Well, I'm completely on board with playing it however you want. My little brother only plays in Creative apparently, as relax time. To each his own. I'm un-diagnosed but MUST have ADD. Tedium puts me into a blissful, Zen state.
What marks a mod/item as "OP" or "Unbalanced"?
- Thread starter Wagon153
- Start date
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Play whatever you want i say.
Just don't bloody complain like hell as your favourite modpack inserted a mod in the update which you don't like.
Ontopic: Its more of what other mods achieve and what you can do with that mod.
Simple explained, Morph (Before configs):
Could fly moment you kill bat.
IC2:
Could fly moment you get a jetpack which is made with stuff.
Balance is a hard thing.
And as in my opinion Vanilla is unbalanced and OP/UP on so many places. (Look, they added horses. Made minecarts for transport near useless. Next update: BUFFED MINECARTS, USE THEM PL0X)
But mods balance towards Vanilla *Mostly* so in my opinion most mods are either to cheap, to easy or to unbalanced.
Just don't bloody complain like hell as your favourite modpack inserted a mod in the update which you don't like.
Ontopic: Its more of what other mods achieve and what you can do with that mod.
Simple explained, Morph (Before configs):
Could fly moment you kill bat.
IC2:
Could fly moment you get a jetpack which is made with stuff.
Balance is a hard thing.
And as in my opinion Vanilla is unbalanced and OP/UP on so many places. (Look, they added horses. Made minecarts for transport near useless. Next update: BUFFED MINECARTS, USE THEM PL0X)
But mods balance towards Vanilla *Mostly* so in my opinion most mods are either to cheap, to easy or to unbalanced.
This reminds me of my 1.4.7 mindcrack world someone once saw. They only ever played vanilla minecraft, but when they saw all the automation in my fourth base on that server they commented that "isnt that kind've like playing in creative?" to which I replied "do you know what all I had to do to get all this stuff?"
That entirely depends.
Consider a hypothetical weapon called "Wither's Bane". A ranged weapon capable of killing a Wither from a comfortable distance with a single shot, and also destroys Wither Skeletons and make them drop their skulls 100 % of the time. OP much? Not if several Nether Stars are included in its crafting recipe. The Wither's Bane would be a neat way to farm Nether Stars, but it would never aid you with game progression, because it requires you to have won the milestone Wither fight multiple times already before you can even acquire the weapon.
I think "OP-ness" is a matter of effort vs. reward, with some regards to game progression. If the Axe Of Ultimate Choppiness requires you to have cut down a thousand trees before you get it, you have already achieved everything you need the Axe for when you obtain it. By the time you get it, an item that cuts a forest with a single strike isn't strictly necessary, because you have already cut down that forest through conventional means. It then wouldn't be OP as far as game progression goes, but it would drastically reduce late-game tedium. Well-balanced in my opinion. A truly OP item skips the effort and goes straight for the reward.
The scope of the efforts and the rewards should also be considered. A stack of Diamonds in vanilla Minecraft is stupidly hard to get, but it would provide enough materials to craft several pieces of the best tools and armour in the game. In a pack like FTB Ultimate, a stack of Diamonds would be the cheap part of some late-game recipes. The Diamonds then represent a much smaller reward compared to the scope of the game, so an item enabling you to acquire those relatively quickly (say, a Quarry) isn't considered as overpowered. The same can be said for Iron, which is valuable in Vanilla, but mundane in modpacks due to the ease of acquiring it, plus the extreme amounts needed for late-game progression. In the light of the latter, ore doubling machines don't seem as overpowered as they would be in Vanilla.
You can go on with more examples. Autocrafting is made balanced by the large amount of multi-step crafting recipes. Easy, automated farming is balanced because you need so much biomass to even get started with some aspects of the game. Induction Furnaces are almost required to cope with the enormous backlog of ores that would otherwise build up in your depot (unless you spend half your playing time gathering fuel to power conventional Furnaces). In Vanilla, all those things would make large parts of the game practially obsolete.
In other words, you have to consider the milestones of the game or modpack. At which points do the game really go into a new phase, and how hard should it be to get to each of those points? Is the Wither fight the defining climax of the game, the final challenge to prove your proficiency, or just a step on the way to get the Nether Stars you require to craft your basic late-game tools? Do you need two diamonds to craft the ultimate weapon, or two hundred? How far into the end-game have you got when you find Redstone? The OP-ness of stuff can then be measured by how much of the game progression they allow you to skip with no effort. The defining characteristic of OP items or mods is that they enable you to get to through certain phases of the game a lot quicker than the mod as a whole intends you to. They allow you to go to the point where you can do almost everything the game has to offer with little effort.
To put it short, OP items or mods make the rest of the game obsolete by comparison.
Everytime I read something about something being "OP" or "unbalanced" I laugh a little bit. Everything in Technomancy is entirely OP, but that's what makes it fun.
Creative mode does not give you creativity. It only gives you access to all the blocks in the game. Even with infinite resources, you still need knowledge and creativity to use them. Read through the forums and you'll see numerous threads made by people who "conquered GT, gathered all the things" and are begging for help because they don't know what to do with the resources.
As much as people call mods like Dartcraft "OP" there is a progression to it that requires knowledge before access to great powers. In Thaumcraft, I'd love to see creative mode give you Augmented Runic Armor without setting up an infusion altar, gathering essentia and infusing the cheated in pieces. There's always a progression with most things in this game that requires knowledge and a bit of creativity before you can use them at all or to full effect.
TL; DR Creative mode is like winning the lottery. Most people end up with nothing because they don't know how to use it.
Yeah, I'd be pretty surprised to find out that I suggested that playing Creative mode would give one creativity.
Whenever i go creative i go power crazy and get frustrated that i can't build nice stuff with all the resources i have at the hand.
Then whenever i go survival i am satisfied with my 9x9 cobble.
Guess this pairs with the ''Whatever i build sucks, but if my friend copys it i will look awesome'' Syndrome
Then whenever i go survival i am satisfied with my 9x9 cobble.
Guess this pairs with the ''Whatever i build sucks, but if my friend copys it i will look awesome'' Syndrome
I find its easy to copy someone and end up improving it. Kinda why I build new bases every month or two. I copy myself and it ends up better because I see all the faults with the plan I had and work around them in the new build.
I don't think OP is a thing. At all. I just play, and then when I get bored, I add some different mods, and start a new world. No matter what, I always have fun, and THAT is what really matters to me.
I'm a bit late here, but I'll pitch in:
Difficulty and tedium are both subjective, but closely related. IMO, a task is "tedious" when it surpasses your preference of the amount of time it takes to accomplish the task, "too difficult" when it surpasses your preference for the ease of accomplishing the task ("difficulty" is usually related to the threat of death or losing limited resources) and "UP" when the reward for the task is too small compared to the time and/or effort spent. On the other side of the spectrum, "easy" is used whenever a task either doesn't take enough time to complete or is simply not difficult enough (this double definition leads to problems) and "OP" likewise describes a task that gives too great a reward for the time and/or effort spent. Hope that makes some sense, at least.
Now, just because balance is subjective doesn't mean we can throw it out the window. We, like basically every community ever, have developed "primary balance standards", as I like to call them. In other words, a general sense of balance shared by many people. Specifically, we have around 3 of these: the "Base" standard (examples: Monster, Direwolf, Resonant Rise), the GregTech standard (heavily increased time requirements and some added difficultly via early game limiters, example: Unhinged) and the "Lots of Death" standard (heavily increased difficulty and due to this increased time requirements, examples: Blood 'N Bones, Magic Farm). The third group doesn't cause many issues for the first two as their method of balance is created by dedicated mods. However, the GregTech and Base standards use largely the same mods with massive config changes, leading to two completely separate groups that frankly should never have been put together like this wanting completely opposite things out of the same products. Honestly, the blame for this goes to GT for morphing into a total conversion over time, but that's irrelevant now.
This whole mess is starting to be fixed now as the GregTech and base groups are using group-specific mods instead of shared ones (base IC2, etc.), but we'll be in this crappy spot until at least the end of 1.6.
Welp, there's my ramble of the subject. Hope you can pull something useful out of that lol.
Difficulty and tedium are both subjective, but closely related. IMO, a task is "tedious" when it surpasses your preference of the amount of time it takes to accomplish the task, "too difficult" when it surpasses your preference for the ease of accomplishing the task ("difficulty" is usually related to the threat of death or losing limited resources) and "UP" when the reward for the task is too small compared to the time and/or effort spent. On the other side of the spectrum, "easy" is used whenever a task either doesn't take enough time to complete or is simply not difficult enough (this double definition leads to problems) and "OP" likewise describes a task that gives too great a reward for the time and/or effort spent. Hope that makes some sense, at least.
Now, just because balance is subjective doesn't mean we can throw it out the window. We, like basically every community ever, have developed "primary balance standards", as I like to call them. In other words, a general sense of balance shared by many people. Specifically, we have around 3 of these: the "Base" standard (examples: Monster, Direwolf, Resonant Rise), the GregTech standard (heavily increased time requirements and some added difficultly via early game limiters, example: Unhinged) and the "Lots of Death" standard (heavily increased difficulty and due to this increased time requirements, examples: Blood 'N Bones, Magic Farm). The third group doesn't cause many issues for the first two as their method of balance is created by dedicated mods. However, the GregTech and Base standards use largely the same mods with massive config changes, leading to two completely separate groups that frankly should never have been put together like this wanting completely opposite things out of the same products. Honestly, the blame for this goes to GT for morphing into a total conversion over time, but that's irrelevant now.
This whole mess is starting to be fixed now as the GregTech and base groups are using group-specific mods instead of shared ones (base IC2, etc.), but we'll be in this crappy spot until at least the end of 1.6.
Welp, there's my ramble of the subject. Hope you can pull something useful out of that lol.
I'm basically just reiterating what people said here, but yeah - an item is only overpowered if it creates more "power" for lesser cost when compared with the mods around it.
An example: Back in 1.4, when Thermal Expansion was just becoming a thing on my server, everyone (on my server) saw it as overpowered as the Pulveriser and Induction Smelter created considerably more than double ore output which we were currently getting with IC^2, and back then I'm pretty sure there was an exploit with that you could use Rich Slag with dusts.
An example v2: I think a lot of people agree that DartCraft can be overpowered at times, with many of it's machines running IC2 Induction Furnace style, and having tools and armour which gave you Creative Flight VERY early on in the skill tree (I think just a few gold ingots and some leather is all you need to access most, if not all DartCraft items) - Compared to the rest of FTB, this was considerably broken.
An example v3: And for a more thinky example, compare most of the mods in FTB with the VANILLA GAME. Looking at it that way.. most, if not ALL mods included in FTB (except maybe Translocators and Hats) are overpowered - as you can achieve so much more with less effort than if you did it with Vanilla. (You TRY automating a storage system in Vanilla, I dare ya ;D)
An example: Back in 1.4, when Thermal Expansion was just becoming a thing on my server, everyone (on my server) saw it as overpowered as the Pulveriser and Induction Smelter created considerably more than double ore output which we were currently getting with IC^2, and back then I'm pretty sure there was an exploit with that you could use Rich Slag with dusts.
An example v2: I think a lot of people agree that DartCraft can be overpowered at times, with many of it's machines running IC2 Induction Furnace style, and having tools and armour which gave you Creative Flight VERY early on in the skill tree (I think just a few gold ingots and some leather is all you need to access most, if not all DartCraft items) - Compared to the rest of FTB, this was considerably broken.
An example v3: And for a more thinky example, compare most of the mods in FTB with the VANILLA GAME. Looking at it that way.. most, if not ALL mods included in FTB (except maybe Translocators and Hats) are overpowered - as you can achieve so much more with less effort than if you did it with Vanilla. (You TRY automating a storage system in Vanilla, I dare ya ;D)
I haven't played MC for long now, but already something in me dies whenever I see someone calling something OP in a sentence that doesn't include one of the words "think", "feel" or "opinion". Many people apparently don't realize how (admittedly mostly unintentional) arrogant that is. It's basically a form of saying "my playstyle is the Only True One(tm)".
Let's take the IC2/DartCraft example. In some regards I feel the same, but the receipees DartCraft adds for some basic IC2exp components? Yes, they make things easier, but thats in my opinion not OP, it's removing unnecessary tedium and makes IC2exp crafting more bearable to me.
I'm going to be blatantly antagonistic on that one and call it completely wrong. It's formulated much too general to be applicable (and what I said before).
Let's take the IC2/DartCraft example. In some regards I feel the same, but the receipees DartCraft adds for some basic IC2exp components? Yes, they make things easier, but thats in my opinion not OP, it's removing unnecessary tedium and makes IC2exp crafting more bearable to me.
I think using your example, its simply fair to say its imbalanced relative to the more tedious route; and one of the routes is therefore correspondingly either overpowered or underpowered. (in professional game design, having them together in the same game would be considered poor design)
In "better" design, your preferred route would be balanced by making it more difficult to attain. Either more expensive or more tedious to acquire (requiring a tedium-investment on your part
)minecraft and mods are op, takes all the fun of writing things from the ground up, getting them working and compiled right, away from all the people of the world.
likewise consumer/commercially available machinery such as computers are op as they deprive people from the "joy" of working out the material, electrical and thermal properties of getting each component done to generate the abstractions needed to chain together into much larger constructions that perform generalised useful work at the same time they deprive people from all the needed resource gathering and processing.
furthermore utility providers are destroying balance by removing the everyday joys of needing to find resources to generate heat and convert this to useful work and/or power. therefore they too must be op.
and of course standards. standards like 60hz ac at a given voltage in one country and uniform wiring and connector arrangements. they make things way too easy.
ditto for these "grocery store" things that not only put all kinds of comestibles in one place from vastly different geographical locales, but also streamline the removal of needing to do all that needlessly time consuming "farming" "harvesting" "packaging" and "shipping". even worse as those "grocery stores" weren't bad enough, we also now have "convenience stores" meant to trump the gamebreakingly overpowered level of "grocery stores" and to dial the level of op up to eleven.
all these things enabling someone to shove provided meat between provided bread for eight hours on request(with a level of mental engagement an automaton can, and sometimes does, prove more than capable of)or an equivalent task, to bypass all the "real" work, skewing their sense of accomplishment from each and every day, enabling them to obtain machinery and power and comestibles, sit down at minecraft and find issue with a mod or mods then proclaim they intend to settle the issues they see and or hear about with strangers around the world, once and for all is the worst op offender of them all.
now that we have that sense of scale properly fixed in your minds, the concept that balance is an abstract, and that any attempt to discuss what others should be doing (that you are not doing for yourself mind) or should be in regards to that abstract which you are not forced to interact with in the first place, well. i think the sane mans cry at that would be " get some perspective".
once perspective is properly obtained then we can continue with the debate as to task vs torment, tedium, meaning vs motivation, etc, to which i will direct you all to any debate over whether sisyphus was the happiest man in existence (as he knew his task with crystal clarity for all of time while pushing that boulder up the hill forever- the kamus perspective), or the most tormented and unhappy as he had to push that boulder uphill forever(kafka/taylor style view).
well, that or devolve into bell curve probabilistic confidence generalisations and math and test method refinement tuning to gather data and make changes to suit the widest audiences of pavlovian conditionedmindless drones end users passably well.
then again perhaps we can redirect into the issues of trying to assemble prefabricated modifications into a pack designed to tell a story according to the flow and mechanical interactions of the universe as you the composer see it, and the issues with building A being taller than building B within the context of the universe you are crafting, yet finding you have no means to alter the height of either building without infringing upon the rights of the authors of the mods that enable building A and building B to exist as prefabricated objects (not designed with your specific universe creation attempt in mind), while allowing for others to partake in your specific universe.. or to alter said prefabricated mods that provision these willfully obstinate buildings and be restricted from sharing the resultant universe that finally fits your vision with others.
/sartorial grin off.
as an ultimate difficulty vs reward topper. i/you can write a simple permutational script in most computer languages with less than 200 lines that will eventually spit out every movie, piece of music, book, etc ever possible. to complete, it will need to run longer than the universe(ie universal entropy death will occur before it finishes) but that minimal input effort to ensure eventually getting, well.. everything ..is very real. of course that upkeep might be reasonable balance for the rewards vs time.
likewise consumer/commercially available machinery such as computers are op as they deprive people from the "joy" of working out the material, electrical and thermal properties of getting each component done to generate the abstractions needed to chain together into much larger constructions that perform generalised useful work at the same time they deprive people from all the needed resource gathering and processing.
furthermore utility providers are destroying balance by removing the everyday joys of needing to find resources to generate heat and convert this to useful work and/or power. therefore they too must be op.
and of course standards. standards like 60hz ac at a given voltage in one country and uniform wiring and connector arrangements. they make things way too easy.
ditto for these "grocery store" things that not only put all kinds of comestibles in one place from vastly different geographical locales, but also streamline the removal of needing to do all that needlessly time consuming "farming" "harvesting" "packaging" and "shipping". even worse as those "grocery stores" weren't bad enough, we also now have "convenience stores" meant to trump the gamebreakingly overpowered level of "grocery stores" and to dial the level of op up to eleven.
all these things enabling someone to shove provided meat between provided bread for eight hours on request(with a level of mental engagement an automaton can, and sometimes does, prove more than capable of)or an equivalent task, to bypass all the "real" work, skewing their sense of accomplishment from each and every day, enabling them to obtain machinery and power and comestibles, sit down at minecraft and find issue with a mod or mods then proclaim they intend to settle the issues they see and or hear about with strangers around the world, once and for all is the worst op offender of them all.
now that we have that sense of scale properly fixed in your minds, the concept that balance is an abstract, and that any attempt to discuss what others should be doing (that you are not doing for yourself mind) or should be in regards to that abstract which you are not forced to interact with in the first place, well. i think the sane mans cry at that would be " get some perspective".
once perspective is properly obtained then we can continue with the debate as to task vs torment, tedium, meaning vs motivation, etc, to which i will direct you all to any debate over whether sisyphus was the happiest man in existence (as he knew his task with crystal clarity for all of time while pushing that boulder up the hill forever- the kamus perspective), or the most tormented and unhappy as he had to push that boulder uphill forever(kafka/taylor style view).
well, that or devolve into bell curve probabilistic confidence generalisations and math and test method refinement tuning to gather data and make changes to suit the widest audiences of pavlovian conditioned
then again perhaps we can redirect into the issues of trying to assemble prefabricated modifications into a pack designed to tell a story according to the flow and mechanical interactions of the universe as you the composer see it, and the issues with building A being taller than building B within the context of the universe you are crafting, yet finding you have no means to alter the height of either building without infringing upon the rights of the authors of the mods that enable building A and building B to exist as prefabricated objects (not designed with your specific universe creation attempt in mind), while allowing for others to partake in your specific universe.. or to alter said prefabricated mods that provision these willfully obstinate buildings and be restricted from sharing the resultant universe that finally fits your vision with others.
/sartorial grin off.
as an ultimate difficulty vs reward topper. i/you can write a simple permutational script in most computer languages with less than 200 lines that will eventually spit out every movie, piece of music, book, etc ever possible. to complete, it will need to run longer than the universe(ie universal entropy death will occur before it finishes) but that minimal input effort to ensure eventually getting, well.. everything ..is very real. of course that upkeep might be reasonable balance for the rewards vs time.
btw do rate the satire for me. i keep redoing a post rather like this and am unsatisfied with any incarnation i've tried as yet. trying to put together a pocket book of these as a cure to the common internet flambait debates. also apologies , this rewrite was a wee bit more off the cuff than most, and probably contains at least one run on sentence longer than dirt is old, sprinkled with more typos and grammatical issues than i care to think on.
I personally prefer the monkeys banging on typewriters approach. That script thing is clearly OPas an ultimate difficulty vs reward topper. i/you can write a simple permutational script in most computer languages with less than 200 lines that will eventually spit out every movie, piece of music, book, etc ever possible. to complete, it will need to run longer than the universe(ie universal entropy death will occur before it finishes) but that minimal input effort to ensure eventually getting, well.. everything ..is very real. of course that upkeep might be reasonable balance for the rewards vs time.
props to anyone who read all that.
My personal, and extremely subjective, definition of what makes something OP compared to another thing that performs the same task is based less on the initial and ongoing resource cost, and more on the intellectual/design cost.
For example, I don't think that "it costs multiple diamond per block" would make a cable which can transfer EU, MJ, RF, up to 8 different liquids simultaneously, and items all at once any less OP. Diamonds can be produced simply through an investment of the time it takes to extract them from the practically endless world (either through automated mining machines or manually branch-mining), and a cable with those properties would remove all thought about how to route pipes, wires, and tubes around each other.
On the subject of tediousness, I see it as a valid design decision, used to apply a time-cost to various activities, to encourage players to seek alternatives. For GregTech, the alternative is often "build more than one of each machine", tending towards increasingly single-purpose factory assemblies, while ThaumCraft rewards advancement through the research tree with wand recharging stations (which can be upgraded over time, even) to eliminate the tediousness of travelling between nodes each time your wands get too low.
Some of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with modded Minecraft were in creative mode, figuring out how to make complex structures within the constraints of some mod or another (A BUD-automated kiln in BTW, a very narrow TBM in pre-tube-embedding RP2), and I have found IC² and BuildCraft power systems to be more interesting, just because of the way they require more than a minimal amount of thought to scale upwards to meet the needs of an ever-growing base.
At the same time, I can see how mods that would be OP by this definition are perfectly fine in themed packs, where the main focus is on some other gameplay element. Less so in those *ALL* the things! collections, unless you have some non-gameplay goals (such as playing with friends, or making an interesting LP).
For example, I don't think that "it costs multiple diamond per block" would make a cable which can transfer EU, MJ, RF, up to 8 different liquids simultaneously, and items all at once any less OP. Diamonds can be produced simply through an investment of the time it takes to extract them from the practically endless world (either through automated mining machines or manually branch-mining), and a cable with those properties would remove all thought about how to route pipes, wires, and tubes around each other.
On the subject of tediousness, I see it as a valid design decision, used to apply a time-cost to various activities, to encourage players to seek alternatives. For GregTech, the alternative is often "build more than one of each machine", tending towards increasingly single-purpose factory assemblies, while ThaumCraft rewards advancement through the research tree with wand recharging stations (which can be upgraded over time, even) to eliminate the tediousness of travelling between nodes each time your wands get too low.
Some of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with modded Minecraft were in creative mode, figuring out how to make complex structures within the constraints of some mod or another (A BUD-automated kiln in BTW, a very narrow TBM in pre-tube-embedding RP2), and I have found IC² and BuildCraft power systems to be more interesting, just because of the way they require more than a minimal amount of thought to scale upwards to meet the needs of an ever-growing base.
At the same time, I can see how mods that would be OP by this definition are perfectly fine in themed packs, where the main focus is on some other gameplay element. Less so in those *ALL* the things! collections, unless you have some non-gameplay goals (such as playing with friends, or making an interesting LP).
