So you're playing creative then? Because the only difference is time?
No, the difference between survival and creative is the incentive to create systems that provide stuff for you. This is especially true for stuff like FTB where you build ender farms for the sole purpose of having a good supply of ender pearls. If you enable creative on a survival server people will simply stop playing because there's no point. If it was just about building cool buildings you would not need FTB.
No. I'm playing survival because the only difference is time. I value the time it takes for me to become bored with a game.
So you can't create systems that provide stuff for you in creative? Balderdash. People do it all the time. Creative simply means that you spend less time gathering the resources. So, again, the only difference is time.
I'm sorry but the bloody wikipedia page (and I'm sorry but if you're quoting dictionary definitions when discussing gamedesign you're a wee bit of a sad person) says so itself:
In massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), time sinks are a method of increasing the time needed by players to do certain tasks, hopefully causing them to subscribe for longer periods of time.[2] Players may use the term disparagingly to describe a simplistic and time-consuming aspect of gameplay, possibly designed to keep players playing longer without significant benefit. Time sinks can also be used for other gameplay reasons, such as to help regenerate resources or monsters in the game world.
That's the definition of time sinks in game design. If you want to argue that "in general" it doesn't have this meaning I could not care less: we're talking about game design here.
Obviously in game design it's used to keep players playing longer. Everything in a game is a timesink in that regard. They want the players to play for longer and enjoy themselves for longer.
There is no subscription fee for feed the beast, so that definition isn't contextual applicable. The only way it is applicable is in the sense that it increases the amount of time that a player spends playing the game. In game design, a time sink is any mechanic that increases a player's time spent playing the game.
In the discussion of game design whether I can use or not use certain aspect is not relevant. If a game designer has the notion that just increasing the time it takes to achieve something makes it harder he is simply a bad game designer. That's what I'm arguing here. To counter all the twerps who go "oh look at me I am so hardcore because I us minecrack on default". You're not fooling anyone; spending an hour crafting something isn't skill, we all know NEI showed you the recipies.
In the discussion of game design, you just called levels of difficulty irrelevant. And I don't mean conceptual levels. I mean the hard-coded option to change the number variables that define the difficulty of whatever you're playing. You just called the difficulty settings in every single game non-relevant to game design.
Do you know how stupid that sounds?
It's just as relevant as any other mechanic in the game.
