If they really want Minecraft to be a "fun for all ages" sort of game, then the difficulty settings really need to actually mean something (which they honestly don't anymore).
It used to be that I could play Minecraft and show it to some of my more "non-gaming" friends, and have them be interested enough to say, "That looks neat, maybe I'd like to play that game." But if I showed it to them now, after one zombie-filled night of continuous hack-and-slash defense, they would respond with "No, that game looks too hard for me."
This new direction Minecraft is going in is killing the game for new players (especially casuals). And given that new players are Mojang's only source of revenue for Minecraft, they are totally shooting themselves in the foot with these changes. They are alienating the only people that are going to be giving them more money, while catering only to people that have already paid them. A 5-year-old could tell you that that's a monumentally stupid way to run a business.
I think again Minecraft should be zombie survival [it is now] I love Minecraft now. Zombies are the most common mob in the game, and now even more commoner.
I have no problem with people that want to play "zombie horde survival" in Minecraft.
What I do have a problem with is the developers forcing this on everyone that plays, since not everyone wants that. There are so many other things to do in the game that being forced to spend so much time just dealing with the mobs seems ridiculous to the rest of us. And it's not just zombies. The new skeleton AI, the new way food regen works (which, I actually like), etc. are all things that make the game less fun for people that DON'T want Minecraft to be "Super Monster Killer Extreme". Implementing all these new "difficulty" features without actually tying them to the difficulty settings is beyond idiotic, and I really hope Mojang realizes this soon.
Ya know of you want to play zombie survival there are some pretty cool servers out there, And... It was only my opinion.
Exactly. There's plenty of mods and modded servers available for the more veteran players that want stuff like this. They really didn't need to add this stuff in at all to the vanilla game, but even so, I wouldn't have had a problem with them adding it in anyway, had they just limited it to the Hard difficulty setting.
Yeah, I wouldn't mind a hard-only or a /gamerule solution to bridge the gap between now and when they get something like this going (assuming they do).
I like your ideas, but honestly, a "hard-only" or /gamerule solution is necessary regardless of what they may (or may not) do to improve this new feature.
There will always be beginners and casuals in Minecraft that don't want to be forced to play on peaceful, but don't want to deal with anything more difficult than what they've been used to forever. I realize that many people seem to want more challenge, but not everyone does. Until Mojang realizes this, and removes all of this additional "difficulty" (yes, it still belongs in sarcasm quotes) from at least the "Easy" setting, these changes will continue to cause beginners and casuals to abandon the game (or not update).
Pro tip for anyone that wants to post about a secret they found:
Unless the update came out less than 10 minutes ago, you can safely assume that someone else already figured out whatever it is you are going to post a topic about, posted it, and everyone else already knows.
Nope, still your fault that you crash. I haven't crashed more than a few times after the change. The reason being that I took the time to learn how to use them instead of wasting that time wishing for the old controls.
I took the time to learn how the new boat controls work. I can avoid crashing, and (for the most part) get the boat to go where I want it to.
And do you know what I've decided? The new boat controls still suck.
I actually ran a SMP server for several months a couple years ago. The server was professionally hosted, whitelisted, and we asked for applications for members to join. We were trying to make a 30+ year-olds server, so we were looking for players that were well above the average Minecraft player's age. We had no way of confirming our applicants' ages of course, but it turns out that it isn't terribly difficult to notice when you have an 11 year old that's trying to sound 30.
We had a great group of people for a while. Everyone played well together, helped each other out, built some nice things (which takes a good deal more effort on a survival server), and conversation was always clean, fun, and not immature. It was great. I paid for the hosting out of my own pocket, and didn't ever ask for donations.
I made sure there were nightly backups, and when there was our ONE "griefer" incident (one of our member's kids got onto the server and wrecked a few things), it was a fairly simple matter for me to MC-edit back in the damaged chunks from the last backup.
The server has since gone away. You know why? Lack of interest. Go figure.
Yes, most SMP servers are indeed horrible. But not all SMP servers are like this.
I'll attempt to address how to avoid your issues one-by-one:
"Laggy as crap."
Servers hosted professionally on a real server machine (not on someone's home PC) generally run fine.
"Horrible Staff"
Don't play on servers hosted by children (Hint: Most of the publicly advertised ones are.)
"If it's a small server, and staff play in PVP, they use mods and creative mode items."
Don't play on PvP servers, they are all like this.
"Hackers are always in the games."
Don't play on non-whitelisted servers, or servers that allow "offline mode" players.
"All advantages require donations. No servers should charge money, or even PROVIDE advantages. (I HATE PAY 2 WIN GAMES!)"
Well, this one I can't agree with you on. Any server worth a snot will be costing the admin real money to maintain, and it's within his rights to attempt to re-coup some of that money somehow. If you don't like it, don't play on those servers, but don't blame people for trying to make money off a a service they are paying for, and providing to you.
"Griefed to hell at start for about 3000 blocks."
See above. Don't play on non-whitelisted servers, or servers that allow "offline mode" players.
"Factions. I hate factions."
Many people like them. Don't play on a server with factions then.
What's next? Gatling ghasts? Teleporting slimes? Creepers immuned to anything weaker than an iron sword?
Dear god, man... don't give them any more ideas! (At least not until they realize they should only be screwing with the "Hard" difficulty, at which point, they can go crazy for all I care.)
Seriously? Why the heck are we forced to deal with these endless swarms of unstopable villager mauling zombies? It's stupid. We should have scaled difficulty, not Hard, with Easy and Normal being the same but with slightly less damage.
Because making crazy zombie AI is fun, and trying to figure out how to scale it to difficulty settings is boring. We all know that Mojang devs always prioritize working on things that are fun, over things that are boring (even if they are necessary).
They are also really good at only listening to the vocal minority of people that post on reddit, and not giving a crap about anyone else. Not that I can really blame them... I mean, have you read some of the things that are posted on these forums?
I honestly don't see any conflicts that can't be solved one way or another.
Stairs currently use up one entire Block ID each and Mojang might hesitate to add stained clay stairs (and potentially stained wood + stained wood stairs), because they would use up so many Block IDs. They probably don't want to hit the 255 so fast, which is were the Item IDs begin (they are currently at 173). But they could solve this using data values, similar to wooden logs, where they combined color and orientation in the data values.
So, in my opinion it's entirely possible to add those. It's just that Mojang would have to find a better solution to handle stairs and slabs for it.
I never said it wasn't possible, I said they were never going to do it.
And they can't solve it using data values as they did for wooden logs. At least not without changing how they work. Logs only have 4 colors and 3 possible orientations. That fits in the existing data value structure. Stained clay stairs would have 16 colors and 8 orientations. That doesn't fit.
"Mostly awesome, with some small amounts of stupid."
Finally fixing the broken lava decay rate (or lack thereof) is awesome.
The horses are admittedly cool (even though I thought they were stupid at first), and the little things like the coal blocks, hay bales, and carpets are very nice additions.
The crazy new AI for zombies and other mobs is great (for the people that wanted it), but should have only been implemented on the "Hard" difficulty setting (zombie apocalypses on Easy is stupid).
I know that the y coordinate doesn't matter when linking portals, however I didn't realize that it matters when searching for the nearest portal.
Not sure what you mean by "the y coordinate doesn't matter when 'linking portals'"... Portals don't actually "link" at all. What I mean is, there is no special code that tells the game "this portal goes to that one" etc. It's determined fresh every time someone uses one. In other words, every time anyone steps into a portal, the game actively searches for the closest already-lit portal to the corresponding coordinates in the other dimension. If it finds one, it puts the person there (and if not, it creates a new one at a nearby acceptable place).
It does this search every single time, even if no portals have moved since the last time. It doesn't "remember" which one it found last time or anything, so it doesn't "form a link" so to speak. It just searches every time, and the Y coordinate does matter when it's doing that search. The links I posted earlier explain this in more (and better) detail.
Nether portal linking works the same way on servers as it does in single-player. I can confirm this.
My guess is that it's one of two things:
1) There's a mod or something on your server that's screwing up the nether portal linking (unlikely, but possible).
2) You have some misunderstanding of how nether portals work (most probable).
If you know for certain that there's nothing actually broken with your server, then I'd suggest re-familiarizing yourself with the nether portal function to try to figure out what you are doing wrong.
You mentioned "moving it up to the ceiling"... keep in mind that when the game looks for the nearest portal, the Y coordinate actually is factored in, it's just not multipled/divided by 8 like X and Z are.
Please don't be insulted by this, as I don't mean it that way, but 99.999% of the time someone is having a problem linking portals, it's because they aren't doing it right.
Yes, it is illegal to charge money to enter a contest like this. They get around this the same way most sweepstakes do, by including the disclaimer (posted a few times now) that gives you a stupidly inconvenient way to enter for free.
Regardless, this is just an obvious cash-grab by curse to try to increase the number of (useless) paid memberships. For those outside the US that are bitching about not being able to enter, trust me, you aren't missing anything.
3
YES. THIS. SO MUCH THIS.
If they really want Minecraft to be a "fun for all ages" sort of game, then the difficulty settings really need to actually mean something (which they honestly don't anymore).
It used to be that I could play Minecraft and show it to some of my more "non-gaming" friends, and have them be interested enough to say, "That looks neat, maybe I'd like to play that game." But if I showed it to them now, after one zombie-filled night of continuous hack-and-slash defense, they would respond with "No, that game looks too hard for me."
This new direction Minecraft is going in is killing the game for new players (especially casuals). And given that new players are Mojang's only source of revenue for Minecraft, they are totally shooting themselves in the foot with these changes. They are alienating the only people that are going to be giving them more money, while catering only to people that have already paid them. A 5-year-old could tell you that that's a monumentally stupid way to run a business.
2
I have no problem with people that want to play "zombie horde survival" in Minecraft.
What I do have a problem with is the developers forcing this on everyone that plays, since not everyone wants that. There are so many other things to do in the game that being forced to spend so much time just dealing with the mobs seems ridiculous to the rest of us. And it's not just zombies. The new skeleton AI, the new way food regen works (which, I actually like), etc. are all things that make the game less fun for people that DON'T want Minecraft to be "Super Monster Killer Extreme". Implementing all these new "difficulty" features without actually tying them to the difficulty settings is beyond idiotic, and I really hope Mojang realizes this soon.
Exactly. There's plenty of mods and modded servers available for the more veteran players that want stuff like this. They really didn't need to add this stuff in at all to the vanilla game, but even so, I wouldn't have had a problem with them adding it in anyway, had they just limited it to the Hard difficulty setting.
5
There will always be beginners and casuals in Minecraft that don't want to be forced to play on peaceful, but don't want to deal with anything more difficult than what they've been used to forever. I realize that many people seem to want more challenge, but not everyone does. Until Mojang realizes this, and removes all of this additional "difficulty" (yes, it still belongs in sarcasm quotes) from at least the "Easy" setting, these changes will continue to cause beginners and casuals to abandon the game (or not update).
0
2
Unless the update came out less than 10 minutes ago, you can safely assume that someone else already figured out whatever it is you are going to post a topic about, posted it, and everyone else already knows.
16
And do you know what I've decided? The new boat controls still suck.
1
We had a great group of people for a while. Everyone played well together, helped each other out, built some nice things (which takes a good deal more effort on a survival server), and conversation was always clean, fun, and not immature. It was great. I paid for the hosting out of my own pocket, and didn't ever ask for donations.
I made sure there were nightly backups, and when there was our ONE "griefer" incident (one of our member's kids got onto the server and wrecked a few things), it was a fairly simple matter for me to MC-edit back in the damaged chunks from the last backup.
The server has since gone away. You know why? Lack of interest. Go figure.
0
I'll attempt to address how to avoid your issues one-by-one:
"Laggy as crap."
Servers hosted professionally on a real server machine (not on someone's home PC) generally run fine.
"Horrible Staff"
Don't play on servers hosted by children (Hint: Most of the publicly advertised ones are.)
"If it's a small server, and staff play in PVP, they use mods and creative mode items."
Don't play on PvP servers, they are all like this.
"Hackers are always in the games."
Don't play on non-whitelisted servers, or servers that allow "offline mode" players.
"All advantages require donations. No servers should charge money, or even PROVIDE advantages. (I HATE PAY 2 WIN GAMES!)"
Well, this one I can't agree with you on. Any server worth a snot will be costing the admin real money to maintain, and it's within his rights to attempt to re-coup some of that money somehow. If you don't like it, don't play on those servers, but don't blame people for trying to make money off a a service they are paying for, and providing to you.
"Griefed to hell at start for about 3000 blocks."
See above. Don't play on non-whitelisted servers, or servers that allow "offline mode" players.
"Factions. I hate factions."
Many people like them. Don't play on a server with factions then.
0
1
They are also really good at only listening to the vocal minority of people that post on reddit, and not giving a crap about anyone else. Not that I can really blame them... I mean, have you read some of the things that are posted on these forums?
0
And they can't solve it using data values as they did for wooden logs. At least not without changing how they work. Logs only have 4 colors and 3 possible orientations. That fits in the existing data value structure. Stained clay stairs would have 16 colors and 8 orientations. That doesn't fit.
0
0
"Mostly awesome, with some small amounts of stupid."
Finally fixing the broken lava decay rate (or lack thereof) is awesome.
The horses are admittedly cool (even though I thought they were stupid at first), and the little things like the coal blocks, hay bales, and carpets are very nice additions.
The crazy new AI for zombies and other mobs is great (for the people that wanted it), but should have only been implemented on the "Hard" difficulty setting (zombie apocalypses on Easy is stupid).
Oh, and the new boat controls are also stupid.
Well, you can't count that, since that's never going to happen, due to damage data value conflicts.
0
It does this search every single time, even if no portals have moved since the last time. It doesn't "remember" which one it found last time or anything, so it doesn't "form a link" so to speak. It just searches every time, and the Y coordinate does matter when it's doing that search. The links I posted earlier explain this in more (and better) detail.
0
My guess is that it's one of two things:
1) There's a mod or something on your server that's screwing up the nether portal linking (unlikely, but possible).
2) You have some misunderstanding of how nether portals work (most probable).
If you know for certain that there's nothing actually broken with your server, then I'd suggest re-familiarizing yourself with the nether portal function to try to figure out what you are doing wrong.
You mentioned "moving it up to the ceiling"... keep in mind that when the game looks for the nearest portal, the Y coordinate actually is factored in, it's just not multipled/divided by 8 like X and Z are.
The wiki explains it in great detail.
And there's a pretty decent guide on these forums as well.
Please don't be insulted by this, as I don't mean it that way, but 99.999% of the time someone is having a problem linking portals, it's because they aren't doing it right.