totemo

/r/IDidTheMonsterMath And I suspect that people would not like the answer if they really bothered to do the math. It would show up how absurdly unbalanced iron grinders are. The ones we currently have on PvE reputedly output 1.5 stacks of ingots in 2 hours, or 18 stacks per day. The balance proposal above is for if you really, absolutely have to keep iron grinders. But I still agree with TheRandomnatrix and, hey... Mojang, that AFKing for stuff breaks game balance. My counter proposal would be that we allow players to create a better smelter, like FactoryMod, where smelting iron ore gives you more than one iron ingot per ore. And that it would be tuned with a setup cost as per my proposal above (something that plugin already does). And that it could be upgraded (again, something that plugin already does). But I fully expect that the reply will be along the lines of "but we must be vanilla at all costs".

I expressed these exact sentiments in the other thread on smelting armour. And I also expressed the opinion that we should do what makes a good game and not care so much about what Mojang tolerates in the game. As you point out: Compare my remarks here, as well as those of jeb_ and Dinnerbone. In that linked comment I also provided some stats on how we're doing with iron production, mostly by mining. I assumed that the iron spawners are producing negligible amounts of iron in my analysis. Here are the highlights, copied from the other thread: There have been 902 unique logins to PvE so far this rev (determined by checking the playerdata directory). The rest of the figures I list were determined through LogBlock queries. In my figures below, I have had to guesstimate how much iron armour and tools people use. We don't currently have the tools to traul through all those inventories. If all 902 unique logins have created 2 suits of armour, 2 picks, one axe, one shovel, one sword and one pair of shears, they would have used 62 iron each just on tools and armour, or 55924 ingots. That's probably a gross over-estimation. Probably half didn't stay long enough to play. And a lot of them moved on to diamond armour before needing a second suit of iron. I considered total iron ore mined, nett iron blocks placed, total anvils placed (all anvils were assumed to be destroyed by use, rather than picked up and moved), nett rails, nett iron bars, nett hoppers, nett iron trapdoors, nett cauldrons and nett iron doors. I considered LogBlock totals from all three worlds. In total, PvE has mined 308288 iron ore this rev. PvE has placed iron blocks, anvils, rails, bars hoppers, doors, trapdoors, and cauldrons amounting to 133770 ingots. PVE players are estimated to have consumed 55924 ingots of iron in tools and armour. That leaves 118594 iron ingots in chests or inventories. That is the equivalent of: 13177 iron blocks 80 beacon bases 23718 hoppers.... half that number would absolutely cripple the tick rate. 316250 rails, or 13 times around the map border We are about 5 weeks into the rev or 25%. If we continue to acquire iron at this rate, all of these numbers quadruple by the end of the rev without changing anything. Of course, production will trail off as player numbers fall, but the falling numbers are part of the problem we're trying to address. There is already more than enough iron to go around. There are 13,000 iron blocks mouldering in personal chests. Why aren't they being traded? Would a trade plugin help or would someone have a meltdown and ragequit if it were added? (And then delete all the incriminating forum comments?) The other linked discussions include some ideas about game balance which are applicable to automation. One thing I want to particularly highlight (and this is Dinnerbone's stance on XP too) is that there should be no obvious single solution - no clear winner, because that reduces everyones options to just that. The way that you do that is by tuning the grinder output so that it is not too much faster than what you could do by the other ways (i.e. mining). In addition to that, building automation should not be an instant payoff. The material cost should put you behind the plodders who are mining the old fashioned way, and then after a well tuned period of grinding you should first break even and then you can start to gain iron at a faster rate than mining alone. So to implement a well tuned automation mechanic for iron we need to: Establish a performance baseline for iron production by regular mining. e.g. 4 stacks per hour or whatever it is. Determine how much faster we want the iron grinder to be, e.g. 10%. Not double, not ten times. Not triple digit percentages. One thing to consider: should it even be faster? The grinder frees up your time to do other things. Perhaps low tier iron grinders should be tuned to perform at some fraction of the rate of a competent miner. There are plenty of alt accounts. Keeping a grinder constantly producing 24 hours a day is not difficult. But actively playing the game 24 hours a day as a human being is impossible. So imagine a player who plays 3 hours a day, but grinds with his alt 24 hours a day. If that grinder produces the same amount of iron as one hour of mining, that player has improved his efficiency by 33%. That's pretty good. An extra hour of "free" play time per day when you can do something other than going mining. Adjust the rate of the production of the spawners to match. That needs to take L3 into account. It's not hard to tape down the left mouse button on that AFK alt. Alternatively, disable L3 on iron golems by plugin. Determine how long it would take to pay off a grinder that produced iron at that rate, e.g. a few weeks, because afk'ing in the grinder isn't a challenge at all. And here's the special sauce: set the material cost of the iron grinder to be that many weeks worth of iron ore at the grinder's rate. So in order to replace mining, you need X weeks of mining output at the grinder's rate. Your grinder won't break even on its initial material setup cost (measured in iron ore or iron ingots) until that many weeks of constant use have elapsed. EDIT: Someone pointed out to me that favouring players with alts is discriminatory, and I agree (although wherever Minecraft allows AFKing that is always a possibility). If we're trying to replace a laggy vanilla mechanism that is AFK capable then we need to calculate output on the assumption that the mechanism will be active 24 hours a day, because people will do it, however, if we can come up with a mechanism that that doesn't require alts but just produces items at a set rate per day, that is non-discriminatory. Hey, here's your daily chest of free stuff because you're awesome! #purevanilla

50% didn't mine a single iron and 1/3 didn't stay around to punch a log. That's not depressing. It's just the reality of a saturated market of Minecraft servers. And it's how it is every rev. It is the reality that admins in this organisation have been dealing with for years, on S and P. It is nothing new. This is the problem that admins have: how to attract players and how to retain them long enough to get hooked into the game.

The first four pages of LogBlock iron ore mining results (posted earlier) add up as follows (I'm counting destructions only and skipping the placements, to save time): Miners 1 - 15: 76043 Miners 16 - 30: 44453 Miners 31 - 45: 33972 Miners 46 - 60: 23418 Total (1 - 60): 177886 or 57.7% of total iron ore mined. Your maths is way, way off, even after you corrected it. By a factor of two. And as a result you've had this huge emotional reaction about how depressing it is. It's unnecessary. I'm assuming that with better tools we could plot all this and it would show up as a nice neat bell curve. And that the time usage stats would also show up as a similarly tidy bell curve. The top players by time are always going to end up with a bigger share of the loot. There is nothing surprising or depressing about that. That is reality. The question you should be asking is how do we encourage those 13000 iron blocks to move out of people's chests into the hands of the players that need them. Also from those LogBlock stats I can see that only 474 players of the 902 unique logins mined any iron at all. So to talk in emotive terms about "the other 870 unique logins" is nonsense. Most of them didn't stick around long enough to mine any iron, which in single player would be essential to get redstone or diamonds. Just to back that up: total number of unique players who have broken one log, essential to even starting the game at all: 602. Firstly, zombie or skelly grinders are not going to produce a lot of loot. The smelting of armour and tools was not solely motivated as a game balance fix. We've covered this. And now that Mojang are adding it to the game too, I'm surprised you're even mentioning it. Secondly you're telling me that spawner based grinders create huge server lag. OK then. I guess that means we can't have iron grinders. Or this is just more hyperbole. MobLimiter is designed to deal with spawners and we have an established practice of dealing with players who pile up too many mobs. And in 1.11, the maxEntityCramming game rule kills mobs once they get above 24 in the same spot.

We've strayed far off the topic of armour smelting into the iron-grinder game balance debate. I'll speak to the points you've made as briefly as possible. I reckon I'm seeing some absurd thinking here, tobylane. PvE is not just creative plus time delay. There are hostile mobs to contend with, and exploration, and getting lost in caves, and falling in lava. The E in environment. It's a "vs Environment" server, and that is a major component of the fun. You are thinking that PvE is only about building. And yes, there is automation. And automation has game balance implications. It's not a pure sandbox game though is it. A pure sandbox would be creative mode. Survival mode is about resource gathering and exploration and taming the environment. Mojang has set up these expected mechanics, but on a multiplayer server we simply can't provide some of them without huge lag problems. Mojang themselves have also expressed their distaste for some of the overpowered automation designs in the game. There's not much entertainment to be had in automating iron acquisition using spawners, now, is there robr? A couple of hours, maybe. There was much more work grinding mobs last rev to level up the spawners. We will never go back to the enormous iron grinder pods with villagers because of the lag issues caused by all the entities. Now, this is a discussion about game balance: last rev the output of iron grinders was absurdly high and too easily achieved. Any game mechanic which is so ridiculously overpowered that it is the only rational course of action is bad game design. An OP iron grinder at spawn kills the entire early game for new players - they leave spawn in full iron kit. It is one thing to want to build a huge iron grinder in single player. It only affects you. On a multiplayer server, though, it skews the entire economy of the game and can be detrimental to the server as a whole. This rev, the current output is too low for your taste, though it is still possible to get iron by doing nothing (that's not deriding anyone, by the way, that's just the truth). It is the Padmins' role to decide game balance in the interests of the server. I am arguing in support of slower progress in the output of iron grinders and more of other activities. I won't repeat my reasoning as I have said it several times in other comments in this thread. I will give you a few links on game balance, nerfing etc.. The things I am saying about game balance are by no means unique perspectives. They are admin/player perspectives and even Mojang staff perspectives rather than player only perspectives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1vogb3/mob_farms_from_the_view_of_a_server_owner/ http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/archive/future-updates/385033-it-appears-as-though-jeb-will-be-repealing-the?page=6 https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1vlok0/twitter_jeb_will_not_ignore_the_mob_farm_issue/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/yr9pt/why_i_feel_that_dinnerbone_screwed_up_with_the_xp/c5y4klx/?context=3 And finally, some statistics on how people are actually using iron this rev: There have been 902 unique logins to PvE so far this rev (determined by checking the playerdata directory). The rest of the figures I list were determined through LogBlock queries. In my figures below, I have had to guesstimate how much iron armour and tools people use. We don't currently have the tools to traul through all those inventories. If all 902 unique logins have created 2 suits of armour, 2 picks, one axe, one shovel, one sword and one pair of shears, they would have used 62 iron each just on tools and armour, or 55924 ingots. That's probably a gross over-estimation. Probably half didn't stay long enough to play. And a lot of them moved on to diamond armour before needing a second suit of iron. I considered total iron ore mined, nett iron blocks placed, total anvils placed (all anvils were assumed to be destroyed by use, rather than picked up and moved), nett rails, nett iron bars, nett hoppers, nett iron trapdoors, nett cauldrons and nett iron doors. I considered LogBlock totals from all three worlds. In total, PvE has mined 308288 iron ore this rev. PvE has placed iron blocks, anvils, rails, bars hoppers, doors, trapdoors, and cauldrons amounting to 133770 ingots. PVE players are estimated to have consumed 55924 ingots of iron in tools and armour. That leaves 118594 iron ingots in chests or inventories. That is the equivalent of: 13177 iron blocks 80 beacon bases 23718 hoppers.... half that number would absolutely cripple the tick rate. 316250 rails, or 13 times around the map border We are about 5 weeks into the rev or 25%. If we continue to acquire iron at this rate, all of these numbers quadruple by the end of the rev without changing anything. I'll put up a spreadsheet later on.

Robr asserted that people are not entertained. My opinion was that if they are playing the game by caving and mining then that is entertainment. But they have the option of trading with someone else who does enjoy mining iron. Or they can go to one of the slow iron grinders and do nothing to get it, slowly. But I'm not a fan of that mechanic because it is basically just Creative mode plus time delay. You're right, they could be mining because they need to build something completely out of iron. I've built things completely out of iron in the past. I mined the iron to get it. I like caving. Here are the actual stats for placement of iron blocks: The biggest nett user of iron blocks is nolanater5711, who has placed 4 beacon bases made out of iron. A similar story applies to Azumarill. The nerf on iron grinders hasn't prevented people from making beacon bases out of iron instead of, say, emerald blocks. We could add in free materials for everything. It wouldn't be a survival mode server any more. Creative mode is instant resource aquisition, no PVP, instabreak, and flying. Last PvE rev was Creative mode for iron, sans the instabreak. I think it was buzzie71 who said that grinders allow him to allocate his time differently. That is true. This is all about game balance, and ultimately everything in survival mode ultimately equates down to time played. My point from a couple of comments back was that I think that slowing down resource acquisition may lead to people playing the game more, which is to the benefit of the server.

With the new snapshot, smelting armour and weapons takes about 8 seconds. Every item, including armour, tools and weapons, and even horse armour smelts down to a single nugget of gold or iron. As it currently stands in the snapshot, a full health item yields exactly the same amount of metal as a durability 1 item. I expect them to change this last point based on community feedback. But at the moment, they don't have the code in their crafting recipes to match a range of durability values with a result, or to express a probabilistic result.

Does make it rather a moot point doesn't it. We are working towards briinging 1.11 in the New Year. If we do roll out the changes for the rather brief interim, then we should set the recipes to match the returns Mojang has set. If that is not possible without iron nuggets then we should drop the iron recipes. That implies that nobody likes mining and that your intent is to get it all over and done with as quickly as possible and then leave. Here are 60 players who have mined more than 1300 iron ore each: The top 90 miners have all mined more than 900 iron ore each. The top 120 have mined at least 670 each.

As I understand it: That it preferably should not be free in enormous quantities, because that kills a lot of the game for new players. That it should be obtained through active play time in order to draw out the usefulness of the revision. AFKing for enormous quantities of iron does not qualify. My understanding of the motivations are: It takes a lot of effort to set up spawn and make the fancy maps that everyone enjoys. We want the revs to last a while to maximise the value we get out of that staff effort. We seem to have settled on roughly 5 month revisions. This is in part due to the previous point, and in part because we have a significant number of players who have expressed their desire for that duration in order to accomplish their goals. Through long observation of player counts we know that they decay exponentially from a peak at the start of the rev. There are a large number of players who only play the first day, the first week or the first month and then are gone. The rev rolls on and new players come, see 9 people online (as someone did in the small hours last night) and leave 30 seconds later. It is our belief that players are more likely to stay to play if there are more people online. We have a lot of potential new players that don't get past that first impression. That is, our player retention problem comes from network effects: having a lot of players drives more players to us; having few players makes it harder for new players to find us, or to find interest in us. It is my personal belief that people will stay past that initial contact for unique features that "sound interesting". You have to remember that there are 1000s of Minecraft servers out there. There are plenty that offer exactly what Mojang dishes out because that is the default setting; it is the least effort, least creativity option. I have visited them. They are just like P from 3 years ago and they have 0 players. In summary, the iron changes are there to slow things down a little to draw more entertainment value out of the revision (by necessitating more mining or other active resource-gathering behaviours) and in order to drive player number improvements.

You keep saying that as if this is the first time that people have ever wanted to smelt down armour. (Hint: that desire has been expressed by some players for years.) You keep saying it like smelting armour will be incredibly lucrative. (Hint: it will be a small percentage bump.) And you keep saying that as if the reason people play Minecraft is so that they can get armour drops that they immediately throw in lava... like that's the attraction. And finally, worst of all, you keep talking like vanilla Minecraft was handed down by God himself. We're trying to make an entertaining game, despite what Mojang does to it. And we have limited hardware and neverending lag problems. I think you're getting carried away by the emotion of it. But by all means, go play on your vanilla terrain map with your 100% no mods vanilla client in the default texture pack if that's what entertains you.

We have not had vanilla terrain in years. We don't have vanilla ore distribution. I can't remember a rev when we did and I have played all but one. We have a bunch of custom spawners for mobs that don't have vanilla dungeons. Our nether is cray cray. But you can access it all with a vanilla client and nothing is super complicated or super different. It's not a whole different game like CivCraft. But you get more gold fighting pigmen now, so it's not devaluing that. Mining in the mesa is still faster for bulk gold. And I guarantee that when these recipes are enabled, every gold armour chest in every grinder will be emptied. One Pican made off with two thirds of the smeltable armour in Pico grinder chests the minute this poll went up. There will be a momentary blip in the gold economy as old stockpiles are liquidated, and then a small change in player behaviour as they factor their need for gold into choice of XP grinder to use and weigh up how they want to achieve their goals. I don't expect many players will subsequently opt to kill 57,600 skeletons for their armour to get 2 stacks of gold blocks, but there's always one. That's a vote to nerf the amount of material salvaged from smelting down swords. That is certainly something that can be considered. I'm going to take this as an admonishment to be consistent and a reiteration of the opinion that smelting gear is too lucrative. There are some shut-ins who are viscerally opposed to leaving the house to go mining who will do a whole lot of clicking on villagers. A lot of clicking, to turn their sugarcane into iron. Good luck to them. The smelting thing has added a whole new dimension to the game for them. At least they are not standing around AFK. It is hard to balance things where villagers are involved because they are ridiculously OP. A few days into the rev you can get whatever book you want from villagers and cheap diamond chestplates. That is the broken game balance that Mojang have given us. That is vanilla. In comparison to that, I do think that balancing gold smelting is a comparatively minor concern. Just from the voting response it's clear that people want to get some value from armour/weapon mob drops. It scratches the right itch. When I unpack buzzie's concerns they keep coming back to game balance. Is it worth having further discussion on the rate of return? Or should we simply run it as a test this rev and nerf it next rev if it is too much? I have provided enough statistics in my comments for people to calculate exactly how much time would be required to get gold by various means. Do we need further consideration of that one guy who will tape down the left mouse button and park himself in a zombie grinder for five days to get gold? Or do we write that off as equivalent to a vanilla gold grinder?

Would need to be considered. Bars are hard because each one is 6/16ths of an ingot, so probably never for bars. Horse armour is notionally a rare item (even if in a practical sense people end up with a lot of it). I'd personally prefer to see it circulated among players rather than just smelted down.

There is no XP drop.

It's not going to be a huge fundamental change to gold. If you spend a couple of hours and kill a thousand mobs at a dungeon grinder, you get about 20 gold ingots if you can be bothered to combine and smelt the armour. It's pleasing to the packrats who have been saving up drops for years hoping that they would somehow be useful one day, or in fact hoping for exactly this change. But it's not going to completely change the game balance. You can still get a lot more gold, a LOT faster, and with a lot more entertainment value by mining the Mesa. The big winner may actually be the zombie pigmen hunters, who get an extra 20%, based on the tests I did this evening, they would only need 20.6 hours of grinding free-range pigmen to get a full health horse, rather than 24.7 hours. For an hour and half of grinding, 250 kills, we're talking 84 gold ingots instead of 70. Again, it's 20%. It's not double or triple. And we can argue about whether it should be 10%, 20% or 30%. (In fact, I would characterise that as a constructive criticism.) It's still not a huge change. And it's still not as fast as mining in the Mesa.

Unfortunately, Minecraft and the Bukkit API only register unique smelting recipes for a specific material and damage/durability value. In order to enable smelting of a gold chestplate in every possible state of repair, I would need to register 112 recipes - one for each damage value. That would be tedious and I wonder if it might have some detrimental effect. I'm not prepared to do it at this stage. The rate of return from smelting gold items is far less than what you would get for a comparable time investment in mining the mesa.

Details of the current proposed configuration Smelting would apply to iron or gold armour, and tools and weapons that require more than one ingot to make (i.e. shovels cannot be smelted). Smelting would take 20 seconds per piece. Only full durability items could be smelted. You would need to combine items to smelt them down. The rate of return would be about 1/3 the rate that it would take to craft new items from scratch. In a dungeon grinder, you would need to kill approximately 50 mobs with a Looting 3 sword to get one ingot of gold. Iron is a lot rarer and we don't have statistics on it. It is effectively negligible. Smelting results (iron or gold items): Helmet: 2 ingots Chestplate: 3 ingots Leggings: 3 ingots Boots: 1 ingot Axe, hoe, pickaxe or sword: 1 ingot

I just hopped on my donkey, rode north of Pico for 2 and half minutes, went into a cave that someone had clearly already partly explored and mined 2 stacks + 8 = 136 iron ore in 7 and a half minutes. In another 5 minutes, tops, I could be back home in Pico with that your entire rev's iron production smelting in my furnaces. So what you are basing your argument on (and it's not clear to me what that is), boils down to 15 minutes of play time. If people can't be bothered to invest 15 minutes in this game, they shouldn't venture an opinion on how other people play it.

I think the custom spawners suck and most of them should be dropped. They just replace some more interesting part of the game with standing around AFK for free stuff. To the extent that we make some part of the game easy to beat, we make it boring. Examples of spawners that suck: Iron spawners replace mining and exploration, to the detriment of the game. Iron should not be so absurdly cheap to get that people make huge ugly buildings out of it. There is no shortage of iron on this map. Collectively, PvE has mined 234 thousand iron ore blocks in the first 23 days of the rev. That's 10,000 ore per day. I have personally mined 5401 iron ore, or 9.38 stacks of iron blocks - enough for 3 and a half beacon bases. There is plenty of iron for rails, and even if there was not, we would be able to collect rails from abandoned mines. About 10% of all chunks in the world are slime chunks, which means there are roughly 14,000 of them. Conventional slime grinders produce far more slime than anyone actually needs, particularly if you combine multiple slime chunks. They're not particularly complicated to build - they just require effort - and with Haste 2 beacons, the amount of effort required is far less than in the past.

Since I don't like babysitting and I can't trust you to behave, you can join us once Rev 19 has started. I will unban you then.

Sounds good. We're always looking for people who like to build. You're unbanned.

Sorry you weren't unbanned immediately. I didn't get the message. You are now unbanned.

No worries. Mrgauthier34/itsmemrgee is no longer on staff so I have unbanned you on his behalf. Please have a quick read of the general rules and server-specific rules on http://nerd.nu/rules before you play.

Ah. It's called Watson. I haven't updated it lately because I have been too busy. Hopefully soon. You just got treated to old school xray banning, from before I wrote Watson.

Thank you. I appreciate the straightforward appeal. Your inventory has been cleared and all of your edits wiped from the map. You are banned for one month. Open a new appeal on the 12th of October, as a reminder to us, and you will be unbanned. We customarily present the evidence upon which the ban was based, as people are in the habit of denying the facts, even in the most blatant instances. The main facts of the matter are: The tunnels were winding. I don't think sporadic is quite the right word. It was all over in a mere 11 minutes. You mined a mere 253 stone to uncover 30 diamonds, branch mining. That never happens. In the screenshots that follow, I have marked the diamond edits with light blue stained glass.