Making Gameplay Obsolete

[Saedin]

Are all open servers like this? Inundated with gameplay obsoleting mods? Build an airship, dial up a portal, strap on a jetpack, morph into a bat, great ways to travel...but not needed, just type /tpa or /warp.

 

Travel the world or build fantastic automated factories using technology to get the materials you need to create the things you want! Nope just warp to the shop and buy it with the in game currency, possibly that you paid for with real money.

 

Whitelisted servers are the only ones that I've seen that avoid this, but they tend to be unstable. Lag, downtime, crashes. Minecraft servers are run by normal people who have to pay for and admin the server themselves. Public servers run well because they're money grubbing and people are willing to give them money.

 

Do people really hate playing the game so much that they want to skip through it as fast as possible? I was just on a server that actually sold creative mode only items for $20! Am I off-base here? Is this not a big deal and I should really just relax?

[plowmanplow]

I think a large part of running/maintaining a server is building a sense of community. I strive for this on the servers I own/run. Giving the ability for players to help each other out by using /tpa is vital to that or I would just end up with a bunch of people playing SSP while chatting with each other. Travel time in MC/Forge, especially early in game, can be brutal and frequently fatal. Asking someone for help setting up a machine or buliding something only to have them die 10 minutes into a world-spanning travel venture and have no /back command would result in people quitting and never coming back. A lot of us only have so much time to play and we'd rather spend our time designing/building/helping than running/flying across the world.

 

That being said I am totally on board with the "pay to play" mentality. The idea of "donations" seems ludicrous to me. If you are running a for-pay service where you expect people to pay for their time to play then don't delude yourself by offering "perks" for "donations". Call a spade a spade and say "you may buy X amount of Y for Z real world money". I once said something in a thread and still stand by that: Know why you are trying to run a server because hobbies COST money and commercial ventures are supposed to MAKE money. Muddying the waters by trying to coerce people into giving you money to make things easier while calling it a "donation" is disingenuous and detrimental to the community since you are fostering a class system of the haves and have-nots.

 

I run/own/maintain five servers, three of which are custom modpacks I have created. I have 4-6 people cycling through at any given time (usually) with totals in the 25 concurrent player range outside of work and school hours. I have the chats from all five servers linked so that regardless of which server someone chooses to play on they can still chat and help each other. This seems to greatly help the sense of community. The only things I ban or restrict to ranks are things that run a risk of screwing up the servers, bypassing claims or messing up the barter economy (the only economy I permit). I have never asked for anything from my players and never will. This is my hobby. Why would I expect someone else to fund that? Seems a bit selfish to do so.

 

Should you relax? Hehe, likely, if you feel anything like me. Life's too short, and my free time too precious to get worked up about how other people want to comport themselves. I wanted a particular environment for myself, my family and a wide variety of wonderful people I've run into online so I have tried to make something which make me happy. Thankfully there are a few hundred other folks who say they agree with me, but I would do this even if they didn't (although maybe only one or two servers, five of them is crazyness).

[Saedin]

Great post, thanks for replying. However, I feel like that kind of community is mostly an illusion. Yeah, that's probably a pretty strong thing to be saying, almost like I'm completely dismissing everything you said. That's not my intent, I can understand there is a desire for casual gameplay environments. Low stress low effort places to just mess around and have fun. I get that.

 

My issue is that this is the case with nearly every single public server I've run into. Is that simply the nature of public servers? Catering to the least common denominator? Making a place for people who don't care to put much effort into their gameplay?

 

Most of these mod packs as far as I know have mods in them that facilitate travel. These are actual gameplay mods where you have to actually build things, even just vanilla Minecraft has that capability with nether hubs and portal linking and minecart tracks, etc. Sure in the beginning it's rough, but that's the point of playing. To progress, get stronger, better, faster. Obtain resources to build things and protect yourself and your friends and to help other players. If you're well established it should be no issue to go help out someone else without relying on a non-gameplay command.

 

I guess my point is that if you want to play the game you should actually play the game, and travel is part of the game. Typing in a command to teleport around is basically cheating, as you're circumventing gameplay to get what you want.

[plowmanplow]

The great thing about MC, and especially modded MC, is that we all get to play the way we have the most fun and enjoyment. If I want to hop in and write LUA code for a couple hours to interface a bunch of stuff together I can do that. If someone else wants to build a huge structure with little tech, more power to them. I do not feel that the comraderie we feel is an illusion. If folks weren't enjoying themselves I wouldn't have players who have stuck around for well over a year and continue to foster new players while enjoying new things in these different but connected servers.

 

I mean no criticism and welcome the discourse but I think it is a fallacy to think that just because someone doesn't like or wish to experience one aspect of the game that they are not "playing the game". There are so many people who join and never make it even up to the tech level of Tekkit Classic on modpacks with vastly superior technology at their disposal. Does that mean that they aren't really playing because the either choose not to, or are incapable of, fully exploiting every mod in a pack? I do not think it does.

 

We could spend time talking about the good old days of Everquest when it was new and it took an hour of running for your life just to attempt to meet up with friends. I honestly had some amazing fun the first couple trips from Qeynos to Freeport and back, but I would have to be honest and say that over time it wore quite thin and begging for ports was never fun. This is why no modern MMO makes you do that. Sure, there are mechanisms in most mods to facilitate travel and they do help. Trivializing content is way up on the list of things I work hard to prevent. However, since I understand and can empathize with the frustration that can happen in a SMP environment when there is frequently no easy way to set up convenient travel. In SSP you can just make an awesome railway or some flying contraption. In SMP there are often complications that arise from needing to keep anything you don't want broken (by accident or on purpose) in a protection claim.

 

TL;DR - The teleport commands make everyone's life more sane and less frustrating. I have enough of those which try to weasel their way into my life in the real world (much as I try to live a life of peace and harmony).