First let me say that I have only been playing MC for a month or so, and only been on EMC less than a week. My opinion/question is likely to not have the whole picture as I am not a minecraft veteran and I do not know the depth of the economy in a survival multiplayer server. Additionally I am not intending any disrespect to the genius people who create farms, or go to the lengths to get villagers with the right trades. Additionally I notice that a great many people share their success with the server by making farms and villagers public. That being said..... Iron/Gold/Mob/XP Farms I'm wondering if these are actually bad for the health of the game and its economy? While I marvel at the engineering and creativity used in these builds, I struggle to feel the desire to go out into the wastes to hunt when I know I can visit one of these stations and fill my green bar up, and get loot that I would have had to mine for. I feel like these farms incentivize people not to adventure in the world. Villager Trading Along a similar line, I noticed that the majority of the crop producing farms I see, are centered around those items which you can trade to villagers, and additionally the villagers being the core source of enchanted books. I think the villager concept is great at the core, especially for things like saddles, nametags, and other non-power increasing vanity items, or to give an inherent value to common items. However I wonder if this becomes the core of the economy, and instead of people creating farms for items that they believe will be used by people, the farms are setup to feed villagers. Perhaps this is just how MC is, and I am an outsider who is coming at it from a different perspective. Just food for thought. PS. I am absolutely loving EMC. I am having a great time. This is just a food-for-though type of question, not a criticism of EMC in any way. Thats why I posted it in the general discussion, non-EMC related forum
I see where you are coming from... but many players out there use these farms not for profit...... Sure I sell my Iron and Gold, but @ 12845 at a very low price, almost half the cost of a normal shop..... As I think new players should get a chance at buying some for cheap if they need it for a build, or track, or what ever it may be. I do not how ever allow reselling.... I also use my own farms for my builds, as when you need 20 DC's of one item it does get very hard if there are no farms, or anything..... I have thought about making public farms, but it is just pure lack of time. I will not how ever make my farms public for the reasons that I use them for my builds and my cheap shop...
Right now I am farming mostly to stalk up on things. I Once I have a god amount coming in I might start selling some. As it is I have given more things away then sold XD. And I do GO out and mine. In fact I have lost items on two occasion Because I died while out in the waste. Sure Others can use farms if they want but me I chose to go out and do my own mining. Mine craft is what you make it if you do not like using farms don't
I never said I was "right", I was asking a question based on my experience and observing the motivations of the server and the economy.
Like I said, most of the farms I have seen are public, so my question/concern is not whether someone is becoming elite or rich doing it --- its just a question about whether using them removes incentive to go adventuring.
No, as not many players have the time to go out to go mining.... Also not all the mined goods you can get from farms, like quartz, or diamonds for example. Take myself for an example, I like to build... But I am a full time College Student, with a Small Company I own in real life... I find just enough time to build.... If I did not have these farms, it would take months just to gather the items i Needed. I do go mining (Although have not gone in about a year to lack of time), but I still do.... Plus when you are making the farms you have the adventure still, and even more when you are expanding the base in he wild... Also would like to add a side note, that you can quote in one post... no need to have multi post, hehe...
I think players who enjoy going out and mining continue to do it. When I go mining I don't expect to get a massive amount of gold, but when I go to a gold farm I do. Right now the amount of items that can be farmed is rather limited and they usually aren't worth much except in mass quantities. I imagine if there was a way to farm diamonds, lapis, and redstone that would drastically minimize the fun in mining though. Building farms, and communities out in the frontier, is an adventure in and of itself.
..... Perhaps I should not have even expressed my question/concern. I am asking a question of the community, not stating some grand negative fact. I said as much in my first paragraph. I'm not attacking anyone, or judging anyone. I am just asking if this is good for the gameplay. So if you agree that it is good, then thats great, I was asking for peoples opinions.
There is nothing wrong with this... All players have the freedom to speak, and some even learn from it...
Yes, this is what I mean. Its just an impression I get. At least I know I'm not alone in my perspective. It's not ruining the game by any means, it was just an oddity I noticed, being a fresh player to minecraft.
One of EMC's goals is to create a "Play Your Way" environment and I think they succeed at this. If you want to go out and live in the frontier, you can. If you want to live in town and venture to the Wastelands and mine for resources, you can. You can participate in the economy in whatever capacity you want. You can do PVP and other events. You can just socialize in town, on the forums, and on mumble and not really play any of the traditional minecraft. You can switch back and forth between these things and back again and as long as you're having a fun time then all is well. This is vastly different than how EMC was at the very beginning in my opinion. It has gotten better.
I'm absolutely loving the server. I bought gold supporter on the first day. So this was more of a food for thought question, than a criticism by any means.
I agree 100%. I was able to have my wife put the difficulty down a bit when she was learning. Though that part of the play your way has rewards in proportion. And the gold/iron farms are a bit upside down when it comes to effort and reward.
Aikar has put in an AFK auto-kick that help with this. This encourages players to only farm when they are going to be active. If you circumvent the auto-kick then you get punished. If a player wants to spend their Minecraft playing time farming, in an entirely vanilla way, then that's part of "play your way".
Thats good to know but not what I was referring to. I was meaning the small amount of effort needed to get iron/gold/xp -- yields you a large reward compared to the harder method of actually mining, which yields much less. So yes, play your way is great, but ideally the difficulty/effort ratio would be the way the mob hunting difficulty is setup. But my comments are not EMC specific, more just a general minecraft question/discussion. Most of the servers I have seen have a significant economic focus centered around these two areas.
Single player vanilla minecraft will actually allow even more "farming" than EMC in both materials/drops and XP. Figuring out how to make those farms, gathering the materials, finding the time to build them... haha. That would be the catch. The villagers are a bit more difficult since there is no "egging" in SP (well, there's isn't in vanilla - I assume there's a mod for that someplace). The farms help people to build more fun things, stock more goods, repair their armor for the billionth time after getting wrecked by one of the bosses, etc. I think they let us DO more of the fun stuff. Especially for those of us who have kids, marriages, dogs, full time jobs, caring for grandmother (whoops this post isn't about me lol)... Time is limited. I'd really rather be able to run out and fight Momentus without thinking "forget doing that - I'll have to spend 3 hours gaining xp to repair my gear". Let's just go kill the Momo and enjoy it I can't speak to all the public builds, but I know for a fact that ours on smp8 are all tweaked in some little way. Players who enjoy big technical builds can and should build their own bigger and better versions. If you go on YouTube, you will find LOADS of options and variations on these builds. So I don't even think having these public utilities discourages players from wanting their own someday. I gotta get back to work, but there's some 2 cents to your questions I hope.
Farms are part of minecraft. It gives long time builders new purpose and drives a sort of end game play. I agree it can feel upside down when mining/building cease to be the core game play. Town life is generally more about making bigger farms and builds than it is mining. Frontier life sounds like it might be a better fit for you. (You can do both, you don't have to chose one or the other.) There are open frontier towns and outposts where the players just agree to bring very little from town. Anyone can join, live off the land and see how much they can make the town grow.
One of the problems with mining on EMC is that you often have to go out a lot from the wastelands to find ores, most are gone near the spawn. Mining takes a lot of time, and it's only worth it for something super-valuable (like diamonds). Farming is the best alternative for many people: want a huge building made of iron blocks? Giant hopper creations? DCs of anvils? That would take months, maybe even a year is it weren't for farms. I really enjoy EMC a lot because many materials are within easy grasp: If I need iron, I have it, I don't have it. Shops that sell cheaper iron also fuel a huge market of instant gratification, something that I think that everyone loves (maybe a little at least ) IMO the best AFK iron farm is in the utopia end (built by a former mod, JNightwind), and you need supporter to access it. It makes people want to get supporter, which helps keep EMC up, etc. Something (sorta) unrelated: Hoppers. This is the one main Aikar change that just bugs me so much. Every time I make a redstone thingy, I have to test it with hoppers ugh ugh ugh. Well that's enough of that. Now about villagers: On EMC, yes, villagers are (usaully) the only source for enchanted books, mainly because of the economy infrastructure. However, the players who have 'perfect villagers' as they're called here, spent a ton of time and emeralds getting those. While the eggification system makes it SO much easier (re-egging for the librarians), it still often takes over 50 villagers to get one perfect one. It took me around 40 villagers and over 7 stacks of emeralds to get one kinda perfect villager: silk touch for 8. In the end, I am for farms. Part of it stems from the fact that farms are not easy to create. The player making this gracious farm spent a lot of their materials on it, and we are very thankful for that. It's awesome that we have a community that is so giving! With the villager thing, I think that villagers are awesome the way they are and don't need a change. TL;DR: I think farms are awesome and I love instant gratification. Villagers are nice the way they are.
