1) We save the centralized spawn points, min area differences, 'permanent death', and other fancy algorithms up to the discretion of the person running the server (i.e. code them in the game but allow each option to be manipulated and adjusted)
2) Leave spawns as completely random that you've already been to. This ensures fairness, in the sense that you may be anywhere that you've already been but not inside someone else's place just by pure randomness. This also ensures acceptable hardness because you can't possibly remember where you left your fortress last, and if you stumble upon it it will be a random moment of good fortune much alike in the RPG mode of DF.
Can't find your house after you died? Make a new one, chances are someone already found and plundered it.
And I know some of you will be saying "What if you live in a town and you died?" Here's a solution, if you're in an in-game clan, the clan leader can set up a respawning point in the town somewhere and all players would respawn a certain distance away from the respawn point.
The penalties for death are so severe, that not only would people be afraid of dying, they would be afraid of playing in the first place. You are not going to spend weeks working on a map if it can all be lost by a stroke of misfortune. Yes, the death penalty needs to be severe enough that you fear death, but too extreme is no good either. The "respawn someplace else" penalty is either meaningless or absolute, depending on if you expect them to get back to their stuff.
The "lose inventory" penalty is very scary at first, but once you've built up a stockpile of backup resources ,the sting is largely removed. A ban from the server is too extreme if permanent, and a timed more a meta-game annoyance than a good in-game penalty. If an invulnerability is placed on your stuff while you are logged out, which is practically required if you don't want to punish people for having a life, this penalty is even worse, since a raid on a base that kills the owner will render it invincible. There are ways around this, such as people already in the base when the owner logs out have a way around this invulnerability, which would be needed to curtail abusing the log-out.
A "resurrection sickness" that lasts for a minecraft day or two which slows your movement, mining speed, attacks, etc, will make death something to be strongly avoided. Couple this with the lose of your inventory, and death will be a serious setback, but it wouldn't make you lose all of your progress.
The key is to find a balance that encourages teamwork, without making people flee to single-player so they aren't making houses of cards.
If an invulnerability is placed on your stuff while you are logged out, which is practically required if you don't want to punish people for having a life, this penalty is even worse, since a raid on a base that kills the owner will render it invincible. There are ways around this, such as people already in the base when the owner logs out have a way around this invulnerability, which would be needed to curtail abusing the log-out.
Ohgodnotthisagain.
If you are so bent on building **** and mining without any sort of threats, and don't want to play survival, then why not just make a private server and only let trusted people on. It would solve ALL of your problems.
Well to get rid of the occasional DM'ing bastidon, and get rid of the cliff below the spawn and stuff,
The server should have an option:
Outside / Inside
Block Radius
If you have it set to inside, you become a crow to other players, and fly to a spot inside the sphere that you died in which has the radius of "block radius" and you can respawn once you touch ground and press spacebar, at this point. If you have it set to outside, you simply do the same, except in outside explored territory, causing a far-toggle.
As for items:
They should drop near your corpse, so you could have a friend nearby at all times, thus being able to fetch items for eachother, or kill that bastidon who annoys the crudap out of everyone (Commonly me) and has no friend, so is on his own, and take all his stuff. Split the profits 50-50 with your partner, and call it a day.
I never said I didn't want threats. Just the opposite, I want people to attack me on occasion, I want both freinds and foes. Leaving a castle unguarded for 2 weeks before I get around to it again is another matter. If anything you do in multi player is absolutely transitory, there is no point. There should be risks. You should have to defend your base. Having it vulnerable during the time when you are not on defeats all the point. If I mine 20 diamonds, and people are trying to raid them, I want to at least be present on the server to attempt to defend them. Of course, since you seem to think that nothing you do should last more than 10 minutes, I can see why you don't care if your stuff doesn't last. But most people want to achieve something. Why build a uber-fortress with your friends if it won't last?
Your approach only is valid if you intend a session of minecraft to be short-lived. But minecraft, by its nature, is suited to long, sprawling games that take place over time. This isn't a 10-minute Halo match, its a creative game. And yes, it can be a creative game without playing in creative. Just because your fortress is functional at fighting off the hoards of mobs doesn't mean you aren't going to spend time to make it awesome. It takes time to develop the really interesting aspects of the game; the minecart-filled mines that allow people to easily send resources back to their base don't spring up withing 10 minutes, they take time to develop. People need to play long enough to develop great things,
Your approach makes it impossible for the players to want to take risks. Why even try to build a castle over the pool of lava you found if any mistake means you fall into lava and lose it all? Why even try to fight the hoard of zombies instead of hiding inside if failing means you lose everything? Death needs to be undesirable, but going to the extreme makes it so that people will not take risks.
If an invulnerability is placed on your stuff while you are logged out, which is practically required if you don't want to punish people for having a life, this penalty is even worse, since a raid on a base that kills the owner will render it invincible. There are ways around this, such as people already in the base when the owner logs out have a way around this invulnerability, which would be needed to curtail abusing the log-out.
Ohgodnotthisagain.
If you are so bent on building **** and mining without any sort of threats, and don't want to play survival, then why not just make a private server and only let trusted people on. It would solve ALL of your problems.
We already have something like this.
It's called creative. And it's going to get all the ladders and metals and stuff soon enough, Notch said.
Your approach makes it impossible for the players to want to take risks. Why even try to build a castle over the pool of lava you found if any mistake means you fall into lava and lose it all? Why even try to fight the hoard of zombies instead of hiding inside if failing means you lose everything? Death needs to be undesirable, but going to the extreme makes it so that people will not take risks.
Yet your approach eliminates any risk in the game. If the only penalty for falling into a pool of lava while building a castle is losing some stone, then why not do it? If the worst that can happen from fighting a horde of zombies is losing a couple of items, then why hide inside?
My approach makes it undesirable for people to take risks, yes. But it makes them think about it. Do I really need to build my castle over a pool of lava? Do I really need to fight that horde of zombies? If the benefit outweighs the risk, then yes, you would do it. But your approach makes the risk so low that anything is worth doing, as long as you allocate resources properly.
SMP isn't just about building cool castles or having battles with others. It's about survival, that's why it is called SURVIVAL Multiplayer. And a key component of survival is risk assessment and strategy. Respawning nearby makes risk a trivial thing, and even strategy can be traded for just respawning, building another wooden sword, and running back into battle. IMO, everything would be a lot more interesting if you only got what will probably be your one and only change.
Your approach makes it impossible for the players to want to take risks. Why even try to build a castle over the pool of lava you found if any mistake means you fall into lava and lose it all? Why even try to fight the hoard of zombies instead of hiding inside if failing means you lose everything? Death needs to be undesirable, but going to the extreme makes it so that people will not take risks.
Yet your approach eliminates any risk in the game. If the only penalty for falling into a pool of lava while building a castle is losing some stone, then why not do it? If the worst that can happen from fighting a horde of zombies is losing a couple of items, then why hide inside?
My approach makes it undesirable for people to take risks, yes. But it makes them think about it. Do I really need to build my castle over a pool of lava? Do I really need to fight that horde of zombies? If the benefit outweighs the risk, then yes, you would do it. But your approach makes the risk so low that anything is worth doing, as long as you allocate resources properly.
SMP isn't just about building cool castles or having battles with others. It's about survival, that's why it is called SURVIVAL Multiplayer. And a key component of survival is risk assessment and strategy. Respawning nearby makes risk a trivial thing, and even strategy can be traded for just respawning, building another wooden sword, and running back into battle. IMO, everything would be a lot more interesting if you only got what will probably be your one and only change.
Ok, winning strategy: dig a deep hole, cover yourself in. Now you live forever. Sure there is no risk, but you are surviving. And you might as well, because if you try to do anything interesting, something will kill you, either the creeper sneaking up from behind, the treacherous backstabbing 'ally', or just a bad jump that leads to a long fall into lava. If the goal is to survive, that is the only strategy needed. Obviously there must be more than surviving. But building a base that only lasts till the next time you die means you only need to make the most minimalistic base possible, because anything more is a futile effort. In fact, why build a base at all? Just mine down, hoard all th iron you can, and make diamond equipment. Then you can stop mining, since that will just use up wood.
In order for survival to be meaningful, you need something to work towards while you survive. If anything you achieve will just be taken away from you, there is not motive to do anything. Yes, dieing needs a penalty. It needs to be undesirable, and make people put forth every effort to not die. But taking away the primary motivating force in the game is the completely wrong approach. People will not fear death, because they will not have anything they care about losing. Anything that they would be afraid to lose, they won't make, because then they WILL lose it. Such a style of play is good for nothing more than populating leader-boards and high score tables. If you think that is how it should be played, you are obviously missing out on the true potential of the game.
Yes, there could be, and perhaps even should be, game modes focused entirely on how long you can eek out an existence. PvP modes where you join two teams and duke it out, seeing who will survive the longest, or PvE modes where you and your allies try ot survive against the hoards of zombies, for instance. But these would be quick, self-contained games that are played through quickly. The full game mode should be so much more than that. Its not creative with the new elements; that would have no mobs, no health, no gathering, just more building materials. Nor should it be a simple race for survival, since that simply mimics 99% of other games out there and misses the full potential of minecraft. Minecraft is, at its heart, a game about development. You develop your mines, you develop your base, you develop your tools, and you do it in your own way. Nobody says you have to go mining and get iron; you are free to go exploring. Nothing says how you defend yourself; you can build a castle, and underground lair, submerge your base in lava, or any other crazy ideas that you come up with. There is no right way to play it, and there is no wrong way to play it. If you mandate that the primary goal is to never, ever die, then you are imposing a limitation on how they play. You are stating that anything you do that kills you is completely wrong, and a paranoid, scared way of playing is right. Why is the choice to go exploring wrong? Its not going to make you live the longest. How about the choice to build your castle on lava? It is a fun, interesting, and challenging thing to do, but you seem to think that is the wrong way to play. Why is the choice to live as a hermit or roaming trader wrong? Just because you are more likey to die doing it? Why is the choice to be a monster hunter invalid? If somebody wants to gather up high end armour and go around fighting mobs until they are overwhelmed, why should it be the wrong choice? Taking away everything you have accomplished upon death makes it so that 2 styles of play wor: the most survival-centric style of play, and the uncaring style where you develop nothing to lose, so you can die without losing.
The potential of minecraft is to develop a world together, with people of various play styles. Some people will band together and form cities, some people will choose to act as traders, others will live nomadic or solitary lives. The explorer will be able to find the castle suspended over lava, the trader might seek refuge with the loner for the night in order to protect his shipment. If anytime these people died, they had to start over, you will not develop an intersting world. You may argue that people die once and forever in real life, yet we still have countries and cities. The difference is the time scale. In minecrat, you live for a few hours, days ingame, before being killed; less, if fortune does not shine upon you. In real life, people live for decades. If you could honestly expect your character to live for minecraft years, then a full death penalty could work. But then the game would be easy since there is little moment-to moment risk.
The trick is just to not die. It really isn't that hard, I promise.
And as I said before, I'd be astonished if we didn't have options. You'll have your preference and I'll have mine, and in all likelyhood we'll rarely be playing on the same server. That keeps everyone happy. Stop trying to convince someone else of something that is not factual - it is an opinion - and has no point to someone who just doesn't prefer it.
The trick is just to not die. It really isn't that hard, I promise.
But sometimes arbitrary and random, and some things like building towers are kinda prone to death.
Quote from madk »
And as I said before, I'd be astonished if we didn't have options. You'll have your preference and I'll have mine, and in all likelyhood we'll rarely be playing on the same server. That keeps everyone happy. Stop trying to convince someone else of something that is not factual - it is an opinion - and has no point to someone who just doesn't prefer it.
Then why must we put up with your may as well be bans ********? This is an argument for the baseline, what Minecraft in Vanilla has it. You can have your deathservers if you with, why should we have to put up with the frustration of never having anything to achieve?
I've been following this game from the start, and I don't have any reason to believe combat will be anything more than a small aspect of the game. People argue over whether we should be fighting players or mobs when it probably won't be a combat-oriented game at all.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Survival" is a film/literature/video game genre about survival and self-sufficiency in the wild.
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase used to paraphrase natural selection.
Are you the kind of guy to build something out of lego and never take it apart again?
~~~
Quote from Dude »
Yeah, lets stand in an obscure hole and do nothing!
This is exciting and fun!
<string of expletives>
Stop sucking at Minecraft
Quote from Dude »
And? There's so many games that are built around these type of conflicts, with respawn times equal to about 15-30 seconds, they don't need a completely ludicrous respawn time.
These games are about combat, whereas combat is not the focal point of Minecraft.
edit see Lmaoboat's post right above this one
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I want to see forum posts saying "how do i kill dragon" with replies reading "lol"."
---> vede claimed Notch said this (and it is awesome).
The trick is just to not die. It really isn't that hard, I promise.
And as I said before, I'd be astonished if we didn't have options. You'll have your preference and I'll have mine, and in all likelyhood we'll rarely be playing on the same server. That keeps everyone happy. Stop trying to convince someone else of something that is not factual - it is an opinion - and has no point to someone who just doesn't prefer it.
Currently? No, its not really hard to survive. The mis-step near lava still happens. This does not mean that it will always be this easy; I would be greatly surprised if it was. As was pointed out earlier, Notch said he wanted to make the game harder, not easier. Insane death penalties just makes it annoying. I will gladly play a game where I die every 2 seconds on average, If my progress is saved every ten secodns I survive. With minecraft, you don't have any form of innate "level" that you can restart from with failure, so other setbacks need to be devised. Losing your current inventory makes a single mining expedition analagous to a level. You keep everything you have before it, and lose everything you gained on it. You also lose the equipment you brought with you, which is even more strict. Even if you minimize your loss by leaving most of your stuff in your base, and go out with tools, you are losing everything you did on that excersion. If you are going into battle, you will be using your best equipment. If its diamond, you just lost up to 26 diamond, if you had diamond sword+armour. This is a significant setback. If you only have iron, you are losing 26 iron, which is still a setback. The key is that whatever your best suff is, you are going to be using it(or else you might as well not have it), and hence will lose it. Hence, losing your entire inventory is always a setback unless you have chests full of diamond, and even then, youhave to net 26 diamond per death, or you will run out.
Granted, this may not be enough of a penalty, but a few additional aspects should round it out.
I don't want to play a game where anyone can be expected to survive. Everyone should die at some point. If I can expect to live fore 24 hours of playing without dying, its too easy. If you can't expect to survive, your system is sadistic. If I can, its too easy. Therefore, it cannot be a good idea for general play.
Quote from Duke 2.0 »
Quote from madk »
And as I said before, I'd be astonished if we didn't have options. You'll have your preference and I'll have mine, and in all likelyhood we'll rarely be playing on the same server. That keeps everyone happy. Stop trying to convince someone else of something that is not factual - it is an opinion - and has no point to someone who just doesn't prefer it.
Then why must we put up with your may as well be bans ********? This is an argument for the baseline, what Minecraft in Vanilla has it. You can have your deathservers if you with, why should we have to put up with the frustration of never having anything to achieve?
I agree with this fully. You can have a mode where endless swarms of creepers run at you for all I care, but it shouldn't be the norm. Establishing a reasonable baseline for death should not in any way resemble a ban or other negation of your entire work.
Quote from Droqen »
Hey, uh, Mystify:
Are you the kind of guy to build something out of lego and never take it apart again?
Not at all. But I am the kind of guy that will finish what I am making with it, and then play with it for a few weeks first. Building it is fun, and I want to finish. The further into it I get, the more interesting. I don't want to put the first 10 pieces together over and over, I want to build it. Once its built, I keep it around long enough to play with it, and get the enjoyment of out the end result. If its impressive, I want some time for people to see and admire it. Then, when I am done, I will make something completely different. I see the process through from start to finish. The perma-ban methods just cut the process short at placing the first few bricks.
Jesus Christ guys, this isn't a life-or-death situation.
*cymbals crash*
Anyways, I think I've reinforced this many times, and Duke 2.0 makes a nice point of it, but we're arguing for a base line here. And to be honest, the fairest baseline for me is total randomness. You lose your inventory and your bearings and you start over, or you can go looking for your castle all over again if you choose to, it'll just take some time.
Randomness is like the invisible hand of the market in capitalism; it's guaranteed to give no one an unfair advantage and to ensure everyone has the same level of hardship in a statistically consistent manner (i.e. the rare cases of extreme advantage/disadvantage are on the far ends of the bell-curve).
Jesus Christ guys, this isn't a life-or-death situation.
*cymbals crash*
Anyways, I think I've reinforced this many times, and Duke 2.0 makes a nice point of it, but we're arguing for a base line here. And to be honest, the fairest baseline for me is total randomness. You lose your inventory and your bearings and you start over, or you can go looking for your castle all over again if you choose to, it'll just take some time.
Randomness is like the invisible hand of the market in capitalism; it's guaranteed to give no one an unfair advantage and to ensure everyone has the same level of hardship in a statistically consistent manner (i.e. the rare cases of extreme advantage/disadvantage are on the far ends of the bell-curve).
Let's not end this Minecraft debate by starting an economics one.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Survival" is a film/literature/video game genre about survival and self-sufficiency in the wild.
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase used to paraphrase natural selection.
Vanishing from a server for an hour isn't going to result in all of your work being gone.
Anyway: just because a game is hard doesn't mean you have to die frequently. I do want to play a game where everyone can be expected to survive if they aren't stupid about it.
Just as the game is not focally about COMBAT, it is also not focally about DEATH. It is about SURVIVAL which in case you didn't know is the avoidance of death.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I want to see forum posts saying "how do i kill dragon" with replies reading "lol"."
---> vede claimed Notch said this (and it is awesome).
Let's not end this Minecraft debate by starting an economics one.
I'm making an analogy. Forget the economics part.
Mathematically speaking, randomness IS guaranteed (given a continuous real-valued random variable, in this case the distance from the player's build site (which is advantageous when minimized)) to produce a statistical normal distribution with 68.2% of the results being within 1 standard deviation of the mean. The size of the player's build site is negligible because 1) it is extremely small in comparison to the size of the maximum infdev map and 2) the mean build site will also be similarly negligible.
In other words;
Randomness is the statistically-best and most proven way of ensuring fairness in this situation.
Obelisks. You cant craft obelisks but if an admin agrees or if there is some other way to gain them into your inventory (probably one per town/city). You then place it and a cool looking obelisk similar to the ones in aion (http://www.asightline.com/uploadfile/20 ... 366113.bmp) appears at the location (1x1x3? perhaps 2x2x3?). You can 'subscribe' to an obelisk by right clicking a placed obelisk and a menu pops up. It has the obelisks name (set when you place it. eg. Lerks marsh obelisk.) followed by some information about the town. (set when you place it) so people know what they are getting into. They can then choose to bind your soul to it. This process takes 1-10 (how long guise???) min and it is announced to all ([Insert name] Is binding to [Obelisk name here] obelisk!) This alerts people from the same town that a possible enemy could be binding to the an obelisk that is not theirs. When you die there is two options there is 'Spawn at set obelisk' and a smaller button 'Respawn in respawn zone' The respawn zone will be the area you spawn in when you start (A random 100X100 area that is set for the whole game. admins may change the area if there is a building constructed on it or if its been owned by war.) The reason for the ability to go back there is if your town has been invaded and you get spawn killed continually. so you can mount an invasion force (hoo-hah!).
TL:DR: Thingys that you subscribe to that allow you to respawn.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
TAC: 1:3
"He who sees thy challenge shall be victorious."
Vanishing from a server for an hour isn't going to result in all of your work being gone.
Anyway: just because a game is hard doesn't mean you have to die frequently. I do want to play a game where everyone can be expected to survive if they aren't stupid about it.
Just as the game is not focally about COMBAT, it is also not focally about DEATH. It is about SURVIVAL which in case you didn't know is the avoidance of death.
If its not focally about death, then death can't have such a high weight.
If its about avoiding death, death needs to be likely enough that you have to avoid it. If you have to avoid it, you will fail to avoid it at some point. If you lose everything when you die, and you will die eventually, then you will lose everything eventually. If you will lose everything eventually, then there is no point in making anything not directly related to survival. If there is no point to making things not directly related to surviving, you are losing a large amount of minecrafts potential.
Therefore, if you lose everything when you die, and the game is about avoiding death, you are losing a large amount of minecrafts potential.
Quote from Imxset21 »
Quote from Lmaoboat »
Let's not end this Minecraft debate by starting an economics one.
I'm making an analogy. Forget the economics part.
Mathematically speaking, randomness IS guaranteed (given a continuous real-valued random variable, in this case the distance from the player's build site (which is advantageous when minimized)) to produce a statistical normal distribution with 68.2% of the results being within 1 standard deviation of the mean. The size of the player's build site is negligible because 1) it is extremely small in comparison to the size of the maximum infdev map and 2) the mean build site will also be similarly negligible.
In other words;
Randomness is the statistically-best and most proven way of ensuring fairness in this situation.
Fairness? Perhaps. If you have 2 kids and 2 cookies, it is equally fair to give them both a cookie, or to give neither a cookie. That doesn't mean that not giving them both a cookie is the best answer. Letting everyone keep their progress is just as fair as making everyone lose it. In fact, it is more fair, becuase then everyone keeps what they've earned, while if you take it away, the person who developed more loses more than the person with 2 sticks.
1) We save the centralized spawn points, min area differences, 'permanent death', and other fancy algorithms up to the discretion of the person running the server (i.e. code them in the game but allow each option to be manipulated and adjusted)
2) Leave spawns as completely random that you've already been to. This ensures fairness, in the sense that you may be anywhere that you've already been but not inside someone else's place just by pure randomness. This also ensures acceptable hardness because you can't possibly remember where you left your fortress last, and if you stumble upon it it will be a random moment of good fortune much alike in the RPG mode of DF.
Can't find your house after you died? Make a new one, chances are someone already found and plundered it.
And I know some of you will be saying "What if you live in a town and you died?" Here's a solution, if you're in an in-game clan, the clan leader can set up a respawning point in the town somewhere and all players would respawn a certain distance away from the respawn point.
.:pizarro:.
The "lose inventory" penalty is very scary at first, but once you've built up a stockpile of backup resources ,the sting is largely removed. A ban from the server is too extreme if permanent, and a timed more a meta-game annoyance than a good in-game penalty. If an invulnerability is placed on your stuff while you are logged out, which is practically required if you don't want to punish people for having a life, this penalty is even worse, since a raid on a base that kills the owner will render it invincible. There are ways around this, such as people already in the base when the owner logs out have a way around this invulnerability, which would be needed to curtail abusing the log-out.
A "resurrection sickness" that lasts for a minecraft day or two which slows your movement, mining speed, attacks, etc, will make death something to be strongly avoided. Couple this with the lose of your inventory, and death will be a serious setback, but it wouldn't make you lose all of your progress.
The key is to find a balance that encourages teamwork, without making people flee to single-player so they aren't making houses of cards.
Ohgodnotthisagain.
If you are so bent on building **** and mining without any sort of threats, and don't want to play survival, then why not just make a private server and only let trusted people on. It would solve ALL of your problems.
The server should have an option:
Outside / Inside
Block Radius
If you have it set to inside, you become a crow to other players, and fly to a spot inside the sphere that you died in which has the radius of "block radius" and you can respawn once you touch ground and press spacebar, at this point. If you have it set to outside, you simply do the same, except in outside explored territory, causing a far-toggle.
As for items:
They should drop near your corpse, so you could have a friend nearby at all times, thus being able to fetch items for eachother, or kill that bastidon who annoys the crudap out of everyone (Commonly me) and has no friend, so is on his own, and take all his stuff. Split the profits 50-50 with your partner, and call it a day.
Your approach only is valid if you intend a session of minecraft to be short-lived. But minecraft, by its nature, is suited to long, sprawling games that take place over time. This isn't a 10-minute Halo match, its a creative game. And yes, it can be a creative game without playing in creative. Just because your fortress is functional at fighting off the hoards of mobs doesn't mean you aren't going to spend time to make it awesome. It takes time to develop the really interesting aspects of the game; the minecart-filled mines that allow people to easily send resources back to their base don't spring up withing 10 minutes, they take time to develop. People need to play long enough to develop great things,
Your approach makes it impossible for the players to want to take risks. Why even try to build a castle over the pool of lava you found if any mistake means you fall into lava and lose it all? Why even try to fight the hoard of zombies instead of hiding inside if failing means you lose everything? Death needs to be undesirable, but going to the extreme makes it so that people will not take risks.
We already have something like this.
It's called creative. And it's going to get all the ladders and metals and stuff soon enough, Notch said.
Yet your approach eliminates any risk in the game. If the only penalty for falling into a pool of lava while building a castle is losing some stone, then why not do it? If the worst that can happen from fighting a horde of zombies is losing a couple of items, then why hide inside?
My approach makes it undesirable for people to take risks, yes. But it makes them think about it. Do I really need to build my castle over a pool of lava? Do I really need to fight that horde of zombies? If the benefit outweighs the risk, then yes, you would do it. But your approach makes the risk so low that anything is worth doing, as long as you allocate resources properly.
SMP isn't just about building cool castles or having battles with others. It's about survival, that's why it is called SURVIVAL Multiplayer. And a key component of survival is risk assessment and strategy. Respawning nearby makes risk a trivial thing, and even strategy can be traded for just respawning, building another wooden sword, and running back into battle. IMO, everything would be a lot more interesting if you only got what will probably be your one and only change.
Ok, winning strategy: dig a deep hole, cover yourself in. Now you live forever. Sure there is no risk, but you are surviving. And you might as well, because if you try to do anything interesting, something will kill you, either the creeper sneaking up from behind, the treacherous backstabbing 'ally', or just a bad jump that leads to a long fall into lava. If the goal is to survive, that is the only strategy needed. Obviously there must be more than surviving. But building a base that only lasts till the next time you die means you only need to make the most minimalistic base possible, because anything more is a futile effort. In fact, why build a base at all? Just mine down, hoard all th iron you can, and make diamond equipment. Then you can stop mining, since that will just use up wood.
In order for survival to be meaningful, you need something to work towards while you survive. If anything you achieve will just be taken away from you, there is not motive to do anything. Yes, dieing needs a penalty. It needs to be undesirable, and make people put forth every effort to not die. But taking away the primary motivating force in the game is the completely wrong approach. People will not fear death, because they will not have anything they care about losing. Anything that they would be afraid to lose, they won't make, because then they WILL lose it. Such a style of play is good for nothing more than populating leader-boards and high score tables. If you think that is how it should be played, you are obviously missing out on the true potential of the game.
Yes, there could be, and perhaps even should be, game modes focused entirely on how long you can eek out an existence. PvP modes where you join two teams and duke it out, seeing who will survive the longest, or PvE modes where you and your allies try ot survive against the hoards of zombies, for instance. But these would be quick, self-contained games that are played through quickly. The full game mode should be so much more than that. Its not creative with the new elements; that would have no mobs, no health, no gathering, just more building materials. Nor should it be a simple race for survival, since that simply mimics 99% of other games out there and misses the full potential of minecraft. Minecraft is, at its heart, a game about development. You develop your mines, you develop your base, you develop your tools, and you do it in your own way. Nobody says you have to go mining and get iron; you are free to go exploring. Nothing says how you defend yourself; you can build a castle, and underground lair, submerge your base in lava, or any other crazy ideas that you come up with. There is no right way to play it, and there is no wrong way to play it. If you mandate that the primary goal is to never, ever die, then you are imposing a limitation on how they play. You are stating that anything you do that kills you is completely wrong, and a paranoid, scared way of playing is right. Why is the choice to go exploring wrong? Its not going to make you live the longest. How about the choice to build your castle on lava? It is a fun, interesting, and challenging thing to do, but you seem to think that is the wrong way to play. Why is the choice to live as a hermit or roaming trader wrong? Just because you are more likey to die doing it? Why is the choice to be a monster hunter invalid? If somebody wants to gather up high end armour and go around fighting mobs until they are overwhelmed, why should it be the wrong choice? Taking away everything you have accomplished upon death makes it so that 2 styles of play wor: the most survival-centric style of play, and the uncaring style where you develop nothing to lose, so you can die without losing.
The potential of minecraft is to develop a world together, with people of various play styles. Some people will band together and form cities, some people will choose to act as traders, others will live nomadic or solitary lives. The explorer will be able to find the castle suspended over lava, the trader might seek refuge with the loner for the night in order to protect his shipment. If anytime these people died, they had to start over, you will not develop an intersting world. You may argue that people die once and forever in real life, yet we still have countries and cities. The difference is the time scale. In minecrat, you live for a few hours, days ingame, before being killed; less, if fortune does not shine upon you. In real life, people live for decades. If you could honestly expect your character to live for minecraft years, then a full death penalty could work. But then the game would be easy since there is little moment-to moment risk.
And as I said before, I'd be astonished if we didn't have options. You'll have your preference and I'll have mine, and in all likelyhood we'll rarely be playing on the same server. That keeps everyone happy. Stop trying to convince someone else of something that is not factual - it is an opinion - and has no point to someone who just doesn't prefer it.
But sometimes arbitrary and random, and some things like building towers are kinda prone to death.
Then why must we put up with your may as well be bans ********? This is an argument for the baseline, what Minecraft in Vanilla has it. You can have your deathservers if you with, why should we have to put up with the frustration of never having anything to achieve?
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase used to paraphrase natural selection.
Are you the kind of guy to build something out of lego and never take it apart again?
~~~
<string of expletives>
Stop sucking at Minecraft
These games are about combat, whereas combat is not the focal point of Minecraft.
edit see Lmaoboat's post right above this one
---> vede claimed Notch said this (and it is awesome).
Currently? No, its not really hard to survive. The mis-step near lava still happens. This does not mean that it will always be this easy; I would be greatly surprised if it was. As was pointed out earlier, Notch said he wanted to make the game harder, not easier. Insane death penalties just makes it annoying. I will gladly play a game where I die every 2 seconds on average, If my progress is saved every ten secodns I survive. With minecraft, you don't have any form of innate "level" that you can restart from with failure, so other setbacks need to be devised. Losing your current inventory makes a single mining expedition analagous to a level. You keep everything you have before it, and lose everything you gained on it. You also lose the equipment you brought with you, which is even more strict. Even if you minimize your loss by leaving most of your stuff in your base, and go out with tools, you are losing everything you did on that excersion. If you are going into battle, you will be using your best equipment. If its diamond, you just lost up to 26 diamond, if you had diamond sword+armour. This is a significant setback. If you only have iron, you are losing 26 iron, which is still a setback. The key is that whatever your best suff is, you are going to be using it(or else you might as well not have it), and hence will lose it. Hence, losing your entire inventory is always a setback unless you have chests full of diamond, and even then, youhave to net 26 diamond per death, or you will run out.
Granted, this may not be enough of a penalty, but a few additional aspects should round it out.
I don't want to play a game where anyone can be expected to survive. Everyone should die at some point. If I can expect to live fore 24 hours of playing without dying, its too easy. If you can't expect to survive, your system is sadistic. If I can, its too easy. Therefore, it cannot be a good idea for general play.
I agree with this fully. You can have a mode where endless swarms of creepers run at you for all I care, but it shouldn't be the norm. Establishing a reasonable baseline for death should not in any way resemble a ban or other negation of your entire work.
Not at all. But I am the kind of guy that will finish what I am making with it, and then play with it for a few weeks first. Building it is fun, and I want to finish. The further into it I get, the more interesting. I don't want to put the first 10 pieces together over and over, I want to build it. Once its built, I keep it around long enough to play with it, and get the enjoyment of out the end result. If its impressive, I want some time for people to see and admire it. Then, when I am done, I will make something completely different. I see the process through from start to finish. The perma-ban methods just cut the process short at placing the first few bricks.
*cymbals crash*
Anyways, I think I've reinforced this many times, and Duke 2.0 makes a nice point of it, but we're arguing for a base line here. And to be honest, the fairest baseline for me is total randomness. You lose your inventory and your bearings and you start over, or you can go looking for your castle all over again if you choose to, it'll just take some time.
Randomness is like the invisible hand of the market in capitalism; it's guaranteed to give no one an unfair advantage and to ensure everyone has the same level of hardship in a statistically consistent manner (i.e. the rare cases of extreme advantage/disadvantage are on the far ends of the bell-curve).
Let's not end this Minecraft debate by starting an economics one.
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase used to paraphrase natural selection.
Anyway: just because a game is hard doesn't mean you have to die frequently. I do want to play a game where everyone can be expected to survive if they aren't stupid about it.
Just as the game is not focally about COMBAT, it is also not focally about DEATH. It is about SURVIVAL which in case you didn't know is the avoidance of death.
---> vede claimed Notch said this (and it is awesome).
I'm making an analogy. Forget the economics part.
Mathematically speaking, randomness IS guaranteed (given a continuous real-valued random variable, in this case the distance from the player's build site (which is advantageous when minimized)) to produce a statistical normal distribution with 68.2% of the results being within 1 standard deviation of the mean. The size of the player's build site is negligible because 1) it is extremely small in comparison to the size of the maximum infdev map and 2) the mean build site will also be similarly negligible.
In other words;
Randomness is the statistically-best and most proven way of ensuring fairness in this situation.
TL:DR: Thingys that you subscribe to that allow you to respawn.
TAC: 1:3
"He who sees thy challenge shall be victorious."
If its not focally about death, then death can't have such a high weight.
If its about avoiding death, death needs to be likely enough that you have to avoid it. If you have to avoid it, you will fail to avoid it at some point. If you lose everything when you die, and you will die eventually, then you will lose everything eventually. If you will lose everything eventually, then there is no point in making anything not directly related to survival. If there is no point to making things not directly related to surviving, you are losing a large amount of minecrafts potential.
Therefore, if you lose everything when you die, and the game is about avoiding death, you are losing a large amount of minecrafts potential.
Fairness? Perhaps. If you have 2 kids and 2 cookies, it is equally fair to give them both a cookie, or to give neither a cookie. That doesn't mean that not giving them both a cookie is the best answer. Letting everyone keep their progress is just as fair as making everyone lose it. In fact, it is more fair, becuase then everyone keeps what they've earned, while if you take it away, the person who developed more loses more than the person with 2 sticks.