Responding to the OP, this is why I think packs like Unleashed are killing modded minecraft.
lolwut
Survival is a joke once you can make Nano
Not if you play in the style of "Oh, I have this, I'm going to go use it". The amount of times I have died wearing nano is countless.
You don't need quarries, you can mine out the same space in just a little longer than a quarry would take using a TC hammer and without all the supporting infrastructure.
The point of the quarry is that it automines so you can do more fun things, like building. KirinDave has a post somewhere about this exact thing, but I don't have the time (or patience) to find it.
Some of the more interesting parts of the game are tedious and require a lot of patience, which most folks don't have (including myself), so things like Bees, Crops, Trees, Thaum, Ars all get ignored for the most part unless you are magically-inclined.
Ars isn't actually tedious at all, it just requires a low amount of grinding, which can be avoided by just playing the game. I leveled up like 10 times just when I was getting ink sacs...
Some of the mods appear to be in a race to see who can make things the easiest to do things... Steve's Carts used to be something used by a lot of people for tree farms and such, or even villager things and other creative things. Why bother when you can hook up a cheap MFR planter/harvester, or use a safari net to corral your villagers? TC makes things ridiculously easy to mine...why bother with a quarry or turtles if you can just grab a hammer. DartCraft has already been expounded upon at length on how cheap that is to do things.
The general purpose of mods is simplifying vanilla tasks to allow you to do more fun things. This includes (gasp) tree farms! People make Steves Carts farms for 2 reasons; 1) they look WAY cooler than a turtle farm, mfr farm, or a forestry farm, and 2) they are way more efficient than any of those farms. I already told you why the hammer is no where near as good as the Quarry. DC was actually nerfed a lot in 1.6.4.
And then there is the supportability of these mods in a server environment. I am convinced that they are all built for single player. Most server operators use some form of bukkit plugins for grief prevention. When you have server issues with an FTB pack, one of the first responses I regularly see is "sorry, we don't support bukkit, that's your problem".
Mods are made as-is, and generally when developing a mod you should be thinking of people who will be playing that mod, and that mod only, on singleplayer. And a lot of servers don't actually use Bukkit or grief prevention because many servers are private, and everyone is friends; they don't need grief prevention.
Server load and permissions are another issue. If you run an open server, or even if you're closed but with a healthy user base, things like quarries, or elaborate machine builds where pipes are all over the place - like the OP has mentioned - just kill a server because most users can't police their builds. Having one user with an overflowing quarry spitting stuff out is one thing, but having the same with 5 or 10? All with chunk loaders? All with spawners? Our server has disabled several things like quarries, MPS, MFFS because they are OP, have nerved others for same reason, and disabled others because of stability issues (wireless redstone, etc), which in itself ends up limiting folks who are using a pack like Unleashed.
Quarries don't use chunk loaders, because they are chunk loaders. If you are worried about limiting users, don't nerf things more them. Generally if a player is worried about things being OP and they actually care, they won't make it (or they will exploit it, but the things you listed can't be exploited). And, by you saying that Quarries are OP, how does that not contradict your other message of "why bother with a quarry or turtles if you can just grab a hammer." Have you nerfed hammers as well? Quarries seem a bit less OP since they require power. Just because an item exists, doesn't mean you have to make it. And if a server is good enough, it won't lag with a few users making massive setups, generally it's the clients that lag. (Of course, GregTech absolutely demolishes TPS).
Compared to Ultimate, I created a relatively compact and efficient (on paper) base in Unleashed and regularly had worse frames (under 15FPS) on a pretty good computer. Problems like these force people to do less creative things with these mods so end up with a pulverizer, hopper, and large chest. Perfect example...that same setup, I built a nice tower with two multifarms, one to harvest wood and saplings, one to harvest papaya for efficient ethanol production. This was all going into my AE system to get processed as coal, etc. to fuel four railcraft high-pressure boilers, two of them liquid, two on charcoal. I did this so I wouldn't just go straight to ultimate hybrid solar panels or suck the Nether dry of lava. After two or three months of nightmarish problems with the boilers exploding for no reason whenever I re-entered an unloaded chunk, I ended up converting that entire setup and abandoning the farms and ethanol production and just went with 10 hybrids going into a bunch of electric engines. That is hardly a creative build, but there are tons of examples of bugs and problems that either limit your options, or suck the creativity out of people and they end up going with the easiest solution. I should point out, to encourage people not to go directly to hybrids, since they are so cheap to make, on our server they only output 128 EU instead of 512. I get much better frame rates now without that system, and nothing blows up.
I had the same problem, I had decent frames, until I built my treefarm. Turns out if you place a sound muffler or six, you'll frames will increase drastically.
Packs like Unleashed are not designed around balance, at least that's how they feel to me. It's like a bunch of mods were chucked together that people wanted, without thought to actual gameplay, which, agree or not, is where I think GT had the most impact. It made you consider progression. Things like Twilight are a cakewalk because people can go there with Nano or Quantum suits and fly everywhere. There's no challenge...just another thing to check off the list. Removing armour like Nano and Quantum and MPS would help... And I'll admit, that's a playstyle choice, but when playtime in a given week is limited, that goes out the window and it becomes whatever is easiest to do the job.
When it comes down to it, things have gotten too easy to do with the 1.5 packs, so pick the easiest way (there's tons of tutorials) and play for a couple of weeks, then get bored. Or go with a private pack and try and balance things on your own or add different mods to keep things interesting.
Packs like Unleashed are designed around having fun*
TF is actually extremely hard, even with Nanosuit. Quantum, okay, that makes it a cakewalk, I'll give you that. But I died about 6 times on staffcraft just trying to get to the Ur Ghast in full nano. On an old 1.4.7 server I died a few times (mostly due to trying to reach my items) fighting the Lich with full Nano.[DOUBLEPOST=1389281997][/DOUBLEPOST]
I was providing perspective and a point of view to the OP whose players are apparently bored. I am merely relating my experience and my opinion on it. If I did not challenge myself to find things to do, I would have stopped playing in August.
I enjoy it, though I do think a lot of it is too easy, and so I try and find alternate ways to do things, but invariably in a server environment, the alternate ways are not always optimal for the server. Or are buggy and frustrating, so the easiest path is sometimes the only one left, which is not creative.
I should point out, I do not run the server, so have no control over how it's setup. I do, however, enjoy playing with the folks on it.
Keep in touch with them and play a pack you all agree on. I have done this and it's made for some great friendships.
What isn't creative is nerfing things into oblivion by using difficulty as a mask for tedium.[DOUBLEPOST=1389282133][/DOUBLEPOST]
Why would hard mode make life miserable for my friends and I? Maybe that's the kind of mode that we enjoy? Just because you can't handle it doesn't mean other players can't handle it.
True
But if all mod developers start going about their developing in a nerf-nerf-nerf-nerf-tedium fashion, many players will find other mods to use. Most people don't like crafting for 6 hours just to get one item.
