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Minecraft experiment devolves into devastating resource war
- ssdsa 14y agoHow can the "griefers" operate from their floating base? How are they able to leave the floating platform to get to the ground and back? And why couldn't the players of the other guilds simply take the same way up onto the floating base?
- daveid 14y agoIn Minecraft you can swim up a stream of falling water. The griefers used a lever to open/close the stream down to the ground. I assume one of the griefers had to stay up there and operate that lever.
- Lexarius 14y agoSince everyone was always online at the same time, it would also be easy-ish to defend the island if anyone tried to build a pillar to reach it. A bow and convenient sniping platforms could knock attackers down. Lava-based murder holes in the underside could be used to defend blind spots.
- marvin 14y agoYou could concievably lay siege to it. That would be really interesting to watch. Seems like a minority of the players were in the griefing camp. So the majority could coordinate an attack where they built staging platforms successively higher, with similar attack vectors. But this would be very hard, since the "griefers" had both lots of resources, weapons and the advantage of the high ground.
- driverdan 14y agoThis was one of the biggest red flags to me. If 2 people on a platform were doing well and the rest were struggling everyone would team up and take down the griefers. There's no way they could stop 5+ people coming up at once, especially if this was before there were potions. Build up behind a wall and they wouldn't be able to shoot arrows at you.
- milesskorpen 14y agoI'm wondering what kept people playing ... sounds like a recipe for mass desertion, unless they were paid / forced to play / something else. I imagine it was something else, which might also explain the end result. This doesn't seem to be the natural order of things. Also, I wonder how large this box is. Given the size of the griefer base in the image, the whole 'world' seems pretty small.
- sp332 14y agoThere is some indication that this was a hoax: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/yh1ip/closed_map_experiment/c5vokln http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/yh1ip/closed_map_...
- katovatzschyn 14y agoThe factors that make it seem most like a work of fiction: - No screenshots with players visible. - Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
- alevans4 14y agoDoesn't seem that difficult. Raiding guilds in Everquest and WoW pulled this off for years with 40 players and more.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoAs many as 72 in the PoP era. Which is crazy looking back on it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- StevenRayOrr 14y agoThose of us that got heavily into EverQuest "back in the day" recall raids that involved these kinds of numbers (50+) and took place over 8-10 hour periods. It was possible to achieve with sufficient planning, a dedicated guild, and a compulsion overwhelmed the need to sleep, eat, or view the sun. I'm not proud of those days, but it did help me realize the key to managing any large group of people: make it feel like work, make everyone believe that it is a job and not a leisure activity so that you feel obligated to stay despite a complete lack of anything resembling fun. So, yeah, I can imagine this actually happening. If you could do it with EverQuest, you can probably manage to achieve it with Minecraft.
- debacle 14y agoSeems very embellished. From what I know of minecrafters, it's very likely they would have flattened the ground, set up a tree farm, and starting communally building within the first hour or so of play. The only competition would have been for highly scarce materials, however the other key point is that it's trivial to make another nether portal once you have access to the nether.
- stephengillie 14y agoThe claim that "the other team tore down the portal to use in their castle" is ridiculous. No veteran minecrafter would destroy a nether portal just to use it in their castle wall. If anything, they would just make the portal into the castle wall.
- sukuriant 14y agoOr torn out a single segment and them opened another portal, thereby creating two portals in the Nether and another whole portal worth of obsidian... that's just my experience with portals from many many months ago, though.
- stephengillie 14y agoYou're exactly right - as long as the portal was rebuilt far enough away (or take down the first portal), it's literally a way of generating more (obsidian) blocks in the world. Or work with a friend, have that person take out the portal's nether entrance, then just restart the normal portal = boom, 14 more bricks.
- jfb 14y agoWhether or not this particular anecdote is real or fantasy, Minecraft seems like an excellent platform for running studies in e.g. experimental economics. This sort of reminds me of the plague in World of Warcraft, which although the byproduct of a game bug, yielded actual data about the spread of epidemics. Nifty!
- ricardobeat 14y agoCouldn't they have stepped outside the bedrock wall after building a nether portal, or does it extend "underground"? Finding another portal in the nether would lead you back to a different point on the surface.
- lazugod 14y agoThese comments read like a game forum, rather than HN.
- jewbacca 14y agoThe mechanics of this game specifically, as well as the emergent social dynamics of online gaming, are plenty relevant to this story. I can't think of how else you could discuss it.
- jballanc 14y agoTrue or not, the outcome described here is so typical, so ordinary that it even has a name: "Tragedy of the Commons". You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- Dylan16807 14y agoThat kind of comparison doesn't work because you can't get a tragedy of the commons situation in minecraft. All you really need is wood and stone, trees regrow extremely quickly, and stone is effectively infinite.
- nrlucas 14y ago"Within a week, trees were in short supply." If you're implying minecraft in general, then yes. Otherwise in this particular case, resources seemed to be all finite.
- Sukotto 14y agoThe following things are "infinite" if you forbid exploration into new areas: * Water * Lava Flows (Sources are finite) * Wood/charcoal: if you have enough saplings and dirt. * Cobblestone: if you have lava and water in the correct arraignment * Wheat: if you have enough seeds and dirt * Fish: if you have water * Neutral-Monster items: for those monsters you can breed if you maintain the habitat * Aggro-monster items I believe that's it
- jlgreco 14y agoThere are a few random others. Apples should be infinite, since they come from trees. Other plant-ish things as well, like melon or pumpkin, provided you have any in the first place.
- eschulte 14y agoI wish minecraft had to pay royalties to dwarf fortress.
- Auguste 14y agoWhy? They are completely different games that share a few similar themes (mining & construction). Minecraft owes more to Infiniminer, but it has been its own game ever since development on Survival Mode started.
- maayank 14y ago"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man." --Thomas Hobbes
- driverdan 14y agoFor those interested in playing on a map like this there's now a subreddit for limited size servers: http://www.reddit.com/r/limitedservers/ http://www.reddit.com/r/limitedservers/
- droithomme 14y agoHm. What did they do with the dirt, eat it? The idea they somehow consumed all the dirt in the game is questionable.