GregTech

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Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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Hydra (and Dragonfel) this thread isn't meant to be a debate. It's meant for people to just post their opinions and leave it at that pretty much - for the purposes of that I would say that mentioning the addon in its entirety is important for getting a view of the full mod and where it fits.

And I'm doing just that, stating my opinion. However, my opinion is that there are two completely separate issues on which I have two completely separate opinions and that this debate (because a difference in opinions is a debate no matter if you want it or not) I see that most users who are either in favor of gregtech or against it, have the problem that they are talking about different things. What most if not all people seem to like is the additional stuff. The only thing people seem to disagree on is the recipe changes as a default in FTB.

The author of GT should use this input and separate the changes. However, I've seen how he reactes to valid input and since he's a stubborn ass (as in the animal, not the posterior ;)) I don't expect him to make this change.
 

Dragonfel

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Jul 29, 2019
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My point is that for new users coming to FTB the change is confusing so I think it should be "If you like the additional 'difficulty' of the rebalancing you can enable GregTech. My point is just that in the default pack all the new users will use it should not be 'on' by default.

New users, by definition, wouldn't have previous experience with IC2 and therefore wouldn't be confused when they saw the macerator recipe required diamonds.

My apologies if I jumped to conclusions about your initial shock and confusion about gregtech recipes, I wasn't trying to be insulting. What I meant was that you clicked play on your feed the beast launcher before you read up on gregtech. You actively chose to begin playing a new mod pack that you where unfamiliar with, without reading up on the involved mods.

As for my comment about "blaming" gregtech, I noticed you jumped into the topic with a criticism about someone who said they enjoyed things gregtech added and proceeded to explain how you think the mod author should have to rewrite his mod into modular packs so you don't have to change a couple words in a text file to make the game work the way you want it to.

I agree that some of the gregtech hard mode recipes are unwarranted and should probably be set to off by default, but the power to turn off harder recipes is already available to you.
 

Lawbroken

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Jul 29, 2019
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Stating your opinion about a mod shouldn't need you to quote others.

Please keep your opinion like you are just talking to yourself and aimed at no one.

Further quotes that make this a debate on how you like it/don't like it and how someone likes/dislikes something may get deleted without warning or the thread locked.

Thanks Lawbroken.
 
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Dragonfel

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Jul 29, 2019
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I can't help but wonder if it would be such a heated and polarized topic in the forum if gregtech's configs where set not to modify IC2 by default, rather than the opposite. From day one, I mean. People who wanted a more challenging game could have turned the configs on, and chances are we would not have people hating on it so much in the forums. Maybe it's not gregtech to blame, but the modpack for assuming all users would want hardmode on by default.
 

Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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If that's an assumption the FTB crew made it's an incredibly wrong one. Although people like to brag about 'hardmodes' and stuff on forums most people actually don't like stuff to be hard or tedious. If you look at World of Warcraft for example everyone on the forums brags about how raids aren't challinging enough and whatnot and the figures show that most players are actually not even attempting hardmode or whatever. People being vocal on a forum are always a very small minority of your playerbase and you need to cater mainly towards this 'regular' playerbase to be succesful and also present people who want additional challenges with the option to opt-in to them.

The problem is that the balancing changes GT makes are currently opt-out while they should be opt-in.
 

raiju

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Jul 29, 2019
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seriously, you've been asked by a mod now. Opinions do not make a debate. You can just leave and respect someones opinion without arguing about it.
 
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Hydra

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seriously, you've been asked by a mod now. Opinions do not make a debate. You can just leave and respect someones opinion without arguing about it.

If that's the opinion of the mods than I'm fine with that. Just please don't think I disrespect your opinion or anything. I just disagree with it, that's all.
 

SilvasRuin

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Jul 29, 2019
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You must be new here. GregTech threads often derail or devolve into very heated arguments and wind up having to be locked because of it. This thread was created to collect individual opinions and perspectives without the risk of the usual devolution and vitriol.
 

cab435

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Jul 29, 2019
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I like GregTech a lot, it's why I moved from tekkit too FtB. Most of the IC2 stuff before was to easy and cheap, this made it more even I thought.
With great items comes a great price so this work's fine for me and my server.
 

CrazyAL

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Jul 29, 2019
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I like it, many are use to another mod pack so I can see why when you switch over to FTB, Gregtech is a bit complex but like anything else you get use it and start to enjoy it. I think the way it forces you to use different items and mods you may not otherwise use to create tools and machines is a plus, it's healthy to work the brain ;)
 

WTFFFS

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Jul 29, 2019
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There is not supposed to be a debate because the Mods say so and I was told that quite bluntly :D

What is wrong with it is that people often become heated when you try to debate a position mostly due to being unable to separate a debate about their position from a personal attack.
 
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raiju

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Jul 29, 2019
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People are now debating about whether they are allowed to debate. Simply put a mod who represents the people who provide this forum and work on the mod pack you are playing have requested you to not debate gregtech in *just* this thread, and instead allow people to post their opinions without being argued for it. There have been plenty of gregtech discussion threads and there will be plenty more in the future, use them instead please.

I'd appreciate that if a cleanup of comments happens in this thread (again?) that this post gets deleted too.
 

Lawbroken

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thread has been cleaned up with comments getting deleted and some edited to remove quotes.

Remember guys thread my other posts in this thread to know what you shouldn't be doing in this thread.

It's to state YOUR OPINION not a conversation about each opinion.
 
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makeshiftwings

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Jul 29, 2019
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I kind of think the GregTech debate sort of boils down to a debate on game design in general. Ever since World of Warcraft became popular, this very crude idea of "balance" has been introduced into gamer lingo, along with terms like "OP", "nerf", "grind", etc. Everyone's an armchair game designer these days. There are a few common ideas that come up a lot:

"Grind" as "challenge" - A lot of people judge the difficulty of a game based on how long it takes to do something or how much of some thing you have to do. If you could level up to 80 by killing three monsters, that would be "easy", but if you had to kill a million monsters, that would be "hard". This is so ingrained in gamer consciousness (and even game developer consciousness) that it can be hard to let go of. The truth is that doing a repetitive action over and over is not actually that "difficult"; in fact, the human brain is hard-wired to zone out and perform repetitive actions with minimal stress and energy. It's one of the things humans are naturally good at. The main thing that long waits and repetition tax is patience and commitment. Some people do not have the patience or the willingness to sit and click for five hours; the reward is simply not worth the tedium. These people aren't necessarily "weaker" than others or "worse" at the game; perhaps they have an important brain surgery to perform or they prefer to spend those five hours playing soccer. The main thing is that grinding is not really a "challenge" in the same sense that winning an Olympic gold medal or winning a game of chess against a grandmaster is a challenge. Anyone can grind. Anyone can sit there and click for five hours. It's not that some people can't do it; it's that they don't want to. Watching a twelve-hour movie isn't really a challenge; it's just something most people don't want to do.

"Games have to be challenging" - A lot of the reason that grind even exists is because people think that games need to have a "challenge" before a "reward", or otherwise you're self-entitled or not a real gamer. I think a lot of this stems from deeper cultural issues like protestant work ethic, where people instinctually believe that they have to suffer and toil before they are worthy enough to have something they actually like. But in a game like Minecraft it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Minecraft has never been a game that was particularly challenging or full of grind. It's primarily a game about exploring and building stuff. That's where the fun is; the combat is a (fairly terrible) side element to the gameplay, not a focus. The mining is meant to evoke a feeling of fun exploration and finding gold and gems, not to actually simulate the hellish world of real-life coal mining.

People should keep these things in mind before feeling a knee-jerk reaction to post about how much they love "challenge" and feeling pride at how "hard" it was to get five million cobblestone.
 

Robet24

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Jul 29, 2019
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Honestly, I only play PvP smp servers. Gregtech is what limits people to "God-like" gear early on. Everything takes time to get to. Energy for the Matterfab. The matterfab itself takes more time. I like to look at as a teamwork mod so to say.
 

Antice

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'd like to opine some on the concepts of challenge, grind and balance as it relates to games and gaming, since these are terms that crop up a lot in this thread, and others that are about the balancing between mod's

First, there is the matter of balance. balance is not a single term for a single word, but is used interchangeably between different forms of balancing. balancing is all about making everything seem fair from a subjective point of view. with a big player base this becomes increasingly harder since balance is a subjective experience, and not an objectively measurable one.
for instance, it is common in gamer culture to want to beat some kind of challenge before being given a reward. (bee it a new shiny sword in wow, or a powerdrill in mc)
When talking about what level of work that is needed for a particular reward we are generally referring to the difficulty of the game. people have different opinions on what level of work should have to be performed in order to gain certain results. that is why we indeed do have difficulty settings in most games in the first place.

However. there is also grind. grind is the results of attempts at making something harder (read difficult) to do gone wrong.
grind is not equal to difficulty, and is something to avoid if possible. Common types of grind is to have to keep digging around after a resource you need to keep progressing in a game, or to keep having to do fetch quests in EVE online for a corp to gain access to some agent or other.
But grind is also a subjective measure, and peoples tolerances for doing repetitive tasks vary a lot. some people find the repetitive fetching in eve online to be fun, I personally prefer more action, but that is all about subjective taste in entertainment. ones person's grind is another mans entertainment. that is just how it is.

Mow Let's look at a couple of examples from gregtech. since we all are familiar with it.

In order to get the IC2 drill without gregtech, you need to first find some rubber trees and tap those. that requires walking around in the landscape while possibly being assaulted by baddies. (classic fetch quest)
Then you have to dig a hole in the ground til you find a certain combination of pretty common resources, then you smelt some ores, set up some special blocks, craft some more items used to craft other items, and voila. a new shiny toy is yours to play with.
This toy is one that makes all that digging around for resources more convenient.

Now let's compare it with gregtech. (the 1.4.2 version.. not the new one)

You start out the same as before. you go fetch some rubber, dig a hole in the ground and search up some resources for making a portal.
then you take this portal to this other place where the baddies are tougher and meaner than the ones you faced to get rubber, so that you can get this other harder to get resource you need so you can convert some of your previously mined resources into a tier 2 equivalent. then you go home and do the same thing you did before. you craft things that let you craft the things you need to craft the item you want, then you combine it all into the reward.

Comparing these 2 we see that a whole lot of steps got added, while the main quest stayed the same (getting a power drill). the number of sub-quests increased as well, with some quests being the same as before but with a different target item, while at least one of the quests was significantly harder to do due to the higher power of the baddies you have to fight to get the item you need.
On the plus side, you ended up doing some of the quests needed to gain access to other parts of the modpack. so none of the extra steps where actually solely good for getting the quest reward when looking at the pack as a whole. If you were going to do anything in railcraft for instance then you would have had to go on that nether trip regardless. the only difference is that you would have had all your toys before going on the trip. making the trip a lot easier, since you would have a lot stronger gear. (difficulty as in chance to not succeed, rather than as in actual physical effort, this kind of difficulty is described as demanding player skill as opposed to needing patience)

There is no character progression in minecraft, and the character only gains strenght trough his/her gear rather than leveling up like in wow, or by waiting around for skills to train like in eve online.
This leaves equipment as the only way to balance difficulty in minecraft. and doing so without creating any grind for someone is nearly impossible.
For someone who are gung ho about fighting ghasts with only their bare hands will find the nether trip boring. it becomes a game of chance, and not one of skill anymore. but hey. for those who don't spit fireballs back at ghasts the trip is maybe too hard to do at that point. and they will get frustrated when they find they have to kill x number of even harder to fight enemies like the blazes in order to get the item they need instead. or they end up having to default to searching for endless hours for those magma-cubes that only show up after you have found more than enough magma-cream. again it becomes a grind instead of an exciting adventure. both of these scenarios are expamples of what people like to call grind.

Gregtech is a mod that adjusts how and when a player has access to certain items that have a big impact on how difficult a task is perceived. this is either to your liking, or it is not. this is an entirely subjective thing, and we can probably all agree that we will probably never agree on any balance between effort needed to obtain these items and how we should be able to obtain them. this is what config files are for. gregtech allows you to adjust it to your preference. entirely removing the need for the nether before getting your toys is a choice you can make.

And no. as a "hardcore" player, I don't mind editing the configs, so if the FTB team decides that GT is too much then fine by me. I'l just add it myself and then tweak my configs to suit my style. I do hope they keep it in mind tho, and don't introduce incompatibility issues that are too hard to solve.
 

poxun

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Jul 29, 2019
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I dislike it. It adds nothing useful for anyone sensible. Only people who are obsessed with EU generation need/want/care about the new top tier stuff. Most Minecraft players are playing Minecraft to build stuff and not maximize pointless EU numbers that have no direct physical presence in the game.

I've been playing on two servers, one with GT enabled and one with it disabled.

On the server with it enabled almost nobody is using any IC2, opting for Forestry/Buildcraft/Thermal Expansion solutions for everything. Only when players are well established and on their second or third 64x64 quarry run or have no choice due to what GT did to some F/BC/TE recipe have they occasionally been doing IC2 stuff but almost ONLY to make drills and IC2 armour and not for any of the machines (beyond what they need to make stuff). People are now wondering on the forum if its even worthwhile having IC2 (inc addons) and GT installed at all.

On the server with it disabled and have that fact clearly on our wiki and forums we still get confused posts on the forum about "why can't I craft X"? when the user has missed that they need to disable GT in their client. We even had (at least) one person stop playing perm rage quit because they had spent days making various machines (and their power sources) and components to craft something before finding this out...Perm rage quits are not good for the pack! Beyond this we have a healthy mix between people starting mainly with F/BC/TE systems and those mainly starting with IC2.

Edit: also the server with it disabled is far more popular (more people playing for longer) than the server with it enabled, despite pulling from more or less the same group of players.

My view is that GT only serves to make IC2 irrelevant in a multi mod environment such as FTB - even more so when RP2 is added the list.

Either IC2 should be included as is or not installed at all. Adding a mod to effectively remove a mod is crazy.

Edit2: There is no reason not to include a CONFIG file for GT in the pack along with the disabled GT mod. This would allow people to add GT to a server/client without compatibility issues. Doing it this way instead of the other is better as a server that needs GT won't let a client connect without it, but a server without GT will let a client with it installed connect, which is where the confusion is.
 

mfgamesys

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Jul 29, 2019
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I for one enjoy gregtech makes the play through of the ic2g a nice experience for me. I do like that the matterfab(massfab) has become less scrap hungry i can just use hoppers to feed it scrap instead of needing some crazy production rate of scrap. Also I plan on making a nice fusion reactor complex for a minecraft hadron collider base. I find the intense late game addons have made the game seem to give me something to try and obtain. Also I find this mod adds something, no one really has a good grasp of the mod unlike ic2 and forestry so it makes you think of what you are going to do.

If you don't want to think about what you are doing then you want the modded experience to feel like vanilla but with a lot more automation?

this is all my personal opinion shared with the community.
 
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