Thank you, it would be interesting to know what PC players think about it all. Has it proven to be popular? As Geneo stated earlier, it may sound cool in theory but end up being more troublesome than it's worth.
I think you'll find that the vast majority of PC got very used to playing on full-blown servers in the many years prior to Realms being introduced. For one thing, the extremely large worlds available on the PC lend themselves nicely to large servers where pockets of "friends" can play in their own little section of it without ever really encountering the perhaps 100s of other players on the server at all. It's really difficult to get a cooperative environment going among a hundred or so people in a world with only 864 x 864 x less than 128 blocks of resources to work with.
The Xbox Edition, on the other hand, lends itself better to more "intimate" play by very small groups of friends. It's designed to also lend itself to splitscreen play where that small group of friends is actually sitting in the same room. The Xbox is also an environment where there are larger numbers of younger children playing (and that demands more closely controlled play groups than on the PC). With respect to programming, the Xbox is also very much a "closed source" environment and the PC is "open source."
The biggest problems, as I've seen them, involve convincing people to accept and adapt their expectations to these two distinctly different play environments. Teens and young adults, in particular, really desired to be able to just program the Xbox Minecraft edition the same way they've enjoyed doing it on the PC and they also wanted to see large server environments available 24/7. Conversely, it was probably the implementation of Minecraft on the Xbox that, in part, created a demand on the PC for more tightly controlled, smaller group play among close friends as parents introduced to Minecraft on the Xbox also bought Minecraft PC Edition for their children).
I don't know whether either the PC or the Xbox edition can really handle both styles of play well. I am convinced that Mojang, 4J, Microsoft, and now Sony have been working together to give it a good, honest try. Certainly, the Xbox 360 Edition (and PS3 edition) is very limited because of limited and now essentially obsolete hardware that is just not readily expandable. The PC Edition, along with the Xbox One and PS4 Editions, certainly have a better chance of "bringing all the different fringes towards the middle" so to speak.
As has been stated, if you choose to share a world with your friends, the responsibility to maintain it and keep it healthy is spread among everyone. Choosing which friends can share ownership as well as using "Invite Only" and other in-game options would help prevent griefing to an extent. The world creator would be able to add/remove friends from the ownership list to help expand/protect the save integrity. I think having a backup option is nice but may add an unwanted level of complexity. If something goes bad, you can either deal with it or start over. That's the Minecraft way.
There's a lot to like about Realms, but I have a few qualms. Why should I pay $13/mo when our consoles work just fine as servers? One reason might be expanded world sizes and higher limits/restrictions. If a large portion of the heavy lifting is being done on a dedicated host, that frees up a lot of memory on my side. Restricting which players can join is a nice feature, but I don't think texture packs are supported. That's a bummer. If Realms were to support consoles, they'd likely have to set aside time/personnel to handle the development and upkeep... for each console.
Unfortunately, this is all hypothetical. I think persistent worlds would be a huge hit with the community, whether it be through shared saves, Realms, or some other avenue. It's a shame we don't have anything like it yet. I'm fairly sure a shared save system would work well -- the idea shares much of it's functionality with several online services (Dropbox, Google Apps, etc). If our consoles already function as the server, all we really need is a way to synchronize a save file across multiple clients. Not to mention simply hosting a file would be miles cheaper than using a dedicated host like Realms.
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I think you'll find that the vast majority of PC got very used to playing on full-blown servers in the many years prior to Realms being introduced. For one thing, the extremely large worlds available on the PC lend themselves nicely to large servers where pockets of "friends" can play in their own little section of it without ever really encountering the perhaps 100s of other players on the server at all. It's really difficult to get a cooperative environment going among a hundred or so people in a world with only 864 x 864 x less than 128 blocks of resources to work with.
The Xbox Edition, on the other hand, lends itself better to more "intimate" play by very small groups of friends. It's designed to also lend itself to splitscreen play where that small group of friends is actually sitting in the same room. The Xbox is also an environment where there are larger numbers of younger children playing (and that demands more closely controlled play groups than on the PC). With respect to programming, the Xbox is also very much a "closed source" environment and the PC is "open source."
The biggest problems, as I've seen them, involve convincing people to accept and adapt their expectations to these two distinctly different play environments. Teens and young adults, in particular, really desired to be able to just program the Xbox Minecraft edition the same way they've enjoyed doing it on the PC and they also wanted to see large server environments available 24/7. Conversely, it was probably the implementation of Minecraft on the Xbox that, in part, created a demand on the PC for more tightly controlled, smaller group play among close friends as parents introduced to Minecraft on the Xbox also bought Minecraft PC Edition for their children).
I don't know whether either the PC or the Xbox edition can really handle both styles of play well. I am convinced that Mojang, 4J, Microsoft, and now Sony have been working together to give it a good, honest try. Certainly, the Xbox 360 Edition (and PS3 edition) is very limited because of limited and now essentially obsolete hardware that is just not readily expandable. The PC Edition, along with the Xbox One and PS4 Editions, certainly have a better chance of "bringing all the different fringes towards the middle" so to speak.
There's a lot to like about Realms, but I have a few qualms. Why should I pay $13/mo when our consoles work just fine as servers? One reason might be expanded world sizes and higher limits/restrictions. If a large portion of the heavy lifting is being done on a dedicated host, that frees up a lot of memory on my side. Restricting which players can join is a nice feature, but I don't think texture packs are supported. That's a bummer. If Realms were to support consoles, they'd likely have to set aside time/personnel to handle the development and upkeep... for each console.
Unfortunately, this is all hypothetical. I think persistent worlds would be a huge hit with the community, whether it be through shared saves, Realms, or some other avenue. It's a shame we don't have anything like it yet. I'm fairly sure a shared save system would work well -- the idea shares much of it's functionality with several online services (Dropbox, Google Apps, etc). If our consoles already function as the server, all we really need is a way to synchronize a save file across multiple clients. Not to mention simply hosting a file would be miles cheaper than using a dedicated host like Realms.