HC Hunger findings and balance observations

[FlowerChild]

All right, everyone is obviously playing the shit out of HC hunger right now, and everyone probably has their own opinions on the current balance.

I'm creating this thread as a central repository for people to post and discuss their findings.

I don't mind if you have issues with the current balance, and please feel free to voice them. I would advise against being a dick about it though ;)

A couple of useful tips:

-If you're sprinting and jumping everywhere, yes, food is definitely going to be a BIG issue. Part of what HC Hunger is intended to do is encourage people to consider their own actions and the energy they are burning through them. So, if you're sprinting everywhere, and think HC Hunger is too hard as a result, I really don't want to hear it. Think about your actions and the impact they have on your overall health.

-Make sure your observations here are based on *actual game play*. If you're just looking at the change log and saying "Hurr durr...villages are too random", I really don't want to hear it. This goes for any other points you may want to make. If it isn't based on actual gameplay, you're just farting in the wind and wasting our time.

With that, have at it. I'll post a quote here of some of my own early playtesting observations that I made in another thread to get things started.

Yup, and I will also point out that it further emphasizes the need for building stairs and ramps within your base to reduce the amount of jumping around you're required to do.

I'm presently testing what play is like with "developed" HC Hunger, in that I'm basically playing at the Cauldron level of tech (which is top tech for food), and I'm not at all finding eating to be an excessive burden, even with rather meager farms. I'm mostly eating steak dinners at present, having just planted my first mushroom farm, and I'm busily expanding my cow, carrot, and potato farms to accommodate the increased demand.

I'm finding that I can get plenty of in game "work" done on my base without hunger becoming an issue, so right now, the late(r) game balance is looking pretty good.

I'll be testing the true early game later on, once I have my current base setup for HC Hunger.

[Ceunon]

I think that a fine tuning point, at least for the early game, would be going hungry (or, precisely, "feeling" the need of food) by the time it goes dark on your first MC day. The idea of gathering food and other resources during the day and then getting inside a hole in the ground to cook and mine fits MC perfectly, and it feels like HC Hunger is pretty close to that. I'm actually going hungry a bit earlier than that (I don't sprint at all), so I think it's just a little bit hard on the very first day, but once you get used to it, things go rather smooth.

I still have to play around with recipes and the statuses, but I've just started a new world and am experimenting with the basic mechanics.

[FlowerChild]

I think that a fine tuning point, at least for the early game, would be going hungry (or, precisely, "feeling" the need of food) by the time it goes dark on your first MC day. The idea of gathering food and other resources during the day and then getting inside a hole in the ground to cook and mine fits MC perfectly, and it feels like HC Hunger is pretty close to that. I'm actually going hungry a bit earlier than that (I don't sprint at all), so I think it's just a little bit hard on the very first day, but once you get used to it, things go rather smooth.

I can hear that for sure. There's one major variable in that though: the amount of jumping the player engages in. As a result, making it bang on would be difficult, thus if you're getting hungry just a bit earlier than nightfall, that may be just about right.

[ion]

damn i just posted this on the other thread:

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stated a new map today big taiga biome, pigs around pumpkins. my first thing was to get food asap and chop some wood. after it try to find a village. all was easy going i didn't really understood how to build up fat until i got a windmill up so i was mostly going around low on fat.
i did got some days with pumpkin seeds and some porkchops, got some chickens when trying to find a village and started to feed them for eggs and also make some bacon and eggs. from now onward i got into a big trip to find a village to get production going. it was an always sprinting jumping and killing animals that were on my path and i got that going for 4-5 RL hours because my first village didn't had any crops (this time i didn't kill them), got lost trying to find my way back, another trip and i got another village with all the crops. started farming at my base in the middle of the taiga and now i'm set.

now with HCH you can really go sprinting and jumping when traveling you just need to understand that you'll be eating food a lot. still very doable even for a starter spawn.
i don't know how it works with SFS armour on, maybe that needs a bit of tweaking. from my experience the food bar goes down faster that before but again i didn't had any fat at all so i don't know how it works with it. that means more food to eat.
moving to the injuries system that it seems is a bit too high when you get disabling injuries. it doesn't seems very right to get removed sprinting ability at hurt witch is really under 5 hearts of damage. for starters without armour on some skeletons or ninja creepers this means death as regeneration also is really slow for yo to recover. of course at more tiers you can make potions and rest, but for a lowlife starter it's a bit too much to enjoy. remember in 1.5 zombies and skellis "call for help" so would be more instant death things.
also the food draining is a bit too much when building and just waiting even for few minutes. all this was done in hard difficulty so it may be diff related.
for me it was a great experience today, more testing is required to understand all the features about HCH. but maybe for a newbie to BTW it may be too hard to further enjoy the mod.

[FlowerChild]

Again: no farting in the wind.

This thread is intended for observations based on play. Mixing that in with theorizing about upcoming vanilla changes or extrapolations of what the experience will be at a later point in the tech tree than you've progressed to is not helpful, and just decreases the signal to noise ratio in anything you're saying.

With regards to monsters in the early game: if monsters are too dangerous when you aren't wearing armor, then that's entirely awesome. Not being able to handle them early game is not an issue IMO, it's a blessed and much needed change to gameplay to actually make players afraid of them early on again.

[EpicAaron]

With the new early game task of finding a village as fast as possible, I am finding myself having to pass up really nice base spots due to the inevetable lack of animals the area will soon fall under if I stay too long. I also have no reason to return to these areas until much later in the game, thanks to the villages supplying me with all of the food and shelter I could ever need. Hardcore hunger certainly makes exploration a much larger part of the game, but at the cost of the necesity to build defensive structures and my own early game towns I used to enjoy very much. The new dependence on pre-generated structures seems to have made building more of a later game luxury, but I may just be overthinking all of this. (This post is based off of gameplay)

EDIT: Thinking about it more, is permanent building meant to be a luxury? I apologise if I completely missed that.

[Shengji]

One observation I have is just how quickly your hunger drops when using the handcrank. I actually don't know how I feel about it right now - I love that it basically makes grinding wheat unavailable before you manage to build a windmill, unless you REALLY want to chuck your hard earned food stockpile out the window. I also love that it forces you to process hemp little and often instead of stockpiling it and having an epic crank session (pun intended), which quite frankly I have done whilst literally napping!

I dislike how long it stretches the manual power tier out when other tiers are not restrained in the same way. I don't mind tiers being stretched out, its a shame it's such an early one - though I have to acknowledge that the reward - a windmill and power generation is one of the coolest moments in the entire game.

I guess I felt like the balance of this was good previously and now it has been made more difficult - which in itself I'm OK with, but I feel that other tiers should be changed proportionately.

[dawnraider]

Yeah, I agree about the mobs. I am terrified of them once again. I haven't had any fear since beta 1.3, when I first started. I am now scared of a single skeleton. A spider actually poses a challenge. Before, I would walk up to 2 skeletons, 2 creepers, 3 zombies, and a spider and walk away with maybe a few hearts of damage, which quickly regen'd so I could do that again. The slow regen reminds me of pre-1.8, where health never came back except when eating food, but now eating food very slowly brings it back instead of instantly. The on issue I have, and it is a rather small one, is how quickly food drains. If it drained slightly slower, I believe it would be more enjoyable. Other than that, it is fantastic.

[Thorium-232]

With the new early game task of finding a village as fast as possible, I am finding myself having to pass up really nice base spots due to the inevetable lack of animals the area will soon fall under if I stay too long. I also have no reason to return to these areas until much later in the game, thanks to the villages supplying me with all of the food and shelter I could ever need. Hardcore hunger certainly makes exploration a much larger part of the game, but at the cost of the necesity to build defensive structures and my own early game towns I used to enjoy very much. The new dependence on pre-generated structures seems to have made building more of a later game luxury, but I may just be overthinking all of this. (This post is based off of gameplay)

EDIT: Thinking about it more, is permanent building meant to be a luxury? I apologise if I completely missed that.

I agree with a lot of this. Firstly, let me say that for the most part these changes are awesome. Multi-tier, complex recipes add a depth to cooking that was just lacking in the game as it stood, and being given a reason to pick one crop over another but not necessarily all the time is just what farming needed.

My single criticism is needing to find a village for wheat. Not even that you need to find one first which could be problematic based on the world you spawn in (had we had to do that on my server all of us would have starved. It took us a month to find a village... we actually found a stronghold first), but that once you find a village a large part of the "survival" element of the game is gone. I never liked starting in a village because I thought it was akin to starting with some kind of cheat mode enabled. Ready built housing that comes with free food, free materials, and even lava if you're lucky. I do agree that getting wheat from long grass was a bit of a stretch, but having to take it from villages now really removes that kind of frontier feel to surviving off the land.

Once again, the vast bulk of the changes are great, and because I'm in an established world the wheat change doesn't affect me. It's just something we had a lot of trouble with (finding a village that is) and I get the feeling will permanently and fundamentally alter the early gameplay.

With regards to monsters in the early game: if monsters are too dangerous when you aren't wearing armor, then that's entirely awesome. Not being able to handle them early game is not an issue IMO, it's a blessed and much needed change to gameplay to actually make players afraid of them early on again.

On this you have my 100% agreement. Even in basic iron armor you're a tank. The living dead should be scary.

[Sandrew]

I'm pretty much with dawnraider. I love the added challenge but find food to drain so quickly that I barely have time to do anything besides scavenging. It makes reaching the next tier very tedious, especially when spawning on a poor location (ie. no chickens). I've been playing several ingame weeks now and all I've managed to do so far is set up a small hut on top of a hill. That said, HCH is a magnificant edition otherwise, I love how much you have to take movement into consideration. All my caves and mineshafts are completely equiped with dirt slab ramps and stairs. Killing a spider and getting that last bit of string needed for a fishing rod has never been as satisfying now that it guarantees your continued survival for at least another week.

[FlowerChild]

Once again, the vast bulk of the changes are great, and because I'm in an established world the wheat change doesn't affect me. It's just something we had a lot of trouble with (finding a village that is) and I get the feeling will permanently and fundamentally alter the early gameplay.

Again man...farting in the wind. I don't want to hear your (or anyone's) predictions about gameplay, just observations.

I'm trying to collect data here to aid in further balancing, and as a result, I would prefer that not be tainted by dire and overstated predictions of doom and gloom based on whatever opinion an individual is trying to promote.

You'll note it's exceedingly rare I open up these kinds of discussions, and the above is an example of one of the reasons why.

Also, with regards to your server not finding a village for a week....large biomes right? Figures. If you were trying to provide useful data instead of sell me a used car, you might have chosen to mention that.

[Six]

I've not really been experiencing the early game, so I can only really talk for using steak dinners and stew. I've been doing a lot of travelling (as you might have seen in the offical server thread) and I've found the high end food to be working well for me. I actually had to 'prepare' before heading out on a mapping expedition, making several stacks of good food and having those take up an actual chunk of inventory, which is nice. The constant visible draining hunger has added an interesting urgency to things as well, with you no longer feeling quite so safe boxing yourself in for the night as you can see your hunger going down while you wait.

The health changes haven't affected me too much, as due to client lag I've always been terrified of mobs and played things very safe around them. I have had a few tense moments falling down holes or running into a few mobs by accident, but as I am already overly cautious this hasn't been much of a problem for me.

As for villages, I can say that mapping out the 2km x 2km NW area (using a fair bit of jumping and running) cost me around 48 steak dinners and I found no villages in it. The 2km x 2km NE area (mostly by boat) took a little over 32 delicious stew and had 2 villages, only one of which (I think) had crops.

[Calo290]

I'll try to be as accurate as possible. Started a new co-op Large Biome world with the wife today; spawned in a Taiga biome with Plains nearby. We were quite fortunate as to have some snow covered pumpkins nearby and the plains also had a large herd of cows we thinned down to provide us with some greater sustenance. The first few nights were quite shaky, with us huddled around the furnace too nervous to go outside (dear god I hate skeletons more than ever) after our first couple run-ins with HCH. I'll be honest, I was in quite a panic crawling back to our hidey-hole with the sun setting, myself injured and famished, just hoping that nothing spawned in front of me. I can not speak for the later game obviously as we've only put a couple hours in so far this world, but for us HCH definitely made us focus on getting a food supply setup and think twice before running off to explore or go digging for ores.

As it stands, we are in no danger of starving in the immediate vicinity of our base, with pumpkin seeds and fishing to sustain us. I'm not willing to speculate on exploration and such as we've really not delved into that too far yet. I DO know however our next goal will to be to round up some of the chickens we saw nearby to have ready when we get cauldron tech and to start a mushroom hut (only found 1 red mushroom so far sadly, but it's a start).

TL;DR: We found ourselves focusing much more on getting a secured source of food instead of punching grass for wheat seeds. We also are much more wary delving into caves now that getting injured has a much more severe impact on you. We personally enjoyed it, as it gave us a much more "on the edge of your seat" feeling to surviving so far. It's a real mind-set shift in playing, you start keeping an eye on your hunger bar MUCH more closely than you would have done before.

I give you props FC, I never thought I'd love seeing a pumpkin farm so much.

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Small warning to those on laggy servers: Be careful when eating foods like steaks near (3-4 pops) full hunger, as I've experienced eating 2 steaks when meaning to eat only one, which is a much more weighty decision than the old "oh I wasted a steak on half a pop" situation.

[JakeZKAM]

The balance itself seems perfectly fine with just the right amount of difficulty. The feeling after finding a village though is less of "Yay now I found a sustainable food source and shelter!" and more of "Aw easy food..." however that is my only gripe. It's still too easy for my tastes to find wheat/carrots/potatoes, but the amazing early game survival feeling is great :). Taking several weeks in game to set up a small cabin base and gather a good amount of resources far from spawn, then the long trek back is brilliant. The more survival features the better ;)

*Edited for spelling.

[Thorium-232]

Again man...farting in the wind. I don't want to hear your (or anyone's) predictions about gameplay, just observations.

Wasn't a prediction man, I was saying that from my experience starting with villages that I find a lot of the work is done for you, and if we're essentially forced to do so now that could impact gameplay unless we choose to then abandon the village in an attempt to make the game artificially harder, which feels metagamey to me.

I'm trying to collect data here to aid in further balancing, and as a result, I would prefer that not be tainted by dire and overstated predictions of doom and gloom based on whatever opinion an individual is trying to promote.

Wasn't dire or overstated, sorry if it seemed that way. Like I said I really appreciate the direction this new addition is going and I'm hardly doomy and gloomy about it.

You'll note it's exceedingly rare I open up these kinds of discussions, and the above is an example of one of the reasons why.

My apologies, I thought I had a point worth bringing up.

Also, with regards to your server not finding a village for a week....large biomes right? Figures. If you were trying to provide useful data instead of sell me a used car, you might have chosen to mention that.

No, not large biomes, sorry. Just astounding bad luck finding villages. The closest one we found (just checked cartographer) is 1.5k east and 1.1k south from our main base which is itself a half kilometre south of our start area. You walk through three plains, two forests, a taiga, and two deserts to get there. Our main continent is about four square kilometres (and 14 biomes) without a single village on it. I'm not going to try and snow you man, I know better than that.

I'll back out of the thread now before breaking rule #3 more than I have.

[FlowerChild]

Wasn't a prediction man

...

I get the feeling will permanently and fundamentally alter the early gameplay.

Wasn't dire or overstated

...

I get the feeling will permanently and fundamentally alter the early gameplay.

Come on man.

It's all good and all...don't sweat it. But I'd really like to avoid this kind of thing in this thread.

[SpaceGuyR]

I started a new map after the update (standard biomes, no seed), so I've had a couple hours of gameplay in which I made no progress. I honestly got more exploring done by accidental deaths in that time (hardcore spawning) than I've had in any other map by preparing and moving out.

I found pumpkins and two villages which each had wheat and one of the two crops, so access to crops wasn't an issue. I don't think I ever managed to produce any new food, though. None of the plants I found grew in a few nights at a village as I used up chickens and hand-cranked bread. A few deaths later I'd tried to take all the carrots (20 or so) out of a village (to protect the population) and grow them to feed pigs: by the time I got/fought for bones to fertilize them I was below the level to hand-crank them, and then dead before any grew.

I can see where this would produce good gameplay: even if I had an working base, then after finding a village it still requires significant investment to start mass-producing the crops you do find. Even so I haven't yet worked out how to get something renewable from a standing start.

Before one death I saw a jungle temple. My objective at that point was to get the mechanisms to start something like a chicken farm, as I haven't yet been underground with so little supplies. I'd started searching for it again by boat, so no sprinting/jumping, but I still had to kill/cook many sheep in the area to stay full. I died after that (never did find it, it's possible there's two jungles within the spawn radius) which makes keeping this one world much less encouraging, it's just depleted of several things to no effect.

I'm all for having to plan expeditions etc., but with the current danger level I'm finding it hard not to use some sort of gamey "is it more efficient to break two blocks or to jump here" idea with every step.

It definitely has me thinking a lot more, but I'm not sure I'm personally good enough at the game to make it to an established base any more!

[FlowerChild]

The feeling after finding a village though is less of "Yay now I found a sustainable food source and shelter!" and more of "Aw easy food..."

I was a bit afraid of that one actually. Not sure if I mentioned this on IRC or in another thread, but I really would have preferred if the crops had at least been spread out between different villages, so that the player would find them a bit at a time, but given my policy of not modifying world gen, that wasn't an option.

But yeah, I don't quite like how everything is all clumped up at present, where you go from scrounging to having pretty much every crop in the game at your disposal, even though I do consider it to be a big step up from having a staple crop handed do you just by punching grass.

One at least partial solution I am considering at present is to allow for the gathering of tall grass to make hay, with which you can breed animals in the early game, which would spread out some of the wheat functionality somewhat, rather than the wheat itself, and hopefully lead to a slightly more gradual progression rather than the big clump upon finding a village.

It's something I'll continue pondering as yes, I do consider the above to represent a balance issue at present.

[magicjani]

Probably the greatest thing that happened to me with the HCH was that I actually went fishing!
That reminds me... I wasn't fishing in MC since the "Official release" happened.

It's great that you remind us of the old and great stuff with these Hardcore changes, which are probably unknown to the newer MC players, while Mojang just "buries" the old stuff to make way for newer, easier ways to do things.

[Habsnorre]

So, I just played for a few hours and man this is brutal. Early game is totally different from what it used to be. I made a new world going for hard difficulty and large biomes. I found a village right at the start in a plains biome. The farms had potatoes and wheat. There were sheep and chickens nearby, the neighbouring forest biome had wolves.

So these are my findings:
- Invest in food production right away. The farms do not even come close to sustaining the player. Most of the food in the early game will have to come from hunting.

- No longer being dependant on hunting takes a very very long time. After playing for almost 4 hours I still wasn't able to sustain my self without hunting. Potatoes give like no saturation and wheat can't be eaten directly. Animal farms are dependant on the wheat, which will run out really fast. (Note: Because this was the first time with the new hunger mechanisms I made choices that later on I paid out badly. Thus slowing me down).

- The player needs to make clear choices and the game has become very unforgiving for bad choices. HCH made me think about every food item I had. There was a real choice between eating a potato or planting it. Do I go long term or short term? These trade off's make the early game very interesting. Also bad choices will really hurt. For example: when I arrived at the village there was already some grown wheat. I made the terrible decision to grind it into flour and eat the bread. My sheep farm is still stuck at 6 sheep because of this.

- Hand cranks need a big food surplus. Making bread before having a windmills is a waste of time (most of the time). The bread will only restore a little more energy than is needed to grind the wheat into flour. I don't like this for wheat, but I love it for hemp. Before being able to go "industrial" a food surplus is needed (very historical :D)

- Not dying is one thing, expanding is another. Getting enough food to survive is the "easy" part. But to be able to mine, travel and do other stuff, even more food is needed. A food surplus is crucial.

- Mobs are scary. Armour isn't the issue, having enough food to be able to heal or run away is.

- Variety of food. Where in previous worlds I would eat just one kind of food, now I find myself eating anything. This is what I ate to survive: potatoes, bread, doughnuts, mutton, chicken, eggs, wolf, apples, rotten flesh and spider eyes.

- Spider eyes are pretty stupid now. Spider eyes give one saturation point, that is now a big deal. No food kills, poison doesn't. At one point i was in danger of dying because I had no food. I just ate all my spider eyes and was ok. Maybe a chance of food poisoning or real poison (aka can die from being poisoned)?[quote][/quote]

- Trading is awesome! Villages don't only offer farms, but also villagers to trade with. I traded paper (and even iron once) with villager A for an emerald and traded the emerald for 3 breads with another. Don't know if this was intended but I love it.

Hope this helps. Going to test in another world what it's like to start without a village.

EDIT: Forgot this one:
- Villages don't always offer all 3 vegetables. My farm only offered potatoes and wheat, no carrots. For the best food I need to go explore and find a second village.

[Solymr]

After spawning next to a village I realized that finding a village and being able to be self sufficient is a matter of having luck or not. I didn't feel like I deserved to get those crops that early on.
I didn't have to work crap for it, and got an exceedingly good reward: infinite and profitable food sustain. Whereas for hemp I have to look around tilling grass to get the seeds and then making a farm big enough to get profit, with these crops it's just matter of finding a village and having the work half done for you.
This is the part where it's unbalanced: sometimes it takes no effort to get a critical part of the game already going, meanwhile other times you are just stuck there and having to make a crapload of effort to get the same result.
The early game feels left to luck too much, and when I found myself spawning next to a village the biggest challenge introduced to the beginning of the game was gone. Because I was lucky.

While sometimes luck can be an important factor, I want to work for the reward too. When mining for diamonds, luck is a factor, but you have to make preparations to go exploring a cave or make a mine where you can work. If I found diamonds just laying around in the surface, well the thrill of that is gone.

Progression in this mod feels real, you need to work for it, and your work gets rewarded. This last change means either you get a village early on and you get rewarded for just starting the game and get lucky, or you have to spend most of your time with lower tier food with all that implies because you couldn't find a village. It really breaks the feeling of progression right from the very beginning.

EDIT: What I'm saying is that the bell curve can go both ways. While the hay may solve the problem of animal farms, finding a village too early kills the feel of survival and working to get higher tier food. The village represents a jump too big to be that random.

[heypaint]

I love the hunger aspect, like everyone else said, "it adds a new aspect of challenge, and a renewed respect for those damnable skeleton snipers." The only difficulty I had was in finding a village. Without wheat you can't "lead" animals to a pen, and can't breed them. Finding a village is a must, and there is a certain amount of luck to finding a village that can make starting out rather frustrating.

"One at least partial solution I am considering at present is to allow for the gathering of tall grass to make hay, with which you can breed animals in the early game."

Hay sounds like a fantastic idea! Not just a partial solution, IMO it is a good solution.

In regards to the balance between starving and eating. I think the balance is good.

Just my opinion, but you asked for it.

Thanks for making MC interesting again.

[Wafflewaffle]

- Hand cranks need a big food surplus. Making bread before having a windmills is a waste of time (most of the time). The bread will only restore a little more energy than is needed to grind the wheat into flour. I don't like this for wheat, but I love it for hemp. Before being able to go "industrial" a food surplus is needed (very historical :D)

This is very true. Eating bread is only possible after you built yourself a windmill. Most of the food comes from hunting and rotten flesh. Speeding food production with bonemeal is a no go. Grinding shit is so hard now the only reason i use handcracks is to build the windmill and early bellows stoking.

The thing i am finding the most difficult is surviving the first night. Between building your first safehouse and killing cows and pigs i rarely have enough food to eat during the night and death is certain if i go night hunting. Getting accustomed to the new gameplay is possible, but its a brutal endeveour.

[Sarudak]

Are you guys making sandwiches with your bread? Because it really increases the return on both items.

[Lars]

What I kinda like about this so far, is that just like in real life, that LAST little bit of fat, is very hard to get rid of :P

I'll have to look into the whole thing a bit more before I can make a real statement about anything, but it did seem to me that I was gobbling down excessive amounts of food when I was building stuff using scaffolding. It's explained by all the jumping ofcourse, but to me it did sometimes feel a little obnoxious and in your face. I'm consuming about a stack of bread per 10 minutes of play. It seems a bit of a steep payoff for doing one of my personal favorite activities, which is building awesome structures. It might besomething I just need to get used to, but it seemed to me that HCH isn't a subtle change, but a complete focus shifting feature, that dramatically changes your playstyle and the overall feel of the game. Again, I'll need to play more to be able to make a real founded statement about this.

If I had to condense it all, I'd have to say that I feel like I'm constantly being punished for doing stuff I like, and keeping your hunger bar full is not very rewarding. There's only really punishment involved, which is when you get low. It feels as if the whole food thing requires just a bit too much of your attention. It's undoubtedly the big scary change that is upsetting my delicate little self though; and it's not all bad at all. I love the fact that monsters are fucking scary now. Especially trying to escape from a skeleton while moving at the speed of a tortoise is exciting as hell. Trying to use trees for cover and such, really amazing!

What I also love about this, is that it's perfect for coöp play! I know BTW is focused on anarchy play, so it might be a bit weird in that respect; but it just is perfect for coöp. You can actually take on usefull roles, like being a hunter, a miner or a farmer. I'm going to have to force some of my friends to come and play BTW with me during a 2-3 day LAN at my place because of this release! =D

Anyway, I get the feeling that there'll be a few bumps to sort out and that it'll take some brave/difficult decisions on FC's part; the whole thing is incredibly ambitious, but we all know he will eventually balance it perfectly =) I hope I've been of some help, some way. I can't play a lot right now to test it all out, since I'm on a tight deadline writing my scripture and I barely have any nails left as a result. Getting banned for farting in the wind might not be so bad even ><'

Edit: Reading my post again, I realise it sounds very negative. This wasn't my intention at all! I love the release, so please just take everything I said, and throw in a bag of salt to even it out! (except the positive stuff, I did mean that!)