Hello everyone! [warning]This post affects all players. Please read![/warning] Unfortunately, the mod pack for the current version of Alice is poorly balanced compared to the previous releases, in that a large number of items have become considerably easy to obtain provided that you follow the right procedures. Now, this in effect means that you can rush through the game quickly, and as some of you have noticed, you can simply just get a lot of items for cheap now from others, without even playing the game. With that in mind, a few weeks have passed and options are limited. Some have suggested that they may be interested in a restart of the world as they'd like to play from the beginning, without obtaining a lot of materials so easily. However, that would mean losing potentially a lot of work, so we'd like to avoid that as much as possible. Much of the balancing issue has stemmed from bee-related additions, as certain mods were added to the modpack without the proper balancing that usually occurs in such a case. Before we can do anything, we'd like to gauge the community's opinion on the matter, and entertain any dissent or suggestions. Please make a reply to this thread and post your feelings on the subject. If we do end up restarting, we plan on adding new mods and adjusting the ones available: Tinker's Construct might make a return. Dimensional Doors may be added. Biomes o' Plenty may replace ExtraBiomesXL. GregTech/IC2 may be made easier in certain ways (i.e. less annoying cables). ... we're open to many other ideas
Well I was working on a nether hub, and I've been putting a lot of effort on my building skills I really don't care about the machines but I'd like to keep my house. If there is a map reset I'd like to throw my hat in on the build team.
I propose if you want to chlorinate the gene pool, make it a pay-server. That usually works wonders in weeding out the undesirables. In the process, you get paid for your hard work. You may also want to look into paid sponsors for the new wiki site. A few ads couldn't hurt. Under no circumstances should you restart the world without making it a paid site. I'd remove the bee additions before I did that.
Okay, I have made this argument before: Three Basic Assumptions (permises): 1. Minecraft progress is exponential. Stuff makes you get more stuff makes you get more stuff easier. Techmods with their inherent automation capacitys will make people get infinite stuff of nearly everything in a short period of time. Nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing you do to the modpack is gonna tackle that. To adress this issue you would need to rebalance all the automation from mods and remove most of it. Even in the most hard core of GregTech only servers people will have everything and infinite amounts of everything after a few months. 2. Some players play more then others (and better maybe). These players will always have a head up. Nerfing progression will in progress hurt casual people alot worse then it'll hurt the power-players respectively - Causing more monopolization then whats currently in place. Again nothing you do to balance will not hurt the normal players more. 3. As long as there is even some way to automate something, people will do it - and get infinite materials of said type in return. What you nerfed laser drills into oblivion? Better run quarries, or make UU Matter, or do Bees... or ... you get the picture. What you nerfed withering bees by 90%? Here let me setup 10x as many apiaries. This goes for any automation at any scale. That beeing said however, there is a bunch of things in modpack balance that make things ridiculously easy to get: 1. Gendustry - I think we all agree on that one. Bees and bee traits are balanced under the premise of beeing hard to get. 2. MFR Laser Drills - Turns Iridium from rare metal into more-common-then-iron 3. Spawn Mob - Drop shops : They made endgame Thaumcraft WAY easier to reach then it was supposed to be reached (notably the 4 Iron - 64 Rotten Flesh and the 4 Diamond - 8 Nether/Ender Shards) 4. Basicly Free food at spawn - Why even survival? 5. Redstone Arsenal Tools - Better then a diamond drill, enchantable, never runs out when used with a handheld battery. Available in the first hour of the game if you find diamonds. Im not opposed to a map reset - i'll be where I am again in a matter of weeks.
If poeple want to rush the game, they'll do it... At this rate though i'd even be okay with a map restart. Spawn might just be copied into the new world and there we go. And i'd love to see Tinker's back. Personally i don't care about the "work" I've put into my base yet, since it's a game to spend some time and effort... But i can imagine, that many poeple will oppose a map restart. Some restrictive "rules" for trades ( Bazaar and Player<--> Player) , so poeple don't get their hands too easy on end game items, might be helpful, too.
Remove Bees and Thaumic Tinkerer. Those are basically easy to get into end game from the start type mods. Once you have either you don't need anything else, ever. Bees especially kills the server with lag as most people into them won't just have 1 or 2 apiaries they'll have 256 and add another 128 each week since the bees provide all the materials they'll ever need plus unlimited power. Ruining the gameplay for those doing it and everyone else trying to just chop down a tree that keeps rubber banding back into existence. You can get anything you want from bees and the only cost is lack of smooth gameplay for the entire server. TT is nauseatingly overpowered in so many ways. Once you have a few items you're finished with the game. The osmotic enchanter is insane. EVERY possible enchant on any item for free. Armor with no upkeep that lets you heal while in lava or have perm creative flight with no fuel/power. Tools that will silk touch 20,000 blocks in less than an hour. Quarries are redundant since you can hand mine faster than it can and no storage worries since you have bags that hold 2 million items. TC is pretty overpowered and while I miss the glass it's another version of TT where once you have the one tool you never need another. Plus it's all super laggy with many of the tools causing missing blocks constantly. No idea about Dimensional Doors, we have and have adapted to Enhanced Portals, do we need this? BoP is so much better than ExtraBiomes but wouldn't that mean a reseed restart since basically the whole world already exists? Lets just remove GT and IC2. All it's used for that can't be done better elsewhere is Fusion and that's what's causing so much problem right now and really only a few people will ever get it. IC2 is so broken and incomplete with no signs of being fixed before 1.8 that it's really just there to provide power to GregTech machines. If they aren't gonna fix reactors and the energy net and we're not gonna remove these mods, then go full retard with them instead of what we did where it was optional. Turn on hard mode, hand grind through steam/bronze age and make steel needed for all mods. Otherwise it's nothing but a nuisance for people who try to use GregTech while everyone else has easy mode. But again, remove it, it just keeps getting worse and more invasive every patch. 80% of my gameplay is just waiting for centrifuges to finish making dusts so I can centrifuge them again. Kill Bees, TT and GT and make the world a better place. Oh yeah, and remove spawn shops.
I'm for a map restart and hoping that people who plan to murder the server cpu have brains and empathy enough to go singleplayer this time. Just because you're not breaking any rules, doesn't mean you're not in the wrong.
First of all, I would like to point ourselves to the Gendustry Fiasco. This term refers to the somewhat premature addition of Gendustry to the modpack, which in turn made TT and bees, and resource gather in general quite... painless to say the least. Taking bees out isn't an entirely great solution, but it isn't far-fetched either. To put it in perspective, in order to obtain substantial resources from bees, you must have a good power source, good Extra Bees infrastructure, which in turn, requires some mid/high-tier bees such as the Industrial bees. Overall, it takes a long time to acquire all of the infrastructure and power, breed and mutate bees, and so on to even be- OH LOOK IT'S GENDUSTRY. I PUT THIS BEE WITH THIS ONE AND I GET DAT ONE. I'M BEE GOD. I hope you understand the point I'm trying to make. Thaumic Tinkerer had similar issues, one of the biggest bottle-neck in order for TT Thaumaturgy to be worth was nether stars and dimensional shards. The nether stars were covered by the Gendustry Fiasco, and the dimensional shards were taken care of by a tiny lil' spawn shop that sold those, hard-to-obtain, completely over-powered shards for 4 diamonds. Yep. With Gendustry and spawn shops remedied, I feel like bees and Thaumic Tinkerer will be go back to their place of being over-powered, but also overly hard-to-obtain, just like they were supposed to be. P.S. Why remove Thaumic Tinkerer entirely? The ub3r OP "Kami" items come with an extra module. TT can be kept, but the Kami items can be removed.
I've only been playing for a few weeks now and I had plans to build other things like a town since I'm on track to be 'endgame' in GT soon but I guess I can scrap that for the next reset since it seems to be coming only a little after a month of the last one.
I think a reset and careful re-balancing is in order. These are the things I would change: Remove all but essential items from spawn's market. Several mods (Thaumic Tinkerer in particular) were far to easy to complete because otherwise troublesome items were easily available. Items sold in spawn should be limited to a few starter items, and things sold to address specific game balance issues, not so there are lots of cool NPC's in pretty shops. Redstone Arsenal recipes need to be adjusted. Flux-infused tools obsolete all of the drills, and their recipes should reflect that. Bees... It makes no sense that every ore, and mob drop of value in the game should be easily mass produced with bees in such a short time. The energy cost of the industrial apiary should be tweaked so running them in numbers is more akin to mining lasers and mass fabs. It may be a good idea to remove several bee species altogether. Limit fusion reactors and energy production in general. Some players have talked about how progress is exponential, but that is only possible with a combination of poor balancing and limitless power generation. Players do not need multiple fusions or massive arrays of dynamos, and allowing that causes uncontrollable item generation. Lastly, I have to reluctantly agree with Kylania, and suggest Thaumcraft and Thaumic Tinkerer should be removed. They introduce items and armor which does not balance well with, or fit with Alice's industrial theme. Kylania has gone into more detail, and his post should be read
Wolfenstein is pretty much right. The mods we have are tech, and automation. The players that understand the progression and have the time to tackle the problem will always be ahead of everyone. The key there is time. Sadly SK the problem is due to your success at making a server that attracts some of the best/fast/committed minecrafters. I think a better discussion need be had about what outcome you want to achieve. If it's about building great automated works of genius than I think nothing needs be changed. If it's about making sure people take 4-8 weeks before they have a fusion reactor, then a conversation needs to be had about iridium and rubies or how to prevent them from being obtained so quickly. Keep in mind this means that someone who plays 18 hours a day needs to be slowed down to 37 days @ 18 hours in order to build a reactor. Some Bee's might need to be removed. Laser drill's might need to be removed. Quarries might need to be removed. Unless you can figure out a way to limited the amount of those automated resource gathering systems, you will almost never have balance. Again Wolf said it. Slow down quarries, no problem! Build 15 quarries. Slow down bee's, no problems! Add 500 more Apiaries. Slow down power, no problem! Use the 50 or so other power generating systems and scale it up to the power size I need. Doesn't really matter to them they have the time. I think the MPT needs to really sit down and think about what "version" of minecraft they want to offer and not worry about what the players what/need. I have always found that on the internet, if you build a high quality product no matter how idiotic it might seem there will always be a group of people looking for that. Christ look at Flappy Bird. Why I love the SKcraft server is the attention to detail. The unique spawn, and stories behind it. Even the quest lines (BTW I've never seen a spawn that's had the quests portion ever totally finished...if you need help im good with CustomeNPC's) The Staff is always quirky and while they may disagree with or get annoyed at a player they are always honest and fair with dealing with them. Maybe you look into Bungee Cording multiple servers together, so that you can add features back to the game that are server intensive but slow down the game. Things like Infernal Mobs MOD or Zombie Awareness MOD. Maybe add a server that has mini-games like CTF/FFA/Deathmatch/King of the Hill. Those are things that allow players to stay and feel connected while still out there building and tinkering when done smashing and slashing. Lastly the lag needs to be addressed in some fashion. It's hard to say "We want to slow down automation or rebalance" while at the same moment it takes 4-5 breaks of the same block to manually mine something. I know and understand that is not an easy fix, heck there mostly likely is not a fix for it. But like you said in your Blog post dated March 1, 2013 regarding lag; weight having mod's against having lag. I'd like to point out you did suggest to link many servers together.... I think though, people are just going to have to embrace the idea that this server can't be everything to everyone. Players must understand that this is a free service and while you might like the staff and restaurant if they stop serving steak and start serving chicken then just get up an leave and make room for the people that like chicken. I like both chicken and steak, so what ever you serve I'll be dinning and if it turns out I don't like it, I will leave I know there are PLENTY of others who would fill the void.
Agreed. automated resource gathering is what makes the end game obtainable in such a short time. God forbid players should have to mine in minecraft. Resource limitations only apply until a player sets up their first quarry or laser. Could not have said it better.
Compared to previous versions of Alice though: Literally nothing new was attempted when building this modpack. We mostly have mods that were in previous versions of Alice, and there are almost no new mods at all. Whatever new mods we have have been merely extensions of old ones, and yet we still have several mods (i.e. Additional Buildcraft Objects) that have been largely obsoleted and ignored by everyone but are still in the modpack just because we previously had them. There have been plenty of other mods released -- perhaps not with the detail of the more well-established mods -- but there's no fun in sticking with the same. Many, many things were available for cheap at spawn. This was strongly not the case on previous versions of Alice. Spawn had a very small selection of items that was mostly setup by me, Cran, Jon, and Pyrocommando. On Alice 1.6, people were able to skip a lot of gameplay by simply buying things from spawn. Bees have been made massively easier compared to versions of Alice. This is been a large part of the problem, because the gains from Gendustry have translated in a quickening of progressing in other mods that were not designed to handle such a scenario. My issue is not that the fact that you can automate things. When I first started playing back long ago, I was already bored of crafting and hooking up pipes within a few hours. What did I do? Try to create something like Applied Energistics, long before it even existed, with just RedPower2, IC2, and BC2. I'm all for automation, but there are nuances to the issue. The difference between building a Applied Energistics-like system with very fundamental components, compared to just hooking a few mods together, is a massive distinction. While I am not suggesting the removal of Applied Energistics, a project such as "re-creating AE" is not something most people can just throw time at -- it requires a fair amount of ingenuity, thinking, and it follows a different track of gameplay. I am interested in "increasing the challenge" while not "increasing the effort." Games are fun because they are challenging, not because they require time and effort. If we have to consider how long it takes to get to a fusion rector, then we're doing it wrong. We need to care about new things. I do not know if that is possible, but we can well try and see.
I think that all of you that are asking for the removal of bees are impossibly foolish and have zero understanding of what exactly goes into bee breeding when just ExtraBees is installed. The issue is not, was not, and never will be that Bees (using just the ExtraBees mod) are overpowered, or in any way an entry-level type of mod. It takes a significant amount of time to learn the mod, and a significant amount of time to breed the bees when you are using ExtraBees. The issue is not the bees. The issue is not ExtraBees. The issue is Gendustry. Gendustry removes all the work, barriers of entry, time requirements, and organizational skills that are needed to mass produce materials with bees. Everything from it's industrial apiaries with crazy easy to produce upgrades, to it's complete and utter removal of challenge for the breeding aspect of the game is an insult to the original bee breeding that we have had on past versions of the game. The only negative that Bees/ExtraBees has is that Alvearys tend to produce some lag. I'm certain there is a way we can overcome that, or server police it so that it isn't an issue. Remove Gendustry, the actual problem.
You should also consider Sk that what you consider fun and challenging may not be what other people consider fun and challenging. For me, automated materials processing, autocrafting, power generation, all of these are means to an end. They are not even remotely meaningful as a goal in and of themselves. It is more fun to build grand structures that are intricate, detailed, and have purpose when you play survival with a slew of mods to give the various buildings and structures purpose. It is easier to do this when you have tech mods and can automate what I consider drudgery: resource gathering. It is fun to architect the systems and infrastructure that you need to build large builds without using creative. It's not particularly enjoyable when that process is deliberately tweaked by our beloved MPT to BE the main focus of the game, such that building that architecture takes all of your time, is deliberately difficult, and is extended for weeks and weeks. Perhaps that's just the direction you guys want to go with Alice. Personally I'd suggest an examination of what you want from Alice, and what your goals are for play on Alice. Do you want the focus to be on obtaining machines and infrastructure? Or do you want the focus to be on building a rich survival world with many neat buildings and structures? The latter can go on forever if individuals are remotely creative. The former has a limited shelf life, because someone, somewhere, will hit "end-game" very quickly, enable others to do so, and it spirals on from there. Literally nothing you do will change this. As an aside, regarding IC2/Gregtech: I'm not going to advocate for its removal, but I will say this: I was, prior to 1.6, an avid and hardcore IC2/Gregtech fan. I loved those mods, and I used them exclusively. Barely touched TE or any other mod prior to 1.6. However, Gregtech has gone off the deep end, is adding an enormous level of tedium. In the name of extending the game and putting off the end-game machines, he has added all sorts of steps and intermediary materials and tools. But it hasn't made it more interesting or fun to play. It's made it a chore. Something to consider. Also, also! Thaumcraft is a dirty, nasty magic mod. I advocate tech purity in our mod pack.
I think you missed my point. First off, I have mostly enjoyed playing Minecraft for the past two years because of building. I do not enjoy setting up the machines. In the past 6 months, I have setup at most 10 machines (we're talking a single macerator as being 'a machine') and nearly all my time has been building, where base mates have done most of the machine work. Second, if you referring to the crafting and automated materials processing that you do now, it is vastly different from what you did in, say, MC 1.2.5. Back then, there were very few recipes and very few things to learn, and you were given extremely basic tools. Your imagination and ingenuity determined what you were able to accomplish. You might have to sit thinking about a problem for a day before you figured out how to do it, and in that time, you would have not needed to crafted anything at all. If I was playing in creative, it would have made negligible difference to the amount of time that I would have had to spend at a crafting table or machine. Therefore, to re-use what you mentioned, there are actually three ways to play the game: Obtaining machines and infrastructure Creating interesting and unique contraptions with basic versatile components Building a rich survival world with many neat buildings and structures What seems to be missing is a strong distinction from #1 and #2. Alice (and to be honest, all Minecraft modpacks in existence) nowadays is mostly strongly weighted towards #1 -- you follow recipes and follow instructions. If you need something, you can find some block that does exactly that. It is mind numbingly dull, at least to me. With the newest versions of GregTech, it has become even worse: more recipes and more instructions. It's like, rather than being assigned the fun task of building a new skyscraper, your task is to churn solutions to 400 Calculus problems. It's just pure busy work. As for building neat buildings and structures, honestly, that isn't affected by much. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it, and if you don't, you don't. Gaining the materials for building has not become much harder, likely would not become much harder (especially if the goal is to not add tedium), and the new tools that have been added over the years have only made building easier. We also try hard to add as many stable (and decent-looking) decorative mods as much as possible. Regardless, most of the reason for this thread has been due to imbalances caused by: Gendustry The NPCs at spawn It's not that people are reaching end game quickly; it's because they are reaching it in all the wrong ways.
