When answering the poll, please select only mutually compatible options. --- I'm very open about this in town chat. I hate creepers. Actually hate is too timid of a word. I won't go into the subjective reasons, but I will go into the objective reasons why I believe having this choice will benefit the EMC community at large. 1. mobGriefing is still griefing. If it weren't the flag wouldn't have griefing in the name. When players grief they are punished harshly for it, as they should be. So it's perfectly within reason for at least some players to find creepers', if not all mobs', griefing distasteful at best. This is particularly true in the Frontier. (I only take umbrage against creeper griefing in the frontier. Others may also dislike it in the wastes) 2. It's possible to abuse creepers to functionally grief a player construction while leaving a more difficult to trace electronic trail. Such acts, if I am not mistaken, need to be witnessed and recorded by other players to be proven. 3. Some players are just BAD at fighting creepers. Leaving this enabled means that either a) we accept the accidental landscape griefing as a matter of course and do nothing about it, b) start cracking down on these players whose only real crime is having skills that do not match their ambitions, for not cleaning up the holes, or c) continue with the status-quo which silently adds an avoidable portion of work to the manual landscape cleanup happening by staff and members. Turning it off will eliminate this as a matter of conversation regarding the appearance of fractured landscape near spawn. Boom! One part of the problem solved! And a conversation detractor eliminated. 4. EMC has a plea visible in chat, to all players when entering the Frontier, to keep it clean and beautiful. Creeper griefing ruins it in a hurry, regardless if it's being exploited, or just a matter of a bad fight, or poor skills. Let's face it, we don't always carry 2 stacks of sand and dirt to repair our own creeper-oopses, with 7000 new members a month (so I've heard) 1 hole per new member per day not filled in is well... Roughly 21000 new creeper holes a month. I would be surprised if it's that "low." 5. I understand that some people actually like creeper holes! I've heard they find them funny. So having only certain servers with this off and some with it on, will allow for players to select the world type that best fits how they like to play Minecraft. In my ideal world there would be some mechanism that only affected creepers, or could selectively disable for other mob types. I mean, we still want Frontier villagers to farm, right? Oh and the single blocks Endermen move are hardly noticeable... unless you ran a redstone circuit across a block type Endermen pick up... But we all know better than to do that, right?
Alright, here are some points that counter your suggestion. Explosions in general have already been altered to not destroy blocks that a player normally uses (To prevent griefing) I believe. Creepers are part of the "French Vanilla Experience" and that includes their damage. I believe in equal rights for servers. We have a difficulty system thing. I love your creativity and your points though!
Thanks for clarifying that for folks that may not be aware of it. The cleanup threads, and manual cleanups I've mentioned, are concerned with precisely the block types that are affected by creepers.
I'm also opposed to this idea. Apart from what has already been said, gameplay, I'm also worried about what would happen if this change would be applied. I think it might only be a matter of time before someone starts commenting about the Endermen which also nabs blocks from time to time. Or those pesky zombies when building at night... Thing is; I really think it would be too much of a gamechanger. Creepers are part of Minecraft, and although I'll fully agree that they can be nasty and annoying buggers; it's still part of the game (and the challenge). The way I see it is that all building options are basically covered... The town world allows you to build without any outside danger at all, but with a certain size limit. Although you could work around that, and also could gain 120x120 size (Utopia). If the size limit is not what you're after then the Frontier could be an alternative, but although it comes without size restrictions you now have to cope with other problems such as the hostile mobs and your land being unprotected. It really is part of the game to me and I don't think it should be changed like this. I'd be more in favor of allowing us to set certain flags whenever claimed Frontier areas can be protected. Comparable to what we have with our town plots right now. So, for example, I could imagine that you'd be able to set a flag which would disallow (hostile) monsters to spawn in your outpost. That might also solve some of these problems.
This is a good point that I didn't consider when creating the poll. Thanks for raising it. As it stands most folks seem to want the creeper-holes or possibility of them.
and sandstone... but the main point bite made still stands... only uber common types get creeper damage. . .
