BrickedKeyboard

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay Ok, so every point I made is 1. Available as an optional patch on the forums OR 2. A Major complaint thread in these forums OR 3. Something every new player has to be told to fix (like the keymapping conflicts) I don't know what I'm doing, and deserve your abuse of forum admin powers. Right. Anyways, it is now quite obvious why the actual mod authors (Eloraam, Player, SpaceToad, etc) all hate your guts, and call the technic people n00bs and idiots. I tried defending technic/tekkit on IRC, pointing out that this latest version seems to be reasonably stable and usable. The launcher is very, very nice (so if you can write such a nice launcher, why not spend 30 more seconds to adjust the keybindings? Why not spend 5 minutes adjusting the configuration files for game balance?) Everything I have asked you to fix are very minor configuration tweaks or very small code changes that are not going to take more than a tiny fraction of the time that has already gone into the pack. Analogy : it's like you built a new mercedes, but didn't bother to install the seats. It might be a free Mercedes, but it makes people wonder why you did all that work but didn't finish the last few details. So here I am, saying "hey, I'll bolt those seats in for ya" and you have basically just trolled this thread like an 8 year old with mod powers.

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay Idiots can abuse their power all they want. But when they do so on a routine basis, you end up with North Korea. If, instead of listening to when you're wrong, you exile the person that says it, you can never make progress. This is why the tekkit pack is riddled with horrendous bugs and why your server tick rate is unplayably slow. As long as you just ban whoever points this out, you'll never fix anything.

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay Look what Gumby wrote there. Isn't a half fix better than something completely broken? Those were some bugs I didn't even know about. I wrote and maintained my own mod pack. Apparently, it was better than the tekkit pack, because I fixed (and tweaked) EVERYTHING I could. Proof : brickedtechnology.blogspot.com I got bored with it because it was a lot of work, and only 3 servers were using it. Still...

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay Basically, you aren't going to do shit. You'll release your pack misconfigured and sucking badly, and then server admins and players are forced to sift through the forums to find the fixes. This explains a lot, actually : why several crucial fixes that there are no drawbacks to are NOT included in the pack and are only available on this forum. Yeah, yeah, you're doing it for free. Still, I would hope that with as much publicity as you get, you'd at least attempt to adhere to better standards.

No they are not broken, but the builder in Tekkit is not as capable as the one in Technic. All it can do is remember the placement, NOT the type of blocks, in an area. If you look carefully, that "blank template" you made in the table has a different item ID than it started with (turn on display of IDs in NEI). If so, it isn't blank, and it can be used. The pink texture is some bug or another that doesn't affect functionality.

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay No, I was banned because a certain power-tripping admin decided he didn't have to have any standards of conduct whatsoever. You know, no warning that I was being annoying, or in fact one single negative word directed my way until BOOM, ban. Sounds totally fair and legit, yep. Anyhow, does this mean you WILL accept fixes to the pack? I had the impression that you would not. Where do I go to submit these fixes?

I hear this tired argument every time I suggest nerfing something. Yes, if you weaken something that lets you get resources without effort, in the long run people will build a lot more of that something. But consider this : quarries let you get resources without effort. HV solars let you get resources without effort. And tree farms, etc, etc, etc. The problem with EE is twofold 1. It lets you get ALL resources without much effort or even thought or creativity as to how to accomplish it. With quarries, you have to figure out a way to sort and process the mountains of loot : it doesn't come in ready to use (unlike an energy condensor which can give you an ingot or even a finished product ready-made). With quarries, you will eventually exhaust the resources you mined, leaving a gaping hole in the ground, and have to move elsewhere. With EE, you cause no such consequences and the free resources never stop coming. With a forestry treefarm, you have to craft humus or the farm will eventually stop. You can automate this, but it requires a hugely complex setup for the automation to be reliable(I've done it before) 2. It gives you a LOT of resources, with insane geometric growth. If you slow the geometric growth down enough, EE would actually be WORSE than building quarries or making UU-matter. There has to be a penalty, a reason to use another mod instead of the much easier method in EE. So, I agree with you partially : the proposed nerfs don't go far enough. You should probably lose 75% of the EMC when you burn resources, cobblestone should give precisely ZERO EMC when when burned, and energy collectors should be slowed down 30-40 times. This would let you eventually build arrays to get stacks of diamonds, but it would require immense resources that would have to come from elsewhere (aka other mods would still have a use for a long time) Now, after weeks have gone by, if dedicated players have mined up huge amounts of ground to find the resources, and built tons of infrastructure, they would have enough resources that EE would make sense at this point. That's fine : I'm fine with it being in the endgame, I just don't think the endgame should take 10 hours to reach. A few weeks to a month is fine with me.

Solution : 1. Slow down the collector arrays. The problem is geometric growth : the collector arrays make enough EMC to double themselves every 4.5 hours (per the author of equivalent exchange in IRC). If they took say, 96 hours to make enough EMC for a doubling, they would not be so stupidly overpowered. You'd have to run quarries to mine enough materials to make more collector arrays rather than creating them from their own EMC. That means slowing them down by a factor of at least 20 times. 2. Add losses when you liquify items to get EMC (using antimatter relays, etc). If you lost ~50% of the potential EMC when you "burn" an item to get EMC, many of the imbalances of this mod would be fixed. Now, you could choose to convert iron to diamond, or diamond to iron...but you lose resources in the conversion, so it's more efficient to find the resources you need directly. Conversions are just there for the convenience factor when you have a huge surplus of one resource and a shortage of another. In fact, making the losses 75% or even 90% would still make conversions to EMC a good idea when it's a junk resource, but it would actually make finding expensive resources still worthwhile. Granted, this does change the mod's title to Equivalent* Exchange *Some taxes and fees may apply

Problems : 1. Several controls overlap with each other out of the box. It would have taken all of 5 seconds to configure the client so that quantum run doesn't conflict with zoom, sort inventory doesn't conflict with NEI's recipe lookup, etc. I was very unimpressed to see that this very basic step was not done, and server admins don't have the power 2. Certain mods are left configured to leave massive exploits in by default. While I think that the tekkit pack should leave fine tuning to the server admins, it should not come out of the box with massive exploits or ridiculous gamebreaking bugs enabled. Examples : 1. Equivalent exchange allows you to duplicate all machinery in the mod (and therefore resource production of everything in the game) every 4.5 hours. That is, a collector + condensor can dupe itself in 4.5 hours of time. This means that in 1 week, a player who uses chunk loaders or places their collector array near the spawn point could have 68 billion times as much resource production as when they started. Production of resources via EMC should be balanced to be comparable to the speed of production via mass fabrication. With mass fabrication, it takes about 4 days for a solar panel to make enough UU-matter to duplicate itself. Thus, in a week of 24/7 play, a player would have ~4 times as much production as they started with, rather than 68 billion. I'm not saying that perfect balance should be the goal of the pack, but 68 billion is so ludicrious that leaving the mod set to default settings is like leaving an exploit to give players god mode. 2. You can get double the bronze by combining copper and tin ingots in the crafting table. Since bronze is not in short supply, this is a minor exploit, but the forestry author never intended to have this recipe enabled when industrialcraft is enabled. 3. You can make oil buckets for 50,000 EU/bucket, refine it to fuel for about 20,000 EU, and then burn the bucket of fuel for ~600,000 EU. This "energy duping" can be easily fixed by adjusting the power converters config file. It should be fixed by default. 4. The water strainer is left enabled by default, when it destroys the tick-rate of servers. And so on. Again, I'm not saying that every mod should be rewritten (though it certainly would help a ton) but a few minor tweaks would make this pack far more usable.