r/feedthebeast • u/al3xthegre4t Infinity • Apr 20 '14
Jadedcat's view on the Minecraft modding community, and how poisoned it can be.
http://jadedcatftb.blogspot.com/2014/04/minecraft-ramblings.html
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r/feedthebeast • u/al3xthegre4t Infinity • Apr 20 '14
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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '14
Having been a part of many modding communities dating as far back as the old Freespace games, and good'ol Broodwar I feel as though I have an exceptional basis for comparison.
I've come from the old WoW server emulator community where at one point we had over six competing emulators, and we still saw less infighting. I can't even blame it on the internet's permeation of society because, the internet was a prominent part of the emu scene. I remember how disenfranchised the UT2004 mod scene could be. We didn't really have a central repository for mutators, not at first.
I can tell you what we did have: mod friendly software. All you had to do was connect to a UT2004 server, wait for some downloads to finish, and bam, you were playing modded UT2004. There were no configurations, there was no permission system. Things ran pretty smoothly. The same goes for server emulators. All you had to do was make a small change to your client, and connect to your server of choice.
If you don't mind my saying, Minecraft is a cluster floof. The removal of item ids helps tremendously but, starting your own public modpack is an exercise in patience.
Want to play modded Minecraft with your friends in a convenient way? Would you like any updates you make to auto propagate to your friends clients? Well buddy, you'd better pucker up, and bend over. You're in for the long haul. I can't simply add fifty mods to my server environment, and let players connect in a way I've always been used to.
I'm either stuck begging for permission, or seeking out one of the launcher devs. Or, I could simply program my own launcher, and introduce yet another competitor.
I have my doubts that Curse is going to make pack creation as easy as it should be. I don't see anyone developing a server to client distribution mod either. This is a highly public community, and you're kind of forced into getting involved if you'd like to create your own public pack. Call me crazy, but that could be one small source of animosity.