Quote from Princess_Garnet»
Wardens are blind, but in addition to hearing, they can smell you. So they may eventually discover you even if you are silent but nearby.
I personally find them insanely easy to avoid spawning once you understand the mechanics, and there's also many ways to easily avoid one even if you had spawned it. So I think they are a bit the opposite of how you're describing them. I personally wish there was more to them, as there's a lot of room for them to more fully live up their potential (this would mean making them "harder" though), but they're not outright failing at their intended goal of "being something that encourages avoiding it to begin with". So I say they're "fine-ish".
The part about being unable to get diamond because of wardens seems like a vast exaggeration though. You make it sound like a vast majority of diamonds in a given world are within the vicinity of potential warden spawn locations, when in reality it's by the opposite because the deep dark is a minority of the underground. If you find a place that is the deep dark, avoid it and the warden isn't a concern at all.
Branch mining (not strip mining) has commonly been more time efficient for finding diamonds throughout the history of the game. That was true before the deep dark and wardens were introduced to the game, and it's true now, so wardens don't have anything to do with branch mining being the path of least resistance. The same goes for farms. People have been taking these least paths of resistance since the early days. If one chooses to do those things and then complains the game is boring, well... that seems like a problem of their own creation to me. Nobody is forcing someone to do those things.
If people don't like farms then why are they even building them? doesn't make sense to me, they do something then complain that it makes the game boring, that is their own fault, as such, it doesn't give them the right to then punish players for using Villager trades for manually obtaining valuable resources over and over. Envy is not a good reason to nerf something, just as intentions don't justify stealing.
And as you said the Warden is easy to avoid, just don't go toward Deep Dark biomes or Ancient Cities and you will never encounter one, and as it is a minority of the underground sector, players have no excuse here, even if they were to be made harder, provided that they function as intended, which is to deter players from spawning one or going near biomes where they're likely to spawn, it's not a big deal.
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It depends...
I started playing Minecraft all the way back to 1.8, though 1.7.10 was the real version I played first but soon after there was the upgrade. And I / we kept playing but if you really want to enjoy something you should also take breaks. Though... the introduction of copper and the decrease of iron had a negative effect on the both of us and we kinda stopped playing for a long(er) time.
Before last December I think neither of us have played Minecraft intensively for well over 2 years!
Yet here we are... Last Holliday season I finally took a check off my bucket list and set up a (private) Forge LAN server, allowing my gf and me to both play modded Minecraft. As I hoped the modded part seriously refueled our interest in the game; we even expanded our custom collection of mods with a few more "modern" ones.
And we're still playing
1
Worst case scenario a repeating commandblock...
/execute if @e[type=minecraft:spider,distance=..20] run kill @s
Of course this may cause you some other issues such as drops now appearing around the structure. Well, that can be fixed as well if need to:
/execute if @e[type=minecraft:spider,distance=..20] run data merge entity @s {DeathLootTable:"minecraft/vex"}
Maybe this is a bit overkill but... it works. Oh: you need to use the second command before the first one, obviously. Hope this can help too!