I would rather have 10 creeper explosions in the heart of my base than lose the resources from a mining trip. It is so much less work to pick up after a creeper than to remine the resources. If anything in the game is an obstacle and waste of time, it is losing your inventory, not a creeper explosion. Again, I ask: What is so special about the blocks you placed that makes them more important than all the unplaced blocks in your inventory?
Actually, there is something you can do in multiplayer you can't do in singleplayer.
Logout at night. Whereever you are, whatever you are doing, you can log out when night falls, log back in 10 minutes later, and continue working, bypassing all danger without the need for so much as a bed or shelter
The only reason I "go on" about them is because I keep having to reply to people who are telling me that I'm wrong to be sick of the creeper, and that I shouldn't have the option of disabling them.
But that's not how game design works. it would be a nightmare trying to design a game that functions properly with any arbitrary subset of it's features. A few specific subsets, sure. But arbitrary options just expand on the number of interactions that could go wrong. Even something like a graphics option. Fancy or fast. That causes issues and disparities in gameplay all by itself. And you can't say you are only asking for one option. You obviosly feel very strongly about this one, but I've seen dozens of requests for options that people felt just as strongly about, which widely varying degrees of justification. Creepers as an optional feature has no more right to exist than many of those other options. A lot of optional features just turns the game into a shapeless blob.
As I was saying earlier,if an option is integrated into the game, it comes with the implication that it is fully supported. Every combination of those options should function smoothly. If they cannot guarantee that, there is a problem. Mojang is already starting to slip in this regard. More options would not help the matter. Mods will soon be fully supported, which should alleviate most of your concerns with using them. Mods allow people to access options without the associated implication that the game will function properly with out it.
For example, say gunpowder was given a greater purpose beyong TNT, something you would want to utilize. Exploding arrows, for instance. Suppose notch added the ability to combine arrows and gunpowder to make exploding arrows. He balances the game with the knowlege of the existence of gunpowder arrows in mind. If you play on peaceful, you can't access explosive arrows, but you probably don't need them either. However, if creeper's are toggleable, then explosive arrows become extremely rare. Your only source of gunpowder is ghasts, which possibly got disabled for destroying blocks, and even if they weren't, ghasts are not a practical source of gunpowder. Without explosive arrows, other aspects of the game may become much more difficult. Now Notch has to consider the disparity between explosive arrows and non-explosive arrows for everything he has to design. Or he may have to drop the idea of adding explosive arrows because people may be disabling creepers, and he wants to avoid all the trouble that will cause.
Trust me, bro, the notion that anyone hates the creepers always attracts pro-creeper people.
I think that's been made quite obvious.
People who dislike something are definitely not the most vocal, either.
If people who dislike things don't tend to be the most vocal, explain why this forum is coever in "Endermen will destroy everything" threads and not "I love notch" threads? The reason hating on creepers attracts pro-creeper people is because most people are pro-creeper, and hence are the people around. We are in the deep bowls of this thread. How would your statement's against creepers attract pro-creeper people? They are already here.
Not really, people who dislike the creeper tend to play on Survival less and are naturally going to have less interest in the "Adventure Update" than people who are gung-ho for nonsense like burrowing mobs and creeper explosions.
There have been plenty of people in this thread panicking about blocks being moved. The disparity cannot be that great.
For instance, all you need to do to get rid of creepers, to be honest, is slather everything with torches. It's cheap, and wouldn't take too long. However, that looks like ****, and isn't very fun. People choose not to do stuff like that, because they want to be able to build cool stuff.
For one, it stacks with death, you could say. Creeper explosions often mean death + maintenance, not just one.
Generally, if its an explosion someplace you cared about, you are not going to be far from spawn, unless you have a habit of building 5 minutes away from spawn and don't reset your spawn point with a bed. Now the death is 10 seconds of walking out your door, picking up things, and the crater is a minor concern. If you died far enough away that the travel time or lost items are an issue, the crater is not important. The crater is the only thing worrysome about death near your base.
In addition to that, creeper explosions often happen out of the blue, and are over before you really have a chance to do much about it. Again, they often bypass any chance of an enjoyable interaction, they simply leave you with a mess to clean up and sometimes just kill you before you can really react.
Death is caused by many things, but none are quite as prevalent or trollish. You generally know when lava is a prevalent danger. A skeleton's strike isn't overpowered, and the brunt of their attack isn't over in an instant. If you hear the thwack of an arrow, you get to engage them, have some enjoyable combat. Maybe you get swarmed, maybe they run you into a spider, but you still at least get a little adventure in there.
After the novelty wears off, you tend to get bored with always having to anticipate a creeper explosion.
You are really over-exagerating the prevalance of creeper stealth explosions. And the inabilty to counter them. It is fully possible to escape a creeper that has snuck up on you without explosions. Having the ever-present risk of creepers when you go out keeps things exciting. I've been playing for years, and they are the only thing that has remained exciting about combat. Killing zombies is nothing but a chore. I would rather have to clean up creeper explosions than fight zombies.
The way you go on about them, you would think this is the constant state of the world:
Singleplayer. If you are disabling mobs and such, that is your own problem. Multiplayer just gives you allies to help you. If one man against teh world is not survival, 5 people againstthe world is even less so.
What was the title of the thread? Creepers, Love VS Hate. Considering how fanatic pro-creeper people are, I'm surprised their vote tally wasn't higher.
Hate always attracts more vocal people than love does. Look at this thread. It has nothing to do with creepers, so it should represent as fair a sample as you can get on this forum for topics regarding creepers. Are 1/4 of them siding with you? No, there are a couple people who say that an option wouldn't be objectionable, and a lot of people saying they are fine. Where are these masses of anti-creeper people that should be backing you up?
If not counting people who are indifferent inflates the portion of people who dislike it, it also inflates the portion of people who do like it.
The issues wasn't how many people love them compared to how many people hate them. Your claim is that 25% of people hate creepers. If 50% of people where apathetic, then that would be 12.5% of people surveyed who dislike creepers. The indifferent masses can make a huge difference in the measurement of what percentage of people dislike a feature.
Okay, here is maybe your first valid point of this entire argument, and something I can find a little common ground with you on.
If we were talking about zombies knocking out doors or breaking glass, sure, that would be somewhat of an integration. The repair would not be structural, and would not reach the level of banal maintenance. Doors would simply dislodge, the only thing you would have to replace is glass, and would not nearly be the same amount of blocks as destroyed during a creeper explosion. I would be somewhat in support of zombie destruction. But a creature that does nothing but explode and leave large craters... no. That's not an integration. That level of damage is an impediment.
The problem with that, is all it does is make it stupid to have doors and windows. People would just go back to filling in their doorways with dirt. Creepers are integration because it creates a casual tie between your performance in combat and your creative works. And in return, enforces the tie between your constructions and the survival aspects.
Creepers completely ruin the balance. Time spent cleaning up after creepers is time not spent on an adventure, nor being creative. Take into account the fact that creepers not only dislodge blocks from the world, but also destroy them. Depending on where you are, what was just destroyed, what mats you have on you, and where your base is, it can turn into an ordeal that eats up way more game time than is worthy.
What is the impact of a creeper explosion:
A few lost blocks- you have lost some resources
Time spent on repairs - it takes a bit of time.
What is the impact of a normal death:
Lost resources - unless you died in immediate proximity to your base, it is fully possible for your resources to have despawned. This loses significantly more resources than any creeper explosion. Resources lost upon death are resources not spent on creativity.
Time spent returning- if you are not right outside your base, you have to spend a while travelling back. This can often be much more time spent than patching a creeper explosion. Time spent walking back to your corpse is also time not spent on adventure or creativity.
So what is so magical about a creeper explosion that makes it worse than death? Why is a block that happens to be on the ground so much more valuable than the same block in your inventory? That's like saying its fine if people pickpocket your wallet as long as they don't steal it off your dresser.
Because lava does not seek you out. Lava doesn't spawn in large numbers at night. Players on a multiplayer server don't attract lava in somebody's base and cause damage. Lava is slow, it does not fall off a ledge and spring upon you in an instant. Lava is inert unless you take action upon it. Lava is nothing like a mob.
My point is that there are things in the game with much more dire consequences than a creepr explosion.
Please stop bringing up moot points I've already covered, it's getting old. And please stop dedicating chapters to something that only takes a sentence to clarify.
Your posts arn't exactly a single sentence either.
Mystify, not every post you make needs to be a chapter in a novel.
Sorry if I have a lot to say, and like to adequately support my assertions. Other people seem to appreciate my posts, the only people who ever complain are the people I am arguing against.
Adventure mode and hunger do not make sense together. Adventure mode's primary distinguishing feature is a reduced or eliminated abilty to place and remove blocks. The goal of this is to allow for more contrained challenges. For instance, I have seen several maps with various challenges you have to accomplish. Right now, block manipulation make it trivial to bypass them. If you have everseen the yogscast, the pyramid is a basic example of this. A pool of lava, with stepping stones across. crossing it legitamately is a challenge. Bypassing it is dead simple. It is the reason redstone was added, to have a way to hook levers to doors. In adventure mode, an iron door truly is unpassable until you trigger it to open. This allows a lever to be a goal, and challenges to be put between you and it.
Now that you understand what adventure mode is intended to be, do you still think hunger makes sense with it?
Actually, yes it was. It was exactly my point. The only solution to playing without NPC griefing, as it stands, is to play on Peaceful. The whole point of my argument is that I want to enjoy the adventure aspect of the game, minus NPC griefing. It's an entirely reasonable request, and will in no way effect your game, so stop freaking out.
...that was a joke option. Of course people are going to be silly and select the "cookies" option.
In the "Creepers Love VS Hate" thread, there were two options: Love Them / Hate Them. Zero room for vote inaccuracy.
But there are many factors skewing those numbers. For one, people who don't like creepers are much more likely to go to a thread about disliking creepers and say they dislike people than your average player is to look at the thread in the first place. The two options also ignores the people who don't really care, thereby inflating the apparant portion of people who dislike it. All in all, everything about that is inflating the numbers.
The standardized gaming experience should balance adventure and creativity. There should be no one or the other. For somebody to ask that they have the option of disabling block-destroying-mobs in a -> s-a-n-d-b-o-x <- game is not unreasonable.
And the game is moving towards that balance. I disagree that creeper's ruin that balance. If there is no interaction between the adventuring and creative aspects, then you are just adventuring on the same map as you are creating. They need to intergrate. Its like playing monopoly in a child's sandbox. The superposition of the two element adds nothin to either, and in fact interferes with each other. Now you have this board in the middle of the sandbox, the board is getting all sandy, fake money is getting buried, and neither experience is enhanced. You have to blend the experience. Building hotels translates to sand castles. Make money holders in the sand. Obviously merging monopoly and a sandbox is a shaky metaphore, but you get the idea. You have to blend the aspects together. Mobs add design constraints to your buildings. spiders encourage ceilings or other anti-climbing defenses. skeletons encourage cover on rooftops. The spawning algorithm encourages you to light your roofs up. Creepers pose a threat to the buildings, making it so you have to protect what you ahve built. If you don't merge the elements, you don't have a cohesive game. Creepers are the biggest point of merging between the creative and survival aspects. It is exactly that aspect of them that you dislike, but that is why they are key.
I understand the value of the pure-sandbox aspect of the game. that is why we have creative and peaceful modes. No block destruction, just building. But when you go to easy or higher, you are saying you want the challenges. You want the obstacles to face against. You want mobs to make gathering resources more dangerous. You want risk, you want excitement. Only its too much risk for you. Why do you find it an accpetable risk to fall in lava and lose an hour's worth of work, or get killed by mobs and not be able to recover several stacks of stone, but it is not an acceptable risk to replace several blocks? It has a much lower cost in both time and resources. Walking back to my stuff after dying far from base is a bigger penalty than a crater in the yard or a hole in my wall. The only time it is otherwise is if you lost extremely rare blocks, like gold or diamond blocks, in which case it is your fault for putting them in a location with such risk.
Yes, 25% is a rather enormous minority, and we would greatly appreciate a little "disable" button for mob block destruction.
I really, really don't trust that number. It was from a forum poll, which is an extremely innacurate form of measurement, full of all kinds of skews and biases. And even if that is accurate, there are tons of other things that people want to be optional that get higher poll results. If 25% was sufficient to make a feature toggleable, EVERYTHING in the game would be toogglable.
do you really think 25% of people expect silverfish to be cookies?
Beyond that, there is the issue of standardizing the experience. Not to imply everyone should experience the same things, far from it, but when designing a game, you need to know the general context your addition will be in. Currently, there are 2 contexts: peaceful and non peaceful. That is fairly simple, and it is easy to see how things will impact both. Yet even with this simple paradigm, they falter in mantaining both. The biggest disparity is sticky pistons. I think you will agree that people playing on peaceful have every reason to want sticky pistons, and they can be a great tool for creativity. How do you get them? Slimeballs, which come from slimes, which are not on peaceful. So even now, the option of toggling mobs creates an unfortunate disparity in gameplay. The more options present, the more disparities arise. The more content added, the more oppurtunities for this options to cause problems. Putting in excessive options is not healthy for the game design. players can still utilize other optiosn with mods, but by doing so they are explicitly stepping outside the bounds of the game, and any issues that arise due to it are not the responsibility of the developer. However, if they developer provides those options, he is implying they are viable.
You do not have to start a new map to get the new content. Rumors stating otherwise were due to a communication error. You will have to explore new regions of the map, though.
Anyone who even remotely cares about building cool stuff, which is kind of the whole point of Minecraft, is doomed to spend time cleaning up after creepers. If creepers were perfectly simple and easy to avoid and never did any damage, there would be no reason for you to defend their right to be in the game. Either they're a threat or they're not. You can't have it both ways.
However, I'm not suggesting to get rid of them. I just want the ability to turn block destroying mobs off. It ruins the balance of the game for myself and a lot of other players.
Creepers are perfectly simple and easy to avoid. You just have to do it. I build cool things. I play with mobs. Creepers are not a problem. Any damage they inflict is minor, and can often be turned into an asset. They often encourage me to build better designs. They are a threat. They occasionally cause damage. That is the point. If there is nothing on the line, it doesn't matter. When you have something to lose, the fight is much more important. It is the reason games become boring if you turn on invincibility. Its fun for a time, but ultimately becomes boring. That is why creepers can be the most interesting battles. There is more at risk. However, the risk is nicely constrained. It matters, but its not too much. It doesn't destroy hours of work, or delete your world. Its a small crater. You can turn their explosions to your benefit. You are blowing it completely out of proportion.
3
0
Logout at night. Whereever you are, whatever you are doing, you can log out when night falls, log back in 10 minutes later, and continue working, bypassing all danger without the need for so much as a bed or shelter
9
But that's not how game design works. it would be a nightmare trying to design a game that functions properly with any arbitrary subset of it's features. A few specific subsets, sure. But arbitrary options just expand on the number of interactions that could go wrong. Even something like a graphics option. Fancy or fast. That causes issues and disparities in gameplay all by itself. And you can't say you are only asking for one option. You obviosly feel very strongly about this one, but I've seen dozens of requests for options that people felt just as strongly about, which widely varying degrees of justification. Creepers as an optional feature has no more right to exist than many of those other options. A lot of optional features just turns the game into a shapeless blob.
As I was saying earlier,if an option is integrated into the game, it comes with the implication that it is fully supported. Every combination of those options should function smoothly. If they cannot guarantee that, there is a problem. Mojang is already starting to slip in this regard. More options would not help the matter. Mods will soon be fully supported, which should alleviate most of your concerns with using them. Mods allow people to access options without the associated implication that the game will function properly with out it.
For example, say gunpowder was given a greater purpose beyong TNT, something you would want to utilize. Exploding arrows, for instance. Suppose notch added the ability to combine arrows and gunpowder to make exploding arrows. He balances the game with the knowlege of the existence of gunpowder arrows in mind. If you play on peaceful, you can't access explosive arrows, but you probably don't need them either. However, if creeper's are toggleable, then explosive arrows become extremely rare. Your only source of gunpowder is ghasts, which possibly got disabled for destroying blocks, and even if they weren't, ghasts are not a practical source of gunpowder. Without explosive arrows, other aspects of the game may become much more difficult. Now Notch has to consider the disparity between explosive arrows and non-explosive arrows for everything he has to design. Or he may have to drop the idea of adding explosive arrows because people may be disabling creepers, and he wants to avoid all the trouble that will cause.
0
Does adventure nesseccitate combat? Can't we just enjoy our exploration?
0
1
If people who dislike things don't tend to be the most vocal, explain why this forum is coever in "Endermen will destroy everything" threads and not "I love notch" threads? The reason hating on creepers attracts pro-creeper people is because most people are pro-creeper, and hence are the people around. We are in the deep bowls of this thread. How would your statement's against creepers attract pro-creeper people? They are already here.
There have been plenty of people in this thread panicking about blocks being moved. The disparity cannot be that great.
Generally, if its an explosion someplace you cared about, you are not going to be far from spawn, unless you have a habit of building 5 minutes away from spawn and don't reset your spawn point with a bed. Now the death is 10 seconds of walking out your door, picking up things, and the crater is a minor concern. If you died far enough away that the travel time or lost items are an issue, the crater is not important. The crater is the only thing worrysome about death near your base.
You are really over-exagerating the prevalance of creeper stealth explosions. And the inabilty to counter them. It is fully possible to escape a creeper that has snuck up on you without explosions. Having the ever-present risk of creepers when you go out keeps things exciting. I've been playing for years, and they are the only thing that has remained exciting about combat. Killing zombies is nothing but a chore. I would rather have to clean up creeper explosions than fight zombies.
The way you go on about them, you would think this is the constant state of the world:
0
0
Hate always attracts more vocal people than love does. Look at this thread. It has nothing to do with creepers, so it should represent as fair a sample as you can get on this forum for topics regarding creepers. Are 1/4 of them siding with you? No, there are a couple people who say that an option wouldn't be objectionable, and a lot of people saying they are fine. Where are these masses of anti-creeper people that should be backing you up?
The issues wasn't how many people love them compared to how many people hate them. Your claim is that 25% of people hate creepers. If 50% of people where apathetic, then that would be 12.5% of people surveyed who dislike creepers. The indifferent masses can make a huge difference in the measurement of what percentage of people dislike a feature.
The problem with that, is all it does is make it stupid to have doors and windows. People would just go back to filling in their doorways with dirt. Creepers are integration because it creates a casual tie between your performance in combat and your creative works. And in return, enforces the tie between your constructions and the survival aspects.
What is the impact of a creeper explosion:
A few lost blocks- you have lost some resources
Time spent on repairs - it takes a bit of time.
What is the impact of a normal death:
Lost resources - unless you died in immediate proximity to your base, it is fully possible for your resources to have despawned. This loses significantly more resources than any creeper explosion. Resources lost upon death are resources not spent on creativity.
Time spent returning- if you are not right outside your base, you have to spend a while travelling back. This can often be much more time spent than patching a creeper explosion. Time spent walking back to your corpse is also time not spent on adventure or creativity.
So what is so magical about a creeper explosion that makes it worse than death? Why is a block that happens to be on the ground so much more valuable than the same block in your inventory? That's like saying its fine if people pickpocket your wallet as long as they don't steal it off your dresser.
We don't know what they are doing yet, so you can't say what impact it will or will not have on the game.
My point is that there are things in the game with much more dire consequences than a creepr explosion.
Your posts arn't exactly a single sentence either.
9
Sorry if I have a lot to say, and like to adequately support my assertions. Other people seem to appreciate my posts, the only people who ever complain are the people I am arguing against.
1
Now that you understand what adventure mode is intended to be, do you still think hunger makes sense with it?
2
But there are many factors skewing those numbers. For one, people who don't like creepers are much more likely to go to a thread about disliking creepers and say they dislike people than your average player is to look at the thread in the first place. The two options also ignores the people who don't really care, thereby inflating the apparant portion of people who dislike it. All in all, everything about that is inflating the numbers.
And the game is moving towards that balance. I disagree that creeper's ruin that balance. If there is no interaction between the adventuring and creative aspects, then you are just adventuring on the same map as you are creating. They need to intergrate. Its like playing monopoly in a child's sandbox. The superposition of the two element adds nothin to either, and in fact interferes with each other. Now you have this board in the middle of the sandbox, the board is getting all sandy, fake money is getting buried, and neither experience is enhanced. You have to blend the experience. Building hotels translates to sand castles. Make money holders in the sand. Obviously merging monopoly and a sandbox is a shaky metaphore, but you get the idea. You have to blend the aspects together. Mobs add design constraints to your buildings. spiders encourage ceilings or other anti-climbing defenses. skeletons encourage cover on rooftops. The spawning algorithm encourages you to light your roofs up. Creepers pose a threat to the buildings, making it so you have to protect what you ahve built. If you don't merge the elements, you don't have a cohesive game. Creepers are the biggest point of merging between the creative and survival aspects. It is exactly that aspect of them that you dislike, but that is why they are key.
I understand the value of the pure-sandbox aspect of the game. that is why we have creative and peaceful modes. No block destruction, just building. But when you go to easy or higher, you are saying you want the challenges. You want the obstacles to face against. You want mobs to make gathering resources more dangerous. You want risk, you want excitement. Only its too much risk for you. Why do you find it an accpetable risk to fall in lava and lose an hour's worth of work, or get killed by mobs and not be able to recover several stacks of stone, but it is not an acceptable risk to replace several blocks? It has a much lower cost in both time and resources. Walking back to my stuff after dying far from base is a bigger penalty than a crater in the yard or a hole in my wall. The only time it is otherwise is if you lost extremely rare blocks, like gold or diamond blocks, in which case it is your fault for putting them in a location with such risk.
0
I really, really don't trust that number. It was from a forum poll, which is an extremely innacurate form of measurement, full of all kinds of skews and biases. And even if that is accurate, there are tons of other things that people want to be optional that get higher poll results. If 25% was sufficient to make a feature toggleable, EVERYTHING in the game would be toogglable.
Look at this poll, for instance:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/530188-silvefish-bug-vs-fish/page__mode__show
do you really think 25% of people expect silverfish to be cookies?
Beyond that, there is the issue of standardizing the experience. Not to imply everyone should experience the same things, far from it, but when designing a game, you need to know the general context your addition will be in. Currently, there are 2 contexts: peaceful and non peaceful. That is fairly simple, and it is easy to see how things will impact both. Yet even with this simple paradigm, they falter in mantaining both. The biggest disparity is sticky pistons. I think you will agree that people playing on peaceful have every reason to want sticky pistons, and they can be a great tool for creativity. How do you get them? Slimeballs, which come from slimes, which are not on peaceful. So even now, the option of toggling mobs creates an unfortunate disparity in gameplay. The more options present, the more disparities arise. The more content added, the more oppurtunities for this options to cause problems. Putting in excessive options is not healthy for the game design. players can still utilize other optiosn with mods, but by doing so they are explicitly stepping outside the bounds of the game, and any issues that arise due to it are not the responsibility of the developer. However, if they developer provides those options, he is implying they are viable.
0
0
7
Creepers are perfectly simple and easy to avoid. You just have to do it. I build cool things. I play with mobs. Creepers are not a problem. Any damage they inflict is minor, and can often be turned into an asset. They often encourage me to build better designs. They are a threat. They occasionally cause damage. That is the point. If there is nothing on the line, it doesn't matter. When you have something to lose, the fight is much more important. It is the reason games become boring if you turn on invincibility. Its fun for a time, but ultimately becomes boring. That is why creepers can be the most interesting battles. There is more at risk. However, the risk is nicely constrained. It matters, but its not too much. It doesn't destroy hours of work, or delete your world. Its a small crater. You can turn their explosions to your benefit. You are blowing it completely out of proportion.