The Term end game and resource collection.

[Dmyster]

Hi guys im Don. I just wanted to start a discussion and share my thoughts with you guys.

So as I have been an admin on some servers and just a normal player on others. I have seen a lot of people leaving or giving up and becoming bored because they have all the resources they could have ever needed.

Personally I use that as an expansion platform to allow me to create bigger and better things. I enjoy the feeling of not having any restrictions with resources when I build.

Am I the only one or do all of you just get to end game in a week and decide to restart your world 52 times a year?

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[PierceSG]

Nah, a lot of players doesn't want to build impressive stuffs and feels like minecraft is a resource gathering game only. Thus they get bored once they get a lot of stuffs, whereas for some, once they gained the ability to gather lots of resources they start their next phase, which is impressive builds.

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[Celestialphoenix]

Simulating creative mode does make the bigger projects a little easier, though its personally through building a factory to make specific resources rather than hitting the end game then building with unlimited materials+flight.
Setting up with unlimited resources [for me] actually kills a lot of the fun- designing something to work within your limited resources is a more rewarding challenge than doing the same knowing you have infinite.

I think theres a lot more fun involved in the journey to the end game than what there is once you get there. As a result the end game remains this vague concept which I'll hit eventually- and each current build becomes a step in a design challenge to ultimately fulfil this.

Very rarely I chose to restart a world- normally they get broken by game updates/bugs before I finish.
Unfortunately here (and lately vanilla too) worlds are treated as disposable junk to be tossed out whenever.

 

[MigukNamja]

That's the thing about gaming - each person has their own goals and ideas about "fun". Personally, I find enjoyment in exploring new mods, doing things different ways, finding solutions to new problems, and making the best-looking and best-functioning worlds I can. Ideally, everything should "make sense" and look appropriate and there is always room for improvement.

I've done enough worlds that "racing to the end" is self-defeating. Rather, each world I do takes longer and longer to reach the "end-game" so I can enjoy the journey as long as I can.

If you want to try and force (heavy-hand) slower progression, there are many ways to do it, but forcing a slower progression will likely cause those same players who rush to their "end game" in a week and then leave/quit to simply leave due to frustration. Personally, I wouldn't sweat it. People will like playing how they like to play.

 

[zorn]

That's the thing about gaming - each person has their own goals and ideas about "fun". Personally, I find enjoyment in exploring new mods, doing things different ways, finding solutions to new problems, and making the best-looking and best-functioning worlds I can. Ideally, everything should "make sense" and look appropriate and there is always room for improvement.

I've done enough worlds that "racing to the end" is self-defeating. Rather, each world I do takes longer and longer to reach the "end-game" so I can enjoy the journey as long as I can.

If you want to try and force (heavy-hand) slower progression, there are many ways to do it, but forcing a slower progression will likely cause those same players who rush to their "end game" in a week and then leave/quit to simply leave due to frustration. Personally, I wouldn't sweat it. People will like playing how they like to play.

I disagree. It's fine to say that some players enjoy the late game and have fun making huge builds, but to say not to worry about adjusting the game for the other style of players isn't fair. The friends I originally played with all quit because when we started, they used mining lasers and auto crafting tables. Once we found quarries and nether lava and ME systems, they raced to have lots of resources... and quit. They had more fun when we started, thinking a couple HV solars were a big deal, than when they had 50K iron ores in storage and could build anything. Rubber was always a resource you needed more of making solars... and then we found MFR tree farms and never worried about rubber again. The struggle disappeared as we found new ways to do things more easily, and once my friends really got to the game style the OP is talking about... they quit.

I was just messing aroudn with factorization and realized... whats the point? The only reason to make a factorization system is to watch the items move around and set up some automation. Ideally there would be two reasons to process ores this way: to solve problems with automation, and to increase yield to get more 'stuff'. But there is no need to get more stuff. Just run more quarries. Now go back to how my friends started playing, without quarries or turtles, and just using mining lasers. Now there is a sense of satisfaction in increasing your yield. In the over abundant dw20 1.5, even the friends I play with now that use Tic tools have no reason to figure out ore tripling with factorization.

It's great that lots of people get satisfaction out of the creative side of the game, but I would argue that minecraft is not 'a building game' alone, as people contend. It is ALSO a resource gathering and survival game. Its fun to build, but also fun to struggle to survive and gather resources to be able to build too. (For many people).
Many people quit, I think, once it becomes a primarily a building game and the other two aspects of the game disappear.

 

[PierceSG]

All in all, you just create an environment you like to be in, eventually those who has similar play style as you will start joining and staying. Those who leave, just let them be.

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[zorn]

All in all, you just create an environment you like to be in, eventually those who has similar play style as you will start joining and staying. Those who leave, just let them be.

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I get this, but not everyone I know wants to play minecraft, and everyone says public servers are a waste of time. If I installed say... Technic's Big Dig pack and my friends all quit, my fun is also ruined.

And i think the real issue is that a lot of people don't even realize WHY they lost interest, they just know it got boring and found another game. They might not realize that it was that they enjoyed the journey more than being flush with resources and not having to worry about resources.

 

[MigukNamja]

... and my friends all quit, my fun is also ruined if my friends all quit.

If you and your friends can agree upon how to build the server to force/encourage longer worlds, that's the ideal way to do it. But, that's more of a human issue (i.e. garnering consensus) than a technical issue.

My advice was aimed rather at public or semi-public servers. If a public server admin makes it harder or more tedious than the players expect, most players will likely move on to easier servers.

Overall, I believe gaming enjoying is more about meeting expectations than forcing a certain style of gameplay. Yes, eyes can be opened, the reward has to be worth the effort for it to be enjoyable. Life is often about disappointed expectations and rewards not matching the (time) sacrifice, but gaming should be. Hence, why bother gaming ?

 

[zorn]

If you and your friends can agree upon how to build the server to force/encourage longer worlds, that's the ideal way to do it. But, that's more of a human issue (i.e. garnering consensus) than a technical issue.

My advice was aimed rather at public or semi-public servers. If a public server admin makes it harder or more tedious than the players expect, most players will likely move on to easier servers.

Overall, I believe gaming enjoying is more about meeting expectations than forcing a certain style of gameplay. Yes, eyes can be opened, the reward has to be worth the effort for it to be enjoyable. Life is often about disappointed expectations and rewards not matching the (time) sacrifice, but gaming should be. Hence, why bother gaming ?

I agree, although we have run into some issues with adjusting configs, etc. And I think it's normal. For example, when my friends and I moved to FTB and started with Ultimate, I remember one saying 'oh THEY increased the cost of DSUs'. It turned out that it is just a config option, and it can be turned back to just requiring chests instead of ender pearls. But no one cared because they felt it was out of our control, ("they" changed it) so we just dealt with it.

But to make config changes feels... to quote your post... heavy handed. Instead of a game designer making a change in the name of balance, its the server admin makign the changes. And if one person suggests a change that affects another player, it causes tension. But if the FTB crew make changes before putting out a pack, or if the dev makes a change, people seem much less likely to complain unless it's a big change. This is how it seems to be in my experience anyway.

 

[Dmyster]

I do believe that people on both ends of the spectrum can play together... Those people who take their time or those who rush for a creative experience.

Personally for me I like the accomplishment of gathering the resources... being the technical person who makes farms that can well succeed my needs. But that does not mean its end game for me. It allows me to access a higher level which others may not strive to possess.

For me there is no end game unless there is a game breaking pack. I strive to build things that entertain me and allow me to learn new things.

I take pride in showing off my creations and allowing others to learn from them too...

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[Hoff]

Many people quit, I think, once it becomes a primarily a building game and the other two aspects of the game disappear.

So my problem with this is that it presumes that is a bad thing. For you and your friends it may well be but the rather harsh truth is because people enjoy this game so many different ways not everyone plays one world for the same amount of time. Differing playstyles simply do not allow for it.

There is nothing wrong with someone finding enjoyment in starting a new world every week rushing to get endless resources as fast as they can and that's it. At the same time there's nothing wrong with wanting that to take longer. There is something wrong with wanting others to be made to do any one playstyle if they don't want to. The FTB team handing out heavy-handed configs for everyone would be far more detrimental than not.

The problem with modded minecraft is that it is not suited to be played with the same people again and again. It's not football(either one), dota, LoL, or any other game with pre-established meaning and rules. Similar people choose to play it because they know what to expect. With minecraft people do not need similar reasoning to choose to play and thus it is difficult to establish an environment in which people looking for different things can play together.

The FTB does have a few packs that presume on certain playstyle traits; these are not the most successful packs. They cater to specific groups through the playstyle they lean toward the most. Packs like RR and Big Dig do this as well. They simply will never be the number 1 shining star of packs akin to ultimate or unleashed. Those two packs offer a relative area in which a much more generalized group of playstyles can thrive. It can be played slowly or rushed and quit or rushed and build or anything in between. So while the big packs may not work for everyone or work to have every playstyle in it at once; the ones that don't fit are corner cases and there is generally another pack somewhere that will fit that corner case. Even if there isn't the new FTB launcher is being designed to allow those to create areas in which they do. It is also making it easier to allow others access to these areas.


All in all if you want to play together with a group of people you'll want to find packs that work toward specific playstyles akin to RR, MF2, UHS2, etc. and find people that understand what is in those packs and then play together.

 

[Dylan4ever]

Personally, I never made it to the end-game (worlds didn't last for long because of various reasons). I do know I enjoy the struggle. If I find anything too abundant or OP, I dive into the configs to see if I can change it.
I often construct my own packs which I balance out as much as I can. I have the luck to have some friends with the same playstyle as I have, which means I never ran into the problem of people leaving.
But then again, the worlds we had never survived long though. Not necessarily because we got bored, but because I always made major changes in the pack that instantly made that world "outdated" in a way.
I like the struggle to last, but I love the creative part of the game if you have worked hard to get to it. Knowing how much struggle went into that amount of resources makes it so much more valuable.

Being a mod developer (Erebus mod, don't know if you've heard of it), I tend to tailor the mod to my playstyle. This means the Erebus is quite hardcore and makes survival a struggle, even with great gear. That way, I always have a dangerous place to die and struggle if the Overworld gets too easy. The addition of dimensions often provides a whole new level of gameplay, even with tons of resources. That is, I think, what I love most about dimension mods.

The whole problem with endgame is that the game practically ends (surprise). It is Minecraft ofcourse, so you can keep on playing. But since nothing you do is really necessary anymore, I can understand people quiting, because there is a lack of a real goal. Why they would work so hard to eventually quit, I don't understand though.

 

[zorn]

So my problem with this is that it presumes that is a bad thing. For you and your friends it may well be but the rather harsh truth is because people enjoy this game so many different ways not everyone plays one world for the same amount of time. Differing playstyles simply do not allow for it.

There is nothing wrong with someone finding enjoyment in starting a new world every week rushing to get endless resources as fast as they can and that's it. At the same time there's nothing wrong with wanting that to take longer. There is something wrong with wanting others to be made to do any one playstyle if they don't want to. The FTB team handing out heavy-handed configs for everyone would be far more detrimental than not.

The problem with modded minecraft is that it is not suited to be played with the same people again and again. It's not football(either one), dota, LoL, or any other game with pre-established meaning and rules. Similar people choose to play it because they know what to expect. With minecraft people do not need similar reasoning to choose to play and thus it is difficult to establish an environment in which people looking for different things can play together.

The FTB does have a few packs that presume on certain playstyle traits; these are not the most successful packs. They cater to specific groups through the playstyle they lean toward the most. Packs like RR and Big Dig do this as well. They simply will never be the number 1 shining star of packs akin to ultimate or unleashed. Those two packs offer a relative area in which a much more generalized group of playstyles can thrive. It can be played slowly or rushed and quit or rushed and build or anything in between. So while the big packs may not work for everyone or work to have every playstyle in it at once; the ones that don't fit are corner cases and there is generally another pack somewhere that will fit that corner case. Even if there isn't the new FTB launcher is being designed to allow those to create areas in which they do. It is also making it easier to allow others access to these areas.


All in all if you want to play together with a group of people you'll want to find packs that work toward specific playstyles akin to RR, MF2, UHS2, etc. and find people that understand what is in those packs and then play together.

I never said there was anything wrong with other playstyles.

Notice though that the OP has seen 'lots' of people quitting. Those same people would pick unleashed over unhinged, but they quit, Id argue, because unleashed overloaded them on the ability to gather resources. Unhinged was not as popular not just because of slower resource gathering, it also has mostly older mods in it, and not that many of them.

Id offer some evidence to the argument though, beyond just the "people can do what they want" defense. A friend of mine played Final Fantasy online, and he told me that as the game lost popularity the game designers started making things that were previously very hard to get very easy. He said everyone had super strong items, the best rare item drops, etc. And... they had a surge of players at first, because they enjoyed having the things that they couldnt get before that, but then they lost players like they had before. He said people said that even though they had more items it ended up being more boring to play. BUT they ALL loved it at first. Unlike the Final Fantasy game, the players can dictate, kind of, what the game plays like. PEople demand Quarryplus... and we get the ridiculous Quarryplus. (IMO) So the evidence im giving here is that other games that do trying giving players what they want 'ALL TEH THINGS!' don't end up being very successful at it.

Ultimate was a super popular pack because... (looks around carefully and whispers) ... Gregtech... created a pack unlike unleashed, where people had more than just 'a building game', they had a resource gathering game EVEN weeks into a world, if not a survival game anymore (MPS kills that).

Again, nothing wrong with enjoying the building aspect of the game more, but as the OP said... lots of people quit because, I think, they want MORE than a building game.

 

[Hoff]

Again, nothing wrong with enjoying the building aspect of the game more, but as the OP said... lots of people quit because, I think, they want MORE than a building game.

I'm not talking about building. What I'm trying to point out is that presuming that quitting a world because they got tons of resources is not a bad thing necessarily. The whole thread(Not just you) presumes that is a bad thing. It may be exactly what some people want. These same people did Ultimate the same way they did Unleashed. They don't care about building, progressing, but simply having stocks of resources.

The idea that worlds can't be disposable is what I'm trying to point out as wrong.

A friend of mine played Final Fantasy online, and he told me that as the game lost popularity the game designers started making things that were previously very hard to get very easy. He said everyone had super strong items, the best rare item drops, etc. And... they had a surge of players at first, because they enjoyed having the things that they couldnt get before that, but then they lost players like they had before. He said people said that even though they had more items it ended up being more boring to play. BUT they ALL loved it at first.

They couldn't have ALL enjoyed it at first because they had a surge of players; players like those that play modded MC just to get tons of resources and don't care for using them. It's not bad to want to play this way. It doesn't work for games like Final Fantasy online because the number of incarnations of classes and playable styles is limited and thus those people that played that way were able to reach the maximum number of permutations the game has to offer relatively quickly. On the other side those that enjoyed the previous way no longer had the chance to enjoy the game. That's what makes it a poor design choice for a game of rather limited playable permutations but in modded MC that number is insanely high. I would easily estimate I've played over 60 worlds where I purely rushed to have huge numbers of resources. No buildings, tech, or progression in mind. Not on any of those worlds did I do things exactly as I did before.

On an aside 1.4.7 GT was terribly easy. It was the equivalent of IC2 before the age of automining. It didn't take weeks to beat Ultimate it took days; if you wanted to reach that point in the game.

 

[Dorque]

I think what often kills it for me is that resource gathering is the thing that I'm really good at. I'm not so good at design. I've made some pretty interiors in the past but most large constructions I've ever made have a bad habit of looking pretty much like boxes in the long run. I'm getting better... slowly... but I'm never going to be able to keep pace with some of my more artistic friends; I might have an eye for colour but spatial relationships generally elude me, and most of the reason I play on a server is so that I can show my stuff off to my friends.

Now, certain mods (or certain mod groupings, if you will) do ameliorate this somewhat. For example, the combination of Forestry and Binnie's gives me something to strive for in the realm of gathering and non-design-based crafting that I can show off and are still pretty impressive, for a given value of impressive. I've gone much further into bees and trees on our Unleashed server than anyone else and so I still have something to show off without having to recreate Xanadu. That being said, we're switching to a new world as soon as the 1.6 flagship pack comes out because yeah, I've hit that boredom level again, I've got about 50k diamonds collected among a lot of other things and once I hit that point I'm typically ready to start over again; if I wanted to play Creative, I'd play Creative.

::EDIT:: Just a note to add to this:

I'm not talking about building. What I'm trying to point out is that presuming that quitting a world because they got tons of resources is not a bad thing necessarily. The whole thread(Not just you) presumes that is a bad thing. It may be exactly what some people want. These same people did Ultimate the same way they did Unleashed. They don't care about building, progressing, simply having stocks of resources.

That's pretty much exactly how I play. I enjoy the gathering above and beyond everything else and it's how I play a lot of games. I'm currently playing a Horizons game with no mining allowed just to challenge myself and I'm almost at a full stack of gold bars.

 

[MigukNamja]

I'm currently playing a Horizons game with no mining allowed just to challenge myself and I'm almost at a full stack of gold bars.

^^^ This

As you have wisely done, creating one's own challenges is a great way to get the most out of an open-ended, sandbox game like (modded) Minecraft.

 

[RedBoss]

Am I the only one or do all of you just get to end game in a week and decide to restart your world 52 times a year?

I don't like to restart a lot unless I'm moving up minecraft versions or I've had a horrible spawn with ugly biomes. I prefer to "set a spell" and enjoy the game. I also like building cool looking things and exploring. These two goals clash with each other so my visible results are often low based on available time to play.
For people who like to gather resources, I liken them to folks that get all the secret items in GTA or have a house full of items in Skyrim. It's fun if you like it but I'm not interested, at least not primarily.

I view the rush mentality of modded players as a direct result of how focused the community is on updating. There's no goal of staying in a world when the newest version is lurking around the corner. With each update of vanilla, there's an almost guarantee that you can't take your modded world with you so there's no attachment to it. That's a big deal.

In vanilla, people hold on to worlds for years. I think Etho's SSP world is at least 2 years old. AvidyaZen still has his SSP world from the Alpha days. In vanilla there's no arms race because you're pretty much assured that all your work will stay and you'll only be a nether trek away from new mobs, biomes, & other content. You know that you can keep your world for a year or more without an update killing your progress.

Modded MC worlds last 6 months before being on death row. Yes some people stick with worlds longer than that but with each vanilla update, the time line for a world wipe and upgrade is coming. So this, to me, explains the rushing and boredom. The constant option of novelty from mods also lends itself to a lack of permanence for a world. I don't feel the need to dispose of my worlds so often. But that's just me.

 

[zorn]

I'm currently playing a Horizons game with no mining allowed just to challenge myself and I'm almost at a full stack of gold bars.

No automining? This was what I was going to try, removing all methods taht allow you to mine while you do other things. So a mining laser would be ok, but not a quarry or turtles.

 

[Dorque]

No automining? This was what I was going to try, removing all methods taht allow you to mine while you do other things. So a mining laser would be ok, but not a quarry or turtles.

Even if I wanted to I'm still far, far away from automining =P But to the best of my knowledge there aren't any laser drill equivalents in Horizons. I did get an igneous extruder set up, about 20 hours in when I found some cobble in a chest.

The gold is all from looting and oreberries, almost.

 

[Dmyster]

See auto mining takes away a key aspect of the game. Yes it takes time but so does everything else in minecraft.... it we didn't enjoy a single part of the game we wouldn't have taken the time to find modded mc.....

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