I love Tom, but geez. Really man? Way to completely miss the point of the game. He’s ignoring all the crazy possibilities that Minecraft represents because he’s focused on minor stuff like in-game documentation and trees that don’t fall over. I could understand if this was 1995 when accompanying documentation actually mattered, but as a modern day gamer I pretty much expect to be looking things up online at some point with any game I play. Hell, I look FORWARD to pulling up the wiki for a game and finding out about all the neat stuff I never would have found otherwise.
Chuck
4342
It’s worth repeating: Tom Chick has jumped the shark.
One of the objective flaws of the game is the total lack of some help system or tutorial or something for the crafting.
Because, let’s be honest here, no one had played MC purely with only the game and just improvising. You are supposed to use a wiki or some other internet resource as the unofficial manual for the game.
This is a case where I think Tom is saying more about his own tastes than anything objective about the game.
I’m sure he’ll find a lot of people that agree with him about Minecraft…you really do have to make your own fun…and I think we can all say, pretty resoundingly, “WE HAVE!” :D
Don’t worry, I wasn’t defending Tom, lots of times i disagree with him :P, just saying what I was saying… the point about the game lacking a manual or some system to teach the player.
JM1
4346
For some of the more obscure stuff? Sure. But if you’ve worked out how to create a crafting table, it takes very little experimentation (and that’s what it is given the way the crafting works in terms of the “shapes” you make) to find out how to make sticks.
KevinC
4347
I figured out how to make everything from furnaces to stairs to ladders to armor to all the tools and weapons without consulting the wiki. Experimenting was half the fun for me, although TNT had me stumped.
One thing I don’t think Tom realized is that there is logic of sorts behind crafting, and the game doesn’t tell you. You just try to “shape” an object in the 3x3 grid. If you know that its awfully easy to figure out sticks, boxes, basic tools, etc. But his comment of “Ohhh, I didn’t know the placement mattered” would have made early experimentation awfully frustrating.
chequers
4348
You need documentation to play the game, but I don’t see a problem with this, or with the documentation being third party.
Fugitive
4349
Your first few minutes of Minecraft can be baffling; I’ve watched a number of LPs where someone decided to jump into it completely blind and they spend the first 5-10 minutes running around and going “uh, what do I do? Oh, I can punch a cow. Uh, how do I make anything? What do I dooo?!?!?!” before finally stumbling on the hold-to-break-blocks lynchpin.
But maybe it then comes down to motivation. Someone who’s seen examples of what you can make in Minecraft and wants to do that is going to be more willing to put in the time to figure it out or look for outside help on what to do, whereas someone going into it blind might be more likely to just look around and wonder what the point is. Tom sounds like he’s kind of in-between in that he knows what you can accomplish in Minecraft, but wasn’t motivated enough by it to look into it earlier, so there’s no real drive for him to put in any extra effort. Maybe that’s a block of potential players that Notch is overlooking, but maybe his bank account is sufficiently full enough that they’re not worth the effort to him.
Perhaps it needs to start out with active ‘missions’ rather than passive achievements, so that the first thing you see pop up in the corner is “Punch trees!”…
Therlun
4350
Well it worked (again) didn’t it?
There seem to be a great number of comments on that click bait, and that’s all he ever wanted.
DeepT
4351
I figured out my crashing problem. Its the Millenarie mod. I set the maximum village active distance to 1200 (from 300). I changed to to some other numbers, but it seems much above 300 (ie 450 ) causes it to crash periodically. Is anyone famillair with this and know how to get it to work with much larger numbers. I have a number of villages that are just on the edge of running from my base. If I go anywhere half of them shut down. Id really like to get it to run stable at 600 units, but 450 would work, if it were stable.
Another thing I noticed is that minecraft only thinks it has 1 gig of ram to play with. I am running 64 bit java. I was thinking, maybe that was the problem, it was running out of memory. Is there a way to tell minecraft that you can use 2 gigs or more?
JM1
4352
27 comments (not including his) is a “great number” now?
Therlun
4354
Just for emphasis I’ll repeat what Morberis said.
For the front page, yes.
The game DEFINITELY needs both A: in game documentation. Maybe you can find recipes in the world and B: a way to find the rarer stuff like diamonds. I’m down to the bedrock in my game and have found one diamond C: more gems and block types.
JM1
4356
OK. Now, assuming that Tom trolls for hits, such a pitiful number would be worth nothing. Who would write articles like that for the purpose of so few comments?
Therlun
4357
The comments are just an indicator.
The typical (non piracy themed) Rock Paper Shotgun article has between 10 and 40 comments with high profile topics breaking 100, yet I assume their visitor numbers are a tad above pitiful.
Getting twenty people to comment and participate on a short, no-research article on the qt3 frontpage is quite good.
It’s so far more comments than his “Most Disappointing” post, but not yet as high as his “Most Overrated” @ 55 or “Top 10” @ 66 which appear to be his greatest number of comments ever.
Let’s talk about all the nifty updates to Minecraft since 1.0 released instead.
Haha, I make funny comment!
Let’s talk about nifty mods that have been released since 1.0!
OptiFine General all-purpose graphics update and HD-Texture-Pack enabler. Generally smooths framerate, gives much more graphics options, and is ready for all your HD-Texture Pack needs.
Industrial Craft has been updated with no new content, a few mechanics changes and loads of bug fixes. Industrial Craft is a mod aiming to expanding the mid to late game goals. You can build machinery, advanced alloys for higher quality armor, battery powered mining drills and lasers, and even nuclear reactors. Download Thread here
Red Power has also been updated, but is still in “prerelease” status. Red Power is an excellent mod aiming to really expand the red stone circuitry mechanic by allowing you to build wires that can run up walls and on the ceiling. You can also build advanced circuits for logic gates and latches in addition to timers and clocks. Download here (enjoy those adfly links!. pro tip, once you get past the first adfly link, copy the download url and just change the filename to download the other pieces).
Millénaire has been updated to 1.0! Millénaire is a SP-only mod that adds NPC villages where you can trade resources with, take quests from, or pillage and plunder.
