The 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.
>play was only allowed to continue when all players were online at the same time.
I can't get the same 5 people together to continue a game of Civilization V. 30 people is ridiculous.
>“The loss of a resource such as clay was a small warning most players missed,” WordWorks notes. Within a week, trees were in short supply. Wood is essential for tool building in Minecraft, and so tensions began to mount.
Now, I know they're joking. How would anyone even know if all clay was gone (I never even use it)? Trees, by the way, are a renewable resource.
A raiding guild for 40 players is typically composed of no less than 60-70 regular players to deal with precisely this problem. Top guilds will often have enough players to fill three or more raid groups in order to have enough prepared players for the "main raid."
That's a bit of an exaggeration. A lot of guilds can barely fill their raid roster. They manage by strongly pressuring all raiders to show up every day on time, and to give advance notice if they need to be out.
Speaking personally, until very recently my regular raiding guild only had about 26 or so raiders who could show up every night (and another 3 or 4 who could show up for 1 or 2 of the nights). And yet we still managed to clear 8/8H.
And there's a reason they got rid of them. Spending two hours of your life waiting for people to log, relog, get add-ons, read and repeat boss fight documentation just to spend another 6 wiping with ninja loggers wasn't very fun.
Those 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.
The main factor that makes me think this is fiction is the math.
A 350x350 world seems pretty small, but that's over 120,000 blocks per layer, or over 15 million total blocks within the barrier (including empty/air blocks). Using stats from some of my other worlds, I'd expect a world of that size to have about 6 million stone blocks, maybe 750 thousand dirt, and 75,000 grass.
And two players out of 30 supposedly managed to mine/destroy basically all 75,000 grass blocks in the level without others realizing it and fortifying relatively large safe zones? Those who banded together around tiny protected grass patches didn't manage to surround them with more dirt, thereby allowing them to grow?
There was supposedly a lot of strip mining, so where are the giant cobble structures? "Oh, it all fell in the lava" -- how does every single player manage to drop thousands of blocks of cobble in the lava, exactly?
Thinking about other resources leads to similarly absurd conclusions. I'd estimate 1,500+ diamond ore in that area, or about 50 per player. That's enough to make 16-17 diamond picks per player, which is enough to mine about 25,000 blocks. Yet it's claimed diamond was used "only for obsidian" -- so where are the giant obsidian structures that took multiple players multiple diamond picks to create?
Similarly for iron, gravel, and all the other resources -- what did 30 players do with it all in only a couple of months?
Whoever wrote this little piece of fiction simply didn't realize how much stuff there is in a MineCraft world that size. Anybody actually playing in a situation like this, even with a couple of griefers, would find they were able to manage just fine. It doesn't take all that much to build a self-sustaining secret base, and once one is running, it's not that hard to build another and another and another. The amount of resources available in a 350x350 space are way more than 30 players could use, or destroy, in 2 months of playing.
I agree with hoax just due to the fact that there's a lot of fail in this article.
First, grass doesn't matter. Wheat matters, and you don't need grass to grow wheat. For those that don't know, you need to eat or you'll die and wheat can be used to make bread. But there's plenty of stuff to eat, including renewable zombie flesh.
Second, while there are a few blocks that aren't renewable, there are plenty that are. Wood and cobblestone are completely renewable. And a lot of blocks aren't renewable but never used up. You should have just as much dirt in the world when you end as when you begin, unless it gets blown up by creepers or thrown into lava.
And you hardly need to build on a mountain and then cut away the mountain. Just build up and outward.
Eventually you should end up with people using only wood tools and be completely out of interesting materials. It would just be boring at that point.
Wow, you actually need to eat now? Minecraft sure has changed since I last played it. Back then, food was only used to restore health, and even then I'd usually just strip bare and jump off a mountain to respawn.
The change was that you no longer eat to renew health, you have a food bar that when full, or close to full, results in you being able to regenerate health. Doing nothing doesn't cause you to lose food points, but walking, sprinting, mining does and at various levels (sprinting burns more food than walking).
At first the food mechanic was a little annoying but it has added a nice touch to the game. You tend to be a little more careful than before and you have to devote a little more time to food resources. But this is slightly configurable based on the difficulty setting as well.
Neat. Maybe I should try the game again. Although this doesn't really solve my primary problem which is I never really had any good idea as to what I should actually do in the game, besides build a random house on some random hilltop and admire the view.
>I'd usually just strip bare and jump off a mountain to respawn.
You'll be pleasantly surprised to know this is more of a viable option than it used to be. It's quite hard to fill up your food bar once empty, but quite easy to jump off a cliff to reset it.
>I never really had any good idea as to what I should actually do in the game, besides build a random house on some random hilltop and admire the view.
I think everyone has this question. I tried to solve it by setting personal goals for myself:
2. craft a map (which can only be filled in by exploring the surrounding area) and fill it in completely
If you decide to try to "beat" the game, be warned that it's rather boring and anticlimactic. Probably the coolest part is it forces you to explore the "Nether".
You should definitely play again. As always, you can still open-world play with no end, but now there is a rather complex but possible way to beat the game. There is also a limited set of achievements, potions, enchanting, new mobs, and new blocks. There are also NPC villages you can trade with.
What got me to play the game again was doing it on Hardcore mode. In this mode, difficulty is set to hard and when you die your world save gets destroyed and you cannot continue playing.
For me, this works well, as I just play when I really feel like it and no more time that my brain can handle[1], and when there are dangerous situations, you can really feel the stress for survival and preservation of all the "things" built.
[1]: Sometimes with games, after one hour or two, one is just playing the game, but not enjoying it.
I haven't played Minecraft in a while so things may have changed, but I recall that animals would only spawn on grass. If you wanted pet wolves or animal products, you'd need grass to spawn them on. And if someone repeatedly raids your fields, you can run out of wheat seeds. Grass is the primary way of getting more seeds.
That all changed with the release of the full game last November. Animals no longer spawn at all, but are rather found in newly generated chunks and then bred. Seeds come originally, not from grass, but from Tall Grass.
I know, grass used to be a precious resource. I spent hours cultivating it myself back in beta! But these days it's mostly decorative. You can even mine it and put it wherever you want.
I didn't think to doubt the validity of the story when it first popped up in /r/Minecraft, even in the comments section of the forums people don't start to get skeptical until later.
Why would someone hoax this? What would they gain from it?
Does anybody know what version of Minecraft the experiment took place in? That could explain certain mechanics that will make sense, it looks like it was before enchanting/potion making.
People seem to underestimate the power of grass, grass + bonemeal means seeds for wheat, if the factions kept raiding the other players it seems very possible they looted the players from all wheat and seeds they might have had, the original forum post also details that factions keept stealing saplings from other players, thus allowing the possibility of wood for becoming very rare.
That 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.
There 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.
Seems 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.
The 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.
Or 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.
You'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.
How 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?
In 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.
Since 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.
You 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.
This 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.
I'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.
Whether 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!
Couldn'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.
The 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.
"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
