, three times faster to render, and two thousand times less likely to spit out an incorrect response, and I imagine the base code block will be less than a quarter of the size, not counting all the extra spaghetti code used both to hardcode the pre-renderer separate from the renderer as well as to mitigate all of the undesirable effects of the various poor design features. I'm not going to respond to this portion any further because it is off topic of the actual thread. If you want to bring it up further, feel free to make a thread in Forum Discussion and Info on it. But again, we 100% are aware and agree. But we can't just revert to the old editor willy-nilly or just introduce a new editor out of nowhere. These things cost time and money to do properly, and things (inadvertently) not being done properly in the past is why the current editor has problems.

This does not sound like a good idea to me. Making a tier objectively worse in order to force players to use it more certainly fixes the problem you have with this part of the game but I'd make the argument that the game suffers as a whole if your change was added. This change forces players to the first tier unless they A. Wander around until they find extremely specific world generation features in a randomly generated game, or B. Play chicken with one of the most dangerous overworld mobs repeatedly until you get 3 cobblestone, all the while you are being shot at by Skeletons, chased by Spiders and Zombies, and you only have a crappy sword and likely have zero armor unless you happened to spawn next to a large herd of cows (as you said, iron armor is often easier to get than leather). Any of the three of us currently in this thread could deal with this, although personally I would not be enjoying it and it sounds like Jancrash wouldn't either. But we could deal.

For new players this would be catastrophic. Unless you are using the wiki or have watched a ton of YouTube videos, the game is already confusing enough for new players. But at least you can kind of piece together what to do with the inclusion of the recipe book. Punch wood, game tells you how to make wood tools, and general understanding of what the tools are in real life can help you figure out mining stone. "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby." is not a hard train of thought to follow.

However the following is not a logical train of thought: "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby. Wait, this doesn't work. Maybe if I wander in a random direction I will find a sub-tier of Stone that is not commonly found naturally and mine that, even though nothing I have done so far indicates that is possible and the gameplay experiences I HAVE had have told me that my pickaxe won't work on rock items. Or I can find a temple that I've never even heard of or seen before, somehow know there is a hidden basement, and also somehow know there is TNT below that, and if I don't accidentally blow myself to the Nether and back I can use this to blow up the Stone (also I'll very likely find Iron in the temple and can then skip Stone entirely). Or alternatively I can maybe make these strange green creatures blow up the Stone."

See what I mean? The alternatives to get cobblestone are extremely obtuse. Experienced players like us could do them, although I want to dispute your disagreements with changes because you find them tedious because this sounds like the most tedious start to a game I can think of. I'd personally play the tutorial to Kingdom Hearts (the most tedious tutorial I can think of) a dozen times before doing this once. That may be harsh, but I don't mean it in a rude way. I just want to really make it clear how tedious this would be for me. But beyond this being "me using commands to skip wood entirely from now on" tedious, it is completely beyond a new player's comprehension.

I would love to give an alternative fix to this problem but I really don't think it is one. The worst tool tier in the game will always be the worst tier. That doesn't sound like something that needs to be fixed. There will always be a worst food item. There will alway be an enemy that is the easiest to deal with. And that is fine. I really don't see why you want to force people to be stuck in the worst part of the game for an extended period of time.

As for the issues with the editor: Yeah we know about them, and we aren't pleased with the editor either. It is on the list but there are other higher priority things that need to be worked on unfortunately.