-Spawning algorithms that decrease spawn rate when an absurd amount of them die in a given area. This also hurts normal players. Killing mobs all the time near your base will make it artificially safe, making living there less exciting. It certainly doesn't HELP the game overall (??)
Spawning algorithms that detect that an absurd amount of mobs have died in the area, thus assigning it a cool down time, during which mobs will continue to spawn but at a much slower rate until the cool down period is over.
-Mobs that can destroy blocks. This would be super controversial, and would make the game really suck for a lot of people's playstyles. Anybody building creative architecture, but also wanting the challenge of mobs is out of luck now. I.e., probably the huge majority of all players. If you make it an option in the menu, fine, but then it doesn't stop mob farms...
Creepers used to explode on death, but I think it upset a lot of people.
-Better AI and pathfinding. To make AI good enough to see around corners four chunks away (where the actual hazard of the trap is) would require making AI absurdly strong, which would make normal play way too hard.
Maybe such as when they're near lava/cactus and in a water source, they try to move upstream.
-Changes to liquid physics. The only changes that would really matter for ALL mob traps would require making mobs or items not flow in water, which would definitely hurt the overall game. (no defensive moats, no vending machines, all sorts of cool stuff gone.)
Signs not holding up water and stopping flow. Notch didn't want this to happen in the first place, but he never figured out a way to make the water go through things.
-Lava burns signs. This would help overall (although not do much to stop mob farms)
It would stop lava mob farming. People would then move on to cactus and drowning traps, though.
First off, I support trunksbomb's poll, fair and clearly worded.
Now time to beat a dead horse. I feel that Minecraft is a core, if you will. The base game should have an abundance of simple game mechanics that can be combined and enlarged until you have something divergent from the core game, such as redstone "contraptions", cactus farms, and yes, mob traps. However, after release I feel there will be a huge amount of new game modifications, as diverse as they are plentiful. Removing part of the core can vastly decrease the potential for content later down the line. I will alway support something that uses simple game mechanics to make useful (or useless) builds. What I am saying is that regardless of how you feel about the balance of mob farms, think about the diversity the mechanics used to build them can make availible farther down the road.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from The Zephyr »
If he were so inclined, he could carry a Nimitz class supercarrier, but that'd take him two trips. That ranks about an eight on my scale, with Mars being a 9 and the Andromeda galaxy being nearly a 10.
No, this would eliminate at least 75% of the stuff available to newbies early on (sunlight kills, etc.)
I see absolutely no point to this statement, what do you get out of sunlight kills? Arrows you can make yourself? Bones that are already unbalanced because you should have to kill skeletons to get the ability to instantly grow trees(i'm sure a new player really need them either way.) Feathers? Because chickens aren't all over the place or anything.
Dunno about you but unless zombies start dropping diamonds i don't see this changing much to gameplay even for the greenest player.
Quote from smurfsahoy »
This also hurts normal players. Killing mobs all the time near your base will make it artificially safe, making living there less exciting. It certainly doesn't HELP the game overall (??)
More ignorance and lessening of the impact of math. You realize mob traps kill THOUSANDS of mobs per hour right? The algorithm could easily be designed for it to -slowly- wean off the mobs, no human player could possibly kill enough mobs for their spawn to be affected, even if the algorithm was set for a very very small amount of kills over a time period.
TL;DR: Humans can't kill enough to lower their spawn, mob traps would break in 10 minutes.
Quote from smurfsahoy »
Okay, this would be good overall.
-insert angel singing choir here for astonishment effect-
Quote from smurfsahoy »
This would be super controversial, and would make the game really suck for a lot of people's playstyles. Anybody building creative architecture, but also wanting the challenge of mobs is out of luck now. I.e., probably the huge majority of all players. If you make it an option in the menu, fine, but then it doesn't stop mob farms...
I'm not even gonna go into this one simply because it would require its own topic to explain the intricacies of, but just have it for the sake of discussion that it is a -possible- double whammy solution to how powerful mob farms are right now, were it implemented.
Quote from smurfsahoy »
To make AI good enough to see around corners four chunks away (where the actual hazard of the trap is) would require making AI absurdly strong, which would make normal play way too hard.
Again, ignorance, changing the AI doesn't have to mean completely stupid to insanely smart, it could easily be a balance between the two and still nerf the hell out of the crazy returns of mob traps currently.
Quote from smurfsahoy »
The only changes that would really matter for ALL mob traps would require making mobs or items not flow in water, which would definitely hurt the overall game. (no defensive moats, no vending machines, all sorts of cool stuff gone.)
Ignorance(sort of gets old saying that over and over) you keep assuming that changing one thing instantly is going to break every other, but for the sake of picking one item in particular, what about mobs not being dragged along by water, would be detrimental to the game? No comprende.
Mod edit: Please try to AVOID starting arguments. That probably means not repeatedly accusing other forum members of ignorance. Please be respectful from now on.
They're imbalanced in comparison to the rest of the game, and they don't work as a mechanic.
I'm still yet to see anyone explain this properly. If they were taking advantage of a limited resource, thus monopolising any market, I could see it as a problem, but the mechanic is available to everyone that plays the game, and monsters are an UNLIMITED resource. You just choose to "harvest" them in the most inefficient way.
If you don't like them, don't use them. If you're on a SMP server that allows their construction, find another server. Better yet, start your own and find like minded people that don't like them to join you on it, frequently check the map using cartograph to spot any suspicious constructions that might be a monster trap (eg. unusual water channels, strange lava configurations, strange sign positioning, et. al.) and swiftly destroy it with MC edit, then ban the culprit.
The whole "imbalance" argument is completely meaningless in a game like Minecraft.
But if a man wants to still play the rest of a game legit, but does not want to waste time killing millions of mobs?
Then let him.
It. Is. Not. Hurting. You. In. any. Way. Shape. Or. Form. You. Idoits. If. You. Hate. It. Don't. Do. It.
It's like saying "he is making money by using the internet, let's tax him more for not being productive!
I spent a week of real time building my tower. then a couple days figuring out the kill area. The items arent free.
Ok, so lets say you spend 2 weeks working on your mob trap. That's a fairly reasonable amount of time for a really big one. We'll assume you took 8 hours a day to build your trap.
Now, say your mob trap gives you 10,000 items an hour.
If you use the mob trap for one hour. Not including the time you sit at your trap, you've just invested 8 hours a day for 2 weeks, or 6,720 minutes into getting 10,000 items. You've gotten 1 item every .672 minutes, or roughly every 40 seconds.
Do you honestly expect to get an item every 40 seconds straight, until you have 10,000 items?
No.
Let's go a bit more.
Now when you use this trap a bit more.. say, you've used the trap for 2 hours total. You've gotten 20,000 items now, more than you'll ever need. You've gotten those 20,000 items at about 1 item per 20 seconds.
As you can see, the time spent per item will gradually decrease until it approaches 0. This my friend, is the problem. You're getting effectively infinite items for no time spent per item.
Quote from Armitige »
Quote from trunksbomb »
They're imbalanced in comparison to the rest of the game, and they don't work as a mechanic.
I'm still yet to see anyone explain this properly. If they were taking advantage of a limited resource, thus monopolising any market, I could see it as a problem, but the mechanic is available to everyone that plays the game, and monsters are an UNLIMITED resource. You just choose to "harvest" them in the most inefficient way.
If you don't like them, don't use them. If you're on a SMP server that allows their construction, find another server. Better yet, start your own and find like minded people that don't like them to join you on it, frequently check the map using cartograph to spot any suspicious constructions that might be a monster trap (eg. unusual water channels, strange lava configurations, strange sign positioning, et. al.) and swiftly destroy it with MC edit, then ban the culprit.
The whole "imbalance" argument is completely meaningless in a game like Minecraft.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
5/9/2010
Posts:
42
Member Details
No mob farm will ever give you 10,000 items an hour. Besides, if you are digging, you get items a whole lot faster (slightly more than 100x, assuming Dirt and a Diamond Shovel) than 1 item every 40 seconds, and I use Dirt/Cobblestone waaay more than I use feathers/string. Obviously digging is overpowered and an exploit, and needs to be removed ASAP.
No mob farm will ever give you 10,000 items an hour. Besides, if you are digging, you get items a whole lot faster than 1 item every 40 seconds, and I use Dirt/Cobblestone waaay more than I use feathers/string. Obviously digging is overpowered and an exploit, and needs to be removed ASAP.
Even so. 5000 per hour or whatever it is is still absurd. That would just halve my figures. Either way, the time spent per item will eventually decrease to near 0.
And you know what I mean by items, don't play smart. Mob drops, not dirt.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
5/9/2010
Posts:
42
Member Details
Quote from trunksbomb »
Quote from Woozl »
No mob farm will ever give you 10,000 items an hour. Besides, if you are digging, you get items a whole lot faster (slightly more than 100x, assuming Dirt and a Diamond Shovel) than 1 item every 40 seconds, and I use Dirt/Cobblestone waaay more than I use feathers/string. Obviously digging is overpowered and an exploit, and needs to be removed ASAP.
Even so. 5000 per hour or whatever it is is still absurd. That would just halve my figures. Either way, the time spent per item will eventually decrease to near 0.
And you know what I mean by items, don't play smart. Mob drops, not dirt.
Yes, I did know what you meant by items. Hence the edit. Additionally, the inventory only has room for something like 2560 items, so even with the 10,000 per hour you'd need to move things to a chest/make more chests every 15 minutes, which is fairly active for "idle play". Also, assuming you get equal numbers of all mobs, I'd only use 40% of the items I get, whereas with digging, I use 100% of the items I get.
I like how most of the people, even the naysayers, posting here seem to support a rebalance of mob traps atleast, and yet the poll shows a wide mark towards leaving them alone.
Nice to see people don't read for **** and just click a poll for their free items~
Two things
1. People aren't automatically wrong because they disagree with you. Your opinion is not the only one that matters
2. You can't discredit the results of the poll because the people posting in the subsequent thread are saying things contrary to the polls results. In my experience I've found that people who have opinions in the minority are the most vocal about it
1. People aren't automatically wrong because they disagree with you. Your opinion is not the only one that matters
Practice what you preach.
Quote from AwkwardWhale »
2. You can't discredit the results of the poll because the people posting in the subsequent thread are saying things contrary to the polls results. In my experience I've found that people who have opinions in the minority are the most vocal about it
I can make a poll asking if boosters are gonna be fixed, does that mean people are gonna vote yes(even though they are, based on what Notch has said.)
Polls are pretty much irrelevant to meaningful discussion, you could poll 100 white supremacists whether other races are equal to them, what do you think the results of that poll are gonna be?
If you know anything about marketing, polls require a big sample size to be effective, and they also need to be given about something that people aren't very opinionated about, like a product.
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
5/9/2010
Posts:
42
Member Details
2. You can't discredit the results of the poll because the people posting in the subsequent thread are saying things contrary to the polls results. In my experience I've found that people who have opinions in the minority are the most vocal about it.
This is the simplest phrasing of the truest statement it took me a long time to realize. If there was a rep-type function, you would be getting a lot of rep.
I find it unlikely anyones getting 17k after spawning was changed. And I built my tower my way I could have copied someone elses but I wanted it to be mine.
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE MOB TRAP DON'T USE IT!!!
end of discussion. Balance? Its a sandbox game where you can build anything for gods sake. Seriously, its not competitive or anything, about how much items you can get. If you want more items, build a large mob trap. If you don't want it to break the balance of the game, make a smaller one or don't make one at all. Who really cares if somebody else makes a mob trap, its not going to effect your game in anyway. Notch should not try to fix the spawning of mobs just to decrease the power of Mob Farms. That is just stupid and needless work. However, at the same time nobody should really complain if Notch changes spawning algorithms for some other purpose, which effects your mob trap in some way.
They're imbalanced in comparison to the rest of the game, and they don't work as a mechanic.
I'm still yet to see anyone explain this properly. If they were taking advantage of a limited resource, thus monopolising any market, I could see it as a problem, but the mechanic is available to everyone that plays the game, and monsters are an UNLIMITED resource. You just choose to "harvest" them in the most inefficient way.
If you don't like them, don't use them. If you're on a SMP server that allows their construction, find another server. Better yet, start your own and find like minded people that don't like them to join you on it, frequently check the map using cartograph to spot any suspicious constructions that might be a monster trap (eg. unusual water channels, strange lava configurations, strange sign positioning, et. al.) and swiftly destroy it with MC edit, then ban the culprit.
The whole "imbalance" argument is completely meaningless in a game like Minecraft.
Read above.
Doesn't explain how "they don't work as a mechanic" Whatever that means.
But I get it now. You basically want everyone to have to repeat a menial task over and over for a tiny reward because that's somehow more "fun". Do you work for Blizzard perhaps?
Minecraft has no economy as of yet. The survival element is over after about 3 hours of game play. String and arrows lose their value around the same time. Sulfur is used primarily for an item that has few practical uses in the game world. And you equate all that to equalling mob traps are "imbalanced". Perfectly logical.
But I get it now. You basically want everyone to have to repeat a menial task over and over for a tiny reward because that's somehow more "fun". Do you work for Blizzard perhaps?
I like how you use an example that is one, if not the richest gaming company in the world now, just because you personally think their games are grindy or some nonsense like that. Obviously they're doin' something right, mmk?
Quote from Armitige »
Minecraft has no economy as of yet. The survival element is over after about 3 hours of game play. String and arrows lose their value around the same time. Sulfur is used primarily for an item that has few practical uses in the game world. And you equate all that to equalling mob traps are "imbalanced". Perfectly logical.
I didn't know the mobs disappear after three hours, i thought you still had to face them if you go outside your little hobbit hole during the day. Again, you're using the "game is shitty so shitty mechanics are okay" example. We're talking about balance here, not whether or not you think something matters to be exploitable.
I'm just interested in why you think restricting building objects or using spawning algorithms to your advantage is so bad in a sandbox game as this. I'm not trying to insult you or anything. You just don't explain the key part of your discussion.
Spawning algorithms that detect that an absurd amount of mobs have died in the area, thus assigning it a cool down time, during which mobs will continue to spawn but at a much slower rate until the cool down period is over.
Creepers used to explode on death, but I think it upset a lot of people.
Maybe such as when they're near lava/cactus and in a water source, they try to move upstream.
Signs not holding up water and stopping flow. Notch didn't want this to happen in the first place, but he never figured out a way to make the water go through things.
It would stop lava mob farming. People would then move on to cactus and drowning traps, though.
Now time to beat a dead horse. I feel that Minecraft is a core, if you will. The base game should have an abundance of simple game mechanics that can be combined and enlarged until you have something divergent from the core game, such as redstone "contraptions", cactus farms, and yes, mob traps. However, after release I feel there will be a huge amount of new game modifications, as diverse as they are plentiful. Removing part of the core can vastly decrease the potential for content later down the line. I will alway support something that uses simple game mechanics to make useful (or useless) builds. What I am saying is that regardless of how you feel about the balance of mob farms, think about the diversity the mechanics used to build them can make availible farther down the road.
I see absolutely no point to this statement, what do you get out of sunlight kills? Arrows you can make yourself? Bones that are already unbalanced because you should have to kill skeletons to get the ability to instantly grow trees(i'm sure a new player really need them either way.) Feathers? Because chickens aren't all over the place or anything.
Dunno about you but unless zombies start dropping diamonds i don't see this changing much to gameplay even for the greenest player.
More ignorance and lessening of the impact of math. You realize mob traps kill THOUSANDS of mobs per hour right? The algorithm could easily be designed for it to -slowly- wean off the mobs, no human player could possibly kill enough mobs for their spawn to be affected, even if the algorithm was set for a very very small amount of kills over a time period.
TL;DR: Humans can't kill enough to lower their spawn, mob traps would break in 10 minutes.
-insert angel singing choir here for astonishment effect-
I'm not even gonna go into this one simply because it would require its own topic to explain the intricacies of, but just have it for the sake of discussion that it is a -possible- double whammy solution to how powerful mob farms are right now, were it implemented.
Again, ignorance, changing the AI doesn't have to mean completely stupid to insanely smart, it could easily be a balance between the two and still nerf the hell out of the crazy returns of mob traps currently.
Ignorance(sort of gets old saying that over and over) you keep assuming that changing one thing instantly is going to break every other, but for the sake of picking one item in particular, what about mobs not being dragged along by water, would be detrimental to the game? No comprende.
Mod edit: Please try to AVOID starting arguments. That probably means not repeatedly accusing other forum members of ignorance. Please be respectful from now on.
I'm still yet to see anyone explain this properly. If they were taking advantage of a limited resource, thus monopolising any market, I could see it as a problem, but the mechanic is available to everyone that plays the game, and monsters are an UNLIMITED resource. You just choose to "harvest" them in the most inefficient way.
If you don't like them, don't use them. If you're on a SMP server that allows their construction, find another server. Better yet, start your own and find like minded people that don't like them to join you on it, frequently check the map using cartograph to spot any suspicious constructions that might be a monster trap (eg. unusual water channels, strange lava configurations, strange sign positioning, et. al.) and swiftly destroy it with MC edit, then ban the culprit.
The whole "imbalance" argument is completely meaningless in a game like Minecraft.
But if a man wants to still play the rest of a game legit, but does not want to waste time killing millions of mobs?
Then let him.
It. Is. Not. Hurting. You. In. any. Way. Shape. Or. Form. You. Idoits. If. You. Hate. It. Don't. Do. It.
It's like saying "he is making money by using the internet, let's tax him more for not being productive!
Ok, so lets say you spend 2 weeks working on your mob trap. That's a fairly reasonable amount of time for a really big one. We'll assume you took 8 hours a day to build your trap.
Now, say your mob trap gives you 10,000 items an hour.
If you use the mob trap for one hour. Not including the time you sit at your trap, you've just invested 8 hours a day for 2 weeks, or 6,720 minutes into getting 10,000 items. You've gotten 1 item every .672 minutes, or roughly every 40 seconds.
Do you honestly expect to get an item every 40 seconds straight, until you have 10,000 items?
No.
Let's go a bit more.
Now when you use this trap a bit more.. say, you've used the trap for 2 hours total. You've gotten 20,000 items now, more than you'll ever need. You've gotten those 20,000 items at about 1 item per 20 seconds.
As you can see, the time spent per item will gradually decrease until it approaches 0. This my friend, is the problem. You're getting effectively infinite items for no time spent per item.
Read above.
Even so. 5000 per hour or whatever it is is still absurd. That would just halve my figures. Either way, the time spent per item will eventually decrease to near 0.
And you know what I mean by items, don't play smart. Mob drops, not dirt.
Yes, I did know what you meant by items. Hence the edit. Additionally, the inventory only has room for something like 2560 items, so even with the 10,000 per hour you'd need to move things to a chest/make more chests every 15 minutes, which is fairly active for "idle play". Also, assuming you get equal numbers of all mobs, I'd only use 40% of the items I get, whereas with digging, I use 100% of the items I get.
Two things
1. People aren't automatically wrong because they disagree with you. Your opinion is not the only one that matters
2. You can't discredit the results of the poll because the people posting in the subsequent thread are saying things contrary to the polls results. In my experience I've found that people who have opinions in the minority are the most vocal about it
There's a mob trap floating within the first few pages that has its item count at over 3 thousand per hour, one at 6 and one at 17k/hr.
You just built a crappy one.
Practice what you preach.
I can make a poll asking if boosters are gonna be fixed, does that mean people are gonna vote yes(even though they are, based on what Notch has said.)
Polls are pretty much irrelevant to meaningful discussion, you could poll 100 white supremacists whether other races are equal to them, what do you think the results of that poll are gonna be?
If you know anything about marketing, polls require a big sample size to be effective, and they also need to be given about something that people aren't very opinionated about, like a product.
This is the simplest phrasing of the truest statement it took me a long time to realize. If there was a rep-type function, you would be getting a lot of rep.
end of discussion. Balance? Its a sandbox game where you can build anything for gods sake. Seriously, its not competitive or anything, about how much items you can get. If you want more items, build a large mob trap. If you don't want it to break the balance of the game, make a smaller one or don't make one at all. Who really cares if somebody else makes a mob trap, its not going to effect your game in anyway. Notch should not try to fix the spawning of mobs just to decrease the power of Mob Farms. That is just stupid and needless work. However, at the same time nobody should really complain if Notch changes spawning algorithms for some other purpose, which effects your mob trap in some way.
Doesn't explain how "they don't work as a mechanic" Whatever that means.
But I get it now. You basically want everyone to have to repeat a menial task over and over for a tiny reward because that's somehow more "fun". Do you work for Blizzard perhaps?
Minecraft has no economy as of yet. The survival element is over after about 3 hours of game play. String and arrows lose their value around the same time. Sulfur is used primarily for an item that has few practical uses in the game world. And you equate all that to equalling mob traps are "imbalanced". Perfectly logical.
I like how you use an example that is one, if not the richest gaming company in the world now, just because you personally think their games are grindy or some nonsense like that. Obviously they're doin' something right, mmk?
I didn't know the mobs disappear after three hours, i thought you still had to face them if you go outside your little hobbit hole during the day. Again, you're using the "game is shitty so shitty mechanics are okay" example. We're talking about balance here, not whether or not you think something matters to be exploitable.