[1.1] Team Liquid Minecraft Server - Page 201

On March 13 2012 22:07 Serejai wrote:
Minecraft is just a boring game in general. Like, you first get it and it's the coolest thing ever. But it's so repetative and there's really no content so after you finish making your awesome house you really lose interest fast.

My personal story... when I first got Minecraft I spend days straight farming and building this awesome house. I was new and didn't really understand how to make weapons so I had an island that I pretty much stayed on all night (where my house was) and only ventured to land during the day. Eventually I got some iron and made a track across the water to a second, larger island... which I dug out to make a mine I could use at night without fear of monsters.

That was when I realized that I was very quickly becomming bored. I had my house... I had a mine... but what was the point of mining? I didn't really feel compelled to build a giant city by myself for no reason. Enter multiplayer.

Multiplayer was the best thing ever when it first came out. Finally I could build large towns with other people! But this, too, became dull rather quickly. After building the town, what next? Monsters were so weak they didn't even matter anymore. PvP was, is, and will likely forever be terrible leaving the only option available... keep building. What most people don't realize is that when they were a kid and played with legos it wasn't fun to just constantly build things. You had cars, roads, boats, trains, planes, etc. Your structures were static but it was fun because you could create a living, breathing city.

That's simply not the case with Minecraft. Everything is inanimate and even if you were to build a car or a plane you can't do anything with them. Legos would've been pretty damn boring, too, if all you could do was look at them once you were done.

Compare Minecraft to a similar game like Terraria. In Terraria you spend your time mining and building just like in Minecraft. But the monsters are actually a challenge and boss fights keep you interested in between builds.

I don't know exactly what Minecraft needs but I do know that progress is far too slow on the game. Looking at Minecraft now and Minecraft in alpha two years ago... nothing at all has really changed. There have been a few new blocks added, a few mobs, a really poorly designed boss fight that was quite honestly a complete waste of resources, an equally terrible new world (two, actually, as the Nether was a really stupid idea as well - and ironically the one good world idea, skylands, was scrapped), and some features ported in from plugins (powered rails, pistons, dispensers). There hasn't been a single decent feature added in two years that wasn't already available via plugins. I can't imagine more than five hours a week has been spent working on Minecraft since it hit beta and it really shows.

Where are lanterns? Hang gliders? All the other decent features that have been promised for years and are instead pushed to the backburner for things like cake and baby animals?

We've had about 4,500 unique players on this server since I started it a few years ago. The average playtime for someone is about one day - or just enough time for them to build a house, then disappear. There are certainly some die hard players who love building but the overwhelming majority simply get bored after they complete their initial home. That was a problem I was hoping to rectify with this new server before Bukkit decided "LOL NOPE WE ARE GONNA SCREW YOU OVER LOLZ".

In short, you guys have likely noticed that in the entire time I've been running this server I have never actually played myself. This is because - even though I really, really enjoy map/terrain design - I get burnt out simply building the spawn towns and whatnot and end up having zero interest actually playing. I try really, really hard to play but I simply can't bring myself to do it because there is absolutely zero challenge.

This game has been in decline for quite a while now... daily sales figures during alpha were 30k+ per day, and for the last year that number has been sitting around 6-8k per day. Most servers have closed up shop and the only ones that tend to be left are heavily themed ones like RPG or themed-build servers. Even those are a fraction of what they used to be.

Anyway, I feel the glory days are long since gone and as such the people playing right now tend to be those die hard, close knit players. Unfortunately this is a small group, so you won't see 50+ on the server like it used to be. I think we've peaked at like 15 this time around.

I just woke up and felt like ranting. Also, I'm considering taking the server down until all of this Bukkit stuff gets worked out. There are only a couple people per day logging in and I'd personally rather have the CPU resources put towards the new world but I don't know.