Back in the old days, Minecraft is a pretty simple game about exploring and building. And now, with more and more updates, Mojang added in more and more stuff that makes the game seems like another mainstream RPG. The game changes from a simple masterpiece to a complex cliche.
For me, in my opinion, the game became worsened. More and more complex unnecessary features are added in without much of a thought.
Back then it was a pretty simple game about building and mining and now its a convoluted rubbish.
Eh, this topic arises every now and then. I mean, from my point of view I definitely think it lost its identity for a while. That is in no way masked frustration with Mojang trying to fix things that aren't broken whilst leaving things that are broken to rot whilst erasing the remaining character the game had.
Over time, something is going to change. It is inevitable. Were it to stay the same it may not have reached the popularity it has today. Though I'm still salty over the new textures and 1.4+ sounds. Nobody asked for them to change a legacy. There have been many improvements throughout the years. Lots of quality of life changes, some performance enhancements, and oh yeah: FIXED BOATS AND ACTUAL AQUATIC CONTENT. TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH MOJANG. Now get on Minecarts and reverting 1.7 biome and cave gen k thx.
Out of genuine curiosity, as it varies from individual to individual, what are these sort of changes of which you speak? [Forget the 1.9 combat changes, those are almost universally detested in some form lol]
Microsoft attempts to make Minecraft a 100 year game, and for that they must provide support and new "game changing" features.
Luckily, unlike bedrock- the legacy java edition has an advanced launcher that allows players to stick to old versions, and mod those for their liking. Additionaly, a big majority of Minecraft servers and modpack creators recommend sticking to versions like 1.8, and 1.10.
It entirely lost it's original integrity but at least we can somewhat get over it.
This sounds a lot like the Minecraft becoming more like modded Minecraft topic from a while ago.
The reason that they're adding these features is because the base of the game was being completed during Beta, and after release they were just building on it. Notch mentions in his blog around the time that 1.7B was released that the core to the game is finished and now they can add more features to it.
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There have been many improvements throughout the years. Lots of quality of life changes, some performance enhancements...
I giggle whenever I read of "performance enhancements" in newer versions - they are literally an order of magnitude worse than 1.6.4, not even including my own optimizations, which far offset the impact of added features:
Nearly 1000 FPS on 10 chunk render distance, with a server tick time of only 2.4 ms (5% of the maximum allowed) and only 353 MB allocated and 206 MB used (which only happened to be a bit higher since I'd gone to the Nether):
This is with maximum chunk updates enabled via Optifine (which itself only has a minor impact on performance compared to my own optimizations - in fact, I'm considering removing all support as it would make it a lot easier to add my own rendering code, as well as enable adding settings to adjust them, was Optifine's are all broken):
20 chunk render distance, still with a mere 512 MB of memory allocated (on a 32 bit OS) and only about half it it being used. This suggests that a lot of the memory usage seen above is simply garbage that the GC allows to pile up, starting memory use on lower render distances can be less than 100 MB (I still play on Normal/8 out of preference and because in-game maps only show a 128 block radius and generating more chunks than necessary is wasteful to me). Even at these settings it runs smoothly, including no server lag when generating new terrain (tick time is still only 4.3 ms, increasing to 10-20 when generating terrain):
In case you are wondering, some of my added features enhance the graphical quality of the game, such as smooth lighting for water - a Bedrock exclusive; smooth lighting in general was also fixed (vanilla has various graphical artifacts; MC-43968 and MC-138211):
For comparison, these are the recommended CPUs for 1.6 compared to the current minimum:
1.6 recommended; note that the Athlon 64 is a single-core CPU (the Pentium D is dual-core and is probably better since the game does run on two main threads, since 1.3.1):
Any claims of "performance fixes", such as those claimed in the 1.14.x patches, only partly offset the long-term trend. This is also one reason why I've never updated past 1.6.4:
These all came from my old computer, which had a CPU that was about twice as fast as recommended for 1.6 (similar single core performance):
The most extreme biome in TMCW, with huge trees up to 64 blocks tall, without Optifine, yet I didn't have any issues as long as I didn't use Fancy graphics, mainly because my GPU only had 256 MB of VRAM and it would run out (render distances above Normal also caused issues for the same reason):
By contrast, every version since 1.7 behaved like this, worsening after 1.8:
If you think that the above are bad, this is what happened when I went underwater in 1.8 - completely and utterly game-breaking (I'm definitely not one of those who thinks that e.g. 30 FPS is "good". The framerates shown above are highly misleading because the "pauses" every 10th frame for about half the time create very visible stuttering at 1/10 the frame rate):
These also don't show the biggest issue with newer versions - server performance; the average tick time for 1.6.4 was 8 ms while 1.8 was 71 ms (above the maximum of 50, so the server was falling behind):
Game load and world generation times are also far worse; particularly while developing mods I don't want to have to wait for the game to load or generate a new world, which takes only seconds with 1.6.4, even faster with TMCW despite the much more complex world generation (I made no optimizations to game startup but a few hundred additional textures only minimally affects load time):
18:15:00 - 2019-05-03 18:15:00 [SERVER] [INFO] Starting integrated minecraft server version 1.6.4
18:15:00 - 2019-05-03 18:15:00 [SERVER] [INFO] Generating keypair
18:15:00 - 2019-05-03 18:15:00 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing start region for level 0
18:15:01 - 2019-05-03 18:15:01 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing spawn area: 27%
18:15:02 - 2019-05-03 18:15:02 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing spawn area: 60%
18:15:03 - 2019-05-03 18:15:03 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing spawn area: 97%
18:15:03 - 2019-05-03 18:15:03 [SERVER] [INFO] TheMasterCaver[/127.0.0.1:0] logged in with entity id 25798 at (-115.5, 90.0, 249.5)
(even a "mega forest" biome only takes about twice as long to generate, and still much faster than 1.13)
Some examples of performance improvements; I've also significantly improved the time taken to render many other things (for example, vanilla fences cause huge lag spikes when updating a chunk with 16x16 fences, yet I get far less lag when updating an entire section of 16x16x16 (16x more) after optimizing them, as each block renders 40 times faster and they have proper culling of invisible faces, reducing the number per block from 30 to 20 when connected to blocks to the sides and top/bottom):
Time taken to render Fancy leaves:
17:56:58 - Took 2780 nanoseconds to render leaf block (vanilla)
17:56:58 - Took 2795 nanoseconds to render leaf block (vanilla)
17:56:59 - Took 2775 nanoseconds to render leaf block (vanilla)
17:57:00 - Took 626 nanoseconds to render leaf block (modded)
17:57:00 - Took 645 nanoseconds to render leaf block (modded)
17:57:01 - Took 625 nanoseconds to render leaf block (modded)
Time taken to render Fancy clouds (the optimized time is actually faster than "Fast" clouds in vanilla):
22:12:23 - Took 188486 nanoseconds to render vanilla clouds
22:12:29 - Took 188199 nanoseconds to render vanilla clouds
22:12:34 - Took 188571 nanoseconds to render vanilla clouds
22:12:50 - Took 16207 nanoseconds to render optimized clouds
22:12:55 - Took 17033 nanoseconds to render optimized clouds
22:13:00 - Took 16701 nanoseconds to render optimized clouds
Time taken per spawn cycle (optimized in part by slowing down the spawn attempts per chunk by a factor of 4; 25% of chunks can spawn mobs per cycle, with no effect on the ability to maintain the mob cap since it is still far beyond what is necessary, and a side effect of nerfing mob farms, which I've nerfed in many other ways because I don't thunk the game should be "Farmcraft"):
16:02:49 - Took 633764 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (vanilla)
16:03:39 - Took 633854 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (vanilla)
16:04:29 - Took 634061 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (vanilla)
16:05:19 - Took 122141 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (modded)
16:06:09 - Took 129139 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (modded)
16:06:59 - Took 124512 nanoseconds per spawn cycle (modded)
Time taken to generate caves (TMCWv5 is still slower than vanilla when the total time is considered but overall world generation is faster due to other optimizations, and TMCW is faster at carving out a given volume of caves):
And yes, all the unnecessary things Mojang is adding contribute to the problem (moreso because of how they rewrite the code as I've shown that you can add more content without degrading performance). Not to mention they seem to ignore long-standing bugs, while not fixing new ones as soon as they are reported so they pile up, some of them quite serious (like chunks swapping places, an issue which became much more common after 1.8 (the report mentions a full disk as a cause but that is not the cause in most of the cases I've seen reported, and this "resolution" may be why Mojang isn't paying much attention to it; at least they didn't mark a newer report as a duplicate, which also indicates that the issue may be even more serious in 1.14), possibly related to the way the client doesn't shut down the internal server properly when you quit a world, as I noted here - and which I fixed over 5 years ago).
Aside caves, I'm fairly content with what the game has now, other than the fact that my main survival is still in 1.12.2 because I can't port forward custom terrains. A lot has been improved and variety added. I'm a creative builder and map maker/player for a lot of it, and the things that've been added have greatly expanded the playability and creativity in maps now compared to walls of signs and mine cart tracks to take you 500 blocks away to the next area.
Eh, this topic arises every now and then. I mean, from my point of view I definitely think it lost its identity for a while. That is in no way masked frustration with Mojang trying to fix things that aren't broken whilst leaving things that are broken to rot whilst erasing the remaining character the game had.
Yep, i feel like with every new update Mojang just adds unnecessary stupid stuff that destroys the original reason why the game is so great in the first place. If they left the game in the beta days, i'm sure the game would be bigger than today.
Over time, something is going to change. It is inevitable. Were it to stay the same it may not have reached the popularity it has today. Though I'm still salty over the new textures and 1.4+ sounds. Nobody asked for them to change a legacy. There have been many improvements throughout the years. Lots of quality of life changes, some performance enhancements, and oh yeah: FIXED BOATS AND ACTUAL AQUATIC CONTENT. TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH MOJANG. Now get on Minecarts and reverting 1.7 biome and cave gen k thx.
Some agreed some disagreed. I still don't get what's going on in Mojang's head but they keep adding stuff and leaving the actual broken stuff as if they don't exist. However with the aquatic update, I think we deserve more. And yeah, cave updates to.
Out of genuine curiosity, as it varies from individual to individual, what are these sort of changes of which you speak? [Forget the 1.9 combat changes, those are almost universally detested in some form lol]
Yeah, 1.9 change is universally hated (which makes me wonder why Mojang haven't revert the change and why this dumb of a system only existed in Java edition of the game, hmmmm). Anyway, there are many changes i don't particularly like. I think things like the addition of new 'table' block from 1.14 (stonecutter, cartography table), shulker box, woodland mansion, basically everything after 1.8 update. (excluding fish mob)
Microsoft attempts to make Minecraft a 100 year game, and for that they must provide support and new "game changing" features.
Luckily, unlike bedrock- the legacy java edition has an advanced launcher that allows players to stick to old versions, and mod those for their liking. Additionaly, a big majority of Minecraft servers and modpack creators recommend sticking to versions like 1.8, and 1.10.
It entirely lost it's original integrity but at least we can somewhat get over it.
Let's just hope that the devs would actually listen to the community instead of following their stupid design philosophy
This sounds a lot like the Minecraft becoming more like modded Minecraft topic from a while ago.
The reason that they're adding these features is because the base of the game was being completed during Beta, and after release they were just building on it. Notch mentions in his blog around the time that 1.7B was released that the core to the game is finished and now they can add more features to it.
Maybe that could be the case of Minecraft becoming more "moddy". But i do think design integrity has more to do with authenticity, extreme depth, and many more things like the many features that perfectly exist without flaw during the beta days.
I giggle whenever I read of "performance enhancements" in newer versions - they are literally an order of magnitude worse than 1.6.4, not even including my own optimizations, which far offset the impact of added features:
Nearly 1000 FPS on 10 chunk render distance, with a server tick time of only 2.4 ms (5% of the maximum allowed) and only 353 MB allocated and 206 MB used (which only happened to be a bit higher since I'd gone to the Nether):
This is with maximum chunk updates enabled via Optifine (which itself only has a minor impact on performance compared to my own optimizations - in fact, I'm considering removing all support as it would make it a lot easier to add my own rendering code, as well as enable adding settings to adjust them, was Optifine's are all broken):
20 chunk render distance, still with a mere 512 MB of memory allocated (on a 32 bit OS) and only about half it it being used. This suggests that a lot of the memory usage seen above is simply garbage that the GC allows to pile up, starting memory use on lower render distances can be less than 100 MB (I still play on Normal/8 out of preference and because in-game maps only show a 128 block radius and generating more chunks than necessary is wasteful to me). Even at these settings it runs smoothly, including no server lag when generating new terrain (tick time is still only 4.3 ms, increasing to 10-20 when generating terrain):
In case you are wondering, some of my added features enhance the graphical quality of the game, such as smooth lighting for water - a Bedrock exclusive; smooth lighting in general was also fixed (vanilla has various graphical artifacts; MC-43968 and MC-138211):
For comparison, these are the recommended CPUs for 1.6 compared to the current minimum:
1.6 recommended; note that the Athlon 64 is a single-core CPU (the Pentium D is dual-core and is probably better since the game does run on two main threads, since 1.3.1):
Any claims of "performance fixes", such as those claimed in the 1.14.x patches, only partly offset the long-term trend. This is also one reason why I've never updated past 1.6.4:
These all came from my old computer, which had a CPU that was about twice as fast as recommended for 1.6 (similar single core performance):
The most extreme biome in TMCW, with huge trees up to 64 blocks tall, without Optifine, yet I didn't have any issues as long as I didn't use Fancy graphics, mainly because my GPU only had 256 MB of VRAM and it would run out (render distances above Normal also caused issues for the same reason):
By contrast, every version since 1.7 behaved like this, worsening after 1.8:
If you think that the above are bad, this is what happened when I went underwater in 1.8 - completely and utterly game-breaking (I'm definitely not one of those who thinks that e.g. 30 FPS is "good". The framerates shown above are highly misleading because the "pauses" every 10th frame for about half the time create very visible stuttering at 1/10 the frame rate):
These also don't show the biggest issue with newer versions - server performance; the average tick time for 1.6.4 was 8 ms while 1.8 was 71 ms (above the maximum of 50, so the server was falling behind):
Game load and world generation times are also far worse; particularly while developing mods I don't want to have to wait for the game to load or generate a new world, which takes only seconds with 1.6.4, even faster with TMCW despite the much more complex world generation (I made no optimizations to game startup but a few hundred additional textures only minimally affects load time):
(even a "mega forest" biome only takes about twice as long to generate, and still much faster than 1.13)
Some examples of performance improvements; I've also significantly improved the time taken to render many other things (for example, vanilla fences cause huge lag spikes when updating a chunk with 16x16 fences, yet I get far less lag when updating an entire section of 16x16x16 (16x more) after optimizing them, as each block renders 40 times faster and they have proper culling of invisible faces, reducing the number per block from 30 to 20 when connected to blocks to the sides and top/bottom):
And yes, all the unnecessary things Mojang is adding contribute to the problem (moreso because of how they rewrite the code as I've shown that you can add more content without degrading performance). Not to mention they seem to ignore long-standing bugs, while not fixing new ones as soon as they are reported so they pile up, some of them quite serious (like chunks swapping places, an issue which became much more common after 1.8 (the report mentions a full disk as a cause but that is not the cause in most of the cases I've seen reported, and this "resolution" may be why Mojang isn't paying much attention to it; at least they didn't mark a newer report as a duplicate, which also indicates that the issue may be even more serious in 1.14), possibly related to the way the client doesn't shut down the internal server properly when you quit a world, as I noted here - and which I fixed over 5 years ago).
Congratulation on strengthening my belief that Mojang does more harm to the game with more and more unnecessary updates. I guess all the bug fix and performance fix are actually just a roose so that the employee can still be fed by Micro$oft. Seems like people like you deserve the position at Mojang unlike the crazed SJW "worker" we currently have.
Congratulation on strengthening my belief that Mojang does more harm to the game with more and more unnecessary updates. I guess all the bug fix and performance fix are actually just a roose so that the employee can still be fed by Micro$oft. Seems like people like you deserve the position at Mojang unlike the crazed SJW "worker" we currently have.
there is SO much to unpack here like, the random microsoft conspiracy comment?? just throwing out dae hate the sjws at the end?? it's like you're making up crazy reasons to dislike some updates that can be essentially ignored entirely
Mid-air (& mid-water spawning) in 1.13 [not mentioning the general drift into social activism and playstyle coercion] and the Hero-O-Da-Village minigame grafted onto 1.14 would support an affirmative answer to the OP question.
MS/Mj also seems to have lost focus: simultaneously waging war on auto-farms (particularly the high-end designs) and changing mechanics in ways that increase the value to players that build such.
[As for 'performance improvement':
I will agree that each main version has performed better than its snapshots.
Comparing performance between main versions since at least ~1.10, the only metric where I see this claim being justified is in teh sales performance of the new boxes increasingly needed to run newer versions effectively… ]
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"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Your case hasn't lined up with any of the issues I've had. I used to run on what is now something close to a 15 year old work laptop running Win XP up to the early days of 1.9. I had lag problems post-1.8 but nowhere near as badly as whatever your machine is. Since my switch to a newer machine and OS both being pigeonholed for supposedly bad performance I notice a stark uptick in performance post-1.8. The chunks-swapping bug is extraordinarily rare at least in my experience, except for back in early 1.3 superflats.
Yep, i feel like with every new update Mojang just adds unnecessary stupid stuff that destroys the original reason why the game is so great in the first place. If they left the game in the beta days, i'm sure the game would be bigger than today.
Some agreed some disagreed. I still don't get what's going on in Mojang's head but they keep adding stuff and leaving the actual broken stuff as if they don't exist. However with the aquatic update, I think we deserve more. And yeah, cave updates to.
Yeah, 1.9 change is universally hated (which makes me wonder why Mojang haven't revert the change and why this dumb of a system only existed in Java edition of the game, hmmmm). Anyway, there are many changes i don't particularly like. I think things like the addition of new 'table' block from 1.14 (stonecutter, cartography table), shulker box, woodland mansion, basically everything after 1.8 update. (excluding fish mob)
Let's just hope that the devs would actually listen to the community instead of following their stupid design philosophy
Maybe that could be the case of Minecraft becoming more "moddy". But i do think design integrity has more to do with authenticity, extreme depth, and many more things like the many features that perfectly exist without flaw during the beta days.
Congratulation on strengthening my belief that Mojang does more harm to the game with more and more unnecessary updates. I guess all the bug fix and performance fix are actually just a roose so that the employee can still be fed by Micro$oft. Seems like people like you deserve the position at Mojang unlike the crazed SJW "worker" we currently have.
OOC what do you mean we deserve more in terms of the aquatic update? I'm happy it happened at all frankly. I remember wanting fish mobs badly ever since I first joined several years ago. Underground updates are a must-have, and if my memory serves me correct I believe there were some teasers for an update like that a while ago. Hopefully they still keep the general feel of the underground and build/expand upon it as opposed to making it a hassle. Though I suppose that depends on your personal definitions. As a Terraria player I'd be ecstatic to see underground jungles.
The combat system change is perplexing in that they did not provide a gamerule or an option to enable/disable it, especially given that Minecraft is known for being a highly customizable game. Shulker boxes are pretty darned cool IMO. I'm going on half-blind and have hardly done anything with 1.14 so I can't comment on there just yet.
Most certainly not. Microsoft has taken a back seat due to the contract (though I cannot see Mojang on their own adding micro-transactions at their own will). Bug/Performance issues are more up to developer's level of competence as opposed to trying to somehow siphon the greenbacks. And uh, for the record avoid dropping "SJW" out of nowhere, as that will in most places of discussion such as these forums discredit you and your arguments. Though indeed, have a large, strong, dedicated community and they can prove to be more fit and able for the job than the developer's themselves.
Aside caves, I'm fairly content with what the game has now, other than the fact that my main survival is still in 1.12.2 because I can't port forward custom terrains. A lot has been improved and variety added. I'm a creative builder and map maker/player for a lot of it, and the things that've been added have greatly expanded the playability and creativity in maps now compared to walls of signs and mine cart tracks to take you 500 blocks away to the next area.
There actually is a way to port custom terrain. It's a fairly complex workaround, but here you go:
It definitely is way different and has changed a lot, but honestly I'm okay with it. I've been playing and following minecraft since probably Alpha or Beta, and still play it to this day. I used to play it with my older brothers all the time and my cousins and the original versions of minecraft has its charm and will always have a special place to me, I'm happy with new features. When things change it brings something new and exciting to explore, now I think many of the texture changes and things like that were unnecessary and I'm kind of annoyed about that, but lots of the new additions are making the game just more fun and something new to try out that makes the game feel more fresh. Plus we can always go back and play in older versions.
I don't complain about the unnecessary updates. I just play 1.8. I was one of the original beta testers and I enjoy simplicity. 1.73beta, IMHO, was one of the best Minecrafts put out.
Given a miles-long version history, it's probably best not to boast about being one of the original beta testers...you guys missed a whole heck of a lot of stuff over the years, some of it only now just getting fixed.
I don't complain about the unnecessary updates. I just play 1.8. I was one of the original beta testers and I enjoy simplicity. 1.73beta, IMHO, was one of the best Minecrafts put out.
Marv
I think i can agree i really enjoyed 1.8 and still play on it if the server i try to join accepts it
For a while I was thinking that there needed to be more threads like this; all I could find were people disagreeing about 1.9's changes years after it passed, but no-one spoke about the game losing integrity with all of the new additions.
I do think that the recent additions do have some negative effects on gameplay. Particularly, I think the endgame items give endgame players a greater advantage, and also causes some players to hunt for them more than building houses or cool projects. Honestly, the totem of undying is basically a 1-up, shulker boxes are basically backpacks, and it's very hard to run from an endgame player with elytra. And as I've said in another thread, 1.13 and 1.14 overall feels like a modpack to me, which is not something I'd like to be the case with vanilla. I enjoy when extra modlike stuff is optional, but right now, you prettymuch have to play in 1.14 sometimes unless you want to be limited to a smaller range of servers.
I personally mainly just play multiplayer, and I'd say the game's integrity loss is larger there. There's a wide variety lot of server types, but I don't see very many of them resembling the classic survival gamemodes we used to have. Some are heavy on plugins (crates, holograms, lifeless NPCs that purely lead you to a GUI), some are about afking for powerful items through an economy, many are in 1.13 or 1.14 (which as I said, feels too modded to me), occasionally (but not always) there are landclaim servers where players might act as hermits in their invincible bases, not interacting much with you... I could probably go on about many types that are different from traditional survival, but you get the idea.
Now get on Minecarts and reverting 1.7 biome and cave gen k thx.
I know you put this in tiny text, but I agree with you about 1.7 and minecarts. 1.7 added a lot of new biomes, but I've noticed less unique and random terrain for the actual base generation. Minecarts are also an example of a fun and simple-feeling mechanic that they could fix and make useful again. Since 1.8 furnace minecarts can't travel in a north-south east-west direction different from when they started without being depowered, although I did make a server plugin that fixes this.
Given a miles-long version history, it's probably best not to boast about being one of the original beta testers...you guys missed a whole heck of a lot of stuff over the years, some of it only now just getting fixed.
I don't think he's boasting, rather simply stating this. Also, if anything, I'd think the beta testers have missed less than players who only joined in 2016... and being a beta tester doesn't mean you stopped playing entirely after beta. Not everything about veteran players has to be negative, you know.
Any game that has been under continual development for ten years is likely to evolve over time. And it's not unreasonable for the game to hit a sweet spot at some point in that evolution, before and after which you feel the game just isn't as good. There's also the issue of complacency. Playing a game for ten years means much of the mystery and joy of discovery is long, long gone. Pangs for versions past may be legit, but they may be closely tied to memories of discovering the game for the first time and not necessarily related to later changes.
I only began playing the game 7 months ago. Thus my first experience with Minecraft was with 1.13. I absolutely loved the experience and have been playing the game daily ever since. I am a much more experienced player now than then but even so I'm still discovering new things. And yet I already have that since of nostalgia for my very first days of game play. I can well remember running around the world without a map, or fighting a zombie for the first time, or finding diamonds for the first time only to watch them fall into lava.
For me, things like shipwrecks, cartographers and polar bears are all as much a part of the game as zombies, coal ore and horses. From my perspective, the current state of the game is well balanced and immensely replayable. I still have much to discover, (I've only just started venturing into the Nether and I have yet to cross the End Portal), and the fact that I can play millions of unique seeds promises much variety yet to experience.
Whether or not I'll still be playing the game in 10 years remains to be seen. I still fire up Fallout 2 from time to time and have been playing ADOM for 20 years, so it's quite possible. Certainly the game has the breadth to maintain that interest.
So, to answer the initial question: No, the game has not lost its integrity. I think Minecraft is quite an enjoyable in its current state, (stability issues with 1.14 changes aside).
For a while I was thinking that there needed to be more threads like this; all I could find were people disagreeing about 1.9's changes years after it passed, but no-one spoke about the game losing integrity with all of the new additions.
I do think that the recent additions do have some negative effects on gameplay. Particularly, I think the endgame items give endgame players a greater advantage, and also causes some players to hunt for them more than building houses or cool projects. Honestly, the totem of undying is basically a 1-up, shulker boxes are basically backpacks, and it's very hard to run from an endgame player with elytra. And as I've said in another thread, 1.13 and 1.14 overall feels like a modpack to me, which is not something I'd like to be the case with vanilla. I enjoy when extra modlike stuff is optional, but right now, you prettymuch have to play in 1.14 sometimes unless you want to be limited to a smaller range of servers.
I personally mainly just play multiplayer, and I'd say the game's integrity loss is larger there. There's a wide variety lot of server types, but I don't see very many of them resembling the classic survival gamemodes we used to have. Some are heavy on plugins (crates, holograms, lifeless NPCs that purely lead you to a GUI), some are about afking for powerful items through an economy, many are in 1.13 or 1.14 (which as I said, feels too modded to me), occasionally (but not always) there are landclaim servers where players might act as hermits in their invincible bases, not interacting much with you... I could probably go on about many types that are different from traditional survival, but you get the idea.
I know you put this in tiny text, but I agree with you about 1.7 and minecarts. 1.7 added a lot of new biomes, but I've noticed less unique and random terrain for the actual base generation. Minecarts are also an example of a fun and simple-feeling mechanic that they could fix and make useful again. Since 1.8 furnace minecarts can't travel in a north-south east-west direction different from when they started without being depowered, although I did make a server plugin that fixes this.
I agree here for the most part (not all).
The first paragraph brings up a very interesting point. There's been threads of varying sort, coming close to, but not touching on this subject specifically. I think it's because some have a hard time finding the words for it and merely come up with what is first on their mind with regards to it. Personally I've been questioning the integrity of Minecraft's game design for a while, yet, I didn't think about this subject specifically when it came to threads. I definitely believe the game overall has lost character and design integrity over time. Though the amounts of which can be debated.
I find it both funny and irritating how Mojang handles some things with multiplayer. Some things seem more intended for single player, whereas a respectable portion of the playerbase plays SMP instead, thus making the hunt for rare items in chests like Elytra a truly long and excruciating task on a decently populated server.
It is a shame how multiplayer has changed. I remember many new and creative game modes would be created, and things like free-build creative and more lax SMP servers were plentiful. Most of what you find is today skyblock, minigame, and faction servers. Finding servers like the ones in the old days is not an easy task.
Minecarts have bothered me for a long time. All I'd like to see if the ability to control furnace carts, and the ability to hook carts together to form trains. As carts exist right now, they are buggy and powercreeped to all heck by things such as horses. The 1.7 changes still make my blood boil. The same 5-6 biomes over and over... I'm going to end it there because I could rant on 1.7 for a while.
Minecarts have bothered me for a long time. All I'd like to see if the ability to control furnace carts, and the ability to hook carts together to form trains. As carts exist right now, they are buggy and powercreeped to all heck by things such as horses. The 1.7 changes still make my blood boil. The same 5-6 biomes over and over... I'm going to end it there because I could rant on 1.7 for a while.
They are still much better than horses and elytra for transportation between two fixed points, like my bases, since you don't need to control them, just get in and go, and horses require some terraforming if you want to ensure easy passage through many areas (my modded worlds make them particularly bad with more rugged terrain, proper rivers, and giant tree biomes); I've never used horses for anything other than trophies and have nearly 16 km of rail lines spanning most of a continent in my first world (material costs are irrelevant for me since I've collected 165 km of rails from mineshafts, never mind the half million iron I've mined, and enough gold to make over 100 times the powered rails I've used, and almost as much for the redstone blocks I use to power them; the rails are in 1x2 tunnels below the surface, which can be mined out pretty quickly, with more time spent if there is water):
Otherwise, all my transportation is going to and from where I left off from caving, with the return/exit points often widely separated so I'd have to walk quite far back to where I left my horse if I used them for this, and I don't have to do this that often, once every two play sessions in vanilla (the power of ender chests and mineral blocks, even when you regularly mine 3,000 ores per session. I've recently been playing on an old modded world where I used Fortune but ender chests have 54 slots and was able to spend 3 days caving despite collecting more than 18,000 resources and other items).
The majority of the distance I walk, around 17.5 km per play session, is while caving (assuming an average distance of 500 meters from a base to where I'm currently caving and a return trip every other session this means that only about 0.5 out of 17.5 km or 2.8% of the time spent walking is spent going back and forth, and walking 500 meters takes less than 2 minutes, say a very generous 4 to account for obstacles, which is less than 1.9% of an average play session; likewise, the 1090 km I've traveled by minecart in my first world has taken only about 1.1% of the total time I've spent playing at a speed of 8 m/s).
Yes, this is about 1.57 days spent just riding a minecart but it has been in short intervals over a long time (the longest round-trip time is about 15 minutes, which has steadily increased as I've gone further and further from spawn, but at the same time the area covered increases by the square of the distance. The time could also be cut by 8-fold if I used the Nether, where it is a lot easier to make a railway than other faster transportation, at least that exist in 1.6.4, which as far as I know is only horses as boats on ice (IMO a bug) may be specific to 1.9+ boats, not that I've ever tested it, and even that requires going out of my way to collect ice, while the materials for railways are a byproduct of caving.
(naturally, this shows much playstyle factors into whether minecarts, or anything else, are better and/or worth using; I know of people who have made iron farms to get the iron needed for a 1 km railway, which takes less than two hours of caving for fun for me to get, same for the gold needed for a few dozen powered rails)
The first paragraph brings up a very interesting point. There's been threads of varying sort, coming close to, but not touching on this subject specifically. I think it's because some have a hard time finding the words for it and merely come up with what is first on their mind with regards to it. Personally I've been questioning the integrity of Minecraft's game design for a while, yet, I didn't think about this subject specifically when it came to threads. I definitely believe the game overall has lost character and design integrity over time. Though the amounts of which can be debated.
I find it both funny and irritating how Mojang handles some things with multiplayer. Some things seem more intended for single player, whereas a respectable portion of the playerbase plays SMP instead, thus making the hunt for rare items in chests like Elytra a truly long and excruciating task on a decently populated server.
It is a shame how multiplayer has changed. I remember many new and creative game modes would be created, and things like free-build creative and more lax SMP servers were plentiful. Most of what you find is today skyblock, minigame, and faction servers. Finding servers like the ones in the old days is not an easy task.
Minecarts have bothered me for a long time. All I'd like to see if the ability to control furnace carts, and the ability to hook carts together to form trains. As carts exist right now, they are buggy and powercreeped to all heck by things such as horses. The 1.7 changes still make my blood boil. The same 5-6 biomes over and over... I'm going to end it there because I could rant on 1.7 for a while.
I think one of the main reasons SMP servers aren't as popular is that the game isn't as well balanced for multiplayer. People reach the "end game" too quickly and are too powerful at that point. There's a general lack of motivation to play the game after a certain point unless there are projects decided on ahead of time. While this may seem like one unavoidable element of a sandbox game, it shouldn't be for Minecraft; the game should motivate the player to play.
Back in the old days, Minecraft is a pretty simple game about exploring and building. And now, with more and more updates, Mojang added in more and more stuff that makes the game seems like another mainstream RPG. The game changes from a simple masterpiece to a complex cliche.
For me, in my opinion, the game became worsened. More and more complex unnecessary features are added in without much of a thought.
Back then it was a pretty simple game about building and mining and now its a convoluted rubbish.
Do Minecraft lost its original integrity?
Eh, this topic arises every now and then. I mean, from my point of view I definitely think it lost its identity for a while.
That is in no way masked frustration with Mojang trying to fix things that aren't broken whilst leaving things that are broken to rot whilst erasing the remaining character the game had.Over time, something is going to change. It is inevitable. Were it to stay the same it may not have reached the popularity it has today. Though I'm still salty over the new textures and 1.4+ sounds. Nobody asked for them to change a legacy. There have been many improvements throughout the years. Lots of quality of life changes, some performance enhancements, and oh yeah: FIXED BOATS AND ACTUAL AQUATIC CONTENT. TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH MOJANG. Now get on Minecarts and reverting 1.7 biome and cave gen k thx.
Out of genuine curiosity, as it varies from individual to individual, what are these sort of changes of which you speak? [Forget the 1.9 combat changes, those are almost universally detested in some form lol]
Figured it was time for a change.
Microsoft attempts to make Minecraft a 100 year game, and for that they must provide support and new "game changing" features.
Luckily, unlike bedrock- the legacy java edition has an advanced launcher that allows players to stick to old versions, and mod those for their liking. Additionaly, a big majority of Minecraft servers and modpack creators recommend sticking to versions like 1.8, and 1.10.
It entirely lost it's original integrity but at least we can somewhat get over it.
This sounds a lot like the Minecraft becoming more like modded Minecraft topic from a while ago.
The reason that they're adding these features is because the base of the game was being completed during Beta, and after release they were just building on it. Notch mentions in his blog around the time that 1.7B was released that the core to the game is finished and now they can add more features to it.
If you want to see my full profile just find the account named SharkMonster. Twitch won't unlock my account reeee
I giggle whenever I read of "performance enhancements" in newer versions - they are literally an order of magnitude worse than 1.6.4, not even including my own optimizations, which far offset the impact of added features:
This is with maximum chunk updates enabled via Optifine (which itself only has a minor impact on performance compared to my own optimizations - in fact, I'm considering removing all support as it would make it a lot easier to add my own rendering code, as well as enable adding settings to adjust them, was Optifine's are all broken):
20 chunk render distance, still with a mere 512 MB of memory allocated (on a 32 bit OS) and only about half it it being used. This suggests that a lot of the memory usage seen above is simply garbage that the GC allows to pile up, starting memory use on lower render distances can be less than 100 MB (I still play on Normal/8 out of preference and because in-game maps only show a 128 block radius and generating more chunks than necessary is wasteful to me). Even at these settings it runs smoothly, including no server lag when generating new terrain (tick time is still only 4.3 ms, increasing to 10-20 when generating terrain):
In case you are wondering, some of my added features enhance the graphical quality of the game, such as smooth lighting for water - a Bedrock exclusive; smooth lighting in general was also fixed (vanilla has various graphical artifacts; MC-43968 and MC-138211):
For comparison, these are the recommended CPUs for 1.6 compared to the current minimum:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130819173020/http://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-system-requirements
Current minimum:
https://help.mojang.com/customer/en/portal/articles/325948-minecraft-java-edition-system-requirements
Any claims of "performance fixes", such as those claimed in the 1.14.x patches, only partly offset the long-term trend. This is also one reason why I've never updated past 1.6.4:
The most extreme biome in TMCW, with huge trees up to 64 blocks tall, without Optifine, yet I didn't have any issues as long as I didn't use Fancy graphics, mainly because my GPU only had 256 MB of VRAM and it would run out (render distances above Normal also caused issues for the same reason):
By contrast, every version since 1.7 behaved like this, worsening after 1.8:
If you think that the above are bad, this is what happened when I went underwater in 1.8 - completely and utterly game-breaking (I'm definitely not one of those who thinks that e.g. 30 FPS is "good". The framerates shown above are highly misleading because the "pauses" every 10th frame for about half the time create very visible stuttering at 1/10 the frame rate):
These also don't show the biggest issue with newer versions - server performance; the average tick time for 1.6.4 was 8 ms while 1.8 was 71 ms (above the maximum of 50, so the server was falling behind):
Game load and world generation times are also far worse; particularly while developing mods I don't want to have to wait for the game to load or generate a new world, which takes only seconds with 1.6.4, even faster with TMCW despite the much more complex world generation (I made no optimizations to game startup but a few hundred additional textures only minimally affects load time):
(even a "mega forest" biome only takes about twice as long to generate, and still much faster than 1.13)
Some examples of performance improvements; I've also significantly improved the time taken to render many other things (for example, vanilla fences cause huge lag spikes when updating a chunk with 16x16 fences, yet I get far less lag when updating an entire section of 16x16x16 (16x more) after optimizing them, as each block renders 40 times faster and they have proper culling of invisible faces, reducing the number per block from 30 to 20 when connected to blocks to the sides and top/bottom):
And yes, all the unnecessary things Mojang is adding contribute to the problem (moreso because of how they rewrite the code as I've shown that you can add more content without degrading performance). Not to mention they seem to ignore long-standing bugs, while not fixing new ones as soon as they are reported so they pile up, some of them quite serious (like chunks swapping places, an issue which became much more common after 1.8 (the report mentions a full disk as a cause but that is not the cause in most of the cases I've seen reported, and this "resolution" may be why Mojang isn't paying much attention to it; at least they didn't mark a newer report as a duplicate, which also indicates that the issue may be even more serious in 1.14), possibly related to the way the client doesn't shut down the internal server properly when you quit a world, as I noted here - and which I fixed over 5 years ago).
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?
Aside caves, I'm fairly content with what the game has now, other than the fact that my main survival is still in 1.12.2 because I can't port forward custom terrains. A lot has been improved and variety added. I'm a creative builder and map maker/player for a lot of it, and the things that've been added have greatly expanded the playability and creativity in maps now compared to walls of signs and mine cart tracks to take you 500 blocks away to the next area.
Stay fluffy~
Yep, i feel like with every new update Mojang just adds unnecessary stupid stuff that destroys the original reason why the game is so great in the first place. If they left the game in the beta days, i'm sure the game would be bigger than today.
Some agreed some disagreed. I still don't get what's going on in Mojang's head but they keep adding stuff and leaving the actual broken stuff as if they don't exist. However with the aquatic update, I think we deserve more. And yeah, cave updates to.
Yeah, 1.9 change is universally hated (which makes me wonder why Mojang haven't revert the change and why this dumb of a system only existed in Java edition of the game, hmmmm). Anyway, there are many changes i don't particularly like. I think things like the addition of new 'table' block from 1.14 (stonecutter, cartography table), shulker box, woodland mansion, basically everything after 1.8 update. (excluding fish mob)
Let's just hope that the devs would actually listen to the community instead of following their stupid design philosophy
Maybe that could be the case of Minecraft becoming more "moddy". But i do think design integrity has more to do with authenticity, extreme depth, and many more things like the many features that perfectly exist without flaw during the beta days.
Congratulation on strengthening my belief that Mojang does more harm to the game with more and more unnecessary updates. I guess all the bug fix and performance fix are actually just a roose so that the employee can still be fed by Micro$oft. Seems like people like you deserve the position at Mojang unlike the crazed SJW "worker" we currently have.
there is SO much to unpack here like, the random microsoft conspiracy comment?? just throwing out dae hate the sjws at the end?? it's like you're making up crazy reasons to dislike some updates that can be essentially ignored entirely
Mid-air (& mid-water spawning) in 1.13 [not mentioning the general drift into social activism and playstyle coercion] and the Hero-O-Da-Village minigame grafted onto 1.14 would support an affirmative answer to the OP question.
MS/Mj also seems to have lost focus: simultaneously waging war on auto-farms (particularly the high-end designs) and changing mechanics in ways that increase the value to players that build such.
[As for 'performance improvement':
I will agree that each main version has performed better than its snapshots.
Comparing performance between main versions since at least ~1.10, the only metric where I see this claim being justified is in teh sales performance of the new boxes increasingly needed to run newer versions effectively… ]
Your case hasn't lined up with any of the issues I've had. I used to run on what is now something close to a 15 year old work laptop running Win XP up to the early days of 1.9. I had lag problems post-1.8 but nowhere near as badly as whatever your machine is. Since my switch to a newer machine and OS both being pigeonholed for supposedly bad performance I notice a stark uptick in performance post-1.8. The chunks-swapping bug is extraordinarily rare at least in my experience, except for back in early 1.3 superflats.
OOC what do you mean we deserve more in terms of the aquatic update? I'm happy it happened at all frankly. I remember wanting fish mobs badly ever since I first joined several years ago. Underground updates are a must-have, and if my memory serves me correct I believe there were some teasers for an update like that a while ago. Hopefully they still keep the general feel of the underground and build/expand upon it as opposed to making it a hassle. Though I suppose that depends on your personal definitions. As a Terraria player I'd be ecstatic to see underground jungles.
The combat system change is perplexing in that they did not provide a gamerule or an option to enable/disable it, especially given that Minecraft is known for being a highly customizable game. Shulker boxes are pretty darned cool IMO. I'm going on half-blind and have hardly done anything with 1.14 so I can't comment on there just yet.
Most certainly not. Microsoft has taken a back seat due to the contract (though I cannot see Mojang on their own adding micro-transactions at their own will). Bug/Performance issues are more up to developer's level of competence as opposed to trying to somehow siphon the greenbacks. And uh, for the record avoid dropping "SJW" out of nowhere, as that will in most places of discussion such as these forums discredit you and your arguments. Though indeed, have a large, strong, dedicated community and they can prove to be more fit and able for the job than the developer's themselves.
Figured it was time for a change.
There actually is a way to port custom terrain. It's a fairly complex workaround, but here you go:
It definitely is way different and has changed a lot, but honestly I'm okay with it. I've been playing and following minecraft since probably Alpha or Beta, and still play it to this day. I used to play it with my older brothers all the time and my cousins and the original versions of minecraft has its charm and will always have a special place to me, I'm happy with new features. When things change it brings something new and exciting to explore, now I think many of the texture changes and things like that were unnecessary and I'm kind of annoyed about that, but lots of the new additions are making the game just more fun and something new to try out that makes the game feel more fresh. Plus we can always go back and play in older versions.
I don't complain about the unnecessary updates. I just play 1.8. I was one of the original beta testers and I enjoy simplicity. 1.73beta, IMHO, was one of the best Minecrafts put out.
Marv
Given a miles-long version history, it's probably best not to boast about being one of the original beta testers...you guys missed a whole heck of a lot of stuff over the years, some of it only now just getting fixed.
I think i can agree i really enjoyed 1.8 and still play on it if the server i try to join accepts it
For a while I was thinking that there needed to be more threads like this; all I could find were people disagreeing about 1.9's changes years after it passed, but no-one spoke about the game losing integrity with all of the new additions.
I do think that the recent additions do have some negative effects on gameplay. Particularly, I think the endgame items give endgame players a greater advantage, and also causes some players to hunt for them more than building houses or cool projects. Honestly, the totem of undying is basically a 1-up, shulker boxes are basically backpacks, and it's very hard to run from an endgame player with elytra. And as I've said in another thread, 1.13 and 1.14 overall feels like a modpack to me, which is not something I'd like to be the case with vanilla. I enjoy when extra modlike stuff is optional, but right now, you prettymuch have to play in 1.14 sometimes unless you want to be limited to a smaller range of servers.
I personally mainly just play multiplayer, and I'd say the game's integrity loss is larger there. There's a wide variety lot of server types, but I don't see very many of them resembling the classic survival gamemodes we used to have. Some are heavy on plugins (crates, holograms, lifeless NPCs that purely lead you to a GUI), some are about afking for powerful items through an economy, many are in 1.13 or 1.14 (which as I said, feels too modded to me), occasionally (but not always) there are landclaim servers where players might act as hermits in their invincible bases, not interacting much with you... I could probably go on about many types that are different from traditional survival, but you get the idea.
I know you put this in tiny text, but I agree with you about 1.7 and minecarts. 1.7 added a lot of new biomes, but I've noticed less unique and random terrain for the actual base generation. Minecarts are also an example of a fun and simple-feeling mechanic that they could fix and make useful again. Since 1.8 furnace minecarts can't travel in a north-south east-west direction different from when they started without being depowered, although I did make a server plugin that fixes this.
I don't think he's boasting, rather simply stating this. Also, if anything, I'd think the beta testers have missed less than players who only joined in 2016... and being a beta tester doesn't mean you stopped playing entirely after beta. Not everything about veteran players has to be negative, you know.
Any game that has been under continual development for ten years is likely to evolve over time. And it's not unreasonable for the game to hit a sweet spot at some point in that evolution, before and after which you feel the game just isn't as good. There's also the issue of complacency. Playing a game for ten years means much of the mystery and joy of discovery is long, long gone. Pangs for versions past may be legit, but they may be closely tied to memories of discovering the game for the first time and not necessarily related to later changes.
I only began playing the game 7 months ago. Thus my first experience with Minecraft was with 1.13. I absolutely loved the experience and have been playing the game daily ever since. I am a much more experienced player now than then but even so I'm still discovering new things. And yet I already have that since of nostalgia for my very first days of game play. I can well remember running around the world without a map, or fighting a zombie for the first time, or finding diamonds for the first time only to watch them fall into lava.
For me, things like shipwrecks, cartographers and polar bears are all as much a part of the game as zombies, coal ore and horses. From my perspective, the current state of the game is well balanced and immensely replayable. I still have much to discover, (I've only just started venturing into the Nether and I have yet to cross the End Portal), and the fact that I can play millions of unique seeds promises much variety yet to experience.
Whether or not I'll still be playing the game in 10 years remains to be seen. I still fire up Fallout 2 from time to time and have been playing ADOM for 20 years, so it's quite possible. Certainly the game has the breadth to maintain that interest.
So, to answer the initial question: No, the game has not lost its integrity. I think Minecraft is quite an enjoyable in its current state, (stability issues with 1.14 changes aside).
I agree here for the most part (not all).
The first paragraph brings up a very interesting point. There's been threads of varying sort, coming close to, but not touching on this subject specifically. I think it's because some have a hard time finding the words for it and merely come up with what is first on their mind with regards to it. Personally I've been questioning the integrity of Minecraft's game design for a while, yet, I didn't think about this subject specifically when it came to threads. I definitely believe the game overall has lost character and design integrity over time. Though the amounts of which can be debated.
I find it both funny and irritating how Mojang handles some things with multiplayer. Some things seem more intended for single player, whereas a respectable portion of the playerbase plays SMP instead, thus making the hunt for rare items in chests like Elytra a truly long and excruciating task on a decently populated server.
It is a shame how multiplayer has changed. I remember many new and creative game modes would be created, and things like free-build creative and more lax SMP servers were plentiful. Most of what you find is today skyblock, minigame, and faction servers. Finding servers like the ones in the old days is not an easy task.
Minecarts have bothered me for a long time. All I'd like to see if the ability to control furnace carts, and the ability to hook carts together to form trains. As carts exist right now, they are buggy and powercreeped to all heck by things such as horses. The 1.7 changes still make my blood boil. The same 5-6 biomes over and over... I'm going to end it there because I could rant on 1.7 for a while.
Figured it was time for a change.
They are still much better than horses and elytra for transportation between two fixed points, like my bases, since you don't need to control them, just get in and go, and horses require some terraforming if you want to ensure easy passage through many areas (my modded worlds make them particularly bad with more rugged terrain, proper rivers, and giant tree biomes); I've never used horses for anything other than trophies and have nearly 16 km of rail lines spanning most of a continent in my first world (material costs are irrelevant for me since I've collected 165 km of rails from mineshafts, never mind the half million iron I've mined, and enough gold to make over 100 times the powered rails I've used, and almost as much for the redstone blocks I use to power them; the rails are in 1x2 tunnels below the surface, which can be mined out pretty quickly, with more time spent if there is water):
Otherwise, all my transportation is going to and from where I left off from caving, with the return/exit points often widely separated so I'd have to walk quite far back to where I left my horse if I used them for this, and I don't have to do this that often, once every two play sessions in vanilla (the power of ender chests and mineral blocks, even when you regularly mine 3,000 ores per session. I've recently been playing on an old modded world where I used Fortune but ender chests have 54 slots and was able to spend 3 days caving despite collecting more than 18,000 resources and other items).
The majority of the distance I walk, around 17.5 km per play session, is while caving (assuming an average distance of 500 meters from a base to where I'm currently caving and a return trip every other session this means that only about 0.5 out of 17.5 km or 2.8% of the time spent walking is spent going back and forth, and walking 500 meters takes less than 2 minutes, say a very generous 4 to account for obstacles, which is less than 1.9% of an average play session; likewise, the 1090 km I've traveled by minecart in my first world has taken only about 1.1% of the total time I've spent playing at a speed of 8 m/s).
Yes, this is about 1.57 days spent just riding a minecart but it has been in short intervals over a long time (the longest round-trip time is about 15 minutes, which has steadily increased as I've gone further and further from spawn, but at the same time the area covered increases by the square of the distance. The time could also be cut by 8-fold if I used the Nether, where it is a lot easier to make a railway than other faster transportation, at least that exist in 1.6.4, which as far as I know is only horses as boats on ice (IMO a bug) may be specific to 1.9+ boats, not that I've ever tested it, and even that requires going out of my way to collect ice, while the materials for railways are a byproduct of caving.
(naturally, this shows much playstyle factors into whether minecarts, or anything else, are better and/or worth using; I know of people who have made iron farms to get the iron needed for a 1 km railway, which takes less than two hours of caving for fun for me to get, same for the gold needed for a few dozen powered rails)
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?
I think one of the main reasons SMP servers aren't as popular is that the game isn't as well balanced for multiplayer. People reach the "end game" too quickly and are too powerful at that point. There's a general lack of motivation to play the game after a certain point unless there are projects decided on ahead of time. While this may seem like one unavoidable element of a sandbox game, it shouldn't be for Minecraft; the game should motivate the player to play.
Check out my suggestions! Here is one of them: