The obligatory "difficult" vs "tedious" distinction

I noticed playing meepcraft for a little bit how generally tedious it is to play on the server. No plot tp, no /tpa, not even a spawn warp at this point. It really limits your mobility and thus you rarely ever see any players even when dozens are playing at the same time. Player-player interaction is tedious because you have to locate the town manually and (oftentimes) walk to the person you're trading with.

But is it really difficult? I argue the answer to that is no.

There's nothing inherently difficult with any of the features towny extreme currently has. In fact, aside from losing donator perks it's not really any harder than the old towny system. You still make money from the server at roughly the same rate when you grind as you did before, and some features are even easier than before (e.g iron farms aren't nerfed anymore). The biggest challenge on the server, getting baltop, is roughly just as hard as before (my town collectively got it even after being a week late to the party).

However, the server is nigh on alienating because of how limited mobility and travel is. Towny is intended to be a group effort, and visiting towns that make beautiful architecture, shops etc is part of that experience. However it's almost entirely lacking because mobility is and will forever be a challenge as long as the server runs with this "realism" in mind. I play on meepcraft (and in general towny) to build and travel to towns when I feel like doing it. If I wanted to experience realism I'd bike or drive to my adjacent town in real life. It's the sort of tedious gameplay that isn't interesting or even unique to the genre of towny server, but almost entirely stifles player -> player economy and just causes people to either quit or grind pve dungeons all day.

So, in essence, the server does not currently offer great difficulty for the playerbase, but it sure as hell offers tedious, boring, and downright uninteresting gameplay, which is the worst of it. Meepcraft has the capacity to be VERY FUN, it's just unfortunate that right now, at least for my view as a more casual player, it's not.

 

I fully second this. I was giving extreme a shot in hopes I could have some bits of fun, but it's hard to play if one has a busy lifestyle. I'm not gonna let someone carry me and I don't want to mine for an hour just so I can find 5 pieces of iron. If I really want any sort of adrenaline rush from Minecraft I'll just play hardcore or pure vanilla. It's discouraging to the people who can't pour 5 hours of videogames into their life every day.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 22, 2020, Original Post Date: Apr 22, 2020 ---

Don't mean to spam post, but it just occurred to me: what is the plan once the radius runs out of resources? Tools break, iron doesn't last forever, do they expect y'all to suck it up and use wooden swords when the going gets tough?

 

Tedious, time consuming tasks is an example of "fake difficulty." Genuine difficulty provides a challenge that can be overcome by skill. Having to walk everywhere does not take skill, it just takes time.

 

We’ve all been playing Minecraft for almost a decade. How different did you expect it to be this time around?

 

The people who complain about instant teleporting won’t even play long term anyways. No /tpa is basically standard for most of the big towny servers right now and they’re doing pretty well, averaging over 100 people even in down times on their platforms, it would seem then that they don’t have a problem without tpa

From what I’ve seen in game no /tpa has improved it tremendously. Already we have several major infrastructure projects all around the map, towns are already starting to negotiate and form agreements with each other, creating a nice and strategic environment that wasn’t present in classic towns. I don’t know how true this may be but I’ve also noticed a spike in activity where we frequently hit 50+ even on weekdays (this may have been happening before just I didn’t notice).

You’re right, walking everywhere doesn’t take skill, you know what does take skill though? Planning roads and highways to places of interest to your towns, engaging in talks with neighboring towns over possibilities of connections, negotiating foreign policy (or closest thing you can get to that on a block game). Instead of whining about needing a command to take you everywhere just get good at the other aspects that were introduced

You want people to take your ideas and opinions seriously but you won’t even take the time to read the suggestion page. Tons of things such as supply drops, ore spawn suggestions, and more have been suggested, accepted, and implemented all in the last month. If it ever gets to this point (which is going to be a pretty long time considering the world isn’t exactly tiny).

the “Casual player” usually quits after 3-5 days, that’s the cycle of towny lol. By introducing an economy that requires you to interact with players in both hostile and peaceful settings, you get a much more immersive experience. the point that it’s “uninteresting gameplay” has to be the worst take though, there’s tons of new interesting mechanics introduced here and if you’re not willing to see them that’s on you.

 

Boss is entirely right. Really glad you saved me the trouble of a huge post, thank you so much.

 

I don't find what you are saying to be true, not in the slightest.
For one, almost all of the players who are still playing come from old meep and are mostly playing for community sake. I don't know many people who are saying that the restrictions on mobility are a net positive to the server or say that's why they're playing. Same goes for the other servers as you mention; the lack of a /tpa doesn't make their servers any better or more popular, people play despite that feature not because of it.

Also, major infrastructure was going to happen regardless of there being convenient mobility or not. Towns are inherently "major infrastructure" and shops are as well. Instead, we're spending more and more of our time building infrastructure... just to go to other towns and see their lackluster infrastructure due to the general lack of cross-town transactions? It seems contradictory to the point almost, and yet even then there's no way to bring about infrastructure that is so wide scale that you can link every big town together in a huge minecart system.

Ultimately, this is the biggest issue- even if/when the minecart infrastructure is fully built, how are you going to make an appeal towards casual players or new players anyway? This infrastructure surely won't be easily editable and thus new towns will struggle to use the railing system to their advantage. And even if you could instantaneously link the transportation to your town, is it really fun having to wait several minutes just to get to each town when you could previously do so instantaneously via /pwarp, /warp, /t spawn, /home etc? Compare this to commuting to work every day- it's repetitive and no one can really say that it's their favorite part of the day. That's exactly what this system would be when all said and done. Just a mindless, time-consuming ride across the same rail every time you want to go to a store or town. That's not fun, nor is it challenging. It's tedious, and most casual/new players would not want to go through that every time they wanted to visit a town. Imagine if in skyblock you had to build a connector to each island you wanted to visit. No one would play it after a while!

The player count, as mentioned by you, is inherently deceptive because that reflects no growth in the server if all of the players are veterans who are playing just as the server has reset. The same bump happened every single time the server reset, and inevitably it shrinks down. The reason why is that the server is alienating towards the new players, the more casual group. Having this sort of limitation on travel is simply not accessible to a lot of players. Also, other towny servers, they still have at least ways to speed up travel or have a centralized spawn where marketplaces can be held for ease of trade. That doesn't even exist on meepcraft, the spawn being deliberately removed days ago. Player to player economy should be a large emphasis but it is the exact opposite right now.

 

Commuting to work was actually my favorite part of my morning.

Removing the warp commands has added a risk factor in traveling between towns that causes some pvp to happen and that would get removed if the warps came back. Extreme is more fun that regular towny because it’s actually somewhat dangerous now

 

You can go anywhere on the map in a couple mins by running through the nether while adding a risk factor for doing this. People are leaving safe zones that would never be left if teleportation commands exists. As for getting baltop, you town sat in mountain dungeon for hours on end practically afk because of a poorly designed dungeon which repeatedly spawned wolves and donkeys in the same block every 2 seconds (which has been changed so it cannot be afked anymore) and reached baltop 1 without much issue. There are many things that are being fixed and balanced right now so the process of earning skulls is more interactive and risky. The game is a work in progress but can be fun if you give it a chance.

 

Yeah I think you're mad that my town members killed you in dungeons and we were smart to not grind the 40k/hour crypt and instead going for 100k in the dungeon we grinded in

Also that doesn't alleviate the fact that it's still overly tedious and not really fun if you have to do it every. single. time. That's the whole point of my thread. It's never difficult nor is it truly risky (you don't get a deathban, for instance); just tedious.

 

the fact you think pvp is enabled in dungeons proves my point that you clearly haven’t played enough to be complaining. And in fact, your town learned how to make money this way from Epix who is a mayor in our town. So yes congratulations on your achievements. I hope the skulls are serving you well.

 

Man wants /tpa so he doesnt risk losing his precious cash

 

I don't play seriously so i don't care if i lose cash really, I have more cash shared in a town bank than I could realistically spend in this economy.

/tpa is one of many things that would make the server more fun and more town-oriented, though.

 

the only situations i see /tpa being necessary is for things such as buying items from people in different areas or possibly bringing a staff member to somewhere where you need em. though i really wouldnt mind having /tpa added back to the server. i havent even realized the difference w/ it since coming back, but it'd be nice to add it again

 

this.

another thing i learned is that hostile mobs don't spawn outside of dungeons. so not only is it not really fun to go outside of your town to explore the surface, go mining etc, it's not dangerous either (which kinda removes the "extreme" thing)

if extreme means it takes you 10 hours to get a set of iron armor, stripmining with hardly any caves, mineshafts or loot... just stone and the occasional iron and coal? on top of all this... there's no monsters to fight while you spend 10 hours stripmining for 24 iron ore


i like the idea of no /tpa

but no /warp spawn or something like that? yes, the intention is to create nether infrastructure or whatever, which can work, but is that a challenge? not really, it's just a grind to make a tunnel in the nether. (the other problem is that the nether will probably reset in 1.16 ruining all potential highways)

there isn't even a vshop to trade with players long distance.

also, i can't even do the quests because i can't get back into the extreme spawn to talk to npcs. so that's fun.




EDIT: while no /tpa is it a good idea, i think the fact that elytra (and the end in general) is unable to be accessed kind of ruins that factor even more. basically limiting your transportation to walk slowly in the overworld 10k blocks to your friend, or spend hours creating a tunnel in the nether so thatyou can travel 10k blocks by only going 2k blocks instead (which is still not fun)

basically what im saying is give me elytra or give me death

 

Mob spawns in the overworld is dependent on server infrastructure which doesn't currently exist. After we have more efficient hardware and software this will be implemented. There's already a backdoor into the Extreme spawn on the back too.

 

I still don't know where to find creepers