What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
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Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it's a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
They've made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn't purchase them. They're still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I'd definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for "suspicious activity" ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don't do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that's not "child safe", even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don't really get, it wasn't difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don't like it in theory but also haven't seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn't make sense that it's enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren't on realms
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you're rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven't made lots of positive changes but that's my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it's only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn't likely say it's too easy necessarily, I also didn't notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it's nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is... Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can't really get into vanilla in general, I'm always playing modded if I'm playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they're just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
I love farming, I'm a technical player so that's my main focus. I'm saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you're a different kind of player then the "target" for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they're generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they'd be playing it more "as expected", which isn't really "easy" unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there's tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don't know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What's great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there's a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren't farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There's a balance that can be made.
I agree but also don't understand where your problem really is, like you want it to be more frustrating to use the non-intended things in the first place?
The fact that you can make crazy raid or iron farms isn't a bad thing, compare that to how "normies" would play the game and how trying to balance the two would mean just overall worse experience for the normies most likely with more work needed also by the more in-depth farmers.
Rereading your prior response, I think I get where you're coming from, but I feel like it'd be very hard to balance such a large difference between the player bases/styles, like if mob drops were nerfed then typical players would noticably get less loot, or some people aren't into the designing aspect of farm creation but do it simply for the resources because they prefer to build or create redstone contraptions, idk.
I want the mechanics to have more depth and to be more challenging and fun to work with. Most normies don't build farms so the game would be pretty much unchanged for them. You could still make easy farms if you want to dip your toes into it but the effort to reward ratio would be more balanced.
Can you give another specific example for something you would want changed that you think would give you a greater challenge and would leave average players experience unchanged?
Not really off the top of my head so I'll elaborate on the points I've already made to demonstrate why I think these things are such an issue. It also goes to show that with a few minor changes, Mojang would be able to balance these things super easily.
Portal based farms are really the worst culprit, imo. It's the meta for loads and loads of different mob farms and just consists of a cube of portals making all these once separate farming concepts basically the same. They're also incredibly overpowered and yield huge amounts of items. I remember back in the day people spent lots of time perfecting the designs of their big farms and there really hasn't been much interesting development in the tech community because portal based farms are super fast, easy to throw together, and get you more items than most other designs. I think removing them would force people to be more creative again. This is a pretty common sentiment in a large part of the tech community. Here are a couple of portal farms and you'll see that things get boring real fast:
Slime: https://youtu.be/cerBKl6Gzeg?si=27PPAqpeVaOmJ8ID
Guardian: https://youtu.be/n_IH6LUYyMk?si=fAtOK47fv-5Qhjvs
Ghast (I'm on mobile so I can't timestamp but you can skip about 30mins in): https://youtu.be/ZlefdidnABI?si=H7Rlhb3yKIB8SyVp
Wither skeletons: https://youtu.be/Dj5JedJuXrY?si=7JjKvU5uMYlmY3Pz
There are quite a few more mobs that can be farms in the same way but I think that proves the point enough.
Raid farms tech has also gotten absurd lately if you check out this: https://youtu.be/owuP8P4s_8g?si=2sjTYPAHNG0dVcfi. That farm produces hundreds of thousands of items per hour and can be built in an hour or two. The raid stacking mechanics are really overpowered. I think raid farms should definitely be a thing and some of the simpler designs are decently balanced but stacking farms are game breaking. For reference, this farm yields more witch drops than scicraft's witch farm project which took years to finish.
I'm really just speaking in terms of my little niche corner of the game. Nerfing portal based farms or stacking raid farms wouldn't really effect anyone outside of technical players because it requires some obsidian farming setup as a barrier or entry. Stacking raid farms, while easy to build for technical servers, are still a little bit above the skill level where it would be something casual players would build.
I know that you can always just not build these farms if they're boring, but it's really stagnated cool farm development in the entire community. It's more than just an individual decision because most tech servers these days just reluctantly go the easy route because the time and effort involved in developing more interesting concepts isn't worth it in comparison to the amount of items you get from the easy route. I've also played on tech servers where we agreed to work on a new concept but some players decide to just go and build a portal based farm anyways discouraging people from spending their time to design a new farm for items which we already have plenty of.
Interesting, thanks!
I think the development was reinvigorated when microsoft joined the team here.
Oh yeah, extreme censorship, shitty mob votes, and a DLC marketplace. So reinvigorated.
The whole 'censorship' narrative was a nazi psy-op. I literally didn't even hear about it because I blocked all the mientubers for unrelated issues, and the one guy who did eventually tip me off its existence was essentially parroting talking points straight from that guy who I blocked after I caught him trying to groom his majority child audience that what Notch said on twitter was OK and he was being cancelled.
Like obviously I don't trust macroshaft to do any chat moderation since they seem to think cracker is a deeply offensive racial slur but ret--d is just harmless banter, but when literally everyone making a stink about it is either an outright nazi propagandist or has close ties to one, it's hard not to see what's going on.
The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.
That being said, I don't think that Microsoft's moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It's just the principle that I take some issue with.
Just set the server to offline mode...
That's a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.
True on the risk aspect, there are authentication plugins you can get instead on the server side.
On the ban aspect, I don't see people making this claim for Steam, if you get banned on Steam you lose all your games, not just a $30 purchase, and maybe don't call people slurs in online text chat? Idk, it seems like it was just an overhyped concern with few actually getting banned that didn't deserve it somewhat.
I'm generally libleft and I'm quite upset about it. I bought the game. I own the game. They shouldn't be allowed to take it away from me. What if you were gay and a car bricked itself because the manufacturer didn't approve of you frequenting a gay bar?
The censorship is kind of rediculous, tbh I thought that was in before Microsoft. Don't see the rest as negative, and development seems more stable in the new groove, with regular larger updates. Couldn't vote on mobs at all before, and there is DLC for Minecraft??
All editions have DLC except Java. Many free Java features are paid in other versions. The problem with the mob vote is that they could totally just add all 3, but don't.
I'm not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
He always was a weirdo.
Yup. Comes with the nationality.
Source: am Norwegian
That is what I call untrustworthy source, to much conflict of interest.
I don't know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn't really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.