Content: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Background: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Welcome to TerraFirmaCraft Forums

Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to contribute to this site by submitting your own content or replying to existing content. You'll be able to customize your profile, receive reputation points as a reward for submitting content, while also communicating with other members via your own private inbox, plus much more! This message will be removed once you have signed in.

  • Announcements

    • Dries007

      ATTENTION Forum Database Breach   03/04/2019

      There has been a breach of our database. Please make sure you change your password (use a password manager, like Lastpass).
      If you used this password anywhere else, change that too! The passwords themselves are stored hashed, but may old accounts still had old, insecure (by today's standards) hashes from back when they where created. This means they can be "cracked" more easily. Other leaked information includes: email, IP, account name.
      I'm trying my best to find out more and keep everyone up to date. Discord (http://invite.gg/TerraFirmaCraft) is the best option for up to date news and questions. I'm sorry for this, but the damage has been done. All I can do is try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
    • Claycorp

      This forum is now READ ONLY!   01/20/2020

      As of this post and forever into the future this forum has been put into READ ONLY MODE. There will be no new posts! A replacement is coming SoonTM . If you wish to stay up-to-date on whats going on or post your content. Please use the Discord or Sub-Reddit until the new forums are running.

      Any questions or comments can be directed to Claycorp on either platform.

29 posts in this topic

Ok so....what makes the night dangerous...answer,  hostile mobs. Questions...why do we need idiotic hostile mobs popping in just because it gets dark!? I am sure this august community and the game developers can come up with something better. Hows about some ideas for dealing with the root of the problem rather than the branch.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm sorry, but how is that argument straw man? Forcing a level of difficulty that you desire onto the entire player-base in hopes of bettering the game through emergent gameplay is not a realistic option in the majority of cases. For example, take the Ultra Hardcore style of gameplay. For players who believe that there should be no natural health regeneration, and in some cases only 1 life per world, they are more than welcome to play Minecraft in that way. However, not all players are forced to do so and can easily play using a different level of difficulty.

 

Appeal to popularity can never be dismissed in regards to game development. If you piss off the majority of the player-base with something new, it can result in the death of the community.

 

Limiting the ability to pass the night as the game currently stands isn't going to change anything. Players who think it is too hard are simply going to dig themselves a little safe hole, and then alt-tab while they wait for night to pass. Or they might switch to just playing on peaceful. It doesn't fix a single part of the problem, and in essence can actually make it worse.

 

The first step to expanding night is to add new features and possibilities of things to do during the night. At that point, players who usually use the bed to skip the night, or just dig themselves a safe hole are much less likely to do so. The problem becomes moot because more and more players stop using that functionality completely by their own will, but the option is still there for those who do decide they wish to use it.

I'd like to discuss a few more things regarding what you're saying. 

 

I didn't make this point in my previous mention of the appeal to popularity part of your post. Yes, you can destroy your community if you piss off the player base, but changing some aspect of a game almost never does that unless it explicitly reveals some underlying extremism behind the game or the game developers opinions (ie if you support naziism in a direct and nonambiguous manner with clear intentions), or the change is so dramatic that it hardly resembles the game it used to be. You may make some players unhappy initially with that feature, but that does not mean they will stop playing the game. To explain what i mean I'll draw an analogy: I have disliked nearly every single update of minecraft since 1.0.0 because in almost every single update since then the features that have been added have not added a significant amount of gameplay in any way, but i still play it. When adding a new feature in particular loss of the player base is almost never an issue, because almost nobody will go from enjoying a game to actually hating the game inherently without a serious change in the direction of it's development. Bad features don't make a game bad, every game has them, and players don't stop playing just because they don't like a single thing, but poor gameplay and bad direction of development does. 

 

It is also important to note that I still do not think that removing night as it stands will make the gameplay better, but that doesn't mean it's a bad development step right now. Development is, by definition, a process, and so removing a feature now that may make the game less enjoyable now can still make sense in the long run if it's purpose is to facilitate the expansion of an aspect of gameplay that said feature conflicts with (as to why the CHOICE of whether or not to sleep actually still conflicts with gameplay see my other post) In fact one of the biggest problems with popular input when it comes to development is that players frequently seek instant gratification from updates and get upset when a feature seems bad, when that feature may very well be part of the implementation of a much broader system that adds a large amount of gameplay value that they are not aware of because they are not privy to the specifics of the development plan. If developers cave in to these complaints they shoot themselves in the foot by completely breaking apart a plan that may very well have been excellently executed, but which now falls short because one important feature can no longer play it's part. A good example of something like this is with rock salt in TFC. People complained constantly about the lack of rock salt and frequently requested simplifying salt by allowing it to be gathered from oceans, but the plan was to implement it the way it is purposefully as a useful rarity in the context of numerous other methods of preservation that were to be added later. It seemed like a poorly implemented feature, but people only saw an incomplete portion of the whole. Luckily in this case the dev did not cave. 

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 

Because beds have been around so long, I understand a large part of the playerbase considers them a core part of the game. However, I do recall the earlier days of the game before beds were an addition. You had to build little depots and secondary bases every so often to hide inside when night came, otherwise you'd be completely obliterated. There was tension in daytime travel from the mobs that had appeared overnight, requiring you to pay close attention to your surroundings and listen for the footsteps of nearby mobs. Anything that enhances a player's engagement in the game is a net positive, whether or not they happen to think it's enjoyable at the time. The best games are the ones you might rage at now and then, but you just keep going back to again and again to throw yourself wholeheartedly into.

 

 

 

And honestly, do not sit here and tell me BTW somehow proves that it makes the game more fun to all players to take the bed away. BTW players are a tiny subset of the modded-client minecraft world, which is a tiny subset of the pc minecraft world, which is a tiny subset of the minecraft player community as a whole. And among that tiny subset of a tiny subset of a specific demographic, the single most common request and complaint is so-called "hardcore beds." (:edit: Well, second most common, I was forgetting Hardcore Spawn) 

You're right Gopher, he didn't prove anything with that, he merely explained his earlier point. You on the other hand assumed that his analogy was an argument and strawmanned him by attacking said analogy which makes your argument invalid since you tried to prove an entirely different point. Accordingly your argument is actually that not all players enjoy BTW, nothing else. I agree with that, but that has nothing to do with this discussion. You seem to have missed his point entirely. His point was that when a game engages the player it is a good thing. Everything else was explanatory analogy. You also seem to not understand the difference between correlation and causation. You have OBSERVED that the most common complaints are about hardcore beds and Hardcore spawn, this does not prove in any way that taking beds away makes the game less fun. There are several reasons for this: Firstly, these complaints are collected from a convenient sample and are likely to have a very significant level of bias. That bias is there because people who speak out on complaints are statistically likely to have far stronger opinions than those who choose to complain in silent. Secondly, you cannot generalize such an observation to anything other than BTW itself because BTW is a special case. Furthermore your point that the biggest complaints from BTW players are hardcore beds and Hardcore spawn is ridiculous because if they don't represent the demographic of BTW players who do enjoy said features in any way shape or form, for all you know they could be less then a tenth of a percent of the demographic, and you can't generalize from a tenth of a percent of a demographic to the whole demographic if the way you chose that tenth of a percent is through the feature you are trying to generalize to that demographic. That's circular reasoning at its finest right there.

 

As to his point, that when a game engages a player it is good, this is true, because it is self-evident. Personally I'm not making my argument from the standpoint of someone who would prefer beds were removed because of BTW, but because I remember the days before the bed in vanilla minecraft and see so much potential for the same types of emergent gameplay to arise in TFC because there is more encouragement for the type of gameplay that led to the emergent gameplay we saw before beds in vanilla than there ever was in vanilla. 

 

 

I understand all of that, believe it or not. Ultimately, beds are optional. For the players who don't WANT to encounter hostile mobs, adding gameplay elements that attempt to reward them or, worse, FORCE them to run around at night will NOT make them enjoy the game more. It will make them switch to peaceful and complain on the forums that they can't sleep through the night anymore.

 

If you don't want to encounter hostile mobs then why would you be playing on anything other than peaceful? That is precisely what peaceful is for.  Referring to the use of the word FORCE, did you know that TFC FORCES you to drink water? Do you realize that TFC FORCES you to store food for winter if you're in temperate climates? Do you understand that TFC rewards killing hostile mobs? Your point is moot because FORCING someone to do something in a game isn't inherently bad. You also are making your own argument in your next paragraph a hypocrisy as well, since these players who don't like encountering hostile mobs in TFC are also a tiny subset of the modded-client minecraft world, which is a tiny subset of the pc minecraft world, which is a tiny subset of the minecraft player community as well. You simply can't make those types of generalizations from that type of data. 

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

And locking the thread because it's dissolved into nothing more than pedantic circles.

1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.