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[Mackinz]

redstonevet90, on 30 January 2013 - 03:50 PM, said:

You still have to wait for the food to grow, or breed animals with wheat - which you needs time to grow. You cannot reasonably say that speeding up a process to the extent that you have a constant supply of instant food doesn't decrease difficulty. It defies all logic.

It doesn't. There isn't difficulty in waiting for food to grow, unless you actually don't have food, and the ability to breed animals doesn't get sped up significantly unless you think that the difference between breeding a bit immediately and breeding after your harvest really matters in the short or long term.

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You just mentioned an entire list of things that deplete your heath! Food heals you!

What?

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You might as well have no hunger bar at all, if you have a constant supply of food.

I fixed your argument by removing one word, and I agree. The hunger bar is more annoying than anything, and is not a source of difficulty in vanilla. But it does provide a tool for mapmakers to torment the players, so I think that it's fine.

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You can keep ignoring this point, but its going to get you nowhere. I'm tired of responding to these 1/2 baked arguments. I made this point pages ago.

Ignoring what point? That the hunger bar is more annoyance than difficulty? Because that isn't a point. It's an intentional part of the system in vanilla.

[Crowdit]

redstonevet90, on 30 January 2013 - 01:13 PM, said:

^This is a null point. It's not about the amount of clicks. It's completely about time.

Bonemeal is instant. If I had enough bones and 1 seed I could make an entire chest full of wheat in about 5 minutes. You can't get a chest full of wheat in 5 minutes with 1 seed by building a normal farm and waiting for it to grow so they can replant again and again until they are able to make a large harvest. You also mentioned having to automate your farm which takes even more time and more resources.

But bonemealing for five minutes is more time consuming than planting and harvesting normal farm, because you don't have to sit and wait for the wheat to grow. You can do something in the mean time. Something productive. Usually I harvest the wheat only when I need it and immediately replant. You save time by skipping the middle step of bonemealing and instead you mine or build or whatever.
Cost of setting up a farm (even automated) is negligible because it's a one time investment. We're talking about sustainable source of food. Initial setup is not really relevant.

[cecilhowe]

Mackinz, on 30 January 2013 - 03:40 PM, said:

Okay, let's go make the already-better-than-Bonemeal Wheat growth alternative harder to accomplish, and then we can finally add a false sense of difficulty to those who think that surviving in Minecraft should be "difficult". Farming wheat, without Bonemeal, leads to the same result: infinite wheat, enchanting, a fleet of rideable (lol) pigs and massive amounts of wool, and doesn't take nearly as long as you would think.

Bonemeal doesn't change anything in Vanilla. You can accomplish the breeding of Cows without ever touching Bonemeal, and it is the better alternative because you can go do other things in the meantime, so you're not changing the difficulty in breeding Cows, getting Leather, making Books, making Bookshelves, and enchanting until you actually nerf Wheat.

The end result is the same either way you spin it. You're not going to convince anyone that Bonemeal is OP when Wheat isn't hard to grow regardless, and food is incredibly easy to obtain regardless.

But why try hinder the process of making those things more difficult?  Without bonemeal those things aren't impossible, but it does make them much easier to accomplish.  If you want to make a giant sail for your boat, but don't want to play by the rules, there is creative mode.

MumblesMiner, on 30 January 2013 - 04:06 PM, said:

Redstone, yes food heals you but your missing one HUGE thing about this. Besides newbs (people who don't have jack ­ to begin with) EVERY SINGLE STINKING PERSON FROM ROYALTY, BANDITS, MERCHANTS, NOMADS, ARTISTS, TOWN GUARDS, HUNTERS, ABSOLUTELY ANYONE HAS THIS ABILITY TO HEAL PASSIVELY, AND WRITE OFF HUNGER ANYWAY.

This paragraph has no place in this debate.  It makes no sense.  There are no royalty, bandits, merchants, nomads, artists, town guards, and hunters in vanilla minecraft.  Furthermore, no one playing on a difficulty higher than peaceful will heal passively if they are hungry.  If there is some way to heal passively (meaning the player heals without doing anything) that I don't know about, I would like to know.

What's more; you keep using my current single player survival game to drive your arguments.  Stop it; it is an infirm way to further your point.  You make it seem as if I said that by the Bear Blood Dripping From The Beard Of My Ancestors I would never use bonemeal.  That is a lie, I only mentioned that in my current world I let my crops grow naturally.  I even admit to using bonemeal as means to get emeralds quick.  Something that shouldn't have been so easy.

Mackinz, on 30 January 2013 - 04:23 PM, said:

The hunger bar is more annoying than anything, and is not a source of difficulty in vanilla.

Which is a clear oversight!  Now they are fixing that! Hooray!

[Wanderer]

I think this is stupid.

Ten pages of arguing over the philosophical nuances of the usages and functions of various game aspects, countless perspectives of what the game is "meant" to be... Everyone trying to argue opinion as if it's fact. Pages and pages of people bickering endlessly and not one person has had their mind changed.

Fact is that everyone here can see "obvious" flaws in the other people's opinions. Because EVERY argument here is based on some level of subjectivity.

My opinion? I like BC_Programming's idea to make the bonemeal advance one growth stage but also work as an area-of-effect from where you apply it. Could be used to make some really cool tree-strangulation traps, too.

[cecilhowe]

Wanderer, on 30 January 2013 - 04:37 PM, said:

My opinion? I like BC_Programming's idea to make the bonemeal advance one growth stage but also work as an area-of-effect from where you apply it. Could be used to make some really cool tree-strangulation traps, too.

I agree with this, for sure!

[MumblesMiner]

cecilhowe, on 30 January 2013 - 04:33 PM, said:

This paragraph has no place in this debate.  It makes no sense.  There are no royalty, bandits, merchants, nomads, artists, town guards, and hunters in vanilla minecraft.  Furthermore, no one playing on a difficulty higher than peaceful will heal passively if they are hungry.  If there is someway to heal passively (meaning the player heals without doing anything) that I don't know about, I would like to know.

You are basing your dismisal on the WORDS Used. So let me rephrase it so you might actually get the point.

Besides people on their first couple days, NOBODY gets hungry without outright neglecting it. If you have a wheat farm bigger than 10 blocks, hunger is a non issue. This is what I meant by bandits / royalty and all that. If you have a self sufficient food source (Even a small farm, which damn near anyone whos not a new spawn has) Food is not an issue,  as you have more than you need. If you starve, its because you didn't put it into your inventory, or "forgot" to eat, letting your hunger drop to zero despite the fact you have food.

This has been my argument the whole time. If you have a farm, Food isn't something you worry about. You take what you need, eat what you need, and besides when your hunger drops 1/2 down, you don't even think about hunger.

The advantage between someone going for their first diamonds, and someone who has collected the ender egg when it comes to food is almost NOTHING, since neither party will starve.

This is what I mean. Now stop dancing around what I say, its getting old cecil.

[daft_rucks]

cecilhowe, on 30 January 2013 - 03:29 PM, said:

Lies.  Wheat leads to breeding which leads to enchanting, a fleet of rideable pigs, and massive amounts of wool.  Even for players with an endless amount of food wheat can be important to fighting, building, and exploring.

I'm not sure if you have difficulty with comprehension or not (a troll maybe – oh noes!), but as previous posts by myself and others have made completely clear, the amassing of a large wheat horde (to be used for whatever purpose) can be easily accomplished without bonemeal, and in fact using bonemeal doesn't offer much of an advantage, if any.
It might save a few minutes on the farm in some situations (which you have to balance against bonemeal collection – I bet you have a mob grinder for that eh?), but the cost in tedious grindy game play to use bonemeal (even with one click growing) for volume farming would far outweigh any advantages (for me at any rate).

The only difference I imagine is that (beside having to source the bonemeal to begin with) you spam a small number of soil blocks, planting, boning, growing and harvesting in an obviously artificial machine like way, whereas folk who have embraced the creation of a more realistic world actually plant fields and wait a little (working on their building projects in the interim).

Do people actually use bonemeal in the way Cecil thinks they do?  Is it fun? Does it need to be fun if it’s just a means to an end?  Is Cecil wasting his time or is he an agricultural genius? Anyone?

Anyway, if it does go to seven bonemeal clicks per wheat, then your farming method is screwed anyway, so you’d better be arguing against the change if you know what’s good for you.

So what will we have gained after the change?  I’ll farm naturally like I always did and get loads of easy wheat, but now, when I want wheat immediately for some localised purpose, I won’t have the luxury of instant growth without a click fest, and you’ll be boned (pardon the pun). Maybe the change is worth it just for that  ;-)

[Mackinz]

cecilhowe, on 30 January 2013 - 04:33 PM, said:

But why try hinder the process of making those things more difficult?  Without bonemeal those things aren't impossible, but it does make them much easier to accomplish.  If you want to make a giant sail for your boat, but don't want to play by the rules, there is creative mode.

Why hinder the process of making those things more difficult? Because you're not. You're making them more annoying.

It's like doing what GregTech does to IndustrialCraft. It makes creating things more annoying, not more difficult.

And then, there's the whole thing that vanilla Minecraft is not supposed to be hard.

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Which is a clear oversight!  Now they are fixing that! Hooray!

They haven't fixed:

Wheat
Carrots
Potatoes
Pumpkins
Melons
Pigs
Cows
Chickens
Villager Trading
Any source of food that is not listed

Oversight not corrected. Likely because it wasn't an oversight, and you are delusional in your quest for difficulty.

[Wanderer]

MumblesMiner, on 30 January 2013 - 04:42 PM, said:

You are basing your dismisal on the WORDS Used. So let me rephrase it so you might actually get the point.

Besides people on their first couple days, NOBODY gets hungry without outright neglecting it. If you have a wheat farm bigger than 10 blocks, hunger is a non issue. This is what I meant by bandits / royalty and all that. If you have a self sufficient food source (Even a small farm, which damn near anyone whos not a new spawn has) Food is not an issue,  as you have more than you need. If you starve, its because you didn't put it into your inventory, or "forgot" to eat, letting your hunger drop to zero despite the fact you have food.

This has been my argument the whole time. If you have a farm, Food isn't something you worry about. You take what you need, eat what you need, and besides when your hunger drops 1/2 down, you don't even think about hunger.

The advantage between someone going for their first diamonds, and someone who has collected the ender egg when it comes to food is almost NOTHING, since neither party will starve.

This is what I mean. Now stop dancing around what I say, its getting old cecil.

In that case: I disagree with food collection being so easy. It should be harder. Please debate this purely opinion statement with endless pages of repeated examples.

No one's dancing around what you're saying. They have a different opinion than you. It's like the abortion debate, but over something much more stupid and less significant. It's opinion.

The thing that is broken here is your logic circuit. Somehow you believe yourself to be the arbiter of which opinion is correct and incorrect.

"It should work like this because..."
You see, the problem is that everything after "because" is just an example. Just supporting evidence for an opinion. And the people on the other side think their evidence is better than your evidence, where you think the reverse.

What are you looking to get out of this? Does cecilhowe have to agree with your opinion before you will stop? Do you need some validation that your case is stronger? Because you both just keep repeating yourselves. For ten pages.

[MumblesMiner]

Wanderer, on 30 January 2013 - 04:53 PM, said:

In that case: I disagree with food collection being so easy. It should be harder. Please debate this purely opinion statement with endless pages of repeated examples.

No one's dancing around what you're saying. They have a different opinion than you. It's like the abortion debate, but over something much more stupid and less significant. It's opinion.

The thing that is broken here is your logic circuit. Somehow you believe yourself to be the arbiter of which opinion is correct and incorrect.

"It should work like this because..."
You see, the problem is that everything after "because" is just an example. Just supporting evidence for an opinion. And the people on the other side think their evidence is better than your evidence, where you think the reverse.

What are you looking to get out of this? Does cecilhowe have to agree with your opinion before you will stop? Do you need some validation that your case is stronger? Because you both just keep repeating yourselves. For ten pages.

So then what advantage in there in the short / mid term to having a gigantic surplus of food?

Also you guys HAVE been pretty dismissive, sometimes ignoring entire paragraphs of my posts.

Also, cecil, he said the hunger was ANNOYING. This does not make it any harder, especially for anyone with a full farm (since they do not need bone meal) It only makes it more ANNOYING for fresh spawns.

I'm bout to give up on this debate, since you guys have ignored nearly every single reason put forward so far. Its like trying to play chess with pigeons.

[daft_rucks]

Bottom line is, the bonemeal change is just annoying and has no merits.
It's poor design Mojang, so leave it alone and fiddle with something more worthwhile like ocean biome content or something.

Cheers.

[Wanderer]

MumblesMiner, on 30 January 2013 - 05:15 PM, said:

So then what advantage in there in the short / mid term to having a gigantic surplus of food?

Also you guys HAVE been pretty dismissive, sometimes ignoring entire paragraphs of my posts.

Also, cecil, he said the hunger was ANNOYING. This does not make it any harder, especially for anyone with a full farm (since they do not need bone meal) It only makes it more ANNOYING for fresh spawns.

I'm bout to give up on this debate, since you guys have ignored nearly every single reason put forward so far. Its like trying to play chess with pigeons.

Sorry, what did you say? Apologies... Ear infection.

Some people like this change. You seem to insist it's because they're already established and aren't just starting a new world. Do you mean to say that you believe none of us will start a new world from now on? Are you still on the first 5 days on your world? Do you think we only like this change because we want to make it harder for newbies? Do you think we're just fanboys who would blindly love any update from steam-power to mining lasers?

You missed my point.

Entirely.

We seem to "ignore" parts of your post because they CAN'T BE ARGUED. They are OPINION. You can't DEBATE AN OPINION. Now feel free to "give up on this debate". The pigeons won't mind. (How rude.)

[daft_rucks]

The real crime here is that Mojang choose to muck about with stuff like this, rather than fixing all the other half finished or bug ridden things in the game.

[Wanderer]

daft_rucks, on 30 January 2013 - 05:42 PM, said:

The real crime here is that Mojang choose to muck about with stuff like this, rather than fixing all the other half finished or bug ridden things in the game.

Get real. This change probably took like five minutes to code.

[Wanderer]

If you think your opinion is superior, voice it here.
http://www.minecraft...tions-the-poll/
Ordinarily I wouldn't promote a topic on another topic, but I believe I've found pretty much all of the sensible solutions posted on the forums for bonemeal (while it's being worked on anyway, you know). Some of the solutions are popular (including "Leave it alone from 1.4.7 to 1.5") and one of them I really like but hadn't gotten its own topic (Area-of-Effect bonemeal).

Might as well make it into a poll and see which one is most popular without having to read three ten+ page topics where people are just senselessly bickering.

[daft_rucks]

Wanderer, on 30 January 2013 - 05:43 PM, said:

Get real. This change probably took like five minutes to code.

Exactly, that's the problem.  Five minutes to code and no time spent on thinking about the wider impact.
Too much is being done with no sense of focus.
Oh look I can just fiddle with this for 5 minutes. Whoops broke something, nevermind, I'll just leave it and go break something else.

Yes this is a snapshot and things might change before the end, but if a bit of thought went into these changes to begin with, then no later adjustments would be needed.

Anyway, I think this change might well be the tip of a larger (but probably ill thought out) iceberg, but I still manitain that there's lots of other stuff that needs work, before doing things like this.

[MumblesMiner]

Wanderer, on 30 January 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

Sorry, what did you say? Apologies... Ear infection.

Exactly. Sums up you guys entirely.

And even with a check list, trying to identify WHAT you found was op, you ignored that too, as I was trying to identify what PRECISELY you saw as the problem.

MOST of you (redstone vet excluded) have been jerking us around this entire thread, ignoring / not reading well thought out responses, refusing to answer hot questions, and being rude on many many occasions.

As for the pigeon comment, You know what they say about playing chess with pigeons. No matter how good you are at chess, the pigeon will knock all the pieces over, crap on the board, and strut around like its victorious.

and whether or not this took 5 minutes to code or 5 hours(I know it wasn't this, shut up), WHATEVER amount of time this took, could of been spent say, working on something that wouldn't divide us so much (Like more potion options, even just being spawn-able in creative mode)

[redstonevet90]

This thread is once again off topic.

I'm not going to enter into a philosophical debate about what constitutes difficulty. Any reasonable person would agree that nerfing bonemeal increases the time it takes you to gather food which is necessary for survival. As a result you are forced to build and maintain an actual farm.

If none of you can admit that food is necessary for survival and that the bonemeal nerf forces you to construct a better farm, which takes time and effort, then we are clearly not going to get anywhere because you are unwilling to face reality.

[Wanderer]

MumblesMiner, on 30 January 2013 - 06:31 PM, said:

Exactly. Sums up you guys entirely.

And even with a check list, trying to identify WHAT you found was op, you ignored that too, as I was trying to identify what PRECISELY you saw as the problem.

MOST of you (redstone vet excluded) have been jerking us around this entire thread, ignoring / not reading well thought out responses, refusing to answer hot questions, and being rude on many many occasions.

As for the pigeon comment, You know what they say about playing chess with pigeons. No matter how good you are at chess, the pigeon will knock all the pieces over, crap on the board, and strut around like its victorious.

I haven't been here the whole thread. I'm coming in at the end and trying to explain why the argument is stupid. On both sides.

This isn't chess. This is opinionated minecrafters on an internet forum that have argued over the last ten pages over what is THE most INSIGNIFICANT change since bats.

I read the first two pages before I hopped to the last page. Feel free to convince me. I could care less whether they change it or leave it as it used to be (removing the dispenser functionality, of course). My ears are wide open as long as you cease the ad hominem garbage and act civilized.

redstonevet90, on 30 January 2013 - 06:40 PM, said:

I'm not going to enter into a philosophical debate with you about what constitutes difficulty. Any reasonable person would agree that nerfing bonemeal increases the time it takes you to gather food which is necessary for survival. As a result you are forced to build and maintain an actual farm.

If none of you can admit that food is necessary for survival and that the bonemeal nerf forces you to construct a better farm, which takes time and effort, then we are clearly not going to get anywhere because you are unwilling to face reality.

This is more or less an accurate summation. Might I ask (since I've ignored this thread until now) what you advocate in regards to the bonemeal change?

[MumblesMiner]

redstonevet90, on 30 January 2013 - 06:40 PM, said:

This thread is once again off topic.

I'm not going to enter into a philosophical debate about what constitutes difficulty. Any reasonable person would agree that nerfing bonemeal increases the time it takes you to gather food which is necessary for survival. As a result you are forced to build and maintain an actual farm.

If none of you can admit that food is necessary for survival and that the bonemeal nerf forces you to construct a better farm, which takes time and effort, then we are clearly not going to get anywhere because you are unwilling to face reality.

Again... AGAIN.... The "time" it takes to gather food is almost a non factor once you have a farm. If you have a farm, stores of food, getting food takes .5 seconds, going into a chest, grabbing a stack of bread / meat.

This only effects those without farms of reasonable size, whom already sometimes struggle (And depending how you define struggle, you could even say its ALWAYS a struggle)