Minecraft experiment devolves into devastating resource war

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/21/minecraft-experiment-devolves-into-devastating-resource-war/

by SuperChihuahua • 14 years ago

143 48 14 years ago

ssdsa• 14 years ago

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?

daveid• 14 years ago

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.

Lexarius2• 14 years ago

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.

driverdan2• 14 years ago

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.

milesskorpen• 14 years ago

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.

reustle• 14 years ago

It was 350x350

Groxx• 14 years ago

350x350 would keep 30 people busy for what, a couple hours? Certainly not weeks.

sp332• 14 years ago

There is some indication that this was a hoax: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/yh1ip/closed_map_...

katovatzschyn2• 14 years ago

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.

alevans4• 14 years ago

Doesn't seem that difficult. Raiding guilds in Everquest and WoW pulled this off for years with 40 players and more.

jere2• 14 years ago

>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.

Funny, but very likely this never happened.

lotharbot• 14 years ago

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.

Zimahl3• 14 years ago

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.

thinkingisfun• 14 years ago

Yeah. War over iron or diamond I could get, but grassland? Share and enjoy!

eridius3• 14 years ago

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.

ne0codex• 14 years ago

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.

Lexarius2• 14 years ago

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.

debacle• 14 years ago

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.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

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.

sukuriant• 14 years ago

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.

jfb• 14 years ago

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!

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

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.

lazugod• 14 years ago

These comments read like a game forum, rather than HN.

jewbacca• 14 years ago

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.

jballanc• 14 years ago

True 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

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

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.

nrlucas• 14 years 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.

eschulte• 14 years ago

I wish minecraft had to pay royalties to dwarf fortress.

Auguste• 14 years ago

Why? 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• 14 years 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

driverdan2• 14 years ago

For those interested in playing on a map like this there's now a subreddit for limited size servers: http://www.reddit.com/r/limitedservers/

droithomme• 14 years ago

Hm. What did they do with the dirt, eat it? The idea they somehow consumed all the dirt in the game is questionable.

Minecraft experiment devolves into devastating resource war

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