Would you play a pack that has greg tech in it?
- Thread starter karl2002
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Balance is always 100% objective, period. The only question is what you weigh on the scales.
People who think otherwise are thinking of "design quality", not balance, which is a different matter altogether (and addresses your concerns directly, in such a way that I 100% agree with you.)
Thanks guys for the overwhelming responses was not expecting this. I am glad to see that so many do infact like gregtech or would give it a shot. What this means for me is bringing back my old server Aurora on the FTB res pack once releases will be a good idea.
Karl
Karl
I wouldn't play but that is because I'm Lazy and want to have all the things as fast as I can.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
So if it was configured to have everything as fast as you can then you'd play it?
(such as traditional ore gen, with recipe styles from the old IC2)
Turn on "Allow Cheats" option when you create your SSP world, then you can play survival but still be able to get the stuff you need if you decide you're just too lazy to go search for it. I think this is the best way to play even tho its obviously "cheating" (which is why it is called "Allow Cheats"). If you play a modpack normally, it might be weeks or months before you even get to a mod to learn it. By cheating, you are able to learn all the mods in the modpack much quicker. But you also have the option to just play normally, without cheats, if you so desire. Of course, if we're talking SMP then my post is useless. I even set up two keyboard macros so I can type "/gamemode 1" or "/gamemode 0" with one keystroke to quickly switch back and forth.
I play for building and then the toys after. So if I can get the really nice looking blocks and it is fast I guess I'd try. (I don't mind the new Ic2 but as long as I can have it crafting things in the background.)
I have in the past and doubt I will again...
My usual modded games go something like... Temporary base (normally just a hole below ground) -> power and some storage to run a quarry and/or other resource gather of some sort -> collect materials -> build nice base with those materials. Normally (depending on how much I play) it takes me a couple of weeks to get to the build nice base which is the bit you really want to get to as showing your base and ideas to people is one of the key points of playing on a server.
When I played on a server that had GT I was still living in a hole in the ground after over a month, and still building machines to build machines to get started rather than a nice base. And this was on a server with a couple of 'convenience' mods such as power converters which made power and stuff relatively simple.
I never did get a nice base built on that server as by then pretty much everyone else was in the same boat, got bored and left so after 3 days of seeing no one else (there were about 20 active at start) I moved on.
My usual modded games go something like... Temporary base (normally just a hole below ground) -> power and some storage to run a quarry and/or other resource gather of some sort -> collect materials -> build nice base with those materials. Normally (depending on how much I play) it takes me a couple of weeks to get to the build nice base which is the bit you really want to get to as showing your base and ideas to people is one of the key points of playing on a server.
When I played on a server that had GT I was still living in a hole in the ground after over a month, and still building machines to build machines to get started rather than a nice base. And this was on a server with a couple of 'convenience' mods such as power converters which made power and stuff relatively simple.
I never did get a nice base built on that server as by then pretty much everyone else was in the same boat, got bored and left so after 3 days of seeing no one else (there were about 20 active at start) I moved on.
See, there's the part there. "100% objective, period. The only question is what you weigh on the scales." There is the massive amount of subjectivity. How does one decide how to balance an experience? Minecraft itself has no baseline to work with, unlike a well balanced game like TF2 due to their mastery of Perfect Imbalance.
Again, though, I merely say this because Minecraft has given us a very poor framework to even establish balance beyond the core game, in which there is still close to zero. Everything balances in some way with everything else; when I play Minecraft I rarely edit configs aside from fixing conflicts and occasionally adding new recipes or removing ones I don't like. For some odd reason, I still take forever to get anything done, and yet, I could have an extractor up and running on every world in under an hour if I plan it out. And get lucky with ore spawns, mind you.
Depends on the community. I'm pretty much happy playing most things so long as I'm chillin' with my homies or something.
But on its own, I find that gregtech is rather tedious, especially for someone as lazy as me. I find that Iguana tweaks is a good earlygame limiter, but interferes with other mods much less than gregtech. I like fun faster.
This does come from the fact I played a lot of MF2. That was reasonable to my tastes.
But on its own, I find that gregtech is rather tedious, especially for someone as lazy as me. I find that Iguana tweaks is a good earlygame limiter, but interferes with other mods much less than gregtech. I like fun faster.
This does come from the fact I played a lot of MF2. That was reasonable to my tastes.
Nobody said anything about balancing an experience. Or an emotion. I fully agree with all your concerns in game design.
Balance is a different issue altogether. Sadly, in gaming, people hear the word "balance" and frequently think it means something altogether different than mathematics.
The mathematics you speak of is just a metric, one metric of many, that is used to measure whether or not X feature, Y boss fight, or Z item is "balanced" in the scope of which it is relevant. With enough observation of the gameplay you can mathematically determine where things fall short, and what could be deemed as overpowered. Balance encompasses many things, and i hate to say it, but the "experience" is a large part of it. Without a balance, certain rules, techniques (skills, abilities, etc), or even complete segments of the game can be deemed ineffective, worthless, or at the other end of the spectrum, gamebreakingly overpowered.
This is part of my major gripe with modded minecraft; with such a large swath of mods, so many different developers visions of what is and is not balanced, and even within the same mod some things are ho hum or take it or leave it, and other things making you feel like you *must* progress down X path and forgo the rest. It kind of ruins certain parts of the "experience." and this is why balance is always subjective, because everybody has their own idea what is and is not.
edit: both paragraphs can be taken as two separate thoughts/posts. balancing a modpack is very different than balance in civilization or skyrim. as in, it's near impossible.
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I think you tried to "argue" my point but actually repeated all my points.
Objective: Balance
Subjective: Deciding what to balance.
I've already mentioned that the only outlying concern is what we decide to weigh on the scales. Balance isn't subjective, ever, because the term is already taken in the English language for an objective purpose. It cannot, by defition, be subjective. What you're talking about is game design mechanics, and I agree with every single thing you said about it.
I don't think we're arguing the same points at all. I know the difference between mechanics and balance. I mean, how can we be talking specifically about mechanics when mechanics are one of the things being balanced in a game?
Balance is completely subjective because everybody has their own idea on what is balanced. How can "balance" be objective if people use a different measure? If balance was a math problem, wouldn't there be less discussion about it? If it were in terms of absolutes, nobody would have long drawn out discussions on what or how much to nerf, buff, or remove from a game.
If we're using the scale analogy, each developer has their own idea on where to position the fulcrum. You can still achieve "balance," but not to everybody's standards. This is why it is entirely subjective.
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Balance is in no way objective when it comes to gaming. Balance is entirely in the eye of the beholder. While I do enjoy Greg-tech I don't find it be necessarily balanced for my tastes at any given time. Balance in the natural world I will grant you is objective. You can quantify the balance of an ecosystem. However to put the term on something that is created by a person means it loses its objectivity. Once again, be it play styles or what the mod creator sees fit for his mod (to use an example: ore quintupling from mekanism) balance than lies solely in the hand of one person.
*steers the conversation back to gregtech* Yes I love the new Gregtech, it's very configurable, you can adjust ore gen how you like and once NEI is fully integrated it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to figure out crush redstone ore twice, than throw in cauldron to get redstone. LOL only took me 20 minutes to figure that out.
Alright, have it your way. Instead of some engaging discussion on game design, back to a dead-end discussion and 4 more pages of the same "Yeah, new GT is great. I'll play it"