What exactly is offensive about being told to play in creative mode?

[Hambeau]

I agree with the sentiment that people who tell others to go play creative are complete wankers.

I completely, utterly, totally DISAGREE with the way you seem to think discussing mod balance is a stupid thing to do. There needs to be balance and it needs to be considered, addressed and applied effectively at all stages of both game and mod development. To do otherwise is ridiculous. And the balance in vanilla Minecraft itself is already somewhat broken. To quote the Escapist: "This is a game where having the resources to bake a cake is a mark of considerable status"

It is something that easily gets out of hand though. I don't like EnderStorage. I believe it is a vastly overpowered mod that makes large sections of both the vanilla game and many mods completely invalid, for what is effectively free. I am allowed to have this opinion. I am allowed to say this, online, but for some reason, anyone who loves the mod feels the need to rant about my tedium-based hardon and clear affectations for GregoriousT.

I think EnderStorage needs a drastic balancing factor brought in. It needs something to make it not completely invalidate Railcraft, the QuantumBridge in AE, Tesseracts from TE, or any other method of transporting items more than a couple chunks. It needs to cost energy, or randomly lose items to the ether, or something. It is an inherently unbalanced addition to the game.

I DON'T run around telling people that "They should play creative" if they play with EnderStorage. It just makes me think they've cheaped out and taken the easy option, when there are infinitely cooler, more interesting and ultimately "fairer" ways of playing.

If the response to the above two paragraphs is to tell me "I'm playing wrong" or that "I should let people do what they want" then all it does is tell me the person isn't interested in gameplay, so much as they want the way they know is easy to remain functional.

It's funny, as a high school IT teacher, I see kids playing a fair amount of games. The one that gets me is the "godmode" style cheats / hacks. There's a game out there, called "The worlds hardest game". It's 30 levels of "You're a red box. Get through this obstacle course without touching a blue circle. Collect the yellow circles as you go". And if you touch a blue circle, you restart the level.

Nice and tricky, right? Some might say it needs balancing. It gets damned difficult. It is called "The worlds hardest game" though, right?. You know what >50% of kids do after playing it for 10 minutes? They find "The worlds hardest game - hacked" which makes it so touching a blue circle doesn't kill you. It doesn't even act as a wall. You can just travel straight through. There's even an "ultra hack" version where the level walls don't stop you. Here's what that game looks like:

Somehow, this is fun. Kids will load this up, and play it through to completion 2-3 times in a row, and then again the next day. When the page they load it from has thousands of other games as well.

And personally, this is how things like EnderStorage, MPPS, Early Dartcraft and Mystcraft feel like to me. It's the easy solution. It detracts from finesse, skills and the inherent puzzle that playing this game is supposed to be.

Some people feel they "outwit" the game designers by using "hacks" and cheat codes. I find this especially funny in console gaming, where the hacks and cheat codes only exist because the designers put them there.

The one time I succumbed to the "meta-gaming" temptation I ruined the game for myself forever... In the DOS days a buddy and I had the same game. He used a macro key program to run the game all night while he slept. To get back at his "cheating", I found and interpreted the character file (hidden by DOS) and just changed my character's level and equipment to show I "played" better. Never touched the game again.

 

[Dorque]

What bugs me personally is that if you go one step further and just make things even harder than the norm... people attack you. "tedium isnt difficult!" which is basically saying that just making the game harder so that it takes longer to accomplish the same task does not mean you deserver more credit.

But crafting anything at all is just tedium. A creative player could say "why did you waste all that time crafting that MPS suit when you could have just build fun things and done fun stuff with the same effect I do without all that tedium?" Everyone is doing the same exact thing, but just to different levels.

What you have to understand here is that, according to game design philosophy, no, tedium is not the same as difficulty.

And they're right.

Things that are hard require: more skill, more practice, more learning. Things that are tedious require more time, more clicks. It's the difference between getting better at something and investing more time into something.

Let's look at it from an MMO perspective. Let's say we have two methods to acquire an item. The first is to defeat a raid boss that requires your entire group to be coordinated, for everyone to know their role and play it well, for people to reposition, to avoid AoE attacks, to know exactly when to use the once-per-encounter stuff... that's hard. The second is to run basic dungeons which are well below your skill level 150 times to collect a currency to purchase them. That's tedious.

The reason this is important is that, broadly speaking, one of these is fun, and the other is a means to an end.

 

[Hoff]

I'm not.

-Anonymous individual in crowd, "Life of Brian", when Brian tells a crowd "Don't let anyone tell you what to think... You're all individuals!"

I must admit I've never seen that movie.

 

[Dorque]

I must admit I've never seen that movie.

You're missing out.

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[Hoff]

You're missing out.

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Not really my uh, flavor... or something.

 

[Dorque]

Not really my uh, flavor... or something.

I dunno,man. If the look on Eric Idle's face doesn't make you pee yourself a little, I must question the existence of your soul =P

To be fair, this is only my second-favourite bit, but you need a rudimentary understanding of Latin to get the other one.

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[DREVL]

@OP Simply because validation of self importance.

 

[Hoff]

I dunno,man. If the look on Eric Idle's face doesn't make you pee yourself a little, I must question the existence of your soul =P

To be fair, this is only my second-favourite bit, but you need a rudimentary understanding of Latin to get the other one.

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Oh no need to question; I've never had one

 

[Dorque]

Oh no need to question; I've never had one

Ah, well then, mystery solved! Good work, gang.

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[Hoff]

Ah, well then, mystery solved! Good work, gang.

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[Dorque]

Glad I was able to bring my audience with me on that one

I'd have gone for a line about lack of soul and tech support instead, but, Ash.

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[Hoff]

Glad I was able to bring my audience with me on that one

I'd have gone for a line about lack of soul and tech support instead, but, Ash.

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@Ashzification a soul? Pfft. She just filled the place a soul would normally be with kittens.

 

[Dorque]

@Ashzification a soul? Pfft. She just filled the place a soul would normally be with kittens.

Hey, your words. All I'm saying is that she scares me a little

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[mrbaggins]

What you have to understand here is that, according to game design philosophy, no, tedium is not the same as difficulty.

And they're right.

Things that are hard require: more skill, more practice, more learning. Things that are tedious require more time, more clicks. It's the difference between getting better at something and investing more time into something.

Let's look at it from an MMO perspective. Let's say we have two methods to acquire an item. The first is to defeat a raid boss that requires your entire group to be coordinated, for everyone to know their role and play it well, for people to reposition, to avoid AoE attacks, to know exactly when to use the once-per-encounter stuff... that's hard. The second is to run basic dungeons which are well below your skill level 150 times to collect a currency to purchase them. That's tedious.

The reason this is important is that, broadly speaking, one of these is fun, and the other is a means to an end.

All completely true.

However, minecraft as a whole is ENTIRELY tedium, to various levels.

And the currency in Minecraft? Time. Nothing more, nothing less. There's no particularly difficult part of minecraft, especially once you've gotten up to diamond armor. There's that one breach point along the way where you have to survive without it, but that's not long.

EVERYTHING in this game is TIME. Nothing else. Hence the tedium argument being so prevalent. Because all "difficulty" in this game can ever actually be is to make things take longer. Sure, you might end up needing some slighty different strategies, depending on the mods / situation, but they can hardly be said to be difficult. There's no finesse, no practicable skills to speak of, it's all about how much time you have to invest and what you get out of it.

 

[Hambeau]

I dunno,man. If the look on Eric Idle's face doesn't make you pee yourself a little, I must question the existence of your soul =P

To be fair, this is only my second-favourite bit, but you need a rudimentary understanding of Latin to get the other one.

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Not really... I know next to nothing about Latin but got the gist, having taken French in Jr. High school. Besides, who hasn't had the pleasure of having to write something on the blackboard 100 times as punishment (on threat of being gelded)? At least among those of us who remember blackboards, anyway...

 

[Hoff]

There's no finesse, no practicable skills to speak of, it's all about how much time you have to invest and what you get out of it.

I disagree. Creating, implementing, and improving strategies is a skill to begin with. What you're arguing of minecraft could be said of MANY MANY games. Given enough time anyone of any skill will get to the same point. The problem with saying that? Some get there faster. How do they do that? Magic? Cheating? Nope. They've gained an understanding of everything and are able to see, use, and abuse mechanics in a way to reach a goal faster. That is skill. Give someone who has never played modded MC all the information known to someone who has been playing it for years; the veteran will almost always be faster. Developing strategies is not something which is inevitable it is something learned.\

At least among those of us who remember blackboards, anyway...

Imagining the sound of chalk writing on a blackboard makes me want to explode my brain so I can't hear it anymore.

 

[RedBoss]

Imagining the sound of chalk writing on a blackboard makes me want to explode my brain so I can't hear it anymore.

That never bothered me. Running your nails across the chalkboard never bothered me.

The sound of writing on a whiteboard does irk me. Someone touching a balloon drives me insane. Especially someone making balloon animals. A clown making balloon animals is motivation for shotgun use.

 

[Dorque]

Not really... I know next to nothing about Latin but got the gist, having taken French in Jr. High school. Besides, who hasn't had the pleasure of having to write something on the blackboard 100 times as punishment (on threat of being gelded)? At least among those of us who remember blackboards, anyway...

Well, the joke there specifically is that the Centurion doesn't care about the content (he's writing Romans Go Home), just that he's using the wrong tense.

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[Dorque]

Imagining the sound of chalk writing on a blackboard makes me want to explode my brain so I can't hear it anymore.

That one gets me too. Squeaking chalk should be a shootable offense.

As to the rest of your post, I'd add that a ton of actual learning is involved. Redstone alone has pushed me to a first-year understanding of electronics, and I still have trouble setting up a lot of circuitry.

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[Hoff]

That never bothered me. Running your nails across the chalkboard never bothered me.

The sound of writing on a whiteboard does irk me. Someone touching a balloon drives me insane. Especially someone making balloon animals. A clown making balloon animals is motivation for shotgun use.

See I'm the reverse. I actually like the sound of touching and rubbing balloons.