Random rants about aspects of game Balance and democracy

Quote from Two

I could as well spent the time to learn a new language or watching a movie, but I decided to spent it on having fun with Minecraft. However gathering resources is only one part of the game, using them is the second. Let me put it this way: assume you have a full double-chest of every resource available and 10 of the biggest EU storage units available full of EU. What do you do with it?

Nothing cause you are bored. Though, fortunately this hasn't happened because you had GregTech, so even though you played hours, you still have a goal, which is currently getting a working MB generator. Fusion is on the way.

I know in GT there is no real point of getting the fusion reactor, and that's an issue to me but ... who doesn't hope for Particle Accelerators to get better than Q-Suit ?

Quote from Two

Let me put it this way: assume you have a full double-chest of every resource available and 10 of the biggest EU storage units available full of EU. What do you do with it?

Build an endgame base with teleporters between every room, a machine control panel that remotely turns on/off processing machines and indicator lights, a GT teleporter hub with destinations to all the important locations in my SMP world, a huge automated factory which takes input from a single chest tesseracted to all my advanced miners and sorts/processes them properly and precrafts a single chest of every conceivable resource for my AE to use, a sugarcane-powered fusion plant, a bee-powered fusion plant, a bee-powered SUC-reactor using redstone produced as a byproduct from my bee-powered fusion plant, a proper multifarm -> Ethanol setup that recycles all the cells and tesseracts the ethanol to LP boilers around the world for railcraft use, and powered by steam from the charcoal produced as well as the creosote waste, realize that my fusion reactors don't make enough plasma to provide EU for everything and build more, then run out of advanced machine casings because a double chest is really not that much, then set up more advanced miners to collect the resources necessary to finish this small part of my plans.

Seriously, minecraft is about the challenge of building and designing fun/effective things, not "crafting one of every machine until I get the highest tier machine, then quit and make a new world".

Quote from Nonotan

Seriously, minecraft is about the challenge of building and designing fun/effective things, not "crafting one of every machine until I get the highest tier machine, then quit and make a new world".

Exactly. That is why building things should be fun, not tedious.

Quote from Chocohead

The only tedious things in IC2 result in getting things to be less tedious.

And now to loop back to my initial post: you can design the mod in a way that the player is pushed by annoying things and tedious tasks to advance and automate this using the mod's tools, which will result in players being initially frustrated, then happy. Or you can design the mod that it is fun right from the start and then gets even better the further you proceed, causing the player to be happy then even more happy while playing.

The later however is much more difficult but also much more desireable.

But players are happy to start with, nothing in GT takes stuff away from you that you don't already have when you launch a game, everything you do gains you more resources and technology; the problem here is that you're comparing GT to vanilla minecraft instead of seeing it as its own thing. The only reason people are unsatisfied with GT earlygame nerfs is because "it's worse than vanilla". So what? If vanilla gave you 16 planks a log you'd also complain if GT nerfed it to 4, even if you're perfectly fine with it now.

Quote from Two

And now to loop back to my initial post: you can design the mod in a way that the player is pushed by annoying things and tedious tasks to advance and automate this using the mod's tools, which will result in players being initially frustrated, then happy. Or you can design the mod that it is fun right from the start and then gets even better the further you proceed, causing the player to be happy then even more happy while playing. bored after obtaining everything so quickly that he logs off Minecraft to play a different game...

Your vision of game designed couldn't be more flawed. Why do MMO's exist? Because they have a protracted reward system that lasts for nearly months at a time. If you hand the rewards out too quickly, you don't give the player any more incentive to keep playing the game. Once they bull-rush thru the tech and hit 'endgame', they are left with the two choices: do I use this stuff to do something creative, or do I wait till later when I feel like applying some ACTUAL effort in the game?

Most of the time, people will choose the lazy route. Besides, why do anything hard when you just had almost everything handed to you?

I am not sure where you got that 'rushing through' idea after I clearly said that I like it if mods take it a little slower, but then you already gave the answer by just rewriting the "quote" as you want to support your argument. How about we take out the emotion of this discussion and stay with the facts instead?

I feel that some people here have the idea in mind that anything that is fun is as well OP, so to have something balanced, the player needs to feel pain and tediousness all over the place. This is the common concept of "It was painful for me, so it has to be painful for others too!", which is one way of designing/playing the game. I know that some people love the "torture" of a hard-mode and that is why I have nothing against Greg Tech as an addon for those who love it, but for the general game it is a bad idea to assume that the same concept holds true for everyone out there.

Reward without challenge is no reward but a gift. That's absolutely true and that is why every reward needs to have a proper challenge to feel good. The question that I am asking is: does a challenge need to be painful or can it be fun, too?

I took the nuclear reactor as an example earlier, because it is imo a very good concept for fun gameplay. You can just throw in a single cell and get EU out of it, which is the easy entrance part. You can assemble some basic stuff to get more EU out of it, which is the learning phase. And you can spend hours of testing, modifying and researching to create the one perfect setup for your situation, which is the hard-to-master part, including explosion and total destruction of your setup + home if you screw up, which is the challenge part. Now if you like that kind of challenge, you can enjoy it fully, if you don't, you can just look up a recipe that works on the wiki and ignore the entire mini-game. You won't probably get as much out of it as you could, but it works and doesn't annoy you. In the end you still need to pay the resources to get your EU like everyone else, so no gain beside time from looking it up on the wiki AND you don't need to redo the same again once you "played through" the mini-game, because then it becomes boring at some point.

Now players can theoretically look up everything on the wiki, build something according to a tutorial without spending a single thought on the details and then complain that there is nothing to do anymore, like many do in current theme-park MMOs. But then it is not your job to cure laziness and you just have to accept that those players are not the target audience instead of trying to force them to "enjoy" the game. Because if you try to force them, all you archive is to frustrate them, which then turns into more complaining.

Now IC2 is a tech mod, and the core fun comes out of fiddling around with the components to get the perfect setup. The nuclear reactor is one example, and so is the ENet and the crop system. And all I ask is to follow that path further and design the components and additions to be as well fun to fiddle around as they are balanced in terms of resources/time. Putting every ingot into the crafting grid twice with a Forge Hammer is neither complicated, nor requires it any thinking, nor does it add anything to the game beside a time-sink, effectively turning into an annoyance very soon, aka "grinding" or "tediousness". So this is not following the initial IC2 concept of having fun with the toys you get, and that is why I think it should be removed and/or replaced with something else.

The prime example of a fun Minecraft mod is (even though I don't like her personally) Eloraams machines. Beside all balance issues: what you get is a set of easy to make tools that everyone understands withing a few minutes of gameplay, but the possibilities are close to unlimited. With like 5 (each on it's own easy to grasp) blocks, people have assembled millions of creations happily for days and month.

Quote from SirusKing

Nothing in GT encourages AFKing much.

unsuspcious hunger config..

Quote from GregoriusT

When I add Achievements, I will make one which requires you to push a certain Button one hour long.

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A lot GT was inspired by RedPower, you know.

That doesn't change the argument though

Quote from Chocohead

She added a furnace, and an alloy furnace. IC2 adds an entire processing line, flight and a sensible way of hiding your cables. The sorting machines were nice, but never really seemed to be fully expanded to what they could be.

I meant the block-breaker, Filter, Tubes, Motor and Frame combination that allowed you to create countless of machines including but not limited to: flying fortress, underground ore crawler, automatic tree farming, gravel to flint converter, spawner-tractor, automated doors, draw-bridges, secret stairs, traps, an so much more.

And all that out of only 5 blocks.

The Blue-electric implementation was very unfinished and a good reason to install IC2 alongside.

Quote from Two

I meant the block-breaker, Filter, Tubes, Motor and Frame combination that allowed you to create countless of machines including but not limited to: flying fortress, underground ore crawler, automatic tree farming, gravel to flint converter, spawner-tractor, automated doors, draw-bridges, secret stairs, traps, an so much more.

And all that out of only 5 blocks.

Well, that stuff was really awesome, but terribly OP in the end ... Greg, add them but with high power consumption!

GT has no frames; frames enabled most of that, actually.