Hardcore Mode with BTW: Anyone Do it?

[Vexalor]

Trivial? My God man. You must be an absolute god at BTW :)

Oh no, I'm not :). I certainly die my fair share. What I mean is that, when you die, you can immediately get back on your feet again. Yes, you have to work your way through he early game again to get home, but it's simply like starting a new game. Obviously, increasing the death penalty to have temporary effects on the re-spawned player and his environment could cause people to start new worlds upon dying early in a new game, but I think this could add something to the game where you really have to fight to keep a world in existence: not because there is any chance of your builds getting deleted, but because you have to have the willpower to struggle through a death that totally defeats you to get home.

[FlowerChild]

Oh no, I'm not :). I certainly die my fair share. What I mean is that, when you die, you can immediately get back on your feet again. Yes, you have to work your way through he early game again to get home, but it's simply like starting a new game. Obviously, increasing the death penalty to have temporary effects on the re-spawned player and his environment could cause people to start new worlds upon dying early in a new game, but I think this could add something to the game where you really have to fight to keep a world in existence: not because there is any chance of your builds getting deleted, but because you have to have the willpower to struggle through a death that totally defeats you to get home.

Ok man, you've been warned, and temp banned for making suggestions outside of the suggestion sub-forum. You seem like you could be a constructive member of the community, so I'll state this quite clearly:

Next suggestion you make outside of the appropriate sub-forum results in a perma-ban.

[BrainNoMore]

I used to play on hc before because I would forgot to switch to hard after messing around on peaceful in creative, but with introduction of hc spawn i felt like I'm cheating on big experience so I eventually switched over when restart world syndrome got me.

[dawnraider]

I love HCS because while it brings the needed penalty for death, there is always something to work back towards. I never have and never will play vanilla hardcore mode, a large portion being because of silly mistakes, such add falling down you're mineshaft (which I have done all too often).

[Mud]

I love HCS because while it brings the needed penalty for death, there is always something to work back towards. I never have and never will play vanilla hardcore mode, a large portion being because of silly mistakes, such add falling down you're mineshaft (which I have done all too often).

Might be good a chance to learn how to not fall down your mineshaft...

[kilgore trout]

I love HCS because while it brings the needed penalty for death, there is always something to work back towards. I never have and never will play vanilla hardcore mode, a large portion being because of silly mistakes, such add falling down you're mineshaft (which I have done all too often).

Might be good a chance to learn how to not fall down your mineshaft...

The one and only time I played on a vHC world was with BTW included. It was a bug that killed me. The one that caused you to suffocate in walls if a water stream pushed you into it. I had worked up to a windmill. It was quite a while ago, mind you, so the task was much easier then than it is now. However, it was enough of a bitch to make me realize that it is a flawed method of game play. if it works for you, that is great. It's not for everyone.

On the flip side, I am definitely a big fan of hardcore spawn. As others have mentioned, it causes a great deal of frustration but the end feeling is so rewarding it makes it worth it.

[Mud]

Having died from lag in Diablo, I know that feel.

[Pucc]

The one and only time I played on a vHC world was with BTW included. It was a bug that killed me. The one that caused you to suffocate in walls if a water stream pushed you into it. I had worked up to a windmill. It was quite a while ago, mind you, so the task was much easier then than it is now. However, it was enough of a bitch to make me realize that it is a flawed method of game play. if it works for you, that is great. It's not for everyone.

On the flip side, I am definitely a big fan of hardcore spawn. As others have mentioned, it causes a great deal of frustration but the end feeling is so rewarding it makes it worth it.

This is exactly why I stay away from vHC I just know the lag in the nether from loading new chunks will throw me off the edge of a netherrack cliff an that'll be the end of it. Total world wipe is too harsh, I get quite attached to my worlds heck I even get dismayed when a creeper blows a hole in the earth, you don't even want to know what happens if they catch one of my structures. HCS just fits right the punishment is isn't so harsh but its enough to make you actively avoid dying, and the fear and panic it brings when exploring cave spider ridden mineshafts are great feelings, get that heart racing.

HCS can be made all the more harsher through game mechanics too, especially when you return to see a pigman parading around with your battleaxe whilst the wither skeleton that killed you last time comes marching at you with more persistence than a Dalek to do the act again.

[jkievlan]

I love HCS because while it brings the needed penalty for death, there is always something to work back towards. I never have and never will play vanilla hardcore mode, a large portion being because of silly mistakes, such add falling down you're mineshaft (which I have done all too often).

Or, building a portal out of the nether and porting directly into a wall and suffocating (happened to me once on a vHC world). Lol I was mad...

[The Phoenixian]

I obviously don't really think destroying what a player has built up over time is ever a good idea, it's just that dying seems to me trivial to overcome in BTW and an absolute joke in vanilla.

Trivial? My God man. You must be an absolute god at BTW :)

Interjecting with something from personal experience to add a little commonality and differences to Vexalor's point:

I find that Hardcore spawn is a challenge early on in a world --- and one that is honestly harsher than deleting the world and starting over from scratch if you're not invested in your world yet or invested in your location rather than your progress --- but as things continue it becomes less and less important. Eventually you get to the point where you start memorizing the landmarks in your world, or creating them from scratch. Once that happens, while you might need to create food waypoints and food stores depending on where you spawned, death mostly just means a long walk.*

That said, I still don't think I agree with it being a trivial obstacle in the late game given that a lot of work and/or planning that goes into beating it permanently. Even if just memorizing and/or mapping the terrain doesn't add physical structures to the world, it does add familiarity and it likewise takes a certain amount of time and planning to do and you'll still need either roads or storage caches to get back from the longer treks, especially if you're taking advantage of a multi kilometer terrain feature to orient yourself. (I suppose you could say that I view HC spawn as being a boss battle against a single mechanic with numerous means of beating it through either luck and planning, planning and effort, or sheer technological progress.)


*The official server is a good example of this: You've got a gigantic coastline for a landmark to the north and east that you can always head towards and even without that there's enough bases and roads to learn to orient yourself in short order.

[Blazara]

I've had this conversation with people on the IRC before; I tend to play on Hardcore worlds simply because otherwise I find myself hitting peaceful to escape death. Hardcore removes the temptation entirely. I get genuinely pissed with myself when I difficulty switch but "can't not" as it were.

[FlowerChild]

I've had this conversation with people on the IRC before; I tend to play on Hardcore worlds simply because otherwise I find myself hitting peaceful to escape death. Hardcore removes the temptation entirely. I get genuinely pissed with myself when I difficulty switch but "can't not" as it were.

Egads. I knew the variable difficulty level was bad for the game, but I didn't fully realize how much even hardcore BTW players really abuse it. I would have expected that to be more limited to the casual crowd.

I'll be taking care of this shortly, so thanks for the extra motivation towards doing so guys :)

[Mud]

I'll be taking care of this shortly, so thanks for the extra motivation towards doing so guys :)

Woot!

[Thalarctia]

Thank you FC! Reading through this thread must have caused you some serious facepalming, just like it has for me. Using difficulty to quickly cleanse your world of creepers has to be the biggest cheatcode of all time, next to "iddqd"...

[FlowerChild]

Nah, it's cool. I knew this was a problem for a very long time now, and have always had it in the back of my head to do something about it. A little extra motivation never hurts though :)

I also mentioned recently that I'll be doing a stratification convertor for old worlds. My intent is to create a GUI screen (well, 2 actually...one for old worlds, one for new) for the various mod options, to include stuff like selecting the difficulty for the save, and provide options for world conversion, etc. So, when you create a new world using BTW, or load up an old world for the first time, you'll be able to select all this stuff without having to fiddle with the config file.

I just wanted to wait until I was confident all the mod options would remain as is before working on that, to avoid having to rework it later, and I think I've reached that stage now.

[Sarudak]

Egads. I knew the variable difficulty level was bad for the game, but I didn't fully realize how much even hardcore BTW players really abuse it. I would have expected that to be more limited to the casual crowd.

Even I have done this a couple times and regretted it afterward.

*bows head in shame*

[FlowerChild]

Even I have done this a couple times and regretted it afterward.

*bows head in shame*

Hehe...it's cool man. You're one of the most hardcore players here in terms of respecting the value of difficulty in gameplay, so if you've done it, then it really reinforces this as a problem that needs to be resolved.

I'm used to balancing games with all kinds of debug tools at my immediate disposal, so I guess I've developed an extremely thick skin when it comes to this stuff and am able to avoid it entirely as a result. I don't think I've even once change my difficulty to affect gameplay (only for testing purposes with mod features) in my entire time playing MC as a result.