Edwardos wrote:
Wow, such a recent thread!
I've been playing Minecraft for longer than anyone I know and I love this game. Or rather, I view it as several different games with an amount of cultural associations between 0 and 4, and I love a good percentage of those two categories. This didn't change much, even after the multiple tumor-like server dramas I've been through, some of which were simply people who didn't understand what I was.
This game helped me out a lot, got me many friends, bragging rights, brain cells, escapes from the worst of reality, and a whoooole lot of amazing night dreams which have partly been recorded or written down. Despite the major aspect of horror throughout its history, my dreams have infrequently been scary. Mostly they've just been beautiful. But it's not fully as exciting for me anymore.
I've been incredibly disappointed with a lot of new features and practically all of how YouTube has been representing the game (other than a few exceptions, which I'll get to), but with server-side "vanilla" enhancements and good friends I can still enjoy current versions basically as much as I ever did.
Ever since Phantoms and the removal of Customized, I've been growing increasingly disinterested in default singleplayer, to the point where I can play it for a fraction of the many hours I used to play MC versions for, and then discovered that I could still play Minecraft Alpha for many hours at a time. In singleplayer.
Yeah, I know, basic as hecking heck, and way behind in the past, but Alpha wasn't just smaller, it was different. Mojang added a lot of features after 2011 but they removed a lot of features. And changed balancing, gameplay, terrain, and graphics significantly. In mind and spirit, the old style is just what I prefer. It's enough that I can live without the many vital quality of life changes added since late 2011. I could probably do the same in Minecraft 1.12, but I was doing that for like 19 months and would rather not.
And now to YouTube... well, the dominant server and cultural town square of Minecraft culture in Minecraft videos is Hermitcraft. Not everybody is like Hermitcraft, but I've looked around in a lot of places and found very few people who don't basically behave the same way. Family-friendly and strangely-non-gristled.
Now, at long last I've found the best way to describe why I can't watch them with the best possible readers. As non-controversially as possible, I'd like to say...
Hermitcraft is played by some of the least-autistic Minecraft players ever.
Yeah, I know, they're much more popular than me and people like them, but before they came to the center of attention, there were thousands of smaller servers worth watching and Mindcrack. The biggest difference is that depending on who you watched, Mindcrack videos could be more or less adult-oriented than others or more or less quirky-weirdo than others. I just don't love Hermitcraft. I love servers that make me wonder if the players are autistic!
The Mindcrackers, in no necessarily-correct order, got bored of Minecraft and stopped hanging out with their #1 cool guy quirky friend, Old Man Willakers.
Now I have lots to say about Old Man Willakers, but I'll skip that part. Bottom line is there are too many things I love about him for me to ever hate him or even feel bored of him.
Mindcrack dying was a huge gut punch to me, even if I didn't realize it at first. It was one of the last surviving servers to not be family-friendly. Diversity is way down nowadays, and I can't stand family-friendly MC. I'm 23 years old and would rather hear dirty jokes once or twice a week. It's good for people who like FFMCVs, but terrible for everybody who would rather not watch 'em. Hermitcraft also is not something I watch, because I'll just be honest, it feels like watching chatbots.
Eventually I decided I should just buy hosting and create my own whitelisted server, which worked out better than any other similar venture. Oddly enough, one friend of mine says that the very reason he got into let's playing the game (which is beneficial to his life) was basically my inclusion of him in the server and an appearance in a video I made - and I didn't even know I caused it at the time.
Today I sit down in front of a Wrongplanet thread form, with an obscure Minecraft channel translucently linked to a good friend's channel and all of his friends, a downright encyclopedic knowledge of all things Java Minecraft, and a huge dry spell of videos of my favourite sandbox which I can actually sustain watching. The most likely videos I'll ever be able to watch about Minecraft from 2016 on are from the handful of players who I've met IRL and online.
As my good friend says, "It seems like your time with Minecraft is quite bittersweet!" which is true.
Wait a minute.
I've been playing this to death since long before chickens got added, and I honestly cant remember any features that were ever removed. Aside from the whole "customized" thing, which is still bloody stupid, but whatever.
I mean, seriously. Removing things that werent outright broken has never really been Mojang's thing. Why would they, when it's a sandbox game focusing on player choice and diversity of playstyle? Now, the combat itself did get altered heavily, but there's two extremely easy fixes to that: The java version has easily accessible mods for it, and the Bedrock edition (or whatever it's called, I'm not good on names) outright never received that change (and is frankly dramatically superior to the eternally wonky Java version, if you're not intending to use mods in a particular world).
Added features, on the other hand, have always been pretty much optional, which is one reason why I've never understood the community's tendency to rant angrily about them. I remember alot of threads about how potions were "ruining the game". I kept wanting to smack whoever was ranting over the head, and yell "JUST DONT USE THE BLOODY THINGS! It's a freaking sandbox game! All playstyles are viable! Ignore things that dont fit how you play the game!" I mean, hell, I couldnt care less about redstone, but that doesnt impact anything for me... I just dont use it for anything other than crafting compasses and such. It's the same with almost all features, they can be safely ignored without changing anything, or even modded out. The one big one beyond combat was hunger, but hunger makes alot of sense in a survival game.
Overall, the only change I find moderately annoying was the change to the Nether. When that originally came out it was a place of brutal difficulty... ghasts spawned in hordes, raining fiery doom on you constantly. As Notch put it, the Nether originally wasnt intended to be a destination, but instead a place you used for faster travel through the Overworld.
At the same time though, I can see why it was toned down. For many players, it was waaaaayyyyyyy too much, even if they didnt intend to actually stick around the place.
Now that all being said, I'll be honest and say that I dont quite grasp the other stuff. Like multiplayer: I hate it in *every* game. I'll deal with it in fighting games, because the AI is always too braindead to offer a challenge, but outside of those... that's a big fat "nope" for me. So that stuff is over my head. Like, I know of Mindcrack's existence, and similar things, but avoided them like the plague, so the details escape me.
Same with Youtube, in a way. I use Youtube ALOT, but it never, ever has any effect on my enjoyment of any game. They're two entirely seperate entities, after all. I've certainly watched alot of Minecraft content, but yeah, it doesnt change the way I look at the thing. Why should it?
That being said, a general lack of videos now was expected. Youtubers cannot profit from sticking with older things (which sucks). Minecraft remains one of the most popular and most played games *ever*, even today, but Youtube doesnt care about that: it cares about NEW trends. Like the whole Moba thing, and the nonsense that is Fortnite. I'll never understand Fortnite. But that's a whole different topic, eh?
I dunno where I was going with any of this. I apologize if this seems a bit directionless and rambly. I always get in that state of mind when the weather is like this. Bah.
It's interesting to see differing views on the whole thing though.
06 Nov 2018, 3:45 am
