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Quote from Agtrigormortis»

It's the reason why many people cannot afford healthcare and often get into debt or bankruptcy over medical bills when Federal assistance programs won't cover their basic needs.

That's plenty of capitalist countries with public welfare. It's not like they're mutually exclusive, capitalism is not against taxation in itself.

Socialism has its problems, but don't pretend that capitalism is inherently altruistic

Never said that. It's individualistic. But socialism is altruistic only on paper because it's founded on the belief that the individual is supposed to contribute to society, not the opposite.

if it wasn't for worker protection legislation private companies would get away with paying working populations a lot less, remember when child labour used to be legal in Europe?

I know, but Europe adopted capitalism waaay before socialism, it was basically born when the first banks were created in Italy in the middle ages. Socialism is useful to correct capitalism, but look at countries who went directly from feudalism to socialism and see how they're doing.

But generally speaking competition and market forces alone aren't enough to stop businesses from doing dodgy things

Nobody claims that, I hope. Capitalism is just an economic system, there's plenty of other things needed to run a society, for example laws. If the US can't stop their capitalists from abusing the law all the time, while other countries can, it's easy to assume that the issue isn't capitalism in itself.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

One of the many problems of capitalism.

I didn't really mean to make a political comment, but let's go.

It isn't just because of capitalism.

I live in Italy, one of those rare countries where capitalism and socialism were made to coexist on purpose (they called it "the third way" back in the days). You didn't see much corporative 🐂💩 here before US-based corporations began to stomp their way into our economy, but man, you might have no idea of the level of corruption, ineptitude, inefficiency, and criminality that was and is still allowed by the socialist mindset, with the largest industries controlled by politicians i.e. shady people who can afford to corrupt them. Hello shitty jobs with high taxation. Need something basic that the law grants you? Find a politician to beg or forget about it.

And yet we still had capitalism, but in a very different form than US capitalism: a huge network of small companies that still managed to keep our country in the world top 8 economies. Just a few miles of sea away, Albania experienced no capitalism and is still one of the most underdeveloped countries in Europe.

There's lot of examples where capitalism meant a better life, and lot of examples of lack of capitalism leading to poverty. The problem with US capitalism is not capitalism, is the american mindset: get big, or die trying. And 🖕 everybody else.

You know why the USA never really had mafia? Because they don't need it. Like Japan, they just made it legal and forget about it. But don't blame it on an the generic economic theory that people should be free to have their business and protect their property, it's a little unfair.

I started my world maybe in beta 1.3 (for sure it was before 1.8) back in 2010 and I kept updating it until release 1.19, in the meanwhile using MCEdit multiple times to make some big changes. I didn't lost any chuck, and blocks where mostly kept as they were, but the following happened every now and then:

• Ender chests losing their content
• Fences and panes not connecting, turning into single pole-like fences and panes.
• Double chests disconnecting, turning into single chests close to each other which still kept their content
• Animals kept in pens disappearing
• Spawners losing their assigned monster, turning them into default pig spawners
• Loot chests being empty

... and stuff like that. Making backups before each update, at least, is highly recommended.

Yep, Princess Garnet is right: another full-fledged ocean update is not happening anytime soon. But a few additions to oceans could, especially now that updates are no longer themed.

To me, aside from having more variations in beaches, the game really needs deeper oceans, which could be an update to the regular Deep Oceans, or a new biome as well. I tried a datapack that makes all oceans deeper (probably overkill) and it was awesome, so atmospheric (really felt like being in an ocean) and finally challenging (can't just dive down and get up without potions and such).

Any version with beds, stackable food, sprinting or the ability to switch to Creative mode is a disgrace to the memes that where running around back when "Survival" meant something (so anything above beta 1.2).

The latest versions added so much quality of life and new things to do, don't get me wrong, but the feeling or living in a world that wanted you dead and you had to mine/craft your way to survival is totally gone now. It's like back then Minecraft had a proper early game but no late game (once you have diamond gear and a defendable base, you're done), and now it's the opposite because you go straight to late game in a matter of hours. Kind of bizarre from a game design perspective.

Quote from Princess_Garnet»

I'm with you. I don't get farms. At least, not for playing in survival. (,,,) People don't want to admit that but that's what it is. A passive, "free" way of getting items without doing the intended way of getting it is just creative-mode item gifting.

I used to think like that until I heard from some people why they do it, and it boils down to two different aspects:

• Some people just want to build nice-looking stuff without the grind, but still enjoy having to deal with the other Survival challenges.
• Some people also like building contraptions to see how much they can abuse the game, like it was a meta challenge in itself.

Those are people who can't just be satisfied by switching back and forth between Survival and Creative. Creative gives absolutely no challenges and makes the abuse of loopholes pointless.

Getting something infinitely once you have it once is too close to creative, and wouldn't be appealing to those making farms in survival. (...) It won't stop people from playing "traditional" survival and just building farms though, so I get the impression Mojang is unlikely to spend time and effort towards it (...) It's unfortunate though that certain things were left unchanged, or even attempted to be changed and reverted, all because of farming though.

I agree, but that beyond the point of this suggestion, it's meant for people who just don't want creative restrictions while surviving. I don't know how many of them are out there, but I guess there's million of children that would love to play like that because the more I hear about them, the more I believe they don't care for "farming", legitimate forms of automation, or other time-efficient reproduction methods. They just want to get in the game and start building.

People who want to abuse the game only to abuse the game will not be interested, yes, and that's beyond fixing until Mojang grows a pair, which this gamemode/whatever would give them the occasion to do: people who would cry outrage because Mojang wants them to grind would have no excuse to do so with a grindless alternative to the original Survival mode, which this suggestion would left untouched.

Maybe every item drops extra items

Unfortunately that won't work because there's blocks that would still require too much work too often. From a builder's perspective there's a huge unbalance in their palette between blocks that are everywhere and blocks they would rather use but there's too little and are not easily reproducible. If I need to build a whole Greek agora with temples and all, with quartz (the only things that can pass as marble), even a maxed out Fortune pickaxe won't cut it. Or an entire cursed forest full of spider cobwebs. Or a mediterranean city with lot of houses in all concrete colors. I have lot of examples because I tried and I had to give up.
From a builder's point of view there's no reason to work for getting blocks, that's basically what I learned. I could have made this suggestion give a full-fledged Creative inventory in Survival (so Creative without flying, immortality and invisibility to mobs), but this would detract the challenge of finding such blocks, that some people still enjoy: it still gives some satisfaction, for example, to build something out of obsidian because I had to go to the process of getting my first one, which is not that trivial, but then I don't have to bother anymore; I believe getting more of those same blocks is not fun in itself for such people.

That's a little simplistic. Many people feel like switching between Survival and Creative is cheating (not my word, theirs), and Creative makes you totally immortal, which is overkill for people who just want to build in a not-that-friendly environment. Also, renewability usually takes work, too much work for people who just want to start building without caring for such complications.

Anyway, what could go wrong if adding an option like that? I would use it.

I never built "grinders", or "farms", or anything like that so maybe I don't understand why people who do, do it. But bear with me. In my opinion the problem is how grindy it is to get large quantities of blocks for building, and how once an area is depleted (happens easily on SMP) there's really no other option but making a new base elsewhere (someone plays like that and it's fine, but someone hates it with a passion).

So I came up with an idea that was bombed on /r/minecraftsuggestions for attacking the freedom or farmers or whatever, anyway I might as well propose it here where there's more reasonable people, excuse me but it's true.

Now the idea: a gamemode, gamerule, whatever, that gives people who need lot of resources an alternative to abusing bad game design.

It would work exactly like Survival, with a big difference: once you obtain a new block with whatever mean, you can place that block an infinite amount of times, almost if you were in Creative. Example, you mine your first cobblestone with your wooden pickaxe; now every time you have cobblestone in your hotbar you can keep placing it forever. Unintended bonus: no more need for towers of chests full of building blocks, sorting systems and the like. Someone cares playing like that, I bet many don't.

Since I don't grind/farm I'm probably missing something, so maybe there should be a list a blocks that can't be reproduced infinitely no matter what. Or include items that are not blocks, and so on.

What does this accomplish?

Once you worked your way into the game enough to get a new resource, that resource is never going to deplete unless you don't lose it somehow. No more mining for weeks to build a quartz castle, but not an easy access to quartz before being able to reach the Nether either.

Also, it would be an experiment: do people abuse the game because it's their only choice to play how they want, or it's just to get an easy advantage over people who don't? Right now nobody really knows it and in my opinion it hurts the game because the developers have to cater to all the people without enough options to give each one of them the experience they desire. If such people are given an alternative maybe they will no longer make for an unbalanced MP experience with players who don't want to play like them.

Quote from Princess_Garnet»

For just one example, fossils are apparently found under desert or swamp only. If biomes formally went away, would mimicking the current behavior be an easy thing to do?

Kind of. Just as an example, currently a desert biome is just the worldgen picking a specific assortments of noise values that Mojang called "desert" and no other biome uses. They would just have to tell fossils to generate only in chunks which get those same values. Or, more interestingly, instead of just resorting on temperature, humidity etc. structure could use more noise values specifically designed to handle structures, which would be maybe even more flexible than the current system, and for sure it wouldn't be worse.

Nerfing the easily cheesable zombie villager discount is a good thing (removing it would be better, but hey) and maps pointing to villages is still better than running on a random direction or relying on seed hunting software, but I don't think forcing people to explore the world fixes the reason why people don't explore the world: it's neither interesting or fun. Also, requiring diamonds for diamond trades seems oblivious to the reason why people trade in the first place: they don't want to mine.

Anyway, one big mistake was "fixing" trades before fixing enchantments. People forget about the enchanting table and the anvil because cheesing trades is way more convenient, the RNG is very frustrating, and the anvil has one the most unintuitive mechanics of the whole game, rewarding people who read tutorials instead of figuring it out in play (even brewing is designed much better than that).

It's really not ideal to remove an alternative when the original method sucks so much ass. I bet if they made enchanting more reasonable before announcing the trade nerfs people would possibly be upset, but not like this.

As a side note, trading is such a wasted opportunity. It's kinda like a quest system where villagers reward you for doing stuff for them, but using a currency makes it not fun and easily exploitable because there's no need to do something hard to get a great reward, it suffices to do something trivial for a million times. And then deal with more friggin' RNG.

Of course any moderation that doesn't rely on the consensus of the people strictly involved in the incident is never going to work. But that's beyond the point of these changes.

It's not about moderation. It's about cleaning a brand they paid billions for. They keep releasing MC-branded content obviously aimed at children, with the possible goal of controlling the most profitable preadolescent franchise since Pokemon, maybe earning them as future customers of MS products, and nothing threatens a plan like that like having some big media outlet report of someone swearing, promoting unwanted political content, or worse, on a server where children can go.

You don't own a game. You rented a service that can be denied at any time by their real owners if that makes them profit. Welcome to the 21st century, guys.

I would argue that Minecraft died even before the sellout, when it let players steer it course by abusing the (many, many) loopholes the game has because the need to abstract everything, so much that the original experience of Mining and Crafting was then considered "annoying" because abusing loopholes was tolerated for so much time it's now almost official, aside from some pretty superficial nerfs that, at most, change how players abuse loopholes or, even better, create new loopholes to abuse. People think mining is "too grindy" and they unironically don't even know that's what made the game addictive in the first place.

"But you can play however you want". Yeah, and die all the time, and waste all the time I have because making a respiration potion is way harder that crafting doors. Such a weak argument.

Anyway, the game won't really die until a better alternative shows up. Not any alternative, there's plenty of those. One game that does the original Minecraft magic better than Minecraft itself, and it's not even that hard: just take the basic experience of beta MC, fix a few glaring gameplay problems, and proceed from there without making silly decisions like limiting furniture and color variations, ignoring the most basic risk/reward rules, not differentiating how SP and MP work at all, using politics as a reason to (not) add something, or attack their own customers for not agreeing with their worldview.

Quote from Zeno410»

Most Minecraft players don't realize how awesome a good transition can look.

Bingo. New players simply don't know how the game would be without bubble biomes because that's all they have experienced, but having started in beta 1.12 I know how biomes gradually shifting into each other made world so much more natural and interesting, no matter how that version had such a limited palette of natural blocks.

Not every player is into building, engineering, caving or fighting. There's people like me who like to explore, be amazed, or just enjoy a nice view.

Also, they handled bubble biomes in a way that I don't understand from a gameplay standpoint. If you check biome definitions you'll notice how aside from the shape of the landscape and decorations, pretty much nothing changes from a biome to the next one: almost always the same hostiles spawn (animals don't change that much even when they look different, anyway), ore drop is almost the same, structures are almost the same aside from how they look, the weather is almost the same, the way you're supposed to play is almost always the same everywhere. What's the point of having biomes if it makes not much difference playing in one or the other?

One could say that the possibility of spawning everywhere makes it necessary. If that's the case all they had to do was to make a handful of biome designed specifically for starting players and only make them spawn there. Plenty of games can do that.

Finally, a technical problem with using bubble biomes. Assume you want more variety and better transitions. With the current system you have to add literally dozens of "new" biomes to accomplish what RTG does so much more organically. I did it with a datapack and it was a friggin' nightmare for so many months. And yet I still don't understand why Mojang wouldn't do it.

Quote from Princess_Garnet»

Also, if data packs can do this, it's probably easy enough to add as a game rule on world creation? They seem to be heading down the path of adding more customization with that again.

A game rule is not really fit for something like that in my opinion. It's not like it's impossible to code, it's just not what gamerules are about: tweaking mechanics, not something static like the worldgen. Anyway, I'm very skeptical about customization being more accessible. Aside from the format being so WIP it basically breaks after every version, it seems like Mojang wants us to write data packs instead of picking options in a menu. Unfortunaly writing such complex data packs with almost no documentation is a nightmare.

Quote from Zeno410»

There was a huge missed brilliancy with Shipwrecks. Just put them *only* deep underwater. Just that would have made finding them really exciting, and there would be a cottage industry of YouTubes on "how to find and plunder a shipwreck".

That's an excellent idea because it's mid game loot, so it makes sense to require mid game challenges to get it. Now, if only making potions wasn't made so pointless by making it harder to do than getting special gear...

Quote from TheMasterCaver»

Again though, there never was any actual increase in structure frequency, other than due to changes to biome generation

That's part of the problem: since they always generate with the same frequency but the overall frequency of structures is not adjusted after adding more structures, each time they add a new one the place gets more crowded.

Also, they're mostly found in easy to reach places: you never have to climb a mountain because there's nothing special up there. No need to reach the (unexistent) ocean depths because you can only find Ocean Monuments and they're borderline useless. Go underground and it's always the same congerie of dungeons and mineshafts, with the new Ancient City being very optional and just rare, not hard to reach.

It's like they want anyone to be able to reach Overworld structures from day 1. No challenge, no fun, in my opinion.

Quote from Princess_Garnet»

The problem is, this would likely take away a lot of development time (whether it should or not) and an "update" of rebalancing will likely go over poorly with the modern community. I'm hoping the villager changes are a part of a bigger pass that they're spreading out over time, but time will tell.

As you said, they're already dedicating lot of development to rebalancing, it keeps happening no matter how it almost always disappoint a part of the community. It's not stopping, so it might as well go in the right direction.

Just a word about the community, though: we're talking about a vocal minority here. I bet anyone would have a hard time proving the majority of players care about "trading halls" and "farming", it's mostly children who want to build and play like it was a normal game instead of Engineering 101. Every time Mojang caters to technical players they risk leaving behind the rest of them, which might switch to another game and stop giving them free advertising.

If you want to approach them as efficiently as possible, even if that means cheesing them, end cities can have the same said about them though.

Well, everybody in this game can be cheesed because it gives a lot of freedom to the player. It's inevitable. But there's a difference between almost everything being abusable by players with enough experience, and giving away free stuff to everyone. It shortcuts progress too much in a game where progress is one of the core features that distinguish it from a regular sandbox game without rules. It's like they don't want players to experience early game anymore. Why?

Also, the opposite is true: there's structures where the risk is not worth the reward. Cheesing them is the only rational solution, and that's a pity.

I think you're overlooking (or perhaps forgetting due to how rare they are?) woodland mansions.

It was not a complete dissertation about every single structure but yes, I didn't even think about those. To me, it's a mixed bag. The difficulty seems tuned around mid to late game players, but the only notable loot you can't find easier elsewhere, the Totem, is only useful in SMP because, let's be frank here, dying in SSP is not a big deal in itself and can be easily avoided by a player with enough experience to get a Totem in the first place. Basically, it shares the same problem Ancient Cities have: too hard for people who would use its reward.

But they definitely need to tone the frequency of like all of them (well, almost all of them) way, way down, and sometimes way, way, way, way down (looking at you, villages, but add shipwrecks, ruined portal, and ocean ruins to this). I get they don't want things to possibly take too long to find, but here's the thing.

Seeds are always RNG, so anyone who really wants a village by spawn can search one out.

I did a test with datapacks that simply made common structures spawn much farther from each other. Guess what: finding one was exciting, even when there was no challenge involved because it felt like being given an unexpected opportunity. I guess the problem here is servers: lot of people defiling every single thing they find. Make structures rarer and it would impossible to find one. One more reason to split SSP and SMP once and for all.

Anyway, the recent snapshot adding maps to find villages for the purpose of solving the problem with enchantments they just created, is maybe by mistake the right thing to do in this game: give tools to find structure in most interesting ways than just walking in a random direction. It would be cool if getting a map required some challenge related to progress, but I'm not hopeful about that (if they do, please make the Spyglass relevant, thanks).