Hello everyone! I'd like to tell the tale from my side of the story. Whether that's good or bad or it's all complete nonsense is for you to decide.
Early on in the development of TConstruct I made a bunch of modifiers for tools. One of these was the auto-smelt modifier. It seemed quite useless in the face of the Smeltery and other modifiers, so I added a bit of code to make it interact with Fortune. A tool with Fortune III and Auto-Smelt will give you 1-4 materials. Say... iron ingots. Fast-forward a couple months and GregTech adds a bunch of furnace recipes to reverse items.
The exploit should be fairly obvious. Fortune-smelt an iron block and you'll get back 9-36 iron ingots. Rinse and repeat. There was some indirect talk about the interaction though a messenger, but Greg basically called it a bug and thought it should only happen with pickaxes on ores. The modifier is supposed to work on all tools - charcoal and bricks included.
Some amount of time passed. A month, perhaps two. At this point I was getting 3-4 reports a day about people "discovering" the exploit. I added a message to TConstruct about disabling reverse smelting in GregTech. Greg added a full-screen rant about things. A config setting was added to disable the interaction on my end, Greg altered the message on his end, everything seems fine for awhile.
That's the past. It's context for the recent spat, and is a previous incident.
One of the recent updates to GregTech modified vanilla in... undesirable ways. Wood and stone tools have very, very low durability compared to before. Iron tools require hammers and files to make, and those require refined iron. Vanilla wood crafting from logs into planks gives 2 instead of 4, with the caveat that you can get the original 4 with a new saw. I added some new recipes to the game to restore the wood crafting. Greg goes and... crashes the game. Purposefully, with full knowledge, crashes the game.
The crash happened when a recipe was detected outside his config. The wood nerf was forced ON while TConstruct was installed, so the crash was guaranteed to happen.
I removed the wood recipes from TConstruct and told Greg to remove his crashing code, as well as all of the other code he had regarding TConstruct. He also had something called the "Pumpkin of Shame" that would constantly replace my helmet item, breaking the game for me personally with his mod installed. Everything regarding the crash has been undone, I'm pretty sure, but... well.
I do apologize for any trouble I've caused. TConstruct and GregTech do not play well together, and I would never recommend them in the same pack. I would rather people play the game however they like though, and I hope people can enjoy themselves in the future.
That message has THIRTY-SEVEN FLIPPING LIKES.
That's better than KL.
I agree with most of those points, except for TiC and GT not together. I, personally, absolutely love Gregtech and TiC. Recent changes have become pretty amazing. MDiyo, your Smelteries are the best idea ever.
Greg, on the other hand, that way of making Iron Tools actually makes some sense. I can see that Greg is trying to make the game more realistic, and I applaud that. And if you don't like that specific section, there are configs. I also understand that it is quite a tussle for people to have to change those configs and distribute them on servers. I understand this also. A few fixes for this are as follows:
Greg ships different versions of his mod that make the default configs different, like an easy mode version.
Greg asks for opinions of what an Easy Mode for his mod would be and ships all related options into one specific config option, like Forestry's config. For example, he could have CUSTOM as you make your own, EASY as all the options put at the easiest level, NORMAL as putting certain options in hard mode, but not real game changers like the Wood thing and the Iron Pick thing and such and such. HARD would be enabling more hard configs, and HARDCORE would be the act of setting every config to its hardest possible level.
FTB team makes a plugin that creates "Server Configs." This will ship the configs of the server you are on into a special folder for that specific host, and enable those configs. It would take a bit longer to join new servers or join a server that has changed some configs, but it would still work, and would be easiest on the Players. It might be a bit harder on the FTB team though.
And those are my opinions on this post. As I read through the other posts, I will put my hopefully flameless opinions on them.
